Black Light

39

These were difficult days for Red. He could do so much and then had to let go, sit back and trust the others to execute his plan. He couldn’t, as Amy had said of her father, indulge in his capacity to overmanage. He had to trust. Would Bob read the clues correctly? Would he show up as predicted? Would the damned Duane Peck be able to bring off his end or would the man’s stupidity and impetuousness bring them down? Would Jack Preece hit the shots that needed to be hit? Would the old man, the scrofulous, nasty Jed Posey, hold together in a long session with Bob?

Ironically, of them all, Red trusted Posey the most: he was familiar with the type, the prison rat so hardened by a life lived at the extreme end of existence he’d been turned into some Nietzschean thing, a being so intense and one-pointed he hardly had any other life left him except the life of duty.

The other irony was that this whole thing even now, as it had for so long, completely delighted him. It was … remarkably fun. Such a clever plot, so astutely calibrated, based on such an intense analysis of Bob’s character. Really, truly a masterpiece.

“Red, you’re away.”

That was Jeff Seward, first operating vice-president of Fort Smith Federal. The others in the foursome were Neil James, of Bristow, Freed, Bartholomew and Jeffers, Attorneys-at-Law, and Roger Deacon, of McCone-Carruthers Advertising Agency. It was the weekly golf foursome of the Fort Smith Rich Boys Club, at Hardscrabble Country Club off Cliff Drive.

And Red was indeed out and Jeff was indeed delighted.

His ball lay a long fifty-three feet from the pin. Between it and the hole was a wilderness of elevations, switchbacks, slopes and bare spots. It was the eighteenth hole: Red had shot low, standing at a 71, but damned Jeff, who had never beaten him, was standing at a 72 and had hit an uncharacteristically nice approach shot that had deposited him a few feet from the pin. His one-putt would put him out at 73; Red’s two-putt would leave him at 73 also—damn!—and if he three-putted, a distinct possibility, he’d lose. The image of Jeff’s smirk filled him with dark rage, which he enjoyed because it cut through the mesh of anxieties that he otherwise had suffered.

Jeff was an old friend and enemy; he’d played on the same Razorback football team with Red in the early sixties, and had at least kept up with him in the wife department, trading in an older model on a newer one every fifteen years, though he’d never reached—and never would—the beauty pageant level as had Red. They’d been in and out of business deals a dozen times and made at least four or five million off of each other’s friendship and connection. But … golf was thicker than blood. Red did not want to lose.

He approached the ball and knelt to read the green. Around him the vivid beauty of the course expressed itself in full vertiginous glory, the most agreeable golf course in West Arkansas and better than all of the courses but one in Little Rock.

So Red looked across the ball into a treacherous maze of possibilities. He glanced at his watch. It was late. Suddenly, he felt a strange thing, a collapse of will. It was as if his warrior’s spirit, which had sustained him these many years, had suddenly vanished. He didn’t want to putt out. He wanted to lie down.

I am getting old, he thought.

He read the putt as a left-to-right crosser and knew it demanded courage above all else. It would seem to die a half dozen times, seem to quit and sputter or slide off into irrelevancy, would live a whole odyssey of adventures before it even got in the neighborhood of the cup. You had to hit it hard. You had to believe. You could not shirk or flinch or whine: go at it like a man and live or die, like a man.

“That would be a hell of a putt, Red,” said Jeff.

“You wouldn’t want a side bet, would you, Jeff?”

“Hmmmmm,” considered Jeff. “Something in the neighborhood of—oh, a grand?”

“A grand it is, bubba,” said Red, smiling wolfishly and setting himself up. “Did I ever tell you boys about the time I took three grand off Clinton? That’s why he won’t play with me no more!”

Damn!

The buzz of the vibrator on his beeper.

“Scuse me, gents.”

He stepped off the green and took his folder from his caddie. He punched up the phone mail and heard Duane Peck’s breathless voice: “Call me. Fast.”

Red punched the number in.

“Mr. Bama?”

“Yes.”

“It’s working. I just dropped Preece off. The old man’s got ’em in there. I’m holding now at the fallback point, waiting for Preece to dust them. By God, it’s going to work! They’re here!”

Red’s heart filled with joy! He was so close and it would all be over: another threat to his empire and its little secrets defeated. Life, its own beautiful self, would go on and on and on: he’d put all his children through college and maybe, in a few years, when the Runner-up wore down, he’d gracefully retire her to some country mansion and get himself the actual thing he wanted more than anything: a true, authentic Miss Arkansas, young, hot and nubile. Wouldn’t that beat all!

“Duane, you call me the second it is over, do you understand?”

“Yes sir, I do.”

Red handed the folder back to the boy and remounted the green.

“Good news, Red?”

“The best.”

“Another million for Mr. Bama,” said Neil James, “and that means another twenty thousand in billing for me.”

“Boys,” said Red, “when the big dog’s happy, everdamnbody’s happy.”

He addressed the putt, filled to the eyeballs with blazing confidence.

“Jeff, you want to make that five grand, even up?”

“Hell, Red,” said Jeff, “I’se hoping you’d let me off the hook on the grand!”

Everybody laughed except Red, who bent into the putt and laid the considerable pressure of the Bama concentration against it, until he thought he’d explode. Then, almost reflexively, with a sharp rap, he struck the ball, wrists stiff, head down, shoulders loose, a perfect putt built on courage, iron determination and $100,000 in golf lessons over the years.

Like Xenophon’s lost Greeks, it wandered across the Persia of the green, this way and that, up mountains and down into lush green valleys, seeming to die at least twice but always getting over the next crest on the apparent delusion that the sea lay ahead. At last it descended, bouncing and gathering speed, and hit the cup, spun with a whiskery sound—and halted.

“Damn,” said Red.

“Five grand!” shouted Jeff.

“It may drop still,” said Neil.

Red stared at the ball, balanced on the very equipoise between hole and green, seemingly riding on nothing more than the sprig of loam fighting the ball’s weight and preventing Red from achieving yet another triumph.

“If a jet’d come along and a sonic boom would hit, maybe it would drop,” said Roger Deacon. “You could probably call the air force on your phone, Red.”

“Damn,” said Red.

“You could explode another car bomb,” said Jeff. “That might loosen it.”

But Neil had the best idea.

“Order it to drop,” he said. “It knows who you are.”

“Damn right,” said Red. “Everybody does.”

He squinted, assumed the position of an especially pugnacious bulldog and issued his command: “Ball! Drop!”

Damned if it didn’t.

Red sat around the nineteenth hole with his fellow Rich Boys, choosing a very expensive twelve-year-old George Dickel Tennessee bourbon as the night’s poison, finding himself in a boisterous mood. He said he’d let poor Jeff off the hook on his thousand if Jeff would just pick up the tab. Jeff agreed and Red set out to drink a thousand dollars’ worth of Dickel. He wasn’t celebrating too soon: he was trying to get a certain part of his brain disengaged from the drama that was surely playing out seventy miles to the south even now, in a forest battleground.

If he let himself think on it, he was sure he’d die. His heart would go into vapor lock; he’d pitch forward in rigor mortis and they’d have to cut him out of his golf shoes. He’d end a joke: the total golfer who died in a bright red (his favorite color) Polo shirt and a pair of lemon-yellow slacks.

“You okay, Red?”

“Yes I am. Tell that gal: another round.”

“Red, you are so generous with my money,” said Jeff, though not bitterly. “Damn, I have to give it to you. You always squiggle out. I got you on the goddamn hook and presto, you’re off it!” But it was said in something like respect.

“Many a man has thought he had me on the hook, only to find out the hook was in him,” said Red, as the girl deposited another Dickel straight up before him. He took a hit: blam. Hot, straight and tough, just the goddamn way he liked it.

“Hey, Red, got a question for you.”

“Shoot, son.”

“Have you heard the Holly Etheridge rumor?”

“Every goddamn one of ’em.”

“No, I mean the rumor.”

“Which one would that be?”

“It’s all over town. He’s your friend, you’d know.”

“He isn’t my friend. He went to Harvard. He ain’t hardly ever come back to the old stomping grounds. Hell, he went to prep school in Washington, D.C. St. Albans School, I think. He ain’t no Arkansawyer, I’ll tell you that. I know him some.”

“They say he cut a deal with old Mr. You Know Who, the front-runner. He’d drop out early and work behind the scenes … and that would get him the vice-presidential nomination.”

Roger Deacon pitched in with a comment. “We have been his local media buyers for eighteen years, and believe me, if Holly Etheridge were going on the national ticket, we’d know it by now. You have to buy into prime time early. It’s too late otherwise.”

“You ain’t thinking right, Rog,” said Red. “It ain’t a senatorial race. The buy would come from national party headquarters and not in his name. You check, and I’d bet you’ll see the parties already got money down on the time they need, through one of the big Little Rock shops.”

“So it is going to happen, huh, Red?”

“Neil, I ain’t heard diddly about old Holly. He’s too busy trying to fuck every living female between Maine and Southern California. I think he’s made it through Illinois and is just starting on Missouri.”

“I don’t think he’s given up his national ambitions,” said Jeff. “His daddy gave him an order, and one thing about Holly, he always obeyed his daddy. I think I ought to give him a call. He’ll probably end up looking for a good chief of staff. Maybe I’ll be moving up to Washington.”

“Shit, his team is set,” said Red. “I shot sporting clays with Judge Myers a few weeks back, and he’s the boy with the inside track. But he didn’t say nothing.”

“Holly may surprise us yet,” said Neil.

“We made a hell of a lot of money off that goddamn road he wanted to build for his daddy, though,” Red said.

“Hear, hear,” cheered the Rich Boys, for they too had made money, even at some remove, from the $90 million that the federal government had poured into Arkansas to build the Boss Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway down to Polk County.

It went on that way until eleven, when Red finally broke it up. Toward the end, as the booze wore off, he found himself becoming morose and mean-spirited. The vibrator on his beeper had not gone off.

What did it mean? What was going on? It was so goddamned perfect.

He pushed aside his fears and went to the car, but for the first time in years, his two obedient, discreet bodyguards irritated him, though they were so steely efficient there was no cause for the annoyance. They just bugged him tonight.

He said, “I’m going to the lounge, not home.”

“Yes sir,” came the reply, untainted by human emotion.

He climbed into the big S-class and turned right, down Cliff Drive and back toward the city, instead of left toward his big white house overlooking the airport. At the halfway point, he called the Runner-up.

“Hello?”

“Beth, honey, something has come up. I’ve got to nurse one through the night.”

“Sweetie, are you all right?”

“I am fine. And soon, I’ll be finer.”

“Are you sure?”

Dammit, even she was irritating him tonight.

“Yes! Yes, everything is fine. You know what I want you to do? Plan a vacation. A nice one, the whole family, both families, Hawaii, we’ll rent out a goddamned island to ourselves. Your mother, even. All right?”

“Yes, Red, honey.”

“Your brother. He can come too. That’s my babe.”

He hung up, crossing Rogers, turning in toward town, took his next right and followed the progressively seedier Midland Boulevard until at last he came to Nancy’s. His parking place was wide open, as usual, and he pulled into it. As he leaped out, his two bodyguards seemed to materialize from nowhere and took up position next to him.

He threw open the door and about six dreary drunks and four dreary pool players looked over at, his magnificence and withered in it; he blasted through, telling Fred the night barkeep just one word: “Coffee.”

In his lair, he felt a bit more relaxed. Here at last was a world small enough and known enough to be completely dominated. He sat at his father’s old desk. He felt comfortable. He set his folder on the green blotter before him and willed it to ring: Phone! Ring! But unlike the golf ball of late afternoon, it did not obey him. What adventures could it be concealing? What extraordinary battle, what act of profane violence, what deliverance or destruction?

He tried to shut it out by concocting a plan to implement if he were to fail utterly.

Swagger lives. Swagger kills both men. No, worse, Swagger captures poor Duane, who spills the beans about the Bama connection. What would Swagger do next?

He’d come after me, he realized.

He leaned out and gestured to his bodyguards.

“It is very possible,” he said, “that a very tough man will be coming after me in the next few days. Not sure, but possible. Therefore y’all will need to be at your absolute tops. Understood?”

“Yes sir,” said the talkative one.

“We go into Condition One, all the way. We’ll need support teams, aerial surveillance, motion detectors, the works. I ain’t going to give it up without a fight.”

“We’ll get him, sir.”

Maybe, he thought, that would be better: face it, do it, get it over with. He and Swagger, man-on-man.

Then he laughed.

Swagger was too good. That would be suicide.

He looked at the phone.

Damn you. Ring!

But it wouldn’t.

The hours leaked by. He read the papers, tried to work on his books, had a lot of coffee, watched some TV on a ratty black-and-white. He may even have dozed for a time, for it seemed that there was a moment when it was dark followed by another moment when the dawn was suddenly breaking. He went out, looked down the broad boulevard that was still lifeless. Odd, even a slum like north Fort Smith could look pristine and wondrous in the first wash of moist, dewy light. But he knew his sentimentality was phony, more a function of stress and exhaustion than genuine feeling.

Now he began to feel sorry for himself. It went with the territory, the long night nursing through a crisis that he himself was incapable of influencing at this point, one which he must fight with surrogates.

He mourned his father, that great man. He wondered again at the great bitterness of his life: who had killed him? He missed his two wives and his five children. He missed the boys at Hardscrabble, the men he hunted, fished, flew to Super Bowls and occasionally caroused with. He mourned his life: was someone going to take it away from him now? At least his children would know who killed him, more than he knew of his own father’s death. He saw Swagger as a pale-eyed avenger, a figure of death, come to take it all away. Part of him yearned to fire both barrels of that expensive Krieghoff into Swagger and blow him to shreds. He calculated: two blasts of Remington 7½ from five feet, that’s almost sixteen hundred pieces of bird shot delivered at over 1,200 feet per second, hitting him that close, before the shot column opened up into a pattern but instead traveled through space with the energy and density of a piston. Wow! Total destruction.

But in the end, he weakened. His warrior spirit was spent. His dick was soft and would never be hard. He needed sleep, he needed help.

He faced the phone. It was nearly seven.

I can take it no more.

I have to know.

He dialed Duane Peck’s number. The phone rang once, twice, three times, and Red feared that catastrophe had occurred. His heart bucked in terror.

But on the fourth ring Peck answered.

“Yeah?”

“What’s happening, Peck?”

There was a pause that seemed to last an epoch in geological time as ice ages rolled down from the north, then retreated, whole species were created and evaporated, civilizations rose and fell, and then Peck said, “It’s over. Got ’em both.”

“Goddammit! Why didn’t you call me?”

“Ah—” began Duane.

“I told you to follow orders exactly. Don’t you get that?”

“Yes sir,” said Peck. “Sorry, I—”

“Is the general all right?”

“Yep.”

His heart soared in gratitude and intense pleasure.

“Bury the bodies, get the general home and disappear for a week. Call me next week. I want a full report.”

“Yes sir,” said Peck.

Red snapped off to the dial tone, the most beautiful sound he’d ever heard.