Black Light

6

“Oh, God, Jimmy,” she said.

The voice came from far away but as Earl drew near he could hear it increasing in clarity and the familiar rhythms of the young man he’d watched grow up became evident.

“Honey, oh, God, I am so sorry,” Jimmy was saying, “I have made such a mess of things, oh, Lord, it just got out of hand.”

Earl hovered over Edie, feeling huge and helpless and enraged at what Jimmy was doing to her.

“Jimmy, please, don’t hurt anybody else.”

“I swear to you I won’t.”

Earl tried to fight his way through his anger: What should I do? What’s the smart move? He was always so certain, he always acted decisively and correctly, in every situation from a hunting camp to a battle to any of a hundred police dilemmas. But now he felt sluggish, stupid, lost. He tried to get his mind working.

This was almost a jail breakout, and in almost all jail breakouts, standard operating procedure was to wiretap the homes of those the escapee would most likely turn to, then raid them when contact was established. But would the department have had time to set up a wiretap? The robbery was around noon; it was now four, that was a few hours. He didn’t think so.

More to the point, though, Betty Hill, the operator, was known to listen in as she threw wires into jacks at the Polk County switchboard. She might be listening. And if so, who would she call, the sheriff? She might even call Earl himself!

“Find out where he is,” he mouthed to Edie.

“Jimmy, oh my God, where are you?”

“I’m at some general store up near Mulberry on the public phone. It’s around back, ain’t nobody can see us. We done dumped two cars and picked up another one.”

“Oh, Jimmy. They’ll get you. You know that.”

“Honey, listen. It’s all over for me. I got to face up to it, I’m finished, I’m over. You’re a free gal. I love you but you can’t stick to me from now on. Ain’t nothing in it for you. Honey, I crossed the line and can’t get back over.”

“Oh, Jimmy, Jim—”

“But listen here, the problem is Bub. Christ, that boy didn’t do nothing but what I told him. He’s out in the car crying for his mama. I cannot have it said that I got Bub killed or sent away.”

“Jimmy, I—”

“Honey, I want you to get Mr. Earl. Mr. Earl will know what to do.”

“Honey, he’s here.”

“Oh, thank God! Put him on!”

Earl took the phone.

“Jimmy—”

“Earl, don’t waste your breath telling me how I done messed up. Lord, Lord, I know.”

“What the hell happened?”

“Earl, I wanted a stake. I wanted to go to L.A. and be a movie star. I didn’t want no job in no sawmill living in a cottage off some rich lady’s charity.”

Earl could only shake his head in dismay.

“Now I got a mess,” said Jimmy, “and I got to fix it up. I got to save Bub. Can you git me a deal?”

“Best just come in and face up to it.”

“Here’s the deal, Earl. I go murder in the first, and if the state wants, it can fry me. And it’ll probably want. In exchange for my plea, Bub gets maybe accessory to armed robbery, manslaughter two at the worst, he gets out in a year or so, no hard joint neither, one of them work farms where nobody going to bother him.”

“I can’t get you that deal without talking to the Sebastian County prosecutor. Best thing for you to do is to surrender peacefully to the first law enforcement officer you see and then tell them you did all the killing. I’ll call Sam Vincent down here and—”

“No!” screamed Jimmy. “Goddammit, Mr. Earl, these boys is loaded for bear. They got machine guns and shotguns and deer rifles and dogs. I killed a cop. They got a taste for blood. I walk in there hands up and by God I end up on a slab with dimes on my eyes next to some tinhorn deputy smiling for the camera and thinking about how famous he’s gonna be. Poor Bub too!”

Jimmy was right, of course. Earl knew it. Too many hotheads with guns, too many chances for a slipup, a mistake. He thought of the fool Buddy Till with the big tommy gun and the fifty-round drum, just itching to cut loose and make himself a state hero. The man that got Jimmy Pye! Jimmy would die certainly, poor Bub probably, as well as whatever citizens happened to be standing around. Shit, Jimmy, what’d you do this for?

“Mr. Earl, I’ll surrender to you! You can put us both in cuffs. Please, please, please just give me a minute or two with Edie afterwards, one last time with her, and promise me you’ll call Sam and help out with Bub. That’s a lot, I know, but please, Earl, please, Mr. Earl, I know you got it in you, help me clean up my mess.”

“How the hell you going to get up here?”

“I can make it up there okay. We won’t move till after dark, and I know the back roads like the other side of my hand.”

“Jimmy, no one else can die! Do you understand? Do you swear it?”

“I swear to you, Earl. I swear to you. I got it all figgered out, how we can work it. I’ll meet you at ten. Swear to you.”

Earl thought darkly. He didn’t like it at all. Jimmy crossed the line, you couldn’t cut him that slack. It went against so many principles. Be rigid, he told himself. Live by your rules. You have rules, now live by them.

But Lannie Pye, Jimmy’s dad, begged Earl to look out for his boy, help his boy. That cut to the quick. He gave his word on Iwo and it wasn’t a thing he could walk away from, goddamn his own soul.

“There’s a cornfield just below Waldron, maybe ten, twelve miles,” said Jimmy. “It’s right off 71.”

“Which side of Boles?”

“The Fort Smith side. Just beyond Boles. On the right as you’re coming up. Beyond the mountains.”

Earl had lived the past ten years on Route 71.

“I know it.”

“There’s a cornfield road. I’ll pull in maybe a hundred or so yards.”

“No, I’ll pull in first, Jimmy. I want to see you approach and throw the beam on you. You git out of the car with your hands up, you and Bub both. You show me your guns, then throw ’em on the ground.”

“Okay, Mr. Earl. That sounds square. Ten.”

“Ten. If you get jumped or chased before, you throw your hands up, you hear? Nobody else can die!”

“Tell Edie I love her.”

“I’ll have her waiting in town. We’ll take you boys into Blue Eye. I’ll be with you every step of the way.”

Jimmy hung up.

“It sounds like he’s trying to do right by what he done wrong,” he said.

He looked at Edie, who’d gone over back by the window. In the distance, they could see Buddy Till, arms folded, leaning against his fender, chewing a long stalk of grass.

Earl picked up the phone and pushed the button a couple of times.

“Operator.”

“Betty, it’s Earl, calling from the Longacre cottage.”

“Why, Earl, you do git around.”

“What you hearing?”

“The coloreds is all excited about that poor little gal. They’re blazing away on the line. Them people really talk a lot. There’s talk too about Jimmy Pye, and what he done. The coloreds don’t care about him, though. They only care about their own, just like people everywhere.”

“Is there any talk about Edie and Miss Connie?”

“Folks wonder about how they’ll take it when Jimmy gets his reward. Pity, lots of pity. Pity and palaver. And a little about you, Earl.”

“Me?”

“Earl, you are a mighty man, but there’s an element that don’t care for you. They think you’re too big for your britches, ever since President Truman hung that ribbon on your neck. There’s talk that if you’d taken a hard hand with Jimmy when he was young, he’d not have turned out as he did. There’s talk—Earl, do you want to hear this?”

“I suppose.”

“There’s talk it’ll serve you right and bring you down a peg or two. You tried to invent some fairy-tale life for Jimmy and that poor girl who maybe didn’t love him as much as you told everybody she did. You and Miss Connie, you got together and wrote a fairy tale and never really knew what was going on.”

“And what was that?” asked Earl.

“The Pyes are trash and always will be. It’s as wrong to mix trash and quality as it is to mix black and white. It’s not meant to be and there’s consequences. Earl, sometimes as smart as you are, you can be a very thick old boy.”

“All right, Betty, thanks.”

He hung up. There was no news there, nothing he hadn’t felt or suspected before. What was important was that Betty couldn’t have gotten through that performance if she’d just heard Earl talking to Jimmy; she’d been too busy eavesdropping on the others. He felt safe at least; if the sheriff and his machine gunners showed up when Jimmy came in, it could be a disaster.

He went over to Edie, who simply sat and stared out the window.

“You all right?”

She smiled and put a hand on his wrist.

“Yes, Mr. Earl. I am fine.”

“Some are saying Miss Connie and I tried to set up a life for you and Jimmy out of something of our own. I never thought of that. If it’s the case, I apologize. I tried to help. Sometimes helping just makes it worse.”

“Mr. Earl, you did what you thought was best.”

“I swore to Lannie Pye I’d help his boy. That’s what it was. I went too far.”

“Jimmy is no child anymore, Mr. Earl. He’s twenty-one. He made up his own mind. But he does have a gift for selling. I bought because I wanted to buy. Except for the poor folks in the store, maybe this is best for all of us down here in Polk County. Now we all have a chance to start over.”

“That’s the smart way to look at it. Okay, you’re okay, then? I’ll be moving out. I have other places to cover before tonight. I’ll—”

“Earl?”

“Yes?”

He was aware she’d never called him that. It made him slightly uncomfortable.

“Earl, if I was you, I’d call in your buddies. If Jimmy gives you even a twitch, I’d have them shoot that boy down like a dog. And Bub too. Earl, I don’t trust him. In honest-to-God truth, I don’t trust him a bit.”

“Edie, I have to give the boy a chance. And on top of that, I don’t trust my own people. They might shoot no matter what. I can bring this thing off, you watch.”

“Earl, Miss Connie would tell you your word to a killer doesn’t matter. You look out for Mr. Earl first.”

“This is the best way,” he said. “I know it in my heart. We can set this thing as right as it can be set, and then we can go find whoever killed that poor little Negro girl.”

A weird light shown in Edie’s eyes. He’d never seen it there before. She was gazing at him with such admiration.

“Earl, Miss Connie says no man ever carried more of the world around on his shoulders than you do. You’re going to carry this whole thing around until you set it right. Where do they grow men like you? I never met a one.”

“They grow us on trees, in the thousands. Don’t you put no account on it. You’re still young. You’ll meet plenty now. You have some great things ahead of you.”

She looked at him as he’d never seen her look at him before. Late in a very long afternoon. Her face was calm, grave, lovely in the serene light. She was so young. He’d never let himself look at her before. She was someone else’s daughter who grew to be someone else’s wife. The most beautiful girl in the county, and so what? He was married to a good woman, had a son, enough responsibilities to choke a cat, a goddamned duty that would never, ever stop.

“Earl,” she said.

Put it away, he told himself. Put it far, far away.