Black Light

7

Sometimes the thirst for whiskey was so palpable it ached. This was such a night. He lay in the bed, hearing the warm desert breeze run through the night and the low, even breathing of his wife. In a room down the hall his daughter slept.

He dreamed of whiskey.

In whiskey was the end of pain: whiskey blurred the images of boys shot in the guts crying for mama and mama wasn’t there, only Sergeant Swagger screaming “Medic!” at the top of his lungs while pouring M-16 fire off into the paddy breaks. Whiskey banished the stench of the villes after the Phantoms had laid down napalm, the odd blend of burned meat and scorched straw and fried water buffalo shit. In whiskey disappeared the emptiness of emotion when the recoil spent itself against one’s shoulder and the rifle settled back and the crosshairs reimplanted themselves on a man so far away, who was now horribly altered, his posture destroyed by death arriving in packages of 173 grains launched at 2,650 feet per second. Sometimes they staggered, sometimes they instant rag-dolled. Always they went still forever.

Gone too in the whiskey was this one:

He woke late, to a lot of commotion downstairs, the sounds almost of a party or meeting. He blinked sleep out of his eyes, confused, a little scared.

“Daddy,” he called. “Daddy?”

Outside another car pulled up and then another. He was wearing underpants and a Davy Crockett T-shirt which he had got by sending fifty cents and six caps from Mason’s root beer off to Chicago. It took weeks for it to arrive and he wore it every day and every night. He was nine. He heard his mother crying downstairs and listened to a man’s footsteps on the stairs. He heard creaking leather, the sag of the floorboards, the squeal of the stairway banister, all familiar from a thousand times his father came home late as he always did, letting the duty day stretch out sometimes for eighteen and twenty hours. But there was a heaviness to the tread which he knew was not his father’s. He sat up as the man entered and it was some other state policeman. The crickets were chirping desperately in the dark just beyond the open windows and outside it was a clear night, glittery with starlight.

“You’re Bob Lee, is that right?” said the man in his daddy’s uniform, the flat-brimmed, round-topped hat, not quite a cowboy’s hat, and the big gun in the holster, not quite a cowboy’s gun. He stood in the doorway, just a silhouette, the light behind him blazing.

“Yes sir,” he had said.

“Bob Lee, may I come in? Have to talk man-to-man to you.”

Bob nodded. He knew something was wrong. Another police car pulled up out front of the house.

“I’m Major Benteen. You’re going to have to be a man now, son,” the man in his daddy’s uniform told him.

“What you mean?”

“Son … son, your daddy was killed in the line of duty this evening. He’s in heaven now, where all the good soldiers and policemen and men who do their duty have to go eventually.”

“What’s duty?” Bob said.

“I can’t explain it. I don’t even know. It’s what special men like your dad lived by and for,” said the major. “It’s the best thing a man can have. It’s why your daddy’s a hero. It’s—”

But the man stopped and Bob saw that he was crying too.

Now Bob shook his head; that big officer bawling away in the dark over his father’s death, trying so hard to be manly but so destroyed by the bitter futility of it he had no chance.

That was a whiskey memory. You wanted to soak that motherfucker in amber fluid that roasted your tongue as it went down your gullet and sent its radiant message of hope and love to the far precincts of your body and numbed out your mind with the buzz of alcoholic bliss. That’s what whiskey was for, to kill those lost black memories that when they came out from hiding would try and kill you like this one was now trying to kill him.

Bob sat up in the bed. He was glad there was no whiskey in the house for if there were he knew he’d grasp it and drown himself in it, going down so far there’d never be an up. He could hardly breathe.

He rose, a tall, thin, strong man, graying, but still with a gift for silent movement and a face famous for the little that it showed. He had slept alone for so long: now he wasn’t alone in the bed anymore and he looked at her, dozing softly under the sheets, such a beautiful woman. Who’d have thought it?

He slipped down the hall and pushed open the dark door into the next room, hearing the child’s breath. He snapped on the light. YKN4 was curled up, her little nose fluttering ever so gently. She stirred, disturbed by the light. She looked as if she were made of candy, a moist, perfect little thing, her wide lids enveloping her wide eyes, her curled lashes as perfect as the tracing of a doily, her tiny little nose cusping her tiny perfect seal of lips. She rubbed a hand against an eye, shivered in some sort of animal delight, pushed some hair off her face, and pulled the blanket tighter, dreaming, no doubt, of horses. He wondered if he would ever be the mystery to her that his father was to him. He hoped not. Bob turned off the light, bent to her and kissed her smooth cheek gently, feeling a radiance much stronger than whiskey’s and much truer.

That’s worth getting through it all, he thought.

Suddenly, he felt a bit braver. Resigned almost, steady at least, and aware at last of what must be done.

He walked down the hall, pulled a lanyard so that a section of the ceiling pivoted downward with a groan, and a section of wooden ladder slid out. He climbed into the attic, pulled the light switch. It was any attic: jumbled trunks, racks of old clothes, sheaves of pictures, most of it Julie’s. But a small portion of it was his, loaded into the trailer for that drive out from Blue Eye years ago, after he’d buried his guns. He climbed and looked toward his small claim of the space. He saw an old seabag full of marine utilities, boots, the like, his dress blues hanging off a rack, a leather shooting jacket with its many buckles and straps, a few old pieces of luggage.

And at last, what he was looking for. It was an old shoe box, with a red ribbon tied prettily outside it. The label on the box said “Buster Brown, Size C7, Dark Brown Oxfords,” the container for his Sunday shoes sometime in the fifties. Though it was sheathed in dust, he could make out handwriting, his mother’s ornate script: Daddy’s Things, it said.

He tugged on the old ribbon, which, easily enough, gave up the ghost and popped. Dust stirred like vapors of lost memory. He carefully lifted the lid off, and there, kneeling in the yellow light in a pair of sweats, he began his exploration.

This is what remained of Earl Lee Swagger, USMC, Arkansas State Police, killed in the line of duty, July 23, 1955. First, Bob saw old brown photographs on stiff, slightly wilted papers. He picked them up to enter an alien universe that seemed built around a little farm boy with a chubby face that showed but a trace of the bone structure that would eventually yield the face he would recognize as his father’s. In this brown world, there was a farmhouse, a trellis, a scrawny old goat in a straw hat, a three-piece suit even in summer’s full blaze, a bow tie and starched collar, a face chipped out of granite who must have been a father, that is, Bob’s grandfather; he also wore a circled star on his chest that was a sheriff’s badge and a wide belt festooned with cartridges and a holster that swallowed up all but the Colt Peacemaker’s curved grip. Next to him was the grandmother, a dour woman in a shapeless dress and a face that looked as if it never had worn a smile. He turned it over and in faded ink read the date: 1920, Blue Eye, Ark. There were others, various arrangements of the same three people, sometimes together, sometimes alone or in twos. None of them had ever gotten fat off the land, Bob saw. A final shot showed Earl in his twenties, in a marine olive-drab service uniform, with that tight tunic collar, a glistening Sam Browne belt diagonally transecting a manly chest and a sergeant’s three stripes on the shoulder, looking proud and ramrod-straight. He’d joined in 1930, at twenty, and had made his rank fast: turning the picture over, Bob saw in his grandmother’s flowery penmanship the inscription “Earl home on leave, 1934.” Earl’s hair was slicked back over white sidewalls and he looked dapper as possible.

Next he found the medals. There was a nest of them, police marksmanship badges (his father was a natural, extraordinary shot), Pacific Battle Star and campaign ribbons, the Purple Heart with four clusters, a Presidential Unit Citation for the 2nd Marines, another one for the 3rd Marines, a Distinguished Service Cross, a Silver Star and of course, the big one, the Medal of Honor, a chunk of metal in the configuration of a star that hung on a necklace of now faded but once sky-blue ribbon. He hefted the ornament: it had weight and density, gravity almost, dignity perhaps. Its gold plating was grimy from years of neglect and he realized that he’d never seen the thing itself before; his father never had it out or displayed it and his mother must have dumped it in this box sometime after the funeral, and sealed the box and herself off from the pain.

He held it in his hand for a few seconds, waiting to feel something. It was only a chunk of dirty metal, a trinket. He’d won medals himself and knew the odd distance a man feels from them, looking at them and thinking, so what? They explain so little, they have no connection with the reality of what they signify.

The citation was there too, on official Department of the Navy paper, a fancy-looking, thick piece of paper dated 10 December 1945, that had the look of formal ostentation that he despised. It could have hung in a dentist’s office.

He read it, wondering if he’d ever read it before or only heard it told by other men. His father never spoke a word about the war.

Somewhere Bob had seen a picture, though it appeared not to be here. He remembered a yellowed scrap of newsprint, almost delicate to the finger in its crumbly dryness, and on it the image of his much younger father, flat-bellied and stoic of face, in dress blues, as the President of the United States, behind bifocals and a folksy Missouri face, laid the ribbon over his head. Again, it was nothing: the ceremony was for other people, not for his father, who kept his feelings to himself about what he’d done and why he’d done it.

At last Bob set the medal down. He knew enough of war to know that the description of his father’s action was antiseptic to say the least. In the nest with the Japs, working them over with a tommy gun, he must have watched them disintegrate under the heavy impact of the .45s. The air was sulfurous and full of lead and smoke; mortars exploded everywhere, sucking the oxygen from the surface of the planet. Exhaustion, stress, dirt and filth, grime, the gritty volcanic soil of Iwo, the hundreds of scrapes, cuts and abrasions from low-crawling, the utter terror, maybe some bloodlust, some pleasure in watching the enemy’s head torn off or limbs blown away, fear that the gun would jam: all that, and much more, was left unnoticed by the citation.

Hell of a fight you made, Daddy, he thought.

Next his eye caught on something unusually regular and a pull yielded a thick wad which turned out to be an old tablet of Arkansas traffic violation citations. An amazement! There were at least twenty unused citations with their triplicate carboned forms left flat on the pad, but curled back over the spine of it were five or six carbons on tickets already handed out. Bob saw in a second that they were the tickets his father must have issued that last week and was unable to file with the court before his death. He shuffled through them, seeing his father’s own handwriting recording a series of meaningless misdemeanors against the Arkansas Standard Traffic Code in the second and third weeks of July 1955. “Driving with left taillight disabled” was checked on one citation, and the driver’s name and address and license number and below that, under the rubric “Issuing Officer,” the scrawled semisignature “E. L. Swagger.” A couple of speeding violations on Routes 71 and 88, a DWI, the small beer of a rural highway patrolman’s life. He felt his father so powerfully he almost doubled over.

And then, next, a notebook. Evidently, Earl’s pen had broken or some such, for it was spattered with brownish fluid on the cover, and a discoloration had worked under the cardboard and bled through the pages. Bob peeled them, one at a time, trying to make sense of it. He saw a list of meaningless names inside the cover, like Jed Posey, Lum Posey and Pop Dwyer. He saw a stick figure crudely inscribed and lines radiating off toward landmarks that indicated distances; and a variety of other unrelated facts or observations: “Was she moved?” it said at one place. “Little Georgia,” it said at another. “Cause of death,” it wondered, “blunt force or strangulation?” “Meeting at church? Find out what?” He could make no—

A sudden sense of profound unease hit Bob. He turned back to the cover of the notebook and felt the thing burn in his fingertips. It occurred to him that the brownish stain that had seeped through to discolor the pages must be blood. It was his father’s blood. His father had been holding this or had it in his pocket when Jimmy Pye fired the fatal bullet and the wound had emptied on this document.

It had the sense of something religious to it, something from an ancient saint’s reliquary, like a blessed chard of bone or a fragment of hair or cloth. Its power overwhelmed him, and he put it down, feeling somehow as if he’d blasphemed. It was almost too much.

He suddenly had a need to put the lid on the box, stuff the box back into the slot where it had rested beribboned and sheathed in dust, and flee back to the good life he’d finally built for himself. He had horses to care for, a daughter to raise, a wife to support. In the box was only pain and black memories.

No, go on, he told himself. Go on, do it, see every last thing.

Next came some news clippings of the event itself, the various rags’ account of the events of July 23, 1955. He slipped through them, uninterested in details. Only one caught his attention: HERO TROOPER BURIED, it said, July 26, 1955, the Fort Smith Southwest Times Record front page, also brown and crackly with age. He saw himself as a small dour boy standing next to his poor mother, surrounded by a sea of uniforms and suits under a spreading elm tree. A minister seemed to commandeer the most artention; the casket was aligned next to the hole in the ground under the tree where it would go. At least Daddy had some shade. A marine honor guard stood on the right, ramrod boys with no hair and severely raked white dress hats, bills low over their eyes, their gloves white, the high-necked dress coats severe as any Puritan’s frock. Bob glanced at what the picture showed of himself, and saw only pudge and softness, as if he were out of focus, which he was. He could barely even remember the event itself, though the photo brought something back: his mother would not stop crying, though by this time he himself had been fully cried out. It was hot, the speeches seemed to go on forever. Someone called Miss Connie was like the dowager empress of the event, the Mother Courage who took over and got everything organized and done. He remembered her smell and beauty and how strong she’d seemed. But she was not in the picture.

Bob put the clipping down, passed through what little was left. Letters of condolence, official and otherwise, testifying to his father’s greatness, from, among others, the commandant of the United States Marine Corps, two men in the platoon who could write that day only because his actions had saved their lives, one on Iwo, one Tarawa, testimonials in inflated language from the commanding officer of the Arkansas State Police and the governor of Arkansas and a final crude letter from someone called Lucille Parker, telling his mother what a wonderful white man Earl Swagger had been, the only white man who’d listened to her pain over her daughter, Shirelle, and pledged to help. What on earth could that mean?

So many mysteries, so many unconnected elements, unfinished bits of business, the stuff of his father’s life. Not much to show for forty-five years on a planet where you’d done so much good work, and only a shoe box was left to testify to your existence.

That was it? Would the boy find such material interesting? Possibly. Bob made his mind up that in the morning he’d call the boy and arrange to let him borrow the stuff. Possibly some good would come out of it, after all.

There was a last scrap of paper. Bob picked it up, curious. It took some effort to get it figured out. It was the last page of what may have been an autopsy or a hearing report. In fact, lodged under the staple at the left top was the mulch of other pages that had been torn away. Bob understood that it had been the necessary, clinical, appallingly unemotional and excessively professional description of the wounds his father had suffered. A copy had been sent to his mother and when she discovered its meanings—Bob guessed it would have read something like “translateral passageway from under left nipple at 43-degree angle to sternum led to severe and catastrophic destruction of left ventricle” or some such—she’d just been unable to face it and had ripped it up and destroyed it. Why had this page survived? He couldn’t guess; it couldn’t be explained. Maybe she’d gone back and pulled it out of the garbage can and remorsefully tucked it away in the box. Her own sad decline had just been initiated; she would not live much longer herself, bent under grief and regret and finally alcoholism.

So this alone remained. Bob glanced at it and saw that it was a partial list of exhibits pertaining to the ballistics evidence of the hearing or autopsy or whatever. Because he knew a great deal of such matters, he read onward and saw what state police detectives had recovered at the scene.

“1) Colt .38 Super Government model, serial number 2645, with staghorn grips, four cartridges left in the magazine in the pistol.” That was Jimmy’s gun, slick, flashy Colt automatic shooting high-velocity bullets, vest-penetrating, shock-inducing, meant only to kill. Very professional choice.

“2) Fourteen cartridge cases bearing headstamp COLT .38 SUPER—WW,” the spent casings that Jimmy had ejected in the fight, meaning he’d fired fourteen times, he’d reloaded once and was halfway through the reloaded mag when his father took him out. He was a shooter, that boy. Bob wondered which of the fourteen rounds had been the fatal one, whether his father took it early or late. He shook his head. A fleeting wish came to him that he could reach back through time and deflect that bullet or maybe improve Earl’s aim just a bit on an earlier round; who knew how differently it might have turned out? But no: Jimmy fired the last round; he killed Earl even as Earl was killing him.

“3) Smith & Wesson 1926 Model .44 Special, SN 130465, with six unfired WW .44 Special rounds in the cylinder.” Bub’s gun, Bob guessed. Unfired. Hadn’t got a shot off.

“4) Colt Trooper .357 Magnum, SN 6351, with three loaded cartridges and three empty in the cylinder.” His father’s gun. Bob had seen his father clean that big piece of machinery once a week and after every firing session. Most of his memories of his father, in fact, were connected with firearms and his father teaching him how to shoot, how to hunt, how to clean, care for and respect the firearm. They were the lessons he’d never forgotten.

“5) Six cartridge casings bearing headstamp REMINGTON .357.” His father had reloaded himself, a speed reload under heavy fire from a guy with a semiauto and plenty of ammo. Good work, he thought, the best kind there is.

Only one label remained on the sheet. It bore the depressing title “Bullets Recovered” and he knew it meant recovered from bodies. The coroner’s last connection to the physical mechanism of death.

Did he have the courage to read on? With a sigh, he discovered he did. There were three “exhibits,” that is, bodies, and under each of them was listed the items recovered. Nothing in it surprised him, except that he learned that Bub had a bullet in him from Jimmy’s gun, probably delivered in the excitement of the action, a friendly-fire accident of the kind that was distressingly common in battle.

At last he read of the bullets taken from his father.

There were three.

“Two (2) misshapen (calibration impossible to determine) bullets, copper clad, weighing 130.2 grains and 130.1 grains.”

Then “One (1) misshapen (calibration impossible to determine) bullet, metal clad, weight 109.8 grains.”

Bob looked at it, not quite sure what he was reading, then he read it again and a third time. It did not go away. 109.8 grains.

“I thought I’d find you here,” Julie said.

He turned, startled.

“Yeah, here I am. Going back through it.”

“Bob, you ought to help that boy. It would help you more than anything. You’ve been angry ever since 1955. You should face it.”

“I’m going to do more than face it,” he said.