Black Light

8

In the gloom of twlight, Earl drove swiftly down Route 88 until he passed beyond Board Camp and came to his own mailbox, turned in and followed the dirt road to his own house. He picked up the microphone and called in.

The news was not good at all. The state detectives had not been able to get to the Shirelle Parker site yet and wouldn’t make it until the morning. Only a one-man shift from the Polk County Sheriff’s Department could be assigned to secure the crime area overnight, though a coroner’s assistant had come out to make a preliminary investigation.

“How long was he there?” Earl asked over the radio.

“Ten minutes.”

“Ten minutes!” Earl exploded to the sheriff’s dispatcher. “How the hell could he learn anything in ten minutes?”

“Come on, Earl, you know we goin’ to go to Niggertown tomorrow when all this about Jimmy is settled, and sooner or later someone goin’ to talk to us. That’s how it works down there. Them people can’t keep no secrets.”

Earl thought: Suppose it was a white person who killed Shirelle?

“Okay. Tell them I’ll be out there first thing in the morning, and to keep the site as clean as possible. I hate to think of that little girl lying out there all alone another night.”

“It don’t matter to her none, Earl.”

Earl signed off.

All sorts of things weighed on his mind; he tried to will them away.

You got to stay sharp, he told himself. You got lots to do.

But he wanted more than anything to sleep, to end the day and hope that tomorrow would be a better one.

He reached the house, which had once been his father’s, low but surprisingly gracious, a white place with a porch and green shingles in a grove of elms. Out back there was a rope swing and a creek. The barn held four good riding horses and the fields were Earl’s for two hundred acres all around. His son came running off the front porch.

“Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!”

“Well, howdy there, Davy Crockett, how’s Daddy’s best boy?” he said, his heart swelling at the sight of the kid running toward him, the ever-present coonskin cap clutching his head, its tail bobbing on his back. Damnedest thing Earl ever did see, but all the kids wore them.

Bob Lee was nine and had never given anybody a lick of trouble. He was all the son a dad could wish for; all boy, but a hard worker too, and he had something of his father’s natural ways with a firearm. For a nine-year-old, he could fire a .30-30 lever gun with amazing accuracy and last year had bagged a deer, though he’d shot it too far back and Earl had to track it all the way into the mountains of Scott County to finish it. Earl picked his son up and gave him a swirl up to the sky as if he were a bag of feed, swinging him till his little feet swept upward.

“Whoooooooooo!” screamed the boy.

“Best hope I hang on to you, Bob Lee, I let you go, you’ll end up on the moon!”

The boy laughed as Earl set him down.

“Mama’s up the road a piece,” he announced. “Mrs. Fenson felt poorly and Mama said she’d take over some dinner.”

“Umh,” said Earl, recognizing his wife’s behavior in the gesture. “I’m just gonna git me a sandwich and an iced tea and be on my way.”

The disappointment was ripe on the boy’s face.

“You going out, Daddy? You go out every night.”

“Tomorrow, I swear to you, I’ll stay in. Got me one little thing to do. When that’s over, I’m going to take a rest. Come on, boy, let’s see what she’s got in the kitchen.”

In they went, and in no time, Earl had slapped some ham on his wife’s good bread and opened two root beers. He took it all out on the porch, and Bob went with him. They ate in silence. Earl looked at his watch. It was now 8:30 and he had close to an hour’s drive up to near Waldron and the cornfield. He finished the sandwich, took a last gulp on the root beer, draining it.

“Walk me to the cruiser, Bob Lee.”

“Yes sir,” said the boy, adoring the private time with his father.

They got to the car. Earl opened the door, ready to climb in and pull away. The sun was setting. It was the gray hour of perfect stillness and clarity in the world; here in eastern Polk County, the Ouachitas changed subtly in character and became lower, rounded hills, crested with pine and teeming with game, like islands rising out of a flat sea. Earl didn’t do much farming, but it was nice to have some land to hunt and to shoot on. He’d made a good life for his family, he thought.

An immense melancholy and regret suddenly flooded him; there was a kind of hole in his mind where he’d exiled his most recent memories and focused instead on the perfection of the here and now. He reached down and grasped his son and gave him a crushing hug.

“You be a good boy, now, Bob Lee,” he said. “You tell your mama how much I love her. I just have this one last little thing to do, you understand? Then maybe we’ll take some time off. It’s been a rough summer. Time to go fishing, you understand.”

“Yes sir.”

“Got a surprise for you. In a month or so, the Chicago Bears goin’ come down to Little Rock and play the New York Giants. Saw an ad in the paper. They call it the Football Classic of the South. War Memorial Stadium, September 10. You send off for tickets. They’re pretty expensive, three-eighty apiece, but what the heck. Figure you, me and Mommy’d go down to Little Rock, have us a nice dinner and see that game. How’d you like that?”

“At night?”

“Yes sir. They rig these big old lights and it’s bright as day.”

“That’d be great,” the boy said.

But he had picked up the strangeness in his father.

“Daddy, you okay?”

“I am fine,” said Earl. “I am—” He paused, perplexed. He felt he had to explain something to his son.

“I’m going to arrest a bad boy,” he said. “A boy who made a big mistake. But there’s two kinds of bad, Bob Lee. This boy’s bad was he just decided to be bad. He said, I will be bad, and he did bad things and now he’s got to pay. See, that’s one kind of bad.”

The boy looked at him.

“But you ain’t ever going to be like that. Most nobody’s ever like that. That other kind of bad, see, that’s the kind that a good boy like you or any good boy could fall prey to. That’s the kind of bad that says I will be good but somehow, not meaning to, not facing it, not thinking about it, lying to yourself, you just sort of find yourself where it’s easy to be bad and you don’t have the guts or the time or whatever, maybe you don’t even realize where you are, and you just do it and it’s done. Then you know what?”

The boy’s vacant eyes signified that he was lost.

“Well, anyway, someday you’ll understand all this. What you got to do next, you got to clean up your mess. You got to make it right. If it’s busted, you got to fix it. You got to face the consequences. Do you see?”

The boy just looked up at him.

“Well, so you don’t. You will, I know, and you’ll be a fine man and not make the mistakes your poor, stupid old daddy made. Now I have to go. You tell your mama that I love her and I’ll see y’all tonight, do you hear?”

“Yes, Daddy.”

Earl got in the car, took one of his swift, practiced U-turns, the maneuver of a man who drove beautifully and with great confidence, and pulled away. As he drove he saw his son in the rearview mirror, standing there in the fading light, one arm lifted to say goodbye. He put a hand out the window and gave a little waggle of acknowledgment, hit the main road and sped off.

“That was the last thing I remember,” Bob said.

“The wave?” Julie asked.

“Yep. He just put his big old arm out the window and gave a little, you know, a little wave. Then the car turned and off he went. Next time I saw him, he was in a casket with a pink-frosted face and a smile like a department store dummy and all these grown-ups were saying sad things.”

He paused, remembering the wave, not the man in the casket. It seemed to sum his father up, a little masculine salute from an arm thickened with muscle, hand big and loose and square, three yellow chevrons gleaming in the failing light, hat set square on his head in silhouette as he went off to do something—no one could ever tell Bob what it was—called duty.

“Would you let me be, please,” he said.

“Are you all right, honey?”

“I’m fine. I need to be alone a bit, is all.”

“I’ll be downstairs if you need me,” she said, and departed softly.

When she left, Bob cried hard for the first time in his life since July 23, 1955.