Black Light

profiles ran in all the big magazines and on TV shows; in the Arkansas State Legislature, a bill was introduced to rename the parkway now called solely after his father the “Hollis and Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway,” and it passed within a week, though no money could be found in the budget to remake the signs so that will have to wait until a better year.

As for Red Bama, after the grand jury refused to indict him, he joined his family in Hawaii for the remainder of the summer. They had a wonderful time, and returned in the fall, fit and tan and rested. His children prosper, even poor Nicholas; Amy is planning on Yale Law School and wants to go to work as a prosecutor and Red has told her he can arrange it and she still sniffs at him. But occasionally she wears that gold Rolex. He is, after all, her father. He is still married to Miss Runner-up but rumors persist he has been seen in out-of-the-way clubs with an actual Miss Arkansas of early nineties vintage.

Bob and Russ left Arkansas that very afternoon; they drove all night, after turning in the rental car and paying a healthy fee to get the green pickup, much battered, out of the airport parking. Late that afternoon, they were in Oklahoma City, where Russ still had his apartment in an old house.

Bob pulled up outside it.

“Okay, bub, here you be,” he said.

“God,” said Russ, “I can’t believe it’s over.”

“Over and done,” said Bob. “Or as done as it can be.”

“Jesus,” said Russ.

“You’re a great kid, Russ. You write that book. I know it’ll be a success.”

“I never really got enough. Not enough facts, not enough documentation. But it turned out to be exactly as I thought it would be, didn’t it? A profound endorsement of the genetic theory of human behavior. Good fathers, good sons. Bad fathers, bad sons, straight down the line. Like a laboratory experiment.”

“Write it as a story.”

Russ wondered: a story? Then he realized Bob meant as fiction.

“You mean as a novel?”

“That’s the ticket. Make up the names, change the locale, that sort of thing. All them Johnnies do it, no reason you shouldn’t.”

“Hmmmmm,” said Russ. That’s a good idea.” It was a good idea.

“And let me give you one last piece of advice, all right?”

Russ said, “Okay.”

“Make peace with your father. You’ll be a lot happier. He’ll be a lot happier. He’s your only father. You only get one. I’d give anything for another few minutes with mine.”

Russ laughed cynically. Then his bitterness came washing over him.

“Yeah, well,” he said. “Your dad was a hero. He was a great man, a great American man. They don’t come any better. But my dad’s just a man. He’s an asshole. He finally gave in to his selfishness. That’s all there is.”

Bob was quiet for just a second and then he said, “You know, you’re a very bright kid. You were right on so many things. You were right about the Parker crime and how important it was. I was wrong, dead wrong. You were so smart, you saw so much, you were quick and brave. You’d make a hell of a marine.”

“I—”

“But you missed something, Russ. You missed something big.”

Russ turned. What could he have missed? What surprise was left?

“What are you talking about?”

“Ask yourself this: if the child who became Lamar Pye was born nine months after Jimmy’s death … when did Jimmy get his young wife pregnant?”

Russ paused, considering.

“He never made it back to Blue Eye,” said Bob. “My father stopped him in that cornfield. Edie Pye never saw her husband alive from the last time she visited him in jail a month earlier.”

Russ shook his head. What did …? Where was this going?

“I think Miss Connie might have figured it out, but she was the only one. If she did, she didn’t let on.”

“I don’t—” Russ began.

“Oh yes, you do,” said Bob.

Russ looked up at Bob.

“My daddy was alone with Edie that last day for at least an hour. He liked her a lot. She liked him a lot. Later, when he left to go for Jimmy, he told me about two kinds of bad. Bad evil, where you decide to do wrong and say fuck it, and bad mistake, where you want to do the right goddamn thing but it gets clotted up and confused sometimes and before you know it, never meaning to, you done made a mess. He was talking about himself.”

“You’re saying …?”

“That’s right, Russ. Big bad old Lamar Pye? He was my brother.”

47

R

uss didn’t stop having Lamar Pye dreams right away; in fact, two weeks after he got back, he had a terrible one, the worst yet, a screamer, full of Lamar, shotguns, this time Jeannie Vincent thrown in, his hero Bob’s gun empty and not shooting, a real monster. But as the weeks passed, the space between them seemed to widen and then one day in late September he’d been so busy with his arrangements and his goodbyes, he suddenly realized it had been almost a full, clear dreamless month.

So he knew it was time for the last thing.

It was a small house, much smaller than he expected, and he checked twice to make sure he had the address right. But he had. The day was beautiful, now chilly with the coming fall, but very clear, and the constant Oklahoma wind pushed through the trees, shaking them dry of leaves.

Russ got out of the truck and went up to the house, climbing up the porch and going to the front door.

I feel like an idiot, he thought.

But he knocked anyway, and after a bit, the door opened—it was still the Midwest and people opened doors without looking out first—and a young woman stood before him. She was in her late twenties, strikingly attractive, thin, with a spray of red freckles on her whitish skin and a crop of reddish-blond hair.

“Yes?” she asked.

“You’re Holly?” he said.

“Yes. I’m sorry, who are—”

“I’m Russ.”

She still looked blank. She was not getting this.

“Russ Pewtie,” he said. “My dad lives here.”

“Russ! Russ! Oh, God, Russ, I didn’t recognize you, it’s been so many years and you were a teenager. Come in, come in, he’ll be so happy!”

She all but pulled him into the house, which was modest but clean and had a lot of books and gun magazines around. Little indicators of domestic intimacy irritated Russ: a Lawton Constitution TV guidebook, a pair of Nike running shoes, his father’s by the size, a table with a checkbook and a stack of bills where someone had been paying what was due, a frame displaying a batch of decorations from the Oklahoma State Police. But he pushed the anger and the pain away.

This is the way it is, he told himself.

From somewhere deeper in the house came the sound of a football game.

“Bud, Bud, Bud honey, guess who’s here?”

“Goddammit, Holly,” came his father’s irritated voice from the sunporch where the TV evidently had been placed, “it’s the fourth quarter. Who the—”

“Bud, it’s Russ.”

“Russ!”