Black Light

“You haven’t heard from him today?”

“I haven’t. The truth is, Mr. Earl, I don’t want to ever hear from him again. I can’t have this. It’s too horrible. I have to leave and start over.”

He saw that she was crying.

She turned.

“Mr. Earl, I have to tell you. I married Jimmy because I was bad. I let him—”

“You don’t have to tell me a thing. All that’s your business.”

“I was pregnant. I didn’t have a choice, I didn’t think. My baby had to have his father.”

A single track ran down from her left eye.

“No one knows but Miss Connie. It would kill my poor mother.”

“No one will ever know,” said Earl.

“No. I lost the baby. I miscarried a month ago. The baby’s gone. I lost my baby and now I’m married to a killer. Oh, Earl.”

“You don’t have to worry about that,” Earl said. “We can fix all that.”

The phone rang.

“Should I answer?”

“It’s probably for me.”

She went and picked it up, and no, it wasn’t for Earl.

“It’s Jimmy,” she said.

5

T

he boy sat on the porch with Bob and Julie.

“Can you get him something to drink, please,” Bob said. “He says he wants to write a book about my father.”

“Do you want some lemonade? A Diet Coke? We don’t have any alcohol in this house.”

“I’m a drunk,” said Bob. “Can’t have it around.”

“A Diet Coke,” said the boy.

Bob stared at him. What was he, some kind of emissary from the dead? Who could speak of his father to him? Bob found himself strangely agitated, not fearful exactly, but ill at ease, uncertain. Not that the boy looked difficult or dangerous. Quite the opposite: the boy wore wire-rim glasses and looked a little queasy. It was a look Bob had seen on boys he’d had to lead into battle. Why me? Why anyone? Why?

Julie came back with the Coke and a glass with ice. He felt that the can was cold and took a swig, bypassing the glass.

“Go ahead,” said Bob.

“My name,” said the boy, “is Russell Pewtie, that is, Russell Pewtie, Jr. I’m twenty-two years old and I spent two years at Princeton University before dropping out. It’s possible the name Pewtie rings a bell?”

“Not yet,” said Bob.

“My father is Russell ‘Bud’ Pewtie, Sr. Until three years ago, he was a sergeant in the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. Big guy, old-boy type. Everybody liked him a lot. Decent man. He was famous for a bit. It was in all the magazines. They say they’re going to make a TV movie about him, one of those ‘Line of Duty’ things.”

“I must have missed it.”

“Well, it may have fallen through,” said the boy. “I don’t talk to my father anymore, so I wouldn’t know. What happened was, in June of 1994, a guy named Lamar Pye led two other men on a breakout from McAlester State Penitentiary in Oklahoma. Lamar was a powerful criminal personality, tough, violent, very smart, extremely aggressive. He cut a swath through southwestern Oklahoma they’re still talking about. Robbery, murder, kidnapping, the works. Now, for some reason, he and my dad—well, they were fated, somehow, mixed together. Lamar ambushed my dad, wounded him, though only superficially, but killed his partner. My dad took it personally. Twice he tracked Lamar down. He had a total of three shoot-outs with Pye. He killed his cousin, he killed a woman who’d thrown in with Pye and finally he killed Pye. Shot his face off, then shot him in the head.”

“Sounds like a brave man,” said Bob.

“Well,” said Russ, as if judgment were still pending. “He was seriously wounded. Shot in the lung, broke his collarbone, nerve damage crippled his right arm. But he recovered, and then one day he says to my mother, ‘I love you, I always will, goodbye.’ Leaves flat cold on a Wednesday morning. Moves across town to a little house near the airport. He was in love with and was carrying on with the woman who was his partner’s wife. Closer to my age than to his.”

“Excuse me, Russ,” said Julie, “where is this going? What does this have to do with my husband?”

“I got to thinking how much we lost to Lamar Pye. And we were lucky. We got out alive. Lamar Pye killed two men during the break out, he killed Ted Pepper, my dad’s partner, he terrorized a farmer and his wife and the woman died soon after, he kidnapped and terrorized a young woman, he killed seven people in a robbery before my dad finally ended it. We were lucky. There’s eleven people in the ground because of Lamar Pye. That was three months’ work. But Lamar took my family. He broke it up. Whatever happened, he enabled my father to leave my mother. It nearly killed my mother. I should tell you, to be quite honest, that I now truly hate my father. How he could do that to her after all those years he gave her? And so if all the Pewties survived Lamar, Lamar still killed the family. He couldn’t have done a better job with a shotgun.”

He paused, took a swig on the Coke. Now it was dark.

“I got curious. Where does a Lamar Pye come from? What so fills him with anger and hatred and fury, what turns him that way? So I thought: There’s a book. There’s a great book. The story not only of how my dad got Lamar Pye but what created Lamar Pye.”

“Russ, we still don’t—” Julie said.

“Honey, let the boy finish,” said Bob. “I know where he’s going.”

“I thought you would,” Russ said. “So I contacted the McAlester prison authorities—I’m a journalist, used to be assistant Lifestyles editor of the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City—and I got to look at his records and the stuff he left behind. I found his reform school records, his criminal rap sheet, the prison records and I found—this.”

He reached into his wallet and unfolded a document and handed it over to Bob.

“What is it, honey?” Julie asked.

Bob recognized it immediately and shuddered.

It was from the Arkansas Gazette of July 24, 1955.

HERO TROOPER SLAYS TWO BEFORE DYING, ran the headline.

A state trooper sergeant shot and killed two suspected murderers on Route 71 north of Fort Smith yesterday evening before dying himself of gunshot wounds inflicted by the two men.

Dead were Sergeant Earl Lee Swagger, 45, of Polk County, a marine Medal of Honor winner in the Pacific; and Jim M. Pye, 21, of Fort Smith, and his cousin Buford ‘Bub’ Pye, 20, also of Polk County.

Bob’s eyes ran down the account of the long-ago gunfight.

He handed it to his wife.

“See,” he said, as she read it, “this Lamar Pye that shot all them people in Oklahoma. He was the son—I guess that’s it, right?”

“That’s it,” said Russ.

“—he was the son of the man who killed my daddy.”

“So you see—” started Russ.

“Incidentally,” said Bob dryly, “the papers then weren’t no better than the ones we got today. The Gazette’s a big Little Rock paper: it don’t know shit about West Arkansas. They got a fact wrong. They said north of Fort Smith. It was south of Fort Smith. That’s why I don’t trust ’em.”