Black Light

begin and—”

“The plan,” said Bob, “is that we go grocery shopping.”

It was full night when they got there, but the store was still open. If once it had been the flagship of a national chain, that identity was long since faded, though if you looked, in the neon you could make out the silhouettes of the letters when they removed the “IGA” from the big sign. It just said “Smitty’s,” hand-painted on plywood, nailed halfway up the big struts of the old sign. But it was still at 222 Midland Boulevard.

Brown light sustaining a cloud of insects beamed down from the pylons installed as a crime deterrent. The store looked ratty, even threadbare, and through the broad windows, Russ could see a few shoppers rushing among junky, sparse shelves. It occurred to him that the neighborhood had changed in forty years: everybody he saw in the store, everybody going in and out, was black or Asian or Hispanic.

“So,” Bob said, “you’re a writer. You figure things out. You tell me: why here?”

“Huh?” said Russ.

“Begin with a beginning. That day, it starts here at this grocery store at about eleven in the morning. Now: you tell me why.”

“Me?”

“Yep, you.”

“Ah, maybe they just fell into it. They were—”

“Russ, they’d stolen a car and somehow come up with two guns and ammunition. They were fixing to rob something. Now, if they went to all that trouble, you think they’d just walk into it? First place they saw? The jail is downtown. Blue Eye’s the other way, south, out of town. Why’d they come north to this place?”

“Ahh—” Russ had no answer. It shocked him, though. Clearly, Bob had mastered the material at a much deeper level than he’d expected, surprising from a man who seemed as far from formal intellectuality as he could imagine.

“Look at it as a military problem. What is it about this place that recommends it for an operation?”

Russ looked around nervously. It was on a long straight stretch of road, a main drag into and out of town from the north, but now looking grim, three or four miles removed from downtown proper. There wasn’t much to be seen. Long, straight road leading off in both ways, trees, a commercial strip full of bars and car dealerships and decaying retail outlets. Now and then cars moved up and down the block just by them, but there wasn’t much.

“I don’t see a thing,” he admitted.

“Or, consider this way,” Bob said. “There were two other big grocery stores in Fort Smith in 1955: Peerson Brothers, on South Thirty-first Street, and Hillcrest Food Market, on Courtland, in Hillcrest. Do you want to drive there and see what’s different about them?”

“Er,” said Russ. Then he asked, “Do you see something?”

“I didn’t go to no college or anything,” said Bob. “What would I know?”

“But you see something?”

“I see a little thing.”

“What is it?”

Bob looked up and down the road.

“Now, I’m no armed robber. But if I was an armed robber, what I’d be most afraid of is that while I’m in robbing and before anybody even got an alarm out, a cop might come along.”

Russ nodded. It seemed logical.

“Now, what’s different about this block?”

“Ahhhh—” He trailed off in acknowledgment of his stupidity.

“It’s long. If you look at the map you’ll see that it goes for an unusual length. Look, no side streets and there ain’t a stoplight in either direction for more than a bit.”

Russ looked. Indeed, far down in each direction a stoplight glowed, one red, one green.

“Now, if you looked each way, and you knew no cop was in sight, you’d have about a clear minute or so to git in and out and you’d be guaranteed no cop could sneak up on you. In fact, a cop did come, but the boys were out and old goddamn Jimmy Pye had plenty of time to set up a nice clear shot. That cop didn’t have a chance.”

“Wow,” said Russ, surprised. Then he added, “Jimmy was smart. He wasn’t just improvising, he’d worked it out. It figures. His son was very smart. Lamar was very, very clever when he set up his jobs, and he always knew exactly what to do. That’s something he got from his old man.”

“Yeah, he was a regular genius,” said Bob. “But how could he have scouted it out if he was in jail for three months?”

“Uhhh—” Russ let some air out of his lungs but no words formed in his brain.

“Now, let’s consider something else. The guns. All the newspapers say Bub brought the guns. They was planning a job, Bub got the guns together, had plenty of ammo, they went right into action.”

“Right.”

“But Jimmy’s was a Colt .38 Super, not a common gun, a kind of special gun, very few of ’em made. I’d love to find out where that gun come from. The .38 Super never really caught on; it was invented by Colt and Winchester in 1929 to be a law enforcement round, to get through car doors and bulletproof vests. But the .357 Mag come along a few years later and did everything it did better. So the Super just sort of languished. It wasn’t your street gun, the kind a punk kid like Bub would come up with. It’s not a hunting gun. It was never accurate enough to be a target round. It’s not a nineteenth-century cartridge, a .38-40 or a .32-20, say, that could have been lying around a farm for sixty years. No, it didn’t have its day until the eighties, when the IPSC boys begun loading it hot to make major. But in 1955, let me tell you, it wasn’t something you’d just find. You’d have to ask for it: a professional’s gun, real good velocity, nine shots in the mag, smooth shooting. If you were a cop or an armed robber, it’s just the ticket. How’d Jimmy know that? He a gun buff? He into guns? He a hunter, an NRA member, a subscriber to Guns magazine? How’d he end up with just the right gun for that kind of work?”

“Ah—” Russ flubbed.

“And how’d Bub get it?”

“Stole it, I guess,” said Russ.

“Guess is right. But no one ever reported it stolen, not so’s I’d know. What’s that tell us?”

“Ah,” said Russ, not quite knowing what it told him.

“It tells us maybe someone’s putting this thing together who knows a little bit about what he’s doing.”

Russ said, “Like I say, Jimmy was smart, like his boy, Lamar.”

“Not that smart” was all that Bob said.

Where is this going? What’s this guy up to? Russ wondered.

The next morning, they took the new Harry Etheridge Parkway down toward Bob’s hometown. It was a strange experience: the road was not yet built when he left Blue Eye, seemingly forever, three years ago. Now it seemed so permanent, he could not imagine that it hadn’t been there forever, four wide lanes of white cement gleaming in the sun. The road, however, was practically deserted. Who went from Blue Eye to Fort Smith and back again? As a recreation area, Blue Eye had yet to be developed.

It was strange, almost dislocating. He’d walked these hills and mountains daily for the seven years he’d lived alone on a mountain in a trailer with the dog Mike, just forgetting the world existed. He knew them a dozen different ways, all their trails and switchbacks, their enfilades and shortcuts, the subtle secrets of terrain that no map could yield. Yet penetrated from this angle, they gave up visions before unseeable as the highway almost seemed to rearrange the mountains themselves in new and unusual ways. It troubled him, announcing the mistake of going back thinking that things have stayed the same, for they always change and must be relearned again.

A part of him hated the damn road. What the hell was the point, anyhow? They say Boss Harry Etheridge never forgot he came from Polk County and he wanted to pay back his home folks, give them some shot into the twentieth century. They say that his son, Hollis, when he was in the Senate before he began his presidential quest, wanted a monument to his father. They say that all the politicians and businessmen wanted a free feed at the expense of the U.S. government, which is why so many people called it the porkway and not the parkway. But it