Black Light

“Well, goddamn,” said Sam, exhaling a burst of smoke that billowed and furled in the room. “Probably a day doesn’t go by I don’t wonder why all that had to happen. Lots of good people all messed up. Your own mother’s decline begun that day, I believe.”

“I believe it did also,” said Bob.

“And poor Edie White. Edie White Pye. I always fergit she married that piece of trash. Her decline begun then, too. Nine months later she gives birth and in a year she is dead. Whatever happened to Jimmy Pye’s son, I wonder.”

“He continued in his father’s footsteps,” Russ said. “They were two of a kind.”

“That I don’t doubt. So what is it you want from me?”

“Well, sir,” Russ said, “I hope I can re-create what happened that day in a sort of dramatic narrative. But as you know there was a fire in 1994, when the old courthouse burned. That’s where all the records were kept.”

“I don’t have a thing, I don’t believe. Maybe a scrap or two.”

“Well, did the papers have it right?” Russ asked, fiddling with a small tape recorder. Sam eyed the little machine warily.

“Bob, this is under your say-so? You’re letting this boy ask questions because you want the answers too?”

“He says it could be an important book.”

“Well, I’ve read enough books not to give a hunk of spit and a quart of whittler’s shavings for any of ’em. But go ahead, young fellow. You ask ’em and if I don’t fall asleep, I’ll answer ’em.”

“Thank you,” Russ said. “I wanted to know, did the newspapers have it right? Their accounts?”

“Wasn’t much to get wrong,” said Sam. “In my business, you get to a lot of crime scenes. Oh, I’ve seen death in bathrooms and kitchens and basements and in swimming pools and outhouses, even, and sometimes there’s a mystery to it, but most often not. Mysteries are for books. In life, you look at the bodies and the cartridge cases and the blood trails, or you look at the knife and the spatter pattern and the fingerprints, and they won’t lie. They’ll tell you all you need to know, or at least the whodunit part. In this case it was pretty open-and-shut. Whydunit, why it happened? That no one ever can truly know.”

“Is there some account somewhere of the movements of the day? I mean, how and when Jim and Bub got down here, how Earl ran into them in that cornfield?”

“No sir. As I say, the event explained itself. No other information was really important.”

“Was there any kind of legal resolution?”

“In the case of unlawful homicides in which there are no survivors, the state of Arkansas deeds all power to the Coroner’s Office to hold an inquest. I represented the state and all agreed with the finding: the death of Earl Swagger was murder in the first degree, the deaths of Jimmy Pye and Bub Pye were justifiable homicide by a sworn law enforcement officer in the course of his legal duties. So it went into the books.”

“Is that document worth chasing down?”

“For your purposes, probably not, though I bet I have a copy of it at home. It contained a diagram of the bodies’ locations, a list of the recovered exhibits, testimony of the first officers on the scene, that’s all. But I’ll find it for you.”

“That would be very helpful. As I break this down, I’d like to try and acquire material in four other areas,” Russ said, consulting his notes and trying to sound important. “Witnesses. Maybe talk to the first people on scene. Then relatives of all concerned, that is, Jimmy and Bub. Next is secondary accounts. News media coverage, but maybe there were other accounts in true-crime magazines. Of course we ought to walk the site too, don’t you think, Mr. Swagger?”

“Hah,” said Sam. “Walk the site! I believe the famous Harry Etheridge Memorial Porkway buried it under a ton or so of concrete in memory to the greatest man Polk County ever produced. Son, you’re looking for a past that ain’t hardly there no more. There’s no Pyes left in Polk County. I heard that Jimmy’s father, Lannie, had a brother in Oklahoma.”

“Anadarko,” said Russ. “He was murdered in 1970, by parties unknown.”

“Miss Connie Longacre knew Edie the best. But she left town after Edie died and the child went to some Pye kin. She tried to get that baby herself, but they said she was too old. Nineteen fifty-six, I think.”

“Was there an autopsy?” Bob asked.

“There was,” said Sam. “State law in the case of unlawful deaths. Paperwork all gone, however, in that courthouse fire.”

Bob nodded, chewing that one over.

“A long and terrible day,” said Sam. “It has always seemed to me a tragedy of the Republic that it can no longer produce men the caliber of Earl Swagger. I’ve said this to you many a time, Bob Lee. He was a quietly great man.”

“He did his duty,” said Bob, “more than some.”

“Fortunately, Polk County has never had such a day since. Four dead. It marked the community for many years that followed. In some places, the pain even yet hasn’t—”

“Excuse me,” said Russ. “You mean three dead. Or are you counting the victims in Fort Smith? Then it would be seven dead. Just a little—”

“Young man, where did you go to college?”

“Ah, Princeton, sir.”

“Did you graduate?”

“Er, no. I, uh, left after two years. But I may return.”

“Well, no matter. Anyhows, Princeton? Well; if you want to climb up and blow the dust off that picture frame”—he gestured to the wall—“you’d see old Sam Vincent, the country rube lawyer from Hicksville, Arkansas, he went to Princeton University too! And if you blow the dust off the other frame, you’d see he went to Yale Law School. And though he’s old, he’s not as dim as you seem to think, at least on good days. And if he says four, he goddamn-your-soul means four.”

Russ was stilled.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I meant no disrespect. But who was the fourth one?”

“Earl’s last case. A poor girl named Shirelle Parker. A Nigra child, fifteen years old. She was raped and beaten to death out in the Ouachitas, and it was Earl who found her that very morning and made the initial reports. I felt it was his legacy and I pursued it with a special attention to duty. Fortunately, it was open-and-shut too. In that one, there was some justice.”

“I think I remember,” said Bob. “Some Negro boy. Wasn’t he—”

“He was indeed electrocuted. I watched him die up at the state penitentiary at Tucker in 1957. Reggie Gerard Fuller, it was a terrible tragedy.”

“You going to put that in your book?” Bob asked.

“I don’t know … it is very strange, isn’t it?”

“Earl spent the morning out there. Possibly he was still thinking of that case when he ran into Jimmy and Bub and that’s how they got a jump on him.”

“It was open-and-shut?”

“Like a door. The poor girl had ripped his monogrammed shirt pocket as he had his evil fun with her. We checked among the colored folk for the proper initials, and when we found one that matched, we raided. I’m happy to say that even in those benighted days, I arranged for the proper warrants to be issued. Here in Polk County, we run it by the goddamned rules. We found the shirt stuffed under his bed, the pocket missing. It was smeared with her blood, by type. She was AB positive, he was A positive. The boy made a mistake, he got carried away, he couldn’t stop himself. She died, he died, both families devastated. I don’t hold with the theory Nigras can’t feel pain as white people do. The Parkers and the Fullers felt plenty of pain, as much as I’ve ever seen.”

Russ shook his head, which now profoundly ached. He wanted to get away: this was like something out of Faulkner or Penn Warren, blasphemed southern ground, soaked in blood a generation old, white trash and black, white innocence and black, all commingled in a very small area on the same day.

“Sam, we’ve tired you. I may have some things I want you to do. You’ll take my money, I suppose,” Bob was saying.

“Of course I will,” said Sam.