Black Light

you a new one?”

“Daddy, you suck.”

Red laughed. Good-naturedly tormenting his children was one of his deepest delights. Amy knitted her fierce, bright little face up into something like a fist, and if it had been possible, she would have smacked him with it. A wave of deep and uncompromising love poured over and through him. The way a man feels about his favorite daughter who goes her own way, takes nothing and makes good on everything. The watch was presented to her not by Red at all but by Maryvale Prep, for graduating with the highest accum in its history.

The lights began to dim.

“Okay, got to get back to family number two,” Red said cheerily to Susie.

“You’ll bring Nick home tonight?”

“He can stay with us if you want.”

“No, that’s fine. He’s got practice early. I know you won’t get him there.”

“We’ll take him for ice cream after, and bring him by.”

“Great, honey.”

“See you,” he said, as the overture came up, hot and pounding.

But Red didn’t return directly. He walked back to the rear of the house, paying no attention as the curtain opened to tumultuous applause, revealing what looked like a back alley populated by sleek, sinuous feline shapes that one after another began to shimmer to life.

Red dialed his number and listened.

“It’s Duane Peck here,” the voice came, telling him what he already knew and impressing him with nothing. “Anyhows, uh, this kid is in town, and I got him nailed and I’ll stay with him. First stop, old Sam Vincent. Is that a problem? Should I take care of that? Let me know. Also, uh—”

Someone was singing.

And we all say:

“—ah, he ain’t alone. Tall guy, lanky, looks you up and down real fine. I thought it might be. Yeah, it was. The son. The guy in Vietnam, called him Bob the Nailer. He’s along with the kid. Don’t know why, but he’s here too. Bob Lee Swagger, Earl’s boy.”

No emotion showed on Red’s face. He just cleared the call and, standing there in the back of the house, dialed another one.

“Billy, Red here.”

“Hey, Red, what’s on your—”

“Listen here, got me a situation. You put me together a team. Very tough guys, experienced, qualified on full automatic, professionals. I don’t want to use my boys. Got that?”

“Red, what—”

“Shut up, Billy, and listen. I want no less than ten. I want good weapons, good team discipline. I want ’em all to have felony records, preferably as drug enforcers. Get ’em from Dallas, get ’em from New Orleans, get ’em from Miami. Out-of-town boys. I want them to have records, in case we lose a few and bodies start showing up in Polk County, the newspapers will start calling it a drug war.”

“How much you want to go, Red?”

“I want the best. The best costs. You get ’em here, get ’em here fast. Good boys. Shooters. I want the best shooters. I want an A-team.”

“We’ll get working on it right now.”

“Good work, Billy,” Red said, then returned to his seat for the rest of Cats.

13

I

t took three hours, not at all helped by the fact that Sam’s old eyes weren’t as good as they once were and that he had to stop twice to go to the bathroom. Then he got irritable and hungry and they bought him some pancakes at the Waldron exit Denny’s. But there were no more episodes of strangeness, where Sam forgot who they were or who he was.

Then, once, Sam said, “Here, here, I think it’s here!”

“It can’t be here,” Russ, the navigator, exclaimed. “We just passed 23 and the papers say it was south of 23. We’re heading north toward Fort Smith. We must have gone too far!”

“Goddammit, boy, don’t you tell me where the hell we are. I traveled all this on horseback in the thirties, I hunted it for fifty years and I’ve been over it a thousand times. Tell him, Bob.”

“It’s the new road,” said Bob. “I think it’s throwing us off.”

For old 71, with its curves and switchbacks, slalomed between the massive cement buttresses that supported the straight bright line that was the Boss Harry Etheridge Memorial Parkway. Sometimes the huge new road would be to the left of them, sometimes to the right of them and sometimes above their heads. There would be times too when it disappeared altogether, behind a hill or a screen of uncut forest. But it was always there, somehow mocking them, a symbol of how futile their quest seemed: to recover a past that had been destroyed by the coming of the future.

But at last the two points of their peculiar compass jibed to form some sort of imaginary azimuth to where they wanted to go: Sam’s memory and Bob’s to the corrected version of the Arkansas Gazette of July 24, 1955.

They had just passed an odd little place set by the side of the road called Betty’s Formal Wear, in a ramshackle trailer a few miles out of a town called Boles. It was Sam who shouted, “Here, goddammit, here!”

Bob pulled off the side of the road. A little ways ahead, an Exxon station raised its corporate symbol a hundred feet in the air so it could be seen from the parkway, the inescapable parkway, off to the right. The roadway was thirty feet up, a mighty marvel of engineering, and even where they were, they could hear the throb as the occasional car or truck whizzed along it.

“Aren’t we looking for corn?” Russ asked. “I thought it was a cornfield.”

“Ain’t been no corn or cotton in these parts for two decades,” said Sam. “All the land’s in pasturage for cattle or hay fields. No cultivation no more.”

They were parked next to a GTE relay station, a concrete box behind a Cyclone fence.

“Back there?” said Bob.

“Yeah.”

Someone had planted a screen of pines in the sixties and they now towered about thirty feet tall, as if to block the ground from public scrutiny. Bob could see the flat, grassy field through the pines, however, shot with rogue sprigs of green as small bushes fought against the matted grass for survival.

“Yeah,” said Sam. “Corn, it was all corn then. Couldn’t hardly see nothing. I was the fifth or sixth car out here, but it was getting busier by the moment.”

Bob closed his eyes for just a second, and he imagined the site after dark, lit by the revolving police bubbles, punctuated by the crackle of radios, the urgent but futile shouts of the medics. It reminded him somehow of Vietnam, first tour, 1965-66, he was a young buck sergeant, 3rd Marine Division, the aftermath of some forgotten nighttime firefight, all the people running and screaming, the flares wobbling and flickering in the night the way the flashing lights would have ten years earlier, in 1955.

“You okay, Bob?”