Black Light

Bob nodded. “All right, now ask him two more questions. The first is, where were all the tenant farmers’ shacks? Were they right here, did this road run back to them? Or were they farther along? Where did this road go then? And second: ask him which direction my father’s car was parked. He said it was aslant the road and the body was behind the steering wheel. I want to know on which side of the road that was, which direction it faced.”

Russ took a deep breath, then turned and ran back to the old man.

Again alone, Bob turned to face the highway that towered above him. He walked back through the weeds and came at last to stand next to one of the mighty concrete pylons upon which the road rested. It was cool here in the shade, though the road rumbled. Someone had painted POLK COUNTY CLASS OF ’95, and beer cans and broken bottles lay about on the gravel. Beyond the parkway Bob could see the land fall away into forest and farm over a long slope of perhaps two miles until a little white farm road snaked through the trees.

He looked back and saw that the action had played out halfway down just the subtlest slope. He saw Russ standing big as day where he had left him. He walked on back.

“Okay,” Russ said, breathing hard, trying to keep it straight. “The road evidently was an old logging trail and it ran back and up and over the ridge. This area used to be logged back in the twenties. The ‘croppers lived another mile or so down U.S. 71 away from Waldron, toward Boles. That’s where Sam shot his deer and the lady yelled at him.”

“It wasn’t here?”

“No sir.”

“Okay. And my daddy: he was on the left side of the road. Facing east. Facing the ridge, right? Sitting sideways in his seat, with his feet on the ground, not as if he were about to drive away, is that right?”

Another look of befuddlement came across Russ’s face.

“How did you know that? It wasn’t in any of the newspaper accounts. Sam says the car was parked on the left side of the road and the door was open and your daddy—”

Bob nodded.

“What’s going on?”

“Oh, just seeing the place gets me to thinking. I got a question or two.”

“What questions?”

“How’d they get here? Through the biggest manhunt in Arkansas?”

“That was my question! Remember, I asked that question. When we were driving in the day before—”

“But when you asked it, it was a stupid question. It was stupid because we had no idea of the layout of the roads that led to the site and the kind of terrain it was. It could have been there were fifty obscure country roads, far too many for the cops to cover, all leading here. But there weren’t. There’s only Route 71, a major highway, well covered, and this little logging track that don’t go nowhere. So now it’s a smart question.”

Russ didn’t get the distinction, but he didn’t say anything.

“Then,” Bob said, “how come here? You tell me?”

“Ah—” Russ had no answer. “This is where he ran into them. He chased them, they turned off the road, he got by them and blocked them, uh—”

“You think that little road is wide enough for him to get by them? It’s night, remember, and if he slides off the road into the soft soil of the cornfield, he’s fucked. No, he was waiting for them. He was already here. And it’s off the road, out of public view, so they wouldn’t get surprised by someone coming along. How’d he get jumped by them? Hell, he was a salty old boy. He’d made two thousand arrests, he’d fought in three major island invasions, he was nobody’s fool. Yet they open up and hit him bad, first few shots? How?”

“Ah—” Russ trailed off.

“Maybe he was the mastermind of the job. Maybe he had come to get his payoff and split the take.”

Russ looked at him in horror. “Your father was a hero,” he said.

“That’s what it said in the papers, isn’t it? He was just a goddamn man, don’t think of him as a hero, because then you don’t think straight about it. No, he wasn’t in on it. He didn’t trust ’em. But he knew they was coming. Reason he swung around to park in the direction he did was so he could use his searchlight, which was mounted outside the driver’s-side window. He had to cover ’em. Hell, they were surrendering to him, that’s what it was. How’d he know where to go, where they’d reach him? Why would he believe them? What was it really about?”

Russ had no answers.

“Come on,” said Bob. “There’s only one man who can tell us.”

“Sam?”

“No,” said Bob, leading the way, “Daddy himself. He wants to talk. It’s just time we listened.”

They walked back and found Sam sitting on the open tailgate of the truck, his pipe lit up and blazing away. It smelled like a forest fire.

“You boys didn’t get lost? That’s a surprise.”

“Sam,” said Bob, “let me ask you something. Suppose I wanted to exhume my father’s body? What sort of paperwork is involved?”

Sam’s shrewd old features narrowed under his slouch hat and grew pointed.

“Now, what the hell you want to do that for, boy?”

“I just want to know what happened. The diagrams may lie and the newspapers may lie and all the official documents may be gone, but the body is going to tell the truth.”

“Bob, it was forty years ago.”

“I know there’s not much left. That’s why we need a good man. Now, what’s it going to take?”

“Well, I file a Motion of Exhumation with the county clerk and the Coroner’s Office and you have to find a good forensic pathologist. Get a doctor, not an undertaker like they got in too many counties down here.”

“Someone from Little Rock?”

“There’s someone in the medical school up at Fayetteville who’s well thought of. I could call him. Then I suppose you have to make an arrangement with a mortuary to clear out a place for him to work. Bob, you want to go to all that trouble? It was open-and-shut.”

“It’s the only way my daddy can talk to me. I think I ought to listen to what he has to say. I have to find out what happened that night.”

Sam slept on the way back and when they pulled up to the old house where he’d lived and raised his kids and married his daughters and his sons and buried his wife, they waited for the stillness in the car to wake him. But it didn’t.

“Sam?” Bob finally said softly. It was twilight, with the sun lost behind Rich Mountain, which towered over Blue Eye from the west.

Sam made some wet, gurgling sound in his sinuses, stirred a bit but then seemed to settle back.

“Sam,” said Bob a little louder, and Sam’s eyes shot open.

He looked at each of them.

“Wha—where—what is—”

“Sam, Sam,” said Bob, grabbing the old man’s shoulder. “Sam, you been sleeping.”

But Sam’s eyes lit in panic and his body froze in tension.

“Who are you?” he begged fearfully. “What do you want? Don’t hurt me!”

“Sam, Sam,” said Bob calmly, “it’s Bob, Bob Lee Swagger, Earl’s boy. You just done forgot where you was.”

The old man was shaking desperately.

“You’re okay, Mr. Vincent,” said Russ. “Really, it’s fine, you’ve forgotten.”

But Sam’s eyes flashed between them, wide with horror.

“It’s okay,” said Bob. “It’s okay.”

14