Black Light

“He was guilty. Who would go to so much trouble to frame a boy like that?”

“The man what killed my baby Shirelle and has been walking around laughing about it all these years.”

“Madam: think about what you’re saying. A man would have to find Reggie, break into his house, get his shirt, take it to the site of the murder, dip it in your daughter’s blood, rip the pocket off, plant the pocket in your daughter’s dead hand, return to Reggie’s house, break in again, hide the shirt under the mattress. Now, who would do such a damned crazy thing? If he does nothing, we only find the body and there ain’t no other evidence to point to a suspect. Without that damned pocket and that bloody shirt, there ain’t no evidence, ain’t no case, ain’t no nothing. There’s only a dead girl.”

She didn’t blink or look away but faced him square.

“I knows all that. But … he did have the time. It ain’t like there’s some limit on the time he had, like a single night. He had four full days between the time he killed my girl and Mr. Earl found the body. It could have been done.”

It was the damn TV! Everybody thought they was Columbo or Matlock or some such and when people’s loved ones got killed, there always had to be some meaning in it. Sam looked into Mrs. Parker’s crazed old eyes: she’d been fulminating on this over the decades. She’d invented a goddamned conspiracy about her daughter’s death. No one wanted to face the squalid, simple, irrational truth, as here: a colored boy lost control and smashed her poor little daughter to death with a rock.

“Mrs. Parker, it don’t never happen that way. It just don’t.”

“Mr. Sam, I see in your eyes what you thinking. You thinking, crazy old colored woman, she be blaming a white person. Every last thing, it’s all the white man’s fault. It’s race, like all the colored, that’s all they think about. That’s what you thinking, right?”

She regarded him with fierce, brilliant eyes.

“Sister, I—”

“You is, isn’t you? Tell me!”

He sighed.

“I suppose I am. There are some things I cannot overcome. Some suspicions about y’all. I haven’t grown as I should have.”

“Then let me tell you something surprise you. I don’t think a white man done it. I think a colored man did.”

This threw Sam. It was the last thing he expected. The old woman had him foxed something powerful.

“What you mean, there, sister?”

“In them days, the one thing we told our girls, and I must have said it a hundred times to Shirelle: you don’t never get in no car with a white boy. White boy only wants one thing from you and you don’t want to give it to him. He may be friendly, he may be nice, he may be handsome, he may have the devil’s ways to him. But he only want one thing, girl, and if you give it to him, he hate you and all the black boys find out and they hate you, but they goin’ try and git the same off of you and really be angry if you don’t give it. So I know she don’t get in no car with no white man. Some colored man done this to her.”

Sam blinked, confounded. The old lady was smart. Not white smart, fancy sentences smart, but somehow she knew things: she had seen into the center of it. He’d known many a detective sergeant who wasn’t as sly as this.

“Mr. Sam, you the smartest man in this county. You smarter even than old Ray Bama or Harry Etheridge and his son, you smarter than Mr. Earl. You got his boy, Bob Lee, off when the whole U.S. govmint say he was a killer. You got Jed Posey to spend his black evil days in prison. Now you a old man and I a old woman. We both be gone soon. Cain’t you please just look at that case again? Just so’s when you goes you knows you done your job as hard at the end as you done it through the middle.”

“Well—”

He thought about it. His was a life of certitude. He was an absolute believer. He hated revisionism, hindsight, detached examination, the whole spirit of equivocation and ironic ambivalence which had become the American style in the nineties. He hated it. Goddamn Nigra woman wanted him to become what he hated.

But … there was time. She was right. It was not technically impossible. Why anyone would do such a thing was beyond his imagining, but it was, in the technical sense, by the laws of the physical world, possible. And the bit about the black man being the one who did it—that was so interesting.

As pure mystery, as pure problem of the intellect, it goaded him powerfully.

“My mind ain’t what it once was. It gits foggy. It clouds up with anger. I can’t find my socks. Seems like people hide things on me. But if I git another clear day like today, I will look at the case records again, or what of them remain. I will look, but don’t you expect nothing. I can’t have you expecting nothing, Mrs. Parker.”

“God bless you, sir.”

“Now, don’t call me sir. Call me Sam. Everybody else does.”

23

I

t was the football dream, a late variant. Lamar Pye and Russ’s father, Bud, were at his football game. It was 1981 and Russ was eight; he was not a very good football player. In fact he’d only played that one year.

Lamar said, “I think that damn boy’s got too much gal in him.”

“He ain’t no athlete, that’s for sure,” agreed Bud. “You should see his younger brother. That little sucker’s a studpuppy. You can’t hardly git him to quit.”

“I like that in a man and in a boy. When they don’t quit. Old Russ here,” Lamar explained, “not only do he got too much quit, he don’t even got no start.”

The two old boys laughed raucously on the sideline, and it seemed that everybody there was staring at poor little Russ, waiting for him to screw up.

It didn’t take long. Because he was too small to play the line and not fast enough to play the backfield, he’d been stuck at a position called linebacker. It involved a lot of football knowledge for which he just had no gift and the coaches were always yelling at him for being out of place or slow to react. He was never, ever comfortable. When he charged the line, inevitably a pass zinged to the exact place he’d just abandoned; when he stayed put against a pass, someone blasted through the line and veered through the hole he was supposed to plug. It was a terrible season and he yearned to quit because he wasn’t born with that cool-headed instinct his younger brother possessed in spades, but was, in truth, a spaz.

“Come on, Russ, stop ’em,” yelled his dad.

“Come on, Russ, you can do it,” yelled big old Lamar, ponytailed, charm, charisma, big white teeth, big sickle in his hands which he was sharpening with an Arkansas stone, running it with goose-pimply grinding sounds up and down the wickedly curving blade.

Russ was so intent on them that he missed the start of the play and when he finally snapped to—the coaches were yelling his name—it seemed that a big black kid on the other team had juked to the left then broken outside and was already beyond the line of scrimmage with no one near him but poor Russ in his weak-side linebacker’s slot.

Willing himself to run, Russ found a surprisingly good angle on the running back and zoomed toward him. But as he approached he saw how big the boy was, how fierce with energy and determination, how his legs beat like pistons against the ground, and in some way Russ’s ardor was dampened. Though everyone was yelling “Hit him low” he hit him high. Briefly, they grappled and Russ had the sense of bright lights, stars maybe, the wind rustling and then blankness.

When he blinked he was on the ground, his face mask having grown a fungus of turf, his whole body constricted in pain and as he turned, he could see through the ache behind his eyes the runner continue his scamper down the sidelines, borne by cheers from the crowd, until he crossed the goal line to be festooned with garlands and ribbons.