Black Light

“Earl, Jimmy Pye and his cousin Bubba shot up a Fort Smith grocery store. Oh, Earl, they done killed four people, even a cop! Earl, they got the whole state out looking for that boy!”

2

J

immy reached back over the seat and pulled out a paper grocery bag whose heavy contents, as he lifted it into his lap, stretched it out. But it didn’t break, though when he set it down in his lap, Bub heard the dull clunk of some kind of heavy, metal-on-metal contact.

“Here you go,” Jimmy said, removing a large, long-barreled revolver from the bag and handing it to Bub. “That there’s a Smith .44 Special. That’s a big ole mulekick of a gun.”

Bub looked at the thing. It felt impossibly heavy in his hands, oily, dense, weirdly charged with energy. A gun. A pistol. He’d never had a pistol. Where he came from, everybody had guns, but not pistols. He’d seen policemen with them, that was it. He looked over at Jimmy and felt his jaw drop and the look of gaping stupidity come across his face when he didn’t have no idea of what to say.

Jimmy, meanwhile, had pulled out some kind of automatic gun with gnarled stag grips and had commenced clacking and snapping it, fitting something into its handle, fiddling with a little lever.

“Thirty-eight Super,” he said contentedly. “Your Colt. Goddamn asskick gun too. A lot of gun for a little package. A pro’s gun.”

But then he noticed the look of utter befuddlement on his young cousin’s face.

“Now what’s up and bothering you, Bub? What’s eating you?”

Bub could think of nothing whatever to say. Then he blurted. “I-I-I-I’m … scared.”

“Oh, come on now, Bub. Ain’t not a goddamn thing to it. We go in, we show ’em the guns, they give us the money and we done be gone outta there. It’s that simple. Guy in the joint tole me how you take down a big grocery store. See, they put their dough in the safe every damn hour. So by now, with the morning’s shopping in there, it’s all in the safe in the office, right up front. Every damn IGA’s the same. He tole me: nothing to it. Easiest take there is.”

Bub’s throat got dry and then he had trouble breathing. He wanted to cry. He so loved Jimmy but … he didn’t think he had it in him for this kind of thing. He just wanted his old job back. He just wanted to pound nails for Mr. Wilton, every day just like the other, rain or cold, snow or frost, just pound them nails. That was enough for him.

“Look, Bubba,” said Jimmy, leaning over, drawing Bub in conspiratorially, “I don’t know about you, but I ain’t going back to some goddamn job in a sawmill to make a Mr. Goddamned Earl Goddamned Swagger a happy man. I ain’t working there. Sooner or later, you lose a finger, a arm, a leg. You seen ’em runnin’ around, goddammit, no arms, ‘Oh, he used to work down at the sawmill.’ Not me, no sir.”

He sat back, breathing hard, and checked his watch.

“Now’s the time. We go, we in, we out. Nobody knows nothing. Then we got us a stake. Yes, we do. We can git out of shit-poor West Arkansas and head out to California. Look at me? Bub, look at me!”

Bub lifted his eyes and stared at his cousin.

“Now, do I look like a goddamned sawmill worker, making a thousand a year and living in a cottage off some old biddy lady’s charity? No sir, I look like that goddamned fellow James Dean, I know I do. I am that handsome. I’m going out to California, where I aim to become a big movie actor. You can come on too, Bubba. A star, see, a star always has his Number One Man, you know, calls and makes reservations and picks up the airline tickets. That’s what I got you slotted for. You be my Number One Man.”

“B-but Edie love you.” Like so many, Bub was half in love with Jimmy’s young wife.

“They’s gonna be plenty for Edie. You just watch, be plenty for that girl. We gonna take her too. She’s goin’ to California with us! I got me friends looking out for me out there: oh, we going to have a time, you, me, Edie, in L.A. We going to be stars!”

He was so ardent that Bub closed his eyes and saw it for just a second: his image of movie stars involved swimming pools, fancy clothes, little mustaches, sleek cars, all under the California sun. It seemed utterly beyond dreaming until just now.

“I swear to you, nobody going to git hurt. You just back me up in that office. You show ’em the gun, I show ’em the gun. Nobody going to fight us for some goddamned money belongs to a grocery company. Then we out of there. We swing on by and pick up Edie and off we go. Nobody going to git hurt. Come on now, Bub, I need you. Time to go.”

Jimmy got out of the car and wedged the automatic into the waist of his chinos. He set his sunglasses squarely on his handsome face, then reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of Luckys. With a flick of his wrist he snapped a butt out, picked it out of the pack with his lips and then lit it off a Zippo that had magically appeared in his hand. He turned and winked at poor Bub, who just watched, thinking, without a stammer anywhere in his mind, it already is a movie.

* * *

Jimmy in the lead. Jimmy walking confidently, a bebop in his step, a smile on his face. Bub is behind. Bub is scared and confused. He too has stuck the gun into his trousers but it’s heavy and awkward and the barrel is so long it sticks him in the thigh, so he’s walking peg-legged, like some cripple, scampering clumsily to stay up.

Shouldn’t we have masks?

Suppose we get recognized?

My mama is going to be sooooo mad.

Why am I doing this?

Why is this happening?

Jimmy … Jimmy … Help me!

Jimmy just swaggers ahead, his bright face lit with pleasure. As he blows in, he stops, gives a courtly gesture to a woman struggling to load her car, bends swiftly and lifts her last bag up so that she can secure it.

“Why, thank you,” she says.

“Yes, ma’am,” he sings, so charming she never notices the gun stuck in his pants. This eats up a second or so and Bub catches up, and as a twosome they enter. The store is strangely dark and vast; Bub thinks of a church. At six counters six women are plunkety-plunkety-plunking over cash registers, feeding items one at a time to baggers as they click up the tote on the machine. It’s the biggest grocery store Bub has ever seen! He has an impression of giant spaces, aisle leading to aisle, stacks of goods and foods. It’s an America he’s never seen. Something about the order of such a place, the hugeness and careful planning with which it’s laid out, scares him. He feels as if he’s about to defile a shrine. A small voice begins to whimper. His knees are pounding. He yearns for the courage to scream No! No! Jimmy, no! But up ahead Jimmy is so completely sure of himself that Bub’s got no chance and no nerve to confront him. Besides, it’s happening already, so fast.

Jimmy has reached a kind of office beyond the last register, a high, walled structure with a door in the center of all that space, with a counter around it and a pleasant, red-haired woman standing there talking to a Negro lady. “Virginia,” it says on her blouse, “Assistant Manager.”

She looks at Jimmy, responds as everyone does to his charm and looks, and a broad smile begins to beam until she recognizes that what he lifts to her face is a gun and her face melts into fear. Jimmy shoves the colored lady to the ground and puts the gun right into Virginia’s face and is screaming, “Git into that office and git that safe open.”

Gulping poison air like a fish dying on a pier, Virginia rings a buzzer and the door up to the office opens and a young man leans out. Bub isn’t sure what happens next. There’s a crack that he can’t identify from anywhere, that seems to make no sense, that is uncalled-for, and the young man is on his knees and then on the floor. He’s wet. Something wet is coming out of him and going all over the place. Bub hears screaming, shouts, yelps. He gets his own gun out slowly, and in a second they’re up in the office but Jimmy is pushing him