Black Light

sprinklers heaved back and forth like giant fans on a few of the lawns and a couple of young men mowed their grass, the mowers sounding clackety and mechanical. They passed an old lady.

“Howdy, ma’am,” said Jimmy. “Nice day.”

“Nice day to you, young man,” she answered with a smile.

Soon enough Jimmy came to an Oldsmobile parked unattended in a driveway. He turned back and smiled at Bub.

“See, you get all nervous, you can’t do nothing, people sense you’re up to bad. You be cool, you just smile and look like you got the whole world in your back pocket, they back off and give you all the room you want. You just watch how damn easy this gonna be.”

With that, he sauntered up the driveway, opened the door and in a second had the car started. He backed up.

“Come on, Bub. You gonna wait for Mr. Earl Swagger himself to invite you?”

Bub got in.

Off they drove, in another nice car, tooling down suburban streets as mild as could be. Jimmy looked at his watch again, as if he had a schedule to keep.

“Turn on the radio, find us some good tunes,” he said.

This felt weirdly familiar to Bub and he bent over and worked the dials and knobs as a crackle of sounds came out. But none of that hard-driving hillbilly crazy stuff that Jimmy preferred. He got some country, Patsy Cline, he got that Perry Como singing about the moon hitting your eye like a big pizza pie, he got Miss Day doing “Que Sera, Sera” and he got—

“Authorities in Fort Smith have set up a two-state dragnet to locate two armed and dangerous men who robbed a downtown grocery store, killing four men including a police officer.”

Bub just heard the killing news dumbly.

“The police say that newly released car thief Jimmy M. Pye, of Blue Eye, and his cousin Buford ‘Bub’ Pye, also of Blue Eye, were responsible for the outbreak of violence on peaceful Midland Boulevard. They theorize that the two killers will attempt to return home to the Polk County wilderness.

“Says State Police Colonel Timothy C. Evers,” and here a richer, deeper voice came across the radio, “‘If I know my bad men, they’ll head to land they know. Well, they’ll run into our blockades and we’ll take care of ’em the way they should be taken care of.’”

“That ole boy sounds ticked,” said Jimmy. “He sounds like we got him out of bed or something. Jesus.”

“J-J-J-Jimmy?”

“Yeah, cuz?”

“He did so say we done killed them boys.”

“Well, maybe they was real bullets in my gun. But there weren’t none in yours. You in the free. You was just ’long for the ride, Bub. Your cuz Jimmy wouldn’t get you in no shit, that I swear. Wouldn’t be cool at all. Now, we’s just gonna head out to Blue Eye, pick up Edie and off we go. Figure we may lay up with an uncle I got over in Anadarko, Oklahoma. He’ll—”

But Bub was crying.

“Bub, what’s eating you, boy?”

“Jimmy, I want my mama. I don’t want to go to no jail. I didn’t want to kill nobody. Oh, Jimmy, why is this happening? It ain’t fair. I never did nothing wrong, not nothing. I just want—”

“There, there, Bub, don’t you worry ’bout nothing. I swear to you, you got it all up ahead: California, a job as a star’s Number One Boy. You can bring your mama out there and buy her a nice little house. It’s all set up. I swear to you, all set up.”

Bub began to sniffle. His heart ached. He threw the gun on the floor. He just wanted to make it all go away.

“Well, lookie here,” said Jimmy.

Bub looked up and saw a gaudy sign against the bright blue sky, but since it was midday, the sign wasn’t turned on. It said “Nancy’s Flamingo Lounge” and Bub noticed that all up and down the street were other places called “clubs,” all of them with unlit signs and the sleepy look of nighttime spots. Jimmy pulled off the road and down a little driveway so that he was out back, in a parking lot area dominated by a large, blank garage.

There was utter silence.

“Hey,” said Jimmy. “Guess what? We there. We made it. We gonna be fine.”

Bub watched as the large garage doors of the structure peeled back and Jimmy eased the car forward. Darkness and silence swallowed them, cut only by some jangled music, far off, as from a cheap, small radio.

ROCK ROCK ROCK around the clock tonight
ROCK ROCK ROCK ’til the broad daylight!

“Cool,” said Jimmy.

3

W

hen he got there, he thought everything would clear up, but instead—and of course—things simply got more confused. He took a room in a cheap motel near the Mexican quarter of town and spent the morning fretting in his room about his next step. Here’s what he came up with: no next step.

Ultimately, he decided to go for a walk on the dumb hope that he’d just get lucky, that things would just work out, as they usually did. But of course the one fact he knew precisely and totally was that things didn’t always work out. That’s why he was here, because sometimes things don’t work out, violence and craziness break out, people die, lives are destroyed.

It was so much hotter and brighter. It was, after all, the desert, but he’d had a different image of it, somehow. What he saw was a spine of purple mountains, or hills, actually, blocking the horizon in one direction and in all the others just low rills of hills crusted with spiny, scaly vegetation, the odd cactus pronging up off the desert floor like some kind of twisted tree of death. The color green was largely absent from a World now dominated by browns, ochers and pewters.

The town was total jerkwater; it lay along a single main street, fast-food joints at one end, trailer parks and quasi “suburban” places back a little bit farther under imported palms, and the rest scabby little shops, many boarded up, convenience stores, a grocery, a dry cleaner, cowboy and Indian “souvenir” places for the odd, lost tourist, any small town anywhere too far off the interstate. This state happened to be Arizona and the town happened to be called Ajo.

So Russ walked up and down the street and saw nothing and didn’t get lucky. He found a bar-cafe and eventually had lunch, listening to cowboys talk in low hushed voices about nothing much. Nobody noticed him. Finally, he paid the bartender the five dollars for the sandwich and thought he caught a semihuman smile of acknowledgment.

“Say,” he said, “I wonder if you can help me.”

“Oh, I bet it is I know what you want, son.”

“Is it that obvious?”

“It’s pretty goddamned obvious.”

“You get a lot of guys like me?”

“Some like you. And other kinds too. Had a German TV crew in town for close to a month. Sold ’em maybe a thousand dollars’ worth of barbecue. The soundman, Franz, he really got to liking my wife’s barbecue.”

“But they didn’t get anywhere?”

“Nope. Not them. Not nobody. Had a real slick fellow from New York. He acted like he owned the world and