Black Light

34

T

he funeral was in the late morning but they couldn’t make it, because the Baltimore-Dallas flight and the hop via American Eagle to Fort Smith didn’t get them back until about noon. But there was a wake to be held at Sam’s old house at four, and, driving hard down the parkway, they knew they’d make it by at least four-thirty.

Russ drove; Bob was even more sealed off than usual. The sniper’s stillness: part of the legend. His bitterness, his repressed anger, his sense of isolation—all a part of the same package. But behind those calm, dark eyes, Russ knew there was something going on.

“So what are you thinking?” Russ finally asked.

“That we just wasted a good solid day and that I’m out thirteen hundred bucks in tickets.”

“I’ll pay you—”

“It ain’t that, I don’t want your money. It was just waste. We are heading in a wrong direction.”

“No sir,” said Russ. “I honestly believe that there has to be a connection between the death of that child and the death of your father.”

“You bonehead,” said Bob cruelly, not even looking at him. “That’s impossible. My father was killed the same day that girl was found. There’s no way they could have set what they set up that fast. It was a four- or five-day operation, Frenchy working at his goddamned craziest. And second: there was no way anybody could have predicted that my daddy would find that body that day or any day. That was pure goddamn luck or whatever. Her mama came to him, and he went a-looking. Suppose he hadn’t have found that body? He’d still be dead by 11.00

P.M

. That body could have laid for weeks yet before someone came across it, and by that time it could have been so decomposed that it would take still more weeks before they got around to identifying it. No, what happened to that girl is a crime, and if poor Reggie Fuller died on its account, that is a pity and a sorrow, but it don’t mean shit to us.”

Russ still believed that there was some connection.

“It had to. What else could possibly have been going on in Polk County in 1955 that would have been worth setting up that elaborate conspiracy? Frenchy Short wouldn’t just do something for—”

“That is right as rain,” said Bob. “So here’s what I think. I think my father was on some kind of investigative team or something the state police were running. Maybe it had to do with what was going on at Camp Chaffee. And somehow he found something out. And had to be stopped.”

“That sounds like a crummy movie,” said Russ.

“I know it does, and I don’t even go to movies,” said Bob grumpily.

“Well, maybe—”

“Slow down,” said Bob, “and don’t turn around fast.”

A moment or two ticked by.

Bob slid his .45 out of the inside-the-belt holster which Russ hadn’t even seen him put on.

“What the hell—”

“Easy, easy,” said Bob.

Russ became aware of a van, blue, riding in the dead man’s slot just where his mirrors couldn’t track it.

The van suddenly accelerated and began to pull even.

“Don’t look” said Bob, “and if I say go, you hit the brake hard, you understand?”

Russ swallowed, tasting pennies. They were back.

But the van kept passing them and Russ could no longer obey; his head sneaked sideways, where he saw, in the backseat, a very pretty little girl who stared intently at him. She stuck out her tongue.

“Shit,” said Russ. “You had me scared.”

“Maybe I am losing it,” said Bob, sliding the pistol back behind his jacket. “I didn’t see that boy pull up; he was in the slot. I got to be paying more goddamned attention.”

“So what do we do next?” asked Russ.

“You’re the Princeton boy. You tell me.”

“Well,” said Russ, and then he realized … he didn’t know either.

The complexity that had been Sam Vincent was on full display in the odd mob that congregated at his house to mourn his passing, or possibly to celebrate it, or at least to get drunk at his expense. African Americans from the west side of the tracks, aristocrats from Little Rock, cronies from the thousands of hunting trips he’d taken, old boys who’d guided him, farmers who’d traded with him, politicians, police officers, children, bitter secretaries, opposing lawyers, corrections officers, even a few men that Sam had sent away. Each had a Sam story to tell, but the one that was making the rounds when Bob and Russ finally arrived and found parking—the street was thronged with cars, everything from Mercedes to forty-year-old pickups—had to do with the ultimate disposition of Sam’s estate, itself quite large from a lifetime of extremely shrewd investing and trading. He’d been wisely sidestepping the estate tax by dispensing his wealth in $10,000-per-year chunks for a number of years to his children and even to his sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, divorced or not, second marriage or not, no questions asked, on the principle that anyone who’d had to put up with him in the family deserved a nice little present. He’d also already established trust funds for each grandchild worth $200,000 but only payable to educational institutions in the form of checks for tuition, food or housing. He left each of his fired or resigned secretaries $10,000 except for the one who’d become a drunk: she got $15,000. That left an untidy sum in the estate of $19,450.

“God, Dad,” said Dr. John Vincent, Scotch on his breath (the bar was well stocked) and amazement in his voice, “he left $9,725 to the NRA’s ILA fund and $9,725 to Handgun Control, Inc. I can see him cackling when he thought that one up!”

“He was a good man,” said Bob, who seemed in the crowd of revelers the only one who was morose and still grieving.

“Oh, he was a mean old bastard,” said the doctor, the eldest son, the one who’d borne the brunt of his father’s rages and praises. “Smart as a whip, mean as a rooster. He whaled the tar out of us when we were growing up. But by God each of us turned out. Two doctors, a lawyer, a travel agent, an investment counselor and an impressionist painter.”

“Who’s the painter?” Bob asked.

“Jamie.”

“I thought he was a lawyer.”

“He was, for ten years. Then he finally screwed up his courage and did what he wanted, not Dad. I think Dad respected him for it.”

“He was a stubborn bastard,” Bob said.

“Jesus. And tough. You know in twenty-two years at home, I only saw him cry once. He didn’t even cry when Mom died. He only cried when your father was killed. I remember he sat downstairs all by himself when he got back. Must have been well toward dawn. He sat down there and had a drink. I was awakened by a sound I’d never heard. I snuck downstairs. He was sitting in that old rocker there”—John pointed through the crowd to a threadbare old chair that had stood in the same spot for fifty years—“and rocked back and forth and sobbed like a baby. He loved your father. He thought Earl Swagger was the most perfect man ever put on earth: hero, father, police officer, incorruptible symbol of everything that was right and strong about America.”

“I keep telling people: my father was only a man.”

“Well, my dad didn’t think so. Bob, I have to ask: what’s going on? I keep hearing things.”

“About old crazy Bob Lee digging up some Confederate?”

“Yes. That. And suddenly you’re here and there’s a terrible gunfight over in Oklahoma and ten men are killed. Never happened before you came back. Nothing connects you to it, but people still remember you went hunting a few years back, and two boys came out of the woods in body bags. Old Dad saved your butt in a federal court.”

“Nobody went into a body bag around me that didn’t deserve to. It’s just some old business. About my