Black Light

father.”

“Did it involve mine?”

“I asked him to do some legal work for me. That’s all.”

“That’s it?”

“My young friend over there. He come to me because he wanted to write a book about my daddy. No one remembers Earl Swagger, except maybe your father and old Miss Connie. He’s dead, she will be soon. It seemed to me to be worthwhile. Better’n writing a book about me.”

“Okay. You should know, people are asking. You walk alone, but you cast a long shadow, my friend. Now come with me, I have something for you.”

They walked through the crowd, which in effect was a walk through the fragments of Bob’s past. He saw Sara Vincent, Sam’s eldest daughter, who had married twice and divorced twice; she was now the town’s travel agent, prosperous and lonely. She alone of the Vincent kids did not have Sam’s magnetism, though she’d once conceived an awful crush on Bob, and even now threw an awkward, hot-eyed glance at him. But she alone made eye contact; for the others, he knew, he was an embarrassment.

I killed men. I am the sniper. I am apart.

It was the crushing sense of exile that the killer feels, which sometimes makes him more of a killer. Everyone knew from the publicity three years back: Bob Lee Swagger, not just a drunken marine vet alone on his mountain, but a sniper, an executioner, a man-hunter, the man who reached out and touched eighty-seven somebodies. In Arizona, nobody really cared because that’s who he was from the start, but here it had the effect of a scandal. They connected him with a past and wondered: Why him? What sets him apart? What does the sniper know that other men don’t? What’s it like to send a piece of lead and copper through somebody’s head and blow his brains out? The pink mist effect: turn a man to colored rain. What’s it feel like?

There was a girl once named Barb Sempler: he’d been on a date with her in high school but she thought he was too wild, a country boy. Wasn’t her father a lawyer or something? Now she was oddly inflated, having picked up the forty pounds, her once beautiful features spread across the wide face. A boy over there, now fat and bald and well dressed, had once blocked him blindside on a football field and laughed about it until Bob had jumped him and the coach had pulled him off. He’d grown up to sell insurance, Bob to kill men. Strange. That woman. He thought her name was Cindy—ah, what, Tilford, that was it—and he’d gotten backseat tit off her one night in 1961. So long ago. Tit seemed like paradise. She was now slim and hard, where she’d been fat and dumpy. A divorcee, therapy, lots of aerobics. She smiled, scaring him. He yearned for his wife. He yearned to feel whole and connected again: father, family man, lay-up barn owner. Julie, YKN4, horses: he missed them, but also what they represented, which was the normal way, not the sniper’s way. But they parted, to let him pass, to let him stand alone.

I am the sniper. I stand alone.

They reached the stairs, again the crowd parted magically, and they went down into the basement where Sam had had his office. John walked to the closet, opened it, took something off the shelf.

“I had to clean out Dad’s office,” he said. “Here, I think this stuff belongs to you. It was locked in the safe.”

He held out a cardboard box: in it were his father’s old notebook, with its brown blasphemy of blood, that old tablet of half-issued tickets.

“And this too,” said John, holding out a sheet of yellow legal paper. “Dad had inscribed some notes. He seemed to be working on a case. Maybe it’ll help you.”

Russ was talking to an extremely pretty girl who seemed to know all about him, or at least to be very interested in him. It was slowly dawning on him that in this odd world he was a minor celebrity: the sidekick of the famous, mysterious, dangerous and—yes—sexy Bob Lee Swagger. He felt a little like Mick Jagger’s gofer.

“So Princeton,” the girl was saying, “why’d you drop out?”

“Oh, my mother and my father separated. I knew it would be hard on my mother, so I didn’t want to be twelve hundred miles away. I spent the last year in Oklahoma City, working on the Daily Oklahoman. That, plus the fact I didn’t really like the East. I spent my life trying to get out of Oklahoma because I was too good for Oklahoma. Then I got to the Ivy League and the people seemed to be so, you know, little. They were fundamentally bigots. They viewed the world through such a perverted prism. Everyone outside was a redneck Nazi, anyone who owned a gun or was in the NRA or voted Republican was subhuman at worst and an amusing ignoramus at best. I just couldn’t stand it. They didn’t know anything. I somehow ended up working for a year on the Oklahoman, where I discovered that I fit in … nowhere.”

“Oh, go on. I’m sure you’ll find a fit. You’re very bright.”

“I was very bright. In Oklahoma, I was so smart. Then I got to New Jersey and I was just another toad on a rock.”

She smiled.

“Aren’t you some sort of writer?”

“The unpublished sort. Very glamorous.”

“Are you going to write a book about Bob the Nailer?”

“No. Bob has secrets so deep ten years of therapy followed by ten years of torture couldn’t get them all out. He’s spent his life trying to live up to his father’s ideal. And, unlike the rest of us, I’d say he made it. He wouldn’t say he had, but I would. Anyhow, the book is reputedly about the dad. Earl Swagger was an extremely heroic man, killed in a shoot-out with white-trash scum, after winning the Medal of Honor on Iwo Jima. I had the idea of doing a long narrative on his last day, how it summoned up a whole slew of American pathologies. But all I’ve done is run around and get coffee.”

“It sounds interesting. I like the idea of a symbolic episode: you learn so much about the macrocosm by evoking the microcosm.”

“Wow,” he said. “You must be an English major.”

“I’m a junior at Vanderbilt.”

“That’s a good school.”

“Thank you. I’m writing my senior thesis on Raymond Carrrrrr,” Russ not quite catching the last name.

Raymond? Writer? Begins with C, has r’s? Russ panicked. Had she said Carver? He’d never read any Carver. But maybe she’d said Chandler. That was much better. He hadn’t read any Chandler either, but at least he could bluff his way through.

“The L.A. private-eye guy? Lots of neon, that sort of stuff.”

“Yes, but so much more,” she said, and Russ sighed with relief. “He could really tell a story. Maybe it’s a southern thing, but I love it when you can just sink into a book’s language. Will your book be like that?”

“Yes,” said Russ, thinking I hope.

“How far are you?”

“Well, we’re really still researching. Listen, I’m sort of mixed up. Who are you?”

“Oh,” she laughed. “One of the grandchildren. You knew Grandpappy?”

Now he got it.

“At the end, I went with Bob to see him. He was a crusty old boy, I’ll say that. He told me a thing or two.”

“Crusty as they come. The original male tyrant king. But somehow, a necessary man,” she said. “And sweet. Underneath. He was getting vague, though.”

“We noticed. But there was something heroic in the way he fought it. He was an Arkansas Lear,” Russ said, really pleased with the Lear remark, though he’d never gotten around to reading it either.

“Such a man. A tyrant, a ruler, but somehow, oh, I don’t know, necessary. They don’t make them like that anymore, do they?”

“No, they make ’em like me,” he said—she laughed—“and I agree it’s a kind of a comedown.”

“Oh, Russ, you’ll do fine.”

“You’re … whose daughter?”