Black Light

we was his employees. He was out here for six weeks. He’d done a lot of big business. He’d set up a deal with that fellow they executed in Utah and with O.J. himself. But he didn’t get nowhere. And a French magazine writer. Some babe. Wish she’d come to write about me. I’d have told her all my secrets, even the secret to my wife’s barbecue.”

“Does anybody ever see him? Does he come out?”

“Oh, he’s about. Tall, quiet fellow, keeps to himself mostly. Married a damn fine woman. They got a little girl now. But he lives a life. He does things, sees things, mixes.”

“Can you tell me where he lives?”

“Can’t do that, son. He wouldn’t want me to. I respect him. You have to respect him. I think he just wants the world to leave him alone.”

“I do respect him,” said Russ. “That’s why I’m here.”

“You’re probably going to fail. Everybody else has. Why should you be different?”

Why should I be different? Russ thought. Yes, key question.

“Well,” Russ said, “I bet it’s something nobody ever threw at him before. It’s not even about him.”

“Then just be patient, son. He’ll know you’re here. Probably knows already. People tell him things, you know.”

“Yeah, I know. Well, thanks. I’ll probably end up buying my thousand dollars’ worth of barbecue too. I’m in for the long haul.”

Russ went out—ouch! that blinding sun—and fumbled for his sunglasses. As he got them on, a pickup truck pulled down the road and Russ thought he saw him: a lean man, suntanned and leathery, with calm, squinty eyes. But no; it was just a fat cowboy.

He ambled up and down the street, trying for eye contact with the locals, but all he got was the grim stare of smalltown America that proclaimed: No trespassing. Eventually, he went back to the motel and got out his file again.

The exhibits were tattered and dry, a few a little greasy, from being handled too much. If reading could have drawn the blackness out of the ink, then they’d be faded as well; but it hadn’t and they weren’t. Modern industrial printing: vibrant, colorful, indestructible.

The most famous item was the Newsweek cover from that month in 1992 when he’d been the most wanted man in America. “Bob Lee Swagger,” it said, “hero turned assassin.” Time, which he didn’t have, had run the same shot: “Bob Lee Swagger, Vietnam’s Tragic Legacy.” It was an old picture of Swagger, taken in Vietnam. It told everything and nothing: a southern face, somehow, a man in his twenties who could have been in his forties, with a jaw so grim and skin so tight he looked a little like a death’s head, which in a way he was. He wore tiger camouflage and a marine boonie cap; the eyes were narrow and hooded, allowing no contact with the world on any terms save their owner’s; they lurked behind sharply etched cheekbones. It was almost a nineteenth-century face: he looked like a cavalry trooper with Mosby or one of Quantrill’s raiders or someone who’d lugged a Colt down to the OK Corral—and come back again five minutes later, the job done. On the magazine cover, in the crook of his arm there rested a sleek rifle with about a yard of scope atop it, and it had been well established that with that tool he was one of the world’s foremost hunters of men.

Russ passed on the cover shot and looked at other photos, which had come out of the photo morgue of his recent employer, the Daily Oklahoman of Oklahoma City. These were shots taken at the mysterious 1992 hearing that ended Bob Lee Swagger’s two months of celebrityhood and marked his return to total self-willed obscurity. He was like T. E. Lawrence hiding as Shaw the aircraftsman, a man who had an almost physical need for anonymity. He had just vanished, amazing in an America that quite routinely awarded celebrity with huge amounts of cash. But no: no book deals, no movies, no TV specials, no answers to the provocative questions some analysts had raised, suggesting that he knew things no one else knew. There’d been a rip-off novel from someone way on the outside and a number of patch-job articles in the survivalist and gun-nut press, all misleading, all vague and speculative, all, Russ knew, wrong. But one of them had contained one nugget of information: that Swagger had evidently come to roost in Ajo, Arizona, with his new wife, the handsome woman who had attended the explosive hearing.

Therefore, thought Russ, I am in Ajo, Arizona, in a cheap motel, running out of money and time and luck.

Finally, on the fifth day, as Russ chomped through his last morsel of barbecue while not facing the reality that his funds were getting dangerously low, the bartender came over.

“Say there,” the man whispered, “did you know that a certain party sometimes comes to town today?”

Russ swallowed.

“Yes sir. It’s Friday. He comes in to lay in supplies at the Southern States. Now, I may have this mixed up with someone else, but I’d say I just saw a certain pickup heading down in that direction and if I was you, that’s where I’d relocate myself.”

“Great!” blurted Russ.

“You didn’t hear nothing from me.”

“Not a thing.”

Russ fumbled with his sunglasses and sprinted out. Southern States, Southern States? Yes, Russ remembered, two blocks down, where the ranchers gathered in the mornings before work and then returned to after work, where you could buy anything from sacks of grain to half-million-dollar International Harvester threshers. Russ was so excited he got a little mixed up, but then got himself under control and decided, rather than driving, to just hoof it.

He turned and sprinted, his feet flying, ducking along the covered sidewalk, around the odd party of tourists, past some lolling teenagers, feeling like a complete jerk. No: feeling somehow flushed and excited. Once in his career on the Oklahoman he’d had to sub for the vacationing movie critic and go on what was called a junket, where he’d flown down to New Orleans and sat at a table in a hotel banquet room when Kevin Costner and Clint Eastwood were paraded around the room, a half an hour per table. It was of course a completely ridiculous situation, but when he first saw the two men entering the big hotel room, he felt as he felt now: giddy, goofy, unprepared, callow as a pup, completely unworthy. And they were only movie stars and turned out to be, at least as far as he could tell in the time he shared with them at the big tables, fairly decent guys but pretend heroes.

Now, this guy was a real hero: in war and in peace, he’d done extraordinary things. As Russ ran and as his excitement mounted, his concentration scattered; his mind seemed full of glistening soap bubbles.

A plan, he thought, you need a plan.

But before he could hatch a plan, his shoes took him around a corner and into the parking lot that lay in front of the Southern States store. It was a gravel lot and dust hung in the air; Russ stopped, and drank in what looked like a scene from some documentary on America’s working habits. This would be the rural division, as imagined by someone with the mordant glee of Hieronymus Bosch and the eye for detail of Norman Rockwell: Everywhere it seemed that farmers or ranchers or cowboys milled in the yard, swapping yarns near their pickups or backslapping and grab-assing in little clots. In the background were cattle pens and there was some lowing from the imprisoned animals. It looked like Saturday night at the railhead; where was John Wayne? Well, dammit, John Wayne was everywhere.

These men all had craggy brown faces and seemed woven together out of rawhide and pemmican. All were encased in dusty denim and leather from head to toe in a dozen different shades, all wore boots beat to hell and gone, but the headgear was various: straw hats, Stetsons both domed and flat, brims curly or straight, baseball caps, engineer caps, even a fishing cap or two.

Out of such chaos Russ could make no sense at all, and felt as out of it as an African American at the local Klan meeting. But they seemed to be so enjoying themselves that they paid him no mind at all, and he wandered among them, looking for a set of features he could match with the features he’d memorized off the magazine cover and the more recent photos. He’d guess a man like Bob would leave a wake of wannabes, would be at the center of a circle of acolytes, so he looked for a king among all these princes. He could make out none, and now, one or two at a time, the boys would peel out and begin to leave.