Black Light

Swagger in these parts or any other ever broke his word or welshed on a bargain.”

“There’s a goddamned first time for everything,” said Jed bitterly. “You come on, then. But you keep your distance.”

Bob and Russ climbed the rickety steps into the dark dwelling. Russ was always amazed at how things diverged from his imagination of them, but this time he was absolutely correct. It was one grim big surpriseless room, rank with odor. A deer’s shabby antlers were nailed to a crossbeam; the stove was old and stank of cold, ancient grease, the bed, a pallet in the corner, supported a scurvy nest of swirled blankets. One wall had been transfigured into Jed’s hall of fame by the industrious use of thumbtacks as his front page from the paper had been pinned to the wood, where it was now yellow and crackly with age—COUNTY MAN SLAYS NEGRO, it said, uniting him and Davidson Fuller in journalistic immortality. The smell of unwashed clothes, dead animals, human destitution and loneliness hung everywhere in the thick air.

“Ah, could I have a decaf cappuccino and a mocha for my son?” asked Russ. “And the chocolate biscotti.”

“Shut up, Russ,” Bob said, as Jed’s squirrelly little face fell into anger, “this ain’t no time to be smart.”

The old man threw down at an oilcloth-covered table, clinging to the shotgun, and Bob sat across from him. There was no place for Russ to sit and there wasn’t enough money in the world to induce him to physical contact with that bed—yccch, he shuddered—so he just sort of leaned against the closest wall.

“Tell me about that day,” said Bob.

Jed pulled a pack of Red Man from his pocket and stuffed some of the stringy tobacco in his mouth, did some manipulating with his tongue until he got it lodged between cheek and gum on the right side, where it bulged like a tumor. He smiled, showing brown gums.

“Ain’t much to goddamn tell. They woke me in the Blue Eye drunk tank along with my brother, Lum, rest his soul, and that fat old deputy Lem tole me he had work detail. I’se so hung over, I didn’t realize where we was until we got there. Let me tell you, Swagger, I wasn’t in no mood to go horsing around in them hot woods lookin’ for no nigger gal.”

“What happened?” Bob said. “Talk me through it.”

Jed looked around, spat at an overflowing Maxwell House can on the floor and then narrated a rambling account of the day, of the heat and dust of the forest even high in the mountains, of the agony of picking through the saw brier and the bracken, of the mosquitoes and other things that buzzed and bit, and the stench of the dogs, and the final thing, the girl.

“Shit,” he said. “She was a ripe one, all blown up like b’loon. You could see her goddamned li’l mouse, tell you what. Just out there in the open. Now they show that stuff in the magazines. In them days, boy, you never saw no mouse. Heh, heh.” He absently chortled in memory of the smoky pleasure of it and Russ saw a flicker of rage play across Bob’s face, then subside.

“Why did my father belt you?”

“’Cause he’s a mean sumbitch is why,” said Jed, not meeting Bob’s eyes.

“My father was many things but he wasn’t a bully. Why’d he hit you, old man?”

“I didn’t mean no harm. I said a little something about riding the gal is all. Bastard. He had no cause to do that. She was a nigger gal and I was right. A nigger boy kilt her. I said so then and that’s way it turned out. Then that nigger boy’s daddy he go all around pretending to be some kind of big shot. Well, I showed him. I ripped open his skull with a goddamned spade. Best feeling I ever got, yes it was, by God, and worth ever damn day of prison. Niggers tried to kill me in prison, you know. Yeah, look at this.”

He pulled down the strap of his overall and the bib fell, and Russ saw a long purple crescent of scar tissue, a witless smile of pucker, running from one nipple almost down to the appendix.

Jed’s eye lit with yellow madness. “Niggers done that. Two hunnert and thirty-five stitches! Doc sewed me up like a burlap sack. But they couldn’t bleed me out. No sir. I got more damn blood in me than a sloat pig on slaughter Friday. By God, not no niggers, not no Earl Mr. Fancy Medal Swagger done got the best of me, by goddamn!”

He sat back, spent, and awarded himself a recreational gob of tobacco juice which he launched like a missile in an arching parabola until it hit dead center in the can, raising a tiny mushroom cloud. Russ shuddered in revulsion and looked away. But Jed wasn’t done. He looked up.

“I was right about the niggers too. I said, you give them people anything, next thing you know, they be shooting and fucking and killing all over the goddamned place. And they is too, ain’t they? Niggers is fine in Africa. Bring ’em over here and look what good it done us. Niggers. They’s the end of America, that’s for damned sure.”

Bob kept still through this tirade, as though he were waiting patiently for a dark storm to blow over. Then he said, “Tell me about my father. What was his mood? What was he doing? How did he act?”

“He was soft on the niggers, that was his problem,” said Jed. “I could smell it on him. This little missing gal: hell, you’d a thought it was his little gal, not some nigger’s. He was sad. Whole goddamned morning. That is when he weren’t coldcocking me. I could take him in a fair fight.”

“Not on your best day, you old dick. Ask the Japanese. They knew him well,” Bob fired back. “Who did he talk to? What did he say?”

“Mainly, old Lem. And Pop Dwyer, who run the dogs. He liked Pop but he didn’t like them dogs. I don’t know why, but I could tell. He hung back from them dogs. But mainly, he was fuckin’ around on me. Mr. High and Mighty. He’s on my case like a bastard from the start,” said Jed. “Didn’t your old lady give him none? It was like he hadn’t had nothing in weeks.”

Bob just glared at him.

“So he runs us up and down the road and into the woods, goddammit, it was hot nigger work. All the time he’s jawin’ on me, like I say. And when he finds that damn girl, I hears him telling goddamn Lem to order all this fancy equipment. Teams, shit like that, from Little Rock. Like it was goddamned important or something. Hell, it were just a raggedy-ass nigger gal.”

Bob took all this in evenly, his face drawn and remote.

“How did he know to look there? What led him to that spot? Do you recall?”

Jed’s features knitted up in concentration. As if summoning a memory, he summoned up a gob of juice and fired it toward the can, missing by a wide margin. Russ noticed that the gobs were coming closer and closer to him.

“Something about a lady calling in saying she’d seen a nigger boy acting ‘peculiar’ four days earlier out by the Texaco sign. Yore damn daddy always poking his nose in other people’s business. When he heard the girl was missing, he put ’em together and that’s how he got us out there.”

Bob nodded. It squared: the black boy, in local lore, would have been Reggie Fuller.

But it wasn’t Reggie Fuller, because he was driving people home from the meeting in secret. But if it was a black boy who’d killed the girl, someone was doing an elaborate operation to frame Reggie. Why? Why? What possibly could there be to gain?

“Did he say anything about other investigations or matters?” asked Russ. “Was he consumed with anything else?”

“He’s tired,” said Jed. “That’s all, tired. He always seemed tired.”

“From what?” asked Russ of Bob.

“He didn’t work no regular duty day,” said Bob, recalling. “He’d be gone sometimes fifteen, sixteen hours a shot, sometimes two or three days. He’d work the mornings and the afternoons, maybe come home for a couple of hours at dinner, maybe take a nap. Then he’d go back out on the road, monitor the state police network, look for speeders, mischief, answer calls, that sort of thing. He worked like a goddamned dog.”

Bob ended, letting it hang quiet in the melancholy air.

“Is that it, Swagger?” Jed demanded.

Bob just looked at him.

“That’s all you wanted? Hah! That ain’t worth no twenny dollar! You ain’t got no more questions and I’m still hotter’n a firecracker.”

He laughed, as if he’d won some great victory.