Black Light, Page 2

  “What’s going on, son?” he asked.

  “They’s some people here to see you, Daddy,” the nine-year-old answered. “They wun’t go in the house, though Mommy ast ’em to.”

  Something in the boy’s voice told him immediately an oddity was occurring and indeed it was: a Negro man and woman stood stiffly on the porch, evidently too frightened to take June’s offer of hospitality.

  Earl walked up to them.

  “Hep you folks?”

  It was extremely unusual for black people to pay a house call on white people, particularly strangers, particularly after dark. So Earl knew in a second something was wrong. Though it seemed ridiculous, as he approached, he let his right hand brush against the holster flap over the Colt Trooper, freeing it in case he had to go to pistol work fast.

  But in the next second he realized he’d overreacted.

  “Mr. Earl, I’m the Reverend Percy Hairston down at Aurora Baptist. I do hate to bother you at home, sir, but this poor lady’s so upset and the town police didn’t pay her no mind at all.”

  “That’s all right, Percy. Sister, won’t you sit down and git your load off?” He called through the screen door, “June, can you git these people some lemonade?” He turned back to the Negro couple. “You just tell me what it is, and I can’t make no promises, but I will look into it.”

  But a part of him blanched: Negro problems were not a specialty of his. He had no idea how Negroes lived or thought; they seemed to happily occupy a parallel world. He also knew that they had a tendency to get into thorny problems of the sort only the lowest kind of white people ever managed. It seemed they were always stabbing each other or someone’s brother was running away to the big city with someone’s wife, leaving ten scrawny kids at home and an out-of-work daddy or something. None of it ever made any sense, at least to a white man, and if you let it suck you in, you might never get out. Policeman’s wisdom: let the niggers go their own ways, as long as they don’t get in our way.

  “Mr. Earl,” said the woman, who looked to be about forty, with a big hat on, in her Sunday best to come to see the Man. “Mr. Earl, it’s my girl Shirelle. She went out last Tuesday night it was, and she done never come back. Oh, Mr. Earl, I’m so scared somethin’s done happened to Shirelle.”

  “How old is Shirelle?” Earl asked.

  “She’s fifteen,” said the mother. “Prettiest little thing in the whole town. She my sweet baby daughter.”

  Earl nodded. It sounded like some typical kind of Niggertown thing: the girl had been picked up by a handsome buck in a fancy suit of clothes, hauled off to what they called their “cribs” out on the west side of town where the music and the dancing never stopped and the alcohol and God knew what else were passed around for free, despite the fact that Polk was a dry county. Then the buck had the girl and left her by the side of the road. Maybe the girl woke up ashamed and left town or maybe she went to live with the buck. You never knew; it played out different each time, but it was always the same.

  “Well, honey,” Earl said, “maybe she met a feller and went to a party. You know these young kids these days.”

  “Mr. Earl,” said the reverend, “I’se knowed Sister Parker and her people nigh on two decades. I know Shirelle since I baptized her. She be a good child. She be the Lord’s child.”

  “Hallelujah and a-men, please Jesus,” said Shirelle’s mama. “My baby daughter be a good baby daughter.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Earl, beginning to lose patience now that they were going all holy on him.

  “You know, them white polices they got in town, them boys don’t give no two nothings about what happens to a Negro girl, even a high-class Negro girl like Shirelle,” said the minister bitterly.

  Earl was surprised that Percy dared express himself so clearly; but he knew it to be true. The Sheriff’s Department wouldn’t do squat to help a Negro problem or solve a Negro crime.

  And then Earl made the connection: the strange Negro boy out by the road, where he shouldn’t have been, late at night, when he shouldn’t have been. The girl who’d disappeared the same night. Who knew?

  “Y’all have some lemonade, now,” said June, coming out with a pitcher and two glasses on a tray.

  “All right,” said Earl, “as I said, I will look into it. I know some bucks who might tell me a thing or two. And—well, that’s the best I can do for y’all. But I’ll give her a fair shot.”

  “Oh, Mr. Earl, you so kind. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you, Jesus, you done answered my prayers,” said the lady, as the Reverend Hairston tried to calm her down.

  Earl walked the two back to the minister’s old car, a prewar De Soto that had seen a lot of miles. When he got the lady settled he followed the old man around and drew him aside.

  “Percy, I may need something of Shirelle’s, if it comes to it,” he said, playing his last card. “You know, a piece of clothing, something she kept close to her body. Can you manage that when you drive Mrs. Parker home? I’ll make some phone calls tonight about some things, get some boys I know, and I’ll stop by the church early tomorrow, say, ’round nine.”

  “Yas sir. What you need them things for—”

  But then the old man stopped and looked at him.

  “I ain’t necessarily saying anything,” said Earl, “but yes, we may have to go to the dogs. You go home now and pray them dogs don’t find nothing in the morning.”

  Earl was a methodical man and before he let anything happen, he carefully inscribed each man’s name in big, blocky print on the inside cover of his notepad.

  “Jed Posey,” he wrote. “Lem Tolliver. Lum Posey. Pop Dwyer,” and under that: “Search team, 7-23-55.”

  “Earl?”

  “All right, all right,” he said, hearing the impatience in Lem’s voice. “Okay, let’s get her a-goin’.”

  The old man worked the dogs beautifully. It was as if he spoke to them in a secret language, a low, soft vocabulary of mutterings, whispers, clicks and crackles and, most expressively, a kind of smooching sound. The low fat beagle seemed to understand that he was the special one; like a movie star, he didn’t do much work and nosed the earth with an affected casualness, unimpressed by everything. The younger, bigger dogs were wilder and more exuberant; they seethed with impatience and immaturity. Pop took them up and down the road for half a mile in each direction, and got no response from any of them, except once one of the blues broke hunt discipline and went straining toward a coon that shimmied in panic across the asphalt. Pop gave it a mean swat and it fell into line behind the offhanded master sniffer.

  At the same time Earl, Deputy Tolliver and the Posey brothers eyeballed the vegetation, looking for—well, who knew for what? Signs of a disturbance? Tracks? Articles of clothing, shoes, socks, ribbons, anything? But they saw nothing, except Lum Posey found a Coke bottle, which he carefully cleaned and put into his overall pocket for the penny it’d bring.

  The sun climbed, and burned more fiercely. Jed Posey was muttering about nigger gals and how pointless all this was, loud enough to be heard, not loud enough quite to provoke Earl. Earl felt the sweat collecting in the cotton of his shirt and watched as the other men sweated through their own shirts. It was god-awful heat.

  “Well, Earl,” said Lem, when they’d finished trekking in each direction, “what you want to do now? Want to go into the forest and up the damn hill? Your call.”

  “Goddamn,” said Earl. He checked his watch. It was close to noon. Jimmy Pye was out now. He’d be at the Fort Smith bus station with Bub; Earl knew the schedule by heart. The Blue Eye bus didn’t leave till 1:30.

  “Ah, maybe give it another damn hour or so. Say I tried, anyhow.”

  “Mr. Earl?”

  “What is it, Pop?”

  “My dogs is gittin’ hot. They can’t work in this weather much longer.”

  “Pop, you’ll get your damn seventy-five cents an hour from the state, but you ain’t done till I say you’re done.”

  Shit! Earl wanted to leave
too. He had things to check on. Maybe he could talk to a nigger he knew who owned a pool hall in west Blue Eye. That’d be one more thing he could check. But he still had four and a half hours till Jimmy’s bus arrived.

  “Let’s take it about a hundred yards back through them damn trees and do a goddamn sweep,” he called. “You boys keep your eyes open.”

  Jed Posey hawked a gob of something yellow and thick into the dust as his comment on the decision, but wouldn’t meet Earl’s glare. The old man yanked hard on the leashes of the three animals and the little squad set off toward the trees.

  As they penetrated, the land seemed to fight them. The slope increased, to wear against their legs; no clear path yielded through the dense pines, and the saw brier slashed at their legs. The sunlight fell in slanting sheaves through the darkness but it wasn’t a cool darkness, and was instead hot and close. Sweat burned Earl’s eyes.

  “Goddamn,” screamed Jed Posey, stumbling for the tenth time in the saw brier as the frustration built, “this ain’t no goddamned picnic, Earl. This ain’t white man’s work. Git some niggers if you want to fight your way through this shit.”

  Even Earl had to agree. It was pointless. You could hardly see ten feet ahead. The dust rose and swirled.

  “All right,” said Earl, admitting defeat. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Mr. Earl?” It was Pop.

  “We’re leaving, Pop. Ain’t nothing back here.”

  “Mr. Earl, Mollie’s got something.”

  Earl looked. The two stupider young dogs had collapsed, their heads forward on the loam, their pink, wet tongues spread out under half-opened jaws. Their bodies heaved with effort and disappointment. But Mollie sat quietly, his head cocked, his eyes quizzical, very calm. Then he began to keen. The sound seemed to come from some other orifice than his throat: it was pure animal, a single howl throaty with texture and meaning. Then he bobbed up, pivoted, his tail wagging smartly, and pointed with his nose.

  “He’s got her, Mr. Earl,” said Pop. “She’s here.”

  “Goddamn,” shouted Jimmy Pye. “Shoot and goddamn, boy, turn that damned dial! Git me some noise!”

  Jimmy’s hair was blond and longish, slick with Brylcreem, which glinted in the sun like a sheet of beaten gold above his beautiful, fine-boned face.

  Bub’s thick fingers worked the dial, but the trace of musical energy that Jimmy claimed to have heard as Bub slid through the possibilities seemed to vanish.

  “J-J-Jimmy. I cain’t f-f-f-find—”

  “Spit it out, boy. Just go on, goddammit, and spit it out.”

  But Bub couldn’t. The word hung up somewhere between his brain and his tongue, trapped in a molasses of frustration and pain. Goddamn, when would he learn to talk like a man?

  Bub was twenty, a thickish, sluggish young man, who had worked as an assistant carpenter at Wilton’s Construction in Blue Eye until he’d been let go because he’d never quite got the hang of it. He had grown up totally in awe of his older cousin, who was the best running back Polk County had ever produced and had hit .368 his senior year at Polk High and could have gone either to the minor leagues or the University of Arkansas, if he hadn’t gone to jail instead.

  But today Bub was more than in awe: he was possibly in love. For Jimmy’s golden power seemed to fill the air, radiating the magic of possibility.

  “Go on, boy,” yelped Jimmy, his face alight with glee, “find me some music. None of that nigger shit. No hillbilly shit, neither. No sir, want to hear me some rock and roll, want to hear me ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ by Mr. Bill Haley and his goddamn Comets.”

  Bub hunted, earnestly sliding the radio dial left and right, seeking a powerful Memphis or St. Louis station, but for some reason the gods weren’t cooperating, and exactly the kind of shit Jimmy didn’t want kept coming up loud and clear, KWIN out of Little Rock or that nigger beam KGOD from Texarkana. But Jimmy wasn’t angry. He was enjoying Bub’s struggle and gave him a little pat on the shoulder.

  Jimmy was driving. Where the hell had he got a car? Well, goddamn, Bub was so overwhelmed with love when he arrived at the jailhouse in west Fort Smith, he just hadn’t bothered to ask, and Jimmy hadn’t explained. The car was a goddamned beauty too, a sleek white Fairlane with Fordomatic gearshift, a convertible no less, looking brand spanking new, as if it’d just been driven off a showroom floor. Jimmy drove it like a god. He whipped out Rogers Avenue, zooming in and out of traffic, blowing by the slower vehicles, honking merrily, waving with a movie star’s sexy confidence whenever teenage girls were glimpsed.

  The girls always waved back and this was one thing that left Bub a little confused. Jimmy was married. He was married to Edie White, who was Jeff White’s widow’s daughter and a legendary beauty. Why would Jimmy want to go and wave at strange girls? It was all set up, it was perfect. Mr. Earl had gotten Jimmy a job at the sawmill in Nunley and Jimmy and Edie was going to live in a cottage outside Nunley on the late Rance Longacre’s cattle ranch; Miss Connie Longacre, Ranee’s widow, had said they could have it for free if Jimmy pitched in at driving time. Meanwhile, Jimmy would learn a trade at the sawmill. He might even become a manager. Everybody wanted it to work out.

  “Lookie them gals,” said Jimmy, as the car sped by a Pontiac station wagon. Four pretty blond girls who looked like cheerleaders smiled as Jimmy shouted, “Hey there, pretty missies, y’all want to git some ice cream?”

  The girls laughed, for Jimmy was so handsome and outrageous they knew he meant no harm, though it was Bub who noticed that he had crossed the centerline and that a truck was bearing down on them.

  “J-J-J-J—”

  “Or how about a drive-in movie, we could go to the Sky-Vue and see Jail Bait,” Jimmy hollered.

  The truck was—

  The truck honked.

  The girls screamed.

  Jimmy laughed.

  “J-J-J-J—”

  With just the flick of his wrist, Jimmy jiggered the wheel and stepped on the gas and with his athlete’s coordination shot into the tiny space left between the station wagon on the right and the rushing, honking, squealing truck just ahead; the car dipped and swooped ahead.

  “Whooooooie!” sang Jimmy. “I’m a goddamned free man.”

  He took the next left, fishtailing in a spray of gravel, and headed back downtown.

  “You find me some music, Bub Pye, you old dog, you.”

  Bub caught something familiar, with at least the kind of banging rhythms he had figured his cousin needed.

  “That’s a nigger,” said Jimmy.

  “N-n-n-n-no,” finally Bub got out. “That’s a white boy. He sounds like a nigger.”

  Jimmy listened. It was a white boy. White boy with rhythm. White boy with nigger in him, full of piss and cum, hot and dangerous.

  “What’s that white boy’s name?” he wanted to know.

  Bub couldn’t remember it. It was something new, some name he could never remember.

  “Cain’t ’member. Goddamn,” said Bub.

  “Well, you ain’t no damn good, then,” said Jimmy with a big old smile, in the way of saying in code, it don’t matter a damn.

  Jimmy looked at his watch. He seemed to know where he was going. Bub had only been up to Fort Smith a few times before; he had no idea.

  Pretty soon, Jimmy pulled over.

  “Just about noon,” he said.

  They were on a busy street, Midland Boulevard, across from a big grocery store. “IGA Food Line,” it said on the sign. It was the biggest grocery store Bub had ever seen.

  “Goddamn,” said Jimmy. “Lookie that, Bub? Lookie all them people in and out a place like that. All of them with their goddamned money just spent on food. Hell, boy, must be fifty, sixty thousand dollars in that place.”

  Bub wondered what the hell Jimmy could be talking about. Something he didn’t quite like about it.

  “J-J-J-J-J—”

  But goddamn, Jimmy’s luck was good.

  One, two, three o’clock, four o’clock ROCK,


  five, six, seven o’clock, eight o’clock ROCK,

  nine, ten, eleven o’clock, twelve o’clock ROCK,

  We gonna ROCK around the clock tonight!

  We gonna ROCK ROCK ROCK ’til the broad daylight!

  The unleashed dogs found her. Earl heard them baying wildly, their voices a-gibber with excitement.

  “Them dogs won’t—”

  “Won’t touch a goddamned thing,” said Pop.

  “Over here, over here,” shouted Jed Posey. “Goddamn and a half, over here!”

  Earl, breathing hard, struggled uphill through the trees and saw brier and broke into some kind of clearing, where, the shade vanished, the full, killing force of the heat struck him.

  Earl saw Jed standing, his chest heaving, next to a shale wash, where the earth was stony and broken, the sun harsh. On the other side of the wash, the three dogs sat obediently, barking to drive the devil away. But the devil had already been here and done his work.

  Shirelle lay on her side, her pink gingham dress crunched up around her hips, her panties gone, her blouse ripped off. She was beyond shame. Her eyes were wide and lightless. Her skin was gray, almost colorless, sheathed in dust. Her body was fat with bloat so that she seemed some balloon version of herself, and the left side of her face was swollen into a massive yellowish bulge crusted with a fissure of gore, where someone had smashed her with a rock. A yard away, the rock lay stained with black.

  “You can see her cooze,” said Jed. “G’wan, look everbody, you can see her cooze.”

  You could, of course, and Earl looked and saw what appeared to be a black gruel of blood on the child’s privates and what looked like contusions and abrasions. The buzz of flies, the stink of rot.

  Earl had seen death in all its forms over three major island invasions. He’d done more than his share of dealing it too. But the girl looked so broken and thrown away, so blasphemed by the gases that filled her, then abandoned on the side of a rough hill, it broke a heart he thought would break no more after the long walk through the tide at Tarawa and the flamethrower work on Saipan and the up-close tommy-gun killings, so very, very many of them, on Iwo. No Jap or dead American boy ever looked so uselessly, pointlessly wasted.