Black Light Read online

  Bergman.

  Deems.

  Ver Coot.

  Truely.

  It was a great puzzle. He stood and realized that he was on a ridge, one of the folds in the land that wasn’t really visible until you actually walked it. He stood, now a little higher, and unfolded the photograph and compared what he saw with where he was.

  The site in the photo seemed to be on a ridge too. Could he make out other ridges behind it, all the way to the trees? He could not. The background was lost in blur, as the dots became nonsense. He saw that the key had to be the trees, now gone for whatever reason. His daddy lay under a big tree. Maybe one hundred yards behind it was another tree. And that smudge in the dots, was that a tree? If so, that meant three trees in a rough line heading—in which direction? Couldn’t say.

  Hey, boys, help me. Help the one among you who should have been with you, help him.

  But the dead were silent.

  Feeling lost and a complete failure, he took another step to leave the ridge and find another, when in his far peripheral vision some anomaly registered. He turned to track it down and saw nothing. He turned back, moving, and again there came a signal from his subconscious that something should be noted.

  Were the dead speaking in some odd way?

  Come on, boys, tell me. Give me your message.

  No, nothing, only silence. Far off, the sound of a power mower. Above, a jet glinting high in the sky, a commercial job leaving a fat contrail. A white car in the distance.

  Duane Peck’s, of course. Keeping watch.

  Duane, who are you working for?

  Someday soon, we may have to have a discussion with you.

  He turned again: another strangeness assailed him.

  He tried to sift through it. What was he feeling or noticing? It seemed only to come when he moved and in his peripheral, as if in focusing on it, it went away. He set out to duplicate the phenomenon.

  He stepped, turning, trying to keep his eyes focused straight ahead and his mind emptied. Nothing. Did it again. Nothing. Felt like an idiot.

  Did it the third time.

  Now he had it. Far off, in the orthodox line of gravestones, was a gap. No, not a gap, an irregularity. One stone was slightly out of line. Why would that be?

  He sighted on it and walked. It was 150 yards away.

  Mason.

  Mason, what’s your goddamned problem? You a fuckup, Mason? You a mama’s boy, you think the rules don’t ever apply to you? That’s how a sergeant would talk to a man out of formation. Why are you buried about a foot to the right of Shidlovsky and Donohue? Isn’t Murphy pissed, you moving in on his territory?

  Was it a mistake or—

  A tree.

  It was gone now, but when poor Mason went into the earth back in 1899 with a Spanish Mauser bullet in his heart, a giant tree must have been right here on this spot, and so they made a slight adjustment. Later the tree died, but Mason stayed out of whack until eternity.

  Bob took the picture out.

  If he looked hard, he could force himself to believe that if this was the spot for the tree, and since this spot was quite close to the boundary of the cemetery, then maybe this was the third tree in the line.

  He looked again at the picture. What time of day was the picture taken? He ransacked through forty long years of memories, putting aside much that was not pleasant, and a little that was, and at last he remembered a formidable presence named Miss Connie rushing him through breakfast and dressing him because his mother kept breaking down. That put the funeral in the morning, before noon in any case. Figuring then that the photographer would have moved until the sun was behind him, and that it would have been reasonably low, Bob guessed that the photographer was facing west, his back to the east. So if this was the last tree, then the other two in the rough line would be to the east.

  He orientated himself that way and saw only crosses. But he took off his blue denim shirt and draped it on Mason. He didn’t think Mason would mind. Then he turned to the east and began to walk the line.

  He found the second gap fifty yards beyond and rushed ahead. But where the first one should be, according to his reading of the photo, he found nothing, except a damned sidewalk that led to a little park of what appeared to be abstract statuary a little bit farther out. The rows were nice and even. He looked, uncomprehending how such a huge tree, had there been one, wouldn’t have thrown the lines of graves out of whack. What the hell was wrong?

  He looked more carefully at the picture.

  Sidewalk, he thought. Where the hell is it going?

  He found it, walked to the little garden. Some Confederate thing? No, dammit, Vietnam. The county had erected a little memento mori to the boys of Nam, a plaque, inscribed with words like honor and duty and sacrifice and of course the names. He looked, then looked away. He knew Harrison, and Marlow, he knew Jefferson too, though Jefferson was black. Jefferson was AirCav, right, a brother of the Black Horse? What about Simpson? Straight-leg grunt, draft bait, caught a booby when he was down to days until DEROS, the town’s favorite hard-luck story.

  Now Bob’s head ached and he couldn’t deal with the problem anymore. He turned to leave, and as if in giving up, he got it.

  The tree comes down for whatever reason, but it was so imposing that its very presence had intimidated the gravediggers, so they’d never gotten near to it. And when it came down, that’s where they build their garden to the Vietnam War dead, and that’s where they build the sidewalk. So that would make his dad’s now hidden grave somewhere along the sidewalk, probably to the right of it. He thought it made sense too. If some guys were exchanging gravestones that probably weighed two hundred to three hundred pounds apiece late at night, they’d need a wheelbarrow or cart and the sidewalk would be helpful. He walked a bit until he reached a halfway point and then just turned west. He saw nothing, then moved up and back and at last up a bit more. He was on a ridge. He could see two gaps in the line before him to the west, one of the tombstones by the farthest gap the blue of his shirt.

  “Hey.”

  He turned. It was Russ.

  “Those old records were miserable, but I got at least thirteen names. Man, it’s amazing the records that place keeps.”

  Bob looked to his immediate right.

  “I bet one of them says Jacob Finley.”

  Russ dug out his paper, looked them over and then said, “Yeah. Jacob Finley. Fifth Arkansas Light Infantry.”

  Bob looked at the grave marker, limestone corrupted by the passage of time, untended, leaning ever so slightly to the right.

  He knelt and put a hand on the cold stone.

  Hello, old man, he thought. I’ve come. It’s time.

  This time it was easy. They went back to the County Coroner’s and refiled the exhumation papers for poor Jacob Finley, according to them Bob’s long-lost cousin. No lies had to be told regarding the reasons for changing the request, because, the first paperwork already in order, nobody in the Coroner’s Office particularly cared. Sam wasn’t even necessary. A few phone calls later and all the mechanisms of the day before were reinstalled.

  Mr. Coggins and his two boys were luckier this time. The grave site, being accessible off that helpful sidewalk, was now approachable by backhoe, and Mr. Coggins was an expert with the machine. In less than an hour he excavated the coffin, and just as the machine uncovered the box, Dr. Phillips showed up.

  “How did you find him?” he asked.

  Bob explained.

  “Well, maybe you’re right and maybe not.” He went and looked as the quickly erected tackle drew the box from the ground.

  “I will say this, that’s a metal casket, circa the fifties. Do you remember the funeral home?”

  Bob said no and then a name shot into his memory like a flare out of the void.

  “Devilin’s,” he said.

  “Yep,” said the doctor. “And your father’s name was Earl Swagger.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “That’s what it says he
re. That’s him. Okay, boys, load it into the hearse and we’ll be off.”

  It didn’t take a long time at the mortuary.

  Bob and Russ waited outside, while a funeral procession formed up in one of the viewing rooms and people filed out to cars. The hearse that took Earl to the mortuary took some other poor joker back to the boneyard a half an hour later.

  “I feel soaked in death,” said Russ.

  Presently the doctor came out. They went over to a little shady remembrance garden tastefully sculpted into the earth near the funeral home. Beautiful day late in the afternoon: the sun was just setting.

  “I can put this in writing for you, but it’ll take a day,” he said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Writing’s not necessary. The boy’ll take notes.”

  “Fine. First of all, then, I found the physical remains of a man in his midforties in a state of some advanced decomposition. What that means is that little tissue remains, which in turn means that some pathological determinations are impossible. Bullet tracks, for example. We can’t tell which directions the bullets went through the body and what damage they did to soft-tissue elements like organs and the central nervous or respiratory system.”

  “Damn!” said Bob.

  Speak to me, Daddy, he thought. This is your only chance.

  “But,” the doctor continued, “the skeletal remains were in good shape and the marks of the wounds were recorded there.”

  “Yes,” said Bob. “Go on.”

  “I initially noticed two wounds. The first was on the leftside ulna, the outermost bone of the forearm, just down from the thickness of bone we call the olecranon, an inch or so beneath the elbow. I could tell from impact beveling that a bullet struck and shattered that bone; there was a traumatic ovoid indentation visible on some of the fracture segments. This is characteristic of a high-velocity solid-point bullet delivered at close range.”

  “Thirty-eight Super.”

  “A jacketed .38 Super would get the job done nicely, yes. The bones were in such fragmented disarray that, pending further lengthy examination, I couldn’t rearrange them to get a caliber reading on the damage.”

  “Not necessary,” said Bob.

  “The second wound resembled the first. The same shattered bone, the same fragment presence, the same ovoid groove in some of the pieces, again characteristic of a smaller-caliber, high-speed bullet. This was observed at the frontal curve of the third rib of the left-hand side of the cadaver.”

  Bob mulled this over.

  “Could he move, hit like that?”

  “If he wanted to.”

  “Both wounds were survivable?” he finally asked.

  “Well, that’s a subjective judgment, dependent upon the subject’s viability. Given that your father was in extremely robust health, that he’d been hit before and understood that getting hit didn’t automatically equate to death, and given that he stanched his blood flow and that help arrived within a few hours, and given that there were no serious soft-tissue wounds not registered in the skeletal system, then yes, my judgment is that those two wounds were survivable. But there was a third wound.”

  “Go on,” Bob said.

  “I missed it at first,” said the doctor. “Some tissue remains were present and the condition of the bones was not pristine. Of course I’m not in my lab working under the best conditions.”

  “But you found something?”

  “Yes, finally, I did. In the sternum, a frontal plate of bone that shields the heart and anchors the ribs. There’s a very neat round hole, or almost round. Ovoid actually, suggestive of a downward angle, that is, a high to low shooting trajectory. There’s impact beveling suggestive of an entry wound. If you extrapolate from the placement of the penetration of the sternum on that angle, you get a real solid heart shot. The bullet path leads straight into the right ventricle where the pulmonary artery pulls the deoxygenated blood in. That artery and the ventricle would have been instantaneously destroyed. Brain death would have followed in, say, ten to twelve seconds.”

  “So he couldn’t have been shot in the heart and walked three hundred feet back to where he was found?”

  “He couldn’t have moved a step. I doubt he was conscious much more than three seconds after impact.”

  Bob nodded and turned to Russ.

  “So how’s goddamn Jimmy Pye hit him a hundred yards out in the corn and he walks all the way back to the car?”

  Russ just looked at him.

  “You measured the hole, I take it,” Bob asked the doctor.

  “Yes, I did.”

  “I’m guessing it wasn’t .357 or .429, right? It was, what, .311, .312 inches?”

  “Good. Actually, .3115.”

  “As I understand it, the impact beveling always widens the diameter by a couple of thousandths of an inch?” “Typically,” said the doctor.

  “So the bullet that killed my father, it was, say, .308 in diameter? That would make it a .30-caliber rifle bullet?”

  “That’s what every indicator says,” the doctor replied.

  “I don’t get it,” said Russ. “What’s all this with the numbers?”

  “It tells me who killed my father,” Bob said, turning to look at him. “It sure as hell wasn’t no Jimmy Pye.”

  “Who killed your father?” asked Russ.

  “A sniper,” said Bob.

  19

  The snake rattled again in the corn. The arm hurt. The side had gone to sleep. The legs ached.

  Earl, sitting sideways in the front seat of his cruiser, straightened his legs out before him. He was all right. He would make it. A little smile came to him.

  If that goddamn snake don’t bite me, I made it again.

  His radio crackled.

  “Car One Four, this is Blue Eye Sheriff’s Department, Earl, you hang on, goddammit, we are inbound and closing fast and I have an ambulance a minute or so behind. You hang on, son, we are almost home.”

  There was always that moment in the islands when it finally occurred to you that you had somehow made it again. It was like a little window opening, and a gust of sweet air floating through the room, and you experienced the simple physical pleasure in having escaped extinction. Other things would come later: the guilt you always felt when you thought of the good men lost forever, the endless dream replays where the bullets that missed you hit you or your own weapon jammed or ran dry. But for now it was okay: it was something God gave to infantrymen, just a moment’s worth of bliss between the total stress of battle and the dark anguish of survivor’s guilt. You just got one moment: Hey. I made it.

  Earl thought of the things he had to do. He made a list.

  1. Take Bob Lee to that football game. The boy had never been. He himself hadn’t been since 1951, on a visit to Chicago, when he’d seen the Bears play the Rams. It was a lopsided game. He wanted Bob Lee to see a good game.

  2. Buy a Remington rifle, Model 740A, the new autoloader, in .30-06. He’d read about it in Field & Stream. Said they were building them even more accurate than the Winchester Model 70s, and you had that second and third shot automatically, without a recock.

  3. Kiss his wife. Tell her how much he liked her strawberry pie. Buy her a present. The woman needed a present. Hell, buy her two presents.

  4. Face it out with Edie. It had to be dealt with. Do it, put your house in order, clean up your mess.

  5. See Sam Vincent. A policeman had to have a will. Sam could recommend a lawyer. Get a will, figure it all out.

  6.

  But at 6 an odd thing occurred. It seemed like time stopped for a second and Earl’s soul flew out of his body. He imagined himself floating through space. He watched from above as the black Arkansas woods and hills flew by. In the distance, beyond Board Camp, he saw a well-lit little house off by itself. He descended and flew through the window. His wife, June, was there. She was doing something in the kitchen. She was dutiful, erect, a little irritable, in an apron, looking tired as usual, and not saying much. He floated up to her and
touched her cheek but his finger had no substance and sank through her. He stroked at her harder, but could make no contact.

  Puzzled, he flew up the steps. Bob Lee sat in his room, trying to put together a Revell model airplane. It was a Bell P-39 Airacobra, very dangerous-looking, but Earl knew the pilots hated it and that it never flew after 1943. Bob Lee, still wearing that damned coonskin cap and that Crockett T-shirt, was bent earnestly into the effort, trying with clumsy boyish fingers to cement the clear plastic cockpit bubble to the cockpit frame, a tricky operation because too much cement could smear the transparency of the ersatz glass, ruining the entire illusion of reality. Usually, Earl did this job himself, though the boy glued the bigger pieces together and was getting better and better at it. Earl reached to help the boy, but again his fingers were weightless; they touched nothing.

  Bob Lee, he called. Bob Lee, Bob Lee, Bob Lee, but Bob Lee didn’t hear him and struggled with the cockpit and somehow got it mounted. Earl watched as his boy’s face knitted in disappointment and fury, and he beat a single tear away. But Earl knew too the model was ruined. He ached now to take the boy into his arms, and say, now, that’s all right, maybe you didn’t do so good this time, but there’ll be other times. But when he reached he touched nothing.

  7. Stop vomiting blood.

  The blood was everywhere. What was happening? It spread across his chest and poured from his absolute center. When had this happened? It must have occurred in that split second when Earl went out of his body. It occurred to him that he had been shot and he looked out into the goddamned darkness and heard only the hooting of the owls and the stirring of other animals. It was so dark.

  He had the consciousness of it all slipping away. He thought of a drain, of being whirled down a drain. His mind grew logy and stupid. He yearned to see his son again and his wife and his father; he yearned but it did no good.