Black Light bls-2 Page 7

  “That silly boy’s on his way to Hollywood if you ask me,” said Connie. “We won’t see him in these parts ever again. Well, I’ll leave you two alone for a bit. Have things to tend to. Go gentle with her, Earl.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Earl.

  He and Edie went and sat by the window. Next to her he always felt cumbersome and awkward. He could feel his boots and his leather gun belt creaking. The Colt Trooper felt impossibly heavy.

  He got out his notebook, turned past the ten pages of notes he’d taken on Shirelle Parker.

  “Edie, has Jimmy been in contact?”

  “No, Mr. Earl. The last time I spoke to him was three weeks ago. He seemed fine. He was looking forward to getting out. He was full of excitement. I got a very nice letter a week ago. He was full of excitement about the sawmill. Said he’d end up owning it before 1960!”

  “He didn’t say nothing about making new friends in jail or anything?”

  “No sir.”

  “Sometimes a young guy like Jimmy, he can fall in with some hard cases and they can turn his mind. He didn’t mention anybody, a new friend or nothing?”

  “No sir.”

  “You should tell me, now. It ain’t a question of betraying. He’s killed some people. There’s a price to be paid. He has to pay it like a man. That’s the best that can be offered at this point. A safe surrender, a fair trial.”

  “That’s what I want, Earl. I never, ever wanted anybody to get hurt. Oh, Earl, is it true? He killed four men?”

  “They say. At least four witnesses identified him. And Bub.”

  Edie looked off, into the sunlight, across the fields.

  “Poor Bub,” she finally said. “He couldn’t hurt a mouse.”

  Jimmy, Jimmy, Jimmy, thought Earl bitterly. You fool. Why the hell did you have to go and do this thing for?

  “You haven’t heard from him today?”

  “I haven’t. The truth is, Mr. Earl, I don’t want to ever hear from him again. I can’t have this. It’s too horrible. I have to leave and start over.”

  He saw that she was crying.

  She turned.

  “Mr. Earl, I have to tell you. I married Jimmy because I was bad. I let him—”

  “You don’t have to tell me a thing. All that’s your business.”

  “I was pregnant. I didn’t have a choice, I didn’t think. My baby had to have his father.”

  A single track ran down from her left eye.

  “No one knows but Miss Connie. It would kill my poor mother.”

  “No one will ever know,” said Earl.

  “No. I lost the baby. I miscarried a month ago. The baby’s gone. I lost my baby and now I’m married to a killer. Oh, Earl.”

  “You don’t have to worry about that,” Earl said. “We can fix all that.”

  The phone rang.

  “Should I answer?”

  “It’s probably for me.”

  She went and picked it up, and no, it wasn’t for Earl.

  “It’s Jimmy,” she said.

  5

  The boy sat on the porch with Bob and Julie.

  “Can you get him something to drink, please,” Bob said. “He says he wants to write a book about my father.”

  “Do you want some lemonade? A Diet Coke? We don’t have any alcohol in this house.”

  “I’m a drunk,” said Bob. “Can’t have it around.”

  “A Diet Coke,” said the boy.

  Bob stared at him. What was he, some kind of emissary from the dead? Who could speak of his father to him? Bob found himself strangely agitated, not fearful exactly, but ill at ease, uncertain. Not that the boy looked difficult or dangerous. Quite the opposite: the boy wore wire-rim glasses and looked a little queasy. It was a look Bob had seen on boys he’d had to lead into battle. Why me? Why anyone? Why?

  Julie came back with the Coke and a glass with ice. He felt that the can was cold and took a swig, bypassing the glass.

  “Go ahead,” said Bob.

  “My name,” said the boy, “is Russell Pewtie, that is, Russell Pewtie, Jr. I’m twenty-two years old and I spent two years at Princeton University before dropping out. It’s possible the name Pewtie rings a bell?”

  “Not yet,” said Bob.

  “My father is Russell ‘Bud’ Pewtie, Sr. Until three years ago, he was a sergeant in the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. Big guy, old-boy type. Everybody liked him a lot. Decent man. He was famous for a bit. It was in all the magazines. They say they’re going to make a TV movie about him, one of those ‘Line of Duty’ things.”

  “I must have missed it.”

  “Well, it may have fallen through,” said the boy. “I don’t talk to my father anymore, so I wouldn’t know. What happened was, in June of 1994, a guy named Lamar Pye led two other men on a breakout from McAlester State Penitentiary in Oklahoma. Lamar was a powerful criminal personality, tough, violent, very smart, extremely aggressive. He cut a swath through southwestern Oklahoma they’re still talking about. Robbery, murder, kidnapping, the works. Now, for some reason, he and my dad—well, they were fated, somehow, mixed together. Lamar ambushed my dad, wounded him, though only superficially, but killed his partner. My dad took it personally. Twice he tracked Lamar down. He had a total of three shoot-outs with Pye. He killed his cousin, he killed a woman who’d thrown in with Pye and finally he killed Pye. Shot his face off, then shot him in the head.”

  “Sounds like a brave man,” said Bob.

  “Well,” said Russ, as if judgment were still pending. “He was seriously wounded. Shot in the lung, broke his collarbone, nerve damage crippled his right arm. But he recovered, and then one day he says to my mother, ‘I love you, I always will, goodbye.’ Leaves flat cold on a Wednesday morning. Moves across town to a little house near the airport. He was in love with and was carrying on with the woman who was his partner’s wife. Closer to my age than to his.”

  “Excuse me, Russ,” said Julie, “where is this going? What does this have to do with my husband?”

  “I got to thinking how much we lost to Lamar Pye. And we were lucky. We got out alive. Lamar Pye killed two men during the break out, he killed Ted Pepper, my dad’s partner, he terrorized a farmer and his wife and the woman died soon after, he kidnapped and terrorized a young woman, he killed seven people in a robbery before my dad finally ended it. We were lucky. There’s eleven people in the ground because of Lamar Pye. That was three months’ work. But Lamar took my family. He broke it up. Whatever happened, he enabled my father to leave my mother. It nearly killed my mother. I should tell you, to be quite honest, that I now truly hate my father. How he could do that to her after all those years he gave her? And so if all the Pewties survived Lamar, Lamar still killed the family. He couldn’t have done a better job with a shotgun.”

  He paused, took a swig on the Coke. Now it was dark.

  “I got curious. Where does a Lamar Pye come from? What so fills him with anger and hatred and fury, what turns him that way? So I thought: There’s a book. There’s a great book. The story not only of how my dad got Lamar Pye but what created Lamar Pye.”

  “Russ, we still don’t—” Julie said.

  “Honey, let the boy finish,” said Bob. “I know where he’s going.”

  “I thought you would,” Russ said. “So I contacted the McAlester prison authorities—I’m a journalist, used to be assistant Lifestyles editor of the Daily Oklahoman in Oklahoma City—and I got to look at his records and the stuff he left behind. I found his reform school records, his criminal rap sheet, the prison records and I found—this.”

  He reached into his wallet and unfolded a document and handed it over to Bob.

  “What is it, honey?” Julie asked.

  Bob recognized it immediately and shuddered.

  It was from the Arkansas Gazette of July 24, 1955.

  HERO TROOPER SLAYS TWO BEFORE DYING, ran the headline.

  A state trooper sergeant shot and killed two suspected murderers on Route 71 north of Fort Smith yesterday even
ing before dying himself of gunshot wounds inflicted by the two men.

  Dead were Sergeant Earl Lee Swagger, 45, of Polk County, a marine Medal of Honor winner in the Pacific; and Jim M. Pye, 21, of Fort Smith, and his cousin Buford ‘Bub’ Pye, 20, also of Polk County.

  Bob’s eyes ran down the account of the long-ago gunfight.

  He handed it to his wife.

  “See,” he said, as she read it, “this Lamar Pye that shot all them people in Oklahoma. He was the son—I guess that’s it, right?”

  “That’s it,” said Russ.

  “—he was the son of the man who killed my daddy.”

  “So you see—” started Russ.

  “Incidentally,” said Bob dryly, “the papers then weren’t no better than the ones we got today. The Gazette’s a big Little Rock paper: it don’t know shit about West Arkansas. They got a fact wrong. They said north of Fort Smith. It was south of Fort Smith. That’s why I don’t trust ’em.”

  “Well,” said Russ, a little nonplussed, “uh, yes, mistakes do get made. Uh, but you see if I wrote a book about Lamar Pye and what he took from people and where he came from, well, it has to start on the night of July 23, 1955. It all starts that night: Lamar’s life, and what became of it. Is it some genetic thing: like father like son? Well, maybe it is. Jim Pye was a criminal and a killer: his son was a criminal and a killer. On the other side, there’s Earl Swagger, war hero and man of honor. And there’s his son. War hero and man of honor.”

  “My father was a man of honor,” said Bob. “I was just a marine.”

  “But it all begins on that night. All of it: your life, Lamar’s life, what you did, what Lamar did. What happened to all those people in Oklahoma, people who never heard of Jim Pye—”

  “Jimmy Pye,” said Bob. “They called him Jimmy.”

  “Yes, well, anyhow, people who just walked into the fury Jimmy passed on to his son and died for it. It could be a great book. Too bad a great writer didn’t see it. But I’m the guy that saw it, and so I’m going to write it. I’m going to call it American Men. It’s a study of the life of Jimmy Pye and Earl Swagger and it’s the story of Jimmy’s son, Lamar, and poor old Bud Pewtie, the cop who ran into him and chased him down. The parallels are so unbelievable. Two bad boys just out of prison, father and son. Two state police sergeants. Two violent robberies. Gunfights, close up and scary and dangerous. It’s—it’s a great book.”

  Bob just looked at him.

  “It won’t have a thing to do with 1992 and what happened to you and the Time and Newsweek covers and all that,” Russ said. “It’s not about Vietnam. It’s about a legacy of violence handed down through two generations and the two lawmen who stopped it, who stood up and said, by God, no more, it stops here, tonight. Your dad who gave up his whole life and my dad who got his head all messed up because of it.”

  Bob doubted that at any moment during their long and violent nights either sergeant had said, “By God, no more, it stops here, tonight.” That’s how the movies would have it. More likely, each man had thought, “Oh, Jesus, don’t let me get killed tonight,” but the movies never got that part right.

  “Bob,” said Julie, “it would be so nice to give your father his due. He could have some measure of the respect and honor he deserved, even now, forty years later.”

  “What do you want from me?” Bob said.

  “Ah. Well, I suppose, fundamentally, your blessing. And in small ways, your help. I was hoping to interview you on the subject of your father. I was hoping you’d share your memories of him, not just of that night and the aftermath and what you remember or know of it, but generally, what sort of a man he was, that sort of thing. Then I guess there might be some documents you’d still have: photo albums, maybe some more articles, letters, I don’t know. Anything to build it up, to recall it, to help me re-create it.”

  “Umh,” grunted Bob noncommittally.

  “And finally, some kind of help, you know, in getting others to talk. I know how reluctant people can be to open up to a stranger, particularly a younger man from a different part of the country, though Lawton, Oklahoma, where I’m from, isn’t all that far from Blue Eye and Fort Smith. But a phone call, a letter of introduction. See, it has to be all oral recollection. One of the first things I learned was that in 1994 the Polk County courthouse annex burned down, and that’s where all the files and exhibits from the hearings were stored. The after-action reports, the medical records, all that. I have secondary sources from the newspapers but I want to talk to people. I even wrote the Arkansas congressmen and both senators and some other people in hopes of opening doors. I just got generic replies, but with Bob Lee Swagger helping me—”

  He stopped. He was done.

  “That’s it. That’s all I have. I’m finished. Uh, why don’t you, you know, think about it? Give it some thought. I’m no salesman. I hate selling things. I want you to be comfortable too.”

  “Well,” said Bob. “Look, I could lie to you and say, yep, you let me think about it and we could play this game out. But here’s my answer, straight out: No.”

  “Bob—”

  “Julie, no, you let me talk. I can’t have it. That’s all over. I buried my daddy and went on and made my way. I can’t be talking it up into some tape recorder. Those memories—you don’t give them away for someone else’s book. It seems—indecent.”

  The boy took it well.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Well, you’re consistent, at least. Just let me say, I’d try to do honor to your father. To me he’s a hero. He never left his family. But going back is painful, what’s the point except to make some kid you never heard of a published writer? Okay. Uh. I’ll probably still go ahead, somehow. I’m sort of committed. I actually quit my job and I’m determined to take it the whole way. So … well, I’m sorry. I appreciate your time and your honesty.”

  “I wish you luck, Russ. You seem all right. Your dad seems like a hell of a man. I’m sorry he did what he did.”

  “Sure. Uh, I guess I’ll be going now.”

  He stood and tentatively put out a hand, which Bob shook, and then turned and stepped out of the porch and began to walk up the road to his truck.

  “Bob,” said Julie. “Are you sure—”

  Bob turned and his wife saw something on his face she’d never seen before. It was, she realized, fear.

  “I can’t go back there,” he said. “I can’t face all that. It nearly killed me then. It killed my mother. It’s better off forgotten.”

  6

  “Oh, God, Jimmy,” she said.

  The voice came from far away but as Earl drew near he could hear it increasing in clarity and the familiar rhythms of the young man he’d watched grow up became evident.

  “Honey, oh, God, I am so sorry,” Jimmy was saying, “I have made such a mess of things, oh, Lord, it just got out of hand.”

  Earl hovered over Edie, feeling huge and helpless and enraged at what Jimmy was doing to her.

  “Jimmy, please, don’t hurt anybody else.”

  “I swear to you I won’t.”

  Earl tried to fight his way through his anger: What should I do? What’s the smart move? He was always so certain, he always acted decisively and correctly, in every situation from a hunting camp to a battle to any of a hundred police dilemmas. But now he felt sluggish, stupid, lost. He tried to get his mind working.

  This was almost a jail breakout, and in almost all jail breakouts, standard operating procedure was to wiretap the homes of those the escapee would most likely turn to, then raid them when contact was established. But would the department have had time to set up a wiretap? The robbery was around noon; it was now four, that was a few hours. He didn’t think so.

  More to the point, though, Betty Hill, the operator, was known to listen in as she threw wires into jacks at the Polk County switchboard. She might be listening. And if so, who would she call, the sheriff? She might even call Earl himself!

  “Find out where he is,” he mouthed to Edie.

 
; “Jimmy, oh my God, where are you?”

  “I’m at some general store up near Mulberry on the public phone. It’s around back, ain’t nobody can see us. We done dumped two cars and picked up another one.”

  “Oh, Jimmy. They’ll get you. You know that.”

  “Honey, listen. It’s all over for me. I got to face up to it, I’m finished, I’m over. You’re a free gal. I love you but you can’t stick to me from now on. Ain’t nothing in it for you. Honey, I crossed the line and can’t get back over.”

  “Oh, Jimmy, Jim—”

  “But listen here, the problem is Bub. Christ, that boy didn’t do nothing but what I told him. He’s out in the car crying for his mama. I cannot have it said that I got Bub killed or sent away.”

  “Jimmy, I—”

  “Honey, I want you to get Mr. Earl. Mr. Earl will know what to do.”

  “Honey, he’s here.”

  “Oh, thank God! Put him on!”

  Earl took the phone.

  “Jimmy—”

  “Earl, don’t waste your breath telling me how I done messed up. Lord, Lord, I know.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “Earl, I wanted a stake. I wanted to go to L.A. and be a movie star. I didn’t want no job in no sawmill living in a cottage off some rich lady’s charity.”

  Earl could only shake his head in dismay.

  “Now I got a mess,” said Jimmy, “and I got to fix it up. I got to save Bub. Can you git me a deal?”

  “Best just come in and face up to it.”

  “Here’s the deal, Earl. I go murder in the first, and if the state wants, it can fry me. And it’ll probably want. In exchange for my plea, Bub gets maybe accessory to armed robbery, manslaughter two at the worst, he gets out in a year or so, no hard joint neither, one of them work farms where nobody going to bother him.”

  “I can’t get you that deal without talking to the Sebastian County prosecutor. Best thing for you to do is to surrender peacefully to the first law enforcement officer you see and then tell them you did all the killing. I’ll call Sam Vincent down here and—”