Black Light Page 7

  “I should have done more for him. I could have done more. But I had my own son.”

  “Will they catch him?”

  “Yes, they’ll catch him. And make him pay. He’ll have to pay. No other way.”

  “It’s appropriate. I do feel sorry for his poor cousin.”

  “Bub loves Jimmy too much. Jimmy’s easy to love, but dangerous. It ain’t been a very good day in Arkansas,” he said. “We found a poor colored girl this morning north of town. Somebody messed her up real good.”

  “Oh my Lord. Who was it?”

  “Shirelle Parker.”

  “I know Shirelle. I know her mother. Oh, Earl, that’s terrible.”

  It seemed to strike Miss Connie very hard.

  “Those poor people,” she finally said. “Woe is always unto them.”

  “They ain’t got no picnic, that’s for sure.”

  “Some black boy, I assume?”

  “I hope. I don’t know, though, Miss Connie. There’s some monkey business going on and it’s got me buffaloed.”

  “Earl—”

  He turned.

  “Honey, you shouldn’t be up,” said Mrs. Longacre.

  Earl looked at Edie White Pye, keeping his face blank as possible. He was not an emotional man, but he had feelings, all right. He just put them away and pounded a couple of nails into them to keep them there.

  Edie had been Jimmy Pye’s best girl since 1950, when Jimmy had led Blue Eye High to a second-place finish in the state football classic; she was possibly the most beautiful young woman anyone had ever seen in Polk County. Her father died in the war, a few weeks after the Normandy invasion, smoked by a German Tiger in some French hedgerow. Her mother raised her alone, though not much raising had to be done with Edie. From the start, she was all right. Her nickname was Snow White, for that’s who she reminded many people of; Jimmy was her Prince Charming, and charming he could be, when he wasn’t being wild.

  Earl drank her in for a moment and put his feelings even deeper and pounded three or four more nails into them.

  “Oh, Mr. Earl,” she said. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Don’t be sorry, Edie,” he said. “Jimmy made his own decisions. This is his damn fix. He’s got to face the music this time. I only hope no one else has to get shot.”

  He imagined Jimmy running into someone like Buddy Till and his machine gun. There’d be hair and blood all over everything and God help anybody who got in between. He shivered.

  “That damned boy,” said Connie Longacre. “He always was too handsome for his own good. He spent too much time looking in the mirror. I never trust a man who loves what he sees in the mirror more than what he sees outside it. Edie, you needed a solid man, a real man. It’s too bad Earl here is already married and has a boy. Rance used to say Earl Swagger’s the best man Polk County ever gave birth to. And that was before the war!”

  “Now, you stop that, Miss Connie,” said Earl. She loved to say provocative things and watch people’s jaws gape.

  “Well, if I was a young woman, Earl’s the one I’d have gone after.”

  “Edie, I have to talk to you. I have to ask you some official questions. They want me to stay here in case Jimmy heads this way.”

  “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 evening 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.