Black Light - Страница 3

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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?”