n the latter half of the nineteenth century, it was not uncommon for armed men to ride into Fort Smith, Arkansas, the bawdy, bustling city nestled on the confluence of the Arkansas and Poteau rivers. Founded in 1817, it boasted a population of thirty thousand by 1875, perched as it was at the head of the long valley between Ozark and the Ouachita Mountains, and perched again on the border between Arkansas and what in those days was called Indian Territory and is now known as Oklahoma.
In those days, the city was nicknamed Hell on the Border. Fort Smith was the gateway to the savage and untamed West. In those days, civilization tried mightily to enforce its will upon the lawless, and the enforcers were federal deputies to the hanging judge, Isaiah J. Parker. Between 1875 and 1896, the judge sent his men into Indian Territory to carry out the law. They were of a type: lean, slit-eyed, exquisitely practical, without much in the way of larger views. All could shoot; all would shoot. For two decades Fort Smith was the gunfight capital of the world, sending its men out to bring back the desperados and outlaws who roamed Indian Territory. Of the marshals, 65 were slain in the line of duty; of the 172 men they brought back alive, 88 were hanged by the judge; no one knows how many outlaws perished in the territory at the hands of the deputies. In those days, such facts weren’t worth recording.
Now, of course, all that has changed: there are no gunslingers, no bawdy houses, no rigid judges. Instead, Arkansas’s second largest city is a bit shopworn, its downtown, once the most sophisticated urban thoroughfare west of the Mississippi and east of Denver, fallen on hard and empty times, with the action having moved out to the suburbs where the Central Mall and the Wal-Marts are. Its skyline is dominated by two large grain elevators. City fathers have tried gamely to reclaim or re-evoke the glories of the past, and the old fort, Parker’s courthouse, a brothel called Miss Laura’s and many fine homes in the stately Belle Grove District of Victorian Houses have been restored, but they do little to disguise the fact that history has moved elsewhere. Now its parade-widened Garrison Street, a reminder of the days when it was an army post sited to keep the Cherokee and the Osage from tribal war, has the look of a beautiful mouth that has lost too many teeth to gingivitis. The most prominent downtown landmark is, in fact, the Holiday Inn on Rogers Avenue, a mock Hyatt with a nine-story atrium and a disco that blows loud, bad rock into the night. It is partially owned by the Bama group.
So the men who come to Fort Smith from Indian Territory these days are unlikely to be federal marshals or gun-fighters. But still, some come on missions, and some are slit-eyed, hard and practical. One was Bob Lee Swagger, accompanied by his new young partner, Russ Pewtie, driving east on U.S. 40 in Bob’s green pickup truck. They reached the city near twilight. The lights were coming on as they approached it through the rolling land of Sequoyah County, Oklahoma, though they couldn’t see the Arkansas River off to their right, broad and flat but invisible behind a train of trees.
“See,” Russ was saying, the folder of old articles from 1955 on his lap, “it just shows how crappy the newspapers were back then. We’re much better now,” he insisted, though Bob only grunted noncommittally.
“These stories,” he argued, “they just don’t tell you enough. No reporter ever went to the sites, they just took the police handout and reprinted it. Jesus, I can think of a hundred questions I’m going to have to figure out how to answer. How do Jimmy and Bub get all the way from Fort Smith down to Blue Eye through the largest manhunt in Arkansas history? How do they just run into your father? Is it coincidence? Yet there’s no speculation here on these issues at all. Also, the bigger question: why? Why did Jimmy Pye on his first morning out after ninety days in jail go off on this thing, and why did poor Bub, who had no criminal record, why did he go along with him? And this bit here, stopping at a drive-in and eating a burger and flirting with the waitress? What was that all about? It sounds like someone who wants the world to think he’s cool. Also, why—”
“Say, you do talk a mite, don’t you?” said Bob.
“Well—”
“It ain’t like I haven’t thought about this, you know.”
“All right,” said Russ. “One of my least lovely characteristics. I am a talker. I can’t shut up. I don’t feel things, I yap about them. And you’re the original Wyatt Earp and you’re stuck with me.”
“Son, I ain’t no Wyatt Earp. I’m just a beat-up old marine trying to stay on the goddamn wagon.”
Russ said nothing. In the fading light, Swagger’s face looked as if it were carved out of flint; his eyes hardly showed a thing. He hadn’t said a word in hours, and yet he drove with the perfect adroit grace of a race driver. He just swung the truck in and out of traffic, smooth and light as could be, hardly moving himself. He was the stillest man Russ had ever seen; no man seemed to care less what the world thought of him.
“I’ve worked out a plan,” said Russ. “I want to approach this coherently and methodically. I know where we’ll begin and—”
“The plan,” said Bob, “is that we go grocery shopping.”
It was full night when they got there, but the store was still open. If once it had been the flagship of a national chain, that identity was long since faded, though if you looked, in the neon you could make out the silhouettes of the letters when they removed the “IGA” from the big sign. It just said “Smitty’s,” hand-painted on plywood, nailed halfway up the big struts of the old sign. But it was still at 222 Midland Boulevard.
Brown light sustaining a cloud of insects beamed down from the pylons installed as a crime deterrent. The store looked ratty, even threadbare, and through the broad windows, Russ could see a few shoppers rushing among junky, sparse shelves. It occurred to him that the neighborhood had changed in forty years: everybody he saw in the store, everybody going in and out, was black or Asian or Hispanic.
“So,” Bob said, “you’re a writer. You figure things out. You tell me: why here?”
“Huh?” said Russ.
“Begin with a beginning. That day, it starts here at this grocery store at about eleven in the morning. Now: you tell me why.”
“Me?”
“Yep, you.”
“Ah, maybe they just fell into it. They were—”
“Russ, they’d stolen a car and somehow come up with two guns and ammunition. They were fixing to rob something. Now, if they went to all that trouble, you think they’d just walk into it? First place they saw? The jail is downtown. Blue Eye’s the other way, south, out of town. Why’d they come north to this place?”
“Ahh—” Russ had no answer. It shocked him, though. Clearly, Bob had mastered the material at a much deeper level than he’d expected, surprising from a man who seemed as far from formal intellectuality as he could imagine.
“Look at it as a military problem. What is it about this place that recommends it for an operation?”
Russ looked around nervously. It was on a long straight stretch of road, a main drag into and out of town from the north, but now looking grim, three or four miles removed from downtown proper. There wasn’t much to be seen. Long, straight road leading off in both ways, trees, a commercial strip full of bars and car dealerships and decaying retail outlets. Now and then cars moved up and down the block just by them, but there wasn’t much.
“I don’t see a thing,” he admitted.
“Or, consider this way,” Bob said. “There were two other big grocery stores in Fort Smith in 1955: Peerson Brothers, on South Thirty-first Street, and Hillcrest Food Market, on Courtland, in Hillcrest. Do you want to drive there and see what’s different about them?”
“Er,” said Russ. Then he asked, “Do you see something?”
“I didn’t go to no college or anything,” said Bob. “What would I know?”
“But you see something?”
“I see a little thing.”
“What is it?”
Bob looked up and down the road.
“Now, I’m no armed robber. But if I was an armed robber, what I’d be most afraid of is that while I’m in robbing and before anybody even got an alarm out, a cop might come along.”
Russ nodded. It seemed logical.
“Now, what’s different about this block?”
“Ahhhh—” He trailed off in acknowledgment of his stupidity.
“It’s long. If you look at the map you’ll see that it goes for an unusual length. Look, no side streets and there ain’t a stoplight in either direction for more than a bit.”
Russ looked. Indeed, far down in each direction a stoplight glowed, one red, one green.
“Now, if you looked each way, and you knew no cop was in sight, you’d have about a clear minute or so to git in and out and you’d be guaranteed no cop could sneak up on you. In fact, a cop did come, but the boys were out and old goddamn Jimmy Pye had plenty of time to set up a nice clear shot. That cop didn’t have a chance.”
“Wow,” said Russ, surprised. Then he added, “Jimmy was smart. He wasn’t just improvising, he’d worked it out. It figures. His son was very smart. Lamar was very, very clever when he set up his jobs, and he always knew exactly what to do. That’s something he got from his old man.”
“Yeah, he was a regular genius,” said Bob. “But how could he have scouted it out if he was in jail for three months?”
“Uhhh—” Russ let some air out of his lungs but no words formed in his brain.
“Now, let’s consider something else. The guns. All the newspapers say Bub brought the guns. They was planning a job, Bub got the guns together, had plenty of ammo, they went right into action.”
“Right.”
“But Jimmy’s was a Colt .38 Super, not a common gun, a kind of special gun, very few of ’em made. I’d love to find out where that gun come from. The .38 Super never really caught on; it was invented by Colt and Winchester in 1929 to be a law enforcement round, to get through car doors and bulletproof vests. But the .357 Mag come along a few years later and did everything it did better. So the Super just sort of languished. It wasn’t your street gun, the kind a punk kid like Bub would come up with. It’s not a hunting gun. It was never accurate enough to be a target round. It’s not a nineteenth-century cartridge, a .38-40 or a .32-20, say, that could have been lying around a farm for sixty years. No, it didn’t have its day until the eighties, when the IPSC boys begun loading it hot to make major. But in 1955, let me tell you, it wasn’t something you’d just find. You’d have to ask for it: a professional’s gun, real good velocity, nine shots in the mag, smooth shooting. If you were a cop or an armed robber, it’s just the ticket. How’d Jimmy know that? He a gun buff? He into guns? He a hunter, an NRA member, a subscriber to Guns magazine? How’d he end up with just the right gun for that kind of work?”
“Ah—” Russ flubbed.
“And how’d Bub get it?”
“Stole it, I guess,” said Russ.
“Guess is right. But no one ever reported it stolen, not so’s I’d know. What’s that tell us?”
“Ah,” said Russ, not quite knowing what it told him.
“It tells us maybe someone’s putting this thing together who knows a little bit about what he’s doing.”
Russ said, “Like I say, Jimmy was smart, like his boy, Lamar.”
“Not that smart” was all that Bob said.
Where is this going? What’s this guy up to? Russ wondered.
The next morning, they took the new Harry Etheridge Parkway down toward Bob’s hometown. It was a strange experience: the road was not yet built when he left Blue Eye, seemingly forever, three years ago. Now it seemed so permanent, he could not imagine that it hadn’t been there forever, four wide lanes of white cement gleaming in the sun. The road, however, was practically deserted. Who went from Blue Eye to Fort Smith and back again? As a recreation area, Blue Eye had yet to be developed.
It was strange, almost dislocating. He’d walked these hills and mountains daily for the seven years he’d lived alone on a mountain in a trailer with the dog Mike, just forgetting the world existed. He knew them a dozen different ways, all their trails and switchbacks, their enfilades and shortcuts, the subtle secrets of terrain that no map could yield. Yet penetrated from this angle, they gave up visions before unseeable as the highway almost seemed to rearrange the mountains themselves in new and unusual ways. It troubled him, announcing the mistake of going back thinking that things have stayed the same, for they always change and must be relearned again.
A part of him hated the damn road. What the hell was the point, anyhow? They say Boss Harry Etheridge never forgot he came from Polk County and he wanted to pay back his home folks, give them some shot into the twentieth century. They say that his son, Hollis, when he was in the Senate before he began his presidential quest, wanted a monument to his father. They say that all the politicians and businessmen wanted a free feed at the expense of the U.S. government, which is why so many people called it the porkway and not the parkway. But it was meant as a monument to a father’s love of his home and a son’s love for his father.
“This Etheridge,” Russ asked, “is this the same guy that’s running for President? The guy that’s finishing third in all the primaries?”
“Same family,” Bob said. “The father was the big congressman. The son was a two-term senator. Handsomest man that ever lived. He thinks he can be the President.”
“He’ll need more than pretty looks,” said Russ.
“Umm,” grunted Bob, who had no opinions on politics, or particularly on Hollis Etheridge, who was only an Arkansas fellow by political convenience. He’d been raised in Washington, been to Harvard and Harvard Law School and only came back during symbolic trips with his father when he was a youngster. In Arkansas, he was a tribute to name recognition. His two terms in the Senate were marked by obedience to the rules, blandness, party-line votes, rumors of a flamboyant adultery habit (and if you saw his wife, you’d know why) and a great willingness to siphon funds back to the statewide political machine that had put him in office.
Whatever, the road he built got Bob and Russ to their destination in less than an hour where by the old twisty Route 71 it was a close-to-three-hour trip.
“That’s a hell of a road,” said Russ. “We don’t have anything in Oklahoma like that. Too bad it doesn’t go anywhere.”
The end of the highway yielded a futuristic ramp that swirled in streamlined hurry to earth—but it was the earth of beat-up old Blue Eye, depositing them quickly enough in the regulation strip of fast-food joints: McDonald’s and Burger King but also some more obscure regional varieties. Bob noted there was a new place called Sonic, a classic fifties drive-in that boasted pennants snapping in the breeze, clearly a hot dog joint, but it didn’t look like it was doing too well otherwise. The Wal-Mart had moved across the street and become a Wal-Mart Super Saver, whatever the hell that was, and it looked like some kind of flat spaceship landed in the middle of a parking lot. A few blocks on they came to the same scabby, one-story town hall and across the square, the razed remains of the old courthouse, which had burned in 1994 and had simply been flattened and cemented over, until someone figured out what to do with the property. Some Confederate hero stood covered in pigeon shit and graffiti in the center of the square, saluting the empty space where the courthouse had been; Bob couldn’t remember the Reb’s name, if he ever knew. Off the main drag, the same grubby collection of stores, general merchandising, men’s and women’s clothing stores, the life sucked out of them by Mr. Sam’s Wal-Mart. A beauty parlor, a sporting goods store, a languishing tax accountant’s office. And, to the left, the professional office building where two doctors, two dentists and a chiropractor had an office, as did one old lawyer.
“We’ll start here,” Bob said. “Good to see this old dog again. Hope he can still hunt.”
“Is this the great Sam?” Russ asked.
“Yes, it is. They say he’s the smartest man in the county. For close to thirty years Sam Vincent was the county prosecutor. In those days, they called him Electrifying Sam, because he sent twenty-three men to the chair. He knew my daddy. I think he was assistant state’s attorney for Polk in 1955. We’ll see what he has to say. You let me do the talking.”
“He must be in his eighties!”
“He’s eighty-six now, I think.”
“Are you sure he’s even here? He could be in a rest home or something.”
“Oh, no. Sam hasn’t missed a day since he came back from the war in 1945. He’ll die here, happier than most.”
They parked and got out. Bob bent and reached behind the pickup’s seat and removed a cardboard box. Then he led Russ up a dark stairway between Wally’s Men’s Store and Milady’s Beauty Salon; at its top, they found an antiseptic green hallway that reminded Russ of some kind of private-eye movie from the forties; it should have been in black and white. The lettering on the opaque glass in one of the doorways read SAM VINC NT—Atto ney a L w.
Bob knocked and entered.
There was an anteroom, but no secretary. Dust lay everywhere; on a table between two shabby chairs for waiting clients lay two Time magazines from the month of June 1981. Cher was on one of the covers.
“Who the hell is that?” a voice boomed out of the murk of the inner office.
“Sam, it’s Bob Lee Swagger.”
“Who the hell are you?”
They stepped into the darkness and dank fumes and only gradually did the shape of the speaker emerge. When Russ got his eyes focused, he saw a man who looked as if he were built out of feed bags piled on a fence post. Everything about him signaled the collapse of the ancient; the lines in his baggy face ran downward, pulled inexorably by gravity, and his old gray suit had lost all shape and shine. His teeth were yellowed and his eyes lost behind Coke-bottle lenses. He was crusty and unkempt, his rancid old fingers blackened from long years of loading and unloading both pipes and guns. A yellowed deer’s head hung above him, and next to it some kind of star on a ribbon and a couple of diplomas so dusty Russ couldn’t read the school names.
He squinted narrowly.
“Who the hell are you, mister? What business you got here?”
“Sam. It’s Bob. Bob Lee Swagger. Earl’s boy.”
“Earl. No, Earl ain’t here. Been dead for forty years. Some white-trash peckerwoods killed him, worst damn day this county’s ever seen. No, Earl ain’t here.”
“Jesus,” whispered Russ, “he’s lost it.”
“Sonny,” said Sam, “I ain’t lost a thing I can’t find soon enough to whip your scrawny ass. Go on, get out of here. Get out of here!”
Bob just looked at him.
“Sam, I—”
“Get out of here! Who the hell do you think you are, Bob Lee Swagger?”
“Sam, I am Bob Lee Swagger.”
The old man narrowed his eyes again and scrutinized Bob up and down.
“By God,” he finally said. “Bob Lee Swagger. Bob, goddamn, son, it’s great to see you.”
He came around the desk and gave Bob a mighty hug, his face lit and animated with genuine delight.
“So there you are, big as life. You on vacation, son? You bring that wife of yours? And that little baby gal?”
It was a little awkward, the sudden return to clarity of the old man. But Bob pretended he hadn’t noticed, while Russ just looked at his feet.
“She ain’t so little anymore, Sam,” Bob said. “Nicki’s big as they come. No, I left ’em home. This is sort of a business trip.”
“Who the hell is this?” demanded Sam, looking over at Russ. “You pick up a long-lost son?”
“He ain’t my son,” Bob said, “he’s someone else’s.”
“My name’s Russ Pewtie,” said Russ, putting out a hand, which the old buzzard seized like carrion and crushed. Christ, he had a grip for a geezer!
Bob said, “Here’s the business part: this young man is a journalist.”
“Oh, Lord,” said Sam. “The last time anybody wrote about you I sued ’em for you and we made thirty-five thousand.”
“He says he isn’t going to write about me.”
“If you don’t have that on paper, you better get it there fast, so that when his book is published we can take him to the woodshed.”
“It’s not about Mr. Swagger,” said Russ. “It’s about his father. It’s about July 23, 1955.”
“Oh, Christ,” said Sam. “That was the longest goddamn day I ever lived through, and I include June 6, 1944, in that reckoning.”
“It was a terrible day,” said Russ. Leaving out the personal connection, he tried to explain his book but Bob had heard it and Sam appeared not to care much.
“So anyway,” he concluded, aware he had not impressed anyone and getting a headache from the plummy odor of the tobacco, “that’s why we’re here.”
“Well, goddamn,” said Sam, exhaling a burst of smoke that billowed and furled in the room. “Probably a day doesn’t go by I don’t wonder why all that had to happen. Lots of good people all messed up. Your own mother’s decline begun that day, I believe.”
“I believe it did also,” said Bob.
“And poor Edie White. Edie White Pye. I always fergit she married that piece of trash. Her decline begun then, too. Nine months later she gives birth and in a year she is dead. Whatever happened to Jimmy Pye’s son, I wonder.”
“He continued in his father’s footsteps,” Russ said. “They were two of a kind.”
“That I don’t doubt. So what is it you want from me?”
“Well, sir,” Russ said, “I hope I can re-create what happened that day in a sort of dramatic narrative. But as you know there was a fire in 1994, when the old courthouse burned. That’s where all the records were kept.”
“I don’t have a thing, I don’t believe. Maybe a scrap or two.”
“Well, did the papers have it right?” Russ asked, fiddling with a small tape recorder. Sam eyed the little machine warily.
“Bob, this is under your say-so? You’re letting this boy ask questions because you want the answers too?”
“He says it could be an important book.”
“Well, I’ve read enough books not to give a hunk of spit and a quart of whittler’s shavings for any of ’em. But go ahead, young fellow. You ask ’em and if I don’t fall asleep, I’ll answer ’em.”
“Thank you,” Russ said. “I wanted to know, did the newspapers have it right? Their accounts?”
“Wasn’t much to get wrong,” said Sam. “In my business, you get to a lot of crime scenes. Oh, I’ve seen death in bathrooms and kitchens and basements and in swimming pools and outhouses, even, and sometimes there’s a mystery to it, but most often not. Mysteries are for books. In life, you look at the bodies and the cartridge cases and the blood trails, or you look at the knife and the spatter pattern and the fingerprints, and they won’t lie. They’ll tell you all you need to know, or at least the whodunit part. In this case it was pretty open-and-shut. Whydunit, why it happened? That no one ever can truly know.”
“Is there some account somewhere of the movements of the day? I mean, how and when Jim and Bub got down here, how Earl ran into them in that cornfield?”
“No sir. As I say, the event explained itself. No other information was really important.”
“Was there any kind of legal resolution?”
“In the case of unlawful homicides in which there are no survivors, the state of Arkansas deeds all power to the Coroner’s Office to hold an inquest. I represented the state and all agreed with the finding: the death of Earl Swagger was murder in the first degree, the deaths of Jimmy Pye and Bub Pye were justifiable homicide by a sworn law enforcement officer in the course of his legal duties. So it went into the books.”
“Is that document worth chasing down?”
“For your purposes, probably not, though I bet I have a copy of it at home. It contained a diagram of the bodies’ locations, a list of the recovered exhibits, testimony of the first officers on the scene, that’s all. But I’ll find it for you.”
“That would be very helpful. As I break this down, I’d like to try and acquire material in four other areas,” Russ said, consulting his notes and trying to sound important. “Witnesses. Maybe talk to the first people on scene. Then relatives of all concerned, that is, Jimmy and Bub. Next is secondary accounts. News media coverage, but maybe there were other accounts in true-crime magazines. Of course we ought to walk the site too, don’t you think, Mr. Swagger?”
“Hah,” said Sam. “Walk the site! I believe the famous Harry Etheridge Memorial Porkway buried it under a ton or so of concrete in memory to the greatest man Polk County ever produced. Son, you’re looking for a past that ain’t hardly there no more. There’s no Pyes left in Polk County. I heard that Jimmy’s father, Lannie, had a brother in Oklahoma.”
“Anadarko,” said Russ. “He was murdered in 1970, by parties unknown.”
“Miss Connie Longacre knew Edie the best. But she left town after Edie died and the child went to some Pye kin. She tried to get that baby herself, but they said she was too old. Nineteen fifty-six, I think.”
“Was there an autopsy?” Bob asked.
“There was,” said Sam. “State law in the case of unlawful deaths. Paperwork all gone, however, in that courthouse fire.”
Bob nodded, chewing that one over.
“A long and terrible day,” said Sam. “It has always seemed to me a tragedy of the Republic that it can no longer produce men the caliber of Earl Swagger. I’ve said this to you many a time, Bob Lee. He was a quietly great man.”
“He did his duty,” said Bob, “more than some.”
“Fortunately, Polk County has never had such a day since. Four dead. It marked the community for many years that followed. In some places, the pain even yet hasn’t—”
“Excuse me,” said Russ. “You mean three dead. Or are you counting the victims in Fort Smith? Then it would be seven dead. Just a little—”
“Young man, where did you go to college?”
“Ah, Princeton, sir.”
“Did you graduate?”
“Er, no. I, uh, left after two years. But I may return.”
“Well, no matter. Anyhows, Princeton? Well; if you want to climb up and blow the dust off that picture frame”—he gestured to the wall—“you’d see old Sam Vincent, the country rube lawyer from Hicksville, Arkansas, he went to Princeton University too! And if you blow the dust off the other frame, you’d see he went to Yale Law School. And though he’s old, he’s not as dim as you seem to think, at least on good days. And if he says four, he goddamn-your-soul means four.”
Russ was stilled.
“I’m sorry,” he finally said. “I meant no disrespect. But who was the fourth one?”
“Earl’s last case. A poor girl named Shirelle Parker. A Nigra child, fifteen years old. She was raped and beaten to death out in the Ouachitas, and it was Earl who found her that very morning and made the initial reports. I felt it was his legacy and I pursued it with a special attention to duty. Fortunately, it was open-and-shut too. In that one, there was some justice.”
“I think I remember,” said Bob. “Some Negro boy. Wasn’t he—”
“He was indeed electrocuted. I watched him die up at the state penitentiary at Tucker in 1957. Reggie Gerard Fuller, it was a terrible tragedy.”
“You going to put that in your book?” Bob asked.
“I don’t know … it is very strange, isn’t it?”
“Earl spent the morning out there. Possibly he was still thinking of that case when he ran into Jimmy and Bub and that’s how they got a jump on him.”
“It was open-and-shut?”
“Like a door. The poor girl had ripped his monogrammed shirt pocket as he had his evil fun with her. We checked among the colored folk for the proper initials, and when we found one that matched, we raided. I’m happy to say that even in those benighted days, I arranged for the proper warrants to be issued. Here in Polk County, we run it by the goddamned rules. We found the shirt stuffed under his bed, the pocket missing. It was smeared with her blood, by type. She was AB positive, he was A positive. The boy made a mistake, he got carried away, he couldn’t stop himself. She died, he died, both families devastated. I don’t hold with the theory Nigras can’t feel pain as white people do. The Parkers and the Fullers felt plenty of pain, as much as I’ve ever seen.”
Russ shook his head, which now profoundly ached. He wanted to get away: this was like something out of Faulkner or Penn Warren, blasphemed southern ground, soaked in blood a generation old, white trash and black, white innocence and black, all commingled in a very small area on the same day.
“Sam, we’ve tired you. I may have some things I want you to do. You’ll take my money, I suppose,” Bob was saying.
“Of course I will,” said Sam.
“Here’s a box,” he said, handing over the cardboard container. “You have an office safe, I guess?”
“I’m so old I may have forgotten the combination.”
“Well, can you keep this stuff here? It’s my father’s effects. For some reason, I thought it might come in handy. I don’t want to be carrying it about.”
Sam took the package and they all rose.
“Tomorrow,” Bob said, “I think we may go see where it happened. Sam, could you come? You were there?”
“Oh, I suppose.”
“In the meantime, you’ll look for that document and any others?”
“I will.”
“This afternoon I think we’ll go to the library, see what the old papers said.”
“Fair enough,” said Russ.
Sam shook Bob’s hand and ignored Russ, leaving the younger man to face the fact that nobody gave a damn. He thought he could live with it.
The two went out, down the dark stairs, and stepped out into bright daylight.
“He seemed a little daffy there at the beginning,” said Russ. “I hope he’s up to this thing. What did he call them? Nigras? Colored folk? God, what Klan klavern did he come from?”
“That old man is as tough as they come. Not only did he keep my bacon out of the fire a few years back, he was the first prosecutor in Arkansas to try a white man for killing a black man back in 1962, when it wasn’t the easiest thing in the world. He may say ‘Nigra’ where you say ‘African American’ to show everybody how wonderful you are, but he risked his goddamned life. They shot up his house, scared his kids and voted him out of office. But he stuck to it, because he knew it was right. So don’t you go disrespecting him. He’s solid as brass.”
“Okay,” said Russ. “If you say so.”
Then they saw a big deputy sheriff looking into Bob’s cab window.
“What’s this all about?” Russ said.
“Oh, just a small-town cop who noticed an out-of-state plate.” He walked over to the cop.
“Howdy there,” he said.
The cop turned, flashing pale eyes on Bob; then those same eyes hungered over to Russ and ate him up. He was a lanky, tan man, with a thick mat of hair that was maybe a bit too fussed over, hipless and lean and long-faced, with a Glock at a sporty angle on his belt. He looked mean as a horse whip.
“This your truck, son?” asked the cop.
“It is, uh, Deputy Peck,” Bob replied, reading the name off the name tag. “Is there some kind of problem?”
“Well, sir, just checking up is all. We got a pretty nice little town here and I like to keep my eyes open.”
“I grew up in this town,” said Bob. “My daddy’s buried in this town.”
“Bob Lee Swagger,” said Peck. “Goddamn, yes.”
“That’s right.”
“I remember—”
“Yes, all that’s finished now. You want to run my tag and name you go ahead. I come up clean, you’ll see. That was all a big mistake.”
“You back on vacation, Mr. Swagger?”
“Oh, you might say. Got a young friend here with me. It’s just a sort of a sentimental trip. Looking at my old haunts and the places I went with my father.”
“Well, sir, you got any trouble or need any help, you come see me. Duane Peck’s the name.”
“I’ll remember that, Deputy Peck.”
Peck drew back, let them pass, but Russ had an odd feeling of being sized up, read up one side and down the other. He didn’t like it.
“Did that guy seem a little strange?” he asked. “I’ve been around cops all my life and that guy couldn’t keep his eyes off us.”
“You think so?” said Bob. “Seemed like a pretty nice feller to me.”