Black Light by Hunter Stephen - Bob Lee Swagger 02

Author:Hunter, Stephen - Bob Lee Swagger 02 [Light, Black]
Format: epub
Published: 2010-08-11T22:00:00+00:00

"I suppose I am. There are some things I cannot overcome. Some

suspicions about y'all. I haven't grown as I should have."

"Then let me tell you something surprise you. I don't think a white man

done it. I think a colored man did."

This threw Sam. It was the last thing he expected. The old woman had

him foxed something powerful.

"What you mean, there, sister?"

"In them days, the one thing we told our girls, and I must have said it

a hundred times to Shirelle: you don't never get in no car with a white

boy. White boy only wants one thing from you and you don't want to give

it to him. He may be friendly, he may be nice, he may be handsome, he

may have the devil's ways to him. But he only want one thing, girl, and

if you give it to him, he hate you and all the black boys find out and

they hate you, but they goin' try and git the same off of you and really

be angry if you don't give it. So I know she don't get in no car with

no white man. Some colored man done this to her."

Sam blinked, confounded. The old lady was smart. Not white smart,

fancy sentences smart, but somehow she knew things: she had seen into

the center of it. He'd known many a detective sergeant who wasn't as

sly as this.

"Mr. Sam, you the smartest man in this county. You smarter even than

old Ray Bama or Harry Etheridge and his son, you smarter than Mr. Earl.

You got his boy. Bob Lee, off when the whole U.S. govmint say he was a

killer. You got Jed Posey to spend his black evil days in prison.

Now you a old man and I a old woman. We both be gone soon.

Cain't you please just look at that case again? Just so's when you goes

you knows you done your job as hard at the end as you done it through

the middle."

"Well--" He thought about it. His was a life of certitude. He was an

absolute believer. He hated revisionism, hindsight, detached

examination, the whole spirit of equivocation and ironic ambivalence

which had become the American style in the nineties. He hated it.

Goddamn Nigra woman wanted him to become what he hated.

But ... there was time. She was right. It was not technically

impossible. Why anyone would do such a thing was beyond his imagining,

but it was, in the technical sense, by the laws of the physical world,

possible. And the bit about the black man being the one who did

it--that was so interesting.

As pure mystery, as pure problem of the intellect, it goaded him

powerfully.

"My mind ain't what it once was. It gits foggy. It clouds up with

anger. I can't find my socks. Seems like people hide things on me.

But if I git another clear day like today, I will look at the case

records again, or what of them remain.

I will look, but don't you expect nothing. I can't have you expecting

nothing, Mrs. Parker."

"God bless you, sir."

"Now, don't call me sir. Call me Sam. Everybody else does."

-It was the football dream, a late variant.

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