Natchez Burning (3 page)

And then she died.

Lilly had passed when he was thirty, she twenty-eight. Albert had never remarried. He’d passed the last twenty years with various girls, none more special than the last, and he’d stayed away from white women as much as he could, despite considerable pressure from some of the housewives whose homes he visited to tune their pianos. He always tried to make his calls when the husband was home, and he worked hard to make a good impression. That was how you survived in cotton country. From one corner of the parish to the other, every white man of property knew Albert Norris as a “good nigger.”

Albert stopped playing in mid-measure, like a walker in mid-stride, and listened to the suspended chord fade into silence. It took half a minute, and he knew that a child could probably hear the sound waves decay for another thirty seconds after that, the way he used to when he’d sat on the floor by his mother’s old Baldwin. Age took those things from you, though—slow but sure.

In the haunting silence, he heard a muted thump from the workroom. A few seconds later, the sound repeated itself. The trapdoor had closed. Pooky Wilson was slipping out into hostile night, like a thousand black boys before him.

“Godspeed, son,” Albert said softly.

He’d drunk more whiskey than usual tonight, hoping to dull the memory of the men who’d visited him that afternoon, not to mention the specter of Big John DeLillo cruising past on the hot asphalt outside. Sometimes reality crowded in so close on you, not even music could block it out. He could almost hear Pooky’s pounding heart as the boy tried to cover the two blocks to Widow Nichols’s house. Filled with bitterness, Albert got up from the piano bench, wobbled, then marched up to the display window and fiddled with some glittery drums to draw the eyes of any watchers outside. After a couple of minutes of this, he staggered to his bedroom at the back of the shop. He could still smell the white woman’s sex on the air, and it made him angry.

“Bitch ought to stay with her own,” he muttered. “Nothing but trouble.”

His last words were mumbled into his bunched pillow.

THE SOUND OF BREAKING
glass dredged Albert from a dreamless sleep. Instinctively, he reached for the .32 pistol he kept on his bedside table, but he’d been too drunk to bring it from the office when he went to bed. Somebody fell over a drum set, and a cymbal crashed to the floor. Then a flashlight beam cut through the short dark hallway that led to the sales floor.

“Who’s there?” Albert called. “Pooky? That you?”

The noises stopped, then continued, and this time he heard muffled voices. Albert got up, fought a wave of dizziness, then hurried into his office. His pistol was right where he’d left it. He picked up the .32 and padded carefully up the hall. He heard a deep gurgling, like someone emptying herbicide from a fifty-five-gallon drum. Then he smelled gasoline.

Panic and foreknowledge swept through him in a paralyzing wave. He wanted to flee, but the store was all he had. He owned the building—a rare feat for a black man in Ferriday, Louisiana—but he had no insurance. He’d put the premium money into new inventory, those electric guitars all the white boys was wanting since the Beatles hit the TV. Albert flung himself up the hall, then stopped when he saw two black silhouettes in the darkness. The shadow men were emptying gasoline over the piano in the display window, and splashing it high on the guitars hanging on the wall.

“What ya’ll doin’?” he cried. “Stop that now! Who is that?”

The men kept emptying the cans.

“I’ll call the po-lice! I swear I will!”

The men laughed. Albert squinted, and in the faint light bleeding through the window he saw the paleness of their skin. In the shadows to his right, Albert sensed more than saw a third figure, but it looked larger than a man, almost like a Gemini astronaut with air tanks on his back.

“I got a pistol!” Albert cried, ashamed of the fear in his voice. If he fired now, the muzzle flash or the ricocheting bullet was as likely to set off the fumes as a struck match. “Please!” he begged. “Why ya’ll want to ruin my store? What I ever done to you fellas?”

A pickup truck passed on the street outside, and in its reflected headlights Albert recognized the faces of the two men in the window. One was Snake Knox, the brother of Frank, the Klansman who’d visited the store that afternoon. The other was Brody Royal. The third man remained in shadow.
Dear Jesus
… These were serious men. They made the regular Ku Klux Klan look like circus clowns. Albert had managed to keep off the wrong side of men like this all his life. He’d bowed and scraped when necessary. He’d ignored the flirtations of their women, greased the right palms, and given gifts of service and merchandise. But now … now they wanted the life of a boy who was guilty of nothing but being young and ignorant.

“Mr. Brody, you
knows
me,” Albert said with absurd reasonableness. “Please, now … I done told you this afternoon, I don’t know
nothin’
’bout your daughter getting up to anything.” This lie sounded hollow even to him, but the truth would be worse:
Mr. Royal, your little girl’s got a willful streak and she’d hump that black boy right in front of you if he’d let her
. “Please now, Mr. Royal,” he pleaded. “Why, I’ve got your own church organ up in here, fixing it.”

“Shut up!” snapped the shadow man. “Tell us where that young buck is right this minute, or you die. Make your choice.”

“I don’t know!” Albert cried. “I swear! But I do know that boy didn’t mean no harm.”

Brody Royal dropped his gas can on the floor and walked up to Albert. “Cur dogs don’t mean any harm, either, but they’ll impregnate your prize bitch if they can get close to her.”

“He ain’t gonna tell us nothin’,” Snake Knox said. “Let’s finish the job.”

“I thought you were a businessman, Norris,” Royal said, his eyes seeming to glow in the pale, angular face. “But I guess in the end, even the best nigra’s gonna be a nigger one day a week. Let’s go, boys.”

Snake picked up the piano bench and tossed it through Albert’s plate glass window. The shards tinkled in the street like a shattering dream. Snake leaped through the window after the bench, and Albert saw a man nearly twice his size join him in the street. Brody Royal scrambled out onto the porch, then jumped down to the sidewalk. Instinct told Albert to follow them, but before he could move, the giant figure stepped from the shadows and stared at him with unalloyed hatred. The huge shape was no astronaut; it was Frank Knox, wearing an asbestos suit and some kind of pack on his back.

“You should have talked,” he said. “Now you get the Guadalcanal barbecue.”

Albert backpedaled in terror, but the roaring jet of flame reached toward him like the finger of Satan, and Knox’s eyes flashed with fascination.

The display room exploded into fire.

Facedown in a roaring fog of pain, Albert slowly picked himself up from the floor, then ran blindly from the inferno raging in the front of his store. When he crashed through the back door, arms flailing, he saw that his clothes had already burned away. Like a deer fleeing a forest fire, he bounded toward a bright opening at the end of the alley. There was a service station there—a white-owned station, but he knew the attendant. Maybe somebody would take him to the hospital.

As Albert windmilled down the alley, a big car pulled across the open space, blocking it. The gumball light on its roof came to life, spilling red glare onto the walls of the buildings. A huge shape rose from beside the car. Big John DeLillo.

“Help me, Mr. John!” Albert screamed, running toward the deputy. “Lord, they done burned me out!”

As he ran, Albert saw that his hands were on fire.

“
IF THEY’D HAVE
left them two Jews alone and just shot the nigger,” said Frank Knox, “none of this would even be happening. New Yorkers don’t give no more of a damn than we do about one less nigger in the world. But you kill a couple of Jewboys, and they’re ready to call out the Marines.”

“You talking about that Neshoba County business?” asked Glenn Morehouse, a mountain of a man with half the intellectual wattage of his old sergeant.

“What else?” said Frank, flipping a slab of alligator meat on the sizzling grill.

Sonny Thornfield popped the cap on an ice-cold Jax and watched the veins bulge in Frank’s neck. The discovery of the three civil rights workers in an earthen dam a few days ago had stirred Frank up in a way Sonny hadn’t seen since the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In a way, this whole camping trip had been designed to let off pressure after the FBI’s discovery of the bodies up in Philadelphia. After their shift ended Friday, they’d mounted four camper shells on their pickups, then towed Frank’s boat and Sonny’s homemade grill down to the sandbar south of the Triton Battery plant, where they all worked during the week. The long weekend of sun had pretty much worn everybody out, except the kids. Now the women sat in folding chairs, fanning themselves and swatting mosquitoes in the shade of the cottonwoods. Frank’s and Sonny’s wives were back there, along with Granny Knox and Wilma Deen, Glenn’s divorced sister. The kids who weren’t out in the boat were teasing a stray dog down by the riverbank.

The men had spent the weekend practicing their demolition skills on stumps, and on an old Chevy that lay half buried in the sand down by the water. Frank’s younger brother Snake was still down there, fiddling with something under the Chevy’s dash and flirting with the nineteen-year-old waitress he’d brought with him. All the men on this picnic were old hands with dynamite and Composition B, but Frank had bought some of the new C-4 off a supply sergeant he knew at Fort Polk, and they’d been using it to try to master the art of the shaped charge. Every time they peeled eight inches off a stump top, the kids squealed and hooted and begged for fireworks.

But not even that had calmed Frank down. When they’d driven into town yesterday for cigarettes, he’d used a pay phone to call some buddies and ask about national coverage. He came back to the car saying Cronkite wouldn’t shut up about the “national scandal” and all the big-city papers were riding the story hard. All weekend, Sonny had sensed that Frank was coming to some kind of decision. And if he was … that meant changes for them all.

Even Morehouse seemed unsettled by the anger that seethed through Frank’s pores like sour sweat. Sonny studied the two men with clinical detachment. The gentle giant had done his share of killing during the war, but Morehouse had quickly grown soft in civilian life, putting on eighty pounds of new fat. He stood with his thumbs hooked behind the straps of his overalls and masticated a blade of grass as though it required all his concentration. By contrast, Frank Knox still had a washboard stomach, ropy muscles with pipeline veins running along them, and eyes that Sonny had never seen more relaxed than when behind the sights of a .30-caliber machine gun.

Sonny didn’t push Frank for more information; whatever was coming would arrive in its own time. Keeping Morehouse’s body between himself and the sinking sun, Sonny sipped the Jax and watched Frank’s teenage son spray rooster tails out in the reddish-brown river behind his father’s souped-up bass boat.

“There’s reporters crawling all over Neshoba County,” Frank said, basting the gator meat with his special sauce. “Whole damn country’s stirred up, and it’s gonna get worse.”

Sonny took a bent Camel from his shirt pocket and lit it with a Zippo. “I heard they had navy divers up there, helping search for those corpses. You believe that?”

“Navy pukes,” Frank muttered, reaching out to turn up the volume on a GE transistor radio. Marty Robbins was singing “Girl from Spanish Town.” Whenever Frank saw a Japanese radio, he’d slam it into the nearest wall, and no one ever protested. “But it wasn’t any navy diver found them bodies,” he said.

“Who found ’em, then?” asked Morehouse.

“It ain’t
who,
Mountain. It’s
how
.”

Morehouse still looked lost, but Sonny’s eyes narrowed. “He’s saying they got rats up there just like we do down here.”

Frank nodded. “Federal informants, they call ’em. Paid Judases is what they are. Feds never would have found them bodies without help.”

“I heard the reward was twenty-five thousand dollars,” Morehouse said in an awestruck voice. “That’s enough money to buy a house and a truck and a boat besides.”

Frank speared him with a glare. “Would you sell out your ancestors for twenty-five grand, Glenn?”

Morehouse’s eyes bugged, and his cheeks filled with blood. “Hell, no! You know that, Frank.”

“My wife told me something weird this morning,” Sonny said thoughtfully. “Her sister lives up in Kemper County, and she heard some Italian bastard was going around Neshoba threatening people. She heard he beat up a Klansman, pulled down his drawers, shoved a pistol up his butt, and asked for the burial location. She said some Klan boys thought he was a mob button man.”

“When exactly did she tell you this?” Frank asked.

“This morning, in the camper. She talked to her sister just before we pulled out of town Friday.”

While Frank considered this rumor, Jim Reeves began singing “He’ll Have to Go.” “Gentleman Jim” had died in a plane crash near Nashville only nine days ago, and disc jockeys had been playing his records practically nonstop ever since.

“Bullshit,” Frank decided at length. “Not that the FBI hasn’t cozied up to the mob some, ’cause I know they did during the Cuba mess. Half the guns coming into our training camps in sixty-one were being supplied by Carlos Marcello’s people, and Trafficante’s Havana contacts were providing our intel for the invasion. Hoover knew all about that. The CIA ran the South Florida camps, but I met FBI agents down there, too. J. Edgar wouldn’t use a wop on something like this, though. If he wants a gun stuck up some Klansman’s ass, he’s got field agents who’ll do it for him. The Bureau’s got some hard boys, same as us.”

“Yeah,” said Morehouse. “They got southern boys in the FBI.”