Zion (8 page)

Brownlow tried to breathe. He released his hands from the roof and fished for the car keys in his pocket, opening the driver’s side door, the backseat, and put the box inside. After he opened the front door and pulled himself inside the cab, he felt even more ill. He sat down hard in the seat and leaned out of the open door to the ground, vomiting violently, a projectile. The second volley of vomit caused vessels to burst in his right eye.

“I think this is a good day to pass on,” he said out loud.

Instead of dying, he had the presence of mind to drive himself over to Dr. Dan Danly’s office. The doctor was about to retire after a day seeing patients. He was locking the glass doors to his office when he saw the marshal turn into the lot in front of the building. The marshal looked half dead, and the physician checked him as he sat in the patrol car in the parking lot. He called for an ambulance with the marshal’s police radio, knowing that the man was in the early stages of cardiac arrest.

Ten minutes later, a pair of medics placed Brownlow into the ambulance and put an oxygen mask on his face. They transported him to the Ninth Ward Hospital Emergency Room where he was treated by the doctor on staff, his world uprooted and sprung like a giant oak tree caught in a tornado, the entire landscape a dark pall.

James Luke Cate’s hair was black except for some distinguished hi-lights of silver around the edges close to his ears. He lived with his third wife in Natchez, Mississippi, on South Pearl Street. The house, built in 1852, was called the Slocum Cottage. It was named after his wife’s maternal ancestors. Natchez was a city on the east side of the Mississippi River, a notorious river town with a seedy reputation, a sordid past that never seemed to die.

He had been away from Baxter Parish for almost a decade, ever since he left his first wife Nelda in the spring of 1965. He fled the parish and had almost no contact with anyone from the area since his departure. At first, he lived in the capital city of Baton Rouge, where he worked for the state highway department headquarters. He moved in with a wealthy woman from Baton Rouge, or “the red stick” as it is translated into English from the French.

The woman was only one of the reasons for his departure from Nelda, and it didn’t take long for him to marry again. His second wife caught him with another woman from Natchez, and she divorced him, too. But not before he could steal an ample amount of her money. He took the money with him to Natchez and his new job as a civilian manager with the Army Corps of Engineers, working on the levees on the Mississippi River floodplain. His ex-wife’s assets left him a solid business stake, and his profitable holdings grew rapidly.

In Natchez, he continued his love affair with the old money divorcee, Heloise Tartt. They married following a torrid romance. Her money did nothing less than compound his power and influence. His background in the military and years with the Louisiana highway department, followed by the job in the Army Corps of Engineers in Baton Rouge, not to mention his wife’s father, a scion of Natchez and the South, played heavily into his rapid advancement in the Vicksburg District of the Army Corps. His father-in-law lived in a mansion overlooking the river and was a banker, the son and grandson of Natchez and Vicksburg bankers. The family was prominent even before the siege of Vicksburg in 1863, a time when townspeople ate dogs, cats, and even rats to stay alive.

Today, James Luke was fishing in the brown silt-filled Mississippi River, the water the color of worn saddle leather. He stood on the bow of the fiberglass boat and cast his lure into a bramble of treetops on the edge of the bluff. He’d caught three small bass and tossed each one back into the water, none of them worth keeping.

He cast the stiff rod with a hard flick of his wrist, and the line lobbed out into the water about fifty feet. On the end of the line was a spinner bait with stainless steel hooks as sharp as a new razor. The bait fell into the bramble. He thought he’d gotten his lure stuck on a limb, so he began to troll over to the half-submerged treetop using his battery-powered electric motor. He jerked the rod a few more times. He felt the lure give way, and he started cranking the pricey Abu Garcia reel, the fastest model for sale at Downtown Natchez Sporting Goods.

The line went as taut as a steel guitar string, and the rod bent. The fish took the line back toward the bramble. James Luke set the hook with a mighty jerk of the pole, and he was able to fight the big fish, pulling him from the bramble with his arms stressing the pole’s strength. He tugged on the rod with the bull bass on the other end of the line, fighting it, and twice the fish broke the water’s surface as if to spit the bait and treble hooks into James Luke’s eyes. But the barbed hooks held and the gear was strong and the line was kept tight through his determination and unfailing luck. James Luke finally got the big bass to the edge of the boat after about five minutes, and he reached into the brown Mississippi River water and lifted the lunker with his thumb in his mouth, an index finger under the lower jaw.

He gave a successful smile when he held the largemouth bass at eye-level. He removed the hook with a pair of needle-nose pliers and placed the big fish into an ice chest. It weighed more than five pounds, the biggest bass he’d caught in the Mississippi River, not a true monster, but a fine one.

He opened a second chest, ice covering Budweiser cans, a dozen of them. He’d drink all of them by dark. It was ten o’clock in the morning, and he lit a cigarette and embraced his first beer of the morning.

Just a few miles away, North Natchez was a hilly slum out of sight, out of mind, an area practically nonexistent to the gentry and middle classes, a community east of the river’s bluffs where the elites—with their mythic pretense of Mississippi history—wouldn’t have to view it. It was a forlorn landscape of abject poverty. Despite the civil rights movement, nothing much had changed there since Reconstruction. James Luke thrived because of the stringent inequality and contradiction of Natchez and the surrounding areas. No group or individual was equal to the gentry class, to which his wife’s mother was heir. However, James Luke was getting ahead faster than almost any other man in Natchez, a far more rapid ascent than an outsider was allowed to make.

Across the river from Natchez were the small Louisiana farm towns of Vidalia and Ferriday. Ferriday was the loathsome home place of the piano player Jerry Lee Lewis and the preacher Jimmy Swaggart. Mickey Gilley, the country singer, was actually from Natchez, but he had his musical roots in Ferriday. All three were cousins and professional musicians. In 1974, only Jerry Lee Lewis was a household name, though his two cousins were gaining in notoriety. Lewis ran off with his thirteen-year-old cousin and besmirched the disreputable town until he made it big banging on the piano and singing “Great Balls of Fire.”

On both banks of the river, James Luke thrived. His father-in-law made the business go well, and his job with the Corps helped him peddle influence and grease the wheel for lucrative contracts, which gave him steady tax-free cash kickbacks. From concrete work to livestock grazing, there was money to be siphoned off the government and its business partners.

He began making gains as a regional slumlord, buying up shotgun shacks in North Natchez and out in the country. These tarpaper and clapboard houses were mostly located in the black quarters. However, some were in white ghettos, and he’d started the first trailer park of any real size in North Natchez and filled it to capacity with hardly room to park a car between the mobile homes. These were hovels, tin shacks, most still on rubber tires, trailers with dented and gapped aluminum siding. He rented many of them from week to week—sometimes for cash, sometimes for drugs or stolen property, and sometimes for sex.

The more money he made, the more he wanted. The more power he acquired, the more he sought. His father-in-law was impressed with his holdings and entrepreneurship, his innate friendship with capitalism. James Luke knew this by the way he carried on and on about his Louisiana son-in-law, bragging about his many acquisitions and profitable exploits.

Recently, James Luke had become the freshman member of the board of directors of the Planter Class Bank in Natchez, the first non-native Mississippian to hold the post in anyone’s memory. He was also on the board of the Natchez Adams County Republican Party. In fact, the Party of Lincoln was rare in Natchez, but James Luke could see the future turning toward the GOP like a crystal ball, and he believed Mississippi whites were within a decade of going Republican en masse.

He drove a 1973 Chevrolet Suburban four-wheel drive, a long-bodied truck that was can-like in its capacity, a panel truck that he used to carry workers who cut grass and did maintenance on his rental houses. Much of his work in rentals was done while on the clock for the Army Corps. As a field supervisor with the Vicksburg District, James Luke had the freedom to come and go as he pleased, simply needing to tell the secretary that he was “in the field,” which could be anywhere in the large district. A low profile in the towns up and down the river was essential. When he wanted to do something truly nefarious, however, he had to be wary of onlookers and witnesses. He knew that in time his identity as a businessman and a Corps employee would cause public exposure. He was becoming more and more recognizable, and he knew it was a potential problem.

During the afternoon following the fishing trip, once he’d put away his boat at his house, he drove across the big river bridge to a Louisiana duck hunting camp. It was a swampy area known only as “The Wash,” a lawless region of derelict Cajuns and poor blacks south of Vidalia that seemed stuck in some kind of historical malaise. The Wash was beginning to receive some of the South’s first shipments of cocaine, and James Luke was one of the chief financiers of its distribution along the Mississippi River. Likewise, he was setting up pot growers with seed and even lamps to raise it behind closed doors, such places as hay barns and homes and hot houses. One of his “associates,” as he often called the men he worked with in the drug trade, had put out over one thousand marijuana plants on a secluded Corps property across the river from Natchez. James Luke was just beginning his ascent as a drug lord, but he liked to think of himself as an entrepreneur and a business pioneer. He worked on the drug project like it was a full-time job, and he was getting ready to expand his business to other states.

He drove his Suburban out to The Wash, the land as flat as the bottom of a raccoon’s foot. He’d gotten overheated while fishing and was running the air conditioner in the vehicle, nursing an ice cold beer in his lap. The Wash passed beside his window like a bad memory, all darkness and poverty maintained by government welfare, monthly checks and benefits, which could only be received if the residents remained in poverty. Crippling poverty was a tool used to keep the labor cheap, usually day wages paid in cash, and men like James Luke enjoyed the status quo of their social class as if it was established natural law.

Local governments refused to tax the landowners enough to provide adequate schools or services, keeping the structure of poverty and wealth as rigid as a corpse, so fixed and immutable that it rivaled the Divine Right of Kings. However, the local taxpayers were always obliged to build prisons to house the worst rabble-rousers and offenders to keep the public safe for democracy. The place gave the term “vicious cycle” clear and concrete testimony for anyone with eyes to see it.

James Luke steered the vehicle deep into a rice field, the roadway nothing more than grass and ruts. He wondered if he’d make it to the camp without getting the truck bogged down to the axles. But he had four-wheel drive and all terrain tires. After skidding and sliding in the muck, he pulled into an old hunting camp nestled in a stand of cypress at the back of an open field. He was glad that he wouldn’t have to be extracted from this gumbo mud that some misguided fools referred to as a road.

A dozen vehicles were parked in the camp yard. The building was set atop cypress blocks about three feet off the ground. Both the yard and porch were busy with movement. On the porch sat several black men hovering around a table throwing cards. They drank liquor and smoked joints, barely lifting their eyes to James Luke and his long blue Chevrolet Suburban. He saw them focusing on their fast moving card game, and he could hear the Godfather of Soul pulsating from the turntable, “Say it Loud - I’m Black and I’m Proud.”

“Shit,” James Luke said. “I’ll do well to keep from getting stabbed. The sorry sumbitches.” He got out of the automobile and walked to the porch. One man looked up from the cards and nodded.

“I need to see Took. Is he inside?” James Luke asked.

“He up in the house. You got any rooms to let? My lady friend need a place,” the man said. A wicked scar passed from his jaw to his temple, and he wore a sagging blue shirt that showed a thin collarbone.

“I might,” James Luke said.

“I’ll tell her to go see you,” the man said, dropping a playing card on the table.

Inside the old camp, Tucker “Took” Newbill stood over three racks of ribs at the kitchen sink. He rubbed the ribs with both hands covering them in a concoction of red spice. A big box fan blew swampy air through the room. The air floated with the sharp smell of cayenne pepper and garlic. The music was muffled inside, the speakers on the front porch pushing bass thuds and thumps into the yard. James Luke nearly heaved from the smell, his eyes watering.

“How’s it going, Took?” James Luke asked. They were the only two men in the room.

“It ain’t nothing but a thing,” he said, hardly glancing at him. The racks of ribs were red and heavy, and he worked in the red rub like a pit master. “You staying for dinner? We got plenty. I got some barbeque on the pit now, and it’ll be ready before long.”

James Luke could see the tableful of washed vegetables—piles of onions and carrots, bell peppers, tomatoes, and a giant pot of boiling water on the propane stove. “No, I need to get on back to the house.”

“You here to see the supply?”

“Yeah.”

“It’s in the bedroom.” He pointed to a closed door.

“How much?”

“Five kilos.”

“I thought we’d agreed on six?”

“We got less. Sometimes it just be that way in this hard business. Just pay me for five.”

“No, I want six.” James Luke saw the butcher knife beside Took’s right hand, a long knife with a wooden handle. His thoughts focused. He believed Took was cheating him, holding back a kilo of marijuana for his own sales. “How much off for the kilo?”

“Same as the rest. Prorate it,” Took said, stuffing a clove of garlic into a slice cut in the ribs.

James Luke did the math. “Okay, I’ll give you twenty percent less, but you’re going to need to tell me what happened to the rest of it.” He was nursing a growing element of rage, but he viewed the butcher knife as an imminent threat.

“I’d go get the reefer for you, but my hands is all nasty.” Took pointed again to the door not far from the refrigerator. “It’s by the bed in the tote.”

James Luke went toward the door.

Took said, “There might be somebody in there, but pay ’em no mind. They just kids. The reefer’s in the canvas tote.”

James Luke nodded. “You know I don’t carry no dope in my truck. You’re going to need to be here this evening for Sonny Boy to come for it.” He put his hand on the door knob and pushed it open. A faint light entered the otherwise dark room. He could smell the strong odor of green marijuana. In the bed, a pair of bodies was grinding under a white sheet, a slim man and a fat woman. They never stopped.