Natchez Burning (Penn Cage) Read online

Albert had set up a couple of places where couples could meet discreetly, far away from his shop. But if the white half of the couple had a legitimate interest in music—and enough ready cash—he occasionally allowed a hasty rendezvous in the back of the store. He’d got the idea for using his radio show to set up the meetings from his stint in the navy. He’d only been a cook—that’s about all they’d let you be in World War II, if you were black—but a white officer had told him how the Brits had used simple codes during music programs to send messages out to French Resistance agents in the field. They’d play a certain song, or quote a piece of poetry, and different groups would know what the signal meant. Blow up this railroad bridge, or shoot that German officer. Using his Sunday gospel show, Albert had found it easy to send coded messages to the couples waiting to hear their meeting times. And since whites could tune in to his gospel show as easily as blacks, the system was just about perfect. Each person in an illicit couple had a particular song, and each knew the song of his or her partner. As disc jockey of his own show, Albert could say something like “Next Sunday at seven o’clock, I’m gonna be playing a one-two punch with ‘Steal Away to Jesus,’ by the Mighty Clouds of Joy, followed by ‘He Cares for Me,’ by the Dixie Hummingbirds. Lord, you can’t beat that.” And they would know.

  Simple.

  The rhythm of the sofa springs picked up, then stopped suddenly as Willie cried “Jesus!” with a sinner’s fervor. A moment later, the floorboards creaked under Willie’s two hundred and thirty pounds. Albert didn’t know how that skinny schoolteacher could take what Willie gave her, but that was another thing he’d learned over the years: the size of a woman on the outside didn’t mean nothing; it was how much hunger she had on the inside that made her what she was between the sheets. Some of the white women he’d seen come through his store had a desperate hunger that nothing would ever fill.

  Albert heard shuffling, then the door opened. Willie Hooks stood there wiping sweat from his forehead with his shirtsleeve. The schoolteacher looked like she’d just run a mile to catch a bus and got run over by it instead. Dazed, she slowly buttoned up her dress with no regard for Albert’s presence or what he might see.

  “This is the last time,” Albert said. “For a long time, anyway. And you be damn careful when you go. Big John’s cruising around out there, and half the Klan is hunting for Pooky Wilson.”

  “Big John Law,” Hooks said with venom. “What’s Pooky done?”

  “Don’t you worry ’bout that.”

  “Is that why you sent that little boy to warn me off?” Willie asked, his voice a full octave lower than Albert’s. “Why you had that warning light on? ’Cause of Big John?”

  “I’ll tell you why I sent that boy. Two white men busted up in here today, and one was screaming bloody murder. Screaming ’bout his daughter goin’ with a nigger boy.”

  “What white men?” Willie asked, interested.

  “Brody Royal, for one.”

  Willie blinked in disbelief. “That fine girl he got is doin’ Pooky Wilson?”

  The schoolteacher elbowed Willie in the ribs.

  Hooks didn’t flinch. “That skinny little bass player with the crooked back?”

  Pooky Wilson had severe scoliosis, but Katy Royal didn’t seem to mind. “You forget you ever heard that,” Albert said. “You, too,” he added, glaring at the white woman, who under any other circumstances could have had him jailed for backtalk.

  “I ain’t scared of Brody Royal,” Willie said. “That rich bastard.”

  Albert gave Willie a measuring glance. “No? Well, the man with Brody was Frank Knox.”

  Willie froze.

  “You ain’t talking so big now, are you?” Albert asked.

  “Shit. You let Mr. Frank’s little girl come up in here to meet somebody?”

  Albert stamped his foot in disgust. “I look retarded to you, boy? Frank Knox ain’t got no little girl. He was just here to make the point. Now, you get the hell out of my place. You got to find some other place to get your corn ground.”

  The schoolteacher moaned, sounding more like a feral cat than a human being.

  Willie looked at her with frank desire. “Well, if this is the last time for a while . . .”

  She opened her mouth and started unbuttoning her dress, but Albert shoved Willie toward the side door. “Get out! And don’t come back. Anybody stops you, tell ’em you moved some pianos for me. I’ll take care of getting missy out of here.”

  Hooks laughed and plodded to the side door. “How about a hit of lightnin’ for the road, Mr. Albert?”

  “I got no whiskey for the likes of you!” He turned back to the woman as Willie cursed and vanished through the door.

  The schoolteacher’s dress was buttoned now. She looked primly up at him. “You know a lot about a lot of people, don’t you?”

  “Reckon I would,” Albert said, “ ’cep’ I got a bad memory. Real bad. Forget a face soon as I see it.”

  “That’s good,” said Mary Shivers. “We’ll all live longer that way.”

  She started to follow Willie through the side door, but Albert blocked her path and motioned for her to leave by the front. “Pick up some music from the rack on your way out. God help you if you can’t lie, but I imagine you’re pretty good at it.”

  After a moment’s hesitation, Mary Shivers obeyed.

  Albert switched on a box fan to drive her smell from the lesson room. He figured darkness would fall in about fifteen minutes. To pass the time, he walked into his office, knelt beside the desk, and pulled up a pine floorboard. The door of a firebox greeted him. Taking out one of several ledgers he kept inside the box, he sat at his rolltop desk and opened the leather-bound volume, revealing perfect columns of blue-inked names and numbers in his own precise hand.

  Albert kept a ledger for everything. He had one for sales of musical instruments, another for rentals. He kept a book for instruments he sold on time, marking in the payments and late charges. He kept a black ledger for whiskey sales, and a red ledger for loans he’d made to people he trusted. He’d loaned out a lot of money over the years, much of it to boys he’d trained in his store, boys sent off to cities like Chicago and Los Angeles with a single marketable skill besides digging ditches or picking cotton—tuning pianos. To a man, they had paid him back their stakes, even if it had taken them years to do it. Those boys were Albert’s faith in humanity. It comforted him to know that when Pooky Wilson reached Chicago—if he did—he’d probably be able to find work as a piano tuner before the hundred-dollar stake Albert had given him ran out.

  In the back of his loan ledger, in red, Albert wrote in the sums he’d loaned to folks in trouble, the kind of trouble where he knew he’d never get the money back. Sometimes you had to do that, even if you were a businessman. That was his mama coming out in him. But the ledger Albert worked in now was special. In this volume he kept a record of every rendezvous he’d ever arranged—the names of the people involved, the times and dates they’d met, the money they’d paid him, their song codes for his radio show. Over eighteen years, quite a few pages had accumulated. There were nearly eighty names in the ledger now. Albert wasn’t sure why he kept it. He had no intention of blackmailing anybody, though the ledger would certainly be worth a lot to an unscrupulous man. But a good businessman kept records. It was that simple. You never knew when you might need to refer back to the past.

  After writing in the particulars about Willie and the schoolteacher, Albert replaced the ledger in the firebox and covered it with the floorboard. Then he took a quart of corn whiskey from a suitcase, went out to the sales floor, and sat at his favorite piano. He drank in silence until the street went dark outside the display window. Then he got up, switched on the lights, and returned to the piano.

  Laying his fingers on the keys, he started with “Blues in the Night,” rolling his right hand with a feather-light touch. Then he gently twisted the melody inside out until it became “Blue Skies,” despite not having felt smiled upon in quite a while. I
t was times like this that Albert wished his wife had lived. Lilly would always sit at his side while he played, or on the floor behind him, leaning against his lower back, and sing over the notes he coaxed from whichever piano they had at the time. Sometimes she’d sing the way Billie Holiday sang on the radio, other times she crooned in a language all her own, improvising over whatever Albert did with the keys. Tonight he’d give all the money he had in the bank to have recorded the songs his wife had made up on those nights. But he never did.

  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 de
puty. “Lord, they done burned me out!”

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

  CHAPTER 2

  Twenty-two days later

  Natchez, Mississippi

  “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.