Natchez Burning (112 page)

“Do it,” Regan urges, pumping his fist in the air. “Cook her!”

I step to the limit of my chain, then extend the derringer, sighting along its two-inch barrel toward the larger of the two cylinders. With Brody standing in profile, I can only see the heads of the cylinders in cross-section—a vanishingly small target, considering my weapon. But I have no choice.

“
Drop it, Cage!
” Regan shouts, turning his pistol on me. “I’ll blow your shit away, I swear to God!”

As I start to depress the trigger, Henry says, “No,” in a clear and distinct voice. “No more.” Then he starts walking toward Brody.

The reporter’s eyes shine with the ecstasy of a martyr walking into the flames. His first step is tentative, as though he might fall, but his next is stronger, and then suddenly he’s closing the distance between himself and the hissing jet pipe with the flame rising from its mouth. Startled, Brody retreats a couple of feet and tries to brace the firing pipe again. Clearly, he fears the weapon in his hands more than he does Henry Sexton.

“Burn him!” Regan shouts, shifting his pistol toward Henry.
“Now!”

“Regan!” I yell, whipping my aim from the flamethrower to his head. Now he knows he can’t fire on Henry without taking a shot from me.

But it’s Henry we’re all watching: he’s much too close now for Brody to fire the flamethrower without risking self-immolation.

Their collision is anticlimactic: so weakened is Henry by his wounds that the older man easily absorbs the shock without falling. Even encumbered by the Flammenwerfer’s cylinders, Royal is clearly the stronger of the two on this night. Any second he will knock Henry to the floor, where he can be easily dispatched by Regan.
Yet he doesn’t.
Henry clings to Brody with fierce tenacity, and for the first time I see panic in Royal’s eyes. As they tear at each other, Brody’s face tightens like that of a desperate fighter who feels his strength ebbing. Henry’s face shows strain but not fear, and conviction blazes in his eyes.

At last Regan turns fully away from me, trying to find a safe shot at Henry.
Should I fire into Regan’s back and hope to hit his heart? The .22 wouldn’t likely pierce his back muscles
—

“Don’t!” Regan shouts in a high-pitched voice.
“Brody, look out!”

Henry’s left hand has disappeared between the two wrestling bodies.

“Henry, don’t!” I scream.
“HENRY!”

The instant he finds the flamethrower’s trigger, Henry pulls it, and a white-orange sphere of burning tar and gasoline engulfs the two men. A screech of agony splits the air, then dies as the windpipe that produced it melts shut. The blast of ignition throws off a broiling wall of heat, driving Regan backward with his gun arm raised as a shield against the blast.

I fire the derringer between his shoulder blades a half second before his back crashes into my chest, knocking me to the floor and driving the breath from my lungs. With his full weight crushing me, I can’t get a breath. For a couple of seconds he seems dead, but then he jerks as though coming awake and roars in pain. Desperately aware of the pistol in his right hand, I drop the derringer and push my arm between his arm and body, grasping for his wrist. If I hadn’t shot him before he landed on me, he would already have blown my brains out. But there’s no guarantee that the little .22 slug will do more than stun him. I’ve got to kill Regan before he can recover his senses.

As my right hand closes around his thick wrist, I clamp my left forearm around his throat and try to cut off his oxygen. This triggers a thrashing movement, as though I’m trying to throttle an alligator and not a man. Regan’s muscles strain with frightening power as he tries to bring his pistol up to my head. I squeeze his neck as hard as I can, but trapped beneath him as I am, it’s hard to get enough leverage to completely cut off his air with only one arm. With a whiplike motion he raises his head, then slams it back into my face—once, then again. White stars explode in my field of vision. I feel his pistol rising to my head, but I can’t stop it. He’s simply stronger than I am.

A deafening blast of flame and thunder scorches my face, and Regan tries to twist from my grasp. If my strength fails now—if he moves the gun another inch upward—I will die. There’s no way I can strangle him before he brings that pistol to bear. Purely out of instinct, I release my forearm lock from his neck, then chop the inner edge of my hand back down on his injured throat with all my strength. His body jerks, and the power in his gun arm wavers. Before he can recover, I drive my hand down three more times, each blow harder than the last. Cartilage crunches beneath my final strike, and then both Regan’s hands fly to his throat, the gun forgotten.

With a single heave I roll him off me, then grab his gun and scramble to my knees. Smoke is billowing through the basement tunnel. Regan’s mouth gapes as he gasps for oxygen, his eyes wide with terror. As I aim the pistol at his chest, he claws the air like a drowning man grasping at a rescuer. Then he slowly drops his arms and goes still.

Sprinklers in the ceiling have begun spraying water like rain. Fans must be churning somewhere, but I feel like I’m choking on soot. The heat and smoke will soon overwhelm me. Laying the muzzle of Regan’s pistol against my leg chain, I fire. The first bullet fractures one link; the second severs the chain.

Getting to my feet in the smoke, I make my way to Caitlin’s pole. Freeing her proves more difficult, but a third and fourth bullet snap the ropes, and she stumbles away from the pole.

“We’ve got to get out!” I shout. “Now!”

“Make sure Johnston’s dead!” she cries, lifting the fire extinguisher and stumbling downrange to where the bank boxes still burn.

I turn and find my way to Sleepy’s body, then drop to the floor and press two fingers into his neck, searching for a carotid pulse. I feel nothing at first, but as I dig for any pressure, he says, “I can’t move, man. I think my back’s broke.”

“He’s alive!” I shout, scarcely able to believe it.

I whip my head back and forth, trying to find Caitlin again. Then the smoke parts, and I see her charging toward me with a charred box in her arms. Beyond her, orange flame still rages in the smoke. At the center of a burning sphere, two black figures appear locked in eternal combat, like soot-shadows seared onto a Hiroshima wall.

“Is Mr. Royal dead?” Sleepy Johnston rasps from beneath me.

“Yes,” I assure him, squeezing his hand.

The black man settles into a deeper stillness.

The charred banker’s box drops heavily to the ground beside me, then Caitlin falls to her knees. “We’ve got to get him out,” she says.

“We can’t move him. His spine’s hit.”

“He’ll burn alive!”

She’s right, of course. I must be in shock. We’re
all
about to burn.

“I’ll take his arms!” she says, scrambling to her feet and the suffocating smoke. “You get his legs. I’ll do what I can.”

“What about Henry’s files?”

She looks down at the charred box, then shakes her head. “Screw it. This man saved our lives.”

“Get back,” I tell her, recalling a moment much like this one seven years ago, when I carried my maid from our burning house. “Take your box and go.”

“Penn, you can’t—”

“Go, goddamn it! Don’t wait for me!”

Stunned by my anger, Caitlin bends and shoves her hands beneath the heavy box, then heaves it up to her waist. With an inchoate fury impossible to contain, I set my knees against the floor, shove my right arm under Sleepy’s back, then strain to heave him bodily over my shoulder. Fear and adrenaline surge through me, and my muscles bulge with blood.

“You’re going to fall!” Caitlin yells.

“Get out!”

Straining every fiber of muscle, I get one foot under me, then balance the load across my right shoulder and lunge upward, whipping my left foot under me as I rise. Once both feet are beneath me, it’s only a matter of steadying myself before I can start across the floor toward the far door.

Caitlin leads the way, and I follow the white flag of her blouse through the smoke. She pauses at the stairs, meaning to help, but I bull forward and she scrambles out of the way.

There are only a few steps to climb. This stairwell leads out to the yard and not up to the next floor. As I reach the top, pure cold air flows into my lungs like the breath of God, and the load on my shoulders vanishes to nothing.

TOM STOOD AT
the edge of the lake, shivering in a raincoat he’d found in Drew’s closet. His wounded shoulder throbbed relentlessly, but he fought the urge to take another pain pill. The dose of narcotics required to dull that pain could easily depress his respiratory function to a lethal level. On the other hand, going without relief might raise his stress level to the point that it triggered another heart attack. The bullet wound was relatively minor, as missile injuries went. A battlefield medic would have popped him with a syrette of morphine, patched the holes, and moved on to the next foxhole. But at seventy-three, alone in the night, he felt the pain of that wound beginning to work on him.

Most M.D.s understood pain about as well as most lawyers understood prison. Doctors
believed
they understood pain, since they’d experienced the mild or moderate forms at some point in their lives. But two years in Korea—and twenty years of living with psoriatic arthritis and diabetes and coronary artery disease—had taught Tom the true nature of pain, from the slicing, electric burn of a nerve to the bluntest fist crushing the chest. Melba hadn’t been gone long, but already her words of faith seemed distant and ephemeral. In all his life, he had never felt so alone as he did now.

Just after his nurse left, he’d sat on the sofa and immediately fallen asleep. Jerking awake a few minutes later, he was gripped by the certainty that if he sank into deep sleep he would never wake again. Many of his patients had experienced this premonition over the years, and often enough reality had borne it out. In the end, he’d chewed up half a Lorcet with a nitro chaser, then walked down to the water’s edge, where the cold would keep him awake.

He sensed that his mind had come partly unmoored from the present. That might be a result of the wound, or the drugs, but it might simply be sleep deprivation, or the cumulative shocks he’d sustained over the past three days. His emotions swirled and eddied like a dark body of water in his skull, and his thoughts bobbed and slipped over the surface, only tenuously tied to reality.

Snatches of his last conversation with Melba sounded in his mind, like something overheard on a train. The word
sin
resonated again and again. Tom had committed the usual sins during his life, but there were other, more profound transgressions that he seldom acknowledged, even to himself. He’d done terrible things during the war. He knew the common guilt of the combat survivor, and the special guilt of the combat medic. He carried the deadened grief sense of the civilian physician, who lost so many battles with death in lonely sickrooms, his only weapon at the end his ability to ease pain, and sometimes not even that. As for the more universal sins: the familiar guilt of the adulterer had been dwarfed by that of the absentee father, who brought life into the world and then left it to struggle like a seed abandoned on the ground. A dozen rationalizations came to him, of course, the first being that he hadn’t known of the boy’s existence. But at his core, that brought no comfort.

Ever since Viola had told him about her son, Tom had been reflecting on Thomas Jefferson. Tom been named after the third president, but that was only an accidental irony. At some level, though, he had always strived to follow in Jefferson’s footsteps. How could you not love a man whose library had contained six thousand books in an era when public libraries held only half as many volumes? A man who called himself a Christian but spent six years painstakingly cobbling together a customized Bible that contained no miracles, prophecies, angels, or resurrections?

Six days hence, historians would celebrate the nation’s acquisition of the very land beneath Tom’s feet, one of Jefferson’s greatest accomplishments. And yet, this mental giant whom he’d studied in school like a demigod now shared with him a unique sin. Upon his death, Jefferson had left behind an enslaved black mistress and mixed-race children. He had freed some of his Negro descendants before his death, but others, along with most of his remaining slaves—more than a hundred human beings—had been sold at auction to pay his debts, a monumental hypocrisy and surely a sin by any measure.
How,
historians asked,
could the man who authored the Declaration of Independence have done this?

Tom knew the answer. Moving with the same passive blindness, he had fathered a child by a black employee in her twenties. And though Viola had loved him as surely as Sally Hemings must have loved Jefferson, Tom had to wonder how much choice either woman had really had in their circumstances. He hated to think of himself as a man who during difficult times had offered a troubled woman only temporary comfort and not real help. He was no Thomas Jefferson in intellectual terms, but that probably meant only that Jefferson had found some more facile way to justify actions that went against the grain of all he had championed during his life.

Rubbing his hands together against the cold, Tom recalled a quote from Peggy’s distant cousin, Robert Penn Warren: “
And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost
.”

An image of Penn rose in Tom’s mind, but he pushed it away.
What of my
other
son?
he thought in desolation.
I don’t even know him, much less love him. My Sally Hemings is dead, and my own dark descendant wants only to see me die behind bars. Would Jefferson’s bastards have wanted the same, if they’d had the power to bring about that result? Would they have punished the man who gave them life but not his name?
Tom knew one thing: he would not compound his sin by following Jefferson’s example of neglect. If he lived through this nightmare, he would take steps to ensure that his illegitimate child would never suffer in the same way, no matter how much he might hate his father.