Natchez Burning (13 page)

“But … but …” Henry stuttered, knowing already that his heart was full of something that felt nothing like foolishness.

“But
nothing,
” Swan snapped. “I’m just giving you some special lessons, that’s all. Lessons you need.”

Five weeks of special lessons followed, each one ending with mutual ecstasy. Twice Swan freed Henry from his jeans and sucked until he almost screamed, and those times he felt what the preachers claimed being filled with the holy spirit was supposed to be like and what a heroin addict had told him it felt like when he’d shot up for the first time.

Once during a “special” lesson, Albert actually left the store to run an errand. Swan didn’t waste time with preliminaries. She pulled Henry down to the floor, tugged down his pants, climbed astride him, and unbuttoned her shirt. He’d never seen or felt anything like he did that day, the swelling heat of Swan’s chocolate-tipped breasts and the near-religious glaze in her eyes. Swan had known exactly when he was going to finish, and she slid off him and helped with expert hands, laughing as he spent himself across the ebony piano bench. But Henry couldn’t laugh. After that day, he
was
in love, or in something even more profound. He was like the drug-addicted musicians Albert spoke mournfully about, the ones who couldn’t go more than a few hours without a fix.

Henry could not stop thinking about Swan. His grades plummeted, and his mother noticed. He started riding his bike through the colored section of town, trying to get a look at Swan sitting on Albert’s porch. The first time she saw him doing this, Swan knitted her brow in an angry frown and did not wave. The next Thursday, Henry found Albert waiting in the teaching room, saying Swan was too sick to teach. Henry immediately stopped riding his bike on the wrong side of Louisiana Avenue.

The next Thursday he found Swan waiting in the teaching room as though nothing had happened. When Albert started giving a church organist a lesson in the main room, Swan stood up and began playing the piano Jerry Lee Lewis style. As Henry gaped, she reached back with her right hand, flipped up her skirt, and pulled down her panties without stopping the bass line with her left hand. By this time Henry had lost his childish nerves. He dropped his jeans and plunged into her from behind, amazed that she could play so perfectly while he thrust so hard. But on this occasion Swan didn’t realize he was going to finish, and neither did he—not until the moment had passed. Suddenly Swan was twice as slippery as before, and she jerked away from Henry as though he’d scalded her.

“I’m sorry!” he cried, yanking up his pants in shame. “It was an accident!”

Swan’s face went twice as dark as usual. “Boy, you and your little
thang
gonna get me with
child
!” She sat on the bench and looked down at her little bush while her father played a hymn on a Hammond organ in the next room. “Run up the street to the gas station and get me a pop,” she said crossly.

Henry looked blankly at her. “A pop?”

“A Dr. Pepper! A hot one, if you can get it.
Hurry
.”

“What do I tell your father?”

“Tell him … tell him you bet me a Dr. Pepper that I couldn’t play something.”

“Like what?”

Swan nearly swatted him. “What do I care? Charlie Parker. Get going, dummy!”

When Henry returned, Swan took the ten-cent bottle of soda into the bathroom. It was only years later that he learned a fizzing Dr. Pepper had been a primitive method of birth control used by desperate girls in the days before the Pill.

Swan eventually got over her anger, and things continued as before, but most of what came after had been blurred by the passing years. What Henry remembered most was how tense that summer had been, how the sky would pile up each afternoon with slate-gray clouds that looked full of rain but brought only dry thunder. People on the street were grouchy. The white people were tense, the blacks scared or angry. The air felt so still that noises sounded different than usual. To make things worse, Henry’s father came home and stayed for three straight weeks. All he talked about was “nigger trouble” all over the South, and the “goddamn Kennedys twistin’ up LBJ.” Henry’s only escape was the hours he got to spend at school or with Swan.

One August afternoon, while he and Swan sat on the store steps, Albert walked out, looked at the sky, and said, “This drought done turned the ground into a drum.” Swan poked a stick in the dust and said, “What you talkin’ ’bout, Daddy?” Albert sat down and illustrated his words with his flattened hands. “The ground is the top head, the bedrock the bottom, and precious little water between. Every time a truck goes by, I hear the earth echo. Everybody’s prayin’ for God to send rain. White and black, they prayin’ the same words.”

Henry liked it when Albert talked this way, and he wondered why he seemed more in tune with these thoughts than Swan. Swan lived so instinctively that she seemed to care nothing about codifying feelings into language. If it rained, it rained. If it didn’t, she’d make do with the heat.

“Is it ever going to rain again?” Henry asked.

Albert did something then that he’d never done in public: he laid a comforting hand on Henry’s shoulder and squeezed. “Son,” he said softly, “I think maybe a storm’s comin’ that could wash away everything we know.”

Recognizing the anxiety in her father’s voice, Swan finally looked up.

“You chil’ren be careful from now on,” Albert said. “Don’t let nobody see you together. There’s good folks and bad in this town, same as everywhere else. But right now the bad ones got the power. You hear me?”

Swan locked eyes with Henry, and they knew then that nothing ever got past her father.

Henry’s ringing cell phone startled him so profoundly that his arms flew up defensively. He felt as though he had awakened from a deep, feverish sleep. Shaking his head, he took his phone out of his pocket. The caller was a female FBI agent who often checked in to pick his brain for clues. He wondered if she’d heard about the death of Viola Turner. Henry couldn’t let himself think about Viola yet. If he did, he’d lose the objectivity he would so desperately need when he faced Glenn Morehouse. He muted the ringer of his phone and climbed out of his Explorer into the cold wind. Leaving the door open, he walked to the edge of the lot. One of the concrete pyramids that had supported Albert’s pickin’ porch still stuck up out of the mud. Henry planted his right foot on it. In spite of the coming Morehouse interview, his heart felt as empty as the lot before him.

He looked down the deserted street. A three-legged dog was pissing on a fence, while farther on, a black boy rode a rusted banana bicycle with what appeared to be grim purpose. Forty years ago, this street would have been jumping with the sounds of Albert’s piano. People would have been laughing and dancing on their porches, looking forward to the evening, when they would head over to Haney’s Big House to hear a name band. Now the druggies Albert used to pity ruled the streets.

The fire that killed Albert Norris had killed more than a man, Henry reflected. It had killed the store, and with the store had passed the magic that flourished there, the living hope of black and white interacting with trust and respect rather than fear and hatred. Henry often wondered why no one had ever built a new business on this site. Some people believed that an evil lingered in this earth after the murderous fire, like a dissonant chord that never faded. The tragic truth, Henry knew, was that bad feelings didn’t linger any more than good ones did. There was
no
feeling here. The land itself retained neither Albert’s magic nor the horror of his death. All that remained was the memory of an aging reporter and those few survivors who had shared the magic with him.

And the killers,
he thought. The Double Eagles who had burned Albert Norris to death—and either flayed or crucified Pooky Wilson—were still walking the streets of Ferriday, Vidalia, and Natchez. Henry was not a vengeful man, but the knowledge that those men lived while their victims lay in the earth ate at him like battery acid. While the Double Eagles watched their grandkids play Little League baseball, the families of their victims mourned grandchildren who had never been born. Worst of all, Henry thought, worse than the goddamned rednecks who had set the fires and wielded the knives and fired the guns, was the privileged millionaire who had ordered many of those murders. But if Glenn Morehouse lived up to his promise this morning, he might just give Henry what he’d craved more than anything else in his life: a weapon to take down an untouchable foe.

Henry wiped tears from his face. Why was he the only pilgrim standing at this place? There wasn’t even a memorial marker to commemorate Albert Norris. The man had been buried in his church cemetery, two miles from this spot, and Henry had never found flowers on the grave when he went to visit. Swan lived in Irvine, California. Despite some modest musical success, she’d been married three times and had lost both perfect breasts to cancer. She had a grandson who played in a band with a recording contract. He was the light of her life. After Swan read one of Henry’s stories about the fire (sent to her by a local girl she’d gone to school with), she’d sent Henry a picture of her grandson. The boy had Swan’s face but Albert’s wise eyes. Enclosed with the photo was a note: “
I learned more about my father’s murder from your stories than I did in forty years of pestering the FBI.
Thank you.
Please add my name to your subscription list. P.S. You were a good student. XOXO Swan.
”

That solitary note would have been sufficient to sustain Henry through his battles with the angry Klansmen, indifferent government bureaucracy, and reluctant or hostile witnesses that waited in his future. But he’d received many more letters like Swan’s. That was why the best-intentioned warnings of friends always fell on deaf ears. Swan and Albert Norris had transformed Henry from a timid boy into a man. After being adopted by them, he’d no longer cared whether his biological father loved him or not.

“What you doin’ over here, white man?”

Henry turned slowly and saw the black boy on the banana bike sitting a few feet away. He looked about ten, and wore a New Orleans Saints windbreaker, but his eyes had the sullen defiance of a teenager.

“Just lookin’ around. There used to be a store on this lot. Did you know that? A music store.”

“I need five dollars, man. You got five dollars?”

“What do you need five dollars for?”

“None yo’ business. You got it?”

Henry started to walk back to his Explorer, then took out his wallet and handed the kid a one-dollar bill.

“Shit. Gimme that wallet, too,” the kid said. “I need that wallet.”

Henry put his foot on the running board of the Explorer.

“I said gimme that goddamn wallet!”

Henry turned, half expecting to see a pistol, or at least a knife. But all he saw was the enraged face of a ten-year-old kid who wasn’t going anywhere but jail or an early grave. “You can’t have it,” he said gently. Feeling like Albert must have felt so many times, he said, “Go home to your mama and stay out of trouble.”

“Fuck you, old man! Go home to
yo
mama!”

“I wish I had time,” Henry said, feeling a stab of guilt. His mother was ill, and probably wouldn’t be with him much longer.

He shut the door and started his engine, his mind filled with memories of Viola Turner, an emaciated woman wearing an oxygen mask, her eyes filled with urgency, righteous anger, and concealed fear. Henry had known that Miss Viola was dying, but somehow her actual death seemed counterintuitive. Impossible, even. She had not been ready to die, he was certain of that. But she was gone now.
Another witness silenced
.

“But how?” he murmured. “By time? Or human intervention?” He supposed Shadrach Johnson would tell him when he reached Natchez.

Henry switched on his CD player as he drove past the Arcade theater, and the wail of Little Walter’s overdriven harmonica filled the Explorer. After listening for a few seconds, he shook his head and hit the next-track button. Robert Johnson began sawing at rusty old guitar strings with his slide. Today Henry heard only death and sadness in the sound. He hit next again. This time the a capella opening salvo of Kansas’s “Carry On Wayward Son” shattered the oppressive silence. It might be cheesy, but Henry didn’t give a shit. He was old, he was white, and he needed something to stoke the hope that still smoldered in the darkest recess of his heart. One of the beauties of digital technology was that he could replay the crystalline opening harmonies a hundred times if he wanted to, with one touch of a button. No rewinding, no guesswork. He laid his forefinger on the replay button and hit it one millisecond before the band’s instruments kicked in, again and again, all the way to the highway.

“Swan,” he whispered, wishing it was still 1964.

SNAKE KNOX STOOD
on the tarmac of Concordia Parish Airport and watched Brody Royal’s Avanti turboprop scream down out of the gray sky. The fastest private plane of its kind in the world, the $5 million Avanti was one of the quietest aircraft you could buy—on the inside—but to anyone watching it take off or land, it sounded like the devil’s fingernails raked over a chalkboard. Touchdown looked a little rough by Snake’s standards, but as a crop duster he would likely have found fault with the technique of anyone short of a Blue Angel.

As the Avanti taxied toward the terminal, Snake saw Brody Royal himself at the controls. The old multimillionaire had lost his license due to some deficit on the flight physical, but since his son-in-law was licensed, Royal simply had the younger man perform the takeoffs, then took over the controls and did the flying himself, even the landings back in Concordia Parish.

An hour earlier, Royal’s maid had informed Snake that the businessman had made yet another trip to New Orleans. Brody Royal had been flying back and forth three or four times per week ever since Hurricane Katrina, and he sure as hell wasn’t delivering relief supplies. There had to be money in it—big money—or Brody wouldn’t be wasting his time or fuel. Snake gazed covetously at the Italian-built jet with the royal blue
R
on its tail fin and
ROYAL OIL
emblazoned aft of the seventh window, just above the low-mass wing with its backward-facing pusher props. A machine like that got Snake’s blood going quicker than any woman these days. There were women in every damned honky-tonk in America; there were only one hundred Avantis in the whole world.