Natchez Burning (6 page)

Something had changed inside him during the past four years. The early operations back in ’64 had felt like war. But what Frank had pushed him to do to get Jimmy Revels out of hiding had left Sonny sick with shame and confusion. Like what the nips had done to the Chinese at Nanking. Sonny had never turned down a free piece of ass, but rape was something else. And raping a woman you cared about … that made you want to crawl in a dark hole and never come out again. But what could you do, with Frank Knox giving the order and going first?

As he trolled the boat between the great cypresses, searching for familiar landmarks, Sonny recalled how fired up they’d been after capturing Revels and his big bodyguard, Luther Davis, who was Jimmy’s drummer and a former army infantryman. But then death had taken Frank from them, as surely and randomly as it had taken friends in the islands during the war, and Snake had gone batshit crazy. Left to his own devices, he’d have crucified Jimmy Revels on a telephone pole in the center of Natchez, then waited for the big shots to fly in for the protests and the funeral, like ducks to a decoy. But before he could, Brody Royal had sent word that the Eagles were to abort the operation. Royal wanted Jimmy Revels and Luther Davis dropped into a hole so deep that no one would ever find them, and Sonny knew why. The millionaire didn’t trust Snake to carry out the operation without landing all of them in prison.

The chaos that followed Royal’s decision had resulted in days of brutal torture that shook Sonny to the core. Sleep deprived and high on drugs, Snake had tried to take out his grief on the prisoners in his power. Worse, he’d ordered the kidnapping of Revels’s sister Viola, on the pretext that she’d seen their faces when they’d gang-raped her to bring her brother out of hiding. If Sonny could have bailed on that operation, he would have, but by then he was so deep in, there was no way out—only through. That meant forty-eight hours of hell in a machine shop so far out in the woods that no one could hear the screams. When deliverance arrived for Viola like divine intervention, Sonny had said a silent prayer of thanks. But Snake’s rage had only escalated, making Sonny fear he would disregard the stand-down order and doom them all.

That was the moment he’d decided to follow Brody Royal’s order in spite of Snake’s ascension to Frank’s post as commander of the Double Eagles. Because an order from Brody Royal might actually be an order from Carlos Marcello, and nobody who disobeyed Carlos survived to tell the tale. When Snake finally crashed—three hours after his brother’s funeral—he lay snoring in a chair only feet from his chained and bleeding captives. At that point, Sonny had dragged Glenn Morehouse outside and told him they needed to follow Royal’s orders before Snake got them both killed. Morehouse hadn’t had the nerve to risk Snake’s wrath, but Sonny didn’t let that stop him. Since Luther Davis looked likely to die of his wounds anyway, Sonny had cut Jimmy Revels loose, carried him out to his pickup, and driven him to the edge of the Lusahatcha Swamp, where so many other bodies had been dumped over the years.

Revels had stopped talking a couple of hours ago. The only words he’d spoken during the afternoon were to ask about his sister and Luther Davis. Sonny didn’t know where Viola was, but he prayed that Luther was at the bottom of the Jericho Hole in Concordia Parish, where Sonny had ordered Morehouse to dump him.

Sonny opened the outboard’s throttle a little and nosed the boat through a deeper channel in the cypress trees. They were thirty miles south of Natchez and twenty west of Woodville, deep into Lusahatcha County. This swamp lay mostly on land owned by the Double Eagles’ hunting club, but partly on federal land, too—a national forest. Sonny’s destination was a stand of virgin cypress that looked like something on the cover of an Edgar Rice Burroughs paperback. At the heart of this swamp, some cypress trunks were fifteen feet in diameter. Sonny and Frank had once tried to stretch a fifty-foot rope around the trunk of the one called the Bone Tree, and they’d come up three feet short. Frank claimed some of those trees were a thousand years old.

“Shit,” Sonny muttered, watching the orange sun flare against the purple sky as it sank below the horizon. He was going to have to use a flashlight to get back to civilization. “We shoulda been there by now.”

He put down his pistol and picked up a map Snake had drawn for him on a much earlier occasion. As he studied it, Sonny kept glancing over its edge to make sure Jimmy Revels stayed still. The kid’s T-shirt was rusty with dried blood and stained black with grease, his left arm wrapped in bloody gauze. In the fading light, Sonny could no longer tell if his eyes were open or closed.

Stinging sweat dripped into Sonny’s eyes, and he squinted through it at the map.
I gotta be almost there,
he thought. Then, as though transported by his thought, he realized he was. The normal cypresses had given way to grassy islands, humped mounds of earth crowned by gargantuan trees. The cypress knees alone were larger than the trunks of most trees. Sonny saw paths worn through the grass on some tussocks, probably by hungry deer, exhausted from swimming. Deer were damn good swimmers, though not many people knew it.

Sonny hadn’t seen the Bone Tree since 1966, but he remembered it all too well. The colossal cypress reared up out of the swamp like the Tree of Knowledge in the Garden of Eden. But this was no paradise. More than a dozen men Sonny knew of had died under that tree, and Frank claimed the real number was over a hundred. He’d shown Sonny hand-forged chain links embedded in the bark that dated back to slave times. Runaway slaves had supposedly been hanged or hobbled beneath this cypress. High inside the hollow trunk, Sonny had seen carvings Frank swore were Indian sign, from before the French came. Sonny didn’t need those facts to make him wary of this place. The things he’d seen done to men beneath the Bone Tree were seared into his brain. He was half tempted to carry Jimmy Revels to Baton Rouge and put him on a northbound bus rather than make the journey out of this snake-infested swamp alone.

“Glenn don’t know how easy he’s got it,” Sonny muttered. “Compared to this, dumping Luther’s car in the Jericho Hole is nothing.”

A heavy swish in the water to his right made Sonny’s sphincter lock up. He knew that sound. Sure enough, when he squinted, he saw the armored back of an alligator swimming alongside the boat. When his heartbeat finally slowed to normal, Sonny looked forward and saw the Bone Tree towering a hundred feet above him, its base as broad as a building blocking his path. The fibrous bark looked like the leathery skin of some great creature, not dead but only sleeping, and high above, its branches joined the crowns of other trees to form a thin canopy. Killing the motor, Sonny let the johnboat glide up onto the edge of the hummock that surrounded the massive trunk. A narrow, A-shaped crack of utter darkness offered entrance to the hollow tree, and Sonny wondered what lay inside that cavelike space on this night. Soon Jimmy Revels could tell him.

Sonny stood and pointed his pistol down at Revels’s bloody form. “Get out,” he said, kicking Revels’s foot.

The nigger didn’t move.

“Come on, boy!” Sonny’s voice sounded higher and thinner than he’d intended. “I know you’re playing possum.”

Revels remained still.

“By God, I’ll shoot you where you lay.” Sonny was lying. The slug from his .357 Magnum would likely go through Revels and punch a hole in the bottom of the boat. He didn’t plan to spend the night surrounded by water moccasins and alligators. Hell, there were
bears
in this swamp.

“What difference does it make?” Revels moaned at last.

“Get up, damn you! Or I’ll shoot you in the pelvis. That’ll make a difference, I promise you.”

“Tell me where my sister is. Then I’ll get up.”

“I don’t know!”

“But ya’ll ain’t done nothin’ else to her?”

“No!” Sonny yelled, blocking out the memory of all they’d done to Viola Turner. He couldn’t bear to think about that. “She got away, I told you.” He squinted at his watch in the dim light. “You saw it happen. She’s probably with Dr. Cage right now, all patched up and pretty again.”

“That’s impossible, after what ya’ll did.”

“Move, boy!”

Revels struggled to his knees, then crawled out of the rocking boat and collapsed in the grass. He was lying squarely in a deer path.

Sonny picked up his flashlight, climbed out of the boat, and kicked Revels’s thigh. “Get your ass up, damn it!”

“Why for? You just gonna shoot me and roll me into the water so the gators get me. Go on and do it.”

“That’s not what I’m gonna do. I’m just leaving you out here for a couple of days, till things cool down.”

“Leave me, then.”

“Not here. Inside the tree.”

Revels rolled over and looked at the gigantic cypress. “
In
the tree? What you mean?”

“This tree is hollow. I want you to get inside it.”

Swollen, bloodshot eyes looked up into Sonny’s flashlight beam. “You lyin’, man.”

“I ain’t. The deer get up in there and sleep sometimes, ’cause it’s dry. See that crack there? They call this the Bone Tree, ’cause wounded deer crawl up in there to die. You’ll get up in there, too, if you want to live. This is gonna be your jail for a couple of days.”

Revels stared at the black opening for half a minute, thinking. Then he rolled over and slowly got to his feet. Sonny prodded him in the back, pushing him up the hummock, toward the crack in the fibrous wall of wood. Only eighteen inches wide, it stretched upward for ten feet, gradually narrowing to nothing.

“I ain’t going in there,” Jimmy said with boyish fear. “Ain’t no telling what’s up in there.”

“Ain’t nothing in there now. The animals heard us coming from way off.” Sonny stepped forward and rapped the side of the tree with his pistol. “See? If there was a deer in there, he’d have bolted.”

“Might be snakes in there.”

“You’ll just have to take your chances. Go on, now. I got to get out of here.”

“I’ll just come back out after you leave.”

“I’m gonna nail a board up.”

Revels stared into the yellow beam and spoke in a voice stripped of all affect. “I know you didn’t like what those others did to Viola. Or to me. I saw it in your eyes.” He held up his bandaged arm, showing the gauze Sonny had wrapped around the wound made by Snake Knox slicing off the boy’s navy tattoo. “You were raised a Christian, just like me, Mr. Thornfield. How can you do this?”

Sonny shook his head and looked away, at the black water to his right. The kid was right about the torture, but he didn’t seem to grasp the nature of race war. Having a common faith meant nothing. Niggers weren’t true Christians, after all. As slaves, they’d simply latched on to the faith of their masters in desperation, not realizing that the master simply used religion to keep them tame.

“Go on, now,” Sonny said, motioning toward the crack with his pistol.

“I ain’t going,” Jimmy insisted. “I can’t.”

Sonny gauged his chances of stuffing Revels through the crack if he was dead. The boy was thin enough, but Sonny didn’t relish the idea. Moving dead men was hard work. “You go on, Jimmy, or I’ll shoot you where you stand. That’s the deal.”

“Is Luther dead?”

“He is,” Sonny said, hoping it was true.

Jimmy’s shoulders sank, and whatever resistance he had left went out of him. “At least you told me the truth. So maybe Viola’s really all right.”

“She is, I swear.”

Jimmy intoned something that sounded like a prayer. Then he turned sideways and worked his dark body through the crack in the tree. He might as well have been entering a cave.

Thank God,
Sonny thought, as the stained white T-shirt vanished. He shone his flashlight through the crack. Jimmy stood a few feet away, staring at something at the center of the hollow tree. Sonny took the beam off his back and shone it around. The hollow trunk created a round room like some turreted castle tower. The way the walls narrowed as they reached skyward gave him a sort of religious feeling. “What you looking at?” Sonny asked.

Jimmy moved aside and pointed at the floor.

At the center of the round room lay a yellowed skeleton.
Not human,
Sonny realized. “That’s just a deer,” he said, noticing a carpet of other bones beneath it. “Probably crawled up in here wounded last hunting season.”

“You don’t have any board to nail up, do you?” Jimmy said in a fatalistic tone.

“No,” Sonny said, almost apologetically. “That’s a fact.”

Jimmy turned slowly and raised a hand against the beam of the flashlight. The whites of his eyes glowed in his black face. Revels was twenty-six years old, but he looked like a teenager.

“You swear my sister’s all right?” he insisted.

“I do,” Sonny said in a shaky voice. “And if it makes you feel any better, finishing this up out here is going to save your hero’s life.”

Jimmy blinked in confusion. “Who do you mean?”

“Senator Kennedy.”

“What about him?”

“You dying here is going to save his life.”

The boy pondered this for several seconds. “It doesn’t matter. He’ll never be president. If not your bunch, somebody else will get him. The best men never make it. Moses, Jesus … Medgar, Malcolm. Even Dr. King. He won’t live to see the Promised Land.”

Sonny had a feeling the boy was right, but he was glad not to be part of that business anymore.

“Someday,” Jimmy said, dropping the hand shielding his eyes, “you tell Viola where to find me, okay? It ain’t right to leave a person not knowing about their kin. You were in the service. You know that. Even if you lie about how they died, you tell ’em where the body is. To give the family peace.”

Sonny swallowed and raised his pistol. He didn’t enjoy killing in cold blood, but neither had he ever hesitated to do his duty. And they’d gone too far to reverse course now. Everything had to be buried.
No body, no crime,
Frank always said. “Maybe someday,” Sonny lied, trying to make it easier on the boy.

Revels plainly didn’t believe him. Sweat poured off the kid’s face, and Sonny had to shake his own head to get the burning sweat out of his eyes.