Snake glanced at his watch. At the last instant, he reached up and snatched the babbling Junelle down behind the desk, saving her from the flash and possible mutilation by shrapnel. It wasn’t gratitude that had prompted this action, but his awareness that he might yet need an ally in this location, despite his immediate plans.
While Junelle shook her head in shock at the explosion, Snake got up, walked through the smoke, and crouched before the open safe. He found his new ID documents in a manila folder with Chinese characters on it. He laughed cynically as he got up. To get these documents, the white-supremacist bikers had dealt with local Arabs who then procured the desired articles from a Chinese supplier.
As he walked past the desk, Snake picked up the flight bag he’d packed earlier and headed toward the door. At that point, Junelle finally figured out that he was leaving, and what his departure was likely to mean for her future. As she begged him to take her with him, he said, “Sorry, hon, my plane only holds one.”
“But—but they’ll kill me,” she said. “Toons will kill me!”
“Tell him I made you tell me about the IDs.”
“He won’t believe me.”
“Yes, he will.” Snake drew his pistol from the holster on his hip and cracked her across the face with it.
Junelle dropped like a sack.
He kept his pistol out as he left the office and crossed the open space between it and the airstrip, listening for the sound of the ATV’s engine returning. He knew they had tried to sabotage his plane, but the bikers were amateurs when it came to that kind of work. Snake had slipped out before dawn and repaired the wires they’d cut.
He climbed into the Air Tractor and started the engine, then turned the plane and taxied into the wind, building speed as fast as he could. When the plane’s wheels left the earth, he felt a wild laugh building in his chest, the same one he’d felt when Alois showed him the Needle Box.
As the plane climbed, Snake banked and flew over the sod field. Three hundred feet below him, the blue ATV was parked beside the big orange tractor. The men by the Kubota looked up, looked down, then looked up again and began pointing and yelling.
“Adios, assholes!” Snake yelled, even as the men drew handguns and began firing at him.
He wished he had a load of herbicide to dump on them as a parting gift. Talk about fucking up somebody’s day . . .
As Snake climbed away from the futile bullets, he felt his burner phone vibrate in his pocket. Taking it out, he yelled, “Toons? That you?”
“This ain’t Toons,” said a woman. “You know who this is?”
Wilma Deen. Wilma and Alois had headed back to Natchez a few hours ago. “I do. What’s going on?”
“I heard some taped testimony from the trial. The dead nurse’s sister testified today. And you should have been there to hear it.”
“What’d she say?”
“Your brother didn’t die from them batteries fallin’ on him. That nigger nurse killed him.”
Snake flew right through a pillar of smoke spewing from one of the chemical plants near Westlake. “Hold up. Cora Revels said that?”
“Not willingly. That Quentin Avery pulled it out of her. But it sounded pretty conclusive. She killed him while he was waiting for treatment back there in Dr. Cage’s office. And Dr. Cage likely covered it up for her. I mean, he had to, didn’t he? He was dickin’ her.”
Snake felt acid flood into his gut. “That nigger murdered Frank?” he said dully, not really believing it. He thought back to the day that pallet load of batteries had tumbled off the forklift and crashed into his brother, crushing bones and opening his chest. And how Sonny and Glenn had rushed him to Tom Cage’s office rather than the hospital, because that was what Frank wanted . . .
“If Tom Cage knew all along that bitch killed Frank . . .”
“What’d you say?” Wilma shouted. “All I can hear is a roaring!”
“I said, Ya’ll get that place we talked about ready! I’ve got my papers and I’m on my way.”
“You mean it?”
“Do what I told you, goddamn it! Out.”
Snake rocked back and forth in the small cockpit, fighting a compulsion to throw the phone out of the plane. He felt like his brain was on fire. His beloved brother had not died in an accident; Frank had been murdered. Using all the skill he had, Snake lifted the AT-501 to its operational ceiling and then beyond it. The flat land of Louisiana drifted beneath him like a slow-motion film, unrolling endlessly. Snake never looked down, only forward. He was watching for the most familiar landmark of his flying career, the great brown serpent of the Mississippi River. The only fluid that could quench the fire in his head waited on the far bank of that river, pulsing with ignorant hope.
The blood of the Cage family.
Chapter 33
It’s night, and Annie is watching our DVD of To Kill a Mockingbird, searching for clues to the legal system and ideas on how to defend her grandfather. She has long known that Atticus Finch inspired me to become an attorney—as he did thousands of other lawyers—and that in many ways, To Kill a Mockingbird inspired me to write my first novel. The irony is that, for most of my life, I believed I was raised by a father who was as close as you could come to Atticus Finch in the real world. Dad might have been a doctor rather than a lawyer, but people still looked at him the way they looked at Gregory Peck in that film, and the way most citizens of Maycomb looked at Atticus in the novel: as a paragon of honor, courage, and rectitude.
More to the point, the black people of my little Mississippi town seemed to honor my father with the same respect shown to Atticus, as when the old preacher says: “Jean Louise, stand up. Your father’s passin’.” But tonight, all I can think about as Annie watches the old black-and-white classic is what Scout would have thought if, at age forty-five, she’d learned that she had a half brother fathered by Atticus on Calpurnia, their maid. Such things seem unimaginable in the idealized world of the film, but in Lee’s novel, Mr. Dolphus Raymond married a black woman and fathered interracial children, thus earning social exile for himself, his morphine-addicted wife, and his children.