“Just keep the subject where he is, Don. I’m on my way.”
Hanging up, I whip my Audi left onto Martin Luther King Street and head out into the county, toward a bend in the Mississippi River. Before I cover a mile, a new thought strikes me with chilling power. Last night, when I was jotting down reasons that Dad might have jumped bail, I omitted one potential answer—probably because it was so primal and obvious. Of course, at that point I didn’t know Walt was with Dad.
What if Henry was right the first night we talked? What if the Double Eagles have threatened violence against our family unless Dad takes the fall for Viola’s murder? If they have, I can easily imagine Dad and Walt going on the offensive, rather than letting Dad die in jail. He and Walt could have gone to the borrow pits in search of the men who threatened us. That dead trooper could have been one of them, a soldier in the secret army of Forrest Knox. If I’m right, then I made a terrible mistake by having the FBI eavesdrop on Brody Royal and his son-in-law. I may well have set up the technology that will record my father and Walt Garrity wiping out the men who framed Dad for Viola’s murder. With fear filling my mind, I press my foot to the floor and lean into the curves that lead into the thickly wooded hills above Anna’s Bottom.
CHAPTER 72
ANNA’S BOTTOM IS a vast, fertile floodplain that swells like a pregnant belly into the old course of the Mississippi River north of Natchez. For 250 years cotton has been cultivated in that plain, and black men and women have toiled there without cease. Though their equipment has changed, little else has, and it’s on the high rim of those fields that Lincoln Turner has chosen to while away his hours this afternoon.
The road to Anna’s Bottom winds through densely forested hills between Highway 61 and the river, and my Audi easily hugs the bulging curves at eighty. All this land was once part of plantations, and many of the big houses still stand amid cattle ponds and old slave quarters. Quite a few people make this drive purely for the exhilaration. The hills rise steadily above the river, the road narrows, and then at three hundred feet above sea level the blacktop plunges down the most precipitous slope in ten counties, snaking back and forth as it falls toward the bottomland. Your mind reels from the sudden change in perspective; the forest drops away, and your gaze flies out over the flatlands of Louisiana toward Texas, while far beneath you a couple of oil wells pump with lazy persistence, all that remain of the fifty that once sucked thirty million barrels of black gold out of these cotton fields.
Today I will not make that plunge, for the “jook joint” that Chief Logan directed me to squats in the trees on the ledge overlooking that wild drop. It’s a juke, all right, just like the ones that used to dot Highway 61 all the way through the Delta. The Crayola purple cinder-block building has eight or ten vehicles parked out front, and a tin-roofed appendage spews smoke into the sky from a rusted vent pipe, spreading the mouthwatering smell of cooking pork for miles. The building’s black-painted windows have been covered with airbrushed paintings of martini glasses, Colt .45 Malt Liquor cans, and bubbling champagne bottles. Above this hodgepodge of images someone has splashed the words “CC’s Rhythm Club” in bold graffiti script. Most juke owners would have chosen CC’s Blues Club, which make me wonder whether the eponymous C.C. named his (or her) establishment after the infamous Rhythm Club in Natchez, where 209 African-Americans burned to death in 1940. This whole building could easily fit inside Pithy Nolan’s parlor at Corinth, but more human drama unfolds within these walls over a Labor Day weekend than has in Pithy’s mansion over the past twenty years.
Lincoln Turner’s white pickup is parked on the right end of the line of vehicles—I confirm it by the Illinois plates—so I park my Audi on the left end. Given that Lincoln has no idea I’m coming, keeping a reasonably clear line of retreat seems prudent. I see no police car as I walk to the front door, and I don’t know whether to feel better or worse about that. Since CC’s stands outside Chief Logan’s jurisdiction, it’ll be one of Sheriff Billy Byrd’s deputies who responds to any 911 call made from here. Of course, most of CC’s customers don’t think of the police in terms of aid, so emergency calls are rare.