A pickup truck passed on the street outside, and in its reflected headlights Albert recognized the faces of the two men in the window. One was Snake Knox, the brother of Frank, the Klansman who’d visited the store that afternoon. The other was Brody Royal. The third man remained in shadow. Dear Jesus … These were serious men. They made the regular Ku Klux Klan look like circus clowns. Albert had managed to keep off the wrong side of men like this all his life. He’d bowed and scraped when necessary. He’d ignored the flirtations of their women, greased the right palms, and given gifts of service and merchandise. But now … now they wanted the life of a boy who was guilty of nothing but being young and ignorant.
“Mr. Brody, you knows me,” Albert said with absurd reasonableness. “Please, now … I done told you this afternoon, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout your daughter getting up to anything.” This lie sounded hollow even to him, but the truth would be worse: Mr. Royal, your little girl’s got a willful streak and she’d hump that black boy right in front of you if he’d let her. “Please now, Mr. Royal,” he pleaded. “Why, I’ve got your own church organ up in here, fixing it.”
“Shut up!” snapped the shadow man. “Tell us where that young buck is right this minute, or you die. Make your choice.”
“I don’t know!” Albert cried. “I swear! But I do know that boy didn’t mean no harm.”
Brody Royal dropped his gas can on the floor and walked up to Albert. “Cur dogs don’t mean any harm, either, but they’ll impregnate your prize bitch if they can get close to her.”
“He ain’t gonna tell us nothin’,” Snake Knox said. “Let’s finish the job.”
“I thought you were a businessman, Norris,” Royal said, his eyes seeming to glow in the pale, angular face. “But I guess in the end, even the best nigra’s gonna be a nigger one day a week. Let’s go, boys.”
Snake picked up the piano bench and tossed it through Albert’s plate glass window. The shards tinkled in the street like a shattering dream. Snake leaped through the window after the bench, and Albert saw a man nearly twice his size join him in the street. Brody Royal scrambled out onto the porch, then jumped down to the sidewalk. Instinct told Albert to follow them, but before he could move, the giant figure stepped from the shadows and stared at him with unalloyed hatred. The huge shape was no astronaut; it was Frank Knox, wearing an asbestos suit and some kind of pack on his back.
“You should have talked,” he said. “Now you get the Guadalcanal barbecue.”
Albert backpedaled in terror, but the roaring jet of flame reached toward him like the finger of Satan, and Knox’s eyes flashed with fascination.
The display room exploded into fire.
Facedown in a roaring fog of pain, Albert slowly picked himself up from the floor, then ran blindly from the inferno raging in the front of his store. When he crashed through the back door, arms flailing, he saw that his clothes had already burned away. Like a deer fleeing a forest fire, he bounded toward a bright opening at the end of the alley. There was a service station there—a white-owned station, but he knew the attendant. Maybe somebody would take him to the hospital.
As Albert windmilled down the alley, a big car pulled across the open space, blocking it. The gumball light on its roof came to life, spilling red glare onto the walls of the buildings. A huge shape rose from beside the car. Big John DeLillo.
“Help me, Mr. John!” Albert screamed, running toward the deputy. “Lord, they done burned me out!”
As he ran, Albert saw that his hands were on fire.
CHAPTER 2
Twenty-three days later
Natchez, Mississippi
“IF THEY’D HAVE left them two Jews alone and just shot the nigger,” said Frank Knox, “none of this would even be happening. New Yorkers don’t give no more of a damn than we do about one less nigger in the world. But you kill a couple of Jewboys, and they’re ready to call out the Marines.”
“You talking about that Neshoba County business?” asked Glenn Morehouse, a mountain of a man with half the intellectual wattage of his old sergeant.
“What else?” said Frank, flipping a slab of alligator meat on the sizzling grill.
Sonny Thornfield popped the cap on an ice-cold Jax and watched the veins bulge in Frank’s neck. The discovery of the three civil rights workers in an earthen dam a few days ago had stirred Frank up in a way Sonny hadn’t seen since the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In a way, this whole camping trip had been designed to let off pressure after the FBI’s discovery of the bodies up in Philadelphia. After their shift ended Friday, they’d mounted four camper shells on their pickups, then towed Frank’s boat and Sonny’s homemade grill down to the sandbar south of the Triton Battery plant, where they all worked during the week. The long weekend of sun had pretty much worn everybody out, except the kids. Now the women sat in folding chairs, fanning themselves and swatting mosquitoes in the shade of the cottonwoods. Frank’s and Sonny’s wives were back there, along with Granny Knox and Wilma Deen, Glenn’s divorced sister. The kids who weren’t out in the boat were teasing a stray dog down by the riverbank.
The men had spent the weekend practicing their demolition skills on stumps, and on an old Chevy that lay half buried in the sand down by the water. Frank’s younger brother Snake was still down there, fiddling with something under the Chevy’s dash and flirting with the nineteen-year-old waitress he’d brought with him. All the men on this picnic were old hands with dynamite and Composition B, but Frank had bought some of the new C-4 off a supply sergeant he knew at Fort Polk, and they’d been using it to try to master the art of the shaped charge. Every time they peeled eight inches off a stump top, the kids squealed and hooted and begged for fireworks.