The White Road-CP-4 (3 page)

Errol Rich is about to die for breaking a window.

He was driving his truck, his old truck with its cracked windshield and its flaking paint, when he heard the shout.

“Hey, nigger!”

Then the glass exploded in on top of him, cutting his face and hands, and something hit him hard between the eyes. He braked suddenly, and smelled it upon himself. In his lap, the cracked pitcher dumped the remains of its contents on his seat and on his pants. Urine. They had filled a pitcher between them and thrown it through his windshield. He wiped the liquid from his face, his sleeve coming away wet and bloody, and looked at the three men standing by the roadside, a few steps away from the entrance to the bar.

“Who threw that?” he asked. Nobody answered, but, secretly, they were afraid. Errol Rich was a strong, powerful man. They had expected him to wipe his face and drive on, not to stop and confront them.

“You throw that, Little Tom?” Errol stood before Little Tom Rudge, the owner of the bar, but Little Tom wouldn’t meet his eyes. “’Cause if you did, you better tell me now else I’m gonna burn your shit heap down to the ground.”

But still there was no reply, so Errol Rich, who always did have a temper on him, signed his death warrant by taking a length of timber from the bed of his truck and turning to the men. They backed off, waiting for him to come at them, but instead he threw the timber, all three feet of it, through the front window of Little Tom Rudge’s bar, then climbed back in his truck and drove away.

Now Errol Rich is about to die for a pane of cheap glass, and a whole town has come to watch it happen. He looks out on them, these God-fearing people, these sons and daughters of the land, and he feels the heat of their hatred upon him, a foretaste of the burning that is to come. I fixed things, he thinks. I took what was broken and made it good again. The thought seems to have come to him almost out of nowhere. He tries to shake it away, but, instead, it persists.

I had a gift. I could take an engine, a radio, even a television, and I could repair it. I never read a manual, never had no formal training. It was a gift, a gift that I had, and soon it will be gone. He looks out at the crowd, at the expectant faces. He sees a boy, fourteen or fifteen, his eyes bright with excitement. He recognizes him, recognizes too the man with his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He had brought his radio to Errol, hoping to have it fixed in time for the Santa Anita because he liked to listen to the horse races. And Errol had repaired it, replacing the busted speaker cone, and the man had thanked him and paid him a dollar extra for coming through for him.

The man sees Errol looking at him, and his eyes flick away. There will be no help for him, no mercy from any of these people. He is about to die for a broken window, and they will find someone else to repair their engines and their radios, although not as well, and not as cheaply. His legs tied, Errol is forced to hop to the Lincoln. They drag him onto the roof, these masked men, and they put the rope around his neck while he kneels. He sees the tattoo on the arm of the largest man: the word “Kathleen” spelled out on a banner held by angels. The hand tightens the rope. The gasoline is poured over his head, and he shivers.

Then Errol looks up and says the last words anyone will ever hear from him on this earth.

“Don’t burn me,” he asks. He has accepted the fact of his death, the inevitability of his passing on this night, but he does not want to burn.

Please Lord, don’t let them burn me.

The tattooed man splashes the last of the gasoline into Errol Rich’s eyes, blinding him, then climbs down to the ground.

Errol Rich starts to pray.

The small white man entered the bar first. A smell of stale, spilled beer hung in the air. On the floor, dust and cigarette butts formed drifts around the counter, where they had been swept but not cleaned up. There were blackened circles on the wood where soles had stamped out thousands of embers, and the orange paint on the walls had blistered and burst like infected skin. There were no pictures, just generic beer company signs that had been used to cover the worst of the damage.

The bar wasn’t too big, certainly no more than thirty feet in length and fifteen across. The counter itself was on the left and shaped like the blade of an ice skate, the curved end nearest the door. At its other extreme there was a small office and storage area. The toilets were beyond the bar, beside the back door. Four booths stood against the wall to the right, a pair of round tables to the left.

There were two men sitting at the counter, and one other man behind the bar. All three were probably in their sixties. The two at the bar wore baseball caps, faded T-shirts beneath even more faded cotton shirts, and cheap jeans. One of them had a long knife on his belt. The other had a gun concealed beneath his shirt.

The man behind the bar looked like he might have been strong and fit once, a long time ago. There was bulk on his shoulders, chest, and arms that was now masked by a thick layer of fat, and his breasts were pendulous as those of an old woman. There were old yellow sweat stains beneath the arms of his white short-sleeved shirt, and his trousers hung low on his hips in a way that might have been fashionable on a sixteen-year-old but was ridiculous on a man fifty years older than that. His hair was yellow white but still thick, and his face was partially obscured by a week’s growth of scraggly beard.

All three men were watching the hockey game on the old TV above the bar, but their heads turned in unison as the new arrival entered. He was unshaven, wearing dirty sneakers, a loud Hawaiian shirt and creased chinos. He didn’t look like he belonged anywhere above Christopher Street, not that anybody in this bar knew where Christopher Street was, exactly. But they knew this man’s type, yes they did. They could smell it on him. Didn’t matter how unshaven he was, how shabbily he dressed; this boy had “fag” written all over him.

“Can I get a beer?” he asked, stepping up to the bar.

The bartender didn’t make any move for at least a full minute, then took a Bud from the cooler and placed it on the bar.

The small man picked up the beer and looked at it as if seeing a bottle of Bud for the first time.

“You got anything else?”

“We got Bud Light.”

“Wow, both kinds.”

The bartender looked unimpressed.

“Two-fifty.” This wasn’t the kind of place that ran a tab.

He counted out three bills from a thick roll, then added another fifty cents in change to bring the tip up to a dollar. The eyes of the three men remained fixed on his slim, delicate hands as he replaced the money in his pocket, then they returned their gazes to the hockey game. The small man took a booth behind the two drinkers, leaned into the corner, then put his feet up and directed his face toward the TV. All four men remained in those positions for about five minutes, until the door again opened softly and another man entered the bar, an unlit Cohiba in his mouth. He was so quiet that nobody even noticed him until he was four feet from the counter, at which point one of the men looked to his left, saw him, and said:

“Little Tom, there’s a colored in your bar.”

Little Tom and the second man dragged themselves away from the TV to examine the black man who had now taken a stool at the lower end of the L-shaped bar.

“Whiskey, please,” he said.

Little Tom didn’t move. First a fag, now a nigger. This was turning into quite a night. His eyes moved from the man’s face to his expensive shirt, his neatly pressed black jeans, and his doublebreasted overcoat.

“You from out of town, boy?”

“You could say that.” He didn’t even blink at the second insult in less than thirty seconds.

“There’s a coon place couple of miles down the road,” said Little Tom. “You’ll get a drink there.”

“I like it here.”

“Well, I don’t like you here. Get your ass out, boy, before I start takin’ it personal.”

“So I don’t get a drink?” The man sounded unsurprised.

“No, you don’t. Now you going to leave, or am I gonna have to make you leave?”

To his left, the two men shifted on their stools in preparation for the beating that they hoped to deliver. Instead, the object of their attention reached into his pocket, produced a bottle of whiskey in a brown paper bag, and twisted the cap. Little Tom reached under the counter with his right hand. It emerged holding a Louisville Slugger.

“You can’t drink that in here, boy,” he warned.

“Shame,” said the black man. “And don’t call me ‘boy.’ The name is Louis.”

Then he tipped the bottle upside down and watched as its contents flowed along the bar. It made a neat turn at the elbow of the counter, the raised lip preventing the liquid from overflowing onto the floor, and seeped past the three men. They looked at Louis in surprise as he lit his cigar with a brass Zippo.

Louis stood and took a long puff on his Cohiba.

“Heads up, crackers,” he said, and dropped the flaming lighter into the whiskey.

The man with the tattoo raps sharply on the roof of the Lincoln. The engine roars and the car bucks once or twice like a steer on a rope before shooting away in a cloud of dirt, dead leaves, and exhaust fumes. Errol Rich seems to hang frozen for a moment in midair before his body uncurls. His long legs descend toward the ground but do not reach it, his feet kicking impotently at the air. A spluttering noise comes from his lips, and his eyes bulge as the rope draws tighter and tighter around his neck. His face becomes congested with blood and he begins to convulse, red drops now speckling his chin and chest. A minute goes by and still Errol struggles. Below him, the tattooed man takes a branch wrapped in linen doused with gasoline, lights it with a match, then steps forward. He holds the torch up so Errol can see it, then touches it to Errol’s legs.

Errol ignites with a roar, and somehow, despite the constriction at his throat, he screams, a high, ululating thing filled with terrible agony. It is followed by a second, and then the flames enter his mouth and his vocal cords begin to burn. He kicks again and again as the smell of roasting meat fills the air, until at last the kicking stops.

The burning man is dead.

The bar flared, a small wall of flame shooting up to scorch beards, eyebrows, hair. The man with the gun at his belt leaped back, his left arm covering his eyes while his right reached for his weapon.

“Ah-ah,” said a voice. A Glock 19 was inches from his face, held firm in the grip of the man in the bright shirt. The other’s hand stopped instantly, the gun already uncovered. The small man, whose name was Angel, yanked it from its holster and held it up so that he now had two guns inches from the barfly’s face. Near the door, Louis’s hand now contained a SIG, trained on the man with the knife in his belt. Behind the bar, Little Tom was dousing the last of the flames with water. His face was red and he was breathing hard.

“The fuck you do that for?” He was looking at the black man, and at the SIG that had now moved to level itself at the center of his chest. A change of expression flickered in Little Tom’s face, a brief candle flame of fear that was quickly snuffed out by his natural belligerence.

“Why, you got a problem with it?” asked Louis.

“I got a problem with it.”

It was the man with the knife at his belt, brave now that the gun was no longer aimed at him. He had strange, sunken features: a weak chin that lost itself in his thin, stringy neck, blue eyes buried deep in their sockets, and cheekbones that looked like they had been broken and flattened by some old, almost forgotten impact. Those dim eyes regarded the black man impassively while his hands remained raised—away from his knife, but not too far away. It seemed like a good idea to make him get rid of it. A man who carries a knife like that knows how to use it, and use it fast. One of the two guns now held by Angel made an arc through the air and came to rest on him.

“Unclasp your belt,” said Louis.

The knife man paused for a moment, then did as he was told.

“Now pull it out.”

He grasped it and pulled. The belt caught once or twice before it freed the scabbard and the knife fell to the floor.

“That’s good enough.”

“I still got a problem.”

“Sorry to hear that,” Louis replied. “You Willard Hoag?”

The sunken eyes betrayed nothing. They remained fixed on the interloper’s face, unblinking.

“I know you?”

“No, you don’t know me.”

Something danced in Willard’s eyes. “You niggers all look the same to me anyways.”

“Guessed you’d take that point of view, Willard. Man behind you is Clyde Benson. And you—”

The SIG lifted slightly in front of the bartender. “You Little Tom Rudge.”

The redness in Little Tom’s face was due only partly to the heat of the burning liquor. There was fury building in him. It was there in the trembling of his lips, in the way his fingers were clasping and unclasping. The action made the tattoo on his arm move, as if the angels were slowly waving the banner with the name “Kathleen.”

And all of that anger was directed at the black man now threatening him in his own bar.

“You want to tell me what’s happening here?” asked Little Tom.

Louis smiled.

“Atonement, that’s what’s happening here.”

It is ten after ten when the woman stands. They call her Grandma Lucy, although she is not yet fifty and still a beautiful woman with youth in her eyes and few lines on her dark skin. At her feet sits a boy, seven or eight years old, but already tall for his age. A radio plays Bessie Smith’s

“Weeping Willow Blues.”

The woman called Grandma Lucy wears only a nightdress and shawl, and her feet are bare, yet she rises and walks through the doorway, descending the steps into the yard with careful, measured strides. Behind her walks the little boy, her grandson. He calls to her—“Grandma Lucy, what’s the matter?”—but she does not reply. Later she will tell him about the worlds within worlds, about the places where the membrane separating the living from the dead is so thin that they can see one another, touch one another. She will tell him of the difference between day-walkers and nightwalkers, of the claims that the dead make upon those left behind. And she will talk of the road that we all walk, and that we all share, the living and the dead alike. But for now she just gathers her shawl closer to her and continues toward the edge of the forest, where she stops and waits in the moonless night. There is a light among the trees, as if a meteor has descended from the heavens and is now traveling close to the ground, flaming and yet not flaming, burning and yet not burning. There is no heat, but something is ablaze at the heart of that light.