Lightning Men

by Thomas Mullen

  “This Gilmore probably isn’t, either. Come on. I’m not saying I’ll interrogate him, I just want to be able to look him in the eye. See what he gives away.”

  The reverend held out the bowl. Lucius took a handful. They were sweet and delicious and he himself could eat piles of them if given the chance.

  “I suppose you’re the last person I should remind, but: you should be careful what you wish for. And yes, you can come to the meeting. Tomorrow morning at ten.”

  By early evening, William had returned to Morehouse and Reginald had retired to his wife and children. The early rising reverend had turned in as well, and Marshall was perusing the family’s book collection in the study while Lucius handed him another rye. The job’s late hours made it impossible for Boggs to go to sleep early even on his one night off. Normally he would have a date with Julie, but he had pointedly let this night come without setting something up. He still wasn’t sure what to do.

  “How are you taking to the job, son?”

  Boggs thought for a moment. “There was a spell in the beginning when I thought it would get easier with time. I don’t think that way anymore.”

  “Which part you find harder, the white cops who hate you for thinking you’re as good as them, or the colored folk who hate you for ‘acting white’?”

  How freeing it felt to talk with someone who could actually understand his experience. He tried to imagine how it felt to stand, as Marshall had, before a rural judge and jury, where the simple facts of his suit and tie and proper diction must have enraged them.

  “I knew the white cops would be awful. But knowing it and feeling it every day, right in your face . . . That’s something different.”

  “Your father protected you from a lot of that growing up, huh? Sweet Auburn. This is a special place. Reminds me of Harlem, only smaller. And with better weather.”

  “And better-looking women.”

  “Ha!” Marshall leaned forward. “Get yourself to Harlem, boy, and you’ll see some women. Hell, we have half of the Georgia-born girls by now, so many are coming north.”

  Lucius smiled—Marshall was one of the few people who could cuss in this house and not be chastised for it. “I suppose my father did protect us.” The thought did not warm his heart. Earlier in the evening, when they’d been exchanging news, Lucius had noted how his father bragged to Marshall about William’s latest academic accomplishment and Reginald’s promotion, had even mentioned a recent school recital by one of the Boggs grandchildren, but had failed to mention Lucius’s engagement. The old man was refusing to admit the marriage was possible. It was as though he knew, somehow, that something would happen in Julie’s life, some past sin revisiting, to chase Lucius away.

  “I could put you in touch with some Negro cops up in New York if you ever need someone to compare notes,” Marshall said. “Trust me, it ain’t no cakewalk up there, either.”

  “So even if you get us backward Southerners to catch up with the rest of the country, that’s no cakewalk?”

  “They still find ways to have segregation even when it isn’t explicitly written into the law. Smart fellow like you, I can’t be telling you anything you don’t already know.”

  “I just . . . I want to believe there’s a better place to strive for. I want to believe it’s real.”

  “I’m not saying it’s not real. Just that winning one battle doesn’t make the next day as easy as you might hope. Biggest case I ever won, I celebrated and had a few too many of these,” and he swirled the rye again, “but the next morning I woke up and still had a case to fight somewhere. With a hangover.”

  The phone rang, very late for a call. Boggs hurried into the kitchen and answered it during the second ring. “Boggs residence.”

  “It’s Tommy. I need you to steal your old man’s car and get over to Hanford Park, fast.”

  33

  PAST MIDNIGHT, BOGGS saw a trio lingering outside.

  Malcolm must have noticed from the way Boggs’s shoulders had tensed, or maybe he’d spied the reaction in Boggs’s eyes, though that would have been tough given the room’s darkness. Malcolm scooted toward him. They were sitting on the floor of the front parlor. Curtains drawn, lights out. Hannah had finally gone to bed no more than half an hour ago; she’d agreed only when they said they’d wake her in two hours so they could rest in shifts. Boggs was holding his pistol and Malcolm had a Winchester repeating rifle.

  “I don’t see any guns,” Boggs said softly. When he’d arrived an hour ago, he’d drawn the curtains in such a way that he could see through a tiny sliver, just enough to keep watch. Malcolm had been looking through one of the side windows, which afforded a view of an intersection to the north.

  Boggs had arrived here in his father’s Buick, pistol in his pocket and a knapsack concealing a rifle that now sat just a few feet behind him. He had driven as fast as he could until he was at the edge of the neighborhood, at which point he had decelerated to a crawl so he could scope out the area. He’d noted a larger-than-usual amount of light on in people’s homes for such an hour, but no one had seemed to be out on the street.

  He’d slouched low as he’d driven, knowing that his skin color would be seen as a provocation to the sorts of people he was hoping to protect the Greers from. When he reached their house, he pulled all the way into the driveway and quickly walked to the back door, knocking six times, as he’d told them he would.

  An hour later he was watching the three white men. They weren’t directly across the street but were one house over, a good twenty feet from the nearest streetlamp, making it hard to see any details. Two had hands in their pockets—a chill had descended on the city—and Boggs still saw no weapons. Then one of those hands emerged with a flask. The man took a snort and passed it around. Not a gun, but not a good sign.

  “Know any of them?” Boggs asked.

  “One in red lives in that house, I think. Never said a word to me one way or the other.”

  Malcolm had been discharged from the hospital that morning. His face still showed signs of the beating, not that Boggs had gotten a good look at him: every light in the house was out, at Boggs’s instruction.

  The three white men each took a slug from the flask. Someone took a second. It would be empty soon. They were talking, not terribly animated. Boggs had cracked the windows open when he arrived, but the crickets and locusts—quieter now, a vestige of summer not yet removed from the cool October nights—were just loud enough to conceal whatever the men were discussing.

  All his life Boggs had heard stories of the horrible few nights in ’06 when the white people had rioted through downtown. His father had been a child, yet the reverend vividly recalled the night when his own father, a postal carrier, had run into his house for refuge at midday, and several other relatives and friends had hid there while the white people raged. Reverend Boggs’s adult relatives had sat sentry all through those nights, holding rifles should any white people attempt to storm the house that the family had owned for years. And here Boggs was, nearly half a century later, on the verge of seeing the same madness. No one in his family had died that night, but dozens of Negroes had been murdered during the riot, countless others beaten and maimed. Whole neighborhoods of Negro-owned houses and businesses had been torched. In the ensuing months, the colored residents of downtown fled east, settling in what would become Sweet Auburn. Decades later, they had created their own, separate community. But the city was too crowded now, and there wasn’t room for all of the Negroes in Sweet Auburn and Summerhill and Buttermilk Bottom and Darktown and the other areas whites had restricted them to. Had Malcolm and Hannah and the other two Negro families had any choice but to try living here? Was there really a choice between taking this chance and living in a hovel in Darktown, in a third-floor walk-up with a door accessible only through a lightless alley, where men smoked marijuana on their front stoop even before dark, where drunks harassed them and boys with knives tried to take what was theirs, where only ten Negro cops tried to protect t
housands upon thousands? All to live in a tiny apartment with a shared bathroom and no kitchen sink?

  Malcolm crept to a side window. “No one else is coming, I don’t think.” He scooted back to Boggs. “Pulled a lot of late nights in the Pacific. Did a lot of watching out at nothing. Didn’t think I’d have to do it in my own city.”

  The white men gazed at Malcolm’s house. Boggs knew they couldn’t see inside, yet still he felt their predatory gaze. The men smoked, the ends of their cigarettes dancing like fireflies. Sometimes they laughed.

  Boggs watched in silence, seething. He wished he could stand out there with a partner, in uniform, but the mere sight would drive the neighbors wild. The line of how to wield power without provoking greater backlash was so narrow as to be invisible.

  In ninety minutes, Smith would be off duty and would catch a ride to Hanford Park with Dewey. Until then, Boggs was the only cop here.

  The three white men looked to Boggs’s right. Another group was approaching. Three more men, in what appeared to be uniforms. Khaki or olive, hard to tell given the dim light. Then Boggs saw the lightning bolt patches on their sleeves.

  “Lord. The Columbians.”

  “The who?”

  Boggs told Malcolm about them. “Have you seen them around here before?”

  “No.”

  One of the white men from the first group pointed at the tall Columbian who stood in the middle and carried himself with the gait of a leader.

  Boggs had called Hanford Park’s other two Negro families, warning them. They had exchanged numbers with Malcolm and Hannah when they’d first moved in, trading pleasantries about future cookouts or cakewalks, not realizing that the first time they’d call would be to warn each other of danger. One of the men Boggs talked to had said he would take his wife and two children to his brother’s house in Mechanicsville for the night. The other, though, had insisted on standing firm; Boggs hoped all was quiet at that house, a block behind this one and out of view.

  “You recognize them?” Boggs asked. He still suspected the Columbians were the ones who’d beaten Malcolm. “From that night?”

  Malcolm nudged Boggs aside so he could get a closer look. “I just didn’t see anything. I keep thinking maybe I’ll see somebody and it’ll jar some memory. But they got me from behind. Didn’t see a damn thing.”

  Boggs wondered if Rakestraw had spoken to any of them, checked their alibis. Would he really investigate a white person’s crime against a Negro in his own backyard? It would be so much more convenient for him and his family and his bank account if he simply ignored the crime, or helped cover it up.

  Headlights. Boggs let the curtains close even more, narrowing his view. He watched as a car approached from the south. A squad car. It pulled in front of the six men, its red lights off.

  Boggs couldn’t make out the driver, as the window was up and the faint amount of light reflected off of it. One of the men pointed at Malcolm’s house. He could hear raised voices but couldn’t make out what they were saying.

  Then he saw the men laughing. The squad car pulled away.

  “What’s happening?” Malcolm asked.

  “Good ol’ boys being boys.” But the fact that the squad car had left made his heart sink.

  Only minutes later, his feeling was confirmed: the six men outside were joined by three more. Then another, and another. None of these were in those Nazi getups, but still, they all looked quite comfortable out there together.

  Then a group of four more. Soon Boggs counted more than two dozen, including a few women, arms crossed, and a couple of teenage boys. He didn’t see any weapons yet but he couldn’t see everyone, couldn’t see their belts or bulging pockets. And with this many, they’d barely even need weapons. Rocks weren’t hard to find. And most of them probably had lighters in their pockets, matches.

  Some looked angry but many were smiling, entertained. Like they’d been invited to some climactic event and they couldn’t wait to see it commence.

  “Jesus,” Malcolm said. “What do we do? Should I fire a warning shot?”

  The gun handle had gone slick in Boggs’s hand. “No.”

  “Then what do we do?”

  Boggs tried to sound calm. “We wait.”

  The whites of Malcolm’s eyes had grown. “Until when?”

  He took a breath. “Until we stop waiting.”

  34

  THAT SAME NIGHT, Dale’s one-time friend Iggy was in the midst of one of those rocky stretches in his marriage, during which his wife decided she and the kids should best live elsewhere. Her folks were only three miles away, so for Iggy it felt like a short vacation. The house to himself, no one complaining or turning minor disagreements into crises. He knew he would have to drive to the in-laws soon, go through the song and dance of apologizing to win her back, but frankly he was enjoying the silence too much.

  He’d stopped at the bar on the way home from work, only meaning to have one, yet somehow he’d managed three—or was it four?—by the time he left. He’d been leaving the front door unlocked in case his wife decided to return, as she chronically lost keys and purses and matches and cigarettes and other items of importance, and he didn’t want her to come back only to find herself locked out, though there would have been justice aplenty in that.

  He opened the door, stepped into the bungalow’s small foyer, and hit the light switch. Nothing. He cursed—was there an outage? No, the streetlamps were on. Maybe it was the bulb.

  Then his head exploded and his knees liquefied. He landed on the floor, his body numb.

  Sensation returned in time for him to feel something grab him by the armpits, dragging him into the familyless family room. He tried to push it away, tried to stand up, but two blows to his ribs left him flat on the ground again. The pain made him dizzy, and together with the darkness and his drunkenness he found himself imagining a grizzly bear loose in his house, mauling him to death.

  Then the small lamp his wife liked to read by flickered on. Before him loomed a bear-sized man in a plaid shirt and jeans. The butt of a pistol stuck out from beneath his belt buckle like some terrible metal phallus.

  Something pressed on Iggy’s back. He couldn’t see behind him but it was most likely a foot belonging to another man. Or possibly a bear.

  “Inman Daniel Christiansen,” the man by the lamp said. “Aka Iggy.”

  “The hell’s going on?”

  “You beat up some coloreds in Coventry a few nights back.”

  “Like hell I did.”

  Perhaps he’d had more than four beers after all. This was a fever dream, like delirium tremens, only he was drunk. Surely it was a hallucination of some kind. He’d always been terrified of bears.

  “You left these behind while you were there.” The giant dropped something onto the floor, just in front of Iggy’s face. Something metal and shiny and spinning. No, the metal thing wasn’t spinning, Iggy’s drunken perspective was. The thing on the ground was still. His dog tags! With his name imprinted on them. He’d realized they were gone a few days ago, had looked everywhere for the damn things.

  “Those ain’t mine.”

  The giant kicked him in the ribs. Iggy thought he might throw up.

  Then a foot nearly stepped on Iggy’s head, and the old floor creaked beneath the man’s shifting weight. He was bending down, lowering his head to almost Iggy’s level.

  “Me and my brother really don’t care if you beat on a couple niggers. What we do care about is our other brother being killed in Coventry that same night, something that nobody, not even the cops, can tell us shit about.” The man paused for this to sink in. “We’re awfully keen on figuring out what exactly happened. Care to tell us?”

  35

  THREE MILES FROM Hanford Park, it seemed fitting Jeremiah would find himself back at the rail yards for today’s shift of “work.” Not normal work, he knew, and not even day, as darkness shrouded him.

  That afternoon Jeremiah had reported to the Rook for another night of washing a
nd rinsing, but Feckless had stopped him at the door. Turned out, he didn’t really need that kind of help. He’d only given Jeremiah those first days of labor out of pity. No, if Jeremiah really wanted to earn money from Feckless, he would need to do something altogether different.

  A week earlier, perhaps Jeremiah would have said no. But days of being told no while pursuing other employment, days of barely finding food to eat, days of sleeping in a rat-infested basement, had swayed him.

  So Jeremiah was driving a tan GMC pickup. In back, a canvas top obscured what they were hauling: a quartet of trash barrels, two of them empty. In shotgun rode Cyrus: light-skinned, maybe twenty, and quite thin. Jeremiah couldn’t tell if Cyrus’s eyes were a bit larger than normal or if he was just perpetually on alert.

  “You done time, huh?” Cyrus asked after Jeremiah had been driving for ten minutes.

  “Yes.”

  “How long?”

  “Five years. One month. And six days.”

  Jeremiah was facing forward but he could tell Cyrus was staring at him. After a two-second pause, Cyrus laughed. “Damn, you strange.”

  Funny that he was being teased. He had thought his time would lend him some status around hoods like this. But it never worked that way with Jeremiah. He wasn’t sure why. People sensed in him some goodness, which many took for weakness, and no one took seriously.

  Cyrus had bragged earlier about the pistol in his pocket, implying that Jeremiah would be unwise to challenge him. He apparently hadn’t realized Jeremiah carried one as well.

  How strangely life was twisting before Jeremiah.

  He had expected to be washing dishes again, yet instead he was doing this, something that made use of his past experience. He wanted to stay true to his promise to the Lord, true to his promise to Julie so long ago, that he would not do the devil’s work again. This morning he had woken up thinking that the strange nocturnal visit from Officer Tall had been a dream (how had he known Jeremiah was camped out in that basement?) until he saw the gun lying there. Not a dream, then, but something that had been somehow preordained, scripted in advance. He had told the Lord he would walk a righteous path, yet this messenger had been sent to him, bearing food and a lethal gift and a distinctly nonrighteous command: kill Boggs. He knew it was wrong, crooked, diabolical, yet it also felt so simple and straightforward, after days of the free world’s puzzling complexity.