Lightning Men

by Thomas Mullen

  Boggs had the sense Vanders’s words weren’t directed solely at the Negroes but at the other white men as well. There seemed to be a difference of opinion on that side of the table as to how bright of an idea this meeting was.

  “The greater issue is that there is a severe shortage of housing for Negroes,” Reverend Boggs explained. “Much of the existing properties in Negro areas are substandard at best, and we have thousands more people moving into the city. No one wants to live in a dilapidated shack in Darktown or a hovel in Buttermilk Bottom that doesn’t have plumbing.”

  “All that new public housing was supposed to remedy that,” Gilmore said.

  “It has helped, but there is still a shortage,” Darden said. “Particularly for those Negroes with means beyond what public housing offers.”

  Boggs remembered what Reginald had told him: Darden had spent a not inconsiderable amount of money on a wooded parcel northeast of Hanford Park, not far from one of the public housing complexes put up during the New Deal. He planned to build single-family homes and an apartment building for Negroes. Any decisions about the future of Hanford Park would have a huge impact on Darden’s nearby investment.

  “We may have differences of opinion on a lot of things,” Puckett said, “but one thing I’m sure we agree on is that we want to avoid violence. We don’t want people taking up arms and rioting because things have gotten out of hand.”

  “There’s already been violence,” Boggs pointed out. “One of the Negro residents was nearly killed.”

  “None of us condone that,” Gilmore claimed, “and none of us want anything like that to happen again. That’s why we’re here.”

  They’re so slick, Boggs thought. With one hand they beat Malcolm and nearly run riot like last night, and with the other they offer bland sentiments and claim to be moral and just, all the while warning you that the first hand is still clenched and ready.

  “One of the things we had been planning to put on the table today was an offer to have the neighborhood association buy back the properties those three Negro households bought,” Gilmore said. “But, ah, as I understand it, just last night the money was stolen.”

  Boggs knew about the break-in, but he hadn’t realized what exactly had been stolen.

  “Now, I do hope the money will be recovered,” Gilmore said. “But if it isn’t, then I’m afraid we will not be in a position to buy those properties.”

  One of the Negro families had temporarily moved out of their home, but Boggs had told his father not to disclose that. If we let the white people know that they’ve bullied Negroes away, they’ll be emboldened. And if word spreads that one of the houses is vacant, it’s more likely to be torched.

  “We feel that the needs of the greater community could be met and more housing could be available to colored families if we began to treat Magnolia Street as the new border,” Puckett said, removing from one of his folders another map. Sure enough, the area north of Magnolia was marked White, with Colored to the south. Magnolia wasn’t a main road like Beacon, but it ran along the southern end of the park, making it a logical border in the white people’s minds.

  Boggs said to his father, “So they’re asking us to sign off on restricting Negroes’ right to live where they see fit? Didn’t the Supreme Court already have something to say about that?”

  A flash of anger in his father’s eyes, but before he could reply, Puckett did.

  “First of all, we’re not a housing authority or the state senate, we’re just a group of private citizens having a conversation. There isn’t a court in America that has a problem with that. Secondly, no one will sign anything. And third, as Mr. Gilmore just explained, you aren’t the only ones who would be giving something up. You agree that the Negroes stay south of Magnolia, and we agree that those whites who now live on those three square blocks—and have been for decades—will move out.”

  “That’s not a minor sacrifice,” Gilmore said. “It’s three blocks down and five across for you all. And we’d be the ones who’d have to tell those folks they have to sell. I assure you, those are not conversations I’m looking forward to.”

  Puckett said, “Just like you, we are trying to avoid bloodshed and chaos.”

  “And those white people would all move because you tell them to?” Boggs asked.

  “They would be extremely foolhardy not to,” Puckett said. “No one wants to be the last white house in a neighborhood of Negroes.”

  “Lucius,” Reverend Boggs said, “I left my briefcase in the car. Could you get it for me?”

  He felt the blood rise in his cheeks. He was being banished.

  “Yes, sir. I’ll be right back.” He walked slowly through the hall and back to the elevator and its nervous young operator. Out the lobby and down the block to the car. There the briefcase sat, no doubt left on purpose, just in case his father needed to employ this ruse.

  By the time he returned to the room, everyone was shaking hands. Not celebrating, exactly, but difficult business had been worked out, and the grown-ups had restored order.

  He endured a lecture from his father during the drive home. “This is how we do things in Atlanta. This is why we’ve had peace for so long.” It made Boggs sad, as if the city should congratulate itself by posting a knockoff of one of those factory signs, “Welcome To Atlanta, 44 Years Without A Race Riot!” “I know it feels wrong to concede anything when you’re sitting across the table from them, but that’s the thing: we were across the table from them. In most Southern towns, white folks wouldn’t consider sitting down with us. Don’t you appreciate how rare that is? I have worked very hard for a very long time to have earned my seat at that table. I can’t have hotheaded talk jeopardize that, badge or no badge.”

  He was not in the mood to fight with his father—his father who might have been right about Julie all along, his father who would no doubt never let him forget making such an error in judgment. Boggs feared he had many days of penitence to go, so he needed to choose his battles carefully.

  They were pulling into the driveway when they saw Boggs’s mother in the front yard, hurrying toward them, her brow creased with worry.

  As soon as they stepped out, she walked past the reverend and right up to her son. “Tommy Smith called. His sister and brother-in-law are in jail.”

  41

  SMITH DROVE SLOWLY down Malcolm and Hannah’s block. Midmorning and gorgeous, the purple and white aster blooming in more than a few front yards, a young woman planting bulbs in a bed alongside her driveway.

  Malcolm and Hannah had been arrested about two hours ago. He saw no squad car in front of their place, no yellow tape barring entrance, no police presence of any kind.

  He had borrowed Dewey’s car to get here, lying when Dewey asked if he had a license. He’d only driven in the States a few times, but in the war he had driven not only a tank but also various trucks, so he had a good enough knack for it. The engine did not appreciate the way he used the clutch, based on the noises it made, but he hadn’t hit anyone or been pulled over.

  Smith pulled into the Greers’ driveway and parked beside the house. He exited quickly and made for the back door, less likely to be spotted. With a spare key they’d given him, he let himself in. He didn’t call out hello. Apart from the hum of their refrigerator and the birdcall from some opened windows, he heard nothing. The place smelled of stale coffee.

  First he checked to see if they’d left the rifle out in the open, but if they had, the white cops would have found it. In which case Malcolm was already doomed. He didn’t see it, so next he checked the obvious places: the closets, under their bed. Then, back in the parlor, he looked under the sofa. Where was it? He sat down, and then he felt the rifle, stuffed behind the cushions.

  The white cops must not have been looking for it. They’d simply come to pin a burglary on Malcolm, not realizing he had committed a much worse crime.

  Smith wrapped the rifle in a spare blanket from the bedroom closet. Then he exited through the back door
and hid the rifle in the trunk of Dewey’s car. He slowly backed out of the drive, scanning every near window and yard as he did, hoping to slip out unnoticed.

  Speed limits obeyed, rear mirrors checked constantly, yellow lights humbly acquiesced to, he made it to his side of town in twenty minutes.

  He was beyond exhausted. His eyes hurt, pulse pounding in his temples. He had gone from his night shift to his overnight vigil with Malcolm, leaving at sunrise around seven, then managed barely three hours of sleep before being woken by pounding feet from the upstairs neighbors, informing him of the phone call, which was Hannah calling in tears from jail.

  He was still reeling from his revelation about what Malcolm had done for Feckless. (Did Hannah know? He hadn’t dared ask last night.) He knew that he himself was wading deep into morally suspect waters just by agreeing to keep silent about it.

  But knowing that the white cops were pinning the burglary on the Greers, using their power to so casually eliminate the problem of Negro neighbors—it was more than he could bear. The white people had gone too far. He knew they went this far quite often—even further—but this was his family. He needed to protect them from the sheer evil of the other cops, of their new neighbors, of all those lightning men in their various uniforms. He would protect them, even if it meant also protecting them from the consequences of Malcolm’s dirty work for Feckless.

  He couldn’t imagine what his straitlaced, preacher’s-son partner would say if he’d told him about this. The hell with Boggs. As much as Smith loved him for sitting vigil with the Greers, for putting his life on the line for his family, he knew this was more than Boggs could ever condone or forgive. For God’s sake, Boggs was about to drop the love of his life, all because she’d once been with a man who’d smuggled cigarettes! The perceived purity of the Boggs line was more important to his partner than a happy life with Julie. No, Boggs wouldn’t understand this at all. Smith hated what he was doing, and he despised how Malcolm had turned himself into a drug dealer’s goon, and perhaps if the situation had been different, he would have let the arm of the law take Malcolm all the way to the electric chair, would have allowed his pregnant sister to become a widow. But what good would that do? Who would that possibly help? It would be a victory for the lightning men, and he could not abide that.

  Fifteen minutes later, the city vanished, overtaken by red-clay forest, the autumn sunlight sharply cutting through the boughs. Tar paper shacks down here, dirt-poor Negroes living without plumbing in an area that seemed so many worlds from the unseen capitol building, which Smith had passed a moment ago. Then farther south the road straightened and he passed the local prison, trying not to think about the murder weapon in his trunk or stare at the razor wire and the armed guards on those watchtowers, trying not to think of some boys from his childhood he knew were inside, there but for the grace of God or sheer luck, there but for better parenting, there but for the fact that they were offered a quick way to make some cabbage and I wasn’t, there but for the fact that I was too afraid to run with those boys, or too square, there but for the fact that I got hired for this job when I applied but Malcolm didn’t, he told me so when I got the job, we hadn’t even known the other had applied, and if the Department had chosen him instead of me, where would I be right now? Would Malcolm be disposing of a murder weapon for me?

  He needed to hurry back to the city, see if the lawyer Boggs had recommended had visited Hannah and Malcolm in jail yet. Like with Thunder Malley, he feared someone in the Department would have reason to permanently silence Malcolm. He couldn’t imagine how his pregnant sister was being treated.

  He came to an old quarry, some of which had been filled with water in a sad attempt to turn these trash-strewn woods into a pleasant escape for city folks. No cars in the gravel lot. He hiked along the trail ten minutes before cutting into a narrow, untended side trail he’d walked once before, ignoring the Warning signs until he came to one of the still-empty pits. A great wound in the earth, the striations of orange and red and so many shades of brown he was amazed to see them all, a veritable rainbow of brownness, and beyond that, black, a pit of endless depth.

  He used the blanket to wipe the gun down once more, then tossed it. A full five seconds until he heard it strike anything. A cool breeze hit him then, as if coming from the pit, and he wrapped the blanket around his shoulders like some vagabond as he walked back to the car.

  42

  THE LOCATION OF Joe’s Ribs, one block from police headquarters, meant that the barbecue joint was responsible for countless failed physicals. Sergeant Gene Slater was a regular patron, though he’d managed to eat there for two decades without putting on a spare tire. Tall fellows were like that sometimes, McInnis noted as he slid into the chair opposite his former partner.

  Slater was dressed in his uniform blues, this being his break. McInnis had a few hours to go, wearing a white polo shirt with the police crest in the corner.

  “That still your old Plymouth parked at headquarters?” McInnis asked. “I heard your wife has herself a Chrysler convertible.”

  “It’s not a good idea to drive something like that to the station. Hello to you, too.”

  “These last few years have been good to you.”

  “Can’t complain.”

  “Must be nice to supplement one’s salary like that.”

  The pert waitress took McInnis’s order—pulled pork, collards, sweet tea—and left.

  “Feeling left out?” Slater asked with a smile. “You had your chance, Mac. Plenty of chances. I seem to recall a certain high-and-mighty attitude, an unwillingness to play by the same rules as everyone else.”

  “I don’t regret my decisions.”

  “Yet it’s why you find yourself working down in the Congo.” Slater leaned back and laced his fingers behind his head, still smiling. “How the hell were we ever partners?”

  “We had a few similarities then. You were a fairly good cop, for one. Just a tad greedy.”

  “You think I’m the one who changed? Please. You were a good cop then, too, ’til you decided you liked informing on others so much.”

  McInnis looked around the joint for a moment—crowded, half of the clientele cops. It smelled like heaven set on fire. “Gene, you and your boys need to find a new way to supplement your income, outside my precinct, effective immediately.”

  Slater sipped his tea. He looked entertained. “Men who sell liquor and drugs sell ’em to those that use ’em. Coloreds love that stuff. Just good business, Mac.”

  “Be that as it may, your business is making things difficult for my officers.”

  “Shit, your officers. You make it sound all professional, not like the laughingstock it is.”

  “They are men working under my command. And maybe you don’t give a damn, but they can’t do their job while officers under your command are helping move drugs into their beat.”

  “Who says my men are doing anything like that?”

  So Slater was calling McInnis’s bluff, but that wouldn’t stop McInnis from bluffing some more: “Are you asking me to provide evidence? Is that really what you want?”

  “You’re right, I don’t give a damn about your boys. You keep on about this, and I’ll start feeling the same way about you.”

  “In that case, let me rephrase it without a question mark at the end. Wait, no, there wasn’t one to begin with. So I’ll just make sure it’s real clear for you. If you and your boys don’t stop protecting bootleggers and dealers in my precinct, then the taxpaying citizens of Atlanta will soon be reading yet another front-page story about corrupt officers being busted.”

  Silence while Slater sat there, watching a man he thought he once knew.

  “You’re serious?”

  “I’ve never been accused of being a very comedic man.”

  “Then you’re suicidal.”

  “Nah, that’s un-Christian. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know, as a courtesy, that, two years in, we’re done arresting the little fish and we’re movin
g up.”

  “Like Thunder Malley, huh? That didn’t work out too well for anyone.”

  “No, it didn’t. We’ve got enough murders to clear without having to deal with turf battles between rival groups moving dope, to say nothing of cops getting their hands dirty.”

  “You think I’m to blame? That’s what you came here to accuse me of? Why would I do something like that?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I should have asked Isaiah Tanner a few years ago.”

  McInnis felt right then that the scathing look in Slater’s eyes was something that few other men had ever seen and survived.

  “That is ancient history,” Slater said, “and not worth bringing up.”

  For someone who spent so much of his time putting away criminals, it was galling to have this conversation, speaking in code like this. How badly McInnis wanted to just come out and say it: Slater, your MO is to protect smuggling rings in colored neighborhoods, taking your cut while you do what you can to dissuade other cops from taking a closer look. And when, alas, things do go sour—due to an FBI investigation into wartime theft in ’45, or due to Negro cops stopping a drug shipment this month—you cover your tracks by killing off whoever might be able to identify you, lay low for a bit, then start again with the next group.

  The waitress passed by and Slater asked for his order to go, on second thought. McInnis said the same.

  “I understand the relatives of one of your officers were just arrested,” Slater said. “Smith, right? Sounds like my ol’ buddy Helton has an ironclad case against them for B and E. They’ll do a lot of time for that. And don’t we have rules about not hiring people with felons in their family?”

  “That doesn’t apply retroactively, you know that.”