Lightning Men

by Thomas Mullen

  They sat there a long while.

  “I know I’ve . . . pretty much disappeared the last couple weeks. There were some things going on with my partner’s family, and . . . I think I just needed time to get my head right about this.”

  “How about your heart?”

  “My heart’s crazy about you, girl.” He smiled, nearly laughed. “Sometimes my head tries to tell me something else, but I’ll stop listening to it. It isn’t as smart as it thinks it is.”

  “I know this must have been confusing for you, but . . . I didn’t know any other way.”

  “I understand now.”

  “But you can’t keep doing this to me, Lucius. Can’t pinwheel back and forth all the time. When that preacher says ’til death do us part, that’s serious business.”

  “I know that. And I still plan on saying ‘I do.’ If you’ll have me.”

  It was as if she realized she’d been breathing shallowly all week, and only now did her lungs expand and her shoulders rise. She took his face in her hands, held it there for a moment, then kissed his lips.

  “Yes, I’ll still have you.”

  They kissed again, longer this time, long enough that she feared her parents might get up for a glass of water and find them like this.

  When they stopped, she said, “I’ll have you, but you’re gonna have to sweet-talk Sage some. He’s sore you haven’t come by in a while.”

  “I’ll make it right with him. And with you.”

  Despite the hour, they talked longer, about Sage, about Lucius’s parents, about Smith’s family troubles in Hanford Park. The sorts of things they hadn’t been able to talk about, that had been eclipsed by her past, which hopefully now was receding again to where it belonged, like a distant planet, ancient and cold.

  Then she had another thought about Jeremiah, and though she probably should have let the subject stay closed, she said, “You asked me once why Jeremiah wasn’t killed when those other men were. I don’t know. I never knew. But I know what he would’ve said: it was because he’s been chosen.”

  “What?”

  “Chosen by God. For something great. He said that sometimes.” The memory of it made her smile wistfully. It also made her almost start crying again. “Said the Lord was going to do something amazing with him. He always believed that. And I did, too, for a time.”

  She felt something in her chest that she needed to press down, forever.

  “But he was wrong,” she said. “He was just another boy who got into trouble. God didn’t want nothing to do with him.”

  Shuffling feet, tiny ones. She looked up just as Sage walked into the parlor. “Mama?”

  Lucius was even faster than she was, walking toward the boy and bending down on one knee.

  “You all right, son?”

  “I had a nightmare.”

  She felt guilty for not having been in her bed when he woke looking for her. On the other hand, this was a drill she’d performed so many times now, so she stayed on the sofa and watched as Lucius lifted Sage into his arms.

  “It wasn’t real. Let’s get you back in bed.”

  Eyes half-mast, Sage briefly looked at her, no more confused by Lucius’s presence here than he was by the sudden absence of whatever monsters or demons he’d been dreaming of. He let his head droop onto Lucius’s shoulder as he carried him through the doorway and into a place where those demons would not catch him.

  EPILOGUE

  WORD SPREAD QUICKLY through Hanford Park: the neighborhood association had come to a new understanding with the Negro community, and borders were being redrawn. Magnolia Street would now serve as the dividing line. Three square blocks that had been all-white for years—until two months ago—would soon be acceptable for Negro homeowners. Which meant three square blocks of white people would need to sell their homes, immediately.

  Those who found themselves on the wrong side of a line someone else had drawn were outraged, as were plenty of others, livid that white people’s property rights could be forfeited like that. And by whom? Not by elected officials but by a few self-important men who’d sat at a table with Negroes. Yet once the deal was announced, it was like a stampede broke loose as people moved to sell, imbuing a mere gentlemen’s agreement with all the force of ratified law.

  The desire to torch those three Negro houses became all the more intense. But that only would have cast a darker shadow on the neighborhood, driving home values further down. It was now in the white residents’ best interests to keep the peace so they could get out for as much money as possible. A few more bricks were tossed through some Negroes’ windows, and some garbage barrels were emptied onto their lawns, but no more blood was shed. For Sale signs sprouted like autumn-blooming goldenrod on every front yard, and the Negro realtists descended without fear this time, no need for Cassie Rakestraw or anyone else to document license numbers.

  The Klan shoot-out had horrified not just Hanford Park but far beyond. The violence in an otherwise idyllic area generated headlines nationwide, even in some Northern papers that liked to look down their noses at those backward Confederates, even though housing-related violence was occurring in Chicago, Detroit, and other cities where people couldn’t buy a decent biscuit or enjoy a warm November afternoon. The death of a policeman who’d been clad in Klan attire made the story unprintable for some publications; others ran the story but omitted that detail. The pertinent facts were that four men had been shot to death, and despite the racial tensions in Hanford Park, every victim and shooter had been white. Salacious as the event was, a certain shame about this one-sided bloodbath led residents to avoid the subject after the first days of shock. They seemed to understand that something terrible had occurred, something no one condoned but no one had stopped, and for many this only underscored the fact that Hanford Park just wasn’t what it had once been, and the time had come to leave.

  Within the doomed three-block zone marked as transitional stood the Rakestraw residence, a mere block from the new border separating it from acceptability and the abyss. Denny Jr. would never learn how to ride a bike in Hanford Park, Cassie realized. Maggie wouldn’t chalk hopscotch patterns on the sidewalk. The family would never host another cookout here or carry a Christmas tree through that front door. The bulbs she had just planted would yield orange and white tulips next spring to delight an altogether different kind of family.

  Among the first homeowners to sell were the Thameses. They sold so quickly that they had, in fact, disappeared.

  No one had seen them since the night Denny had demanded that the plumber confess to staging the burglary. The next day, after Rake had made his reports and spoken to all the investigators and tried without success to console his sister, who refused to let him come near her now, he had collapsed in bed. Fourteen hours later he woke up, and then, taking a drive to clear his mind, he saw the Sold sign in their front yard.

  No car in the driveway, the lights off. The rooms viewed through the break in the curtains looked hastily emptied. Furniture remained, but pictures had been removed from the walls, white rectangles of unfaded wallpaper glaring at Rake like the soulless eyes of some villain he couldn’t lay hands on.

  The next day, Rake learned that Thames had sold to a Realtor the day before. And Thames was a no-show at a deposition into the theft of the CAHP money. Without the city’s one witness, the Greers’ lawyer petitioned the judge to drop the case. Seeing that the community was already moving on from the crime—most of them were moving, quite literally—the judge agreed. The case dropped, Malcolm and Hannah walked out of jail and returned to their home, sweeping up the broken glass.

  In ten days, Hannah would go into early labor from the stress. Her small but healthy baby girl would be the first Negro born on that block in fifty years, yet by the time she mouthed her first words, the local playground would be busy with colored children.

  Sue Ellen and her boys left Atlanta.

  Their house, too, was within the newly Negroes-allowed area, so she had to sell. They mo
ved to Macon, where two of Dale’s sisters were raising families. Rake felt terrible when he remembered how calculating he’d once been, back when he’d imagined what might happen if Dale were jailed and Sue Ellen and the boys moved in with him. That had seemed like a horrible fate, yet now he wished he could have it. Anything would have been better than the crushing guilt he felt.

  He had failed to protect Dale from himself, from Dale’s delusions of power, from Dale’s cloying need to cast himself as the hero against Negro marauders. Rake had failed to protect his family from the changes happening around them, failed to keep the neighborhood’s anger from degenerating into violence, failed to win the support of any of his fellow officers. He likely would always be a pariah within the Department. First his former partner, Dunlow, disappears, and now two years later a white cop in a Klan getup is gunned down in a shoot-out in which Rake fired several shots. Would any officer ever trust him again? Who would promote someone with ties to two alarming incidents like that?

  And who had the other Klansmen been, the ones who’d escaped into the night? Were they cops as well? Cops he worked with? He feared he would always be surrounded by enemies who pretended to be friends, smiling to his face while planning the best time to slip a knife in his back. He would need to keep his guard up forever.

  He avoided discipline, though not suspicion, by leaving a few facts out of his official story. He explained that, after the GBI agents had spoken with him about Dale’s suspected involvement in the Coventry attack, he’d talked to Dale to ask if it was true. Rake lied and said that Dale had denied it, which had seemed good enough to Rake, but that the next night he’d decided to drop by his brother-in-law’s and ask a few follow-up questions. That’s when the Irons brothers had shown up, and the Klansmen, and Mrs. Bleedhorn, leading to the violent culmination of at least two different blood feuds.

  When Cassie asked Rake what had really happened with Dale, he told her the truth, making her vow never to tell another soul, certainly not Sue Ellen.

  “You did the right thing,” Cassie consoled him. “You put your family first. Anyone would have.” She’d kissed him on the lips, something he hadn’t felt he deserved or even wanted right then. “You do the right thing and you protect your family, then you’re right with God. What He does from there, no one can predict.”

  He couldn’t tell if such simplicity was naïveté or wisdom. Yet he clung to it.

  Some good news: Delmar Coyle was under arrest for conspiracy to assault his cousin, Martin Letcher. Rake had finally managed to track down the man claiming to be “Whitehouse”—witnesses at the bar where he and Dale had met that night described him, and it turned out he, too, was a cousin of Coyle’s and had felt their mutual relation, Letcher, needed to be taught a lesson. Rake wasn’t confident those charges against Coyle would stick—with Dale dead, they lacked key testimony—but once arrested the Columbians had quickly informed on each other for various other assaults and crimes. Anxious to avoid doing more time, Coyle did try to tempt investigators with a story about how Rake had been more involved in that Coventry Klan beating than they realized, but the investigators didn’t buy it. Or so Rake hoped.

  The mysterious phone caller to Rake, claiming he’d seen Klansmen beating Malcolm, had been a ruse, called in by one of the Columbians to throw Rake on the Klan’s trail. When Rake relayed this information to Smith, slightly apologetic for never solving the mystery of Malcolm’s assault, Smith had thanked him hurriedly and hung up. It made Rake wonder if Smith actually knew more about Malcolm’s beating than he let on, but at that point, Rake was past caring.

  One thing was certain: if Boggs, Smith, or any other Negro officer ever asked another favor of him, he would decline. He wouldn’t spit in their faces, no, but neither would he take a single risk for their cause ever again. He had his own battles to fight, and he couldn’t afford to weaken himself by associating with the troubles that shadowed their every step.

  The next shift for Boggs and Smith was very awkward indeed.

  Boggs at first couldn’t even bring himself to talk to his partner. Eventually he spoke, but only when necessary, avoiding the kind of chatter that usually made their shifts bearable. Smith had committed a grave sin in Boggs’s eyes—no, the Lord’s eyes, anyone’s eyes—and just because it happened to be a sin that benefited Boggs greatly, that shouldn’t matter.

  Their case against Feckless, meanwhile, was as dead as Jeremiah and Quentin Neale. Too many dead men, who couldn’t testify against Feckless. Malcolm only knew so much; the information he’d fed Boggs and Smith had been enough to lead them to the smuggling location and the shoot-out, but it wasn’t enough to get a judge to sign a warrant for them to search Feck’s bar or house. They and McInnis kept Malcolm’s identity as their source secret, lest he face retribution. Feck had lost a lot of his men, and the former smuggling point at the rail yards was being watched carefully, so at least they’d hindered his operation for now. They would have to hope his many losses would convince him to walk away from smuggling again.

  Malcolm had followed through on his promise to Smith, taking a construction job for one of Clancy Darden’s new Negro housing developments and staying away from the Rook, so far.

  Martin Letcher himself, though still recovering physically, was making out quite well financially. Agents backed by his real estate venture were happily buying homes from white families anxious to flee to the right side of the new color line. The agents would then, no doubt, resell those properties—at a significant markup—to Negro families who were even more desperate to leave the overcrowded, crime-ridden, run-down neighborhoods to which they’d previously been consigned.

  Rake soon saw that he and Cassie had no option but to sell. He managed to work through a different Realtor, at least; he could not bring himself to talk to anyone associated with Letcher, anyone associated with the case. Yet in a way, he understood now, everyone was associated with it.

  Their new home in Kirkwood, on the east side of the city, was not the disaster they’d feared. A retiring cop was moving to Savannah and wanted to unload his place quickly, no haggling. The front and backyards were smaller than their Hanford Park place, and the three-bedroom home needed more work, but it had an unfinished basement they might expand upon. The trees here weren’t as tall, and the lack of an oak canopy would be especially disappointing in the summer heat. But that gave them a better view of the lavender sunsets, and they were still close to downtown. The neighbors seemed friendly so far, the lack of tension almost surreal.

  “I might even like this place better,” Cassie said the first night, when they sat in the backyard, listening to the new sounds: the different traffic patterns, the louder owls, the occasional train whistle.

  “Me, too,” Rake lied. Because as promising as the house was, living here felt like failure, and he feared it always would.

  Boggs realized he was supposed to be happy now, yet he felt consumed with self-loathing.

  He had Julie now, but at what cost? He had killed once before, in self-defense, yet this time, even though he hadn’t been the one to pull the trigger on Jeremiah, guilt overpowered him. It was as though his selfish thoughts had been made flesh, compelling his partner to become a killer. Smith had killed in the war, many times, but surely this was different. Boggs’s pride and jealousy and fear had allowed him to be morally compromised. He needed to put an end to it.

  Two years earlier he had come close to resigning from his position. He’d had second thoughts after a near-death experience, deciding to stay on after all. But this time trauma was leading him in the opposite direction. He’d made too many mistakes, of the kind that weighed heavily on his soul. He couldn’t possibly show Sage how to be a good man while being party to murder. Or maybe he just couldn’t stand the thought of what Smith had done, couldn’t bear to work with him any longer.

  He remembered how, in his rookie days, McInnis had chastised him for writing overly professorial arrest reports laden with the fruits of a Morehouse education. So h
e used simple words and short declarative sentences in the resignation letter that he left on McInnis’s desk one perfect late-October morning.

  Smith couldn’t sleep.

  It wasn’t the loud neighbors and it wasn’t the sun rising too early after his night shift. It wasn’t the booze he’d been drinking at night, alone, in his dingy apartment. It was the realization that he wasn’t keeping pace with who he’d expected to be.

  His own partner could barely look at him. Treated him like a moral leper. Which only made Smith angrier, wanting to justify himself. And as he lay awake in bed, he feared he couldn’t justify himself, and that his sudden hatred of Boggs was fire that should be directed elsewhere.

  What had he been thinking? His blood had been flowing and the adrenaline had clouded his judgment, he’d nearly been shot and beside him had stood his partner, a man he deeply respected, but who was still too naïve to realize how in danger he and his girl were. Smith had found himself pointing a gun at the source of all Boggs’s problems, so why not? Why not?

  He had crossed another line.

  And lines are only ideas people dream up, to govern what should be possible, to keep you from moving toward the forbidden. Tommy Smith had gotten this far by ignoring lines, crossing them whenever he needed to take a next step, or talk to the right lady, or show people that he was not afraid.

  But because he’d crossed that line, now he was afraid.

  They found Thames on Tybee Island, hundreds of miles away. A man missed a stop sign that had been completely obscured by tropical shrubbery, and his Ford slammed into the side of Thames’s Chevy. Thames tried to leave before filing a report, but a cop took down the drivers’ info, learning that Thames was wanted for questioning in Atlanta, and what had happened to that five thousand dollars?

  To Rake’s surprise, Cassie’s obsessively compiled log of the comings and goings of Negroes and all other suspicious traffic in Hanford Park had come in handy. One of the cars she had made note of turned out to match the description one neighbor had given of the getaway car from the Thames “robbery.” Cassie had taken down the tag number when she’d spotted it on the previous day, stopping at that same house; the car was owned by one of Thames’s friends, a man who, coincidentally, had bought himself a fine new car just two weeks later.