Natchez Burning (Penn Cage)

by Greg Iles

  “Okay, sorry,” Thornfield said. “Do whatever you can, Doc. You can’t let Frank die.”

  Tom waved them off and went on to the surgery.

  When he opened the door, he froze, stunned by a scene so unexpected that it paralyzed him for a few critical moments. Frank Knox lay on the floor, half propped against a cabinet, his mouth gaping, his face blue. Viola stood five feet away, staring down at Knox like a vengeful goddess watching the death of a mortal who had offended her. In her hand was a 60 cc syringe, one of the big ones Tom used to drain swollen knees, far too large to be of any use in Knox’s situation.

  “What the hell’s going on here?” Tom asked in a shocked whisper. He shut the door behind him. “What’s he doing on the floor?”

  “Dying,” Viola said in a monotone.

  “Fuck!” He shoved her out of the way and knelt beside Knox, holding his stethoscope to the man’s chest. He heard no heartbeat or breath sounds. “Help me get him up, Viola!”

  “No.”

  “What!”

  Tom frantically examined Knox’s head and torso, searching for the most serious injury. The airway seemed to be open, but Knox had a massive contusion on his skull, which almost certainly meant a concussion. As Tom felt his way along Knox’s chest, he realized that the falling batteries had not only crushed ribs on his left side, but had also torn open his chest wall. Morehouse and Thornfield had no business bringing this man to a clinic. He should have gone straight to the hospital.

  “Go check on the ambulance,” Tom ordered.

  “No,” Viola said again, her voice almost lethargic.

  Tom scrambled to his feet, enraged by her lack of professionalism. He might be an emotional wreck due to their affair, but he wasn’t about to let a patient die because of it, no matter who the man might be.

  “Go check on the ambulance!” he repeated.

  Viola didn’t even look at him. Like a little girl who’d pulled the wings off some insect, she just watched Knox turning blue.

  Tom slapped her face. “What the hell’s wrong with you?”

  Viola didn’t respond.

  He slapped her again, hard.

  At last she looked up, her eyes cold and dead. “He raped me.”

  Something curdled in Tom’s stomach. “What?”

  “He—raped—me.” Viola’s eyes seemed to focus at last, and they held an accusatory fire that cut through Tom’s bewildered anger. “That man there,” she said. “He raped me. His friends helped. The ones outside. Plus one more. They had a fine old time . . . yes, sir.”

  Tom suddenly felt as though he were trying to think and move underwater. The man on the floor seemed far less important than he had only a moment ago. “When was this?”

  “Two nights ago.” Viola cocked her head as though trying to discern some detail of Knox’s mortal suffering.

  Tom almost staggered under the rush of awareness that resolved every question that had been torturing him since yesterday. “Why?” he asked.

  “They couldn’t find Jimmy,” she said in the same monotone. “They did it to flush him out of Freewoods. This one did, anyway. The rest of them just wanted me. You know what that feels like, don’t you? To want me?”

  Tom looked down at Knox, who was gaping like a landed fish on the floor. To his surprise, he felt no urge whatever to save the man. Not even in Korea had he felt this emotion, or lack of it. Indeed, in Korea he had helped to save wounded North Korean and Chinese soldiers, despite seeing horrors they had inflicted upon American prisoners. But if what Viola said was true—and Tom had never been more certain of anything—then he wanted Frank Knox to die where he lay.

  The sound of a distant siren pulled Tom out of his trance. He took hold of Viola’s wrist and held up the oversized syringe. “What’s this for?”

  “Air,” she said. “Like those dogs you told me about, in medical school.”

  Tom went dizzy for a moment. One of his worst memories from medical school was having to euthanize dogs with air injections after medical experiments. About a month ago, he had told Viola about that experience, and she had just used the information to murder Frank Knox. Tom wondered how much air it had taken to cause a vapor lock in the Klansman’s heart. At least 200 ccs, and probably more.

  “We’ve got to get him up on the table,” he said in a detached voice.

  “I’m not touching him.”

  “We’re going to the gas chamber if you don’t help me get him up.”

  “I don’t care.”

  “Your brother will. Help me!” Tom was trying to communicate the idea that he was no longer working to save Knox, but Viola. “It has to look right when the ambulance men get here.”

  At last Viola seemed to grasp the import of his words. Together, they wrestled Knox’s limp body onto the examining table. Tom put the stethoscope to his heart again. There was no heartbeat, not even a whisper of a pulse.

  “He’s gone,” Tom said, grabbing the syringe from Viola’s hand and removing the needle. “Where did you inject him?”

  “Twice internally. Once in the antecubital vein.”

  “Christ.” Tom stuffed the syringe into the bottom corner of a cabinet. “Which arm?”

  Viola pointed to the crook of Knox’s right elbow.

  Tom opened a fresh syringe, drew two milligrams of adrenaline from a vial, then carefully injected it into the hole where Viola had injected the air.

  The drug had no discernible effect on the prostrate man.

  The siren was screaming now, just outside the clinic. Then the crew cut it and the wail began to drop in pitch, like a child’s top spinning down to stillness.

  “When they come in,” Tom said, “we’re going to be working our asses off. Get a blood pressure cuff on him, and I’ll be treating him for a tension pneumothorax. Do you hear me?”

  Viola made no sound, but she did turn and get the sphygmomanometer.

  What happened next unfolded with the unreality of dreams. Anna Mae screamed when she opened the door for the ambulance crew. The two attendants shook their heads and said Knox should have been taken to the hospital. Anybody could see the man was mortally wounded. Sonny Thornfield stood in the door and cursed the forklift operator who’d spilled the load of batteries, then himself for not taking Knox to the hospital, and finally the ambulance men for not getting to the clinic sooner. Glenn Morehouse cried like a little boy who’d lost his father until Thornfield cursed him for being a baby and dragged him out of the clinic to take the news back to the boys at the plant.

  Eventually—after Dr. Ross had put in his two cents and all the office girls had glommed all the details they could spread later as gossip—Tom was left in his private office with Viola, who sat on the couch like the rape victims he’d treated during his internship at Charity Hospital at New Orleans. It was as though whatever the Klansmen had done to her had happened only an hour ago, not two days earlier.

  “Tell me,” he pleaded.

  “What’s the use?” Viola asked.

  “Why didn’t you call the police after it happened?”

  She closed her eyes, and by this simple gesture communicated that Tom might be the stupidest man on the planet. At length she said, “You can’t rape a black woman in this state. Not if you’re white. Ain’t no such thing. Don’t you even know that, Tom Cage?”

  The coldness in her voice startled him. “I guess I thought—”

  “Thought? You didn’t think. You’re walking around with blinders on! That’s what you’re doing.”

  “But—”

  “No, Tom.” The face that had always seemed so serene was now distorted by pain and grief. “You’ve got to face how things are. They came at me to get to Jimmy. They couldn’t find him, so they hurt the only thing they knew would matter to him. And if Jimmy finds out what they done to me, he’s as good as dead. Pacifist or not, he’ll do just what they want—go after them—and they’ll kill him. I’m worried he may already have heard.” Viola’s eyes blazed suddenly, and she leaned forward, s
tabbing the air with her forefinger. “So you can’t ever tell him! Swear it.”

  “Viola—”

  “Swear it, before God!”

  “I swear, Viola. I’ll never tell Jimmy.”

  “Or Luther!”

  “Luther, either. I swear.”

  She collapsed against the sofa back.

  “Are you all right?” he asked. “Physically, I mean?”

  Viola turned her head and wiped tears on her sleeve. “I don’t really know. They beat me. Everywhere but where it would show. I had to come up here and steal some antibiotics. You reckon Dr. Lucas will fire me for that?”

  “Viola, please don’t—”

  “You can’t help me, Tom. You want to, but what can you do? You’ve got a wife and kids to take care of. You want to fight the Ku Klux Klan for me? I know you’re brave. But are you that kind of hero?”

  Until that moment, Tom had never quite realized how high the risks of becoming involved with Viola were. She seemed to want an answer to her question. Her unblinking gaze probed him like an X-ray beam.

  “I don’t know what to do,” he said. “You’re probably right about the police not believing you. It would be your word against Knox’s buddies, and they’d all give each other alibis.”

  She gave him the most cynical look he had ever seen.

  “To be honest,” he said, “about the only thing we could do . . . is kill them.”

  Viola nodded slowly. “I got one of them.”

  Tom shuddered as the magnitude of what they had done hit home. “There’ll almost certainly be an autopsy,” he thought aloud. “An experienced pathologist might discover the true cause of death, but this post will probably be done by Adam Leeds. With Knox’s massive injuries, Leeds won’t be looking for anything exotic. I doubt he’ll notice the air escaping when he cuts open Knox’s heart.”

  Viola seemed unconcerned by the risk of being found out.

  “Where’s Jimmy now?” Tom asked. “Still in Freewoods?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve stopped calling him, in case the klukkers on the police force are tapping my phone.”

  Viola was right about the police department having Klansmen in its ranks. “What do you want to do now? Do you want to go home?”

  Her eyes had been flat and lifeless for so long that it stunned Tom to see some depth come back into them. “What do I want?” she asked softly. “I want you to take me away from here. I want you to take me to a place where we can have children and grow old together. A place where my brother can come live and be safe, and play music all day long. A place where I can love you like you ought to be loved, and you can love me the same.”

  Tom felt himself shaking.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked. “Don’t I look the same to you anymore? Do I look different to you, now that you know them rednecks used me?”

  “No.”

  “Do I look different now that I killed somebody in front of you?”

  “No. I’m as guilty as you of that crime.”

  She stared relentlessly at him, as though waiting for him to admit that he could not give her what she wanted. But she was only waiting for him to face what she’d known all along.

  “You finally see, don’t you?” Viola said. “It was just a dream. Every time we made love, we were just children pretending. This is the truth, right here. My torn genitals. That dead man on his way to the morgue. My brother running for his life. And you going back to Peggy and your babies. That’s the truth, Tom. There ain’t no place for me in that picture. I’m on my own. I always have been.”

  “Please tell me what I can do,” he said uselessly.

  She stood, wavered on her feet, then straightened up. “Nothing. There’s nothing in your power.”

  He walked around his desk, but she held up a warning hand, just like a traffic cop. “A hug won’t help.”

  “What do we do now?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. Pray, I guess. Can murderers pray?”

  “That bastard deserved what he got. Don’t think about him anymore.”

  “He deserved worse,” Viola said with venom. “I won’t lose no sleep over that trash. I just . . . I guess I don’t know what to do next, either.”

  “One day at a time,” Tom said, hating the impotence in his voice. “That’s all we can do. And pray the worst is over.”

  But it wasn’t over. Not by a damn sight—

  “Tom?” Peggy moaned, sitting up in bed, then shielding her eyes against the reading light she’d left on.

  “What’s the matter, honey?” he asked.

  Peggy rubbed her eyes until she was more than half awake. “I had a nightmare.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “I don’t know.” She felt along the bedside table for her water glass, then took a gulp. “We were at a funeral.”

  “Whose funeral?”

  Peggy blinked, still bleary with sleep. “I don’t know. I saw the casket there, and I was holding Annie’s hand, and she was crying.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything. It was just a dream.”

  “It felt so real. I’m trying to remember who was sitting with us. I want to know.”

  You want to know who was in the casket, he thought. “You said ‘we’ when you woke up. Was I sitting with you?”

  Peggy’s eyes widened suddenly. “Oh, Tom. I think it was one of the kids. Penn or Jenny. Dear God.”

  He laid his hand on her forearm and squeezed. “It doesn’t matter who it was, Peg. That was just a dream.”

  She stared at him with almost frightening intensity. “I’m telling you, it felt real. Like it means something. It couldn’t, could it?”

  “No. It’s just the stress of today, and tomorrow. Premonitions of death are a normal human feeling during times like this.”

  Peggy took his hand and fixed her eyes on him with solemn deliberation of a priest. “Tom . . . I want to talk to you about last night.”

  He felt his defenses go up. “Peg—”

  “I know you don’t want to talk about it,” she said quickly. “But I feel like we should. We have to, don’t we? I’m not sure I can go on if we don’t.”

  He met her gaze but said nothing.

  “I know sometimes it’s better to leave some things unsaid,” she went on. “And maybe this is one of those times. But I truly feel like something terrible is coming toward us.”

  Tom closed his other hand over hers. “If you really want to talk about it, we can. But I think this is one of those times where it’s best to move forward, and not look back. Remember Lot’s wife.”

  As Peggy gazed back at him across fifty years of experience, he knew that she understood him better than anyone ever had—better even than Viola, in most ways. Her hazel eyes moved across his face, missing nothing. Then she said, “I’m going to try to go back to sleep.”

  He gave her an encouraging smile. “Everything’s going to be all right tomorrow. You’ll see.”

  “You don’t think you should listen to Penn? About hiring Quentin?”

  “There may come a time for that. But right now I think I’m better off following my own counsel.”

  She patted the quilt over his thigh. “All right. Do you want to take one of my pills?”

  “Better not. I’m fine, Peg. Go back to sleep.”

  She stared sadly at him for a few moments, then patted his side and lay back down. Seconds later she began to snore again.

  Tom thought of all the years that had passed since he’d given up Viola, years drifting down upon each other like leaves settling on a forest floor. Over time those leaves had hardened and begun to petrify. The young Tom Cage—the man who had loved Viola with soul-searing ardor—lay somewhere beneath those leaves, entombed in ash like an ember after a wildfire. And Viola . . . whatever had remained of her younger self was long gone. That person existed only as a memory that occasionally flickered to life in the minds of those she had treated decades ago. There were probably patients she’d touched s
imilarly in Chicago, hundreds of them, but Tom knew nothing of those people, or those years. And he suspected that the Viola they had known was not quite the same enchanted spirit who had so blessed the people of Natchez.

  A fearful ache went through him as he thought of his impending arrest. He had already laid out his clothes on a chair, in case the sheriff came early. Peggy had helped, never once questioning him about anything deeper than his choice of shirt and tie. Rebuffing Penn all day had been more difficult than dealing with his wife. It was a tempting proposition to simply put himself in his son’s hands. Penn had the legal talent and experience to do as good a job as anyone alive defending him. But to do that, Penn would need the truth, and Tom was not prepared to burden him with that. Not yet. He might never be.

  For now, Walt Garrity would be his ally. The old Texas Ranger wasn’t a lawyer, but he had other talents. More to the point, Walt had shared horrific trials with Tom. Together they had endured things that young men should never be asked to witness, much less take part in, and they had survived them together. They had literally saved each other’s lives. If Tom was going to be confined in jail, he couldn’t ask for a better second pair of eyes and ears than those of Walt Garrity. At least that had been the reasoning that prompted his earlier call to Walt.

  Yet tonight Penn had unknowingly brought Tom a glimmer of hope. For the death of Glenn Morehouse offered Tom a chance he hadn’t dared hope for: a chance at true deliverance. As Peggy snored beside him, Tom pondered the Greek and Hebrew legends of the scapegoat. Pharmakos to the Greeks, Azazel to the Hebrews. A shameful human practice, he’d always thought, one born from guilt and superstition. But most human behavior had grown out of necessity, and he now understood the empirical value of the rituals for which he had felt only contempt before.

  He thought about Morehouse, the hypertensive battery assembler who’d committed unspeakable atrocities as a young man. Like so many guilty souls, Morehouse had desperately sought redemption through confession before the end. Had cancer claimed him? Or had his fellow Eagles finally stepped out of the shadows to stop his mouth forever, before he could unburden his conscience? Tom didn’t care one way or the other. All he knew for sure was that if he walked down the path that had opened to him now, Viola would surely forgive him.