The New Inheritors

by Kent Wascom

  They talked politics and of the war in Europe; they talked of New Orleans, to which Egan had recently come on the heels, he said, of a socialist workers’ strike in San Francisco. (The latter fact alone endeared Egan to Rule, who still felt the sting of not being native, though he’d been in the city for most of his life.) They got high and drunk enough that Egan could say aloud in a crowded place that he was a Socialist Internationalist and Rule could call himself a Pan-Africanist who held true with some of the socialist writers (though the race-hatred of Egan’s beloved Jack London made the latter impossible for Rule to esteem), and when other men around them overheard these ropy titles and demanded to know what the hell they meant, they were drunk and high enough to fight. But most often they talked of books, the vectors of virulent ideas. Egan had even read some negro writers. (And looking back Rule would be more ashamed of his excitement at this fact than anything.) Rule had to catch himself at times, such was the strangeness of their friendship. Just giving it that name was a dangerous act. It was one thing to work alongside a white man, one thing to fish at the same river or yell at the same boxers—these were acts of anonymity, carried out from the safety of crowds. It was quite another to talk with a white man like this.

  But now he realized he’d been basking in Egan’s notice; how he’d glossed over certain fool arguments, as we do with friends, that otherwise would’ve aggravated him; how Egan tried one night, as Irishmen have a habit of doing, to claim that his people had been colonized too. Going on about the Celts’ poor treatment at the hands of the British and, later, Americans, as though the best way of meeting minds with a black man was to establish just how much your people (or some vague notion of them) had been treated like niggers by the white world. Which was to assume, he’d said to Egan when pushed to his limit, that nigger is some Newtonian constant by which every swinging dick with a grievance can measure his plight now and forever. Egan had backed off, tried to turn the conversation around, and Rule tried to forget it. One night he asked Egan what the hell an educated man like him was doing slinging fruit in New Orleans, and Egan said, I could ask you the same thing. At the time Rule had liked that. It made him feel good. Egan had drawn him in so close that by the time he told Rule that he was a newspaper writer, working on a story about the illegal shipping of weapons to the government of Mexico, Rule was so wrapped up in him that he told Egan almost everything he knew. Which wasn’t a great deal, but he’d seen enough in his shifts to know what Gulf was sending on its boats to Tampico. Shared information that seemed small enough at first, and Egan was smart enough to not press him often. So they went on trading books and pamphlets and spun great webs of ideas in smoky barrooms, at dawn roaring out into the combustible air. And in the heat, the danger of it, Rule’s reservations fled. This was a man who believed in good causes; and more, Rule thought, this was a man who could handle himself. But then he couldn’t; he’d talked too much, asked too many questions. Said the wrong thing to the wrong person. And now he was in the kind of trouble you don’t come back from.

  When they’d arrived at the appointed place and the sack had been taken off and he’d gone inside and seen what they had there gagged and bound to a kitchen chair, after some unbearable moments of watching, Rule went down the broken steps of the house and out into the yard. The shut door barely muffling the sounds of what went on inside. He stumbled through the dirt unmarked by any feet save his and those of the men who’d brought him, to the deep shadow beneath an oak, where he tried, like someone at the rotten, spinning tail of a drunk, to make himself vomit.

  The property had been a part of a sugar plantation for much of the past two centuries, but the house, once an overseer’s, and the land it sat on had seen no tenants, no cultivation, for a long time. The house teetered on its pilings, inner walls colonized by mildew and mold and larger organisms, but whole enough for the purpose at hand. In the coming years the house would serve as incubator to a young man, child of Sicilian immigrants, who gathered indigent orphans there to pool their takes after sessions of pickpocketing in the city, and who, when he was an older and more powerful man noted for both his foul mouth and benevolence to Catholic charities, would be deported to the jungles of Guatemala in the efforts of our nation’s first Catholic president to yoke organized crime even as he employed, according to his successor, a goddamn Murder Incorporated in Latin America, out of whose mountains the Sicilian would emerge in time to play a part in ending the young Catholic president’s life.

  Everywhere you look is imprinted with its own history of iniquity (and will play host to worse), and so Rule Chandler, when he could urge nothing more from his stomach, went out from the tree down a run lined with shacks that had once housed men and women, lives bought and sold. Not far beyond, the fields that had owned their days. Though Rule had lived in New Orleans from the time he was a boy, his family had come from a rural parish to the southwest. His mother and father, his sisters, had returned there years back, believing life better out in the reeds and he’d found his absolution in the pavement and stone and endless streets, the purity of electric light. But even still he was awake to the land, to the smell on the air from some distant farm, fields smoking, sugar cooking. He’d turned from that life, and Rule supposed he could turn now and run. Between the cabins like the gaps in teeth, the fields, and, farther on, the marsh stood overgrown and waiting. Tell yourself you’re somewhere else, he thought. No doubt that’s what the man bound to the chair was doing, or had done while he could. What we all do in moments of abandonment and pain. Tell yourself that these sounds are something else and the sight you fled from isn’t real and the broken thing in there is not your friend and those are not his muffled screams. That what happened to him isn’t your business anymore and now all you have is your own life to save. Tell yourself he lied to you, he put you here casually as you might give directions to a stranger. Anger now, doubled by the knowledge that as bad as what had happened was, what was coming would be worse.

  When Rule returned to the house, Woolsack was waiting for him on the steps.

  There were five of them there. The driver, the other man, Rule, Egan, and this Woolsack. At first, when Rule heard one of the men address the young man with blood-red hair as Mr. Woolsack, Rule didn’t believe them. The Woolsack he’d seen before was a stooped old man, hard-bitten in a way few rich men are. Son, it was rumored, of a slaver, a gentleman of storied violence. This Woolsack was his age or just a little older, thick muscled, though of the kind gotten from iron weights and physical culture rather than work.

  Seeing Rule approach, Red Woolsack wiped his brow, fingers lingering on his face like a bald man checking a toupee. Smiling, Woolsack said it was time they had a chat. And that smile was like nothing Rule had ever seen, sort of patched on.

  —Feeling better? Woolsack said.

  —Not particularly, Rule said. Nobody wants to see a thing like that.

  —No, but then you’d be surprised at what some people want.

  Rule took out a pack of All-Star cigarettes and lit one.

  —Be frank, he said. Ain’t much would surprise me anymore.

  —Don’t ain’t me, Woolsack said, voice suddenly harsh. Don’t pretend to be stupid. It’s insulting, and worse it’s a lie.

  Rule winced. There were tricks to living, to avoiding death or gaining favor or trust, and playing dumb was one. Let your language slip low as your gaze should go, as though whatever white being stood before you was as magnificent and confounding as a pyramid in the sun.

  —It’s an awful thing, being lied to. Woolsack turned to Rule. Isn’t it.

  —It is.

  —If you counted all the lies you’d been told your whole life, you’d go crazy.

  —You might that.

  —You would. He was speaking slowly now, to the dark beyond them. You know that Egan in there lied to you. Put you in this with his lies. But it never starts with lies outright, does it. He told you what he really did … what he was planning to do to me and my business.


  —He told me he was studying working conditions. Said he was a journalist, working—

  Woolsack went tsk, as if something had hurt him.

  —Don’t call it that, Woolsack said.

  —What?

  —Don’t call what they do journalism.

  —What would you call it?

  —Lying. In person or on paper, it doesn’t matter. It’s still telling people lies. Putting words in their mouths and voices in their heads so that they …

  Woolsack made a fist as if to catch the loose end of his sentence and then went quiet.

  —So what am I here for?

  —You see, Woolsack said. Egan there took you for exactly what you pretended to be just now, when you tried to nig’ it up. Just a dumb ole good one. But you aren’t like that. I can see it.

  Rule turned his head at the sound, coming from inside, of something heavy being dragged across the floor.

  —I want you to think, right now, Woolsack said. Did you tell him anything you wish you hadn’t?

  Rule could think of many things. But they were not about this man’s business or workers’ strikes or the guns that Gulf Shipping was illegally sending to Mexico. They were about his own life, what he had known. He cursed himself for these and all the ways he had betrayed everything that his life and the lives of others had taught him.

  Woolsack stood and waved for him to do the same.

  —When we go inside, he said, I’m going to offer you a choice.

  Woolsack shut the door behind them and Rule stood before the body bound to the chair in the center of the room. Egan’s wrists were tied to the chairlegs, fingers bent at strange angles. At his feet lay a hurricane lamp, bell-glass flecked with blood so that the light thrown on the rotting walls was patterned with spots of darkness. Rule spoke the bound man’s name, but the head hung limp, the twisted hands lay still. Face swollen out of all proportion, arms like those of a whorehouse sofa, torn, discolored, spotted with the black divots of cigarette burns; only the pop of blood in bubbles from one nostril to tell that the man was still breathing. Beyond him some movement in the dark, and from the far corner the driver approached, stripped to the waist and sweating, ready to resume his work, but Woolsack told him to wait.

  From the pocket of his coat Woolsack produced a pistol. A Smith & Wesson Model 1899. He flipped the gun in his hand and held it out grip-first, to Rule.

  —Take it.

  Rule made no move. The driver and the other man were muttering.

  —Go on, Woolsack said.

  The men in the dark came forward now, uneasy glances to their boss and at Rule.

  —Easy now, Woolsack said to them. And when Woolsack offered the pistol for the third time, Rule took it.

  The great weight of metal, his palm slick on the grip. He couldn’t look at it.

  —It’s not right, said the second man. A neg’ to shoot a white man.

  —No, Woolsack said, locking eyes with Rule. It’ll be him.

  The second man began to speak, but the driver beside him held up a hand in warning.

  —You see, Rule, Woolsack said. Mr. Cormier here thinks just the same of you as this man, Egan, did.

  Woolsack stepped closer and reached out, embracing the pistol and the hand that held it, as if to impart some strength. His eyes trembling on the verge of something.

  —He thinks you’re a nigger, Woolsack said. But I know different.

  Woolsack stared, seeing in Rule’s expression an affirmation of this knowledge. What Woolsack had sensed the moment he’d first seen him. There was a blessed silence around Rule Chandler, a silence Woolsack could find in the presence of an increasingly precious few. Only those he could trust. With others, like these two here, his head filled with voices. The voices he’d heard first around the age of eighteen, whispers in the dark, and which came in chorus shortly after Red Woolsack’s twenty-second birthday, when he was newly married. At first he could make no sense of what they said, but as time wore on and the voices took purchase he found they spoke small, troubling truths. Warnings. When he first heard the voices he thought his house was haunted; then they followed him to work; they spoke when he was alone and he thought himself possessed; then they spoke in the presence of others and he searched the faces of those around him, pleading silently for them to say they could hear the voices too. But he could ask nothing outright for fear of being thought mad, and so he was alone in his suffering and there were times he wept, so great was his loneliness and so dire the warnings he heard. Until the time came when he understood what he was being told, of the dangers everywhere and the system arrayed against him, all-encompassing and complex. It was as though he’d been gifted with a new kind of perception, a keyhole into the minds of all those who wished him harm. He began to listen and to feel, for the first time in his life, that he was not alone.

  All this behind Woolsack’s eyes. What Rule knew was that he would not leave this place alive unless he did as this man said, and likely not even then. He felt drugged. It was as if a great hole had torn open in the floor before him and the pistol was an anchor dragging him toward the edge where he would fall forever. And on the other side was Egan, who had begun to move. Who raised his head.

  —He brought you into this, Woolsack said. Now you get yourself out.

  It does not make Rule Chandler a better man that he wondered in those madness-choked moments whether he could shoot the two men and Woolsack before they could kill him. The driver and his partner had their hands at their hips, waiting for a word from Woolsack, who looked on with eyes bizarrely pleading. As if Rule were the crazy one to refuse his offer.

  —All right Rule, he said. Let’s get it over with.

  There was no space for sanity in that room. Rule raised the pistol level with Egan’s ruined face, the swollen forehead nodding to him, almost offering.

  Rule squared his body and hoped that his hand wouldn’t shake as he aimed the sight between the things that had once been eyes but were now beaten so that it was incredible to imagine that they had ever seen the sky or a lover or a mother or, as they did now, a crack opening in the weltered flesh, a friend.

  Rule remembered seeing, when he was maybe eight, a group of men on the corner of Fourth Street one summer evening reading from a paper in voices not loud or broken but horribly flat, of the lynching of a black man in the city of Atlanta. Pieces of the lynched man’s body had made their way into the reliquary of whiteness. His heart sent to the governor of Georgia, his right hand kept in the display window of a downtown Atlanta grocer, where it was seen by W. E. B. Du Bois on his way to a meeting with the white man who invented Remus. The men in the crowd cussing, mumbling, locked there together on the corner taxed once more with the knowledge of this possible fate. The boys at the curb seeing now the anger and the fear in the faces of the men they admired. Rule among them, watching. Listening to what it meant to live and to die. There are men who shoot and men who get shot, they said. You might get shot anyway, even if you’re strong and carrying. But at least you had a chance. You might take one with you, which meant you might at least have satisfaction in death. You might be dead before they got you, which meant they would put your eyes out and hack off your hands and your balls and light you on fire and laugh while you burned.

  The men on the streetcorner a chorus of negation.

  I won’t, they were saying. I won’t go down that way. They’ll have to kill me first.

  Rule notched the hammer. The trigger went back and back and seemed like it would never fire.

  It does not make him a worse man that he wanted to live.

  Two

  He was given the pistol and further instruction on its use. He was given money and the promise of more to come when, as Woolsack said, there was more such work to do. In the coming days Rule kept to his room, on the top floor of a camelback house owned by a woman from Haiti who lived on the ground floor with her husband, a jeweler, and two children, girls, and asked no questions of the tenants.

  He settled into
a kind of nightmare softness. Given nothing to do for weeks, he drank more than usual, to steady his mind, and ate the food brought by the Haitian woman’s daughter, a long and faintly freckled thing named Augustine, who was much too old to be going into men’s rooms but didn’t so much as glance at him anyway, leaving the dish on the sideboard and slipping out; so he sat alone and put on fat for the first time in his life. He couldn’t sleep and couldn’t bring his mind to read, and so lay for hours in bed with catalogs propped open, taking pulls from a bottle of rye and imagining which presents he’d send home. Imagined his parents, his cousins, slack-jawed before a pile of crates.

  That winter he took part in the burning of a pair of warehouses, the bludgeoning of their guards. He found that, drunk, he didn’t mind the work.

  In February he learned that dynamite weeps.

  In March, at carnival, he rolled the accountant of a fruit wholesaler. In April he ransacked offices and went with the driver to slip a bomb in the wheel well of a car. But at that time he’d only killed one man.

  He drank down what visions arose to trouble him in the night. He got himself measured for a new suit. He went to the red-light district, streets full of soldiers chasing their hard-ons, and gave himself over to whoring. A stint that ended when he could no longer take the braying stupidity of everyone around him, the money-flinging fools who fought to be the loudest and the dumbest in the room. So he went back home, and whenever one of Woolsack’s men came calling, he did what was asked of him, and well; and in between he ate and drank and it took more and more to make him feel anything at all, as though something in him had been dulled. A callus grown over the man he’d been.