Perfect Killer: Not An Easy Read
Many of the posts on Facebook’s Murrah-Callaway Class of 1967 have commented on the “sad” state of many things in Mississippi.
Back in 2001-2004 I returned frequently and spent months — mostly in the Delta where I was born and in Jackson — doing research for Perfect Killer. I was both encouraged by astonishing progress from our high school days and disheartened by intractable problems of poverty and residual racism.
Racism is no longer legally sanctioned, and so many barriers have been lowered. But in my experience there, I found that racial suspicions and hard feelings still exist.
But more than anything else, poverty has become the biggest enemy for the state to overcome.
Our 1967 classmate, Martha Bergmark, founded an organization that’s chipping away at some of that poverty and the inequality it brings regardless of race. Her organization, the Mississippi Center for Justice has accomplished wonderful things. Take a look at the site and see if it would be appropriate for you to support them.
Now on to the book.
First of all, Perfect Killer is not an easy book to read. I do realize that I wrote a complicated book that is actually three books in one:
- A coming of age book.
- A Southern novel set in the Delta.
- A thriller about an actual covert government project to create a perfect killer by pharmaceutically engineering soldiers.
On top of that, the coming of age and Southern book parts are a thinly disguised roman a clef for my family and by own life up to the point I was thrown out of Ole Miss.
And all of it — every character and their every action — is about free will, moral choices, doing the right thing … and why good people often do evil.
Bringing them all together between one set of covers makes this a complicated book to read.
PROLOGUE
A MOONLESS BLACK-ON-BLACK NIGHT SHROUDED THE MISSISSIPPI DELTA in shades of dark and darker that flattened the feverishly humid world into a two-dimensional caricature.
Heard, felt but unseen, mosquitoes boiled out of the killing fields’ stagnant pools like a biblical plague. In the distance, a scattering of lights glowed beyond a low embankment that kept the Columbus and Greenville Railroad tracks above water even in flood season. From beyond the embankment came strains of a church hymn drifting from the general direction of Balance Due, the notoriously impoverished black quarter of Itta Bena, where raw sewage fermented in open ditches along rutted dirt roads lined with battered wooden shacks.
At one with this deepest of nights, Darryl Talmadge squatted in the tall, soggy grass and held his suppressed Colt .45 Model 1911 well out of the swamp water seeping into his boots. He breathed silently through his mouth and listened with his whole body, trying to feel his quarry as much as hear him. A freight train rumbled distantly from the east, and from the darkness near the C&G berm came the sounds of a desperate man making his way through mud and tall grass. Talmadge knew all he had to do was be patient. Like hunting deer, he thought. Bag a big buck. The thought made him smile.
Talmadge had been a hunting guide in the Delta before the Korean War, before the head wound they’d fixed up so well. They’d saved his life, and for that he did what they asked. That and because he needed the medicine they gave him to keep the visions and memories away.
A sucking sound riveted Talmadge’s attention. Over to his left, maybe twenty-five yards away. Then another and another. Feet liberating themselves from muck, slowly, cautiously at first, then with a labored acceleration making an angle toward the railroad tracks.
Perfect.
Talmadge stood up and in a single fluid motion aimed the Colt. It took only a split second to spot the faintest of shadows, night modeled on night. He sighted, squeezed the trigger, registered the mild cough of the shot and the shriek of pain as the shadow dropped with a wallowing splash.
“Give it up, nigger!” Talmadge yelled as he crashed through the mud and high grass. Then he picked up the panicked thrashes of a wounded man stumbling away
“Shit a brick,” Talmadge mumbled. This was number four in the past ten days, and he was simply tired of tracking down these boys.
Ahead of him, his prey’s shadow moved right, reversed course, then sprinted toward the tracks. As the freight rambled closer, Talmadge knew the boy would rush across the tracks in front of the engine and let the rest of the train shelter his escape, or hop a boxcar.
Either way worked for him, Talmadge thought as he swiftly made his way to the edge of the clinker stone at the base of the berm and hunkered down behind a clump of dead grass. He leaned against the slope and aimed the Colt down the berm, steadying it with his left arm.
Behind him the light from the train engine played shadows atop the berm. In moments, Talmadge spotted a shadow maybe thirty yards away detach itself from the brush and start up the slope. In another instant the locomotives headlight lit up a wounded man, red across his shoulder where the last shot had winged him.
Talmadge fired, then cursed when the slug scattered gravel immediately behind the man’s feet. The man scrambled faster. Talmadge felt no anger, no emotion, no disappointment. He kept the aim of his last shot and its trajectory precisely in mind as he corrected his sights for the spot he figured the man would reach at the top of the tracks.
Talmadge fired as the locomotive blew its horn. The man with the wounded shoulder froze as his face turned toward the train. The slug punched through the man’s torso, bent him forward over the nearby track, and fed him to the locomotive’s wheels.
CHAPTER 1
MONDAY LAY ON THE LAND AS GRAY AND STONE COLD AS A CORPSE. Slate clouds, winter-frosted grass, pale headstones, sucked the color and life from the Itta Bena I had loved as a child.
Down the gently sloping field beyond the rusting iron pickets of the cemetery fence, and across the pitted, often-patched asphalt of the access road, the trunks of naked trees waded in the chill, muddy shadows of Roebuck Lake. The day promised little for the handful of mourners due to gather on this raw January morning to say good-bye to my mother.
I stood alone next to a half dozen folding chairs beside the freshly dug grave. Timeworn Astroturf carpeted the ground but did little to mask the pile of dirt next to the headstone carrying the name of Mama’s second husband. She’d married him only after previously marrying and divorcing my father three times.
The morning silence gave way infrequently to the occasional car or pickup passing by on Highway 7. A wan breeze brought me faint, episodic snatches of conversation from two distant men whose yellow coveralls lent the day an Impressionistic splash of color. I watched them lean against a muddy yellow backhoe a hundred yards away, smoking one cigarette after another.
When the wind strengthened, it struck my bare forehead like an ice-cream headache and slashed through my brand-new dark wool suit bought for this occasion. The gusts snatched at me with sharp fingers, which sent my testicles climbing tight and desperate against my groin. I turned my back to the wind and shoved my hands deeper into the pants pockets and felt the icy handprints on my thighs. It reminded me of cold evenings in high school when football practice would run until it was too dark to see the ball, and we’d jam our hands right down into our jockstraps to keep our fingers limber enough to function and yell loudly for coach to put us in because no matter how dead tired you were, it was even worse to stand on the sidelines and have the wind refrigerate the sweat soaking your practice jersey.
Where the hell was everyone? I turned in a half circle, taking in the deserted little cemetery. As I did, a sudden movement caught my eye over toward the stately magnolia tree’s waxy evergreen leaves. I saw nothing now, but convinced someone lurked near the magnolia, I closed my eyes and tried to recall the brief image flashing across the vague edge of my peripheral vision.
Nothing.
I shook my head. Stress again, I reasoned as I opened my eyes. Regardless, I walked among the dead, heading toward the tree and thinking that even if no one was there, a little walk would get my blood moving, generate some heat.
The headstones reminded me how dead people continue to hold us long after their deaths, binding us with memories as strong as love. I studied these things in my work. I tried to tease through the fabric of neurons and skeins of synapses to determine what makes us conscious, what makes us, us. But none of my scientific conclusions mattered now, only sorrow’s dark gravity holding my heart in its irresistible orbit.
I navigated among the graves of children who died too young and the rusting iron Southern Crosses of Confederate soldiers who died for no good reason. So much sorrow here, each grave its own epicenter of pain and loss, each marker a final punctuation mark for a life story increasingly forgotten as its memories faded as those who could remember dwindled.
Death hurts not only because we face the inevitability of our own demise, but also because it opens a hole in our memories and robs us of the warm breathing evidence of who we have been. The loss forces us to redefine ourselves.
When I reached the magnolia, I found an old Ford hubcap, cigarette butts, two used condoms, and enough malt liquor cans to verify this as a major after-hours entertainment spot, life continuing, surrounded by death. I walked on and quickly found myself at the southern end of the cemetery, next to the Stone family plot holding the remains of my grandparents, my uncle William, and my uncle Wester, whom I had never known because, like so many in the rural South of the 1920s, he died as an infant from some now-treatable disease. The small angel on his headstone, meant to imply his innocence and express ticket to heaven, looked vaguely sinister to me this morning.
The low, powerful growl of a truck’s exhaust drew my attention to the cemetery entrance. I watched as a limousine-sized, four-door, deep metallic gray pickup truck with a matching shell over the full-size bed pulled in and parked behind my rental. Behind the wheel sat Rex, his shaved head gleaming as if he had waxed and power-buffed it. He was a young contractor who had occasionally worked at my mother’s apartment complex and had taken a liking to her sweetness and anachronistic Southern charm.
For the past three years, he’d looked in on her almost every day, taken special care of her, installed all the special bathroom railings and fixtures needed for a woman whose mobility had been compromised by age.
Rex and his wife, Anita, a physician at the nearby University Medical School, had taken care of Mama and always made sure “Miss Anabel” did well. He refused to take my money for any of this and yet kept me posted on Mama’s needs and condition and helped me secretly funnel funds and provide some level of extra care Mama would never take directly because she was determined she would never “be a burden to my children.”
Rex was a tough man of few words and an uncertain past, which may or may not have included warrants connected with murder and mayhem. By the time I met him and learned enough about his past to confuse and concern me, he had already adopted Mama.
Rex waved at me when he got out of his truck and started toward me. He stood a head shorter than me, with a physique like a muscular tank. In his pin-striped, double-breasted suit, he looked like a dapper Mafia hit man and I wondered if he was packing.
CHAPTER 2
REX CLIMBED DOWN FROM HIS TRUCK AND WAVED AS HE STARTED TOWARD ME.
I returned Rex’s greeting and took a last look at the family plot. My mother had often told me she wanted to be buried here, but her younger brother William had beat her to the last available real estate in the plot. She had really wanted to be buried next to her father, whom she called Daddy and others called the Judge even though he had never been elected or appointed to the judiciary and felt those sorts of public office were not for gentlemen like him. It was, he felt, the duty of true Southern gentlemen like him to anoint those who would stand for election and appointment and who would do his bidding once in office.
The success of his theory was attested to by a file cabinet full of personal correspondence from governors and senators and congressmen and lesser elected officials and lower mortals all assuring the Judge they would do his bidding. Mama had inherited the papers half a century ago, and when she’d moved out of her big house into the little apartment across Lakeland Drive from St. Dominic’s Hospital in Jackson, she’d passed the papers along to me. Out of respect for her, I had not thrown the papers away, but after one slapdash glance through a couple of the hundred or so file storage boxes (the accreted paper residue of the Judge’s forty years of law practice and power brokering), I had stashed them all in mini-storage and forgotten about them until now.
The Judge’s elitism and especially his attitude toward public officials formed the basis for his everlasting contempt for my father, whose family tree hung heavy with elected officials including a congressman and a famous U.S. senator, my great-greatgrandfather J.Z. Goerge, who, according to history books, was the first to formalize Jim Crow segregation when he wrote the Mississippi state constitution in 1890 and embodied in it the literacy test and the poll tax that disenfranchised half the state’s population for the next three-quarters of a century.
For this, they put my great-great-grandfather in the U.S. Capitol’s Statuary Hall next to Confederate president Jefferson Davis. I never quite understood the Judge’s contempt for my family’s dark legacy, since it had produced a masterpiece of constitutional handiwork allowing the Judge to keep the black sharecroppers on both his plantations in virtual slavery.
For all these familial reasons and because my father worked for the governor at the time, I scandalized the family with my expulsion from Ole Miss in the fall of 1967 for leading a civil rights march. The Judge disinherited me from his substantial estate faster than you could say scalawag. They were all thankful when I enlisted in the Army and shipped out.
I turned away from this past – yet again – and headed toward Rex.
He had called me at my office on Thursday, something he had never done before. Mama, he said, had gone to the hospital that morning. Like any relatively affluent and extensively insured eighty-seven-year-old, Mama had a battalion of medical experts she visited on a regular basis. And on a regular basis they sent her to the hospital for inpatient tests.
And likewise regularly, she had her doctors forward copies of her test results to me. She and I would discuss these results extensively. We would have had nothing to talk about had I never gone to medical school. She disapproved of where I lived, how I lived, most of what I believed in, and never failed to complain about my accent and how I sounded “like a blank Yankee.” My mother was far too genteel to say damn. Southern ladies, in her mind, never used coarse language.
And make no mistake about it, Mama was a Southern lady of the very old school, an unreconstructed Delta belle born on a plantation who never understood why happy darkies no longer wanted to stay in their place as God had ordained, like bluebirds not mixing with the sparrows. For this reason, our conversations tended to focus on her medical history. She loved me as only a mother could, but she never understood me or why I had turned out the way I had. Neither had I.
Rex and I met now, one hundred hours later, by a headstone bearing the Stallings name.
“Hey, Doc.”
I held out my hand, but instead of shaking it, he stepped closer and gave me a bear hug. I returned it genuinely but briefly. Hugs from men – other than from my father, who was dead, and my son, who died far too short of being a man – made me uncomfortable.
“Thanks for coming.” I knew it sounded lame even before Rex frowned at me. “Nice suit,” I tried. He shrugged and turned to face the gravesite. “I owe you big time, man,”
Rex gave me a curious look.
“If you hadn’t called me, I’d never have seen her alive again.”
“How’s that?”
“After you called me, I phoned Mama at the hospital. She gave me all her usual chatter about how I shouldn’t come because my patients surely needed my attention more than she did, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if I would take that endowed chair the University of Mississippi Medical School had offered me right there in Jackson.”
Rex smiled.
“She never stopped talking about that; that’s for sure.”
I shrugged.
“Well, I just had a feeling this time. I’m glad you called me.”
The religious would say it was a divine message, but I think maybe it was more the tone in her voice, or simply that she was getting old and my own professional medical judgment told me that the accretion of illnesses would soon overwhelm her stubborn grip on life. Regardless, I canceled my patient appointments and hospital rounds and took a red-eye from LAX Thursday night. When I got to her room at St. Dominic’s Hospital early afternoon Friday, I sat down with a pale, dry husk of the woman I had seen only months before. It took a moment for her to open her eyes. They were lethargic, flat, and filled with tears when she recognized me. Colon cancer, she said. Terminal, the doctors said. She wanted no special measures, no interim surgeries or chemo.
“I spent the afternoon with her,” I said as we walked toward the gravesite. “She was drifting in and out, and the few times she spoke, her voice was so faint I had to lean over the bed and hold my breath to hear her.
“What did you talk about?” Rex’s voice had an odd tone, not fear but not simple curiosity.
“Mostly I read to her from the Bible, especially Psalm 121, over and over.”
“That’s it?”
I nodded and his usual poker face showed me something like relief. Something like a secret that had not been divulged. That confounded me and I put that down to yet another artifact of stress, like the person who wasn’t by the magnolia.
“Yeah.” I felt the regret. That was it. When the light from the window got too dim to read by any longer, I told her I needed some sleep, because I didn’t have any on the red-eye from L.A. I kissed her, gave her a hug, and told her I would be hack in the morning.”
He gave me a knowing look, as if he already knew what I had said and what I was about to say.
Movement interrupted my thoughts. In the distance, a hearse turned into the cemetery off Highway 7. It glided to a dignified stop behind Rex’s truck.
“Nothing more until the phone call from the hospital at maybe four thirty in the morning to tell me she was dead.” I stopped and looked at Rex closely “They told me she had apparently gotten up to get a cigarette, lost her balance, hit her head as she fell in the darkness.”
Rex stopped and looked back at me.
“She died all alone on the cold, hard linoleum floor.”
I shook my head as the image tore through my heart again. “You cannot possibly imagine how many times I have prayed that she had been knocked out by the blow on the way down. I can’t stand to think that she ended up on the floor, conscious for a long time, dying all alone in the dark. I wonder if she called for help or simply gave up, closed her eyes, and let go?”
The detail in Rex’s eyes gave my stress-worn nerves the impression that he somehow knew the answer to that.
CHAPTER 3
IN THE DISTANCE, AN OLDER, FOUR-DOOR CHEVROLET SEDAN WITH CLERGY LICENSE PLATES PULLED INTO THE CEMETERY behind the hearse. A bent, old gentleman in a dark suit climbed painfully from the sedan, his ragged white hair stirring in the wicked wind.
Rex and I turned toward him.
“Mama stage-managed everything you know,” I said. “Right down to the last detail.”
Rex raised his eyebrows.
“Right there in the safe-deposit box with her will,” I said.
“She’d paper-clipped a note to the prepaid funeral papers and specified everything she was to be dressed in right down to hosiery and undergarments, which pastor to call, and what Scripture he would read.”
I couldn’t help but smile as I thought of her lifelong theological rebellion against one of the foundations of Christianity.
“What’s so funny?” Rex asked me.
“The note was very clear that when we recited the Apostles’ Creed during the service, we would absolutely, positively not say the part about Jesus descending into hell.” I shook my head. “No matter how much she ragged on me about my heretical religious beliefs, she never managed to accept her personal savior spending time in hell.”
“You mean Hades,” Rex corrected me.
I smiled again at the memory. To Mama, hell was profanity and she was always too much of a lady to say those sorts of words.
As we drew closer to the hearse, two large men in dark suits got out of it and met the bent, old man at the rear of the vehicle. I pegged him as the minister rustled up by the local funeral home.
The funeral attendants were well dressed and professionally bland. The minister’s face was chapped and red, patched all over with scars I recognized as from a workmanlike removal of skin lesions. I counted at least a dozen more precancerous patches in need of treatment. His left hand clutched a cracked and worn leather-covered Bible. His free hand was cupped gently and trembled faintly like a farmer sowing seed.
I shook the trembling hand and thanked him for coming and introduced Rex.
“I remember your mother,” the minister said “And especially the Judge—but then, who doesn’t? — particularly during the spring floods of 1929 when the levees threatened to burst, all of them except the ones the Judge built when he was president of the Levee Board. Yessiree, he was a man all right.”
The well-practiced funeral home functionaries interceded then and pulled the old preacher back to the present. Rex and I slid Mama’s pewter-finish casket—the one she had picked out herself God-only-knew how many years ago—out of the back of the hearse and carried it to the gravesite and placed it on the aluminum structure over the hole. Rex and I stood silently during the brief ceremony. Psalm 121 again, and the usual dust to dust. During the final prayer, as I closed my eyes and tried without success to visualize Mama in any other setting than the hospital or in her casket, I heard a car pull to a halt on the gravel access road behind us.
When the minister said the last amen, the men from the funeral home tripped some hidden lever and Mama descended into the hole.
Rex and I stood at the side of the hole as the sound of the backhoe grew louder. I picked up a handful of dirt and tossed it on the top of the coffin. The impact of the dirt, the hollow, dull sound the frozen dirt clods made as they rolled off the metal, tore a membrane in my heart, and suddenly I saw nothing for the tears. I swiped at my eyes with the cuff of my new suit and cursed at the sky for not showing even a little sunshine for Mama. I thought about cursing God as well, but I’ve never been much for existentially futile gestures.
Finally, I turned and saw that Rex had walked away and stood with his back to me and head bowed. On the other side of the dirt mound the backhoe idled restlessly. The two men in overalls looked expectantly at me. I nodded, then turned and made my way to the minister, who stood discreetly at a small distance. I thanked him for coming, mentioned that he should have his face looked at closely by a competent dermatologist, then slipped him an envelope containing two hundred-dollar bills.
As he walked away, I saw a tall woman with mocha skin climb out of a bright red Mercedes sedan parked behind Rex’s truck.
“Well, I guess the bodies are spinning in their graves now,” Rex said as he stopped by my side. He nodded at the woman walking toward us. She looked awfully familiar to me.
“Meaning?”
“Dude. This is a cemetery for white folks only,” Rex said. “Even the labor with shovels’re white.”
I resented Rex’s comments, wanted nothing to do with skin-color irrelevancies right now. But I turned toward the backhoe anyway and realized he was right. What’s more, the men stood stock-still, their heads tracking the woman as she made her way toward us. Likewise, the two funeral home attendants and the minister were shocked into immobility by the sight of a dark-skinned woman in a white cemetery.
I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised, but the disappointment tasted like dirt. I hadn’t been here to Itta Bena in twenty years, and that absence from Delta reality had allowed me to construct a convenient little fiction of self-congratulation that my modest efforts in the civil rights movement and the phenomenal dedication of many others had changed things here into a culture of meritorious equal opportunity. But clearly, life here in the Delta, more than in the rest of Mississippi, more than in the rest of the Deep South, and more than most any other where in America, still revolved about a deeply rutted axis of race, class, and misunderstanding.
I started to verbalize this to Rex when my heart stopped: the woman walking toward us was Vanessa Thompson. The Vanessa Thompson, moneyed securities attorney former head of the Securities and Exchange Commission, whose striking face had made the cover of Time magazine when she’d shuttered her lucrative New York law practice to move back to Mississippi almost ten years ago to use her money to provide legal services for the state’s poor, because “it was time to give back.” But I also remembered quotes in the article from some of the more cynical observers who thought her move was “more like payback than give back.” I still had that copy of Time in a drawer in my living room in Playa Del Rey.
But it wasn’t the powerful, wealthy crusader Vanessa Thompson who arrested my pulse. No, it was the teenage Vanessa Thompson, my high school heartthrob and the ultimate forbidden fruit, who momentarily flatlined my EKG precisely as she had done more than thirty years before.
Her appearance didn’t entirely surprise me because she and I had swapped e-mails over the past month about a strange, cold hate-crime case.
While I kept e-mailing her that I didn’t do forensics, Vanessa persisted, attaching her e-mails with file after file crammed with information about Darryl Talmadge, a local white man who had recently been convicted of murdering a black man in the 1960s. I could not fathom why Vanessa wanted me to help save Talmadge from the gas chamber.
CHAPTER 4
VANESSA THOMPSON HAD SINGLE-HANDEDLY DEFLECTED THE TRAJECTORY OF MY LIFE from that of privileged, multigenerational son of the Confederacy to a traitorous scalawag, who betrayed his race and turned his back on a heritage filled with statues and oil portraits in public buildings. I met Vanessa in 1965 when court-ordered integration placed her in my Jackson high school as part of a handful of token black students. I’d like to believe I changed way back then because Vanessa showed me how wrong the old system was. But it wasn’t that way at all, not that clean and simple.
“You sure as hell know how to piss folks off, my friend,” Rex mumbled to me as we made our way toward Vanessa.
I looked around and saw the white-hot hate stares shift from Vanessa to me and back.
“Comes naturally I guess.”
“Damn straight,” Rex said. “So how is it you know the famed Vanessa Thompson?”
“High school,” I said, remembering the wild sweetness of adolescence and the intoxicating hormone rushes. “She was in my history class. She always spoke up—”
“That sure hasn’t changed.”
“—spoke up and always had something interesting to say. Things I had never considered. Dangerous ideas.”
“Y’Mama thought you had way too many dangerous ideas. I imagine one of those started with her?” Rex nodded toward Vanessa.
“Not exactly.”
“How exactly?”
“I fell in love with her a long time before her words really mattered.”
Rex grimaced and made a sucking sound with his front teeth. “Lordy!”
I nodded.
The meaning of her words would grow paramount as time passed, but at first it was her voice, the tones and timbre of the words, the steel of commitment reinforcing her voice, the energy of her emotions, and mostly the inexorable gravity of her wisteria-colored eyes that pulled me into orbit and made me hers.
And the testosterone.
“Vanessa and the other black students took the same classes, ate lunch by themselves at the same table every day, and pretty much kept to themselves, “ I said. “White students ignored them, like they were invisible. I started out the same way until American history.”
“Let me guess,” Rex said. “You committed the unpardonable sin of talking to them.”
“To Vanessa,” I said nodding.” Sometimes just a few seconds between classes. But that was enough.”
“Nigger lover.”
The word still hit me like a physical slap. No matter how much hip-hop practitioners gratuitously tossed the word around, it felt like a profanity of the soul.
“Scratched into my locker, painted on my car, spelled out on the front lawn with used motor oil. I think they tried to set the oil on fire, but Papa chased them off with his twelve-gauge.
“The principal called me into his office and told me to stop fraternizing with the enemy, something about ‘godless Communists’ being behind it all. He called my parents. My mother cried; my father said he’d lose his job.”
“So she turned your head around?”
“In a manner of speaking,” I said.
The old irresistible rush fluttered in my gut as Vanessa drew closer. How could this be? How could this feeling endure over the distance of so many decades?
“I was in love. Civil rights started out as a way to her heart. It took a while for it to become an end of its own.” I nodded at the memories that played out in my head. “I asked her what to read, who to listen to, how to find the subversive literature behind the movement.
“Not surprisingly, Vanessa’s dad was one of the leaders. He was a professor at Tougaloo. The whole thing came to a head right before Christmas when Vanessa invited me to a discussion-group party at her house. I told Mama I had to do some research at the library, then drove north on old Highway Fifty-one toward Tougaloo. When I got to Vanessa’s house, it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. That plain little tract house was packed—I mean literally jammed—with people of every color.” I shook my head. “Black, white, Asian, Latino—” I turned to Rex. “I remember that day like it was this morning. I’d never, ever, been anywhere before in my entire life where blacks and whites and everybody else just … just hung around together as equals.
“I wasn’t all that surprised to find all three of the Jewish students at my high school or the owner of the only real deli in town. But I was floored to find my physics teacher there, and that was my first indication that there were white people who didn’t hate.
“When Vanessa took my arm, I was on cloud nine as she led me around and introduced me to people there. It was almost like the initiation into a secret society.”
I felt the euphoria again as Rex and I covered the remaining few steps toward Vanessa. Now, as then, I felt the euphoria turn dark and ugly remembering how all hell had broken loose when she’d introduced me to her parents. Her father was furious, and his deep, booming anger silenced the assembled crowd.
“How dare you step foot in my house!” he yelled at me.
“You of all people! Your entire family and your ancestors have done more damage to my people than anybody else in this state’s sorry history!”
He was convinced that at worst, I was there as a spy, and at the very best, a fulminating embarrassment.
He and Vanessa’s brother Quincy escorted me to my car and told me never to speak to her again.
Vanessa transferred out of my high school the next week, and I had not seen her face-to-face again until this moment.
CHAPTER 5
NOW ON THIS BITTER DAY, NEXT TO ONE OF THE MANY GRAVES HEARING A RUSTY IRON SOUTHERN CROSS, Vanessa and I met again. She reached out and touched my forearm with her fingers.
Seismic plates moved again in my heart.
“I’m so sorry about your mother.”
I opened my arms and she stepped into them as if the past thirty-five years had never rolled by She returned my embrace, then slipped a hand inside my suit coat to make the hug even more intimate. She took a step back then. Reluctantly, I let her go.
“I’m very, very sorry to barge in at a time like this, but this Talmadge thing has gotten out of control in the past few days. We really need your help and I hoped to convince you in person.”
As Vanessa spoke, movement from behind her caught my eye. Again, I found myself staring toward the big magnolia tree; this time, I registered movement far beyond, in the trees down by Roebuck Lake.
Before I could react, a rifle shot thundered through the chill air.
Vanessa pitched forward. I opened my arms to catch her and saw an evil void where her left eye had once been. The warm, red-and-gray eruption from the ghastly wound blinded me. I grabbed Vanessa, rolled us to the ground, and covered her with my body as a second shot tore through the morning silence.
