 
A Slow Burning (UNABRIDGED Cassettes)
The author of the New York Times bestseller The Fourth Procedure is back with a provocative thriller that takes readers to a place where memories can become a living nightmare.
A brilliant scientist is close to an astonishing neurological breakthrough that will alter the very nature of who we think we are . . . a hard-boiled cop stumbles upon the merciless killer who had murdered his father twenty years earlier . . . a woman who lies in a coma is given one last, desperate chance at life. All meet with shattering consequences in this latest novel from Stanley Pottinger-a bestselling author who combines the intelligent, well-researched storytelling ability of Michael Crichton with the gritty crime realism of Michael Connelly. In A Slow Burning, Pottinger skillfully mixes colorful, complex characters with a hauntingly plausible story, weaving an unforgettable tale of deception, murder, and science going too far.
You are bidding on one:
"A Slow Burning"
by Stanley Pottinger
Narrated by Richard Ferrone
Used, in good condition UNABRIDGED Audiobook on Audio Cassettes!
14 Audio Tapes, Approximately 20.58 Hours!
Recorded Books, LLC. Audio!
More Exciting than a Teaching Company Course!
EX-LIBRARY COPY!
Publishers Weekly:
Ending a five-year hiatus after his bestselling debut (The Fourth Procedure), Pottinger proves he is a master of the art of the medical thriller and a formidable voice in examining American race relations. Here, he examines racial tensions in a plot that includes a vast web of biotechnical dangers and political corruption. New York police detective Nat Hennessy is coerced by his boss to exploit the trust of his fianc e, architectural restorer Camilla Dissonette, the beautiful granddaughter of an aristocratic New Orleans family. It's part of a conspiracy to discredit Dr. Cush Walker, a brilliant and controversial African-American neurosurgeon short-listed for a Nobel in medicine. Walker, who also happens to be Dissonette's ex-boyfriend, invented a breakthrough brain-scanning technique for detecting the predisposition for racial bias. This advanced polygraph-type analysis, called the BIAS test, threatens the careers of many cops, including Hennessy. Other effects of Walker's work involve the development of technology to restore damaged brains and transplant personalities, used in the hopes of eradicating the legacy of racial bigotry. Peopled with quixotic characters who enrich the mosaic of revenge, murder and intrigue, the action bounces around like machine-gun fire in a dark alley, while Pottinger makes pseudo-technobabble somehow sound simple. Though one must forgive the occasional clich d lapse in the romantic scenes and minor side trips to smell the roses (and garbage), this kaleidoscopic thriller is marvelously complex, charged with emotional impact and resounding ethical questions.
New York Post:
Pottinger's clear, crisp prose does just that, steadily building tension in every subplot. That means once you're 50 pages in, don't expect to put this one down. Like Cook, Pottinger is able to describe complex mediacl procedures in layman's language, making the book refreshingly free of scientific technobabble. A Slow Burning is a quickly burning fire of a story that you won't be able to extinguish until the last page.
Internet Bookwatch:
It's been twenty years since Nat watched his father being beaten to death: now a routine homicide investigation lends him opportunity to avenge the murder, and others become embroiled in a story of deception and violence. Boyd Gaines lends a dramatic tone to this thriller.
Lorenzo Carcaterra:
A Slow Burning is a shake, rattle, and roll dance with danger. The plot is a lightning jolt of tension, expertly pitting a scientist playing God games in the lab with a determined cop on an elusive hunt and a lone woman clinging to a life fast slipping away. The action is nonstop, the dialogue is sharp, fresh, and real, and the story rushes by at a marathon runner's pace. A Slow Burning is the perfect hot read for a cold winter's night.
FROM THE BOOK:
Friday, November 22, 1963
He had seen a cross like this once before, in the field behind the barn where he'd been sleeping on a hot summer night. But this one was different. When the torchlight hit it just right, it looked as if it were upside down, and instead of being plain and white, it had bands around the beams, like strips of paint, or cloth, or rope. Or something.
Hunching down, he reached out and carefully parted the thorny blackberry bush, afraid that the hooded figures could see his puffs of breath hanging in the cool November air. The white-sheeted figures seemed huge and unreal, powerful in the way they moved, mysterious like ghosts. Maybe they were ghosts. Maybe they didn't need to see him at all—maybe they could catch his scent or feel his presence. The thought of it dried his mouth and numbed his lips. Get out of here, his legs said, but his eyes held him tight. He was witnessing something large here, like the sinking of a ship or a wrecked train, and no one, least of all a nine-year-old boy, could be expected to run from that.
He let go of the berry bush and lay on his back behind its camouflage. His eyes were open, the stars brightly lit, his mind's eye reconstructing the cross he'd seen the summer before. He remembered waking to the sound of strange voices, then peeking through the cracks in the hay-loft wall to see phantoms in white robes lifting the Mississippi pine into place, hand over hand, as if it were a barn post. He remembered watching them use ax heads to pound stakes around the base, then douse it withgasoline and touch fire-brands to it and make it quiver beneath a film of floating yellow heat. He could still picture the flames licking its skin, arching across the velvet-black sky. He could still feel the shock of seeing the symbol of Jesus rising like charred flesh into heaven. At first he'd thought they'd stolen the cross from the Baptist church in Hardy and were just prankin', but then he understood who they were. These were the men his parents described as "Satan's children," the nameless, faceless ones he saw in nightmares standing unburned in rings of fire, tall steeples of cold white stone. Seeing them that summer night was the first time he'd grasped his parents' warnings that it was the brutes, not the angels, who held power over the earth. At least if you were black.
One of the men in the distance cursed, stopping the boy's heart. After scrunching up, he lifted his head and found the cross through the leaves. Why had they turned it upside down? He tried to make out what they were doing and saying, but he was too far away; he'd have to circle around to the trees and crouch in the cotton stubble and watch from there. Quiet and invisible. Brave.
His heart pounded in his throat. Brave? He was so scared his lungs ached. What he really needed to do was run back to the farmhouse and tell his father and brothers and get the dogs and the shotgun and—
What's that?
Two white robes move toward the base of the cross, torches blazing. There was something on the other side of the vertical beam, as if it were lashed to a mast.
He hunkered down again and closed his eyes and began counting, one ... two ... three. When he got to ten he'd jump up and run away as fast as his legs could go.
* * *
The doctor closed his eyes and tried to imagine the girl they were talking about, but he was upside down, and blood had pooled in his head, threatening to black him out. Despite the stench of kerosene-soaked torches, he could smell the man's fetid breath, rancid with rotting hush puppies and cheap liquor. His upper eyelids fell open. A foot away from his face, two inverted heads covered in white leaned forward from a kneeling position to get a closer look. Behind the ragged holes he could see their eyes, one pair clear and cold, the other pair blinking nervously.
"Tell me you did it and we'll leave you be," the cold-eyed man said.
"Elsewise," the blinker said, "we gonna hurt you bad."
He's the weak one, the doctor decided ... the coward with a spine of booze and an unhinged tongue ... talks tough when the action's high ... vomits when it's over.
The doctor listened to his pulse pound in his ears. St. Peter ... crucified ... on an inverted cross. Dear God ... if you can hear me. His toes were turning cold from hanging upside down, and from the bindings on his ankles.
"We know you did it, Doc," the cold-eyed man said. "She done told us. All's you gotta do is admit it and you kin go home."
"Did ... what?" the doctor said.
"Aw, shit," the nervous blinker said, taking an angry swipe at the grass. He stood up.
Cold Eyes didn't move. "Is that what you want? To hear the words?"
Toeing the sod, the nervous blinker said, "You ain't never gonna hear it come outta my mouth."
The first man bent a little closer, speaking quietly in the intimate tone of a friend. "She ain't my girl, Doc, so it don't make me no never mind whether I say the words or not, but you know what we do to niggers who mess with our women, so what's the point?"
The doctor pictured the young white girl on the floor of his clinic, her eyes staring blankly into space, her cold, taut body quaking in an epileptic fit. He remembered kneeling beside her, holding her arms down with one hand and using the other to pry loose the tongue that had collapsed into her throat. He hadn't treated a white patient for years, but this was an emergency. Her panicked sister didn't know where else to go; he was the closest doctor she could find; naturally he would help. Of course, the girl had said nothing about her sister being pregnant, much less about her having been raped. He'd explained that to the Klansmen over and over, from the first time they'd called him at the clinic and threatened him to only an hour earlier, when they'd dragged him to the pebble pasture and tied him to the cross. But none of it did any good. Telling them again would only mean another blow to his head, which was already the size of a melon. It might shake loose the watch, too, and if things didn't go right—Lord, help me—he'd need the watch.
He turned his head to the side, searching for a way out, and felt the adhesive tape stretch the skin on the side of his neck. The watch fob was still there, but how was he going to get to the case? Should have thought of this ... missed my chance to open it when they grabbed me. He saw three more white sheets standing off to the side, each clutching a torch.
"Don't look away from me!" Cold Eyes barked.
Turning back, the doctor saw two hooded men on the other side, one standing still, the other rocking back and forth like a little boy about to pee his pants. There were five of them in all ... maybe seven.
The ringleader stood up and pulled two men aside and talked to them in a low voice. The doctor watched, trying to keep his mind alive. Their white costumes reminded him of something ... Halloween ... his five-year-old daughter in her little cat suit, pulling off her whiskered mask because it was too hot and sweaty, too hard to breathe in, too stupid to wear. Now these men ... overgrown children without the wits of five-year-olds ... too hot and sweaty to breathe ... too dumb to take the hoods off.
The leader returned to the stake. "Listen to me," he said. "I'm gonna give you one more chance."
The doctor, dizzy and swollen, refused to speak.
Cold Eyes reached under his robe and withdrew a bone-handled knife. Shick-clunk—a gleaming blade appeared from nowhere.
Stay awake. The pocket watch is there ... but no good unless you can reach it. Stay awake.
* * *
The boy sneaked onto a bed of pine needles and curled into a ball. He was no more than seventy-five feet from the cross now, hidden from view on one side by a pile of fir logs too full of pitch to be used as firewood, protected on the other side by the night. He decided to lie still and make sure he was invisible before lifting his head to see what was happening. Brave enough? For what? He wanted to know without knowing.
* * *
"The baby looks just like you, Doc. Just like you."
"I ... never ... touched ... the girl."
"Then why's she say you're the one? Tell me, Doc. Why would she say a thing like that?"
The doctor tried to shake his head slowly.
"You expect me to take the word of a nigger over the word of a innocent fourteen-year-old white girl?"
"Let's check him out," someone said. "She told us how to prove he's the one."
"Shut up!" the ringleader said. Using his fingers and thumbs, he pressed the cloth of his hood into his eyes to wipe away the sweat, then exhaled a long, defeated sigh. Holding the switchblade across the doctor's neck, he drew its flat edge against the grain of the old man's day-old growth with the sound of a soft zipper. When it reached his chin, he lifted it, stood up, and placed the sharp tip of it into the doctor's pants near his knee.
The doctor trembled and closed his eyes. Laboring to breathe, he said, "Watch."
"Watch what?" the Klansman said. "You the one needs to watch." He grabbed the old man's pants leg at the shin and drew the knife downward toward his crotch, cutting his trousers open clean as a seamstress.
The other white sheets stood still, hoods pulsing in and out at their mouths, eyes fixed on the knife.
He placed the blade under the elastic band of the doctor's undershorts and flicked it upward, cutting them loose. Then he stuck the knife under the cloth from the waist to the leg hole and cut it in half.
"Watch," the doctor said again.
"Look at that," the nervous one said. "Didn't I tell you? She said he wuddn't circumcised!"
"You dumb son of a bitch," the ringleader said. "Ain't ten old niggers in the county been circumcised."
Another one said, "Got to be hospital-born to git circumcised."
The ringleader squatted down and once again brought his face close to the doctor's. "Last chance, Doc. Why'nt you just admit it and git it off your chest?"
The doctor heard a popping metal sound. I know that sound. He murmured something. The hood bent down closer.
"My ... watch," the doctor said in a raspy voice.
"Your watch? What about your watch?"
The doctor's outstretched hands curled back toward his chest as if he were reaching for something. I know ... that sound ... the popping of sheet metal cooling ... like a tin of water ... or a can of gasoline.
A cat walked down his spine. It had been years since lynchings were commonplace in Mississippi, not since the late twenties, early thirties, but there was trouble in Mississippi now, civil rights workers coming around, angry marchers and torchlit mobs and church bombings, and when that kind of trouble reared its head, he knew the whitecaps would pick up the torch. Fire was what the Rocky Ford mob had used on a family in Vicksburg, and it was how a mob had killed the mulatto gambler named MacIntosh. Fire was their favorite way in Mississippi. Wasn't that long ago that a six-hour lynching—what whites called "a slow burning"—brought out ten thousand citizens, including the sheriff and his family, on a Sunday afternoon. After roast chicken dinner. After Sunday morning church. After readin' the Bible and prayin'. Couldn't let a lynching interfere with lovin' God and prayin'.
The hood looked at the doctor's wrists but found no watch. He stood up. "He's talkin' crazy again. He ain't gonna admit nothin'."
"Let me try," the nervous blinker said. "I gotta right, she's my girl."
The ringleader stood looking down at the old man's face, fingering the enormous switchblade, deciding what to do. After a moment he took a step backward and let the girl's daddy take his place.
* * *
With his head up and his gaze fixed, the boy's spirit drained out of him like syrup off a spoon. He knelt in the bed of pine needles, a legless statue, openmouthed and wide-eyed in a dream. The object on the cross was a man, someone hanging upside down, his feet tied at the top, his arms outstretched on the horizontal beam. And someone in a sheet was doing terrible things to him—punching him, yelling at him, hitting him in the face, the stomach, between his legs. He could see the victim's feet curl forward each time a blow landed, see bits of cornmeal shaken loose from his pants cuffs. He could see his shoes trembling ... a pair of high-top farmer's shoes with long laces tied around the ankles and back to the front in a bow.
Exactly the way his father tied them.
The obvious washed over him. He became disembodied, unable to feel the ground beneath him, unaware that he was standing up or walking out into the open. Only the sound of his own voice yelling "Dad!" brought him back to reality.
That, and the vise grip of a man's hand on the back of his neck.
The whitecaps at the cross looked up through their saggy holes and watched as their lookout steered the boy toward them.
* * *
His father's eyes were swollen closed, but Cush could tell that his dad knew what had happened: his nine-year-old son had been captured. A shot of adrenaline surged through his veins, making the ropes moan against the cruciform. He tried to speak, but his voice box was smashed and swollen, allowing only a whisper.
One of the hooded men said, "What the fuck you doing bringing that kid over here?"
"He seen us!"
"Seen what? What the hell you think we wearing these hoods for, you dumb son of a bitch?"
"Everybody shut up!" the cold-eyed ringleader said.
Cush dropped down to his father's head. "Daddy!" he said, hanging onto the man's battered face and neck.
"Run," his father whispered to him. "Run, run ... run!"
Cush heard him but didn't move. "Dad!" he pleaded, as if this man who saved other people's lives had the power to save his own.
"My watch," his father whispered. "Open it."
The boy didn't understand.
"Take ... my watch."
Cush fumbled at his father's torso, searching for the big pocket watch he'd seen him pull from his pants many times before. He felt it in the center of his chest. With his hands shaking, he reached inside his father's shirt and found the gold circle dangling on a fob that had been taped to his smooth skin.
"Hey, boy, what you got there?" the nervous blinker said. He reached down and swatted the nine-year-old onto his haunches, then took the timepiece in his hand and lowered his hooded face for a closer look. "Where'd you get this, nigger?" he said to Cush's father, and pressed the latch that opened the gold cover. A small black capsule dropped onto the ground. "What's that?" the blinker said.
"Leave him alone!" the boy cried.
Paying no attention, the nervous man knelt beside the doctor's face and pawed the grass for the pill. "You fixin' to git outta this with cyanide, old man? Before I'm done with you?" He tugged at the watch again, but the taped-down fob held fast. He turned his head up to the ringleader. "Gimme the knife," he said.
"Fuck the knife, just take it."
"It ain't the watch fob ah'm fixin' to cut."
The ringleader flicked open the blade and laid the handle in the nervous hood's outstretched palm. He turned it around and pushed the sharp tip against the doctor's neck, indenting the skin. "Hold the boy," he said. "This'll learn him a lesson he won't never forgit."
With his other hand, he tugged at the watch fob and felt it hold fast. "Shit," he said, and in a violent rage ripped it off the man's chest.
As the watch fob pulled away from the skin, the whitecap's knife hand jerked forward no more than a quarter inch—but enough to puncture the swollen jugular.
Blood spurted out of the bulging vein in a geyser, squirting in pulses onto the Klansman's white robes, spewing under the enormous pressure of gravity and a desperate heart.
The Klansman yelled—"Ah, shit!"—and scrambled backward, shaking the blood off his outstretched hands, head bent down toward the stream of red.
The other men froze.
"Jee-zus," one of them said.
The boy stood still, disbelieving. Run, run, run, his father had said. Cush grabbed the watch off the ground and bolted on liquid feet toward the ravine.
"Get the kid!" someone yelled.
"I cain't run in this goddamn thing!" another answered.
"He ain't seen no faces!" a third said.
"Shit!" the killer said, shaking his dripping hands, gawking at his red-soaked robe.
One of the Klansmen raised a rifle, took aim at the fleeing boy, and fired a single shot. "I got him! I got the kid!"
"Let's get outta here!" the ringleader said. Someone splashed gasoline onto the cross, the doctor, and the ground.
The first torch set the place ablaze, then everyone tossed in their own, end over end like juggler's pins. Like an awakened dragon, the crucifix roared its voracious split-tail flames into the air, sucking everything into a consuming vortex—leaves, oxygen, breath, madness—inflating itself with a guttural growl that stunned the Klansmen and scattered them into the night like frightened maidens running with their skirts held high.
The pyre continued burning without an audience, cauterizing the air and cleansing the earth, transporting a human spirit into the ether. With its work finally done, with yet another Mississippi killing field sanctified, the fire slowly receded into a cool, crinkled ash, transforming itself from a raging inferno into a dignified cocoon, removing the last remains of the doctor from the beauty and scum of the world, ensuring, at last, that nothing—not a torch or a hand, not a curse or a breath, not even the adoring gaze of his children or the gentle rays of the morning sun—would ever touch him again.
* * *
As young Cush Walker approached the steps of the church dressed in his Sunday best, even though it was Saturday, he saw a newspaper pinned to the side of the dilapidated newsstand on the corner. His mother let go of his good hand—the other was in a sling from a bullet wound in his shoulder—and embraced a woman in a black straw hat, one of the doctor's patients who'd come to pay her respects. Cush wandered over to the shed and read a one-word headline on the bottom half of the folded paper that spoke of the earthshaking events of the night before. SLAIN! it said, and beneath it, a line that said after November 22, 1963, the world would never be the same.
Cush stopped to ponder what he saw, impressed that the white people who printed newspapers had heard about his father's murder so quickly. He wanted to see a picture of him on the pages inside, the faces of his killers without their masks, the doomed expressions, the slouched figures sitting on metal bunks in the jail behind the courthouse. He asked the vendor if there were pictures of his daddy inside. When the man finally understood what he was talking about, he unfurled the newspaper and showed him the headline above the word SLAIN! PRESIDENT, it said.
President slain? The story was about the killing of the president?
The sense of betrayal was instant. Tears welled up in Cush's eyes, but his mother's white-gloved hand reached down and took his own and tugged him toward the church. Soon he was in the midst of flowers and sad music and a sanctuary filled with black folks dressed in their Sunday best just like him.
Assassination?
The rest of the world might think the day before was about the death of a president and white folks' problems and all the other terrible things going on up north, but Cush knew better. The day before was about his father, Dr. Calvin Walker, and what white men did to blacks. He knew because he'd seen it with his own eyes, witnessed firsthand how they went crazy with a hate so hot it burned up the air itself. Maybe the newspaper people didn't understand this, but he did. So did his father. So did God.
Considering what he wanted to do, that would probably be enough.
The organ finally went silent and the preacher took the pulpit to comfort the living and bury the dead, but Cush wanted no part of it. He sat fingering his father's pocket watch, hearing nothing the minister said, staring at endless bunches of hideous blue lilies.
He turned the watch over and read the inscription: Death is but crossing.... There had been more words following them, but they'd been sheared off years before.
Cush read them, thinking about hot cider on cold nights and the stories his father saw flickering in the fireplace flames. He pictured him in the immaculate white coat he wore at the Calvin Walker Clinic for Negroes and smelled the pills that filled the huge brown bottles on the shelves in his office. Then he saw his father hanging upside down on the inverted cross, his face swollen beyond recognition.
He looked at the words on the watch again, Death is but crossing....
Someone was crying at the pulpit, but Cush Walker was dry-eyed and concentrated, no longer thinking of the past but staring into the future.
November 22, 1963, a day of death and outrage.
When the newspapers said the world would never be the same, they had no idea what that meant.
No idea at all.
Thursday, October 29, 1929
The young girl hurried across the street in quick, deliberate steps, paying no mind to the oppressive heat of the day. October in New Orleans was like the devil's pied piper, gathering the gullible behind the promise of autumn one day, marching them back to a summer swamp the next. Calendars be damned, the town was baking as if it were mid-July, with street tar as sticky as filé gumbo and steaming bayous hot enough to cook their own crawfish pie. Sweating men in undershirts unloaded trucks in slow motion, and damp-skinned women took afternoon breaks on wrought-iron verandahs, legs set apart and skirts pulled high, fanning themselves with sheet music or church programs, moving the languid air as thick as black bean soup. On a scorching day in New Orleans, time moved at the pace of a tired horse while everyone waited for the hell-yellow sun to burn itself out and give them the softer gift of night. The seedy, dreamy night, when the scorching sun was down and people's appetites were up, giving the French Quarter its fragrant soul.
Maybe for others, but not for Camilla Bea. In her world, sunset meant the end of the day, not the beginning. At fifteen, with strict patrician parents and a family name to uphold, evening time consisted of dinner at the huge Queen Anne table, reading or catching fireflies with her cousins, playing the piano in the recital room for cotton merchants or linen-suited bankers or bishops and Southern politicians. Then it was early to bed, where she'd write an obligatory passage in her diary, endure a loving homily from her black nanny, and turn off the lights. Dreams there would be of distant, candlelit places as she tenderly explored her own body, but the real thing? The flesh-and-blood goods of life? Not at her age, not in this house. That she would have to continue discovering secretly, in the afternoon heat, while the rest of New Orleans endured and waited.
Camilla Bea passed by the chemist on the corner of DeMuth and Lessay and turned into the recessed doorway beyond a black iron gate. The heavy wooden door to the building closed behind her, leaving her standing before a long stairwell, looking up at a cut-glass window with a leaded crucifix in the center. She closed her eyes and filled her lungs with scents of clove and citrus. It was always the same when these doors went closed, this moment of transformation.
She climbed the steps one at a time, smoothly, like a spotted fawn. Reaching the top, she stood on tiptoe to see through a peephole in the door, then knocked gently.
The door opened and a man in his early thirties, the finest piano teacher in the French Quarter, stood with his arms outstretched, smiling. He wore an open-necked shirt with billowing sleeves, the foamy surf of fine white Egyptian cotton splashing over velvet copper skin. With his light features and aristocratic bearing, his friends assumed he was the distant offspring of the nineteenth-century gens de couleur libre, New Orleans' "free people of color" who, depending upon the genes they'd inherited and the lies they told, passed for either black or white. In the two years she'd known him, Camilla Bea thought of him as a golden god.
"Hello, Camilla," he said in a resonant voice, unexpectedly deep for his slender build. He closed the door and led her by the hand to the practice room, a small, high-ceilinged library dominated by a polished Steinway mirroring the afternoon light. After seating her on a tufted leather couch, he walked to the kitchen and returned with two tall glasses of freshly brewed ginger tea, each garnished with mint and rimmed with brown sugar.
"You look wonderful," he said. His long, elegant fingers rose to her face and laid back a wisp of her honey blond hair. He brushed her pink cheeks lightly with the back of his hand. "It's too warm to be running."
"I didn't want to be late," she said.
"You're never too late."
He took her hands in his and inspected them, first the backs, then her palms. Then her eyes. "Are you ready to play?"
The word "play" tickled her blood. "Yes," she said, this time feeling the blush in her cheeks. "That's why I came. To play."
* * *
The late afternoon light descended the wrought-iron balustrade and infiltrated the room between the shadows and the blinds. Above the bed, a ceiling fan stirred the flesh-fragrant air, cascading a light breeze onto their naked bodies. Camilla Bea lay on her side with her head on her teacher's chest, eyes closed, hair strewn over his neck and arms as if freshly washed and drying in the sun. He twirled a lock of it in his fingers.
"Camilla?" His tone was soft as petals.
"Mm?"
"I'm afraid it's time to go."
"Mm." She summoned the strength to move her lips. "But I don't want to."
"Your mother will start wondering, and besides, I have another student coming."
She waited a moment—he did not push her—then dragged herself to her elbows. Scratching her head, she turned herself into a blond Medusa. "But I haven't played the piano."
"We'll do it next time."
She bent down and kissed his nipple and laid her chin on his chest. "I can't go quite yet. I have a present for you."
He looked amused. "What kind of a present?"
"Do you know why I was late today?"
"No, why?"
"I stopped to see Miss Emily."
Now perplexed. "Miss Emily?" She said nothing. "On Pinellas Street?"
Yes, her eyes said.
He sat up. "How do you know Miss Emily?"
She was mildly insulted. "I have friends in the Quarter, you know."
"Camilla, stop it. What are you telling me?"
She kissed his smooth, hairless chest, waiting for him to guess. When he didn't speak, she said, "You're going to be a daddy."
He laid his head back against a bolster and stared at the ceiling fan. She rested her cheek on his breastbone, once again fanning her hair over his neck. This time he didn't twirl it in his fingers.
"When?"
"I don't know. Five or six months from now."
He closed his eyes. Oh, God.
"I kind of knew a few weeks ago," she said, "but I was scared to find out for sure. That's why I asked Miss Emily to, you know, examine me." She balanced her chin on his chest, waiting for his reaction, but he said nothing. "It's true," she said, as if perhaps he didn't believe it. She took his hand and opened it and ran her index finger along his lifeline, wondering what lay in his silence. "I'm a little scared," she said. She'd known another girl in her situation: sixteen, Catholic, white family. Before her "problem" became obvious, the girl had disappeared to her grandmother's house in Iowa without even saying good-bye.
He took a deep breath and held it as if underwater, then let go, exhaling grandly. "Well," he said mostly to himself, "what's done is done." His voice struck her as distant now. "Your family will be—Lord, what will they be?"
"Shocked," she said. "Daddy would be furious if he knew his little flower is blossoming."
Sebastian blinked slowly. "He still calls you his little flower?"
"Always," she said. "He says I was named after one."
"Good Lord," he scoffed. "That's a camellia, not a Camilla." He stroked her hair lightly. "Leave it to a cotton merchant not to know the difference between a flower and a Roman warrior."
She pulled back and sat on her haunches. "Camilla was a warrior?"
He reached for a cigarette and a tortoiseshell holder on the round marble table next to the bed. "According to Roman mythology, she lived with the shepherds, who taught her how to hunt. When she grew up, she led maiden warriors into battle against Aeneas."
There it was again—that sophistication from being an artist and living in Europe and knowing music and wine and food and other marvelous things. He was deep and worldly, not superficial like her white friends. "That's wonderful," she said. "For the first time I absolutely love my name."
"Yes, well, don't tell your father," he said, working the end of the cigarette into the holder.
"Daddy's not a bad person, Sebastian."
"Of course he isn't." He stroked the cigarette between his fingers. "He's just so fucking bourgeois."
She waited a second, digesting his comment. "But he loves his family more than anything in the world," she said. "If he knew I was pregnant, it would absolutely kill him."
"Not to mention me."
She touched his cheek. "Your color won't make any difference to him."
"You really have had a heat stroke, haven't you?"
"It absolutely won't, you know why?"
Sebastian closed his eyes, he couldn't imagine.
"Because he's never going to know you're the father," she said.
He put the cigarette holder in his mouth. "Don't be naïve, Camilla."
"He's not, I swear. I'll never tell either of them who it is. Never." She stared at him intently. He had no rebuttal. "And I'm not naive, Sebastian," she added. "I'm a warrior."
"That's good," he said, rising from his pillow. "Before this is over, you're going to need to be."
They dressed in silence. When she dallied, he removed the cigarette holder from between his clenched teeth and pointed it at a mahogany clock. "When are you going to tell them?"
Buttoning her dress, she said, "I'm going to tell Mother tonight, before I start to show."
Trying to appear nonchalant, he reached out and placed his hand on the gentle curve of her belly. "Of course. You have to." He struck a match, touched it to the end of the cigarette, and drew in smoke. "What will she say?"
"I don't know." She stopped buttoning and reached for his cigarette, looking for a drag to dizzy herself. He held it back; the smell on her breath would give her away. She frowned. "She'll be furious," she said. She considered his face. "You aren't angry with me, are you?"
He looked a little miffed. "Why would I be angry?"
"I don't know. You seem kind of strange."
"I'm just surprised."
"Me, too." She slumped under the weight of it. "What are we going to do?"
"I have to think about it."
"I know!" Her eyes brightened. "Let's run away to Paris!"
"Paris?"
"Of course! It's your home and I've never been." She looked up at him. "What's it like?"
He raised his eyebrows. "It's the most beautiful city in the world—graceful, green in the summer, full of life and poetry and music. Except for the goddamned Eiffel Tower, it's perfect."
"What's wrong with the Eiffel Tower?"
"Oh, it's hideous—an iron monstrosity with no art or soul."
"Then we won't look at it." She closed her eyes. "We'll erase it from the sky!"
He smiled at her and brushed her cheek. "Do you know how wonderful you are? So full of possibilities."
She placed his hand on her belly again. "So full of you." She threw her arms around his neck. Their kiss was warm. He opened the bedroom door and extended a hand.
She said, "I'll come back tomorrow morning and tell you what happened, and we'll make plans." She looked up at him. "If it's a boy, I want to name him after you."
He lifted her hand and kissed her palm tenderly. "Come early, little lamb. We have many things to talk about."
She smiled. "And then you can tell me what that word means."
"What word?"
"Boohj-wah."
* * *
Camilla Bea entered the grand foyer of her antebellum house and, like a kid sniffing boiled spinach, knew immediately that trouble was afoot. There was a quiet hush of crisis, the heavy air of dread. She stood waiting. Who could have told them?
Her nanny entered the room with her finger at her lips and quietly pulled the drawing room door closed.
"What is it?" Camilla asked nervously.
"I don't know, Miss C, 'cept they's saying the stocks crashed and it's bad, real bad." She underlined the point with a scowl that said, You best mind me on this one, chile.
Camilla started up the winding staircase to her room, then stopped. "Tell Mother—better tell Mother I need to see her."
Nanny looked worried. "Now don't you be makin' trouble for your mother today, you hear?" She wiped her hands on her small white apron. "Not today, honey, hmm-mm."
* * *
Camilla Bea's mother sat on the chintz-covered chaise in her daughter's room, her back straight, her eyes fierce and level. Camilla was on the edge of her bed with a white cotton coverlet pulled over her lap, as if for protection. She picked at the lace fringe, eyes on her fingers.
"Who's the father?" her mother asked.
Camilla Bea said nothing. Her mother waited. Finally, Camilla said, "I'd rather not say."
"You—what did you say?" She was incredulous.
"It doesn't matter who it is. I'd rather not tell you."
Her mother's cheeks reddened. "If you think for one second that you can sit there and ..." Her voice trailed off and her hand rose to her mouth. "Oh, my God. You had a piano lesson today."
Camilla looked up, slightly stricken. "So what if I did?"
Her mother touched her forehead. "Good Lord, how could I have missed it?"
Camilla watched her set her lips grimly, as if words were not permitted to pass, her eyes blue with frost. She knew. Her mother knew. The silence stretched so long Camilla lost track of time. What was she thinking?
A knock on the door and the nanny's face appeared through a crack. "Mister say he need you in the drawing room right away, ma'am. He's fixin' to leave for New York."
Her mother stood up. "I'll deal with this when I come back." She opened the door. "If you see your father, say nothing about this, do you understand? I'll tell him when the time is right."
Camilla faced her. "It doesn't matter when the time is right, Mother, and there is nothing to deal with. I love Sebastian and he loves me. I'm sure he'll want to marry me."
Her mother walked over to her and examined her as if she'd never seen her before. The girl stared back defiantly.
Her mother said, "You disgrace your family with this vulgarity, and now you have the gall to stand there and suggest you're going to disgrace us with a marriage? Have you forgotten who you are? Do you think I don't know who he is?"
"Who is he, Mother?" she hissed. "Go ahead and say it! Who is he?"
Her mother clenched her teeth and slapped her daughter hard across the face.
Camilla's hand rose to her cheek in disbelief. In one instant everything familiar disappeared—love, hate, time. Watching her mother return to the door, Camilla leaned forward and wailed her fury. "I don't care what you think, Mother! He's beautiful and he loves me!"
She heard the door lock click from the outside, making her a prisoner.
"I hope my baby is black as coal!" she screamed. "You're not going to stop me! I love him!"
Wednesday, July 13, 1977
The sandy-haired boy stood at the front window of the fast-moving subway car pretending to be an astronaut in Stanley Kubrick's 2001. He loved every minute of that movie—the apes, the space walks, the computer named HAL—but most of all he loved the scene when the spaceship reached a distant planet and had to fly through layers of onrushing color and lights. No matter how many times he saw it, it still took his breath away, dazzling him with the sensation of speed and flight. That's what the subway tunnel reminded him of with its crossties fluttering beneath his feet, its green and white lights whizzing past his ears, the shiny tracks slipping beneath his spaceship like a pair of endless silver arrows. It was the perfect start, a great beginning.
Staring through the window, Nat Hennessy paid no attention to his reflection in the glass. At eleven, he was still more dead-end kid than adolescent, taken with the world of adventure instead of mirrors and pimples and the first broodings of adolescence. He loved summertime nights like this, walking down the street toward the subway entrance with his father, breathing in thick, humid air that smelled of river scum, warm cement, and the sweet stink of overcooked sausages, then speeding along toward Yankee Stadium.
He turned from the window and looked back at his father, sitting with his coat off and his tie loosened, staring across the car blank-faced and preoccupied. Nat knew what was on his mind: he was yearning for his wife, Nat's mom, cursing the cancer that had taken her. But having choked it down for so long, Nat was ready for a break from it, a moment of rebirth, a taste of normal life with his dad. Tonight, he sensed, was the official start of their future life together.
They had made this trip to the Bronx before. In past summers, he and his father, sometimes with his uncle Jim, had trekked off to see the Yankees play on Bat Day, when kids were given a free baseball bat for the price of admission. This year they'd missed the game when his father had been forced to tend to a crisis at the office, but Nat's Irish luck hadn't run out: to make up for it, his father had arranged with a friend in the Yankees' front office to give them a private tour of the stadium while the team was on the road. Tonight Nat would see things other kids could only dream of: the club's locker room, Reggie Jackson's at-home uniform, the dugout where Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and Joe DiMaggio had once sat, the mound where Don Larsen pitched his perfect 1956 World Series game. Died and gone to heaven is what Nat had done. He could feel the angels in the air.
At 116th Street, in the middle of Harlem, the train took on three boys about Nat's age, and soon each took a turn dancing in the aisle while the other two set the beat with clapping hands. Because it wasn't a game night, Nat and his father were the only white people on the car, but Nat didn't care. He liked the way these kids moved, admired their audacity and street-smart style. When one of the boys came to the front of the car with an upturned cap, Nat's father dug into his pocket for change, after which the boy thanked him and returned to his seat.
That made Nat proud. He left the front window and sat next to his dad. A lean man of forty-five, his father smiled and tousled his son's hair, then wrapped his arm around him and pulled him tightly to his side. Slightly embarrassed but loving the hug, Nat sat with his cheek against his father's shoulder, smelling his warm suit and the aroma of spent cigars, the faint blend of musk cologne and evening perspiration. He loved these tangs of his father's strength and prowess, these scents of King Arthur and leather shields and men storming a musty cell to free the queen. That's who his father was to him now: a modern knight, lonely, but loving and strong. With no brothers or sisters and his mother dead, Nat needed him like oxygen.
The train sped beneath Harlem toward the South Bronx, traveling north through the crusty bowels of the city. When it pulled into the 125th Street station to exchange passengers, Nat stood up and returned to his place at the front window.
Only three more stops to go.
* * *
The train left 138th Street and was speeding along nicely when all the lights in view—track signals, bulbs on the walls, the interior lighting in the car—flickered in a unified, cosmic blink—and died.
The train's brakes jolted, bringing the cars to a shuddering halt. All sound disappeared: the motor, the air fans, the passengers, and the squealing of steel on steel.
Voices behind Nat rose in curiosity—"What's happenin'?" Nat felt stuffiness and uncertainty closing in around him. Suddenly, what had been a magic capsule was now the inside of a pitch-black closet with the doorknob missing.
Nat raised his hands in front of him like a sleepwalker but couldn't see them. "Dad?" He began inching forward when the battery-powered fluorescent lights blinked on, spreading a funereal glow through the car. He reached his father and pressed himself against his knee. "What's wrong?"
"I don't know. Sit tight and we'll see."
Fifteen minutes later, the conductor entered the car waving the beam of a flashlight and walked to the sliding doors. After lifting a seat, he reached down and pulled a large handle and opened the doors manually. "Listen up, everybody. The power's gone out and we're going to have to walk the tracks to the next station. Stay in line behind me, I don't want nobody near the third rail, the power could come back on at any minute."
People grumbled and stirred. Three older boys, excited by the chaos, jumped down and ran ahead, heedless of the motorman's warnings. Older people shuffled forward, held onto the sides of the door, and, with the help of the conductor's hand, stepped cautiously onto the filthy, wet ground.
As Nat's father started out the door, the conductor, a black man, stopped him with a hand on his biceps.
"You know where the Forty-fourth Precinct is?" he asked quietly.
"Is that the one on the other side of the stadium?"
"That's it. When you get to the street, go straight for it." He looked at Nat's father squarely. "You're in the middle of the South Bronx, you understand what I'm saying?"
Nat's father nodded and stepped down, with Nat following.
Once on the ground, Nat got a firm grip on his father's hand and waited for the conductor to lead the way. A few minutes later they were stepping over ties and around puddles, plodding behind the conductor's beam of light toward the station a half mile away.
"What did he mean back there?" Nat asked softly.
"He was just being a friend, that's all." His father's voice was seamless and comforting, showing no trace of concern. Nat never saw his father worry about things.
* * *
By the time they reached the 149th Street station, the fun had already begun.
They climbed the steps and came onto the street to the sounds of broken glass and distant sirens and the whooping of boys in fishtailing cars. Nat and his father stepped into the middle of the Grand Concourse and looked down 149th Street toward Manhattan. The city they knew had disappeared into the asphalt as if it had been stepped on by an enormous shoe. Whole skyscrapers, flattened. Queens and La Guardia Airport, gone. Billboards on the Major Deegan, missing. Traffic lights, time-and-temperature boards, street lamps—the ordinary veneer of civilization—all disappeared. Suddenly, everything was altered—not just what was visual but the night itself, as if when the lights had gone out, so had the rules. In a matter of minutes, the town had become a roadside saloon reeking of spilled beer, bad music, fuck-you eyes, and tattooed muscle itching to be tested.
Nat flared his nostrils like a jungle cat at an unfamiliar watering hole. No longer did he appreciate the scents of the city—these odors of sulfur flares and burning rubber and men sweating danger. No longer did he find the street romantic.
"What happened?" he asked his father.
"It's a blackout," he said. "All the electricity's gone."
Nat heard steel wheels on cement and turned to see a flashlight beam coming at him, a surfer on a skateboard rocketing down the sidewalk. Just as Nat stepped back, the boy reached out and lifted Nat's baseball cap off his head, then sailed on, hooting and waving it like a scalp.
Nat touched his head to make sure the hat was really gone. His father touched his shoulder. "You all right?"
Nat stood with his lips parted, then nodded yes.
"Come on," his father said, taking Nat by the hand. "The police station's only a few blocks away."
They walked up the Grand Concourse at a fast clip, past the post office and Cardinal Hayes High School. When they reached 153rd Street they stopped in the middle of the intersection to get their bearings. Ahead was a siren-burping ambulance caught in a parade of slow-moving automobiles ... headlights illuminating a geyser from a hydrant, people dancing in the spray ... bottles streaking down from atop tenement buildings before splattering on the street. It was the way to the station house, but it was also a gauntlet.
They looked to the left down 153rd Street. At the bottom of the hill cars were moving along the Major Deegan Expressway. "Let's go to the highway and catch a lift," his father said.
"You think somebody will take us home?" Nat asked.
They hadn't walked more than ten yards when they saw a flash of T-shirts and people running, then heard a full-throated, unmuffled automobile engine revving up—then tires screeching, metal cranking, and the loud crash of a tin roll-down cover being ripped off a store window. People ran toward it, and within seconds the street was filled with splintering plate glass, more yelling, and the car dragging the gate away.
Nat's father stopped and turned in a circle. They were trapped.
"This way," his father said confidently. They stepped onto the sidewalk and started back up the Grand Concourse, but it was now a hallway of flying bottles and fire hydrant geysers. They'd walked half a block when the outlines of a hill loomed on their left behind a waist-high stone wall. A few more steps and they came to a concrete park bench with its wooden slats ripped off, and, next to it, a sidewalk entrance angling past a sign that read FRANZ SIEGEL PARK.
They stopped. Nat watched his father consider the risk of an unlit park. What was the risk of an unlit park? Nat had no clue, but it didn't matter. He had his father.
They heard the whoop of a police siren down by the looted store, then a police bullhorn—"Clear the street or you'll be locked up!"—and the answer—"Fuck you, pig!" A floodlight from the cruiser burst onto the looters, scattering them like roaches.
They heard what sounded like firecrackers.
"Are those firecrackers?" Nat asked. He could hear his own breathing now.
A car careened around the corner and headed directly for them. Something came flying out a window—a glint in the air—the sound of an open beer bottle cooing like an owl. Glass smashed on the sidewalk, spraying shards against Nat's legs and chest.
His father pulled him up the ramplike sidewalk into the pitch-black park.
* * *
When they reached the top of the hill, they looked down toward the street below and saw the glow of a bonfire, then caught the smell of burning garbage. Descending the path, they heard voices up ahead. Men's voices. Nat's father stopped and listened. "Be quiet," he said. The two of them continued moving toward the sound. In the distance, where the path met the street, they could see a group of men gathered in a circle lit by a fire in a wire trash basket, sitting on boxes or standing, their eyes focused on something in the center of the ring they formed as if they were shooting craps or watching a fight. Whatever it was, Nat knew his father didn't like it.
"We have to go back," he said. He took Nat by the hand and turned around.
A flashlight beam hit them between the eyes. Nat's father blocked it with a raised hand.
The beam dropped to the sidewalk, revealing two men standing behind it.
"What you lookin' at?" a large man in an undershirt said.
Nat's father waited a moment, then said, "Maybe you fellows could give us directions. We're looking for the stadium."
Both men laughed. "Ain't no Yankees game tonight," the one with a stick and a bottle of whiskey said. "Game tonight be on the street."
Nat's father pulled his suit jacket off his shoulder, flipped it over his forearm, and tugged at Nat to follow him past the men.
"Wait a minute," the man with the bottle said, stepping in front of them. "You jus' got here."
Nat's father stood quietly, looking at him.
The drunk turned to his friend. "Jus' like white folks, always be rushin' around." He tapped an imaginary watch on his wrist and exaggerated the shape of his lips in mock seriousness. "Got me a meetin' to go to," he said like the Kingfish. "Got to git down to the bank an' with-draw a million 'fore it close." He bent forward at the waist and took a drink of whiskey.
"Maybe he want to tell the po-lice what he seen down there," the man in the undershirt said.
Nat's father looked toward the bonfire and back. "Sorry, guys, but we weren't close enough to see anything."
The drunk stepped closer and placed the stick he held against Nat's father's suit coat, touching it lightly. "Hmm," he said, inspecting the garment through a pair of imaginary bifocals. "Maybe he want to go 'cause he don't like our company." He took another swig of whiskey.
"I've got no problem with you fellas," Nat's father said.
The large man in the undershirt said, "You lookin' for Yankee Stadium, you got to go this way." He pushed Nat's father on his chest, toward the bonfire.
Nat had never seen anyone do that to his dad before, and the sight of it momentarily jolted him. Nat felt his father's hand form a fist by his side, then relax. They turned, as instructed, and continued down the path, leaving their two friends behind.
* * *
As Nat and his dad approached the bonfire again, the walkway widened, and through the leaves Nat could see candles and flashlights in tenement windows on the other side of the blacked-out street.
Walking a step ahead, his father stopped abruptly and placed a hand on Nat's chest to keep him from going farther.
That's when Nat heard the voice.
At first it was no different from other voices yelling and whooping it up on the street, except that this one was higher-pitched—the voice of a woman. A voice that was not celebrating so much as yelping. Or pleading. Or crying.
Now, shrieking.
Nat's father turned around, still blocking Nat's view of the bonfire.
"Who's that yelling?"
His father didn't answer. "We have to go back," he said, once again taking Nat by the hand.
"But those guys won't let us," Nat said, hoping he was wrong.
He wasn't. His father didn't move. Nat thought his dad's large, engulfing hand was unusually moist now, not entirely from the hot night air.
They heard another sickening moan.
His father turned around and looked down the path toward the voice. Nat stepped around him and looked, too.
On the sidewalk below, three dark-skinned men stood to the side of a burning trash can, its dirty, sparky smoke casting an orange light onto the sidewalk in place of the dead streetlamps. Between the men Nat could see a young, brown-skinned girl on her hands and knees facing the trash can, her dress pulled up high on her naked back. A muscular man with a towel over his bare shoulder and a pair of flowery, baggy beach pants around his calves kneeled behind her, pulling on her long, shiny black hair as if it were a bridle, yanking it as he moved his hips back and forth against her backside. The girl was crying, her head pulled back, her cheeks glistening with tears.
A shirtless, skinny man sporting a mustache, heavy work boots, and the girl's panties around his neck took a drink from a can wrapped in a brown bag. Holding it off to the side, he pushed the girl's panties against his nose and bent down and said something into her ear while the man behind her continued his motion. Nat had never seen anyone having sex before and it took him a moment to get it. He swallowed involuntarily. The scene terrorized and mesmerized him at the same time.
A fat man wearing a cutoff tank top unbuckled his pants, dropped them around his ankles, and stepped out of them. How weird. How embarrassing. He wasn't wearing underpants.
The muscular man with the baggy pants around his calves let go of the girl's hair, allowing her forehead to drop to the ground. As he backed away from her, the man with the mustache and brown bag put his hand on the girl's neck to keep her from crawling away.
The muscular man behind her stood up, pulled up his baggy pants, and leaned down and picked up a baseball bat from the sidewalk.
The fat man in the tank top stepped behind the girl, got on his knees, and took the muscular man's place. Looking down, he grabbed the girl's flanks and began moving against her the way the first man had.
Nat felt his heart straining against his chest.
While the fat one undulated against the girl, the muscular man in the baggy pants kneeled next to her, resting the baseball bat against his leg, and gathered her hair into a ponytail like a stalk of celery. The other men said something, then laughed and slapped their thighs.
The girl cried in big sobs.
Up on the path, Nat's father stooped in front of his son.
"Now listen to me," he said. "If something happens and we get separated, I want you to run down that street and turn toward the highway at the first corner."
"Why are we going to get separated?" Nat's voice verged on panic.
"We're not, but if something happens, that's what I want you to do, okay?"
Nat felt his throat muscles tighten.
"Do you understand?" His father's voice was almost scolding.
"Yes," he said. "But Dad—"
His father raised his hand to quiet him, then handed Nat his suit coat. "Remember what I told you," he said, reaching for his son's hair. Instead of tousling it this time, he smoothed it down gently, finger-combing it the way Nat's mother used to do when she tucked him into bed. His father used to watch her do that, but he'd never done it himself.
"Wait here," his father said, then turned and walked down the path toward the group of men. By the time he arrived, the three had become four, then five.
Nat stood still, watching without understanding, shivering in the heat. He saw his father step between the men and stand next to the girl. She craned her neck upward to see who he was, then grabbed his leg and held on. He didn't bend down to help her, but kept his eyes on the muscular man with the baggy pants who was still holding her hair in a bunch.
Seeing Nat's father, he seemed surprised at first, then angry. He reached down with his free hand, lifted the baseball bat, and pointed it at the intruder.
Nat laid his father's coat on the ground and watched. His father was talking to them, but Nat couldn't hear what he was saying.
* * *
The skinny man with the work boots, brown bag, and the girl's panties around his neck put his nose in Nat's father's face. "Hey, brother," he said, "who you be, telling us who we can't fuck?"
"You in the wrong neighborhood be talkin' that shit, Jack," another man said.
Nat's father glared at the man with the girl's panties, then bent down and put his hands under her arms to help her to her feet.
The muscular man in the baggy pants squeezed the bat handle as if he were at home plate and Nat's father was the pitcher. Then, without warning, he swung the bat in a small circle, smashing it onto Nat's father's arm. The blow weakened his knees and closed his eyes. He bent over, grimacing and holding his bashed arm with his good hand.
Up on the path, Nat's heart stopped. Hey—you hit my dad!
"You want the girl, motherfucker?" Baggy Pants said. He pulled up her ponytail hard, raising her to her knees, holding her head up like a rabbit by its ears.
T he other men moved in closer.
Nat took a step down the path toward his father.
The girl looked up at Nat's father with pleading eyes.
Baggy Pants said, "You want the bitch so bad, come and get her."
The fat man in the tank top pushed Nat's father in the center of his back, making him stumble toward the girl. He raised the palm of his undamaged hand, trying to calm them. "Take it easy," he said. "I'm not looking for trouble."
"You sure's hell found it," a man said.
"Why don't you just let her go and we'll get out of here," Nat's father said.
The man with the baggy pants and the bat cocked his head to the side, all attitude. "I told you, come and get her."
Nat's father was breathing hard now, nursing his damaged arm against his stomach as if it were in a sling.
The fat man pushed him from behind again. "You heard him, go 'head."
Nat's father waited.
Baggy Pants gripped the girl's hair in one hand and held the baseball bat in the other, tapping it against the sidewalk. "How many times I got to tell you?" he said.
Nat's father wiped the sweat out of his eyes with his forearm. No one moved. He took a step toward the girl, keeping his eyes on the bat. Baggy Pants' fingers worked the handle like a string of worry beads.
Nat's father bent down slowly to help her up again.
The man lifted the baseball bat and swung it, this time bringing it down onto his father's shoulder so hard his legs buckled and his body crumpled onto his hands and knees.
The girl turned back to see the hitter raising the bat for another blow.
"No!" she screamed.
Baggy Pants stuck his foot on her chest and pushed her backward.
Nat found himself running toward the men, crying and yelling in someone else's voice.
The fat man who'd pushed Nat's father now kicked him in the side, making a whomping sound with his foot.
Good idea, the man with the panties nodded. Standing in front of the downed man, he did a small hop and kicked him in the face with his steel-shanked work boot. Nat's father's nose snapped and his mouth split into four lips. Blood spewed in all directions.
Running down the sidewalk screaming, Nat rammed his head into the stomach of the kicker, stunning him without knocking him down. Carried beyond him by his own momentum, Nat hit the ground and skidded across the sidewalk, splitting his chin with a pebble-filled gash.
Rising to her knees, the girl beat Baggy Pants with her fists, yelling incomprehensible words from a contorted, furious face.
Nat got up from the sidewalk, blood dripping from his chin, and ran back to his father, who was on his hands and knees spitting pieces of broken teeth and red goo to the ground.
He pulled at his father's neck to help him rise. "Get up, Dad!"
His father coughed. In a gurgling voice, he said, "Highway."
The man placed the end of the bat on the woman's collarbone and rammed it forward, sending her sprawling onto her back. Then he raised the bat in both hands like an ax.
Nat saw the bat poised in the air, but had no idea why.
The man brought it down in an enormous blow onto the back of Nat's father's neck. His body fell flat on the ground, his arms extended out to his sides as if he were trying to embrace the whole of mother earth.
Nat's eyes paralyzed him.
The man in the baggy pants raised the bat and swung it again, this time landing the sweet spot on the back of Nat's father's head. The blow sent chunks of hair and bone into the air, some of it against Nat's face.
He didn't blink.
His father didn't move.
"Ou-wee," the man with the panties said. "That peckerwood be daid."
Nat sat in a catatonic daze, one hand suspended in space.
That can't be. That didn't happen. That can't be.
Stepping up to the body, muscles rippling, Baggy Pants poked at his victim's gaping skull with the end of his bat like a golfer playing with a divot. As the other men stared at the carnage, the girl scooped a wallet off the ground near Baggy Pants' feet and crept backward into the darkness.
"What about the kid?" the man with the panties and the brown bag said.
He looked at Nat, then gripped the bloodstained bat in both hands again.
"Hold his head out," he said to the fat man in the tank top. "Don't get too close, this could be messy."
Nat stayed at his father's side, eyes dry and unblinking, reaching out slowly to gather up the pieces of his father's head that lay scattered on the sidewalk.
Back together—got to put him back together—
The fat man in the tank top placed his hands under Nat's arms and lifted him to his feet and placed his hand behind his neck and bowed his head forward onto an invisible chopping block—
BAM ... zing! They heard the sound of metal bouncing off concrete.
The fat man looked up. "Huh?"
BAM ... "Ouch!" The fat man grimaced and let go of Nat and grabbed his shin and danced on one foot. "Fuck—I been shot!"
The men looked up and stared into the anonymity of a grayed-out tenement. This was a black neighborhood—what brother would be shootin' at a brother?
The girl ran up behind Nat like a cat, grabbed him by the hand, and pulled him into the middle of the street, trying to make him run.
BAM, zing! More bouncing lead, more men crouching and ducking. Suddenly, the air was full of a new menace, the ink hiding someone else.
BAM, thwock. A bullet splintered a piece of the bat in Baggy Pants' hands and ricocheted into his right jaw, tearing off a piece of flesh and bone. He dropped the bat and grabbed his face, grimacing. Blood oozed between his fingers and ran down his hand and wrist. He pulled his palm away and looked at it. "Shit." His eyes were raving.
BAM, zing!
The men scattered.
A few yards away, Nat saw the jagged wound on Baggy Pants' jaw, the blood and the volcanic, searching eyes. They found Nat's freckled face. The girl yanked his hand and he stumbled in the direction in which she pulled him, still dazed and unanchored, propelled by high-twitch muscle and a remarkably selfless thought: Your father saved me, I'm going to save you.
Nat had one coherent thought, given by his dad: The highway—the highway—
The girl and Nat were running without direction now, streaking blindly into the stenchy night beyond the reach of them all—soulless maniacs and bat-wielding killers, rescuing snipers and dumbstruck voyeurs—beyond fever and insanity and everyone they saw, trusting nothing but the cover of night and their instincts to survive.
***********************************************
United States add $3.75 for shipping.
DUE TO THR EXTRA LARGE SIZE OF THIS ITEM THERE IS NO INTERNATIONAL SHIPPING OPTION AVAILABLE!
The Monkfish accepts only Paypal due to new (and unwelcome) eBay regulations!
The Monkfish takes every possible step to assure a speedy delivery but the post office doesn't always do the same.
Please allow for up to 14 days for order to be processed, packed, driven to the post office, shipped and delivered!
When leaving feedback please remember that you are dealing with a real person and not a huge corporation - be polite!
Thanks for looking at our auction.
For other interesting items see our other auctions.
**********************************************************************************************
Wide, handpicked selection of quality books!
Reasonable prices!
Swift, careful shipping!
Excellent feedback!
THE MONKFISH CARES! Click below to... View my other auctions |
Back to home page
) 
All rights reserved.
