“She’s from Laurel, Peter. Other side of the state. Not a lot of interaction between Natchez and Laurel.”
He said nothing for a few moments. “Are you sure that’s it?”
I felt the sting of indignation. “What does that mean?”
“Nothing, bro. Just give me a call tomorrow. And I’m sorry things are so tough. I’m praying for your father.”
“If you don’t hear from me tomorrow, that’s a no.”
I hit end and walked over to the lamp beside my desk. I had told Peter the truth about Laurel. I know a hell of a lot of people from Mississippi, but I don’t think I’ve ever known more than one from Laurel. Compared to Natchez, it’s like another planet over there.
As I stare at Serenity Butler’s photograph, Peter’s voice echoes in my mind. I read her book . . . It’s breathtaking.
I wasn’t lying when I told Peter things had been crazy around the time I was sent this galley. But was that really why I never got around to reading it? Jealousy is a powerful and stubborn emotion, and maybe the literary buzz that began as soon as this new writer’s manuscript began to circulate in New York had awakened that poisonous feeling in me. The critics had hailed Butler as a wunderkind, a raw new voice of realism on race, one that might someday rival that of Toni Morrison. That kind of hyperbole was sure to put off most veteran writers, and at forty-five, I am certainly a member of that club.
Almost resentfully, I flipped open the book, which revealed the dedication page. The dedication read: For my mother, who died bringing me into this world; and my father, whoever he might be.
I swallowed once, reread the lines, then turned the page.
I’m a big believer in first lines. If a writer doesn’t grab you with their first sentence, even in a literary novel, they might need to think about another line of work. As my eyes sought out the first line of Serenity Butler’s memoir, I realized she had a killer.
Not every child has a father, nor every mystery a solution.
When my eyes reached the period, I realized I wasn’t breathing. In eleven words, Serenity Butler had reached through my chest wall and tapped her fingernail against my heart, like an archaeologist searching for an echo. As my eyes retraced the line, I backed over to my Eames lounge chair, collapsed into it, adjusted the lamp, and began to read.
Friday
Chapter 10
Keisha Harvin’s brothers arrived from Alabama in the small hours of Friday morning. Despite the time, John Kaiser arranged for them to see their sister in the St. Catherine’s ICU. I didn’t see the two brothers until later that morning, when I went to check on Keisha. Both were big men, but it was obvious which one had played defensive tackle for Auburn. Everything about Roosevelt Harvin was round: head like an oversized bowling ball, arms like anacondas, thighs like live oak trunks. The man’s hands defied description: they weren’t simply huge; he looked as if he could open the valve on a fire hydrant without a wrench. His brother, Aaron—who was maybe thirty—was big by conventional standards, but at least he fell within the normal frame of reference. He had a close-trimmed mustache and looked like a ladies’ man.
When I saw the two of them standing over their sister’s hospital bed, Roosevelt’s big tears falling on the sheet beside Keisha’s scarred face and taped-shut eyes, I had no idea what to say. After I quietly introduced myself, Aaron shook his head and said, “I’d cry, but I done cried all my water out.”
“Look what they done to her, Mr. Cage,” said Roosevelt, his hand on her upper arm. “Why they did that?”
My deepest fear was that Keisha’s attackers had chosen her because they could not get to me or my family. But I couldn’t bring myself to voice that here.
“They didn’t like the stories she was writing.”
“She was writing the truth, wasn’t she?”
“These assholes don’t like the truth. Pardon my language.”
Roosevelt nodded.
Aaron said, “They killed your fiancée a few months back, huh? Keisha’s boss?”
“That’s right.”
“I seen you got bodyguards around your family now. I met your little girl earlier this morning. I like her.”
“Thank you. Yes, the Double Eagle group has made several death threats against us.”
Both men stared at me for a while without speaking. Then Aaron said softly, “Keisha thought maybe after Ms. Masters got murdered, you, uh, maybe took things into your own hands. Killed that Knox fella. That dirty cop.”
I looked back at them but acknowledged nothing.
“Li’l K didn’t want to make a thing out of it,” Aaron went on. “That’s what we call her in the family, Li’l K. She said guy killed your fiancée, and if you’d wasted him, you was right to do it.”
I communicated as much as I could to them without speaking.
Roosevelt nodded, then squinted and said, “The man who owns the newspaper don’t pay no security for my baby sister?”
I felt my cheeks redden. “He paid for additional security at the paper, but he didn’t cover all the reporters at home. I told my guys to watch out for Keisha when she left in the mornings, and most times she’d text them and say she was leaving. But yesterday she was running late and didn’t text anybody.”
“Sounds just like Li’l K,” Aaron said. “Always in a hurry.”
Roosevelt reached out with one of his enormous hands and gently patted his sister’s leg. Then he looked up at me again. “Do you know who done this to Keisha, Mr. Cage?”
“I don’t. Keisha said in the ER that a woman threw the acid, an older woman, but that’s all she knew. Yesterday I went to a restaurant where some of the old Double Eagle guys hang out, and I got in their faces pretty good. Pulled my gun on them. But I don’t think I accomplished much.”
The two brothers shared a look. “How about you show us where that place is?” Aaron asked. “Maybe we’ll get further than you did.”
“I’m afraid you’ll get yourselves thrown in jail.”
“I been in jail before,” Roosevelt said. “Ain’t the end of the world.”
“What about these motorcycle guys we hear been hangin’ around town?” Aaron asked. “Keisha wrote about you and one of your guys shooting two of them a few weeks back. You think this was some kind of payback for that?”
Aaron Harvin spoke without rancor, but he sounded very familiar with the concept of payback.
“I’m afraid it could have been, yes. That’s my deepest fear.”
Both young men nodded sadly, but neither implied that their sister’s present condition was my fault.
“If there’s anything you guys need,” I said helplessly, “anything I can do—”
“You can tell us where those crackers hang out at,” Aaron said. “Ain’t nobody else done no good around here, seems like. Might as well let us try.”
So I told them what I knew. The three of us spoke softly across the sedated body of their sister, our voices barely audible amid the hum and beeping of the medical machines. After we finished, both men took hold of my hands, forming a rough circle over their sister.
“We gon’ pray now,” Roosevelt said. “Aaron, you do the talkin’.”
When I left that ICU room, I had for the first time some small inkling of the guilt my father must feel over Caitlin’s death. When I could stand the guilt no longer, I allowed a different feeling to rise and take its place. Dread. Dread, and pity for the people who committed that outrage upon Keisha Harvin. Standing joined in that prayer circle, my hands dwarfed by those of the Harvin brothers, I felt immeasurable fury seething within both men. No power on earth is going to stop Aaron and Roosevelt from making someone wish they had never taken it into their fevered brains to attack a vulnerable young woman trying to make her way in the world. Whether it’s the Knox clan or some faction of the VK motorcycle club, they should consider themselves beneficiaries of divine deliverance if they live to be arrested by the FBI.
When I got home from the hospital, I called Peter Smith and t
old him he could give Serenity Butler my cell number. After reading her memoir, I realized I had been an ass not to read it on the day I received it. I told Peter that Serenity could call me whenever she arrived, and we’d have coffee waiting for her at my house. Peter told me that would probably be after five, and he would update me if he learned anything more specific.
Mia and Annie overheard this call, and I thought nothing of it until Mia began to question me while Annie watched a DVD of Grey’s Anatomy in the library.
“What’s the story on Serenity Butler?” Mia asked, tapping away at her MacBook. “Google says she won the National Book Award last November.”
“She did. For a memoir.”
“Ever met her?”
“Nope.”
“She’s pretty.” Mia rotated her computer so that I could see a shot of Serenity standing in front of a huge pine tree. “Like model pretty.”
“I know. But in the book she explains how that’s been more of a liability to her than an asset. In the army, and also when she was a little girl. It drew too much attention to her.”
“This woman was in the army?”
“I know. It seems weird, doesn’t it? She grew up dirt poor outside Laurel, Mississippi. Never knew her father. Her uncles were in the pulpwood business, which is a damn tough life. She enlisted to get money for college. She was in when the first Gulf War broke out. Served in both Kuwait and Iraq during Desert Storm. She saw a lot of stuff.”
“Wow.” For once, Mia looks impressed.
“The book is structured around her search for her father in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He was a white man.”
“Obviously. Her mother never told her who her father was?”
“Her mother died in childbirth.”
“Man. She’s, like, out of Dickens or something.”
“Alexandre Dumas, more like. It’s an amazing story. Her mother hated Mississippi. She was ten years older than I am, born in 1950. Her name was Charity. Charity took off across the country when she was eighteen, aiming for California. She was in Kansas City during the riots after Martin Luther King was assassinated. She was in Los Angeles when Bobby Kennedy was killed. She even got involved with some Black Panther actions. She knew Bobby Hutton and Eldridge Cleaver.”
“Who’s Bobby Hutton?”
“The seventeen-year-old treasurer of the Black Panthers. He’s dead. Shot by a cop in 1968. Anyway, after all that fell apart, Charity managed to get a music scholarship to an arts college in Philadelphia. She hitchhiked across the country and stayed there two years. Then she got pregnant by somebody—Serenity was never able to discover who—and rode a Greyhound back to Mississippi during her eighth month of pregnancy. She died from preeclampsia right after giving birth to Serenity.”
“That definitely sounds worth a book. Was it more the story that won the award, or her writing?”
“Both, I’d say. Her writing’s first-rate. She has an unbelievable eye for detail, and she’s psychologically incisive as well. Ruthless, really, with both herself and others. But her life is the amazing thing. Apart from being a soldier, she’s worked as a journalist, a teacher, a dancer, and a singer. She’s been married twice, she kicked a drug problem . . . and she’s only thirty-five.”
“Any kids?”
“None mentioned in the book.”
Mia is watching me with an appraising eye. “I don’t think I’ve ever heard you this impressed with anybody before.”
“It’s the military service. Combat service.”
“Why?”
“Well . . . guys in my generation got really lucky. We were too young for Vietnam, and by the time the next war rolled around, we were too old, unless you were already in the service.”
“So?”
“Military service is a rite of passage for men. A big one. My father served in Korea. My mother’s father and uncles fought in World War Two.”
“I would think you’d be glad to miss the chance of getting killed or crippled.”
“Sure—on one level. But it’s not that simple.”
A deep curiosity lights Mia’s eyes. “Why not? Not some Hemingway trip, surely?”
I wonder if I can explain this to a twenty-year-old girl without sounding like a testosterone-driven idiot.
“I remember when Desert Shield was going on, the prep operation that led up to the first Gulf War. Things seemed rational enough. But then the bombs started falling on Baghdad, and everybody knew we were going to war for real—the first large-scale war since Vietnam. One night I was watching the news, and they ran a story on a female soldier who’d been ordered to ship out to the Gulf. They showed her at home with her family—a husband and two kids. Her children were crying, and her husband didn’t know what to do. He was about to be living with two crying kids who missed their mother, and she was the one going off to fight. And . . . I don’t know. Something welled up in me that I couldn’t keep down. Tears came into my eyes, my throat closed up. Sarah grabbed my hand and asked me what was wrong. I jumped up out of my chair and said, ‘By God, if they’re shipping mothers over there to fight, something’s wrong. I need to get over there.’”
“Are you serious?” Mia asked.
“You’re damn right. When I saw that girl packing up to leave her kids behind, I was filled with shame. I felt an absolute conviction that it was time for me and every boy I’d grown up with to get a rifle and pair of boots and go take care of business.”
“Jesus, Penn. That’s a natural reaction, I guess. But also childish. You never trained as a soldier.”
“Maybe not. But I know how to fight. And that wasn’t George W’s war, which was bullshit. It was the first one. Anyway, I guess on some level, when I was reading Serenity’s book, I kept seeing that mother from that newscast.”
“Was she black? The woman in the news story?”
“No, white.”
Mia nodded but said nothing further. It was strange to realize that by suppertime we might be sitting at the table with the young celebrity on Mia’s computer screen, a woman who has done far more dangerous—and traditionally masculine—things than I, a man ten years her senior.
“Well,” Mia said finally, turning her computer back around. “I can’t wait to see what all the fuss is about.”
Chapter 11
Walt Garrity watched Tom Cage shuffle into the visiting room at the Pollock federal prison and carefully take a seat at the empty table. The two men said nothing at first. They didn’t need to. They had survived the hell of Korea together. Heat, snow, VD, the Chinese coming over the wire in suicide waves . . . even the Bugout. Once you shared history like that, speech tended to be redundant.
“How you makin’ it?” Walt asked finally.
“Can’t complain,” Tom said. “Beats a sleeping bag in forty below.”
“Scraping ice out of the men’s noses.”
Tom chuckled. “Hypodermics taped under both armpits?”
“And your mouth full of morphine ampoules.”
Tom lifted his arm to take in the prison visiting room. “Luxury by comparison.”
Thirty seconds passed, during which Tom looked over at the window in the door to see if anyone was observing them.
“I’m glad to see you, Walt,” he said finally. “Something happen?”
Walt shook his head. “Nothing on my end.”
“Shit.”
“Yeah. Is it safe to talk in here?”
Tom nodded. “Within reason.”
“I heard about that colored reporter. The one who got acid thrown in her face yesterday.”
“People don’t say ‘colored’ anymore, Walt.”
“Well, I do. Among friends, at least. No harm done. Anyway, it seems like an escalation. I’m afraid that acid attack is just the beginning of something.”
“You and me both. Kind of puts teeth in Snake’s message about wives and children.”
Walt grunted. “That old boy makes it easy to pick a side, don’t he?”
A shadow came into Tom??
?s face. “Not for you. Not when the stakes are what they are.”
“The stakes are what they always were, pardner.”
“Walt. Carmelita wants you home, and don’t try to sell me anything else. She feels lucky to have you, and you’re damn lucky to have her. You keep this up for me, and you could get killed. You might not get home to her.”
The old Texas Ranger sat in silence for half a minute. Then he said, “I reckon I’ll stick a while longer.”
“Walt—”
“I figure I owe it to you.”
“You don’t owe me a goddamn thing. We’re even. We’ve been even since Korea. We each of us saved the other.”
Walt smiled in a way that cut right through Tom’s assertion. “No, sir. When we escaped from that Chinese patrol, you should have left me behind.”
“Left you? Go to hell, Garrity.”
“You know I’m right. My leg was broke. I couldn’t walk for shit. If you hadn’t carried me down that mountain, I’d have spent the past fifty years buried in North Korea.”
“Well. Whatever you think you owe me, you paid off last December, with change to spare.”
Walt shook his head. “Maybe that’s not even it now. Sometimes during the long nights, I get to thinking about Knox and his bunch. They’ve outlived their time, you know? We have that in common with them. And I think maybe they’re our burden to bear. Our evil to deal with.”
Tom nodded. “I can’t argue with that. But we haven’t exactly done a bang-up job so far.”
“Sometimes it takes a while to stir a rattlesnake out of his hole. Sometimes you gotta smoke him out.”
“I thought Penn was going to do that for us.”
“Give it time, buddy.”
Tom winced in pain as he shifted on the chair. “I don’t know how much time we have. My trial starts in three days.”
Walt tapped his fingernails on the table. “I look for something to happen before then. But I tell you, things would be a damn sight easier on me if I could tell Penn what I’m doing. I wouldn’t have to spend so much time hiding from him and his bodyguards.”