Natchez Burning Read Online Free Page A

ran, Albert saw that his hands were on fire.

CHAPTER 2
     
Twenty-three days later
Natchez, Mississippi
     
    “ IF THEY’D HAVE left them two Jews alone and just shot the nigger,” said Frank Knox, “none of this would even be happening. New Yorkers don’t give no more of a damn than we do about one less nigger in the world. But you kill a couple of Jewboys, and they’re ready to call out the Marines.”
    “You talking about that Neshoba County business?” asked Glenn Morehouse, a mountain of a man with half the intellectual wattage of his old sergeant.
    “What else?” said Frank, flipping a slab of alligator meat on the sizzling grill.
    Sonny Thornfield popped the cap on an ice-cold Jax and watched the veins bulge in Frank’s neck. The discovery of the three civil rights workers in an earthen dam a few days ago had stirred Frank up in a way Sonny hadn’t seen since the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In a way, this whole camping trip had been designed to let off pressure after the FBI’s discovery of the bodies up in Philadelphia. After their shift ended Friday, they’d mounted four camper shells on their pickups, then towed Frank’s boat and Sonny’s homemade grill down to the sandbar south of the Triton Battery plant, where they all worked during the week. The long weekend of sun had pretty much worn everybody out, except the kids. Now the women sat in folding chairs, fanning themselves and swatting mosquitoes in the shade of the cottonwoods. Frank’s and Sonny’s wives were back there, along with Granny Knox and Wilma Deen, Glenn’s divorced sister. The kids who weren’t out in the boat were teasing a stray dog down by the riverbank.
    The men had spent the weekend practicing their demolition skills on stumps, and on an old Chevy that lay half buried in the sand down by the water. Frank’s younger brother Snake was still down there, fiddling with something under the Chevy’s dash and flirting with the nineteen-year-old waitress he’d brought with him. All the men on this picnic were old hands with dynamite and Composition B, but Frank had bought some of the new C-4 off a supply sergeant he knew at Fort Polk, and they’d been using it to try to master the art of the shaped charge. Every time they peeled eight inches off a stump top, the kids squealed and hooted and begged for fireworks.
    But not even that had calmed Frank down. When they’d driven into town yesterday for cigarettes, he’d used a pay phone to call some buddies and ask about national coverage. He came back to the car saying Cronkite wouldn’t shut up about the “national scandal” and all the big-city papers were riding the story hard. All weekend, Sonny had sensed that Frank was coming to some kind of decision. And if he was … that meant changes for them all.
    Even Morehouse seemed unsettled by the anger that seethed through Frank’s pores like sour sweat. Sonny studied the two men with clinical detachment. The gentle giant had done his share of killing during the war, but Morehouse had quickly grown soft in civilian life, putting on eighty pounds of new fat. He stood with his thumbs hooked behind the straps of his overalls and masticated a blade of grass as though it required all his concentration. By contrast, Frank Knox still had a washboard stomach, ropy muscles with pipeline veins running along them, and eyes that Sonny had never seen more relaxed than when behind the sights of a .30-caliber machine gun.
    Sonny didn’t push Frank for more information; whatever was coming would arrive in its own time. Keeping Morehouse’s body between himself and the sinking sun, Sonny sipped the Jax and watched Frank’s teenage son spray rooster tails out in the reddish-brown river behind his father’s souped-up bass boat.
    “There’s reporters crawling all over Neshoba County,” Frank said, basting the gator meat with his special sauce. “Whole damn country’s stirred up, and it’s gonna get worse.”
    Sonny took a bent Camel from his