Unwritten Laws 01(16)

“Ain’t nothing in there now. The animals heard us coming from way off.” Sonny stepped forward and rapped the side of the tree with his pistol. “See? If there was a deer in there, he’d have bolted.”

“Might be snakes in there.”

“You’ll just have to take your chances. Go on, now. I got to get out of here.”

“I’ll just come back out after you leave.”

“I’m gonna nail a board up.”

Revels stared into the yellow beam and spoke in a voice stripped of all affect. “I know you didn’t like what those others did to Viola. Or to me. I saw it in your eyes.” He held up his bandaged arm, showing the gauze Sonny had wrapped around the wound made by Snake Knox slicing off the boy’s navy tattoo. “You were raised a Christian, just like me, Mr. Thornfield. How can you do this?”

Sonny shook his head and looked away, at the black water to his right. The kid was right about the torture, but he didn’t seem to grasp the nature of race war. Having a common faith meant nothing. Niggers weren’t true Christians, after all. As slaves, they’d simply latched on to the faith of their masters in desperation, not realizing that the master simply used religion to keep them tame.

“Go on, now,” Sonny said, motioning toward the crack with his pistol.

“I ain’t going,” Jimmy insisted. “I can’t.”

Sonny gauged his chances of stuffing Revels through the crack if he was dead. The boy was thin enough, but Sonny didn’t relish the idea. Moving dead men was hard work. “You go on, Jimmy, or I’ll shoot you where you stand. That’s the deal.”

“Is Luther dead?”

“He is,” Sonny said, hoping it was true.

Jimmy’s shoulders sank, and whatever resistance he had left went out of him. “At least you told me the truth. So maybe Viola’s really all right.”

“She is, I swear.”

Jimmy intoned something that sounded like a prayer. Then he turned sideways and worked his dark body through the crack in the tree. He might as well have been entering a cave.

Thank God, Sonny thought, as the stained white T-shirt vanished. He shone his flashlight through the crack. Jimmy stood a few feet away, staring at something at the center of the hollow tree. Sonny took the beam off his back and shone it around. The hollow trunk created a round room like some turreted castle tower. The way the walls narrowed as they reached skyward gave him a sort of religious feeling. “What you looking at?” Sonny asked.

Jimmy moved aside and pointed at the floor.

At the center of the round room lay a yellowed skeleton. Not human, Sonny realized. “That’s just a deer,” he said, noticing a carpet of other bones beneath it. “Probably crawled up in here wounded last hunting season.”

“You don’t have any board to nail up, do you?” Jimmy said in a fatalistic tone.

“No,” Sonny said, almost apologetically. “That’s a fact.”

Jimmy turned slowly and raised a hand against the beam of the flashlight. The whites of his eyes glowed in his black face. Revels was twenty-six years old, but he looked like a teenager.

“You swear my sister’s all right?” he insisted.

“I do,” Sonny said in a shaky voice. “And if it makes you feel any better, finishing this up out here is going to save your hero’s life.”

Jimmy blinked in confusion. “Who do you mean?”

“Senator Kennedy.”

“What about him?”

“You dying here is going to save his life.”

The boy pondered this for several seconds. “It doesn’t matter. He’ll never be president. If not your bunch, somebody else will get him. The best men never make it. Moses, Jesus … Medgar, Malcolm. Even Dr. King. He won’t live to see the Promised Land.”

Sonny had a feeling the boy was right, but he was glad not to be part of that business anymore.

“Someday,” Jimmy said, dropping the hand shielding his eyes, “you tell Viola where to find me, okay? It ain’t right to leave a person not knowing about their kin. You were in the service. You know that. Even if you lie about how they died, you tell ’em where the body is. To give the family peace.”

Sonny swallowed and raised his pistol. He didn’t enjoy killing in cold blood, but neither had he ever hesitated to do his duty. And they’d gone too far to reverse course now. Everything had to be buried. No body, no crime, Frank always said. “Maybe someday,” Sonny lied, trying to make it easier on the boy.

Revels plainly didn’t believe him. Sweat poured off the kid’s face, and Sonny had to shake his own head to get the burning sweat out of his eyes.