Albert stopped playing in mid-measure, like a walker in mid-stride, and listened to the suspended chord fade into silence. It took half a minute, and he knew that a child could probably hear the sound waves decay for another thirty seconds after that, the way he used to when he’d sat on the floor by his mother’s old Baldwin. Age took those things from you, though—slow but sure.
In the haunting silence, he heard a muted thump from the workroom. A few seconds later, the sound repeated itself. The trapdoor had closed. Pooky Wilson was slipping out into hostile night, like a thousand black boys before him.
“Godspeed, son,” Albert said softly.
He’d drunk more whiskey than usual tonight, hoping to dull the memory of the men who’d visited him that afternoon, not to mention the specter of Big John DeLillo cruising past on the hot asphalt outside. Sometimes reality crowded in so close on you, not even music could block it out. He could almost hear Pooky’s pounding heart as the boy tried to cover the two blocks to Widow Nichols’s house. Filled with bitterness, Albert got up from the piano bench, wobbled, then marched up to the display window and fiddled with some glittery drums to draw the eyes of any watchers outside. After a couple of minutes of this, he staggered to his bedroom at the back of the shop. He could still smell the white woman’s sex on the air, and it made him angry.
“Bitch ought to stay with her own,” he muttered. “Nothing but trouble.”
His last words were mumbled into his bunched pillow.
THE SOUND OF BREAKING glass dredged Albert from a dreamless sleep. Instinctively, he reached for the .32 pistol he kept on his bedside table, but he’d been too drunk to bring it from the office when he went to bed. Somebody fell over a drum set, and a cymbal crashed to the floor. Then a flashlight beam cut through the short dark hallway that led to the sales floor.
“Who’s there?” Albert called. “Pooky? That you?”
The noises stopped, then continued, and this time he heard muffled voices. Albert got up, fought a wave of dizziness, then hurried into his office. His pistol was right where he’d left it. He picked up the .32 and padded carefully up the hall. He heard a deep gurgling, like someone emptying herbicide from a fifty-five-gallon drum. Then he smelled gasoline.
Panic and foreknowledge swept through him in a paralyzing wave. He wanted to flee, but the store was all he had. He owned the building—a rare feat for a black man in Ferriday, Louisiana—but he had no insurance. He’d put the premium money into new inventory, those electric guitars all the white boys was wanting since the Beatles hit the TV. Albert flung himself up the hall, then stopped when he saw two black silhouettes in the darkness. The shadow men were emptying gasoline over the piano in the display window, and splashing it high on the guitars hanging on the wall.
“What ya’ll doin’?” he cried. “Stop that now! Who is that?”
The men kept emptying the cans.
“I’ll call the po-lice! I swear I will!”
The men laughed. Albert squinted, and in the faint light bleeding through the window he saw the paleness of their skin. In the shadows to his right, Albert sensed more than saw a third figure, but it looked larger than a man, almost like a Gemini astronaut with air tanks on his back.
“I got a pistol!” Albert cried, ashamed of the fear in his voice. If he fired now, the muzzle flash or the ricocheting bullet was as likely to set off the fumes as a struck match. “Please!” he begged. “Why ya’ll want to ruin my store? What I ever done to you fellas?”
A pickup truck passed on the street outside, and in its reflected headlights Albert recognized the faces of the two men in the window. One was Snake Knox, the brother of Frank, the Klansman who’d visited the store that afternoon. The other was Brody Royal. The third man remained in shadow. Dear Jesus … These were serious men. They made the regular Ku Klux Klan look like circus clowns. Albert had managed to keep off the wrong side of men like this all his life. He’d bowed and scraped when necessary. He’d ignored the flirtations of their women, greased the right palms, and given gifts of service and merchandise. But now … now they wanted the life of a boy who was guilty of nothing but being young and ignorant.
“Mr. Brody, you knows me,” Albert said with absurd reasonableness. “Please, now … I done told you this afternoon, I don’t know nothin’ ’bout your daughter getting up to anything.” This lie sounded hollow even to him, but the truth would be worse: Mr. Royal, your little girl’s got a willful streak and she’d hump that black boy right in front of you if he’d let her. “Please now, Mr. Royal,” he pleaded. “Why, I’ve got your own church organ up in here, fixing it.”