The Bone Tree (47 page)

“Well, they ain’t. After Elam rotted, Frank wired ’em together and put ’em back up so nobody would ever forget what happens to somebody who betrays the group. But I didn’t want you knowin’ who it was, if I could help it.”

“Does Forrest know about this?”

“He knows,” Snake said. “Hell, he’s been to that Bone Tree more than any of us. But I didn’t finish the story. That night, while Daddy was hanging in the tree, we made a fire outside it and sat talking, mostly about Frank Junior, but also about some of the things Elam had done to us as boys. To Mama, of course. Elam hollered till he lost his voice: first threatening us with fire and damnation, then begging for forgiveness. He begged for water, too, but Frank would just throw swamp water on him now and then to keep him awake I stopped going in with him after the first couple of times. Elam died just after dawn.”

Billy looked longingly at the bourbon bottle in his father’s hand, but he knew he’d had enough.

“The thing is,” Snake said, “killing Elam didn’t really help Frank get over his boy. He still blamed himself. From 1966 till the day he died in ’68, he was drunk. I think they only kept him on at Triton out of pity, because of Junior being a war hero. Dr. Cage even tried to get Frank to take a year off, but he wouldn’t listen. Frank was drunk the day that forklift dropped the pallet on him.”

“You’re sure Elam molested Forrest the way he had Frank Junior?”

Snake nodded. “He confessed it to Frank before he died.”

“God
damn
.”

“Forrest puts on a good front, Billy, but deep down, he’s got that demon in him. And you don’t want to hitch yourself to that.”

Billy didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t tell his father what Forrest had said to him earlier. Snake might do something truly crazy. So he just said, “Thanks for protecting me from that, Daddy.”

Snake grunted as if in protest. “I wish I could take credit for it. But I can’t. It was just dumb luck, like I said. You were lucky being born last.”

Billy rubbed his jaw and tried to swallow. His tongue felt like a forty-year-old shag carpet. “You’re right about that. And I get what you’re saying about not hitching myself to Forrest. Is that what you came in to tell me?”

“Most of it.” Snake leaned back in his chair. “But I also need something from you.”

Billy nodded warily. “What do you need?”

“Forrest’s got us walking blind into the Concordia sheriff’s department tomorrow. And for all we know, Walker Dennis has enough evidence to jail us the minute we cross the threshold.”

“I hear you.”

“We can’t go in blind like that. I need an ace up my sleeve. Insurance.”

“What do you have in mind?”

Snake sat up again, then flexed his hands like a man about to take control of some machine. “I need to know where Dr. Cage is. I know the Black Team went to get him. That’s the only reason that chopper would have lit out of here like that. Don’t waste time telling me you don’t know where they went, ’cause I know you do.”

A lump had risen into Billy’s throat. “Did you ask Forrest?”

Snake snorted. “I called him. He said I was better off not knowing.”

Billy closed his eyes, wishing he could somehow escape this room. Looking past his father at the speared hog, he empathized with the animal yet again.

“I’m gonna ask you once more,” Snake said. “Where’s Forrest taking the doc?”

TOM LAY ON
the six-foot square bed in the back of Walt’s Roadtrek. Forrest Knox had left long ago, and the SWAT helicopter had departed shortly after that, leaving three team members behind to guard him. One was the young medic, and Tom was grateful for that. The kid had done a good job on his shoulder, stabilized his blood sugar level, and relieved his angina with close monitoring of his heart and careful administration of nitroglycerine.

The other two cops had spent their time in the captain’s chairs at the front of the vehicle, playing cards over a small dining table. The passenger window had been smashed somehow, and patched with a square of tarp and some duct tape. If Forrest gave the order to kill him, Tom knew, one of those two men would carry it out. That was why they were keeping their distance. Tom had done what he could to bond with the young medic, who had asked him a dozen questions about his trade. But he was under no illusions that this boy would—or could—protect him against the guns or knives of his comrades.

Tom wasn’t sure what time it was. Despite his best efforts, he had drifted off several times. Relief from pain tends to do that to you. While awake, he’d thought back to his visit with Caitlin and wondered whether she would keep her promise not to tell Penn about their meeting. At this point he hoped she’d break it. Because if she told Penn about Quentin’s house, Penn would go there and find Melba, or her dead body. If she was alive, Penn would get her medical attention, and if not, at least he would come into the open so that Forrest Knox could make contact with him. Tom didn’t know whether Penn would agree to any deal with Knox, but he would surely have the sense to
pretend
to make one—until Tom could get himself and Walt out of harm’s way.

Tom was trying to think of a way to probe the medic for information when someone knocked on the Roadtrek’s side door. All three
SWAT cops had their guns out before Tom had fully registered that a newcomer had arrived. The two men up front communicated with hand signals alone. When they were satisfied, one stood just out of the line of fire of the door and called: “Who’s there?”

“Snake Knox!” came the reply. “Forrest sent some beer and food for you guys. He says you may be here longer than he first figured.”

“Shit,” muttered one of the cops, lowering his gun.

He reached out and flipped the door handle, and someone pulled it open from outside. Then a wiry old man wearing jeans, a black sweatshirt, and a John Deere cap climbed the steps into the van. He had white whiskers, but his black eyes darted throughout the van, taking in everything at a glance.

Snake Knox
, Tom thought, remembering a much younger man.

“Bring that box, Sonny!” Snake called. “These boys are probably hungry.”

Sonny Thornfield followed Snake up the steps, a grease-stained cardboard box in his hands. He was clean-shaven and looked scared. Tom could hardly believe only two days had passed since he and Walt had tortured Thornfield in this vehicle. His pulse began to accelerate.

“What you got there, Snake?” asked the SWAT cop.

“Burgers and chicken. Better than nothing, right?”

“You’re damn right.” The SWAT cop holstered his pistol and pulled a chicken leg from the box.

The central aisle of the van had filled with men.

“Hey,” called the medic from beside Tom, “pass me a hamburger.”

Somebody tossed a wrapped sandwich back to the bed.

“You want something, Dr. Cage?” asked the boy.

“No, thanks.”

“A burger won’t hurt your sugar. You gotta keep your strength up.”

“Do I?” Tom asked with frank skepticism. “I hope so.”

The medic averted his eyes.

Tom turned his head and sought out Snake Knox among the bobbing heads in the front of the van. He couldn’t make out anything but a green cap sandwiched between black ballistic nylon, LSP logos, and Velcro utility straps. The sound of men eating voraciously turned Tom’s stomach. He found himself worrying that Snake and his partner would relieve the SWAT cops, leaving him at their mercy. Thanks to Walt,
Thornfield knew exactly where the miniature blowtorch was stored in the van. God only knew what kind of revenge he would take on Tom if given the opportunity.

Tom was asking himself whether he’d done the right thing in saving Thornfield from Walt when he heard a man gasp in surprise. Jerking his head to the right, Tom saw the SWAT cops trying to back away from something in the narrow aisle. They had nowhere to go.

“Not one move,” somebody said. “Or I blow his goddamn brains out.”

“You’ve lost your fucking mind, old man,” said a younger voice.

“I guess we’ll see about that. Take their guns, Sonny.”

As Thornfield plucked big semiautomatic handguns from black holsters, the medic beside Tom reached slowly for the pistol on his belt.

Tom whispered, “Don’t try it. You can’t shoot in here without hitting your buddies, and Snake Knox is crazy.”

The medic’s hand touched the butt of the pistol.

“He’ll empty his gun back here,” Tom hissed. “He wants me dead anyway, but there’s no sense in you dying.”

The young cop dropped his hand just as someone jerked the rear doors open from outside the van, and a cold wind rushed through the RV. Tom looked back and saw two men in their seventies training guns into the van. One held a long-barreled revolver, the other a shotgun. Tom was pretty sure he had treated both men in an earlier decade.

“Sorry, boys,” Snake said to the SWAT cops. “But if you was earning your money, I’d already be dead. I need you to go outside and lie down on the ground.”

“Colonel Knox is going to spread you across Louisiana in pieces,” said the biggest of the cops.

Snake laughed. “I wouldn’t expect any less. I taught my nephew everything he knows in that line. Now get the fuck out, shitbird.”

After the cops filed out of the van’s narrow side door, Snake walked down the little aisle and stood looking down at Tom. Looking up into his eyes, Tom saw the wild light he would have expected in the eyes of Quantrill’s Raiders, men who’d rebelled against all authority and who in anger and defeat had burned towns and slaughtered women and children.

“Well, Doc,” Snake said in a sandpaper voice. “I hear you and your Texas Ranger buddy gave Sonny a rough time in this van the other
night.” Snake raised a boot and planted it squarely on Tom’s chest, then pressed down until Tom gasped for air. “I’m glad to be able to return the favor.”

Tom grabbed the heavy boot and tried to pull it off his chest, but he hadn’t the strength to even shift it.

Snake grinned beneath the brim of the John Deere cap. “This is how death comes for you, Doc. I never trusted you. No matter what the others said. You liked that nigger nurse way too much. And now it’s me that God sends to cut your string. Ain’t that something? I can’t say I won’t enjoy it.”

Tom knew Snake Knox would give no quarter. “If there is a God,” he gasped from beneath the crushing force of the boot, “I hope there’s a hell, too. Because that’s where you’re bound.”

Snake only laughed.

Tom’s breath was failing and his mind growing dim. “At least I left something good behind me,” he whispered. “My son . . . my daughter. At least I helped some people. All you brought into the world was death and pain . . . and that’s all you’ll leave behind. It won’t be long, either.”

The glow in Snake’s eyes rose like a stoked furnace. Snake drew a pistol from his pants and aimed the barrel down at Tom’s face.

“Snake, don’t!” cried a frightened voice from somewhere in the van. “You can’t do it! Not yet. Think about Forrest. Think about tomorrow!”

“Fuck him,” Snake said. “You know the score. It was always gonna come to this.”

I COME OUT OF
blackness grabbing for the cell phones on the bedside table, but all are dark. Propped on my elbow, I try to orient myself in time. Only after I switch on my new BlackBerry and read its face do I see that it’s two thirty in the morning.

What woke me up, if not a cell phone?

Swinging onto the edge of the bed, I pull on my pants and shoes, then take my .357 from the table and walk onto the landing outside my bedroom.

A quick glance into Annie’s room tells me she and my mother are fine, their fragile forms outlined beneath a chenille bedspread. Moving carefully, I descend the narrow staircase with my gun at the ready and
alight on the ground floor of the Abrams house. Ambient light from the outside streetlamps leaks through the cracks in the curtains, giving enough illumination to navigate the furniture.

After checking the ground floor, I open the back door and slip into the backyard. The cold night air raises the hair on my skin, but I move steadily around the perimeter of the house, my eyes focused in the darkest parts of the yard. My eyes will pick up movement in the lighter areas; it’s the pools of blackness where death may wait. My forefinger twitches against the thin metal curve of the trigger. I’d hate to have to explain firing a .357 Magnum in the middle of town, but better that than the alternative.

After making a full circuit of the house and finding nothing, I return to the front yard and gaze out over the old ninth hole of the Duncan Park golf course, a long, misty slope that falls away from Duncan Avenue, then terminates at the fences where I played Little League baseball as a boy. The sight triggers one of those temporal dislocations I’ve sometimes experienced since moving back to my hometown. At my back stands a house where I studied for advanced chemistry exams with my high school friends, yet now it’s a makeshift safe house that protects my family from men who were killing people while I was learning how to make a double play on the baseball field down the slope. How is it that, decades later, it falls to me to bring those men to justice? Perhaps it’s only fitting. This is my town, after all. And its legacy is the one my father and his contemporaries left me and mine: a community crippled by unresolved conflict, anger, and grief.

I wish that I felt equal to the task, but in truth I feel as lost as I’ve ever been. I began this week by investigating a relatively simple murder. Now I find myself caught in a skein of connections I never knew existed. Through my father’s secret actions, and possibly by blood, I am bound to Viola Turner’s family, to the Knox family, and through them to the Royal and Marcello families, and their crimes. At the farthest reach of this tangled web may lie the assassination of a president.

Surely I must stand at that hinge point where in novels and films the hero suddenly reexamines his situation and discovers that the answer has been staring him in the face all along. Alas, I feel no looming epiphany. All I possess is a plan for disruption: sow discord among the enemy and pray for a miracle.

Centuries ago, Heraclitus made a famously sweeping assertion:
Character is fate
. Almost without fail, men make choices based on instinct, eternally proving his maxim. As a lawyer I exploited this knowledge to dissect defendants, opponents, and even judges. As a novelist, I use it as a charting compass. But to profit from the principle in my present circumstance—to see where I must go and what I must do—I need to know
my own
character.

And what is character but the sum of our genes and the pressures of human interaction? Our parents are the door through which we enter the world. In coming together they fix our essential natures, but it’s after we become self-aware that they begin weaving the narrative that will ultimately shape the people they send into society. If our parents lie to us—not merely by omission, as all do, but by commission—then how can we ever know ourselves?

For most of my life, my father’s character seemed a static and transparent thing, a multifaceted diamond whose essential trait was clarity. Then four days ago, that stone cracked along some pre-existing fault and became milky, opaque. It happens. Even fine diamonds contain flaws, inclusions invisible to the naked eye that weaken the whole. But the revelations about Viola Turner were only the beginning. Soon the milky stone had broken in two. As I tried to piece the halves back together, Henry Sexton began tapping at them, fracturing each into still smaller fragments. Then tonight Kaiser and Stone shattered those fragments into jagged shards, each reflecting light in all directions, creating interference patterns I may never be able to penetrate. Even if I do, how can I possibly piece the original stone back together, when I know my memory of it to be flawed?

Only my father can put himself back together. And if he dies before he does that, I will never truly know him. I will never
have
known him. Which means I may never know myself. I’ll be a man without a past, and a man without a past is like a nation without a history, or worse, with a myth of one. If the narrative of my life has been woven from lies, then how can I choose my next move? What crimes were my father’s lies told to conceal? If Shad Johnson is right, then simple, selfish murder. If Kaiser and Stone are correct, then murder on a historic scale. The latter proposition seems incredible, but the ties binding my father to the Knoxes, to Royal, and even to Marcello and beyond
have been established beyond doubt. At least I’m not alone in my ignorance. If murder has haunted my family, it has also haunted my country. From the humblest victims—forgotten black boys vanishing into the night—to the most privileged and high—President Kennedy cut down on national television—these killings and the darkness that enshrouds them deny us the truth about ourselves.

Standing here in the darkness, my best hope may be to heed Carl Jung’s admonition:
If you bring forth what is within you, it will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, it will destroy you.
Though I am poorly informed and inadequately armed, this now must be my quest, whatever the cost. Men still live who shared the secret paths of my father’s hidden history, and the history of this nation. Soon I will face some of them across an interrogation table. And this I know: to learn what
they
know, I will stop at nothing.

The howl of a dog from the shadows makes me whirl toward the house, but I see no sign of the animal. Looking back at the street, I half expect to see Lincoln Turner’s white pickup rolling along the pavement, but the scene is almost ghostly in its stillness.