“It’s dynamite,” Alvin starts to say, but the same fed tough hits him open-handed across the back of his head.
“One more word and I’ll shoot you here, you hear me? Save us the bother of the hot squat.”
Around Bobby Junior and his associates, the frenzy is subsiding. If anything, the crowd presses closer. Craver watches us. Alvin’s shoulders tremble.
“You killed your wife.”
The voice comes from the earth. From the stones in witness of their own destruction. From the bodies whose repose Craver will guard at the cost of his own place beside them.
“She threatened to leave and expose those pictures you made her take. You buried her body in the potter’s field and told everyone she had left for Vegas.”
The officer holding Alvin jumps back as if he’s been burned.
Alvin sits up slowly, continues: “Bobby Senior had fixed every election since twenty-four. The police and the city council helped him do it in exchange for favors and cash. Bobby Junior was meant to follow him in the last election, but he had killed a man in the city and fathered a colored child and the mayor was worried about the scandal. Bobby Junior has forced himself on ten women, and every one was a Negro who couldn’t say a word about it, because he would destroy them and their families. One killed herself. He can’t get it up, unless he pretends that she’s unwilling, and black. Officer Fisk has two wives—”
There are two guns at Alvin’s temples now, two men implacable with anger and fear.
“You shut that hole you use for a mouth now, boy.”
“Believe me,” Alvin says, so calmly he looks possessed. Not by the devil—by a divinity. “Craver has loaded himself with dynamite. He is about to—”
Someone shoots. Pea has launched herself from the ground so quickly that I don’t realize what she’s doing until she’s on her side in the dirt and Alvin is crying and bleeding all over her lemon-colored skirt.
I jerk against the officer holding me, though Pea is all right, I can see it in her eyes.
“Damn it, I told you—”
I mistake the sound for gunfire at first, but it’s coming from the church. Explosives detonate in rapid succession. They spit smoke and fire against the milky sky. Deafened, I crawl toward Pea. Ashes and debris rain over us, they burn where they land. Alvin writhes, but I can no longer hear those wordless howls. Pea has worked her hands free somehow. She rifles through the pockets of the officer who must have shot Alvin, the one who killed his wife. He has fallen while the old church made of itself an offering. He has fallen and the remains of his brain and skull have mixed with the ash falling around us. Three more thuds that I can feel but not hear, three more mortal rains.
Pea’s hands still. We look at each other. I wonder if we will die, if our child will die, before we ever had a chance to know her.
“To hell,” her lips say. Then she smiles, tangles her hand in my hair, and pushes me to the ground.
I can hear the bass of the moment Craver gives himself back to God. It vibrates through the graves he has died to save. Pea has made sure I can’t see. The air smells of hell, or war. Of charred flesh and charred earth and the blood that covers them both. Only my position on the ground keeps me from vomiting. My position prostrate, facing away from Craver’s massacre and toward the church.
From its wreckage, a solitary figure emerges, now that there’s almost no one left to witness. A black woman, slight but strong, with enmities as venerable and fierce as Craver’s, better hidden. She wears a scarf over her hair and ashes on her dress.
Mae didn’t threaten Craver that afternoon. But I should never have left them alone.
She sees me looking but doesn’t pause. She just points to her boy and slips out of sight.
The Little Easton Massacre is the biggest news in the country for eight days. Bobby Junior survived. He ran moments before Craver detonated—the only one who, at last, believed us.
He has been a very helpful witness to the police.
Conspiracy to commit mass murder. The commission of said mass murder. Political terrorism. Destruction of property. Trespassing.
At that last, even Finn couldn’t stop a bitter laugh. Pea and Alvin and I are set to spend a reasonable time in jail followed by a short appointment with the hot squat. Walter managed to get us out on bail. He has been quiet about our prospects for freedom.
“I’ll say I did it all with Craver,” I tell him. “I’ll confess so they have to drop the charges against Pea and Alvin.”
“You’d leave your kid without a father?” Walter asks.
“Better to lose a father than a mother.”
A considered pause. “You could give Phyllis up. Declare loyalty to the fuzz and turn informant. They’ll keep you out of the draft and I’ll get her out before they can make charges stick. Wait a few years and you could be in the kid’s life, at least.”
“She would never forgive me.”
“Of course not. But she wouldn’t kill you. For the kid’s sake.”
I have to laugh. Oh, if only one of our hearts were hard enough. But hadn’t I made my decision the moment that I knocked Jack cold from behind, the moment I grabbed Pea’s knife and turned on Victor? And then that wet, putrefying silence of Victor’s curse and Victor’s death—there is nothing simple about survival, after giving yourself over to love like that.
Walter sighs. “I had to mention it. There’s always the truth.”
I’m suspicious. “What truth?”
“That Mae Spalding did it. She and Craver between them. That old mayor had let his son do whatever he wanted with her for years, hadn’t he? And I think she and the mayor had been together before that. So she had killed
