Mortal Fear

job or went to graduate school, I was going to play music for a while.”

“How did they respond?”

“Not well. When I was a kid, they were really supportive of my music. But during my senior year of high school, things changed.”

“What happened?”

“The second act of a tragedy that started fifteen years before. Summer of sixty-four. The Freedom Summer. The year they killed those three civil rights workers in Neshoba County.”

Lenz nods. “Schwerner, Chaney, and Goodman.” He says the names softly, as if those long-dead kids were friends of his.

For the first time I suspect Lenz might be Jewish. “Right,” I tell him. “Buried them in that dam. Anyway, a New York college sent some civil rights workers down to Cairo County, where our farm is. My dad, being who he was, decided to invite a couple of them over-”

“Excuse me? ‘Being who he was?’ ”

“He wasn’t a native Mississippian. He was from Louisiana, down below the hard-shell Baptist parishes. He was raised strict, but not prejudiced, you know? He was a doctor, but he came from working class people. Grew up working right alongside blacks.”

“Go on.”

“These civil rights workers would come in from a day of running the back roads, teaching blacks how to answer the voting questionnaire or whatever, and my dad would feed them. He’d talk medicine, they’d talk politics. Or maybe they’d talk baseball. I got this from my mother, you understand, much later.”

“Keep going.”

“Anyway, the local yahoos, the Klan or whoever, didn’t like my dad having these guys over to the house. They warned him, but Dad didn’t pay any attention. Then this colored guy got killed at a church outside Itta Bena. They blew him up in his car. He was a patient of my father’s. He’d served in action in Korea. Dad put a lot of stock in a man serving his country in battle. He’d turned a blind eye to a lot that the Klan and the Citizens’ Council did in those days, like everybody else. But he couldn’t stomach the murder of this black vet. He sat down and wrote an editorial that would blister the hide off a rattlesnake. He told it like it was, and he named names. He sent that piece to the Greenville paper, the liberal paper owned by Hodding Carter, the paper printed it, and lo, there came a shitstorm.”

Lenz smiles in the dark. “I’ll be damned.”

“My mother just sat around the house waiting to be firebombed. But it didn’t happen. Dad had been so public with his accusations that the Klan was afraid to do anything too soon after the piece appeared. The fact that my mother was from an old Delta family helped. It wasn’t a wealthy family, but her people-the Grants-had been in the Delta about as long as anybody but the Indians. Quite a few white patients stopped coming to my father, but blacks took their places just as fast, so that didn’t matter much. After about a year, it was all forgotten. At least by my family.”

“But not by the Klan.”

“I wouldn’t necessarily say the Klan. The Klan doesn’t even exist in Mississippi anymore. Not in any meaningful way. It’s just a bunch of bitter old drunks now. Anyway, a lot of time passed. And during that time, another facet of my dad’s character emerged, though we knew nothing about it.”

I wonder how far we are from Quantico, but I don’t dare break the flow to ask. “My dad was a doctor of the old school. All he cared about was treating people’s sickness. He never thought about money. Some years he didn’t collect fifty percent of what he was owed. And he’d accept anything as payment when he did collect. Green beans, catfish, peaches, venison, collard greens, whatever. He was still making house calls in 1987.”

Lenz leans his head back and flips on the Mercedes’s headlights. “A dying breed,” he says softly.

“A dead breed. And the country’s worse off for it. Anyway, his entire financial planning strategy was his belief that if a doctor worked hard in America, he’d make enough money to raise his family and pay for his whiskey and cigars, and send in the next patient please. Get the picture?”

“A common failing among practitioners of his generation.”

“Yeah? Well, it didn’t take long for that failing to get him into serious trouble. By 1968 he was a year behind on his income taxes. That meant that every April-every year-he had to go to the bank and borrow the full amount of his taxes to pay off the government-something like sixty or seventy thousand dollars at whatever the interest rate happened to be. And after he’d paid, he would still be a year behind. He did that for twenty years.”

“My God.”

“Talk about pressure. But he didn’t tell a soul about it. It was a secret between him and his banker, who was thrilled by the arrangement, of course. There was enough cash flow that nobody felt the pinch, but it was all an illusion.”

“What about an equity loan?” Lenz asks. “A home mortgage?”

“Not a chance. All he could have used as collateral was the farm or the house sitting on it, and both had been in my mother’s family for generations. She didn’t have any brothers, so hers was the first generation of Grants that hadn’t farmed the land. They leased it out. Anyway, Dad felt the debt was his cross to bear. He just worked harder and harder.

“My junior year of high school, things came to a head. The people we leased the farm to had had two bad harvests in a row. Dad’s income was stretched to the breaking point. And when he went into the bank and asked for his annual tax loan, they said no. They’d never demanded collateral before, because they knew he could cover the debt. But this time they did. He was stunned. He went to another bank and got the same story. After a while he figured it out. The chickens from 1964 had come home to roost.”

Lenz is shaking his head.

“You can see the rest. Dad had to put up the farm as collateral. Carter was president; interest rates were twenty percent. When Dad finally told my mother how things stood, she didn’t hesitate to sign the papers. But it almost killed her. Her father had never believed in borrowing money, and she didn’t either. I mean never. Dad worked harder that year than he ever had in his life. He was nearly fifty then, and he was working hundred-hour weeks. Seventy-two-hour shifts in emergency rooms out of town. Seven months into it, he had a coronary. He survived, but the cash dried up. I worked, my mother worked, but it wasn’t any good. The people we leased to had their third bad year, and we lost the farm.”

“All of it?”

“We managed to keep the home place. Where my wife and I live now. Everything else the bank took. They put it up for auction, but somehow the bank president himself bought it for about half what it was worth. He was a smug, redneck son of a bitch named Crump. He loved taking that land. He was about sixty-five then.”

“How did this affect your mother?”

The memory of my mother in those years is something I would prefer to forget. “She became a ghost,” I say softly.

“I beg your pardon?”

“A ghost of herself.”

Lenz nods silently.

“So you can imagine what happened when I arrived home from college four years later with my honors degree in finance and announced my intention to roam the country playing guitar. They weren’t exactly thrilled.”

“Yet you did it anyway.”

“Not immediately. For a couple of weeks I just moped around. Then I got mad. I saw that their whole view of the world had been warped and beaten down by bastards like Crump. And worse, that it was going to affect my whole life if I let it.”

“Did you confront Crump?”

“What good would that have done? I had no leverage, no power. I packed up my clothes, my textbooks, and my life savings-five grand-and took the Amtrak to Chicago. One of my professors wangled me a job at a company with seats on the Board of Trade. After a week of trading for the company, I started trading for myself. And I was fearless. I can’t explain it. I was trading like I played music, purely on instinct. Balls to