The White Road-CP-4 Read Online Free PDF Page A

came to rest on him.
    “Unclasp your belt,” said Louis.
    The knife man paused for a moment, then did as he was told.
    “Now pull it out.”
    He grasped it and pulled. The belt caught once or twice before it freed the scabbard and the knife fell to the floor.
    “That’s good enough.”
    “I still got a problem.”
    “Sorry to hear that,” Louis replied. “You Willard Hoag?”
    The sunken eyes betrayed nothing. They remained fixed on the interloper’s face, unblinking.
    “I know you?”
    “No, you don’t know me.”
    Something danced in Willard’s eyes. “You niggers all look the same to me anyways.”
    “Guessed you’d take that point of view, Willard. Man behind you is Clyde Benson. And you—”
    The SIG lifted slightly in front of the bartender. “You Little Tom Rudge.”
    The redness in Little Tom’s face was due only partly to the heat of the burning liquor. There was fury building in him. It was there in the trembling of his lips, in the way his fingers were clasping and unclasping. The action made the tattoo on his arm move, as if the angels were slowly waving the banner with the name “Kathleen.”
    And all of that anger was directed at the black man now threatening him in his own bar.
    “You want to tell me what’s happening here?” asked Little Tom.
    Louis smiled.
    “Atonement, that’s what’s happening here.”

    It is ten after ten when the woman stands. They call her Grandma Lucy, although she is not yet fifty and still a beautiful woman with youth in her eyes and few lines on her dark skin. At her feet sits a boy, seven or eight years old, but already tall for his age. A radio plays Bessie Smith’s
    “Weeping Willow Blues.”
    The woman called Grandma Lucy wears only a nightdress and shawl, and her feet are bare, yet she rises and walks through the doorway, descending the steps into the yard with careful, measured strides. Behind her walks the little boy, her grandson. He calls to her—“Grandma Lucy, what’s the matter?”—but she does not reply. Later she will tell him about the worlds within worlds, about the places where the membrane separating the living from the dead is so thin that they can see one another, touch one another. She will tell him of the difference between day-walkers and nightwalkers, of the claims that the dead make upon those left behind. And she will talk of the road that we all walk, and that we all share, the living and the dead alike. But for now she just gathers her shawl closer to her and continues toward the edge of the forest, where she stops and waits in the moonless night. There is a light among the trees, as if a meteor has descended from the heavens and is now traveling close to the ground, flaming and yet not flaming, burning and yet not burning. There is no heat, but something is ablaze at the heart of that light.
    And when the boy looks into her eyes, he sees the burning man.

    “You recall Errol Rich?” said Louis.
    Nobody responded, but a muscle spasmed in Clyde Benson’s face.
    “I said, do you recall Errol Rich?”
    “We don’t know what you’re talking about, boy,” said Hoag. “You got the wrong men.”
    The gun swiveled, then bucked in Louis’s hand. Willard Hoag’s chest spat blood through the hole in his left breast. He stumbled backward, taking a stool with him, then landed heavily on his back. His left hand scrambled at something unseen on the floor, and then he was still. Clyde Benson started to cry, and then it all went down.
    Little Tom dived to floor of the bar, his hands seeking the shotgun beneath the sink. Clyde Benson kicked a stool at Angel, then ran for the door. He got as far as the men’s room before his shirt puffed twice at the shoulder. He stumbled through the back door and disappeared, bleeding, into the darkness. Angel, who had fired the shots, went after him. The crickets had grown suddenly quiet and the silence in the night had a strange anticipatory quality, as though the natural world awaited the