“You say that word again and you better enjoy that leak, ’cause it will be the last one you ever take.”
“Sorry,” said Virgil. He tried to force the offending word from his brain, but it came back each time with renewed force. He began to sweat.
“Sorry,” he said again.
“Well, that’s all right. You finished down there?”
Virgil nodded.
“Then put it away. An owl might figure it for a worm and carry it off.”
Virgil had a vague suspicion that he’d just been insulted, but he quickly tucked his manhood into his fly just in case and wiped his hands on his trousers.
“You carrying a gun?”
“Nope.”
“Bet you wish you were.”
“Yep,” admitted Virgil, in a burst of sudden and possibly ill-advised honesty.
He felt hands on him, patting him down, but the gun stayed where it was, pressed hard against his skin. There was more than one of them, Virgil figured. Hell, there could be half of Harlem at his back. He felt a pressure on his wrists as his hands were cuffed tightly behind him.
“Now turn to your right.”
Virgil did as he was told. He was facing out onto the open country behind the bar, all green as far as the river.
“You answer my questions, I let you walk away into those fields. Understand?”
Virgil nodded dumbly.
“Thomas Rudge, Willard Hoag, Clyde Benson. They in there?”
Virgil was the kind of guy who instinctively lied about everything, even if there didn’t seem to be any percentage in not telling the truth. Better to lie and cover your ass later than tell the truth and find yourself in trouble from the start.
Virgil, true to character, shook his head.
“You sure?”
Virgil nodded and opened his mouth to embellish the lie. Instead, the clicking of the spittle in his mouth coincided perfectly with the impact of his head against the wall as the gun pushed firmly into the base of his skull.
“See,” whispered the voice, “we goin’ in there anyhow. If we go in and they ain’t there, then you got nothin’ to worry about, least until we come lookin’ for you to start askin’ you again where they at. But we go in there and they sittin’ up at the bar, suckin’ on some cold ones, then there are dead folks got a better chance of bein’ alive tomorrow than you do. You understand me?”
Virgil understood.
“They’re in there,” he confirmed.
“How many others?”
“Nobody, just them three.”
The black man, as Virgil had at last begun to think of him, removed the gun from Virgil’s head and patted him on the shoulder with his hand.
“Thank you…” he said. “I’m sorry, I didn’t catch your name.”
“Virgil,” said Virgil.
“Well, thank you, Virgil,” said the man, then brought the butt of the gun down hard on Virgil’s skull. “You been great.”
Beneath the black oak, an old Lincoln has been driven into place. The red truck pulls up beside it and three hooded men climb from the bed, pushing the black man onto the ground before them. He lands on his stomach, his face in the dirt. Strong hands yank him to his feet and he stares into the dark holes of the pillowcases, crudely burnt into the fabric with matches and cigarettes. He can smell cheap liquor.
Cheap liquor and gasoline.
His name is Errol Rich, although no stone or cross with that name upon it will ever mark his final resting place. From the moment he was taken from his momma’s house, his sister and his momma screaming, Errol had ceased to exist. Now all traces of his physical presence are about to be erased from this earth, leaving only the memory of his life with those who have loved him, and the memory of his dying with those gathered here this night.
And why is he here? Errol Rich is about to burn for refusing to buckle, for refusing to bend his knee, for disrespecting his betters.
Errol Rich is about to die for breaking a window.
He was driving his truck, his old truck with its cracked windshield and its flaking paint, when he heard the shout.
“Hey, nigger!”
Then the glass exploded in on top of him, cutting his face and hands, and something hit him hard between the eyes. He braked suddenly, and smelled it upon himself. In his lap, the cracked pitcher dumped the remains of its contents on his seat and on his pants.
Urine. They had filled a pitcher between them and thrown it through his windshield. He wiped the liquid from his face, his sleeve coming away wet and bloody, and looked at the three men standing by the roadside, a few steps away from the entrance to the bar.
“Who threw that?” he asked. Nobody answered, but, secretly, they were afraid. Errol Rich was a strong, powerful man. They had expected him to wipe his face and drive on, not to stop and confront them.
“You throw that, Little Tom?” Errol stood before Little Tom Rudge, the owner of the bar, but Little Tom wouldn’t meet his eyes. “’Cause if you did, you better tell me now else I’m gonna burn your shit heap down to the ground.”
But still there was no reply, so Errol Rich, who always did have a temper on him, signed his death warrant by taking a length of timber from the bed of his truck and turning to the men. They backed off, waiting for him to come at them, but instead he threw the timber, all three feet of it, through the front window of Little Tom Rudge’s bar, then climbed back in his truck and drove away.
Now Errol Rich is about to die for a pane of cheap glass, and a whole town has come to watch it happen. He looks out on them, these God-fearing people, these sons and daughters of the land, and he feels the heat of their hatred upon him, a foretaste of the burning that is to come.
I fixed things, he thinks. I took what was broken and made it good again.
The thought seems to have come to him almost out of nowhere. He tries to shake it away, but, instead, it persists.
I had a gift. I could take an engine, a radio, even a television, and I could repair it. I never read a manual, never had no formal training. It was a gift, a gift that I had, and soon it will be gone.
He looks out at the crowd, at the expectant faces. He sees a boy, fourteen or fifteen, his eyes bright with excitement. He recognizes him, recognizes too the man with his hand on the boy’s shoulder. He had brought his radio to Errol, hoping to have it fixed in time for the Santa Anita because he liked to listen to the horse races. And Errol had repaired it, replacing the busted speaker cone, and the man had thanked him and paid him a dollar extra for coming through for him.
The man sees Errol looking at him, and his eyes flick away. There will be no help for him, no mercy from any of these people. He is about to die for a broken window, and they will find someone else to repair their engines and their radios, although not as well, and not as cheaply.
His legs tied, Errol is forced to hop to the Lincoln. They drag him onto the roof, these masked men, and they put the rope around his neck while he kneels. He sees the tattoo on the arm of the largest man: the word “Kathleen” spelled out on a banner held by angels. The hand tightens the rope. The gasoline is poured over his head, and he shivers.
Then Errol looks up and says the last words anyone will ever hear from him on this earth.
“Don’t burn me,” he asks. He has accepted the fact of his death, the inevitability of his passing on this night, but he does not want to burn.
Please Lord, don’t let them burn me.
The tattooed man splashes the last of the gasoline into Errol Rich’s eyes, blinding him, then climbs down to the ground.
Errol Rich starts to pray.
The small white man entered the bar first. A smell of stale, spilled beer hung in the air. On the floor, dust and cigarette butts formed drifts around the counter, where they had been swept but not cleaned up. There were blackened circles on the wood where soles had stamped out thousands of embers, and the orange paint on the walls had blistered and burst like infected skin. There were no pictures, just generic beer company signs that had been used to cover the worst of the damage.