The Lesser People Read online

  I jerked back, hit my head on the roof of the tunnel and cried out.

  Preacher said, “Don’t be afraid of what you can’t see, Eli. Be afraid of what you can.”

  I don’t want to be afraid at all anymore, I thought. I’m only ten and I shouldn’t have to be.

  Preacher said, “The worst thing about being dead is you miss breathing.”

  I nodded, frightened by his voice and what he said. I wanted to ask him to help me get out of there, to pray for me if he thought it’d help, but I couldn’t move my mouth. I brushed my hand against it, felt the metal contraption strapped to my face and I clawed at it, trying to rip it free, find the clasps that held it on.

  “No breathing for any of us down here,” Preacher said.

  “Help me,” I said.

  Something moved just outside the light, a leather shoe, a black pant leg. I feared it wasn’t Preacher at all because it didn’t sound like him anymore, its voice without emotion or inflection. I thought it was the spider that stole sight playing games with me. I thought the unknowable tunnel and the trapped sensation it created was its web.

  I slid back the direction I’d come.

  The slightest movements hurt.

  Thinking, Somebody always suffers, hurt.

  Scurrying sounds echoed from the walls.

  The muzzle dug into the bottom of my chin as I struggled to open my mouth, the sounds growing louder, almost growling in my ears, the light bleeding from my pores losing its intensity as my terror rose. Leonard screamed in another tunnel. His sister shushed him and told him that everything was all right, her voice sing-song, then soft and sad as she said, “That’s a lie. There’s very little that’s all right other than we got each other.”

  My hands scraped the walls in vain. I thought there had to be a passage to them.

  Cool breath swept across my neck and clung there like webbing.

  Something with a powerful grip seized my shoulders and pressed down on the back of my head until the muzzle covering my mouth scraped against the rock floor.

  I tasted dust, inhaled it, coughed, then tried to struggle free of the thing gripping me from behind, holding me down, but it was too powerful.

  It chuckled, more insect than man.

  Monstrous, it whispered, leaning onto my back, crushing me.

  I couldn’t breathe.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  I woke in a cold sweat, a scream trapped in my throat and my fingers clawing at the air as if I could rend myself from the nightmare if only I could dig my hands into reality and hold on.

  I shuddered, thinking about the tunnel, about Preacher talking nonsense from some otherworld, about Sarah and Leonard lost without their mother, about the spider.

  Ben sat on my bed, near my feet. He touched my leg and said, “Hey, it’s all right.”

  I thought about what Sarah had said: That’s a lie. There’s very little that’s all right other than we got each other.

  He said, “You just had a bad dream is all.”

  Sunlight spilled a golden pool across the carpet of our bedroom. I figured it was probably early afternoon. I caught my breath, sank my head back onto my pillow, lay my hands on my stomach and found my center by staring at the ceiling.

  I said, “Where are Sarah and Leonard?” Some small part of me feared that they were trapped in that other reality, as if by some dark force I’d carried them away into my nightmare, and they were stuck there, like Uncle Tommy had carried their family into his nightmare by association and it’d cost their mom her life.

  I wondered what kind of dreams her and her brother were having.

  I said, “Where are Sarah and Leonard?”

  “Sleeping. So is Uncle Tommy.” Ben rubbed his forehead. His fingers were very pale. He said, “I think he was digging through that burned up house all night looking for us.” He stroked my blanket, shook his head, said, “I been thinking hard about something.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know that I’ll be able to talk you into it.”

  “What?”

  He tapped my leg and said, “Come on.”

  I looked at the clock on the wall. It was late afternoon. The road was still and silent. So was our house. I didn’t want to get out of bed. I wanted to sleep longer, wake up when everything was back to normal. I told Ben as much but he slapped my face lightly to get my attention and make me shut about sleeping. He said, “This is probably the most important thing you’ll ever do. It can end all of this.”

  “Why don’t you just tell me?”

  “I will,” he said, “once you come with me.”

  I grudgingly got out of bed. I doubted I’d have done it for him before all that had happened. In the last twenty-four hours Ben had shown me a side of him that I’d never seen before, maybe a side that hadn’t even existed until he’d started hanging around Uncle Tommy and since he’d met Sarah and Leonard and poor Miss Jessie.

  He handed me my shoes. I took them but shook my head. “We can’t go anywhere,” I whispered. “We just got home today.”

  “You want to end this or not?” he said.

  I did. I wanted all of it to end and for things to return to normal more than I wanted anything. I nodded once, trying to trust him, but Ben had that strange, determined light in his eyes. We hovered near the bedroom door. He said, “Well.”

  “All right,” I said. “What are we doing?”

  “Come on.”

  I followed him down the hall into the foyer. Sarah and Leonard were sound asleep on the floor. One of them was snoring but I couldn’t tell who since Leo sometimes had a feminine tone to his voice. I glanced at the couch. Uncle Tommy had a forearm draped over his face to block out the light. Daddy, sometimes exhausted and needing a nap in the daytime, had to drape his arm like that since he couldn’t fall asleep in the light without doing so. I figured they were probably more alike than I’d ever imagined. More than Momma even realized probably. It made me think that me and Ben were probably a lot alike deep down, too, even though he barely read comic books anymore and he liked girls whereas I thought they were still weird.

  My brother crept into the living room and into our parents’ bedroom off to the right of Sarah. He came back a moment later, nervously watching the couch, as he carried the .22 rifle.

  I wondered why he grabbed the rifle, thinking we couldn’t go out and target practice, even though it did sound appealing. Daddy used to place a nickel in a notch of rough bark and we’d pace off fifty steps and hunker down to destroy that coin with a single bullet. I’d hit it and send it flying repeatedly. Ben was lucky to hit the tree itself. Daddy could shoot like me though, even better really, almost driving the coin into the tree like he was driving a nail with a hammer. Ben used to hate admitting that I was better at something than him, that I had the same gift Daddy had, but he didn’t mind now as he grabbed my arm and we snuck onto the front porch.

  The road was lonely, still, dusty. Ben pulled a handful of cartridges from his pant pocket and stuffed them in my shirt pocket, close to my heart. They were cold. The day itself was warm but cooling off quickly, a drabness hovering in the late afternoon sky that whispered of rain and brutal storms. Ben held a finger to his lips and waved me down the steps and down the dirty, quiet street. Nobody was out, though even if there had been, most people, before at least, would never have bothered us whether we were carrying the .22 or not since we were a police man’s children. Once we got a half mile from the house, I said, “Where are we going?”

  “You know.”

  “No I don’t.”

  “Be quiet,” he said.

  We sped between rows of houses as we neared the city center, and we hurried across back yards, my lungs burning, but I had to admit that it beat crawling through a dark cave. The sunlight felt great on my skin. A light sweat slicked my flesh. Ben slowed ahead of me, dropping the rifle to his side. We knelt and scooted behind a hedgerow that ran parallel with Montgomery Street. Cars lined the sidewalk, and a few people milled
about, talking quietly on stoops. These were the richer people. Granddad’s people. I looked for Fred, expecting him to be there, but all I saw was unfamiliar faces of important people.

  We moved beneath the hedge. It clawed at my back. I whispered, “What are we doing?”

  Ben’s head was hunched beneath the shrubbery, him holding the rifle like a soldier in both hands, prone next to me. He said, “Grandpa works in there.”

  Men entered and left the double doors of a tall brown building. They didn’t say hello to each other, each moving in his own bubble, head down, gripping briefcases, a few holding unfurled umbrellas. When the last of them disappeared into the building or into their automobile, Ben looked at his watch. He said, “He’ll be coming out in about forty minutes. I know ‘cause I called the office while you were sleeping to find out.”

  He nodded back to the door. “When he comes down those steps you’re going to shoot him.”

  I shook my head, felt a chill slide down my back and my flesh was pebbled with gooseflesh even though the evening was warm and still half-bright.

  “No,” I said. “I can’t do that.”

  “You’ve got to,” Ben said. “I can’t. I’ll miss, or I’ll only wound him.”

  “I can’t,” I said again.

  Ben opened the action of the rifle and a shiny brass shell filled the chamber. It held twenty short bullets in a carriage beneath the barrel. He released the action and locked the bullet in place. He handed me the rifle in the shade of the hedge. “Take it,” he said. “Do it when he’s coming down the steps.”

  “No,” I said, trying to push the gun back on him but he wouldn’t take it. He pushed it hard and it hit my chin. Funny lights danced in my skull. I almost cried once the lights faded and the pain bit into me like a razor-wired beast.

  Ben said, “Shut up. You know there ain’t no other way.”

  “There is,” I said.

  “What?” he said. “Nobody’s going to arrest him. He’s their boss, and he’s in charge of what all these assholes do.”

  He trembled, stared out at the steps across the street with a deadly concentration like he was watching what he wanted to play out as if it what actually happening. He smiled a little, a sick, twisted, heartbreaking smile.

  He turned to me. “He’s the reason Daddy and Momma are in jail. He’s the reason they broke her arm and beat Daddy up. He’s the reason Preacher is dead, why Sarah’s mom is dead. You understand that? He ain’t no human being. He’s some kind of monster. And,” Ben said, jabbing his finger into the black dirt, “we don’t do this and it could be our parents next. Or it could be Uncle Tommy. They don’t care, Eli, especially him. We’re like bugs to them. But we can show him that he’s flesh and blood same as anybody else.”

  “I—”

  “You lay there and think about it for a bit,” he said. “We got a while before he comes out.”

  The only thing that I was able to feel was the cool darkness creeping in around us beneath the hedge. It was as if we were stuck in the tunnel beneath the old slave quarters on Miss Jessie’s property, and that tree of suffering was yawning wide as it woke and revealed thick dark fruit clotting its branches like knots of flesh. It felt like Isaiah and Mr. James were there with us, prone on the damp soil, the air smelling electric, bringing electric rain.

  I stared at the steps. More people came and went, men in suits mostly, oblivious to us there, probably not even caring about what the Klan had done to the Negroes south of town, or what our Granddaddy had done to his own family and the families of those who called Forksville home. Everybody’s roots were planted deep and I didn’t think that anybody could change it, and though I knew that Daddy had killed Conover on accident and I understood that, this was different.

  I tried imagining what it’d be like with our grandfather pushing open the double doors, walking out onto the landing and pausing there like some kind of king. And he wouldn’t have any ideas that I had the sights of that .22 rifle trained right between his eyes.

  Ben would be breathing heavily beside me, whispering, “Now. Shoot.” And my heartbeat would be pounding in my ears until I took a few deep breaths, Granddaddy there with his hand on the rail and staring at the gray sky as if he disapproved of it ruining the beautiful life he’d created for himself. His face would be an ugly, ruddy color, his eyes hard like bits of flint. And my finger would find the trigger, the cool, hard metal.

  I’d relax into my position, letting the tension run out so that I’d be rooted to the earth, the rifle steady in my hands. I knew how he moved, so sure of himself, forcefully, that he’d move with a fake grace down the steps, his cane tapping by his left foot, his right hand sliding along the railing. And I’d let him reach the sidewalk. Ben would want to hit me but wouldn’t because he wouldn’t want to mess up my shot, if I took it.

  I didn’t have to squeeze my left eye shut like a lot of people, I don’t know why. I liked being able to see what was around the target. And I’d be able to make sure that nobody walked up on our grandfather as I pulled the slack from the trigger and his right shoe hit the concrete, the street between us still and empty.

  I blinked. Ben rubbed his head. He said quietly, “Once he comes out and you shoot him we’re going to have to run like the wind and we gotta make sure that nobody sees us.”

  “How?” I said. I glanced down the length of my body, past my shoes at the lawn behind us. It was open for about ten feet before a copse of trees and somebody’s garden. The hedge hid the lawn from the road.

  I said, “We’d have to crawl back to the garden before we stood up.”

  He nodded. “That’s what I was thinking. But we’re going to have to ditch my rifle somewhere they won’t find it and so they can’t find it on us once the cops are scouring town.”

  The police station was a couple of streets over. I didn’t think it’d take them long to get there but then the .22 wasn’t very loud when shooting short bullets. Daddy said it sounded like a typewriter’s keys clacking. If nobody came out with our granddad then he may lay there for a few minutes before anybody spotted him and called the police.

  I shook my head, said, “What if he has somebody with him?”

  “Take the shot,” Ben said.

  “What will Daddy say?”

  “We’re not telling him or anybody else. It’s going to be our secret, Eli, one we’ve gotta take to the grave with us.”

  “Why don’t Uncle Tommy do it? I can’t,” I sputtered. The rifle felt heavy in my hands. I kept thinking about a line of men holding guns on the street outside the jail when Preacher went willingly, maybe to save our parents, and in my head I could hear all those guns going off and see his body jerking about, that serene and sad and serious cast carved into his face.

  I didn’t know what Grandpa Irons would look like when the first bullet hit him, and I didn’t want to find out. Problem was that there was a cruel part of me that agreed with Benjamin. There was a part of me that said our grandfather had sealed his own fate with his choices and if I didn’t follow through and perform this horrible act then somebody somewhere else was going to suffer for it. Other children would suffer. Fathers. Mothers. White and black. Just everyday people who didn’t mean anybody else any harm.

  Sweat stung my eyes. I smeared it across my forehead, my hand greasy.

  Ben said, “You know there isn’t any other way.”

  “If they find out it was us then they won’t let Mom and Dad go,” I said. “What about that?”

  “You don’t know that,” he said. “And they ain’t going to catch us if you listen to me and listen good.”

  Acid burned my throat. I blinked. It felt too hot under the hedge. The dark kept rolling in like God had a huge paint brush. Ben said, “You know he tried to kill us and Sarah and Leonard, too. They tried to erase us at Miss Jessie’s because we don’t agree with them. They’d kill over that, Eli. What you’re going to kill him over is a better reason even if it ain’t right.”

  “I know it ain’t
right,” I said.

  Out of the corner of my eye I caught movement. I turned my head. Sheriff Bordeaux walked up the street, across the road, his face pale and drawn. Ben whispered in my ear, “That son of a bitch. He’s no better than the rest of them. He’s grandpa’s puppet.”

  I turned the rifle and aligned the rear and front sights over Bordeaux’s head.

  I figured he was a hundred feet away.

  I could shoot him in the eye, I thought.

  And he’d drop there and thrash on the ground for a minute.

  I remembered how it’d felt when he’d pulled my hair, and how it felt to see him slap Momma across the face, and how good it felt to see her dig her nails into his cheek as she went for his eyes, trying to blind him.

  I could shoot him in the eye.

  But I couldn’t shoot him.

  Ben said, “Wait for grandpa. He’s behind it all.”

  Sheriff Bordeaux reached the steps to the mayor’s office and climbed them. He disappeared inside. A car puttered down the road, on an adjacent street. My eyes drooped. More than anything I wanted to be back in my bed, just waiting for Uncle Tommy to wake us up and for him to go to the jail to get our parent’s free. I wondered if he’d already done it, while we were laying under the hedge plotting a murder. I thought maybe that was why Sheriff Bordeaux looked so downtrodden. Probably part of him hated setting them free.

  I turned to Ben. His eyes were closed. He lay on his back, hands crossed on his chest. I said, “Did you sleep at all?”

  He turned his head and I noticed how dark his eyes were, how tired he looked.

  He said, “Watch the front door.”

  I watched it, my heart in my throat. I tried to think of something funny or something stupid but I couldn’t. I knew I had to gear myself up for doing something really bad, something I couldn’t ever take back once I pulled the trigger.

  My dreams and reality got mixed up sometimes. Both of them washed over me as the front door opened ten minutes later and grandpa Irons filled the front steps with his entourage. Sheriff Bordeaux was on his right side, a half a step behind him. Old man Conover was behind them, chewing on an unlit cigar. Fred was there too, like he was our grandpa’s assistant, looking pale and miserable in his wrinkled suit. His tie was blue and striped with yellow and too short.