The White Road

I didn’t have any choice but to tell him something of what I knew.

“Tereus visited Atys Jones in jail. I wanted to know why.”

“You find out?”

“I think Tereus knew the family. Plus he’s found Jesus.”

Willie looked unhappy, although not terminally so.

“That’s what he told Andy. I figure Jesus should be more careful about who finds Him. I know you’re not telling me everything, but I’m not going to make an issue of it, not this time. I’d prefer it if you didn’t go back to the club, but if you do have to go, keep it discreet and don’t kick Andy Dalitz in the balls again. In return, I expect you to let me know if there’s anything that I should be worried about, you understand?”

“I understand.”

He nodded, seemingly content, then sipped his coffee.

“You tracked down that preacher, right? Faulkner?”

“That’s right.”

He watched me carefully. He seemed amused.

“I hear Roger Bowen is trying to get him out.”

I hadn’t called Elliot since Atys Jones had told me of Mobley’s co

“You curious about why that might be?” Willie continued.

“Very.”

He leaned back and stretched, exposing a sprinkling of sweat under his arms.

“Roger and me go way back, and not in a good way. He’s a fanatic and he has no respect. I’ve thought about maybe sending him away on a cruise: a long cruise, strictly one-way to the bottom, but then the crazies would come knocking on my door and it would be cruises for everyone. I don’t know what Bowen wants with the preacher: a figurehead, maybe, or could be the old man has something stashed away that Bowen wants to get hold of. Like I said, I don’t know, but you want to ask him, I can tell you where he’ll be later today.”

I waited.

“There’s a rally in Antioch. Rumor is that Bowen is going to talk at it. There’ll be press there, maybe some TV. Bowen didn’t use to make public appearances too often, but this Faulkner thing has brought him out from under his rock. You go along, you might get to say hi.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

He stood, and the other four men rose at the same time.

“I figure why should it just be me who has his day fucked up by you, you know? If you’ve got shit on your shoe, you spread it around. And Bowen’s already having a bad day. I like the idea of you making it worse.”

“What’s so bad about today for Bowen?”

“You should watch the news. They found his pitbull Mobley up at Magnolia Cemetery last night. He was castrated. I gotta go tell Andy Dalitz, maybe make him see how lucky he was just to get his nuts bruised instead of cut off completely. Thanks for breakfast.”

He left me, his blue shirt billowing, his four goons in tow like big children following a little piece of fallen sky.

Elliot did not turn up for our scheduled meeting that morning. The answering machine was picking up calls at his office and at his home. His cell phones-both his own and the clean one we were using for day-to-day contact-were off. Meanwhile, the papers were full of the discovery of Landron Mobley’s body at the Magnolia Cemetery, but hard details were scarce. According to the reports, Elliot Norton had been uncontactable for comment on his client’s death.

I spent the morning confirming the details of more witness statements, knocking on trailer doors, and fighting off dogs in overgrown yards. By midday I was worried. I checked on Atys by phone, and the old man told me he was doing okay, although he was becoming a little stir-crazy. I spoke to Atys for a couple of minutes, but his replies were surly at best.

“When can I leave here, man?” he asked me.

“Soon,” I replied. It was only a half truth. If Elliot’s fears about his safety were real, my guess was that we’d be moving him soon enough, but only to another safe house. Until his trial, Atys was going to have to get used to staring at TVs in unfamiliar rooms. Pretty soon, though, he wouldn’t be my concern. I was getting nowhere fast with the witnesses.

“You know Mobley’s dead?”

“Yeah, I heard. I’m all cut up.”

“Not as cut up as he is. You got any idea who might have done a thing like that to him?”

“No I ain’t, but you find out you let me know. I want to shake the man’s hand, m’sayin?”

He hung up. I looked at my watch. It was just after twelve. It would take me more than an hour to get to Antioch. I tossed a mental coin and decided to go.

The Carolina Klans, in common with klaverns across the country, had been in decline for the best part of twenty years. In the case of the Carolinas the decline could be dated back to November 1979, when five Communist Workers died in a shootout with Klansmen and neo-Nazis in Greensboro, North Carolina. The anti-Klan movements assumed a new momentum in the aftermath while Klan membership continued to drop, and on those occasions when Klansmen took to the streets they were vastly outnumbered by protesters. Most of the recent Klan rallies in South Carolina had been the work of the Indiana-based American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan, since the local Carolina Knights had demonstrated a reluctance to become involved.

But against their decline had to be set the fact that over thirty black churches had been burned in South Carolina since 1991 and Klansmen had been linked to at least two of those burnings, in Williamsburg and Clarendon counties. In other words, the Klan may have been dying on its feet, but the hatred that it represented was still alive and well. Now Bowen was trying to give that hatred a new momentum, and a new focus. If the news reports were to be believed, he was succeeding.

Antioch didn’t look like it had too much to recommend it at the best of times. It resembled the suburb of a town that didn’t exist: there were houses, and streets that somebody had taken the trouble to name, but none of the larger malls or town centers that might have been expected to grow up alongside them. Instead, the section of 119 that passed through Antioch had sprouted small strip malls like clumps of mushrooms, boasting between them little more than a couple of gas stations, a video store, a pair of convenience stores, a bar, and a laundromat.

It looked like I had missed the parade, but midway along the strip was a green square surrounded by a wire fence and untended trees. Cars were parked nearby, maybe sixty in all, and a makeshift stage had been created on the back of a flatbed truck from which a man was addressing the crowd. A group of about eighty or ninety, consisting mostly of men but with some women scattered throughout, stood before the stage listening to the speaker. A handful wore white robes but most of them were dressed in their usual T-shirts and jeans. The men in the robes were sweating visibly beneath the cheap polyester. A crowd of fifty or sixty protesters stood some distance away, kept back from Bowen’s people by a line of police. Some were chanting and catcalling, but the man speaking from the stage never broke his stride.

Roger Bowen had a thick brown mustache and wavy brown hair, and he looked like he kept himself in good condition. He wore a red shirt and blue jeans, but despite the heat his shirt appeared to be unsullied by sweat. He was flanked by two men who led the occasional bursts of applause when he said something particularly important, which seemed to be about every three minutes, judging by his aides. Each time they applauded, Bowen looked to his feet and shook his head, as if embarrassed by their enthusiasm yet unwilling to curb it. I spotted the cameraman from the Richland County lockup close by the stage with a pretty blond reporter close by. He was still wearing his fatigues, but this time nobody was giving him a hard time over them.