Lightning Men

by Thomas Mullen

  “Just got out, huh? What you doing with him, Odell?”

  The reverend, too, stares straight ahead. “I was just offering a ride to someone. Didn’t mean no trouble by it.”

  “Hell,” the cop says, just like a basic exhalation, as if unaware it’s not a polite word to use around a man of God. “What a morning.”

  “Those people okay?” the reverend asks.

  “What people?”

  “The fire. I can smell it on you.”

  Jeremiah can, too, the cop carrying with him a miasma of burned wood, a scent familiar from winter fireplaces but different, too, something else mixed in, bitter and sharp.

  “It was awful. Awful.”

  Please, Lord, please spare me please.

  Seconds pass and that appears to be all the officer can speak of the matter. He stands there with one hand against the roof of the pickup, and at first Jeremiah had taken this for a proprietary mannerism (I own this pickup and the two of you both) but with each passing second it seems different.

  “Are you all right?” the reverend asks.

  Please, Lord, please do not let this man take me.

  Jeremiah is still afraid to look directly at the officer but he’s watching from the corner of his eye and it seems like the officer takes one of his hands, the one not holding on to the truck, and drags it up his own body as if trying to make sure it’s all there, and it lingers over his heart. Then the cop falls.

  “Officer Dave?!” the reverend calls in alarm. The officer lands on his side, a wholly unnatural and strange position, one arm pinned beneath him and the other hand still gripping his chest as if trying to find a handle there, something to switch it back on. The reverend gently rolls the officer onto his back.

  More wrinkles have gathered on Officer Dave’s forehead than Jeremiah has ever seen on a white person. The cop seems to be holding his breath, his face red, his entire body clenched like the fist that can’t find a handle for his heart.

  “Officer Dave, can you speak?” The reverend is panicked and only later will Jeremiah wonder if he’s seen this sort of thing before, because surely preachers visit many a deathbed but how many times do they see the hand of God strike so clearly and violently?

  The officer lifts his head a bit off the ground, like he’s trying so hard to reply that his entire body moves even if his tongue won’t, and then his head hits the ground and he unclenches.

  “Oh Lord! Oh Lord!” The preacher is as still as the cop for a moment, and then he reaches for the white man’s wrists, checking for a pulse. “You hang on there, Officer Dave, you hang on!” From here Jeremiah can’t see the preacher’s face as he intones with the sudden clarity of his profession, “Lord Jesus, please spare this man. Please let him see his family again, Lord.”

  Jeremiah wonders if the reverend knows that the Lord has received wildly conflicting prayers from this very spot, within seconds.

  Did You do this, Lord? Did I?

  The reverend stands, looking first at the squad car and then at Jeremiah and then back at the fallen man. “We gotta . . . We gotta get him to a hospital. Help me get him in!”

  Getting Officer Dave into the pickup is difficult, as they are both wary—or Jeremiah certainly is, at least—of touching a white man, especially a defenseless one. They carefully lift him from either side, almost like pallbearers, and part carry, part drag him, his shoes etching long trails in the gravel. They manage to sit him in the passenger seat, and after Jeremiah closes the door, the cop’s head leans onto the glass, looking uncomfortable and perhaps dead already, but the reverend insists he’s alive yet.

  Jeremiah picks up the man’s hat, which had fallen off, and he holds it in his lap as he hops into the back of the truck. The sun shines hot on Jeremiah’s skin as the reverend hits the gas and they speed off, leaving the squad car and grocery behind like a tiny island of civilization in the midst of God’s wilderness. The wind is too loud as they speed along and Jeremiah is left with his thoughts, his shockingly answered prayers, his profound confusion.

  Did You light a fire for me and kill innocents, Lord? Have You struck down this man as well? For what have You marked me? What is in store?

  He stares at the cop’s hat, upside down in his hands now, sees the sweat stain and feels the dampness there, and he holds it to his nose and breathes in, taking the scent of the woodsmoke and holding it in his chest.

  They reach a town and the reverend drives through a stop sign while honking his horn. The truck pulls into a circular drive beside a white building that back in Atlanta would have been considered small but here it’s the county hospital.

  A thin white man in a blue smock is waving his arms in the universal symbol of do not proceed which Jeremiah knows so well from his time working the rail yards but the reverend proceeds nonetheless, pulling up right in front of this outraged white man.

  “We don’t take coloreds here!”

  “I got a white man that’s sick! A policeman!”

  The white doctor or orderly looks through the window now, and though Officer Dave’s mussed and sweaty hair against the window hardly looks official, he can see the uniform shirt and the badge and now the white man realizes this is a serious matter. He looks back at the reverend, then at Jeremiah in back, as if searching for weapons or signs of blood.

  “What happened?”

  “We were talking and he just up and keeled over! Don’t know if it’s his heart or heat exhaustion from the fire or what, but he needs help!”

  The white man tells them to wait there, and they do, at least until he’s disappeared into the building.

  “Get out,” the reverend says as he opens his door. Jeremiah climbs out of the pickup, and the reverend reaches into his pocket and hands Jeremiah a five. “That’s plenty for a ticket to Atlanta.” Then another five. “And that’s insurance against the Atlanta police using your empty pockets as an excuse to get you for vagrancy.”

  “Thank you, sir. Thank you very much.”

  “You’d best get away from here now. Gonna be crawling with cops in a minute.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’ll manage. Now walk down that way to the corner and you catch the bus to Statesboro. Bus don’t come soon, might want to hide someplace. I’ll do what I can for you.”

  “Thank you.”

  The preacher grabs Jeremiah’s shoulder now, holding him for a second, seeming to want a last, good hard look at this man for whom the Lord has made such a startling intervention. He says, “May the Lord bless you and keep you safe,” and Jeremiah nods, then walks away.

  The Lord sends the bus in mere seconds. It is nearly empty and Jeremiah sits alone in the back, the wind through an open window warm in his face.

  He rides for what feels like an hour. Finally the bus passes through the ghostly beauty of live oaks dripping with Spanish moss—so foreign from Atlanta, like another world—and then past the one stoplight en route to a small train station flanked by palmetto trees. Three colored people stand outside in the colored waiting “room,” a mere platform with a roof but no walls. The white waiting room is indoors.

  As he boards the train, stepping onto the front colored car that smells like soot, he ponders the reverend’s words about his namesake prophet’s warnings. He marvels at the morning’s events, wondering if he has the strength to endure whatever the Lord might throw at him next. Why would Jeremiah, who already loves God, need to be tested like this? And if Jeremiah truly does love God, why does he always think the Lord so cruel, so manipulative, so hurtful? Is this really love, or something worse? If Jeremiah is undeserving of all the ills that befell him these last five years, is he also undeserving of being spared at the expense of Officer Dave and the white people in the burned house? How would the preacher figure that kind of arithmetic?

  Jeremiah sits by the train car’s window and feels the world pull out from beneath him, first with a weary immensity and then with more speed and power until he is near weightless, hurtling north toward the city from
which he’d been exiled.

  1

  OFFICER LUCIUS BOGGS looked at other men differently now. He had always been fairly comfortable about his own appearance, his five feet and ten inches, thin and healthy, neither the fastest nor the strongest but falling somewhere in the middle. He had thought of himself as normal, an overgrown kid who eventually realized he was a man. But since taking this job, his perspective had changed. He came to realize that he was looked at differently by those who were taller—and many men were. In those first weeks, his snug uniform shirt only advertised the fact that his frame was not rippling with muscle, that he was not as intimidating as many of the men he encountered on the streets. So he’d added to his workout routine, spending two hours at the YMCA most days, the heavy bag and the speed bag, jumping rope, lifting barbells, and then, after showering, descending a flight of stairs to the Y’s basement, which served as the precinct for the Negro officers. As a result of those months of commitment, he’d added a good fifteen pounds of muscle and had moved up a shirt size, but he still felt very much in debt to the billy club on his belt and the pistol in his holster. Whenever he met a man, he made note of the fellow’s height, he glanced at the fellow’s chest and the reach of his arms, making calculations. This felt mercenary and superficial, yet it was the sort of vital note-taking that, Sergeant McInnis had drilled into him, may well save his life, or his partner’s. Always know what you’re up against and what you’re dealing with, and how you’ll get out of it if it turns ugly, McInnis was fond of saying. And the world had a habit of turning ugly.

  So the man who was crossing the street tonight, Boggs quickly surmised, was around five six, and the way his lightweight jacket hugged his frame made him appear slight of build. The jacket was buttoned and there were several places he might have been carrying a weapon. He lit a cigarette using a silver Zippo, which meant he might have been a veteran, and thus familiar with firearms, and he used his left thumb on its wheel, which meant he was a southpaw.

  These were the sorts of things Boggs thought about now when he saw strangers.

  Boggs and his partner, Tommy Smith, were walking their beat on Jackson Street, a few blocks south of Auburn Avenue. Less than a minute after the man crossed the street, a block ahead of them, they smelled it: he wasn’t smoking tobacco.

  “Interesting,” Smith said. The man turned a corner, and before they could think of pursuing him, they saw a car turn onto Jackson, headlights off. It pulled out of their view, behind a two-story building that had once held a Pentecostal church but had been vacant for a year. For a moment they faintly heard voices, but no door opening or closing. Then the car reappeared, its headlights on this time, going back the way it had come.

  “You approach, I’ll smoke him out,” Smith whispered.

  They split up, Smith silently creeping toward the far side of the building, then hiding around the back alley corner. From the near side, Boggs stepped carefully until he’d reached the alley behind the boarded-up church. He saw a man leaning against the alley wall, an apple crate on the ground beside him.

  “Evening,” Boggs said, and he’d barely asked, “You have someplace to be?” before the man’s eyes lit up and he darted away in the opposite direction. Where Smith was waiting.

  Smith stepped into the alley and tackled the man, whose momentum carried him straight into the ground, hard. Smith had him cuffed in seconds, then stood him up, pressed him against a wall, and patted him down for weapons, finding none.

  “Whoa, hey, this is a big misunderstanding!”

  In the apple crate Boggs found mason jars of white lightning and a King James Bible.

  “Looks like you’ve been misunderstanding the law about corn liquor,” Boggs said.

  Even so many years after Prohibition, Atlanta remained strict about alcohol, granting liquor licenses only to a few establishments. Selling moonshine did not bring in the big bucks it once did, but bootleggers still found customers, ranging from pool halls and clubs that lacked licenses to individuals who preferred the strong stuff to watered-down beer.

  “Look, I’m sorry, I ain’t never even done this before,” the bootlegger insisted.

  “Sure, and it’s our amazing luck to catch you the first time,” Smith said. He removed the man’s cash-stuffed wallet from his pocket, turned him around, and pushed his shoulders down. “Sit.”

  An ID card proclaimed his name Forrester, Woodrow W., Neg. Short and a bit hefty, he seemed terrified by his plight, his sweaty forehead glistening in the beams of the officers’ flashlights. This alley, like so much of their beat, was not graced with streetlights. Boggs and Smith replaced their flashlight batteries weekly.

  “No, really! A buddy a mine usually does this, and I kept my distance, but he got sick and said he needed this stuff sold pronto or he’d be hard up. He only does this ’cause he got four kids to feed, and I got three myself.”

  “That’s a pity,” Smith said. “Those kids ain’t gonna be fed with you in jail, are they?”

  Boggs picked up a jar and swirled it around before he unscrewed the lid and took a sniff, not even needing to bring his nose close to pick up the tang. He opened the Bible, which was hollowed out from Judges to John, the hole filled with about twenty pre-rolled marijuana joints.

  “Come on, now, y’all weren’t hired to be giving other colored men such a hard time. I’m just trying to get by.”

  “You’re getting by by poisoning our community with this junk,” Boggs said.

  “Just this one time! It was a mistake, I own up. I plead guilty right here, right now. But, come on, it’s just the one time, and I can’t be going to no jail. I got me a real job, too.”

  “Doing what?” Smith asked.

  “I cook at the phone factory’s cafeteria.”

  Smith tsk-tsked. “They ain’t gonna keep no man with a criminal record.”

  “Come on, now. You can keep all of that money, too. Take the shine, or pour it all down the drain, whatever you want. Just don’t give me no record.”

  Flicking his flashlight off, Smith crouched in front of Forrester. “Number one, you do not bribe us.” He pointed at his own face. “This look white to you? Y’all may bribe the white cops to look the other way, but you don’t do that with us. Got it?”

  “Yessir.”

  The fact that he’d even tried to bribe them, Boggs thought, argued for Forrester’s honesty: if he’d been selling reefer and moonshine before, he would know the ropes, know not to make such an offer to the city’s Negro officers.

  Of course, there may have been another explanation. Perhaps this fellow was in fact a regular dealer and had learned that some Negro officers could be bribed. Boggs had never taken a cent, and he was certain Smith hadn’t, either. But from what they’d learned over their two-plus years on the force, it seemed half of the white officers took bribes, so how long would the Negro officers resist? The son of a preacher, Boggs was all too familiar with the fallibility of men, even men with power. Especially men with power.

  “Number two,” Smith said, still crouched in front of Forrester, “I’m a hardworking fisherman and I ain’t about to cut loose a catch. Only way I’d even think about doing something like that is if I knew I was about to catch a bigger fish. You follow?”

  Judging from Forrester’s furrowed brow, he did not.

  “We take you in,” Boggs translated, “unless you know someone bigger we can take.”

  “Oh, come on, now, I told you I’m new at this. I don’t know no big fish.”

  “Then I do feel sorry for you.” Smith grabbed Forrester by the collar and pulled him up. “Because it’s the minnows like you, without any information to sell, who get fried first.”

  Boggs asked, “What about that friend of yours? He know anything?”

  Forrester’s head moved about as if trying to spy some escape route, but he said nothing.

  The nearest call box to request a wagon was two blocks away. Smith pushed Forrester from behind, not too hard but enough to make a condemned man st
art moving to his sad destiny. They’d only taken a few steps when he blurted out, “I know when the deliveries come!”

  Boggs, who had been in front, turned around. He put a hand on Forrester’s chest to stop him. “First you’ve never done this before, and now you know when the deliveries come?”

  “Like I said, I cook at the Phelps phone factory. Clean up, too. There from before lunch to midnight, three days a week, and sometimes their deliveries ain’t food.”

  Boggs looked over the cook’s shoulder into his partner’s eyes. Smith, who always seemed more skilled at spotting lies—possibly because he himself was the more experienced liar, Boggs wondered—looked interested.

  “Go on,” Smith said.

  “Look, I keep my nose clean, you know, but a few times I been out there throwing trash away and then all of a sudden a truck come up and two fellas jump out and a couple more pop out and they be moving some crates into different cars, like, and then the truck pulls out straightaway. Barely there a minute. And I think to myself, okay, whatever it is they’re delivering is something they’re awful anxious to be rid of. But, you know, I don’t ask no questions, not being the type to get involved in no nonsense like—”

  “When does it happen?”

  “Eleven thirty. On Wednesdays.”

  In other words, in thirty minutes.

  At half past eleven, Boggs was leaning against the brick wall of the Phelps factory, two blocks south of the tracks, an industrial corridor of Cabbagetown where trucks pulling in or out would not be viewed as suspicious. He was hidden from the street’s view by a parked truck emblazoned with a painting of a smiling white woman who held a receiver to her ear. This close up, her eyes seemed to glare at him in anger despite that smile on her face.

  Smith stood a block away, around the corner of an alley, viewing the street. Trains had been whistling all night. On the way here they’d walked through a tunnel under the train tracks, the smell of coal hanging thick in the dry air, and even at that hour they could see the glow of welders’ torches as men repaired busted tracks and train cars at the nearby rail yards. They’d skirted the haunted graveyards of Oakland Cemetery, which held legions of Confederate dead, among many others. And they’d passed through the wood-shavings-scented air of the Pencil Factory, where a young girl had been murdered decades ago, a sensational crime for which a Jewish man was later lynched. To the west loomed the dark downtown office towers and scaffoldings that rose like skeletal haunts above half-constructed new buildings.