“Now do you know where you are?” Goodwin asks me.
But I don’t, I’m confused, I don’t get it.
“No,” I tell them.
“Don’t you know a cave when you see one?” he asks, in an insinuating tone that sends cold shivers through me. Behind me, two of them snicker. My God, they’ve brought me to the cave where they buried my parents’ bodies. Now that I know that the dark hole—maybe ten feet across at ground level—is a cave, I begin to hear something from its depths: running water, a sound of a waterfall deep within.
“This is where you dumped my parents.”
“Very good. It’s too bad that you’ll never see it by daylight, because this is one of the prettiest caves in all of Alabama, if I do say so myself.”
Carefully, very carefully because I’m afraid of losing my balance, I turn around so that I can see them all. It scares the hell out of me to have my back to the cave, to that terrible drop into nothing, but I have to see them.
Even in the darkness I can see that they’re smiling at me. They have shotguns, each of them.
“I don’t understand,” I admit to them. “How could you do something like that to my parents—or to me—and still be the kind of people who would help civil rights workers escape to freedom?”
Marty is the one who fits the last horrifying piece to the puzzle.
“What makes you think,” he says, with a sly grin, “that they escaped from us?”
BETRAYAL
By Marie Lightfoot
—•—
CHAPTER EIGHT
From the time they were boys growing up together in Sebastion, they adored plots and plans, sneaky tricks, practical jokes, subterfuge, and sabotage. If they had been born in a later generation, a game such as Dungeons and Dragons might have satisfied their lust for adventure and subversive action. Perhaps they could have satisfied that urge with something innocuous like “paint ball,” where they could chase one another in the woods, carrying fake guns loaded with paint to shoot harmlessly at their “prey.” Or maybe when they were young men they should have joined the CIA or the FBI and openly claimed what they were born to be by their very natures: spies and double agents.
But they weren’t born into an age of fantasy and fun and games; they were born in more serious times. The guns they learned to use in their boyhoods were real. The issues that galvanized them were as real as ammunition. And so their boyhood desires had all the opportunity in the world to develop into the real thing. They came by their motives honestly, too; those motives were bred intothem as naturally as they, themselves, were born into their own secretive natures, for they were all three born into the comfortable status quo of the white South. In common with most of their peers, they liked it just fine and would do almost anything to keep it that way. In their case, they did do “anything.”
“Lyda’s brought herself home a Yankee husband,” one of the three informed the other two, early on. “I hear he’s a real strong integrationist. How about we have a little fun with Lyda and her new husband? He’s got himself a job at the college; we’ll be working with him, we may as well have some fun with it. Let’s just sidle up to them and see what the enemy is up to, how about it? We’ll have us a good time.”
That’s all it was at first, nothing more than a parlor game, really, putting one over on that silly Lyda Montgomery with her silly views on race relations. A side benefit to their game was that it pleased their wives, who had grown up with Lyda and been influenced by her liberal views. For Melinda, Anne, and Delilah, it came as a relief when their husbands seemed at first to be charmed by that handsome, smart new husband of Lyda’s, and then even to admire him. It was fun to form a little social group with the Folletinos, whom the other wives admired, and who had such interesting and brave ideas about just about everything.
The men played up to Michael, agreeing with him when he ventured radical views, but doing it quietly, so he’d think they didn’t want to get themselves or him in any kind of trouble. They pretended great respect for him. All the while they saw him as one of those deadly earnest sorts, like annoying Lyda, an intellectual who took himself and his damned causes seriously enough to be amusing to them but dangerous to the white society they cherished.
“You’ve got to blend in around here,” they advised him.
Watch how we do it, they told him.
They showed him how to act like everybody else, so nobody knew what you really thought, how deeply—deeply!—you wanted freedom and justice for all those poor suffering black folks. Voting rights! Free and equal accommodations! Equal job opportunities!
“Absolutely, Michael, we couldn’t agree with you more, and if there’s ever anything that we can do to help. . . .”
They were natural recruits for Hostel when he formed it.
“Lyda doesn’t quite trust us,” one of them observed to the others.
“We’ll have to prove ourselves to her,” another one said, with a crocodile smile, and so at the first opportunity, he said to the other members of Hostel, “the next time you get a name of some poor black kid who needs help, give it to us and we’ll pick him up.”
They were kind as butter on a burn to every refugee they picked up and delivered to a first-level safe house. They didn’t want any of the escapees to complain about them. By the time there were reasons for complaint, it would be too late for anybody to hear about it. But all of that changed when they got the opportunity to move a man along to a second or third safe house. That’s when they got to take off their masks of tolerance. That’s what they lived for, those were the moments of their glory.
“You’re getting out here.”
“But there ain’t no house, here, where am I s’posed to go—”
“Just follow the way my gun is pointing, son. That’s where you’re supposed to go.”
It was a service they were performing to humanity, to their own families, to their precious way of life that had existed for a hundred years, and to the South as they knew and loved it best. Get rid of the troublemakers. Eliminatethe bad seeds. And no one would ever know, because if an unknown black man didn’t get on a bus going north, if he didn’t make it all the way to Chicago or New York City, there was no one but themselves to know.
“We heard from his auntie in Philadelphia. He got there fine.”
“Michael suspects something,” one of them said one day.
“What? What could he suspect?”
“I think maybe he got word that the last one we drove never made it to the North. He asked me about it, he said was I sure that was the boy’s mother who called me.”
“What’d you say?”
“What do you think I said? I said I was positive.”
“Did he believe you?”
“Of course, but that won’t be the end of it.”
“Then let’s us make an end of it.”
“How?”
“That cave is big enough to hold two more people in it.”
“What two?”
“Michael and Lyda.”
“If we do that, it’ll be the end of Hostel, too.”
“Good, I’m tired of this game. If we’re going to end it, let’s do it up right and let’s do it in a way that nobody will ever suspect we had anything to do with any of this.”
“How?”
“We know something about Michael that most people here in town don’t know, don’t we? His own parents are Communists. There’s an FBI program, COINTELPRO, that’s still on the lookout for Reds. All we have to do is tell them that Michael has Communist connections and they’ll break up Hostel as a potentially subversive organization.”
“You sure about that?”
“I’m positive. They use it all the time like that.” He laughed. “You ever hear of ol’ Ben Turner?”
“No.”
“Benjamin Turner was his name. He was the first Negro ever to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from Selma, Alabama. This was during the Reconstruction, in the 1870s, you know.
Well, sir, Turner was so furious about how Selma got treated during the war that he, himself, introduced the bill in Congress that gave back to the Confederate soldiers their rights to vote and to hold office.” He smiled a bit. Michael is a bit like that, isn’t he? You might say that he belongs to the great foolish tradition of Benjamin Turner. By meaning well, he has let the snakes back into his very own garden where they will proceed to bite his friends to death.”
“What’s going to happen to us if Hostel gets opened up to public view?”
“We get embarrassed, I guess. But isn’t that better than getting charged with a bunch of murders, even if they were only of Negroes?”
“Maybe we shouldn’t have gotten involved with any of this.”
“Are you kidding? We’re soldiers. We have served history.”
“You’re right. We should be proud. When do you want to do this?”
“There’s a party at the Fishers on the night of June twelfth. All the white Hostel members will surely be there. I think that’s the night to do it.”
“Well, if we’re going out, let’s do it in a big damned way.”
The planning was simple but precise: deliver the facts about Hostel to the FBI on the condition of their own anonymity as double agents. Urge the FBI to plan a breakup of Hostel on the night of June 12. Suggest that they blame Michael Folletino for the arrests that night, telephone Michael and anonymously warn him that Klan members were coming to torch his house and kill him and Lyda. Warn him to get out of there as fast as possible. Then follow them and wait for the right place and opportunityto ambush them. The only tricky part was timing. If they got held downtown at the police station too long, they’d miss their best chance to kill the Folletinos. But the FBI got them out quickly. All they had to tell their wives then was that they were going out in their trucks to check up on the black members of Hostel. Then they were free for the rest of the night to do whatever they wanted to do.
They couldn’t know that the president would help them out by giving a speech that inflamed their fellow bigots, drawing them to the streets to watch the parade of Hostel members, drawing down even harsher fates onto the black members, and creating such chaos all over the South—what with the speech and the Medgar Evers assassination—that nobody cared when a couple of wrongheaded white people went missing.
It didn’t even take them long to get forgiven by their friends.
“We never meant it,” they told the society into which they’d been born. “We were only playing along to see what the rest of them were up to.” And to their own wives and to Eulalie and Clayton, they said, “We’re telling people that we were only playing along with Hostel, so maybe we can find out what they’re up to. If that’s what we have to do to serve integration, why, we’ll gladly humble ourselves to do it.”
But it wasn’t much of a game, not compared to the excitement of what they’d already experienced, and over the years, it paled. They craved another game, a bigger one with stakes as big as what they used to know.
When the Folletinos’ famous grown-up writer-daughter first appeared in Sebastion, asking questions, they took it as a warning shot.
“If she ever really tries, she could find out something.”
But she didn’t really try, she eased off, let it go.
And then one day Lackley Goodwin happened to glanceat a Peoplemagazine that his daughter Mo had brought home with her from the supermarket. And there was an article about little Marie Folletino and her black boyfriend, just like her parents would have wanted her to have.
“Read this,” he told his two friends.
Their amusement turned to dismay and fury when they read:
Lightfoot’s own past is shrouded in tragedy due to the mysterious disappearance of her parents from their home in Sebastion, Alabama, when she was only a few months old. The author acknowledges she has attempted to apply the same investigative techniques she uses in her books to solving that personal mystery, too.
“I haven’t gotten very far with it,” she says.
But now and then she gets strange phone calls that lure her on to finding out more.
“Somebody leaves me messages,” she tells People,“in which they claim to have knowledge about my parents, but they never tell me what it is. They sound sincere and scared, that’s all I can say. I wish whoever it is would contact me again.”
The three men looked at one another.
Apparently, they had a traitor somewhere near them.
Lackley never suspected it was his own daughter, not until the night of the meeting with the Fishers at the inn when they were going to discuss the “guilt” of Rachel and Hubert, a handy pair of scapegoats. That’s when he sneaked upstairs to search the Folletino daughter’s room and found the note that Mo had written her: “Can I talk to you? I’m the one who called you.”
“How are we going to find out who it is?” they asked one another at the start, long before they knew the traitorwas one of their own offspring, and the least likely one, at that. Long before they knew they were going to have to set a fire to destroy all—all—of the traitors who threatened them.
“By forcing things,” Austin said. “By playing a little game with the daughter, just like we did with her parents, and with the very same conclusion for her that there was for them.”
Until the very end, when Lackley suffered qualms about his daughter, it was all great fun, serious and deadly fun, a recapturing of the finest hours of their valiant youth. They were soldiers again, outsmarting all enemies, banding together in a tight brotherhood of thrilling espionage.
They devised a scheme to plant a story in a tabloid that would serve as a first notice to her. They would invent a stalker, an anonymous killer who threatened her and forced her to do what they wanted her to do. He would tell her he had a harebrained scheme to write a book with her about her own death, so that she would be forced to tell them everything she was doing, every step of her way, and so that they could get her to give them all of the information she had already gathered about her parents and their disappearance.
Quickly, step by step, they would lure her here.
Austin would plant himself near her in Florida so that he could spontaneously act as needed, move as she moved, furnish details the three of them needed to convince her that the man they invented, “Paulie Barnes,” was genuine.
The other two would stay behind in Sebastion, seeing to airline tickets, a room at the inn, planting the idea for a copycat picnic at Eulalie’s house with their wives.
“You know, it could be her aunt and uncle.”
“What could be?”
“Our traitor, maybe it’s Julia Montgomery who’s placing those calls to her.”
“Julia doesn’t know anything.”
“Maybe, maybe not, but she and Joe might have suspected something.”
“So what? If there were ever people opposed to integration—”
“Then maybe it’s their son, that Hollywood liberal. He’s more like the Folletinos than he is like the Montgomerys. Maybe he heard them talk about us sometime, maybe he put something together—”
“But then why wouldn’t he just tell his cousin that?”
“I don’t know. But let’s bring him here and find out.”
Their skills were rusty from long disuse, but they sharpened them.
Once upon a time they were able to move at a moment’s notice, make contingency plans at the drop of a hat, strike with cunning and subterfuge, kill without warning, which they would get a chance to demonstrate when they ran Marie’s bodyguard off the highway.
They could do it again, one more time, they knew they could.
This was going to be fun.
34
Marie
I am so horrified and nauseated at what my executioners have implied that I can barely stand up on my own.
“You killed them? You killed those men?”
“Not all of them, just as many as we could get away with doing.”
I can’t
tell who said that. I don’t care. They’re all the same to me.
“Is there anything else you want to know?” one of them asks me.
“How did you do it? Why did you kill my parents? Why have you done this to me?”
“Shall we tell her?” That’s Austin’s thin voice, I think.
And so they do tell me, giving me the information I will need to close the book on my parents’ deaths. Their tone and their words mock me, my parents, and the good cause of the real civil rights. It’s all I can do to stand there hearing it, without breaking down, but I let them spin it out, let them brag on themselves, because every minute they talk is a minute more that I get to live and to try to think of a way out of this.
But at the end, I have thought of no way out.
When they’re finished, when I finally know that I am going to lose everything anyway, I hurl their contempt back at them with everything I’ve got in the last few minutes of my life.
“Oh, you really changed history, didn’t you?” My own voice drips a sarcasm that could shorten my life by a few seconds, but I can’t help myself now. “You sure made a big difference in the history of the world, didn’t you? Hell, you must have slowed down the march of civil rights by, what, a few hours? People all around the country and the world were so horrified by what people like you were doing to black people down here that civil rights legislation suddenly looked like the right thing to do, didn’t it? Because of that week! Because of murderers like you! Aren’t you proud? Just think what you accomplished! And, hey, just look around you! The proof of how much difference you made is everywhere now, isn’t it? I can see it when black people check into any hotel they want to, and go into the finest restaurants. I can see it in public swimming pools . . . in television commercials . . . on the Supreme Court . . . in presidential cabinets. I see it in mixed marriages and on baseball fields. Wow, you guys sure stemmed the tide of history, didn’t you? And just look what you did to your own hometown—it now has half the population it used to have, most of the businesses are closed, the whole town’s in complete decline. And you can take the credit for all that!”
The Truth Hurts Page 31
