Paper Gods

by Goldie Taylor

  Melham opened his sermon this morning with a prayer and a piece of Scripture. Dressed in a flowing black cassock with royal purple and silk piping, as usual he took his time getting to the point.

  While the preacher rambled on, Hawkins stared down at his Italian leather wing tips. The gone years weighed on him like a wool suit in a high sun. There was the summer of ’64 in Mississippi, and that Bloody Sunday on the Edmund Pettus Bridge the following year. Then came Memphis and the sanitation strike. He had been with Dr. King in the pulpit at Mason Temple that fateful night in ’68.

  But knowing that you are going to die, if not the particular moment, is like being inside the mind of God, Hawkins thought. Brother Martin, rest his soul, likely found some consolation in that, but it was the kind of comfort that eluded Hawkins now. A season of grieving would be upon them again, he knew. Whether it would be hours or days, he treasured these last moments all the more.

  He had loved only two women in his life, Victoria, his protégée, and another she couldn’t get him to talk about. He’d been married to his work, he’d often explain. When her father, his closest friend and confidant, passed on to Glory twenty-odd years back, Hawkins readily fulfilled his promise to stand in his stead. He’d given her away on her wedding day and sat in the front row as she was twice sworn in as mayor of Atlanta.

  Time was drawing short, he thought to himself, but Pastor Melham was hitting all the right notes now. Sister Epatha Flowers, her fatty girth spilling off the pew, was filled with the Holy Ghost.

  “What a friend we have in Jesus!” she exclaimed. “Make it plain, Pastor! Yessuh! Yessuh! Tell it, son!”

  As the sermon came to a close and Sister Flowers had finished falling out, Hawkins bowed his head. He prayed the same simple prayer before every speech, the one his mama used to say would cover everything.

  I am yours, Father God. I receive the fullness of your grace.

  Despite the broken air-conditioning unit, praise filled the dense air. There was little relief to be had from the large standing fans humming from the corners of the sanctuary, and Hawkins was sweating profusely by the time Melham was halfway through his lengthy introduction.

  “I bring to you my brother, our leader, and our friend, Congressman Ezra J. Hawkins,” Melham said with outstretched arms.

  Hawkins rose to thunderous applause, adjusted his necktie, tucked the Bible under his arm, and ambled toward the pulpit. Pastor Melham met him at the edge of the stage. They embraced like brothers, gripping hands and heartily patting one another on the back. The organist unleashed a barrage of flourishes, his fingers dancing up the keys. Hawkins took to the lectern. He steadied himself, stared at his notes, and wiped his face with a freshly pressed, crisp white handkerchief.

  On an ordinary day, he would simply read from his prepared remarks. He would wax poetically about his years as a movement man, the howling dogs and the water hoses, the countless days in various jail cells across the South.

  Hawkins heard a popping noise coming from overhead and flinched. He quickly realized it was the air-conditioning system clicking and wheezing. Hawkins wasn’t the kind to scare easily, but he measured his life in moments now.

  According to the itinerary prepared by his congressional office staff, Hawkins was scheduled to fly up to D.C. that same afternoon. Delta flights ran every hour on the hour, and if he made good time, he could get a taste of Sister Lucille Ballard’s buttermilk fried okra at the repast and still make the 1:50 P.M. departure. And then, the little colored boy from tiny Veazey, Georgia, the child who’d never had a pair of shoes that didn’t belong to somebody else first until he was fourteen years old, would stand in the White House East Room and receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom the following morning.

  If the Good Lord kept him long enough, he would get a seat next to Rep. Thad Pickett in the first-class cabin and bend his ear about how to revive that omnibus transportation bill the region so desperately needed. Hawkins had personally drafted a new amendment and was confident it would be sufficient to get the legislation to the president’s desk.

  But there had been a transient ischemic attack just the day before yesterday, the second in as many weeks. His physician warned that a major stroke could soon follow. Medication was prescribed to deal with his increasingly erratic heart rhythm, and Hawkins was advised to give up his beloved pulled pork sandwiches and anything deep-fried in Crisco. The blackouts were coming closer together now, though thankfully never in a committee meeting or on the floor of the House.

  Hawkins opened his remarks with a glorious salutation, calling several of the congregants by name as he proclaimed his gratitude for their presence. There was little time, he knew. His chest was tightening again, so he decided, right then and there, to forget the four-by-six index cards and get right down to the crux of the matter.

  He removed his suit jacket and draped it over an arm of the majestic center chair. He began to preach then, shouting and dancing, whooping and hollering, bending his knees and then swooping upward as if to take full hold of the heavens. His baritone voice climbed three octaves, shook, and broke.

  “I said, glory!” he sang out in a high tenor, clutching his chest. “Oh, glory!”

  He bombarded the congregation with an onslaught of soul-shaking declarations without concern for the physical toll on his body. Hawkins was preaching in rapid bursts now, sweating out the pits of his dress shirt.

  “Joy!” he bellowed. “I said joy!”

  “Joy!” the congregation answered in unison.

  “Comes in the morning!” he exclaimed, waving the Bible above his head.

  By then, the repairman had been on the roof for the better part of an hour. An embroidered patch on his work shirt read SMITTY if anyone had cared to look when he’d entered the grounds with a toolbox. The white cargo van parked in the side lot said he was from Atlanta’s Best Heating and Cooling. Deacon Deray Garvin had been kind enough to escort Smitty up the rear stairs and unlatch the metal-hinged roof hatch. Perched high above the main hall, he lay prone with his belly pressed against the sloping gabled roof, attached to a harness, and went about his work.

  He had never done a single religious thing in his entire life, so killing a man in church was just another job.

  Smitty carefully applied the suction cup on the glass skylight and positioned the carbide tip. When he was satisfied with the cleanliness of the incision, he slipped his customized AR-15 sniper rifle and its sock suppressor from its foam-lined encasement. He quickly snapped its two major components into place, twisted the silencer around the muzzle, and clicked the preloaded 5.56 mm magazine into its slot. He could let off five rounds in 1.6 seconds, if on the off chance it became necessary, the floating mechanism minimizing any impact on his aim.

  One shot, one kill.

  He gripped the small black suction cup, twisting it slightly, and carefully removed the impeccably cut, four-inch glass disk. As if winding up for a pitch, he situated the butt stock high and firm in the pocket of his shoulder, right up against his jutting collarbone, and stabilized his elbow on the flat gabling. The handguard fell lightly into his slender non-firing hand. Resting his cheek on the stock of the rifle, he wrapped his firing hand around the grip. His callused forefinger now on the trigger, he peered through the ocular lens and waited.

  TWO

  Three miles away, in a split-level bungalow along the northwesterly edge of Candler Park, Hampton woke up with a dull pain in his neck. He fumbled around in the nightstand for a bottle of generic aspirin, but quickly decided going for water wasn’t worth the trouble. Somewhere in the darkness, his cell phone was humming, and a stream of sirens swept by outside. Hampton let out a groan.

  These days, getting out of bed before noon was an accomplishment. Hampton was satisfied if he could start a day with clean underwear, which at the moment seemed unlikely. The laundry was piling up and he was content to remain bare-ass in bed anyway. At least it was Sunday, he thought with some small bit of relief, and that was enough to
allay the slight pang of shame tapping at the walls of his belly. Hampton exhaled, and gently rubbed the crick in his neck, his pale bony fingers pressing against the tender knot at the top his spine.

  His open laptop glowed from a corner table across the room. The thought of another half-finished and overdue feature story stung like warm whiskey tumbling down his throat. He still had a paying job at the Atlanta Times-Register. Though, at the moment, even that was like a drunken sea dog that had the nerve to burp and beg for more. He used to tell himself that Atlanta was going to be a stopover on his way to the big leagues. A man like him, at least with his academic credentials, belonged in D.C. or New York. That wild-eyed dream was now wasting away in a bucket of hopes he had yet to live.

  He was thirty-nine and, while he was stuck covering the Dogwood Festival in Piedmont Park, younger and lesser reporters had Pentagon press badges and tossed back their copious goblets of wine on live TV at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Others posted thousand-word columns on much-ballyhooed political blogs and watched their pedantic ramblings go viral. He hated watching them spew their vagaries under the klieg lights from cable news studios, while he was marooned in Atlanta “covering Dixie like the dew.”

  Just as he’d settled in and learned to love, or at least tolerate, the Atlanta Braves, everything fell apart. Getting reassigned to the weekly Sunday Living & Arts section was due punishment for his many foibles, he reckoned, but the bills were springing out of the cracks like kudzu. Debt collectors representing various doctors, medical facilities, and credit card companies chasing maxed-out balances still called sunup to sundown, six days a week. He’d been sued twice that he knew of, but had never answered the summons. The rent was current and the electricity was still on, and for now that had to be enough.

  Such were the spoils of war, the dregs of a costly divorce. The three-paged, double-spaced final decree had left him penniless. He’d tried in vain to convince himself that the two-bedroom house with its outdated kitchen, complete with matching gold harvest appliances and water-stained linoleum tiling, was a temporary setback. But right now, Hampton wondered if he might not be better off banking a union-backed pension like his father, who did thirty-three years on the assembly line at the Chevy plant back in Michigan.

  His father shook his fist in the air and called him all kinds of no-good sons-a-bitches the day Hampton told him he wanted to be a journalist. Hampton was more than happy to get out of Flint and even happier to escape his father’s whiskey-fueled tirades.

  He buried his head under a pillow when his work-issued smartphone buzzed again. He muttered something indiscernible and fought off the impulse to answer it. Whoever it was and whatever they wanted could wait.

  It’s Sunday, damn it. We’re closed.

  A few months back, his managing editor, Tucker Stovall, unceremoniously dumped him from the statehouse beat, suspended him indefinitely from his weekly political column, and took him off the editorial board. Hampton thought it was the beginning of the end. The drinking had been too much, the girls too young and pretty. One more false move, Hampton calculated, and he’d be lining up for Styrofoam plates of pork and beans down at the Union Mission. Then came the car accident that nearly took his life.

  “Think of this as some paid time off,” Tucker said. “When you’re ready, we’ll get you back into the thick of things.”

  “You want to fire me?” Hampton shouted, gripping the cushioned armrests of his wheelchair. “Be a gawd-damn man, why don’t you, and fire me!”

  “It doesn’t have to come to that,” his editor said evenly. “You were, after all, sleeping with an intern.”

  Tucker calmly shut the glass door and closed the blinds.

  “You don’t need me to tell you how good you are,” Tucker said. “Don’t let your career end here. Take the assignment and do what I know you can do with it.”

  Lying in bed, unsure of the time, still ignoring his cell phone and cooking up yet another excuse for yet another blown deadline, Hampton could hear Tucker admonishing him in his head:

  Take the assignment and do what I know you can do with it.

  Hampton was sitting up now. Only his mother called on Sundays, and he wasn’t in the mood for that. She’d been asking about his physical therapy sessions, and he didn’t have the heart to tell her that he hadn’t kept an appointment in a good long while. Inman, his golden retriever, tugged at the bedcovers.

  “C’mon now. Cut me some slack.”

  Hampton eyed the empty wheelchair stationed at the foot of his bed.

  Inman sat on his haunches and whined. Hampton gave in. He slipped on a house robe, maneuvered himself into the wheelchair, and rolled himself to the kitchen. Inman followed him. The morning feeding used to be Claire’s job. The marriage had been short and the split hasty, but his ex-wife had been kind enough to leave the pooch with him.

  Hampton poured a mound of dry food into one dish and filled a second with cool tap water. Inman watched intently now, his tail wagging with delight. The dog’s marvelously light brown eyes, the way he loved him better than anyone else, made Hampton feel as if there was at least some good left in the world.

  “There you go, you greedy mongrel,” he said, laughing.

  Inman buried his snout in the plastic bowl. Fifteen minutes later, Hampton was sipping coffee and thumbing through The New York Times Book Review, still blissfully naked under the terry cloth robe, when his phone chimed again. He grumbled and finally answered.

  “Where’ve you been?” Tucker’s voice thundered. “I’ve been calling you since noon.”

  “Long night. Look, Tuck, I know I promised to turn in that piece by Friday press time, but something came up,” Hampton started to explain.

  “Congressman Hawkins is dead.”

  “Come again?”

  “He was murdered, Hamp.”

  THREE

  Mayor Victoria Dobbs lingered in the rear seat of a blacked-out Chevy Suburban, clutching the congressman’s Bible. The horrific scene—the shots and splattered blood, the agonizing screams and moans—played itself over and over again in her head.

  She shifted in the seat to alleviate the searing heat radiating from her left hip. The raining glass and plaster had clipped her arms and ripped a patch of skin from her forehead, but she had survived. It was difficult to see the blessing in that now, given the carnage inside the church, and nearly impossible to hold back the tide of anger flooding her bones. This was her city and her church, and they were hers to protect. That someone had come to this place, with such malice and destruction, required a reckoning that she had only begun to measure.

  Every street and alleyway had been shut off two blocks to the north and south of Auburn Avenue, from Peachtree Street to the west and Boulevard Avenue to the east. Residents of Wheat Street Towers, a nearby senior citizens’ high-rise, and customers at the Silver Star Barbershop next door were told to shelter in place until every inch of every surrounding building was cleared. Riot gear–clad strike forces lined the intersections, tightening the perimeter.

  Victoria surveyed the chaos unfolding outside the back passenger window now, the blaring sirens muddling her thoughts. Not more than twenty yards away, under the stately clock tower, first responders were treating victims with non-life-threatening injuries. Tourists visiting the King Center were evacuated and loaded into waiting buses. She watched solemnly as a large family, dressed in matching T-shirts, was led away. The building was then chained shut.

  Over her police chief’s objections, the mayor refused to leave the scene, refused a change of clothes or even to be examined by a paramedic. Victoria needed to see this through to the end, she told Chief Otis Walraven, no matter how long that took and whatever that might come to mean.

  The driver’s-side front door clicked open. Lieutenant S. A. Pelosi, her body man and driver, slid behind the steering wheel and peered at her in the rearview mirror.

  Locking eyes with her, he cranked the engine and turned on the air-conditioning
.

  “Sal, is he still inside?”

  “Yes, ma’am, he is.”

  “I need to see him,” she said, almost inaudibly. She steadied her voice, brushed away a rush of tears, and said, “Please, take me to see him.”

  Pelosi studied her face and cut the ignition. “Are you sure you want to do this?” he said.

  “Yes, I am sure.”

  A wave of tremors swept over and through her as she stepped out of the vehicle. She lost her footing on the side step railing and stumbled. Pelosi caught her by the elbow. The open gash that snaked up her forearm was bleeding more profusely now.

  “Let me help you,” he said, examining her blood on his hand. “Let me call a medic over here.”

  “I’m fine, Sal,” she responded, planting her feet firmly on the sidewalk. “It’s just a little blood.”

  Her legs tensed, and for a moment, she froze in place. Standing in front of the old Ebenezer, where Dr. Martin Luther King was baptized and preached, mere steps from the fountain where he was laid to rest in an aboveground tomb, the gone years washed over her. Dr. King’s mother, Alberta Williams King, was gunned down six years after her son had been assassinated, while sitting behind the organ in June of ’74. And fifteen years ago, the mayor’s own father had been eulogized on the altar of the tiny redbrick church.

  There was no safe harbor here, and there never had been. The history she knew all too well rolled through her head. She felt Pelosi’s light touch, his comforting strong hand securing the small of her back, as she scanned the crevices between the bricks and calculated the gravity of the loss. She felt faint, but dared not yield to that weakness now.

  The mayor looked at the chain of APD patrol cars clogging the avenue and noted the scrum of somber-faced reporters sequestered between barricades in front of the King Center. To her right, oversized live-shot trucks were jammed, bumper to bumper. She had personally ordered the media pen put in place, a lesson well learned after a day trader executed his family and shot up a Buckhead office complex back in ’99. She was still in law school back then, toiling in the bowels of City Hall as a summer intern, awaiting her ascent, when the mayor tapped her to support the crisis teams. In the wake of the shooting spree, Victoria was sent to work in the communications unit out of an empty office suite in Piedmont Center, the epicenter of the massacre. It was the first of many trials by fire.