Natchez Burning Read Online Free

almost like a Gemini astronaut with air tanks on his back.
    “I got a pistol!” Albert cried, ashamed of the fear in his voice. If he fired now, the muzzle flash or the ricocheting bullet was as likely to set off the fumes as a struck match. “Please!” he begged. “Why ya’ll want to ruin my store? What I ever done to you fellas?”
    A pickup truck passed on the street outside, and in its reflected headlights Albert recognized the faces of the two men in the window. One was Snake Knox, the brother of Frank, the Klansman who’d visited the store that afternoon. The other was Brody Royal. The third man remained in shadow.
Dear Jesus
… These were serious men. They made the regular Ku Klux Klan look like circus clowns. Albert had managed to keep off the wrong side of men like this all his life. He’d bowed and scraped when necessary. He’d ignored the flirtations of their women, greased the right palms, and given gifts of service and merchandise. But now … now they wanted the life of a boy who was guilty of nothing but being young and ignorant.
    “Mr. Brody, you
knows
me,” Albert said with absurd reasonableness. “Please, now … I done told you this afternoon, I don’t know
nothin’
’bout your daughter getting up to anything.” This lie sounded hollow even to him, but the truth would be worse:
Mr. Royal, your little girl’s got a willful streak and she’d hump that black boy right in front of you if he’d let her
. “Please now, Mr. Royal,” he pleaded. “Why, I’ve got your own church organ up in here, fixing it.”
    “Shut up!” snapped the shadow man. “Tell us where that young buck is right this minute, or you die. Make your choice.”
    “I don’t know!” Albert cried. “I swear! But I do know that boy didn’t mean no harm.”
    Brody Royal dropped his gas can on the floor and walked up to Albert. “Cur dogs don’t mean any harm, either, but they’ll impregnate your prize bitch if they can get close to her.”
    “He ain’t gonna tell us nothin’,” Snake Knox said. “Let’s finish the job.”
    “I thought you were a businessman, Norris,” Royal said, his eyes seeming to glow in the pale, angular face. “But I guess in the end, even the best nigra’s gonna be a nigger one day a week. Let’s go, boys.”
    Snake picked up the piano bench and tossed it through Albert’s plate glass window. The shards tinkled in the street like a shattering dream. Snake leaped through the window after the bench, and Albert saw a man nearly twice his size join him in the street. Brody Royal scrambled out onto the porch, then jumped down to the sidewalk. Instinct told Albert to follow them, but before he could move, the giant figure stepped from the shadows and stared at him with unalloyed hatred. The huge shape was no astronaut; it was Frank Knox, wearing an asbestos suit and some kind of pack on his back.
    “You should have talked,” he said. “Now you get the Guadalcanal barbecue.”
    Albert backpedaled in terror, but the roaring jet of flame reached toward him like the finger of Satan, and Knox’s eyes flashed with fascination.
    The display room exploded into fire.
    Facedown in a roaring fog of pain, Albert slowly picked himself up from the floor, then ran blindly from the inferno raging in the front of his store. When he crashed through the back door, arms flailing, he saw that his clothes had already burned away. Like a deer fleeing a forest fire, he bounded toward a bright opening at the end of the alley. There was a service station there—a white-owned station, but he knew the attendant. Maybe somebody would take him to the hospital.
    As Albert windmilled down the alley, a big car pulled across the open space, blocking it. The gumball light on its roof came to life, spilling red glare onto the walls of the buildings. A huge shape rose from beside the car. Big John DeLillo.
    “Help me, Mr. John!” Albert screamed, running toward the deputy. “Lord, they done burned me out!”
    As he