Southern Man

Book 7: Penn Cage

by Greg Iles

Genres: Crime Fiction; Legal Thrillers; Suspense; Southern

Synopsis

The hugely anticipated new Penn Cage novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Natchez Burning trilogy and Cemetery Road, about a man—and a town—rocked by anarchy and tragedy, but unbowed in the fight to save those they love.

Fifteen years after the events of the Natchez Burning trilogy, Penn Cage is alone. Nearly all his loved ones are dead, his old allies gone, and he carries a mortal secret that separates him from the world. But Penn’s exile comes to an end when a brawl at a Mississippi rap festival triggers a bloody mass shooting—one that nearly takes the life of his daughter Annie.

As the stunned cities of Natchez and Bienville reel, antebellum plantation homes are being torched and the deadly attacks are claimed by a Black radical group as historic acts of justice. Panic quickly sweeps through the communities, driving the prosperous Southern towns inexorably toward a race war.

But what might have been only a regional sideshow of the 2024 Presidential election explodes into national prominence, thanks to the stunning ascent of Robert E. Lee White, a Southern war hero who seizes the public imagination as a third-party candidate. Dubbed “the Tik-Tok Man,” and funded by an eccentric Mississippi billionaire, Bobby White rides the glory of his Special Forces record to an unprecedented run at the White House—one unseen since the campaign of H. Ross Perot.

To triumph over the national party machines, Bobby evolves a plan of unimaginable daring. One fateful autumn weekend, with White set to declare his candidacy in all 50 states, the forces polarizing America line up against one another: Black vs. white, states vs. the federal government, democracy vs. Fascism. Teaming with his fearless daughter (now a civil rights lawyer) and a former Black Panther who spent most of his life in Parchman Prison, Penn tears into Bobby White’s pursuit of the Presidency and ultimately risks a second Civil War to try to expose its motivation to the world, before the America of our Constitution slides into the abyss.

In Southern Man, Greg Iles returns to the riveting style and historic depth that made the Natchez Burning trilogy a searing masterpiece and hurls the narrative fifteen years forward into our current moment—where America itself teeters on the brink of anarchy.

Release date: May 28, 2024

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 928

Reader says this book is...: action-packed (1) emotionally riveting (1) high stakes (1) rich setting(s) (1) terrific writing (1) thought-provoking (1) unputdownable (1)

Sample

THURSDAY

Chapter 1

THE HIGHEST-PAID POLITICAL consultant in America disembarked from his Cessna Citation at Medgar Evers Field in Jackson, Mississippi, and slid into a limo that shuttled him toward the white-flight ring of the capital. Rafael Carrera—“Tio” to his clients—savored the irony that he had to remind himself not to drink the public water when visiting the capital city in an American state.

“Mississippi,” he muttered. “Que barrio cochambrosa.”

Tio Carrera’s olive-skinned face had the hard, knowing look of a career gambler’s. In his late seventies, his belly now had twice the girth of his shoulders, but he’d been in the game since Nixon in ’68, and he had seen everything, forgotten nothing. Tio knew where actual bodies were buried. Cuban by birth, he had been first a Kennedy-lover, then a Kennedy-hater, until he’d given up all conviction and worked for whoever paid best—which was usually Republicans. But woe betide the WASPs who saw him merely as a Florida specialist. Insiders loved telling a story about Tio taking Karl Rove for five figures by bluffing at poker on a late-night plane ride during the Bush-Gore litigation. A few claimed that Tio had been present at the actual Bay of Pigs as a teenager, and nobody was sure if he’d been on the beach or in the boats. In any case, he’d been credited with some of the most devastating negative attacks in the history of American politics, and one thing was sure: if you paid for his opinion, you got it without Vaseline.

Today Tio was flying from Washington, D.C., to Brasilia, Brazil, to advise during the special presidential election, but he’d agreed to touch down in Jackson for sixty minutes to give the two men waiting at Magnolia Star Studios a thumbs-up or -down on a single political ad. He wouldn’t normally have bothered with something so small, but the potential candidate in this case intrigued him.

The kid in question—a forty-two-year-old conservative radio host named Robert E. Lee White—had literally come out of nowhere, exploding into the national consciousness after a book by a disgraced Delta Force operator revealed that “Bobby” White had personally killed Abu Nasir El Sherif—second-in-command to Abu Musab al-Zarqawi—during the famous 2008 raid in Afghanistan. White had also lost an arm while doing this. His pitching arm, as it turned out, when America learned that Bobby White—in the tradition of Pat Tillman—had after 9/11 walked away from a Division I baseball scholarship at Ole Miss to enlist in the army and fight Al Qaeda. Better still, the killer of Abu Nasir turned out to be the son of Big Ed White, the Hall of Fame left-hander for the Astros in the 1980s. It was a story an old baseball fanatic like Tio couldn’t resist.

As Bobby’s biography took shape on social media, mainstream America began to learn what the conservative radio audience already knew: that saving a brief dip when he condemned Trump on January 6, Bobby White had virtually owned the Center in conservative morning radio. Media experts believed it was only his refusal to deny the 2020 election results or condemn all abortions that had kept him from taking the number-one spot. White’s record as a special ops soldier had always been public, but the Abu Nasir revelation changed everything. His audience had rocketed from eight million to nearly twelve million in the interval since, which put him within spitting distance of Sean Hannity. By the time the GOP donor class learned that he had a law degree from Vanderbilt and had authored two respected nonfiction books on the South and the Lost Cause, they were talking Bobby White up as a national candidate.

But it was TikTok that had truly sparked his meteoric rise, to the point that oddsmakers in Vegas were now giving three-to-one that the kid would

announce a third-party presidential run by next week. What made this anything but juvenile fantasy was the army of young foot soldiers who had been relentlessly gathering names to register the war hero by petition on the presidential ballot in every state in the union. Rumor had it that the nascent White campaign had already gathered nearly enough signatures to put their candidate on every ballot in the country in January 2024. What drove those kids Tio didn’t know. Bobby White was Hollywood handsome—anyone could see that. But beyond this, all Tio had seen were stunt videos, in which White used jaw-dropping special operations skills to execute extreme physical feats while calmly dissecting issues like book-banning or the lunacy of arming teachers in grade schools. Tio didn’t really get it. But then, he was too old to live by the pulses of his cell phone.

He would see Bobby White in the flesh soon enough.

Tio was a little taken aback by the modest studio that hosted White’s radio show, but he’d seen gifted men shake the souls of millions from tiny cubicles before. And the idea that one of the most consequential campaigns of the twenty-first century might go airborne from a small corner of Mississippi was no less likely than it had been in 1980, when Ronald Reagan gave the dog whistle of all time from the Neshoba County Fair. Tio had been there on the day, on that goddamn harness-racing track, forty feet from the candidate, sweating like a pig though he’d been fifty pounds lighter. And who the hell was Reagan then? A former governor. An out-of-work actor.

Wiping his face on his jacket sleeve, Tio walked into the Magnolia Star studio and surveyed the two men who stood waiting in the small reception area. The candidate made an impression up close. Six feet two inches tall, Robert E. Lee White possessed a craggy handsomeness to which no photograph did justice, and his photos were good. This kid was what Tio’s staff kids called an “American archetype.” To a modern audience, the retired master sergeant probably landed somewhere between Matthew McConaughey and George Clooney. But his masculinity quotient was off the charts, with the gravitas of an earlier era, suggesting a young Gregory Peck or even Clark Gable. But Bobby White was no actor; he was the man those actors were hired to play. It wasn’t hard to see why he’d taken off on the damn TikTok, or whatever it was.

Tio stuck out his pudgy hand—his left, because Sergeant White was missing his right arm from the shoulder down, and he wore no prosthetic. Despite his weight and age, Tio still had considerable strength, but in the grip of the one-armed special forces vet he sensed a power that could have crushed his own, even in his prime.

“War hero cleans up good in person,” Tio said, withdrawing his hand with a throb of refilling blood vessels. “That’s good. Ben Affleck’s got nothing on you, Sergeant.”

“Call me Bobby,” said his host with an easy smile. White leaned to his left, toward another well-conditioned man of six feet who, if not quite as intimidating, was equally handsome. “This is Corey Evers, my literal right hand, no pun intended.”

Tio nodded to the staff man, but Corey’s name was already forgotten. “Nice,” Tio remarked, touching his own right shoulder. “Pinning your coat sleeve to the shoulder like you do? Reminds me of old Bob Dole. Connects you to that whole generation. 

And they all vote.”

White didn’t acknowledge the observation. He knew well the effect the coat sleeve had. He cultivated it.

Tio looked around as though he actually gave a shit about their surroundings. “What a country we live in, right, Sergeant? Two months ago I didn’t know your name. Now Vegas is taking three to one you’ll announce by the middle of next week. Like you’re Ross Perot already. They say you’ve already met the ballot by petition requirement in thirty-nine states. You’ve got fanatical ground troops, like none anybody’s ever seen. Most kids under twenty-four. But what do I know about this TikTok shit? I saw the video you call ‘Don’t Be Afraid of History.’ Filmed upside down over the damn Grand Canyon, they told me. This crazy country moves faster every hour. So, show me this ad you got. Ads, I understand.”

Tio signaled his driver to wait, then followed White and his staff man to a video room, where a stool had been placed before a thirty-two-inch monitor. Tio sat and waited with a neutral expression. He’d seen thousands of political ads, and he had a wise farmer’s gift for separating wheat from chaff.

Corey touched a remote, then waited in tense equipoise just one step behind Carrera. On the screen, incandescent light rose over a night street in a rural town—Bruce Springsteen’s America. Then the camera tracked in as Bobby White walked through the gleaming doors of the Dixie Grand Theater in Bienville, Mississippi, his old hometown. Though north of forty by the calendar, Bobby still wore his high school baseball jersey with ease, and he cupped a worn Rawlings in his left hand as he smiled through the lens with a born actor’s intimacy. He wore no glove on his right hand, because he’d left his pitching arm in a cave in Afghanistan, and by now everybody knew it.

“I like the baseball,” Tio murmured. “I saw your old man pitch against the Braves during his final season. He was tough. Lost some money on him.”

At this moment Bobby’s father lay in the cardiac recovery unit at University Medical Center a few miles away, but he was already enshrined in Cooperstown, his legacy assured. And men like Tio Carrera did not forget.

“It seemed like the natural angle,” Corey said.

Tio held up his hand for silence.

“Friday night in a small town,” Bobby said to the camera. “Maybe there’s an early game. Afterward, you hook up with your friends, drink some beers, hang at the fast food joint, maybe go to the movies. At the theater you pair off, couples go their separate ways. Ritual old as time.”

Through some video magic, Bobby strolled through a montage of small-town imagery, his feet crunching on gravel. Soon he stood beside a line of eighties-vintage cars parked on a dark slope beside a river.

“But eventually you all end up down at the same place—the lake or the river. 

Coziest places in the world, some of those cars.”

Bobby tossed the baseball up and down, then turned into the camera and lowered his voice with conspiratorial candor. Behind him at least one of the cars was gently rocking.

“Found out who we were in those cars, didn’t we? Sometimes . . . we even got lucky.” Bobby grinned. “But sometimes we didn’t get so lucky. Sometimes we got in a bind. In trouble. And when that happened . . . who paid the price? You and your boys? Nope. If you lived in the kind of town I did—or you lived in my mom and pop’s time, especially—it was the girls who paid the price. The girls who got stuck in these tired old towns, becoming worn-out housewives at nineteen, when they could’ve been doctors or lawyers or God knows what else.”

A car door opened, and a young woman climbed out with an infant wrapped tightly at her breast. She walked dejectedly off along the road as though looking for a ride.

Bobby stopped tossing the baseball. “Too many men in Washington have got the wrong end of the stick on this problem, folks. We all know it. Hell, they don’t know what they want themselves, other than a fundraising issue. But I know one thing about women: They deserve the same chance we get in this life. No more, no less.”

More car doors opened, and trim young women in white medical coats and business suits climbed out and walked up toward the road reading charts or holding cell phones to their ears.

Bobby stepped closer to the camera as though winding up for a hard throw. “It’s time to leave all the Sunday school stuff in church, fellas. Because any society that tries to hold half its members in domestic servitude has only got one future in my book:

“Lights out.”

With a whoosh like a catapult, Bobby White fired his left arm into the darkness, and 150 feet away a streetlight exploded into a shower of sparks worthy of a Hollywood feature film. Tio jerked on the stool, but it was impossible to read his reaction from behind as the screen went black. Good or bad, it had been visceral.

A production team could have faked the exploding light shot, of course, but they hadn’t. Even if they had, Bobby knew how the American male thought. Any one-armed vet who could HALO jump onto the roof of a Mississippi Delta hospital to dramatize its imminent closure due to lack of Medicaid expansion—or make fifteen-hundred-meter sniper shots to check off his to-do list—as Bobby had done on YouTube and TikTok—could sure as hell bust out a streetlight with a baseball.

“Well?” Corey asked anxiously.

The feared consultant’s voice came back hard and flat. “You crazy bastards aren’t thinking about asking for revocation of the Second Amendment

in your next ad, are you?”

“We hadn’t planned on it,” Bobby replied.

“Good. Because I thought you were Republicans. Baby steps, okay? Even for crazy bastards who want to start a revolution. Dios mio . . .”

“So, what do you think?” Corey prodded.

“Esta volado.” Tio Carrera spun slowly on the stool and looked at Bobby with something like admiration—which appeared to be a rare emotion for him. “Sergeant White, if I were thirty years younger and a woman, I’d fuck you myself.”

“Is that what we’re going for here?” Bobby asked.

“It never hurts, my friend.”

“So . . . you think we run with it?”

Tio folded his arms and mulled over the question like a man who didn’t have a would-be dictator waiting for him in South America. “How old are you boys? Forty? Forty-five?”

They nodded in unison.

“Do you remember Edwin Edwards? Democratic governor across the river? Colorful guy, old school.”

“I remember him,” Bobby said. “He came out to the house once. My dad knew him.”

Tio chuckled fondly. “Edwin used to fly his campaign plane to Las Vegas with a briefcase full of cash and hooch. Some flights maybe a pistol or two. And the women? Tremenda manguita. Ask James Carville, he can tell you stories. Anyway . . . after Edwin got his ass in hot water in Korea and elsewhere, he ran for a third term. And he had a saying.”

“‘Unless they catch me in bed with a dead girl or a live boy,’ ” Corey said, “‘I’m going to win again.’ ”

Tio looked at Corey with fresh eyes. “I’m gonna give you boys my gut, as crazy as it sounds. Looking at Sergeant White here, and knowing his record, I feel like an old atheist tasting his first breeze of faith in a generation—maybe the last before he dies. A hell of a wave is building under you. And the field is weak this time out. Trump clones, wannabe Nazis, QAnon conspiracy nuts, brownshirt governors, a token prieto . . . and Trump’s liable to burn down the whole party, if they give him half a reason. Bobby here is the only candidate who never took a lick of shit off Donald. You called the son of a bitch a traitor on January 6 and you never wavered. Never gave an inch, so far as my staff can find.”

Tio licked his lips as though working the plan out in front of them. “In ’92 Perot proved a third-party run is viable—even a last-minute one. And in 2016 Donald proved anything is possible. With this TikTok insanity my interns and media staff keep telling me about—they say you’re breaking all kinds of records—those stunt videos of yours are turning you into some kind of combination of Elvis and the Beatles.”

Corey grinned at the dated references.

Tio shrugged. “I’m old, I get it.” He clapped Bobby on his shoulder, squeezing the thick pad of muscle. “But you, my friend, seem to be that rara avis—the full package. Military service always gives candidates a halo, though it’s never enough by itself. Carrying a rifle can’t get Buttigieg over the queer hump, and we’ve already had two draft dodgers win the goddamn Oval. Right? But you, Sergeant? You crept into the heart of darkness, mano-a-mano, and killed the beast. And you never even claimed credit. That’s the kicker. That’s the John Wayne center of it

all. You’re an old-school hero. You’ve got humility. Vanishing breed.” Tio leaned back and fixed Bobby with a basilisk stare. “So long as you don’t have an Edwin Edwards problem.”

“You don’t think we’re going too far, coming out pro-choice like this?” Bobby asked.

“You don’t . . . do you?” Tio pressed. The consultant’s glassy eyes seemed almost lidless as they peered into Bobby’s. “Have that kind of problem?”

“No dead girls or live boys,” Bobby said with an easy laugh.

Tio nodded as though only half-convinced. Clearly he’d been burned before. “Just making sure. Best to know early, I’ve found.”

“What about Bobby’s ad?” Corey asked. “How big a slice of the Right do we lose by going at the issue this hard?”

Tio shrugged. “Two schools of thought. One, Dobbs lost us the midterms. You don’t give women something for fifty years, then snatch it back. This ad here buys you back a lot of goodwill.”

“And the other school?” Corey asked.

Tio laughed like a Cuban Santa Claus. “What the hell do you care? Third-party run, your odds of winning are shit anyway, so why not campaign on what you really think?”

Bobby grinned. “That’s a strategy I understand. Fastballs right down the middle.”

“Only one glaring negative I see,” Tio said with a look of displeasure. “You gotta know it, right?”

Corey shrugged.

“No Jackie O.”

“And no kids,” Bobby said.

Tio nodded. “What’s the story? I can’t believe there’s not at least one rice-strewn ex–homecoming queen in your past. All-American stud like you? I read your CV three times on the plane to be sure I hadn’t missed an early divorce.”

Bobby shrugged. “I saw a lot of guys make mistakes early on. Didn’t want to do the same.”

Tio tilted his round head. “Not sure how I feel about that. Part of the country won’t be, either. They like stability.”

“In your experience,” Corey interjected, “does marriage provide stability?”

Tio gave him a withering glare. “It’s still America, kid. They like tradition. Perception is everything.” The consultant returned his focus to Bobby. “So, I only got one other question. And given what I’ve seen today, it’s a killer. How the hell are you going to bring the QAnon crazies into this third-party tent of yours long enough to get them to vote for you? You may nail every suburban GOP housewife in America with this ad. You’ve got the Center Right from your radio audience. But a hard fifty-one percent are stone-cold MAGA rats who’ll vote for Donald for president in an orange jumpsuit in solitary confinement—how you gonna get them, Sergeant? Because you’re going to need every one of ’em to win.”

Bobby felt the heavy burden of expectation shift onto him. “I’m not worried about

Trump.”

Tio mocked a look of being impressed. “No? Your war hero bit goes a long way with that crowd, but not far enough. Not when you’re spouting pro-choice from their TVs and calling January 6 straight-up treason.”

“Have you ever been to a Trump rally, Tio? I mean, out in the heartland?”

“No.”

“I have. You know what Trumpers love more than anything? What really gets their motors spinning? Violence. Trump, too, or so he thinks. Well, unlike Diaper Don, I’m an expert on that subject. I am intimately acquainted with violence, from every side. And that makes me a viable substitute candidate for him—the only one, in fact, for those voters. Trump knows it. And that’s why I terrify him.”

Tio stared at the young candidate with new appreciation. “You know what I know, don’t you, Sergeant? Even the dumbest Republican advisers have figured out the skinny on the next election. There’s only one way they win. White panic. Because if white America doesn’t vote as a block this time out, the GOP can’t win. Not without stealing it.”

Bobby shared an uncomfortable look with Corey. He’d figured this out some time ago. “Agreed. So what are you telling us?”

“Accept that as fact, then forget it. Because somebody’s going to find a way to provide that fear. A summer of chaos. Riots from Baltimore to Watts. Who knows over what? The next George Floyd. Who cares? Look at that shooting in Memphis last week. Second time this year up there. Protests spreading across the country as we speak. That’s just a taste of what’s coming. The background of the next election.”

“Are you that sure?” Corey asked.

Tio looked at him like the original sucker. “The white elite in America needs riots, sonny. Looting-level chaos is the only hot glue that can bind the winning block I mentioned. And given recent history, I doubt anyone will even have to manipulate the Blacks into it. The cops in some city will screw up by default. You’re too young to remember the summer of ’67. The Long, Hot Summer. A hundred and fifty race riots, cities on fire from coast to coast. Eighty-three dead by September. Detroit and Newark were battle zones. I think that’s coming down the pike again. Maybe bigger this time. Take it from me. There’s no critical mass like white anger plus white panic.”

Bobby’s eyes shone the way they did when his team had been planning ops in the TOC back in the Sandbox. “I’m with you. Go on.”

“Not before you tell me a secret, Sergeant. What are these white people so angry about?”

Bobby grinned. “Hard to figure for you, I’ll bet. But to me it’s plain as piss on a dress boot. They’re being forced to face the fact that no one ever had it easier than their people. They were raised to believe nobody ever worked harder for success than their grandpaw or memaw, or their fourth ancestor up the line who came over

rom God-knows-where and fought for every scrap they got. But the truth is, they had it better than any immigrants anywhere ever did. Everybody else had it tougher. Except the Melania Trumps of the world. The refusal to let go of that myth. . . . That’s the root of white privilege, and of the threat to democracy. The irrational hell we’re living through now.”

The old Cuban nodded with both approbation and worry. “You’re not going to win any new white voters with that pitch.”

“We’ll see. I know those people. I came from them. Unlike their orange Ozymandias.”

Tio got up from the stool, which didn’t raise his height by much, but this did nothing to diminish his personal intensity. “Well, here’s my take on what’s coming. You’ve been to war, Sergeant. Anybody with a match can start a fire. But it’s not starting fires that gets you the White House this time out. It’s putting them out. Every GOP candidate will compete to exploit the coming battle. The role you need to be ready to step into is that of another vanishing breed—a possibly extinct specimen.”

“Which is?”

Tio smiled with genuine pleasure. “Statesman. Don’t just be the law-and-order man. Be the law-and-order man with a vision.”

“Law and order’s good enough for most white people,” Corey observed.

“Order’s enough for most,” Tio conceded. “That’s the root of Donald’s appeal. But people like to feel good about themselves, too. Figure a way to help them do that, you might even pick up a few Black votes along the way.”

“I plan to,” Bobby asserted. “Wait till you see my plan to transform the Mississippi Delta into the Imperial Valley of the east.”

Policy plans went right past Tio Carrera. “You’ve got some Black friends, I assume? Real ones? Army buddies?”

“Sure. My catcher on our state championship baseball team was Black. He’s one of my best friends.”

Tio gave Bobby a hard look. “Just make sure that’s the last time you call him my catcher. I hate to piss on your party, boys, but you’re gonna have to start paying attention to the little things from now on.”

“What about

money?” Bobby asked.

Tio waved his hand as though he had brought up popcorn concessions. “Don’t worry about that right now. If you’re really the man of the moment, the golden boy, the dollars will flow to you. You just need seed money to start. A hundred million. Two hundred’s better.” Tio checked his watch, then glanced at the door for his driver. “You got a source for that?”

“Yeah.” Bobby looked uncomfortably at Corey. “I think so.”

“Good. Well . . . Me voy. I’ve got a date with the Concrete Christ.”

“You advise down there a lot, huh?” Corey commented.

“Less and less, thank God. But every time I try to beg off, they up my fee. Things are getting crazy down there. I don’t know about global warming, but if that rain forest they got is really the oxygen factory for the planet, we’re in trouble. I see less of it from the window every time I fly down.”

“Maybe you ought to support some different candidates,” Corey suggested.

Tio snorted. “I live on Jupiter Island, sonny. Just down the road from Tiger Woods. They don’t give that sand away.”

The consultant walked to the door, turned the knob, then looked back over his shoulder. “So . . . have you boys already gathered the signatures to register as an independent on the ballots in all fifty states? Because if you have, and I knew that, I could make a hell of a killing.”

“I’m going to make coffee now,” Corey said, using an English version of the Cuban hint that it was time for a guest to leave.

Carrera’s face darkened for a moment, but then he smiled. “You sons of bitches. I think you’ve already got the names. I think this TikTok thing is bigger than I’ve got my head around.”

“Could be,” Corey teased.

“I’m glad I came today. You boys give me that old tingle on the back of my neck.” The old man dropped his hand from the doorknob. “You know, I was with Reagan in ’80 when he spoke at the Neshoba County Fair, not two hours east of here. He started the Republican Revolution right here. That nervy bastard talked states’ rights not ten miles from where the Ku Klux Klan buried those three civil rights workers in the dam. And from that moment on, he had the right wing with him.”

Tio held up two thick fingers. “Two lessons there. One, you gotta have some big balls to play this game. And two . . . one way or another, you gotta bring the Right with you.” Tio jabbed his finger at Bobby’s chest. “That’s your job now, Sergeant.”

“How about you get some of your Miami buddies to bump some of Trump’s free coverage off Univision? Then maybe we can do some business.”

Tio Carrera smiled like an old wizard. “Alas, my powers are great, but they have limits. Chao pescao!”

And with that, he vanished from their lives, leaving only an astounding bill as evidence that he had ever been there.

“Jupiter Island,” Corey said, staring at the door. “He’d clear-cut the rain forest so he can keep living on Jupiter Island.”

“Next to Tiger Woods,” Bobby said with a grin. “What a character, though. Huh?”

“He did have one tough question. How are you going to bring the QAnon crazies into our camp long enough to get them to vote for you?”

Bobby nodded.

“You sounded like you’re reconciled to the kind of street warfare he’s predicting.”

“You and I can’t stop that, Cor.”

Corey had hoped for more, but he didn’t press it. “Oh, I got a text from your mom while Carrera was here. Some more enzyme tests came back on your dad’s heart. He’s still stable, but they want to keep him in the unit another night.”

Bobby clucked his tongue. “Okay.”

“She also said to tell you Penn Cage’s mother is sinking fast. She had a stroke on top of her cancer treatment, and she’s unconscious. I don’t know why Frances thinks you’d be interested in that, as busy as you are.”

“Small towns, Natchez and Bienville. Penn went to school with my dad, and he had a big career as a prosecutor and author. He was mayor of Natchez, too.”

“He also just won a record-breaking verdict in that environmental suit against Triton Chemical. But I didn’t know your families were that close.”

“It’s the South, Cor. People being born, marrying, cheating, dying . . . that’s what we talk about. I hate to hear that about Mrs. Cage, though. She’s a classy lady, and her husband was old school. Dr. Cage stitched up my ankle once during a game after a guy cleated me. Right in the dugout. You think these doctors now would risk that? Too afraid of being sued.”

“I’ll send them something.”

“Don’t. I’ll speak to Penn after she passes.”

Corey looked surprised. “And the ad video?”

Bobby made a fist and pumped it. “We’re going with it. Every GOP senator who ever paid for an abortion is going to wish he’d made it first. Also—call the Belle Rose Country Club people. They can put me down for the PGA pro-am in Bienville next week. I’m committing. I’ll do those commentary pieces for the Golf Channel, too, straight through the weekend.”

“Are you serious?”

Bobby smiled, and his eyes glinted. “Southern presidents have hometowns, Corey. Plains . . . Hope. It’s time I pressed a little flesh.”

Corey’s eyes narrowed. “When Tio asked you if you could get a hundred million dollars, and you told him yes, I nearly shat myself.”

Bobby chuckled. “You need some time in the bathroom?”

“What the hell were you talking about? Who’s your source for that kind of bread?”

Bobby didn’t reply.

Corey’s face showed exasperation, but then his eyes went wide. “You’re thinking about Charles Dufort, aren’t you? You’re thinking about the Poker Club. That’s why you want to visit Bienville.”

Bobby’s smile let Corey know he was on the right track. “We’ll talk about it. Let’s sketch out tomorrow’s show and get out of here.”

Corey shook his head. “You liked Tio, didn’t you?”

“‘They don’t give that sand away,’ ” Bobby repeated, laughing. “I’ll bet he was at the Bay of Pigs. That SOB has got the look. You know

Corey gave a reluctant nod. A veteran of military intelligence himself, he knew the look Bobby was talking about. The world-weary expression of men who had seen the elephant. “I didn’t like what he said about the riots. Summer of chaos? Cities on fire? He sounded pretty damned sure.”

“He knows his business. And I don’t think he’s wrong. We’ve got six months to plan for a desperate summer—the last spasm of white America before the demographics turn against us forever. That’s when the election will be decided. Most people warning about a second Civil War don’t know shit about the first one. But it’s going to get rough. I feel that in my bones.”

SATURDAY

Chapter 2

NOTHING IS STILL but the dead.

The wind, the earth, the sun and stars, the twitch of the nerve, the whispering rush of blood through the vein, the snake coiled on the sand, the hibernating bear, all are in motion, save those settling toward death, as is the woman on the bed before me, my mother, eighty-six now but soon to be no more, and I . . . I must follow her sooner than she knew, and by the same route, the same dread affliction.

But first . . .

THE CHAOS THAT Tio Carrera predicted in Bobby White’s studio arrived much sooner than promised. Only five days after the consultant flew on to Brazil, a historic antebellum mansion in Natchez, Mississippi, called Tranquility exploded into flame and burned to the ground, leaving only haunting columns smoldering in the dusk. Later that night, a second mansion went up, and that time a graphic note claiming responsibility for both fires was nailed to the dewy courthouse door. Drawn on the inside of a vintage LP jacket—Tupac Shakur’s Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z.—was a Black fist bearing a broken shackle on its wrist. Below the fist someone had stapled a printed note declaring the arsons to be but the first in a series of retributive strikes for both police misconduct and centuries of oppression. The note was signed: The Bastard Sons of the Confederacy. Under this signature appeared a long list of names, which turned out to be those of locally lynched Black men that dated back to 1861. (More than fifty of these had died less than two miles from the house I grew up in as a boy—something I didn’t learn until I was past fifty—but that’s a matter for later in these pages.)

For America, this was a new crime under the sun: domestic terror clothed in the garb of historical retribution. The scale and effect of the blow were shattering. News of the “Bastard Sons” and their Black fist swept through the Magnolia State like a storm, spurring condemnation from the governor down to local mayors, and out into the digital hinterlands of social media. White supremacist militias in all eighty-two counties issued warnings of apocalyptic revenge, and when the Bastard Sons made good on their threat of additional strikes, the militias began pushing Natchez and nearby Bienville inexorably toward war in the streets. The very night Tranquility burned, a sheriff’s deputy torched a Black country church as payback, and that was only the start of what was to come.

The Bastard Sons had chosen their first target well.

Unlike so many of Natchez’s antebellum mansions, which had long ago been sold to out-of-towners, Tranquility remained the ancestral home of perhaps the richest man in the state—the attorney, energy speculator, and well-known GOP donor Charles Dufort. Dufort’s most famous ancestor had helped Natchez survive the Civil War intact, by supporting Abraham Lincoln and opposing secession. (He’d also enslaved more than a thousand Africans on his five plantations, but that astonishing irony is also best dealt with later.) Charles Dufort represented for many the last in an unbroken line of educated “Southern gentlemen” who still existed with honor under the long shadow of the Civil War. Thus, for many whites across the country, the intentional burning of Tranquility represented an attack on History Itself, and on the unspoken hierarchy that defined their sense of place in America.

But the Tranquility fire didn’t happen in a vacuum. Three days before Dufort’s mansion lit up the Natchez skyline, the deadliest local tragedy since the Rhythm Club fire of 1940 had sent the Black community reeling, leaving twenty-one dead and the Tenisaw County Sheriff’s Department buried in civil litigation. This incident—now dubbed the Mission Hill massacre—also touched my family in the most destructive way, and still shrouds us in mourning as we wait to watch my mother pass. It was probably naïve for the white community to think such a terrible slaughter could occur without some retaliatory consequence,

especially in the post–George Floyd world. Yet I was present at Mission Hill when the fusillade of bullets did their damage, and I didn’t imagine anything like the Tranquility fire as a possible result.

If the nation’s attention had not been focused on Memphis—the eye of America’s most recent racial hurricane—some of the resulting violence might have been averted. But the national lens was aimed upriver, and consequently civil order in southwest Mississippi unspooled at a rate that made almost any atrocity possible. In the shotgun shacks of the Black quarters where some fathers still rode horses to work in 2023, and in the mobile homes where the white trash cooked the meth, old folks began muttering that it felt more like 1965 than the twenty-first century. Tio Carrera would have told them that where race in America was concerned, the twenty-first century might soon make 1965 look like a warm-up bout for the main event.

Unknown to anyone, the man Tio had made his prophecy to—retired sergeant Bobby White, the hero who dreamed of saving America from itself—was already on his way to our little corner of the republic, the corner from which he had sprung forty-two years earlier. His public arrival—the baseball star who blew out the brains of Abu Nasir—would forever alter the course of history in the two counties and the Louisiana parish in which I not so long ago fought the murderous legacy forces of the KKK and the Double Eagle group, losing loved ones and family members in the process.

Until 2016, I had believed that battle mostly done.

Then the patients took over the asylum.

I watched in disbelief as businessmen voted for a repeat bankrupt, laborers for a boss infamous for stiffing his workers, evangelicals for a serial adulterer, women for an admitted sexual assaulter, patriots for a draft dodger who would sell his country’s secrets for trivial gain, educated men for an ignoramus. But they did so with fierce gladness in their hearts. Because what their chosen one had done was open Pandora’s box—yes, the old one, filled with the ancient calamities of race hatred and rage and cruelty and bloodlust and infinite greed—and tell them that these things were the remedy for all their grievances, that all their anger was justified, and most important: None of what ailed them was their own fault—or ever had been.

They took to that like infants to a honeyed tit.

The problem, as any midwife can tell you, is that honey can kill babies under a year old. It carries botulism spores, lethal to those without antibodies. The gospel of Trump is just as lethal, and unlike poisoned honey, highly contagious. Worst of all, it demands an adversary . . . as all great stories do.

The Other.

Once you accept this equation of fault and blame, the road to war is a short one. And somewhere an enthusiastic engineer is designing new prisons, and the ovens that will wait at the end of the tracks.

Forgive me if I’m screwing up the sequence of events, or not making sense at all. I’ve been having trouble with time lately. I haven’t really slept for days, except for brief naps in the chair beside my mother’s rented hospital bed. Losing your first parent is a stunning blow, jarring to the soul. But losing your last truly orphans you, unmooring you from the past, destabilizing your sense of self.

I am and remain Penn Cage. I can keep that much in my head, even after swallowing two oxycodone pills from my mother’s hospice supply. But I’m not the man you remember, the man I once was—if I ever was. I’m no longer the mayor of Natchez, Mississippi. I no longer even live in Natchez, but in Bienville, forty miles to the north. (Had it been solely up to me, I’d have left the South altogether—at least for a while—but my grieving daughter didn’t want to get too far from her grandparents, who were going through hell at the time I resigned the mayoralty.) Seventeen years have passed since I put the last of the Knox clan under the ground, the same since my father sent himself to Parchman Prison for the murder of a Black woman whom he did not kill, but in fact loved as much as he ever did my mother. My daughter, Annie, who was eleven when a motorcycle gang member nearly ran her over with a van in front of my old Natchez house (and my father’s best friend gave his life to save her), is now twenty-nine and a civil rights lawyer in Jackson, Mississippi, practicing with the widow of my querulous and involuntary mentor Quentin Avery.

After my mother passes, only Annie and I will remain to carry on the Cage name, and Annie’s not even dating anyone, much less close to marrying. There’s a reason this concerns me. I carry a lot of scars that I didn’t fifteen years ago. I also carry a secret that I did carry back then, one held so closely that only my father knew about it, and it weighed on him like a tumor. My mother eventually learned of my private burden, but she never revealed it to Annie, and she will carry it to the grave soon enough.

But nature now, it seems, has her own ideas about outing me.

It’s probably best that I stake my narrative into the earth somewhere, tie us to a place and time, some fixed point from which to view what came before and after, for only by so doing will we make sense of the horrifying truths that the Bastard Sons’ arsons and the resulting violence eventually revealed. Were this only a story of politics, I wouldn’t waste the time to write it down. But as I have so often found in the South, mysteries that date back more than 150 years retain the power to wreck families and destroy fortunes, even today, when almost every vice is permitted. In so doing, they teach us things we desperately need to learn.

This is one of those tales.

IT’S SATURDAY.

This past Monday my mother suffered the first of several strokes, likely brought on by one of the harsher chemotherapy agents she recently began taking as the milder ones failed one by one. She’s been fighting blood cancer for five years, and the toll on her body and spirit

 has been relentless. Three days ago she lost consciousness and began taking on the look of a cadaver. Her oncologist told me she’s unlikely to wake again. At this point that’s a blessing, though I’ve spent hours pondering questions I should have asked about our family history before losing the chance forever.

Mom had already signed a DNR order when she fell unconscious, and she’d also told me she wants to die in Edelweiss, the residence she’s been living in since 2008. The most unique house in Natchez (other than the octagonal, unfinished Longwood), Edelweiss stands on the bluff’s edge, two hundred feet above the Mississippi River, looking out over the seemingly endless plain of the Louisiana Delta, where my mother was raised. The 1883 chalet was the dream house of my fiancée, who was murdered in 2007. When I announced that I intended to sell it rather than live with traumatic memories, my mother confessed that Edelweiss had always been her favorite as well, and asked if she might live out her days there. I agreed. Now—fifteen years later—she will die here, fifty miles and a world away from the poor parish where she was born.

She lies supine on the stained sheet, breathing with interminable slowness, so shallowly that I almost can’t feel the air move when I cup my hand over her mouth. And yet . . . I do. The sigh of a long, slow respiration animates her pale lips, and I listen for even the semblance of a word.

There is none.

Through the brick walls of the ground floor, I hear the low chanting of a hundred Black people protesting the police shooting in Memphis that happened ten days ago. Like some human timekeeping device, they march out an endless, weary oval with signs in their hands, high above the copper-colored river. They march in solidarity with thousands of protesters three hundred miles upstream, where two cops committed yet another case of egregious misconduct. Their signs demand to know whether Black lives matter, when, sadly, the nation has answered that question many times over. They might as well ask their question of the river.

Maybe they are.

The killing they’re protesting is the kind of story where, if you’re white, you want to switch off the TV set or scroll down your Twitter feed before you see the body-cam footage, because you know it’s going to be worse than you feared. But sitting by my mother’s deathbed, I’ve had little to distract me since her last stroke. The facts are depressingly simple: a twelve-year-old mentally challenged Black boy was attending a birthday party in a white Memphis neighborhood, and running between houses carrying one of the few realistic-looking toy guns still for sale in America as he played some anachronistic variant of Star Wars. Despite his age, this teddy bear of a boy was nearly six feet tall and reported by a neighbor as a “prowler.” When he didn’t respond to police warnings, he was shot seven times by a white cop.

Protests immediately

broke out in a dozen major cities across the country, and two or three more joined in every day. The bluff city of Elvis and Dr. King still shudders under ever-increasing pressure, but after ten days, the chanting downstream in Natchez has a more perfunctory timbre than it did in the beginning. The marchers have grown tired of dedicated action with no response. Fox News began by predicting that this would be the next “George Floyd phase” of American politics, but despite the ever-expanding demonstrations, a prevailing sense has already settled over the nation that not even mass slaughter will spur anything more than a few days’ outrage plus “thoughts and prayers” for the victims’ parents.

What fools we are.

Sometime after the cop shot that boy, one of the three fates must have turned to her sister and said, “Hold my beer.” For what lay in store for me, my family, and those I love would soon make the Memphis tragedy seem inconsequential by comparison. But I did not know. So I sat in the little sickroom atop the bluff in my own hometown and held my mother’s hand while she settled toward the final stillness, while chaos worked beneath the ground, and the buildings, and in the hearts and minds of those who long ago gave themselves over to anger and hatred. Worst of all, like termites that never sleep, it worked also in the mind of one who cared nothing for others, and only for himself.

It is those people who harry us all down the road to hell.

EVERY SON BELIEVES his mother beautiful, but God, mine truly is. Here at the end, after the yearslong struggle, her luminous loveliness has finally risen through the ravages of both poison and cure. The pain and regret for so long etched into her features has somehow relaxed, so that her papery skin—lately transparent as the wrapping of a summer roll—has taken on the supple smoothness of youth, like a memory come to life. Perhaps the most recent IV hydrated her at last, or maybe it’s the fentanyl patch (yes, fentanyl can be a blessing—I tasted its mercy when I lost my lower right leg in a car crash more than a decade ago). But whatever the reason, her face has taken on an aura of gentle radiance, as though giving off its own light.

Marveling at this change, my gaze falls upon the coarse white fabric serving partly as a coverlet, and which even in her coma Mom clenches in her right hand. It’s a “cotton sack,” and by this I mean cotton-picking sack—ten feet long and two feet wide—that Mom herself likely dragged behind her as a child, on the subsistence farm she grew up on in Louisiana. There, like her four siblings, she began picking cotton at the age of three—yes, three—and did not stop until eighteen, when she left home as the first in her brood to attend any college, to ultimately graduate first in her class. She brought this particular sack back from a journey over the river to Quitman Parish during her recent researches into her family’s past. In that desperately rural parish, near a town called Heronville, she picked her own family’s cotton, then other people’s for fifty cents per hundred pounds—same as the Black pickers working at her shoulder. Now she cannot even lift the cloth. But Lord, she traveled far before she faltered. How does a woman of such humble origins look

regal at the end?

The vibration of my cell phone startles me from my reverie. Reluctantly checking the screen, I see an incoming FaceTime from my daughter, Annie. Pressing the answer button, I wait for the flickering image to stabilize into the features that somehow meld the comeliness of the wife I lost at thirty-six with the earthy beauty of the woman on the bed before me. The pounding of powerful subwoofers thumps through my phone, and the whoops and cries of an amped-up crowd override whatever vocal is being chanted over the bass-driven hip-hop music. The first clear image I see is a message on Annie’s silk-screen T-shirt: JUST BECAUSE IT DIDN’T HAPPEN TO YOU, DOESN’T MEAN IT DIDN’T HAPPEN.

Next I see the café au lait face of Martine Boucher, the fortysomething French-Dominican filmmaker I befriended fifteen years ago, during the worst weekend of my life. Martine has been filming a documentary in “Cancer Alley,” between Baton Rouge and New Orleans, one featuring General Russel Honoré, but she brought a skeleton crew north for the weekend to film an all-day hip-hop concert being staged on a former cotton plantation called Mission Hill, a few miles south of Bienville. The outdoor festival is being held in solidarity with all protesters against the Memphis police shooting. While the Mission Hill event has proved controversial, even among local Black politicians (primarily because its organizers are notorious former felons), in the end the festival came off, drawing considerable talent from across the South. Our local mayor—a close friend for whom I reluctantly serve as city attorney—asked that I make an appearance if I can possibly get away from Mom’s sickbed.

“How’s Gram doing?” Annie asks, trying to hide the excitement in her eyes.

“No change.”

“Aww. I’m sorry. Well . . . is Althea still coming to relieve you at four thirty?”

Althea Foster is my mother’s favorite sitter. “She’s supposed to be.”

“Are you still planning to make it out here?”

In truth I never promised to attend the concert, and Annie knows this. “Hasn’t it been raining on and off all day?”

“Oui!” Martine cries with exuberance. “But the temperature’s wonderful, so it’s no problem. The music is fantastique! And the crowd is so young and wild. You must come out, Penn! You’ll enjoy yourself, I promise.”

The prospect of stumbling across muddy, uneven ground with my prosthetic leg while being jostled by a crowd of rap fans fills me with dread, but Annie and Martine already know this. Yet still they’re asking me to come. They must figure I really need the break.

“I just talked to Mayor Berry,” Annie says. “He really wants you out here.”

Ezra “Doc” Berry

is a retired physician whom I helped elect mayor in Bienville’s last election by largely running his campaign. After a rocky start, we closed out that battle in the history books, after Doc—a married Black man known to be homosexual—beat his white opponent by taking 94 percent of the vote in the general election. I don’t know whether Doc’s victory says more about his long history as a beloved physician, his distinguished record as a Vietnam medic, or Bienville’s character as a progressive Mississippi town, but his tenure as mayor—barring a highly contentious Covid year—has been relatively smooth and successful.

“Doc wants a white face in the social media photos,” I say wryly.

“Wouldn’t hurt,” Annie concedes. “But you won’t be the only one.”

“Who else is out there? A few old blues freaks?”

“How about Master Sergeant Bobby White?” A note of challenge puts an edge on Annie’s voice.

“What?”

“I shit you not, Dad. Bobby effing White has been all over this bluff, shaking hands with Black politicians and talking smack with guys he used to play baseball with.”

“Is anybody with him?”

“Nope. No bodyguards, no staff people, and most important, no camera crew. I figured he might be out here to film one of his TikTok videos. One with some Black faces in it, right? But no. And people are treating him like he’s the goddamn Second Coming! Black voters, you hear me?”

“What the hell is Bobby White doing at a local rap concert when he’s trying to put together a third-party run for the White House by next week? He must be there to film something.”

“They say he’s playing in that PGA pro-am at Belle Rose next Wednesday. And the rumor is that if his TikTok army gets enough names to register him third-party in every state, he’s going to announce from Bienville, since it’s his hometown.”

“I saw that on Twitter. I’ll be damned. I mean . . .”

“You seriously need to get out here, Dad. Bobby White may be running third party, but everybody knows he’s a Republican. You need to fly the flag for our side!”

“Well, at least Bobby’s pro-choice. I saw that ad he did on my cell phone. I liked it.”

“Daaa-ad,” she whines with real irritation.

“Boo, seriously, my stump is giving me hell today.”

“What if you don’t have to drive? What if Doc sends Ray to get you?”

Ray Ransom is a former Parchman convict who, after serving thirty-five years, runs a program in Bienville for wayward youth. A close friend of Doc’s, he also handles a dozen different jobs, from political adviser to bodyguard. “Doc needs Ray there a lot more than he needs me. And I’d still have to walk that uneven ground.”

“Ray has a golf cart! He can come get you in the parking lot and ferry you to the VIP bleachers where Doc and the Black aldermen are sitting. You won’t have to do any serious walking.”

She’s not going to relent.

“Penn, please,” Martine pleads, tilting her head in an inviting way she knows

I can’t resist. “Give yourself two hours! The headline act is coming up. They’re flying in this young female rapper from New Orleans. ‘Octa’ is her name, short for Octoroon. She’s the hottest new thing in the country. It’s going to be wild. Come dance with us!”

Despite considerable pain in my leg and elsewhere—sharp enough to penetrate the cushion of oxycodone—I feel my resistance crumbling.

“Okay . . . I’ll text you guys when I’m nearing the parking lot. Have Doc send Ray with his golf cart. I’ll watch this Octa girl long enough for Doc to get some photos with me there.”

“Awesome!” Annie darts out of frame as two young Black kids dance in front of her. “We’ll see you when you get here!”

Martine touches blue-painted fingernails to her lips and blows me a kiss, and then the screen goes blank.

Looking down at my mother’s placid face, I already regret giving in. If only they understood what I’m actually going through . . . they’d give me the space I need to deal with something that no one can be prepared for—

Imminent mortality.

As difficult as it is for any child to watch their parent die, for me it’s harder still. For my mother is dying of the same disease that will someday kill me—likely sooner rather than later. I am, in fact, watching a preview of my own passing, as I have been for the past five years, though only a handful of people know it. I realize I’m outing myself here—after decades of secrecy—but I can’t fully tell this story without doing so, and beyond that . . . two things occurred over the past week that let me know I’ll soon have no choice about public knowledge of my condition. The first was simple yet terrifying in the most visceral way imaginable. Lying half-asleep in bed, I rolled over my iPad and snapped a rib clean in two. I’ve dreaded such an event for more than twenty years, and nothing made it any less terrifying or painful when it finally happened.

The second event—which took place yesterday morning—was almost too surreal to believe. Having left Edelweiss to meet a photographer dispatched by Southern Living for an absurd photo spread on porches, I found myself facing a six-hundred-pound black bear standing on its hind legs outside the Parsonage, the antebellum home across the street.

The Ursus americanus luteolus stood with one enormous claw resting on the wrought-iron fence, as though considering purchasing the mansion within.

I was in my motorized wheelchair—something I use at times to rest the stump of my right leg—and thus could not flee. With a single swipe he could have decapitated me. Yet, strangely, I felt no fear. Or perhaps my helplessness was so complete that I’d simply passed into a state beyond terror. I felt rather a conviction that the great shaggy creature—like dogs that can smell certain tumors—somehow understood my plight, and most important . . . that my time is near.

Searching the bottomless brown eyes for a clue, all I could see was ineffable sadness, something akin in scale and kind to grief. The standoff continued

without him closing the distance dividing us, our eyes locked like those of any two beings separated by lack of common language.

I realized I might be deluding myself by searching for meaning. I might be nothing more than a meal on wheels to this beast that had stepped out of Faulkner’s Mississippi and into mine.

He had scars, I realized, one raking slash from ear to yellow snout, and another at his belly, a pale cicatrix that transected his ribs and ended in an ugly hump, most likely a spent bullet. This told me that the bear lived under ever-present threat of death, and more important, he knew it.

Our communion was broken by the squeal of motorcycle brakes and a uniformed cop shouting at me to back away from “the animal” as slowly as I could. As the officer drew his pistol, the bear broke eye contact to gauge the threat and I felt myself touch the joystick that put the wheelchair into reverse. With a click and hum I began to recede from him—or him from me—and even as the cop shouted uselessly, and sirens sounded in the distance, the bear dropped onto all fours and crossed Broadway, paused at Silver Street as though considering a visit to Natchez Under-the-Hill, then changed his mind and loped south toward Fort Rosalie with almost equine speed and vanished over the rim of the bluff. What I saw as a suicidal leap, he saw as safety. Two hundred feet of kudzu-covered loess soil with just enough slope to offer escape from men and guns.

The wildlife people had their explanation, of course, but I could have demolished that in three minutes. The thing I couldn’t put out of my mind was how, when at least a hundred marchers occupied the green space just across Broadway from Edelweiss, that old bear found his way to me alone, and others would only see him later, as more police and hunters were called in to try to run him to earth.

As a squad car screamed onto Broadway, the brief rumble of a turning cycle startled me from behind.

“Hey, mayor. You okay? You need help with that wheelchair?”

“No, I’m good. Thanks.”

“You look pale. You all right?”

For once, I actually considered this question: “No . . . No, I don’t think I am.” 

 

Chapter 3

WHEN I WAS thirty-eight years old, I began living a nightmare universally feared by most Americans. Feeling in perfect health, and possessing no symptoms of any kind, I walked into a tiny cubicle where an uncomfortable physician (in this case one of my father’s younger partners) nervously informed me that I had one of those diseases for which medical science can do nothing, and which would in an unknown but surely brief time remove me from the mortal plane.

It sounds like fiction, I know. A movie setup.

It wasn’t.

Having just published my third legal thriller as a Houston prosecutor, I found myself unexpectedly flush with money and flirting with fame. On the advice of my brother-in-law, an accountant with Arthur Andersen, I applied for two million dollars in life insurance, to protect the security of my four-year-old daughter. (Having lost Annie’s mother to cancer six months earlier, it seemed only prudent.) I went in for the insurance physical without a thought, and when my total protein came back a tenth of a point above normal, I didn’t worry. My father even told me not to worry. The only dangerous illness that my abnormal number might indicate was “an old people’s cancer”—multiple myeloma.

Ten days later, after a battery of further tests, I got the diagnosis:

Myeloma.

When you read that unfamiliar word, imagine a cobra wrapped around your bare leg, its hood flared, fangs bared, and slit eyes locked on yours. Imagine you are hours away from medical care, and that no antivenin exists, even should you reach a hospital. I’ll spare you the numbness, shock, confusion. The Kübler-Ross stages of grief: you’ll go through them all soon enough. (For your sake, I hope, much later in life.) But to understand how hopeless my verdict was in those days, one need only know that this obscure blood cancer had just killed the Arkansas billionaire Sam Walton—founder of Walmart—and that Walton had endowed a massive research center in Little Rock to try to discover a cure. I soon learned that myeloma wasn’t so rare after all, that Geraldine Ferraro suffered from it, in fact. Like all diseases, mine had its celebrity patients. But celebrity protects no one from such a deadly foe.

Because my father was a doctor, we were given access to an early experimental treatment in Little Rock, but side effects from the infusions nearly killed me, and after months of being monitored like a guinea pig waiting to be given its death date (all done in secret), I suddenly and quite irrationally walked away from all treatment, including Walton’s own physician.

Then . . . a strange thing happened.

I didn’t die.

Everyone else in my boat did, I’m sorry to say. But through some rare dispensation of fate or chance, I found myself in the luckiest one-hundredth of one percent of patients—those who live years beyond the normal prognosis, thanks to what doctors call a “smoldering” form of the mutation that would soon take the lives of Roy Scheider, Susannah York, Norm McDonald, Colin Powell, and many less famous people I knew from Mississippi and Texas. As those worthies fell, and their obit photos flickered across my TV screen, I would sit numb with my unknowing daughter, not quite believing I carried the same malignant proteins they did. I lived in terror of the inevitable moment that I would roll over in bed and snap a brittle bone, or find that my organs were failing after being choked with runaway immunoglobulins. . . .

And yet—

That didn’t happen, either.

Despite possessing the deadly daughter cells that had bored lesions into my spine

and skull (and created an agglomeration of cancerous plasma cells, called a plasmacytoma, in my pelvis), my smoldering variant of the cancer gave me what even Sam Walton had not gotten: the option of suffering in secret.

This was a precious gift, but also a curse.

Why?

Because it’s a desolate way to exist.

At first I lived in constant fear of exposure, a man walking in existential shadow, the hawk of mortality hovering over my shoulder. But my secret was so hopeless that eventually I learned to keep it not only from the world, but also from myself. You can do that, though you might not believe me. It requires a perpetually exhausting exercise of will, a supreme act of denial, but it’s a viable path, and perhaps a peculiarly male one. To reveal terminal vulnerability—the mark of doom, the black spot—to those who see you every day, to those who employ you, is more than a sobering prospect. It’s a submission, a surrender. I’d known people in that era to lose promotions, even careers, after being diagnosed with cancer. In response, I withdrew from doctors and science and began living a lie to protect my career, and thus my family. I believe profoundly in science, but the instinct to protect one’s child runs marrow deep, and the compulsion to huddle in the dark at the back of the cave lives deeper still. Confronted by a fatal disease for which no effective treatment exists, one either accepts death or turns away and perseveres in hopes of . . .

What?

A miracle? A reprieve? Granted by whom? The gods? Fate? Whatever that alternative is, I chose it. I simply went on with life, secretly knowing I lived under sentence of death. After all, doesn’t everyone live that way? They simply comfort themselves that their expiration date waits much further in the future. To my amazement, the road I chose not only led to an unprecedented period of survival, but to the absurd reality of watching my mother perish from the same disease—which she would not even be diagnosed with until two decades after fate condemned me to the same scaffold.

Things have changed profoundly since Sam Walton died. In the two decades of life my miracle has given me, tens of thousands have been treated with revolutionary new drugs and much-improved bone marrow transplants. Some have survived a considerable number of years. In the end, of course, they’ve all died. But today’s prognosis is better than it once was. If I’m correct about my present plight—that my smoldering cancer has finally “switched on”—then I’m likely to be hurried into a transplant regimen (something my mother was too frail to qualify for), which will offer me the best chance at long-term remission. That’s the future I’ve been trying to come to terms with for the past week: one in which I enter the Kubrickian isolation of a transplant room, where a sterile team obliterates my living marrow—the spongy cradle of all human existence—putting me into a terminally compromised state, during which they will seed my barren marrow chambers with stem cells previously harvested from the reservoirs in my pelvis, sternum, and spine . . .

Am I really ready for that?

In truth, I have

choice. The broken rib informed me of that, and yesterday the bear confirmed the none-too-subtle message (which I might have found a way to ignore). And if I ignore the message of the bear? What will nature send me next? A third warning? Or will Annie find me lying in my bed, having perished from organ failure, or anemia so severe that I die without even being aware the serpent was at my throat—

“Mr. Cage?” calls an alto female voice. “Mr. Penn? Hey! Mayor Cage! Are you all right?”

Someone is gently but persistently shaking my shoulder.

Starting in my chair, I look up and back, into the warm brown face of Althea Foster. The nurse and sitter is staring down with concern. “I knocked, but nobody answered,” she informs me. “I saw your car outside, so I figured you must be in here. And it’s four twenty now.”

“Althea,” I manage, rubbing my face. “I’m so glad to see you.”

“I’ll bet you is. You look terrible, if I say so myself. You need sleep bad.”

“Yeah . . .”

“How Mrs. Peggy doin’? Looks the same to me.”

“No change, I’m afraid.”

“I figured.”

I straighten up in my chair. “You didn’t want to go to the concert at Mission Hill?”

“Lord, no. I got no use for that hip-hop stuff. I’m an R&B girl from way back. Still got my daddy’s vinyl record collection.”

“I’m with you, ’Thea.”

“Besides, I hear it’s a mess out there with this rain. And that’s not all. My niece told me they had some food poisoning earlier, off a barbecue truck. And they’ve had so many kids just walk in up the bluff that they don’t have near enough toilets. They’re charging ten dollars for bottles of water out there. It’s still hot for October.”

“Wow. Well, I have to run out there for at least a few minutes.”

“Oh, no!”

“Mayor Berry asked me to, and Annie won’t let me out of it. Just tell me one thing before I go.”

“What’s that?”

“If I leave for two hours, is Mom likely to pass while I’m gone?”

Althea steps closer to the bed, reaches down and touches Mom’s cheek with her experienced fingers. “I don’t believe she will. Too well hydrated. Look at that color in her skin. Better than yesterday. I’m not saying she couldn’t have another stroke, now. That happens, I can’t take responsibility.”

“I understand. But she’s not just going to fade out like this?”

Althea touches my arm with empathy. “I’ll call you if I sense any change.”

“Thank you.”

Before I can go, the nurse lifts her hand and touches my cheek with the same

fingers she used on Mom’s face. “How are you feeling?” She takes hold of my fingers and examines my nail beds. “You look mighty pale to me.”

“I’m just tired. Exhausted, really.”

“I think you ought to go by Dr. Shaw’s and get stuck for a chem panel. Not my business, of course, but caretakers have to look out for themselves.”

“You’re right,” I say, wanting to get away before she can examine me more thoroughly. “I’ll check into it.”

She gives me the chiding look of one of my old grade-school teachers. “I wish Dr. Cage was still around to take care of Mrs. Peggy. You, too. I only worked with him two years before that damned trial, but Lord, he was one of a kind. Best family doctor I ever saw.”

“Mom would have had a completely different experience if he’d been here to take care of her.”

The nurse shrugs philosophically. “You know what they say . . . we ain’t put here to stay.”

She takes out a book and her smartphone, then settles into the recliner still warm from my body heat. “You be careful at that concert. Liable to be some rough types out there. All this gang trouble we been having . . . all that dope. You look out. You’re not young as you was, Mayor.”

“I’ll be careful.”

FOURTEEN MILES FROM the Mission Hill concert ground, Corey Evers pulled Bobby White’s gray Range Rover into the driveway of Belle Rose, the “big house” of one of the largest cotton plantations in Mississippi prior to the Civil War. Ten years ago, two thirds of the land had been sold to develop the Belle Rose golf community and country club. Next week, the club would host a PGA tournament it had been trying to attract for most of the decade. The board had finally succeeded, thanks to the economic boom brought on by the construction of the Azure Dragon paper mill, a two-billion-dollar Chinese manufacturing facility sited on the Mississippi River.

Charles Dufort, the eighty-four-year-old attorney and oil speculator who sold the board the land for the club, had retained a third of the original plantation for himself, as well as Belle Rose itself, an Italianate mansion of palatial scale and renowned design. He’d also kept three of the original six plantations his ancestors had owned before the war, which included two sugar plantations in South Louisiana and Tranquility in Natchez, a spectacular “suburban villa” in a city famous for them.

“Look at this palace!” Corey breathed with undisguised awe. “If it was anywhere but Mississippi, it would cost fifty million dollars.”

“That’s why we’re here,” Bobby said, as Corey put the Rover in park.

Corey nodded. “Didn’t Dufort tell you he wants you to evaluate a family

 letter? One suggesting that one of his ancestors played a heroic role in helping the Union navy run the Confederate guns at Vicksburg, prior to the siege?”

Bobby chuckled. “He did. It’s a decent pretext for this meeting, you have to admit. But if he has such a letter, it’s almost certainly a lie, if not an outright forgery. A typical attempt at reputational rehab in our PC era. The Dufort family actually looks pretty good from our age, despite being slaveholders prior to the war. They both resisted secession and supported Lincoln. But I used to play in Charles’s study when I was a boy, with his youngest son. He had some weird shit in there. Framed sugarcane machetes from various centuries. Stuffed pit vipers that the cane cutters had to contend with on the daily. Canebrake rattlers, copperheads . . . it was creepy, man.”

“The more I hear, the more Dufort sounds like a Harlan Crow–type billionaire. Just how well do you know that old man?”

“I know the son a lot better. As you know.”

Corey sighed with several degrees of frustration.

“I’ll tell you this much,” Bobby added. “I’m the son that old bastard wishes he’d had. He literally told me that when I was home on leave at nineteen.”

“That’s so pitiful.” Corey thought of what he knew of Bobby’s history with the family. “I can’t believe you’re even trying this.”

“Look, Charles called me. After getting calls from the biggest GOP donors from around the country. Something’s happening at the major donor level. But if we’re going to get access to that money, it has to go through Charles. I don’t really have a choice.”

“Don’t you? What about the Poker Club?”

“Ahh,” Bobby sighed. “If only . . .”

The Bienville Poker Club was a largely hereditary private club that dated back to the Civil War in Bienville, when some bankers and planters had banded together to resist the occupying Yankee forces in every way possible. Using a combination of business smarts, ruthlessness, and courage, they exploited the black market in cotton, thwarted and even cheated Union officers at every turn, and afterward—during Reconstruction—conned carpetbagging businessmen out of most of the legal profits they’d tried to extract from Tenisaw County.

Today some heirs of those men still possessed considerable fortunes, but on the Mississippi scale. In the Magnolia State, an oil magnate like Blake Donnelly might be worth eighty or ninety million dollars, and that bought a lot of respect. But in Massachusetts or California, such money wouldn’t even get you a seat at the VIP table. Men of such meager millions couldn’t help Bobby in his present situation. For that he needed real money, and the only man he knew personally who possessed it was the father of one of his most intimate friends from childhood.

In 1850, the original Dufort ancestor had been among “the nabobs of Natchez,” those cotton planters whose fortunes were so large, and spread so

liberally among family and friends, that the Natchez District contained more millionaires than any city in America except New York. But unlike most of those other families’ descendants, the Dufort children down the generations had inherited sufficient business acumen (and luck) to maintain their fortunes through all the lean years that followed the war, even through the Great Depression.

“How do you ask somebody for a hundred million dollars?” Corey wondered aloud.

“Start at two hundred?” Bobby suggested with a laugh.

Corey put one hand over his eyes and sighed with bitter humor as his phone pinged with a text. He checked it without hesitation. “Boom! We just hit forty-five thousand signatures in Indiana. That’s forty-three states, Bobby. This is getting real.”

The candidate grinned and pumped his fist. “Boo-ya! That’s a good omen going into this meeting.”

Corey made a fist with his left hand and gnawed at his forefinger. “Bobby . . . your history with this family’s too damned complicated to risk the kind of entanglement you’re about to get into with this old man. The risk is potentially catastrophic.”

“What alternative do you suggest? Seriously.”

“Something cleaner. Where there’s only a present and future, not a past filled with land mines.”

Bobby sighed with exasperation. “It’s the South, Corey. Every road leads back through the past.”

“Jesus. Let’s get this over with.”

Bobby yanked the Rover’s door handle and marched across travertine pavers to an entrance that dwarfed him. The man who lived behind that door could make or break his presidential campaign, and he was about as right-wing as they came, short of being a conspiracy nut. Bobby hoped this invitation had nothing to do with any historical letter about the Vicksburg campaign. Old people often became obsessed with genealogical pig trails like that, and he had no time to waste. And Corey was right to worry about the personal risk of dealing with the Duforts, of course. Bobby knew things about the family that would likely make the patriarch expend millions to destroy rather than anoint him. But Charles Dufort didn’t know he possessed such knowledge, and Bobby wasn’t about to walk away from this chance. As he listened to the heels of an efficient maid clacking over the floor inside, Bobby heard Tio Carrera’s parting words in his head: You gotta have some big balls to play this game. ...