Authors: Lewis Perdue
Vanessa Thompson had single-handedly deflected the trajectory of my life from that of privileged, multigenerational son of the Confederacy to a traitorous scalawag, who betrayed his race and turned his back on a heritage filled with statues and oil portraits in public buildings. I met Vanessa in 1965 when court-ordered integration placed her in my Jackson high school as part of a handful of token black students. I'd like to believe I changed way back then because Vanessa showed me how wrong the old system was. But it wasn't that way at all, not that clean and simple.
"You sure as hell know how to piss folks off, my friend," Rex mumbled to me as we made our way toward Vanessa.
I looked around and saw the white-hot hate stares shift from Vanessa to me and back.
"Comes naturally I guess."
"Damn straight," Rex said. "So how is it you know the famed Vanessa Thompson?"
"High school," I said, remembering the wild sweetness of adolescence and the intoxicating hormone rushes. "She was in my history class. She always spoke up—"
"That sure hasn't changed."
"—spoke up and always had something interesting to say. Things I had never considered. Dangerous ideas."
"Y'Mama thought you had way too many dangerous ideas. I imagine one of those started with her?" Rex nodded toward Vanessa.
"Not exactly."
"How exactly?"
"I fell in love with her a long time before her words really mattered."
Rex grimaced and made a sucking sound with his front teeth. "Lordy!"
I nodded.
The meaning of her words would grow paramount as time passed, but at first it was her voice, the tones and timbre of the words, the steel of commitment reinforcing her voice, the energy of her emotions, and mostly the inexorable gravity of her wisteriacolored eyes that pulled me into orbit and made me hers.
And the testosterone.
"Vanessa and the other black students took the same classes, ate lunch by themselves at the same table every day, and pretty much kept to themselves, " I said. "White students ignored them, like they were invisible. I started out the same way until American history."
"Let me guess," Rex said. "You committed the unpardonable sin of talking to them."
"To Vanessa," I said nodding. "Sometimes just a few seconds between classes. But that was enough."
"Nigger lover."
The word still hit me like a physical slap. No matter how much hip-hop practitioners gratuitously tossed the word around, it felt like a profanity of the soul.
"Scratched into my locker, painted on my car, spelled out on the front lawn with used motor oil. I think they tried to set the oil on fire, but Papa chased them off with his twelve-gauge.
"The principal called me into his office and told me to stop fraternizing with the enemy, something about 'godless Communists' being behind it all. He called my parents. My mother cried; my father said he'd lose his job."
"So she turned your head around?"
"In a manner of speaking," I said. The old irresistible rush fluttered in my gut as Vanessa drew closer. How could this be? How could this feeling endure over the distance of so many decades?
"I was in love. Civil rights started out as a way to her heart. It took a while for it to become an end of its own." I nodded at the memories that played out in my head. "I asked her what to read, who to listen to, how to find the subversive literature behind the movement.
"Not surprisingly, Vanessa's dad was one of the leaders. He was a professor at Tougaloo. The whole thing came to a head right before Christmas when Vanessa invited me to a discussion-group party at her house. I told Mama I had to do some research at the library, then drove north on old Highway Fifty-one toward Tougaloo. When I got to Vanessa's house, it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. That plain little tract house was packed—I mean literally jammed—with people of every color." I shook my head. "Black, white, Asian, Latino—" I turned to Rex. "I remember that day like it was this morning. I'd never, ever, been anywhere before in my entire life where blacks and whites and everybody else just ... just hung around as equals.
"I wasn't all that surprised to find all three of the Jewish students at my high school or the owner of the only real deli in town. But I was floored to find my physics teacher there, and that was my first indication that there were white people who didn't hate.
"When Vanessa took my arm, I was on cloud nine as she led me around and introduced me to people there. It was almost like the initiation into a secret society."
I felt the euphoria again as Rex and I covered the remaining few steps toward Vanessa. Now, as then, I felt the euphoria turn dark and ugly remembering how all hell had broken loose when she'd introduced me to her parents. Her father was furious, and his deep, booming anger silenced the assembled crowd.
"How dare you step foot in my house!" he yelled at me. "You of all people! Your entire family and your ancestors have done more damage to my people than anybody else in this state's sorry history!"
He was convinced that at worst, I was there as a spy, and at the very best, a fulminating embarrassment.
He and Vanessa's brother Quincy escorted me to my car and told me never to speak to her again. Vanessa transferred out of my high school the next week, and I had not seen her face-to-face again until this moment.
Now on this bitter day, next to one of the many graves hearing a rusty iron Southern Cross, Vanessa and I met again. She reached out and touched my forearm with her fingers.
Seismic plates moved again in my heart.
"I'm so sorry about your mother."
I opened my arms and she stepped into them as if the past thirty-five years had
"I'm very, very sorry to barge in at a time like this, but this Talmadge thing has gotten out of control in the past few days. We really need your help and I hoped to convince you in person."
As Vanessa spoke, movement from behind her caught my eye. Again, I found myself staring toward the big magnolia tree; this time, I registered movement far beyond, in the trees down by Roebuck Lake.
Before I could react, a rifle shot thundered through the chill air. Vanessa pitched forward. I opened my arms to catch her and saw an evil void where her left eye had once been. The warm, red-and-gray eruption from the ghastly wound blinded me. I grabbed Vanessa, rolled us to the ground, and covered her with my body as a second shot tore through the morning silence.
From a shadowy perch hidden beyond the silvery, weathered boards of a derelict and graffiti-smeared lakeside cottage, the shooter focused on the drama playing out in the perfect circle of the scope's eyepiece. The reddish mist from the lawyer's head appeared as a silent cloud of dust and created the familiar calming satisfaction that ran warm in the shooter's veins.
The shooter paused to get the first real-life glimpse of the famed Dr. Bradford Stone, legendary Marine recon operative turned healer and scientist. He was such a big man—six foot five, 230 pounds—that he filled the scope's field of view and made it hard for the shooter not to take him out instead of the intended target. Before the first shot, the shooter had canvassed his face, looked into the deep green eyes and compassed the lines of his face and the arrow-straight part in his short, graying hair, and knew she could have taken him out in another split second, but her employer had other plans for him.
The dossier they had given her on Stone tracked him through every country in Southeast Asia and included fitness reports that described a friendly, congenial, wellmannered, ethical, and deeply moral man with an outstanding record of killing those who were enemies of his country.
Stone's lengthy and highly classified record of his service both as an active-duty Marine and a government contractor afterward showed an unusual proficiency for killing, whether at close range with bare hands, knife, garrote, or at the farthest distances as one of the best snipers ever to graduate Camp Pendleton.
Then one day, he filed a request to train as his unit's medical officer. After Stone's request was approved, he became a gifted healer who could staunch a bleeding wound with one hand and kill an attacker with the other. Killing became preventive medicine.
The dossier contained extensive psychological evaluations indicating that Stone still had no moral issues with killing in the service of his country or his own self defense, but that he had grown weary of dealing with his postbattle regrets of killing other humans. And that he was
afraid that he'd stop having those regrets and begin to enjoy the process.
The shooter remembered a time when she had had to struggle with the personal nature of reaching out and touching her targets, seeing their faces and regretting the deaths as a necessity of war. But that regret ended with her own wounds. Now, killing brought her profound joy. Other soldiers killed to live, but she lived to kill.
"Bang," the shooter whispered faintly as the crosshairs of the Leupold scope tracked Stone and the dead lawyer as they rolled to the ground.
Then she heard the reports of a small-caliber weapon, a handgun from the sounds. She played the Leupold around the cemetery and quickly spotted a man with a shaved head firing in her general direction.
"Good-bye, motherfucker," the shooter said as she steadied her breathing and caressed the trigger like the lover it had become.
It was too damned cold to be Thailand or Vietnam, but in the next split second, my body reacted with the old combat reflexes my brain had developed there and in a variety of other warm, humid places where I was officially not supposed to be. Slugs thumped into graves around me as I gave Vanessa a great bear hug and rolled with her into a pale protective penumbra in the lee of a polished marble monument.
Slugs tracked us as I rolled, peppering my face with the sharp, stinging shrapnel of frozen earth. When the timbre of the slugs changed key and chewed at the soft stone of the marble monument, I knew we were safe, if only for a moment. I paused then to think, to plot a path of escape, or barring that, better shelter. I didn't want to die in a cemetery, although it did suggest a certain ironic propriety.
Then, a second firearm weighed in from my left flank with a higher, shorter pitch. I looked over and watched Rex shooting from the safety of Mama's headstone. His return fire silenced our unknown assailant. In the brief lull, people yelled into cell phones for help. An instant later rapid semiautomatic weapons fire from somewhere beyond the magnolia plowed the earth around Rex into potting soil, shredded the green canvas canopy, and ricocheted off the heavy steel of the backhoe. There was an instant of silence, the distant snick and clatter of a magazine being ejected, a fresh one inserted, followed by a volley coming as fast as our assailant could pull the trigger.
An instant later, the shots ceased. I focused my thoughts and stilled my ragged breath into the calm, steady rhythms that had served my survival so well in the past. I looked over at Rex. He gave me a thumbs-up and made a questioning nod toward Vanessa.
I wiped at the tissue that covered my face, then examined her closely. As the medical specialist for small, agile detachments of highly mobile combat teams, I had seen wounds like hers before and had never seen anyone survive. Regardless, I laid her gently on the cold earth, ignored the hideous wound, and searched all the usual locations for some signs of a pulse.
Finding none, I pulled back the lid on the intact eye and found the pupil wide, flat, and totally unresponsive even when I raked a fingernail firmly across her forehead. So dilated was the pupil that I had to close my eyes to remember the deep wisteria that had once made her gaze so compelling for me. I looked over at Rex and shook my head. From somewhere beyond the magnolia and, to my ears, farther down Lakeside Drive toward town came the high-pitched whine of an electrical starter, then the growl of a powerful motorcycle engine. It idled for only an instant, then accelerated swiftly into the distance.
As the sirens regained the upper hand over the receding motorcycle noise, Rex made his way over to me in quick, erratic lunges, using the headstones and monuments for cover in a practiced manner far too accomplished to be self-taught. One more mystery. As he crouched beside me, he tucked a palm-sized, nine-millimeter automatic into an ankle holster.
"Catch you later." He looked about with a quick, precise scan as the sirens grew louder. "Can't hang around." He gave me an enigmatic smile. "All those warrants, you know."
Then he was gone, all swift, fluid moves and secure, confident steps. I was even more convinced than before that I would not want him as an adversary.
With the immediate threat certainly gone, the great survival gate in my mind imploded beneath a flood tide of dark, biting grief. As I looked down at Vanessa—not really her, but at the deceptively dead sack of organic remains of what once had been her—I searched for a thought to tag this feeling with, a dust-to-dust sentiment or maybe something about remembering people as they had lived and not as they had died. But where I had remembered Psalms and sorrow and guilt with Mama, Nietzsche came to me now. Words I had not remembered since college filled my head and with the same dark emotional entourage that had accompanied my postadolescent Herman Hesse
Steppenwoff
phase. "Many die too late, and a few die too soon.... Die at the right time! ... Die at the right time—thus teaches Zarathustra."
I shook my head, trying to shed the words. But it was all too clear to me Vanessa had not died at the right time, and that made me angry. I held my hand close to my face and looked intently at the bits of gray matter clinging there. Fractions of a second before, the tissue had held Vanessa's mind. I had devoted my life to figuring out how this biological jelly mysteriously orchestrated itself into the phenomenon of consciousness, how it defined who we were and how it gave us the unique human consciousness of being conscious, our awareness of being aware of being aware.
I sat back on my haunches, transfixed by tissue that had once sustained genius and goodness, a sense of humor and one of outrage. Now the shards of Vanessa's mind were just sticky dying bits of organic dust-to-be thanks to the simple transfer of kinetic energy from a few grams of lead.
"Where are you?" I tried to imagine where her thoughts had gone.
Sirens pulled me back into the cold, bitter day as first one, then a second squad car came flying into the cemetery showering gravel over the nearby graves. A big, white, boxy ambulance followed a few seconds behind. The driver's-side door of an Itta Bena PD squad car opened, and a moment later a defensive-tackle-sized black man in a police uniform climbed out. He reached deliberately into the car and pulled from it a large black cowboy hat, which he carefully placed on his head. Only then did he look slowly around the cemetery and pull a large automatic pistol from its holster and hold it along his thigh, index finger resting ready outside the trigger guard. Shouts echoed through the cemetery. Everyone pointed toward me.
The cemetery grew silent again as the giant cop looked at me. His face was as broad and expressive as a cast-iron skillet as he took in my embrace of Vanessa. Something like disapproval rippled beneath his gaze, then turned to horror as he took in Vanessa's bloody, gaping wound.
I saw recognition make its way across his face. Despair, then anger, and finally sadness played across his face in cinematically swift flashes as he recognized Vanessa. During all this, the ambulance attendants stayed close to their vehicle, looking to the giant cop for directions. Finally, he holstered the automatic and made his way slowly toward me. The paramedics came running behind; the contents of their kits rattled in the stillness. I thought to tell them they could take their time, but my words found no voice.