SID PARTED THE BLINDS of their apartment above Mate Street, bending in his striped silk pajamas to look down on the street where the shoot-out had taken place exactly one year ago today. Where the gun thugs had been laid out before him, their blood spooling into the muck, and the mayor moaned with a bullet buried in his gut.
In the early light, Sid could see strange bodies hovering upright all over town. He wiped his eyes. Not ghosts but men, their pressed trousers and three-piece suits looped with leather cartridge belts, their military-issue rifles fresh from the crate, the blued barrels glazed with packing grease. They wore white armbands on their sleeves—an army birthed overnight from the county courthouse.
Jessie came to the window beside him. “What is it, baby?”
“God-damned Vigilance Committee, already out.”
“Vigilance?”
“Vigilantes. Puffy spoon-suckers don’t know they pricks from gun barrels.”
“Sidney.”
Sid knew their kind. Men who considered themselves rare and fine, turning up their noses at the people of the hollers and mines. They’d never descended into the black gut of a mountain before dawn and worked till night, missing the day’s short leap of sun from ridge to ridge. Never seen their kin hungry, truly hungry. Men who could afford for the world to stay the way it was. Who’d fight to keep it that way. They stood high-chinned at street corners, holy with duty, each armed with a rifle and eighty rounds of ammunition.
Sid rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “Like to see how cock-tall they walk after a week in the Stone Mountain Number Nine.”
Sid thought of them staggering into the light after twelve hours underground, six days in a row. A miner’s week. Their faces blacked with coal, their fingernails. Their armpits rancid, their spines crooked, their shoulders like balls of carbolic acid. Their palms ripped bloody from the hickory haft of a pick. Humble and sorry-eyed, like they’d look at the point of his bright gun.
When he didn’t move from the window, Jessie slipped her hand inside the fly of his silk pajamas. “Speaking of cock-tall.” Her breath tickled his earlobe. “I need that pistol of yours more than them this morning.”
Sid remained bent at the window, his nose thrust to the glass. An attitude of furious fixation, like a bird dog aimed at the street below. His temples rippled; his breath whistled through clenched teeth. His eyes zeroed on this corner and that.
Jessie’s hand found hold, coaxing and tugging him, drawing his attention back into the room. Her teeth found his earlobe, her breath tickling him, humming into his ear canal. She knew how to steer him from fixation. To loosen the bone clenched between his teeth. The one he and his ancestors could carry to the grave. She pressed her belly against his hip, her damp, scratchy heat against his thigh.
“Please, Sidney.”
Sid yielded and straightened from the window, letting the blinds fall back into place.
A MUFFLED RHYTHM OF raps on the door downstairs—the Union’s secret knock. Sid uncoupled himself from Jessie, his skinny thighs smacked rosy. Still in his pajamas, he took his bright gun from the side table and descended the stairs in his bare feet, skipping the steps that groaned. He held the pistol close to his belly, pointed at the door. Through the peephole, he saw one of the Union’s organizers, Lavinder. The man was looking over his shoulder, chewing his bottom lip.
They spoke in the dark of the stairwell, voices just above a whisper. Spies could be listening, their ears pressed to drilled holes in the wall or resonating pipes. The organizer’s face was sharp, a flinty mask of angular facets and creases. A man accustomed to living on a knife’s edge. He once told Mother Jones he couldn’t carry her across the creeks any longer—the Felts brothers had thrown him from a moving train, putting a permanent crook in his spine.
“Governor’s thrown down martial law again, Sid. President refuses to send the Regulars, but the governor’s got the state police and eight hundred men from the new Vigilance Committee all under command of Major Davis, the Bulldog.”
“That jowled son-bitch from the old Paint Creek days?”
“That’s him, Sid. Union-buster to the bone. It’s different this time.”
Sid wiped his nose with the back of his hand, still holding the lustrous pistol. “Say it is?”
“Governor’s set strictures in the martial law.” He passed a paper to Sid. “Nine in all. No right of public assembly, no right to bear arms. Holds a pillow over the press’s face. Not so much as a Union handbill allowed. Unconstitutional is what it is. They got us by the short and curlies, Sid.”
Sid didn’t look at the paper. The striped silk pajamas hung reckless from his bony shoulders, flowy as a robe. The bright gun glowed in his hand. He leaned to one side and stared over the man’s shoulder, at the door, as if he might walk out in his nightclothes and start shooting occupiers in the streets. His metal teeth gilded the darkness.
“We’ll see.”