Besides, it seemed like the next few years were going to be plenty hot right here in Mississippi. Sonny recalled the night he’d heard Medgar Evers had been shot in his driveway, then the day five months later when JFK had his brains blown out in Dallas. Sonny had hated both men, yet those killings had left him feeling strangely hollow, as though God had thrown away whatever rulebook came with the universe, leaving humanity to sink or swim on its own. The notion that he might soon be personally involved in that kind of assassination frightened him, and only his confidence in Frank allowed him to suppress his fear.

“You know the only thing we’re missing out here?” Frank said expansively.

“A half-dozen hookers?” Sonny suggested, hoping to mask his anxiety.

Frank grinned. “Nope. We need Norman Rockwell to paint this scene for posterity, and slap it on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post. This is America right here, goddamn it. The real America. And history in the making.”

Snake rolled his eyes, but Sonny and Morehouse held their silence. You never knew when Frank was joking about this kind of thing, and it didn’t pay to make assumptions.

“Let’s eat that gator,” Frank said, turning away and starting up the hill, his big shoulders rolling like a well-oiled machine.

As Snake came alongside him, Sonny said, “He’s serious about killing King and Kennedy, isn’t he?”

Snake’s eyes settled on Sonny with interest. “Why not? Both those guys already lost friends or brothers to bullets. If you step into the gap, you gotta figure you could get the same treatment. That’s war, ain’t it? We’ve all been there.”

As Sonny walked up the sandbar toward the smoking grill, he had to admit Snake had a point. Only this wasn’t the Pacific or Korea—or even Vietnam, wherever the hell that was. This was America. Which meant Snake was talking about a civil war. As soon as this thought flashed through Sonny’s mind, everything came clear, and a feeling of peace spread through him. Appomattox hadn’t ended anything; it had merely heralded an intermission. The war itself was still raging across the country, right under the shiny plastic surface of the American Dream. Some people pretended not to notice, or made out like the Russians were the real enemy. But anybody who’d read any history knew that great civilizations always crumbled from within. And to prevent that eventuality, Sonny was willing to kill whoever Frank said needed to die.

CHAPTER 3

Four Years Later
March 31, 1968
Near Athens Point, Mississippi