Natchez Burning by Greg Iles

alligators. Hell, there were
bears
in this swamp.
    “What difference does it make?” Revels moaned at last.
    “Get up, damn you! Or I’ll shoot you in the pelvis. That’ll make a difference, I promise you.”
    “Tell me where my sister is. Then I’ll get up.”
    “I don’t know!”
    “But ya’ll ain’t done nothin’ else to her?”
    “No!” Sonny yelled, blocking out the memory of all they’d done to Viola Turner. He couldn’t bear to think about that. “She got away, I told you.” He squinted at his watch in the dim light. “You saw it happen. She’s probably with Dr. Cage right now, all patched up and pretty again.”
    “That’s impossible, after what ya’ll did.”
    “Move, boy!”
    Revels struggled to his knees, then crawled out of the rocking boat and collapsed in the grass. He was lying squarely in a deer path.
    Sonny picked up his flashlight, climbed out of the boat, and kicked Revels’s thigh. “Get your ass up, damn it!”
    “Why for? You just gonna shoot me and roll me into the water so the gators get me. Go on and do it.”
    “That’s not what I’m gonna do. I’m just leaving you out here for a couple of days, till things cool down.”
    “Leave me, then.”
    “Not here. Inside the tree.”
    Revels rolled over and looked at the gigantic cypress. “
In
the tree? What you mean?”
    “This tree is hollow. I want you to get inside it.”
    Swollen, bloodshot eyes looked up into Sonny’s flashlight beam. “You lyin’, man.”
    “I ain’t. The deer get up in there and sleep sometimes, ’cause it’s dry. See that crack there? They call this the Bone Tree, ’cause wounded deer crawl up in there to die. You’ll get up in there, too, if you want to live. This is gonna be your jail for a couple of days.”
    Revels stared at the black opening for half a minute, thinking. Then he rolled over and slowly got to his feet. Sonny prodded him in the back, pushing him up the hummock, toward the crack in the fibrous wall of wood. Only eighteen inches wide, it stretched upward for ten feet, gradually narrowing to nothing.
    “I ain’t going in there,” Jimmy said with boyish fear. “Ain’t no telling what’s up in there.”
    “Ain’t nothing in there now. The animals heard us coming from way off.” Sonny stepped forward and rapped the side of the tree with his pistol. “See? If there was a deer in there, he’d have bolted.”
    “Might be snakes in there.”
    “You’ll just have to take your chances. Go on, now. I got to get out of here.”
    “I’ll just come back out after you leave.”
    “I’m gonna nail a board up.”
    Revels stared into the yellow beam and spoke in a voice stripped of all affect. “I know you didn’t like what those others did to Viola. Or to me. I saw it in your eyes.” He held up his bandaged arm, showing the gauze Sonny had wrapped around the wound made by Snake Knox slicing off the boy’s navy tattoo. “You were raised a Christian, just like me, Mr. Thornfield. How can you do this?”
    Sonny shook his head and looked away, at the black water to his right. The kid was right about the torture, but he didn’t seem to grasp the nature of race war. Having a common faith meant nothing. Niggers weren’t true Christians, after all. As slaves, they’d simply latched on to the faith of their masters in desperation, not realizing that the master simply used religion to keep them tame.
    “Go on, now,” Sonny said, motioning toward the crack with his pistol.
    “I ain’t going,” Jimmy insisted. “I can’t.”
    Sonny gauged his chances of stuffing Revels through the crack if he was dead. The boy was thin enough, but Sonny didn’t relish the idea. Moving dead men was hard work. “You go on, Jimmy, or I’ll shoot you where you stand. That’s the deal.”
    “Is Luther dead?”
    “He is,” Sonny said, hoping it was true.
    Jimmy’s shoulders sank, and whatever resistance he had left went out of him. “At least you told me the truth. So maybe