“Ralph had found a carbine rifle to go with his shotgun. A couple of little boys was loading guns for people and there was even a girl, this high school girl wearing an old brown army coat and a straw hat, who was running around carrying ammunition and seeing to the ones that’d got hit. A lot of us got hit, but not me. The bullets came whizzing by, real insolent-sounding. A boy stood up on a roof across the street and he was waving a piece of white cloth, surrendering, I guess, but they shot him anyway. He just pitched on his face and slidded down the roof. He knocked up some shingles as he fell and they spilled off the roof with him. He dropped into a big holly bush. Some more of our boys came around the corner and one of them had one of those big repeating rifles, a BAR. No telling how he got it. Somebody said the armory’d been busted into, I guess that was it. He set this big gun up behind a pile of kettles from I don’t know where — they was piled up on a couch — and he started shooting. He hit a man in the head, a big man in a bright blue shirt, and it looked like his head just snapped off. The bullets kicked splinters off this big church pew some of them was hiding behind. He looked at me once and he had a grin on his face like it had been stuck there last night and forgot about.
“Then just about a minute after he started firing we saw the airplanes. They was two of em, double-wing planes flying right down the street. Men was shooting rifles out of both of em. One plane was painted bright yellow and it had the word SKY KING on the side. The other was a army plane, you could tell by the target it had painted on it. They wobbled as they came. They wadn’t too high up but high enough so it was hard to get a bead on em. A few peoples at that point started running. The planes flew right at us and when they got close up over us, this man in one of them hung out the side and threw a jug of gasoline with a fuse in it that busted right over the left side of the hideout and spilled fire on everybody over there. That set people to hollering and running.
“One of the ones got hit by the gas was the girl. I was watching. This big tongue of flames shot right up over her back and caught her head and hat both on fire. She tried to run, but she tripped and fell, not ten feet from me. I had jumped back and didn’t get nothing but the scorch. The girl was burning all over the back of her and her hair and that hat mixed in was burning bright red like a halo. She wadn’t saying nothing. Me and Ralph started throwing dirt on her to put the fire out, but it didn’t help much, at least at first. Then we got it out. Her army coat had melted right onto her skin. She was smoking and crusty and the back of her head — maybe it was the crust of that hat — was like a black leather helmet. In one place you could see through to the skull bone. She was still restless. She kept trying to draw up her legs but she couldn’t quite. She never had said nothin. She opened her eyes real wide and looked at us, but she didn’t seem to recognize us, and then she shut her eyes tight.
“The other plane had gone by and then it circled back, the yellow one, the Sky King, and when it got over us this man in a army uniform threw out a stick of dynamite. You could tell it was dynamite because it was burning on a fuse. The stick missed and blew up in the street. The shock was like somebody shoving against you. We all — the last of us standing — hightailed it then. There was nothing else for it. We ran for our lives, what lives we had. Amazing how beat up you could get and still want to live. That girl died while we was looking at her. She was squirming, trying to get up, til all of a sudden she shuddered, let out a little sigh, and stopped dead. That was it. There was tears in her eyes but you could see she wadn’t looking at nobody, least none of us.
“I got out of there and on out of town and hid in the big woods on the other side of the brass works. They say that most of the people in Greenwood was rounded up and taken out to camps over toward the old fairgrounds. Put inside wire fences like they was beasts and left there in the hot sun to suffer. The white boys walked around town, they said, just shooting at will.”
He stopped talking and sat quietly, patting the corn dust, leaving with each pat a new print of his palm. Delvin saw in the traces that his two middle fingers were the same length and knew this meant something to fortune-tellers but he couldn’t recall what.
“Damn, damn,” Mr. Rome said softly.
