There were lots of people in the camp, entire families with children. It was strangely quiet. Even the children seemed subdued, walking or playing quietly in groups, and only occasionally would a lone child’s laughter ring out among the tents. The summer warmth had risen quickly from the damp ground and smothered the camp in sultry heat. The mist had risen farther from the ground, but still hung unbroken overhead, a bright white shroud that cloaked the world.
The strange silence that pervaded the camp kept Jason and Arlette from speaking as they made their way toward the back fence. Arlette kept her hand in her pocket, touching the box that held the necklace that Nick had given her. The camp had once backed onto a hardwood forest, but the chainlink wall now glittered between the camp and the trees, and the trees had been bulldozed back in order to clear a lane between the woods and the camp. A pair of deputies, neither in uniform, paced along the back fence of the camp. One of them had a shotgun in the crook of his arm, and the other—he drank Diet Dr. Pepper from a can—had a little black machine gun hanging on a strap from his shoulder. Jason walked slowly toward the fence, glanced left and right as he tried to find the weak spot in the camp’s defenses. Jason figured he wasn’t going to stay here long.
“You don’t go to fence,” someone said. Jason turned, saw an elderly black woman crouched in the shadow of a homemade shelter made out of plastic sheeting. “Only camp committee’s allowed to go to fence. You go to fence, they shoot you.”
The woman had no teeth and spoke with a kind of pedantic emphasis, as if she were talking to an unruly house pet. Her eyes were hidden behind thick glasses.
Jason’s nerves gave a shiver at this strange apparition. “Thanks,” he said.
“You don’t go near to fence,” the woman said.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Arlette said.
Jason smiled at the woman and crabbed off to the side. Walked along the inside at the fence, peering out. He felt the stares of the silent people in the camp, and they made him nervous. The trees that had been bulldozed down, he saw, had just been shoved to the back of the lane, piled up against the standing trees. Good cover there, he thought.
“Slow down,” said Arlette. “There’s no place to go.”
Jason stopped, took a breath. “You’re right,” he said. Then, “I’m looking for a way out.” Arlette stepped up to him, touched the scrapes on his face where the deputy’s boot had connected. “You okay?” she asked.
“Yeah. I’m fine.” He swallowed, grimaced, touched his throat where the strap had cut across it. “My throat hurts, though.”
“Thank you for trying to help my dad,” Arlette said. “That was brave.”
“I got pissed off,” Jason said. “That man didn’t even know who Nick was.” There was a pause. Jason saw sadness drift across Arlette’s brown eyes. “He thought he knew everything that mattered, I guess,” she said.
Jason looked at her and felt a restless urge to flee the moment, this unwanted intrusion of the difference that was at the heart of this perverse scene they’d just entered. What she meant was that the deputy had attacked Nick because he was black, and black was all the deputy saw, all he thought he needed to know. All the deputy thought he needed to know about any of the people in the camp, apparently. And he, Jason, was white. And in a camp full of black people who were probably very unhappy with white folks right now. He didn’t want to be mistaken for the deputy or one of his friends. He was surrounded by people who were, in the only way that now mattered, different from himself. He didn’t want to be a member of a minority; he wasn’t used to it, and he didn’t want to think about it. He didn’t want it to matter that Arlette and her family were black. He didn’t want it to matter that he was not. All he wanted to do was get away before it was necessary to deal with any of this.
“I’m getting out,” Jason said. “I don’t think it’s going to be hard.” He licked his lips. “You come with me, if you want. We’ll get on the boat and get out of here. Get to Vicksburg and tell people what’s going on.” He reached out, took Arlette’s hand. “Let’s get out,” he said. “Let’s get out of here. These people are bad.”
Arlette looked serious. “I don’t want you to get hurt. There’s the fence, and those men have guns.”
“Chainlink fences are easy. Back in LA, I used to scale fences all the time so I could go skating. They’re easy to climb, and if that doesn’t work you can go under.”
Arlette looked uncertain. “Let’s find out what’s going on first. Maybe we should talk to some people.” Jason glanced at the camp inmates, the eyes that watched him, that maybe judged him, that maybe put him in the same frame as they put the deputies.
“Okay,” he said reluctantly. “Okay.” If we have to, he thought. Nick and Manon listened in silence to Deena Johnson’s unadorned history of the camp. Partway through the story, Manon’s hand moved across the table to take Nick’s in her own. Nick squeezed her hand. At some point Manon had to take her hand back, because he was clenching and unclenching his fists, and he’d hurt her without meaning to.
Other people came into the tent while Deena was telling her story, either watching silently or adding details to the narrative.
“You can decide best how to tell the children,” Miss Deena said. “But you should tell them, because if they do not hear it from you, they will hear it from others in the camp.”
“Tell my daughter that a bunch of clay-eaters are going to try to kill us,” Manon said. Anger burned in her words.
Deena looked at her. There was a terrible cold objectivity in her eyes. “Yes,” she said. “Yes, or she will not know how to behave when the moment comes. Because we have decided—we have voted—that we will no longer cooperate in any way with these people. No one will leave to work on this other camp of theirs, or to live in it, until someone is taken to the camp and returns declaring that it exists.” Manon’s eyes grew shiny. Her chin trembled. “I will not—” she began to declare, and then turned away, blinking back tears. Nick took her hand again. He could feel his jaw muscles hard as armor.
“What is being done?” Nick asked Miss Deena. “What are you doing to stop them?” The older woman shook her head. “It took us too many days to realize what was happening. And then it took us too long to get organized—the camp was like a committee of two hundred people, each with their own ideas. Some of us resisted on their own and were killed. And we have so few resources, so few weapons, so few people who have had military training.” She looked at Nick. “I don’t suppose you have a military background?”
A chill laugh broke from Nick. “I was raised in the military,” he said, “and my daddy was a general.” He looked at her. “But what I do for a living, Miss Deena—when I’m working—is design weapons.”
PART THREE
J1
THIRTY-THREE
Nothing appeared to have issued from the cracks but where there was sand and stone coal, they seem to have been thrown up from holes; in most of those, which varied in size, there was water standing. In the town of New Madrid there were four, but neither of them had vented stone or sand—the size of them, in diameter, varied from 12 to 50 feet, and in depth from, 5 to 10 feet from the surface to the water. In travelling out from New Madrid those were very frequent, and were to be seen in different places, as high as Fort Massac, in the Ohio.
Matthias M. Speed (Jefferson County, March 2, 1812)
So Nick, in his capacity as military brat and weapons designer, was put on the Escape Committee, seven men who met more or less permanently beneath one of the pecan trees, at least until one or more of them got mad at the others and stomped out. There were no qualifications for being on the committee, only the fact they’d volunteered. They were an argumentative bunch—two were elderly, and had to have things repeated to them—and they were all full of ideas and scorned the ideas of others, and were all too aware that they’d probably only have one chance to organize a big escape. All of this—most of all the knowledge of their own responsibility—had created a
paralysis that had resulted in very little being decided.
They were able to inform him chiefly of what would not work. He heard of the two boys who had tried to drive away, only to have one shot by the Klan Sheriff’s son while the other disappeared. He’d heard of the man who had charged the cops shooting his pistol and been shot dead. He heard about the Klan Sheriff Paxton bringing the Imperial Wizard by to show off his camp. He heard about the twenty-eight men—all single, all without family in the camp—who had been taken away, allegedly to build another camp, and who had never been seen again. He heard of the junkie who had run out of narcotics, who had gone into a screaming fit, been carried away by deputies, and who had not returned. He heard of the diabetics who were running short of insulin, people who needed other medication, and of the mothers whose babies needed milk, and how terrified they all were that their supplies could be cut off. He heard of the man who wriggled under the wire one night and escaped into the country, and whose body was exhibited by the deputies the next day. “He was shot by a neighbor,” a deputy told the camp. “We didn’t have nothin’ to do with it. The folks ’round here hate you; I’d stay in the camp if I was you.” Nick was told about the spotlights that were turned on along the camp perimeter at night to illuminate the lanes on all sides of the wire. He was told about the random bullets fired into the camp at night. He was told that the water table was about four feet below the surface of the water, which meant no exit via tunnel, a la The Great Escape.
All the Escape Committee had managed to do was prepare a signal. Occasionally they heard the thrum of helicopter engines, presumably some relief agency or other delivering supplies to Shelburne City. No helicopter had actually been seen, but next time one was heard, the committee planned to ignite a bonfire of tires taken from the cotton wagons, and hope the column of dense, thick smoke would attract attention.
It certainly seemed worth a try, Nick thought, even though one of the Escape Committee, a thin, intense man of late middle age who called himself Tareek Hall, insisted that this was only one of many death camps, that white America had chosen this moment to exterminate all blacks, that this was all a well-planned worldwide conspiracy. Tareek seemed very happy when he spoke his theory aloud. It obviously gave him great satisfaction to know that millions of people wanted to kill him. Even paranoids have real enemies, Nick told himself.
Nick was told that the camp’s assets in any future conflict consisted of three handguns that had so far escaped the deputies’ attention, an assortment of knives, clubs, hammers, and other improvised hand weapons, plus the services of about twenty veterans of the armed services, aged from their mid-twenties to their sixties, none of whom had ever seen combat. A number of the refugees were country people who had been hunting all their lives and knew how to shoot a rifle, but few of these had even been in the military, and none had fired a shot in anger.
And there were about four remaining gangsters who, as they had arrived with their families, had not been shipped out like the other gangsters. They could be counted on for aggression if nothing else, though one was reluctant to surrender his pistol for the common good.
The Escape Committee had at least made a survey of the guards: which ones would talk, which could be bribed, which would respond only with anger, with blows, or by racking a round into his shotgun. Two guards patrolled the back of the camp at all times. One on each side. Two in front. All were armed with shotguns, machine pistols, or assault rifles. Any of these weapons could perpetrate a massacre. Three or four deputies manned the roadblocks on the highway to either side of the camp. Those four openly displayed scoped hunting rifles that could pick off anyone at long range. The roadblock guards were, in their way, more dangerous than the men patrolling the perimeter, because they could kill from a distance and because there was no way to reach them. Two of these men moved to the camp at night and mainly patrolled around the back, where an attempt to escape to the woods was more likely. The seven argumentative men of the Escape Committee, after vetoing a lengthy series of complicated proposals, had finally thrown up their hands and decided to attempt a mass escape. They’d try to cut the wire, or with the sheer weight of the inmates bash down a part of the fence, and then everyone would pour out of the camp and run into the woods.
It didn’t sound promising to Nick, and he said so. Nobody knew the country. They’d be running blind into the woods with killers firing at their backs. By the time any escapees got through the woods, the deputies could have a whole line of men waiting on the other side of the woods and catch them between two fires. No one knew how large the woods was, or how possible it was for people to evade capture once they were in the trees. Nobody knew of an escape route once they were away from the immediate area. There was no transportation out of the parish even if they did evade the deputies.
“I don’t like it,” Nick said.
“What else can we do?”
“I don’t know,” Nick said. He rubbed the old wound on his arm. “I don’t know.” You need a rear guard, he thought. That’s what his father would tell him. Bunch of civilians in flight, you’ve got to have soldiers who stay behind fighting to make sure they get away. But you can’t have a rear guard armed with three pistols and some clubs. That wasn’t a rear guard—that didn’t even achieve the dignity of suicide. It was pure absurdity. Even if the rear guard were brave, even if they made up their minds to sacrifice their lives, they’d last only a few minutes, and then the horrible pursuit would begin, the massacre would stretch over miles, armed men pursuing helpless people over the countryside.
We’ll need to get their weapons, Nick thought. Then we can put up a fight.
“They’re punks,” Nick said, more to himself than to anyone else. “Punks,” he repeated. “Punks back down when you show fight.”
“Maybe some of them will. But some of those redneck bastards learned to shoot at their granddaddy’s knee. The same place they learned to hate niggers.”
“Let me think,” Nick said. He wished his father were here. “How do they get food in?” he asked.
“They come every two-three days. They bring less food all the time, and never enough, so they can sell us food for money sometimes. But they bring more guards along with the food, and they come armed. March a few of us out of the camp to take the food, then march them back in. The guards hardly ever come in the camp themselves.”
That seemed the best chance for getting weapons, Nick thought. Swarm through the gate and bowl those crackers over. They would take casualties, but that was going to happen no matter what.
“When did they last bring food?” Nick asked.
“Yesterday.”
So he probably had a while, Nick thought, to let that plan mature. But not long. Not longer than overnight.
“Have we got a map?” he asked.
Where could you hide? Nick wondered. Where—assuming you had soldiers—could you hide them?
Back in the woods, certainly. Once you got back beyond the bulldozed area, the trees were relatively open, you could even maneuver your men back there.
The parking lot. Eighty or a hundred cars parked helter-skelter by the side of the road. You could hide people in the cars—if you could first get them out of the camp—then have them jump out from ambush. And the cars provided mobility, too. If he could get people into the cars, they could drive to the roadblocks and fight the riflemen at close range.
Nearby buildings. There was an old tumbledown church—literally tumbled down in the quakes—less than half a mile south of the camp. If he could hide soldiers there, he could enfilade the southernmost of the two roadblocks.
The bar ditch by the side of the road. It didn’t provide much cover, but it was better than nothing. And the camp itself. When all was said and done, there was a surprising amount of cover in the camp. Tents, blankets, and opaque plastic sheeting could hide people from sight even if they wouldn’t stop a bullet. And slit trenches could be dug secretly, inside the tents, to provide cover. The slit trenches would fill wi
th water, with the water table as high as it was, but getting wet was better than getting killed. It might be a good idea to dig slit trenches under all the tents. Hide the children there, till it was time to run for the woods.
His head pounded where the deputy had kicked him. The pain in his kidney made him walk bent over, like an arthritic old man. The barely healed wound on his left arm throbbed. He could feel the tension lying like iron in his shoulders and neck as he walked about the camp making notes on paper. At the end of his tour, he looked at his notes and saw they looked like the scrawls of a madman. Got to do better, he thought. Got to do better, for Arlette and Manon. The grownups didn’t want to talk much. Arlette approached several, with Jason tagging along, and each greeted Arlette, and some asked about her family and where she came from, but they evaded answering Arlette’s questions about the camp.
“There’s a big secret here,” she told Jason. “I’ve never known black people to clam up like this. This isn’t natural. This is not right.”
They kept walking through the camp. Little insects raced along Jason’s nerves with swift sticky feet. His heart gave a leap at the sight of some white people—there were actually white people in this camp, two men and a woman—and he almost ran up to them to say hello.
But he didn’t. Now I’m doing it, he thought. Now I’m rating people by their skin color. His mind whirled. How do I get out of this trap? he wondered.
The Rift Page 80
