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, like in 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 with 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.
A golden beam of sunlight suddenly illuminated the camp. Jason looked up, saw that the pall of cloud that had covered the world was beginning to break up. A modest wind stirred the humid air.
He saw that Arlette was walking away from him, heading toward three boys who looked a few years older than she and Jason. They were all taller and bigger, dressed like almost everyone else in an assortment of ill-fitting, ill-judged clothing. Their hair was uncombed and stuck out in tufts, and thin, youthful beards shadowed their cheeks. Reluctance dragged at Jason’s heels as he followed Arlette toward the three.
“Hey,” she said. “I’m Arlette.”
“Sekou,” one of the young men said. “This is Raymond.” He did not bother to introduce the third.
“We just got here,” Arlette said.
Raymond flicked Jason a glance from beneath heavy-lidded eyes. “Who’s your friend?” he asked.
Jason figured he could speak for himself. He told them his name. The other boys ignored him. “How you get here, baby?” Raymond said to Arlette. “You come on a boat, or they open a road?”
“We were all on a boat.”
“Come through that storm, huh? That must’ve been hard.” He put an arm around Arle/te. “You get all wet, baby? I dry you off.”
Jason’s hackles rose at Raymond touching Arlette. He didn’t much like Arlette’s acceptance of the touch either. “What we wanted to know,” Jason said, “was what’s going on here.”
Sekou sniffed. “What’s it look like, man? One-eighty-six.”
Arlette stiffened. The third boy, the one whose name hadn’t been mentioned, looked amused. He shifted his toothpick from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Boy’s never been stomped by a cop before,” he said.
This didn’t seem much in the way of credentials to Jason. “I’ve been arrested, if you think that’s important,” he said, exaggerating somewhat. “I’ve come a thousand miles down the river in my boat. And this is the second camp some nutcase has stuck us in. We got out of the first one, and we’ll get out of this.”
“Shi-it,” Sekou said, drawling the word out.
Jason decided he was not about to impress these guys no matter what, so he decided he might as well keep silent. Arlette flashed Raymond a smile— jealousy burned through Jason like a blowtorch— and then she shrugged out from under his arm. “Nice meeting you,” she said. “I got to Audi.”
“See you later,” Raymond said. Jason followed her another thirty feet, and then she stopped under one of the old pecan trees and turned to him. He was surprised at the drawn look on her face.
“What’s the matter?” he took her hands. “One of those guys say something?”
“One-eighty-six,” Arlette said. “Sekou said that.”
“And . . . ?” Jason said.
An inscrutable look passed over her face. “Don’t listen to hip-hop much, do you? One-eighty-six— that’s a police call. It means murder.”
That’s where Manon found them, clutching each other’s hands beneath the pecan tree, and she took them aside and— her voice halting, tears welling slowly from her eyes— she told them what Miss Deena had said to her.
*
What else we got to make weapons with? Nick thought. He could feel pain throbbing through the veins in his temples, a new viselike grip with each beat of his heart. There had to be more than sticks and stones. More than three guns. There had to be something.
Miss Deena was surprised when he burst into the cookhouse while she and some others were preparing the noon meal. “Gotta be something here,” he said. “Ammonia, something.”
“What do you want, Nick?” Deena demanded. “We are busy here.”
“What do you use for a cleaner? Ammonia? Anything?”
Deena pointed with one bony finger. “Back there, boy. In the chest.”
The chest was a heavy thing, tin nailed over a wood frame, probably used as a cooler for milk or drinks or bread in the days before light plastic coolers were invented. Standing next to it was a fifty-gallon metal drum with the red-and-yellow Civil Defense symbol on it. Inside were wrapped stacks of crackers, like the ones Nick had eaten for breakfast.
My God, he thought, those crackers have probably been sitting in some basement since the Cuban Missile Crisis. Someone had found them and shipped them to the camp to feed refugees. No wonder they’d tasted rancid.
Nick rummaged through the bottles in the cooler, read yellowed old labels on bottles that had sat here for, probably, decades.
Methanol. Oh, thank God. Somebody had been traditional in their choice of solvents.
“What else you got?” he demanded. “You got any fuel? Gasoline, oil?”
“They’s a tractor,” an old lady said. “Out in the tool shed.”
Nick grabbed the methanol and ran out the door. The tool shed was thirty feet away. The lock had been broken during the previous night’s rainstorm, so that the place could be used for shelter. The tractor— actually a lawn tractor with a 42-inch mower blade— had been shoved out onto the grass. There were some blankets and clothing inside on the soggy, oil-soaked wooden floor, but no one was in the shed at the moment.
Nick ran inside, saw the pair of five-gallon red plastic jerricans standing against the wall. His heart leaped. One was filled with gasoline, and the other was half-full. On a wooden shelf at head-height were three dusty cans of motor oil.
Pain beat a wild tattoo in Nick’s skull. Madly he sifted through the contents of the shed.
Insecticide and a sprayer for fire ants. Gas-powered weed trimmer. Miscellaneous garden tools— from the selection remaining, Nick figured that the ones that could be used for weapons had already been taken. Bases for the sftball field and fielders’ gloves— the bats and helmets were gone. Cleaning rags. A piece of canvas so oil-soaked and rotten that no one had yet been desperate enough to use it for shelter.
Wildflower seed. A twenty-pound sack of Scott’s lawn fertilizer, half-used.
Nick pounced on the bag of fertilizer like a parched man lunging for a fountain. Ammonium nitrate. He wanted to hold the dusty old bag to his chest and dance a waltz.
He stood, looked around the musty-smelling shack. It was a simple equation. Petroleum products plus ammonium nitrate equaled boom.
Boom, he thought.
Boom.
Carrying his bag of fertilizer and his plastic jug of methanol, Nick went to the Escape Committee, still in permanent session beneath the pecan tree, and told them he could make explosive.
“But explosive isn’t any good without a way to detonate it. We need blasting caps, or something like them. I can make them, if we’ve got the right ingredients.” He waved his bottle of methanol.
“Bombs?” one of the older men said. “Want to blow down the fence?”
“I had something else in mind,” Nick said. He wiped sweat from his face. Pain beat through his head. “Antipersonnel weapons. Claymore mines, command detonated.” He looked over his shoulder at the gate. “We kill them. Kill a lot of them, all at once. And then we take their weapons and we fight.”
The seven men of the Escape Committee looked at him, silent for once.
Boom.
Nick made list after list. There was so much to do. Get the battery from the little tractor, so that he could boil the contents down to make sulfuric acid. Get Miss Deena to put out a call for aspirin, which could be used to make picric acid as a booster explosive for detonators. Chip bits of lead off the well pipe and the pipes in the cook shed, to make lead monoxide, which was a preliminary step necessary to make lead picrate as a primary explosive in detonators.
But the first thing on the list was to collect buckets of human manure from the piles behind the outhouses. Because that could be turned into saltpeter, which was necessary for just about everything.
*
“You want your sand buggers?” one of the old men on the committee asked him.
“Hm?” Nick said.
“You want your sand buggers, you best get in line.”
Nick looked up and saw that a line was forming at the dining tent, and he decided that though he had no idea what a sand bugger might be, he knew he was probably hungry enough to eat one. He rose from his crosslegged position under the pecan tree, and walked to the end of the line, still carrying his notes.
Manure, he thought, quite a bit of it. He hoped there was enough methanol to do all the work he needed it to do.
He looked up, saw Manon walking toward him. Her long hands rested on the shoulders of Jason and Arlette. From the solemn look on their faces, Nick could tell that Manon had told them what had been happening here in Spottswood Parish.
“Nick,” Manon said as she approached. “Tell Jason that he’d be a fool to try to escape tonight.”
Nick hesitated before answering. The objections he’d given to the Escape Committee in regard to their planned mass escape might not all apply to a single individual.
But the single individual could still get himself killed.
“I wouldn’t leave without Arlette,” Jason said. “But I think it could be done.”
Arlette’s name set alarms jangling along Nick’s nerves. There was no way that Nick would let his daughter go over the wall before he could make it absolutely safe. “I’m working on something else,” he said.
“What else?” Jason asked.
Nick looked uncertainly at the people standing with him in line. “I’ll tell you later,” he said.
It occurred to him that not all the people in the camp might be safe. He didn’t know how much contact they all had with the guards, or— as far as that went— which of them might just be too talkative, too inclined to boast to his captors.
They stood in awkward silence in the food line till they received a sand bugger apiece— a patty of vegetable matter, fried like a hamburger and consisting mostly of potato with bits of onion and greens mixed in. With this was served a spoonful of baked beans and one of the strange, greasy crackers they’d had when they’d first arrived at the camp.
It all tasted awful. Nick ate every bite, then licked the plate. Then he took the others aside and told them what he was going to do.
Jason wanted to help, so Nick collected some plastic buckets and a shovel and went behind the nearest outhouse. Piled high was a decade’s worth of manure covered with bright green grass and blazing red pods of hearts-a-bustin’-with-love. Nothing like a shit pile, he thought, to make a fine flower garden.
“Dig,” Nick said. “Slowly.”
Jason gave him a thoughtful look, as if wondering if Nick had chosen this moment for some strange joke, and then apparently decided otherwise and began to dig. Jason turned a few spadefuls while Nick peered into the pile, and was rewarded with the sight of a line of dirty yellow crystals running through the soil.
Yes, oh yes, he thought. Potassium nitrate. Saltpeter.
Boom.
Jason filled three buckets with crystal-laced dirt, then he and Nick carried them to the cookhouse, where Nick filled another bucket with wood ash from one of the campfire circles. He took a fifth bucket and punched holes in the bottom, put the bucket in a big saucepan, put a towel in the bottom of the bucket, and poured in a layer of wood ash. Then he put another cloth on top of the wood ash, filled the rest of the bucket with night soil. He told Jason to go into the cookhouse and asked them to boil some water, and when the water began to boil he poured it into the bucket a little at a time while Jason watched.
“What in heaven’s name are you doing?” Miss Deena asked from the shadow of the cookhouse.
“Making saltpeter.”
“You going to add that to our food? Think we’re getting too sexy around here?”
“I’m going to do a magic trick.” He looked up at her from his position hunkered by the bucket. “I’m going to make guards disappear.”
Deena gave him a cold look. “Uh-huh,” she said.
“You’ll see,” Nick said.
“I got that aspirin you wanted.”
“I’d like to take a couple. For my head. I won’t need the rest till later.”
She gave him some aspirin. Nick swallowed them and poured hot water into the bucket. He repeated the procedure until he was out of earth.
When he was done, he poured the hot liquid from the saucepan to a clean saucepan, throwing away the dark sludge left behind. He went into the cookhouse and put the saucepan on a burner. Miss Deena and the other cookhouse crew watched him with suspicion.
“What now?”
“Crystals will start forming in the water after a while. We want to scoop those out with something clean. A paper napkin, or filters from a coffeemaker.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I’m going to need another burner. You might want to clear out for this next bit.”
He found a glass baking dish. He put on some rubber gloves and pulled the caps off the battery he’d taken from the little tractor. He poured battery acid into the dish and turned on the burner beneath it. Sulfuric acid fumes began to fill the cookhouse. Nick sent Jason outside. Nick’s eyes watered, and he tied a bandanna over his mouth and nose and stood outside the cookhouse till he saw white fumes rising from the baking dish. Then he dashed inside, turned off the burner, and took the baking dish outside and put it on the grass.
“That acid’s concentrated,” he told Miss Deena.
“Uh-huh,” she said.
He looked at Jason. “Wait for it to cool, then pour it into a clean bottle. Make sure you’ve got rubber gloves on, and that your eyes and nose are protected. Put the bottle in the chest in the cookhouse, and don’t let anyone touch it.”
“When can I use my cookhouse again?” Miss Deena demanded.
“Use it now, if you like.”
“Uh-huh.”
Whatever Nick did next depended on having sulfuric acid and potassium nitrate, so he washed his implements, then left Jason watching the boiling saltpeter water while he went to report to the Escape Committee.
Leaves rustled overhead. Awnings in the camp crackled as the air snapped at them. The wind that had sprung up since the morning was growing brisk, providing the only relief from the day’s sledgehammer heat.
“Things are coming along,” Nick told the committee.
“Joseph here hacksawed some lead for you.”
“Thank you, Joseph.” He took a handkerchief from Joseph that held bits of lead pipe.
“That enough?”
“I think so. We don’t need much.” Nick put the handkerchief in his pocket, and the movement sent blinding, unexpected pain knifing through his kidney. He gasped, took his hand out of his pocket, and waited for the pain to ebb.
“You best hope you’re not pissing blood tomorrow,” Joseph said.
“Anything else you need?” said another man
Nick blinked away the tears that had sprung to his eyes. “Okay,” he gasped, “okay.” He blinked again. “I’m going to need an electrician or someone who can string wire without blowing us all up.”
“We’ll ask around.” But Nick saw his audience craning to look past him, and felt a stir in the camp. He looked over his shoulder toward the gate and saw a line of vehicles moving along the road toward the camp: a sturdy old five-ton truck, a sheriff’s department car, and a civilian pickup truck.
“Some kind of trouble,” one of the old men said. “They’s not bringing food.”
Sudden anxiety for Manon and Arlette sang through Nick’s heart. He looked over the camp, saw a young woman in a kerchief silhouetted briefly between two of the miserable cotton wagons, and trotted uneasily in that direction.
The little convoy pulled up before the camp. The larger of the two trucks backed up to the gate. A big, burly man in a deputy’s khaki uniform got out of the police cruiser and raised a bullhorn to his lips.
“Our new camp is ready,” he said. “The one your men were building. And we’d like to move the first families over there this afternoon.” He consulted a clipboard. “Jerry Landis and family. Connie Conroy and daughters ...”
Nick’s mouth went dry at the thought that his own name might be called, but then he recalled that he had never been asked for his name, he was on none of their lists. He reached the area where he thought he’d seen Arlette and saw a completely strange girl wearing a kerchief. He stopped dead and peered around.
The camp inmates, instinctively drawn by the announcements, but fearful of the deputies’ firearms, had formed a kind of half-circle at a respectful distance from the gate. Nick thought they would be better advised to be digging themselves into slit trenches. Somewhere a woman shrieked when her name was called; Nick could hear her sobbing and calling on Jesus to help her. Nick stayed well behind the mass of people, trotted along in hopes of catching a glimpse of Manon or Arlette.
Miss Deena was walking from the crowd toward the gate. She was absolutely erect, her white-haired head held high.
Admiration for Deena warred with anxiety in Nick’s soul.
Nick finally saw Arlette and Manon together, with Jason, who was standing on top of a concrete picnic table peering over the heads of the crowd. Nick accelerated, caught up with them, put his hands on Arlette’s shoulders. “Let’s get out of sight,” he said. “Miss Deena’s going to tell them we’re not going along with them anymore. This could be nasty.”