THIRTY-FOUR
As we were all wrapt in sleep, each tells his story in his own way. I will also relate my simple tale.
At the period above mentioned, I was roused from sleep by the clamor of windows, doors and furniture in tremulous motion, with a distant rumbling noise, resembling a number of carriages passing over pavement— in a few seconds the motion and subterraneous thunder increased more and more: believing the noise to proceed from the N. or N.W. and expecting the earth to be relieved by a volcanic eruption, I went out of doors & looked for the dreadful phenomenon. The agitation had now reached its utmost violence. I entered the house to snatch my family from its expected ruins, but before I could put my design in execution the shock had ceased, having lasted about one and three fourth minutes. The sky was obscured by a thick hazy fog, without a breath of air. Fahrenheit thermometer might have stood at this time at about 35 or 40 (degrees).
Louisiana Gazette (St. Louis) Saturday, December 21,1811
Flash. Flash. Flash. The laser pulsed on Jessica’s retina.
“There.” The doctor’s voice. “Can you see anything now?”
Jessica covered her right eye. The doctor’s face floated toward her out of the darkness. “Yes,” she said. She didn’t know whether to be hopeful or not. “But it’s like tunnel vision.”
“I’ve just started.” Jessica lay back in the padded headrest and felt the doctor lean over her. “I saw you on television the other day,” the doctor said. “With the President.”
“Yes.” Flash.
“What’s he really like?” Flash flash.
“I don’t know him well. I’ve only met him a couple times.” She smiled. “But he did appoint me to my job, so I think it’s obvious that he’s a great statesman.”
Flash. Flash flash flash.
“I voted for him,” the doctor said. “But it was just a stab in the dark, you know. You can’t really tell with those people.”
The first time Jessica had met the President, all she had felt was the man’s charisma. When he looked at you, your insides went all warm and tingly. You wanted to roll on your back and have him rub your tummy. Even for someone as professionally accustomed to alpha males as Jessica, the effect had been surprising.
All big politicians were like that, though. Jessica had met a few. They all carried that enormous top-dog energy. The lucky ones could project it on television.
This last time, though, the meeting on Poinsett Island, the President’s affect had been different. It wasn’t so much as that the glow wasn’t there, but that it had gone somewhere that Jessica couldn’t reach. Though there was nothing Jessica could put her finger on, she had the sense that, at least part of the time, the commander-in-chief wasn’t home.
Hey, she told herself. Give the guy a break. He’s just lost his wife.
Flash. Flash flash.
She had lost another part of the vision in her left eye on the return helicopter trip to Vicksburg. The doctor, though, had been encouraging when he spoke to Pat on the telephone. Jessica had probably torn a retina. It sounded frightening— and Jessica was very frightened—but the doctor assured Pat that the retina could most likely be tacked back on with a laser.
To Jessica’s surprise, she didn’t have to check into a hospital. Unless there was some complication, the procedure could be done in the doctor’s office.
And that meant she wouldn’t have to be absent from her command for more than few hours. By the time the paperwork for the procedure caught up with the Army— and that would take a long while, given the current emergency— she would have been back at her work for weeks, if not months. Which meant that it would be far too late to question her presence at her job.
Flash flash flash. “The vitreal humor,” the doctor said conversationally, “that’s the jelly in the center of your eye. Well, it was probably pulling away from the retina— it happens to most of us as we get older. But in your case the vitreal humor pulled the retina away with it. Probably the earthquake tore everything loose.”
“Not the earthquake. It was a bumpy helicopter ride.”
The doctor was amused. “We don’t get many of those,” he said.
Flash flash flash.
“How’s that?”
Jessica blinked cautiously at the world. Reality seemed more or less intact.
“I can see,” she said in surprise.
“You may have lost some detail,” the doctor said. “Time will tell.”
“I—thank you, doctor. Thank you.”
“Lie back and let me take another tour of your eye,” the doctor said. “I want to check and make certain I haven’t missed something.”
“Certainly.” Jessica leaned back on the padded headrest.
“And another thing,” the doctor said. “No more helicopter rides.”
Jessica felt herself smile. She had got here on a helicopter, a smoother ride than driving the torn road between Vicksburg and Jackson.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she said.
*
“Okay,” said Armando Gurulé, the electrician's apprentice. “I've made this double safe. To set off the claymores, you've got to throw both these switches, right?”
“Right,” Nick said. He bit his lip, looked at the wires. “What if they cut power to the camp?”
Armando gave a laugh. “They can't. Look at the power line. They run their own floodlights off the same power source.”
Nick nodded. “Good.”
“So you throw the switches. And then all the claymores go at once. Boom.”
“Boom,” Nick agreed.
Nick blinked gum from his eyes. The sun was just beginning to rise behind the trees east of the camp. In the last hour of darkness he had buried his mines— he'd ended up with eleven— leaving nothing but the detonator wires sticking out of the ground. Armando had crawled after Nick and connected the wires to his homemade control board, then covered the gear with grass or bits of matting or plastic sheeting.
“I hope this works,” Armando said. “I'm from the Dominican Republic, man. I don't understand this crazy scene at all. I keep thinking I'm here by accident.”
“We're all here by accident,” Nick said.
“I guess so.”
Weariness dragged at Nick's thoughts. He hadn't slept at all during the night, and only fitfully on the boat the night before. The thought that he might have forgotten something important beat at his brain like a weak, insistent pulse.
“I'm going to talk to the committee,” he said. “Then I'm going to try to get some rest. Make sure you wake me if the bad guys come.”
“You bet.”
Nick dragged himself to the pecan tree, told the combined Escape and Camp Committees that he'd finished his job. “I'm getting a little worried about security,” he said. “What I've been doing isn't exactly secret. Probably most of the camp knows about it by now.” He rubbed his weary eyes. “What if someone decides he can sell the information to the coneheads?”
“That doesn't make any sense,” someone on the Camp Committee said. “They aren't going to let anyone out of here.”
“People don't always think straight,” Nick said. “All you need is one parent panicked for the safety of a baby, or an alcoholic who will do anything for a drink ...”
“Or a white man who got put in here by mistake,” said Tareek Hall. “Or who was planted in here as a spy by the conspiracy. Or some nigger traitor seduced by the conspiracy, like Martin Luther King or Malcolm X.”
The others were too tired to argue, but they took Nick's point. “The deputies already said nobody but the Camp Committee can come near the fence,” someone said. “All we have to do is enforce that from our side.”
Tareek began to say something about microphones planted by the conspiracy, and laser beams in orbital satellites that could make people behave crazy, but there didn't seem to be anything anyone could do about that. “You people have to organize the fighters,” Nick said. “I can't do that— I don't know the people. You have to find someone to enforce the rules. And you've got to do it yesterday.”
“We got motivation,” one man said. He pointed to the fence, where Nora's body still lay. “We know what happens if anything goes wrong.”
Nick could barely breathe in the hot and humid air. His mind swam. “I'm going to try to rest,” he said, and left them to their arguments.
He'd done what he could. Maybe later he'd think of something else to do, but right now he was too weary to think of anything but sleep.
He went into the storage shed where he'd found the fertilizer and motor oil and lay on the soft, oil-soaked planks. Sleep took him in an instant.
Nick was vaguely aware of Arlette waking him with some breakfast on a plastic plate, but he was less interested in food than in sleep. When he next woke the sun was high, and his body was soaked with sweat where it lay against the floorboards.
They didn't come, he thought vaguely. The deputies had not come. No one had discussed this possibility.
He sat up, and pain hammered through his stiffened body. He saw the plastic plate where Arlette had left it. It held two of the strange greasy crackers and a small mound of an opalescent gelatinous matter. He pushed the stuff around with one of the crackers and concluded that the mysterious substance was made from powdered eggs, but lacked the usual yellow food coloring that turned them into a reasonable facsimile of fresh, scrambled eggs.
Nick scooped some onto a cracker and took a bite. The taste wasn't bad, but wasn't good, either. He ate it all.
He wandered out of the cookhouse and saw people lining up for lunch. He blinked in the sun.
The deputies hadn't come. He had been so certain that the deputies would arrive that morning, would enter the camp and drive the refugees like cattle to the slaughterhouse.
It looked as if they would be given a breathing space. He should check all the work he'd done that night, make sure there wasn't something he'd overlooked in the darkness.
The plan could be refined. Everybody could be made to better understand their roles, to understand the necessity of what Nick needed them to do.
He set about the task.
*
Jason gazed at the woman's body lying beyond the fence. One-eighty-six, he thought. Murder. Stars eddied in his head. He could feel his breakfast surge in his stomach, and he swallowed hard.
He crouched on his heels on the grassy earth and looked at the body. He had seen so many bodies, he thought, bodies drifting down the river, blasted by bullets in Frankland's camp, bodies whimpering life away like Miss Deena, now this woman one-eighty-six'd by the guardians of this prison. The world was probably paved with bodies.
And not just the world, he corrected, but the universe. Sometimes stars blew up.
His throat ached, the pain greater than yesterday. Awareness of the precarious fragility of existence filled his mind. The woman had thrown her own existence away, deliberately tempted death by walking into the lane of death outside the camp. People said her name was Nora. Nobody seemed to know her last name.
Half her name, forgotten already.
Jason had not seen the killing. When Nick, Cudjo, and the others began to argue their various plans back and forth, Manon had firmly drawn Arlette and Jason away from the circle and brought them to a place where they could sleep under one of the cotton wagons. Manon also made a point of sleeping between Arlette and Jason, keeping them apart during the night. Her determination made Jason smile quietly in the darkness as he drifted to sleep.
The shots had torn Jason from sleep. Manon, beside him, woke with a cry, and Jason, in sudden fear, had put his hand over Manon's mouth and whispered “Be quiet!” in an urgent voice. He could see the starlight glimmering on her eyes as she submitted.
Don't let them hear you, don't let them see you, don't become a target. A child, powerless by nature, knows these rules by instinct.
Nora had disobeyed the rules and died.
What did you die for? Jason thought at the corpse. Life was a flash in the darkness, brief enough without throwing it away. Life was the only thing life had.
A modest aftershock trembled in the earth for a moment, then passed. Jason looked away from the corpse as he caught movement in the tail of his eye, Arlette walking toward him. That's what you die for, he thought with sudden certainty.
You die for what you love.
Jason rose and kissed Arlette hello. He put his arms around her. “How was Nick?” he asked, then winced at the pain in his throat.
“Asleep. I left his breakfast with him.” She looked at the body beyond the fence, then turned her head abruptly. “Let's go someplace else,” she said in a small voice.
There's no place else we can go, he almost said. But he said “All right” instead, and took Arlette's hand as they walked away from Nora, toward the front of the camp. There was an undercurrent of excitement, people meeting in small groups. Jason saw some half-concealed weapons, clubs and knives.
Nobody had included Jason in any of these schemes as yet. He and Arlette and Manon had a rendezvous, a place under one of the cotton wagons where they were supposed to meet in the event of an emergency. Other than that, Jason was at liberty, he supposed, to make his own plans, if he could work something out.
He could still try to escape tonight. Cudjo showed it could be done.
But Nora showed how it couldn't. He had to think about that.
He and Arlette paused in the shade of one of the camp's pecan trees. He kissed her again, looked into her somber brown eyes.
I would die for you, he wanted to say. Instead he tilted his head a little to the left, to ease the pain in his throat, and said, “How are you doing?”
“I'm okay.” She shrugged. “Shots, bodies.” Anger hardened her face. “I'm beginning to understand why you're mad at God.”
“I'm not anymore,” Jason said.
She looked at him.
“The universe is too big to be angry at it,” he said. “It's like being mad at this tree for being a pecan instead of a magnolia. It's a waste of our time.”
She glanced over one shoulder in the direction of the gate. Her eyes hardened. “Is it a waste to hate a murderer for being a murderer?” she said.
“Murderers are different,” Jason said. “They're more our size.”
Arlette gave a little sniff, tossed her head. “They're smaller,” she said. “Much smaller.”
“Yes,” Jason said. He glanced over the camp, the people in their small, hurried groups. “I was surprised that you or your mom didn't talk to Cudjo in French.”
A smile touched her lips. “I think his French was probably as funky as his English. I've learned French French, not Cajun, and probably Cudjo speaks a pretty strange version of Cajun, at that.”
“Captain Joe could have talked to him, I guess.”
“From what I heard of him over the radio, he probably could.”
He took her hands. “I'm glad we had a chance to be together last night, before Cudjo turned up.”
“And before my momma came and separated us.” She smiled.
“I don't think she's looking at us now,” Jason said.
“No. I don't think so.”
They kissed. Arlette leaned back against the tree. Jason pressed himself to her. Her presence whirled in his senses.
“God damn, girl,” said a voice. Jason turned, saw the three boys Arlette had spoken to the day before.
“What are you doing with this boy?” Sekou said to Arlette. “You think his color's catching? You think those peckerwoods won't hurt you, you kiss him hard enough?”
Fury flashed through Jason. He faced the other boys, fists clenched by his side. Then he saw that Sekou carried a heavy stick, just hanging casually against his leg, and that the boy called Raymond had a hammer stuck through his belt, and he took a step back.
“Why don't you mind your own business,” Arlette said.
“It's your business to be with black people,” Sekou said. “You're disrespecting the race.”
“Sisters gotta support the brothers,” Raymond said.
Arlette looked at them. “Even when they're being as charming as you?” she asked.
“We're gonna fight for you,” Sekou said, “so why are you hangin' with the little kid? Jason—” His tone turned mocking. “Jason! What kind of trifling Yuppie-ass name is that?”
Jason considered kicking the nearest one in the crotch and then running for it. He thought that probably some adult would call the situation to order before he got his head beaten in.
Anger flashed from Arlette's eyes. “Why don't you just leave us alone?” she said.
“Scandalous-ass bitch upset, now,” said Raymond.
“Jason saved my life,” Arlette said. “He saved my whole family from a boat full of crazy men. You want some respect, you go do something useful instead of fronting on this crap.”
Raymond looked at Jason from under half-closed eyelids. “You better watch it with the white boy,” he said. “They set up a nigga every time.”
His pulse throbbed in Jason's ears. He felt his toes curl in his Nikes. Getting the range on Raymond's crotch.
“Jason's black enough to be here!” Arlette said. “He's black enough for them!” She flung a pointing finger toward the deputies. Arlette's eyes flared. “He's black enough to die with you!”
The others fell silent. Arlette glared at them for a moment, then took Jason's arm and steered him away.
“‘Scandalous-ass bitch!’” she fumed. “You heard what they called me?”
Jason's mouth was dry. Adrenaline sang in his veins. He'd been a half-second from violence, and it would probably have been violence inflicted mostly on him.
“Thanks for sticking up for me,” he croaked through his injured throat.
“You stuck up for me when it counted,” she said.
Jason strove for words to express his surging feelings, the thoughts that whirled in his head. Found himself baffled. “This race thing,” he said finally. “It's really fucked.”