“It’s not going to be a tea party,” Omar said. “It’s going to be a refugee camp with screaming babies and sick people and bugs. Probably there will be a fair number of criminals, too. No place for white gloves and pearls.”
Wilona seemed unconvinced. “I think it could be lovely.”
“Wilona,” Omar said. “What is it you came in here to tell me?”
“Oh. Sorry. Tree Simpson needs you in the council chamber.”
The room where the parish council met was a court room when the council wasn’t meeting there. Tree—short for Trelawny—Simpson sat on the council. He ran one of the parish’s two pharmacies, was a middle-sized man with a little grizzled mustache, and looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week.
“We’re not getting the Bayou Bridge replaced anytime soon,” he said. “Every portable or collapsible bridge in the U.S. of A. has already been deployed into the disaster area.”
“How about an evacuation?” Omar said.
Tree only shrugged. “I couldn’t get ahold of anybody who had the authority to do a thing. I got someone who said he’d put me on a list for someone in logistics, so that at least we could get sent some food.”
“Joy in the mornin’,” said Omar.
“The rest of the council are getting food supplies together. Paying with personal checks. At least we’ll be able to feed our guests later today. Oh.” He looked up as he remembered something. “The governor’s declared martial law in several parishes, including ours. If that makes your job any easier.”
“Could be,” Omar said.
There was a tap on the door, and one of Omar’s special deputies stuck his head in the door. “Sorry, Sheriff,” he said. “But I thought I’d better tell you there’s been a shooting.” It was clear enough what happened. The drifter had been digging through the fallen remains of Ozie Welks’ storeroom. He’d run when Ozie had challenged him, trailed bottles of Miller Genuine Draft behind him as he fled, and then as he paused to hop over Ozie’s straggling barbed-wire fence, Ozie blew the back of his head off with the shotgun he kept on the rack in his pickup truck. The most natural thing in the world, shoot a stranger who was trying to steal your stuff. That’s what you carried shotguns for.
The stranger was a little man, white, with a wrinkled cotton shirt and a porkpie hat. He was maybe fifty, with a homemade tattoo on the back of one hand. Even in death, he still clutched a bottle of Jim Beam to his breast.
“That’s a looter, all right,” said David, one of the first on the scene. Wearing one of his father’s spare uniforms, he looked more official than most of the special deputies, whose uniform consisted of a star and a gun worn over civilian clothes. David poked at the bottle of Beam with the toe of his boot. “Got the evidence right in his hand.” David looked at Ozie with an admiring grin. “That’s a good shot, Ozie.”
“Some ol’ drunk,” said Ozie. “Couldn’t live without the hooch for another minute.” He had come back from helping a friend rescue some furniture from his collapsed mobile home, and he’d found the drifter looting his bar in broad daylight.
“Any ID on the body?” Omar said.
David shook his head. “We checked.”
Omar looked at the looter. Sweat trickled down the sides of his nose. He let his gaze travel over the road, the cars pulled off the highway during the quake and then abandoned by people heading into town.
“One of those cars is probably his,” he said, “but there’s no way to know which one.”
“Shall we take the body to the coroner?” asked one of the deputies. Who, come to think of it, was Tree Simpson. Tree had been appointed when the last coroner, a tire salesman, had been electrocuted in his bathtub.
“Bag it up,” Omar said. “Show it to Tree. Then we’ll shove it in the potter’s field.”
“Dang,” David said. “That was a great shot.”
Ozie looked grim. “I’m going to have to put up with a lot of shit on account of this, ain’t I?” Omar shook his head. “Not with a looter. Not at a time like this.”
“Good.” Ozie wiped sweat off his stubbly chin with the back of one arm. “Maybe nobody’ll miss this boy at all.”
Omar glanced up as a pair of cars drove by, each packed with families heading for Clarendon. The cars slowed, and Omar felt himself being scanned by the eyes of strangers. The Klan Kop, Komplete with Korpse.
He could feel their little tiny refugee brains drawing conclusions.
Strangers, Omar thought, refugees. Wandering around without supervision. Bound to get into trouble, and one of them had just got shot by a local. And unless Omar got things under better control, this body wouldn’t be the last.
He walked to the car, unhooked the mike from the radio, and spoke to the guards he’d sent to his two refugee camps.
“Once people get into the camps,” he said, “I don’t want anyone to leave unless they can tell you the name of the local resident they’ll be visiting. Unless they know somebody here, there’s no place for them to go.”
He held the microphone to his lips for a moment, saw the corpse lying by the vine-covered barbed wire. The Louisiana heat beat on his head.
“Tell them it’s for their own protection,” he added.
Bill Clemmons knew it was going to be bad when he saw the flies. He was carrying government food home from Cameron Brown Park in a wheelbarrow, and when he passed the BMW that his neighbor Charlie Johns had been living in, he saw clouds of black flies floating in and out of the open door. Thousands of them.
Bill hesitated while sweat tracked down his nose. He knew well enough what the clouds of flies meant. He was tempted to let it be someone else’s problem.
But it was his problem. He couldn’t have that next to his own house, his own family. What went wrong? he wondered. What had gone wrong with Charlie Johns? He was too smart to die like this.
Bill started pushing the barrow again. He’d deliver the food, then he’d walk back to the park to inform the authorities about the corpse lying in the BMW.
By late afternoon Omar had a head count. Two hundred thirty refugees, mostly black, on the A.M.E. campsite. Four hundred and forty-three, mostly white, crammed into Clarendon’s parklands, a stench unto the nostrils of Mrs. Ashenden. Thirty-one badly injured people had been moved into the house itself, where they could fulfill her Civil War fantasies—maybe, Omar thought, she’d feed them off the Wedgwood.
And then of course there was the dead man occupying a body bag at the coroner’s office. Omar didn’t know how many natives of the parish were without homes, but it was well into the hundreds. Many had taken refuge with friends; others were camping or living in their cars. Omar couldn’t just round them up. After all, they were voters.
The strangers were all hungry. The parish had done what was possible to get food to them, but there wasn’t that much food in the parish to begin with, less than a week’s supply. Fortunately Judge Moseley had been on the phone to the Emergency Management people, and they had promised for the next day a helicopter supply mission, food, tents, and medical equipment. Omar had just been to the A.M.E. camp to tell them that help was coming tomorrow. His reception hadn’t been very cordial. “There are some damned angry niggers here,” Merle grinned as Omar got out of his car. The camp inmates, Merle implied, wanted assistance now, and they weren’t taking any shit from Klan Kops.
Omar went into the camp and tried to talk to Reverend Dr. Morris, tell him that the government was shipping in stuff tomorrow, but that everyone would have to sleep in their cars tonight—but there wasn’t just Morris, there was a whole wall of black folks, all of them talking. All the white people in the camp—and there were a few—were probably in hiding. Some of the blacks looked like aliens, with dreadlocks or strange headgear or crazy, incomprehensible speech. All of them seemed to know who he was. “You can’t scare us, cone-head motherfucker,” one big man chanted, the deep voice repeating the words over and over, sometimes varying his rhythm, mother fucker alternating with mother fucker. There were at least two people with video cameras, hoping to catch Omar in some brutality. Adrenaline flared through Omar’s veins as he tried to shout his message over the sound of the crowd. He felt his fingers tingle as he thought about his pistol, thought about the flap holding the pistol in the holster. He thought about firing the pistol into the air just to get everyone to shut up. He repressed the thought. These people could be armed, he thought. They could shoot back.