“I think you’re being too negative,” said Wilona.
“Miz LaGrande’s had her foot on my neck from the day I was born.”
Omar turned his head at the sound of a car pulling up in front of their house. David let himself in through the screen door, took off his gun belt, and put it on the sofa as he kissed his mother.
“We were expecting you earlier,” Wilona said.
“I was with Micah Knox and his buddies.” David sat on the couch next to Wilona. “We had a few beers and chewed the fat for a while. He’s an interesting guy.”
“Be careful around him,” Omar said.
David looked at Omar in surprise. “He agrees with you, Dad. That’s why he’s here.”
“Just be careful. That’s all I ask.”
“But he’s so polite,” Wilona said. “So polite he’s almost Southern. He and his friends helped fix up our house.”
“David,” Omar said, and looked at his son. “He’s not one of us. Okay?” David hesitated a moment, then nodded. “Okay, Dad,” he said.
Omar turned to stare at the dead television again. “Maybe I’ll just go to bed,” he said. The big military copters flew into Shelburne City in mid-morning. Judge Moseley had directed them to the fields adjacent to the big house at Clarendon—an easy landmark for the chopper pilots—and the parish had trucks available to receive the government’s bounty. Surplus cheese, rice, butter, and flour were unloaded, along with powdered milk, dried oat-meal, baby formula, rolls of plastic sheeting, two crated generators, water purification gear, and some moth-eaten old military tents that smelled as if they’d lain in a government warehouse since the Korean War. Big plastic bladders of gasoline and diesel fuel were rolled off the helicopters, and a man from the Emergency Management Agency—he looked like the worst case of overwork Omar had ever seen, eyes red, beard scruffy, skin flaking from sunburn—handed out a case of Iridium cellphones so that parish officials could stay in touch with each other and the world.
Then all the government people got back on their helicopters and roared away. They said they had work elsewhere, they would bring another shipment of food in a few days, and the parish should call if they needed help, but they left so quickly that Omar figured they didn’t want to spend any more time in Spottswood Parish than necessary.
To hell with them, Omar decided.
He got some of the food on the trucks, along with most of his force of deputies and the specials, and rolled them onto the Hess-Meier cotton field opposite the A.M.E. camp. He had instructed the guards there not to permit anyone to cross the road until the food was ready to be distributed. Then he let the people cross, no more than twenty at a time, to get their names on a list and draw rations. He had the parents and children cross the road first. Once they crossed into the cotton field, no one was allowed to return to the camp.
Once they were all away from the camp, Omar gave the signal. And his deputies, including Knox and his Crusaders, swarmed into the camp to search for firearms and contraband.
When the refugees saw what was going on, there was an outcry, and they surged toward the road in a swarm—but there were deputies in their path, with shotguns, and Omar shouting on a bullhorn, telling the refugees that the search was for weapons and drugs, that nobody was going to be arrested or get into trouble, but that the camp had to be made safe.
He pulled it off, just barely. There were some young men who stood on the far edge of the bar ditch and glared, their bodies trembling with the urge to violence, faces and bodies frozen in fury while others swarmed behind them, shouting taunts and abuse.
Many of the refugees, he noticed, didn’t seem concerned by the search at all. They were a lot more interested in the food.
Everything in the camp was searched, even the cars—Omar had brought a locksmith to get into locked vehicles and trunks. Almost fifty firearms were found, along with bags of reefer, rock cocaine, a little baggie of brown heroin, and a whole sack of paraphernalia, ranging from a marijuana bong in the form of Godzilla to a very well-used syringe.
With any luck, some video cameras would disappear as well. In his briefing, Omar had mentioned that this would not be an occurrence that he would view as a tragedy.
“Sheriff! Sheriff, what’s this?” One of his special deputies bounded eagerly across the road, holding out a small screw-top bottle half-filled with white lumps. “Is it crack cocaine or what?” Omar opened the screw top, held it below his nose, took a careful sniff. He screwed the top on and handed it back.
“Moth balls,” he said.
The deputy was crestfallen. “I thought I’d found a big stash of something.”
“Better luck next time.”
Omar turned to the refugees and raised his bullhorn. “When the emergency is over,” Omar told them,
“you can apply to the sheriff’s department for a return of your property. Please be ready to furnish a description.”
Steel wool, he imagined on a form, small blowtorch, crack pipe made from old Dr. Pepper bottle. Some of these boys, he figured, were natural sorry to the point where they’d probably apply to get their drugs back.
After the search had been made, and the guns and other gear toted out of the camp and put in the trunks of the deputies’ cars, Omar and his deputies stepped back and let the refugees swarm back to the A.M.E. camp in one great mass.
The Reverend Dr. Morris, Omar saw, had left the group and was approaching. Without, Omar saw, his usual scowling escort.
“There are still some things we need, Sheriff,” Morris said.
Omar nodded. “Can you give me a list?”
“Some people need medication. Insulin is the most urgent, but we’ve got manic-depressives, folks with hypertension, thyroid cases…”
“If you’ll furnish a list to the parish authorities…” Omar began. He really wasn’t in charge of medication, except for the illegal kind.
“I was hoping we could get Dr. Patel here to write some prescriptions.”
“He’s at Clarendon looking after the injured. I could talk to him, but maybe it’s just better if you make up a list and visit him yourself.”
“We also need shelter. We don’t have many tents.”
“We didn’t get much in that line,” Omar considered. The mangy tents that came off the helicopters had been delivered to the Clarendon camp. Omar suspected there was something in the way of a tent shortage in the U.S. right now.
“We can give you some plastic sheeting,” he said.
“We’ll take it. But I was thinking you might send us some cotton wagons. We could park them in the camp, put plastic sheeting or canvas on the top, and they could hold quite a few people.”
“Cotton wagons,” Omar repeated.
There were scores of them in the parish, he knew. They were big open wagons with chicken-wire sides, used during the time of the cotton harvest to carry freshly picked cotton to the gins. Wisps of cotton blew across the roads at that season, caught in trees and fences, piled in the ditches like a strange summer frost. Cotton wagons choked the roads, slow-moving targets often as not drawn at five miles per hour by a tractor, sometimes even by a mule. The wagons were unlit and dangerous at night, the cause of many an accident as fast-moving cars piled into them from behind. The rest of the year the wagons sat in barns or fields, useless.
“I’ll put out a call for cotton wagons, Reverend,” Omar nodded.
Black folks wanted to live in cotton wagons, it was all one to him.
Omar returned to his car, saw the firearms piled in his open trunk. Real guns, he saw. Glocks, Colts, Remingtons. And all the ammunition you’d need to stage a small war.