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.
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.