I remained at New Madrid from the 7th till the 12th, during which time I think shocks of earthquakes were experienced every 15 or 20 minutes—those shocks were all attended with a rumbling noise, resembling distant thunder from the southwest, varying in report according to the force of the shock. When I left the place, the surface of the earth was very little, if any, above the tops of the boats in the river.
The camp was strange at night, almost eerie. No one dared to show a light, no one dared to speak in a normal tone of voice. Sometimes Jason heard a child’s cry, or hushed voices, or the slithery sound of someone moving in a sleeping bag. Sometimes the sounds reminded him of the noises that Deena Robinson had made when she was dying, and he shivered. Aftershocks rumbled on the northern horizon, though most were barely felt in camp. The chain link gleamed silver in the light of the spotlights that were trained on the lanes cleared along the sides of the fence. It was difficult to see anything beyond those lanes of light. All detail seemed to vanish into an exterior darkness, and the camp seemed to exist in its own world, a dark island afloat on a midnight sea.
Jason sat with Arlette in the warmth and anonymity of the night. He leaned against one of the camp’s concrete picnic tables, and Arlette sat with her back to him, reclining against his chest with his arms around her while they whispered to one another. Jason was glad he didn’t have to do more than whisper, because his bruised throat ached whenever he spoke.
“I’m almost sorry that I got talked out of going over the fence,” Jason said. “Our boat might still be where we left it, and I could be on the river by dawn. I could do all right living on water and some of those biscuits till I got to Vicksburg or someplace with a telephone.”
Memories of being hunted through the camp made him shiver. He had almost run for the fence even then, terror making him want to disregard the deputies’ guns.
“The roads are patrolled,” Arlette said. “And our boat might not be there.”
“I can avoid people in a car,” Jason said. “And if the boat isn’t there, I’d try to find someone friendly.”
“The people here aren’t friendly. That’s what everyone says. People here shoot anyone they think’s from the camp.”
Jason hesitated and wondered how to frame his answer. The local crackers might well shoot a black man who they thought was some kind of dangerous escapee, but Jason suspected that they wouldn’t kill an unarmed white boy. But Jason wasn’t certain how to phrase that suspicion, not to Arlette. He didn’t know how to talk about race. He didn’t know the words that were permissible.
“They wouldn’t shoot a kid,” he said finally. “Not if it was just me.”
“I trust my daddy,” Arlette said. “He’ll get us out of here.”
“If it were anyone but Nick,” Jason said, “I’d be out of here by now.” He remembered the fevered way that Nick labored in the cookhouse, the way his jaw muscles clenched as he worked with his primitive materials. It was as if nothing existed but the deadly task at hand. He hadn’t even been disturbed by the moans of Miss Deena, sounds that had Jason nearly crawling up the walls. It was that fierce, exclusive concentration on the work that gave Jason a degree of strange comfort. He knew that Nick would not rest until he had accomplished everything that was possible.
“At least you and I are together,” Jason said. He tucked his chin into the warm notch between her clavicle and jaw, and heard her give a little giggle at the sensation. She reached up a hand, touched his cheek, stroking the down along his jawline.
“Soft,” she remarked. “You don’t really have to shave yet, do you?”
“No, I don’t.”
“That’s cute, that hair you got there.”
“Thanks, I guess.” His mind whirled at her touch. He kissed her cheek. She turned and her moist lips touched his. He kissed her avidly, dreadfully aware that they might have no time at all, that this could end any second. He wanted to melt into her, bury himself in her muscle and nerve. He yearned to obliterate himself in her.
He touched her hair through the kerchief, began to pull it down her hair in back so that he could caress her. Gently her fingers carried his hand away, rearranged the kerchief on her head. Jason felt a baffled amusement at this strange modesty. “I want to touch your hair,” he said.
“No, you don’t,” she said. “I haven’t looked after my hair in over a week.”
“That’s all right.”
“No, it isn’t. It’s a mess. Every day’s a bad hair day for me.”
He let his hand fall from her hair, clasped it around her waist instead. “Okay,” he said. “But I can still kiss you, right?”
“Sure.”
“Could you lean on my other shoulder? My throat hurts if I turn that direction.” Arlette shifted her position. “It’s okay if I kiss you from here?”
“Yes. And you can touch my cute little sideburns all you like.”
Arlette giggled. “Okay.”
She touched his cheek, then brought her lips to his. They kissed again in the clinging darkness. Then Arlette gave a cry of alarm and Jason’s heart leaped; he turned to see a strange figure silhouetted against the stars, standing above them.
The man was burly, dressed in a long coat and a broad-brimmed hat. Jason saw a long beard silvered by starlight, hair tumbled over the shoulders, strange yellow eyes that gleamed in his black face. The man brought with him an earthy smell that Jason tasted on the night air.
“I come from outside, me,” he said, in an accent so thick that Jason could barely make out the words. “I need talk the man in charge, eh?”
Nick sat in the cookhouse, making bombs. He had the overhead light on, but he kept the doors shut so he wouldn’t attract attention. It was hot and stifling in the cookhouse, and his head swam with the scent of fuel. He worked slowly and deliberately, not daring to make a mistake.
Nick took one-pound coffee cans from the camp’s meager stores, then packed them two-thirds full with an explosive made from fertilizer and motor oil. He put all his weight into compressing the explosive, because he wasn’t sure if the picric acid he was using as a booster explosive would be “fast” enough, when exploded, to detonate the fertilizer, and the more fertilizer hit by the shock wave of the detonator, the better. He pushed his finger into the compressed explosive, and then in the hole he made he placed a homemade blasting cap. Each cap was made from one of the spent pistol cartridges that the deputies had scattered in the camp on their raid that afternoon, a fact that Nick considered poetic justice. Nick had punched the used primer out of the bottom of each cartridge with a nail and inserted an electric fuse put together by Armando Gurule, the electrician’s apprentice who had been stranded in Shelburne City on his way to look for a job in California. Once the fuse was in place, Nick then packed in charges of lead picrate and picric acid, the primary and booster explosive.
Nick put in some scrap paper to hold the explosive in place, then began packing in pieces of metal. Nuts, screws, bolts, nails, bits of pipe, old hacksaw blades, coins, more of the spent cartridges—everything the Escape Committee could scrounge, including their own wrist watches. Anything that might make a hole in a deputy if it was shot at him with sufficient force.
When he was done, he’d created homemade claymore mines, a more primitive version of the notoriously effective antipersonnel weapon that U.S. forces had used in Vietnam. Each mine, when planted in the ground with its open mouth pointed toward an enemy, would spray out its scrap metal in the direction of the foe like a huge shotgun, shredding flesh with hundreds of small projectiles. Nick had no certainty that any one mine would work—there were too many variables in these homebuilds, too much improvisation in the formulae, too many things that could have gone wrong in the assembly—but Nick hoped that enough mines would actually work to blanket the area occupied by the deputies when they next came into the camp.