The Rift (92 page)

She half-turned toward him, gave him a resentful look. “You were a sweet man when I married you, Nick. But you changed.”

“I
—” he began in anger, then said,
“I
changed?”

“When your father began to die. You got frantic. You kept
turning into
him— turning into a general, into a man who gave orders and wanted everything exactly his way and no other.”

“I didn’t do that,” Nick said.

“Yes, you did. Sometimes you were yourself— kind, loving— and then you’d snap. And you’d turn cold and start barking out orders.”

Nick stared at her. “Why are you blaming my father? There was nothing wrong with my father.”

“There was nothing wrong with your father, Nick, except that
he wasn’t the one I married.
I married you, not the General.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “Then I realized, okay, the General was a part of you. I tried to accept it, I really did. But I couldn’t.”

He looked at her and wondered why he couldn’t think of anything to do with his hands. “My father was
dying.
Why couldn’t I mourn him?”

“Mourning I could deal with. Being in the military, I could not. I didn’t marry the Army, I didn’t marry McDonnell, I married Nick Ruford.”

“I never said things would be like Toussaint.”

She lifted her chin. “Toussaint wasn’t easy. You think being a David is
easy
?”

“You were in
charge
in Toussaint. Your family owned everything. Folks are a little more insecure out in the world. People outside Toussaint don’t understand that you’re supposed to be some kind of French royalty. People on the outside lose their jobs.”

Manon’s lips compressed in anger. “What’s wrong with being in a secure place? I wanted Arlette to be secure. Growing up with her own people in Toussaint, having all the advantages I had.”

“I wanted her to be in the real world.”

“The real world can be so unkind to a young girl! It doesn’t even know she’s human.
This
is the real world!” She jabbed her finger emphatically at the soil, at the camp with its armed guards.

“And the bayou put Toussaint under water,” Nick said. “You can’t live in your magic kingdom anymore.”

They fell silent for a moment, each communing with the sullen, solitary resentment that each cherished in their heart. Then Manon shook her head.

“Look, Nick,” she said. “You need to be the General now, okay? That’s what will save us. I understand that.” She put a hand on his chest. “So you go and be a general. And when you don’t need to be Army anymore, we’ll talk about...” She hesitated. “Our future.”

Nick looked at her without speaking. He was too weary and heartsick to find the words, perhaps too weary and heartsick even to return to his war.

He felt like he’d been fighting the war for years. Forever.

“I love you, Nick,” Manon said. “I know you love me. But I don’t know what’s possible besides that.”

He took her hand in his own, squeezed it, turned away. Knowing what was possible seemed the key thing. Nick didn’t even know if life itself was possible, if anything was possible more than living a few hours.

“’Scuse me?” a young man approached, carrying a heavy metal toolbox. He had light skin, a scraggly beard, and a Spanish accent. “Are you Nick? The Escape Committee sent me— my name’s Armando Gurulé. They said you needed some wiring done, and I’m an apprentice electrician.”

*

“Well, Omar, some of it worked, and some didn’t,” Knox said. He gave a jittery little smile. “I know you had hopes for that camp committee bungling the food distribution, but they seem to have done a decent job— no complaints, no sign of dissension. Maybe some of the white folks in there taught them how to do it. And the niggers inside are getting more and more surly— I had hoped to keep ’em divided a little better, but it’s not happening. Are you okay, Omar?”

Omar sighed. His skull was splitting. After his conversation with David last night, he’d got a bottle of bourbon out from under the sink and started hitting it pretty hard. And he hadn’t been feeling so good to start with.

Knox’s peculiar, semi-industrial body odor was making Omar’s stomach turn flip-flops. Knox smelled worse than usual today.

“Maybe I’ve got a touch of that camp fever they’ve got at Clarendon,” Omar said.

“Anyway,” Knox said, “things didn’t go so good this afternoon, with our third shipment to Woodbine Corners. We ran out of single men, that was the trouble. We had to start taking away families. There was resistance— we had to go in shooting— but we got our quota.” He shook his head. “I think it’s time to make a maximum effort. We need to liquidate that camp. Everyone there. Just get the whole thing over with.”

It was early evening. Swallows flitted through the growing darkness. After the previous night’s toad-strangler of a rain, the air seemed unusually soupy. Beyond a nearby fence were the massive machines of the John Deere dealership, all strange half-lit looming angles. Omar and Knox met here, in secret, every evening.

“People are going to—” Omar rubbed his aching head. “They’re going to wonder where the camp’s gone.”

“Those Mud People are more dangerous if they stay,” Knox said. “If a whole bunch of ’em bust out of there, we’d get most of them for sure. But what if there were survivors?” He shook his head. “No survivors. That’s the plan. Then we deal with the cars— sink them or bury them or whatever— and we’re home free.”

Omar looked down at the little bouncing crop-haired man and he felt his insides clench in hatred. “No survivors,” he agreed, and narrowed his eyes as he looked at Knox from behind his shades.

And this means you,
he thought.

*

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.

Matthias M. Speed (Jefferson County, March 2, 1812)

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 Gurulé, 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.

There was a soft knock on one of the cookhouse doors. “Nick?” Manon’s voice. “You in there?”

“Yes.”

“Can I come in?”

“I’ll come out. Just a minute.”

He finished packing explosive into a coffee can, then rose and switched off the light. Blinking dazzled eyes, he groped for the door knob. He opened it carefully, then slid out of the cookhouse and closed the door behind him.

Fresh air. He took in a few deep, grateful breaths. He couldn’t see Manon in the starlight, but he felt his flesh prickle as he sensed her nearness.