The Rift (102 page)

It was only then that he noticed flies settling onto a corpse fifteen feet away. Jedthus, he saw, mutilated horribly.

He stared for a while, too shocked to feel fear, and then he straightened, took his bottle of aspirin in hand, and walked into the camp.

They were there, his friends, his action group. He had recruited them in Detroit, or they had recruited him, and they had traveled around the country doing the noble work of the white man. They had been killed horribly, beaten and torn, and lay like broken sacks of meal in the grass of the camp.

They hadn’t died alone. There were nigger corpses lying in the grass as well, and Knox walked to the nearest and kicked the body in the head. He kicked it again, and then he got down on his knees and punched the dead face, and in a spasm of rage he picked up the arm of the corpse and bit it. He licked the arm and bit it again and licked it and bit it. Speed began to crackle through his synapses. He thought he knew what he wanted to do.

It was growing dark. Swallows darted over the camp. He looked for weapons but didn’t find any. All he had was his .38 Special revolver hanging from his belt.

Well, that would have to do.

Speed sang through his blood. His body shivered and jittered. He was getting too hyper, so Knox went back to the car and cooked up some heroin and shot it into his arm. That mellowed him out fine. He could kill now, he thought. He needed to be hyper to want to do it, but he needed to be mellow so that he could do it well. Now he was hyper and mellow at the same time. He had reached the precise point of balance where he could accomplish anything he set out to do.

He put his things in David Paxton’s car and got in and started the engine. David’s father would take care of the nigs who went to Shelburne City. Sheriff Paxton was a man of vision and could handle things there just fine. Knox, therefore, should go looking for the others.

Most of the mud people had taken their cars north, away from Shelburne City and into the country. Knox would find them. Maybe take some trophies. That was clearly what the situation required.

Knox headed north. He kept his lights off so that the mud people wouldn’t see him coming. He drove along the highway until it climbed the District Levee and dead-ended in the washout. He cursed and banged his fist on the wheel of the car.

Speed sang a song of death in his ears. He turned around and headed back the way he came.

They had to be around here somewhere. He would check every road, every lane, until he found them.

And then he would do what he had come to do.

*

After the quake had rumbled to its finale, Omar got on the radio and ordered all his deputies to report to his headquarters.

All seven of them. That’s all that was left, if all the special deputies at the A.M.E. camp were gone. Seven, not counting himself and David.

What could he do with seven men? There were almost two hundred in the camp, and they now had the guns of his special deputies. Their ... general... was right. Omar was outgunned now.

But he couldn’t call in help, could he? The state police, the Federals, the Army ... they wouldn’t be on his side.

So,
he thought.
Time to end it. Time to run.

That’s what he told David, when David came into the courthouse in response to his radio call. Omar took David into his office and told him it was time to run for cover.

“No!” David said. “I’m not leaving! They killed my friends! This is my fight, too! This is a fight for every white man in America!”

Omar shook his head. “Most of the white men in America aren’t on our side,” he said. “It’s too late.” He looked at his son. “We need to save the next generation, okay? Save the—” An aftershock rumbled for a few brief seconds. Omar cast a nervous look at the crack that ran up the exterior wall of his office. “Save the seed corn,” Omar said. “We need you to carry on.”

“Dad— sir— I—” David shook his head. “I don’t want to run away. This whole thing is my fault, and I don’t want to desert you when the chips are down.”

“You’re not deserting me,” Omar said. “You’re obeying orders. I am your Kleagle, and I’m sending you out of here with a message.”

Omar turned to his desk and took out a piece of paper. He wrote the name and address of the Grand Cyclops of Monroe. He handed the piece of paper to David. “I want you to go to this address. Tell Otis there’s been some trouble, and you need to hide out for a while. Don’t go into details— either it’ll be on the news or it won’t, and if it’s not, you don’t want to start any rumors. I’ll make contact if it’s safe— and if it’s not, he can pass you on to some other people who can look after you.” He forced a grin. “You might even see me there in a day or two.”

He walked past David and opened his office door. “Merle,” he said.

When Merle entered, Omar closed the door. “Merle, I need you to get my boy across the bayou. Put him on the road heading south.”

Merle nodded. “I’ll take him across in my own boat.”

Omar turned to David, found himself without words, and instead put his arms around his boy. “You keep safe,” he said. Hopeless love and hopeless despair flooded his heart.

And then he heard shooting. A whole rattling volley heard clear as day through his screened-in windows. Thirty, forty rounds, all different calibers.

“What the hell is
that?”
David demanded. Omar was too astonished to offer an answer.

A few minutes later citizens began to swarm into the courthouse, shouting out that they’d just seen a whole posse of niggers shooting guns into the air as they broke into the Carnegie Library.

*

“Hey,” Jason said. “Hey, that’s our
boat.”

He pointed out the side window of the little silver Hyundai. He saw the battered hull of
Retired and Gone Fishin’
sitting on a trailer outside a chainlink fence that surrounded a tumbledown clapboard business. The outboard was tipped up over the boat’s stem. The homemade sign by the road proclaimed Uncle Sky’s A-l Metal Building Products and Agricultural Machinery Repair— No Drugs!

The place was padlocked and closed. No lights shone in the building or in the fenced yard.

“Stop!” Jason said. “That’s our boat! We can put it in the water and get out of here!”

“I can’t haul a boat and trailer,” the driver said. “Not in this car. I don’t have a trailer hitch.”

Jason, Manon, and Arlette were crammed in the backseat of the small Korean car, stuck in the middle of the long caravan of refugees following Cudjo away from the A.M.E. camp. They’d left the highway and were heading west along an ill-repaired blacktop road.

“We’ll use one of the trucks behind us,” Jason said. “One of them will have a trailer hitch.”

“I’m not stopping,” the driver said. “It’s not safe to stop.” He was elderly and peered anxiously over the steering wheel at the car in front of them. His wife clutched his arm in terror, with a grip so strong he could barely steer. She hadn’t said a word since she’d entered the vehicle.

“Hush,” Manon said to Jason. “Cudjo said he had a boat.”

“That boat won’t have a motor, I bet,” Jason said. “If we get the bass boat, we can run to Vicksburg and go for help.”

But no one was inclined to pay him any attention, so Jason tried to relax, squashed against the inside of the car, as the caravan moved west down a sagging, rutted two-lane blacktop, slowing to a crawl every so often to negotiate parts of the road ripped across by quakes. The country was mostly uninhabited cotton fields with rows of pine trees planted between them. The sun eased over the horizon, and the western sky turned to cobalt. The caravan moved south, then west again, on narrow gravel roads. Sometimes the cars splashed through areas flooded to the floorboards. Eventually the line of vehicles pulled to a straggling halt in an area filled with young pines. Jason could see car headlights glinting off flood waters to the right.

After getting out of the Hyundai, Manon and Arlette thanked the elderly couple for the ride. Jason couldn’t stop thinking about
Retired and Gone Fishin’
sitting in Uncle Sky’s yard. He saw Cudjo walk past with some men carrying rifles, and Jason trotted alongside, his telescope bouncing on his hip. A wind stirred the tops of the pine trees.

“Sir?” he said. “Mr. Cudjo?”

The hermit turned to him, yellow eyes gleaming in the growing night. “Boy, I want you stay with you mama.”

“Could we use another boat right now? As we drove here, I saw the boat we came in sitting on a trailer. We could go back and get it.”

“Put this truck ’cross this road, you,” Cudjo said to the driver of a pickup. “You—” Patting the shoulder of one of his riflemen. “You,
là bas,
down in them trees, you. Stay quiet, you. Lord High Sheriff come, you flank him, yes? The rest of you, you stay here, behind truck, yes? You no shoot, you, you don’t know who come. Could be Nick and them who come, yes?”

Then Cudjo turned to Jason. “You tell me ’bout this boat, you.”

“It’s a bass boat,” Jason said. “We came down on it from Missouri. There’s a fifty-horse Johnson on it, and we had fuel left. If we put it in the water, we could travel to Vicksburg, send for help.”

Cudjo frowned at him. A gust of wind tugged at his long beard. “Where you see this boat, you.”

“Uncle Sky’s Metal Building Whatever,” Jason said. “The boat was right in the yard. It wasn’t even behind the fence, it was like somebody just dropped it there. The place was closed, nobody around. We could hitch the trailer to a truck and drive it off, no problem.”

Cudjo’s eyes narrowed in thought. “Skyler King, he a Kluxer, that man. But he an old man, that Sky, he live in Hardee with his daughter, that Rachel. Ain’t nobody at his business now, no.”

“That Sky place isn’t five minutes from here,” Jason said. “We can make a quick trip.”

“Jason—” Arlette came up the line of vehicles, took Jason’s hand. “Mama says—”

Jason squeezed her hand. “We’ll go get the boat,” he told Cudjo, “if we can have someone to drive us out there.”

*

Jason and Arlette held hands on the bench seat as they were driven to Uncle Sky’s. Their van was alone on the old road— it was a plush vehicle, carpeted and with soft seats, a Chevy that still smelled new. The driver in front of them was a young light-skinned man named Samuel who scanned the road nervously as he pushed the vehicle to high speed in between slowing down for partially repaired tears and crevasses. Every so often Samuel would drop a hand to finger the pistol at his hip.

“Here it is,” Jason called. Jason leaned into Arlette’s shoulder as Samuel swung the van abruptly into Uncle Sky’s gravel drive. The headlights tracked across a yard over which was scattered building materials, agricultural equipment, then the battered bass boat on its trailer, parked on the grass to one side of the gate.

Samuel backed the van to the trailer. Jason left his telescope on the seat, and he and Arlette went out the van’s sliding side door. Jason felt the night wind ruffle his hair. They went to the trailer, and Jason looked down to see that a padlock had secured the ball on the trailer, making it impossible to hitch the trailer and tow it away.

“Damn,” Samuel said. “Wait here.” He opened the hatch at the back of the van and began searching through his large toolbox for something to cut the padlock.

Jason hoisted himself onto the bass boat’s foredeck. Rainwater sloshed in the boat’s bottom. Jason hopped over the cockpit to the aft deck, then bent to inspect the outboard motor. From what he could see in the dark, the outboard was as he left it, but when he felt with his hand in the well near the motor he couldn’t locate any of the jerricans of fuel they’d brought with them from Rails Bluff.

Jason straightened. “There’s no gas,” he said. “They probably took the cans inside. I’ll go look.”

The fence was two feet away, chain link twined with Virginia creeper. Jason launched himself at the fence, clung with fingers, dug his toes into the gaps between the chain link. He scrambled to the top, put both feet on the pipe that ran along the top of the fence, adjusted his footing, and raised himself to a precarious standing position, arms flung out for balance. The gusty wind tried to pluck him off. He grinned. “Wish I had my skates,” he said. “I could travel on this.”

“Be careful,” Arlette said. Jason knelt, reached a hand down to Arlette. “Want to come up?” he asked.

“You better hope there’s not a big dog in there,” Arlette said.

“Woof woof,” Jason said. He dropped his butt onto the pipe, then twisted around and lowered himself to the soft ground inside Uncle Sky’s compound.

Samuel found a hacksaw and began working on the lock that secured the trailer.

Jason walked through the cluttered yard to the unpainted clapboard building. He stepped onto the porch that ran the length of the front. Planks sagged under his feet. He looked into the window, peering through a frame of his two hands pressed against the glass. He saw the glint of a glass counter, dark objects that were probably lawnmowers or lawn tractors. He walked to the front door and tried to turn the knob—

—Then jumped three feet as an alarm bell began to ring out. His heart hammered. The door had been wired. Jason gave a helpless look back toward the gate, saw Samuel and Arlette staring at him, Samuel with the tail lights of his van outlining his exasperated expression.

“Sorry!” Jason shouted over the clatter.

Then he walked to the end of the porch and peered around the side of the building. Another boat loomed there in the shadow of the building, a big eighteen-foot powerboat with a canvas top. Jason wondered about stealing it. It would certainly furnish more deluxe transport than
Retired and Gone Fishin’.

The ringing bell was on this side of the building, right over Jason’s head. The clamor rang in his skull. He clenched his teeth and walked around the boat, put a foot on the fender of the trailer in preparation to boost himself into the cockpit, and he saw that the tire on the trailer was flat. So much for driving off with it.

Jason boosted himself into the cockpit. A hulking outboard was tilted up over the stern. Jason groped in the recesses of the stern and found a pair of plastic jerricans— not, judging by the weight, the ones he had brought on the bass boat, but larger and holding more gasoline. “Bingo!” he shouted over the clamor of the bell, but he doubted that anyone could hear him.