Walter Williams - The Rift

Omar moved back to the table and began to stuff Knox’s paraphernalia back in the aspirin bottle. “For right now,” he said. “Just get Knox on his feet. Give him enough privacy to pop his pills or whatever. Then get out to the camp and do the job.”

Jedthus’s eyes turned hard. “I understand,” he said.

“I’m going back to the courthouse and cover y’all’s asses with the authorities, just like I planned.”

“I’ll give you a ride.”

“No. I’ll walk. You stay here with Knox.”

Omar stepped out of the shop and a lance of sunlight drove straight through his brain. He swayed on his feet.

This is going to be over soon, he told himself. Over.

And then he’d feel better.

*

“Head for that gate,” Nick said. “Fast as you can. Stop only to pick up guns and ammunition. Once you’re out, get in among the cars. Some of you are going to have to run for those roadblocks.”

The young men looked up at him, nodded gravely.

“Don’t stop,” Nick said again. “We’re counting on you.”

I am telling them how to commit suicide, Nick thought. He wondered if they knew that.

He had a military force of sorts, composed of almost all the able men in the camp, along with some of the women, all recruited overnight by the various camp committees. Nick was a kind of general, at least insofar as they all were supposed to be following his plan. They were divided into three groups. The Warriors- younger men and women, mostly- would hold off the bad guys while the others made their escape. The Home Guard- older but able-bodied- were supposed to look after the women, children, and old people, and escort them to a place of safety while the Warriors held off any pursuit.

The third group were the ones Nick had called the Samurai, though he privately thought of them as the Kamikaze. They were the ones who were trusted with the camp’s meager store of firearms, because they professed themselves good with guns.

Their job was to kill guards. They said they were ready to do this. The odds said they would probably die trying.

It was small comfort that they had all volunteered.

“Don’t forget,” Nick said. “Keep moving. Don’t get bogged down. We’re counting on you.”

His father would know just how to do this, Nick thought. His father had been trained in how to send people to their deaths. How to act. How to think about it all.

Just thinking about what was going to happen to his little army made Nick tremble at the knees.

He’d talked to all of them, he thought. The afternoon sun was burning down on him and making his head throb. He needed something to drink. The deputies still hadn’t come.

His father would quote Sun Tzu, he thought. Chinese military strategy was one of his passions. Cold analysis, life and death, marches and battles, but written all in poetry.

To win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the zenith of achievement. His father loved that passage. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the zenith of achievement.

We’ve already lost the chance not to fight, Nick thought. And one victory in one battle is all I ask.

Okay, Sun? he thought. Okay, Dad?

Nick gave his doomed soldiers the floppy-wristed home-boy handshake- My God, he thought at the touch of palm on palm, we are surely going to die - and then he hobbled to the cookhouse. Pain throbbed through his kidney at every step. Drank his glass of water, then poured another glass over his head in hopes it would cool him off.

He shook his head, and droplets of water showered the ground around him. The air hung torrid and oppressive, so sultry that Nick felt as if he were moving under water. One of the workers in the cookhouse gave him a cracker and a scoop of rice, leftovers from the noon meal that he’d missed, and he ate them.

“Excuse me?”

Nick turned to the speaker, a youngish white man with short-cropped hair bleached white by the sun. Nick blinked at the strange figure. One day in the camp, he thought, and now the very fact of a Caucasian seemed odd. The man held out his hand.

“Jack Taylor,” he said. Nick shook the hand.

“Nick Ruford.”

Taylor’s green eyes looked sidelong at the others in the camp. “Listen,” he said. “I know something’s up. And I want to be a part of it. You know what I’m saying?”

Nick looked at him warily. “Why ask me?”

“Because it’s centered around you.” Taylor licked his lips. “Look,” he said. “Nobody will talk to me. And I understand why, okay. Nobody trusts me. But listen-” A dogged look entered his eyes. “My wife is black. My step-kid is black. My children are half-black. They’re all in here with me. And you’d have to be crazy to think I wouldn’t fight for them. I want to fight for them. I want to be a part of what’s happening. Can you fix it?”

Nick thought for a moment. Taylor was sincere, he saw, and angry. But this fight, when it happened, was going to be a mob scene, a giant gang rumble. With the exception of a deputy or two, nobody was wearing uniforms on either side. In a mess like that, that blond head might be all anyone would see. Taylor could have both sides trying to kill him.

Nick looked for him. “How many kids do you have?”

“Two. And my step-daughter. They’re all here.”

Nick took a breath. “Jack,” he said, “the best thing you can do in this situation is stick with your family. Try and keep them safe.” And let them keep you safe, he added mentally.

“Damn it!” Taylor said. “Why don’t you trust me?”

“I trust you fine,” Nick said. “But when these people get out past that fence they are going to turn into a mob, and it’s the mob I don’t trust.”

“I want to fight!”

Nick put a hand on Taylor’s shoulder. Taylor shrugged it off. Nick sighed.

“Look, I can’t give you orders. If you want to do something, listen for orders for the Home Guard. Somebody says Home Guard do this, you do it. But wait till the mob calms down first, or you’ll get lynched.”

Taylor turned and stalked away without a further word. Nick looked after him, sighed.

Lost one, he thought, and the fight hasn’t even started. What else haven’t I done right?

Nick found Manon sitting on the ground in the shade of one of the cotton wagons. He squatted by her and asked her how she was.

“All right. This is where the children and I agreed to meet when-” She hesitated. “When whatever is going to happen happens.”

“That’s good. Keep together.”

She looked at him. There was a distant, mournful look in her eyes, the eyes of a woman much older than her years. He realized with surprise that she resembled her aunt Penelope, her father’s half-sister, who had been twenty years older.

“I keep thinking about Frankland,” Manon said. “About Rails Bluff. It was crazy there, but-” She bit her lip. “Frankland was different from these people. He was kind of goofy. He meant well. He wanted to build Heaven there, in his camp.” She shook her head. “These people here, they set out to build Hell. And they built it. And nobody’s even noticed .”

Nick took her hand. “We’ll make people notice,” he said.

“I keep thinking about my family,” Manon said. “We left them in Rails Bluff. And we thought we were the lucky ones.”

“Baby,” Nick said, “one of those deputies- the little one who shot Miss Deena, the skinhead- he’s got your Gros-Papa’s watch.”

She looked at him in shock. “What?” she stammered. “What are you saying?”

“Some of these people, they must have been traveling around in all this chaos. Robbing people, and-” He shook his head. “They must have been in Toussaint before they came here.”