“Where is Arlette?” Nick asked. “Where is Jason?”
“I am somebody,” Manon said. “I am a person.”
Nick stood, bit his lip as he looked for Arlette. He hadn’t seen anyone familiar among those being herded onto the truck, but anxiety sang through him until he saw Arlette and Jason emerging from behind an awning. He called out to them, hugged them both against him.
He wouldn’t run again, he thought. Next time, he swore, it would be the guards who felt fear. Crystals of salt were forming in the simmering water that Nick had drained from the night soil. Nick set Jason to scooping them out with a coffee filter. Nick began assembling material for his next bit of chemistry.
Miss Deena didn’t die, not right away. She was laid under an awning near the cookhouse, along with an unconscious wounded man who had been shot in the stomach. There were some other wounds, all minor, and a few dead. Miss Deena’s moans and incoherent cries floated through the door and she tossed restlessly on a bloody mattress. The woman who had walked with such pride, spoken with such forthrightness, would not be allowed to die with the dignity she carried in life. Instead she would die slowly, half-conscious and moaning in pain.
Nick could see a little shudder run up Jason’s spine at every moan.
“I can do that job, Jase,” he said. “Why don’t you go find Arlette?” Jason gave him grateful look and made himself scarce. Nick tied a towel around his head so he wouldn’t drip sweat into his chemicals. He continued to pick out crystals of salt until he’d boiled most of the liquid away. Then he added methanol to the solution and filtered it through a paper coffee filter. The white crystals of pure saltpeter, collected on the towel, he laid out to dry.
While the saltpeter was drying, Nick got out the bottle of aspirin that Miss Deena had given him. He ground a fistful of aspirin tablets into a cup and mixed them with water to make a paste, then added methanol and filtered the mixture through a paper towel. He evaporated the remaining liquid out of the mixture, then added the white powder to the sulfuric acid he’d made earlier, then added saltpeter till the mixture turned red.
He refined the mixture further, cooling and straining and reheating, until he had picric acid. While the refining process was underway, he began to make lead monoxide from saltpeter and the chips of lead pipe that Joseph of the Escape Committee had sawn for him. This required more methanol, more distilling and filtering operations. By this point his operations monopolized the burners in the cookhouse. When he had picric acid, he used part of it to mix with the lead monoxide to form lead picrate.
“Boom,” he said softly to himself.
There it was. The lead picrate formed the primary explosive, the picric acid the booster explosive. Pack them together and they made a detonator. And that would set off the fertilizer explosive he would make next.
He had his weapons. What he needed now was a plan for using them that would leave his family alive. He stepped out of the cookhouse to take a breath of air, and he saw a woman drawing a blanket over the terrible gunshot face of Miss Deena. Her agonies were finally over. The wounded man, the one shot in the belly, had died also, apparently without ever regaining consciousness. Nick stared at the two bodies while pain throbbed through his skull. He had the sensation that he lived now in death’s realm, that his father’s passing had somehow opened a door into the world of night. The bodies were piling up. And the only escape, perhaps, was for Nick to start piling up bodies himself. He turned his eyes from Miss Deena and walked away, out of sight of the corpses, and simply stood for a while, looking at nothing, taking deep breaths of the sultry air. He’d been looking at Manon for a while before his mind really registered her presence—when it did, he felt it as a small shock. There she was, her unforgettable profile, the proud Nefertiti arch of the neck. She was facing away from him, gazing at the hardwood forest behind the camp.
Nick approached her. She turned as he neared her, looked at him with an expressionless face.
“You okay?” he asked.
“What a question,” she said. “No, I am not okay.”
Nick felt sweat trickling down the back of his neck. “I’m not okay, either,” he said. She hesitated, then touched his arm. “What’s going to happen?” he asked. “Are we going to be all right?”
“Some of us will get away,” Nick said. “How many, I can’t say. But some will. That’s the best we can hope for.”
Nick saw that Manon’s eyes were shiny, that tears were rolling down her face. She looked away from him suddenly. He stepped closer and touched her face, wiped a tear away with the back of his fingers.
“I’m sorry, baby,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking.”
“That’s all right,” Manon said with a kind of sigh. “That was the General talking.”
“I’m sorry,” Nick said again.
She turned to him. “You don’t think it’s my fault, do you?” she said. “Because I wanted to go the wrong way up the floodway?”
Nick looked at her in surprise. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s their fault.”
“Those bastards,” Manon said. Her lip trembled. “Those clay-eaters. They don’t know us. How dare they judge us on one thing? I am a person.”
Nick remembered her repeating that sentence, I am a person, after the deputies chased them through the camp. Clinging to her selfhood in the face of those who would deny it.
Manon’s family had worked for generations to build their pride, to educate themselves, to maintain their high standards of achievement, to lead their community. And that didn’t matter to the people on the other side of the fence, because they saw color only.
“I know,” Nick said. Because color wasn’t all Nick was, either. He was a father, an engineer, a man who loved. He was a father, at least, before he was a black man. He didn’t have any issues with people who reversed the order of those values—that’s who they were, and that was all right—but he always resented those who insisted that there existed values that were solely black, that black people who didn’t adopt these values, and no other, somehow weren’t black enough; that by choosing one life over another they were somehow betraying their ancestors; that he, by his choice of school, his choice of friends, his choice of a job, was betraying the brothers he’d left behind.
His mind spun. He wondered if the deputies—those people out there he was going to do his best to kill—ever accused each other of not being white enough. Probably they did.
“How dare they?” Manon said. “I have never felt so degraded.”
“Because somebody overlooked this damn place,” Nick said. Overlooked it for a century, probably. All it took for death to take a grip on a community was a handful of crazy people and a lot of other people who weren’t paying attention.
Both in Rwanda and in Bosnia, the radio had told people to pick up weapons and kill their neighbors. And they did. All that was needed to unleash the savagery was for someone to tell people it was okay. Wars were all ethnic now. That had been a problem at McDonnell, maybe even the reason Nick had been laid off. You don’t need a jet airplane to kill your neighbor; all you need is a shotgun and a machete and a voice on the radio to tell you what to do.
Whatever chaotic combination of circumstances had led to this situation in Spottswood Parish, it hadn’t been planned this way from the beginning. Never mind what Tareek Hall might claim about a nationwide conspiracy, this camp and this situation had the feel of improvisation. This simply wasn’t organized well enough to be a deeply held conspiracy. The coneheads and crackers that had gained control of this area were making it up as they went along, and that gave Nick a kind of hope. They might not have any kind of backup plan. If Nick could throw a monkey wrench into their scheme, their whole operation might fly to pieces. The Escape Committee had said there were a couple dozen guards at most, and some of them, like the Klan sheriff, hadn’t been seen since before the troubles really began. The ones who were present were standing double shifts, and were probably weary by now. The total wasn’t very many, not to keep a place like this going.