Forty Days at Kamas (28 page)

The moment we arrived at the brickyard, I scanned the strip along the perimeter fence where Sigler's widow had agreed to toss a brick fragment overnight with her coded message. As I carried my load between the brick pile and the pallet yard, I looked for a peculiarly shaped and marked brick fragment. I found it on my third trip to the pallets, tossed it into my hod and a few moments later slipped it inside my coveralls. The rest of the morning went by slowly as I speculated about what I might learn when I decoded the message concealed inside.

After lunch, the work team in the neighboring section of the brickyard withdrew and was replaced by a platoon of women who set about gathering trash. At the time, I was teamed up with a young Mexican–American car thief named Jimmy Vega to strap clay bricks into bundles using a steel banding device. As it happened, both of us were paying more attention to the women than to our work and failed to notice a defective fastener that caused the steel band to snap open, slicing into both my hands and tearing a deep gash in Jimmy's cheek and temple. The foreman, seeing blood gushing from our wounds, called for guards to drive us to the camp dispensary.

I have always reacted badly to the sight of my own blood. As I watched the bloodstain soak through the shop rag the foreman had given me to wrap around my hands, I felt increasingly light–headed and had to take deep breaths to keep from passing out. While Vega held his rolled–up undershirt against his bloody face and waited stoically for our ride to end, I gazed out the window to find something–anything–that would take my mind off my wounds. By the time we closed within a few hundred yards of camp I had found it.

During our brief absence the camp had become a beehive of activity. The clever officials of the Corrective Labor Administration apparently had spared no pains to restore the damage we had done to the camp the night before. Every officer, guard, warder, and contract worker must have been pressed into service to prepare the camp for our return. As we learned later, security men who had lost the habit of manual labor years ago pushed wheelbarrows and carried hods. The more skilled among them took up trowels or hammers. Skilled tradesmen arrived from nearby military units and civilian workshops to repair metal gates and to change locks. Men in hydraulic cherry pickers replaced bulbs in broken flood lamps.

As we drove the short distance from the camp's outer perimeter into the Service Yard the extent of their work became more impressive. The breaches in the walls were largely bricked shut. Prohibited zones were being marked with lime twenty feet from each wall. Precast concrete fence posts had been installed along the perimeters of the prohibited zones and barbed wire strung between them. Sandbag bunkers were being built at strategic spots around the yard. It was remarkable what wonders these men could achieve when the brass was watching.

The guards who had driven us into camp paid no attention to the construction and made no attempt to conceal any of it from us. They led us into the crowded waiting room of the old dispensary, stayed long enough for the receptionist to sign us in and left. After a while the nurses admitted us into the treatment area and directed each of us to take a seat on a steel examining table.

Paramedics appeared a few minutes later to disinfect our wounds and stitch them up–without the luxury of anesthesia. I marveled at Jimmy’s fortitude as he endured painful stitches to his face. By the time my own wounds had been stitched and dressed, I was a nervous wreck. Once they had finished, however, I had the consolation of knowing that, for many days to come, my injured hands would exempt me from virtually all manual labor. Jimmy would be lucky if he didn’t have to return to the brickyard the same afternoon.

Back in the waiting room we learned that no one would be admitted back into the yard until after dinner. Since dinner was at least three hours away, Vega and I looked for a place to sit. We found two chairs near the admitting desk.

"You boys waiting to be treated?" asked the raw–boned man in his mid–fifties seated next to me. He had the suntanned, leathery face of a cowboy and his drawl seemed to match.

"Nope. Just came from there," I answered. "How about you?"

"They worked on me this morning."

He had gauze dressings on his forehead, nose, and neck.

"Melanomas," he continued, anticipating my question. "Malignant. I don't even want to know where they’ve spread to. I suppose I'll feel a lump somewhere one of these days and then it'll be downhill fast."

"Well, if you don't want to die of cancer, there are plenty of other choices around here," I replied. "I'm Paul Wagner. This is my partner, Jimmy."

"Earl Cunningham. What are you in for?"

"Seditious conspiracy," I replied. "A fiver. And you?"

"Insurrection, treason, conspiracy, serving a foreign power. Take your pick. I've got a lifetime, no–cut contract."

"What did you do to get them so pissed off at you?"

"I emigrated," Cunningham answered. "Then I came back and fought with the partisans. There's more, but I won't bore you."

"Wow. How long have you been here?" I asked.

"Four years. My wife and I and my oldest son were in Mexico for a meeting when the Mexicans signed their secret treaty with the Unionists. We never knew what hit us. The Federales arrested us at our hotel. The next day I was in chains on a military plane to Denver."

"What about your wife and son?"

"The last I saw my wife she was on the same plane, drugged out of her mind. My son died during our first week in Colorado."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"You know, Paul, you're the only person who's said 'sorry' to me in years. I'd almost forgotten the word existed."

"It must be the effects of being a free man for a day. Funny how civilization starts to creep back in."

We both fell silent for a moment as we thought of the extraordinary events of the past two days.

"I don't know about you, Paul, but I want it back," Cunningham went on. Now that I've tasted freedom again, I'd rather die than go back to the mines."

"You might just get your wish," I told him. "The next time we take them on they’re likely to turn this place into a free fire zone."

"I don’t care. Watching those kids bust into the Service Yard taught me something important. By God, the next time they head for the wall, I'm going with them. I don't care how far I get. So long as I’m facing the enemy I'll feel like I died a free man."

Earl looked past me toward Jimmy Vega, who had started paying attention to Earl when his speech became impassioned.

"So, Jimmy boy, what do you say?" he asked the Mexican. "Do we go again?"

"You bet," Jimmy replied. "We took them twice. We can take them again."

Little more was said among the three of us until they brought us our soup, bread, and tea at about seven o'clock. When we had finished our food and were waiting to be released, Earl turned to me one more time.

"Paul, do you think this country can ever go back to what it was before?"

"Someday," I replied. "It may take another generation, but I think we can get over Unionism, given enough time."

Earl shook his head and pressed his lips together.

"Well, I don't. I used to think so, but not anymore."

"Fortunately, civilization is a renewable resource," I said. "It just doesn't look that way right now because there’s such a shortage of it."

"And the Unionists are doing their best to stamp it out," he countered.

"Let them try," I said. "They're not that strong."

I was already back in my bunk when the rest of the prisoners returned from work. They had been held at their worksites a half–hour longer than usual and had not objected to being herded straight to the mess hall for dinner. Nor had they given it much thought when they were escorted straight from the mess hall to their barracks, where the doors were promptly padlocked.

But some had seen the repairs around camp and word had traveled fast. The meeting, the concessions, the cajoling, had all been a ruse to enable the DSS to get us out of the camp long enough to beef up its physical security. The crackdown had already begun.

Ironically, it was the thieves who expressed the greatest outrage at the bosses’ treachery. For the next two hours the vandals huddled in their corner of the barracks plotting their counteroffensive. Some of the more hotheaded young politicals joined them. As soon as the time came for lights out, the group sprang into action.

The vandals' first act was to remove our barracks door from its hinges. Within moments we heard the thieves' long–drawn whistles shrilling throughout Division 3. Then came answering whistles from Division 2. Before long the whistling turned into a blood–chilling chorus. The warders who patrolled the camp in threes or fours took fright and ran for the gates. At first the guards refused to let them out, but when they noticed the warders being pursued by packs of savage prisoners, they relented. Within an hour after lights–out, no warders or guards remained anywhere inside Divisions 2 or 3. The prisoners swarmed into the camp yards but this time it wasn't just the thieves who raised the battle cry.

Still, the same problem faced the vandals who had originally faced them on Sunday: a wall divided their forces in two. The first time they scaled the wall the guards had tolerated it. But now, when the first wave of rebels approached the newly marked prohibited zone, the tower guards loosed a torrent of machine gun fire upon them. The gunfire killed a half dozen vandals and left at least as many wounded.

The vandals wasted no time in responding. They aimed their slingshots at the floodlights as before. With better planning and more practice, they needed even less time to knock out all the floodlights within their range. The towers responded by releasing illumination flares. The tower gunners had also taken the precaution of alternating one tracer round with every five conventional machine gun rounds to better guide their aim.

But the prisoners had an answer to this as well. They had discovered a pair of uniformed escort guards left behind in Division 3 and tied them to a mess hall table. They then pushed the table toward the wall flanked by other mess tables while the guards screamed to their comrades not to shoot. The firing ceased.

Meanwhile, the prisoners severed the barbed wire surrounding the boundary zone and used shovels that they had concealed about the camp the night before to dig a trench under the wall. Working both sides of the wall at once, they shoveled in relays, then formed teams to scrape away the loose dirt and stone with kitchen knives and mess tins. By the time the guards had sought and received permission to resume firing, the trenches were deep enough and enough tables were stacked around those who were digging to shield them from view. By now, the prisoners also had the advantage of enlisting scores of seasoned combat veterans who were accustomed to digging trenches even under heavy fire.

In little more than an hour, the first trench connecting Divisions 2 and 3 was complete and a second was underway in the semi–darkness. Both entrenching teams now began the task of burrowing their way into the Service Yard, which was held once again by a platoon of Tommy gunners with support from machine gun crews in the watchtowers. To help cover their mates, the prisoners kept up a barrage of slingshot fire against the towers as well as a hail of stones and bricks tossed over the wall at the Tommy gunners. Before long, the prisoners had three separate trenches in progress along the wall and were distributing knives to those who waited to attack the submachine gunners from the completed trenches. A staff team of experienced infantry officers and non–coms planned the assault while the troops deepened the trenches.

As it happened, no assault was required to dislodge the Tommy gunners. The bosses, apparently having weighed the likelihood that prisoners might overrun the troops and turn their captured weapons against the watchtowers, ordered the tower guards to hold their fire while the troops withdrew from the Service Yard.

I watched all this from the same barracks roof in Division 2 where I had sat two nights before. As soon as the east gate shut behind the submachine gunners, we let out a great shout that spread throughout the compound. For there was hardly a man or woman in the Kamas camp who was not involved somehow in supporting the action or who did not cheer it on from the sidelines. A single orange cap tossed into the air became a swarm of caps. When the caps hit the ground, we tore off the number patches from front and back and trampled them in the dust.

As soon as the trenches into the Service Yard were complete, slingshot marksmen sprinted to the safety of the sandbag bunkers to complete the extinction of the surrounding floodlights. Then the vanguard of the entrenching team moved forward yet again and burrowed under the wall to the women's camp while other prisoners set about dismantling the interior gates. Still others broke into the tool sheds and took up picks and crowbars to help finish the job of dismantling boundary fences, reopening aboveground breaches in the interior walls, and deepening the trenches. Within a few short hours, the entire day's labor by the camp authorities and their collaborators had been nearly undone.

The second liberation of the women's camp was no less triumphant than the first. Men and women embraced and searched for loved ones as they had two days before. I saw many couples come together across the division boundaries and linger in the Service Yard as if to prolong that initial sense of reunion.

But the women's camp was not the last section of the camp remaining to be liberated. At the opposite end of the compound, in Division 4, the men's jail was still in government hands. The leaders of the assault on the Service Yard reassembled their men and called on them to follow to the Division 4 gate. After taking the precaution of erecting a barrier of mess hall tables to protect them against machine gun fire from the watchtowers, they set to work dismantling the gate and opening a breach in the wall using steel girders as battering rams.