Jericho Iteration Read Free Page B

doing housework, paying bills, shopping for groceries, chatting on CompuServe with friends around the country … the daily affairs of a slightly bored young housewife who believed that her life was as solid as the ground beneath her feet.
    Then, one day last May, the ground was no longer solid.
    Now Jean Moran and her kids, Ellen and Daniel, are only three of some 75,000 residents of the vast tent city that is still in place in Forest Park seven months after the New Madrid earthquake.
    She still does housework—or rather, tentwork, the day-to-day housekeeping responsibilities shared by the four homeless families who occupy tent G-12—but gone are all the material things she once took for granted, except for a few family pictures she salvaged from the wreckage of her house.
    For a while after they moved into the park, Ellen and Danny went to school three days a week, attending one-room elementary classes conducted in the mess tent by volunteer teachers from the Urban Education Project, until government cutbacks closed the school last November. Now, while Jean fills plastic bottles from the water buffalo parked nearby, her children are two more kids playing in the frozen mud between the olive drab tents of Squat City.
    “I’m just grateful I didn’t lose them, too,” Jean says quietly, watching her kids as she hauls the two-gallon jugs back to her tent and stows them on the plywood floor beneath her metal bed. “They were both out in the playground for recess when it happened … thank God I was in the carport and managed to get out in the open, or they would have lost both their parents.”
    Her husband had also been out in the open during the quake, but he wasn’t as lucky as his wife and children. Rob Moran was killed when a cornice stone fell ten stories from a downtown office building while he was on his way back to work from a late lunch. He had a life insurance policy, just as the Moran house had been covered by earthquake rider on the home insurance, but Jean is still waiting for the money to come through. The small insurance company that had protected them went bankrupt before all its claims could be settled.
    With the insurance company now in receivership, it may be many months before the Morans are reimbursed for everything they are owed. Yet this is only one of many nuisances, large and small, with which Jean has had to cope as the widowed mother of two children.
    “Summer wasn’t too bad,” she says, sitting on her bunk and gazing through the furled-back tent flap. “It was hot, sure—sometimes it was over a hundred degrees in here—but at least we had things to do and people were taking care of us. And when construction companies started looking for crews to work on demolition and rebuilding contracts, some people around here were able to get work.”
    She laughs. “Y’know, for a while, it was almost like we were all in summer camp again. At first, we liked the ERA troopers. They put up the tents, smiled at us at mealtime, let Danny play in their Hummers and so forth …”
    She suddenly falls silent when, as if on cue, a soldier saunters past her tent. An assault rifle is slung over the shoulder of his uniform parka, which looks considerably warmer than the hooded sweatshirt and denim jacket Jean is wearing. For an instant their eyes meet; she glances away and the soldier, who looks no older than 21, walks on, swaggering just a little.
    “Lately, though, they’ve turned mean,” she goes on, a little more quietly now. “Like we’re just a bunch of deadbeats who want to live off the dole … I dunno what they think, but that’s how we’re treated. Sometimes they pick fights with the guys over little stuff, like someone trying to get an extra slice of cornbread in the cafeteria line. Every now and then somebody gets pushed around by two or three of them for no good reason. We’re at their mercy and they know it.”
    She lowers her voice a little more. “One of them propositioned me a couple