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 of weeks ago,” she says, her face reddening. “He made it sound as if he’d requisition some extra blankets for the children if I’d … y’know.” Jean violently shakes her head. “Of course, I’d never do something like that, not for anybody, but I think some of the other women around here who have kids … well, you do what you think you gotta do.”
She pulls at her lank hair as she talks, trying to comb out the knots with her fingers. It’s been several days since she has taken a shower in the women’s bath tent. Like everything else in Squat City, hot water is carefully rationed; she gives her bath cards to her kids.
“Last night Ellen wanted to know if Santa Claus was going to visit us even if we don’t have a chimney anymore,” she says. “I told her, ‘Yes, sweetheart, Santa will still find our tent.’ I didn’t tell her I don’t know if he’s going to bring us any presents-I’m hoping the Salvation Army or the Red Cross will come through-but I know what she wants anyway. She wants Santa to bring her daddy back …”
Her voice trails off and for a couple of minutes she is quiet, surrounded by the sounds and smells of Squat City. The acrid odor of campfire smoke, burning paper and plastic kindled by wet branches. The monotone voice of the announcer for Radio ERA, the low-wattage government AM station operating out of the Forest Park Zoo, talking about Friday night’s movie in the mess tents. A helicopter flying low overhead. Children playing kickball.
“Let me show you something,” Jean says abruptly, then stands up and walks between the bunks to push aside the grimy plastic shower curtain separating her family’s space from the others in G-12. “Look in here …”
In the darkness of the tent, a middle-aged man is lying in bed, his hands neatly folded across his chest. It’s impossible to tell whether he’s asleep or awake; his eyes are heavy-lidded, as if he’s about to doze off for a midafternoon nap, yet the pupils are focused on the fabric ceiling of the tent. He is alone, yet he seems unaware that he has visitors.
“That’s Mr. Tineal,” Jean whispers. “He used to own a grocery down on Gravois. He was buried alive under his store for six days before firemen found him. Six days, with both arms broken, and he hung on until they located him. After he got out of the hospital, they put him here, and he’s been like this ever since. His wife and his daughter have been tending to him, but I don’t think I’ve heard him say fifty words the whole time we’ve been here.”
Jean lets the curtain fall. “Three days ago, an ERA caseworker stopped by. They do that once a week, mostly just to have us fill out more forms and such. Anyway, this bitch-I’m sorry for my language, but that’s the way she was-the lady looked him over once, then turns to Margaret, his wife, and they’ve been married now for over thirty years, and says, ‘You oughtta just let him die. He’s only using up your rations, that’s all.’”
Jean walks back to her bunk and sits down on the same impression she had recently vacated. Once again, she’s quiet for a few minutes, gazing down at the muddy tracks on the wooden floor.
“So what do you think?” she says at last. “Is Santa going to visit us this year or what?”
From the Big Muddy Inquirer: April 3, 2013
St. Louis To ERA: Go Away
ERA to St. Louis: Thanks, But We Like It Here
Like a houseguest who has overstayed his welcome but is apparently deaf to hints that it’s time to hit the highway, the federal Emergency Relief Agency shows no signs of leaving St. Louis anytime soon, despite the fact that the last aftershock of the New Madrid earthquake has been felt and many local officials say the city is off the critical list.
Although 550 ERA troopers were recently withdrawn from Metro St. Louis and returned to the agency’s federal barracks at Ft. Devens in Massachusetts, some 600 soldiers remain on active duty in St. Louis County. ERA officials claim that the situation in St. Louis remains dangerous and that the agency’s paramilitary forces are needed to maintain order in the city.
“Look at the map,” says Col. George Barris, commander of ERA forces in St. Louis. He points at a street map tacked up on a wall in the central command post, in what used to be the Stadium Club at Busch Stadium. Large areas of the map-mostly in the northern and southern sides of the city, as well as the central wards-are shaded in red, with black markers pinned to individual blocks within the red areas.
“Those are the neighborhoods still under dusk-to-dawn curfew,” Barris explains. “The little black pins are the places where our patrols have encountered hostile action in the past 48 hours alone. Street gangs, looters, assaults against civilians-you name it. Now you tell me: do you really want us to just pack up and get out of here?”