Sonny Thornfield popped the cap on an ice-cold Jax and watched the veins bulge in Frank’s neck. The discovery of the three civil rights workers in an earthen dam a few days ago had stirred Frank up in a way Sonny hadn’t seen since the Bay of Pigs fiasco. In a way, this whole camping trip had been designed to let off pressure after the FBI’s discovery of the bodies up in Philadelphia. After their shift ended Friday, they’d mounted four camper shells on their pickups, then towed Frank’s boat and Sonny’s homemade grill down to the sandbar south of the Triton Battery plant, where they all worked during the week. The long weekend of sun had pretty much worn everybody out, except the kids. Now the women sat in folding chairs, fanning themselves and swatting mosquitoes in the shade of the cottonwoods. Frank’s and Sonny’s wives were back there, along with Granny Knox and Wilma Deen, Glenn’s divorced sister. The kids who weren’t out in the boat were teasing a stray dog down by the riverbank.

The men had spent the weekend practicing their demolition skills on stumps, and on an old Chevy that lay half buried in the sand down by the water. Frank’s younger brother Snake was still down there, fiddling with something under the Chevy’s dash and flirting with the nineteen-year-old waitress he’d brought with him. All the men on this picnic were old hands with dynamite and Composition B, but Frank had bought some of the new C-4 off a supply sergeant he knew at Fort Polk, and they’d been using it to try to master the art of the shaped charge. Every time they peeled eight inches off a stump top, the kids squealed and hooted and begged for fireworks.

But not even that had calmed Frank down. When they’d driven into town yesterday for cigarettes, he’d used a pay phone to call some buddies and ask about national coverage. He came back to the car saying Cronkite wouldn’t shut up about the “national scandal” and all the big-city papers were riding the story hard. All weekend, Sonny had sensed that Frank was coming to some kind of decision. And if he was … that meant changes for them all.