“So how come I’m a corporal when I’ve been in less than a year and you just made PFC?” Armstrong asked. “They should’ve given you two stripes the minute you came back, and you ought to be at least a sergeant by now.”
Reisen shrugged. “You know who my aunt is.” It wasn’t a question.
“Well, sure,” Armstrong said. Everybody knew Yossel’s aunt had been married to the President and was a Congresswoman herself. “You don’t make a big deal out of it, the way a lot of guys would. But that ought to get you promoted faster, right, not slower?”
“I don’t want it to.” Yossel Reisen spoke with quiet emphasis. “I don’t want anybody giving me anything on account of Aunt Flora. I just want to be a regular guy and get what regular guys get. I know damn well I earned the stripe I’ve got. If somebody handed it to me, what would it be worth?”
Armstrong was chewing a big mouthful of bacon, so he couldn’t answer right away. If he were related to somebody famous, he would have milked it for all it was worth. A cushy job counting brass buttons five hundred miles away from guns going off sounded great to him.
Yossel went on, “When my Uncle David got conscripted in the last war, my aunt was already in Congress. She could have pulled strings for him. He wouldn’t let her. He lost a leg. He’s proud of what he did. He wouldn’t have it any different.”
He’s out of his fucking mind, Armstrong thought. And yet his own father was unmistakably proud of his war wound, too. No doubt he’d screamed his head off when he got it, just like anybody else when a bullet bit him. Memory did strange things, no doubt about it.
“Have it your way,” Armstrong said when at last he swallowed. “You pull your weight. Anybody tells you anything else, kick his ass for him.”
“Thanks,” Reisen said. “You, too.” Armstrong followed the bacon with a swig of coffee. Till he got in the Army, he’d always been half-assed about things, doing enough to get by and not another nickel’s worth. You couldn’t do that once you put on the uniform, though. It might get you killed. Even if it didn’t, it would make your buddies hate you. If you let your buddies down, they’d let you down, too—and that would get you killed. Having somebody he cared about tell him he was all right felt damn good.
After they ate, they went over to a barracks hall. It was cheap plywood, and probably better suited to prisoners on the U.S. side. Armstrong wasn’t inclined to be critical. He threw his few chattels into a footlocker at the end of a real cot with a real mattress and real bedding. Then he took off his shoes and threw himself down on the mattress. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” he said ecstatically. A real bed. The first real bed since . . . He’d tried to remember not so long before. He tried again, harder. He still couldn’t.
Nobody told him he had to get out of it. He was full. He was clean, in a clean uniform. Nobody was shooting at him or even near him. He allowed himself the luxury of taking off his shoes. Then, blissfully, he fell asleep.
As far as he could tell, he hadn’t changed position when reveille sounded the next morning. He yawned and stretched. He was still tired. But he wasn’t weary unto death anymore. He was also starved—he’d slept through the lunch that had sounded so inviting and dinner, too, damn near slept the clock around.
By the way the rest of the men in the hall rose, they’d done nothing much in the nighttime, either. Some of them had had the energy to strip to their shorts and get under the covers instead of lying on top of them. Maybe tonight, Armstrong told himself.
He made an enormous pig of himself again at breakfast. Then he went back to the barracks and flopped down again. He didn’t fall asleep right away this time. He just lay there, marveling. He didn’t have to go anywhere. He didn’t have to do anything. He didn’t have to have eyes in the back of his head—though having them doubtless was still a good thing. He could just ease back and relax. He wondered if he still remembered how. He aimed to find out, for as long as he had in this wonderful place.
****
Jefferson Pinkard hadn’t been in Texas since he headed home to Birmingham after the Great War ended. He’d fought north of where he was now, but the country around Snyder wasn’t a whole lot different from what he’d known half a lifetime earlier: plains cut by washes, with low rises here and there. The sky went on forever, and the landscape seemed to do the same.
Bulldozers were kicking dust up into that endless sky right now. Along with their diesel snorting, the sounds of saws and hammers filled the air. Camp Determination would seem to go on forever when it got finished, too. Jeff had run Camp Dependable near Alexandria, Louisiana, for years. Once Determination got done, you’d be able to drop Dependable into it and not even know the older camp was there.
The barbed-wire perimeter stretched and stretched and stretched. A lot of people would go through Camp Determination. It had to be able to hold them all. And Pinkard had to make sure nobody got out who wasn’t supposed to. Guard towers outside the walls had gone up before the barracks inside. Machine guns were already in place inside the towers. Anybody who tried to escape would be real sorry real fast—but probably not for long.
Stalking along outside the perimeter, Jeff looked up at each tower he passed. He’d climbed up into all of them, checking their fields of fire. If you wanted something like that done right—hell, if you wanted anything done right—you were better off doing it yourself.
His black, shiny boots scuffed still more dust into the air. He wore three stars on each collar tab, the equivalent of a colonel’s rank. But he was called Standard Leader, not Colonel. He had a Freedom Party rank, not one from the Army. His uniform was of the same cut as a colonel’s, but gray rather than butternut.
Tunic and trousers both had some extra room for his belly. He still carried muscle under the fat, though; he’d been a steelworker till he got conscripted and for a while after the war, and no weakling ever went into the Sloss Works. If he scowled more often than he smiled, that was true of most people who bossed other people around.
After he got done prowling the perimeter, he went inside the camp. He carried a submachine gun with a full magazine when he did. So did all the whites who went inside. He had another man with him, too. The rule was that no white man went in alone. He’d made the rule. He lived up to it.
The construction-gang bosses were white. Negroes did most of the actual work, building the barracks where they would later live . . . for a while. If they did a lousy job, they had only themselves to blame.
Pinkard checked with the straw bosses. He could tell by looking that things were pretty close to being on schedule. The bosses blamed the rain that had come through a few days earlier for what delays there were. “Make it up,” Jeff told them. “We’ll open on time, or I’ll know the reason why. And if we don’t, I won’t be the only one who’s sorry. Have you got that?”
He was bigger than most of the gang bosses, and he had a loud, rasping voice, and everybody knew he was in good odor in Richmond. People might grumble about him behind his back, but nobody had the nerve to get mouthy to his face.
There was also another reason for that. Jeff Pinkard didn’t just talk to the construction-gang bosses. He poked his nose in everywhere, as had been his habit ever since he started taking care of prisoners during the civil war between the Emperor of Mexico and the U.S.-backed republican rebels after the Great War ended.
He went up to a colored man nailing boards to the side of a barracks unit. “You got everything you need to do your job?” he demanded.
“Yes, suh. Sure do,” the Negro answered. “Got me a hammer an’ plenty o’ nails.” He looked Pinkard in the eye. “You give me a rifle an’ plenty o’ bullets, I do a job on you.”
“I bet you would,” Pinkard said. “But you tried that, and they caught you.” Most of the laborers were men taken in rebellion against the CSA. “If you try and you lose, this is what you get.”
“I ain’t got my population reduced yet,” the black man said, and went back nailing up boards.
Population reduction and
its variants had been Confederate slang for a little while now. I’ll reduce your population, you bastard! an angry man might shout, when he meant no more than, I’ll fix you! Used that way, the phrase wasn’t so heavily freighted with meaning. But, like a lot of slang, it sprang from something that was literally true. More Negroes, many more, were going into camps all over the CSA than were coming out—coming out alive, anyhow.
Jeff Pinkard eyed the colored man with the hammer in his hand. How did he mean what he’d just said? Was it only slang in his mouth, or had he seen enough to understand exactly where the slang came from? Jeff wondered, but he didn’t ask. As long as it was possible for Negroes to stay optimistic, they made more docile, more cooperative prisoners. Men who were sure they were doomed anyhow had nothing to lose. They caused trouble no matter what it cost them. Better to keep them as happy as you could.
That wasn’t real happy. Several Negroes asked Jeff if they could have bigger rations. He just shook his head and kept walking. They didn’t complain too much. The grits and occasional beans or biscuits they got didn’t quite amount to a starvation diet. The ration was just small enough to remind people it should have been larger.
The workers had no shortage of building supplies. Ferdinand Koenig, the C.S. Attorney General, had promised Pinkard a railroad spur would run to Camp Determination, and he’d kept his word. Everything Jeff needed came right to his front door. As soon as the camp was finished, trainloads of prisoners would come right to his front door, too. It wouldn’t be very long.
More colored prisoners were paving the road that led into Camp Determination and the big parking area at the end of it. Along with the railroad spur, there’d be plenty of truck traffic going in and out of the camp. Jeff smiled to himself. That had been his idea, back at Camp Dependable. But there he hadn’t had the room to do things right. Here, he did. And if anybody came up with something better than trucks, he’d have room for that, too, whatever it turned out to be. Nobody’d improved on trucks yet, but you never could tell what someone might think up.
“You make sure you get that concrete nice and smooth,” Jeff barked to a Negro working on the lot.
“Oh, yes, suh, I do dat. You don’t gots to worry none. Everything be fust-rate. We takes care of it.” As any Negro would when a white boss bore down on him, this one was quick and ready to promise the moon. Whether he’d deliver was liable to be a different question.
Pinkard didn’t care so much about the barracks halls. But the parking lot and the road—they really counted. The trucks were important and expensive. They had to be well taken care of. “I’ll have my eye on you,” Pinkard growled. “You think I’m kidding, you’ll be sorry.”
“Yes, suh.” The Negro didn’t get up from his hands and knees. He probably wanted to show Jeff how diligent he was. “Don’t you fret none.”
As things advanced here, more barbed wire with gates in it would separate the road and the lot from the rest of the camp. He had everything planned. The blueprints for Camp Determination had come out of Richmond, but he had permission from Ferd Koenig to modify them as he thought best. This was going to be his camp, and by God it would work the way he wanted it to.
Guards saluted as he and his silent gun-toting companion left the perimeter. He’d need more manpower when the camp got going, but he didn’t expect that to be a problem. The Confederate Veterans’ Brigades had a guard-training center not far outside of Fort Worth. The way Jeff saw things, the men who came out of it would probably do better than the cops and tough guys who made up most of the guard force now. They’d really know what they were supposed to do.
He had his own office by the growing camp. Telephone and telegraph lines connected it to the outside world. That was more so Richmond could send him instructions than so he could reach other places, but the powers that be back in the capital didn’t mind if he did.
When he walked up to the telegrapher, the young man didn’t quite sit at attention, but he came close. Jeff said, “Billy Ray, I want you to send a wire to Edith Blades in Alexandria, Louisiana. You’ve got the address, right?”
“Yes, sir, Standard Leader!” Billy Ray said. If he didn’t have the address of his boss’s fiancée handy, he’d be in trouble. He grabbed a message pad and poised a pencil over it. “Go ahead, sir.”
“Right.” Jeff paused a moment to work out what he wanted to say before he said it. He always felt like a damn fool when he had to mumble and stumble and backtrack. “Here we go. . . . ‘Dear Edith, All well here. Progress on schedule. Will be back to visit in about two weeks. Expect things to start up in less than two months. Miss you and the boys. See you all soon. Love, Jeff.’ ” He tried to keep things short, even if he wasn’t paying for the wire out of his own pocket.
“Let me read that back for you, sir.” Billy Ray did. He had it right. The boys had surprised him the first time he heard it; he hadn’t known Edith was a widow. Now he took them for granted.
“Send it off,” Jeff told him. The telegraph key started clicking.
Jeff went into his inner office. He’d been careful about more than keeping things short. Suppose the damnyankees got their hands on this wire. He hadn’t given his last name or his rank. He hadn’t said anything specifically about the camp, either. Anybody who didn’t already know what he was talking about wouldn’t be able to make much sense of it. He sounded like a drummer or an efficiency expert, not a camp commandant.
I damn well am an efficiency expert, he thought. A lot of the changes he’d made to the blueprints involved smoothing things out, clearing up bottlenecks, avoiding trouble wherever he could. The parking area was bigger than it had been in the original drawings, and the road leading to and from it better laid out. A lot of trucks would go in and out of Camp Determination. A hell of a lot of Negroes would come in and go out.
He knew where the road out of camp led. At the end of it, there was another barbed-wire enclosure. That one kept people out, not in. Texas had a hell of a lot of prairie. If you put some dozer crews on the job, they could dig a lot of trenches without drawing much notice. Fill those trenches full of bodies, bulldoze the dirt back over them, and dig some new ones . . .
Jeff nodded to himself. The Negroes who got into trucks would think they were on their way to some other camp. So would the ones who stayed behind. They wouldn’t know the exhaust fumes were routed into the airtight passenger box, not till too late they wouldn’t.
Camp Determination was big. The burial ground was even bigger. The Freedom Party was—was determined, by God!—to solve the Negro problem in the CSA once and for all. It would take a lot of work, but Jeff figured they could do it.
II
BRIGADIER GENERAL Irving Morrell wished to God he could get out of the hospital. His shattered shoulder was improving, but there was an unfortunate difference between improving and improved. Morrell, a rawboned, weathered man of fifty, had found out all about that when he was wounded in the Great War. An infection after he got shot in the leg had kept him on the shelf for months, and kept the doctors darkly muttering about amputation. In the end, they didn’t have to go in there with a hacksaw, for which he’d never stopped being grateful.
No wound infection this time, or none to speak of. They had drugs now they hadn’t dreamt of a generation earlier. But he still needed to heal, and that took time, however much he wished it didn’t. He could use his right hand again, though he feared the arm would never regain all its strength and dexterity.
“When can I go back to work, Doc?” he asked the Army physician who was tending his wound. He might have been a roofer who’d taken a fall—most wounds in war weren’t that different from industrial accidents. Most—but not his. The sniper who’d wounded him hadn’t been aiming at anybody else. Two more bullets had cracked past him as the gunner on the barrel he commanded hustled him out of harm’s way.
Like any Army doctor, Conrad Rohde held officer’s rank so he could tell enlisted men what to do. He had a major’s gold oak leaves on the green-gray tunic he
wore under his white hospital coat. He was big and blond and slow-moving—slow-talking, too. After his usual careful consideration, he answered, “Well, sir, it shouldn’t be too long now.”
“Gee, thanks a lot. Thanks a hell of a lot,” Morrell said. Rohde’d been telling him the same thing for a while now. Before that, he’d said a few weeks . . . for a few weeks.
“I’m sorry I can’t be more exact.” As usual, the sawbones sounded not the least bit sorry. “You aren’t ready yet, not unless you don’t intend to do anything more strenuous than stay behind the line—far behind the line—and move pins on a map.”
Since Morrell intended no such thing, he swore under his breath. A barrel commander who didn’t lead from the front wasn’t worth much. So he told himself, anyhow. It was true enough. The other half of the truth was that he’d always been a man who liked to mix it up with the enemy.
Rohde knew what that muttering meant. He didn’t even smirk and look superior; he had a deadpan that probably won him money in poker games. He did say, “You see?”
“The arm’s not too bad,” Morrell insisted. “Honest to God, it’s not.”
Dr. Rohde didn’t come right out and tell him he was a liar. He thought for a moment, then said, “You’re in a barrel. It gets hit. It starts to burn. You have to bail out—right now. Can you open a hatch with that arm?”
Morrell thought about it. He raised the injured member. It hurt. That didn’t bother him so much. He’d learned to live with pain. What bothered him was how weak the arm was. Savagely, he said, “I wish I were lefthanded.”
“I can’t do anything about that. You should have talked to God, or to your parents.” Rohde was maddeningly unhelpful. “Since you aren’t lefthanded, do I take it you’ve answered my question?”
“Yes, dammit.” Morrell couldn’t have been more disgusted. He was even willing to make what was, for him, not far from the ultimate sacrifice: “If they need me on light duty behind the lines for a while, I’ll do that. Anything to get out of here.”
Drive to the East Page 4
