Are you the spy? I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve run my mouth around you. Well, no more, goddammit. But Scott had to know about this. Jeff said, “In three or four days, we’re getting another fifteen hundred, two thousand niggers.”
Scott stared. “Holy shit!” he said. “They can’t do that! This place won’t hold ’em.”
“Oh, yes, it will,” Pinkard said.
“How?” Scott demanded. “You were just now telling me it wouldn’t hold the niggers we’ve got, and you were right. You know damn well you were right.”
“I’ll tell you how.” And Pinkard did.
“Holy shit,” Scott said again, this time in an altogether different tone of voice. “You sure you know what you’re talking about? You sure you know what you’re doing?” Under other circumstances, the questions would have infuriated Jeff. Not now.
He nodded uneasily. “I know, all right. Get the guards we need—you’ll know the ones we can count on. Then pull out the niggers.”
“All at once?” Scott asked.
After a moment, Jeff shook his head. “No. That’d be asking for trouble. Take out a couple hundred. Less chance of anything going wrong.”
“Yeah.” The guard chief eyed him. “How come I’m the lucky one? What are you gonna be doing? Sittin’ in your office pouring down a cold beer?”
Had things been different, that would have infuriated Jeff, too. The way things were, Mercer Scott had the right to ask. Pinkard shook his head. “You stay here and get the next bunch ready. I’m going out with the first ones, and I won’t come back till the job’s done.”
“All right.” Scott nodded. “That’s fair. I can’t tell you it ain’t.” He stuck out his hand. Pinkard shook it. He was grateful for any sort of reassurance he could get.
Along with fifteen guards, he led two hundred Negroes away from Camp Dependable. The black men came willingly enough. As far as they knew, it was just another work detail. When they’d gone two or three miles from the camp, he ordered them to dig a long, deep trench. “This here ain’t nothing but a waste o’ time,” one of them said. But he was only complaining, the way people did when they had to do work they didn’t care for.
Pinkard didn’t argue with him. When the ditch was dug, he ordered the Negroes to lie down in it. That drew more complaints. “You gots to put us on top of each other?” a man said. “We ain’t no goddamn fairies.”
The guards stepped up onto a parapet made from the dirt the Negroes had dug out. Even when they aimed their submachine guns at the men in the trench, the blacks didn’t seem to believe what was happening. This is my camp, Jeff thought miserably. I’m responsible for what goes on here. He nodded to the guards. The order was his to give, and he gave it: “Fire!”
They did. As soon as they started shooting, it was as if the ground convulsed. The submachine guns roared and stuttered and spat flame. The guards slapped in magazine after magazine. Pinkard was appalled at how much ammunition his men needed to kill the prisoners. The stenches of blood and shit filled the humid air. At last, the screaming stopped. Only the groans of the dying were left.
More than one guard vomited into the trench. Jeff felt like heaving up his guts, too, but sternly refrained. “Scrape dirt over ’em,” he told the guards. “We’ve got more work to do.” The guards grumbled, but not too much. They seemed too stunned to do a whole lot in the way of grumbling.
And it got harder after that. The Negroes at the camp had to have understood what was going on when the guards came back and the men they’d been guarding didn’t. But Mercer Scott was no fool. The first gang of blacks had gone off willingly enough, yes. He made sure the next bunch were shackled. That way, nobody tried to run off into the woods and swamp.
Over the course of the next three days, Pinkard reduced the population of Camp Dependable by two thousand men. That was how he referred to it in his reports. That was how he tried to think about it, too. If he thought about reducing population, he didn’t have to dwell on shooting helpless prisoners.
A few of the guards were exhilarated after the job was done. They were the ones who thought Negroes had it coming to them. Most of the men were very subdued, though. They didn’t mind jailing blacks or starving them. Shooting them in cold blood seemed to be something else again.
One shot rang out in the middle of the night: a guard blowing his brains out. He got buried, too, with almost as little fuss as if he were one of the blacks so casually disposed of.
When the promised—the threatened—new shipment of Negro prisoners arrived, Camp Dependable was able to take them. Pinkard wondered if he would get a congratulatory call from Ferd Koenig. He didn’t. Maybe that made sense, too. After all, he’d only done what the attorney general needed him to do.
Scipio wished to God he could get out of Augusta. But it wasn’t so easy as it would have been a few years before. Things had tightened up. Everywhere a black man went, it was, “Show me your passbook, boy.” If he started working in, say, Atlanta, he would have to produce the document that proved he was himself—or proved he was Xerxes, which amounted to the same thing. And if he did that, he would be vulnerable to either Anne Colleton or Jerry Dover.
He didn’t think his boss at the Huntsman’s Lodge had anything in particular against him. He knew damned well his former boss at the former Marshlands plantation did. But he didn’t like the idea of being vulnerable to Dover much better than he liked being vulnerable to Miss Anne. Being vulnerable to anybody white terrified him.
At the restaurant, the rich white men who ate there talked more and more of war. So did the newspapers. Jake Featherston was thumping his chest and foaming at the mouth because Al Smith wouldn’t give him what he’d promised not to ask for the year before. Scipio remembered too well what a catastrophe the last war had been for the Confederate States. Under other circumstances, the prospect of a new one would have appalled him.
Under other circumstances . . . As things were, he more than half hoped the CSA did start fighting the USA gain. All eyes, all thoughts, would turn toward the front. They would turn away from a town in the middle of nowhere like Augusta. And he had heard some of the things bombing airplanes could do nowadays. That made him all the gladder Augusta was a long, long way from the border.
What made life harder was that whites weren’t all he had to worry about in Augusta. The Terry was full of sharecroppers displaced from the land by the tractors and harvesters and combines that had revolutionized farming in the CSA since the Freedom Party came to power. The Terry, in fact, held far more people than it held jobs. A man who wasn’t careful could easily get knocked over the head for half a dollar—especially a man who wasn’t young and who had to wear a penguin suit to and from work, so he looked as if he had money.
Scipio made a point of being careful.
Coming home was worse than going up to the Huntsman’s Lodge. Going to work, he had to face harassment from whites who fancied themselves wits. Most of them overestimated by a factor of two. He had to give soft answers. He’d been doing that all his life. He managed.
He came home in the middle of the night. Darkness gave predators cover—and the Augusta police rarely wasted their time looking into crimes blacks committed against each other. Every street corner on the way to his apartment building was an adventure.
Most of the time, of course, the corners were adventures only in his own imagination. He could—and did—imagine horrors whether they were there or not. Every once in a while, they were. He walked as quietly as he could. He always paused in the blackest shadows he could find before exposing himself by crossing a street. Nobody had worried about street lights in the Terry even before the rise of the Freedom Party. These days, the idea of anyone worrying about anything that had to do with blacks was a painful joke.
Voices from a side street made Scipio decide he would do better to stay where he was for a little while. One black man said, “Ain’t seen Nero for a while.”
“You won’t, neither,” another answered. “Goddamn of
ays cotched him with a pistol in his pocket.”
“Do Jesus!” the first man exclaimed. “Nero always the unluckiest son of a bitch you ever seen. What they do with him?”
“Ship him out West, one o’ them camps,” his friend said.
“Do Jesus!” the first man said again. “You go into one o’ them places, you don’t come out no more.”
“Oh, mebbe you do,” the other man said. “Mebbe you do—but it don’t help you none.”
“Huh!” the first man said—a noise half grunt, half the most cynical laugh Scipio had ever heard. “You got dat right. They throws you in a hole in the ground, or else they throws you in the river fo’ the gators and the snappers to finish off.”
“I hear the same thing,” his friend agreed. “Gator sausage mighty tasty. I ain’t gonna eat it no mo’. Never can tell who dat gator knowed.” He laughed, too. The black men walked on. They had no idea Scipio had been listening.
He waited till their footsteps faded before he went on to his apartment. The Huntsman’s Lodge served a fair amount of wild game: venison, raccoon, bear every once in a while, and alligator. Scipio had been fond of garlicky alligator sausage himself. He didn’t think he would ever touch it again.
Three days later, he was walking to work when police and Freedom Party stalwarts with submachine guns swept into the Terry. They weren’t trying to solve any specific crime. Instead, they were checking passbooks. Anybody whose papers didn’t measure up or who didn’t have papers, they seized.
“Let me have a look at that there passbook, boy,” a cop growled at Scipio.
“Yes, suh.” Scipio was old enough to be the policeman’s father, but to most whites in the CSA he would always be a boy. He didn’t argue. He just handed over the document. Arguing with a bad-tempered man with a submachine gun was apt to be hazardous to your life expectancy.
The cop took a brief look at his papers, then gave them back. “Hell, I know who you are,” he said. “You been paradin’ around in them fancy duds for years. Go on, get your black ass outa here.”
“Yes, suh. Thank you kindly, suh.” Scipio had taken a lot of abuse from whites for going to work in a tuxedo. Here, for once, it looked to have paid off. He got out of there in a hurry. That was unheroic. He knew it. It gnawed at him. But what could he do against dozens of trigger-happy whites? Not one damned thing, and he knew that, too.
He’d gone only a few blocks when gunfire rang out behind him: first a single shot, then a regular fusillade. He didn’t know what had happened, and he wasn’t crazy or suicidal enough to go back and find out, but he thought he could make a pretty good guess. Somebody must have figured his chances shooting it out were better than they would have been if he’d gone wherever the cops and the stalwarts were taking people they grabbed.
The fellow who’d started shooting was probably—almost certainly—dead now. Even so, who could say for sure he was wrong? He’d died quickly, and hadn’t suffered much. Scipio thought of alligators, and wished he hadn’t.
One of the waiters, a skinny young man named Nestor, didn’t show up at the Huntsman’s Lodge. Jerry Dover muttered and fumed. Scipio told him about the dragnet in the Terry. The manager eyed him. “You reckon they picked up Nestor for something or other?”
“Dunno, Mistuh Dover,” Scipio said. “Reckon mebbe they could’ve, though.”
“What do you suppose he did?” Dover asked. “He’s never given anybody any trouble here.”
“Dunno,” Scipio said again. “Dunno if he done anything. Them police, I don’t reckon they was fussy.” They were standing right outside the kitchen, in a nice, warm corridor. He wanted to shiver even so. Nestor would have been wearing a tuxedo, too. Fat lot of good it had done him.
Jerry Dover rubbed his chin. “He’s a pretty fair worker. Let me make a call or two, see what I can find out.”
What would he have done if Nestor were a lazy good-for-nothing? Washed his hands like Pilate? Scipio wouldn’t have been surprised. He didn’t dwell on it. With the crew shorthanded because Nestor wasn’t there, he stayed hopping.
And Nestor didn’t show up, either. Dover wore a tight-lipped expression, one that discouraged questions. Scipio and the rest of the crew got through the evening. When he went back the next day, the missing waiter still wasn’t there. That nerved him to go up to the manager and ask, “Nestor, he come back?”
“Doubt it.” Dover sounded as if he had to pay for every word that passed his lips. “Time for a new hire. He won’t know his ass from Richmond, either.”
“Nestor, what he do?” Scipio persisted. “You find out?”
“He got himself arrested, that’s what.” Jerry Dover sounded angry at Scipio—or possibly angry at the world. “He picked the wrong goddamn time to do it, too.”
“What you mean?” Scipio asked. “Ain’t no right time to git arrested.”
Dover nodded. “Well, that’s so. There’s no right time. But there’s sure as hell a wrong time. What the cops told me yesterday was, the city jail’s full. So those niggers they caught in the Terry—you know about that?”
“Oh, yes, suh,” Scipio said softly. “I tol’ you, remember? They almost ‘rests me, too.”
“That’s right, you did. Well, I’m damn glad they didn’t, because I’d be down two waiters if they had.” If the restaurant manager was glad for any other reason that they hadn’t arrested Scipio, he didn’t show it. He went on, “Jail’s full up, like I said. So they went and shipped these here niggers off to one of those camps they’ve started.”
“Lord he’p Nestor, then,” Scipio said. “Somebody go into one of them places, I hear tell he don’t come out no mo’, not breathin’, anyways.” He’d heard it as gossip between two men he’d never seen, but that didn’t mean he didn’t believe it. It had the horrid feel of truth.
Jerry Dover shifted uncomfortably from foot to foot. What had he heard? Back in the days when Scipio worked at Marshlands, he’d been convinced the Colletons couldn’t keep a secret for more than a few minutes before the blacks on the plantation also knew it. Here at the Huntsman’s Lodge, the colored cooks and waiters and cleaners quickly found out whatever their white bosses knew. Or did they? Just as blacks kept secrets from whites out of necessity, so whites might also find it wise to keep certain things from blacks.
But if Dover had that kind of knowledge, it didn’t show on his face. Scipio thought it would. Dover did what he had to do to get along in the world in which he found himself. Who didn’t, except crazy people and saints? But the manager was pretty honest, pretty decent. He was no “Freedom!”-yelling stalwart without two brain cells to rub against each other.
He said, “You want to watch yourself on the street, then, don’t you? You know I’ve got some pull. But it doesn’t look like I can do anything about one of those places.”
“I watches myself real good, suh,” Scipio answered. “You say de city jail full up?” Jerry Dover nodded. Scipio asked him, “They ’rest white folks now, de white folks go to dese camps, too?”
His boss looked at him as if he’d asked whether the stork brought mothers their babies. “Don’t be stupid,” Dover said.
That was good advice, too. It always was. What worried Scipio was, it might not be enough. He’d escaped the last dragnet as much by luck as by anything else. You could tell a man not to be stupid, and maybe—if he wasn’t stupid to begin with—he’d listen. But how the devil could you tell a man not to be unlucky?
Five-thirty in the morning. Reveille blared. Armstrong Grimes groaned. He had time for that one involuntary protest before he rolled out of his cot and his feet hit the floor of the barracks hall at Fort Custer outside of Columbus, Ohio. Then he started functioning, at least well enough. He threw on his green-gray uniform, made up the cot, and dashed outside to his place in the roll call—all in the space of five minutes.
What happened to men who were late had long since convinced him being late was a bad idea. Back home, his mother had made the bed for him most of the time. He’
d been sloppy at it when he first got here. Now a dime bounced off his blanket, and bounced high. The drill sergeant didn’t have cause to complain about him or even notice him—the two often being synonymous.
He stood there trying not to shiver in the chilly dawn. When the time came, he sang out to announce his presence. Other than that, he kept quiet. Everybody else did the same. For once, the drill sergeants seemed in a merciful mood. They let the assembled soldiers march off to breakfast after only a minimum of growling and cursing.
Everybody marched everywhere at Fort Custer. Armstrong had begun to think Thou shalt march was in the Bible somewhere right below Thou shalt not kill and Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord in vain—two commandments he was learning more about violating every day.
He took a tray and a plate and a mug and silverware, then advanced on the food. A cook’s helper loaded the plate with scrambled eggs and hash browns and greasy, overdone bacon. Another one poured the mug full of coffee almost strong enough to eat through the bottom. Armstrong grabbed a seat at a long, long table. He put enough cream and sugar in the coffee to tame it a little, threw salt on the eggs and potatoes and pepper on the eggs, and then started shoveling in chow.
Nobody talked much at breakfast. Nobody had time. The drill here was simple: feed your face as fast as you could. Armstrong had never much cared for manners. He didn’t have to worry about them here. Compared to the way some of the guys ate, he might have come from the upper crust. Every once in a while, he thought that was pretty funny. More often than not, he didn’t have time to worry about it one way or the other.
As soon as he finished, he shoved his tray and dirty dishes at the poor slobs who’d drawn KP duty. Then he hustled out to the exercise yard. He wasn’t the first one there, but he was a long way from the last. Bad things happened to the guys who brought up the rear.
Of course, bad things happened to everybody right after breakfast. Violent calisthenics and a three-mile run weren’t the way Armstrong would have used to settle his stomach. The drill sergeants didn’t care about his opinion. They had their own goals. His conscription class, like any other, had had some fat guys, some weak guys. He remembered who they’d been. But the fat guys weren’t fat any more, and the weak guys weren’t weak any more. Oh, a few had washed out, simply unable to stand the strain. People said one fellow had died trying, but Armstrong didn’t know if he believed that. Most of the recruits, no matter what kind of shape they’d been in to start with, had toughened up since.
The Victorious Opposition Page 68
