“It could be.” Featherston picked up a pencil and wrote himself a note. “It’s a better scheme than anybody else has come up with, I’ll say that. Whatever else you are, General, you aren’t soft on niggers.”
“I should hope not, sir,” Potter said. “That’s how we first met, remember. I was trying to head off the Red uprising before it got started. I was after that officer’s body servant-”
“Pompey, his name was,” Jake Featherston said at once. Potter wouldn’t have remembered the Negro’s name if they’d set him on fire. Featherston had a truly marvelous memory for detail-and never forgot an enemy or a slight. He went on, “He was a mincing, prissy little bastard, thought his shit didn’t stink. Just what you’d expect from a stinking blueblood like Jeb Stuart III to have for a servant.” He looked as if he wanted to spit on the carpet, or possibly start chewing it.
And he wasn’t wrong. During the Great War and even afterward, the Confederate States had had too many sons and grandsons and great-grandsons of founding fathers in positions of authority for no better reason than that their ancestors had done big things. It wasn’t like that anymore, Nathan Bedford Forrest III notwithstanding. Forrest was there because of what he could do, not because of what great-grandpa the cavalry general had done. The Freedom Party had swept away most of the Juniors and IIIs and IVs. And that, Potter was willing to admit, needed doing.
Featherston let the pencil fall. “All right, General. That’s about it, looks like. Main reason I wanted you here was to find out if those damn people bombs were your notion. But you gave me a good idea, and I reckon we’ll try it out when the time comes-and it will, goddammit. I thank you for that.”
Potter got to his feet. “You’re welcome, Mr. President. We’re on the same side in this fight.”
“In this one, yeah. How about some of the others?” But Featherston waved that aside. “Never mind. Get out of here.”
A man in a State Department uniform went in as Potter went out. Potter wondered what that was all about. He knew he could learn with a little poking and prodding. He also knew he’d catch merry hell if anybody found out he was doing it. You didn’t try to find out what was none of your business. That was one of the rules in this game, too. There were often good reasons why it was none of your business.
After the air conditioning under the Gray House, ordinary Richmond late summer seemed twice as hot and muggy as usual. A haze of dust and smoke hung over the Confederate capitaclass="underline" a souvenir of Yankee bombing raids. The same sort of haze was said to hang over Philadelphia.
Will anything be left of either side when this war is over? Potter wondered. More and more, it reminded him of a duel of submachine guns at two paces. Both countries could strike better than they could defend.
He didn’t know what to do about that. He didn’t think anyone else did, either. Maybe taking Pittsburgh away from the damnyankees really would knock them out of the fight. It had a chance of doing that, anyway. Potter couldn’t think of anything else that did.
A truck dumped gravel and asphalt on the street in front of the Gray House. A heavy mechanized roller started smashing it down into a more or less level surface. And it would stay level till the next time U.S. bombers visited Richmond, or the time after that, or perhaps the time after that.
The machine was more interesting to Clarence Potter than the job it was doing. Not long before, a swarm of Negroes with hand tools would have done work like that. No more. Machinery was much more common than it had been… and there weren’t so many Negroes around. Potter nodded to himself. Both halves of that suited him fine.
Hipolito Rodriguez awkwardly sewed a sergeant’s-no, a troop leader’s-stripes onto the left sleeve of his gray tunic. The letter that came with his promotion notice said it was for “contributions valuable to the safety and security of the Confederate States of America.” That left the guards at Camp Determination who hadn’t been promoted both puzzled and jealous. It also gave the noncoms whose ranks he’d suddenly joined something new to think about.
Tom Porter, who’d been Rodriguez’s squad leader till he got the promotion, added two and two and got four. “This has to do with those new buildings going up alongside the men’s and women’s half, doesn’t it?” he said.
“I think maybe it does, si,” Rodriguez answered. He was still getting used to the luxury of the noncoms’ quarters. He had a room of his own now, with a closet and a sink. No more cot in the middle of a barracks with a lot of other noisy, smelly guards. No more shoving everything he owned into a footlocker, either. He had more room to be a person as a troop leader; he wasn’t just one more cog on a gear in a vast machine.
“I know you helped give the commandant the idea for those new buildings,” Porter said. “If they work out as well as everybody hopes, I reckon you’ve earned your stripes.”
Porter’s acceptance helped ease the transition from ordinary guard to troop leader. It meant the other noncoms made it plain they would back Rodriguez if he ran into trouble. With that going for him, he didn’t, or never more than he could handle by himself. And those buildings rapidly neared completion.
Nobody ever called them anything but that. If you talked about one of them, it was that building. The guards knew what they were for; they’d been briefed. They had to be, by the nature of things. But, also by the nature of things, they didn’t call them by their right names. If you didn’t name something, you didn’t have to dwell on what it really was and really did. Not thinking about those things helped you sleep at night.
A few of the guards, men who’d come to Camp Determination as it went up, would sometimes talk about shooting Negroes in the swamps of Louisiana. They were mostly matter-of-fact, but they would also talk about comrades who couldn’t stand the strain. “So-and-so ate his gun,” they would say. That was how Rodriguez learned Jeff Pinkard’s new wife was a dead guard’s widow. He’d known she was married before; two boys made that obvious. The details…
“Poor son a bitch just couldn’t take it,” a guard said sympathetically.
“He shoot himself, too?” Rodriguez asked with a certain horrid fascination.
“Nope.” The veteran guard shook his head. “Chick must’ve got sick of guns. He ran a hose from his auto exhaust into the passenger compartment and fired up the motor. Sure as hell wish we’d’ve had those trucks back then. You don’t have to worry so much about what you’re doing when you load one of them.”
“The trucks, they came after this fellow kill himself?” Rodriguez said.
“That’s right.” The guard who was talking didn’t see anything out of the ordinary about that. Maybe there was nothing out of the ordinary to see. To Rodriguez, the timing seemed… interesting, anyhow. Senor Jeff was good at getting ideas from things that happened around him.
Rodriguez almost remarked on that. Then he thought better of it. He couldn’t prove a thing, after all-and he couldn’t unsay something once he’d said it. Better to keep his mouth shut.
And keeping his mouth shut proved a good idea, as it usually did. A few days later, an officer tapped him for special duty, saying, “The commandant tells me you won’t screw this up no matter what. Is that a fact?” He sent Rodriguez a fishy stare.
“I hope so, sir,” Rodriguez answered. He recognized that stare. He’d seen it before on white Confederates. They looked at him, saw a Mexican, and figured he wasn’t good for much. He asked, “What do I got to do?”