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?”
“Well, we’re going to test out one of those buildings,” the officer answered. “We’re going to pick about a hundred niggers and run ’em through it.”
“Oh, yes, sir. I do that. Don’t you worry,” Rodriguez said.
His confidence seemed to relieve the officer. “All right,” the man said. He drummed the fingers of his left hand against the side of his leg. His right sleeve was pinned up short, as his right arm ended just below the shoulder-he too came out of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade. He went on, “This has to go good, mind you. We got bigwigs from Richmond comin’ out to watch the show.”
Rodriguez shrugged. “Maybe it go good. Maybe it go wrong. I dunno. All I know is, it don’t go wrong on account of me.”
The other man considered that. He finally nodded. “Fair enough. Make sure all the ordinary guards you’re in charge of feel the same way.”
“Si, senor. I do that,” Rodriguez promised.
Because they were trying things out for the first time-and because bigwigs from Richmond were watching-they used far more guards than they normally would have to deal with a hundred black men. They got the Negroes formed up in a ten-by-ten square. The inmates carried whatever small chattels they intended to take away to the new camp where they thought they were going.
That was part of the plan. As long as they thought they were going somewhere else, they would stay docile. They wouldn’t cause trouble unless they figured they were going on a one-way trip. The one-armed officer worked hard to keep them unsuspecting: “You men, we want y’all to be clean and tidy when we ship you out of Camp Determination. We’re going to get you that way before you leave. You’re gonna take baths. You’re gonna be deloused. No horseplay, or we will make your black asses sorry. Y’all got that?”
“Yes, suh,” the Negroes chorused. Black heads bobbed up and down. The Negroes didn’t think anything was wrong. They were dirty. Most if not all were lousy. They probably wanted to get clean, and they could see why the men who ran the camp would want them to be that way before they left. Oh, yes-everything made perfect sense to them. But it made a different kind of sense to the guards and their superiors.
“Come on, then,” the one-armed officer said. “Keep in formation, now, or you’ll catch it.” The Negroes had no trouble obeying. They often marched here and there through the camp in formation.
Guards opened the barbed-wire gate separating the main camp from that building. In the Negroes went. Two guards waited in an antechamber. One of them said, “Strip naked and stow your stuff here. Everybody remember who put what where. You get in a fight over what belongs to who, you’ll be sorry. You got that?” Again, the Negroes nodded.
So did Hipolito Rodriguez, watching as the black men shed their rags and set down their sorry bundles. This was a very nice touch. It convinced the prisoners they’d come back. The large contingent of guards was hardly necessary. A handful of men could have done the job. But Rodriguez understood why Jefferson Pinkard had assigned so many men to the prisoners. The more ready for trouble you were, the less likely you were to find it. And with visiting firemen watching, you couldn’t afford it.