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.