"Didn't figure Chick'd be the one to do it," Mercer Scott had said. "He never fretted over getting rid of niggers, not that I ever knew."
Jeff Pinkard hadn't noticed that Blades carried any special burden, either. That bothered him. If he'd pulled the guard off of population reductions, would Blades still be alive today? How could you know something like that? You couldn't. You could only wonder. And so Pinkard prowled and prowled and prowled.
He kept chewing on what had happened. The worst thing about a guard's suicide was what it did to the morale of those who survived. He'd have to watch three or four people extra close for a while, to make sure they didn't get any bright ideas. And they were free citizens, like everybody else-everybody white, anyhow-in the CSA. You couldn't watch them every damn minute of every damn day. If they decided to kill themselves, you probably couldn't do much about it.
Chick Blades, if he remembered straight, had a wife and kids. Pinkard supposed it was a good thing the man hadn't hauled them into the motorcar with him. Exhaust from an engine could have done in four or five for the price of one.
A hurrying Negro almost ran into him. "Where the hell you think you're going, God damn you?" Jeff roared.
"Latrine, suh," the black man answered. "I got me the gallopin' shits, an' I don't want to get it on nothin'." He shifted anxiously from foot to foot.
"Go on, then." Pinkard watched him with narrowed eyes till he squatted over the slit trench. The chief of Camp Dependable could see flies rising in a buzzing cloud. The guards put down chloride of lime every day. But a lot of prisoners came down with dysentery. The chemical didn't do much good, and didn't do good for long. For the moment, the breeze blew from him toward the latrine trenches. That cut down on the stink, but didn't kill it. Nothing could kill it. When the wind blew in the other direction, it really got fierce.
The black man rose and set his tattered trousers to rights. He went on about his business. Had he waved to Pinkard or done anything cute, the camp commandant would have hauled him in for questioning. Here, no. Not worth the bother.
"Labor gang!" a guard bawled. "Get your lazy nigger asses over here, you stinking labor-gang men!"
The Negroes came running. A man who showed himself useful building roads or crushing rock wasn't likely to be added to the next population reduction. So the blacks thought. They fought to get included in labor gangs, and worked like maniacs once they were. Lazy? Not likely!
Chick Blades' funeral came two days later, at a church in Alexandria. Behind her black veil, his widow looked stunned, uncomprehending. Pinkard got the idea the dead guard hadn't told her everything he did at Camp Dependable. Nobody would tell her now, either. She wouldn't understand. Neither would his little boys. His wife would wonder if she'd done something that pushed him over the edge or failed to notice something that might have saved him. Jeff didn't believe it for a minute, but he couldn't explain why, not without talking more than he should.
After the preacher read the graveside service and the body went into a hole in the ground, Mrs. Blades-her name, he thought, was Edith-walked up to him and said, "Thank you for coming." Her face was puffy and swollen and pale. Had she slept at all since she found out about her husband? Jeff would have bet against it.
"Least I could do," he mumbled. "He was a good man."
Edith Blades nodded with frantic eagerness. "He was. He really was. He was a kind man, a gentle man. He wouldn't have hurt a fly, Chick wouldn't."
Jeff bit back a sardonic reply. He also bit back a burst of laughter that would have turned the funeral into a scandal. No, the widow didn't know what her husband had been up to. How many Negroes had Chick Blades shot in the head from behind? Hundreds? Thousands? Pinkard shrugged. He'd shot one too many to keep doing it and go on breathing, and that was the only thing that mattered.
"Everybody liked him real good," Jeff managed at last. "He could play the mouth organ like you wouldn't believe."
"He courted me with it," she said, and broke down in tears again. She wouldn't have been a bad-looking woman, not at all, if she were herself. She was somewhere in her thirties, dishwater blond, with a ripe figure the mourning dress couldn't hide. "He was such a funny fellow."
"Yes, ma'am," Pinkard said uncomfortably. "I'll do what I can to make sure you get his pension."
She blinked in surprise. "Thank you!"
"You're welcome," Pinkard said. "I can't promise you anything, on account of this has to go through Richmond. But I sure think you ought to have it. If any man ever died for his country, Chick Blades did."
"That's true," Blades' widow breathed. It was a lot more true than she knew. With any luck, she wouldn't find out how true it was. Chick had got rid of more enemies of the Confederacy than any general except maybe that Patton fellow up in Ohio, but would anybody ever give him any credit for it? Not likely. The only credit he'd ever get was a pine box. Dirt thudded down on it as the gravediggers started filling in the hole.
"You take care of yourself, ma'am," Jeff said, and then startled himself by adding, "You ever need anything, you let me know. Like I say, I dunno if I can manage everything, but I'll do my best."
"I may take you up on that, sir, after things settle a bit," she answered. "I don't know, but I may." She shook her head in confusion. "Right now, I don't know anything-not anything at all. It's like somebody picked up my world and shook it to pieces and turned it upside down."
"I understand," Jeff said. She shook her head again, and then looked sorry she had. She didn't want to make him angry or anything. But he wasn't. It was no wonder she didn't believe him. But he knew more than she thought he did-he knew more than she did, come to that.
What would happen when she found out? Sooner or later, she would, sure as hell. Pinkard shrugged. He couldn't do anything about that.
He went back to Camp Dependable in a somber mood. What he saw in Alexandria did nothing to cheer him up. People who spoke English gestured and flabbled like Cajuns. People who spoke French-fewer than the English-speakers-peppered it with fiery Anglo-Saxon obscenities. Rusty decorative ironwork from before the War of Secession ornamented downtown businesses and houses. The whole town seemed rusty and rustic. He wondered if Pineville, on the other side of the Red River, was any better. The town's name was ugly enough to make him doubt it.
Mercer Scott had the same feeling. "Ass end of nowhere, ain't it?" he said as their motorcar carried them out of town.
"Maybe not quite, but you can see it from there," Jeff answered.
Scott's chuckle, like a lot of his mirth, had a nasty edge. "Some of the white trash back there'd count themselves lucky to be living in the camp. I'm from Atlanta, by God. I know what a real city's supposed to be like, and that one don't measure up."
Jeff hit the brakes to keep from eradicating an armadillo scuttling across the road. "Atlanta, is it?" That explained a lot. Atlanta was too big for its britches, and had been since before the turn of the century. People who came from there always acted as if their shit didn't stink just because they were Atlantans. Pinkard said, "Me, I come out of Birmingham. I could give you an argument about what makes a good city."
"If you want to be a horseshoe or a nail or anything else made out of iron, Birmingham's a fine enough town, I reckon. You want anything else, Atlanta's the place to be."
That struck home, after all the time Jeff had spent at the Sloss Foundry working with molten steel. He was damned if he'd admit it. "Atlanta says it's a big city, but all you've got is fizzy water. And the fellow who invented the number one brand outa that place sucked up cocaine like it was going out of style."
Mercer Scott only laughed. "You had that kind of scratch back at your house, wouldn't you do the same?"