But the mayor did. “Well, sure, General. That’s how things work nowadays, isn’t it?” he said. “You want to use my telephone?” He seemed proud to have one on his desk.
“I sure as hell do,” Pinkard answered. He slid the telephone over to his side of the desk, but didn’t pick up the handset or dial the long-distance operator till the mayor ate humble pie and scurried out of his own office. Then Jeff listened to the inevitable clicks and pops on the line as his call went through. And then he listened to the voice of Ferdinand Koenig’s secretary, which was sultry enough to fit into any man’s wet dream.
“Oh, yes, sir,” she purred. “I’m sure he’ll speak to you. Hold on, please.”
“I thank you kindly.” It wasn’t even that Jeff was a week and several hundred miles away from his wife. Edith could have been standing beside him and he would have been extra polite to a woman with a voice like that.
“Koenig here.” The Attorney General of the CSA, by contrast, sounded like a raspy old bullfrog. But he had Jake Featherston’s ear, so he didn’t need to be sexy. “You find what you were looking for, Pinkard?”
“Reckon I did, sir. I’m in a little town called Humble, up north of Houston. Got a railroad line, and a spur to a new camp’d be easy to build. Mayor’s damn near wetting his pants, he wants it in his back yard so bad.”
“Humble, you say? Hang on. Let me look at a map.” There was a pause while Koenig rustled papers; Jeff listened to him do it. He came back on the line. “All right-I found it. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Yankee bombers’d have a devil of a time getting there from anywhere, wouldn’t they?”
“If they wouldn’t, sir, we are really and truly fucked,” Pinkard replied.
A cold silence followed. Then the Attorney General said, “You want to watch your mouth. I’ve said that before, haven’t I?”
“Yeah, I reckon you have.” Jeff wasn’t eager to kowtow to a voice on the line from Richmond, no matter how important that voice’s owner was. “But wasn’t I telling you the truth?” He used Jake Featherston’s catchphrase with sour relish. “Things don’t look so good right now, do they?”
“Maybe not, but we’ll lick the damnyankees yet. You just see if we don’t.” Ferd Koenig sounded absolutely confident.
“Hope like hell you’re right, sir.” Jeff meant that. “Can we talk about this Humble place some more?” The biggest advantage he saw to closing down Camp Determination was purely personaclass="underline" it would let him get his family the hell out of Snyder without looking as if they were running away. They’d come through every Yankee bombing raid so far, but how long could they stay lucky? Long enough, he hoped.
He wondered if Koenig felt like raking him over the coals some more, but the Attorney General backed off. “Yeah, let’s do that,” he said. “Reckon it’ll suit.”
“All right, then. Next question is, how do we get it built? I used niggers to run up Camp Determination, but I don’t figure that’d work this time around. Can I get me a team of Army engineers, or are they all busy over in Tennessee and Georgia?” That Jeff could mention the Army’s being busy in Georgia said how badly things were going.
Ferd Koenig didn’t hesitate. “You’ll have ’em,” he promised. “Population reduction is a priority, by God. We’ll take care of this, and in jig time, too. You get ready to finish what you’ve got going on at Camp Determination, and we’ll run up the camp by Humble. Plans’ll be about the same as the ones you used before, right?”
“Yes, sir, except we’ll want the bathhouses built in instead of tacked on, if you know what I mean,” Pinkard said. “And I’d like a crematorium alongside, too. More ground in use around here-not so much room for dozers to scrape out the big old trenches we’d need.”
“Don’t worry about that,” Ferd Koenig said. “We’ve got ’em in place at a couple of other camps. Design’s already taken care of, so all we’ve got to do is run up another one.”
“That sounds good. I thought so, but I wasn’t sure,” Jeff said.
“Let me write it down so I make sure I have it straight.” Koenig did, then read it back. “That about cover things?”
Jeff thought before he answered. If he’d forgotten something, getting it fixed after the engineers left wouldn’t be so easy. But he couldn’t think of anything-and then he did. “Mayor here wants to make sure you hire locals for some of the work.”
“Oh, sure-we always take care of shit like that. Gotta keep those boys happy, too,” the Attorney General said indulgently. “You get ready to move, ’cause this one’ll go up faster’n hell. We don’t want to pull the engineers off the line any longer than we have to.”
“I’ll handle that, sir,” Jeff said. “You can count on it.”
“If I couldn’t, somebody else’d be there. Freedom!” Koenig hung up.
The mayor was plainly worrying about his telephone bill when Jeff called him back in. Jeff wondered if the man had ever called anywhere as far away as Virginia. He would have bet against it. But the mayor’s face lit up when Jeff said, “Well, Ferd Koenig reckons Humble will suit us as well as I do. Some Army engineers’ll come in to run up the camp, and then, by God, then we’ll get down to business.”
“That’s mighty fine news-mighty fine,” the mayor said. “Uh-you do recall I’d like some of our people from around these parts to help do the work?”
“Ferd says the engineers’ll take care of that,” Pinkard told him. His repeated use of the Attorney General’s nickname seemed to impress the mayor even more than the near-promise.
“Good news. Damn good news.” The mayor reached into his desk and pulled out a bottle and a couple of glasses. “We ought to have us a drink to celebrate.”
“I sure don’t mind,” Jeff said. The mayor’s whiskey turned out to be rotgut, but Jeff didn’t flabble. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t drunk rotgut before. One drink led to several, and to his staying over in Humble a night longer than he’d intended. The mayor offered to get him a girl for the evening, but he turned that down. He was more practical than virtuous. Any woman the mayor got him would be a pro, and with a pro you never could tell what you were bringing home to your wife. That wouldn’t be so good, especially not with a baby on the way pretty soon.
He set out across Texas for Snyder the next morning. As usual, the sheer size of the state flabbergasted him. The drive in the old Birmingham felt more like crossing a country. Even real cities like Dallas and Fort Worth seemed dwarfed by the immensity all around them. Bomb damage seemed diminished and spread out, too. He knew the USA had hit both towns hard the year before, but he saw only a few battered, firescarred buildings.
West of Fort Worth, woods grew scarcer and the prairie stretched as far as the eye could see. Every so often, Jefferson Pinkard began to spot shot-up motorcars by the side of the road. Some were merely pocked with bullet holes. A couple had bloodstains marring the paint of one door or another; a hasty grave was dug beside one of those. And some were charred wrecks: autos where a bullet had gone through the engine or the gasoline vapors in a mostly empty fuel tank.
Pinkard kept a wary eye on the sky. The Birmingham had nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide if U.S. fighters or fighter-bombers swooped down. Maybe he could get out and hide in a ditch while they shot up the auto. That was his best hope, anyhow.
When he stopped for gas in a little town called Cisco, the woman who pumped it said, “Reckon you’re either mighty brave or mighty damn dumb, comin’ so far in broad daylight.”
“I can go faster,” Jeff said.
“Yeah, but you can end up dead faster, too,” she replied. “Your funeral-if you get one.”
Jeff remembered the grave next to the motorcar. He remembered the bloodstains he’d seen, too. And he stayed in Cisco for a roast-beef sandwich and a couple of bottles of beer, and waited till twilight deepened to get going again. Maybe he wasted a few hours. Maybe he saved his own life. He never knew one way or the other.
Crawling along with headlights masked down to slits, he didn’t get into Snyder till not long before dawn. He drove with special care in town, because craters scarred so many streets. You could crash down into one before you saw it. But he made it home, and found he still had a home to come back to. “Sorry to bother you, hon,” he told Edith. “We’ll be able to clear out, go somewhere safer, before real long.”