“Maybe if we sneak in the spooks at night…” another guard said.
“Got to have lights to move ’em from the railhead into the camp,” Troop Leader Tom Porter said. The veteran was an outstanding noncom; Rodriguez tried to model himself after him. Porter went on, “Can you imagine what would happen if we lit this place up like a Christmas tree? Damnyankees’d be on it like ants on potato salad at a picnic.”
“They’ll blow up the niggers if they do that,” one of the young guards said. “They could hit this place any time they please. They don’t do it, on account of they love coons so goddamn much.”
Porter frowned. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe. But if they figure out they can take out a whole bunch of guards all at once, they might reckon it’s worthwhile. I mean, it’s not like we won’t reduce the niggers’ population anyway.”
The young guard grunted. So did Rodriguez. That sounded as if it made good military sense. “Why don’t they just bomb the camp anyhow, then, though?” the youngster said. “They’d just be blowing up the smokes a little bit before we take care of them.”
“Well, you’re right,” Porter said bleakly, which wasn’t what the young guard expected to hear. “That’s why we’ve got shelters in this place now. If they want to blast the living shit out of us, they can-no two ways about it.”
“What about the antiaircraft guns around the camp?” Two or three guards asked the question in almost identical words.
“What about ’em?” Porter said. “Antiaircraft guns don’t mean you can’t bomb a place if you want to bad enough. They just mean it costs more. If you’re willing to pay, you can do it. You bet your ass you can. You reckon they don’t have antiaircraft guns all over Richmond and Philadelphia? You reckon those places don’t get bombed? Ha!”
Nobody said anything for a while after that. Hipolito Rodriguez found himself looking at the ceiling, as if to see bombers overhead. He would have been embarrassed if he were the only one doing it. But he wasn’t-nowhere close.
He almost panicked when droning airplane engines woke him later that night. He was ready to run for the shelter, not that his middle-aged, almost-electrocuted body could run very fast. But the enemy airplanes went on to the east. Whatever they were after, it wasn’t Camp Determination or Snyder.
Two days later, Jefferson Pinkard sent another contingent of female guards packing. The men who had to go over to the women’s side to take their shift didn’t know exactly why the guards left. All their guesses were lewd, though. It wasn’t as if Pinkard minded brutality, as long as it stopped short of the point where prisoners rebelled.
Rodriguez wondered if he would find Bathsheba and Antoinette alive. To his surprise, he did. They’d lasted longer than most camp inmates. Both of them were dreadfully thin now; the older woman coughed all the time. But they greeted him with smiles. “It’s the nice sergeant,” Bathsheba said. “How is that Xerxes? How is our man?”
Dead. Rotting in a trench a bulldozer scraped in the ground, piled in with God knows how many other bodies. He couldn’t tell them that. He didn’t have the heart. He’d led so many men to their death-what was telling the truth about one of them next to that? Nothing, logically, but logical didn’t seem to have much to do with it.
And so he lied: “He is good. He is about like you. He says hello. He says he loves you both. He says he misses your son.” He remembered Bathsheba had one, and that the boy or young man didn’t come to the camp.
“I misses Cassius, too,” the older woman said, and Antoinette nodded. Bathsheba went on, “I hope he’s all right.”
Wherever he was, if he wasn’t in a camp he was better off than the rest of the family. Rodriguez didn’t say that-why belabor the obvious? He did say, “You got messages for-for your man?” He couldn’t pronounce Xerxes to save his own life, and nothing would save Xerxes’ now.
They poured out their hearts to him. That only made him feel worse about lying to them. But they would hate him all the more for deceiving them if they found out the truth now. And so he listened to words of love for a dead man and promised to bring back answers from beyond the grave.
None of the other guards knew what he was doing. Had they known, they would have laughed at him or said he was doing it to get Antoinette to lie down with him. If he wanted her, he thought he could have her. But what was the point? She and her mother couldn’t last much longer, not the way things were. And when she was dead, he’d be sad she was gone. He’d be sad when she was gone even if she didn’t sleep with him; he liked her.
He didn’t miss the black women he did lay. They were just…bodies. Now they were dead bodies, and so what?
“If they was to drop bombs all over this place,” Bathsheba said, “you reckon a couple o’ skinny colored ladies could run off without nobody noticing?”
“You don’t ask me that!” Rodriguez exclaimed. “I got to keep people inside here, not tell nobody how to get away.”
“You keepin’ people in here?” Bathsheba shook her head. “Don’t reckon so. Ain’t nobody in the whole wide world could keep people in a place like this. What you’re doin’ is, you’re keepin’ niggers here. Niggers ain’t people, not to the folks who go ’round yellin’, ‘Freedom!’ all the damn time.”
“Mama…” Antoinette said.
Bathsheba laughed. “It’s the truth, ain’t it? ’Course it is. You afraid I git in trouble on account of tellin’ the truth? Girl, how kin I git in trouble that’s any worse’n what I’m in already? You answer me that.” She turned to Rodriguez. “You answer me that, too, Mistuh Sergeant, suh.”
Rodriguez had no answers, and he knew it. He was a twenty-year Freedom Party man. He’d shouted, “Freedom!” and “?Libertad!” plenty of times, more times than he could count. He had no use for blacks; if anything, mallate was even more insulting, even more demeaning, than nigger. He still believed Negroes caused most of the Confederacy’s troubles. And without blacks, whites would come down on Mexicans instead.
But this skinny old woman did something no one else had ever been able to do: she made him ashamed of the uniform he wore, of the stripes on his sleeve, of the Party badge on his chest. Bathsheba did indeed tell the truth, and Hipolito Rodriguez wasn’t too far gone to know it.
“Where you goin’?” she called after him. He didn’t answer. He just went away, anywhere away from the terrible truth, as fast as his legs would take him.
“Now look what you went and done, Mama,” Antoinette said reproachfully, as if, despite everything that had happened to them, this could still be her mother’s fault.
“Me? I didn’t do nothin’,” Bathsheba answered, and then, more quietly but not too quietly for Rodriguez to hear, “He done it to hisself.”
And there was another piercingly painful truth. Rodriguez had done it to himself. He looked beneath the face of population reduction and saw murder. He looked at niggers, at mallates, and saw people. He looked at what he’d been doing and saw…
“Madre de Dios,” he whispered, and crossed himself. “?Ai, madre de Dios!” But could even the Virgin forgive him for such a mountain of sins? He had trouble believing it. No-he couldn’t believe it. That made a difference. That made all the difference in the world.
He crossed himself again. The gesture seemed extraordinarily pointless, extraordinarily futile. He was damned. He felt the certainty of his damnation like that mountain of sin falling on him.
He’d known for a long time that Edith Pinkard’s first husband was a camp guard who killed himself. He’d heard of other men who did the same thing. Up till now, he’d thought they were crazy. All at once, he didn’t. How could you live with yourself when you understood what you were doing, what you were helping your country do?
He looked down at his hands. How much blood was on them? A river? A lake? An ocean? He looked at the submachine gun in those bloodstained hands. It was made for one thing: killing people. It was perfectly designed for the job, too. He clicked off the safety, flicked the change lever to full automatic fire. Then, like a man in a trance, he put the muzzle of the conveniently short weapon in his mouth. It smelled and tasted of metal and gun oil.