“He was a friend, dammit,” Jeff said. And that scared him a couple of different ways. Anything that happened to Hip might happen to him, too. Ever since Rodriguez shot himself, the weight of the ceremonial.45 on Jeff’s hip seemed larger and more ominous than it ever had before. And when he picked up a submachine gun to walk through Camp Determination, he often shivered. What was Hip thinking when he turned his the wrong way?
And Jeff hadn’t realized how much having a real friend here mattered till he suddenly didn’t any more. He could talk about stuff with Hip without fearing that Ferd Koenig or Jake Featherston would find out what he said. He could use his war buddy as a back channel to the guards-and they could use Rodriguez as a back channel to him, too. It worked well for everybody.
Except now it didn’t. And under all that lay the hole one friend’s death left in the life of another who survived. Hip and Jeff went through desperate and deadly times together. No one else remembered them-no one else Jeff knew, which was all that mattered. When he and Hip talked, they both understood the mud and the blood and the stinks and the fear and the occasional flashes of crazy fun that lit up the horror and the wild drunken furloughs they’d got to take too seldom. Now all that stuff was locked inside Jefferson Pinkard’s head. He could explain it to other people, but that was the point. He never needed to explain it to Hip. Hip knew.
The telephone rang. Pinkard jerked in his swivel chair. “Son of a bitch!” he burst out. His hand shook as he reached for the telephone. I’m jumpy as a goddamn cat, he thought. Can’t let anybody see that, or I’m in big trouble. “Pinkard here.” His voice came out as a satisfactory growl. “What’s up?”
“Sir, we’ve got a new shipment coming in.” The guard officer at the other end of the line sounded both pleased and more than a little astonished. “Should be here in an hour or two.”
“Good God!” Pinkard said. “Why the hell didn’t somebody tell us sooner?”
“Only thing I can think of, sir, is that they didn’t want the damnyankees listening in,” the officer replied.
Jeff grunted-that did make some sense. “Could be,” he said. “And maybe they’ll let up on this place for a while anyway. They’ve had their damn propaganda offensive. It’s not like they really give a rat’s ass about niggers. I mean, who does, for Christ’s sake?”
“Not me, sir,” the youngster on the other end of the line replied with great conviction.
“Didn’t reckon you would,” Pinkard said. “Let everybody know what’s what. We want to give these coons a nice, juicy Camp Determination hello-and then a nice, juicy good-bye, too.”
If he had to, he aimed to raise hell to make sure the guards were ready. Because of the way U.S. airplanes had pummeled the railroads coming west to Snyder and the camp, things had been painfully slow lately. It would have been easy for the men in gray uniforms to slack off. But they didn’t, which made Pinkard proud. He could tell when the call reached the barracks. Guards exploded out, almost as if they were in a comedy film.
But it wouldn’t be funny when that train got here. Pinkard was at the railroad spur watching when it pulled into the camp. He didn’t say anything. He would if he had to, but the men in charge of the welcoming committee-he chuckled when he thought of it that way-deserved the chance to handle things themselves till they showed they couldn’t.
Engine puffing, brakes squealing, the train stopped right where it was supposed to. The engineer was on the ball, then. That was good, because he didn’t fall under Jeff’s command. Doors opened. The familiar rank stench that rolled out of the jam-packed cars was even richer and riper than usuaclass="underline" the weather was warming up.
“Out!” guards screamed, gesturing with their submachine guns. “Move, you lousy, stinking coons! Move!”
“Men to the left!” officers added. “Men to the left, women and brats to the right!” One of them kicked a dazed black man, who fell with a groan. “Get up!” the officer roared. “Get up, you dumb fucking prick! You too goddamn stupid to know which is your left and which is your right?”
The Negro probably was. How many days had he been stuck in that jam-packed car, with nowhere to turn around, nowhere to sit down, nowhere to ease himself, nothing to eat, nothing to drink? How many bodies would the guards and the Negro trusties find when they went through the train? There were always a good many. Because summer was here, there would probably be more than there had been on runs earlier in the year.
A submachine gun stuttered out a quick burst. Jefferson Pinkard nodded to himself. Every trainload, a few Negroes thought they could beat the odds by playing possum. Every trainload, they found out they were wrong.
“No, you stupid fuck, you can’t carry your suitcase into the camp!” Every time, some Negroes managed to bring things along. What was confiscated was supposed to go straight into the war effort. Some of it did. The guards took what they wanted first, though. That was one of the perquisites that went with this job.
Many of them barely able to stay on their feet, the black men shambled through the gate and into the southern half of the camp. The women and little children went into the northern half. Every time, men and women waved to one another and promised they would be together again soon. Yeah, you will, all right-in hell, Jeff thought.
He sighed. Sure as hell, the senior female guard officer would come around and complain that her girls didn’t get a chance to help with the unloading. She’d done that at least half a dozen times. She wanted them to get what she thought was their fair share of the loot.
“Too damn bad,” Pinkard muttered. In case something out here went wrong, he didn’t want a bunch of flabbling women trying to fix it, even (or maybe especially) if they carried submachine guns, too. They were all right with barbed wire to back them up. They even had advantages over men. Fewer of them had affairs with Negro women. But when they did, they really fell in love with their colored partners. That happened much less often with the men.
By now, the female guards knew how to get the colored women and children into the asphyxiating trucks and the bathhouse on that side of the camp without panicking them. The ones who couldn’t manage that were gone. Jeff had had to be firm about that; the guards in skirts had powerful backers in Richmond. But nobody was more powerful than Ferd Koenig and Jake Featherston, and he’d got his way.
Camp Determination got another shipment of Negroes the next day, and two more the day after that. It seemed like old times again. Barracks started filling up as prisoners came in faster than the camp could process them. That was how Jeff thought of it, and that was how it went down on every report. It seemed so much more…sanitary than talking about killing.
There was some trouble with the prisoners from the last trainload on the second day. As they lined up to “get deloused and bathed,” a man shouted, “You ain’t gwine give us no baths! You gwine kill us all!”
He wasn’t wrong, either in general or in particular. Two guards emptied their submachine guns at him. By the time they got done, he had more holes than a colander. They hit other prisoners, too-only fool luck kept them from hitting other guards. Nobody could stay smooth and polite after that. The only way the guards got the Negroes into the bathhouse was by threatening to kill them all on the spot if they didn’t get moving.
“An ugly business,” Jeff said when he got to the bottom of it. “I hope that damn troublemaking nigger cooks in hell forever. All his fault.”
“Yes, sir,” agreed the guard officer in charge of those prisoners. “We did everything we could.”
“We got the job done-that’s what counts most,” Pinkard said. “Maybe things’ll slow down again so all the spooks who saw this get processed. Then they won’t have the chance to say anything to anybody else. That’s what really matters.”