“I guess,” George said. The rescued men were here, yes. But the poor bastards who didn’t make it out of their airplane…They didn’t break even. They lost. Breaking even only mattered if you were on the outside.
VI
Jefferson Pinkard watched Confederate soldiers set up antiaircraft guns around Camp Determination. He went over to the major in charge of the job, an officer named Webb Wyatt. “How much good d’you reckon this’ll do?” he asked.
Wyatt shifted a chaw from one cheek to the other and spat a stream of tobacco juice much too close to Pinkard’s highly polished boots. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he drawled. “It’s a hell of a lot better’n not doing anything.”
“Than not doing anything, sir,” Pinkard snapped.
The major in butternut looked him up and down. He was suddenly and painfully conscious that he wore Freedom Party gray himself. “Well, I’ll tell you,” Wyatt said again. “I say sir to people who I reckon deserve it. What did you ever do to make me reckon that?”
Rage ripped through Jeff. It thickened his voice as he ground out, “I’ll tell you what I did, you little chickenshit asshole. I fought in the trenches when you were still in short pants. I joined the Party before you had hair on your nuts. I’ve been runnin’ camps since Jake Featherston got to be President of the CSA. My rank’s the same as major general. You want me to call up Ferd Koenig and ask him if he reckons you ought to call me sir? You cocksucking whistleass, how soon you reckon you’ll see the inside of one of these here camps for your very own self? Well, motherfucker? Answer me, God damn you!”
Major Wyatt went very red. Then, as he realized how much more than he could chew he’d bitten off, he went white instead. Pinkard knew damn well he could send Wyatt to a camp. And he knew damn well he would, too, and enjoy every minute of it. Seeing that anticipation of pleasure yet to come helped break the Army officer.
“Please excuse me, sir,” Wyatt mumbled, and saluted as if on the drill grounds at VMI. “I beg your humble pardon, sir.”
“You fuckin’ well better beg,” Jeff said. “Who ever told you you could talk to a superior officer that way?”
Wyatt bit his lip and stood mute. Pinkard knew what he wasn’t saying: that he didn’t think a camp guard really was his superior, regardless of what rank badges might show. Too bad for him. He’d picked the wrong man to rile.
“Let’s try it again,” Pinkard told him. “How much will these guns help?”
“Sir, if the damnyankees send a whole big swarm of bombers over, you’re screwed.” Did Wyatt sound as if he hoped the USA did just that? If he did, he wasn’t blatant enough to let Jeff call him on it. He went on, “For small raids, or for driving off reconnaissance airplanes, they’ll do a lot.”
“There. You see? You really can answer when you set your mind to it,” Jeff said. “Now-how come we don’t have more fighters to drive off those Yankee fuckers before they get here?”
“On account of all that stuff is back East, sir,” Major Wyatt answered. “Far as Richmond is concerned, west Texas is strictly nowhere. Only good thing about that is, it’s strictly nowhere for the damnyankees, too.”
He had a point, but less of one than he thought. Snyder, Texas, and even Lubbock, Texas, were indeed strictly nowhere to both CSA and USA. But Camp Determination damn well wasn’t. It was the biggest of the camps the Freedom Party was using to solve the Confederacy’s Negro problem. That made it vital to the country and the Party. And the Yankees used it for propaganda against the CSA.
“Can you use those guns against ground targets, too?” Jeff asked.
“Reckon we can if we have to, sir,” Major Wyatt said. “Antiaircraft guns make pretty fair antibarrel guns, no doubt about it. But I think you’re flabbling over nothing if you figure we’ll need to. USA won’t get this far.”
“Well, if the damnyankees don’t get this far, you know how come that’ll be?” Pinkard demanded, his temper rising again. “On account of Freedom Party Guards stopped ’em-more than the Army could do by its lonesome. And you know who asked ’em to send in the guards? Me, that’s who.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest.
“Uh, yes, sir.” Wyatt was wising up.
He wasn’t wising up fast enough to suit Jeff. “You think maybe people in uniforms that aren’t the same as yours deserve a salute every now and then, Major? How about that, huh? What do you think?”
“Yes, sir, I think they do. I was wrong before.” As if to prove the point, Major Wyatt saluted.
Pinkard returned the salute. He wasn’t about to let the Army man accuse him of not following etiquette. But as far as he was concerned, Wyatt didn’t prove a damn thing except that he had maybe enough sense to try to save his own neck.
With a small sigh, Jeff decided that would have to do. He couldn’t make the man in the butternut uniform love him. All he could do was make Wyatt treat him with military courtesy. I damn well did that, he thought.
“Anything else, Major?” Pinkard asked.
“No, sir.” Wyatt saluted again. Jeff returned it again. The major said, “Permission to leave, sir?” He wasn’t taking any chances now.
“Granted,” Jeff said, and Wyatt got out of there as if the seat of his pants were on fire. He probably thought his drawers were smoking.
Watching the Army man’s ignominious retreat, Jeff smiled a slow, sated smile: almost the smile he might wear after going to bed with Edith. This was a different kind of satisfaction, but no less real. He was somebody, by God. He could throw his weight around. One hand rested on his belly. He had plenty of weight to throw, too. Not bad for somebody who’d figured on spending the rest of his life making steel at the Sloss Works in Birmingham. No, not bad at all.
Another sign he’d arrived was the driver who took him back into Snyder when his shift at Camp Determination was up. Some evenings he spent on a cot in the administrative compound. Not tonight, though. He smiled again as the camp receded behind him. Thinking about the kind of smile he’d have after going to bed with Edith made him want to put on that kind of smile.
Back in the days before the war, he might have had a colored chauffeur. He didn’t suppose anybody had a colored chauffeur any more. Times were changing in the CSA. An ordinary camp guard had to do. That was all right. The guard was the Party equivalent of a private, and privates got stuck with nigger work. That was true in King David’s day, and Julius Caesar’s, and William the Conqueror’s, and it was still true now.
The brakes squeaked when the driver parked the Birmingham in front of Jeff’s house in Snyder. Got to get that seen to, Jeff thought. The driver jumped out and opened the door for him. “Here you are, sir.”
“Thanks, Cletus.” Jeff made a point of learning the men’s names. It didn’t cost him anything, and it made them feel good. “See you in the morning-or sooner if anything goes wrong.” He never stopped worrying. That was probably why things went wrong so seldom.
“Yes, sir.” Cletus had no trouble remembering that he needed to salute. He jumped back into the auto and drove away.
When Pinkard walked into the house, his two stepsons were playing a game on the floor of the front room. It seemed to involve wringing each other’s necks. They broke off as soon as he came in. “Papa Jeff!” they both squealed in the shrill small-boy register just below what only dogs can hear. “Hi, Papa Jeff!” They tried to tackle him. They weren’t big enough, even together. But they were a lot bigger than when he married their mother the year before. One of these days…
He didn’t want to think about that. And he didn’t have to, not when Edith came out of the kitchen and gave him a kiss. “Hello, Jeff,” she said. “Wasn’t sure if you’d be back tonight.”