Troop Leader Hipolito Rodriguez longed for the old days. So did all the other guards, up to Jeff Pinkard himself. The only people who liked the way things were now were the Negroes still inside the camp, and their opinions didn’t count.
Fewer and fewer Negroes were left. Thanks to the damnyankees’ air raids, trains had a hard time getting to Snyder, Texas, and the camp just beyond it. The bathhouses that weren’t bathhouses and the asphyxiating trucks went right on working, emptying barracks one by one. Blacks went to their deaths without too much fuss; the story now was that they were being moved for their own protection. They knew how many bombs fell on Snyder. They didn’t know bombs wouldn’t fall on them. And so they walked into the bathhouses and climbed onto the trucks-and they never worried about anything else after that.
All of a sudden, Camp Determination had more guards than it needed. Rodriguez and the other men from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades didn’t worry about going anywhere else; they were useless at the front. The tough females who did most of the guarding on the women’s side didn’t need to fear trading their gray uniforms for butternut, either. But the young men, the Freedom Party Guards…
“Shows what kind of people the damnyankees are,” one of them said at supper after another day when no trains came in. “They’d sooner help niggers and blow decent white folks to hell and gone.”
Rodriguez gnawed on a barbecued pork rib. As far as he was concerned, Texans only thought they knew how to barbecue. Down in Sonora, now, they did things right. He found himself nodding to the young guard, though he was neither black nor white himself.
Another youngster said, “How long till there aren’t any niggers left here at all?”
“They aren’t shipping so many spooks out this way, I hear,” said the guard who’d spoken first. “More and more are going to camps farther east, where the U.S. bombers can’t hit the train tracks so hard.”
“That’s not good,” the second guard said. “Camp Determination was made to be the biggest and the best. Country can’t do a proper job of reducing population if this here camp isn’t doing its bit.”
“They didn’t think about no Yankees when they made it,” Rodriguez put in.
“You’re right, Troop Leader,” the first young guard said. Without three stripes on his sleeve, Rodriguez would have been just another damn greaser to him. With them, the Sonoran was a superior. Party discipline ran deep.
“We’ve got to do something,” the second guard added. “We’ve got to push the United States back into New Mexico.”
Go ahead-volunteer, Rodriguez thought. Guards outfits were fighting alongside C.S. Army troops northwest of the camp. Even if he were hale, he wouldn’t have volunteered himself. He’d seen too much infantry combat in west Texas in the last war. He didn’t want or need any more.
“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.”