“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.”
“Yes, sir,” the guard said.
“We’ll have endless trouble if we don’t keep it smooth. I mean endless,” Jeff went on. “Most of the guards I’ve got here, they didn’t serve at a place like Camp Dependable. They don’t know what it’s like when you have to reduce populations by hand.” He meant marching Negroes out into the swamp and shooting them. Saying what he said was easier on the spirit. “They don’t know what it’s like to have the niggers knowing their population’s gonna get reduced, neither. It’s like sitting on a bomb with the fuse primed, that’s what. You hear me?”
“Uh, yes, sir,” the guard officer said once more. He was getting more than he bargained for, more than he wanted, but he couldn’t do a thing about it.
And Jefferson Pinkard still wasn’t through. “If any little thing goes wrong then, the fuse catches and the bomb goes up. And then it blows your fuckin’ ass off. You aim to let that happen? We gonna let that happen?”
“No, sir!” Now the guard got to say something else. It was the right answer, too.
“All right, then,” Jeff growled. “Get the hell out of here, and we’ll see if we can pick up the processing. More niggers we do handle before we get the next trainload in, easier things’ll be from then on out.”
Instead of agreeing this time-or even disagreeing-the guard got the hell out of there, as Jeff had said. Pinkard nodded to himself. Telling other people what to do was an awful lot better than getting told. Where he was now, the only people who could tell him what to do were the Attorney General of the CSA and the President. No wonder I don’t like getting calls from Richmond, he thought.
Then he laughed, because somebody else could tell him what to do: his wife. He laughed again. That was true of any ordinary family man, and what else was he? “Got a new young one on the way,” he said wonderingly. He hadn’t expected that, but he liked it pretty well, even if Edith did have morning sickness all day long. He looked out over the camp and nodded. “I’m doing this for him, by God.”
XI
Major Angelo Toricelli stuck his head into Abner Dowling’s office. “I have the reply from the War Department decoded, sir.”
“Oh, good,” Dowling said, and then, after getting a look at his adjutant’s face, “No, I take it back. It isn’t going to be what I wanted to hear, is it?”