Drive to the East

XI

Back when Cincinnatus Driver lived in Confederate Covington before the Great War, he hadn’t liked going to the zoo. Animals in cages had reminded him too strongly of the black man’s plight. Then when he moved up to Des Moines after the war, he’d been able to take his kids to the zoo there and enjoy it himself. He’d felt freer there-and, to be fair, Des Moines had a much fancier zoo than Covington’s.

Now things had come full circle. Here he was, back in Covington. Here he was, back in the CSA. And here he was, caged.

When the barbed-wire perimeter around the colored quarter went up, a few blacks figured it was just for show, to let colored people know who was boss without really intending to imprison them. Cincinnatus could have told them they were fools. The Freedom Party lied about plenty of things, but not about what it thought of Negroes. Some of the optimists tried to slip between the strands or attacked them with wire cutters, right there where the guards could see them.

Cincinnatus had known for years what automatic-weapons fire sounded like. Hearing it again saddened him without greatly surprising him. The guards’ callousness afterwards did surprise him. They left the bodies they’d shot where they fell, so the sight and, after a day or two, the stench would intimidate the Negroes inside the perimeter.

He didn’t talk to Lucullus about the odious and odorous events. For one thing, visiting Lucullus probably put him on some kind of list. The powers that be in Covington already had too many reasons to put him on a list. And, for another, Lucullus remained in a state of shock at being closed off from the outside world. Cincinnatus had never dreamt the barbecue cook could stay downcast for so long, but that seemed to be what was going on.

With Lucullus… disabled, Cincinnatus took his troubles to the Brass Monkey instead. He didn’t talk about them in the saloon, but that didn’t mean they didn’t go away. A lot of things dissolved in beer, and there was whiskey for what beer wouldn’t melt.

Covington’s colored quarter had always had a lot of saloons. People there had always had a lot of trouble that needed dissolving. Saloons were the one kind of business in the colored part of town that was doing better now than before the wire went up. Even more sorrows than usual needed drowning. And the Confederate authorities no doubt learned all sorts of things from saloon talk. Some of what they learned might even have been true.

Cincinnatus perched on a stool under one of the two lazily spinning ceiling fans. He slid a dime across the bar. “Let me have a Jax,” he said.

“Comin’ up.” The bartender took one out of the cooler, popped the cap with a church key, and handed Cincinnatus the beer.

Resting his can against one knee, Cincinnatus closed both palms around the cold, wet bottle. “Feels good,” he said, and held it for a little while before lifting it to his lips and taking a long pull. “Ah! That feels even better.”

“I believe it.” Sweat beaded the barkeep’s forehead the way condensation beaded the bottle. In his boiled shirt and black bow tie, he had to be hotter and more uncomfortable than Cincinnatus was.

Motion up near the ceiling caught Cincinnatus’ eye. He glanced up. It was a strip of flypaper, black with the bodies of flies it had caught, twisting in the breeze from a nearby fan. That strip had been there since Cincinnatus started coming into the Brass Monkey, and probably for a long time before that. The dead flies couldn’t be anything but dried-up husks. Plenty of live ones buzzed in the muggy air.

Two stools down from Cincinnatus, a very black man in dirty overalls waved to the bartender. “Gimme ’nother double,” he slurred. By his voice and his potent whiskey breath, he’d had several doubles already. The bartender took his money and gave him what he asked for.

The drunk stared down into the glass as if the amber fluid inside held the meaning of life. Maybe, for him, it did. He gulped it down. When the glass was empty, the drunk set it on the bar and looked around. Whatever he saw, Cincinnatus didn’t think it was in the Brass Monkey. During the last war, soldiers had called the glazed look in his eyes the thousand-yard stare. Too much combat and too much whiskey could both make a man look that way.

“What is we gonna do?” the drunk asked plaintively. Was he talking to Cincinnatus, to the bartender, to himself, or to God? No one answered. After half a minute of silence, the Negro brought out the question again, with even more anguish this time: “What is we gonna do?”

The barkeep ignored him, polishing the battered bar top with a none too clean rag. God ignored the drunk, too-but then, God had been ignoring Negroes in the CSA far longer than the Confederacy had been an independent country. If the man was talking to himself, would he have asked the same question twice? That left Cincinnatus. He thought about ignoring the drunk like the bartender, but he didn’t have a polishing rag handy. Swallowing a sigh, he asked, “What are we gonna do about what?”

“Oh, Lordy!” Resignation and annoyance mixed in the bartender’s voice. “Now you done got him started.”

The drunk, lost in his own fog of alcohol and pain, might not have heard the barkeep. But Cincinnatus’ words somehow penetrated. “What is we gonna do about what?” he echoed. “What is we gonna do about us? — dat’s what.”

He might have been pickled in sour mash. That didn’t mean the question didn’t matter. No, it didn’t mean anything of the sort. Cincinnatus wished it did. “What can we do about us?” he asked in return.

“Damfino,” the drunk said. “Yeah, damfino. But we gots to do somethin’, on account of they wants to kill us all. Kill us all, you hear me?”

His voice rose to a frightened, angry shout. Cincinnatus heard him, all right. So did about half the colored quarter of Covington, Kentucky. Even the bartender couldn’t ignore him anymore. “Hush, there. Easy, easy,” the man said, putting away the rag. He might have been trying to gentle a spooked horse. “Ain’t nothin’ you kin do about it, Hesiod.”

Hesiod muttered and mumbled to himself. “Gots to be somethin’ somebody kin do,” he said. “Gots to be. If’n they ain’t, we is all dead.”

Before the barbed wire went up, Cincinnatus would have taken that for no more than a drunk’s maunderings. He still took it for a drunk’s maunderings-what else was it? — but not just for that, not any more. If Freedom Party goons wanted to reach into the quarter they’d cordoned off, take out some Negroes, and do away with them, they would. Who’d stop them? Who’d even know for certain what they’d done?

Hesiod slapped four bits on the bar. “Gimme ’nother double,” he said, and then, as if still ordering the drink, “Gots to kill them ofays. Kill ’em, you hear me?”

“Here you is.” The bartender set the drink in front of him. “Now you get outside o’ this. When you ain’t drinkin’, shut your damn mouth. You gonna open it so wide, you falls in.”

There was another home truth, even if the Brass Monkey was a long way from home. Somebody in the dive-maybe even the barkeep himself-was bound to be spying for the white man, spying for the government. Some blacks thought they could make deals with the devil, grab safety for themselves at the expense of their fellows, their friends, their families.

Cincinnatus didn’t believe it, not for a minute. Like any wild beast, sooner or later the Freedom Party would bite the hand that fed it. Anyone who thought it would do anything else was bound to be a sucker. No, Jake Featherston had never bothered lying about what he aimed to do with and to Negroes, because that was exactly what so many whites in the CSA wanted to hear.

“Them ofays come in here, we gots to shoot ’em! Shoot ’em, hear me?” Hesiod said.

The only trouble with that was, the white men would shoot back. And they were the ones with the heavy weapons. Lucullus Wood had seen as much, and Lucullus knew more than anybody else about the guns the Negroes in Covington had. Lucullus, no doubt, had brought a lot of those guns into the colored part of town.

Expecting a drunk to know what Lucullus knew was bound to be blind optimism. Cincinnatus did say, “Anybody shoot at the ofays, everybody gonna be real sorry.” He didn’t want Hesiod grabbing a.22 and trying to blow out the brains of the first white cop he saw.

“Everybody real sorry already,” Hesiod said, breathing more bourbon into Cincinnatus’ face. “How you reckon things git worse?”

Before Cincinnatus could say anything to that, the bartender spoke up: “Things kin always git worse.” He did not sound like a man who intended to let himself be contradicted.

And he did not impress Hesiod. “What they gonna do? Line us up an’ shoot us?”

“Matter of fact, yes.” This time, Cincinnatus spoke before the barkeep could. “They’d do that. They wouldn’t lose a minute o’ sleep, neither.”

“But they’s already doin’ it. Already,” Hesiod said triumphantly. “They ship your ass to one o’ them camps, you don’t come out no more. They shoots you there, else they kills you some other kind o’ way. Might as well shoot back at them ofay motherfuckers. They come after us, we gots nothin’ to lose.”

A considerable silence followed. Both Cincinnatus and the bartender wanted to tell Hesiod he was wrong. Both of them wanted to, but neither one could. He was too likely not to be wrong at all.

Cincinnatus finished his Jax, set the bottle on the bar, and walked out of the Brass Monkey. The tip of his cane tapped against the sawdust-strewn floor, and then against the battered sidewalk outside. He still carried the cane everywhere he went, but it wasn’t a vital third limb for him the way it had been when he was first getting around after the car hit him. He wasn’t as spry as his father, but he got around tolerably well these days.

Seneca Driver was listening to the wireless when Cincinnatus came back to the house where he’d grown up. The Confederates and the Yankees were jamming each other’s stations extra hard these days, and most of what came out of the wireless set’s speakers were hisses and unearthly whines.

“What you doin’ home so quick, Son?” Seneca had been born a slave, and still spoke with the broad accent of a black man who’d never had a chance to get an education. “Reckoned you’d stay down at de saloon longer.”

“No.” Cincinnatus shook his head. “Can’t get away from bad news anywhere.” After so many years in Iowa, his own speech sounded half-Yankee, especially by comparison to what he heard around himself here. He laughed bitterly. And a whole fat lot of good not sounding ignorant was likely to do him!

“These is hard times,” Seneca said. “We gots to be like turtles an’ pull our heads into our shell an’ not come out till things is better.”

Most of the time, that would have been good advice. Cincinnatus was sure it had worked for his father many times before. But what were you supposed to do when those troubling you wanted to smash the turtle’s shell to get at the meat inside? What then? Cincinnatus had no answers, and feared no one else did, either.

Somewhere up ahead, a machine gun started chattering. Armstrong Grimes threw himself flat. Bullets cracked past overhead. Any time you could hear bullets cracking, they came too damn close.

Armstrong shared a stretch of brick wall near the southern outskirts of Salt Lake City with Yossel Reisen. “Don’t these Mormon maniacs ever give up?” he demanded-more of God, probably, than of the Congresswoman’s nephew.

God had nothing to say. Yossel did: “Doesn’t look like it. Long as they’ve got guns and people to shoot ’em, they’re going to keep fighting.”

“People.” Armstrong made it into a swear word. Yossel was too right. Some of the Mormons who carried rifles, pistols, and grenades were women. Some of the Mormons who crewed mortars and machine guns were women, too. From everything Armstrong had seen, they fought just as hard and just as well as their male counterparts. He didn’t know if that old saw about the female of the species’ being more deadly than the male was true, but in Utah she sure wasn’t any less deadly.

Mormon women usually fought to the death whenever they could. They had their reasons, most of them good. U.S. soldiers who captured women in arms were inclined to take a very basic revenge. That went against regulations. Officers lectured about how naughty it was. It went on happening anyway. Armstrong didn’t see how to stop it. If he caught some gal who was trying to kill him… It was more interesting than thinking about shooting a guy the size of a defensive tackle, that was for sure.

Down in the Confederate States, some of the black guerrillas were of the female persuasion. The bastards in butternut who caught them served them the same way. U.S. propaganda said that only went to show what a bunch of cruel and miserable bastards the Confederates were. Armstrong didn’t doubt the Confederates were cruel and miserable bastards; they’d come too close to killing him too many times for him to doubt it. But raping captives wasn’t one of the reasons he didn’t, not anymore. He understood the enemy in ways he hadn’t before.

That sparked a new thought. He turned to Yossel Reisen and said, “You ever get the idea we’re more like the assholes on the other side of the line who’re trying to kill us than we are like the fancy-pants fuckers back in Philly who give us orders?”

He realized he could have picked somebody better than the Jew to ask. Yossel’s aunt was one of those fancy-pants folks. If he’d wanted to, he almost certainly could have got out of being conscripted. That he hadn’t either spoke well for him or said he was a little bit nuts, depending.

But he nodded now. “Oh, hell, yes. I wonder how many guys in the War Department have ever had lice. Maybe a few in the last war, when they were lieutenants or something.”

“Not many, I bet,” Armstrong said. “People like that, they would’ve found cushy jobs back then, too.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised.” Reisen took a pack of cigarettes out of a tunic pocket, stuck one in his mouth, and offered the pack to Armstrong. Once they were both smoking, he went on, “Did I ever tell you my Uncle David only has one leg?”

There weren’t a whole lot of families in the USA that didn’t have a wounded or mutilated male relative. Armstrong said, “Maybe you did. I think so, but I’m not sure.”

“Aunt Flora could have kept him out of the Army if he’d wanted her to. Same with me,” Yossel said, his voice matter-of-fact. “But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Otherwise, how can you stand yourself?” After a moment, he added, “Did I ever tell you Uncle David’s a fire-breathing Democrat?”

“Yeah, I think you did,” Armstrong answered. Because Reisen seemed to expect him to, he asked, “How does your aunt like it?”

“She doesn’t,” Yossel said, as matter-of-factly as before. “They still get along with each other well enough, but they argue whenever they talk about politics.”

Before Armstrong could say anything, a horrible screech filled the air. “Screaming meemies!” he yelled, and folded himself as small as he could, down there in the foxhole that was now suddenly, horribly, on the wrong side of the fence. Yossel Reisen did the same.

The spigot mortar burst with a roar like the end of the world. A lot of the rounds from the Mormons’ weird makeshift artillery were duds. The ones that weren’t packed a hell of a wallop. The ground shook under Armstrong. For a horrid moment, he thought the foxhole would collapse and bury him alive.

What if it did? The headline would be FORMER FIRST LADY’S NEPHEW KILLED IN COMBAT! Armstrong would make a one-sentence add-on to the story-Another soldier also died-if that.

When he could hear anything but the thunder of the explosion, he heard people screaming. There in the bottom of the hole, his eyes met Yossel Reisen’s. He knew exactly what Yossel was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing himself. Oh, hell, or words to that effect.

He wanted to come out of the safety of the foxhole about as much as he wanted to dance naked in front of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City wagging his pecker at the gilded statue of the Angel Moroni. That might get him shot faster than this. On the other hand, it might not.

But you had to pick up your buddies. That had been drilled into him since day one of his abbreviated basic training. He’d seen the sense of it in the field, too, which wasn’t true of a lot of the crap they’d fed him in basic. If you didn’t help your buddies when they needed it most, they wouldn’t help you if you did-and you were liable to.

“Come on, dammit.” He and Yossel said the same thing at the same time, as if they were an old married couple. They’d both been around this particular block often enough, that was for damn sure.

Up they went, keeping their bellies rattlesnake-low on the ground. Rex Stowe was out there, too. The sergeant made no bones about disliking several of the new men in his section. He came to help them anyway. They were part of his job-and, again, he expected them to do the same for him.

That damned Mormon machine gunner opened up again after the spigot-mortar round went off. He knew there’d be wounded-and that there’d be guys trying to do what they could for them. Spray enough bullets around and you’d get some more wounded, maybe even some dead.

Armstrong and Sergeant Stowe reached the closest injured man at about the same time. They looked at him and then looked at each other. Armstrong was pretty sure his face wore the same horrified expression as Stowe’s. That a man could make so much noise when so little of him was left… War was full of nasty surprises, and it had just pulled another one on Armstrong Grimes.

“Cavendish! Hey, Cavendish!” Stowe said. When he got a momentary lull in the screaming, he asked, “You want us to bring you in, or you want to get it over with right now? Your call.”

Had that been Armstrong, he would have wanted it over and done with. He had no idea how Stowe knew the wounded man was Cavendish; there sure wasn’t enough left of his face to tell by that, and one guy’s shrieks sounded a lot like another’s. But Cavendish seemed perfectly coherent when he said, “For the love of Mike, take me in.” Then, hardly missing a beat, he went back to screaming again.

Stowe looked at Armstrong and shrugged. “He might live.”

He didn’t sound as if he believed it. Armstrong sure didn’t. He looked at what was left of Cavendish. No, he wouldn’t have wanted to go on if he looked like that. But if the other soldier did… “Gotta try, I guess.”

They bandaged and tourniqueted Cavendish’s wounds, stopping the worst of the bleeding. Stowe closed the one in the man’s belly with a couple of safety pins. They weren’t much, but they were better than nothing. Both Armstrong and Stowe gave him a shot of morphine. “Maybe he’ll shut up,” Armstrong said.

“Yeah, and if we gave him too much of the shit, maybe he’ll shut up for good,” Stowe said. “That’s easier than going out the way he was.” Armstrong grunted and nodded. His hands were all bloody. So were Stowe’s. The sergeant asked, “You want to take him back, or shall I?”

No corpsmen were in sight. They did the best they could, but they couldn’t be everywhere. Armstrong considered. Taking Cavendish back would get him out of the front line for a bit, but the Mormons might shoot him while he did it. He shrugged. “I’ll take care of it if you want me to.”

“Go on, then.” Stowe could make the same calculation as Armstrong. “I’ll get him on your back-you’ll want to stay low.”

“Fuckin’-A I will,” Armstrong said fervently. He’d stayed as near horizontal as he could while working on Cavendish. So had Rex Stowe. They’d both spent a lot of time-too much time, as far as Armstrong was concerned-up at the front. They’d learned what tricks there were to know about staying alive and not getting hurt. The only trouble was, sometimes all the tricks in the world didn’t do you a damn bit of good.

With what was left of Cavendish on top of him, Armstrong crawled away from the Mormon machine gun. At least the dreadfully wounded man wasn’t wriggling so much. Maybe the morphine the two noncoms had given him was taking hold.

Even half a mile back of the line, they acted a lot more regulation. A soldier in a clean new uniform stared at Armstrong and said, “What are you doing bringing a body back here? Leave him for Graves Registration.”

“Fuck you, Jack,” Armstrong said without heat. “For one thing, he ain’t dead. For another thing, he’s worth two of Graves Registration and four of you. Point me at the nearest aid station before I kick your worthless ass.”

Armstrong wasn’t small, but the other man was bigger. Fury wouldn’t have worried him. Armstrong’s complete indifference to consequences did. Maybe he thought Armstrong would just as soon kill him as look at him-and maybe he was right. He said, “There’s a tent behind that pile of bricks. It shields ’em from small-arms fire.”

“Thanks.” Armstrong headed that way, carrying Cavendish now. The wounded man was a lot lighter than he had been before he got hurt. A corpsman came out before Armstrong got halfway there. “Hey!” he called. “Come give me a hand with this guy.”

The corpsman trotted toward him. When he got close enough to take a good look at Cavendish, he stopped short, his boots kicking up dust. “Jesus!” he said.

“Tell me about it,” Armstrong said. “You should’ve seen him before my sergeant and me patched him up. But he said he wanted to live if he could.” He shrugged. “What are you gonna do when a guy says that?”

“Jesus.” The corpsman looked green, and he’d seen some of the worst things war could do. “Well, I guess we’ve got to try. I’ll help you get him to the tent.”

“Thank you.” Cavendish’s voice was dreamy and far away. Armstrong had thought he’d long since passed out. The corpsman looked as if he’d just heard a ghost.

The surgeon in the tent did a double take when he saw Cavendish. Armstrong got out of there before the doc went to work. Watching would have made him sick. That was crazy, but it was true. He went back up to the front line. There, at least, death and mutilation came at random. You didn’t know about them ahead of time. That made them, if not tolerable, at least possible to bear.

Jefferson Pinkard wondered why the hell the vice president of the Cyclone Chemical Company wasn’t in the Army. Cullen Beauregard-“Call me C.B.”-Slattery couldn’t have been more than thirty. He was obviously healthy, and just as obviously sharp.

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said. “Anything alive, this’ll shift. You don’t need to worry about that at all.”

“You make it for bugs, though.”

“That’s right.” Slattery nodded.

“But it’ll kill rats and mice,” Jeff said. C.B. Slattery nodded again. Jeff went on, “And cats and dogs?” Another nod. “And people?”

“Yes, sir. It will absolutely kill people. That’s why you’ve got to be careful when you use it,” Slattery said. “Matter of fact, the chemical’s the same one some Yankee states use to kill criminals.”

“Really? Is that a fact?” Jeff said. One more nod from Slattery. He was one of the noddingest people Jeff had ever met. “If you wanted to, you could use it to kill a whole bunch of people, then?”

“Absolutely. You absolutely could.” The chemical-company official didn’t ask why Pinkard might want to use his product, made to get rid of roaches and other pests, to dispose of large numbers of people instead. What he did say was, “If you use large quantities, you’d be entitled to a bulk discount.”

“That’s nice. That’s white of you, matter of fact,” Jeff said. C.B. Slattery laughed uproariously. He didn’t ask what color the people who might die were. Pretty plainly, he already knew.

Somewhere in Camp Determination, a work gang of Negroes chanted rhythmically as they carried or dug or did whatever the guards told them to do. Slattery smiled at that, too, the way he might have smiled at a bear playing with a medicine ball in a zoo.

The shape of his smile decided Jeff. This wasn’t a man who would balk at what needed discussing here. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, then,” Jeff said. “Can your firm design us a facility, I guess you’d call it, that would let us reduce the camp population without leaving the niggers still here any the wiser about what was going on inside?” He’d talked about killing people when it was in the abstract. When it got down to something he might actually do, his own words turned abstract. Reducing population didn’t seem to mean so much.

“My firm? No, sir. Sorry, but that’s not what we do. We make insecticide,” Slattery answered. Pinkard muttered under his breath; he hadn’t expected a flat refusal. But when the bright young man continued, he discovered he hadn’t got one, either: “But I can put you in touch with some design outfits that will help you along those lines. Just as a guess, I’d say you’d want to call it a delousing station or a bath-house or something like that. Sound reasonable?”

“Sounds sensible. I was thinking along those lines myself, to tell you the truth,” said Pinkard, who hadn’t been. He picked up a pencil and wrote, Delousing? Baths? on a sheet of foolscap. Maybe Slattery saw through him, maybe not. He went on, “Now, these outfits you’re talking about-they in Arkansas like you? If I have my druthers, I want to work with somebody local, you know what I mean?”

“I sure do, and I respect that,” Slattery said quickly. Respecting it didn’t mean agreeing with it, but did mean he’d go along if he wanted the Cyclone Chemical Company to get the business. When Jefferson Pinkard wanted his druthers these days, he damn well got them. He remembered wishing for them in the last war, wishing and not getting. A lot of things about growing older were damned unpleasant (his last visit to the dentist leaped to mind). But if you were halfway decent at what you did, you got your druthers a lot more often than you had when you were younger. As if to underscore that, C.B. Slattery continued, “Naturally, we work with people from Little Rock a lot of the time. But I do believe a couple of these outfits have branches in Texas-Dallas or Houston, I’m not quite sure which.”

“Well, you can wire me the details when you get home,” Jeff said, and it was Slattery’s turn to write himself a note. “I’ll do some checking on my own, too.” If Slattery thought he could set up some sweetheart deal, maybe rig kickbacks for Cyclone Chemical, he could damn well think again.

He wasn’t fool enough to let on that he’d had anything like that in mind. “You go right ahead, sir. I think you’ll find out the firms I recommend are competitive in quality and in price.” He paused to pull out a pack of cigarettes, offer one to Jeff, and then stick one in his own mouth. Once they both had lights, he remarked, “Something else occurs to me.”

“What’s that?”

“You might want to site this, ah, facility away from the main camp and take prisoners to it. You’d be less likely to spook the spooks that way, if you know what I mean.” Slattery had a disarming grin.

He also had a point. Jeff scribbled some more on that sheet of foolscap. “Could be,” he said. It applied the same principle as telling Negroes they were going to another camp when they got into the trucks from which they would never get out. “We could move ’em right on through, just like a… factory.”

The word that first crossed his mind, that caused the pause, was slaughterhouse. He didn’t want to say that, any more than he wanted to talk about killing Negroes rather than reducing population. It made him think too openly about what this camp was for.

“You sure could.” C.B. Slattery fairly radiated enthusiasm. “It’d be a privilege for my firm to be affiliated with such a patriotic enterprise. Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jeff echoed automatically. “You’ll be hearing from us. I expect some of those designers may, too, so get me that word quick as you can. Like I say, though, I’ll check out some other outfits in these parts along with ’em.”

“You know your business best.” No, Slattery wasn’t about to argue. No matter who built the places where the Negroes went in and didn’t come out, the chemical that made sure they didn’t come out would come from his company. He said, “Freedom!” one more time and hurried out of Pinkard’s office. By the way he moved, his next appointment was just as urgent and just as important as this one. It wasn’t likely to be, but treating it that way made him a good businessman.

Jeff got up and watched him leave the administrative center, then went back to his desk. He picked up the telephone and called Richmond. He wanted Ferdinand Koenig knowing what was going on every step of the way. The Attorney General heard him out-he did try to keep things short-and then said, “This all sounds pretty good. Only one thing bothers me a little.”

“What’s that?” Jeff asked. Whatever bothered Jake Featherston’s right-hand man was guaranteed to be dead on arrival.

“This whole business of building the, uh, fumigator-whatever the hell you want to call it-away from the camp. That means we’re using trucks again. I thought one of the big points of building the fumigator in the first place was getting away from the goddamn trucks.”

“Well, yes, sir,” Jeff said reluctantly. “Only problem I see with building it here is, the niggers won’t take long to figure out this is the end of the line if we do. We’ll have more trouble from ’em in that case. Camp’s been pretty quiet so far, and I’d like to keep it that way.”

“I understand that, but we’ve got to think about efficiency, too,” Koenig said. “If we can give your trucks back to the Army-minus your exhaust hookup, of course”-he laughed, which meant Pinkard had to do the same-“that’ll help the war effort a lot. We need all the transport we can get right now, what with the big push into Pennsylvania. And you’ve got a good solid perimeter around the camp, right? You’ve got guards who know what they’re doing, right?”

“Well, yes, sir,” Jeff repeated. He couldn’t very well say the camp didn’t have a solid perimeter, or that the guards didn’t know what the hell they were doing. If he said that, he wouldn’t stay camp commandant for another five minutes, and he wouldn’t deserve to, either.

“All right, then,” the Attorney General said. “Any trouble comes up, I reckon you’ll be able to handle it. A few bursts from the guards’ submachine guns should settle most troubles pretty damn quick. If they don’t, well, the machine guns in the towers outside the barbed wire sure as hell will.”

“Yes, sir,” Pinkard said one more time. Everything Ferd Koenig said was true. If the Negroes caused trouble, the guards ought to be able to smash it.

“Good.” Koenig sounded pleased. “You keep at it, Pinkard. I’m sure everything will work out fine. Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jeff said, but he was talking to a dead line.

He hung up, swearing under his breath. Everything Koenig said was true, yeah, but what he said was only part of the story. Jeff remembered how things had been back at Camp Dependable in Louisiana when his guards were reducing population by taking niggers out to the swamps and shooting them. Not only had that put a strain on the white men, it had also made them stay on edge every minute of the day and night. The Negroes in the camp had known too well they had nothing to lose. If they tried to nail a guard, they’d get killed, sure. But if they didn’t, they’d get killed anyhow. So why not try to take somebody with you when you went?

Camp Determination wasn’t like that now. The blacks here believed this wasn’t the last stop. They were wrong, but the belief itself mattered. It mattered a lot. Because they still believed they had a future, they were much more docile than they would have been otherwise.

Building the fumigator here would ruin all that. They’d figure out what was what. How could they help it? Everybody knew Negroes weren’t as smart as white people, but they wouldn’t have to be geniuses to figure this out. And guards would have to stay on their toes every second from then on.

But now Jeff had his orders. He wished he’d never called Richmond. He should have just gone ahead and built the fumigator where he wanted it and then told Ferd Koenig what he’d done. The Attorney General would have gone along with it. The way things worked out, Jeff was stuck.

He swore again, louder this time, sat down to look at a map of Camp Determination, and then swore some more. Pretty plainly, he’d have to build two fumigators, one for men, the other for women and pickaninnies. Otherwise, the sexes would meet on the way to getting eliminated, and that would cause all kinds of trouble-to say nothing of making inmates’ attitudes even worse than they would be anyhow.

After another look at the map-and some more venting of his spleen-he decided how things would have to work. The fumigators could go at, or even next to, the present outer boundaries of the camp. That way, he could use the current perimeter to separate them from the areas where the Negroes lived. Maybe he could send people through on the pretext that they had to be deloused before going to a new camp. That would explain why they didn’t come back.

How long could he keep them from learning that only bodies left Camp Determination? Not forever, he feared. But he could buy at least some time that way. The longer he didn’t have to worry about uppity niggers, the better he liked it. And he would be following orders.

Irving Morrell got his first look at one of the new Confederate barrels just outside of Salem, Ohio. The town, east of Canton, called itself “Ohio’s City of Friends.” It had been founded by Quakers, and many still lived there. What was happening around Salem now had nothing to do with those peaceable people or their ideals.

A U.S. 105 firing over open sights had knocked out the barrel in question. The young lieutenant who gravely explained that to Morrell didn’t see anything funny about it. He didn’t associate it with Jake Featherston’s ranting tract of the same name. Morrell wondered whether to explain why he was laughing. In the end, he didn’t. Any joke you had to explain wasn’t funny.

Neither was the new barrel. It stank of gasoline and cordite and burnt paint and rubber and burnt flesh. Morrell’s nostrils tried to pinch in on themselves to hold out as much of that horrible smell as they could. His stomach lurched as soon as he recognized it. He’d smelled it too often before.

No barrel in the world could withstand a direct hit from a 105 at point-blank range. Getting hits with an artillery piece even at point-blank range was a much bigger problem, though. The best antibarrel weapon was still another barrel.

When Morrell walked around the charred corpse of this one, he got the feeling that the machines he commanded were like boys trying to stop men. The long gun with the big bore, the sloped armor, the low profile… This was what the USA should have had at the start of the war.

He turned to the lieutenant. “Can the inch-and-a-half guns on our barrels hurt these monsters at all?”

“They can penetrate the side armor, sir,” the youngster answered. “That frontal plate-I’m afraid not. Our barrels’ armor-piercing rounds mostly just bounce off.”

“Happy day,” Morrell muttered, and then, “We’ve got to upgun. That’s all there is to it.”

“Yes, sir,” the lieutenant said. “But the turret ring on our present model won’t let us mount a three-incher like these bastards have. Two and a fraction, that’s it-and even then we need a new turret to hold the larger weapon.”

“We’ve got to do it,” Morrell said, more to himself than to his guide. “Building a whole new machine from the ground up-well, we should have started a long time ago. Since we didn’t, we’ve just got to squeeze the most out of what we have for a while longer.”

“Can we?” the lieutenant asked-a question Morrell wished he didn’t have to contemplate.

After a moment’s thought, he answered, “Of course we can, son-because we’ve got to. Now where’s the map that shows our armored dispositions?”

“It’s back in town, sir,” the young lieutenant said. Morrell wished it were farther forward: one of a lot of things he wished that he wasn’t going to get. Back to Salem they went. Refugees from farther west clogged the road. Some of them tried to take shelter in Salem, even as the people who lived there cleared out.

Once upon a time, before bombs and artillery started landing on it, Salem had been a pleasant little city. It had held ten or twelve thousand people, and had boasted a flour mill, a dairy outfit, a couple of china factories, and some metalworks. It also boasted a monument to one Edwin Coppock, an abolitionist who’d raided Harpers Ferry with John Brown, and who’d been hanged with him. If the Confederates took Salem, they would blow that to hell and gone.

When Morrell actually got a look at the armored dispositions in northeastern Ohio, his own disposition soured, and his temper almost blew to hell and gone. “My God!” he burst out. “They’ve got them scattered all over the damned landscape!”

“They support the infantry, sir,” the shavetail said.

“No, no, no, no, no!” Morrell didn’t pound his head against the wall in the pleasant little clapboard house now doing duty for his headquarters. Why he didn’t, he couldn’t have said. As far as he was concerned, that restraint should have been worth a medal. “We’ve been at war for more than a year now. Hasn’t anybody learned anything about anything?”

“Sir?” The lieutenant, an earnest young man, realized he was out of his element.

Morrell didn’t try to explain. It would have taken too long. But the officer he was replacing hadn’t learned a thing from two wars’ worth of barrel tactics. The one thing you needed to do to get the most out of your armor was to mass it, to use it as the spearhead to your attack. Putting some of it here, some of it there, and some more of it in a no-account town twenty miles away was asking-begging-to get defeated in detail. And the Confederates-who, while they were manifest sons of bitches, were also capable sons of bitches when it came to handling armor-were only too happy to oblige.

The study Morrell went into was more nearly black than brown. “How the hell can I get my forces concentrated so I can do something with them?” he muttered.

“How can our infantry respond to the Confederates if they don’t have barrels to stiffen them, sir?” the lieutenant asked.

The look Morrell gave him should have left him charred worse than the burnt-out C.S. barrel. “I don’t want to respond to Featherston’s fuckers,” he ground out. The young lieutenant’s eyes widened, perhaps at the obscenity but more likely at the heresy. Morrell proceeded to spell it out: “I want to make Featherston’s fuckers respond to me. I can’t do that, can I, unless I can pull together enough barrels to get their attention?” It seemed obvious to him. Why didn’t it seem obvious to anybody else in a green-gray uniform?

“But, sir, if the infantry isn’t supported, the enemy will just slice through it, the way he has before.” The lieutenant sounded like a man trying to reason with a dangerous lunatic.

“He’s welcome to try,” Morrell said, which made the shavetail’s eyes get big all over again. “If I have a decent force of barrels of my own, though, I’ll land on his flank and cut his supply line neat as you please. Let’s see how much slicing he does without gasoline or ammo.”

He waited. The lieutenant contemplated. “Do you really think you could do that, sir?” He was too polite and too far under military discipline to call Morrell a liar in so many words, but he didn’t believe him, either.

“Would they have sent me here if they didn’t think I could?” Morrell asked. “Or don’t you think the War Department knows what it’s doing?”

“Sir, if the War Department knew what it was doing, would we be in a quarter of the mess we’re in?” the lieutenant replied.

Morrell stared at him as if he’d never seen him before. In a very real way, he hadn’t. He stuck out his right hand. When the lieutenant hesitated, Morrell grabbed his hand and pumped it up and down. “Congratulations!” he said. “That’s the first halfway smart thing I’ve heard out of you.”

“Uh, sir?” He’d bewildered the lieutenant.

“Always distrust what the people too far from the front line to hear small-arms fire tell you,” Morrell said. “Always. Most of what they think they know is going to be out of date or wrong some other way. It will have gone through too many mouths before it finally gets to them. And a lot of them won’t ever have got close enough to the front to hear small-arms fire. Half the time, they won’t understand what other people are trying to tell them even if it turns out to be the gospel truth. Sometimes it does-accidents will happen.”

The young officer eyed him. “What about you, sir?”

“There. That’s the second smart thing you’ve said.” Morrell grinned. “All I can tell you is, I’ve got an oak-leaf cluster for my damn Purple Heart. Do I pass inspection?”

“Uh, yes, sir.” The lieutenant blushed like a schoolgirl. A glance at the short row of fruit salad on his chest showed he’d never been wounded. He probably thought that made him less of a man. Morrell had had stupid notions like that till he got shot in the leg. Nothing like a wound infection to take the romance out of war.

He got down to business. “All right, then. How secure are the telephone lines out of this place?”

“Well, we do the best we can, sir, but I can’t guarantee the bastards in butternut aren’t tapping them,” the lieutenant said. “Same with the telegraph.”

“It would be,” Morrell muttered. A war between two countries that spoke the same language was harder than other kinds just about every which way. You had to assume the enemy was listening to everything you did, and that he knew what you were up to as soon as you did. You’d give him too much credit some of the time, but you didn’t dare give him too little.

You had to assume he was listening. You had to assume he knew what you were up to… “Do you know, Lieutenant, I hope he is. He’s almost bound to be, isn’t he?”

“Sir?” The blank look was back on the kid’s baby face.

Morrell clapped him on the shoulder. “Never mind. Point me at a typewriter. We do have messengers we can rely on, right?” If the lieutenant told him no, he was up the well-known creek without even a canoe, much less a paddle.

But the young officer nodded. “Oh, yes, sir. They’re very reliable, and they make sure to destroy what they’re carrying if they run into trouble.”

“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Morrell said. “Now where’s that typewriter?”

For the next couple of hours, he pounded away at it. He was no secretary; he typed with his two forefingers. He wasn’t fast, but he got the job done. A look at the messengers reassured him more than the lieutenant’s praise did. They were a raffish lot, men who could be counted on to get where they were going. And if they liberated booze or smokes or a steak along the way… well, so much the better.

He gave them oral orders. Then he handed them the dispatches he’d written. Off they went, in command cars, on horseback, on bicycles, on shank’s mare. Before long, one-word responses started coming in by telephone and telegraph. Received, Morrell heard, again and again and again. He marked the map, again and again and again.

When he was satisfied, he got on the telephone. He called officer after officer, delivered his orders, and hung up. Maybe this would work and maybe it wouldn’t. It seemed worth a try, though.

One thing: U.S. reconnaissance was good. Most people who lived in Ohio, especially in this northern part of it, wanted nothing to do with the Confederates. They slipped through enemy lines, risking their necks to report on what Jake Featherston’s men were up to. When Morrell heard the Confederates were assembling armor in Homeworth, a few miles west of Salem, he smiled to himself.

Their attack on Salem went in two days later. They came loaded for bear, convinced they had a big force of barrels in front of them. Morrell showed a few and shelled the Confederates heavily to slow them down. That only made them push harder. They’d just about reached Salem’s outskirts… when the real U.S. barrel force, which had concentrated some miles to the north, roared down and struck them in the flank.

The Confederates still might have made a fight of it. They had at least as many machines as the USA did, and theirs hit harder. But they were rattled, as anybody hit from a direction he didn’t expect would have been. They fell back in some disorder, and left a lot of barrels burning in front of Salem.

“That was amazing, sir!” Now the young lieutenant looked at Morrell with something not far from hero worship.

“That’s what we’re supposed to do, dammit,” Morrell said, wondering how-and if-he could bring off the same sort of thing again.

Abner Dowling was the man who’d spotted the Confederates thinning their lines in Virginia so they could send more men into Ohio. He hadn’t had the chance to attack them after he caught them doing that. Oh, no. His reward was thinning his own lines so the USA could try to smash through the Confederates’ position at Fredericksburg, which hadn’t worked at all. Now he was thinning them still further to send reinforcements to the West.

He took a half pint of whiskey out of his desk drawer and stared at it. Like most half pints, it was curved to fit the hand. He wasn’t a man who drank to excess. He remembered General Custer. With whiskey as with women, Custer could resist everything except temptation. And Custer with a snootful was even more a bull in a china shop than he had been any other time.

No, Dowling wasn’t like that-which didn’t mean he was teetotal, either. Every once in a while, a nip was welcome. Sometimes you needed not to think about things for a little while, and whiskey was the best thought preventer this side of a blackjack. He undid the metal screw top, raised the bottle to his lips, and took a healthy slug.

His adjutant chose that moment to walk in the door.

Captain Angelo Toricelli had been with him since his unhappy stay as commandant in Salt Lake City-another one of the garden spots of the universe. Unlike some adjutants, Toricelli understood that he wasn’t about to end up on Skid Row just because he drank now and again. It was embarrassing all the same.

Trying to cover that embarrassment, Dowling held out the bottle and asked, “Want some for yourself?”

“No, thank you, sir,” Captain Toricelli answered-not primly, but not in a way that suggested he’d change his mind, either. “We have a message from General MacArthur inquiring how the pullback is going in this corps.”

“Tell General MacArthur to-” Dowling broke off. If he went on in that vein, Toricelli would think it was the whiskey talking. That was nonsense. Dowling needed no booze to despise Daniel MacArthur. Still… “Tell General MacArthur to rest assured that we are complying with his orders and the War Department’s.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. That’s well phrased.” Toricelli’s dark eyes glinted. He knew what Dowling had been on the point of saying. But Dowling hadn’t said it. Neither he nor the half pint could get the blame. Toricelli saluted and left the room.

Dowling eyed the little bottle. It was almost as if the narrow escape gave him the license for another drink. He shook his head and put the bottle back in the desk drawer. It would be there when he really needed it. If he drank when he didn’t really need it… That was how trouble started.

Off in the distance, somebody’s artillery opened up. He thought those were U.S. guns. With fewer foot soldiers on the ground, artillery had to take up some of the slack. Of course, some of his artillery was getting pulled west to try to stop the Confederates, too.

After fifteen or twenty minutes, the guns fell silent. Dowling hoped that meant they’d smashed whatever they were aiming at. If not, some wireless man would rush in with news of a new disaster. And Dowling would have to try to put the pieces back together-and take the blame if Humpty Dumpty remained bits of eggshell.

His eyes went to the large-scale map of Virginia on the wall. He didn’t like the way his right flank was vulnerable. He never had. General Patton, the Confederates’ answer to Irving Morrell, had roared out of the mountains trying to roll him up. Patton hadn’t managed it. Dowling took a certain amount of pride in the way he’d defended against the CSA’s armored wizard, but they didn’t pin medals on your chest for losing only a few square miles. Often that deserved a medal, but it never got one.

If Patton or some other Confederate hotshot tried charging out of the mountains again, could Dowling’s corps hold the enemy again? He muttered unhappily. If the Confederates hit him as hard as they had the last time, he probably couldn’t. But he brightened a little a moment later. He might not have the wherewithal to defend that he’d had before, but he was pretty damn sure the boys in butternut couldn’t mount the same kind of attack as they had then. They seemed to be putting everything they had into the push through Ohio and into Pennsylvania.

He looked at the map again, then slowly nodded to himself. Ever since the war started, people had been saying that whoever could mount two big drives at once would likely win. So far, neither side had come close. Logic said the United States had the better chance. They had more men and more resources. They also had more problems. The Confederates had a smoldering Negro uprising to worry about; their response seemed to be massacre. The United States had to flabble about the Mormons, and now the Canadians, the Japanese in the Pacific, and the really mad naval struggle in the North Atlantic. With all the sideshows, they couldn’t concentrate on the main event.

Captain Toricelli came in again. “Yes? What is it?” Dowling asked with a sinking feeling. His adjutant could bear bad tidings at least as well as a wireless operator.

But Toricelli only asked, “Sir, do you know a Miss Ophelia Clemens?”

“The reporter? I should say I do,” Dowling answered. “I spoke with her outside General MacArthur’s headquarters not more than a few weeks ago, as a matter of fact. Why?”

“Because she just pulled up in front of this building, sir,” Toricelli said. “I doubt like the dickens she’s here to talk to me.”

“Send her in. Send her in,” Dowling said. “How subversive do you think I can be?”

“I couldn’t begin to guess.” By Toricelli’s expression, though, he feared for the worst.

When Ophelia Clemens marched into Dowling’s office, she looked him in the eye and said, “General, I’d murder somebody for a drink.”

“Not me, I hope.” Dowling opened his desk drawer and, with the air of a vaudeville conjuror, produced the half pint. “Here you are, ma’am. At your service.”

“God bless you,” Ophelia Clemens said. “I hoped I could find a St. Bernard in all these Alps.” After that rhetorical outburst, she unscrewed the cap and swigged like a man. She eyed the bottle in her hand with a certain amount of respect. “That’s what they call panther piss, isn’t it?”

“Something like that,” Dowling allowed. “It sure isn’t sipping whiskey.”

She handed the half pint back to him. When he put it away without drinking, she said, “Keep it around just for poisoning visitors, do you?”

“By no means, ma’am. You misunderstand me. I’m about half an hour ahead of you, that’s all. And what besides bartender duty can I do for you on this none too lovely day?”

“Well, I’ve got my own cigarettes,” she replied, and lit one to prove it. “I don’t suppose you could spare me some truth?”

Dowling snorted. “You don’t ask for much, do you?”

“If you had it, I think you might give it to me,” Ophelia Clemens told him. “That’s more than I can say about most of the people in your line of work I know.”

“You flatter me,” he said. “Keep it up. I love it.”

“I’ll give you the reporter’s ultimate flattery, then,” she said. “How would you like to be ‘a reliable source’?”

Dowling knew what that meant: somebody who shot off his mouth without getting called to account for it. At his age and station, such a chance tempted him more than a twenty-two-year-old virgin-more than a twenty-two-year-old professional, come to that. “Go ahead and ask,” he said, “and we’ll see how reliable I am.”

“All right.” Ophelia Clemens took out a spiral-bound notebook, opened it to a blank page, and poised a pencil above it. “How bad do things look in Ohio and Pennsylvania?”

“You just named Pennsylvania. Right there, that says we aren’t doing as well as we ought to be.” Dowling shook his head. “No, I take it back. That’s not fair. I don’t know what things are like on the ground over there. I have my own troubles, Lord knows. You can say things aren’t going as well as we wish they were.”

Her pencil scratched across the page. “Do you think Featherston’s going after Pittsburgh?”

“Too early to be sure, but that’s how it looks right now,” Dowling said.

“Uh-huh.” Ophelia Clemens wrote some more. “Do you know, they wouldn’t give me a straight answer in the War Department? You never heard so many variations on ‘No comment’ in all your born days. Franz Liszt couldn’t write variations like that.”

“Heh,” Dowling said doubtfully as the allusion flew over his head. Had he been up in the War Department, he would have played it cagey, too-he knew that. You could get in trouble for saying yes and being right, for saying yes and being wrong, and conversely with no as well. No comment looked pretty good under those circumstances.

“Can the Confederates take Pittsburgh?” Ophelia Clemens asked.

When Dowling got questions like that, being a “reliable source” looked a lot less enjoyable. “I hope not,” he blurted.

Scritch, scritch, scritch went the pencil point. “Can we stay in the war if they do take Pittsburgh?”

No, this wasn’t any fun at all. “I hope so,” Dowling answered. “Losing it would hurt us. We make an awful lot of steel there. But it’s not like Birmingham-it’s not just about the only place where we make steel. As far as that goes, we can hold on and hold out. Even so…”

“Will the country stand for it?” she asked. “Cleveland was supposed to hold up the Confederates for a long time. It didn’t, not for nearly long enough. It’s gone. It’s lost. If Pittsburgh goes the same way, won’t we just say, ‘Oh, no, we can’t win this one,’ and throw in the towel?”

“That’s what Jake Featherston hopes we’ll do, anyhow,” Dowling said. “We’ve got elections coming up this fall. Now, I’m just a soldier. I’m not supposed to know anything about politics, and I mostly don’t.” Soldiers, even soldiers acting as reliable sources, had to say such things. Dowling-and, no doubt, Ophelia Clemens with him-knew he was being disingenuous, but he couldn’t help it. He went on, “One thing I haven’t seen is anybody from any party campaigning on a ‘Peace Now!’ platform.”

Scritch, scritch, scritch. “Well, neither have I,” the reporter said. “Why do you suppose that is?”

“Because everybody figures Featherston would kick us while we’re down,” Dowling answered at once. “Don’t you? What else could it be? He’s made it pretty damn clear that he tells lies whenever he opens his mouth. Or do you think I’m wrong?”

“Me?” She shook her head. “No, sir. Not even a little bit. You know the number of the beast, all right. I’ve been in this business for as long as you’ve been in the Army-longer, really, because I watched my father before I was old enough or good enough to do it myself. Jake Featherston scares the spit out of me. I’ve never seen anybody like him, not on this continent. Some of the people in Action Francaise, maybe, and that Mosley fellow in England, but nobody here comes close.”

“We should have smashed him when we had the chance, just after he got power,” Dowling said. But Featherston didn’t look so dangerous then. And the USA was stuck in the economic collapse. And so… Yes, Dowling thought sourly. And so…

Hipolito Rodriguez sat on his cot in the guards’ barracks at Camp Determination, methodically cleaning his submachine gun. He’d learned in the dirt and mud and dust of the trenches that a clean weapon could make the difference between life and death. The submachine gun had a more complicated apparatus than his old Tredegar, too.

Another guard, an Alabaman named Jonah Gurney, said, “Anybody’d reckon you was married to that gun.” He carried his weapon when he walked through the camp and ignored it the rest of the time. He was a younger man, not a recruit from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades. He’d never seen combat, and it showed.

“Married? No.” Rodriguez shook his head. “My wife screw me, I like that. This gun screw me, I don’t like nothin’ no more.” He pushed an oily rag through the barrel with a cleaning rod.

The rest of the men in the barracks laughed. “He got you, Jonah,” somebody said. “He got you good.”

By the dull flush rising on Gurney’s blunt features, he already knew that. He liked ragging on other people. Oh, sure-he liked that fine. It wasn’t so much fun when somebody turned the tables on him. If Rodriguez had had a dime for everybody like that he’d met, he would have been one of the richest men in Sonora, certainly too rich to be a camp guard.

Scowling, Gurney said, “You’re asshole buddies with the big cheese in the camp, ain’t you?”

“We were in the war together,” Rodriguez answered with a shrug. Because he’d practiced stripping and assembling the submachine gun so much, he could let his hands do it while he kept an eye on the other guard. “I dunno about asshole buddies. I don’t think I like the sound of that too much.” He did like the sound with which a full magazine went into place: a satisfying click.

Jonah Gurney didn’t seem to notice. “No?” he said. “What you aim to do about it, greaser?”

One step up from niggers-that was how Sonorans and Chihuahuans seemed to a lot of whites in the CSA. Another, smaller, click from Rodriguez’s gun: the safety coming off. Casually, calmly, Rodriguez said, “What do I aim to do? I aim to blow your fucking head off, pendejo.” All at once, the barrel of the gun pointed straight at Gurney’s nose. Rodriguez’s finger twitched on the trigger.

That wasn’t what shook the Alabaman. The smile on his face was. Gurney’s own face went pale as a plate of grits. He tried a smile of his own. The only word that suited it was ghastly. “Hey,” he said with lips and tongue that suddenly seemed numb, “I didn’t mean nothin’ by it, honest to God I didn’t.”

“Kiss my ass,” Rodriguez said succinctly.

“Put down the piece, Rodriguez.” That was Troop Leader Porter, the noncom in charge of Rodriguez’s squad. “There ain’t gonna be any killing here today.”

“Thank you, Troop Leader,” Jonah Gurney gabbled. “You see what that crazy Mexican fucker was gonna do to me? Ought to take him out and-”

“Shut up.” Porter’s voice was flat and hard. “Pack up your shit and get the hell out of here. You’re reassigned, as of now. Maybe some other camp’ll take you. I don’t know. I don’t care. But you’re not gonna stay at Camp Determination another minute, and you can take that to the bank. You’re a troublemaking son of a bitch, and we’ve got no need for people like you. Get out. Fuck off.”

Gurney stared at him as if he couldn’t believe his ears. “You’re gonna back a goddamn dago against a white man?”

“I’m going to back a guard who pulls his weight against a slacker who does as little as he can to get by,” Porter said. “I wouldn’t have been real sorry to see you dead, Gurney, if it wasn’t for the paperwork I’d have to fill out to make sure Rodriguez didn’t end up in hot water over your worthless carcass.”

Gurney plainly thought himself as much abandoned and thrown over the side for no good reason as the original Jonah. He gestured toward the rest of the guards in the barracks, a wave full of angry disbelief. “Come on, y’all!” he cried. “You gonna let him get away with that? You gonna let him screw over a white man for the sake of a goddamn Mexican?” Disbelief stretched his voice high and shrill.

For close to a minute, nobody said anything. Nobody seemed to want to look at Gurney, or at Rodriguez, or at Troop Leader Porter. For that matter, nobody seemed to want to look at anybody else. Finally, somebody behind Gurney said, “He’s got the stripes, Jonah. Reckon that gives him the right.”

“Like hell it does!” Jonah Gurney shouted furiously. “We’re white men! That gives us the right. That’s what this here country’s all about, ain’t it? That’s what the Freedom Party’s all about, ain’t it?”

Again, silence stretched. This time, Porter broke it. “Go on, Jonah,” he said, his voice surprisingly gentle. “Go on now, and don’t get yourself any deeper in Dutch. I’m gonna make like I didn’t hear any of what you said just now. A man’s gotta blow off steam. I know that. But you don’t want me to have to tell the commandant you were trying to make a mutiny, now do you?”

When Rodriguez was in the Army, they’d read out the Articles of War every so often. Making a mutiny was one of the things they could shoot you or hang you for. Even mentioning it put a chill in the hot, muggy air. Rodriguez didn’t know if camp guards came under the same military law as soldiers, but he would have bet they did.

The ominous words seemed to get home to Gurney, too. “This ain’t right, dammit,” he muttered. “My Congressman’s gonna hear about it, so help me God he is.” But he might have shrunk, standing there in plain sight. He filled his gray canvas duffel bag, slung it over his shoulder, and trudged out of the barracks.

Rodriguez nodded to Porter. “Thank you,” he said softly.

“I didn’t do it for you,” the noncom answered.

“Thank you anyway,” Rodriguez said.

His gratitude only embarrassed the troop leader. “I didn’t do it for you, dammit,” he repeated. “I did it for all of us. When we’re in there with the coons, we’ve got to know we can trust each other to guard our backs. Anybody who doesn’t care to help another man who wears the same uniform no matter what, I don’t want that son of a bitch here. I can’t trust him. Nobody can trust him.” He looked around the barracks. “We got anybody else who feels the way Gurney did? Anybody who does, clean out your footlocker and head out the door. I won’t put a bad word on your fitness report-swear to Jesus I won’t-but I want you doin’ somethin’ else. Anybody?”

No one moved. No one spoke.

“All right, then,” Porter said. “Rodriguez isn’t the only man from Sonora and Chihuahua we’ve got at this camp-not even close. Has anybody seen any sign that those people are falling down on the job? Anything at all?” Again, no one said a word. The noncom nodded. “I haven’t, either. The government and the Party-and the Party, mind you-thought they could do it, or they wouldn’t have recruited them in the first place, right? Y’all gonna tell Jake Featherston he doesn’t know what he’s doin’? You let me know where you want your body sent first.”

That pretty much took care of that. White men were careful around Rodriguez from then on out. He wasn’t sure whether they were afraid to say anything bad to him even if he had it coming or they were afraid he’d shoot them if they did say anything. Either way felt awkward. He wished they would just treat him the way they treated one another. Too much to hope for, he feared.

He wasn’t a Mexican, a greaser, to the Negroes in the camp. Maybe that was because they knew most Sonorans and Chihuahuans had no more use for them than most whites did. More likely, he judged, it was because to them, in his gray uniform, he was a guard. The uniform took precedence over the face.

When he went over to the women’s side of the camp, the prisoners always tried to soften him up. If he’d do something for them, they made it plain, they would do something for him. And some of them left nothing to the imagination. Taking up all the offers and come-ons and out-and-out propositions would have drained a man half his age dry in nothing flat.

Some of the guards took up as many as they could. In a way, Rodriguez understood that. They had to think, Why not? Sooner or later, whether she knew it or not, a woman was going out in a truck. Why not enjoy her while she was here? If she was enjoyable, why not fix it so she went out later, not sooner? In the end, what difference did it make?

Rodriguez took up an offer himself every now and then, but only every now and then. Most of the time, he remembered he was a married man. When three guards in quick succession got the clap, that made him more cautious than ever. Magdalena wouldn’t thank him for bringing home a drippy faucet.

Troop Leader Porter was loudly disgusted when that happened. “Jesus fucking Christ!” he exclaimed. “And fucking’s about right, ain’t it? We gonna have to set up a shortarm station around here? I knew we had some dumb pricks on this duty, but y’all have gone over the line. Next man who comes down venereal, he’s gonna get a dishonorable discharge to go with his dishonorable discharge, you hear me?”

“Yes, Troop Leader!” the guards chorused. Sooner or later, somebody would. If it was later, the noncom might have forgotten about his threat. If it was sooner… Rodriguez resisted temptation till he got shifted to the men’s side.

That was a different business. Walking through the men’s side, inspecting barracks to make sure the prisoners weren’t working on tunnels or any other nefarious schemes, was like walking through a cage full of wolves and cougars. Nothing was likely to happen to you if you were careful and if you stayed with your buddies. If you went off by yourself…

One guard got his head smashed in. His weapon disappeared. Everybody turned the men’s half of the camp upside down and inside out. Rodriguez thought that submachine gun was gone for good, or till a mallate emptied the clip into more guards. But, by what had to be not far from a miracle, it got fished out of a latrine trench. It was wrapped in greasy rags and slathered with lard-not as good as Cosmoline, but enough to keep it in working order. No one ever found out who did in the guard. All the prisoners had their rations cut in punishment, but nobody squealed.

“Suh, what they buildin’ out past the wire?” a man asked Rodriguez not long after the gun was recovered.

By chance, the black had picked a guard who knew. The answer would get Rodriguez a promotion as soon as the paperwork went through. But he just scowled at the scrawny prisoner and said, “You find out when the time comes.”

“You don’t got to be dat way, suh.” The Negro’s voice was a sheepish whine he’d no doubt used to talk his way out of trouble before. “I didn’t mean no disrespect. I wasn’t rude or crude or mean or nothin’ like that. I just wants to know.”

“You find out when the time comes,” Rodriguez repeated, and glared at the prisoner. The fellow knew when to back off in a hurry. When the time came, when he found out, that wouldn’t help him a bit.