Drive to the East (12 page)

Dowling thought of burnt weeds and lawn trimmings when he smoked U.S.-made cigarettes. He blew out a cloud of smoke, then said, “You boys want to make me give up the habit.”

The sentries laughed. Jimmy said, “Don’t do that, sir. Only thing worse than lousy tobacco is no tobacco at all. Besides, when you’re smoking you can’t smell the goddamn war so much.”

You can’t smell the goddamn war so much.
Dowling wouldn’t have put it that way, which didn’t mean the kid was wrong. Even here in Washington, well back of the line, you noted whiffs of that smell. Dowling didn’t know what all went into it. Among the pieces, though, were unburied corpses, unwashed men, and uncovered latrine trenches. Cordite and smoke were two other constants. The smell had a sharper note in this war, for exhaust fumes had largely ousted the barnyard aroma of horses.

And there was one other stink that never went away. It blew out of the War Department. With luck, it blew out of the War Department on the other side, too. And it usually did, for most wars went on for a long, long time. No, there was no escaping the all-invasive, all-pervasive reek of stupidity.

H
ipolito Rodriguez had worn butternut in the Great War. The Confederate Conscription Bureau had pulled him off his farm in the state of Sonora, given him a uniform and a rifle and rather more English than he’d had before, and sent him out to fight. And fight he had, first in Georgia against the black rebels in one of the Socialist Republics they’d proclaimed there and then in west Texas against the damnyankees.

He had a son in butternut in this war, and two more bound to be conscripted before long. And he was back in uniform himself. He’d signed up as a member of the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades: men who weren’t fit for front-line service anymore but who could still help their country and free fitter men for the fight.

Now he found himself in Texas again, riding a bus across a prairie that seemed to stretch forever. He wore uniform again—of similar cut to the one he’d had before, but of gray rather than butternut cloth. The rest of the new camp guards wore identical clothes. Only two or three of them besides Rodriguez were from Sonora or Chihuahua. The rest came from all over the CSA.

Being in Texas was a mixed blessing for a man of Mexican blood. White Texans often weren’t shy about calling their fellow Confederate citizens greasers and dagos, sometimes with unprintable epithets in front of the names. But at least Confederates of Mexican blood
were
citizens.

In an odd way, Rodriguez thanked heaven for the Negroes who would fill the camp where he was to become a guard. If not for them, Mexicans would have been at the bottom of the hill, and everything would have flowed down onto them. As things were, most of the trouble went past them and came down on the
mallates
’ heads. That suited him fine.

The bus stopped once, in a dusty little town whose name—if it had a name—Rodriguez didn’t notice. The place had a Main Street with a filling station, a saloon that doubled as a diner, and a general store that doubled as a post office. It was even smaller than Baroyeca, the Sonoran town outside of which Rodriguez had a farm. It looked to be even poorer, too. Since Sonora and Chihuahua were and always had been the two poorest states in the CSA, that said frightening things about this place on the road to nowhere.

Along with everybody else, Rodriguez lined up to use the toilet at the filling station. It was dark and nasty and smelly. The proprietor stared at the camp guards as if they’d fallen from another world.

Some of them bought cigarettes and pipe tobacco at the general store. Rodriguez went into the saloon with others. The bartender must have been used to three customers a day. Having a dozen all at once made his eyes bug out of his head. Somebody ordered a ham sandwich. In an instant, all the men in gray uniforms were clamoring for ham sandwiches. The barkeeper worked like a man possessed, slicing bread, slicing ham, slicing pickles, slapping on mustard and mayonnaise. The bus driver leaned on his horn.

“Screw him,” one of the camp guards said. “He ain’t gonna take off without all of us.” As if to contradict him, the driver blew another long blast.

None of the guards paid any attention. They stayed right there, waiting for their sandwiches and slapping down quarters as they got them. When Rodriguez’s turn came, the man in the boiled shirt and the black bow tie—as much a uniform as his own gray one—gave him a funny look. His dark skin and black hair said one thing, while the outfit he had on said another. Rodriguez just waited. The man handed him the sandwich.

“Gracias,”
Rodriguez said as he paid him. He spoke more Spanish than English, but his English was more than good enough for
thank you.
He wanted to make the Texan twitch, and he did.

When they’d all got their food and their tobacco, they deigned to reboard the bus. The driver muttered to himself. He did no more than mutter, though. Considering how badly he was outnumbered, that was smart of him.

Rodriguez sank down into his seat with a grunt of relief. Not long after his farmhouse got electricity, he’d almost electrocuted himself. He hadn’t been the same since—otherwise, he might have gone to the front himself, and not into the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades.

Away went the bus, rattling west down the imperfectly paved highway. “Reckon I’m gonna pawn my fuckin’ kidneys when we finally get where we’re goin’,” one of the men in gray said.

“You been fuckin’ with your kidneys, Jack, there’s some shit your pappy never learned you,” another one replied. Goatish laughter erupted. The rattletrap bus filled with cigarette smoke.

Towards evening, the bus came into Snyder. It looked like all the other Texas towns through which Rodriguez had passed on the way west: bigger than some, smaller than others. Then the bus rolled on a few miles farther. Somebody sitting up near the front who could see out through the big windscreen said, “Son of a bitch!” It was an expression of awe, not anger.

Other soft oaths, and a few not so soft, followed. Rodriguez, who was sitting somewhere near the middle, tried to peer past the men in front of him to find out what they were getting excited about. He didn’t have much luck. They were all shifting and moving, too.

The bus stopped. This was where they were going, whatever
this
was. The driver answered that, saying, “Welcome to Camp Determination. Everybody off.”

With a tired wheeze, the bus’ front door opened. One by one, the new camp guards filed out. Some of them gathered in front of the luggage bin, waiting for the driver to unlock it so they could get out their duffels. Others, Rodriguez among them, took a look at Camp Determination first. He decided the fellow who said
son of a bitch
had known just what he was talking about.

“I was eighteen years old and in the Army in the last war before I saw a town that size,” said one of the gray-haired men in gray uniforms.

“
Sí,
me, too,” Rodriguez agreed. You could drop Baroyeca down in the middle of that camp, and it wouldn’t even make a splash.

Barbed wire surrounded an enormous square of Texas prairie. Machine guns poked their snouts out of guard towers outside the wire perimeter. Barracks halls built of bright yellow pine as yet unbleached by the sun and unstained by the rain and rusty nails rose in the middle distance. There were a lot of them, but the vast acreage inside the barbed wire had room for at least as many more.

Somebody else pointed in a different direction. “Holy Jesus!” the man said. “Will you look at all them trucks?”

There they sat, on an asphalted lot separated from the barracks by more barbed wire. Along with the rest of the guards, Hipolito Rodriguez had become very familiar with those trucks. They looked like ordinary Army machines, except that the rear compartment was enclosed in an iron box—an airtight iron box. Pipe the exhaust in there and people who got into the trucks didn’t come out again . . . not alive, anyhow.

“They’re gonna get rid of a hell of a lot o’ niggers in this place,” the man next to Rodriguez said. “
Hell
of a lot.”

“You want to shut your mouth about that, Roy,” somebody else told him. “We don’t talk about that shit. If we do it amongst ourselves, we’re liable to do it where the coons can hear us, and then we’ll have trouble.” He’d learned his lessons well; the Freedom Party guards who’d trained them at the much smaller camp near Fort Worth had rammed that home again and again. “Far as the niggers know, when they get on those trucks, they’re always going somewhere else.”

“Yeah, yeah,” Roy said impatiently. “Far as
I
know, they’re all goin’ to hell, and it damn well serves ’em right.”

“Come on, come on.” The bus driver sounded even more impatient than Roy did. “Y’all get your gear and get moving. I got to get moving myself, get the hell outa here and back towards where I live.”

Rodriguez found the gray canvas bag with his last name and first initial stenciled on it in black paint. He slung it over his shoulder and joined the column of guards thumping toward what looked like the main gate, at least on this side of the square. Extra guard towers watched over it. Anyone who tried attacking it without a barrel would get chopped to hamburger.

The camp was already manned. A couple of the men at the gate lowered the muzzles of their submachine guns toward the ground. “New fish,” one of them remarked.

“Don’t look so new to me.” His pal had the heartlessness of a man with all his hair and all his teeth.

“Sonny boy, I learned to mind my own business before you were a hard-on in your old man’s dungarees,” said a man from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade.

“I believe you, Pops,” the guard answered. “Some people need as big a head start as they can get.” He didn’t smile when he said it.

Guards on duty and new arrivals glared at one another. Before anybody could get around to demanding papers and showing them—and before anybody could get around to tossing out more insults like grenades—a man with a deep voice spoke from inside the gate: “What’s going on here? Are these the new guards they’ve been promising us? About goddamn time, that’s all I’ve got to say.”

As soon as the men at the gate heard that voice, they became all business. As soon as Hipolito Rodriguez heard it, he had to look around to remind himself that he wasn’t in a trench somewhere even farther west in Texas, with damnyankee machine-gun bullets cracking by overhead and damnyankee shells screaming in.

Out through the gate came Jefferson Pinkard. He was older now, but so was Rodriguez. He had a good-sized belly and two or three chins and harsh lines on his face that hadn’t been there in 1917. Back when Rodriguez was training, he’d heard that a man named Pinkard was high in the camp hierarchy. He’d wondered if it was the man he’d known. He didn’t wonder anymore.

He took half a step out of line to draw Pinkard’s eye to him, then said, “How are you,
Señor
Jeff?”

Pinkard eyed him for a moment without recognition. Then the big man’s jaw dropped. “Hip Rodriguez, or I’m a son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, and thundered forward to fold Rodriguez into a bear hug. The two of them pounded each other on the back and cursed each other with the affection a lot of men can show no other way.

“Teacher’s pet,” said one of the guards who’d ridden on the bus with Rodriguez. But he made sure he sounded as if he was joking. If one of his comrades turned out to be a war buddy of the camp commandant’s, he didn’t want to seem to resent that, not if he knew which side his bread was buttered on.

When Pinkard let Rodriguez go, he said, “So you’re here to help us deal with the damn niggers, are you? Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Rodriguez echoed automatically. He was used to saying it in English now instead of going,
¡Libertad!
the way he had down in Baroyeca. “
Sí, Señor
Jeff. That is why I have come.”

“Good,” Camp Determination’s commandant told him. “We’re gonna have us a hell of a lot of work to do, and we’re just about ready to do it.”

S
ince coming to Augusta near the end of the Great War, Scipio hadn’t gone far from his adopted home. For one thing, he hadn’t cared to go anywhere else; he’d made his life there, and hadn’t wanted to wander off. And, for another, travel restrictions on Negroes had started tightening up again even before the Freedom Party came to power. They’d got much worse since.

Just how much worse, he discovered in detail when he went to the train station to buy a ticket for Savannah. The line for whites was much longer than the one for blacks, but it moved much, much faster. Whites just bought tickets and went off to the platforms to board their trains. Blacks . . .

“Let me see your passbook, Uncle,” said the clerk behind the barred window. Scipio dutifully slid it over to him. The man made sure the picture matched Scipio’s face. “Xerxes,” he muttered, botching the alias the way most people did when they saw it in print. “What’s the purpose of your visit to Savannah, Uncle?”

“See my family there, suh,” Scipio said. He had no family in Savannah, but it was the safest reason to give.

The clerk grunted. “You got permission from your employer to be away from work?”

“Yes, suh.” Scipio produced a letter from Jerry Dover on Huntsman’s Lodge stationery authorizing him to be absent for one week.

Another grunt from the clerk. He jerked a thumb to the left. “Go on over there for search and baggage inspection.”

Scipio went “over there”: to a storeroom now adapted to another purpose. A railroad worker—a weathered fellow who couldn’t have been far from his own age—patted him down with almost obscene thoroughness. Two more white men of similar vintage pawed through his carpetbag.

“How come you do all dis?” Scipio asked the man who was groping him.

“So nobody sneaks a bomb on the train,” the white man answered matter-of-factly. “It’s happened a couple-three times. We’ve had to tighten up.” He turned to the men checking Scipio’s valise. “How’s it look?”

“He’s clean,” one of them said. “Bunch of junk, but it ain’t gonna go boom.”