Drive to the East (13 page)

Stung by that appraisal of his stuff, Scipio said, “Ask you one mo’ thing, suh?”

“Yeah?” The white man who’d searched him spoke with barely contained impatience.
Why are you bothering me, nigger?
lay at the bottom of it. But Scipio had sounded properly deferential, so the fellow let him go on.

“What you do when a lady come in here?”

“Oh.” The man laughed and gestured as if grasping a woman’s breasts from behind. Scipio nodded; that was what he’d meant. The frisker said, “We got a couple of gals who take care of that. Don’t you worry your head about it, Uncle. Just get on down to Platform Eight.”

“Thank you, suh.” Scipio picked up the carpetbag and headed for the platforms. The Confederate authorities—or maybe it was just the railroad employees—were shrewd. If they had white men groping black women, they would stir up trouble they didn’t need. They already stirred up a whole great storm of troubles; at best, life for Negroes in the CSA was one long affront. But it often wasn’t the sort of affront that made people flash into fury. Back in the days of slavery—the days into which Scipio had been born—white men did as they pleased with black women . . . and with black men who presumed to object. Resentment still simmered, ready to boil. The railroads didn’t turn up the heat under it.

The corridors were designed so that nobody could give Scipio anything while he was on the way from the inspection station to the platform. Some of the barriers were of new, unweathered wood.
We’ve had to tighten up lately,
the railroad man said. They seemed to have done a good job.

Several whites were already waiting on the platform. A couple of them sent Scipio suspicious glances.
Do you have a bomb? Did you sneak it past the inspectors? Will you blow us up?
For his part, he might have asked them,
If you send colored folks into camps, why don’t they come out again?

He didn’t say anything, any more than they did. The questions hung in the air just the same. Despair pressed down heavily on Scipio. How were you supposed to make a country out of a place where two groups hated and feared each other, and where anybody could tell to which group anyone else belonged just by looking? The Confederate States of America had been working on that question for eighty years now, and hadn’t found an answer yet.

The Freedom Party thought it had. It said,
If only one group is left, the problem goes away.
The trouble was, the problem went away for only one group if you tried that solution. For the other, it got worse. No one in the Party seemed to lose any sleep over that.

More whites came onto the platform. So did a few more Negroes. The blacks all grouped themselves with Scipio, well away from the whites. Had they done anything else, they would have fallen into a category: uppity niggers. Nobody in his right mind wanted to fall into that category these days.

A little blond boy pointed up the tracks. “Here comes the train!” He squeaked with excitement.

It rumbled into the station. Departing passengers got off, got their luggage, and left the platform by a route different from the one Scipio had used to get there. He and the other Negroes automatically headed for the last two cars in the train. They wouldn’t sit with whites, either: they knew better. And if the cars in which they sat were shabbier than the ones whites got to use, that was unlikely to be a surprise.

Rattles and jolts announced the train’s departure. It rolled south and east, the tracks paralleling the Savannah River. When Scipio looked across the river, he saw South Carolina. He shook his head. Even after all these years, he wasn’t safe in the state where he’d been born. Then he shook his head again. He wasn’t safe in Georgia, either.

Cotton country and pine woods filled the landscape between Augusta and Savannah. Scipio saw several plantation houses falling into ruin. Marshlands had done the same thing. Raising cotton on plantations wasn’t nearly so practical when the colored workforce was liable to rise up against you.

People got on and off at the stops between the two cities. Scipio wouldn’t have bet that God Himself knew the names of hamlets like McBean Depot, Sardis, and Hershman.

And, when the train was coming out of the pine woods surrounding Savannah, it rolled through a suburb called Yamacraw that seemed to be the more southerly town’s Terry. Negroes did what they could to get by in a country that wanted their labor but otherwise wished they didn’t exist. Drugstores in white neighborhoods sold aspirins and merthiolate and calamine lotion—respectable products that actually worked. Scipio saw a sign in Yamacraw advertising Vang-Vang Oil, Lucky Mojoe Drops of Love, and Mojoe Incense. He grimaced, ashamed of his own folk. Here were the ignorant preying on the even more ignorant.

As soon as he got on the east side of Broad Street, things changed. The houses, most of them of brick, looked as if they sprang from the eighteenth century. Live oaks with beards of moss hanging from their branches grew on expansive lawns. That moss declared that Savannah, its climate moderated by the Atlantic only fifteen miles away, was a land that hardly knew what winter was.

“Savannah!” the conductor barked, hurrying through the colored cars as the train pulled into the station. “This here’s Savannah!” He didn’t quite come out and snap,
Now get the hell off my train, you lousy coons!
He didn’t, no, but he might as well have.

Scipio grabbed his carpetbag and descended. As at Augusta, the exit to the station kept him from having anything to do with boarding passengers. He gave the system grudging respect. That it should be necessary was a judgment on the Confederate States, but it did what it was designed to do.

Once he got out of the station, he stopped and looked at the sun, orienting himself. Forsyth Park was east and south of him. He walked towards it, wondering if a policeman would demand to see his papers. Sure enough, he hadn’t gone more than a block before it happened. He displayed his passbook, his train ticket, and the letter from Jerry Dover authorizing him to be away from the Huntsman’s Lodge. The cop looked them over, frowned, and then grudgingly nodded and gave them back. “You keep your nose clean, you hear?” he said.

“Yes, suh. I do dat, suh,” Scipio said. His Congaree River accent had marked him as a stranger in Augusta. It did so doubly here; from what little he’d heard of it, Savannah Negroes used a dialect almost incomprehensible to anyone who hadn’t grown up speaking it.

Forsyth Park was laid out like a formal French garden, with a rosette of paths going through it. With spring in the air, squirrels frisked through the trees. Pigeons plodded the paths, hoping for handouts. Flowering dogwood, wisteria, and azaleas brightened the greenery.

Scipio had to find the Albert Sidney Johnston monument. The Confederate general, killed at Pittsburg Landing, was something of a martyr, with statues and plaques commemorating him all over the CSA. In this one, he looked distinctly Christlike. Scipio fought the urge to retch.

He sat down on a wrought-iron bench not far from the statue. One of those importunate pigeons came up and eyed him expectantly. When he ignored it, he half expected it to crap on his shoes in revenge, but it didn’t. It just strutted away, head bobbing.
You’ll get yours,
it might have said, and it might have been right.

A squirrel overhead chittered at him. He ignored it, too. He had no certain notion how long he’d have to wait here, so he tried to look as if he were comfortable, as if he belonged. Several white women and a few old men passed with no more than casual glances, so he must have succeeded. Very few white men between the ages of twenty and fifty were on the streets. If they weren’t at the front, they were in the factories or on the farms.

“How do I get to Broad Street from here?” asked a woman with brown hair going gray.

“Ma’am, you goes west a few blocks, an’ there you is,” Scipio answered.

“Oh, dear. I was all turned around,” the woman said. “I’m afraid I have no sense of direction, no sense of direction at all.”

The code phrases were the ones Scipio had been waiting for. He hadn’t expected a woman to say them. He wondered why not. Jerry Dover hadn’t said anything about that one way or the other. A woman could do this as well as a man—maybe better, if she was less conspicuous. Scipio took a small envelope out of the hip pocket of his trousers. As casually as he could, he set it on the bench and looked in the other direction.

When he turned his head again, the envelope was gone. The woman was on her way toward Broad Street. No one else could have paid any attention to, or even seen, the brief encounter in the park. Scipio wasn’t sure what he’d just done. Had he given the Confederate States a boost or a knee in the groin? He had no way of knowing, but he had his hopes.

IV

J
efferson Pinkard was a happy man, happier than he had been since moving out to Texas to start putting up Camp Determination. For one thing, Edith Blades was coming out to Snyder with her boys before too long. That would be nice. She didn’t want to marry Jeff till her husband was in the ground for a year, but he’d still be glad to have her close by instead of back in Louisiana.

And, for another, now he had a man he could trust absolutely among the guards. “Hip Rodriguez!” he murmured to himself in glad surprise. He hadn’t seen the little greaser for twenty-five years, but that had nothing to do with anything. After what they’d been through together in Georgia and west Texas, he knew he could count on Rodriguez. He didn’t know how many times they’d saved each other’s bacon, but he knew damn well it was more than a few.

And he knew how important having somebody absolutely trustworthy was. Running prison camps was a political job, though he wouldn’t have thought so when he started it. And the higher he rose, the more political it got. When the only man over you was the Attorney General, you found yourself in politics and maneuvering up to your eyebrows, because Ferdinand Koenig was Jake Featherston’s right-hand man—and about two fingers’ worth of the left as well.

Back by Alexandria, Mercer Scott was heading up Camp Dependable these days. Scott had led the guard force when Jeff commanded the camp. He’d had his own ways to get hold of Richmond. No doubt the guard chief here did, too. The Freedom Party people at the top wanted to make sure they knew what was going on, so they had independent channels to help them keep up with things.

And if the guard chief started telling lies, or if he started scheming, having someone on your side in the guard force was like an insurance policy. Hip Rodriguez couldn’t have fit the bill better.

With a grunt, Pinkard got up from his desk and stretched. He pulled a pack of cigarettes out of the top drawer, lit one, started to put the pack back, and then stuck it in his pocket instead. He was about to start his morning prowl through the camp when the telephone rang.

“Who’s bothering me now?” he muttered as he picked it up. His voice got louder: “This here’s Pinkard.”

“Hello, Pinkard. This is Ferd Koenig in Richmond.”

“Yes, sir. What can I do for you, sir?”
Speak of the devil and he shows up on your front porch,
Jeff thought.

“I want to know how things are coming,” Koenig said, “and whether you can make a few changes in the way the camp’s laid out.”

“Things
were
coming fine, sir. There’s been no problem on shipments out of here,” Pinkard answered.
Shipments
was a nice, bloodless way to talk about Negroes sent off to be asphyxiated by the truckload. It kept him from thinking about what went on inside those trucks. He didn’t feel bloodless toward Ferd Koenig. If the son of a bitch thought he could run a Texas camp from Richmond . . . he might be right, because he had the authority to do it. Grinding his teeth, Pinkard asked, “What do you need changed?”

“Way you’ve got the place set up now, it’s just for men—isn’t that right?” the Attorney General said.

“Yes, sir. That’s how all the camps have been, pretty much,” Jeff replied. “Not a hell of a lot of women and pickaninnies packing iron against the government.” There were some, but not many. He didn’t know if there were separate camps for black women, or what. He guessed there were, but asking questions about things that were none of your business was discouraged—strongly discouraged.

“That’s going to change.” Koenig’s voice was hard, flat, and determined. “You can bet your bottom dollar that’s going to change, in fact. What’s wrong with the CSA is that we’ve got too many niggers, period. Not troublemaking niggers, but niggers, period—’cause any nigger’s liable to be a troublemaker. Am I right or am I wrong?”

“Oh, you’re right, sir, no doubt about it,” Jeff said. Koenig was just quoting Freedom Party chapter and verse. Jake Featherston had been going on about niggers and what they deserved ever since he got up on the stump for the Party. Now he was keeping his campaign promises.

“All right,” Koenig said. “If we’re gonna get rid of ’em, we’ve got to have places to concentrate ’em till we can do the job. That means everybody we clean out of the countryside and the cities. Everybody. So can you separate off a section for the women?”

“I can if I have to,” Pinkard replied; you didn’t come right out and tell the big boss no, not if you wanted to hold on to your job you didn’t. Thinking fast on his feet, he went on, “It’d mess things up here pretty bad, though, the way Determination is laid out now.”
Ain’t that the truth?
he thought. “What’d be better, I reckon, is building a camp for women right
alongside
the one we’ve got now. That way, we could start from scratch and do it right the first time. Lord knows we’ve got the land we need to do it.”

He waited for Koenig to tell him all the reasons that wouldn’t work. Not enough time was always a good one, and often even true. After perhaps half a minute’s silence, the Attorney General said, “Can you have a perimeter up and a place for shipments to go out of ready in ten days’ time? They can sleep in tents or on the ground till you get the barracks built.”

“Ten days? Oh, hell, yes, sir,” Jeff said, trying not to show how pleased he was. He would have agreed to five if he had to. He hadn’t expected Koenig to say yes at all.

But Koenig went on, “That’s what I like to see—a man who’ll show initiative. I told you one thing, but you had a different idea, and it looks to me like a better idea. Make sure you fix up this new camp so it’s the same size as the one you’ve got now. It’ll need to be.”

“I’ll take care of it,” Pinkard promised, slightly dazed. “Uh—if you aim to do shipments out of two big camps like that, I’m gonna need more trucks. The ones I’ve got now won’t begin to do the job.”

“More trucks,” Koenig echoed. Across all those miles, Jeff heard his pen scratching across paper. “You’ll have ’em.” Another pause. “Instead of building the new camp
right
alongside, why not put it across the railroad spur from the old one? That way, you can separate the niggers out soon as they get off the trains.”

“I’d have to run another side of barbed wire that way, ’stead of using what we’ve got.” Pinkard thought for a moment. “I’d need to get some dozers back again, too, to level out the ground over there.”

“Can’t you use the niggers you’ve got in the men’s camp?” Koenig demanded.

“Well, I could, yeah, but dozers’d be a hell of a lot faster,” Jeff replied. “I figured that mattered to you. If I’m wrong, you’ll tell me.”

Ferdinand Koenig paused once more. “No, you’re not wrong. All right—fair enough. You’ll have your bulldozers. And I’m going to bump you up a rank to brigade leader. That translates to brigadier general in regular Army ranks. You’ll get a wreath around your stars, in other words. Congratulations. When you were in the Army the last time around, did you ever reckon you’d make general?”

“Hell, no. I never even worried about making corporal,” Jeff answered, which was the God’s truth. “Thank you very much, sir.”

“You’re welcome. A raise comes with the promotion. I expect you’ll earn the money,” Koenig said. “More responsibility comes with the promotion, too. You’re going to be in charge of a really big operation out there, and a really important one, too. I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t think you could swing it.”

“I’ll do my damnedest, sir,” Pinkard said. “It’s for the Party and it’s for the country. You can count on me.”

“I do. So does the President. You’ve shown you’ve got what it takes,” Koenig said, which made Jeff button-popping proud. The Attorney General went on, “Those bulldozers and their crews’ll show up in the next few days. You tell ’em what needs doing, and they’ll do it. Anything else you need—barbed wire, lumber, whatever it is—you holler, and you’ll have it. If you don’t, somebody’s head’ll roll, and it won’t be yours. Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jeff echoed the Party slogan, but he was talking to a dead line.

He got up from his desk, stretched, and went to the window. Out beyond the barbed wire, and out beyond the railroad spur and the road that ran alongside it, what was there to see? Nothing but more prairie—sagebrush and tumbleweed and jackrabbits and little gullies that turned into torrents when it rained. Leveling them out would be the dozers’ main job. They could do it, and it wouldn’t take long.

“Son of a bitch,” he said softly. “A women’s camp.” They were serious back there in Richmond. He’d known they were serious—he wouldn’t have been a Freedom Party man if they weren’t—but he hadn’t known they were
that
serious. If they kept on the way they were going, there wouldn’t be a Negro left in the CSA before too long.

Pinkard shrugged as he headed out the door. He wouldn’t shed a whole lot of tears if that happened. If there weren’t any Negroes, white men wouldn’t have to worry about them taking away their jobs. They wouldn’t have to worry about Negroes eyeing white women. And they wouldn’t have to worry about Red uprisings. He’d got his baptism of fire in 1916 against Red Negro rebels in Georgia. They’d fought harder than the damnyankees had. Of course, the USA and CSA took prisoners. Neither side in the black uprisings had bothered with that very often. So . . . good riddance to bad rubbish.

Out into the sunshine he went. Spring was in the air, but the sun wasn’t biting down with full force yet. He’d grown up in Alabama and spent time in Louisiana. Texas summer was no fun for anybody, but it wouldn’t be any worse than what he was used to.

With several submachine-gun-toting guards at his back, he did his usual prowl through Camp Determination. That he did it was normal. How he did it wasn’t. He tried not to make his rounds the same two days running. He’d stick his head into barracks halls, or he’d go through the kitchens, or he’d go around just inside the perimeter checking for signs of tunneling, or he’d talk with prisoners, or . . . He never knew ahead of time. He just followed whatever gut feeling he had.

The Negroes had found they could complain to him if they stayed respectful. “Suh, we needs mo’ food,” a skinny black man said. He didn’t ask for better food; that was obviously a lost cause.

“You’re getting what I can give you,” Jeff said, which was more or less true. “If I get more in, you’ll get more, too.” That was also true, although he didn’t expect to see the camp’s supply increased. To drive the point home, he added, “I can’t make you any promises, mind.”

“Do what you can, suh, please,” the black man said. Pinkard nodded and went on to the next barracks hall. The Negroes there grumbled about the food, too. Jeff listened and nodded and again said he’d do something if he got the chance. As long as they were grumbling about the food and not about the trucks that transported them to other camps, everything was fine. The trucks were what really mattered—and the Negroes didn’t seem to know it.

F
or once, Cincinnatus Driver felt as if he were leading a charmed life. The Confederates had arrested him—and they’d let him go. To him, that went a long way toward proving white men weren’t as smart as they thought they were. He might even find himself on the U.S. border one of these days before too long. He dared hope, anyhow.

Meanwhile . . . Meanwhile, life went on in Covington’s colored quarter. It wasn’t much of a life. Even compared to what he remembered of times before the Great War, it wasn’t much of a life. He shrugged. He couldn’t do much about that. He couldn’t do anything about it, in fact. All he could do was try to get through from day to day.

He thought about staying away from Lucullus Wood’s barbecue place. He thought about it, but found he couldn’t do it. His showing up there wouldn’t make alarm bells go off at the police station. The only Negroes who didn’t show up there were the unlucky ones too poor to afford any of Lucullus’ barbecue.

He hoped—he prayed—he wouldn’t see Luther Bliss at the barbecue place anymore. He hated, despised, and feared the former head of the Kentucky State Police. Of course, he also hated, despised, and feared the Confederate States of America. Bliss was one of the CSA’s sincerest and ablest enemies—and gave Cincinnatus the cold horrors just the same.

If the Confederate police didn’t have informers posted in the barbecue joint, they were missing an obvious trick. Despite the risk, talk there was freer than anywhere else in Covington that Cincinnatus knew about.

By now, everybody who worked in the place recognized him when he came in. More than a few people also recognized that he had a special connection with Lucullus. They would always find a seat for him, even when the ramshackle restaurant was packed. He got extra barbecue when he ordered, and some of the time they didn’t bother charging him. He’d always been a man who paid his own way, but he appreciated that now, because he didn’t have a whole lot of money.

Policemen and Freedom Party stalwarts came into Lucullus’ place, too. They also recognized Cincinnatus—recognized him and left him alone. They’d caught him once, and it hadn’t stuck. Not all of them understood why it hadn’t stuck, but they knew it hadn’t. They were no more energetic than most mere mortals. They didn’t feel like doing anything they didn’t have to.

Lucullus came up to Cincinnatus while he was eating a big plate of beef ribs. The barbecue cook was a massive man, muscle more overlain by fat with each passing year. Who could blame him for liking his own cooking? Everyone else did, too. His father, Apicius, had been even wider and thicker.

Cincinnatus set down a rib. “Afternoon,” he said.

“Afternoon.” Lucullus had a big, deep voice that went with his bulk. “Mind if I join you?”

“You throw me out on my ear if I’m dumb enough to tell you yes in your own place,” Cincinnatus said. “I done plenty o’ dumb things in my time, but nothin’ dumb as that.”

“Glad to hear it.” Lucullus squeezed into the booth, across the table from him. He waved to one of the waitresses. “Bring me a cup of coffee, would you, Aspasia honey, when you git the chance?” Nodding, the woman waved back.

The coffee arrived faster than
when you git the chance.
Cincinnatus hadn’t expected anything different. When the boss asked for something, only a fool kept him waiting—and Lucullus wasn’t the sort to put up with fools. Casually, Cincinnatus asked, “So what do you hear from Luther Bliss?”