Drive to the East (30 page)

“Yeah, I know. They’re smooth now, anyways,” Pinkard said. “But just in case, I mean.”

“Sure, sure.” Vernon Green nodded. He smiled. He was no less ambitious than Mercer Scott had been back in Louisiana. Like Scott, Green undoubtedly reported back to someone in Richmond about how Jeff did his job. But he wasn’t so obnoxious about it. Scott had had a drill sergeant’s manner and a face like a boot. Green smiled a lot of the time, whether there was anything to smile about or not. He caught his flies with honey, not vinegar. He caught a lot of them, however he did it, and that was what a second-in-command was for.

As camp commandant, Pinkard had a motorcar laid on. He could have had a driver, too, but he didn’t want one. He could drive himself just fine. Guards saluted as he left the camp. He would have to go through all the boring formalities getting back in. He shrugged. He would have had the guards’ heads if they were anything but careful about letting people into Camp Determination.

Snyder, Texas, was a nice little town of perhaps three thousand people. Before the camp went up, business there had centered on cattle and on ginning the cotton grown in the surrounding countryside and making cottonseed cake that the cattle ate. The influx of guards had everybody in the four-street central business district smiling. By local standards, they made good money, and they weren’t shy about spending it. And new houses were going up, because a lot of the guards were married men, and didn’t want to live right by the camp.

Whoever’d named the roads in Snyder had no imagination at all. The ones that ran east-west were numbered streets. The ones that ran north-south were avenues, identified by letter. He pulled up in front of a house on Thirty-first Street near Avenue Q, in the southern part of town. Two boys were wrestling on the threadbare lawn in front of the house. They broke off when he got out of the motorcar.

“Papa Jeff!” they yelled. “It’s Papa Jeff!” They ran up to him and tried out a couple of tackles that would have drawn flags on any football field in the CSA or USA. Fortunately, they were still too little to flatten him.

He ruffled their hair. He liked Chick Blades’ sons. He liked Chick Blades’ widow even more. “Easy, there,” he told the kids, trying to pry them loose from his legs without damaging them. It wasn’t easy; they clung like limpets. “Is your mama home?” he asked them.

That did the trick better than any wrestling hold. “She sure is,” they said together, and dashed toward the house yelling, “Ma! Ma! Papa Jeff’s here!” If the racket wasn’t enough to wake the dead, it would have made them turn over in their graves a couple of times.

Edith Blades came out on the front porch. She was a nice-looking blond woman in her early thirties. Each time Jeff saw her, she seemed a little less ravaged by her husband’s suicide. Time did heal wounds. Jeff had got over the disastrous end of his first marriage to the point where he was game to try it again. And so was Edith, though she wouldn’t tie the knot till after the first anniversary of Chick Blades’ death. They were getting there.

“Hello, Jeff. Good to see you,” she said as he walked up to the porch. “How are things?”

“Things are . . .” He paused. “Well, they could be better.”

“Come in and tell me about it,” she said, and then, “Boys, go on and play. Papa Jeff will be with you in a little bit.”

They made disappointed noises, but they didn’t argue too much. They were good boys, well-behaved boys. She’d done a fine job with them, before Chick died and afterwards. Jeff admired that. He also admired the way she listened to him. He’d never known that with another woman—certainly not with his first wife. Animal heat had held him and Emily together—and then broken them apart.

“Set yourself down,” Edith said when she and Jeff went back into the living room.

“In a second.” He kissed her. She let him do that. In fact, she responded eagerly. Whenever he tried for more than a kiss, though, she told him they had to wait. That didn’t make him angry. He thought the more of her for being able to say no. Emily hadn’t, with him or with his best friend. But he didn’t want to remember Emily. “How you doin’ here?” he asked. “You got everything you need?”

“Sure do,” Edith answered. “And I’m not sorry to be out of Alexandria, out of that house, and there’s the Lord’s truth.”

“I do believe it.” Jeff wouldn’t have wanted to live in a house where somebody’d committed suicide. Actually, Chick had done it in his auto, but still. . . . “What do you think of Texas?”

“There’s so much of it, and it’s so big and flat,” Edith answered. “Seemed like we were on the train forever, and that was just getting most of the way across one state. People act nice enough.” She held up a hand. “But tell me what’s gone wrong at the camp.”

Jeff did. The only thing he didn’t tell her was that Chick’s suicide with auto exhaust had given him the idea for the trucks that used their fumes to kill off Negroes. He would never say a word about that, not even if he was on fire. There was such a thing as talking too damn much.

When he finished, Edith was suitably indignant for him. “They’ve got their nerve,” she said. “After everything you’ve done cleaning up the colored problem for them, then they expect
more
? They should get down on their knees and thank God they’ve got a good man like you, Jeff.”

“Ha! Those . . . people in Richmond don’t notice anybody but their own selves,” Jeff said. Only belatedly, after venting his spleen, did he notice the size of the compliment she’d paid him. “Thank you, darlin’. You say sweet things.”

“You’re my sweetheart,” Edith said, her voice dead serious. “If I don’t stick up for you, who’s going to?”

Instead of answering with words, he kissed her again. She pressed herself against him. But when, ever optimistic, he let his hand fall on her thigh as if by accident, she knocked it away. He didn’t get mad—he laughed. “You’re somethin’.”

“So are you.” Edith was laughing, too. Even if she was, he remained sure she’d keep right on holding him at bay till their wedding night. It wasn’t as if she were a virgin—or she could have doubled up on Mary—but she was a respectable woman, and she acted like one.

For a moment, Jeff thought the deep thrumming he heard was the pounding of the blood in his veins. Then he realized it was outside himself. No sooner had he realized that than Edith’s kids ran in, yelling, “Ma! Papa Jeff! There’s a million airplanes up in the sky! Come look! Quick!”

“What the—?” Jeff was off the couch and heading for the door as fast as he could go, Edith right behind him.

They stared up and up and up. Passing high above them, scribing ruler-straight contrails across the sky, were more big airplanes than Jeff had ever seen before. They flew east in what was obviously a strong defensive formation: in staggered echelons where one bomber could easily fire on enemy fighters attacking another. And
enemy fighters,
here, could mean only one thing: Confederate fighters.

“Damnyankees.” Jefferson Pinkard made the calculation almost without conscious thought. “I bet they’re headin’ for Forth Worth and Dallas.”

“How could they?” Edith said.

“They’ve got their nerve, sending ’em out in the daytime.” Pinkard had a nasty feeling the bombers would get through. The war west of the Mississippi had been quiet. He doubted the Confederate authorities were ready for an attack on this scale. The damnyankees had pulled a fast one here.

“Will they drop bombs on
us,
Papa Jeff?” Frank Blades asked anxiously.

“Nah.” Now Jeff spoke with great assurance. He set a big, meaty hand on the boy’s shoulders. “Ain’t nothin’ here the Yankees would ever want to touch. Don’t you worry ’bout a thing, not as far as that goes.”

O
ne thing Chester Martin had to give to Lieutenant Thayer Monroe: the kid could read a map. “We want to call down more fire on these emplacements in back of Fredericksburg, eh, Sergeant?” he said. “I make their positions out to be in square Green-6. That sound right to you?” There was something else Martin had to give him: he did ask the older man’s opinion, and sometimes even listened to it.

Martin looked out from the ruins of Fredericksburg toward the heights to the south and southwest. They weren’t mountains; they were hardly even hills. But they were plenty to let the Confederate field guns and mortars dug in on them make life hell on earth for the U.S. soldiers
in
the Virginia town.

“Yes, sir. I think Green-6 is right,” he said. The platoon commander called for the signalman with the field telephone, then shouted into it. U.S. artillery was still on the far side of the river. Chester had the nasty suspicion that the Confederates had let the U.S. Army get foot soldiers over the Rappahannock so they could bleed them white. All attempts to break out from the town had failed. None seemed likely to succeed, at least not to him.

“Goddammit!” Lieutenant Monroe hung up in disgust. “I can’t get through. Bastards must have cut the wires again.”

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Chester agreed. After a moment, he added, “I wonder how much truth there is in the talk you hear.”

“You mean about Confederates running around in U.S. uniforms and raising Cain?” the lieutenant asked. Chester nodded. After some thought, Thayer Monroe said, “I don’t know for sure, but I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s the sort of bastardly trick Featherston’s people would pull.”

Was it? It struck Martin as the sort of trick anybody with half an ounce of brains would pull, especially in a war where both sides spoke what was for all practical purposes the same language. He said, “I hope we’re doing the same thing to them, that’s all.”

Lieutenant Monroe looked astonished. “It goes dead against the Geneva Convention, Sergeant. If you’re caught in the enemy’s uniform, you get a blindfold and a cigarette. That’s too far to go for a good smoke.”

Chester dutifully chuckled, though he had Confederate cigarettes in his pocket. Plundering enemy corpses—and, here in Fredericksburg, plundering shops—kept front-line infantrymen supplied with better tobacco than they could get from their own country. Front-line service had few advantages, but that was one of them.

Freight-train noises filled the air. Monroe might not have been able to get through to U.S. artillery, but someone had. High explosives thundered down on the heights behind Fredericksburg. How much good they would do . . .

Through the din, the lieutenant said, “At least we don’t have any orders to get out of our holes and attack as soon as the barrage lets up.”

“Thank you, Jesus,” Chester Martin said, most sincerely.

His platoon commander nodded. Monroe
could
learn. The company, and the regiment of which it was a part, were in the line because so many men had tried to take the high ground in back of Fredericksburg: tried and bloodily failed. The Confederate gunners on those heights could murder every U.S. soldier in the world if the Army chose to come at them there. Machine guns and artillery swept the rising ground. Not even barrels had a chance of forcing their way forward.

Martin drew in a breath and made a face. Most of the time, you could forget about the stench of death on the battlefield—oh, not forget about it, maybe, but shove it down to the back of your mind. He’d thought about it, though, and that brought it up in his mind again. His guts did a slow lurch. Too many unburied bodies lay out there, bloating in the sun.

When the company went back into reserve, he would bring that stench with him—in his clothes, in his hair, on his skin. It took a long time to go away. And he’d smelled it in plenty of nightmares between the wars. Bad as it was here, it had been worse in the trenches on the Roanoke front, where the line went back and forth over the same few miles of ground for a couple of years, and where every square yard of ground was manured with a corpse or two.

Keeping his head down—he didn’t know whether the Confederates had any snipers close enough to draw a bead on him, and didn’t care to find out the hard way—he lit one of those smooth Confederate cigarettes and held the pack out to Lieutenant Monroe. “Thanks, Sergeant,” Monroe said. He leaned close for a light.

The smoke in Chester’s mouth and in his nose masked the smell of death. For that, one of the stables-scrapings cigarettes the USA turned out would have done as well. If you were going to go this way, though, why not go first class?

“I pity those poor bastards who don’t smoke,” Chester said out of the blue.

“Why’s that?” The lieutenant, not unreasonably, couldn’t follow his train of thought.

“On account of they can’t ever get out from under the goddamn smell.”

“Oh.” Thayer Monroe considered, then nodded. “Hadn’t looked at it like that, but you’re right.” He started to add something else, probably on the same theme, but all of a sudden he ducked down deep in the foxhole instead. “Incoming!”

“Aw, shit!” Martin got right down there with him. The Confederates were doing something sneaky—something gutsy, too. They couldn’t huddle in reinforced-concrete gun emplacements to serve their mortars. They had to come out into the firing pits to use them. But the nasty little bombs flew at Fredericksburg almost silently. With all the big stuff roaring by overhead, nobody was going to notice the mortars till they started bursting, which would be too late for some luckless soldiers.

And sometimes even being right on the money didn’t do you a damn bit of good. One of the reasons soldiers hated mortars was that the bombs went up at a steep angle and came down at an even steeper one. Plunging fire, the boys with the high foreheads called it. A foxhole didn’t protect you from a round that came right down in there with you.

Chester heard the boom. Next thing he knew, he was grabbing at his leg and bawling for a corpsman. Absurdly, the first thing that went through his mind was,
Rita’s gonna kill me.
When he could think of anything past his own pain, he got a look at Lieutenant Monroe—and wished he hadn’t. The platoon commander was the only reason Chester was still breathing. He’d been between Chester and the mortar round, and he’d taken almost all of it. There wasn’t a hell of a lot of him left, and what there was wasn’t pretty.