Drive to the East (64 page)

She still grumbled, but she seemed happier. Pinkard craned his neck to see who that troop leader was. Hobart Martin, that was his name. He’d won himself a commendation letter, sure as hell. That kind of complaint could have caused real trouble, maybe even a riot. It was something the guards hadn’t thought of, and they should have. Of course separating families made people jump and shout. But Martin had calmed the woman down, and his words kept other men and women from raising a stink. As long as they thought everything would be taken care of . . .

Pinkard nodded to himself. Everything would be taken care of, all right.

He went with the men who believed they were bound for El Paso. They had to march—or rather, shamble—all the way through the camp to get to the bathhouse that wasn’t. He’d posted guards with automatic rifles on both sides of their route. He didn’t think they would try to break away, but he worried that the present inmates might try to rescue them. A show of force ahead of time was the best thing he could think of to keep that from happening.

“Move along! Move along!” guards shouted. “Don’t hold up the line, or you’re in trouble!” They were already in the worst trouble they could find, but they didn’t know it. This whole charade was to keep them—and the present inmates—from finding out.

Hipolito Rodriguez stood there with a rifle at the ready. Like most men from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades, Hip liked a submachine gun better because it was lighter and smaller. But Jeff wanted the guards to have weapons with real stopping power today. He nodded to Rodriguez. The Sonoran nodded back. Then he looked away, scanning the inmates for any sign of trouble. He knew how things worked. The more you showed that you were ready for anything, the less likely you were to run into trouble.

Jeff nodded to himself when the last black man passed through the gateway separating the main camp from the bathhouse. Getting the line through the camp was the hardest, most worrisome part. Already, trucks were taking away the first Negroes who thought they were heading for El Paso. Their true journey would be a lot shorter—and a good thing, too, because Jeff would need those trucks again pretty damn quick to handle more blacks.

He nodded again when the door to the bathhouse closed behind the last Negro man in the queue. Wasn’t there some poem that went,
All hope abandon, ye who enter here?
Once that door closed, those Negroes lost their last hope. They’d get herded into the big room that wasn’t a delousing chamber, and that would be that.

When was the next train coming? Would the camp be able to handle it? Could the crew get the corpses out of the alleged bathhouse, could the trucks get back from the mass grave, fast enough? They could. They did. By the time the next trainload of Negroes from Jackson stopped on the spur between the men’s and women’s camps, the guards were ready.

The next week was the busiest time Jeff remembered. He and his crew ran on sleep snatched in the intervals between trains and on endless cigarettes and cups of coffee. Every storage facility in the camp overflowed, even if relatively few of the Negroes had brought baggage with them. Where those Negroes went, they didn’t need baggage.

And at the end of it, Jefferson Pinkard looked at Vern Green and said, “By God, we reduced that population.”

“Sure as hell did,” the guard chief agreed. Jeff pulled a pint of whiskey out of his desk drawer. He took a snort, then passed the pint to Green. The number two man at Camp Determination also drank. After what they’d just been through, they’d damn well earned the booze.

B
lack clouds boiled up over Andersonville, Georgia. Where the sky wasn’t black, it was an ugly yellow, the color of a fading bruise. The rising wind blew a lock of Jonathan Moss’ hair into his eyes. He tossed his head. The wind got stronger. A raindrop hit him in the nose.

He looked around the prison-camp grounds. POWs were heading into the barracks as fast as they could. That looked like a hell of a good idea. The wind tugged at his clothes as he hurried toward shelter.

“Well, I’ll be damned,” one of the other prisoners said when he walked in. “Moss
does
have the sense to come in out of the rain.”

POWs laughed. Hell, Moss laughed himself. In Andersonville, fun was where you found it, and you didn’t have a lot of places to look. But Captain Nick Cantarella, who’d come in just ahead of Moss, said, “Noah would find someplace to hide from this. It looks like a bastard and a half out there.”

“Worse than that storm this summer?” somebody said.

“I think maybe,” Cantarella answered, and Moss found himself nodding. That had been a cloudburst to end all cloudbursts, yeah. It had also been a cloudburst to end all escape plans, at least for the time being. But whatever was building out there now looked downright vicious. The light was weird, almost flickering; it might have come from the trick-photography department of a bad horror film.

Somebody sitting close by a window said, “Son of a bitch!” Several people asked him what was going on. He pointed. “The guards are coming down from their towers and running like hell!”

“Jesus!” Moss said, which was one of the milder comments in the barracks. The gray-uniformed guards never left the towers unmanned. Never. They always wanted to be able to rake the camp with machine-gun fire. If they were bailing out now . . .

“Oh, fuck!” said the man by the window. Then he said something even worse: “Tornado!”

Somebody with a flat Indiana accent said, “Open the doors, quick! It’ll try and suck all the air out of any building it comes close to. If the air can’t get out, the buildings’ll blow up.” Moss, who’d shut the door behind him, quickly opened it again. The Midwesterner sounded like a man who knew what he was talking about.

POWs crowded toward windows to watch the twister. Moss didn’t. He didn’t want to be anywhere near glass that was liable to splinter and fly as if a bomb went off close by. “Godalmightydamn, will you look at that motherfucker!” somebody said, more reverently than otherwise.

“Wish to hell we had a storm cellar,” somebody else put in. That made good sense. Moss wished for one, too. What they had were barracks built as flimsily as the Geneva Convention allowed, or maybe a little cheaper than that. If the tornado plowed into them, it wouldn’t even notice. Everybody unlucky enough to be inside sure would, though.

He could hear it now, and feel it, too. It sounded like the world’s biggest freight train heading straight for him. That wasn’t really fair to the tornado. If it ran into a train, it would scatter railroad cars like jackstraws. “The Lord is my shepherd—” somebody began.

The Twenty-third Psalm seemed right. “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” might have fit even better, because the Lord was doing some serious trampling out there. Wind tugged at Moss, trying to pull him out the open door. The officer who’d suggested opening it knew what was what. That air would have escaped anyway. With the doors open, it could get out without forcing itself out.

Moss stepped away from the door. The flow wasn’t strong enough to keep him from doing that. He looked over his shoulder and got a glimpse of the onrushing funnel cloud. That made him do a little praying of his own. He’d known one or two tornadoes when he lived near Chicago, but only one or two. They visited downstate Illinois more often.

And they visited the CSA.

“Looks like it’s not gonna hit us,” somebody said—shouted, actually, because that was the only way anyone could make himself heard through the roar and scream of the wind.

Maybe the man who’d yelled was a bombardier. Whoever he was, he seemed able to gauge what that horrid funnel would do. Instead of blowing the barracks to hell and gone, it walked along a couple of hundred yards away. A few windows blew out, but that was all the damage they took. The twister snarled away toward the east.

“Lord!” a POW said, which summed things up pretty damn well.

Nick Cantarella looked outside. He said, “My God,” too, but in an altogether different tone of voice. The captain from New York City pointed. “That fucker just blew half the wire around the camp all the way to the moon.”

Prisoners rushed to the windows, those that still had glass and those that didn’t. Cantarella wasn’t wrong. The tornado cared no more about barbed wire and guard towers than it did about anything else in its path. Three men had the same thought at the same time: “Let’s get out of here!”

That sounded good to Jonathan Moss. He even had some brown Confederate bills—no, they called them banknotes down here—in his pocket. The CSA played by the rules of war, and paid captive officers at the same rate as their own men of equivalent grade. Why not? In camp, the notes were only paper, good for poker games but not much else.

“If they catch you, they can punish you,” Colonel Summers warned. The senior U.S. officer went on, “We’re a long way from the border. Odds of making it back to the USA aren’t good. You might be smarter just sitting this one out.”

Summers had to say something like that. Moss understood as much. Someone needed to be careful and responsible and adult. Captain Cantarella put the other side of things in perspective: “Anybody who’s gonna go better get his ass in gear right now. Those Confederate bastards won’t waste a hell of a lot of time hunkered down wherever they’re at. They’ll come out, and they’ll have guns.”

That made up Moss’ mind for him. He wasn’t the first one out the door, but he was only a couple of steps behind the guy who was. Cantarella was hard on his heels. “How did the escape committee sign up a tornado?” Moss asked him.

Cantarella’s grin was swarthy and stubbly and full of exhilaration. “Hey, Mother Nature owed us one after the way that thunderstorm fucked us over. Every once in a while, I think maybe there’s a God.”

Moss had thought so, too, till that Canuck’s bomb robbed him of Laura and Dorothy. Believing in anything but revenge came hard after that. He said, “You want to stick together? Two heads may be better than one.”

“Long as we can, anyway,” Cantarella answered. “We may have to split up somewhere down the line, but I’m with you till then.” He stuck out his hand. Moss shook it.

Out past the wire they went, out past the wreckage of the guard towers. A machine gun stuck up from a clump of bushes. “Wish it was a rifle,” Moss said. “Piece like that, though, it’s too heavy to lug.”

“Yeah,” Cantarella said. “What we gotta do now is, we gotta make tracks. Somethin’ tells me we don’t have a whole lotta time.” His clotted accent was about as far from a C.S. drawl as it could be.

The something that told him was no doubt common sense. “You think we have a better chance heading north, or east toward the ocean?” Moss asked.

“Depends,” the other U.S. officer said. “If you figure our Navy’s got boats or ships or whatever the hell out in the Atlantic, we haul ass that way. God knows it’s closer. But if we gotta sail up the coast, fuhgeddaboutit, unless you’re a hell of a lot better sailor than I am.”

“John Paul Jones I’m not,” Moss answered, and Cantarella laughed. What the Italian said made an unfortunate amount of sense. Moss faced the general direction of Atlanta. “North, then.”

“Right. Maybe we can steal some clothes so we look like a coupla ordinary Confederate assholes, buy train tickets, and get up to Richmond or somewheres in style,” Cantarella said.

They carried no papers. They wore elderly U.S. uniforms (Cantarella did remember that). They had the wrong accent. They probably didn’t have enough money for train tickets. But for those minor details, it struck Moss as a terrific plan. He didn’t criticize, not out loud. He liked the idea of hoofing it across Georgia, the Carolinas, and Virginia no better than Cantarella did.

They hadn’t got very far into the pine woods north of Andersonville before gunshots rang out behind them. “Ahhh, shit,” Cantarella said, which summed up Moss’ feelings, too. The guards had noticed prisoners escaping, then.

Without Nick Cantarella, Moss figured he would have been recaptured in short order. The younger man was an infantry officer, and actually knew what he was doing as he clumped along on the ground. He and Moss splashed along creeks to throw hounds off the scent. “Didn’t they do this in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
?” Moss said.

“Beats me,” Cantarella answered. “All I know is, this shit works.”

Maybe it did. Moss heard several more bursts of gunfire, but he didn’t see any C.S. prison guards or soldiers. He did get tired. His feet got sore. He knew he was slowing Cantarella down. “If you want to go on without me, it’s all right,” he said.

“Nah.” Cantarella shook his head. “Like you said, two heads are better than one. ’Sides, you can come closer to talking like these assholes than I can.”

“I wonder,” Moss said. Midwest overlain by Canadian didn’t sound much more Confederate than strong New York City. He figured he’d worry about that when he had to, not before. He had other things to worry about now: not only his feet but also the growing emptiness in his belly. If this were a planned escape, he would have brought food along. Now, he and Cantarella would be raiding henhouses before long. That would leave a trail a blind idiot, or even a Confederate guard, could follow.

They came out of the woods into cotton country. Moss had always pictured swarms of darkies in the fields with hoes. It wasn’t like that. Except for a cultivator chugging along in the distance, the countryside was eerily empty. Cantarella had the same thought. “Where’d all the smokes go?” he said.

“Beats me.” Moss had trouble believing the atrocity stories he’d heard. Seeing that landscape without people, though, he had less trouble than before.

He and Nick went on up a poorly paved road till nightfall. Then they lay down by the roadside. All they had to cover themselves with were cotton plants. That would help give them away, too. But it got chilly after the sun went down. The plants weren’t good blankets, but they were better than nothing. Moss wasn’t sure he could fall asleep on bare ground. Five minutes later, he was snoring.

Morning twilight turned the eastern sky gray when he woke. But the growing light wasn’t what roused him. Those voices weren’t just part of his dreams. He saw three men silhouetted against the sky. They all carried rifles.