“That’s what the orders are,” Jeff said grimly.
“How soon they gonna start coming?” Green asked.
“I don’t exactly know-not exactly,” Pinkard answered. “But it won’t be long-I sure as hell know that. Fast as they can throw ’em on trains and ship ’em out here. A few days-a week, tops.”
“You figuring on using the bathhouses and the trucks?”
Jeff nodded. “Don’t see how we’ve got even a prayer of doing it if we don’t. You get the ’dozer crews out to the other place, too, and have ’em dig lots of new trenches. If we’re doing all of Jackson, that’ll take up some room.” He didn’t talk about mass graves, not in so many words.
The guard chief followed him even so. “I’ll see to it,” he promised. “We’re gonna be busy as shit, ain’t we?”
“No,” Jeff answered. Green looked at him in surprise. He condescended to explain: “We’ll be a hell of a lot busier than that.”
“Oh. Yeah,” Green said. “Wish to God I could tell you you were wrong, but that’s how it’s gonna be, all right.” He scowled. “We’ll have a fuck of a time keeping the rest of the niggers from figuring out what’s goin’ on, too.”
“Uh-huh. That already crossed my mind,” Pinkard said. “Don’t know what we can do about it. We got orders on this-orders right from the top.” Ferdinand Koenig wasn’t the top, of course, but he was only one short step down. And he’d made it real clear the President of the CSA wanted every black from Jackson wiped off the face of the earth. What Jake Featherston wanted, Jake Featherston got.
Green sighed. “Well, we’ll just have to take care of that when it turns into a problem, that’s all. In the meantime… In the meantime, I’ll let the boys know a big pile of shit’s rolling down the hill, and we’re on the bottom.” He got to his feet. “Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Jeff echoed. The guard chief left his office. Jeff pulled his copy of Over Open Sights off the shelf by his desk. He knew just the passage he was looking for: the one where Featherston talked about how killing off a few thousand Negroes before the Great War would have saved a lot of trouble during and after. Jeff nodded to himself. That was true, every word of it. When he read the words, he could hear Jake Featherston’s hot, angry voice.
Even so, after a while he scratched his head and put down the book. This didn’t seem the same as that. People on the outside would know Jackson’s blacks had been sent away to camps, but that was all they would know. Even the Negroes already in the camps weren’t supposed to know they’d never come out alive. So what, exactly, was the point?
But that did have an answer. The point was to get rid of as many spooks as the Freedom Party and the Confederate government could arrange to get rid of. Jeff didn’t see anything wrong with what the Party wanted-just the opposite. But doing it in such a big lump made things work less smoothly than they might have, less smoothly than they should. Camp Determination’s profile was going to look like a boa constrictor that had swallowed a big old pig. You’d be able to see the lump the pig made as it worked its way from one end of the snake to the other.
Both sides of the camp, men’s and women’s, were on edge even before the first trains rolled in out of the east. The Negroes knew something was going on, even if they didn’t know what. They must have got that from the guards. Pinkard thought about reaming Vern Green out about it, but he didn’t. The guards wouldn’t have been human if they didn’t pass on the feeling that something was cooking. They hadn’t said what, for which Jeff was duly grateful.
He went out to watch his crews at work when the first train from Jackson came in. He was proud of them. They had a routine, and they stuck to it as much as they could. They hauled the luckless blacks off the train and separated them, men to the left, women and children off to the right. Then they went through the train and pulled out any Negroes who’d tried to get cute and hide. Then more blacks-men as close to trusties as Camp Determination held-removed the bodies of those who’d died on the way.
There were more of those than usual. The survivors moaned about how they’d been packed like sardines, about how they hadn’t had anything to eat or drink. Most of them moaned about how they hadn’t even been able to pack a carpetbag.
The guards did their best to soothe them. “Don’t y’all worry ’bout a thing,” a troop leader called reassuringly, smooth and confident as a preacher in the pulpit. “We’re gonna ship some of you out to other camps right away, and we’re gonna let the rest of you get cleaned up before we move you. You do what people tell you, and you’ll be just fine.”
“This way!” guards yelled. “This way!” The Negroes obeyed. They were too dazed and battered not to-and the guards had automatic weapons to make sure they didn’t get out of line. Most of them didn’t even try.
One man did ask, “How come we gonna git shipped somewheres else when we only just got here?” Nobody answered him, and he didn’t ask twice.
“Listen up, y’all!” an officer shouted. “You’re gonna be in two groups. One group goes on to a camp by Lubbock, the other one goes down by El Paso.” There were camps in both places, small ones. They were there mainly to keep Negroes from panicking when they heard something like that. The officer went on, “Those of you bound for the Lubbock camp, we’re gonna bathe and delouse y’all right here, on account of we got bigger bathhouses than they do at that camp. Y’all goin’ to El Paso, they’ll take care of that when you get there.”
Pinkard and his top officers had hammered out the story in the time before the trains started coming in. He didn’t like it; it had holes you could throw a dog through. But it gave some kind of explanation, anyway, and the Negroes wouldn’t have much time to wonder and worry.
Guards started going along the lines of Negroes. They would say, “Lubbock,” to some and, “El Paso,” to others. Every so often, they would add, “Remember where you’re supposed to go, or you’ll catch hell!”
When everybody had an assignment, officers yelled, “El Paso, this way!” and, “Lubbock, this way!” Two columns of men and two of women and children formed. “Now get moving!” the officers shouted.
A fat black woman let out a screech: “My husband goin’ to de one place, an’ I is goin’ to de other one!” The baby she held in her arms wailed.
“Can’t do anything about it now,” a troop leader told her. “When you get where you’re goin’, you talk to the people there. They’ll do the paperwork and transfer you.”
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.