Edith came out with him in spite of the raw wind blowing down from the north. He’d never seen such a place for wind as the West Texas prairie. No matter what direction it came from, it had plenty of room to get a good running start. “What’s the matter?” she asked him.
“Wondering what the devil we’re gonna do if Lubbock falls,” he answered. “If Lubbock falls, there’s not a… heck of a lot between the Yankees and here. Just miles.” He didn’t worry that much about Snyder itself. The locals could always evacuate to the east. But Camp Determination… Camp Determination was a different story.
“They can’t expect you to take all the niggers out of that place.” Edith knew he worried about the camp, not the town.
“No, don’t reckon they can.” Jeff let it go at that. But the bathhouses that weren’t bathhouses, the trucks with the sealed passenger compartments, the mass graves-all those would be worth millions to damnyankee propaganda. Richmond wouldn’t want such secrets getting out. How could he do anything to stop that, though?
You could drive the trucks away. You could, he supposed, blow up the bathhouses. That would make Camp Determination look like an ordinary concentration camp… till the damnyankees found the mass graves. How many tens, how many hundreds, of thousands of corpses lay in them? Pinkard didn’t know, though he could have figured it out from camp records.
He did know the graves were too big to hide. Even if he bulldozed the ground flat, the bodies and bones remained below. And somebody was bound to blab. Somebody always blabbed. Some secrets you couldn’t keep, and that was one of them.
“Records,” he said to himself.
“Records?” Edith said. “The kind you listen to? The kind you dance to?”
Jeff didn’t answer. Those weren’t the records he had in mind. Just like any other big operation, the camp generated lots of paperwork. If the U.S. Army got close, that paperwork would have to disappear, too. Right this minute, he didn’t know where all of it was. He did know it wasn’t all in the same place, and he couldn’t get rid of all of it in a hurry. And he realized he would have to fix that as soon as he could.
The things you never reckon you’ll have to worry about, he thought. But that was foolish. He’d fought not too far from here a generation before. The Yankees had pushed east from New Mexico then. Why shouldn’t they be able to do it again?
Because we were going to lick ’em this time. Because Jake Featherston promised we’d lick ’em this time. Jeff believed what Jake Featherston said. He’d believed him ever since first hearing him in Birmingham not long after the end of the last war. He didn’t want to think-he hardly dared think-the President of the CSA might be wrong.
He muttered again, this time without words. Whether he wanted to or not, he had to be ready to do what he could in case the Confederates didn’t come out so well in this particular part of the war. (Putting it like that meant he didn’t have to dwell on how things were going across the length and breadth of the North American continent.).
When Edith looked northwest, she had other things on her mind. “Jeff…” she said.
“What is it?”
“Will… Will the boys be all right? The war’s not as far away as I wish it was.”
“Things aren’t bad now. I don’t reckon they’ll turn bad real quick. If the damnyankees get into Lubbock, or if they get past Lubbock, maybe you and the boys ought to go east for a bit.”
His wife nodded. “I’ve got some stuff packed up in case we have to leave in a hurry.”
“Good. That’s good, babe,” Jeff said. “Should be easy enough to get away. Nothing around here is what you’d call a great big target.”
“What about the camp?” Edith asked.
“Nah.” He shook his head. “Don’t you worry none about that. What’s in the camp? Niggers. Who gives a… darn about niggers?” To anyone else, he would have said, Who gives a rat’s ass? or something like that. But he tried to watch his language around Edith. He answered his own question: “Nobody does, not on either side of the border.”
She nodded again, reassured. “Well, you’re right about that, Lord knows. They’re nothing but our misfortune.”
Jeff kissed her. “That’s just what they are, all right.” Not even Saul Goldman and the other fancy-pants slogan-makers for the Freedom Party had ever put it any better. He went on, “They’re not going to be such a big misfortune after a while, though; that’s for sure.”
He didn’t talk in any detail about what Camp Determination did, not even to Edith, not even if she’d been married to a guard at Camp Dependable in Louisiana before she said her I do’s with him. Nobody who didn’t wear the uniform needed to know the details. He felt a certain lonely pride in the knowledge of what he did to serve the Confederate States. He was part of the war, just as much as if he commanded a division of troops.
Edith didn’t ask for details, either. She just said, “All right,” and let it go at that.
When Jeff got back to Camp Determination, he summoned the camp’s chief engineer, a dour assault band leader-the Party equivalent of a major-named Lyle Schoonover, and told him what he needed. One of the reasons Schoonover was dour, and that he held a Party rank and not one in the regular Army, was that he’d lost his right leg below the knee. He heard Pinkard out, nodded, and said, “I’ll take care of it.”
“Not just the bathhouses, mind,” Jeff said. “Set something up where we can get rid of the records in a hurry, too.”
“I said I’d take care of it.” Schoonover sounded impatient. “I meant all of it.”
“You meant all of it…” Jefferson Pinkard tapped the three wreathed stars on the left side of his collar.
The engineer had only one star on each side of his collar, and no wreath. He gave Jeff a dirty look, but said what he had to say: “Sir.”
“That’s more like it,” Jeff said. “I’m in charge here, dammit, for better and for worse. Now that things don’t look so good, we’ve got to ride it out the best way we know how.”
Schoonover’s expression changed. There was respect on his narrow features now-reluctant respect, maybe, but respect all the same. Jeff smiled, down inside where it didn’t show. Educated people often started out looking down their noses at him. He hadn’t finished high school. Before he wound up running prison camps, he was a steelworker and a soldier of fortune. But he had a good eye for what needed doing. He’d always had it, and it let him get and stay ahead of a lot of people who thought they were more clever than he was.
“You’re not running from trouble, anyway-sir,” Schoonover said.
“Trouble’s like a dog. You run from it, it’ll chase you and bite you in the ass,” Pinkard said. A startled grunt of laughter escaped Schoonover. Jeff went on, “You go at it, though, sometimes you can make it run instead.”
“Wish we could make the damnyankees run,” the assault band leader said.
“That ain’t the point.” Educated or not, Jeff knew enough to say isn’t. He used ain’t with malice aforethought. “The damnyankees are the Army’s trouble. Them finding out about what all we’re doin’ here-that’s our trouble. That’s what we can take care of on our own.”
“Some of it, anyhow,” Schoonover said. “Those graves won’t disappear all by themselves.”
“Well, you’re right. I already figured that out myself, too,” Jeff said. “But since we can’t do anything about ’em, no point to flabbling about ’em, either. We got to take care of what we can take care of, that’s all.”
Lyle Schoonover got to his feet. He moved well, as long as he didn’t have to get anywhere in a tearing hurry. “Fair enough, sir. That’s a sensible attitude.” His salute didn’t seem too grudging. He left Pinkard’s office. If you didn’t know he’d been maimed in the Great War, his gait wouldn’t give it away.
He hadn’t been gone more than ten minutes before the telephone on Jeff’s desk jangled. Jeff picked it up. “Pinkard here.” He wondered what had gone wrong now. Telephone calls while he was at work were rarely good news.