“Mistuh Sergeant, suh, my little boy, he powerful hungry. He only five year old. You got chilluns your ownself, suh?”
“I got children,” Rodriguez said. “I’m sorry, but I can’t do nothin’.” Children died fast in the camp. Their mothers often died with them, from trying to share rations that weren’t enough for one.
The Negro woman sighed. “You find him some extra food, Mistuh Sergeant, suh, I do anything you want. Reckon you know what I mean. I don’t want nothin’ for me. But he too little to die like dat. He ain’t done nothin’ to nobody.”
“I don’t want nothing like that. I got a wife, too.” Rodriguez occasionally forgot about Magdalena-temptation would get the better of him. But he didn’t forget more than occasionally.
“You sound like you is a Christian man.” The colored woman sounded surprised.
Almost all mallates were Protestants. To Rodriguez, that meant they hardly counted as Christians themselves. He didn’t want to argue with the woman. The less he had to do with the prisoners, the less he had to think of them as people. The job went better when they were just-things-to him. So all he said was, “I try,” and he started to go on with his rounds.
“If you is a Christian man, suh, an’ if you loves Jesus Christ, what you doin’ here?” the woman asked.
He knew what he was doing: reducing population. As far as he was concerned, that needed doing. If it weren’t for the Negroes, the Confederate States wouldn’t have had so many troubles. He’d got his first taste of combat not against the USA but stamping out a Negro Socialist Republic in Georgia. Were blacks any more loyal to the Stars and Bars than they had been a generation earlier? If they were, would the country need camps now?
“Reckon I ax somebody else, then,” the woman said with another sigh. “You seemed like you was a decent fella, but I gots to do what I gots to do to keep my Septimius alive.”
Another raggedy-ass pickaninny with a ten-dollar name. Rodriguez almost asked the woman why she couldn’t have called him Joe or Fred or Pete or something sensible. In the end, he held his tongue. That little kid had nothing left but his fancy name. Why not let him make the most of it for whatever small span of days he had here?
When Rodriguez walked on, the woman didn’t try to stop him. He wondered what her chances of hooking up with some other guard were. She wasn’t anything special to look at. With so many women throwing themselves at the men in gray, it was a buyers’ market. The Freedom Party guards could pick and choose. Ordinary girls got left behind.
Off to the northwest, something that might have been distant thunder muttered. But it wasn’t thunder, not on a day that was fine and bright if chilly. It was artillery. Rodriguez knew the sound-he knew it at much closer range than this. Just the other side of Lubbock, Confederate and damnyankee gunners were doing their best to blow each other to hell and gone.
If the men in green-gray broke through, if they started down the highway toward Snyder and toward Camp Determination… That wouldn’t be so good. The guards had orders to get rid of as many Negroes as they could, and then to blow up the bathhouses and escape themselves.
More mutters in the distance. Would the prisoners know what those sounds meant? Some of the men would; Rodriguez was sure of that. Either they’d fought for the C.S. government or against it-maybe both. Any which way, they would know what artillery was. That could mean trouble.
Rodriguez glanced at the young men with submachine guns who accompanied him. They showed no signs of recognizing the far-off rumble. That only proved they’d never seen combat.
Why aren’t you in the real Army? Rodriguez wondered. The answer wasn’t hard to figure out-they’d pulled strings. This was bound to be a safer duty than facing soldiers in green-gray. The mallates here might be troublesome, but they didn’t shoot back. And they definitely didn’t have artillery.
An airplane buzzed over the camp. It was a Confederate Hound Dog; Rodriguez could make out the C.S. battle flags painted under the wings. U.S. warplanes had made appearances, too. If they wanted to bomb or strafe, they could. Camp Determination wasn’t set up to defend against air attack; nobody had ever thought it would have to.
So far, the U.S. aircraft had left the place alone. Maybe the fliers didn’t know what this place was. Or maybe they knew and didn’t care. It wasn’t as if people in the USA loved Negroes, either. They complained about what the Confederates were doing to them, but that struck Rodriguez as nothing but propaganda. If the United States really cared about Negroes, they would have opened their borders to them. They hadn’t. They weren’t about to, either.
Two women got into a catfight. They screeched and scratched and wrestled and swore. Rodriguez and his comrades hurried toward the squabble. The women were shrieking about somebody named Adrian. Was he a guard? Rodriguez couldn’t think of any guards named Adrian, but he might have missed somebody. Was he a black man in the other half of the prison? Or was he somebody they’d known back where they came from?
Whoever he was, he wasn’t worth disturbing the peace for. “Enough!” Rodriguez yelled. “Break it up!”
The women ignored him. They were too intent on maiming each other to care what a guard said. “You whore!” one of them shouted.
“I ain’t no whore!” The second woman pulled the first one’s hair, which produced a shrill scream. “You the whore!”
“Break it up!” Rodriguez yelled again. “Punishment cell for both of you!”
Life at Camp Determination was hard anyway. It was harder in a punishment cell. They didn’t give prisoners room to stand up or sit down. They had no stoves-you froze in the winter. In the summer, you baked, but everybody in the camp baked in the summer. You got starvation rations, even skimpier and nastier than the cooks doled out to anybody else.
But the two women really meant this brawl. They wouldn’t stop no matter what a man in uniform said. That was unusual. Rodriguez nodded to the junior guards with him. “Take care of it,” he said.
They did, using the butt ends of their submachine guns. Some of the models that went up to the front were of all-metal construction, so cheap they’d fall to pieces if you dropped them on the sidewalk. But the guards got better-made weapons with real wooden stocks. One reason they did was for times like this. Even if you didn’t want to shoot somebody, you sometimes had to knock sense into an empty head.
Now the women shrieked on a different note. Back when they first got half the camp to themselves, some of the guards were reluctant to clout them. No more. Familiarity had bred contempt.
“Didn’t you hear the troop leader yell for you to break it up?” one of the guards panted. “He tells you to do something, you cut the crap and you do it, you hear?”
If Rodriguez hadn’t had three stripes on his sleeve, he likely would have been nothing but a damn Mexican to the guard. Of course, even a damn Mexican stood higher on the Confederate ladder than a nigger (unless you were a white Texan from down near the Rio Grande). And a troop leader stood infinitely higher than a prisoner in an extermination camp.
One of the women had an eye swollen shut. The other one had blood running down the side of her head. They pointed at each other. At exactly the same time, they both said, “She started it.”
“Nobody cares who start it,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t stop when I say to stop. I say twice, you still don’t stop. Now you pay.” He turned to the guards. “To the punishment cells. They start this shit again, you shoot. You hear?”
“Yes, Troop Leader!” they chorused, their timing almost as good as the women’s.
Rodriguez wondered if the Negroes thought he was joking. If they did, it was the last mistake they’d ever make. Nobody in the Confederate States-nobody who mattered, anyway-would care whether a couple of colored women died a little sooner than they would have otherwise. Far away in the distance, artillery rumbled again. As long as it didn’t get much closer, everything was all right. Rodriguez hoped everything would go on being all right, too.