“Screw him,” one of the camp guards said. “He ain’t gonna take off without all of us.” As if to contradict him, the driver blew another long blast.
None of the guards paid any attention. They stayed right there, waiting for their sandwiches and slapping down quarters as they got them. When Rodriguez’s turn came, the man in the boiled shirt and the black bow tie-as much a uniform as his own gray one-gave him a funny look. His dark skin and black hair said one thing, while the outfit he had on said another. Rodriguez just waited. The man handed him the sandwich.
“Gracias,” Rodriguez said as he paid him. He spoke more Spanish than English, but his English was more than good enough for thank you. He wanted to make the Texan twitch, and he did.
When they’d all got their food and their tobacco, they deigned to reboard the bus. The driver muttered to himself. He did no more than mutter, though. Considering how badly he was outnumbered, that was smart of him.
Rodriguez sank down into his seat with a grunt of relief. Not long after his farmhouse got electricity, he’d almost electrocuted himself. He hadn’t been the same since-otherwise, he might have gone to the front himself, and not into the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades.
Away went the bus, rattling west down the imperfectly paved highway. “Reckon I’m gonna pawn my fuckin’ kidneys when we finally get where we’re goin’,” one of the men in gray said.
“You been fuckin’ with your kidneys, Jack, there’s some shit your pappy never learned you,” another one replied. Goatish laughter erupted. The rattletrap bus filled with cigarette smoke.
Towards evening, the bus came into Snyder. It looked like all the other Texas towns through which Rodriguez had passed on the way west: bigger than some, smaller than others. Then the bus rolled on a few miles farther. Somebody sitting up near the front who could see out through the big windscreen said, “Son of a bitch!” It was an expression of awe, not anger.
Other soft oaths, and a few not so soft, followed. Rodriguez, who was sitting somewhere near the middle, tried to peer past the men in front of him to find out what they were getting excited about. He didn’t have much luck. They were all shifting and moving, too.
The bus stopped. This was where they were going, whatever this was. The driver answered that, saying, “Welcome to Camp Determination. Everybody off.”
With a tired wheeze, the bus’ front door opened. One by one, the new camp guards filed out. Some of them gathered in front of the luggage bin, waiting for the driver to unlock it so they could get out their duffels. Others, Rodriguez among them, took a look at Camp Determination first. He decided the fellow who said son of a bitch had known just what he was talking about.
“I was eighteen years old and in the Army in the last war before I saw a town that size,” said one of the gray-haired men in gray uniforms.
“Si, me, too,” Rodriguez agreed. You could drop Baroyeca down in the middle of that camp, and it wouldn’t even make a splash.
Barbed wire surrounded an enormous square of Texas prairie. Machine guns poked their snouts out of guard towers outside the wire perimeter. Barracks halls built of bright yellow pine as yet unbleached by the sun and unstained by the rain and rusty nails rose in the middle distance. There were a lot of them, but the vast acreage inside the barbed wire had room for at least as many more.
Somebody else pointed in a different direction. “Holy Jesus!” the man said. “Will you look at all them trucks?”
There they sat, on an asphalted lot separated from the barracks by more barbed wire. Along with the rest of the guards, Hipolito Rodriguez had become very familiar with those trucks. They looked like ordinary Army machines, except that the rear compartment was enclosed in an iron box-an airtight iron box. Pipe the exhaust in there and people who got into the trucks didn’t come out again… not alive, anyhow.
“They’re gonna get rid of a hell of a lot o’ niggers in this place,” the man next to Rodriguez said. “Hell of a lot.”
“You want to shut your mouth about that, Roy,” somebody else told him. “We don’t talk about that shit. If we do it amongst ourselves, we’re liable to do it where the coons can hear us, and then we’ll have trouble.” He’d learned his lessons well; the Freedom Party guards who’d trained them at the much smaller camp near Fort Worth had rammed that home again and again. “Far as the niggers know, when they get on those trucks, they’re always going somewhere else.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Roy said impatiently. “Far as I know, they’re all goin’ to hell, and it damn well serves ’em right.”
“Come on, come on.” The bus driver sounded even more impatient than Roy did. “Y’all get your gear and get moving. I got to get moving myself, get the hell outa here and back towards where I live.”
Rodriguez found the gray canvas bag with his last name and first initial stenciled on it in black paint. He slung it over his shoulder and joined the column of guards thumping toward what looked like the main gate, at least on this side of the square. Extra guard towers watched over it. Anyone who tried attacking it without a barrel would get chopped to hamburger.
The camp was already manned. A couple of the men at the gate lowered the muzzles of their submachine guns toward the ground. “New fish,” one of them remarked.
“Don’t look so new to me.” His pal had the heartlessness of a man with all his hair and all his teeth.
“Sonny boy, I learned to mind my own business before you were a hard-on in your old man’s dungarees,” said a man from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigade.
“I believe you, Pops,” the guard answered. “Some people need as big a head start as they can get.” He didn’t smile when he said it.
Guards on duty and new arrivals glared at one another. Before anybody could get around to demanding papers and showing them-and before anybody could get around to tossing out more insults like grenades-a man with a deep voice spoke from inside the gate: “What’s going on here? Are these the new guards they’ve been promising us? About goddamn time, that’s all I’ve got to say.”
As soon as the men at the gate heard that voice, they became all business. As soon as Hipolito Rodriguez heard it, he had to look around to remind himself that he wasn’t in a trench somewhere even farther west in Texas, with damnyankee machine-gun bullets cracking by overhead and damnyankee shells screaming in.
Out through the gate came Jefferson Pinkard. He was older now, but so was Rodriguez. He had a good-sized belly and two or three chins and harsh lines on his face that hadn’t been there in 1917. Back when Rodriguez was training, he’d heard that a man named Pinkard was high in the camp hierarchy. He’d wondered if it was the man he’d known. He didn’t wonder anymore.
He took half a step out of line to draw Pinkard’s eye to him, then said, “How are you, Senor Jeff?”
Pinkard eyed him for a moment without recognition. Then the big man’s jaw dropped. “Hip Rodriguez, or I’m a son of a bitch!” he exclaimed, and thundered forward to fold Rodriguez into a bear hug. The two of them pounded each other on the back and cursed each other with the affection a lot of men can show no other way.
“Teacher’s pet,” said one of the guards who’d ridden on the bus with Rodriguez. But he made sure he sounded as if he was joking. If one of his comrades turned out to be a war buddy of the camp commandant’s, he didn’t want to seem to resent that, not if he knew which side his bread was buttered on.
When Pinkard let Rodriguez go, he said, “So you’re here to help us deal with the damn niggers, are you? Freedom!”
“Freedom!” Rodriguez echoed automatically. He was used to saying it in English now instead of going, ?Libertad! the way he had down in Baroyeca. “Si, Senor Jeff. That is why I have come.”