One of the guards came up to him. “Sir?”
“What’s up, Cromartie?” Jeff tried to know everybody’s name.
Cromartie looked shamefaced. “Sir, I’ve got the clap,” he blurted. “Troop Leader Mauch said I had to tell you, or he’d tear off my dick and stuff it up my… Well, he said I had to let you know.”
“You fucking idiot,” Jeff said, which was exactly Cromartie’s trouble. “Did you catch it here?”
“Reckon so, sir. I sure didn’t have it before.”
“All right. Get your sorry ass over to the doc. He’ll have some pills for you. I’m gonna gig you three days’ pay, and word of this will go on your record.”
Miserably, Cromartie nodded. Even more miserably, he shuffled away. Jeff laughed, but only quietly-no fool worse than a horny fool. The laughter didn’t last. No matter how well Camp Humble ran, he wished he were still several hundred miles farther west. That would have meant the Confederacy was winning the war.
XX
Abner Dowling walked the mayor of Snyder, Texas, through what was left of Camp Determination. The mayor was a plump, middle-aged fellow named Jethro Gwynn. He walked with a limp and a stick; he’d fought for the CSA in the Great War. “You say you didn’t know what was going on here?” Dowling growled.
“That’s a fact, sir,” Gwynn answered. “All the barbed wire and everything…They kept people out, you know.” He sounded earnest and persuasive. Dowling didn’t believe him for a minute.
Neither did Major Angelo Toricelli. “Well, what did you think was going on when all those trains stopped here? People got off those trains. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them got off. Nobody ever got on. Didn’t that kind of make you wonder?”
“No, sir,” Gwynn said blandly. “All them trains went through Snyder sealed up tight. Couldn’t prove by me they had people in ’em.”
“What are we going to do with this lying son of a bitch, sir?” Dowling’s adjutant demanded.
“Here, now. You got no cause to talk about me like that,” Jethro Gwynn said. “Whatever went on here, it was none of my damn business, and I didn’t ask no questions.”
Major Toricelli’s hand dropped to his pistol. “For three cents cash I’d blow your lying brains out. It’s more than you’re worth, too.”
“Nobody who lives in town paid much attention to this place,” the mayor of Snyder insisted. “It was just here, that’s all.”
That was too much for General Dowling. “All right, Mr. Gwynn,” he said. “You’re going to come for a little ride with me.”
“Where are we going?” Gwynn asked, sudden apprehension in his voice.
“Don’t worry-it’s not far,” Dowling answered. “And even if it were, you’d be smart to come along. I bet if I looked in my pocket I could find three cents for Major Toricelli.” His hands folded into fists. He wanted to beat the snot out of this Texan, the kind of urge he hadn’t had since his West Point days. “Get moving. You think you’re unhappy now that the United States are here, you give me any trouble and you’ll find out you don’t know jack shit about unhappy-not yet you don’t, anyway. But you will.”
He must have been persuasive. Without another word, Jethro Gwynn walked back to the command car that had brought him out from Snyder. The driver and the other two soldiers waiting in the vehicle glared at him. Dowling didn’t think he’d need to give them three cents. If the mayor got even a little out of line, he could have an unfortunate accident for free.
“Take us to that field, Clancy,” Dowling told the driver. “You know the one I’m talking about?”
“Oh, yes, sir. I sure do,” Clancy said. The motor was still running. The driver put the command car in gear. It rolled along a well-paved highway-a remarkably well-paved highway, seeing that it ended in the middle of nowhere.
The wind was blowing from the field. Dowling’s nose wrinkled. So did Jethro Gwynn’s. “Maybe we don’t need to go any further,” the mayor of Snyder said.
“Shut up,” Major Toricelli said, his voice hard and flat.
“I think we’ll keep going,” Dowling said. “We’re almost there anyhow, eh, Clancy?” He gave Gwynn a sour stare. “Clancy and I have been here before. Have you, Mr. Mayor?”
“No!” Gwynn said. “Christ, no!”
“I wonder why not,” Dowling said. Jethro Gwynn didn’t answer. Nothing was the best thing he could have said, but it wasn’t nearly good enough. The command car passed through a barbed-wire gate a barrel might have flattened. To the driver, Dowling added, “Stop by the closest trench-the open one.”
“Yes, sir,” Clancy said, and he did.
“Well, let’s get out of here and have a look around, shall we?” Dowling descended from the command car. He waited for the mayor to join him. Plainly, the mayor didn’t want to. Just as plainly, the savage expressions the U.S. soldiers wore told him he had no choice. Looking as glum as a man possibly could, he got down, too. Major Toricelli followed him.
“Come over here, God damn you.” Toricelli shoved him toward that trench, which hadn’t been covered over like the rest. “Take a good look. Then tell me you didn’t know what the hell Camp Determination was up to.”
“Please…” Jethro Gwynn said, but nobody wanted to listen to him. Feet dragging in the dirt, he scuffled his way forward.
Even in October, curtains of flies buzzed above the trench. Crows and ravens and vultures flew away as the men approached, but they didn’t go far. The rations were too good for them to want to leave. The stench was overpowering, unbelievable; it seemed thick enough to make the air resistive to motion. Dowling knew it would cling to his uniform, his skin, his hair. He also knew he would have to bathe several times to get rid of it.
“Go on,” he said harshly. “Take a good look.”
Gwynn gulped. How many Negroes-men, women, children-lay in this trench, all bloated and stinking and flyblown and pecked by scavenger birds? Thousands, surely. The trench was long and deep and about two-thirds full. Had the Confederates not pulled out of Camp Determination and blown the place up, they would have filled the trench with corpses and then scraped out another trench, closer to the entrance, and started in on that one, too. They’d set this up very efficiently.
“Well?” Dowling said. “What do you think, Mr. Gwynn? How do you like it?”
“I had no idea,” the mayor of Snyder gasped, and then he leaned forward and threw up. He was neat about it; he missed his shoes. Wheezing, coughing, spitting, he went on, “Honest to God, I didn’t.”
“You lying sack of shit.” Dowling pointed to the closed trench beyond this open one, and then to the next closed trench, and then to the next and the next. “What did you think they were doing here? Running a hospital?”
“I didn’t ask any questions,” Gwynn said. “I didn’t want to know.”
“That sounds a little more like the truth, anyway-not much, but a little,” Major Toricelli said.
“Not enough,” Dowling said. “Nowhere close to enough. Come on. Let’s go back to the command car.”
“Can we head back to town?” the mayor asked eagerly.
“Not yet, Charlie,” Dowling said. After they got in, he told Clancy, “Go on all the way up to the first trench.”
“Yes, sir,” the driver said.
Again, Jethro Gwynn didn’t want to get out. This time, Major Toricelli gave him a shove. “We had to look at this, asshole,” he said. “You damn well can, too.”
Bulldozers had scraped off the dirt from part of the first trench. The bodies in there were a couple of years old. They were mostly bones, with rotting clothes and bits of skin and hair here and there. Halloween in hell might have looked like this.
“They’ve been doing it ever since this camp opened up, for the last two years or so. How many bodies are here all told, do you think?” Dowling said. “And you have the brass to try and tell me you didn’t know what was going on? God, what a shitty excuse for a liar you are.”