“Now that you mention it,” Sam said, “no.”
Troop Leader Hipolito Rodriguez was starting to dread duty on the women’s side of Camp Determination. Whenever he went over there, Bathsheba and Antoinette looked for him so they could give him messages to take to Xerxes over on the men’s side. And he had to make up messages from Xerxes to give to them. Otherwise, they would realize the truth.
This is what you get for being kind even once, Rodriguez thought unhappily. He delivered one message. After that, he took the old mallate to the bathhouse. Xerxes didn’t care about anything any more. And he wasn’t about to send messages back to the women’s side on his own.
But how was Rodriguez supposed to tell the man’s wife and daughter that he was dead? He saw no way, however much he wished he did. They would wail and scream and blame him. And he was to blame, too. Didn’t he shepherd everybody in that barracks into the bathhouse? It needed doing; more Negroes filled the building now. Pretty soon, they would get what was coming to them, too.
When Rodriguez sent swarms of men and women he didn’t know into the bathhouse or into the trucks that asphyxiated them, it was only a job, the way planting corn and beans on his farm outside of Baroyeca was only a job. He didn’t think about it; he just did it. Didn’t he back the Freedom Party because it promised to do something about the Negroes in the CSA, and because Jake Featherston kept his promises?
When it came to Bathsheba and Antoinette, though, they weren’t just mallates any more. They were people. And thinking about killing people was much harder and much less pleasant than thinking about getting rid of abstractions, even abstractions with black skins.
Part of him hoped they would go in a population reduction while he was over on the men’s side. Then they would be gone, and he wouldn’t have to worry about it any more. But they kept hanging on. No matter what the guards’ orders were, they didn’t clean out the women’s side as efficiently as the men’s. Even those hard-bitten men found their hearts softening-some, at least.
Naturally, that meant the women’s side got more crowded than the men’s. Just as naturally, Jefferson Pinkard noticed. Rodriguez remembered when Jeff came back from what was plainly a disastrous leave during the Great War. Pinkard went hard and merciless himself after that. He hadn’t changed since-if anything, he was more so now. What with the job he had to do, that wasn’t surprising.
He lectured the guards about not softening up-once. When that didn’t work, he found a new way to solve the problem. A work gang-male prisoners-ran up new barracks on the women’s side of Camp Determination. Before long, new guards filled them. They wore the gray of Freedom Party Guards…but instead of gray tunics and trousers, they wore gray blouses and skirts. Jefferson Pinkard or somebody set above him decided that female guards would be as tough on women as male guards were on men.
And it worked. To Hipolito Rodriguez’s way of thinking, it worked appallingly well. The new guards were all whites-no women from Sonora or Chihuahua. They were all tough-looking; Rodriguez would much rather have dallied with colored prisoners than with any of them. They carried the same submachine guns as their male counterparts, and they knew how to use them.
They wasted no time proving it to the Negro women, either. The first few days they started patrolling the north side of Camp Determination, they shot three women in separate incidents. It was as if they were warning, Don’t give us any guff. You’ll pay for it if you try.
And they didn’t waste any time sending Negro women to the bathhouse on that side and for one-way rides in the asphyxiating trucks. They hardly bothered pretending the eliminations were anything but eliminations. The women’s side began to bubble with terror.
With the female guards building up numbers over there, Rodriguez took a turn on that side less and less often. That wasn’t bad; in a lot of ways, it was a relief. But he didn’t like what he saw when he did a shift there, and he especially didn’t like what he felt. The hair on his arms and at the back of his neck kept wanting to stand on end. That side was an explosion waiting to happen.
Because he was who he was, he had no trouble getting in to see Jeff Pinkard. Saluting his buddy from the trenches always felt funny, but he did it. “What’s on your mind, Hip?” Pinkard asked. “You aren’t one of those people who flabble for the fun of flabbling.”
“I hope not, Senor Jeff,” Rodriguez answered. “But those guards on the women’s side, those lesbianos”-he didn’t know if they were or not, but if some of them weren’t, he’d never seen any-“they make trouble there.”
That got Pinkard’s attention, all right. “How do you mean?” he rapped out.
“They don’t-how you say?-they don’t keep the secret. You make the men do it. The lady guards, they should do the same thing,” Rodriguez said.
Pinkard drummed his fingers on the desk. “That’s not so good.” He got out of his chair, stuck his hat on his head, and grabbed his submachine gun. “I’ll have a look for myself.”
He said that whenever he found a problem. Rodriguez admired him for it. He didn’t let things fester. If something was wrong, he went after it right away. He had no trouble making up his mind.
By that time the next day, three female officers and half a dozen noncoms in skirts were gone. Pinkard assembled the rest of the female Freedom Party guards and spoke to them for most of an hour while men patrolled the women’s half of the camp. Rodriguez never found out exactly what the camp commandant said, but it seemed to do the trick. The female guards stopped being so blatant about what Camp Determination was for. Little by little, the women on that side relaxed-as much as they could relax while not so slowly starving to death.
Bathsheba and Antoinette still survived. The cleanouts missed them again and again. In a way, Rodriguez was glad. They were people to him now, and they hadn’t done anything to deserve death except be born black. He liked the older woman. And the younger one would have been beautiful if she weren’t so thin.
But they reminded him of exactly what he was doing here, and he didn’t like that. Thanks to the hard-hearted female guards, they had a pretty good idea of what would happen to them. “One o’ these days, they gonna put an end to us. Ain’t that right?” Bathsheba asked with no particular fear and no particular hatred.
“Ain’t happened yet. Don’t got to happen.” Rodriguez tried to dodge around the truth.
She wagged a finger at him. “I ain’t nothin’ but a nigger cleanin’ lady, but I ain’t no blind nigger cleanin’ lady. You wave somethin’ in front o’ my face, reckon I see it.”
“I don’t wave nothin’.” He did his best to misunderstand.
She wouldn’t let him. “Don’t reckon it’s any different on the men’s side, is it?”
“I don’t know what you mean. You got women over here, men over there. Of course is different.”
Bathsheba sighed. “I spell it out for you.” She laughed. “I ain’t hardly got my letters, but here I is spellin’ fo’ you. They killin’ folks over yonder the same way they killin’ folks here?”
He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. Saying yes would admit far too much. Saying no wouldn’t just be a lie-that wouldn’t bother him a bit-but an obvious lie. Obvious lies were no damn good, not when you were talking about life and death.
When you were talking about life and death, keeping quiet was no damn good, either. Bathsheba sighed again. “Well, I do thank the good Lord fo’ preservin’ my sweet Xerxes along with me an’ Antoinette,” she said. “We is in a hard road, but we is in it together.”
Shame threatened to choke Rodriguez. Along with that shame, though, came an odd pride. Bathsheba and Antoinette still thought Xerxes was alive. That gave them pleasure and hope. And they thought so because of him.