The Victorious Opposition (49 page)

He had other worries, too, though not of the life-and-death sort. Just keeping track of the prisoners was a record-keeper’s worst nightmare. They didn’t come into the camp with passbooks in the pockets of their dungarees. He assumed most of the names they gave were false. Even had those names been genuine, they wouldn’t have helped much. Negroes in the CSA had never been allowed to take surnames, as they were in the USA. With passbooks, the powers that be didn’t have too much trouble sorting out who was who. Without them . . .

The camp had an underofficer who specialized in taking fingerprints and forwarding them to Baton Rouge and to Richmond for identification. If the people in Baton Rouge and Richmond had cared as much as Pinkard did about matching those fingerprints to the ones in their files, he would have been happier. As things were, he wasn’t sure who most of his prisoners were. The only thing he was sure of was that they had good reason for concealing their identity.

“We’ve got to be careful, dammit,” he would tell the guards every morning. “These nigger bastards don’t want to argue with us like the politicals did. They want to kill us. That’s why they’re here. Thing we can’t do is give ’em the chance.”

Work parties that left the barbed-wire perimeter of the camp made him especially nervous. The blacks who went out on road-building details and other hard labor were chained to one another. They wore balls and chains on their left ankles. They couldn’t possibly run. So Jeff told himself. He worried even so.

And it was all his baby. When the politicals had gone off to another camp, the warden at Camp Dependable had gone with them. “You made this place a going concern,” he told Pinkard before he went away. “You know it best, and that makes you best suited to keeping these black devils in line here.”

Maybe he’d even been right. Regardless of whether he had, Jeff didn’t love him and never would. The then-warden had had a choice between an easy job and a hard one. He’d taken the easy one himself and left the hard one to somebody else. If he’d fought in the war, he would have sent patrols forward while he stayed in a nice, safe dugout in his own trench line. Jeff had known officers like that. He’d despised them, too.

Higher rank. Fancier emblems on his collar tabs. A bigger paycheck every month. Pinkard approved of all those things. But he didn’t approve of the way he’d got them.

He checked the clock in his office. Half past five. About time for the working party to come back. Pinkard heaved himself out of the swivel chair, which creaked under his weight. He headed for the front gate. He always liked to watch the gangs come in. If he could get a report on the spot, he didn’t give the guards a chance to come up with any lies. He knew such things happened. He’d done the like himself, and didn’t want it done to him.

His timing was good. He got to the gate two or three minutes before the work party returned. The Negroes clanked along, slowed by their chains and the weights attached to their ankles—and slowed also by doing work they didn’t want to do and coming back to a place where they didn’t want to be.

“How did it go?” Jeff called to the chief guard, a stocky, hard-faced man named Mercer Scott.

“Another day,” Scott answered with a shrug. He shifted a plug of tobacco and spat a stream of brown juice on the ground. “Three niggers keeled over. Two of ’em croaked, and we flung ’em in the swamp. The other one got back up on his feet when we thumped him a couple times. Lazy bastard just wanted a break. I’ll break his black ass, he tries that kind of shit with me.” He spat again.

“Who died?” Pinkard asked. “I’ve got to try and keep the records straight, you know.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Mercer Scott screwed his face into a parody of deep thought. “One was that mincing little faggot named Dionysus. He’s been poorly since that big buck beat him up last month. And the other one . . . Hell, who was the other one?” He turned to another guard. “Who was the other nigger we pitched in the swamp, Bob?”

“The skinny bastard,” Bob answered. “Cicero, that’s his name.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right. I couldn’t recollect if he was today or yesterday.” Scott turned to Jeff. “That’s who it was, all right. Dionysus and Cicero. No loss, either one of ’em.”

Pinkard nodded and scribbled a note to himself. The camp held several Ciceros, but only one of them was in this work gang, so he wouldn’t have any trouble with that. He said, “Good enough. Make sure the count matches, then bring ’em on inside.” A mosquito lit on the back of his wrist. He smashed it. Hell might have more mosquitoes than Louisiana, but he wasn’t sure anyplace else did.

One by one, the Negroes counted off. The reek of their unwashed bodies was harsh in Pinkard’s nostrils. The guards smelled nearly as ripe. In this heat and humidity, everybody stank.

One of Pinkard’s aides pounded on the door to his quarters at half past twelve that night. He woke up grabbing for his pistol. Nobody would bother him at that time of night for anything but trouble. As far as he was concerned, trouble came in two flavors: escape and uprising. “What the hell?” he demanded, throwing the door open in just his pajamas.

“Warden, they need you at the front gate right away,” the aide said.

Jeff shoved his feet into slippers and jammed his hat down onto his head so people would have some idea of who he was. “I’m coming,” he said. “What am I walking into?”

“I don’t exactly know,” the aide answered, and Jeff wanted to clobber him with the pistol. He went on, “There’s folks from Richmond there. Reckon they’ll tell you what you need to know.”

“From Richmond?” Pinkard’s mind raced. Was he in trouble? What kind of trouble could he be in? He couldn’t think of anything he’d screwed up. He’d done his job here. He’d done it back in Alabama, too. He’d been a good Freedom Party man since the days just after the war, and he’d stayed in the Party through the hard times after Grady Calkins shot President Hampton. Hell, he’d broken up with his wife because Emily was fooling around on him on nights when he went to meetings. “Get out of my way, goddammit.” He pushed past the aide and hustled to the gate.

None of the guards said a word about what he had on. He could deal with them later, when he was in proper uniform. The men at the gate wore the regalia of Freedom Party guards, high-ranking ones. Their cold, hard faces would have scared the bejesus out of even a thoroughgoing son of a bitch like Mercer Scott. “You are Jefferson Pinkard?” one of them asked. He didn’t say anything about how Pinkard was dressed, either.

“That’s right,” Jeff answered. “Who the—devil are you?”

“Chief Assault Band Leader Ben Chapman.” The accent wasn’t Virginia; it was Alabama, much like Pinkard’s own. “I have a prisoner to deliver to this camp. You are to acknowledge receipt.”

“You do? I am?” Pinkard said. The Party officer nodded. “Well, who the hell is he?” Jeff asked testily. “And what are you doing bringing him here in the middle of the goddamn night?”

“Orders,” Chapman said, as if orders were the most important thing in the world. Well, maybe he had a point there. “And the prisoner is”—he lowered his voice so Pinkard could hear but the guards at the front gate couldn’t—“a fellow by the name of Willy Knight.”

“Holy Jesus!” Jeff exploded. Having the vice president of the CSA—well, the former vice president, after his resignation and imprisonment (to say nothing of his impeachment and conviction)—in his prison camp was the last thing he wanted. The responsibility if something went wrong . . . and things were only too likely to go wrong. “Didn’t anybody tell you this here camp is full of niggers?”

Chief Assault Band Leader Chapman shrugged. He had an athlete’s grace, and an athlete’s watchful eyes, too. “Goddamn spooks deserve whatever happens to ’em,” he said. “And the goddamn son of a bitch we brought down here deserves whatever happens to him, too. Nobody will say a word if he comes out of this place feet first.”

That took a load off Pinkard’s mind. But, still cautious, he asked, “Will you put that in writing?”

“Nothing about this business goes down in writing,” Chief Assault Band Leader Chapman said scornfully. “Nothing except your name on the form that says we got Knight here in one piece.”

“I might have known,” Jeff muttered, and Chapman nodded, as if to say,
Yes, you might have.
With a sigh, the warden nodded, too. “I’ll sign—as soon as I see him, so I can make sure he
is
in one piece.”

“Right.” Ben Chapman turned to his henchmen. “Bring him on up.” The door to a motorcar at the edge of Camp Dependable’s lights opened and then slammed shut. More Freedom Party guards hustled someone forward. Chapman pointed. “See for yourself,” he told Pinkard.

It was Willy Knight. Jeff had seen him in Birmingham on the campaign trail. He was still tall and blond and still, in a way, handsome. But, where he had been full of piss and vinegar, he was thin to the point of gauntness, and suffering haunted his face—especially the eyes. “Go ahead and laugh,” he said to Pinkard. “One of these days, the son of a bitch will turn on you, too.”

“Shut up, you bastard,” Chief Assault Band Leader Chapman told him. Chapman thrust a clipboard and a pen at Jeff. “You’ve seen him. Sign.” Jeff did. His men took charge of the fallen Confederate hero and led him into the camp.

XIII

H
ipolito Rodriguez had never been a rich man. He was reasonably confident he would never be a rich man. But he was and always had been a proud man. The Confederate States were and always had been a proud nation. And Sonora and Chihuahua were and always had been states where pride counted for even more than it did elsewhere in the CSA. A poor man who could hold his head up often gathered more respect than a rich man who could not meet his neighbors’ eyes.

When Rodriguez brought his youngest son into Baroyeca, he strode along with pride unusual even for him. Pedro seemed a good deal more diffident than his father—or maybe his feet hurt. He had on the sturdy shoes he’d got from the Freedom Youth Corps. He hadn’t worn them much since getting out of the Corps a few months earlier; sandals were plenty good for farm work. But he didn’t want to seem like a peasant when he came into town.

“They will make a man of you,” Rodriguez said as he and Pedro started up the main street toward the
alcalde
’s residence.

“I thought the Freedom Youth Corps already did that,” his son replied. He was taller than Hipolito Rodriguez, and wider through the shoulders, too. Like his brothers, he spoke more English than Spanish these days—except, sometimes, with his mother.

“I have nothing bad to say about the Freedom Youth Corps,” Rodriguez told him. “But it is what its name says it is: it is a thing for youths. The Army of the Confederate States of America is a thing for men.”

He hadn’t thought about it that way when he was conscripted. He remembered as much, remembered very clearly. But times had changed. He’d gone into the Confederate Army in the middle of the Great War and been thrown straight into action, first against Red Negroes in Georgia and then against the USA in west Texas. His son would serve in peacetime. With luck, he would get his hitch out of the way and come back to the farm without ever firing a shot in anger. Rodriguez hoped so, anyhow. When you were shooting in anger, the people on the other side had a nasty habit of shooting back. He didn’t know how he’d come through the war unwounded. Luck, no doubt, luck and the Virgin watching over him.

Out of Jaime Diaz’s general store came Felipe Rojas. When Pedro saw the Freedom Youth Corps drillmaster, he automatically stiffened to attention right there in the middle of the street. Rojas’ smile showed several gold teeth. “You don’t need to do that today, Pedro,” he said. “I don’t give you orders any more.”

“Just as well that he stay in practice,” Hipolito Rodriguez said. “I’ve brought him into town to report, because he’s been conscripted.”

“Has he?” Rojas’ eyes widened. “How the years do get on. He would be old enough, of course, but still, it hardly seems possible. Not so long since we had rifles in our own hands, is it?”

“No, indeed. I was just thinking that,” Rodriguez said. Of course, they’d both had Tredegars in their hands a lot more recently than they’d been mustered out of the Army. They’d shown the big landowners who’d run things in Sonora for so long that the Freedom Party was the new power in the land, and that anyone who thought otherwise had better think again.

“A soldier.” Rojas slapped Rodriguez’s son on the back with a big, hard hand. “He’ll do well. What we showed him in the Youth Corps will help him, and he’s a fine young man. Yes, I’m sure he’ll do very well indeed.”

“We’d better go on to the
alcalde
’s residence,” Rodriguez said. “I wouldn’t want him to get in trouble for reporting late.”

“No, that wouldn’t be the right way to start,” Felipe Rojas agreed. He clapped Pedro on the back again. “Go with God, and God go with you. You’ll be fine. I know you will. Show them what we taught you. They’ll build on that.”

“Sí, señor. Gracias, señor,”
Pedro said proudly.

Another youth and his father were also at the
alcalde
’s residence. He and Pedro started chattering. They’d gone to school together and served in the Freedom Youth Corps together, and now they were going into the Army together. Rodriguez shook his head.
It hardly seems possible,
Rojas had said, and wasn’t that the truth? No matter how it seemed, though, it was the truth. The years had a way of piling on whether you looked at them or not.

His son had to fill out most of the inevitable paperwork, but there was plenty for Hipolito, too, because Pedro was of course under twenty-one. He signed his name a dozen times, mostly without bothering to look at what he was signing. More than half the forms were in English, anyhow, and he read it less well than he spoke it.

At last, it was done. Essentially, he’d deeded his son to the Confederate States. He hugged Pedro and kissed him on both cheeks. “Be strong,” he said. “Do what they tell you and be strong.” Then he left the
alcalde
’s residence in a hurry, so neither the clerk there nor his son would see him cry.

He headed for
La Culebra Verde
. If he wasn’t entitled to drown some sorrows after giving his son to the Army, when could he? Not even Magdalena would complain about that . . . he hoped.

Before he got to the Green Snake, though, a couple of young men he’d never seen before came up to him. They were both dirty and ragged and weary-looking. One was barefoot; the other wore a pair of sandals that had more patches than original shoe leather.
“Buenos días, señor,”
the barefoot man said in Spanish. “Do you by any chance need someone to help you with your work?”

“No, for I have three strong sons, thank God,” Rodriguez answered in the same tongue. Out of curiosity, he switched to English: “Do you know this language?”

“No, señor. Lo siento mucho,”
the stranger said.
“Solamente español.”

Rodriguez had expected nothing different. Dropping back into Spanish himself, he asked, “From which province in the Empire of Mexico do you come?”

Both newcomers in Baroyeca looked alarmed. The man with the patched sandals, who was older and stockier than his friend, replied, “You have made a mistake,
señor.
Like you, we are citizens of
los Estados Confederados
.”

“Bullshit,” Rodriguez said in English. They couldn’t even understand that, and he couldn’t imagine a Sonoran or Chihuahuan who didn’t. He returned to Spanish: “Don’t tell me lies. Do you think I’m too stupid to know the difference? Times are hard here, but I know they’re worse south of the border.”

The ragged men sighed in equally ragged unison. That older fellow said, “Very well,
señor. Usted tiene razón.
We have come from near Mocorito in Sinaloa province.” Rodriguez nodded, unsurprised; Sinaloa lay just south of Sonora. The other man went on, “We have to have work, or we will starve. So will our families, if we cannot send them money.”

“It is as I told you—I have no work for you to do,” Rodriguez said. “If you keep looking, though, maybe you will find someone who does.”

He waited to see what would happen next. If the Sinaloans were hungry enough, desperate enough, or maybe just stupid enough, they might try to get his money without working. If they did, he aimed to fight back. But their shoulders slumped and they went on down the street. As they went, they exclaimed about how fine and fancy everything was. If that didn’t prove they weren’t from the CSA, Rodriguez couldn’t think of what would.

He wondered if they would find someone who’d pay them. They weren’t the first men from the Empire of Mexico he’d seen passing through Baroyeca. He was sure they wouldn’t be the last. Even though the town now boasted electricity, it was a backwater in Sonora, and Sonora was a backwater in the CSA. By the standards prevailing farther south, though, even a Confederate backwater seemed rich and bustling.

I have a dollar in my pocket,
he thought.
To those fellows, that makes me a rich man. God help them, poor devils.

He walked into
La Culebra Verde
. Robert Quinn sat at the bar, drinking a bottle of beer. “
Hola, Señor
Rodriguez,” he said. “What brings you to Baroyeca this morning?”

“Pedro reports to the Confederate Army today,” Rodriguez answered. “I came in with him to fill out papers and to say good-bye.”

“Congratulations to you and congratulations to him,” Quinn said in his deliberate Spanish. “This is a good time to be a young man in the Confederate States. We aren’t going to be pushed around any more.”

Rodriguez wasn’t so sure whether that made this a good time or a bad one. He almost said as much. Then he remembered the two men from Sinaloa who thought times in the CSA were better than those in the Empire of Mexico. He spoke of them instead, meanwhile sitting down beside the Freedom Party man and ordering a beer for himself.

Quinn nodded. “More and more men keep coming north,” he said. “Enough of them do find work to encourage others. We are trying to tighten things at the border, but”—he shrugged—“it is not an easy job.”

“If they do work no one else will or no one else can, I do not suppose it is so very bad,” Rodriguez said, sipping his beer. “But if they take jobs away from Confederates . . . That would not be good at all.”

“We have to take care of ourselves first,” Quinn agreed. After another pull at his beer, Hipolito Rodriguez began to laugh. Quinn cocked his head to one side, a quizzical look on his face. “What is the joke?”

“In other parts of the Confederate States, people worry the same way about Sonorans and Chihuahuans taking their jobs.”

“Yes, they do, some. Not so much as they used to, I do not think,” Quinn answered seriously. “They have seen that people who come from these parts are good and loyal and work hard. And they have seen that
los mallates
are the worst enemies the Confederate States have.”

“Yes.” Rodriguez said the same thing in English—“Niggers”—just to show he knew it. “In this country,
los mallates
are nothing but trouble. They have never been anything but trouble.
Los Estados Confederados
would be better off without them.”

Quinn waved to the bartender. “Another beer for me, Rafael, and another for my friend here as well.” He turned back to Rodriguez. “It is because you understand this that you are a member of the
Partido de Libertad
.”

“Is it?” After thinking that over, Rodriguez shook his head. “No. I am sorry, but no. That is not the reason.”

The bartender set the beers in front of his customers. Robert Quinn gave him a quarter and waved away his five cents’ change. After a sip that left foam on his upper lip, he asked, “Why, then?”

“I’ll tell you why.” Rodriguez drank from his beer, too. “I joined the Freedom Party because it was the only one in Sonora that didn’t take me for granted. You really wanted to have me for a member. And you want vengeance against
los Estados Unidos
. Men from
los Estados Unidos
tried to kill me. I have not forgotten. I want vengeance against them, too.”
But if Pedro fights them, they will shoot back.
He took a big sip from his new beer. Life wasn’t simple, dammit.

“Ah, yes, the United States,” Quinn said, as if reminded of the existence of a nation he’d forgotten—and been glad to forget. “Well, my friend, you are right about that. Every dog has its day, but theirs has gone on for too long.”

“If we fight, can we beat them?” Rodriguez asked.

“I am no general,” the Freedom Party man replied. “But I will tell you this: if Jake Featherston says we can beat them, then we can.”

S
omewhere up ahead—somewhere not very far up ahead—the state of Houston and the USA ended, and the state of Texas and the CSA began. Colonel Irving Morrell bounced along in a command car.
Bounced
was the operative word, too, for the command car’s springs had seen better years, while the roads in these parts went from bad to worse.

However bad its springs might have been, though, its pintle-mounted machine gun was in excellent working order. Morrell had carefully checked it before setting out. If it hadn’t been in excellent working order, he wouldn’t have got into the command car in the first place.

Above the growl of the engine, the driver, a weather-beaten private named Charlie Satcher, said, “Looks quiet enough.”

“It always looks quiet enough,” Morrell answered. “Then they start shooting at us.”

Satcher nodded. “Big country,” he remarked.

“Really? I hadn’t noticed,” Morrell said, deadpan. The driver started to say something, caught himself, and grunted out a little laughter instead.

It was a very big country indeed. The horizon seemed to stretch for ever and ever. The sun beat down out of a great blue bowl of a sky. The only motion in the landscape was the tan trail of dust the command car had kicked up, slowly dispersing in the breeze, that and— Morrell suddenly swung the machine gun to the right, and as suddenly took his hands off the triggers. That was only a roadrunner, loping through the dry brush with a lizard’s tail hanging out of the side of its mouth.

“Nothing but miles and miles of miles and miles,” Charlie Satcher said, as if he were the first one ever to bring out the line.

“Not quite nothing,” Morrell answered. “Somewhere out there, those Freedom Party fanatics are bringing guns and ammo into Houston.”

Calling them fanatics made him feel better. If he could paint them as villains, even if only in his own mind, he could do a better job of trying to deal with them. When he wasn’t thinking of them as fanatics, he had to think of them as tough, clever foes. Not all of them belonged to the Freedom Party. Nobody in the Confederate States had much liked losing Houston, and not many people in Houston liked being part of the USA, either. The people who did like it kept quiet. If they didn’t keep quiet, their neighbors made them pay.

“Miles and miles of miles and miles.” Satcher liked to hear himself talk.

Again, he wasn’t wrong. The Confederates put up a few border checkpoints between Texas and Houston, but only a few, and they mostly cared about things passing into Texas, not things leaving it. As far as they were concerned, things passing from Texas into Houston didn’t really cross a border. If the United States felt otherwise, then it was up to the United States to do something about it.