The Victorious Opposition (74 page)

“Uh, yes, sir. That’s true,” Jeff said. Meanwhile, he was thinking,
Goddammit, some son of a bitch here is telling stories about me back in Richmond. Have to find out who the bastard is.
He didn’t suppose he should have been surprised that Koenig—as attorney general or as Freedom Party big wig?—had spies in Camp Dependable. All the same, he wanted to be rid of them.

The attorney general didn’t sound too angry as he said, “Don’t suppose I can blame you for that. Here’s your news then: you’ve got about fifteen hundred niggers—maybe two thousand—heading your way. They ought to be there in three, four days.”

“Jesus Christ!” It wasn’t a scream, but it came close. Pinkard went on, “Sir, no way in hell this camp will hold that many more people. We’re overflowing already.”

“That’s why I’m telling you now.” Koenig spoke with what sounded like exaggerated patience. “You have the time to get ready for those black bastards.”

“I don’t suppose we’ll get the rations we need to feed ’em,” Jeff said. Only silence answered him. He hadn’t really expected anything else. Reproachfully, he continued, “Sir, you know I’m a good Party man. I don’t mean any disrespect or anything like that. But what the hell am I supposed to do to get my camp ready for a shipment that big?”

“Whatever you have to do.” Ferdinand Koenig paused. Pinkard didn’t think he would say anything more, but he did, repeating, “Whatever you have to do. Is that plain enough, or do I have to draw you a picture? I’d better not have to draw you a picture. I heard you were a pretty smart fellow.”

Maybe he had just drawn a picture. “Jesus Christ!” Jeff said again, not much liking what he thought he saw. “You mean—?”

Koenig cut him off. “Whatever you have to do,” he said for the third time. “You can take care of it, or I’ll find somebody else who will. Your choice, Pinkard. Which would you rather?”

Jeff thought it over. It didn’t take long. He
was
a good Party man. The Party mattered more to him than anything else. The ruins of his marriage proved that. And, where Emily had screwed around, the Party had always been faithful. Without it, God only knew what he would have done when he lost his job at the Sloss Works. Didn’t loyalty demand loyalty in return? “I’ll take care of it, Mr. Attorney General. Don’t you worry about a thing.”

“I wasn’t worried,” Koenig said. “Like I told you, if you didn’t, somebody else would. But I’m glad it’s you. I know you’ve put in a lot of time for us. And I know you’ll do a good job here, too. You won’t screw it up and leave a bunch of loose ends or anything like that.”
You’d better not,
was what he meant.

“Hell, no,” Jeff said quickly. “When I do somethin’, I do it right and proper.”

“Good,” Koenig said, and the line went dead.

Pinkard stared at the telephone for close to half a minute. “Fuck,” he muttered, and finally hung it up. He trudged out of the office.

“What’s up?” Mercer Scott called to him.

Are you the spy? I wouldn’t be surprised. I’ve run my mouth around you. Well, no more, goddammit.
But Scott had to know about this. Jeff said, “In three or four days, we’re getting another fifteen hundred, two thousand niggers.”

Scott stared. “Holy shit!” he said. “They can’t do that! This place won’t hold ’em.”

“Oh, yes, it will,” Pinkard said.

“How?” Scott demanded. “You were just now telling me it wouldn’t hold the niggers we’ve got, and you were right. You know damn well you were right.”

“I’ll tell you how.” And Pinkard did.

“Holy shit,” Scott said again, this time in an altogether different tone of voice. “You sure you know what you’re talking about? You sure you know what you’re doing?” Under other circumstances, the questions would have infuriated Jeff. Not now.

He nodded uneasily. “I know, all right. Get the guards we need—you’ll know the ones we can count on. Then pull out the niggers.”

“All at once?” Scott asked.

After a moment, Jeff shook his head. “No. That’d be asking for trouble. Take out a couple hundred. Less chance of anything going wrong.”

“Yeah.” The guard chief eyed him. “How come I’m the lucky one? What are you gonna be doing? Sittin’ in your office pouring down a cold beer?”

Had things been different, that would have infuriated Jeff, too. The way things were, Mercer Scott had the right to ask. Pinkard shook his head. “You stay here and get the next bunch ready. I’m going out with the first ones, and I won’t come back till the job’s done.”

“All right.” Scott nodded. “That’s fair. I can’t tell you it ain’t.” He stuck out his hand. Pinkard shook it. He was grateful for any sort of reassurance he could get.

Along with fifteen guards, he led two hundred Negroes away from Camp Dependable. The black men came willingly enough. As far as they knew, it was just another work detail. When they’d gone two or three miles from the camp, he ordered them to dig a long, deep trench. “This here ain’t nothing but a waste o’ time,” one of them said. But he was only complaining, the way people did when they had to do work they didn’t care for.

Pinkard didn’t argue with him. When the ditch was dug, he ordered the Negroes to lie down in it. That drew more complaints. “You gots to put us on top of each other?” a man said. “We ain’t no goddamn fairies.”

The guards stepped up onto a parapet made from the dirt the Negroes had dug out. Even when they aimed their submachine guns at the men in the trench, the blacks didn’t seem to believe what was happening.
This is my camp,
Jeff thought miserably.
I’m responsible for what goes on here.
He nodded to the guards. The order was his to give, and he gave it: “Fire!”

They did. As soon as they started shooting, it was as if the ground convulsed. The submachine guns roared and stuttered and spat flame. The guards slapped in magazine after magazine. Pinkard was appalled at how much ammunition his men needed to kill the prisoners. The stenches of blood and shit filled the humid air. At last, the screaming stopped. Only the groans of the dying were left.

More than one guard vomited into the trench. Jeff felt like heaving up his guts, too, but sternly refrained. “Scrape dirt over ’em,” he told the guards. “We’ve got more work to do.” The guards grumbled, but not too much. They seemed too stunned to do a whole lot in the way of grumbling.

And it got harder after that. The Negroes at the camp had to have understood what was going on when the guards came back and the men they’d been guarding didn’t. But Mercer Scott was no fool. The first gang of blacks had gone off willingly enough, yes. He made sure the next bunch were shackled. That way, nobody tried to run off into the woods and swamp.

Over the course of the next three days, Pinkard reduced the population of Camp Dependable by two thousand men. That was how he referred to it in his reports. That was how he tried to think about it, too. If he thought about reducing population, he didn’t have to dwell on shooting helpless prisoners.

A few of the guards were exhilarated after the job was done. They were the ones who thought Negroes had it coming to them. Most of the men were very subdued, though. They didn’t mind jailing blacks or starving them. Shooting them in cold blood seemed to be something else again.

One shot rang out in the middle of the night: a guard blowing his brains out. He got buried, too, with almost as little fuss as if he were one of the blacks so casually disposed of.

When the promised—the threatened—new shipment of Negro prisoners arrived, Camp Dependable was able to take them. Pinkard wondered if he would get a congratulatory call from Ferd Koenig. He didn’t. Maybe that made sense, too. After all, he’d only done what the attorney general needed him to do.

S
cipio wished to God he could get out of Augusta. But it wasn’t so easy as it would have been a few years before. Things had tightened up. Everywhere a black man went, it was, “Show me your passbook, boy.” If he started working in, say, Atlanta, he would have to produce the document that proved he was himself—or proved he was Xerxes, which amounted to the same thing. And if he did that, he would be vulnerable to either Anne Colleton or Jerry Dover.

He didn’t think his boss at the Huntsman’s Lodge had anything in particular against him. He knew damned well his former boss at the former Marshlands plantation did. But he didn’t like the idea of being vulnerable to Dover much better than he liked being vulnerable to Miss Anne. Being vulnerable to anybody white terrified him.

At the restaurant, the rich white men who ate there talked more and more of war. So did the newspapers. Jake Featherston was thumping his chest and foaming at the mouth because Al Smith wouldn’t give him what he’d promised not to ask for the year before. Scipio remembered too well what a catastrophe the last war had been for the Confederate States. Under other circumstances, the prospect of a new one would have appalled him.

Under other circumstances . . . As things were, he more than half hoped the CSA did start fighting the USA gain. All eyes, all thoughts, would turn toward the front. They would turn away from a town in the middle of nowhere like Augusta. And he had heard some of the things bombing airplanes could do nowadays. That made him all the gladder Augusta was a long, long way from the border.

What made life harder was that whites weren’t all he had to worry about in Augusta. The Terry was full of sharecroppers displaced from the land by the tractors and harvesters and combines that had revolutionized farming in the CSA since the Freedom Party came to power. The Terry, in fact, held far more people than it held jobs. A man who wasn’t careful could easily get knocked over the head for half a dollar—especially a man who wasn’t young and who had to wear a penguin suit to and from work, so he looked as if he had money.

Scipio made a point of being careful.

Coming home was worse than going up to the Huntsman’s Lodge. Going to work, he had to face harassment from whites who fancied themselves wits. Most of them overestimated by a factor of two. He had to give soft answers. He’d been doing that all his life. He managed.

He came home in the middle of the night. Darkness gave predators cover—and the Augusta police rarely wasted their time looking into crimes blacks committed against each other. Every street corner on the way to his apartment building was an adventure.

Most of the time, of course, the corners were adventures only in his own imagination. He could—and did—imagine horrors whether they were there or not. Every once in a while, they were. He walked as quietly as he could. He always paused in the blackest shadows he could find before exposing himself by crossing a street. Nobody had worried about street lights in the Terry even before the rise of the Freedom Party. These days, the idea of anyone worrying about anything that had to do with blacks was a painful joke.

Voices from a side street made Scipio decide he would do better to stay where he was for a little while. One black man said, “Ain’t seen Nero for a while.”

“You won’t, neither,” another answered. “Goddamn ofays cotched him with a pistol in his pocket.”

“Do Jesus!” the first man exclaimed. “Nero always the unluckiest son of a bitch you ever seen. What they do with him?”

“Ship him out West, one o’ them camps,” his friend said.

“Do Jesus!” the first man said again. “You go into one o’ them places, you don’t come out no more.”

“Oh, mebbe you do,” the other man said. “Mebbe you do—but it don’t help you none.”

“Huh!” the first man said—a noise half grunt, half the most cynical laugh Scipio had ever heard. “You got dat right. They throws you in a hole in the ground, or else they throws you in the river fo’ the gators and the snappers to finish off.”

“I hear the same thing,” his friend agreed. “Gator sausage mighty tasty. I ain’t gonna eat it no mo’. Never can tell who dat gator knowed.” He laughed, too. The black men walked on. They had no idea Scipio had been listening.

He waited till their footsteps faded before he went on to his apartment. The Huntsman’s Lodge served a fair amount of wild game: venison, raccoon, bear every once in a while, and alligator. Scipio had been fond of garlicky alligator sausage himself. He didn’t think he would ever touch it again.

Three days later, he was walking to work when police and Freedom Party stalwarts with submachine guns swept into the Terry. They weren’t trying to solve any specific crime. Instead, they were checking passbooks. Anybody whose papers didn’t measure up or who didn’t have papers, they seized.

“Let me have a look at that there passbook, boy,” a cop growled at Scipio.

“Yes, suh.” Scipio was old enough to be the policeman’s father, but to most whites in the CSA he would always be a boy. He didn’t argue. He just handed over the document. Arguing with a bad-tempered man with a submachine gun was apt to be hazardous to your life expectancy.

The cop took a brief look at his papers, then gave them back. “Hell, I know who you are,” he said. “You been paradin’ around in them fancy duds for years. Go on, get your black ass outa here.”

“Yes, suh. Thank you kindly, suh.” Scipio had taken a lot of abuse from whites for going to work in a tuxedo. Here, for once, it looked to have paid off. He got out of there in a hurry. That was unheroic. He knew it. It gnawed at him. But what could he do against dozens of trigger-happy whites? Not one damned thing, and he knew that, too.

He’d gone only a few blocks when gunfire rang out behind him: first a single shot, then a regular fusillade. He didn’t know what had happened, and he wasn’t crazy or suicidal enough to go back and find out, but he thought he could make a pretty good guess. Somebody must have figured his chances shooting it out were better than they would have been if he’d gone wherever the cops and the stalwarts were taking people they grabbed.

The fellow who’d started shooting was probably—almost certainly—dead now. Even so, who could say for sure he was wrong? He’d died quickly, and hadn’t suffered much. Scipio thought of alligators, and wished he hadn’t.

One of the waiters, a skinny young man named Nestor, didn’t show up at the Huntsman’s Lodge. Jerry Dover muttered and fumed. Scipio told him about the dragnet in the Terry. The manager eyed him. “You reckon they picked up Nestor for something or other?”