Drive to the East sa-2 Read online

  “Me, too,” Granville McDougald said. They both left the tent to light up-and they both smoked Confederate tobacco, too.

  O’Doull blew out a long plume of smoke. “Great God in the foothills,” he said. “Now I really have seen everything.”

  “Yeah, well, you know what’s gonna happen as well as I do, Doc,” McDougald said. “They’ll patch him up and they’ll send him home till he finishes healing, and he’ll be a nine days’ wonder while he’s there. And then he’ll come back to the front, and he’ll stop a shell burst with his nuts, and he won’t have to worry about telling his grandchildren stories anymore.”

  “Christ!” Whatever O’Doull had expected him to say, that wasn’t it. “And I thought this war was making me cynical.”

  McDougald shrugged. “You got out after 1917. You found yourself a nice little French gal and you settled down. I’ve worn the uniform all that time. I’ve got a long head start on you. The shit I’ve seen…” He shook his head. But then he shook it again in a different way. “I’d never seen anything like that before, though. Talk about beating the odds! I’d heard of it. I knew it was possible. But I’d never seen it, and I never thought I would.”

  “You sure were one up on me,” O’Doull said. “When he rose up on the stretcher there, I figured he was Lazarus.”

  “Gave me a turn, too, and I won’t try to tell you any different.” McDougald took a last drag on his cigarette and crushed it out under his boot. “Well, at least we can feel good about things for a while. Lazarus is going to get better. Some of the ones like that help make up for the sorry bastards we lose.”

  On the other side of the Rappahannock, Confederate guns started pounding. Asskickers screamed down out of the sky. Bombs burst. O’Doull stamped out his cigarette, too. “They’ll be bringing more back to us before very long,” he predicted. “Either that or they’ll move us forward up into Fredericksburg.”

  “Gotta keep us close to the source of supply,” McDougald said.

  “The source of supply,” O’Doull echoed. “Right.” That was cynical, too, which didn’t mean it was wrong.

  VI

  Snyder, Texas, was a long way north of Baroyeca, Sonora. It could get just as hot, though. Hipolito Rodriguez didn’t know how or why that was so, but he knew it was. He’d seen as much in the summertime in Texas during the Great War.

  It wasn’t summer yet, but the hot weather had arrived ahead of the season. Down in Baroyeca, he’d have worn a broad-brimmed straw sombrero, a loose-fitting cotton shirt, baggy trousers, and sandals. He would have been a lot more comfortable than he was in his gray guard uniform, too. The cap he had on didn’t keep the sun off him nearly well enough. And he especially hated his shiny black boots. He didn’t think he would ever get used to them. They pinched his feet at every step he took.

  Nothing he could do about it, though. Guards had to stay in uniform. That was one of the rules, and nobody who didn’t stick to the rules had any business being a guard. Along with the rest of his squad, he stood by the train tracks that ran between Camp Determination and the new women’s camp alongside it.

  Officially, the women’s camp was part of Camp Determination. Brigade Leader Pinkard-Rodriguez’s old war buddy-was in charge of it, too. Unofficially, the guards called the women’s half Camp Undecided. Despite being married to a thoroughly decisive woman, Rodriguez thought that was pretty funny.

  All the guards carried submachine guns. Tower-mounted machine guns also bore on the disembarking point. Prisoners who tried anything cute ended up dead in a hurry. The overwhelming firepower on display helped persuade incoming Negroes that acting up wasn’t smart.

  A big, swag-bellied Alabaman named Jerry pointed east down the track. “Look at the smoke,” he said. “Another load of niggers coming in.”

  The sergeant in charge of the squad said, “Well, what the hell would we be cookin’ our brains for out here if there wasn’t another goddamn train comin’ in?” Tom Porter, like the men he led, was a Freedom Party guard, so his formal rank was troop leader, not sergeant, but he wore three stripes on the sleeve of his gray tunic, and he acted like every senior noncom Rodriguez had ever known.

  Up in the towers, the machine guns swung toward the train when it was still a good half a mile off. A couple of the men in Rodriguez’s squad hefted their weapons. Other guards along the track also grew alert. Dog handlers patted their coon hounds. The dogs were called that because they were most often used to hunt raccoons. The men who used them here had a different sort of fun with the name.

  Wheezing and groaning, the train slowed and then stopped. The locomotive had to date back to the turn of the century, if not further. Even in sleepy Sonora, it would have been an antique. More modern machines served closer to the front. This one would do for hauling mallates.

  The passenger cars and freight cars it pulled had also seen better decades. Again, they were good enough for this. The passengers cars had shutters hastily nailed up outside their windows. That kept the blacks inside from looking out and people outside from looking in.

  All the cars were locked from the outside. Tom Porter pointed to the two closest to his squad. “We’ll take ’em one at a time,” he said, “the front one first.” As he set his beefy hands on the latch, he added, “Be ready for anything. Niggers comin’ out, they’re liable to be a little crazy, or more than a little.”

  When he opened the door, the first thing that rolled out was a ripe, rich stench: shit and piss and puke and stale, sour sweat. Rodriguez wrinkled his nose. Far too many people had been packed inside that passenger car for much too long. They came spilling out now, a jumble of misery, blinking and shading their eyes against the sudden harsh sunlight.

  If you got the jump on them early, they usually didn’t get it back. “Move!” Porter screamed, and the other guards echoed him. “Men to the left! Women and pickaninnies to the right! Move, God damn you!”

  They moved-the ones who could. Some just collapsed by the railroad car. Kicks and punches drove most of those to their feet. The rest were too far gone for even brutality to rouse. “Water!” one of them croaked in a dust-choked voice. “I gots to have water. Ain’t had no water since I dunno when.”

  Rodriguez kicked him-not hard enough to cripple, just hard enough to make sure the mallate knew who was boss. “Get up!” he yelled. “No water here. Water inside the camp.” Slowly, the Negro struggled upright and stood swaying.

  A plump black woman said, “Dey’s dead folks inside de car dere, poor souls.”

  There usually were casualties on a journey like this. The cars carried six or seven times as many people as they were designed to hold. Food was whatever the Negroes managed to smuggle aboard the train. The windows wouldn’t open, and the shutters would have kept out most of the air if they had.

  And, all things considered, this carload of blacks had it easy. They could have come to Camp Determination in a cattle car, the way a lot of Negroes in this train had. Nobody bothered cleaning cattle cars very well before loading people into them. They had no windows, shuttered or otherwise. They had no toilets, either, only a honey bucket or two. And they were so jammed with men, women, and children that getting to a honey bucket would have taken a small miracle.

  A striking young woman with a dancer’s walk and high cheekbones that argued for an Indian grandparent sidled up to Rodriguez. “You keep me safe in here, I do anything you want,” she purred in a bedroom voice. “Anything at all. My name’s Thais. You look for me. I’m real friendly.”

  “Go on. Get moving,” he said stonily, and her face fell. Like most of the guards, he heard something like what she’d said at least once whenever a train came in. Women thought it would help. Sometimes they were even right. Not here. Not now.

  “Form lines! Bring your luggage! Form lines! Bring your luggage!” Like every squad leader, Tom Porter yelled the same thing over and over. “You gotta be searched! You gotta be deloused! You gotta be searched! You gotta be deloused!”

  The searcher
s would take away all the weapons and all the valuables they found. That stuff was supposed to go back into the war effort. Some of it, maybe even most of it, did. The rest stuck to the searchers’ fingers. Searchers were senior men. They’d paid their dues, and now they were getting their reward. Some of them were getting to be wealthy men.

  Slowly the lines formed. Even more slowly, they moved forward. Men and women too weak to rise in spite of calculated brutality lay by the railroad cars. “Get the stretcher parties out!” an officer shouted. “We’ll move them to the transfer facility!”

  None of the guards laughed or winked or nudged one another. They’d got lessons about that. Never do anything to spook the spooks, one trainer had put it. The transfer facility was a killing truck. The only place they’d be transferred was the mass grave not far away. All the prisoners in Camp Determination were heading that way. The ones too weak to rise got an express ticket-that was the only difference.

  Black men carried away the weaklings. The story the bearers got was that the trucks would take them to an infirmary a couple of miles away. The infirmary existed. Every once in a while, a Negro came back from it. That kept the inmates from flabbling about what happened to the ones who didn’t. More guards with submachine guns kept an eye on the stretcher bearers. But guards kept an eye on everybody all the time, so that didn’t seem out of the ordinary.

  Guards went through the cars to bring out the dead, the dying, and anybody who thought he’d get sneaky and try to hide. It was nasty work, but they couldn’t trust it to the stretcher bearers, who were too soft on their own kind. Some of the dead ones had money or jewelry worth lifting. You never could tell.

  Shouts farther down the train said another squad had caught a lurker. More shouts-these of pain-said he was getting what was coming to him. The guards would beat him to within an inch of his life. Then he’d get thrown on the first available truck “to the transfer facility”-and that would take care of the last inch.

  “They’re such damn fools,” said a guard heaving bodies out of the car with Rodriguez. “They think we’re not gonna check the fuckin’ cars. Gotta be dumb as rocks if they do.”

  “That’s right,” Rodriguez said.

  “Damn straight it is,” the other guard said. Buchanan Thornton was his name-he told people to call him Buck. He had no doubts about anything, not as far as Rodriguez could see. Few whites in the CSA did, and Buck Thornton was as white as they came: sandy hair with a lot of gray in it, blue eyes, pointy nose, freckles.

  If there weren’t blacks around to revile, he probably whiled away the time cussing at greasers. Where he was, though, he didn’t have the time or energy to worry about anything but Negroes. As a Sonoran, Rodriguez knew he was on the bottom rung of the social ladder. But he was on the ladder; down below lay the ooze and the muck-the blacks on whose back the ladder stood.

  He looked down on them all the more because he was closer to them than people higher up the ladder. In an odd way, though, Negroes were an insurance policy for people of Mexican blood. As long as they were there, nobody except a few Texans got excited about his kind.

  The first trucks rolled out of Camp Determination. When they came back, the mallates aboard them wouldn’t be there anymore. Rodriguez wouldn’t miss them a bit, either. The first Negroes he’d ever met had had guns in their hands. They’d done their level best to kill him. He’d hated and feared them ever since. If Jake Featherston wanted to get rid of them, more power to him and to the Freedom Party.

  As more stretcher bearers hauled away dead and dying blacks, Rodriguez had an odd thought. Suppose Camp Determination and others like it-for there were bound to be others like it-succeeded. Suppose they made the Confederate States Negro-free. What would the country be like then?

  It would be a lot safer, was the first answer that sprang into his mind. Mallates were nothing but trouble. Even now, they left car bombs in cities and bushwhacked whites in the countryside. Good riddance to them.

  But if they were gone-if they were all gone-what would that social ladder be like? People always needed someone at whom they could look down their noses. Who would fall into that unenviable role?

  People like me, Rodriguez thought-people with brown skin and black hair, people who spoke English with an accent. That might not be so good. He wondered why the question hadn’t occurred to him sooner.

  He shrugged. That would come later, much later, if it ever happened at all. It wasn’t anything he had to lose sleep over, and he didn’t intend to. He had a job to do, and he was going to do it the best way he knew how.

  And maybe he shouldn’t have looked down his nose at that Thais. She wasn’t bad, and he hadn’t seen Magdalena for a long time now. He shrugged again. It wasn’t as if there weren’t plenty of fish in that particular sea.

  Air-raid sirens howled, tumbling George Enos, Jr., out of bed much too early on a Sunday morning. Either somebody with a sadistic sense of humor had picked the time for a drill-always a possibility in the Navy-or the Japs were feeling friskier than usual.

  When antiaircraft guns not far from the barracks started banging away, George got his answer. He also heard several anguished groans-gunfire and hangovers mixed poorly.

  He took the time to throw on tunic and trousers and shoes before running for the closest slit trench. Not everybody bothered. Some people dashed out in nothing but skivvies. Nobody ragged them for it, either. In combat, what you had to do came first, with everything else a long way behind.

  A fighter swooped low. Machine-gun bullets chewed up the grass and sent dirt jumping. Some of them kicked into the trench, too. Somebody howled like a coyote when a bullet found him. George scrunched himself up as small and as low as he could. His whites got filthy, but that was the least of his worries.

  Most of the action, though, was well away from the barracks. The Japs were aiming for the harbor and the nearby airfield. Warships and airplanes could hurt them. Mere men were an afterthought.

  Fremont Blaine Dalby jumped into the trench and just missed pulverizing George’s kidneys with his big feet. He must have dodged the strafing fighter’s bullets like a halfback dodging tacklers. “Bastards are going to pay for this,” he panted, crashing down beside George.

  Something blew up with force enough to make the ground shake. “Looks like they’re dishing it out, not taking it,” George pointed out in a bellow that, under those circumstances, did duty for a whisper.

  “Yeah, but if they want to yank the lion’s tail, they gotta stick their head in his mouth,” Dalby said. That wasn’t the way George would have gone about pulling a lion’s tail, assuming he were mad enough to try such a thing, but he knew better than to criticize a CPO’s choice of metaphors. And when Dalby went on, he was as concrete as Boulder Dam: “If their airplanes can reach us, ours can reach their carriers. And we must have known they were coming unless every goddamn Y-range operator in the Sandwich Islands is asleep at the switch. So we oughta be good and ready for ’em.”

  “Here’s hoping,” George said.

  An airplane smashed to the ground not far enough away. He stuck his head up, hoping to watch a Japanese pilot fry in the wreckage. But the burning fighter was American: he could still make out the eagle and crossed swords painted on the fuselage. He hoped the pilot had bailed out before his machine crashed. Then the warm, tropical breeze brought him the stink of burning meat. His stomach did a flipflop worse than any in the North Atlantic in wintertime.

  Dalby stuck his head up, too. He was looking along the trench. “We’ve got a lot of our crew here,” he said. “We ought to find us a gun to man.”

  The prospect of getting out of the trench did not fill George with delight. He wanted to tell Dalby as much. What came out of his mouth was, “I’ll follow you, Chief.” The desire not to look bad before one’s fellow man is a strange, compelling, and terribly powerful thing.

  When Dalby yelled, Fritz Gustafson answered the call right away. George might have known nothing would faze the loader; even if he was
scared, he was too damn stubborn to show it, probably even to himself. Dalby looked around again. The rest of the gun crew were either out of earshot or sensibly keeping their heads down and their mouths shut. “Screw it,” Dalby said. “We got a shell-heaver, a loader, and I can damn well aim. Come on.”

  He scrambled out of the trench. George did follow him. If he muttered about how many different kinds of damn fool he was, then he did, that was all. There was still a hell of a lot of racket all around. Dalby either didn’t hear him or had a good enough excuse to pretend he didn’t.

  “Plenty going on,” Gustafson said: a novel’s worth of words from him.

  He wasn’t wrong. American and Japanese warplanes tangled overhead. If anybody had an edge, George couldn’t tell who it was. Both ground-based antiaircraft guns and those mounted on ships in Pearl Harbor were throwing shells up as fast as they could. Shrapnel was starting to come down, pattering and clattering off roofs and sidewalks and thumping into bare ground. George wished he had a helmet. That stuff would rearrange your brains if it hit you in the head.

  “Come on,” Fremont Dalby said again. “Let’s find us a gun.” He trotted off as if he knew exactly where to do it.

  And damned if he didn’t. Twin 40mm mounts were almost as thick as fleas on land as well as aboard ship. This one had fallen silent because a bomb burst behind it turned the crew to tattered red rags. George gulped. Blood splashed the guns’ breech ends and dappled the shells.

  Dalby looked at the fallen gunners. “They’re dead,” he said, which was almost an understatement. “Not a damn thing we can do for ’em-except maybe pay the Japs back. You guys feed and load, I’ll aim, and we’ll all hope like hell.”

  George got blood on his hands when he passed shells to Fritz Gustafson. The loader got more on his when he shoved them home. Dalby aimed at a bomber.

  The gun roared. Shell casings leaped from the breeches and clanged on the cement sidewalk. With only three men to serve the piece, it couldn’t fire as fast as it would have with a whole crew. Nobody cared. They were hitting back, not just taking a pounding the way they had been.