'Todo esta listo,' Mateo said, and then, in English as rudimentary as Pinkard's Spanish, 'Everyt'ing ready, Sergeant Jeff.'
'All right, then.' Pinkard heaved himself to his feet. He towered over Mateo, as he towered over almost everybody down here. Lieutenant Guitierrez-no, he was Captain Guitierrez these days-was an exception, but Jeff could have broken him over his knee like a stick.
He left the little wooden shack that served him as an office and strode out into sunlight bright and fierce enough to make what he'd got in Birmingham seem as nothing by comparison. Summer down here was really a son of a bitch. It was bad enough to make him understand just how the spirit of manana had been born.
Standing out there in the broiling sun were several hundred rebel prisoners, drawn up in neat rows and columns. They all stiffened to attention when Pinkard came into sight. He nodded, and they relaxed-a little. Some of them wore uniforms of a darker shade than those of Maximilian III's soldiers. More, though, looked like peasants who'd chanced to end up in a place where they didn't want to be-which was exactly what they were.
Pinkard inspected them as if they were men he would have to send into battle, not enemies of whom he was in charge. While they stood out in the open, he strode through their barracks, making sure everything was shipshape and nobody was trying to tunnel out of the camp.
He wished he had a proper fence, not just barbed wire strung on poles, but he made the best of what there was. Guards on rickety towers at each corner of the square manned machine guns. Jeff waved to each of them in turn. 'Everything good?' he asked, and then, in what passed for Spanish, 'Todo bueno?'
He got answering grins and waves and nods. As far as the guards were concerned, everything was fine. They had easy duty, duty unlikely to get them shot, and they got paid for it-as often as anybody except Confederate mercenaries got paid. The Mexicans didn't stiff the men from the CSA the way they did their own people.
For a while, Jeff had wondered why the devil any Mexican would fight for Maximilian III. Then, from interrogating prisoners, he'd found out the rebels cheated their soldiers every bit as badly as the imperialists cheated theirs. Nobody down here had clean hands. Nobody even came close.
He went back up in front of the prisoners. 'Dismissed!' he shouted. Mateo told them the same thing in Spanish. They all saluted. He thought they meant it, too. As long as they did what he told them to, he treated them fairly. Nobody'd ever treated a lot of them fairly before, and they responded to it even from the fellow in charge of a prison camp. If they got out of line, they were liable to earn a kick in the nuts. As far as Pinkard was concerned, that was fair, too.
As the prisoners went back to the barracks to get out of the ferocious sun, Mateo asked, 'Sergeant Jeff, how you know so much about-this?' His-orderly, Pinkard supposed the word was-waved around at the camp. 'In Confederate States, you policia — policeman?'
Jeff laughed like hell. 'Me? A cop? Jesus God, no. I was a steelworker, a damn good steelworker, before I came down here.'
Getting across what a steelworker was took a little while. When Mateo finally did figure it out, he gave Pinkard a peculiar look. 'You do work like that, mucho dinero, eh? Why you leave?'
'On account of I couldn't stand it any more,' Jeff answered. That plainly made no sense to the Mexican. Pinkard tried again: 'On account of woman troubles.' That wasn't the whole story, but it sure was a big part. If Emily hadn't decided she wasn't going to wait for him to come back from the war… Well, he didn't know how things would have been, but he sure knew they would have been different.
'Ah.' Mateo got that one right away. What man wouldn't have? 'Si. Mujeres.' He rattled off something in Spanish, then made a stab at translating it: 'No can live with, no can live without, neither.'
'By God, buddy, you got that one right!' Pinkard burst out. Even now, when he thought about Emily… He did his best not to think about Emily, but sometimes his best wasn't good enough.
'You no policia, how you know what to do with-?' Mateo waved again as he came back to what he really wanted to know.
Pinkard answered him with a shrug. 'Just another job, God damn it. Somebody had to do it. Remember when we took all those prisoners after the barrels came up from Tampico?' He'd lost his orderly, and backtracked in clumsy, halting Spanish to let the other man catch up. When Mateo nodded, Jeff went on, 'Like I say, somebody had to do it. Otherwise they probably all would've died. So I took charge of the poor sorry bastards-and I've been in charge of prisoners ever since.'
He wasn't altogether sorry-far from it. The distant mutter of artillery reminded him why he wasn't sorry. If he weren't doing this, he'd have been up there at the front, and then some of those shells might have landed on him. He'd seen enough combat in the Great War to be glad he was part of an army, but not part in any immediate danger.
Mateo said, 'You do good. Nobody never hear of nothing like how you do with prisoners. Everybody now try do like you. Even rebels now, they try do like you.'
There was praise, if you liked. When the enemy imitated you, you had to be doing something right.
A couple of days later, Pinkard decided to do something right for himself. He grabbed a ride on a supply truck and went north to the village of Ahualulco, where Maximilian III's army had a supply dump that kept the prisoners eating. Ahualulco wasn't anything much. It wouldn't have been anything at all if two roads-well, two dirt tracks- hadn't crossed there.
Red-white-and-green flags fluttered everywhere. Both sides in the civil war flew those colors, which got as confusing as the Stars and Bars and the Stars and Stripes had during the Great War. For Maximilian's side, they were also the colors of Austria-Hungary, from which his ancestors had come. Pinkard was damned if he knew why the rebels also flew those colors, but he'd never been curious enough to find out.
The fighting was the biggest thing that had happened to Ahualulco since… maybe since forever. A couple of new cantinas had opened, and a whorehouse, and a field hospital. Jeff went into one of the cantinas-which had a picture of the Mexican emperor, cut from some magazine, tacked to the front door-and ordered a beer. Mexican beer was surprisingly good, even if they didn't believe in keeping it cold. He lit a cigarette, found a table, and settled down to enjoy himself.
He'd just started his second beer when the door flew open. In came a couple of big men talking English. One of them looked his way, waved, and called, 'Freedom!'
'Freedom!' Jeff echoed. 'Who the hell are you boys? Where y'all from?'
One of them, a blond, was named Pete Frazee. The other, who sported a fiery red mustache, called himself Charlie MacCaffrey. They sat down by him. Frazee got a beer. MacCaffrey ordered tequila. 'How do you drink that stuff?' Pinkard asked him. 'Tastes like cigar butts, you ask me.'
'Yeah, but it'll get me drunk faster'n that horse piss you and Pete got,' MacCaffrey answered. He knocked it back and waved for more.
He was from Jackson, Mississippi; Frazee from the country not far outside of Louisville. The Kentuckian said, 'They told me I could've gone back after the war, but I was damned if I wanted to live in the United States. I spent three years tryin' to kill those damnyankees. Screw me if I wanted to be one myself.'
'Oh, hell, yes,' Pinkard said. 'How'd you find out about the Party?'
'Heard one of their people talkin' on a street corner in Chattanooga, where I was at,' Frazee answered with a reminiscent smile. 'Soon as I did, I decided that was for me. Haven't looked back since.' He nudged the fellow who'd come in with him. 'How about you, Charlie?'
'I like bustin' heads,' MacCaffrey said frankly. 'Plenty of heads need bustin' in Mississippi, too. We got as many niggers as white folks, and some o' them bastards even got the vote after they went into the Army. I don't cotton to that-no way, nohow. Whigs and Rad Libs let 'em do it. Soon as I found me a party that didn't like it, I reckoned that was for me.'
'How'd you come down here?' Jeff asked.
MacCaffrey made a face. 'Ever since that stupid bastard plugged Wade Hampton V, we pulled in our horns like a goddamn snail. Wasn't hardly any fun any more. I still got more ass-kickin' in me than that. How about you?'
Jeff shrugged. 'Didn't like what I was doin'. Didn't have nothin' holdin' me in Birmingham. I thought, Why the hell not? — and here I am.'
'You're the fellow with the prisoners of war, ain't you?' Pete Frazee said suddenly. Pinkard nodded. So did Frazee, in a thoughtful way. He went on, 'Heard about you. From what everybody says, you're doing a hell of a job.'
