'That's what I said.'
'Sir, you know a lot of my guys are from the Confederate Veterans' Brigades,' Jeff said. Those were men the C.S. Army had already judged not fit to fight, mostly because of wounds from the Great War.
'Yes, I understand that. Sort through them, too. Some of 'em'll probably do-we aren't as fussy as we used to be,' Koenig said. 'But you've got plenty of Congressmen's nephews and Party officials' brothers-in-law. Come on, Pinkard-we both know how that shit works. But we can't afford it any more.'
'Shall I get on the train myself, then?' Jeff asked. 'Reckon I still know which end of a rifle's which.'
'Don't be dumb,' Koenig told him. 'We've got to keep the camp running. That's damn important, too. Way things are, though, we need every warm body we can get our hands on at the front.'
'Well, I'll do what I can, sir,' Jeff said.
'I reckoned you would,' the Attorney General replied. 'Freedom!' The line went dead.
'Freedom,' Jeff echoed as he hung up, too. Once the handpiece was back in the cradle, he added one more word: 'Shit.'
He wondered how few guards he could get away with sending. The men on the women's side, sure. They wouldn't be a problem. He could always replace them with dykes. Plenty of tough broads ready to send Negro women to the bathhouses. Plenty of tough broads eager to do it. And if some of them ate pussy in the meantime…well, hell, as long as the colored gals got what was coming to them sooner or later, Jeff supposed he could look the other way in the meantime. Yeah, lezzies were disgusting, but there was a war on, and you had to take the bad with the good.
Losing guards from the men's side would hurt more. He couldn't bring female guards over here. Some of them, the butch ones, would have liked it. But it would stir up trouble among the coons if he tried it, and it would stir up more trouble among his men. So he'd have to do some pruning, and then live with personnel being gone.
Congressmen's nephews. Party bigwigs' brothers-in-law. Sure, he had some guys like that. He didn't want to get rid of all of them. They were the young, the healthy, the quick here. You couldn't run a camp with a bunch of old farts who couldn't get out of their own way…could you? He hoped he wouldn't have to find out, and feared he would.
He got on the intercom, and then on the PA system, to summon Vern Green to his office. The guard chief got there about fifteen minutes later. 'What's up, sir?' Pinkard told him what was up. He looked disgusted when he heard. 'Well, for God's sake! They reckon our boys gonna win the damn war all by their lonesome?'
'Beats me,' Jeff answered. 'But when the Attorney General tells you you got to do this and that, you can't very well say no.'
Green looked more disgusted yet, but he nodded. 'I'll ask around,' he said. 'Maybe we can fix it.' He had his own back channels to Richmond. Someone in the capital would be keeping an eye on Jeff for the government or the Party or both. Usually, that made the guard chief the camp commandant's rival. They both wanted to pull in the same direction today, though.
'Yeah, you do that,' Jeff said. 'But don't hold your breath. War news is bad enough, they'll be grabbing anybody they can get their hands on.'
'Uh-huh,' Green said. They both had to be careful when they talked about how things were going. Either could report the other for defeatism. But they couldn't afford to pretend they were blind, either. If the news were better, Richmond wouldn't be prying men loose wherever it could. The guard chief went on, 'You got a roster handy?'
'Sure do.' Jeff spread papers out on his desk. 'I've made some marks already.'
Green looked at them. He nodded. 'What you've got makes sense. We can always come up with guards in skirts for the women's side.'
'Just what I was thinkin',' Pinkard agreed. 'The ones over here, though…That's gonna be a bastard. Bastard and a half, even.'
'Yeah.' The guard chief nodded again. 'Some of these guys'll bawl like castrated colts when you tell 'em they got to go and fight the damnyankees. Some of their fathers'll bawl even louder.'
'Tell me about it,' Jeff said with a wry grin. 'But I know what to do about that, damned if I don't. I'll just say, 'You want to squawk, don't you come squawkin' to me. Go squawk to Ferd Koenig, on account of he gave the orders. Me, I'm only doin' like he said.''
Vern Green smiled a slow, conspiratorial smile. 'Ain't gonna be a whole lot o' folks with the brass to try that.'
'Hell, I wouldn't,' Jeff said. 'I know when I'm fightin' out of my weight. Anybody who wants to take a swing at it, well, good luck.' He peered through his reading glasses at the roster. 'Let's see how we can finish this off and still have enough left to do our jobs here.'
Neither of them ended up happy about what they came up with. But they both agreed Camp Humble could go on reducing population without the guards they'd ship to Little Rock. Then they wrangled about who would announce the transfers. Jeff wanted the guard chief to do it. Green insisted the words had to come out of the commandant's mouth. In they end, they split the difference. Pinkard would announce the Attorney General's order, while Green read the names of the men who would go to Little Rock.
Even assembling the guards was tricky. Like any soldiers or bureaucrats, the men knew a break in routine was suspicious. To them, change was anything but good. And they started yelling their heads off when Jeff announced that Ferd Koenig required some of them to go to the front.
'Shut up!' Pinkard yelled, and his bellow was enough to rock them back on their heels and make sure they damn well did shut up, at least for a little while. Into that sudden, startled silence, he went on, 'Y'all reckon I want to do this? You're out of your goddamn minds if you do. You reckon I've got any choice? You're just as crazy if you think so, and a lot stupider'n I figured you were.'
'We won't go!' somebody yelled, and other guards took up the cry.
'Oh, yes, you will,' Jeff said grimly. 'I don't believe you catch on. You ain't just fuckin' with me, people. Y'all are fuckin' with Ferd Koenig and Jake Featherston and the Freedom Party and the Confederate government. You'll end up in the stockade, and then they'll ship your sorry asses to the front any which way. And if you don't end up in a penal battalion for raising a ruckus, then I don't know shit about how things work. And I damn well do.'
A shudder ran through the guards. They didn't want to go to the front as soldiers. That was nasty and dangerous. But if you went to the front in a penal battalion, you were nothing but dead meat that hadn't got cooked yet. And they threw you straight into the fire.
'You still talkin' about not goin'?' Jeff asked. Nobody said anything this time. He nodded in something approaching satisfaction. 'That's more like it. Maybe y'all ain't as dumb as you look after all. Hell, you go and mutiny, maybe they don't send you to the front at all. Maybe they just line you up and shoot you.' He waited for another shudder, and got it. Then he went on, 'Vern here'll read out the names of the men who're going to Little Rock. You hear your name, be ready to ship out tomorrow at 0600. You ain't ready, you got more trouble'n you know what to do with, I promise. Vern?'
One by one, the guard commander read the list of names. Some men who got called jerked as if shot. For a few, or more than a few, that was bound to be anticipation. Others cursed Green or the Freedom Party. And still others reacted with complete disbelief. 'You can't do this to me!' one of them cried. 'Do you know whose cousin I am?'
'You ain't Ferd Koenig's cousin, and you ain't Jake Featherston's cousin, either,' Jefferson Pinkard said in a voice like iron. 'And as long as you ain't, it don't matter for shit whose cousin you are. You got it?'
'You can't talk to me that way!' exclaimed the guard with the prominent-but not prominent enough- cousin.
'No? Seems like I just did,' Jeff answered. 'You can get on the train tomorrow morning, or you can go to the stockade now and get on another train after that. You just bet your ass you won't be happy if you do, though.'
The cousin said not another word. Green went back to reading names. He got more howls of protest. Some guards did some virtuoso cussing. But nobody else said he wouldn't go. Nobody else said he had a relative important enough to keep him from going, either. As far as Jeff was concerned, that was progress.
He waited with the shivering guards the next morning. All but two of them were there. Those two had skipped camp. They'd be the military police's worry from now on. He figured the MPs would track them down and make them sorry. The train pulled in right on time, snorting up in the beginnings of morning twilight-sunup was still a ways away.
