'If it don't get better pretty damn quick, I'm gonna talk to the Governor,' the mayor warned.
Jeff Pinkard laughed. 'Go right ahead. You do that. Be my guest. You reckon the Governor amounts to anything when you set him next to Ferd Koenig and Jake Featherston?'
To his surprise, the mayor of Humble answered, 'Matter of fact, General, I sure do. Richmond's gone. Even if it wasn't, there's damnyankees in between here and there. What the hell can Koenig and Featherston do way out here?'
He might be right. A nasty chill of fear ran through Pinkard when he realized as much. Like any government, the Confederacy ran because people agreed it ought to. What happened if they stopped agreeing? What happened if Texas Rangers came out here with guns? How could you know ahead of time?
'Let me ask you a question, your Honor,' Pinkard said heavily. 'Who went down on his knees beggin' for me to put this here camp where it's at? Who damn near jizzed in his dungarees when I said I would? Was that anybody who looks like you?'
'That was then,' Doggett returned. 'You didn't tell me it was gonna stink the way it does and belch out black smoke you can see for miles.'
'I didn't know, goddammit. Those bastards who put in the ovens and the stacks went and rooked me,' Jeff said. 'But even if it does stink, it's doing something the country needs. You gonna try and tell me I'm wrong?'
'Well, no. I got no more use for coons'n any other decent, God-fearing white man does,' the mayor said. 'But godalmightydamn, General, it sure does stink. Makes the whole town smell like a barbecue pit some stupid fool went and forgot about. You're in a fancy uniform, so you get to give orders. Me, I got voted in, and I got a hell of a lot of people here in Humble who sure ain't gonna vote for me again 'cause of that smell. I mean, gettin' rid o' niggers is one thing. Doin' it so you can smell 'em roast-that's a whole different story.'
'You want to eat roast beef, but you don't want to butcher your cow,' Jeff said. 'Camp's gotta be somewhere. I liked it where it was at before, too, but the damnyankees went and ran us out of there. That ain't my fault.'
'I didn't say it was, but it's another problem. Suppose we go and lose the war.'
'That's defeatism,' Jeff said automatically.
The mayor of Humble astonished him by replying, 'Oh, cut the crap, General. We're fucked, and you know it as well as I do. Like I said, Richmond's gone. They chopped us in half in Georgia. The President's on the run. How are we gonna win? I wish we could, but I ain't a blind man. And suppose we lose, like I said. What if the damnyankee soldiers march in here and ask, 'What the devil were you doin' with a murder camp there on your doorstep, Mr. Mayor?' What do I tell 'em then, hey?'
'Fuck,' Pinkard muttered under his breath. That was insubordination so bad, it was damn near treason. Or it would have been, if it weren't such a good question.
Suppose we do go and surrender. Suppose the Yankees do come marching in. What do I tell them? The only answer that came to mind was, I was just doing what the bigwigs in Richmond told me to do. Would they buy that? What would they do to him if they didn't?
'General? Hey, General! You there?' How long had Doggett been yelling in his ear? A little while, evidently. He'd had other things to worry about.
'Yeah? What is it?' he managed, dragging himself back to the business at hand.
'You don't get that camp cleaned up in jig time, I will talk to Governor Patman. You see if I don't.'
'You'll be sorry if you do.' Jeff thought he meant that, anyway. He knew damn well he had more firepower than the Texas Rangers could bring to bear against him. But whether his guards had the will to fight other Confederate white men…He wasn't so sure about that. He hoped like anything he wouldn't have to find out.
'If you're smart, General, you'll take off your uniform, put your wife an' young 'uns in a civilian motorcar, and head for some town where nobody knows your face. You think the damnyankees'll have questions to ask me? What'll they say to you?'
Pinkard hung up. He did it by sheer reflex. The mayor's thoughts didn't just run parallel to his. They'd got ahead of them on the same road. If U.S. soldiers came here, they would have things to say to him.
Unpleasant things.
'But I can't leave,' he said aloud. No matter what the Yankees had to say to him, he was proud of everything he'd done here, and over in Snyder, and outside of Alexandria, too. He'd had an important job to do, and he'd done it well. If not for him, the whole population-reduction program would have been a hell of a lot less efficient. Didn't that count for anything?
The Attorney General thought so. Hell, the President of the Confederate States of America thought so. What else mattered?
Nothing else mattered-as long as his side was calling the shots. Never mind Texas Rangers. U.S. soldiers wouldn't like what he'd done. And the main reason they wouldn't like it-or so things seemed to him-was that his own side did.
'Fuck 'em,' Jeff muttered. 'Fuck 'em all.'
He wondered whether Mayor Doggett would send cops around to give Edith and the boys a hard time. He didn't intend to put up with anything like that. Maybe his guards would have trouble against the Rangers. Against this little town's one-lung police force, though, they could start a reign of terror.
No sooner had that crossed his mind than the telephone rang again. He said some things that should have melted the glass out of the windows in his office. What did Doggett want now? 'Pinkard here,' he snarled.
'Jeff, it's me.' That wasn't the mayor-it was Edith. 'My pains have started. We're going to have us a baby.'
'Oh, good God!' Jeff said, mentally apologizing to the Lord whose name he'd done worse than take in vain a moment before. 'You ready to go down to Houston?'
'I sure am!' his wife answered. 'Miss Todd next door, she'll take care of Willie and Frank till you can get home.'
'I'll send a guard with an auto for you right away,' Jeff said. He couldn't leave the camp himself right now, especially not after the brawl with the mayor. Humble wasn't big enough to boast a hospital of its own. But it was only twenty miles from Houston, so that shouldn't matter.
He summoned a reliable troop leader to drive one of the Birminghams attached to Camp Humble. As he gave the three-striper his orders, he thought, Damn, I wish Hip Rodriguez was still around to do this for me. His old Army buddy would have done it right, one hundred percent guaranteed. Oh, Porter was more than reliable enough, but still… As always, Pinkard knew a moment of pained incomprehension when he thought about Hipolito Rodriguez. What the devil made Hip eat his submachine gun? He was doing a good job, and doing a job that needed doing.
That was something to brood on as he poured himself a big snort from the highly unofficial bottle in a desk drawer. He couldn't have taken the whiskey along if he had torn himself away from this and gone to the hospital. What could he do in the waiting room, anyway? Worry. He could do that here, too. He could, and he did.
Dammit, what possessed Hip to do that? He didn't see any damnyankee writing on the wall; things were going well enough when he shot himself. Why, then? It was as if he'd suddenly decided he'd made some vast mistake, and blowing off the top of his head was the only way he could fix it.
'But that's crazy,' Jeff said, taking a slug from the drink. 'Just plain old crazy.' It wasn't as if Hip didn't believe in getting rid of Negroes. He couldn't have had woman troubles, either. Jeff knew Hip got laid every once in a while on the women's side. Not many male guards didn't. (For that matter, the same was true of female guards.) He felt guilty about fooling around on his wife-Jeff remembered as much from the Great War. But he didn't feel all that guilty, which Jeff also knew.
So what went wrong, then? The obvious answer-that Hip couldn't stand killing people any more even if they were black-stared Pinkard in the face. It had ever since Rodriguez shot himself. And ever since then, Jeff had stubbornly refused to look at it.
He didn't change now. He'd come too far down this road to change…unless he put the barrel of a gun in his own mouth and pulled the trigger. He refused to look at doing that, either. Instead, he finished the drink and poured another one.
He kept on drinking for the next seven hours. The camp didn't fall to pieces in that time, which was just as well, because he wouldn't have cared if it had. He spilled whiskey when the telephone rang. 'Pinkard here,' he slurred.
'Congratulations, sir! Your wife is fine, and you've got a boy!' Troop Leader Porter said. 'What'll you name
