Harry Turtledove - Drive to the East

Rodriguez glanced at the young men with submachine guns who accompanied him. They showed no signs of recognizing the far-off rumble. That only proved they’d never seen combat.

Why aren’t you in the real Army? Rodriguez wondered. The answer wasn’t hard to figure out-they’d pulled strings. This was bound to be a safer duty than facing soldiers in green-gray. The mallates here might be troublesome, but they didn’t shoot back. And they definitely didn’t have artillery.

An airplane buzzed over the camp. It was a Confederate Hound Dog; Rodriguez could make out the C.S. battle flags painted under the wings. U.S. warplanes had made appearances, too. If they wanted to bomb or strafe, they could. Camp Determination wasn’t set up to defend against air attack; nobody had ever thought it would have to.

So far, the U.S. aircraft had left the place alone. Maybe the fliers didn’t know what this place was. Or maybe they knew and didn’t care. It wasn’t as if people in the USA loved Negroes, either. They complained about what the Confederates were doing to them, but that struck Rodriguez as nothing but propaganda. If the United States really cared about Negroes, they would have opened their borders to them. They hadn’t. They weren’t about to, either.

Two women got into a catfight. They screeched and scratched and wrestled and swore. Rodriguez and his comrades hurried toward the squabble. The women were shrieking about somebody named Adrian. Was he a guard? Rodriguez couldn’t think of any guards named Adrian, but he might have missed somebody. Was he a black man in the other half of the prison? Or was he somebody they’d known back where they came from?

Whoever he was, he wasn’t worth disturbing the peace for. “Enough!” Rodriguez yelled. “Break it up!”

The women ignored him. They were too intent on maiming each other to care what a guard said. “You whore!” one of them shouted.

“I ain’t no whore!” The second woman pulled the first one’s hair, which produced a shrill scream. “ You the whore!”

“Break it up!” Rodriguez yelled again. “Punishment cell for both of you!”

Life at Camp Determination was hard anyway. It was harder in a punishment cell. They didn’t give prisoners room to stand up or sit down. They had no stoves-you froze in the winter. In the summer, you baked, but everybody in the camp baked in the summer. You got starvation rations, even skimpier and nastier than the cooks doled out to anybody else.

But the two women really meant this brawl. They wouldn’t stop no matter what a man in uniform said. That was unusual. Rodriguez nodded to the junior guards with him. “Take care of it,” he said.

They did, using the butt ends of their submachine guns. Some of the models that went up to the front were of all-metal construction, so cheap they’d fall to pieces if you dropped them on the sidewalk. But the guards got better-made weapons with real wooden stocks. One reason they did was for times like this. Even if you didn’t want to shoot somebody, you sometimes had to knock sense into an empty head.

Now the women shrieked on a different note. Back when they first got half the camp to themselves, some of the guards were reluctant to clout them. No more. Familiarity had bred contempt.

“Didn’t you hear the troop leader yell for you to break it up?” one of the guards panted. “He tells you to do something, you cut the crap and you do it, you hear?”

If Rodriguez hadn’t had three stripes on his sleeve, he likely would have been nothing but a damn Mexican to the guard. Of course, even a damn Mexican stood higher on the Confederate ladder than a nigger (unless you were a white Texan from down near the Rio Grande). And a troop leader stood infinitely higher than a prisoner in an extermination camp.

One of the women had an eye swollen shut. The other one had blood running down the side of her head. They pointed at each other. At exactly the same time, they both said, “She started it.”

“Nobody cares who start it,” Rodriguez said. “You don’t stop when I say to stop. I say twice, you still don’t stop. Now you pay.” He turned to the guards. “To the punishment cells. They start this shit again, you shoot. You hear?”

“Yes, Troop Leader!” they chorused, their timing almost as good as the women’s.

Rodriguez wondered if the Negroes thought he was joking. If they did, it was the last mistake they’d ever make. Nobody in the Confederate States-nobody who mattered, anyway-would care whether a couple of colored women died a little sooner than they would have otherwise. Far away in the distance, artillery rumbled again. As long as it didn’t get much closer, everything was all right. Rodriguez hoped everything would go on being all right, too.

Willard Sloan was not a nice man. Scipio listened to him screaming on the telephone: “You call that lettuce? Holy Jesus, only thing it was good for was wiping my ass! What do I mean? I’ll tell you what I mean. It was limper than an old man’s dick, that’s what, and it looked like the bugs ate as much as you sold me. Nobody pulls that kind of shit on me twice, you hear?” Bang! Down went the receiver.

Sloan might have been nice before the Yankee bullet paralyzed him from the waist down. Or he might have been a son of a bitch from the start. If he’d ever heard the old saying about catching more flies with honey than with vinegar, he didn’t believe it. Maybe he just didn’t like flies.

Most restaurant managers worth their pay had some son of a bitch in them. Jerry Dover sure did. But the new man at the Huntsman’s Lodge took it to extremes. When something made him unhappy, you heard about it, loudly and profanely. Sloan operated on the theory that the squeaky wheel got the grease. He didn’t just squeak-he screeched.

He cussed Scipio out when the black man made mistakes. Scipio did make some-with all the things that went on in a busy restaurant, he couldn’t help it. But he didn’t make many, and Willard Sloan noticed. “Well, looks like Dover knew what he was talking about,” he said one day. “You do know what the fuck you’re doin’.”

“I thanks you, suh,” Scipio said. “You do somethin’, you likes to do it good.”

“Ha!” Sloan said. “Most people”-he didn’t say most niggers, for which Scipio gave him credit-“only want to do enough to get by. You show up every day, and you work like a bastard.”

“I does my job bes’ way I knows how,” Scipio said.

“Well, that’s what you’re supposed to do,” the manager said. “Doesn’t happen as often as it ought to, though. I can hire a hundred people who could wait tables kinda half-assed, you know what I mean? Good enough to get by, but not really good. One of you is worth all of them put together. You’re the kind of waiter a place like this is supposed to have. You’re the kind of waiter who makes the Huntsman’s Lodge the kind of place it is.”

“Thank you, suh. Don’t reckon I hear many finer compliments.” Scipio meant it. Willard Sloan didn’t have to waste praise on him. If Sloan did it, he meant it. Maybe hearing that praise made Scipio rash, for he went on, “How much it matter, though, when they kin ship me off to a camp whenever they please?”

As soon as the words were gone, he wished he had them back. Whining to a white man never did a Negro any good. Willard Sloan didn’t answer for a while. Then he said, “When I got shot, I was out in no-man’s-land, between our lines and the damnyankees’. A nigger soldier brought me back, or maybe I would’ve died out there.”

“What happen to him afterwards?” Scipio asked.

Sloan sighed. “Xerxes, I don’t know. I just don’t know. I don’t know where he’s from. I don’t know his name. I don’t know if he got himself killed next day or next week or next month. I can’t tell you, that’s all. I wasn’t an officer leading colored troops or anything-their sector was next to ours, that’s all. I don’t even know if he was out there already or if he came out to get me. I was in the hospital a hell of a long time after that. I never had the chance to find out.”