Drive to the East (42 page)

“Aunt Flora could have kept him out of the Army if he’d wanted her to. Same with me,” Yossel said, his voice matter-of-fact. “But you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. Otherwise, how can you stand yourself?” After a moment, he added, “Did I ever tell you Uncle David’s a fire-breathing Democrat?”

“Yeah, I think you did,” Armstrong answered. Because Reisen seemed to expect him to, he asked, “How does your aunt like it?”

“She doesn’t,” Yossel said, as matter-of-factly as before. “They still get along with each other well enough, but they argue whenever they talk about politics.”

Before Armstrong could say anything, a horrible screech filled the air. “Screaming meemies!” he yelled, and folded himself as small as he could, down there in the foxhole that was now suddenly, horribly, on the wrong side of the fence. Yossel Reisen did the same.

The spigot mortar burst with a roar like the end of the world. A lot of the rounds from the Mormons’ weird makeshift artillery were duds. The ones that weren’t packed a hell of a wallop. The ground shook under Armstrong. For a horrid moment, he thought the foxhole would collapse and bury him alive.

What if it did? The headline would be
FORMER FIRST LADY’S NEPHEW KILLED IN COMBAT!
Armstrong would make a one-sentence add-on to the story—
Another soldier also died
—if that.

When he could hear anything but the thunder of the explosion, he heard people screaming. There in the bottom of the hole, his eyes met Yossel Reisen’s. He knew exactly what Yossel was thinking, because he was thinking the same thing himself.
Oh, hell,
or words to that effect.

He wanted to come out of the safety of the foxhole about as much as he wanted to dance naked in front of the Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City wagging his pecker at the gilded statue of the Angel Moroni. That might get him shot faster than this. On the other hand, it might not.

But you had to pick up your buddies. That had been drilled into him since day one of his abbreviated basic training. He’d seen the sense of it in the field, too, which wasn’t true of a lot of the crap they’d fed him in basic. If you didn’t help your buddies when they needed it most, they wouldn’t help you if you did—and you were liable to.

“Come on, dammit.” He and Yossel said the same thing at the same time, as if they were an old married couple. They’d both been around this particular block often enough, that was for damn sure.

Up they went, keeping their bellies rattlesnake-low on the ground. Rex Stowe was out there, too. The sergeant made no bones about disliking several of the new men in his section. He came to help them anyway. They were part of his job—and, again, he expected them to do the same for him.

That damned Mormon machine gunner opened up again after the spigot-mortar round went off. He knew there’d be wounded—and that there’d be guys trying to do what they could for them. Spray enough bullets around and you’d get some more wounded, maybe even some dead.

Armstrong and Sergeant Stowe reached the closest injured man at about the same time. They looked at him and then looked at each other. Armstrong was pretty sure his face wore the same horrified expression as Stowe’s. That a man could make so much noise when so little of him was left . . . War was full of nasty surprises, and it had just pulled another one on Armstrong Grimes.

“Cavendish! Hey, Cavendish!” Stowe said. When he got a momentary lull in the screaming, he asked, “You want us to bring you in, or you want to get it over with right now? Your call.”

Had that been Armstrong, he would have wanted it over and done with. He had no idea how Stowe knew the wounded man was Cavendish; there sure wasn’t enough left of his face to tell by that, and one guy’s shrieks sounded a lot like another’s. But Cavendish seemed perfectly coherent when he said, “For the love of Mike, take me in.” Then, hardly missing a beat, he went back to screaming again.

Stowe looked at Armstrong and shrugged. “He might live.”

He didn’t sound as if he believed it. Armstrong sure didn’t. He looked at what was left of Cavendish. No, he wouldn’t have wanted to go on if he looked like that. But if the other soldier did . . . “Gotta try, I guess.”

They bandaged and tourniqueted Cavendish’s wounds, stopping the worst of the bleeding. Stowe closed the one in the man’s belly with a couple of safety pins. They weren’t much, but they were better than nothing. Both Armstrong and Stowe gave him a shot of morphine. “Maybe he’ll shut up,” Armstrong said.

“Yeah, and if we gave him too much of the shit, maybe he’ll shut up for good,” Stowe said. “That’s easier than going out the way he was.” Armstrong grunted and nodded. His hands were all bloody. So were Stowe’s. The sergeant asked, “You want to take him back, or shall I?”

No corpsmen were in sight. They did the best they could, but they couldn’t be everywhere. Armstrong considered. Taking Cavendish back would get him out of the front line for a bit, but the Mormons might shoot him while he did it. He shrugged. “I’ll take care of it if you want me to.”

“Go on, then.” Stowe could make the same calculation as Armstrong. “I’ll get him on your back—you’ll want to stay low.”

“Fuckin’-A I will,” Armstrong said fervently. He’d stayed as near horizontal as he could while working on Cavendish. So had Rex Stowe. They’d both spent a lot of time—too much time, as far as Armstrong was concerned—up at the front. They’d learned what tricks there were to know about staying alive and not getting hurt. The only trouble was, sometimes all the tricks in the world didn’t do you a damn bit of good.

With what was left of Cavendish on top of him, Armstrong crawled away from the Mormon machine gun. At least the dreadfully wounded man wasn’t wriggling so much. Maybe the morphine the two noncoms had given him was taking hold.

Even half a mile back of the line, they acted a lot more regulation. A soldier in a clean new uniform stared at Armstrong and said, “What are you doing bringing a body back here? Leave him for Graves Registration.”

“Fuck you, Jack,” Armstrong said without heat. “For one thing, he ain’t dead. For another thing, he’s worth two of Graves Registration and four of you. Point me at the nearest aid station before I kick your worthless ass.”

Armstrong wasn’t small, but the other man was bigger. Fury wouldn’t have worried him. Armstrong’s complete indifference to consequences did. Maybe he thought Armstrong would just as soon kill him as look at him—and maybe he was right. He said, “There’s a tent behind that pile of bricks. It shields ’em from small-arms fire.”

“Thanks.” Armstrong headed that way, carrying Cavendish now. The wounded man was a lot lighter than he had been before he got hurt. A corpsman came out before Armstrong got halfway there. “Hey!” he called. “Come give me a hand with this guy.”

The corpsman trotted toward him. When he got close enough to take a good look at Cavendish, he stopped short, his boots kicking up dust. “Jesus!” he said.

“Tell me about it,” Armstrong said. “You should’ve seen him before my sergeant and me patched him up. But he said he wanted to live if he could.” He shrugged. “What are you gonna do when a guy says that?”

“Jesus.” The corpsman looked green, and he’d seen some of the worst things war could do. “Well, I guess we’ve got to try. I’ll help you get him to the tent.”

“Thank you.” Cavendish’s voice was dreamy and far away. Armstrong had thought he’d long since passed out. The corpsman looked as if he’d just heard a ghost.

The surgeon in the tent did a double take when he saw Cavendish. Armstrong got out of there before the doc went to work. Watching would have made him sick. That was crazy, but it was true. He went back up to the front line. There, at least, death and mutilation came at random. You didn’t know about them ahead of time. That made them, if not tolerable, at least possible to bear.

J
efferson Pinkard wondered why the hell the vice president of the Cyclone Chemical Company wasn’t in the Army. Cullen Beauregard—“Call me C.B.”—Slattery couldn’t have been more than thirty. He was obviously healthy, and just as obviously sharp.

“Oh, yes, sir,” he said. “Anything alive, this’ll shift. You don’t need to worry about that at all.”

“You make it for bugs, though.”

“That’s right.” Slattery nodded.

“But it’ll kill rats and mice,” Jeff said. C.B. Slattery nodded again. Jeff went on, “And cats and dogs?” Another nod. “And people?”

“Yes, sir. It will absolutely kill people. That’s why you’ve got to be careful when you use it,” Slattery said. “Matter of fact, the chemical’s the same one some Yankee states use to kill criminals.”

“Really? Is that a fact?” Jeff said. One more nod from Slattery. He was one of the noddingest people Jeff had ever met. “If you wanted to, you could use it to kill a whole bunch of people, then?”

“Absolutely. You absolutely could.” The chemical-company official didn’t ask why Pinkard might want to use his product, made to get rid of roaches and other pests, to dispose of large numbers of people instead. What he did say was, “If you use large quantities, you’d be entitled to a bulk discount.”

“That’s nice. That’s white of you, matter of fact,” Jeff said. C.B. Slattery laughed uproariously. He didn’t ask what color the people who might die were. Pretty plainly, he already knew.

Somewhere in Camp Determination, a work gang of Negroes chanted rhythmically as they carried or dug or did whatever the guards told them to do. Slattery smiled at that, too, the way he might have smiled at a bear playing with a medicine ball in a zoo.

The shape of his smile decided Jeff. This wasn’t a man who would balk at what needed discussing here. “Let’s get down to brass tacks, then,” Jeff said. “Can your firm design us a facility, I guess you’d call it, that would let us reduce the camp population without leaving the niggers still here any the wiser about what was going on inside?” He’d talked about killing people when it was in the abstract. When it got down to something he might actually do, his own words turned abstract. Reducing population didn’t seem to mean so much.

“My firm? No, sir. Sorry, but that’s not what we do. We make insecticide,” Slattery answered. Pinkard muttered under his breath; he hadn’t expected a flat refusal. But when the bright young man continued, he discovered he hadn’t got one, either: “But I can put you in touch with some design outfits that will help you along those lines. Just as a guess, I’d say you’d want to call it a delousing station or a bath-house or something like that. Sound reasonable?”

“Sounds sensible. I was thinking along those lines myself, to tell you the truth,” said Pinkard, who hadn’t been. He picked up a pencil and wrote,
Delousing? Baths?
on a sheet of foolscap. Maybe Slattery saw through him, maybe not. He went on, “Now, these outfits you’re talking about—they in Arkansas like you? If I have my druthers, I want to work with somebody local, you know what I mean?”

“I sure do, and I respect that,” Slattery said quickly. Respecting it didn’t mean agreeing with it, but did mean he’d go along if he wanted the Cyclone Chemical Company to get the business. When Jefferson Pinkard wanted his druthers these days, he damn well got them. He remembered wishing for them in the last war, wishing and not getting. A lot of things about growing older were damned unpleasant (his last visit to the dentist leaped to mind). But if you were halfway decent at what you did, you got your druthers a lot more often than you had when you were younger. As if to underscore that, C.B. Slattery continued, “Naturally, we work with people from Little Rock a lot of the time. But I do believe a couple of these outfits have branches in Texas—Dallas or Houston, I’m not quite sure which.”

“Well, you can wire me the details when you get home,” Jeff said, and it was Slattery’s turn to write himself a note. “I’ll do some checking on my own, too.” If Slattery thought he could set up some sweetheart deal, maybe rig kickbacks for Cyclone Chemical, he could damn well think again.

He wasn’t fool enough to let on that he’d had anything like that in mind. “You go right ahead, sir. I think you’ll find out the firms I recommend are competitive in quality and in price.” He paused to pull out a pack of cigarettes, offer one to Jeff, and then stick one in his own mouth. Once they both had lights, he remarked, “Something else occurs to me.”

“What’s that?”

“You might want to site this, ah, facility away from the main camp and take prisoners to it. You’d be less likely to spook the spooks that way, if you know what I mean.” Slattery had a disarming grin.

He also had a point. Jeff scribbled some more on that sheet of foolscap. “Could be,” he said. It applied the same principle as telling Negroes they were going to another camp when they got into the trucks from which they would never get out. “We could move ’em right on through, just like a . . . factory.”

The word that first crossed his mind, that caused the pause, was
slaughterhouse.
He didn’t want to say that, any more than he wanted to talk about killing Negroes rather than reducing population. It made him think too openly about what this camp was for.

“You sure could.” C.B. Slattery fairly radiated enthusiasm. “It’d be a privilege for my firm to be affiliated with such a patriotic enterprise. Freedom!”

“Freedom!” Jeff echoed automatically. “You’ll be hearing from us. I expect some of those designers may, too, so get me that word quick as you can. Like I say, though, I’ll check out some other outfits in these parts along with ’em.”

“You know your business best.” No, Slattery wasn’t about to argue. No matter who built the places where the Negroes went in and didn’t come out, the chemical that made sure they didn’t come out would come from his company. He said, “Freedom!” one more time and hurried out of Pinkard’s office. By the way he moved, his next appointment was just as urgent and just as important as this one. It wasn’t likely to be, but treating it that way made him a good businessman.

Jeff got up and watched him leave the administrative center, then went back to his desk. He picked up the telephone and called Richmond. He wanted Ferdinand Koenig knowing what was going on every step of the way. The Attorney General heard him out—he did try to keep things short—and then said, “This all sounds pretty good. Only one thing bothers me a little.”