The Victorious opposition

"You, boy!" Pinkard pointed to one of them, a big, muscular buck. "Give me your name and number and where you were captured."

"I's Plutarch, suh," the Negro replied. He rattled off the camp number, finishing, "I was cotched up in Franklin Parish, suh. Some damn nigger sell me out. I ever find out who, dat one dead coon."

A lot of prisoners here had similar complaints. Some Negroes didn't want guerrilla war in their back yards. The ones who didn't had to be careful with what they did and said, though. A lot of them had ended up gruesomely dead when the men they were trying to betray took vengeance.

"Any complaints?" Pinkard asked.

Plutarch nodded. "I ain't got enough to eat, I ain't got enough to wear, an' I's here. 'Side from that, everything fine."

"Fu

Several of the other blacks in the barracks had smiled and nodded at what Plutarch had to say. None had been rash enough to laugh out loud. Now even the men who'd smiled tried to pretend they hadn't. Pinkard said, "You get the same rations and same clothes as everybody else. And if you didn't want to be here, you never should have picked up a gun."

"Huh!" Plutarch said. "White folks rise up against what they don't like, they's heroes. Black folks do the same, we's goddamn niggers."

"Bet your ass you are, boy," that guard said.

"There's a difference," Pinkard said.

Plutarch nodded. "Sure enough is. Y'all won. We lost. Ain't no bigger difference'n dat." That wasn't the difference Jeff had had in mind, which didn't mean the prisoner was wrong. Pinkard poked through the barracks. He knew how things were supposed to be, and carefully checked out everything that didn't match the pattern. Nothing looked like the start of an escape attempt, but you couldn't be sure without a thorough inspection.

On to the next barracks. As before, prisoners tumbled out of their bunks and stood at stiff attention. There was one difference here, though: Willy Knight dwelt in Barracks Six. The tall, blond, former vice president stood out from the black men all around him like a snowball in a coal field.

He was not the man he had been when Freedom Party guards brought him to Camp Dependable. He was scrawnier; camp rations weren't enough to let anybody keep the weight he'd come in with. He was dirtier, too-water for washing was in short supply. And, in an odd way, he was tougher than he had been. That he'd been tough enough to stay alive surprised Jeff Pinkard, who wouldn't have given him the chance of a snowball: a snowball in hell.

Hell this might well have been. But none of the Negro inhabitants here had taken advantage of the chance to get rid of a Freedom Party big shot. That surprised Pinkard, too-it did, but then again, it didn't. The blacks might have suspected Knight was in here as much as bait as for any other reason. Anybody who harmed him was liable to pay the price.

They might not have been wrong, either. For the moment, Jeff's orders were to look the other way if anything happened to Willy Knight. But one telegram could change that, and could change it days or weeks or months after something nasty happened to the ex-vice president.

Almost as if Knight were any other prisoner, Pinkard pointed at him and snapped, "You! Give me your name and number!" He couldn't make himself call another white boy.

Knight repeated his name and camp number, then added, "I was captured in Richmond, Virginia, trying to save the country."

"I want something from you, I'll ask for it," Jeff said.

The guard who'd growled at Plutarch growled at Willy Knight, too: "You really want to catch hell, just go on ru

Knight shut up. The first time someone had said something like that to him, he'd asked what could be worse than coming to the camp to begin with. The guards had spent the next couple of weeks showing him what could be worse. Another way he was different now was that he didn't have any front teeth. He'd learned something, but not everything, about keeping quiet.

Pinkard didn't ask him if he had any complaints. Even if Knight did, nobody was going to do anything about them. That being so, why waste time and breath?

The warden did inspect Barracks Six with care unusual even for him. If some of the colored prisoners escaped, that would be a misfortune. He'd get called on the carpet. If Willy Knight escaped, that would be a catastrophe. Somebody's head would have to roll, and he knew whose. He might end up in one of these hard, narrow bunks himself-or they might simply shoot him and get it over with. Nobody, but nobody, was going to escape from Barracks Six.

Everything seemed shipshape. Pinkard didn't trust the way things seemed. He had no reason not to. He just didn't. He took out a little book and scribbled a note to himself. Half the men in here would get cleared out before the day was done, to be replaced by prisoners from other barracks. If plots were stirring, that would slow them down. People would have to figure out who could be trusted and who couldn't. I better stick a new informer or two in here, too, Jeff thought. The less that went on without his knowing it, the better the camp ran.

He was heading for the next barracks when a guard came up to him with a yellow envelope. "This here wire just came in, boss," the man said, and thrust it at him.

"What the hell?" Pinkard took the envelope, opened it, and extracted the telegram inside. "What the hell?" he said again, this time in tones of deep dismay.

"What's the matter?" the guard asked.

"What's the matter?" Jeff would echo anybody, not just himself. "I'll tell you what's the matter. We're going to get a new shipment of prisoners, that's what-a big new shipment of prisoners. Nice of 'em to let us know, wasn't it? They're supposed to start comin' in this afternoon."

"A new shipment of prisoners?" The guard proved he could repeat what he'd just heard, too. Then he exploded, much as Jeff wanted to do. "Jesus H. Christ! Where the hell we go

"You know that, Wes, and I know that, and anybody who knows one goddamn thing about this here camp knows it, too," Pinkard said. "But you know what else? The folks in Richmond don't know it. Either that or they just don't give a fuck." He looked around more than a little frantically. "Where am I go

Wes frowned. Then he shrugged. "Split up what you get with as many mouths as we got inside. What the hell else can you do?"

"Damfino." Jefferson Pinkard shook his head in deep discontent. "Prisoners we got are already hungry as can be on what we're feeding 'em. Nothin' left to scrounge off the countryside. If they got to make do with three-quarters as much-or maybe only half as much: how can I guess?-they're go

"You don't need to get your bowels in an uproar about it, boss," Wes said. "They're only niggers, for Chrissake. Ain't like you was starvin' Uncle Henry and Aunt Daisy."

"Oh, hell, I know that," Pinkard said. "But this is all just a bunch of crap." His sense of order, of propriety, was offended. "If they send us extra men, they oughta send us the extra rations to go with 'em. Ain't fair if they don't. It's like in the Bible where old what's-his-name-Pharaoh-made the Jews make bricks without straw." He wanted things to work the way they were supposed to.

"Reckon the sheenies had it coming to 'em, same as the coons do now," Wes said.

But Pinkard shook his head. "No. You give somebody something to do, you got to give him the chance to do it, too. And Richmond ain't."