Some folks were right-dead right. “Who say stupid things like this?” Rodriguez asked. The Negro hesitated. He didn’t want to squeal on his friends, even with the threat from the submachine gun. Rodriguez asked a different question, one that seemed safer on the outside: “What barracks you live in?”

“I’s in Barracks Twenty-seven, suh,” the Negro said.

“Twenty-seven.” Rodriguez turned to the guards with him. “Remember that.”

“Will do, Troop Leader,” the three of them said as if they were one man. Rodriguez had discovered he liked wearing three stripes on his sleeve. He gave more orders than he took these days. In orders as in many other things, it was better to give than to receive.

He turned back to the Negro. “I find you lie to me about where you at, mallate, this camp ain’t big enough for you to hide. You understand?”

“I ain’t lyin’, Mistuh Guard, suh.” The prisoner practically radiated innocence-and no doubt would keep doing it till Rodriguez looked away or turned his back. “If I’s lyin’, I’s flyin’.”

“If you lyin’, you dyin’.” Rodriguez capped the black man’s rhyme with one of his own. He gestured with the muzzle of the submachine gun once more, this time in dismissal. The prisoner scurried away, glad to be out of the dread eye of officialdom.

“Troop Leader, how come we got to remember that barracks number?” asked one of the guards.

Rodriguez swallowed a sigh. Some of these people had no business looking down their noses at Negroes for stupidity. Patiently, he answered, “Because, Pruitt, we got to do something about Barracks Twenty-seven.”

“Like what, Troop Leader?” Pruitt radiated innocence, too. The trouble was, his was real.

“Ain’t gonna talk about it here.” Rodriguez gestured once more, this time with his left hand. There were four of them in their gray uniforms. All around them were Negroes, thousands of Negroes. Even though the men in gray all carried submachine guns, Rodriguez found himself sweating despite the cooler weather. The Negroes could rush them. Other guards would come try to save them. The machine gunners in the guard towers outside the barbed-wire perimeter would fire till their gun barrels glowed cherry red. They would massacre the blacks. Rodriguez doubted that would do him much good.

But no attack came. He and his companions finished their patrol. When they got back to the guards’ quarters, he reported to an officer what the Negro had told him. “Hmm,” said the chief assault leader-the equivalent of a captain in the Freedom Party guards. “What do you reckon we ought to do?”

“Clean out Barracks Twenty-seven, sir,” Rodriguez answered at once. “Tell them we ship them somewhere else because they talk too much. Then put them in trucks or send them to the bathhouse.”

“Hmm,” the chief assault leader said again. “I can’t decide that. I’ll have to pass it on up the line.”

“Yes, sir,” Rodriguez said resignedly. He’d seen this sort of thing in the Great War. Some officers knew what needed doing, then went and did it. Others knew what needed doing, then waited till somebody over them told them to do it. They weren’t so useful as the first kind, but they weren’t hopeless. The ones who didn’t know what needed doing… those were the officers who got their men killed.

Barracks Twenty-seven got cleaned out four days later than it should have, but it did get cleaned out. Rodriguez was part of the crew that took care of it. He wasn’t sorry; he wanted to see the job done. He also wanted to see it done right. “Gotta make sure we don’t spook the spooks,” another guard said. That summed things up, though Rodriguez’s smile was more dutiful than amused: he’d heard that joke, or ones too much like it, too many times before.

A different chief assault leader was in charge of the cleanout. Rodriguez wouldn’t have entrusted it to the man with whom he’d spoken, either. This fellow-his name was Higbe-handled it with aplomb. “We are too goddamn crowded here,” he told the black men lined up in front of the barracks, “so we’re shippin’ your asses down to El Paso. Y’all go back in the barracks and get whatever you need. Much as you can keep on your lap in a truck.” He looked at his watch. “You got ten minutes. Get movin’!”

That was a nice touch. Nothing too bad could happen to a man if he could bring his handful of miserable possessions with him… could it? One Negro hung back. Rodriguez recognized the black who’d spoken to him before at the same time as the mallate recognized him. Instead of hurrying into the barracks, the black man came over to him and said, “Mistuh Guard, suh, I don’t want to go to no El Paso.”

He knows what’s coming, all right, Rodriguez thought. “I think we fix it so you don’t got to,” he said aloud. He didn’t want the Negro kicking up a fuss. The less fuss, the better for everybody-except the prisoners, and they didn’t count. He went on, “Let me talk to my officer. We take care of it. You stay here. Don’t go nowhere.”

“Lawd bless you, suh,” the Negro said.

Rodriguez spoke briefly with Chief Assault Leader Higbe. Unlike the other officer, Higbe didn’t hesitate. He just nodded. “That sounds good to me, Troop Leader. You take care of it like you said.”

“Yes, sir.” Rodriguez saluted and went back to the Negro, who was nervously shifting from foot to foot. He nodded to the black man. “You come with me.”

“Where you takin’ me, suh?”

“Guards’ quarters. Got some questions to ask you.”

“Oh, yes, suh.” The Negro almost capered with glee. “I sings like a canary, long as you don’t put me on no truck.”

“You don’t want to go, you don’t go,” Rodriguez said. “What’s your name?”

“I’s Demetrius, suh,” the Negro answered.

Another fancy name, Rodriguez thought scornfully. The more raggedy the mallate, the fancier the handle he seemed to come with. “Bueno, Demetrius.” His words gave no clue to what lay in his mind. “You come along.”

Demetrius came, all smiles and relief. None of the other prisoners took any special notice; guards pulled blacks out of camp for one reason or another all the time. “What you need to know, suh?” Demetrius asked as they got near the barbed wire that segregated prisoners and guards. “Don’t matter what, not hardly. I tell you.”

“Bueno,” Rodriguez said once more. He waved to the gate crew. They opened up for him and Demetrius. Rodriguez urged the Negro on ahead of him. As soon as buildings hid them from the prisoners’ view, he fired a shot into the back of Demetrius’ head. He waited to see if he would need give him another one to finish him off, but he didn’t. The black man probably died before he finished crumpling to the ground.

“What’s up, Troop Leader?” another guard asked, as casually as if they were talking about the weather.

“Troublemaker,” Rodriguez answered: a response that could bury any black man. “We got to get rid of the body quiet-like.”

“Niggers’ll know he came in here. They’ll know he didn’t come out,” the trooper said.

Rodriguez shrugged. “And so? We say we catch him dealing in contraband, they think he deserve what he get.”

That overstated things a little. The prisoners admired people who could smuggle forbidden things into Camp Determination. But they knew the guards came down hard on the smugglers they caught. Dealers in contraband usually bribed guards to get stuff for them and look the other way. Guards got fired for doing things like that. The Negroes got fired, too: fired on.

“Get the body out of here,” Rodriguez told the man who’d questioned him.

He had stripes on his sleeve. The other guard didn’t. “Yes, Troop Leader,” he said, and took the late, unlamented Demetrius by the feet.

“I want to congratulate Troop Leader Rodriguez for a fine piece of work,” Jefferson Pinkard said at a guards’ meeting a few days later. “He spotted trouble, he reported it, and we dealt with it. Nobody in Barracks Twenty-seven is going to spread rumors anymore, by God. Chief Assault Leader Higbe deserves commendation for making the cleanout run so smooth. A letter will go in his file.”