The Grapple (35 page)

Go ahead—volunteer,
Rodriguez thought. Guards outfits were fighting alongside C.S. Army troops northwest of the camp. Even if he were hale, he wouldn’t have volunteered himself. He’d seen too much infantry combat in west Texas in the last war. He didn’t want or need any more.

“Maybe if we sneak in the spooks at night…” another guard said.

“Got to have lights to move ’em from the railhead into the camp,” Troop Leader Tom Porter said. The veteran was an outstanding noncom; Rodriguez tried to model himself after him. Porter went on, “Can you imagine what would happen if we lit this place up like a Christmas tree? Damnyankees’d be on it like ants on potato salad at a picnic.”

“They’ll blow up the niggers if they do that,” one of the young guards said. “They could hit this place any time they please. They don’t do it, on account of they love coons so goddamn much.”

Porter frowned. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe. But if they figure out they can take out a whole bunch of guards all at once, they might reckon it’s worthwhile. I mean, it’s not like we won’t reduce the niggers’ population anyway.”

The young guard grunted. So did Rodriguez. That sounded as if it made good military sense. “Why don’t they just bomb the camp anyhow, then, though?” the youngster said. “They’d just be blowing up the smokes a little bit before we take care of them.”

“Well, you’re right,” Porter said bleakly, which wasn’t what the young guard expected to hear. “That’s why we’ve got shelters in this place now. If they want to blast the living shit out of us, they can—no two ways about it.”

“What about the antiaircraft guns around the camp?” Two or three guards asked the question in almost identical words.

“What about ’em?” Porter said. “Antiaircraft guns don’t mean you can’t bomb a place if you want to bad enough. They just mean it costs more. If you’re willing to pay, you can do it. You bet your ass you can. You reckon they don’t have antiaircraft guns all over Richmond and Philadelphia? You reckon those places don’t get bombed? Ha!”

Nobody said anything for a while after that. Hipolito Rodriguez found himself looking at the ceiling, as if to see bombers overhead. He would have been embarrassed if he were the only one doing it. But he wasn’t—nowhere close.

He almost panicked when droning airplane engines woke him later that night. He was ready to run for the shelter, not that his middle-aged, almost-electrocuted body could run very fast. But the enemy airplanes went on to the east. Whatever they were after, it wasn’t Camp Determination or Snyder.

Two days later, Jefferson Pinkard sent another contingent of female guards packing. The men who had to go over to the women’s side to take their shift didn’t know exactly why the guards left. All their guesses were lewd, though. It wasn’t as if Pinkard minded brutality, as long as it stopped short of the point where prisoners rebelled.

Rodriguez wondered if he would find Bathsheba and Antoinette alive. To his surprise, he did. They’d lasted longer than most camp inmates. Both of them were dreadfully thin now; the older woman coughed all the time. But they greeted him with smiles. “It’s the nice sergeant,” Bathsheba said. “How is that Xerxes? How is our man?”

Dead. Rotting in a trench a bulldozer scraped in the ground, piled in with God knows how many other bodies.
He couldn’t tell them that. He didn’t have the heart. He’d led so many men to their death—what was telling the truth about one of them next to that? Nothing, logically, but logical didn’t seem to have much to do with it.

And so he lied: “He is good. He is about like you. He says hello. He says he loves you both. He says he misses your son.” He remembered Bathsheba had one, and that the boy or young man didn’t come to the camp.

“I misses Cassius, too,” the older woman said, and Antoinette nodded. Bathsheba went on, “I hope he’s all right.”

Wherever he was, if he wasn’t in a camp he was better off than the rest of the family. Rodriguez didn’t say that—why belabor the obvious? He did say, “You got messages for—for your man?” He couldn’t pronounce
Xerxes
to save his own life, and nothing would save Xerxes’ now.

They poured out their hearts to him. That only made him feel worse about lying to them. But they would hate him all the more for deceiving them if they found out the truth now. And so he listened to words of love for a dead man and promised to bring back answers from beyond the grave.

None of the other guards knew what he was doing. Had they known, they would have laughed at him or said he was doing it to get Antoinette to lie down with him. If he wanted her, he thought he could have her. But what was the point? She and her mother couldn’t last much longer, not the way things were. And when she was dead, he’d be sad she was gone. He’d be sad when she was gone even if she didn’t sleep with him; he liked her.

He didn’t miss the black women he did lay. They were just…bodies. Now they were dead bodies, and so what?

“If they was to drop bombs all over this place,” Bathsheba said, “you reckon a couple o’ skinny colored ladies could run off without nobody noticing?”

“You don’t ask me that!” Rodriguez exclaimed. “I got to keep people inside here, not tell nobody how to get away.”

“You keepin’ people in here?” Bathsheba shook her head. “Don’t reckon so. Ain’t nobody in the whole wide world could keep
people
in a place like this. What you’re doin’ is, you’re keepin’ niggers here. Niggers ain’t people, not to the folks who go ’round yellin’, ‘Freedom!’ all the damn time.”

“Mama…” Antoinette said.

Bathsheba laughed. “It’s the truth, ain’t it? ’Course it is. You afraid I git in trouble on account of tellin’ the truth? Girl, how kin I git in trouble that’s any worse’n what I’m in already? You answer me that.” She turned to Rodriguez. “You answer me that, too, Mistuh Sergeant, suh.”

Rodriguez had no answers, and he knew it. He was a twenty-year Freedom Party man. He’d shouted, “Freedom!” and
“¡Libertad!”
plenty of times, more times than he could count. He had no use for blacks; if anything,
mallate
was even more insulting, even more demeaning, than
nigger.
He still believed Negroes caused most of the Confederacy’s troubles. And without blacks, whites would come down on Mexicans instead.

But this skinny old woman did something no one else had ever been able to do: she made him ashamed of the uniform he wore, of the stripes on his sleeve, of the Party badge on his chest. Bathsheba did indeed tell the truth, and Hipolito Rodriguez wasn’t too far gone to know it.

“Where you goin’?” she called after him. He didn’t answer. He just went away, anywhere away from the terrible truth, as fast as his legs would take him.

“Now look what you went and done, Mama,” Antoinette said reproachfully, as if, despite everything that had happened to them, this could still be her mother’s fault.

“Me? I didn’t do nothin’,” Bathsheba answered, and then, more quietly but not too quietly for Rodriguez to hear, “He done it to hisself.”

And there was another piercingly painful truth. Rodriguez had done it to himself. He looked beneath the face of population reduction and saw murder. He looked at niggers, at
mallates,
and saw people. He looked at what he’d been doing and saw….

“Madre de Dios,”
he whispered, and crossed himself.
“¡Ai, madre de Dios!”
But could even the Virgin forgive him for such a mountain of sins? He had trouble believing it. No—he couldn’t believe it. That made a difference. That made all the difference in the world.

He crossed himself again. The gesture seemed extraordinarily pointless, extraordinarily futile. He was damned. He felt the certainty of his damnation like that mountain of sin falling on him.

He’d known for a long time that Edith Pinkard’s first husband was a camp guard who killed himself. He’d heard of other men who did the same thing. Up till now, he’d thought they were crazy. All at once, he didn’t. How could you live with yourself when you understood what you were doing, what you were helping your country do?

He looked down at his hands. How much blood was on them? A river? A lake? An ocean? He looked at the submachine gun in those bloodstained hands. It was made for one thing: killing people. It was perfectly designed for the job, too. He clicked off the safety, flicked the change lever to full automatic fire. Then, like a man in a trance, he put the muzzle of the conveniently short weapon in his mouth. It smelled and tasted of metal and gun oil.

“Look out!” a woman cried. “He gonna—”

And he did. He pulled the trigger, hard. And that was most definitely that.

C
hester Martin had never gone south of the Ohio River. He’d spend the Great War in Virginia, on the Roanoke front in the west and then, after recovering from his first wound, in the northern part of the state, pushing down toward Richmond. He’d been not far from Fredericksburg when the fighting ended in 1917—and not far from the same town when he got wounded twenty-five years later.

He liked Kentucky better. He especially liked how far the U.S. Army had driven into Kentucky, and how fast it was moving. They’d passed Madisonville and were heading south toward Earlington. Madisonville was a tobacco town. The crop was nowhere near ripe, which didn’t stop several U.S. soldiers from plucking their own, drying or half cooking the leaves, and trying to smoke them afterwards. They proved one thing in a hurry: making cigarettes wasn’t as easy as it looked.

Earlington, by contrast, made its living from coal. U.S. Army engineers dynamited the entrances to one mine after another. “Is that smart, sir?” Martin asked his platoon commander. “Shouldn’t we be using those mines ourselves?” He knew how much coal the steel industry needed, and it wasn’t the only one.

Lieutenant Wheat only shrugged. “I guess the first thing is to deny this coal to the enemy,” he answered. “We can worry about everything else later. It’s not like we don’t mine plenty of our own.”

“I suppose so, sir.” If Chester didn’t sound convinced, it was because he wasn’t. But he didn’t decide such things, even if the news would have come as a surprise to the men in the platoon.

Somewhere not far away, a rifle went off. He and Lieutenant Wheat both reached for their weapons—that wasn’t a Springfield. It also wasn’t one of the Confederates’ automatic rifles, or an older bolt-action Tredegar. Martin didn’t know exactly what it was—some kind of squirrel gun, he supposed. He would have bet whoever squeezed the trigger wasn’t aiming at a squirrel.

The same thought must have gone through Delbert Wheat’s mind, for he said, “They don’t love us around here, do they?”

“Not hardly,” Chester said. The .22 or whatever it was barked again. “I bet we’re going to have to take more hostages.” Soldiers in butternut were trying to hold a line on the southern fringes of Earlington, and they would have to fall back from there in the next day or two. But Confederate civilians had rediscovered the thrills of guerrilla warfare. Kids and old men and even women turned into bushwhackers whenever they saw the chance.

The laws of war said people who weren’t in uniform but took up arms anyway were fair game. Those laws didn’t say taking hostages was all right, but every army on enemy territory did it. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it just made more civilians want to pick up squirrel guns.

“We kill enough of these fuckers, sooner or later the rest will get the idea,” Wheat said. “Or if they don’t, we’ll kill all of them.” He didn’t sound worried—more as if he looked forward to it.

After a third shot rang out, Martin got to his feet. “Somebody ought to do something about that damn sniper,” he said.

He hadn’t gone more than a step or two before a U.S. machine gun stuttered out a short burst, and then another one. A triumphant shout went up: “
Got
the son of a bitch!”

“Talk about service,” Lieutenant Wheat said. Chester grinned and nodded and hunkered down again. He pulled out a pack of Raleighs—properly grown, properly cured tobacco—and lit up. After a deep drag, he nodded again. Yeah, this was what smokes were supposed to taste like.

A soldier trotted back to him and the lieutenant. “There’s a Confederate captain with a flag of truce, wants to talk to us about civilians,” he said.

“Bring him back here,” Wheat said. “We can talk.”

“Blindfold him first,” Chester added. “No point letting him see what we’ve got. That may be part of what he’s after.” The platoon commander nodded. The soldier saluted Wheat and hurried away.

“Would you like to sit in on this?” the lieutenant asked politely.

“If you don’t mind, sir,” Chester answered, as politely. The platoon leader didn’t want to let the Confederates hornswoggle him. Chester was his ace in the hole, and appreciated being invited without having to invite himself.

When the C.S. captain took off his blindfold, he proved to be about thirty, with the ribbon for the Purple Heart—a decoration that went back to George Washington, and that both sides used—on his chest. He said his name was Wilbur Pease. He didn’t seem surprised to find a first sergeant sitting in with a second lieutenant, which showed he knew how the world worked.

Wheat did the talking: “Well, Captain, what’s on your mind?”

“I’ve had reports of atrocities against civilian citizens, Lieutenant, and I’ve come to investigate and to protest,” Pease answered.

“Considering what the Confederate States are doing to their Negroes, aren’t you in a poor position to talk about atrocities?” Wheat asked.

Wilbur Pease didn’t even blink. “Civilian citizens, I said. Negroes are only residents, not citizens. They don’t have the rights of citizens.”
We can do whatever we want to them,
Martin translated. Captain Pease went on, “I’m talking about white people, people who matter.” His racism was so complete, so perfect, he didn’t know he had it.

“We have a problem with—what’s the fancy French for it, Sergeant?”

“
Francs-tireurs,
sir.” Chester pronounced it
franks-teeroors;
he knew no more French than Chinese.

It satisfied both Lieutenant Wheat and Captain Pease. The U.S. officer went on, “If we catch people out of uniform shooting at us, we’re going to kill them. It’s as simple as that, Captain. We nailed one a few minutes ago. If we have to take hostages to make them think twice, we’ll do that, too. And we’ll shoot the hostages if it comes to that. I’m sorry, but these jerks with guns need to understand that we’re serious.”