The Grapple (41 page)

By the look FitzBelmont gave him, that was intimidating, too. How many years had it been since he went out and got drunk? Had he ever done anything like that? With most people, Potter would have taken the idea for granted. He didn’t with the professor.

“Do I need to know anything else?” he asked. “You’ve got a self-sustaining reaction, and you need all the electricity you can steal. Is that it?”

“That is the, ah, nucleus, yes.” Professor FitzBelmont smiled at his own joke.

So did Clarence Potter, in a dutiful way. As quickly as he could, he eased the professor out of his office. Then he called the President of the CSA—this couldn’t wait. “Featherston here.” That harsh, furious voice was familiar to everyone in the CSA, and doubly so to Potter, who’d heard it in person long before most Confederate citizens started hearing it on the wireless.

The line between his own office and the President’s bunker was supposed to be secure. He picked his words with care all the same: “I just had a visit from the fellow at the university.”

“Did you, now?” Jake Featherston said with sudden sharp interest. “And what did he have to say?”

“He’s jumped through one hoop,” Potter answered. “I’ll send you the details as soon as I can. But we really are moving forward.”

“Hot damn,” Featherston said. “The fucking Yankees are moving forward, too. I swear to God, Potter, sometimes I wonder if this country
deserves
to win the war. If we let those nigger-loving mongrels kick the crap out of us, we aren’t the kind of people I reckoned we were.”

“I don’t know anything about that, sir,” Potter said, in lieu of something like,
I see. It’s not your fault we’re losing the war. It’s God’s fault.
Potter didn’t think that was true. But even if it were, it didn’t help, because what could a mere mortal do about God? “I do know our friend thinks he can get this done.”

“Does he think he can get it done in time?”

Hearing that question made Potter feel better. It showed the President still had a feel for the essential. “I don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. It depends on how far along the United States are with their own project.”

“Screw the United States,” the President said. “Question is, can we keep our heads above water any which way till the professors come through?” That showed a feel for the essential, too. All things considered, Clarence Potter wished it didn’t.

D
r. Leonard O’Doull had been with a retreating army. Now he served with an advancing one. From things he’d heard, most people’s morale was sky high these days. His wasn’t. At an aid station, you saw just as much misery going forward as you did going back. The only difference was, he didn’t suppose the Confederates were so likely to overrun the tent while he was operating.

“It doesn’t seem like enough,” he said, looking up from a resection of a kid’s ripped-up lower intestine.

Granville McDougald looked at him over his surgical mask. “Yeah, well, you take what you can get, Doc,” the veteran noncom said. “Only thing worse than fighting a war and winning is fighting a war and losing.”

“Is that really worse?” O’Doull put in another suture, and another, and another. Sometimes he felt more like a sewing machine than anything else. “This poor bastard’s going to be left with a semicolon instead of a colon any which way.”

“A semi—?” McDougald sent him a reproachful stare. “That’s awful, Doc. Period.”

Did he really say
awful
? Or was it
offal
? He was right either way. But once you started making puns, you also started hearing them whether they were there or not. And wasn’t that one short step from hearing the little voices that weren’t there?

“
Is
it better to get shot in a war your side wins than in one where you lose?” O’Doull persisted.

“Better not to get shot at all,” McDougald said, a great and obvious truth to which too many people who went down in history as statesmen were blind. But he went on, “If you have to get shot, better to do it so not so many people on your side will get shot after you. Do you really want to see Featherston’s fuckers opening up with machine guns whenever they feel like target practice all over the USA?”

“Well, no,” O’Doull admitted. He dusted the wounded soldier’s entrails with sulfa powder. Maybe the kid would escape the wound infection that surely would have killed him in any earlier war. Maybe. O’Doull started closing. If the soldier did live, he would have an amazing scar. “Still and all, though, Granny, I wonder if I should have come back from Quebec.”

“So you were thinking about French leave, were you?” McDougald said, and O’Doull winced. Undeterred, McDougald went on, “Can’t say as I blame you.”

“I was tempted,” O’Doull admitted. “I don’t
think
Quebec would have let the USA extradite me. But I put the uniform on, and I can’t very well take it off again till things are done.” Nicole had a different opinion, but he didn’t mention that.

“Hey, Doc!” That shout from outside the aid tent warned another casualty was coming in. This time, though, Eddie added, “Can you work on a civilian?”

The tent wasn’t far south of Sparta, Tennessee. Not all the Confederate civilians had fled fast enough. O’Doull had already patched up several. Chances were they wouldn’t be grateful, but he figured C.S. surgeons had done the same up in Ohio for equally ungrateful U.S. citizens. So he answered, “Sure, Eddie, bring him in. I’ll do what I can for the miserable bastard.” He paused and turned to McDougald. “Or do you want me to pass gas while you do the honors?”

“Sure. Why not? Thanks, Doc,” McDougald answered.

But when Eddie and the other corpsmen brought in the casualty, it turned out not to be a him but a her. She was about thirty, groaning the way anyone else with a blood-soaked bandage on the belly would have. “Aw, shit,” O’Doull said softly. Most of the time, he didn’t get reminded that whole countries were at war, not just armies. When he did, it was like a slap in the face.

“You take the case, Doc,” Granny McDougald said. “All I know about female plumbing stops about nine inches deep.”

“God, what a braggart you are,” O’Doull said. Eddie snorted. The wounded woman, fortunately, was too far gone to pay any attention to the byplay. “Get her up on the table,” O’Doull told the corpsmen. “I’ll do what I can for her.”

She feebly tried to fight when McDougald put the ether cone over her mouth and nose. How many soldiers had done the same thing? More than O’Doull could count. He and Eddie held her hands till she went limp.

“Get a plasma line into her,” O’Doull said. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”

“Already doing it,” McDougald said, and he was. “I’ll put a cuff on her, too, so we can see what we’ve got.” With unhurried speed, he also did that. “Pressure is…100 over 70—a little low, but not too bad. Pulse is…85. A little thready, maybe, but I think she’s got a chance.”

“Let’s see what’s in there.” O’Doull opened her up—actually, he extended the wound she already had. “Shrapnel, sure as hell,” he said, and then, “I’m going to have to do a hysterectomy.”

“Your case, all right,” McDougald said. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

“I haven’t done all that many myself,” O’Doull said. He reached for a scalpel, and then, after he felt the womb, for forceps. “Here’s what did it, all right.” He held up a jagged piece of metal about the size of a half-dollar. “Must have been nearly spent, or it would’ve torn her up worse than this.”

“Happy day. I’m sure she’s real glad of that,” McDougald said.

“Yeah, I know,” O’Doull agreed. “She’s got a tear in her bladder, too, but I can fix it. Guts don’t seem bad. With any luck at all, she’ll make it.”

“That’d be good,” McDougald said. “She’s harmless now. She can’t have any kids to shoot at U.S. soldiers when we try this again in 1971.”

“Christ!” O’Doull’s hand almost jerked. “There’s a cheery thought.”

“It’ll happen unless we really knock ’em flat and sit on ’em,” McDougald said. “You hope we will, but what are the odds?”

“Beats me,” O’Doull said. “But we’d have to be crazy to give them a third chance to cream our corn for us.”

“Yeah? And your point is…?”

O’Doull winced again, but went on suturing. “What are we supposed to do? We can’t occupy the whole CSA. They’ll shoot at us from behind trees and throw Featherston Fizzes at us forever if we try. But how do we hold ’em down without occupying them?”

“Kill ’em all,” McDougald said. “Resettle the place from the USA.”

“Congratulations,” O’Doull told him. “You get an A in Jake Featherston lessons.”

“Them’s fightin’ words,” McDougald said. “Put up your dukes.”

“Later,” O’Doull said. “Let me finish sewing this gal up first.”

“This is a funny business, isn’t it?” McDougald said. “She’s not bad-looking, and there are you messing with her private parts, but she’s not a broad or anything. She’s just a patient.”

“Yeah, that crossed my mind, too.” O’Doull paused for a moment to make sure a suture was good and tight. “Once upon a time, between the wars, I went to a medical conference in Montreal, and I got to talking with this hotshot gynecologist. I asked him if he ever got tired of looking at pussy all day. He kind of rolled his eyes and said, ‘Oh, Jesus, do I ever!’”

The medic laughed. “Well, all right. I guess I believe that. Of course, a lot of what he’s looking at belongs to little old ladies. The young, healthy, pretty gals mostly don’t bother coming to him.”

“I wasn’t finished yet.” O’Doull put in another stitch, then went on, “A couple of years later, this guy’s wife divorced him. Not easy to do in Quebec—it’s a Catholic country. She had to prove infidelity, and she did—with three different patients of his. So not all the young, pretty ones stayed away.”

That made Granville McDougald laugh some more. “See, I know what happened. You asked the wrong question. Maybe he got tired of looking, but do you ever get tired of touching?”

“Good point.” O’Doull looked down at the wounded woman. “I do believe she’ll pull through. Haven’t had to try that particular surgery for quite a while.”

“You looked like you knew what you were doing, whether you really did or not,” McDougald said.

“Thanks a lot, Granny. You really know how to make a guy feel good about himself.” As O’Doull started closing the outer wound and the incision that had widened it, a new thought struck him. “Where are we going to put her? Can’t just dump her with the wounded POWs, you know.”

“No, that wouldn’t work,” McDougald agreed. “Where’s the closest civilian hospital?”

“Beats me. Somewhere north of us—that’s all I can tell you. Oh, there are bound to be some farther south, too, but passing her through the lines won’t be easy. And if we keep moving forward, we’re liable to blow wherever she’s staying to hell and gone.”

“Be a shame to waste your hard work,” McDougald said. “Tell you what we ought to do—we ought to just send her back to the division hospital and let them figure out what to do with her. They’ve got more room for her and more people to deal with her than we do, anyway.”

O’Doull had dealt with the military bureaucracy long enough to know a perfect solution when he heard one. “We’ll do that, all right,” he said. “Fixing her up was my worry. Let the guys in back of the line figure out where she’s supposed to go.”

She went off to the rear in an ambulance with the wounded soldier on whom O’Doull had operated not long before. “They’ll probably be pissed off,” McDougald remarked.

“Too damn bad,” O’Doull answered. They both stood outside the tent, watching the ambulance head off toward Sparta. “What’s the worst they can do? Write me a reprimand, right? Like I give a shit.”

“There you go, Doc,” McDougald said. “That’s one nice thing about coming in for the duration—you don’t care what the brass hats who run things think of you. Must be nice.” He sighed wistfully.

“You’re in about the same place, aren’t you?” O’Doull pulled out a captured pack of Raleighs. “They probably won’t bump you up to lieutenant, and you’d really have to screw up big for them to take your stripes away. You’re free.” He lit a cigarette and smiled as he inhaled.

“Let me have one of those, would you?…Thanks.” McDougald leaned close for a light, then took a deep drag of his own. “You’re right and you’re wrong, Doc. Yeah, I can tell ’em where to head in, I guess. But I don’t really want to most of the time, ’cause this is my outfit. I’ll be here till they don’t want me any more. You’re freer than that.”

“I suppose.” One of O’Doull’s hands touched the oak leaf on his other shoulder. He didn’t feel very free. “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk. That’s what the fellow said when they tarred and feathered him and rode him out of town on a rail, isn’t it?”

“You know who told that joke the first time?” McDougald asked, and O’Doull had to shake his head. “Abraham Lincoln, that’s who.”

“Did he?” O’Doull decided he wouldn’t tell it again. Eighty years ago, the things Lincoln did—and the things he didn’t do—made sure the USA and the CSA would go at each other till the end of time. Few Presidents were better remembered: Washington and Jefferson, perhaps (their memories somewhat tarnished in the USA because they were Virginians), and undoubtedly Teddy Roosevelt. But only James G. Blaine came close to Lincoln as a failure, and Blaine wouldn’t have had the chance to botch the Second Mexican War if Lincoln hadn’t botched the War of Secession. Yes, that was one joke Leonard O’Doull would forget.

J
efferson Pinkard eyed the letter in front of him with several different kinds of pained incomprehension. He understood that it was from Magdalena Rodriguez down in Sonora. But he didn’t understand much that was in it because, although she tried to write English, what they thought of as English in Sonora wasn’t the same as it was in the rest of the CSA. Still, he knew what she had to be asking: why the devil did her husband go and shoot himself?

“I wish to Christ I knew,” Pinkard muttered. Every once in a while, a guard couldn’t stand what he was doing, and he ate his gun or got rid of himself some other way. Pinkard knew that—nobody knew it better. If it weren’t true, he wouldn’t be married to Chick Blades’ widow. But that Hip Rodriguez should blow off the top of his head…“Goddammit, he fucking
hated
niggers!”