The Grapple (70 page)

He set out across Texas for Snyder the next morning. As usual, the sheer size of the state flabbergasted him. The drive in the old Birmingham felt more like crossing a country. Even real cities like Dallas and Fort Worth seemed dwarfed by the immensity all around them. Bomb damage seemed diminished and spread out, too. He knew the USA had hit both towns hard the year before, but he saw only a few battered, firescarred buildings.

West of Fort Worth, woods grew scarcer and the prairie stretched as far as the eye could see. Every so often, Jefferson Pinkard began to spot shot-up motorcars by the side of the road. Some were merely pocked with bullet holes. A couple had bloodstains marring the paint of one door or another; a hasty grave was dug beside one of those. And some were charred wrecks: autos where a bullet had gone through the engine or the gasoline vapors in a mostly empty fuel tank.

Pinkard kept a wary eye on the sky. The Birmingham had nowhere to run to and nowhere to hide if U.S. fighters or fighter-bombers swooped down. Maybe he could get out and hide in a ditch while they shot up the auto. That was his best hope, anyhow.

When he stopped for gas in a little town called Cisco, the woman who pumped it said, “Reckon you’re either mighty brave or mighty damn dumb, comin’ so far in broad daylight.”

“I can go faster,” Jeff said.

“Yeah, but you can end up dead faster, too,” she replied. “Your funeral—if you get one.”

Jeff remembered the grave next to the motorcar. He remembered the bloodstains he’d seen, too. And he stayed in Cisco for a roast-beef sandwich and a couple of bottles of beer, and waited till twilight deepened to get going again. Maybe he wasted a few hours. Maybe he saved his own life. He never knew one way or the other.

Crawling along with headlights masked down to slits, he didn’t get into Snyder till not long before dawn. He drove with special care in town, because craters scarred so many streets. You could crash down into one before you saw it. But he made it home, and found he still had a home to come back to. “Sorry to bother you, hon,” he told Edith. “We’ll be able to clear out, go somewhere safer, before real long.”

“Thank you, Jesus!” she said, and squeezed him tight despite her swollen belly.

C
assius was proud of his new boots. They fit him perfectly, and the Mexican soldier who’d worn them before didn’t need them any more. Somebody—Napoleon?—said an army marched on its stomach. Food mattered, all right, but so did your feet. The shoes in which Cassius got out of Augusta were falling apart, so he was glad to get such fine replacements.

“Lucky bastard,” Gracchus said. His feet were very large and very wide. Cassius’ were of ordinary size, like the rest of him. He’d never thought of that as luck before, but maybe it was.

“We’ll get you some, boss,” he said—as much of a title as the guerrilla leader would take.

“Have to slit ’em,” Gracchus said morosely. The shoes he wore now were slit on either side, to make room for his uncooperative feet. What that lacked in style, it more than made up for in comfort. Gracchus eyed Cassius thoughtfully. “You know how to drive?”

“Wish I did.” Cassius shook his head. “Folks never had an auto or nothin’, though. How come?”

“Want to steal me a pickup truck from somewheres, mount a machine gun in the back,” Gracchus said. “Some of the other bands been doin’ it, I hear tell. Raise all kinds of hell that way. Ain’t as good as havin’ our own barrel, but it’s about as good as a bunch o’ niggers can hope for.”

About as good as a bunch o’ niggers can hope for:
eleven words that spoke volumes about how things were in the Confederate States of America. Crouched in pine woods, hoping the whites and Mexicans wouldn’t put airplanes overhead to hunt for the band and hoping the trees would screen the fires and guerrillas if they did, Cassius had his own worm’s-eye view of what those words meant.

He also had his own reasons for wanting to hit back at the Freedom Party and everyone who stood with it: everyone in the CSA who wasn’t black, or as close as made no difference. “Don’t know how to drive,” he said, “but you bet I do me some fancy shootin’ if you put me in the back o’ that truck.”

Gracchus chuckled. “Every nigger in the band I talk about this with say the same thing. A couple o’ the gals, they say they give me what you ain’t even got if only I put ’em back dere.”

Cassius hadn’t dared approach the handful of women who marched and fought along with Gracchus’ men. They were tougher than he was, and he knew it. The word
intimidated
probably would have sprung to his father’s mind. It didn’t occur to Cassius; he just knew that those gals scared hell out of him.

“Where you gonna get a pickup?” If he thought about the truck, he didn’t have to think about the women.

“Off a farm, I reckon,” Gracchus answered. “Damn ofays mostly keepin’ ’em locked up tight nowadays, though. They know what we kin do if we git our hands on one.”

Locks didn’t usually stop Gracchus when he set his mind on whatever lay behind them. His scouts didn’t need long to find a farm with a pickup truck that would do. The farm had a telephone line so the whites there could call for help if guerrillas attacked them. Gracchus only smiled when he noted that. Among the tools his irregulars carried were several wire cutters.

“Dey kin call all dey please,” he said. “It don’t go through, ain’t that a shame?”

The guerrillas grinned, white teeth shining from dark faces. Despite those grins, they spent a couple of days sizing up the farm before they made their move. If the whites brought in riflemen or a machine gun of their own under cover of night, they could give raiders a wicked surprise. Gracchus couldn’t afford to get surprised that way.

After the telephone line was cut, he pitched a rock through a farmhouse window to get the attention of the people inside. When curses said somebody was awake in there, he shouted, “Throw out the keys to your truck an’ we goes away. We don’t hurt nobody. We jus’ takes the truck an’ goes.”

“Over my dead body!” the man inside yelled. In a lower voice, he went on, “Sal, call the militia!”

“Can’t get the operator!” Sal said in despairing tones.

“Las’ chance, ofay!” Gracchus shouted. “We kin hot-wire the truck if we gotta, but we gonna have to shoot you to make sure you don’t start shootin’ your ownself when we takes it away.”

A rifle shot split the night. The bullet didn’t miss Gracchus by much, but it missed. The guerrillas knew what to do. Some of them started banging away to make the people inside keep their heads down. Others, Cassius among them, ran toward the farmhouse. He wished he had a helmet to go with his boots. But a helmet wouldn’t stop a rifle round, either.

The defenders had several firearms. If they raised enough of a ruckus, someone at a nearby farm might telephone the authorities or go out to get help. The guerrillas had to win quickly, take the truck, with luck kill the whites, and disappear before superior force arrived.

“I’ll shift them fuckers,” a Negro called. “Break me a window an’ see if I don’t.”

Cassius was close enough to a window to smash it with the butt of his Tredegar. Had one of the farm family waited on the other side of the glass, he would have caught a bullet or a shotgun blast with his teeth. That crossed his mind only later. He did know enough to get away fast once the stock hit the window.

A few seconds later, a Featherston Fizz sailed in through the opening he’d made. He heard it shatter on the floor inside. That would spread blazing gasoline in a nice, big puddle. “Burn, you goddamn ofays!” he yelled. “Burn in your house, an’ burn in hell!”

Flames lit that room from the inside. They showed a white man standing in the doorway to see if he could do anything about the fire. Cassius snapped a shot at him. He wasn’t the only guerrilla who fired at the white man, either. The fellow went down, either hit or smart enough not to offer a target like that again.

Another Featherston Fizz flew into the farmhouse. Cassius liked the idea of roasting whites with a weapon named for the founder of the Freedom Party. He’d run into a phrase in a book one time—
hoist with your own petard.
He didn’t know what a petard was (though his father likely would have), but he got the sense of it anyhow. Those Fizzes were petarding the devil out of the family in there.

They stayed in the burning building as long as they could. They stayed a lot longer than Cassius would have wanted to. Then they all charged out the back door at once, shooting as they came. Had they made it to the woods, they might have escaped. But they didn’t. In the light of the fire behind them, they made easy targets. An old man in a nightshirt killed a woman with him before he went down. Another woman, hardly more than a girl, blew off her own head with a shotgun.

They had to fear what the Negroes would have done with them—to them—had they taken them alive. And they had reason to fear that. Revenge came in all kinds of flavors. If you could get some with your dungarees around your ankles…well, why not? It was nothing whites hadn’t done to blacks through the centuries of slavery. Cassius’ own mother couldn’t have been above half Negro by blood. He himself was lighter than a lot of guerrillas in Gracchus’ band. He wasn’t light enough to pass for white, though—not even close. In the CSA, that was as black as you had to be to get reckoned a Negro, as black as you had to be these days to get shipped off to a camp and have your population reduced.

“Let’s get outa here!” Gracchus shouted. “The ofays, they see the fire fo’ sure.”

“We oughta stay, shoot the bastards when they come,” somebody said.

“You dumb fuckin’ nigger, you reckon dey think a fire in the middle o’ the night go an’ happen all by itself?” Gracchus said scornfully. “They don’ jus’ bring the fire engines. They bring the armored cars an’ the machine guns, too—bet your ass they do. I say get movin’, I mean get movin’!”

No one argued any more. Cassius did ask, “We got us the pickup?”

“Oh, hell, yes,” Gracchus answered. “Leonidas done drove it off five minutes ago.”

“All right by me,” Cassius said. “I was busy five minutes ago.”

“Lots of us was,” the guerrilla leader allowed. “Ain’t busy now, though, so git.”

Cassius got. Part of him regretted missing the chance to ambush the whites who’d come to the farm family’s rescue. But he knew Gracchus was right: who would ambush whom wasn’t obvious. Best not to tempt fate.

Somewhere up in the northwestern part of Georgia, the Stars and Stripes already flew in place of the Stars and Bars. Sooner or later, the Yankees would break out into the rest of the state. Cassius could see that coming. All the black guerrillas could. If they could stay alive and keep harrying the Confederates till the U.S. Army arrived…

If we can do that, we win the war,
Cassius thought.

Then he wondered whether winning the war would be worth it. What did he have to go back to in Augusta? Nothing. His family was gone, his apartment not worth living in. The rest of the guerrillas were no better off. They’d already lost, no matter how the war went.

“Boss?” he said as the guerrillas loped away.

“What you want?” Gracchus asked.

“Suppose the United States lick Jake motherfuckin’ Featherston. Suppose we’re still breathin’ when that happens. What the hell we do then?”

“Don’t know about you, but I got me a big old bunch of ofays I wants to pay back,” the guerrilla leader answered. “Reckon that’ll keep me busy a while.”

Cassius nodded. “Sure enough, we can do that for a while. But what kind of
life
we gonna have? What kind of country this gonna be? Can’t kill
all
the damn whites—wouldn’t be nobody left then. Gotta live with ’em some kinda way. But
how
? How we go on, knowin’ what they done to us?”

“Fuck, I dunno. I ain’t never worried about it. Ain’t had time to worry about it—been too worried about stayin’ alive,” Gracchus said. “Lookin’ down the road…You don’t want to think too goddamn much, you hear what I’m sayin’? Spend all your time thinkin’ ’bout tomorrow, you ain’t gonna live to git there.”

That made some sense. But Cassius said, “We ain’t old or nothin’. We make it through this goddamn war, we got a lot o’ time ahead of us. Maybe we go on up to the USA. They ain’t so hard on niggers there.”

“That’s a fact—they ain’t,” Gracchus said. “But here’s another fact—they don’t like niggers much, neither. If they did, they woulda let more of us git away when the Freedom Party first took over. But they didn’t. They closed their border so we had to stay in the CSA an’ take whatever Featherston’s fuckers done dished out. Yankees like us better’n they like Confederate sojers, but it don’t go no further’n that.”

He didn’t just make some sense there—he made much too much. “What’re we supposed to do, then?” Cassius wanted to wail the question. Instead, it came out as more of a panting grunt. It was the sort of thing he would have asked his father when he and Scipio weren’t quarreling.

His father would have had a good, thoughtful answer for it. Gracchus just shrugged and said, “We gots to stay alive. We gots to hit the ofays till the war’s done, an’ go on hittin’ ’em afterwards. Past that…Hell, I don’t know nothin’ past that. Find out when I gits there, if I gits that far.”

The way things were, maybe that
was
a good, thoughtful answer. If you were someplace where you couldn’t make plans, didn’t trying only waste your time? For now, what was there besides fighting and taking whatever vengeance you could? Cassius trotted on. He couldn’t see anything besides that now himself.

XVIII

E
very time an officer Lieutenant-Colonel Jerry Dover didn’t know came to the supply dump, his stomach started knotting up. He kept wondering if someone from Intelligence would take him off and do horrible things to him because of Melanie Leigh. Every time it didn’t happen, Dover relaxed…a little.

He saw plenty of unfamiliar officers, too, enough to keep his stomach sour, enough to keep him gulping bicarbonate of soda. Lots of that came to the front; given what soldiers ate, they needed it.

Some of the new officers he dealt with came from outfits just arrived in northwestern Georgia to try to stem the Yankee tide. Others were men in new slots, the officers they replaced now being wounded or dead.

One day, a brigadier general showed up and asked, “You fought in the line in the last war, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” Dover answered. “I was only a noncom then, though.”

“I was a first lieutenant myself,” said the officer with the wreathed stars. “We’ve both got more mileage on us than we used to. I have a regimental command slot open—Colonel McCandless just stopped some shrapnel with his face, and he’ll be on the shelf for weeks. If you want it, it’s yours.”

“Sir, I’ll take it if you order me to,” Dover answered. “But I don’t think I’d be better than ordinary in that slot. As a supply officer, I’m pretty goddamn good. If somebody ordinary replaces me here, that might hurt the war effort worse than if you have some different ordinary officer take charge of your regiment.”

The brigadier general studied him.
Wondering if I’m yellow,
Dover thought. The officer’s eyes found the ribbon for the Purple Heart above Dover’s left breast pocket. “How’d you get that?” he asked.

“A scratch on my arm. Not worth talking about,” Dover answered.

Maybe the general would have decided he was a liar and a blowhard if he came up with some fancy story of a wound suffered in heroic circumstances. His offhand dismissal seemed to satisfy the man. “Stay where you are, then, Dover,” the brigadier general said. “You’re doing well here—I know that, and it’s one of the reasons I thought about you for a combat post. But you have a point: this work is important to the war effort, too, and it needs to be done right. I’ll find somebody else for the regiment.”

After the general left, Dover lit a cigarette. He had to stir the butts in the glass ashtray on his cheap desk to make room for it. One of the sergeants who helped keep the depot going stuck his head into the tent and asked, “What was that all about, sir?” Like any sergeant worth his stripes, he assumed he had the right to know.

Dover saw no reason not to tell him. “About what you’d figure, Pete—he thought about moving me up to the front, but he decided I can do more here.”

“Christ, I hope so!” Pete said. “You’re really good at this shit. I don’t even want to think about how much trouble I’d have breaking in some new asshole, and some of those clowns just never do get what’s going on.”

“Nice to know I’m a comfortable old asshole,” Dover said, and Pete laughed. Dover tossed the sergeant the pack of Raleighs.

“Thanks,” Pete said. “Even smokes are getting hard to come by, the way the damnyankees keep tearing things up between here and Atlanta. That never happened the last time around, did it?”

“I don’t think so,” Dover answered. “I don’t remember running short, anyway.” He looked north and west. His personal worries weren’t the only ones he had. “You think we can stop the Yankees if they try to break out again?”

“Reckon we’d better,” Pete said dryly. “They start heading for Atlanta, we better start trying to see how much they’ll let us keep if we quit.”

That was about how Dover saw it, too. “Careful how you talk,” he told Pete, not for the first time. “Lots of people flabbling about defeatism these days.”

“Yeah, well, nobody’d be defeatist if we weren’t getting fucking defeated,” the sergeant said, which was nothing but the truth. “I’d almost like to see Atlanta fall, to tell you the truth, just so I could laugh while some of the Quartermaster Corps fat cats there got it in the neck. Those cocksuckers have done more to lose us the war than any three Yankee generals you can think of.”

“You expect me to argue? You’re preaching to the choir,” Dover said. “Now they use the bad roads and the torn-up train tracks for excuses not to send us what we need.”

“Did I hear right that you told one of the shitheads down there you were gonna send Jake Featherston a wire about how lousy they were?” Pete asked.

“I said it, yeah,” Dover admitted. “Don’t know that I’d do it. Don’t know that it would do any good if I did.”

“You ought to, by God. They’ve been getting fat and living soft off Army goods since the war started,” Pete said. “If Featherston can’t rein ’em in, nobody on God’s green earth can, I reckon.”

Maybe nobody could. Jerry Dover was inclined to believe that, which was another reason he hadn’t sent the telegram. Before he could say so, air-raid sirens started howling. Somebody clanged on a shell casing with a hammer, too, which was the emergency substitute for the sirens.

“Head for shelter!” Dover said. He heard U.S. airplane engines overhead even before he got out of the tent. The dugout into which he and Pete scrambled was as fancy as any he’d known in the Great War. It had all the comforts of home—if your home happened to be getting bombed.

“Maybe they aren’t after us,” Pete said.

“Here’s hoping,” Dover agreed. Northwestern Georgia had plenty of targets. Then explosions started shaking the ground much too close. The supply dump was one of those targets.

Something on the ground blew up—a roar different from the ones bombs made. Jerry Dover swore. He hoped the secondary explosion didn’t take too much with it. He was as careful with ordnance as he knew how to be. He didn’t store much of it in any one place, and he did build earth revetments around each lot. That minimized damage, but couldn’t stop it.

Another secondary explosion proved as much, as if proof were needed. Dover swore some more. A couple of other soldiers in the bombproof laughed, as much from nerves as for any other reason. A lucky hit and the bombproof might not be; it might turn into a tomb.

“Sometimes the bastards get lucky, that’s all,” Pete said.

“I don’t want them to get lucky, goddammit,” Dover said. “What if they’re starting the big push now? The guys at the front will need everything we can send ’em.”

“And if the damnyankees break through,
we’ll
be the guys at the front,” Pete said.

That made Dover wish he hadn’t already used up so much good profanity. Then, instead of cussing, he started to laugh himself, which made Pete send him a fishy stare. He still thought it was funny. Here he’d gone and turned down a combat command, but he was liable to get one whether he wanted it or not.

A
big
explosion sent dirt trickling down between the planks on the shelter’s roof. “I hope to God that was one of their bombers crashing,” Pete said.

“Me, too,” Dover said. “Why don’t they go away and bother somebody else?” He knew why perfectly well. That didn’t keep him from wishing anyway.

The bombers stayed overhead for more than two hours. That had to mean several waves of them were pounding Confederate positions. Now that the United States had airstrips down in southern Tennessee, they were only a short hop away. And they were making the most of it, too.

After no bombs had fallen for fifteen minutes or so, Dover said, “Well, let’s see what’s left upstairs.” He hoped something would be. He also hoped he wouldn’t come out when a new wave of enemy bombers appeared overhead.
That’d be just my luck, wouldn’t it?
he thought sourly.

The passage out from the bombproof’s outer door had a dogleg to keep blast from getting in. It also had several shovels stashed near that outer door, in case the men inside needed to dig their way out. But Jerry Dover could see daylight when he got the door open.

He could see daylight, yes. He could also see smoke, and smell it: smoke from burning rubber and explosives and wood and paint and several other things. His eyes stung. He coughed again and again.

Behind him, Pete said, “How bad is it?” He was coughing, too. Dover wished he were wearing a gas mask. He hoped the Yankees hadn’t blown up any gas shells, or he might really need one.

“I don’t think it’s good,” he answered. Getting out of the trench was easy. A near miss had built a nice, convenient ramp. If that one had burst a hundred feet to the left…No, you didn’t have to fight at the front to see combat these days.

He and Pete and the other soldiers hurried up to ground level and looked around. “Fuck,” Pete said softly, which summed things up pretty well.

Enemy air strikes had pounded Jerry Dover’s supply dumps before. That was part of the cost of doing business in a war. He didn’t think one of his depots had ever taken a beating like this before, though. Eight or ten fires raged. Yes, one of them was an enemy bomber’s pyre—he could see the airplane’s tail sticking up. But the damnyankees had done a lot more damage here than they’d taken doing it.

Hoses were already playing on some of the worst blazes. Dover felt proud of his men. They knew what they had to do, and they did it. And in doing it, they took chances front-line soldiers never had to worry about.

Of course, the men at the front had worries of their own. Pete cocked his head to one side, listening. “Firing’s picked up—fuck me if it hasn’t.”

Dover listened, too. He said the worst thing he could think of: “Yeah, I think you’re right.”

“They’re trying to break out.” Pete found something bad to say, too.

“Sure sounds that way,” Dover allowed.

“Think they can do it, sir?” Any time Pete used an officer’s title, he needed reassurance.

Right now, Dover longed for reassurance, too. “Hope to hell they can’t.”

A telephone rang. He would have bet the bombardment had blown up the instrument or broken the lines that made it work, but no. He ran over to it and admitted he was there and alive.

“Dover, you’ve got to send me everything, fast as you can!” He recognized the voice of the brigadier general who’d offered him a regiment. “They’re coming at me with everything they’ve got. If you have a division’s worth of dehydrated infantry, pour water on ’em quick and get ’em up here.”

In spite of everything, Dover smiled. But he had to say, “Sir, I don’t know what the hell we’ve got right this second. They just bombed hell out of the dump, too.”

The general’s opinion of that violated all the Commandments with the possible exception of the one against graven images. “We’re doing all we can, dammit, but how can we hang on if we don’t have enough bullets and shells?” he said.

“I’ll get you what I have, sir.” Dover slammed down the handset and yelled orders. He had to interrupt himself when the telephone rang again. “Dover here,” he said.

“Rockets! Antibarrel rockets!” another harried officer screamed in his ear. “Damnyankee armor’s tearing holes in my lines! They’ve got these goddamn flail barrels to clear mines, and they’re going through us like a dose of salts. If we don’t stop ’em quick, we are dead meat, you hear me? Fucking dead meat!”

Dover didn’t know what a flail barrel was. He didn’t know how many antibarrel rockets had escaped the Yankee bombs. He didn’t even know who was yelling at him. He managed to find that out. He rapidly figured out one other thing, too: the United States were pushing hard here. If they did break through…
If they break through, we’ve lost the damn war for sure,
Dover thought. He dashed off to do what he could to stop them.

S
igns with skulls and crossbones on them warned the world a minefield lay ahead. Lieutenant Michael Pound was pretty sure the signs and the field were genuine. When the Confederates bluffed, they usually slanted the bones and the word
MINES
. These stood straight.

He was a hard charger, but he didn’t want to tear across that field and blow a track or maybe get the bottom blasted out of his barrel. And he didn’t have to. “Here comes a flail,” he said happily, ducking down into the turret to relay the news to his gunner and loader and to get on the wireless to the other machines in his platoon. He’d had to make himself remember to do that when he first became an officer. Now he did it automatically.

Sergeant Mel Scullard grinned. “Those bastards sure are funny-looking,” he said.

“Well, I won’t argue with you,” Pound told the gunner. “But who gives a damn? They do the job, and that’s what counts.”

Some engineer must have been smoking funny cigarettes when he came up with the flail barrel. He mounted a rotor drum on a couple of horizontal steel bars out in front of the barrel’s chassis. The barrel’s engine powered the contraption. Lengths of heavy chain came off the drum. As it rotated, the chains spanked the ground ahead of the oncoming machine. They hit hard enough to touch off mines before the barrel itself got to them. And other barrels could follow the path the flail cleared.

Naturally, the Confederates did everything they could to blow up flail barrels before they got very far. But, after the pounding U.S. artillery and aircraft had given the defenders here, they couldn’t do as much as they wanted to. The Confederate Army remained brave, resourceful, and resilient. It wasn’t so responsive as it had been earlier in the war, though. You could knock it back on its heels and stun it if you hit it hard enough, and the USA had done that here.

“Follow the flail!” Pound commanded, and his driver did. They all wanted to get past the minefield as fast as they could. The pine woods ahead weren’t cleared yet. That meant they were bound to have Confederate soldiers—and, all too likely, Confederate barrels—lurking in them.

The other machines in Pound’s platoon followed him, as he followed the flail barrel. Every commander rode with his head and shoulders out of the cupola, the better to see trouble. He was proud of them. He hadn’t ordered them to do it. He wouldn’t have given an order like that. They got out there on their own.

Fires in the woods sent up smudges of smoke. There weren’t enough of them to drive out the lurkers, however much Pound wished there were. If they had an antibarrel cannon waiting…