The Grapple (73 page)

The
Josephus Daniels
went back to patrolling east of Newfoundland. The men who’d been in her for a while told stories of earlier adventures on that duty. If a quarter of what they said was true, she’d had some lively times. The limeys worked harder at smuggling arms into Canada than the USA did at smuggling them into Ireland. Canada and Newfoundland had a much longer coast than the smaller British isle, which gave the enemy more chances to slip through.

Navy Department doctrine was that stopping the arms smuggling would snuff out the Canadian rebellion. The sailors didn’t believe it. “What? The fucking Canucks can’t find any guns of their own? My ass!” Jorgenson said when the talk got around to the patrol.

Klaxons hooted. That killed a bull session. George and Jorgenson raced toward the bow. They got to their gun in a dead heat. The rest of the crew wasn’t more than a couple of steps behind them. “What’s going on?” asked the new shell-jerker, a big blond kid named Ekberg.

“Beats me,” Jorgenson answered. “Maybe it’s a drill.” He was even bigger than Ekberg, and almost as fair, though neither of them matched the skipper.

“Now hear this!” The PA system crackled to life. Lieutenant Zwilling’s harsh voice got no sweeter blaring from the speakers: “Y-ranging gear has picked up an unidentified aircraft approaching from the south. Exercise caution before opening fire, as it may be friendly. Repeat, exercise caution before opening fire, as it may be friendly. But do not endanger the ship.”

George swore, and he wasn’t the only one. The exec wanted to have his cake and eat it, too. Don’t shoot the airplane down, but don’t let it make an attack run, either? How was that supposed to work?

A minute or so later, the PA came on again. “This is the captain,” Sam Carsten said. “The ship comes first. If we have to fish some flyboys out of the drink afterwards, we’ll do that. We’re trying to find out who’s in the airplane, but no luck so far. If we open up on the wireless, we tell everybody in the North Atlantic where we’re at, and we don’t want to do that.”

“See, the skipper tells us what’s what,” Jorgenson said. “The exec just bullshits.”

“Lieutenant Cooley, he was all right,” Ekberg said. “This guy, though—you can keep him.”

“Damn airplane
ought
to be one of ours,” Jorgenson said. “Don’t see how the limeys could’ve snuck a carrier this far west without us knowing.” He paused. “’Course, sometimes they fly fighters off their merchantmen. One of those assholes carrying a bomb could be real bad news.”

“Confederate seaplane?” George suggested.

Jorgenson frowned. “Right at the end of their range. They couldn’t get home again unless they refuel somewhere.” The frown turned into a scowl. “They might do that, though. Maybe the limeys have a station or two on the Newfoundland coast. We can’t keep an eye on everything. So yeah, maybe. Whatever it is, we’ll find out pretty damn quick.” He swept the southern sky with a gun commander’s binoculars.

Somebody farther astern spotted the airplane first and let out a yell. George had a shell in the breech of each gun in the mount. He was ready to open up as soon as Jorgenson gave the word. The gun chief swung the twin 40mms to bear on the target.

“It
is
a seaplane,” he said, still peering through the field glasses. George felt smart for about fifteen seconds. Then Jorgenson went on, “It’s one of ours. That’s a Curtiss-37, sure as shit. Stand easy, boys—we’re all right.”

“Don’t shoot! Repeat—do not shoot!” Lieutenant Zwilling blared a few seconds later. “The airplane has been positively identified as nonhostile.”

George needed a moment to translate that into English. Then he realized the exec said the same thing as Jorgenson, though not so clearly.

The seaplane buzzed past, the eagle and crossed swords plainly visible on its sides. It waggled its wings at the
Josephus Daniels
and flew on toward the north. “Nice
not
to need to fight for a change,” George said, and none of the other sailors at the mount told him he was wrong.

W
hen a bath meant a quick dip in a creek, Jonathan Moss did what anybody else would: he mostly did without. Sometimes, he got too smelly and buggy to stand himself, and went in for a little while. He came out with his teeth chattering—fall was in the air, even in Georgia.

“Jesus, I miss hot water!” he said.

“Yeah, no kidding.” Nick Cantarella had just taken a brief bath, too. “We’re both skinny bastards these days, you know?”

Moss ran a hand along his ribs. “You mean this isn’t a xylophone?”

“Funny. Funny like a crutch. And you’ve got more meat on your bones than I do,” Cantarella said.

“Not much,” Moss said. “You started out built like a soda straw, and I didn’t. That’s the only difference.”

They both got back into the ragged dungarees and collarless work shirts that would have been the uniform of black guerrillas in the CSA had the guerrillas enjoyed anything so fancy as a uniform. In one way, the only difference between them and the rest of Spartacus’ band was their lighter skin. In another…

“You ofays!” Spartacus called. He used the word as casually as a white Confederate would have used
niggers.
Most of the time, it meant the Confederate whites the guerrillas were fighting. But it could mean any white at all, too.

“What is it, boss?” Jonathan Moss asked. The band didn’t run on anything like military discipline, but Spartacus fancied his title of respect.

“How come the United States done lost the War of Secession? You lick them damn Confederates then, nobody have to worry ’bout ’em since.”

Moss and Cantarella looked at each other. Any schoolchild in either country knew the answer to that, or at least the short version. But Spartacus and the rest of the blacks with him were never schoolchildren. The Confederate States always did everything they could to discourage Negroes from getting any kind of education. They didn’t want them to be anything more than beasts of burden with thumbs.

“Shall I do the honors, or would you rather?” Cantarella asked.

“I can, unless you’re hot to trot,” Moss said.

Cantarella waved him forward. “Be my guest.”

“Well, the first thing that happened was, the Confederates had a good general in Virginia and we had a lousy one,” Moss said. “McClellan was never a match for Robert E. Lee—not even close. And Abe Lincoln didn’t get rid of McClellan and put in somebody who knew what he was doing. We blame Lincoln for a lot, and it starts right there.”

“He wanted to be good to niggers, though,” Spartacus said. “Ofays down here don’t reckon so, they don’t secede in the first place.”

That was probably true. From the U.S. viewpoint, it was one more thing for which to blame Lincoln. If someone sensible like Douglas had won the election…In that case, there wouldn’t have been a War of Secession in the first place.

“It gets worse,” Moss said. “Lincoln couldn’t do anything when England and France recognized the CSA after Lee beat McClellan up in Pennsylvania. Neither could anybody else in the United States.”

“What difference recognizing the Confederate States make?” Spartacus said. “They there whether they recognized or not.”

“After the limeys and frogs recognized them, they broke our blockade,” Moss said. “They had better navies than ours. Then they shipped the Confederates whatever they needed, and got cotton back. And they could blockade U.S. ports if we didn’t make peace with the CSA.”

“They could, and they did,” Nick Cantarella put in.

“They ganged up on us again twenty years later, after the Confederates bought Chihuahua and Sonora from Mexico,” Moss said. “When we lost the Second Mexican War, that’s what made us decide to line up with Germany. That way, we had a…what would you call it, Nick?”

“A counterweight,” Cantarella said.

“There you go.” Moss nodded. “With Germany on our side, we had a counterweight to England and France. And that’s how things have been for the last sixty years.”

“How come y’all don’t let niggers in the USA when things is tough fo’ us down here?” Spartacus might not know much about what had happened a long time ago, but he had that piece of recent history straight. Chances were every Negro in the CSA did.

Moss and Cantarella eyed each other again. They both knew the reason. They both feared it would be unpalatable to the Negroes around them. And they both feared the guerrillas would recognize a lie.

Sighing, Moss told the truth: “A lot of whites in the USA don’t like Negroes much better than whites here do.”

A low hum ran through the guerrillas. It was, Moss judged with more than a little surprise, a hum of approval. “Leastways you don’t put no sugar on a spoonful o’ shit,” was how Spartacus put it.

“I don’t care if them Yankee ofays likes us or not,” another guerrilla said. “Ain’t never had no ofays like us. Don’t hardly know what I’d do if’n they did. Long as they ain’t tryin’ to murder us, that’ll do fine.”

Several other Negroes nodded. One of them said, “Wish them damnyankees’d come farther down into Georgia.”

“Amen!” Two or three Negroes spoke together, as if responding to a preacher. One of them added, “That’d be about the onliest thing that could save the niggers down here. That or the Second Coming, one.”

“Don’t hold your breath,” Spartacus said dryly.

“Well, hell, I know Jesus ain’t comin’,” the guerrilla said. “But the damnyankees, they might.”

“They’re moving again.
We’re
moving again,” Nick Cantarella said. “I don’t think the Confederates can stop us from breaking out of our bridgehead south of Chattanooga. And once we’re loose in north Georgia…”

“Yeah!” Again, the response might almost have come in church.

“They gonna get here soon enough to do us any good?” Spartacus answered his own question with a shrug. “We gots to las’ long enough to find out, dat’s all.”

One way the guerrillas survived was by never staying in one place very long. Mexican soldiers and white militiamen hunted the Negroes—not all the time, but too often. Not staying around to be found was simple common sense.

Of course, moving had dangers of its own. You could walk into trouble as well as away from it. But Spartacus’ point man, Apuleius, was as good as anybody Jonathan Moss ever saw. He was as good as anybody Cantarella ever saw, too. “Put that little so-and-so in our uniform and he could sneak a division of barrels right on into Richmond,” Cantarella said.

“Wouldn’t be surprised,” Moss agreed. “Or he could, anyway, if we let Negroes join the Army.”

“Yeah, well, that’s horseshit, too,” Cantarella said. “You know smokes can fight, and I know smokes can fight, and if Philly’s too goddamn dumb to know smokes can fight, then fuck Philly, you know what I’m sayin’?”

Apuleius held up the band outside an abandoned sharecropper village. He didn’t think it
was
abandoned. “Somebody in dere,” he told Spartacus after crawling back through the forgotten, overgrown vegetable plots around the place.

“How you know?” Spartacus asked. “Looks quiet enough. Ain’t no smoke or nothin’.”

“Not now,” the point man said. “But sure enough was some not long ago. An’ when I git close, I smell me some people ain’t had no baths in a hell of a long time.”

He kept himself cleaner than most of the other guerrillas. Moss had thought that was because he was unusually fastidious, and had even wondered if he was a fairy. Now he saw good sense lay behind it. If Apuleius didn’t smell himself, he had a better chance of sniffing out other people.

“You reckon they ofays or Mexicans?” Spartacus asked.

“Likely ofays,” Apuleius answered. “They stink worse. The Mexicans, they washes when they gits the chance.”

“How we gonna smoke ’em out?” Spartacus suddenly grinned a predatory grin. “Reckon you kin wiggle back close enough to chuck a grenade into the middle o’ things?”

“I kin try.” The point man didn’t sound thrilled, but he didn’t say no.

“Well, why don’t you wait a bit?” Spartacus said. “Let us set up the machine gun at the edge o’ the brush. Then we be ready to give them ofays a proper how-do-you-do.”

The two-man machine-gun crew positioned their precious weapon. The rest of the guerrillas, riflemen all, took cover where they could. Moss hoped the bush he crouched behind wasn’t poison oak.

Apuleius worked his way forward again. Moss presumed he did, anyhow; were the point man visible to him, he would have been visible to whoever was inside the village, too. Moss didn’t see the grenade fly, either.

He sure heard it when it went off. And all of a sudden that village didn’t seem abandoned any more. Militiamen, some in gray uniforms, others with clothes no fancier than the guerrillas wore, boiled out of the tumbledown shacks that hadn’t been anything much when they were in good repair and looked even more sorrowful now. The white men were cussing and clutching their weapons and pointing every which way. Some of those flying fingers aimed at Apuleius, but others flew in the opposite direction.

“Now!” Spartacus said.

Along with the rest of the riflemen in the band, Moss started shooting at the youths, mutilated men, and old-timers who made up the local militia. The machine gun spat death at the village. Death had visited it before—where were the sharecroppers who once lived there? Where were their wives and children? Gone to camps, most of them, if they were like most of the Negroes in Georgia.