The Grapple (9 page)

Congresswoman Blackford was happy for them. She’d met Satchmo and his less memorable bandmates. They were talented men. To her, they were a symbol of everything the Confederate States were wasting with their constant war against the Negro.

She clucked unhappily. To her countrymen, Satchmo and the Rhythm Aces were a curiosity, nothing more. Most people in the USA didn’t want to hear about Negroes, didn’t want anything to do with them, and didn’t want to be told what the Confederates were doing to them. She’d tried her best to make her countrymen pay attention. Her best wasn’t good enough.

“New Orleans Jump” struck her as fitting background music for what she was reading: the transcript of Jake Featherston’s recent speech in Nashville. She’d got it from the War Department. The captain who gave it to her seemed angry that he had to.

Flora wondered what that was all about. She didn’t think the young officer had any reason to be angry at her personally. She’d never set eyes on him before. She wasn’t trying to cut off funding—who would, these days? You gave the Army and the Navy what they said they needed, and you hoped they found ways to shoot all the money at the enemy.

So why was the captain steaming, then? She picked up the telephone and called the Assistant Secretary of War, who was somewhere between a conspirator and a friend. “Hello, Flora,” Franklin Roosevelt said genially. “What can I do for you today?”

“A captain just brought me a copy of Featherston’s latest speech,” Flora said.

“Jake’s a son of a bitch, isn’t he?” Roosevelt said. “Pardon my French.”

“There’s certainly no give in him—as if we didn’t know that,” Flora said. “But that isn’t why I’m calling, or not exactly, anyhow. This captain seemed to be doing a slow burn, and I wondered why. It’s not like I ever met him before.”

“Oh. I think I can tell you that on the telephone,” Roosevelt said. “It’s not as if the Confederates don’t already know it. Dear Jake gave that speech in Nashville, right?”

“Yes.” Flora found herself nodding, though of course Franklin Roosevelt couldn’t see her. He had a gift for inspiring intimacy. If infantile paralysis hadn’t left him in a wheelchair, he might have tried to follow his cousin Theodore into the White House. And he was a solid Socialist, too, unlike Theodore the Democrat. “What about it?” Flora went on.

“This about it: we knew Featherston was going to Nashville. We hoped we’d arranged things so he wouldn’t get there.” Roosevelt sighed. “Obviously, we didn’t. He’s a suspicious so-and-so, and he dodged the bullet. I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s why your captain was steaming. I’m steaming, too, to tell you the truth.”

“Oh.” Flora nodded again. “Well, now that I know, so am I. If we could bump him off…”

“Wouldn’t it be lovely?” Franklin Roosevelt said.

“It sure would.” Flora was sure she and the Assistant Secretary of War shared the same beatific vision: the Confederate States of America thrashing around like a headless snake if Jake Featherston got it in the neck. She had no idea who would or could replace Featherston if he got it in the neck. She doubted the Confederates had any more idea than she did. Jake Featherston made the CSA tick. If he wasn’t there, wouldn’t the country stop ticking?

“The other bad thing about it is, now they know we’ve broken some of their codes,” Roosevelt said. “They’ll change them, and that will complicate our lives for a while.”

Till we break them again,
he had to mean. “Too bad,” Flora said. “Too bad all the way around, in fact. Thanks for letting me know. That does make me pretty sure the captain wasn’t mad at me personally, anyhow.”

“Always a relief,” Roosevelt agreed. “The last thing anybody wants or needs is a secret unadmirer.”

“Er—yes.” Flora tasted the phrase. “But it’s a shame Featherston’s unadmirers here didn’t stay secret enough.”

“Well, so it is,” the Assistant Secretary of War said. “The Confederates didn’t break off the flight because they’re reading
our
codes. I think they put a decoy on it because one of their security people got jumpy. The good ones do, from everything I’ve heard, and Lord knows Featherston needs good ones.”

“Plenty of people on both sides of the border who want to kill him, all right,” Flora said. “Did you notice inflation is coming back to the Confederate States?”

“No.” Roosevelt was suddenly and sharply interested. After the Great War, the Confederate dollar collapsed; when things were at their worst, enjoying a beer took billions. “What do you mean? It would be wonderful if their economy went down the drain again.”

But Flora didn’t mean that, however much she wished she did. “Not what I was thinking,” she said sadly. “When the war was new, though, Featherston promised to drop three tons of bombs on our heads for every ton we landed on the CSA. Now he’s up to ten tons.”

“Oh.” Franklin Roosevelt laughed. “I’d call that deflation myself—as his spirits go down, his threats go up. He was lying then, and he’s still lying now. The Confederates weren’t that far ahead at the start of things, and they’re behind us now. We’re landing more on them than they are on us—quite a bit more, as a matter of fact.”

“Good,” Flora said, wondering how he knew. If she asked him, he’d probably tell her it was a very precise statistic he’d just made up. Odds were neither side knew exactly how much it was getting and receiving. She asked a different question instead: “How are things out West?”

“They’re doing quite well.” Roosevelt sounded enthusiastic, as he often did. “It really does look like General Dowling
will
take Lubbock away from the Confederates. If he does, we may proclaim the state of Houston again. That will give the people in west Texas something to flabble about—something to fight among themselves about.”

“No one—except maybe them—would be sorry about that,” Flora said. “It would also give him a base to go after Camp Determination.” The camps where the Confederates systematically got rid of their Negroes sickened her as nothing else ever did.

“Well, maybe.” Franklin Roosevelt didn’t sound so enthusiastic about that. He spelled out his reasons: “It’s farther from Lubbock to the camp than it is from the border to Lubbock, quite a bit farther. Those are the wide open spaces out there. And detaching men from more urgent things farther east may not be easy, either.”

Flora could have argued that nothing was more urgent than saving the lives of untold thousands of innocent human beings. She could have, but she knew the Assistant Secretary of War wouldn’t pay any attention if she did. He would say that wouldn’t win the war, and winning the war was the most urgent item on the agenda. She would have a devil of a time showing he was wrong, too. So, again, she took a different tack: “How are things farther west than that?”

Had Roosevelt started giving her chapter and verse about the skirmishes on the border between New Mexico and Sonora—and there’d never been more than skirmishes on that border, even though the war was heading towards its second birthday—she would have got angry. But he didn’t. “That seems to be going as well as expected, too,” he said.

“I’m glad to hear it.” Flora didn’t expect to hear anything more, not over the telephone. The project centered on Hanford, Washington, sounded like something from the pages of a pulp magazine with bugeyed monsters and scantily clad girls on the cover. In fact, though, someone had told her that those magazines had a lot of subscribers in Hanford—they were much more popular with scientists and engineers than with the general public. She hoped the Confederacy’s spymasters didn’t know that.

“I do think we’re making progress. I really do,” Roosevelt said.

“Here’s hoping.” Flora didn’t think she’d ever heard of uranium till after the war began. Now she knew there was more than one kind. If the 235 could be separated from the 238, or if the 238 could somehow make some new element altogether—it all sounded more like medieval alchemy than science—the bombs that resulted might blow whole cities off the map. With luck, those would be Confederate cities. Without luck…“Any word on how they’re doing with this on the other side of the line?”

“Well, they do seem to be trying.” The Assistant Secretary of War sounded less jaunty than was his wont.

Fear clogged Flora’s throat. If the cities blown off the map belonged to the USA, Jake Featherston would win his war in spite of the disasters the Confederates had suffered in Pennsylvania and Ohio. “What can we do about that?” she asked. “Can we do anything?”

“We won’t let them get away with it if we can possibly stop them, I promise you that,” Roosevelt said.

“Good,” Flora said, before she asked herself how good it really was. What had Roosevelt promised? To stop the CSA from building a uranium bomb? No. He’d promised to try to stop the Confederates from building one. Of course the United States would do that. Flora found one more question: “What can they do to stop us?”

“They haven’t tried anything yet,” Roosevelt said—another answer that wasn’t an answer. He went on, “They may have done some reconnaissance—we’re not sure about that. If they did, they won’t be able to do it again. We’ve tightened up since the last time we think they came around.”

“Why weren’t things tight right from the beginning?” Flora admired her own restraint. She didn’t raise her voice at all, no matter how much she felt like yelling her head off.

“Because we were asleep at the switch.” Roosevelt could be disarmingly frank. “We aren’t any more. We won’t be, either. That’s about the best I can tell you, Flora.”

“All right,” she said, and hoped it was. “I’m sure we’ll do everything we can.” She said her good-byes then. She hoped the USA bombed the Confederates’ uranium-producing plants to hell and gone. She hoped the CSA didn’t do the same to the one the United States had. Was such hope enough? The only answer that occurred to her was painfully clichéd, which made it no less true. She’d have to wait and see.

III

M
ail call!” That shout always made the guards at Camp Determination hurry up to see what they had. Troop Leader Hipolito Rodriguez wasn’t as good at hurrying as some of his younger, sprier comrades. He was still on the sunny side of fifty, but moved like an older man. He’d almost got electrocuted a year and a half earlier, and he’d never been the same since. He belonged to the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades: men who couldn’t hope to fight at the front, but who could still serve the CSA behind the lines.

All the men at Camp Determination, whether from the Veterans’ Brigades or not, were Freedom Party guards, with the funny ranks that accompanied Party positions. Rodriguez had three stripes on the left sleeve of his gray uniform. He thought of himself as a sergeant. He did a sergeant’s job and got a sergeant’s pay. If they wanted to call him something silly, who was he to tell them they couldn’t?

Because he had three stripes on his sleeve, Rodriguez didn’t need to hurry as much as ordinary guards did. They got out of the way for him. They never would have if he hadn’t been promoted. To most Confederates, greasers from Chihuahua and Sonora were only a short step up from niggers. Rank carried more weight than race, though.

And a short step could be the longest step in the world. Hipolito Rodriguez—Hip to men who grew up speaking English—wasn’t the only guard with Mexican blood. On the other side of the barbed wire were untold thousands of
mallates.
And the camp outside of Snyder, Texas, existed for one reason and one reason only: to kill them off as fast as possible.

The two-stripe assistant troop leader with the sack of mail started pulling out letters and stacks of letters held together by rubber bands and calling off names. As each guard admitted he was there, the corporal tossed him whatever he had.

“Rodriguez!” The noncom, a white man, made a mess of the name. Confederates born anywhere east of Texas usually did.

“Here!” Rodriguez knew the ways they usually butchered it. He raised his hand. The corporal gave him three letters.

He fanned them out like cards. They were all from Magdalena, his wife. He opened the one with the oldest postmark first. She wrote in the English-flavored Spanish middle-aged people in Sonora and Chihuahua commonly used. His children’s generation, further removed from the Empire of Mexico, spoke and wrote a Spanish-flavored English. Another couple of generations might see the older language disappear altogether.

But that thought flickered through Rodriguez’s mind and was lost. He needed the news from Baroyeca. He hadn’t been back since he joined the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades, and he might not get home till the war was over.

Magdalena had heard from the Confederate Red Cross: Pedro was a POW in the United States. Hipolito Rodriguez let out a sigh of relief. His youngest son was alive. He would come home one of these days. He’d done everything he could against the USA, and he was safe. No one could ask for more, especially since the news out of Ohio, where he’d fought, was so bad.

From what Rodriguez’s wife wrote, his two older sons, Miguel and Jorge, were also well. By an irony of fate, Pedro had gone into the Army ahead of them. He was in the first class after the CSA reintroduced conscription, where his older brothers missed out till it was extended to them. Miguel was in Virginia now, while Jorge fought in the sputtering war on Sonora’s northern border, trying to reclaim what the damnyankees annexed after the Great War.

Compared to that news, nothing else mattered much. Magdalena also talked about the farm. The farm was doing all right—not spectacularly, because it wasn’t spectacular land and she had trouble keeping things going by herself, but all right. The family had no money problems. With her getting allotments from her husband and three sons, they probably had more in the way of cash than they’d ever had before.

Robert Quinn was wearing the uniform. That rocked Rodriguez back on his heels. Quinn had run the Freedom Party in Baroyeca since not long after the Great War. He’d put down as many roots as anyone who wasn’t born in the village could hope to do. And now he was gone? The war was longer and harder than anyone imagined it could be.

Carlos Ruiz’s son was wounded. The doctors said he would get better. That he would was good news. That he’d been hurt in the first place wasn’t. Rodriguez and Ruiz had been friends…forever. They grew up side by side, in each other’s pockets.
I have to write him,
Rodriguez thought.

And a couple of women were sleeping with men who weren’t their husbands since the men who were their husbands went to the front. Rodriguez sighed. That kind of gossip was as old as time, however much you wished it weren’t. Back in the Great War, Jefferson Pinkard, the man who was
comandante
at Camp Determination, had had the same kind of woman trouble.

Other guards read their letters from home as avidly as Rodriguez tore through his. Letters reminded you what was real, what was important. They reminded you why you put on the uniform in the first place. Helping the country was too big and too abstract for most people most of the time. Helping your home town and your family…Anybody could understand that.

Not all the news was good. One guard crumpled a letter and stormed away, his face working, his hands clenched into fists. A couple of his friends hurried after him. “Can we help, Josh?” one of them said.

“That goddamn, no good, two-timing bitch!” Josh said, which told the world exactly what his trouble was. Rodriguez wondered if the letter was from his wife telling him she’d found someone new, or from a friend—or an enemy?—telling him she was running around. What difference did it make? Something he’d thought fireproof was going up in flames.

Rodriguez crossed himself, hoping he never got a letter like that. He didn’t think he would; what he and Magdalena had built over the years seemed solid. But Josh didn’t expect anything like this, either. The trouble you didn’t see coming was always the worst kind.

He thought about that when he patrolled the women’s side of the camp north of the railroad spur that came out from Snyder. He and the two guards with him all carried submachine guns with big drum magazines. If they got in trouble, they could spray a lot of lead around in a hurry.

But life-and-death trouble mostly wasn’t the kind guards had to worry about here. In the men’s side, south of the train tracks, you were liable to get knocked over the head if you were stupid or careless. Here, your biggest worries were probably syphilis and the clap. Like anybody else, the Negro women used whatever they had to keep themselves and their children alive. What they had was mostly themselves, and a lot of them were diseased before they came here.

“Mistuh Sergeant, suh?” a pretty colored woman in her twenties purred at Rodriguez. Like most people, she knew what three stripes were supposed to mean and didn’t give a damn about Freedom Party guard ranks. “Mistuh Sergeant, you git me some extra rations, I do anything you want—an’ I mean anything.” If he had any doubts about what she meant, a twitch of the hips—damn near a burlesque-quality bump and grind—would have erased them.

He didn’t even change expression. He just kept walking. When he did, she called him something that reflected badly on his manhood. “I wouldn’t mind me a piece of that, not even slightly,” said one of the younger men with him.

“You want her, you take her,” Rodriguez answered with a shrug. “You think you pass shortarm inspection afterwards?” They had those now. Jefferson Pinkard pitched a fit when four men came down with the clap inside of three days. Rodriguez had a hard time blaming him.

The guard looked back at the woman. “I don’t reckon she’s got anything wrong with her,” he said. Rodriguez didn’t try to argue with him. She had a large, firm bosom and round hips, and that was all the younger man cared about. To Rodriguez, one of the things her looks meant was that she hadn’t been here very long. Eat prisoner rations for a bit and the flesh melted off of you.

Another black woman nodded to him. “Hello, Sergeant,” she said. She wasn’t trying to seduce him. Her gray hair said she was older than he was. But she greeted him every time she saw him. Some people were just nice. Some people were nice enough to stay nice even in a place like this—not many, but some. She was one of them.

“Hello, Bathsheba.” He had trouble pronouncing her name, which had two sounds right in the middle of it that Mexican Spanish didn’t use. Her smile said he’d done pretty well today.

Her daughter came up beside her. Even though the girl was darker than her mulatto mother, he found her very pretty. But she wasn’t one of those who tried to screw their way to safety. Maybe she realized there was no safety to be had. Or maybe she kept her morals. Some women did.

She nodded, too. “Sergeant,” she said politely.

“
Señorita
Antoinette.” Rodriguez nodded back.

“Can you take a message to the men’s side?” her mother asked. Some women would do anything to get word to husbands or lovers.

“Is against regulations,” Rodriguez said.

“It’s not anything bad, not anything dangerous,” Bathsheba said. “Just tell Xerxes we love him an’ we’s thinkin’ about him.” Antoinette nodded.

Rodriguez didn’t. “Even if I find him”—he didn’t say,
Even if he’s still alive
—“maybe it’s code. I don’t take no chances.”

“Please, Mistuh Guard, suh,” Antoinette said. “Ain’t no code—swear to Jesus. Ain’t nothin’ but a Christian thing to do. Please, suh.” Unlike her mother, she was young and pretty. Even so, she didn’t promise to open her legs or go down on her knees if Rodriguez did what she wanted. Oddly, her not promising made him take her more seriously, not less. He lost track of how many times he heard promises like that. More than he wanted to collect. More than he
could
collect, too.

He sighed. “I see this Xerxes”—he stumbled over the peculiar name—“maybe I tell him this. Maybe.” He wouldn’t make any promises of his own, not where the guards with him could hear.

The older woman and the younger both beamed at him as if he’d promised to set them free. “God bless you!” they said together.

He nodded gruffly, then scowled at the other two guards in gray. “Come on. Get moving,” he said, as if they’d stopped for their business, not his.

All they said was, “Yes, Troop Leader.” That was what he said when someone with a higher rank came down on him. Now he had…some rank of his own, anyway. He enjoyed using it.

Would he pass on the message if he found that man on the other side? He didn’t really believe it was code. He also didn’t really believe it mattered one way or the other. Before long, that Xerxes was a dead man, and Bathsheba and Antoinette were dead women, too.

O
ne of the Confederates up ahead of First Sergeant Chester Martin squeezed off a short burst from his automatic rifle. Martin had been about to jump out of his foxhole and move forward maybe twenty feet, maybe even fifty. Instead, he decided to stay right where he was for the next little while. He’d been wounded once in the Great War and once in this one. As far as he was concerned, that was enough and then some.

Didn’t the Confederates know they were supposed to be on the run in this part of Ohio? Didn’t they know they’d already pulled out of Columbus and they were hightailing it down toward the Ohio River? Didn’t they know they would have to fall back across the Scioto River into Chillicothe on the west side? Didn’t they know they couldn’t hold Chillicothe, either?

By the way they were fighting, they didn’t know any of that. They were bastards, yeah, no doubt about it, but they were tough bastards.

More automatic-weapons fire came from the west. Somebody not nearly far enough from Chester Martin let out a screech and then hollered for a corpsman. That was a wound, but it didn’t sound like too bad a wound. Martin knew what badly wounded men sounded like. He’d hear those shrieks in his nightmares till the day he died—which, given the way things worked, might be any day now.

From a hole in the ground not far from Chester’s, Second Lieutenant Delbert Wheat called, “Mortars! Put some bombs down on those gunners!”

Mortar rounds started dropping on the Confederate line. Mortars were handy things to have. They gave infantry platoons instant artillery support, without even adding boiling water. Lieutenant Wheat made a pretty fair platoon leader, too. Before him, Martin had served with a couple of much less satisfactory officers. One of the things a first sergeant was supposed to do was keep the shavetail set over him from making too big a jackass of himself. Most second lieutenants never understood that. They labored under the delusion that they were in charge of their platoon.

A lot of them got killed laboring under that delusion. A first sergeant was also supposed to keep them from killing too many other people on their own side. The second lieutenants who survived went on to bigger and better things. First sergeants who survived got brand-new second lieutenants to break in.

Martin saw only one thing wrong with Lieutenant Wheat’s order. Just about every Confederate soldier carried either an automatic rifle or a submachine gun. The Confederates understood right from the start that they’d be outnumbered. They used firepower to make up for it.