The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  A couple of junior guards fell in behind him when he did. That was all right; nobody armed had any business going into the camp alone except in an emergency. The puppies wouldn’t cramp Pinkard’s style. They wouldn’t know where he was going and what he was doing because he wouldn’t know himself till he started doing it. That often made his subordinates despair, but more than once it let him nip what could be trouble before it got too big to be easily nippable.

  The guards at the barbed-wire-strung gates between the administrative compound and the camp proper saluted him. “Group Leader!” they chorused.

  “At ease, at ease,” he said, returning the salute. Part of him liked being treated like the equivalent of a major general. Another part, the part that was a private during the Great War, thought it all a bunch of damn foolishness. Right now, that part had the upper hand.

  After the guards let him and his watchdogs through the inner gate, they closed it behind him. Then they opened the outer gate. He and the younger men walked into the camp.

  Even the stink seemed stronger on this side of the barbed wire. Maybe that was Jeff’s imagination. He couldn’t prove it wasn’t. But his nose wrinkled at the odors of unwashed skin and sewage. Skinny Negroes stared at him as if he’d fallen from another world. By the difference between his life and theirs, he might as well have.

  The wreathed stars on either side of his collar drew the black men as honey drew flies. “You gots to let me out, suh!” one man said. “You gots to! I’s an innocent man!”

  “Kin we have us mo’ food?” another Negro asked.

  “My fambly!” said another. “Is my fambly all right?”

  “Everybody’s in here for a reason.” Jeff spoke with complete certainty. He knew what the reason was, too. You’re a bunch of niggers. Oh, the Freedom Party still ran camps for white unreliables, too. The whole camp system cut its teeth on them. But not many white unreliables were left any more. The Party also had better ways to get rid of them these days. Slap a uniform on an unreliable, stick a rifle in his hands, put him in a punishment battalion, and throw him at the damnyankees. Most of those people loved the United States, anyway. Only fair they should die at U.S. hands. And if they took out a few soldiers in green-gray before they got theirs, so much the better.

  “Food!” that second Negro said. “We’s powerful hungry, suh.”

  “I’m spreading out the ration best way I know how,” Pinkard said, which was true—all the inmates starved at the same rate. “If I had more, I’d share it out, too.” That was also true; he was cruel because he found himself in a cruel situation, not because he enjoyed cruelty for its own sake. He understood the difference. Whether a scrawny black prisoner did…mattered very little to him.

  When the scrawny black looked at him, it wasn’t at his fleshy face but at his even fleshier belly. You ain’t missed no meals. The thought hung in the air, but the Negro knew better than to say it. He turned away instead, hands curling into useless fists.

  As for the man with the family, he was already gone. He must have realized he wouldn’t get any help from Jeff Pinkard. And he was right. He wouldn’t. Other blacks came up with their futile requests. Jeff listened to them, not that it did the blacks much good.

  Every once in a while, though, somebody betrayed an uprising or an escape plot. All by itself, that made these prowl-throughs worth doing. The ones who did squeal got their reward, too: a big supper where the other inmates could watch them eat, and a ride out of Camp Determination…in one of the sealed trucks that asphyxiated their passengers.

  That was a shame, but what could you do? The CSA had no room for Negroes any more, not even for Negroes who played along.

  Guards kept a long file of men moving toward the bathhouse. “Come on!” one of them called. “Come on, goddammit! You don’t want to be a bunch of lousy, stinking niggers when we ship your asses out of here, do you?”

  Jeff Pinkard smiled to himself. By the time the Negroes got out of the bathhouse, they wouldn’t care one way or the other—or about anything else, ever again. But as long as they didn’t know that beforehand, everything was fine.

  “You, there! Sí, you. Mallate!”

  Scipio stared in alarm. Were he white, he would have turned whiter. The guard with the sergeant’s stripes was pointing at him. He hadn’t been in Camp Determination long before he realized you didn’t want guards singling you out for anything at all. And mallate from a Sonoran or Chihuahuan, as this fellow plainly was, meant the same thing as nigger from an ordinary white Confederate.

  He had to answer. The only thing worse than getting singled out by a guard was pissing one off. “Yes, suh? What you need, suh?”

  “You named, uh, Xerxes?” asked the swarthy, black-haired sergeant.

  “Yes, suh. That’s my name.” At least the man wasn’t asking for him as Scipio. Even though he used it here himself, hearing it in a guard’s mouth might mean his revolutionary past in South Carolina had popped up again. If it had, he was a dead man…a little sooner than he would be anyway. Once you landed in here, your chances weren’t good any which way.

  The guard gestured with his submachine gun. “You come here.” Did some special school teach guards that move? They all seemed to know it. It was amazingly persuasive, too.

  “I’s comin’,” Scipio said. If you told a guard no, that was commonly the last thing you ever told anybody.

  Legs light with fear, Scipio stepped away from Barracks 27. Even I’s comin’ might be the last thing he ever told anyone. That sergeant and his two white flunkies looked ready to chalk him up to “shot while attempting to escape.”

  “You know two women named Bathsheba and Antoinette?” the guard demanded. In his mouth, Scipio’s wife’s name came out as Bat’cheba; Scipio almost didn’t recognize it.

  But he nodded. “Yes, suh, I knows dey,” he said. Fear and hope warred, leaving his voice husky. “Is dey—Is dey all right?” He had to fight to get the words out.

  “They all right, sí.” The guard nodded, too. “They say, they hope you all right, too.”

  “Do Jesus!” Relief flooded through Scipio. “Thank you, suh. Thank from from de bottom o’ my heart. You see dey again, you tell dey I’s doin’ fine.” No black in Camp Determination was doing fine. His wife and daughter were bound to know that as well as he did. They didn’t want him to worry, though, and he didn’t want them to, either.

  “I tell ’em.” The guard sergeant from Sonora or Chihuahua gave him one more brusque nod, then strode away, the two bigger men still at his heels.

  Bathsheba and Antoinette were still alive. There was still hope. And Lubbock belonged to the Yankees. Like a lot of Negroes in the CSA, Scipio would have been a patriot if only the whites around him let him. The Confederate States were the only country he had. But if his own homeland set out to do horrible things to him and the people he loved, then its enemies became his friends.

  He laughed, not that it was funny. From everything he’d heard, the Mormons up in Utah were as firm in denying Negroes equality as white Confederates were, even if they had different reasons. He sympathized with them now, no matter what they believed. What the United States were doing to them wasn’t that different from what the Confederate States were doing to blacks.

  And yet you never could tell. Even in this hellhole, that guard went out of his way to deliver the message from Bathsheba and Antoinette. He didn’t have to do that. He could have refused them straight out. He could have promised to pass along their words and then gone on about his business. He hadn’t. Decency cropped up in the strangest places.

  Scipio looked north. He could see the women’s barracks, there on the other side of the railroad line that brought his family here. Not one but two barbed-wire perimeters separated him from his loved ones. He drew himself up a little straighter. The train ride from Augusta didn’t kill him. If it didn’t, could anything? He didn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe it.

  His gaze swung from the north, the unattainable, toward the north
west. The Yankees might well come down to Camp Determination. If Lubbock was gone, other west Texas towns could fall. He just had to stay alive till U.S. troops arrived.

  Just. That made it sound easier than it was.

  He still didn’t know how many people died in that cattle car. He didn’t know why he still lived, either. Plenty of men and women younger and stronger than he was were dead. If he could make the Yankees listen to his story, maybe his survival would mean something. Bathsheba would say so. She believed things happened for reasons. She believed God watched over people.

  Scipio wished he could do the same. He also wished God did a better job of watching over the Negroes in the CSA. He wished God did any kind of job of watching over them. As far as he could see, God was out to a film, leaving them to fend for themselves. The only trouble with that was, the Freedom Party had a lot more fending power than the Negroes did.

  “Labor gang!” a guard shouted. “Need fifty volunteers for a labor gang!”

  Labor gangs left the camp with men chained to one another like criminals. They worked killing hours on little food. When they came back, the men in them were worn to nubs.

  The guard could have got five hundred volunteers, or five thousand. Work on a labor gang was real work, and you did come back when you went out. Nobody knew what happened when you got shipped to another camp. A lot of people muttered about that. If you muttered too loud, you had a way of getting shipped out yourself. Then other people muttered about what happened to you.

  Except for the labor gangs, there was nothing to do inside the camp but stew and starve. If the Confederate authorities were smart, they could have set up factories where the Negroes they’d dragged from the cities and countryside could make things for them. The authorities didn’t bother. They just didn’t care.

  The only sport in camp was watching new fish come in. Scipio had been a new fish himself, not so long before. Now he watched other dazed, thirsty, half-starved—or sometimes more than that—men stagger into Camp Determination. Their astonishment was funny, as his must have been to those who arrived before him.

  “What you lookin’ at?” a black man would yell at the newcomers. “Y’all reckon you’s in New Yawk City?”

  Scipio didn’t understand why, but talking about New York City never failed to send the prisoners into gales of laughter. For as long as he could remember, the biggest town in the USA had been the symbol of degeneracy and depravity to white Confederates. In films made in the CSA, New York City seemed entirely populated by villains and lounge lizards and slutty women. Maybe that was part of it.

  But New York City was also full of riches and luxury. No matter how white Confederates despised the place, they couldn’t deny or ignore it. That probably made the camp jokes funnier. And sometimes things didn’t have to make any sense at all to be funny. Sometimes not making sense was the point of the joke.

  “You park your Cadillac car outside befo’ you come in?” the wit would call to the new fish. It was always a Cadillac car, never just a Cadillac. Scipio didn’t know why that was so, but it was. It was one more thing that made the jokes funnier.

  Sometimes a new fish would have spirit enough to say something like, “You niggers crazy.”

  That would send the camp veterans into capers as wild as they had the energy to perform. “We sure is crazy,” someone would say. “If you ain’t crazy in dis here place, you gots to be nuts.”

  At one level, that made no sense at all. At another level, it held a profound truth. Scipio was used to thinking in terms like that. Anne Colleton made sure he was thoroughly educated, not for his sake but so he made a better butler, a better ornament, for the Marshlands plantation. Marshlands was a ruin today. Anne Colleton was dead, killed in the early days of the war when U.S. carrier-based bombers hit Charleston.

  And here I am, in Camp Determination. Much good my education did me, Scipio thought. The one thing that mattered in the CSA was his color. How smart he was? That he could quote Shakespeare from memory? Nobody white cared a bit.

  The Negro who’d made the crack about craziness was just making a joke. Scipio was sure he didn’t see that he was kidding on the square. He talked like a field hand. He certainly wasn’t educated. He probably wasn’t very smart. What difference did it make? Here he was, and here Scipio was. They had equality of a sort—equality of misery.

  This batch of new fish had no trouble finding bunks—a large number of men were transferred to other camps just a couple of days before they got here. People came into Camp Determination. They went out. Nobody seemed to stay very long. That could have been why all the rumors swirled around the trucks and the bathhouses. Scipio hoped that was the reason.

  And then he got the chance to find out for himself. When his barracks lined up for roll call one morning, a guard shouted, “We’re gonna ship your asses to Abilene. Head on over to the bathhouse. Don’t want you bringin’ lice an’ fleas an’ shit like that with you, so we’re gonna wash you off and delouse you.”

  “Befo’ breakfast?” somebody said in dismay.

  “You’ll get breakfast on the trucks that take you east,” the guard said. “They got bread an’ all kinds of good stuff. From what I hear, they feed you better in Abilene than we do here.” That sent a buzz through the assembled Negroes. Whatever the food in Abilene was like, it couldn’t very well be worse than it was here.

  Nobody raised any particular fuss as the guards marched the Negroes to the bathhouse. Anyone who did raise a fuss would have been sorry; the guards carried automatic rifles as well as submachine guns, and looked very ready to use them. Among the guards was the Mexican-looking sergeant who’d delivered the message from Bathsheba and Antoinette. Seeing him made Scipio feel better. He didn’t think the man would let anything bad happen to him.

  Inside the bathhouse, the guards ordered the Negroes to take off their rags and store them in cubbies. One of the gray-uniformed men who watched them do it said, “Remember where your shit’s at. Anybody tries stealing somebody else’s duds, he’s gonna wish he was never born.”

  A sign pointed the way to the delousing station. The naked black men walked along the corridor in that direction. It was a big chamber, but they filled it up. Scipio noticed the door was steel, with rubber gasketing around the edges. His unease began there. But for a few metal columns with grillwork at the bottom, the chamber was bare. A sign over a door in the far wall said, TO THE BATHS.

  He’d heard veterans, both white and black, go on about Great War delousing stations. Either they’d changed the way things worked since or…

  Some kind of gas started pouring out of the grillwork. Even a tiny whiff of it set Scipio’s lungs on fire. He ran toward that door in the far wall. Other blacks got there ahead of him. They screamed in despair—the door didn’t open. They fooled us, Scipio thought. They fooled us good, damn them. Half crushed in the panic, half poisoned by the gas, he crumpled. Blackness enfolded him.

  IV

  Up until a few years earlier, sharecroppers lived in this sorry little collection of shacks. Now the buildings stood sad and vacant under Georgia’s mild spring sun. “Where did everybody go?” Jonathan Moss asked. “Did the Freedom Party catch the people who were here and send them to a camp?”

  To his surprise, Spartacus shook his head. “Don’t reckon so,” the black guerrilla leader answered. “Reckon they went to town, to look for work there. Weren’t no’ mo’ work here, that’s fo’ damn sure.”

  “Why the hell not?” Nick Cantarella asked. “You got nothin’ but miles and miles of cotton farms and tobacco farms and shit like that.”

  Spartacus surprised Moss again, this time by chuckling in grim amusement. “You is a city fella,” Spartacus said, not unkindly. “You is a city fella, an’ you don’t see how the country work. Used to be plenty jobs fo’ nigger field hands, yeah. Then the Freedom Party make all these tractors an’ harvesters an’ shit, throw Lawd only know how many niggers outa work. Goddamn bastards.”

  “That’s not all it
did,” Cantarella said. “Factories they built to turn out those tractors and harvesters, they’re making barrels and armored cars nowadays. You can bet your ass on that.”

  “Sly,” Moss said. “Sly twice, because it let them drive the Negroes off the fields and let them gear up for turning out war machines without making the USA flabble about it.”

  “Fuck me,” Spartacus said, looking from one of them to the other. “I seen the first part o’ dat, on account of it happen to me an’ mine. But the other half…Didn’t worry ’bout dat none.”

  “Yeah, well, those Freedom Party fuckers wouldn’t be half so dangerous if the guys running the show for ’em were dumb,” Cantarella said. “Featherston’s a maniac, but he’s a goddamn smart maniac, you know what I mean?”

  Jonathan Moss did, and wished he didn’t. Fighting the war against the Confederates hadn’t proved anything to him one way or the other. Soldiers were soldiers, and sometimes where they came from hardly mattered. Military life had rhythms of its own. But his time since escaping from Andersonville told a different story.

  He’d wondered how the Confederates could hold down the countryside with so many whites of military age off fighting the USA. Now he knew. If Negroes in the countryside lost their jobs, a lot of them had to go to the CSA’s cities and towns, where they were easier to keep track of and get hold of. No, the people at the top of the Freedom Party weren’t dumb at all. Too damn bad.

  Meanwhile, some of the blacks still in the countryside did their best to make the Confederates unhappy. Spartacus said, “Reckon we kin spend the night heah. Ain’t nobody round seen us go in. Better’n sleepin’ on bare ground.”