The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  “All right, already. Got a butt?” Armstrong asked.

  “Sure.” Yossel passed him a pack. He lit up. It helped pass the time. When Armstrong returned the pack, Reisen stuck one in his mouth. Armstrong leaned close to give him a light. After Yossel’s first drag, he said, “We’ve got to lick the damn Confederates. If we don’t, we’ll be stuck with our own shitty tobacco forever.”

  “There you go.” Armstrong blew out a cloud of smoke. “One more reason to hate Jake Featherston. I thought I already knew ’em all. We’ve got to kick his scrawny butt, all right. I wish we could do it, too, instead of fucking around with the goddamn stinking worthless Canucks.”

  Yossel chuckled. “I don’t quite follow you. Tell us how you really feel.”

  Before Armstrong could answer, he discovered they were already in Canada: somebody shot out a window in his railroad car. The bullet missed everybody, but glass sprayed soldiers. Everybody jumped and yelled and swore.

  Machine gunners on the roofs of two or three cars opened up on the sniper. Armstrong had no idea if they hit him, but he did hope they made the bastard keep his head down. Then he said, “My guys—you all right?” He still had his platoon. No eager young second looey had come out to take his place.

  “I got somethin’ in my eye, Sarge,” somebody right behind him said. “Is it glass?”

  “Lemme see.” Awkwardly, Armstrong turned around. “Don’t blink, Boone, for Christ’s sake.” He yanked at the private’s eyelid. Damned if he didn’t see a chunk of glass not much bigger than a grain of salt. “Don’t flinch, either, dammit.”

  “I’ll try,” Boone said. Not flinching when somebody’s hand came at your eye was probably harder than holding steady in combat. The soldier managed…pretty well.

  “Hang on.” Armstrong peered down at his thumb. Sure as hell, he’d got the glass out. He flicked it away. “Blink. How’s your eye?”

  “Better, Sarge,” Boone said in glad surprise. “Thanks a million.” He blinked again. “Yeah, it’s all right now.”

  “Bully.” Armstrong didn’t know why he said that. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d used it. He couldn’t remember if he’d ever used it. Even his old man hardly ever said it. But getting something out of somebody’s eye made you feel fatherly, and fathers talked in old-fashioned ways.

  Yossel Reisen gave him a quizzical look. “Bully?”

  “Well, what about it?” Armstrong snapped. He was embarrassed he’d come out with it, too.

  “Nothing,” Yossel said. But it wasn’t nothing, because he added, “You sounded like George Custer, that’s all.”

  “Thanks a lot, Yossel.” Armstrong had often wondered why his father gave him Custer’s middle name and not his first one. George Grimes would have been a perfectly ordinary handle. Armstrong…wasn’t. He shrugged. Yossel had a funnier name yet, although maybe not if you were a Jew.

  A few minutes later, the train screeched and squealed to a stop. They weren’t anywhere that Armstrong could see—just out in the middle of the damn prairie. Before long, though, officers started yelling, “Out! Out!”

  “What the fuck?” Boone said. Armstrong only shrugged. He didn’t know what was going on, either.

  He was standing out on the prairie with his men, waiting for somebody to tell him what to do next. Either nobody was in a hurry to do that or nobody knew. He looked around. In Utah, he’d got used to always having mountains on the horizon. No mountains here. This was the flattest country he’d ever seen; it made Ohio look like the Himalayas. The train tracks stretched out toward infinity. As far as he could tell, the two rails met there.

  “Next town ahead is Rosenfeld!” yelled somebody with a loud, authoritative voice. “Canucks ran the Frenchies out of there, and they hold the train station. We’re going to take it back from them. Rosenfeld sits at a railway junction, so we need the place if we’re going to be able to use both lines. You got that?”

  “Goddamn Frenchies,” Armstrong muttered. The soldiers from the Republic of Quebec showed no enthusiasm for fighting their former countrymen. He’d heard Mexican troops in the CSA didn’t jump up and down at the idea of shooting at—and getting shot by—the spooks down there. Both sets of soldiers from small countries probably figured they didn’t really want to do big countries’ dirty work for them. Well, the hell with ’em, he thought. I don’t want to get my ass shot off, either.

  Yossel Reisen, on the other hand, summed things up in half a dozen words: “This is where we came in.” Armstrong grunted and nodded. They’d got off the train and fought their way forward in Utah, too.

  He hoped the Canadians wouldn’t be as fanatical as the Mormons. He had trouble imagining how they could be, but a soldier’s life was full of nasty surprises. The men in green-gray shook themselves out into skirmish lines and moved forward. A woman with hair once red but now mostly gray stood outside her farmhouse staring at them as they tramped past.

  “She saw Americans come this way in 1914, too,” Yossel murmured.

  “Yeah, and her husband probably made bombs or something,” Armstrong said. Yossel trudged on for another couple of paces, then nodded.

  One good thing, as far as Armstrong was concerned: this flat, flat ground offered far fewer ambush points than Utah’s rougher terrain. The first gunfire came from a farmhouse and its outbuildings. The American soldiers went after the strongpoints with practiced ease. Machine guns made the Canadians stay down. Mortar teams dropped bombs on the buildings and set some afire. Only then did foot soldiers approach. A few Canucks opened up on them. More mortar and machine-gun fire silenced the position.

  Then something new was added to the mix. A beat-up old pickup truck bounced across the fields. It turned broadside to the American soldiers. “Get down!” Armstrong yelled to his men. Whatever the bastard driving that truck was doing, it didn’t look friendly.

  And it wasn’t. Two Canucks in the pickup’s staked bed served a machine gun on a tall mount. The gun chattered. Bullets sprayed toward the Americans. Wounded soldiers shouted and screamed. A few men in green-gray had the presence of mind to shoot back, but only a few. Leaving a trail of dust in the distance, the truck bucketed away.

  “Jesus!” Armstrong said, and then, “Well, I will be damned.”

  “How come?” Yossel Reisen asked.

  “Because here’s a way to make our lives miserable the fucking Mormons never thought of,” Armstrong answered. He pointed toward the pickup, which was long out of range. “It’s not as good as a barrel, but they can sure as shit chew us up from long range if they’ve got more than one or two of those stinking things. And they will. Bet your ass they will.” He spoke with a veteran’s ingrained pessimism.

  Yossel didn’t tell him he was wrong. The other sergeant did say, “A couple-three rounds through the engine block and those trucks won’t go anywhere fast.”

  “Sure—if we can do it,” Armstrong said. “What about this guy, though? We never laid a glove on the mother.”

  “He surprised us,” Yossel said.

  “Sure as shit surprised me,” Armstrong agreed. “Damn near punctured me besides.” He’d lasted two years with nothing worse than cuts and bruises and scrapes. He wanted to go on lasting, too. He’d seen too many horrible things happen to other people. He knew much too well that they could also happen to him.

  “Now we know they’ve got ’em,” Yossel said. “We’ll spread our machine guns out more or whatever the hell. No soft-skinned trucks are going to make monkeys out of us.”

  “Ook,” Armstrong said, and scratched under his armpits. Yossel gave him the finger, but he didn’t care. As far as he was concerned, he was dead right. That damn machine gun must have wounded eight or ten men. The Americans were flabbling as if it was going out of style, but they weren’t doing anything except flabbling. One lousy pickup truck knocked them back on their heels.

  They needed most of an hour to start moving forward again. Half a mile closer to Rosenfeld, another defended farmhouse held them up. As soon
as they went to the ground, two pickup trucks showed up. They stayed at extreme range and blazed away. Most of their bullets were bound to go wild. A few, though—a few would wound or kill.

  Somebody with an antibarrel cannon made either a lucky shot or a great one and set a pickup on fire. The other truck zoomed up alongside, picked up the men who got out, and roared off. Despite all the U.S. bullets and shells that flew toward it, it got away.

  “How many little trucks do you suppose the Canucks have?” Yossel asked.

  Armstrong gave that the only possible answer: “Too goddamn many.” His buddy nodded.

  They fought their way into Rosenfeld a couple of hours later. The Canadian fighters didn’t try to hold the little prairie town with the fanatical determination the Mormons showed over every inch of ground in Utah. But Canada had a hell of a lot more inches than Utah did. The defenders headed north, toward Winnipeg. They would make another stand somewhere else. Only at the train station and a diner called Pomeroy’s did they put up much of a fight.

  The Canucks wrecked the tracks in the station, blew up the building, and escaped. Pomeroy’s was a different story. The rebels who holed up there didn’t run and didn’t give up. The only person who got out of the burning, battered building was a little boy about six years old. He’d lost the last joint of his left little finger. Otherwise, he didn’t seem badly hurt.

  “What’s your name, kid?” Armstrong asked as he bandaged the boy’s hand.

  “I’m Alec.” The boy looked at him. “You must be a goddamn Yank.”

  “Yeah, well, I love you, too.” Armstrong pulled a squashed chocolate bar out of his pocket. “Here. Want it?”

  “Thank you,” Alec said gravely. “But you’re still a goddamn Yank.”

  “You better believe it, you little bastard,” Armstrong told him, not without pride.

  Vienna, Georgia, was as far as east as Spartacus’ guerrilla band had gone since Jonathan Moss and Nick Cantarella joined them. Spartacus insisted on pronouncing the name of the place as Vie-enna. So did everybody else who talked about it. From everything Moss heard, it probably didn’t hold two thousand people. But its name was proudly distinct from that of the capital of Austria-Hungary.

  Mexican soldiers and overage white men patrolled the roads. The Negroes moved cross-country, past the ghosts of what had been their lives till the Freedom Party turned on them. The countryside was achingly empty: so many people either gone to towns to look for work or just gone, period.

  Nick Cantarella was chortling over an article in a three-day-old copy of the Albany Gazette somebody had brought into camp. “Listen to this,” he said, nudging Moss with his elbow. “‘Brave Canadian patriots with machine guns mounted on the back of pickup trucks have inflicted heavy casualties on the brutal U.S. occupiers in a series of lightning-like hit-and-run raids.’ Isn’t that terrific?”

  Moss gave the U.S. infantry captain a quizzical glance. “Well, I guess it depends on whose side you’re on.”

  “Oh.” Cantarella laughed some more. “Yeah, sure. But it’s a terrific idea. We could do that right here. We should do it. And I was just laughing on account of Jake Featherston’s propaganda asswipe told me about it.”

  “All right. Now I get it. Color me dumb,” Moss said. “Yeah, we could build a machine-gun mount if we had ourselves a truck.”

  “Bet your ass we could,” Cantarella said. “Couple-three of these smokes are better mechanics than half the guys you’d find in a motor pool. They’re used to working with scrap metal and junk, ’cause they couldn’t get anything else.”

  “Let’s talk to Spartacus,” Moss said.

  They put their case to the guerrilla leader. “Ain’t hard gettin’ us a truck, or as many as we need,” he said. “All we gots to do is steal ’em.” He took the prospect for granted. “Wish we had us mo’ machine guns. We could fit ’em out like they was tanks, damn near.” That was the old-fashioned British word for barrels.

  Cantarella shook his head. “Well, no, not quite. The thing about barrels is, they’re armored. Somebody shoots up one of these trucks, it’s gonna be shot up, all right. Can’t get too gay with ’em, or you’ll be sorry quick. You hear what I’m sayin’?”

  “I hear you,” Spartacus answered. “Makes sense. Still and all…Reckon we can git some o’ the ofays round these parts to shit their pants?” He grinned.

  “Oh, I think we might. I think we just might,” Cantarella answered. “We ought to make the mount so we can take it off a truck in a hurry. Sometimes a truck will get shot up. Sometimes we’ll have to leave it behind ’cause we can’t hide it. Shame to have to build a whole new mount again if something like that happens, you know?”

  “That makes sense, too,” Spartacus allowed. His grin got wider. “We’s gonna put trouble on wheels.”

  “Hell, yes,” Cantarella said.

  Three pickups walked with Jesus in Vienna that very night. The guerrilla band’s blacksmiths got to work on one the next morning. Spartacus stashed the other two in an abandoned Negro village a few miles outside of town. Jonathan Moss found places like that heartbreaking. How many of them were there, from one end of the CSA to the other? And what happened to the people who used to live in them? Nothing good—that was only too plain.

  The colored blacksmiths got the idea about fitting a machine gun on a truck as soon as Cantarella started explaining. One of them—a man named Caligula—said, “Don’t need to give us no sermon on the mount, suh.” He sent the white man a sly smile.

  Cantarella winced. Moss groaned. The Negroes broke up. Moss looked at them with new eyes from then on. Anyone who made puns that bad was—damn near had to be—a real live human being, and deserved to be slapped down just like anybody else.

  And the mount the blacksmiths came up with was beautifully simple. They fastened a short length of upright iron pipe to the truck bed. If they lost the truck, they would lose it, too. Into it they stuck a longer pipe whose outer diameter matched the inner diameter of the bottom part of the mount. And on top of that they fixed the machine gun.

  Jonathan Moss admired the result. “If you were going to make these as a regular thing, you couldn’t do any better,” he said. “Where did the pipe come from?”

  “Reckon some plumber wonder where the pipe go, suh,” Caligula answered with another sidelong grin.

  All the Negroes were eager to take their new toy out on the road, so eager that they almost came to blows. They all knew how to serve the machine gun. Only a handful of them, though, could drive. That was funny, in a frightening way. Spartacus sidled up to Moss and asked, “How you like to be our driver?”

  How would I like that? Moss wondered. He was less useful to the guerrillas than Nick Cantarella, simply because he knew less about the infantryman’s trade. But he damn well could drive a truck. “Sure,” he said after no more than a second’s hesitation. “Put somebody who knows where he’s going in the cab with me, though. I didn’t grow up around here, so I don’t know all the little back roads that’ll get me out of trouble.”

  “I go with you my ownself,” Spartacus said. “Reckon I knows this country tolerable good.” He let out a nasty chuckle. “Reckon we gonna give the ofays a little bit of a surprise, too. Yeah, jus’ a li’l bit.”

  What will the Confederates do to me if they recapture me fighting alongside the black guerrillas? Moss decided he didn’t want to know, not in any detail. He also decided he couldn’t afford to be taken, not any more. “Let me have a pistol,” he said, and mimed shooting himself in the head.

  “Oh, yes. We takes care o’ dat,” Spartacus promised, and he did. The .45 he handed Moss the next morning was an officer’s sidearm. It would do the job, all right.

  Strategy was simplicity itself. About an hour after sunup, they set off up the road from Vienna, heading north toward the even smaller town of Pinehurst about ten miles away. Anything they passed, they shot up. The first auto they came up to was driven by a fat, gray-haired white man. He started to give Moss a friendly
smile as the pickup truck passed his beat-up gray Birmingham. The smile changed to a look of horror when he saw Spartacus on the seat beside Moss. A moment later, a burst of machine-gun fire finished him and set his motorcar on fire.

  Spartacus and the blacks in the back all whooped. “Do Jesus!” the guerrilla leader yelled. “This here gonna be fun!”

  That white man wouldn’t think so. But then, if he was one of the yahoos who went around yelling, “Freedom!” he was helping the Confederate States’ government visit wholesale slaughter on their blacks. If he happened to get in the way of a little retail slaughter coming the other way—well, too damn bad.

  A tractor sat in a cotton field not far from the side of the road. “Stop the truck!” Spartacus told Moss. He followed the black man’s order. Spartacus pointed out the window. “Put some holes in that fucker!” he yelled. The gun crew obeyed. The tractor sent a plume of black, greasy smoke up into the sky.

  They wrecked two more tractors and a combine. Jonathan Moss nodded to himself. Those were the tools that let white farmers get along without black sharecroppers. They were handy, yes, but they were also expensive. How would those whites like watching them go up in flames?

  The gunners sprayed an oncoming automobile with bullets. It went off the road, flipped over, and burned like a torch. “This is fun!” Spartacus shouted. Moss nodded. Destruction for the sake of destruction brought a nasty thrill with it, almost as if he were a staid married man visiting a whorehouse.

  There was a checkpoint outside of Pinehurst: a sleepy one, manned by three or four Great War veterans too old or too infirm to do anything more strenuous. They were just going through the motions. They didn’t expect any trouble as the pickup truck drew near. Spartacus ducked down so they couldn’t see him next to Moss.

  When the machine gunners in the back of the pickup opened fire, the guards toppled like tenpins. “Git!” Spartacus told Moss. “Go left, then left again soon as you can.”

  The road up to Pinehurst was paved; the one onto which Spartacus put Moss was nothing but a dirt track. Red dust rose in choking clouds, for it hadn’t rained lately. “The dust will let them track us,” Moss said.