The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  That one impressed the nurses more than it did Armstrong. “Men!” one of them sniffed when she found out Armstrong didn’t get it. “Can you imagine trying to take care of four little tiny babies all at once? Can you imagine trying to take care of four two-year-olds all at once? My God!” She rolled her eyes.

  Armstrong couldn’t imagine anything like that. But, since Susan was young and cute instead of being a battleaxe, he did his best. “Bad?” he asked.

  “My God!” she repeated. “My kids are almost two years apart, and they still drive me nuts. But four of them doing the same things, making the same messes, getting into the same trouble all at the same time? I hope she’s got lots of people helping her, that’s all I can tell you.”

  She wore a wedding ring. Armstrong hadn’t even noticed before. Damn, he thought. “Where’s your husband stationed?” he asked.

  “He’s in west Texas right now,” Susan answered. “He’s been lucky so far.” She reached out and knocked on the nightstand by his iron-framed cot. “But when I see what can happen to you guys…” She grimaced.

  “I’m getting better,” said Armstrong, not the least self-centered young man around. But then he realized that might need something more with it. He did his best: “Most of us are getting better.”

  He won a smile from the nurse. “I know,” she said. “But I still worry. How can I help it?”

  “I guess you can’t, but it doesn’t do you any good,” Armstrong said. “It doesn’t do your husband any good, either. What’s his name, anyway?” He didn’t give a rat’s ass what the guy’s name was, but asking might make Susan like him better, and who could say where that would take him?

  Her smile got bigger—she did appreciate the question. “He’s Jerry,” she said. “He’s so sweet…” Her face went all mushy. If she’d looked at Armstrong that way, he would have been in business. Since she was thinking about Jerry instead, he just lay there and smiled himself and nodded. He didn’t hope the guy would stop an antibarrel round with his face, but he didn’t exactly love him, either.

  He watched Susan’s perky behind as she went to check on the wounded man in the next bed. He wasn’t the only recovering soldier watching her. The guys in this ward were wounded, yeah, but they were a long way from dead.

  That afternoon, Susan bustled up to him with a different kind of smile on her face. She was pleased for him. “You’ve got visitors,” she announced, then turned and said, “You can come in now.”

  In walked his father and mother. His mother gave him a big hug and a kiss. His father squeezed his hand hard and said, “I’m proud of you, son.”

  “What? For getting shot?” Armstrong said. “I’m not proud of that. It was just bad luck.”

  “No, not for getting shot.” Merle Grimes’ left hand stayed on the head of his cane. “For being brave enough to fight in the front line, and for doing it well.”

  His old man had done his fighting a generation earlier, and he must have forgotten how things worked. You didn’t go to the front line because you were brave. You went there because some slob with stars on his shoulder straps decided your regiment could do a particular job—or maybe because you drew the short straw. And if you didn’t go forward when the other guys did, the Army made sure you caught hell. If you did go forward, you had a chance of coming through, anyway.

  “You’re going to be all right,” his mother said. “The nurse told us so.”

  “Yeah, Mom,” Armstrong said. “I probably won’t even have a limp.” They were talking about putting him back on duty once he healed up, so he figured the chances he’d be able to walk straight were pretty fair.

  “That’s good,” Edna Grimes said. “Not that it would be the end of the world,” she added hastily, looking at her husband.

  “I understood what you meant,” Merle Grimes said. “I’m not ashamed of my limp or anything—I earned it honestly. But I wouldn’t be sorry if I didn’t have it.”

  “Thanks for coming, both of you. You didn’t have to do anything like this,” Armstrong said.

  “Oh, yes, we did,” his mother and father said together.

  “Who’s taking care of Annie?” he asked. His little sister was getting big these days; she didn’t need as much care as she would have a few years earlier.

  “Your Aunt Clara has her,” his mother answered. “She says she hopes you get better soon—Clara does, I mean. So does Annie, of course.”

  “That’s nice,” Armstrong said, as politely as he could. He didn’t like his aunt, and it was mutual. Clara was his mom’s half sister, and only a couple of years older than he was. They hadn’t been able to stand each other ever since they were little kids. He was surprised Clara didn’t hope he’d got his dick shot off.

  His mother always tried to pretend things weren’t as bad as they really were. His father, who didn’t, chuckled. “She doesn’t want to see you dead, Armstrong,” he said. “Not unless she does it herself, anyway.”

  “Merle!” By her tone, Edna Grimes would make Dad pay for that, no matter how true it was.

  “Oh, come on, Edna. I was joking,” he said. At the same time, though, he tipped Armstrong a wink. He wasn’t joking a bit, but he didn’t feel like fighting with his wife. He looked at the bandages on Armstrong’s leg. “How did it happen?”

  “We were pushing north toward Winnipeg. The Canucks had a strongpoint in a farmhouse,” Armstrong answered. “I was one of the guys moving up, and the damn machine gun got me. Bad luck, that’s all, like I said before.” He paused. “How did you get wounded, Dad?” He’d never felt able to ask before. Now they both belonged to the same fraternity. He’d had himself a .30-caliber initiation.

  “It was a trench raid,” Merle Grimes answered without the slightest hesitation. “We used to pull them all the time, to grab a few prisoners and see what the guys on the other side were up to. The front didn’t move then the way it does nowadays. We got in, we threw some grenades around, we caught some Confederates, and we were on our way back when some son of a bitch—excuse me, Edna—nailed me from behind. Stinky Morris and Herm Cassin got me back to our side of the line, and it was off to an aid station after that. It hurt like a…Well, it hurt like anything.”

  “Yeah. I found out about that. For the first little bit, it was just like somebody knocked me down. But not for long.” Armstrong shook his head. “No, not for long.” He didn’t want to remember that, so he asked, “How are things back in D.C.?”

  “Well, we aren’t occupied,” his mother said. “It was bad when the Confederates took the town last time around, and it was really bad when the USA took it back. I wasn’t much older than you are now when that happened. But in between there was a long stretch that was pretty quiet, when the front was too far north to let guns reach us. Bombers weren’t so much back then.”

  “They are now,” his father said. “The Confederates still come over us two or three nights a week. We’re not far from their fields, so they can really load up. We go to the cellars when the sirens start howling, and we hope for the best. You can’t do much else. It’s almost like being in the line, except you don’t get to shoot back yourself.”

  “I guess.” Armstrong had no idea what civilian life in wartime was like. He’d been a conscript when the shooting started. “You have enough to eat and everything?”

  “That’s better than it was the last time around,” his mother said.

  “I was in the service the last time around, so I can’t compare,” his father said, “but it’s not too bad. Not much meat—there’s this horrible chopped ham that comes in cans.” He and Armstrong’s mother both made faces. He went on, “What we get mostly isn’t exciting, and a lot of the fruits and vegetables are canned, too. But nobody’s going hungry. Your rations sound like they’re better than what we ate in the trenches. Boy, I never wanted to see another bean after I got out.”

  “We always bitch about what we get,” Armstrong said.

  His father laughed. “King David’s soldiers probably did t
he same thing.”

  “Yeah, probably,” Armstrong said. “But the biggest thing I don’t like is that you get bored. There aren’t that many different kinds of rations, and some guys won’t like some of them, so that cuts it down more. You’re always happy when you can scrounge some chickens or a pig. Once in Utah, we ate a goat.”

  His mother made a disgusted noise. His father just sounded interested as he asked, “How was it?”

  “Better than I expected,” Armstrong answered. “Kinda tough and kinda gamy, but we had this Polack in the squad—Eyechart, we called him, ’cause his name looked really weird with all those s’s and z’s and w’s—who stewed it and stewed it, and it ended up so it was better than rations, anyway.”

  “Sounds like he had some practice in the old country,” his father said.

  “Him or his folks—I think he was born here,” Armstrong said. “But the coffee’s lousy and the cigarettes are worse. That’s the, uh, dirty end of the stick.”

  Merle Grimes chuckled at the just-in-time censorship. Then he said, “Close your eyes.” Armstrong did. When his father said he could open them, he found himself looking at three packs of Raleighs. “These are for you.”

  “Wow, Dad! Thanks!” Armstrong knew he would have to share them with his wardmates. He didn’t care. They were wonderful anyhow. “Where’d you get ’em?”

  “A friend of mine has a son who captured a Confederate truck crammed full of them,” his father answered.

  “Wow,” Armstrong said again. Short of nabbing Jake Featherston, he couldn’t think of anything better. “That guy should’ve won the Medal of Honor.” He hadn’t thought a visit from his parents could turn out so well. A truckload of Raleighs! That was almost better to think about than Susan.

  Nothing official ever came of Cincinnatus Driver’s run-in with Sergeant Cannizzaro. He hadn’t thought it would. Technically, he was a civilian, so they couldn’t even court-martial him. The most they could do was take away his gun and ship him home. That would have pissed him off, but it wouldn’t have broken his heart. He knew he had a better chance of living to a ripe old age in Des Moines than he did hauling supplies through the CSA.

  But there were more kinds of results than official ones. The way he handled himself when the Confederates hit the supply column and the way he stood up to the jerk of a U.S. quartermaster sergeant won him respect from his fellow drivers.

  “You’re all right, you know?” Hal Williamson sounded half surprised when he said it as they dug into ration cans somewhere in central Tennessee. “Never had much to do with colored fellows before. Ain’t a whole lot of ’em in Manchester, New Hampshire. You kinda believe what folks say. But like I said, you’re all right. You’re just—a guy.”

  “What did you expect?” Cincinnatus paused to light a Raleigh. The Confederate from whom he’d taken the pack wouldn’t be smoking again, unless he smoked down in hell. “I ain’t got horns. I ain’t got a tail.” He was thinking about hell, all right.

  “Not what I meant.” Williamson cast about for a way to say what he did mean. He was about Cincinnatus’ age, with steel-rimmed bifocals and with three fingers gone from his left hand. He gestured with that mutilated hand to make his point. “I didn’t figure you people’d have the balls to do some of the things you done.”

  “Niggers’re like any other folks.” Cincinnatus used the word on purpose. He could use it, though he would have slugged Williamson had he heard it from the white man’s lips. “Some’s smart, some’s dumb. Some’s brave, some’s cowards. Some’s good-lookin’, some’s mullions.” Hal Williamson blinked at that bit of black slang, but he followed it. Cincinnatus went on, “Maybe I got balls, maybe I don’t. But even if I do, that don’t say nothin’ about what niggers’re like. It only goes to show what I’m like. You see what I mean?”

  “Maybe.” Williamson lit a cigarette of his own. “It’s like sayin’ all Jews are cheap or all Mexicans’ll pull a knife on you if you look at ’em sideways.”

  He probably knew even less about Mexicans than he did about Negroes. There might be a Negro or two in Manchester, but Cincinnatus would have bet there were no Mexicans. Still, he got the point. “That’s what I’m sayin’,” Cincinnatus told him. “Biggest difference between black folks and white folks is, you’re white and we’re black. Next biggest difference is, you been on top. If we was on top, you bet we’d treat you just as shitty as you treated us.”

  Williamson blinked again behind those glasses. Cincinnatus chuckled silently; the idea that Negroes could be on top plainly had never occurred to the other driver. “Son of a bitch,” Williamson said after a moment, and then, “Well, I bet you would. It’s…What do you call it? Human nature, that’s what.”

  “Reckon so,” Cincinnatus said. “Tell you some more human nature: I ever get my hands on Jake Featherston…Do Jesus!”

  “Yeah,” the white man said. “But for me it’s on account of he jumped my country. It’s personal for you, ain’t it?”

  “You might say so.” Cincinnatus stubbed out his cigarette and twisted his hands as if he were wringing a chicken’s neck—or a man’s. “Yeah, you just might say so.”

  They got rolling again a few minutes later, carrying this, that, and the other thing down past Delphi to where the United States were building up for the attack on Chattanooga. Armored cars accompanied the column. So did a couple of half-tracks full of soldiers. The powers that be probably cared very little about the truck drivers’ safety. What they were hauling? That was another story. Here in Tennessee, the column needed all the protection it could get. The only land the United States really held here was land their men were standing on. Everything else belonged to the Confederates.

  Even shot-up autos by the side of the road could be deadly dangerous. One of them blew up with an enormous roar as an armored car went by. The vehicle got two flat tires and a dent, but otherwise withstood the blast. Whoever set off the auto bomb would have done better to wait for a soft-skinned truck.

  U.S. machine guns sprayed the woods, but that was a forlorn hope. They also fired at other roadside wrecks, which turned out to be a good idea. One burnt-out command car exploded while the closest U.S. vehicle was still a quarter of a mile away. Cincinnatus whooped when it did. “One of Featherston’s fuckers cussin’ his head off now!” he said jubilantly.

  The jubilation didn’t last. It never did. Infiltrators or holdouts started shooting at the trucks. A deuce-and-a-half lurched off the road with a driver wounded or dead. Another coughed to a stop when it took a bullet through the engine block. A couple had tires flattened and had to change them. An armored car stayed behind with them to obstruct the snipers and to shoot at them if they broke cover. Along with most of the other drivers, Cincinnatus went on.

  Night was falling when they got to the supply dump. Soldiers holding dim red flashlights guided them to the unloading point. More men waited there with wheelbarrows and dollies. Off in the distance, artillery rumbled.

  “Come on, youse guys! Move it!” a familiar voice shouted. Cincinnatus swore under his breath. If that wasn’t Sergeant Cannizzaro, he was a blond. “Took youse long enough to get here!” the quartermaster sergeant complained.

  Telling him where to go and how to get there was bound to be more trouble than it was worth. Cincinnatus just sat in the cab of his truck and wished he could have a cigarette. Signs all over the dump screamed NO SMOKING! at the top of their printed lungs.

  “Here you go, Jack.” Somebody handed him a sandwich through the open window.

  “Why, thank you kindly,” Cincinnatus said in glad surprise. He was even more surprised—and even gladder—when he bit into it. That thick slab of ham had never lived in a U.S. Army ration can. He didn’t know where the soldier came up with it, but it was mighty good.

  He wished for a bottle of beer to go with it. No sooner had he wished than another soldier came along and gave him a bottle of…Dr. Hopper. Soda pop wasn’t the same, but it wasn’t bad, either. It had to be plunder, same as
the ham. The taste reminded him he was back in the CSA. Dr. Hopper didn’t come over the border—at least, he’d never seen it up in Des Moines. He hoped they dropped a bomb on the factory that made the stuff…maybe after he’d got hold of a couple of cases for himself for old time’s sake.

  Swearing soldiers unloaded his truck. He thought the cussing in this war was even worse than it had been the last time around. People then sometimes seemed faintly embarrassed at what came out of their mouths. Nowadays, men didn’t even notice they were turning the air blue. They swore as automatically as they breathed—and profanity seemed as necessary as air.

  “Hey, Sergeant!” somebody called. “You got beds for us?”

  “What? You ain’t goin’ back right away?” Cannizzaro sounded genuinely amazed.

  A volley of curses—purposeful, not automatic—washed over him. Cincinnatus added his two cents’ worth to the barrage. The idea of crawling along in the dark with useless taped-up headlights, waiting for raiders he couldn’t see to open up, was less than appealing.

  Sergeant Cannizzaro knew when he was outgunned. “Awright, already!” he said. “Stay here.” He might have been outgunned in the literal sense. Cincinnatus had traded in his .45 for a captured Confederate submachine gun. Other drivers carried Springfields or even C.S. automatic rifles—although U.S. infantrymen in the line grabbed most of those. “Like I said, ain’t got no beds,” Cannizzaro went on. “Youse can spread out bedrolls on the ground, or youse can sleep in your trucks. Ain’t nobody gonna give you no trouble till morning, honest to God.”

  Cincinnatus slept under his truck. More men stayed in their cabs, but he couldn’t stretch out at full length in there. With his battered carcass, sleeping all scrunched up mostly meant not sleeping. A crumpled-up jacket made a good enough pillow. Cincinnatus’ battered bones creaked as he turned and twisted to get as comfortable as he could. All that wiggling might have kept him awake for—oh, an extra thirty seconds.