“Sure.” Armstrong held out the pack.
“Thanks.” The kid took one, pulled a lighter out of his pocket, and got the Duke going. He smoked it halfway down, then said, “You rather go to the front, or do you want occupation duty?”
“Christ! The front!” Armstrong said. “I’ve done occupation duty. You can have it. I want to get some licks in at the real enemy for a change. What about you?”
“I got wounded when we were outflanking Nashville,” the kid answered. “If I could find a nice, quiet spot where nothing much happens…”
“You’re an honest goldbrick, anyway,” Armstrong said, laughing.
“I’d have to smoke funny cigarettes to really believe it, not nice ones like these,” the young private said. “The only guys who draw duty like that are Congressmen’s kids.”
“Not even them. There was one in my outfit—well, a nephew, but close enough,” Armstrong said. “He was a regular joe, Yossel was. Did the same shit everybody else did, took the same chances when the shooting started. He had balls, too—sheenies must be tougher’n I figured.”
Up at the front of the repple-depple, where the principal would have given the students what-for, a personnel sergeant sat reading a paperback with a nearly naked girl on the cover. A young officer came up and spoke to him. He nodded, put down the book, and picked up a clipboard. He read off several names and pay numbers. Men grabbed their gear and went out with the shavetail.
A few more soldiers came in and found seats. The personnel sergeant called other names and numbers. Men slung duffel bags or shouldered packs and found themselves part of the war again. A poker game started. Armstrong stayed away. He’d played a lot of poker in the hospital, and had less money than he wished he did because of it.
Another lieutenant talked with the personnel sergeant. The sergeant looked at his clipboard. Among the names he read was, “Henderson, Calvin.” The kid next to Armstrong got up and walked to the front of the room. Then the noncom said, “Grimes, Armstrong,” and rattled off his pay number.
He got up, too. His leg hurt a little, but he got around all right. He went up and said, “I’m Armstrong Grimes.”
“Hello, Sergeant. I’m Lieutenant Bassler,” the officer said. “I’ve got a squad for you. You’ve led a squad before?”
“I’ve led a platoon, sir,” Armstrong answered.
Lieutenant Bassler took it in stride. “Good. You’ll know what you’re doing, then. Where was that?”
“In Utah, sir, and up in Canada.”
“All right. And you’re in the repple-depple because…?”
Did you foul up? Did they take your platoon away from you? Armstrong could read between the lines. “I got wounded, sir.” He touched his leg. “I can use it pretty well now.”
“Ah. I caught one about there myself last year,” Bassler said. “Gives us something in common, even if we don’t much want it.”
“Hell of a lot better to shoot the other guy,” Armstrong agreed.
“Well, you’ll get your chance. Come on,” Bassler said.
“Hold it.” The personnel sergeant held up a hand. “I gotta sign these guys out.” Armstrong and Cal Henderson and the other men signed on their lines on the clipboard. Now the military bureaucrat nodded approval. He reminded Armstrong of his own father. He wanted all the i’s dotted and the t’s crossed, and he didn’t think anything was official till they were.
When the soldiers got outside, Armstrong said, “Sir, you mind if I load my weapon? Never can tell what’s waiting out here.”
The question wasn’t just practical, though it was that. It would also show him something about how Lieutenant Bassler thought. The officer nodded right away. “You’d all better do that,” he said, and pulled his own .45 from its holster.
Armstrong put a clip in his Springfield and chambered a round. All but one of the other men also had Springfields. The odd man out—his name, Armstrong remembered, was Kurowski—carried a submachine gun: not a Confederate model, but a big, brutal Thompson, made in the USA.
The lieutenant had a couple of command cars waiting to take his new men down to the front. He said, “I’ll handle the machine gun on one of these. Who wants to take the other one?”
“I’ll do it, sir,” Cal Henderson said. “I’ve used a .30-caliber gun before. Haven’t fired one of these big mothers, but they work the same way, right?”
“Near enough,” Lieutenant Bassler said. “A .50-caliber gun shoots farther and flatter and harder, that’s all.”
“Sounds good to me,” Henderson said. It sounded good to Armstrong, too.
But Lieutenant Bassler didn’t put him in with the kid. The officer stuck Armstrong in his own command car, and grilled him as they thumped down the battered road. He got more out of Armstrong about where he’d fought and what he’d done. He probably also learned a bit about how Armstrong thought, but that didn’t occur to Armstrong till later.
When they came into Chattanooga—luckily, without needing to use the machine guns on the way—Bassler said, “Ever see anything this torn up?”
“Sir, this isn’t a patch on Ogden and Salt Lake City,” Armstrong answered. “The Mormons hung on till they couldn’t hang on any more. Then they pulled back a block and did it again.”
An old man picking through ruins with a stick glared at the command cars as they went by. If he had a rifle…But he didn’t—not here, anyway—so he could only hate.
“What do we do with them—what do we do to them—once we lick them?” Bassler said. “How do we keep from fighting another round twenty, twenty-five, thirty years from now? How do we keep them from putting bombs under their shirts and blowing themselves up when they walk into a crowd of our soldiers?”
Armstrong remembered that woman in Utah, when he was heading for R and R. He shivered despite the humid heat. “Sir, I wish to hell I knew,” he said. “I’m just a dumbass sergeant. What do you think? How do we do it?”
“Either we make them like us—”
“Good luck!” Armstrong broke in. “Uh, sir.”
“Yeah. I know.” Bassler wasn’t more than a few years older than Armstrong. When he grinned, the difference hardly showed. “Fat chance. But if we could do that, it would sure save us a lot of trouble down the road. If we can’t, maybe we can make them too scared of us to turn terrorist very often.”
“That’s what they tried in Utah,” Armstrong said. “It sort of worked, but only sort of. You start shooting hostages and stuff, you just make people hate you worse.”
“I’m afraid you’re right,” Bassler said sourly. “And the Confederate States are a lot bigger than Utah. We occupy them all, there are bound to be lots of places where we’re too thin on the ground to do it right. And those are the places where trouble starts.”
“I know one thing we could do,” Armstrong said. Bassler raised a questioning eyebrow. Armstrong went on, “We could give what’s left of the nigger’s guns. If half the shit they say about what Featherston’s fuckers are doing to them is true, they’ll want payback like you wouldn’t believe. They may not love us, but they sure as hell have to hate the bastards who’ve been screwing ’em over for so long.”
Lieutenant Bassler stayed quiet for so long, Armstrong wondered if he’d said something dumb. Well, too bad if he had. Bassler shouldn’t have asked him if he didn’t want to know what he thought. Then the young officer said, “You know, Grimes, I’m going to pass that up the line. We don’t think about the Negroes in the CSA as much as we should. I’m sure we’re doing some things to help them, same as the Confederates did what they could to help the Mormons in Utah.”
“Mostly the Mormons used our weapons, sir,” Armstrong said. “That way, they could get ammo from us. Sometimes they took our guns, too. But they already had a lot when we got there, yeah.”
“Uh-huh,” Bassler said. “But that’s not my point. My point is that we ought to be using the Negroes systematically, and we aren’t. Somebody with stars on his shoulder straps needs to thin
k about that. Maybe the President does, too.”
Armstrong was convinced they wouldn’t think about it on the suggestion of a no-account noncom. Then they drove through the gap between Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge, the gap U.S. forces now held. Bare-chested gun bunnies fed 105s that sent death down into Georgia. Eyeing the high ground to either side, Armstrong said, “My hat’s off to those paratroopers. They saved us a world of grief.”
“You can sing that in church, Sergeant,” Bassler said. “We got over the Tennessee with a ruse, and we took the mountains with a trick. Makes you wonder what we’ll have to do to go forward from here.”
“Well, the country looks easier, anyway,” Armstrong said. “If we start banging barrels through the gap, can those butternut bastards stop us?”
“Good question. I think we’ll find out before too long, once the logistics buildup gets done,” Bassler said. They were close enough to the front to watch incoming artillery burst less than a quarter of a mile away. Bassler tapped the driver on the shoulder. “This’ll do. We’ll hoof it from here. They’ll start aiming at the command cars if we come much closer.” Looking grateful, the driver hit the brakes.
Armstrong ended up with Cal Henderson in his new squad. He was introduced to Whitey and Woody and Alf and Rocco and Hy and Squidface and Zeb the Hat. When he said, “Let’s try not to get each other killed, all right?” they all nodded.
“You’ve been through some shit,” Squidface opined. “That’s good.”
“A little bit,” Armstrong allowed. “You guys look like you have, too.”
“Hell, we’re here,” Squidface said. He was a PFC, skinny and dark and needing a shave. He didn’t have tentacles or even particularly buggy eyes. One of these days, Armstrong figured he’d find out how the nickname happened. Till then, he didn’t need to flabble about it.
The Confederates threw a little more artillery at the U.S. positions. Nobody in Armstrong’s new squad even moved. These guys were veterans, all right; they could tell by listening when falling shells were liable to be dangerous. They watched Armstrong as the shells burst, too. They wanted to see if he got all hot and bothered. When he lit up a Duke and went on talking as if nothing were happening, they relaxed a little.
“You guys think we can break out?” he asked. He’d heard what Lieutenant Bassler had to say. These men would have to do the bleeding. So will I, Armstrong thought. (So would Bassler—second lieutenants were expendable, too. But Armstrong didn’t worry about him.)
They all loudly and profanely insisted they could. Armstrong figured that meant they’d get the chance to try before real long.
Jonathan Moss counted himself lucky to be alive. He didn’t think what was left of Spartacus’ band would attack another airstrip any time soon. Doing it once had cost the black guerrillas too much.
“They was layin’ for us,” Spartacus said. He, Moss, Nick Cantarella, and a dozen or so Negro fighters sat around a couple of small campfires. “Was they layin’ for anybody who come by, or did somebody rat on us?”
That was an ugly thought. A Negro would have to be crazy or desperate to betray his comrades to whites in the CSA, but it could happen. If a man knew his loved ones were in a camp, could he make a bargain with the Devil? Of course he could. Moss could find other reasons that might make a black turn traitor—simple jealousy of Spartacus came to mind—but saving kin stood highest on the list of likely ones.
“Some lyin’ nigger might be sittin’ right here next to me,” Spartacus said. “Damn cottonmouth might be gittin’ ready to bite again.”
The guerrillas stirred. One of them, a heavyset fellow called Arminius, said, “We went to the damn airstrip on account o’ these ofays. Anybody sell us out, reckon they’s the ones. Like calls to like, folks say.”
“It couldn’t very well have been us,” Moss said. “You people have kept an eye on us ever since we joined the band. You think we don’t know that? I don’t blame you for doing it, but it’s no secret.”
He talked like a lawyer: he reasoned from evidence. No surprise—he was a lawyer. Sometimes, though, legal tactics weren’t what the situation called for. Moving quickly but without any fuss, Nick Cantarella got to his feet. “Anybody says I kiss Jake Featherston’s ass can kiss mine.” He eyed Arminius. “Shall I drop my drawers for you?”
The black man jumped up with a roar of rage. He charged Cantarella. He was a couple of inches taller than the escaped POW, and much wider through the shoulders. He wasn’t afraid of anything—Moss had seen that plenty of times.
He swung an enormous haymaker, intending to knock Cantarella into the middle of next week. No doubt the white officer tried to infuriate him so he would fight foolishly. Cantarella got what he wanted. He grabbed Arminius’ arm, jerked, and twisted. The Negro let out a startled squawk as he flew through the air. He landed hard. Cantarella kicked him in the side.
Arminius groaned, but tried to yank Cantarella’s foot out from under him. “Naughty,” the U.S. officer said, and kicked him above his left ear. Arminius groaned and went limp. The brawl couldn’t have lasted half a minute. Cantarella looked around. “Anybody else?”
No one said anything. “Sit down,” Spartacus told him. “I don’t reckon you done nothin’. I reckon you did, you be dead no matter how fancy you fight. You gots to sleep some o’ the time.”
“Throw water on Arminius,” Cantarella said. “He’ll be fine once his headache goes away. I don’t think I broke anything—didn’t do it on purpose, anyhow.”
A bucket—no, they call it a pail here, Moss thought—from a nearby creek revived Arminius. He didn’t remember the fight or what led up to it. He did say, “My head bangin’ like a big ol’ drum.”
“I bet it is,” Spartacus said. He eyed Cantarella. “Where you learn dat?”
“Here and there,” Cantarella answered.
“You learn me how to do it?”
“Probably,” the U.S. officer said. “Most of the time, it’s no damn good. Somebody got a gun, he’ll punch your ticket for you before you get close enough to throw him through a wall.”
“Learn me anyways,” Spartacus said. “Mebbe I got to impress some niggers, git ’em to jine up with me. I do dat fancy shit, dey reckon I’s tough enough to suit.” He paused. His mouth twisted. “Hope I find me some niggers to impress. Ain’t so many left no more, ’cept for the ones already totin’ guns.”
He was right about that. Ten years earlier, the countryside hereabouts would have been full of sharecropper villages, full of blacks. Mechanization and deportation had taken care of that. Not many Negroes remained out here, and fewer all the time. Mexican soldiers and Freedom Party stalwarts and guards from the towns took ever more to train stations. Off they went to one camp or another. And it grew clearer and clearer that the camps didn’t house them, or not for long. The camps just killed them, as fast as they could.
“Assembly line for murder,” Jonathan Moss murmured.
“What you say?” Spartacus asked.
“Nothing. Woolgathering, that’s all.” Moss was glad the guerrilla chief hadn’t understood him.
Nick Cantarella had. “Army’s coming,” he said. “Won’t be too fucking long, either. Chattanooga’s fallen. Even the Confederate propaganda mill can’t spew lies about that any more. If our guys aren’t in Georgia already, they will be pretty damn quick. Territory north of Atlanta’s rough, but it’s not that rough. I don’t think Featherston’s fuckers can stop ’em once they get rolling again.”
“We still be breathin’ when they gits here?” Spartacus asked. “Can’t hardly think about hittin’ towns no mo’. Got to stay alive first.”
“What happen to me?” Arminius asked, holding his head as if afraid it might fall off any minute now. Considering what Cantarella did to it, it might, too. Moss wouldn’t have wanted a well-aimed shoe clomping into the side of his noggin.
“You done did somethin’ dumb, dat’s what,” Spartacus answered, and then came back to the problem at hand: “Wanna hit the
damn ofays. Don’t wanna jus’ lurk out here like swamp niggers in slavery days.”
“You can get dynamite, right?” Cantarella asked. Spartacus nodded. Cantarella went on, “And you can get alarm clocks, too, yeah?”
“Reckon so,” Spartacus said. “What you thinkin’ ’bout? People bombs is too risky, even if we finds folks willin’ to do it. These days, ofays see a nigger they don’t know, they jus’ start shootin’. Can’t get close enough to blow up a lot of ’em.”
“Auto bombs,” Cantarella said. “Set the timer for sunup, but drive in during the middle of the night, park the son of a bitch, and then get out if you can. All the shrapnel flying, auto bombs make a mess of things even if they don’t have a big crowd around ’em.”
Spartacus sighed. “Yeah, we do dat. Dey don’t patrol as good as dey oughta. But it ain’t the same, you hear what I say?”
“We hear,” Moss said. He didn’t want to make himself too prominent right now. The guerrillas had attacked the airstrip on his account. He would have enjoyed strafing Confederates in Georgia if he’d stolen an airplane. He would have enjoyed flying off to U.S.-held territory even more. Instead…Instead, the band wrecked itself. That was all there was to it. Spartacus and the surviving Negroes—fewer than half those who’d gone to the airport—didn’t want to admit that, even to themselves, for which he couldn’t blame them. But it was true.
They’d fought the Mexicans on even terms before the debacle. Now they ran from them. They had to. They would get chewed to bits if they didn’t.
A buzz in the air overhead made everybody look up nervously. “Reckon the woods hides our fires good enough?” Spartacus said.
“We’ll find out,” Nick Cantarella answered.
That wasn’t what Moss wanted to hear. And, a minute or so later, he wanted even less to hear the screech of falling bombs. They wouldn’t be big ones—ten-pounders, say, thrown out of the airplane by hand the way bombardiers did it back in the early days of the Great War. But when he had no trench or foxhole to jump into, all he could do was flatten out on the ground and hope for the best.
The Grapple Page 59
