The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  “Come on!” Jeff shouted. “Move your lazy asses!” Anybody who got in position after he did was in trouble, and everybody knew it. Some of the guards, the men from the Confederate Veterans’ Brigades, moved slower than their younger counterparts. He could put the old farts in the stockade or ship them home, but that was about it. He could send younger guards straight to the front if they fucked off. He’d done it, too, though only twice.

  The train whistled again. Jeff Pinkard was anything but an imaginative man, but he couldn’t help thinking how mournful that sound was. And yet…Who would mourn the Negroes who went into the bathhouses and the trucks and the crematorium? Nobody white in the CSA, that was for damn sure.

  Here it came, smoke puffing from the stack. Sparks flew as steel wheels ground against steel rails. The engineer knew just what he was doing. He stopped the locomotive alongside the flagpole that was his mark and waved to Jeff. As Pinkard waved back, the fellow in the tall cap inside the engine took a pint of whiskey out of his coat and swigged from it. Then he gave a throat-cutting gesture, and then a thumbs-up.

  If he hadn’t added the thumbs-up, Jeff would have reported him for drinking on duty and for political unreliability. As things were, the camp commandant just grinned.

  “Out! Out! Out!” the guards screamed as they unlocked the crowded cars. “Get moving, you stinking, rasty niggers! Form two lines! Men on the left! Women and brats on the right!” When the Negroes stumbled out of the cars, the guards reinforced the orders with cuffs and kicks. A dog leaped forward and bit a woman. Her shrill scream made the blacks move faster to keep the same thing from happening to them.

  Into the camp they went, those who could move. Other Negroes—trusties—carried and dragged those who couldn’t move straight to the trucks. The story was that they were going to a clinic some distance from the camp. In fact, the trucks would go far enough to make sure they were dead, then bring them back to the crematorium. More trusties, these always under the watchful eyes of guards, would load the corpses into the fire, and that would be that.

  Before long, the trusties would get it in the neck—in the nape of the neck, to be precise—and go up in smoke themselves. They didn’t know that yet; they thought they were saving their worthless black hides by going along with the guards. But Jeff and the others in gray uniforms had plenty of Negroes to choose from. Blacks were flooding into Camp Humble faster than even this magnificent facility could get rid of them.

  Guards and trusties went through the train together, pulling out corpses and the live Negroes who were either too far gone to come out on their own or were playing dead. The bodies went straight to the crematorium. The shammers went straight to the trucks.

  One of them saw the wreathed stars on Jeff’s collar and stretched out his hands in appeal. “I didn’t do nothin’, suh!” he said, plainly sensing that nothing good was likely to happen to him. Trusties holding him tight and guards aiming automatic weapons at him gave pretty fair hints.

  “You broke a rule,” Jeff said stonily. “They said come out, and you damn well didn’t. There’s a punishment barracks next to the clinic.” By now, he brought out the soothing lies with the greatest of ease. “You spend some time in there, you’ll learn to behave yourself when you get back here.”

  The Negro went on squawking, but these weren’t the bad kind of squawks. As long as he thought he would be coming back, he was willing to go where the trusties were taking him—not eager, maybe, but willing. He would have kicked up all kinds of trouble had he thought he was heading for his last truck ride.

  Before long, the crematorium went to work. The trusties took jewelry and dental gold from the corpses and gave them to the guards. Keeping any of that stuff sent a trusty into the flames alive. So far, the guards hadn’t caught any of them sticking rings up their ass or anything. Sooner or later, it was bound to happen. Some people would try to steal no matter what.

  Smoke belched from the stacks. Jeff swore softly. The smoke smelled like greasy burnt meat. The outfit that ran up the crematorium had sworn on a stack of Bibles that the smoke would be clean, that you’d never know in a million years they were burning bodies. “Lying bastards,” Pinkard muttered. Yeah, some people tried to steal, all right, no matter what. They weren’t all black, either.

  He wrinkled his nose against the stink. Sometimes half-charred bits of flesh came flying out of the stacks, sucked up along with the hot gases. There was a lot more soot than the manufacturers promised, too.

  Pulling out a notebook, Jeff scribbled in it. Before long, he’d send Richmond a nasty letter. With luck, he could put the company’s ass in a sling. He did some more muttering. He hoped the people back in Richmond weren’t too busy with the war to come down on some not so petty grifters who’d grabbed a fat contract by promising more than they could deliver.

  He wondered if he ought to see where he could put mass graves in case the crematorium just didn’t work out. That would be harder around here than it was around Snyder; this country was more thickly settled. And the ground here was a lot swampier than it was farther west. The stink from graves might be even worse than what the crematorium turned out. All those bodies might pollute the ground water and start epidemics, too. He supposed he’d have to talk to a doc about that.

  So goddamn many things to worry about.

  But Camp Humble was up and running, even if it had a few rough spots. Camp Determination was nothing but a memory. Jeff could go home to Edith and his stepsons every night proud of what he’d accomplished. And pretty soon he would have a baby of his own. Wouldn’t that be something?

  One of the guards came up to him. “Sir?”

  “What’s up, Cromartie?” Jeff tried to know everybody’s name.

  Cromartie looked shamefaced. “Sir, I’ve got the clap,” he blurted. “Troop Leader Mauch said I had to tell you, or he’d tear off my dick and stuff it up my…. Well, he said I had to let you know.”

  “You fucking idiot,” Jeff said, which was exactly Cromartie’s trouble. “Did you catch it here?”

  “Reckon so, sir. I sure didn’t have it before.”

  “All right. Get your sorry ass over to the doc. He’ll have some pills for you. I’m gonna gig you three days’ pay, and word of this will go on your record.”

  Miserably, Cromartie nodded. Even more miserably, he shuffled away. Jeff laughed, but only quietly—no fool worse than a horny fool. The laughter didn’t last. No matter how well Camp Humble ran, he wished he were still several hundred miles farther west. That would have meant the Confederacy was winning the war.

  XX

  Abner Dowling walked the mayor of Snyder, Texas, through what was left of Camp Determination. The mayor was a plump, middle-aged fellow named Jethro Gwynn. He walked with a limp and a stick; he’d fought for the CSA in the Great War. “You say you didn’t know what was going on here?” Dowling growled.

  “That’s a fact, sir,” Gwynn answered. “All the barbed wire and everything…They kept people out, you know.” He sounded earnest and persuasive. Dowling didn’t believe him for a minute.

  Neither did Major Angelo Toricelli. “Well, what did you think was going on when all those trains stopped here? People got off those trains. Thousands and thousands and thousands of them got off. Nobody ever got on. Didn’t that kind of make you wonder?”

  “No, sir,” Gwynn said blandly. “All them trains went through Snyder sealed up tight. Couldn’t prove by me they had people in ’em.”

  “What are we going to do with this lying son of a bitch, sir?” Dowling’s adjutant demanded.

  “Here, now. You got no cause to talk about me like that,” Jethro Gwynn said. “Whatever went on here, it was none of my damn business, and I didn’t ask no questions.”

  Major Toricelli’s hand dropped to his pistol. “For three cents cash I’d blow your lying brains out. It’s more than you’re worth, too.”

  “Nobody who lives in town paid much attention to this place,” the mayor of Snyder insisted. “It was just her
e, that’s all.”

  That was too much for General Dowling. “All right, Mr. Gwynn,” he said. “You’re going to come for a little ride with me.”

  “Where are we going?” Gwynn asked, sudden apprehension in his voice.

  “Don’t worry—it’s not far,” Dowling answered. “And even if it were, you’d be smart to come along. I bet if I looked in my pocket I could find three cents for Major Toricelli.” His hands folded into fists. He wanted to beat the snot out of this Texan, the kind of urge he hadn’t had since his West Point days. “Get moving. You think you’re unhappy now that the United States are here, you give me any trouble and you’ll find out you don’t know jack shit about unhappy—not yet you don’t, anyway. But you will.”

  He must have been persuasive. Without another word, Jethro Gwynn walked back to the command car that had brought him out from Snyder. The driver and the other two soldiers waiting in the vehicle glared at him. Dowling didn’t think he’d need to give them three cents. If the mayor got even a little out of line, he could have an unfortunate accident for free.

  “Take us to that field, Clancy,” Dowling told the driver. “You know the one I’m talking about?”

  “Oh, yes, sir. I sure do,” Clancy said. The motor was still running. The driver put the command car in gear. It rolled along a well-paved highway—a remarkably well-paved highway, seeing that it ended in the middle of nowhere.

  The wind was blowing from the field. Dowling’s nose wrinkled. So did Jethro Gwynn’s. “Maybe we don’t need to go any further,” the mayor of Snyder said.

  “Shut up,” Major Toricelli said, his voice hard and flat.

  “I think we’ll keep going,” Dowling said. “We’re almost there anyhow, eh, Clancy?” He gave Gwynn a sour stare. “Clancy and I have been here before. Have you, Mr. Mayor?”

  “No!” Gwynn said. “Christ, no!”

  “I wonder why not,” Dowling said. Jethro Gwynn didn’t answer. Nothing was the best thing he could have said, but it wasn’t nearly good enough. The command car passed through a barbed-wire gate a barrel might have flattened. To the driver, Dowling added, “Stop by the closest trench—the open one.”

  “Yes, sir,” Clancy said, and he did.

  “Well, let’s get out of here and have a look around, shall we?” Dowling descended from the command car. He waited for the mayor to join him. Plainly, the mayor didn’t want to. Just as plainly, the savage expressions the U.S. soldiers wore told him he had no choice. Looking as glum as a man possibly could, he got down, too. Major Toricelli followed him.

  “Come over here, God damn you.” Toricelli shoved him toward that trench, which hadn’t been covered over like the rest. “Take a good look. Then tell me you didn’t know what the hell Camp Determination was up to.”

  “Please…” Jethro Gwynn said, but nobody wanted to listen to him. Feet dragging in the dirt, he scuffled his way forward.

  Even in October, curtains of flies buzzed above the trench. Crows and ravens and vultures flew away as the men approached, but they didn’t go far. The rations were too good for them to want to leave. The stench was overpowering, unbelievable; it seemed thick enough to make the air resistive to motion. Dowling knew it would cling to his uniform, his skin, his hair. He also knew he would have to bathe several times to get rid of it.

  “Go on,” he said harshly. “Take a good look.”

  Gwynn gulped. How many Negroes—men, women, children—lay in this trench, all bloated and stinking and flyblown and pecked by scavenger birds? Thousands, surely. The trench was long and deep and about two-thirds full. Had the Confederates not pulled out of Camp Determination and blown the place up, they would have filled the trench with corpses and then scraped out another trench, closer to the entrance, and started in on that one, too. They’d set this up very efficiently.

  “Well?” Dowling said. “What do you think, Mr. Gwynn? How do you like it?”

  “I had no idea,” the mayor of Snyder gasped, and then he leaned forward and threw up. He was neat about it; he missed his shoes. Wheezing, coughing, spitting, he went on, “Honest to God, I didn’t.”

  “You lying sack of shit.” Dowling pointed to the closed trench beyond this open one, and then to the next closed trench, and then to the next and the next. “What did you think they were doing here? Running a hospital?”

  “I didn’t ask any questions,” Gwynn said. “I didn’t want to know.”

  “That sounds a little more like the truth, anyway—not much, but a little,” Major Toricelli said.

  “Not enough,” Dowling said. “Nowhere close to enough. Come on. Let’s go back to the command car.”

  “Can we head back to town?” the mayor asked eagerly.

  “Not yet, Charlie,” Dowling said. After they got in, he told Clancy, “Go on all the way up to the first trench.”

  “Yes, sir,” the driver said.

  Again, Jethro Gwynn didn’t want to get out. This time, Major Toricelli gave him a shove. “We had to look at this, asshole,” he said. “You damn well can, too.”

  Bulldozers had scraped off the dirt from part of the first trench. The bodies in there were a couple of years old. They were mostly bones, with rotting clothes and bits of skin and hair here and there. Halloween in hell might have looked like this.

  “They’ve been doing it ever since this camp opened up, for the last two years or so. How many bodies are here all told, do you think?” Dowling said. “And you have the brass to try and tell me you didn’t know what was going on? God, what a shitty excuse for a liar you are.”

  “What a shitty excuse for a human being,” Toricelli said.

  Gwynn puked again. He didn’t try denying things any more, though. Maybe that was progress.

  “And do you know what the best part is?” Major Toricelli said. “Once your smokes here were dead, the guards had people who went into their mouths with pliers or whatever the hell and yanked out all their gold fillings. Waste not, want not, I guess.”

  Gwynn looked revolted in a new and different way. “You’re making that up. Nobody would do such a thing.”

  “It’s the God’s truth, Mr. Gwynn.” Abner Dowling held up his right hand as if taking an oath. “So help me. We had Graves Registration people put on gas masks and look at the bodies up close. They didn’t find any dental gold. None—not a crown, not a filling, not a bridge. Nothing. What they did find was lots of dead colored people with teeth yanked out or teeth broken to get the gold from them. And how do you like that?”

  Had Gwynn looked any greener, Dowling would have been tempted to mow him. The mayor of Snyder said, “I swear on my mother’s name, General, and by our Lord Jesus Christ, I never knew nothin’ about that. Nothin’. Pulling teeth? That’s…just sick.” He bent over and retched some more. This time, he had nothing in his stomach to bring up.

  The dry heaves were nasty. Dowling watched without sympathy till Gwynn’s spasm finally ended. “So you really did know they were killing off Negroes at the camp, then?” he said.

  “Well, I had a pretty good notion they were,” Jethro Gwynn admitted in a ragged whisper. “I didn’t ask any questions, though. None of my business, I reckoned.”

  “You passed by on the other side of the road, like the priest in the Good Book,” Dowling said in a voice like iron.

  By then, Gwynn was in no shape to quarrel. “I guess maybe I did.”

  “I’ve got one more question for you. Then I’ll take you back to town,” Dowling said. “Why don’t you like grubbing gold out of Negroes’ mouths once they’re dead? They don’t need it any more then. Isn’t killing ’em what’s really wrong?”

  “You know, I never looked at it that way,” the mayor of Snyder said seriously. “I mean, they’re just a pack of rebels and troublemakers. But this…” He gulped. “It’s different when you see it with your own eyes.”

  “You liked the idea. You didn’t want to know what it meant, that’s all. Or have you got the nerve to tell me I’m wrong?” Dowling asked.


  “No, that’s a fact, a true fact,” Gwynn said. “You think about gettin’ rid of niggers and you think, Hell, country’d be better off without ’em. You don’t reckon they’re—people, or anything.”

  “Well, what the hell are they, then?” Dowling demanded. When Jethro Gwynn didn’t answer the question, he did it himself: “They’re dead, that’s what. And I bet the worst of ’em has a better hope of heaven than you do, Mr. Gwynn. Come on, damn you.” He shoved the mayor of Snyder toward the command car.

  Gwynn didn’t say anything as Clancy drove him back to town. The U.S. soldier let him off in front of his real-estate agency. The mayor fled inside and slammed the door behind him, as if that would keep Dowling and his men from coming back.

  Having shown Jethro Gwynn what Camp Determination was all about, Dowling grabbed Snyder’s leading (and only) banker, two attorneys, an accountant, and a doctor. With a happy—for him, anyhow—afterthought, he also grabbed their wives. He took them out to the camp together in a deuce-and-a-half. They all denied they’d had any idea what it was doing.

  “I thought you might say that,” he told them.

  The truck driver drove them to the mass graves. They turned pale even before the stink started filling the back of the truck. All but one of them vomited at the first trench. Two women fainted. So did one of the lawyers. The doctor passed out when he heard about taking dental gold from the corpses.

  “We ought to bring the whole town through here, sir,” Major Toricelli said on the way back to Snyder.

  “By God, I’m tempted,” Dowling said. “Maybe I will.”

  His own headquarters were well upwind from the mass grave. He bathed and bathed that night, and still smelled, or thought he smelled, the stench of death clinging to him.

  His telephone rang early the next morning. The accountant in Snyder had shot his wife and three children, then turned the pistol on himself. Another call came in a few minutes later: the banker’s wife had swallowed rat poison. Then the telephone rang again: Mayor Gwynn had hanged himself from the chandelier in his real-estate office.