The Grapple sa-2

by Harry Turtledove

  When they got to the subway station, the ticket-seller wouldn’t take his nickel. “Free to men in uniform, sir,” she said. Before the war, everybody who worked in the subway system had been male. One more thing the pressure of fighting had changed.

  “I hate these cars. They’re so crowded,” Connie said as the train rattled along. George nodded purely for politeness’ sake. It didn’t seem that bad to him. He’d got used to being packed tight with other people on fishing boats. The Navy pushed men together closer still. No subway car could faze him.

  He dropped the duffel inside the front door to the apartment and looked around in amazement. The living room was so big! And the kitchen and the bedrooms lay beyond! And a bathroom just for the family, with a door that closed! “I swear to God, hon, the skipper on the Townsend doesn’t live half this good!” George said.

  “I should hope not,” Connie said, and pulled her dress off over her head.

  That wasn’t what George meant, but it wasn’t bad, either. He would have dragged her down on the floor and done the deed right there. Why not? With a carpet down, it was softer than the decks he’d been walking since going to sea. But, giggling, she twisted away and hurried back into the bedroom. He followed, standing at attention even while he walked.

  A bed was better than even a carpeted floor. Afterwards, sated for the moment, George was willing to admit it. “Wow,” he said, lighting a cigarette and then running a hand along Connie’s sweet curves. “Why’d I go and join the Navy?”

  “I asked you that when you went and did it,” Connie said. “See what you’ve been missing?”

  “It’s good to be home, all right,” he said. “But the Army would’ve got me if I didn’t put on a sailor suit. If I could’ve gone on doing my job, that would’ve been different. But conscription would’ve nailed me. I’d rather be a sailor than a soldier any day of the week, and twice on Sundays.”

  He wondered why. Putting to sea wasn’t safer than staying on dry land. He’d seen as much in the endless clashes with the Japanese over the Sandwich Islands. But he’d been going out to sea since he was in high school. He’d never gone through the middle of the USA till this train trip from the West Coast. He was doing what he was used to.

  Connie poked him in the ribs. He jerked. “What was that for?” he asked.

  “What do you do when you come into port when you’re halfway around the world from me?” his wife said. “Do you go looking for floozies, the way sailors do when they get into Boston?”

  “Not me,” he lied solemnly. If he hadn’t expected that question, he couldn’t have handled it so well. “I’m a married guy, I am. I like being a married guy.” To show how much he liked it, he leaned over and started caressing her in earnest. He wasn’t ready for a second round as fast as he would have been a few years earlier, but he’d gone without for a long time. He didn’t have much trouble.

  Smiling in the afterglow, Connie said, “I like the way you argue.”

  “Me, too,” George said, and they both laughed. She wouldn’t have liked it so much-which was putting things mildly, with her redhead’s temper-if he’d told her the truth. He never felt like straying if she was anywhere close by. If they were thousands of miles apart, though, if he wasn’t going to see her for months…As long as he didn’t come down with the clap and pass it along, what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her. And then he poked her the same way she’d poked him. She squeaked. “What about you?” he asked. “You looking at the handsome delivery guys and truck drivers while I’m gone?”

  “That’s a laugh,” she answered. “These days, the delivery guys and truck drivers have white mustaches or hooks or wooden legs-either that or their voices aren’t done changing yet. Besides, if I was stupid enough to do something like that, you’d find out about it. Somebody would blab. Somebody always does. But you’re off in those places where nobody ever heard of you, so who knows what you could get away with if you wanted to?”

  She was right. She was righter than she knew-and righter than he ever intended to let her find out. And she was right that word about straying wives did get back to husbands. A couple of men on the Townsend had got that kind of bad news from people in their home towns: either from relatives or from “friends” who couldn’t stand keeping their big mouths shut.

  Connie teased him about going off the reservation, but she didn’t really push him, which could only mean she didn’t really think he was doing it. That left him relieved and embarrassed at the same time. She said, “Now that you’ve acted like a sailor who just got home, do you want to see your children?”

  “Sure,” George. “Let’s see if they remember me.”

  Patrick and Margaret McGillicuddy had a house not far from the Enos’ apartment. Connie’s father was a fisherman, too, and out to sea right now. He was well past fifty; they weren’t going to conscript him no matter what. Connie’s mother was a lot like her, even if she’d put on a little weight and her hair wasn’t so bright as it used to be. Margaret McGillicuddy didn’t take guff from anyone, even her grandsons. To George’s way of thinking, that made her a better grandma, not a worse one.

  He missed his own mother-a sudden stab of longing he could never do anything about now. If only she’d never taken up with that worthless, drunken bum of a writer. He’d shot himself, too, not that that did George any good.

  When George walked into the McGillicuddys’ place, Leo and Stan were playing with tin soldiers, some painted green-gray, others butternut. Stan, who was younger, had the Confederates. He was losing, and not happy about it. Being a little brother meant getting the dirty end of the stick. George was the older of two children, and he had a sister. He hoped Mary Jane was doing well. He’d find out…soon.

  For now, the boys looked up from their game, yelled, “Daddy!” and knocked everything over. They charged him. He picked them both up. That was harder than it had been before he joined the Navy-they’d grown a hell of a lot since.

  “Hey, guys!” he said, and kissed each of them in turn. “Are you glad to see me?”

  “Yeah!” they screamed, one into one ear, one into the other. The roar from the Townsend’s main battery might have been louder, but not a lot. Leo added, “We don’t ever want you to go away!”

  “Neither do I,” Connie said softly.

  “I don’t want to, either,” George said. “Sometimes you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do, though, not what you want to do.”

  “That’s so,” Mrs. McGillicuddy said. She turned to Connie and went on, “Do you think I want your father to put to sea and stay away for weeks? But that’s how he keeps us fed, and that’s what he’s got to do.”

  Connie couldn’t even say being in the Navy was dangerous and being a fisherman wasn’t. Storms out in the Atlantic claimed too many boats for that to be true. “I know,” she did say. “But I still don’t like it.”

  “Well, I don’t like it, either,” George said. He put down his sons. “They’re heavy. I think you must be feeding ’em rocks.” That made Leo and Stan giggle. Connie rolled her eyes. George aimed to enjoy his leave as much as he could. And when it was up…when it was up, he would go back, and that was all there was to it.

  With the front stabilized not far southeast of Lubbock, Jefferson Pinkard stopped worrying about the damnyankees. He had more urgent things to worry about instead-making sure Negroes went through Camp Determination in a hurry chief among them. He didn’t have numbers to let him know how the other camps in the CSA were doing, but if his wasn’t the biggest he would have been mightily surprised. One thing seemed clear: they were reducing population faster than blacks could possibly breed. Every day they did that was a victory.

  And then the United States started making his life difficult. U.S. bombers and fighters came overhead with little opposition from Confederate Hound Dogs. The antiaircraft guns around the camp boomed and bellowed, but didn’t shoot down many enemy airplanes. Jeff telephoned the local C.S. field commander to ask for more help. “If I could give it t
o you, I would,” Brigadier General Whitlow Ling said. “I don’t have the aircraft myself, though.”

  “Where’d they go?” Jeff asked. He didn’t quite add, Did they fly up your ass? He wanted the Army man to give him the facts, and pissing Ling off wouldn’t help.

  “Damnyankees pounded the crap out of ’em, that’s where,” Ling said glumly. “They got a whole new air wing sent in, and it gives ’em a big edge, dammit.”

  “Why can’t we get more, then?” Pinkard demanded.

  “I’m trying.” Ling sounded harassed. “So far, no luck. Everything we make, they’re keeping east of the Mississippi.”

  “But the Yankees can afford to send airplanes out here,” Jeff said.

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  “And we can’t?”

  “Right now, that’s about the size of it, too.”

  “Shit,” Jeff said, and hung up. If the USA could do some things the CSA couldn’t match, the Confederacy was in trouble. You didn’t need to belong to the General Staff to figure that out. Only a matter of time before the damnyankees used their air superiority to…do whatever they damn well pleased.

  And before long, what they pleased became pretty obvious. They started bombing the railroad lines that led into Snyder. You needed a lot of bombs to tear up train tracks, because the chances of a direct hit weren’t good. The USA had plenty of bombs. And U.S. fighters strafed repair crews whenever they could.

  U.S. airplanes started pounding Snyder, too. That terrified Jefferson Pinkard, not for the camp’s sake but for his own. If anything happened to his pregnant wife and his stepsons, he had no idea what he’d do. Go nuts was all he could think of.

  The house where Edith and Frank and Willie were staying-the house where Pinkard stayed when he didn’t sleep at Camp Determination-wasn’t that close to the tracks. But when the damnyankees hit Snyder, they didn’t seem to care. They did their best to knock the whole town flat. Maybe they figured that would interfere with the way Camp Determination ran. And maybe they were right, too.

  Pinkard got a call from Ferdinand Koenig. “What’s this I hear about niggers piling up on sidings halfway across Texas?” the Attorney General barked. “Doesn’t sound like your camp is doing its job.”

  The injustice of that made Pinkard want to reach down the telephone line and punch Koenig in the nose. “Mr. Attorney General, sir, you repair the railroads for me,” he growled, clamping down on rage with both hands. “You get the fighters out here to shoot down the Yankee airplanes that are chewing up the line. You do that stuff, and then if I fall down on the job you can tell me I’m slacking off. Till you do it, though, you just back the hell off.”

  “Maybe you want to watch your mouth,” Ferd Koenig said. How often did people talk back to him? Not very-Jeff was sure of that. The Attorney General went on, “I can have your job like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “If you’re gonna blame me for shit that’s not my fault, you’re damn well welcome to it,” Jeff said. “If I screw up, that’s fine. Rake me over the coals on account of it. But if you want me to take the heat because some asshole on the General Staff won’t send airplanes way the hell out here, I’m damned if I’ll sit still for it. Go and find some other whipping boy. Then see how long he lasts. Me, I’ll get the fuck outa here and go someplace safer.”

  A long, long silence followed. At last, Koenig said, “Maybe I was hasty.”

  “Maybe you were…sir,” Jeff said. “I’ve got my family. Maybe you ought to can me. Then I can send them back to Louisiana, and I won’t have to worry about getting ’em blown to smithereens.”

  “I’ll get back to you.” The Attorney General hung up.

  He didn’t call back. Pinkard hadn’t really thought he would. Nobody wanted to admit he’d got his ears pinned back. But no more C.S. fighters appeared in the skies above west Texas. Maybe the CSA truly couldn’t spare them, no matter how much this front needed them. If the Confederacy couldn’t…

  One more thing Jeff didn’t want to think about.

  He was in Snyder for the worst air raid he’d ever gone through. His driver had just delivered him to his house and sped away when the sirens began to howl. Bombs started falling a few seconds later. Snyder boasted no fancy electronic detection gear-or if it did, Pinkard didn’t know about it. Somebody had to eyeball those airplanes before the sirens could cut loose.

  He almost knocked down the front door flinging it open. “Get in the cellar!” he roared.

  Edith was already herding her boys into it. “Come on, Jeff-you, too,” she said.

  “I’m coming.” He tried not to show how scared he was. A storm cellar gave almost perfect protection against a tornado, as long as you got there in time. Against bombs…There was no guarantee. Nothing this side of reinforced concrete gave you a good chance against a direct hit. A wooden trapdoor wasn’t the same.

  But going into a cellar was a lot better than staying out in the open. Fragments couldn’t get you. Blast probably wouldn’t, not unless the bomb came down right on top of the house.

  “Make it stop, Papa Jeff!” Frank wailed as explosions shook the earth.

  “I can’t. I wish I could,” Pinkard said.

  His stepson stared up at him in the dim yellow light of a kerosene lantern. “But you can do anything, Papa Jeff.”

  That was touching. If only it were true. “Only God can do everything,” Pinkard said. And the way things were going for the CSA, even God looked to be falling down on the job.

  “God and Hyperman,” Willie said. The younger boy sounded utterly confident. There was another comic with a similar name in the USA, but that one was banned down here. Its hero frequently clobbered Confederate spies and saboteurs. But it was so vivid and exciting, banning it wasn’t good enough. People smuggled it over the border till the powers that be in Richmond had to come up with an equivalent. Even now, from what Jeff heard, the Yankee comic circulated underground in the CSA. But Hyperman, who’d wrecked New York City at least three times and Philadelphia twice, made a good enough substitute.

  Edith might have explained that God was real and Hyperman only make-believe. She might have, but bombs started falling closer just then. The thunder and boom, the earth rocking under your feet, made you forget about funnybooks. This was real, and all you could do was hope you came out the other side.

  One hit so close that the lantern shuddered off the tabletop and started to fall. Jeff caught it before it hit the ground-miraculously, by the handle. He put it back where it belonged. “Wow!” Frank said, and then, “See? I told you you could do anything.”

  Catching a lantern was one thing, and-Jeff knew, even if Frank didn’t-he was lucky to do even that. Making the damnyankees stop dropping their bombs was a whole different kettle of fish. Jeff had no idea how to say that so it made sense to a little boy, and so he didn’t try.

  All he could do, all anybody in Snyder could do, was sit tight and hope a bomb didn’t come down right on his head. Pinkard also hoped the Yankees weren’t bombing the camp. They hadn’t yet. What did that say? That they valued niggers’ lives more highly than those of decent white folks? Jeff couldn’t think of anything else-and if that was true, then what choice did the Confederacy have but to fight those people to the last cartridge and the last man?

  After the longest forty minutes in the history of the world, the bombs stopped falling. “Do you reckon we can go up now?” Edith asked.

  “I guess so,” Pinkard answered, though he wasn’t sure, either. His wife seemed to think he’d been through things like this before, and knew what to do about them. He wished it were true, but sitting in a cellar getting bombed was new for him, too. Back in the Great War, airplanes couldn’t deliver punishment like this.

  When they opened the door and went up, the house was still standing and still had all the roof. But window glass crunched and clinked under their feet. If they’d stayed up there, it would have sliced them into sausage meat. Edith softly started to cry. The boys thought it was
fun-till they cut themselves on some razor-edged fragments. Then they cried, too.

  Jeff went outside. “Jesus,” he muttered. The house across the street had taken a direct hit. It had fallen in on itself and was burning fiercely. People stood around staring helplessly. Whoever was in there didn’t have a chance of getting out. One of the houses next door to the wrecked one had half collapsed, too.

  A little farther down, a bomb had gone off in the middle of the street. Water welled up onto the asphalt from a shattered main. That would make fighting fires harder, if not impossible. Telephone and power lines were down. He hadn’t noticed that the electricity was out when he came up from the cellar, but he’d had other things on his mind.

  And he smelled gas. “Jesus!” he said again. He’d been about to light a cigarette, but he thought better of that. Then he changed his mind and lit up anyhow. If that blaze across the street didn’t set off the gas, his Raleigh wouldn’t.

  Plumes and clouds of smoke rose all over Snyder. It was just a little Texas town, lucky to have one fire engine. The siren wailed like a lost soul as the firemen did whatever they could wherever they could.

  Edith came out, too, and looked around in disbelief. “This was a nice place,” she said. “It really was. Look what those goddamn sons of bitches went and did to it.”

  Pinkard’s jaw dropped. She never talked like that. But she was right, no matter how she put it. Nodding, Jeff said, “Do you want to take the boys back to Alexandria, then? Y’all’d be safer there.”

  “No,” she said, which surprised him again. “I want to stay right here with you. And I want us to lick the devil out of the USA.”

  Looking around at the wreckage, Jeff knew the Yankees had just licked the hell out of Snyder. And…“They’re liable to come back, you know. I don’t think they’ll just hit us once and go away.” If they wanted to foul up Camp Determination, wrecking the way in would help.