The Grapple (21 page)

But now Anne was dead, killed in a Yankee air raid on Charleston. One of her brothers got gassed by the Yankees in the Great War, and was murdered at the start of the Red Negro uprising. The other went into Pittsburgh. Tom Colleton wasn’t listed as a POW, so he was probably dead. A whole family destroyed by the USA.

“We need that bomb,” Potter murmured. “Jesus, do we ever.”

“W
ow!” George Enos said as the
Townsend
approached San Diego harbor. “The mainland! I wondered if I’d ever see it again.”

“I’ll kiss the pier when we get off the ship,” Fremont Dalby said. The gun chief added, “Too goddamn many times when I didn’t just wonder if I’d see it again—I was fucking sure I wouldn’t.”

He’d been in the Navy since…Well, not quite since steam replaced sail, but one hell of a long time. He could say something like that without worrying that people might think he was yellow. George couldn’t, which didn’t mean the same thought hadn’t gone through his mind.

Dalby nudged him. “You can hop a train, go on back to Boston, see the wife and kiddies. All you need is a couple-three weeks of liberty, right?” He laughed and laughed.

“Funny,” George said. “Funny like a broken leg.” Nobody was going to get liberty like that. The brass might dole out twenty-four- and forty-eight-hour passes, enough to let sailors from the destroyer sample San Diego’s bars and brothels and tattoo parlors and other dockside attractions. George had never been here in his life, but he was sure they’d be the same as the dives in Boston and Honolulu. Sailors were the same here, weren’t they? As long as they were, the attractions would be, too.

“Hey, nobody’s shooting at us for a little bit,” Fritz Gustafson said. “I’ll take that.” From the loader, it was quite a speech.

“For a while, yeah,” Dalby agreed. “Wonder where we’ll go after they fuel us and get us more ammo and all that good shit? Probably down south against the Mexicans and the Confederates, I guess.”

That sounded like nasty, unpleasant, dangerous work to George. He’d seen enough nasty, unpleasant, dangerous work already. “Maybe they’ll send us up off the Canadian coast, so we can keep the Japs from running guns to the Canucks.”

“Dream on,” Dalby said. “Fuck, if they send us up there, they’ll probably send us to whatever the hell the name of that other place is—you know, with the Russians.”

“Alaska,” Gustafson said.

The CPO nodded. “There you go. That’s it. Nothing but emperors for us. We’ve been messing with the Mikado’s boys for too long. Now we can tangle with the Tsar. And the seas up there are worse than the North Atlantic.”

George started to say that was impossible. He knew the North Atlantic well, and knew how bad it could get. But he’d also rounded Cape Horn. That was worse. Maybe the Pacific was godawful up in the polar-bear country, too.

“Russians hardly give a damn about Alaska anyway,” Fritz Gustafson said.

“Well, Jesus, would you?” Dalby said. “It’s more Siberia. They’ve got enough Siberia already. If somebody ever found gold in it or something, you’d have to remember it was there. Till then? Shit, who cares?”

San Diego wasn’t Honolulu. The weather wasn’t quite perfect. It got cooler at night than it did in the Sandwich Islands. It was just very good. To somebody who’d grown up in Boston, that would do fine.

George sent a telegram to Connie, letting her and the boys know he was all right. The clerk at the Western Union office said, “It may take a while to get there, sir. We still don’t have as many lines as we’d like to carry east-west traffic.” The man, who was more than old enough to be George’s father, held up a hand when he saw him start to get mad. “Don’t blame me, sir. I don’t have anything to do with it. I’m just telling you how things are. You got to blame somebody, go and blame Jake Featherston.”

Everybody in the USA had good cause to blame Jake Featherston for something or other. A telegram delayed was small change. Ohio’s being torn to pieces badly enough to delay the telegram was rather larger. George didn’t dwell on Ohio. The telegram ticked him off. Like politics, grievances were personal.

Sure enough, he got a twenty-four-hour liberty. He wished it were forty-eight, but anything was better than nothing. With the rest of the 40mm gun crew, he drank and roistered and got his ashes hauled. He felt bad about that afterwards—what was he doing going to bed with a whore with saggy tits right after sending his wife a wire? He felt bad afterwards, but it felt great while it was happening…and that was what he was doing lying down with the chippy.

He also got a tattoo on his left biceps—a big anchor. That didn’t feel good while it was happening, even though he was drunk. But Fritz Gustafson was getting a naked woman on his right biceps, so George sat still for it. He wasn’t about to flinch in front of his buddy. Only later did he wonder if Fritz took the pricking in silence because
he
was there getting tattooed, too.

His arm felt worse the next morning. He wasn’t drunk then; he was hungover. All of him felt worse, but his arm especially. “It’ll get easier in a day or two,” Fremont Dalby said. That was rough sympathy, not hardheartedness: Dalby had ornaments on both arms and a small tiger on his right buttock.

He turned out to know what he was talking about. By the time the
Townsend
sailed a week later, George almost forgot about the tattoo except when he looked down and saw the blue marks under his skin. He also liked Gustafson’s ornament, but Connie would clout him if he came home with a floozy on his arm. Fritz was a bachelor, and could get away with stuff like that.

The
Townsend
sailed south, toward the not very distant border with the Empire of Mexico. She was part of a flotilla that included three more destroyers, two light cruisers, a heavy cruiser, and two escort carriers. The baby flattops were just like the ones that helped make sure the Japs wouldn’t take the Sandwich Islands away from the USA. They were built on freighter hulls, and had a freighter’s engines inside. Going flat out, they could make eighteen knots. But each one carried thirty airplanes. That gave them ten or twenty times the reach of even the heavy cruiser’s guns.

Although the flotilla stood well out to sea, it wasn’t very long before Y-ranging gear picked up a couple of airplanes outbound from Baja California to look things over. “Goddamn Mexicans,” Dalby said as George ran up to the antiaircraft gun.

“What did you expect, a big kiss?” George asked.

Dalby told him what Francisco José could kiss, and why. The CPO might have embroidered on that theme for quite a while, but Fritz Gustafson said, “Next to what the Japs threw at us, this is all chickenshit. Take an even strain.”

Fighters roared east off the flight decks of the
Monitor
and the
Bonhomme Richard.
They came back in less than half an hour. A couple of them waggled their wings as they flew over the carriers’ escorts. No Mexican airplanes appeared over the flotilla.

“Score one—I mean two—for the good guys,” George said.

“Yeah.” Fremont Dalby nodded. “But now the greasers will start screaming to the Confederates. Gotta figure we’re in business to yank Jake Featherston’s tail feathers, anyway. So pretty soon we’ll be playing against the first team.”

“Confederates don’t have any carriers in Guaymas,” George said.

“No, but they’ve got land-based air, and they’ve got subs, and who knows what all shit they
do
have in the Gulf of California?” Dalby said. “I guess that’s what we’re doing—finding out what kind of shit they’ve got there.”

“Such a thing as finding out the hard way,” George said.

When the flotilla got near the southern end of Baja California, bombers and fighter escorts left the escort carriers’ decks to pummel the Mexican installations at Cabo San Lucas. Scuttlebutt said the installations weren’t just Mexican but also Confederate. George wouldn’t have been surprised. Cabo San Lucas warded the Gulf of California, which led to Confederate Sonora. And the place was isolated enough—which was putting it mildly—to keep word of Confederate soldiers doing Mexicans’ jobs from spreading too far or too fast.

Cabo San Lucas lay at about the same latitude as Honolulu. Even lying well offshore, the
Townsend
got much hotter weather than she did in the Sandwich Islands. George wondered why. Maybe the North American continent screwed up the winds or something. That was all he could think of.

Then he stopped worrying about the weather. “Now hear this! Now hear this!” the loudspeakers blared. “We have two damaged aircraft returning from the raid on the Mexicans. They will come as far as they can before ditching, and we are going to go out after them. We don’t want to strand anybody if we can help it.”

“Roger that!” George exclaimed. He imagined floating in a life raft, or maybe just in a life jacket, praying somebody would pluck him out of the Pacific before the sharks or the glaring sun did him in. He shuddered. It was worse than going into the drink after your ship sank, because you’d be all alone out there.

The
Townsend,
two other destroyers, and a light cruiser peeled off and raced toward the Mexican coast. Up there in the sky, the pilots would be nursing everything they could from their shot-up airplanes. Every mile west they made bumped up their chances of getting rescued.

A swarm of intact aircraft flew over the ships. They were heading home to the carriers. Their pilots had to be thanking God they could get home. Then George spotted a dive bomber low in the sky and trailing smoke. Even as he watched, the airplane went into the Pacific. The pilot put it down as well as anybody could hope to. It skidded across the surface—it didn’t nose in.

Did he ditch well enough? Only one way to find out. The
Townsend
was closer to the downed airplane than any of the other ships. She sped toward where it went down. By the time she got there, the dive bomber had already sunk. But George joined in the cheers on deck: an inflatable life raft bobbed in the blue, blue water. Two men crouched inside. A third, in a life jacket, floated nearby. They all waved frantically. One of them fired a flare pistol, though daylight overwhelmed the red glow.

Lines with life rings attached flew over the ship’s side. The downed fliers put them on. Eager sailors hauled the men up on deck. “God bless you guys,” said the one whom George helped rescue. “You’re prettier than my wife right now.”

He had a nasty cut over one eye and burns on his face and hands. All things considered, he was lucky. The fellow who wore the life jacket couldn’t stand. “Broken leg,” somebody by him said. “Get him down to sick bay.”

“I don’t mind,” the injured man said as they laid him on a stretcher. “I figured I’d be holding a lily. But Jack there, he did a fuck of a job.”

“I hear somebody else was in trouble, too,” said the flier with the cuts and burns—Jack? “I hope some of you sailor fellows find him, too.”

“We’ll look for him, pal. That’s what we’re here for,” a sailor said. “Ought to get you down to sick bay, too. I bet you need stitches.”

“For what?” Jack didn’t even seem to know he was hurt. They took him below anyway.

A fighter was flying slow circles over where the other airplane went down, about forty miles east of the
Townsend
’s rescue. But all the destroyers and cruiser found when they got there was an oil slick and a little floating wreckage—no sign of the crew.

“Too bad,” George said.

“Can’t win ’em all,” Fremont Dalby said. “We broke even. Way things usually work out, that puts us ahead of the game.”

“I guess,” George said. The rescued men were here, yes. But the poor bastards who didn’t make it out of their airplane…They didn’t break even. They lost. Breaking even only mattered if you were on the outside.

VI

J
efferson Pinkard watched Confederate soldiers set up antiaircraft guns around Camp Determination. He went over to the major in charge of the job, an officer named Webb Wyatt. “How much good d’you reckon this’ll do?” he asked.

Wyatt shifted a chaw from one cheek to the other and spat a stream of tobacco juice much too close to Pinkard’s highly polished boots. “Well, I’ll tell you,” he drawled. “It’s a hell of a lot better’n not doing anything.”

“Than not doing anything,
sir,
” Pinkard snapped.

The major in butternut looked him up and down. He was suddenly and painfully conscious that he wore Freedom Party gray himself. “Well, I’ll tell you,” Wyatt said again. “I say
sir
to people who I reckon deserve it. What did you ever do to make me reckon that?”

Rage ripped through Jeff. It thickened his voice as he ground out, “I’ll tell you what I did, you little chickenshit asshole. I fought in the trenches when you were still in short pants. I joined the Party before you had hair on your nuts. I’ve been runnin’ camps since Jake Featherston got to be President of the CSA. My rank’s the same as major general. You want me to call up Ferd Koenig and ask him if
he
reckons you ought to call me sir? You cocksucking whistleass, how soon you reckon you’ll see the inside of one of these here camps for your very own self? Well, motherfucker? Answer me, God damn you!”

Major Wyatt went very red. Then, as he realized how much more than he could chew he’d bitten off, he went white instead. Pinkard knew damn well he could send Wyatt to a camp. And he knew damn well he would, too, and enjoy every minute of it. Seeing that anticipation of pleasure yet to come helped break the Army officer.

“Please excuse me, sir,” Wyatt mumbled, and saluted as if on the drill grounds at VMI. “I beg your humble pardon, sir.”

“You fuckin’ well
better
beg,” Jeff said. “Who ever told you you could talk to a superior officer that way?”

Wyatt bit his lip and stood mute. Pinkard knew what he wasn’t saying: that he didn’t think a camp guard really was his superior, regardless of what rank badges might show. Too bad for him. He’d picked the wrong man to rile.

“Let’s try it again,” Pinkard told him. “How much will these guns help?”

“Sir, if the damnyankees send a whole big swarm of bombers over, you’re screwed.” Did Wyatt sound as if he hoped the USA did just that? If he did, he wasn’t blatant enough to let Jeff call him on it. He went on, “For small raids, or for driving off reconnaissance airplanes, they’ll do a lot.”

“There. You see? You really can answer when you set your mind to it,” Jeff said. “Now—how come we don’t have more fighters to drive off those Yankee fuckers before they get here?”

“On account of all that stuff is back East, sir,” Major Wyatt answered. “Far as Richmond is concerned, west Texas is strictly nowhere. Only good thing about that is, it’s strictly nowhere for the damnyankees, too.”

He had a point, but less of one than he thought. Snyder, Texas, and even Lubbock, Texas, were indeed strictly nowhere to both CSA and USA. But Camp Determination damn well wasn’t. It was the biggest of the camps the Freedom Party was using to solve the Confederacy’s Negro problem. That made it vital to the country and the Party. And the Yankees used it for propaganda against the CSA.

“Can you use those guns against ground targets, too?” Jeff asked.

“Reckon we can if we have to, sir,” Major Wyatt said. “Antiaircraft guns make pretty fair antibarrel guns, no doubt about it. But I think you’re flabbling over nothing if you figure we’ll need to. USA won’t get this far.”

“Well, if the damnyankees
don’t
get this far, you know how come that’ll be?” Pinkard demanded, his temper rising again. “On account of Freedom Party Guards stopped ’em—more than the Army could do by its lonesome. And you know who asked ’em to send in the guards? Me, that’s who.” He jabbed a thumb at his own chest.

“Uh, yes, sir.” Wyatt was wising up.

He wasn’t wising up fast enough to suit Jeff. “You think maybe people in uniforms that aren’t the same as yours deserve a salute every now and then, Major? How about that, huh? What
do
you think?”

“Yes, sir, I think they do. I was wrong before.” As if to prove the point, Major Wyatt saluted.

Pinkard returned the salute. He wasn’t about to let the Army man accuse him of not following etiquette. But as far as he was concerned, Wyatt didn’t prove a damn thing except that he had maybe enough sense to try to save his own neck.

With a small sigh, Jeff decided that would have to do. He couldn’t make the man in the butternut uniform love him. All he could do was make Wyatt treat him with military courtesy.
I damn well did that,
he thought.

“Anything else, Major?” Pinkard asked.

“No, sir.” Wyatt saluted again. Jeff returned it again. The major said, “Permission to leave, sir?” He wasn’t taking any chances now.

“Granted,” Jeff said, and Wyatt got out of there as if the seat of his pants were on fire. He probably thought his drawers
were
smoking.

Watching the Army man’s ignominious retreat, Jeff smiled a slow, sated smile: almost the smile he might wear after going to bed with Edith. This was a different kind of satisfaction, but no less real. He was
somebody,
by God. He could throw his weight around. One hand rested on his belly. He had plenty of weight to throw, too. Not bad for somebody who’d figured on spending the rest of his life making steel at the Sloss Works in Birmingham. No, not bad at all.

Another sign he’d arrived was the driver who took him back into Snyder when his shift at Camp Determination was up. Some evenings he spent on a cot in the administrative compound. Not tonight, though. He smiled again as the camp receded behind him. Thinking about the kind of smile he’d have after going to bed with Edith made him want to put on that kind of smile.

Back in the days before the war, he might have had a colored chauffeur. He didn’t suppose anybody had a colored chauffeur any more. Times were changing in the CSA. An ordinary camp guard had to do. That was all right. The guard was the Party equivalent of a private, and privates got stuck with nigger work. That was true in King David’s day, and Julius Caesar’s, and William the Conqueror’s, and it was still true now.

The brakes squeaked when the driver parked the Birmingham in front of Jeff’s house in Snyder.
Got to get that seen to,
Jeff thought. The driver jumped out and opened the door for him. “Here you are, sir.”

“Thanks, Cletus.” Jeff made a point of learning the men’s names. It didn’t cost him anything, and it made them feel good. “See you in the morning—or sooner if anything goes wrong.” He never stopped worrying. That was probably why things went wrong so seldom.

“Yes, sir.” Cletus had no trouble remembering that he needed to salute. He jumped back into the auto and drove away.

When Pinkard walked into the house, his two stepsons were playing a game on the floor of the front room. It seemed to involve wringing each other’s necks. They broke off as soon as he came in. “Papa Jeff!” they both squealed in the shrill small-boy register just below what only dogs can hear. “Hi, Papa Jeff!” They tried to tackle him. They weren’t big enough, even together. But they were a lot bigger than when he married their mother the year before. One of these days…

He didn’t want to think about that. And he didn’t have to, not when Edith came out of the kitchen and gave him a kiss. “Hello, Jeff,” she said. “Wasn’t sure if you’d be back tonight.”

“Wouldn’t miss it,” he said, and gave her an extra squeeze to show what he had in mind. “What smells good?” he added; an alluring odor followed her.

“I’ve got a nice beef tongue cooking—with cloves and everything, the way you like it.” She paused to eye her sons. “Why don’t you boys go out and play? I’ve got something to tell Papa Jeff.”

“Why can’t we hear?” asked Frank, the older.

“Because I want to tell Papa Jeff, not you—that’s why,” his mother answered. “Now beat it, before I send you to your room instead.” He disappeared even faster than Major Wyatt had. So did his brother Willie.

“What’s up?” Pinkard asked.

“I’m going to have a baby.”

Jeff had gone so long without getting a woman pregnant, he wondered if he was shooting blanks. “Well, I’ll be,” he said. Then he realized Edith had to be looking for something better than that. “Wonderful!” He hugged her and kissed her and, with the boys out of the house, set a possessive hand on her backside.

She smiled. “That’s how this started.”

“I didn’t reckon it was any other way,” Jeff answered. “Jesus, yeah. Not us.”

“Don’t you start.” Edith was a churchgoing woman. She took her faith much more seriously than Jeff took his. He believed in Jake Featherston the way she believed in Jesus. From everything he could see, Jesus didn’t deliver.

Lately, though, Jake Featherston wasn’t delivering, either. The Confederate States were gone from just about all the U.S. territory they took when the war was new. Not even the professional optimists on the wireless were predicting when the CSA would reinvade the USA. All the talk these days was of defense and of outlasting the enemy.

The Freedom Party Guards Ferdinand Koenig threw into the fight had stopped the damnyankees not far beyond Lubbock. They couldn’t retake the town, though, and they couldn’t push U.S. forces back very far. A good-sized chunk of west Texas remained under the Yankee boot heel.

“All right,” Jeff said to Edith, and then, in what had to seem like a change of subject to her but didn’t to him, “I hear the United States are going to start up that, uh, darn state of Houston again—give the collaborators something to do.”

“That’s dreadful!” she exclaimed. “They’re so wicked. They’ve got no business doing anything like that.” She paused, then asked, “How are things at the camp?”

“Going well enough.” He rarely gave her a detailed answer when she asked something like that. She wasn’t really looking for one, either. She both knew and didn’t know what went on inside the barbed wire. She didn’t like to think about it. For that matter, neither did Pinkard. He said, “What shall we name the baby?”

“If it’s a girl, I’d like to call her Lucy, after my mother,” Edith said.

Jeff nodded. “All right. It’s a good name. And if it’s a boy?”

“What do you think of Raymond?” she asked.

He hesitated. Her first husband was called Chick. What the devil was his real name? Jeff didn’t want
his
son named after the camp guard who’d killed himself. Chick Blades’ real name was…Leroy. Jeff almost snapped his fingers, he was so glad to remember. “Raymond’ll do fine,” he said. That was easy.

He ate more than his share at supper. So did his stepsons—they liked tongue. He smiled to see them stuff themselves. Maybe it would make them sleepy sooner than usual. And it did. He smiled again. Things were going his way.

Edith even let him leave the light on. She usually liked darkness better. “You’re beautiful,” he said. While he stroked her and kissed her, while she touched him, he believed it. And he made her believe he believed it, too.

“Oh, Jeff,” she said, and then, a little later, “
Oh,
Jeff.” Her nails dug into his back. He spent himself at the same time as she quivered beneath him. The damnyankees, even the camp, seemed a million miles away. They wouldn’t in the morning, though, and that was a crying shame.

“B
oston,” Lieutenant Sam Carsten said as a pilot guided the
Josephus Daniels
through the minefields that kept submersibles and surface raiders away from the harbor. “Boston’s a good town.”

“Oh, yes, sir,” Pat Cooley agreed. The exec went on, “Good restaurants, theaters, all kinds of things you can do here.”

“Yeah.” Sam’s voice was dry. When he was a rating, his liberties here revolved around saloons and whorehouses. Restaurants? Theaters? Those were for other people, people with time on their hands and without money burning a hole in their pocket.

The pilot swung the helm a little to port. “How did you know to do that then?” Cooley asked.

“Simple, sir. Last time I didn’t, I blew up,” the man answered, deadpan.

“That’ll teach you, Pat,” Carsten said.

“Teach me what?” Cooley said in tones more plaintive than they had to be. The pilot chuckled and turned the ship again when he thought he needed to. The
Josephus Daniels
didn’t explode. Sam was in favor of not exploding.

An hour later, the destroyer escort was tied up at a pier in the U.S. Navy Yard, across the river from Boston proper—and Boston improper—in Charlestown. The first liberty party went off to roister, just as Sam would have without gold stripes on his cuffs.

Since he had them, he went through the Navy Yard to report to his superiors. He gave a lot of salutes and returned just about as many. To his own amusement, he caused a lot of confusion. Here he was, a middle-aged man with several rows of fruit salad on his chest. Young lieutenant commanders and commanders—the up-and-comers in the Navy—would assume he had to be at least a captain, if not of flag rank. Their right arms would start to go up. Then they would see he was only a lieutenant and stop in the middle of their salute till Sam bailed them out with one of his own.

Sometimes they wouldn’t notice they outranked him. When that happened, he gravely returned a salute with one of his own. He left a trail of bemused officers in his wake. He messed up their mental Y-ranging gear.

The men to whom he reported had no doubt about his grade. They were his age, and had the rank he could have aspired to if he weren’t a mustang. “Reporting as ordered, sir,” he said to the four-striper who headed things. He saluted first.

Returning the courtesy, Captain William McClintock said, “Take a seat, Carsten.”

“Thank you, sir,” Sam said, though he wasn’t sure he was grateful. He’d got used to being skipper of the
Josephus Daniels,
a potentate who gave orders and had to worry about receiving them only from a distance. Now, under the eyes of five senior officers, he felt more like a bug on a plate than a potentate.