The Grapple (23 page)

By that time the next day, three female officers and half a dozen noncoms in skirts were gone. Pinkard assembled the rest of the female Freedom Party guards and spoke to them for most of an hour while men patrolled the women’s half of the camp. Rodriguez never found out exactly what the camp commandant said, but it seemed to do the trick. The female guards stopped being so blatant about what Camp Determination was for. Little by little, the women on that side relaxed—as much as they could relax while not so slowly starving to death.

Bathsheba and Antoinette still survived. The cleanouts missed them again and again. In a way, Rodriguez was glad. They
were
people to him now, and they hadn’t done anything to deserve death except be born black. He liked the older woman. And the younger one would have been beautiful if she weren’t so thin.

But they reminded him of exactly what he was doing here, and he didn’t like that. Thanks to the hard-hearted female guards, they had a pretty good idea of what would happen to them. “One o’ these days, they gonna put an end to us. Ain’t that right?” Bathsheba asked with no particular fear and no particular hatred.

“Ain’t happened yet. Don’t got to happen.” Rodriguez tried to dodge around the truth.

She wagged a finger at him. “I ain’t nothin’ but a nigger cleanin’ lady, but I ain’t no blind nigger cleanin’ lady. You wave somethin’ in front o’ my face, reckon I see it.”

“I don’t wave nothin’.” He did his best to misunderstand.

She wouldn’t let him. “Don’t reckon it’s any different on the men’s side, is it?”

“I don’t know what you mean. You got women over here, men over there. Of course is different.”

Bathsheba sighed. “I spell it out for you.” She laughed. “I ain’t hardly got my letters, but here I is spellin’ fo’ you. They killin’ folks over yonder the same way they killin’ folks here?”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t answer. Saying yes would admit far too much. Saying no wouldn’t just be a lie—that wouldn’t bother him a bit—but an obvious lie. Obvious lies were no damn good, not when you were talking about life and death.

When you were talking about life and death, keeping quiet was no damn good, either. Bathsheba sighed again. “Well, I do thank the good Lord fo’ preservin’ my sweet Xerxes along with me an’ Antoinette,” she said. “We is in a hard road, but we is in it together.”

Shame threatened to choke Rodriguez. Along with that shame, though, came an odd pride. Bathsheba and Antoinette still thought Xerxes was alive. That gave them pleasure and hope. And they thought so because of him.

“Ask you somethin’ else?” Bathsheba said.

Rodriguez didn’t sigh, though he felt like it. “Go ahead,” he said, and wondered what sort of trouble her next question would land him in.

“Antoinette give herself to you, it keep her alive any longer?”

The question itself didn’t surprise him. The brutal bluntness of it did. Again, he did his best to evade: “I got a wife at home down in Sonora. I don’t need nobody here.”

“Uh-
huh.
” Her agreement was more devastating than calling him a liar would have been. And he didn’t tomcat around the women’s side the way a lot of male guards did. Every now and then, yes, but only every now and then.

“Is true. I do,” he said. He usually felt bad after he took a woman here. But not while he did it—oh, no, not then.

“All right.” Bathsheba sounded as if that wasn’t worth quarreling about. She got to the point: “Antoinette give herself to some
other
guard, then, it keep her alive any longer?”

He couldn’t very well get around that, however much he wanted to. He gave the best answer he could, saying, “Maybe. Ain’t no way to be sure.”

“Ain’t no way to be sure about nothin’, is there?” Somehow, Bathsheba still didn’t sound bitter. “Reckon some o’ them ofays, they think it’s funny to lie down with a girl one day an’ reduce her population the nex’.”

She was righter than she knew, or maybe she knew the way guards’ minds worked much too well. “I never done nothin’ like that,” Rodriguez said. That was true, but it didn’t do him much good. And it didn’t make him sound very good, even to himself.

“Didn’t say you did,” Bathsheba answered. “Wouldn’t’ve asked if I reckoned you was one o’ them. I is pretty much used up. Don’t want to go, mind, but if I gots to, I gots to. But Antoinette, she jus’ startin’ out. You do somethin’ fo’ her, you make an ol’ nigger cleanin’ lady happy.”

“I do what I can.” Rodriguez had no idea how much that would be. “She don’t got to do nothin’ like that for me.”

Bathsheba started to cry. “You is a good man,” she said, even if Rodriguez wasn’t so sure of that himself right now. “You is a
decent
man. I reckon you is a God-fearin’ man.” She cocked her head to one side and eyed him, the streaks of tears on her cheeks shining in the sun. “So what you doin’ here, doin’ what you doin’?”

He had an answer. He’d always hated
mallates,
ever since they did their level best to kill him after he put on the Confederate uniform. Like any Freedom Party man, he thought Negroes meant nothing but danger and misfortune for the Confederate States. The country would be better off without them.

But how did he explain that to a colored woman in rags, her hair going all gray, who’d just offered her only daughter to him not for her own sake but for the younger woman’s? How did he explain that to a wife and daughter who loved an old man on the other side of the camp, an old man now dead, an old man whose death Rodriguez didn’t have the heart to tell them about?

He couldn’t explain it. Even trying was a losing fight. He just sighed and said, “I got my job.”

“Don’t seem like reason enough.” Had Bathsheba got mad and screamed at him, he could have lost his temper and stormed off. But she didn’t. And that meant he couldn’t. He had to listen to her instead. He had three stripes on his sleeve and a submachine gun in his hands. She had nothing, and chances were neither she nor her pretty daughter had long to live.

So why did he feel he was the one at a disadvantage? Why did he feel she could call the shots? Why did he wish he were still down on the farm outside of Baroyeca? He didn’t know why. He didn’t like wondering, not even a little bit.

J
ake Featherston was not a happy man. Being unhappy was nothing new for him. He ran on discontent, his own and others’, the way a motorcar ran on gasoline. He recalled only two times in his life when he
was
happy, and neither lasted long: when he took the oath of office as President of the CSA, and when his armies drove all before them pushing north from the Ohio to Lake Erie and cutting the United States in half.

Being President was still pretty good, but it was also a lot more work than he ever thought it would be. Hard work corroded happiness. And Al Smith, damn him, was supposed to lie down with his belly in the air after the Confederates went and licked him. When he didn’t, he dragged Jake and the Confederacy into a long war, the last thing anybody on this side of the border wanted.

Now the CSA would have to take a Yankee punch, too. Jake muttered under his breath. Like any barroom brawler, he wanted to get in the first punch and clean up afterwards, especially when the other guy was bigger. He tried it, and he didn’t knock out the USA. He didn’t have enough to hit again. Standing on the defensive went against every ounce of instinct in him. Instinct or not, sometimes you had no choice.

His secretary looked into his office. “The Attorney General is here to see you, sir.”

“Thank you kindly, Lulu. Bring him in,” Jake said.

Ferd Koenig seemed bigger and bulkier than ever. “Hello, Jake,” he said—he was one of the handful of men these days who could call the President by his first name.

“Hello, Ferd,” Jake answered. “Have a seat. Pour yourself some coffee if you want to.” A pot sat on a hot plate in the corner. Jake smacked a desk drawer. “Or I’ve got a fifth in here if you’d rather have that.”

“Coffee’ll do.” Koenig fixed himself a cup, then sat down. After a sip, he said, “Want to thank you for letting that Freedom Party Guard unit go into action in west Texas. They’ve done a pretty good job.”

“Better than I expected, to tell you the truth,” Featherston said. “You want to pick up recruiting for your combat wing, I won’t tell you no.”

“Thanks, Mr. President. With your kind permission, I will do that,” Koenig said. “We need a fire brigade when things get hot.”

“That’s a fact. Other fact is, some of the generals are getting jumpy. I can feel it,” Jake said. “A counterweight to the Army could come in goddamn handy one of these days. You never can tell.”

“Lord, isn’t that the truth?” Koenig set the coffee cup on the desk. “Pour me a shot in there after all, would you?”

“Help yourself.” Jake got out the bottle and slid it across the desk. “Shame to do that to good sippin’ whiskey, but suit yourself.”

“I want the jolt, but I run on coffee these days.” Koenig added a hefty slug of bourbon, then tasted. He nodded. “Yeah, that’ll do the trick.” He eyed Jake. “You really mean that about the Guards units?”

“Hell, yes.” Jake poured himself a shot, too, only without the coffee. He raised the glass. “Mud in your eye.” After a respectful drink—he couldn’t just knock it back, not after he called it sipping whiskey—he went on, “If Party guards aren’t loyal, nobody will be. You raise those units, and by God I’ll see they’re equipped with the best we’ve got.”

“Army won’t like it,” the Attorney General predicted.

“Fuck the Army,” Featherston said. “That’s the whole point. So what else have we got going on?”

“Did you forget?” Ferd Koenig asked. “Day after tomorrow, we clean out Richmond. Isn’t it about time the Confederate States had a nigger-free capital?”

“Oh, I remember, all right. You don’t need to worry about that,” Jake said. “All the cops and stalwarts and guards are geared up for it.” He chuckled. “With the niggers gone, we won’t need so many of those people around here. We can put some of ’em in the Army—and in your Party Guards outfits—and some in the factories, and we’ll be better off both ways.”

“If we didn’t have all those Mexicans coming in, we’d never be able to make enough to stay in the war,” Koenig said.

“Yeah, well, that’s the carrot we give Francisco José,” Jake answered. “He gives us soldiers to fight the niggers in the countryside, we keep the frontier open for his workers. That’s his safety valve, like. They get jobs here instead of going hungry down in Mexico and stirring up trouble against him. He gives us a hard time, we close the border…and start shipping the rebels old bolt-action Tredegars we don’t need any more. His old man made it through a civil war—we can see how he likes another one.” His laugh held all the cynicism in the world.

“Sounds like you’ve got that under control, all right.” Koenig’s role was domestic. He didn’t presume to mess around with foreign affairs. He had his place, he knew it, he was good at it, and he kept to it, all of which made him uniquely valuable to Jake Featherston. He added, “The sooner we clean out all the niggers, the sooner we can throw everything we’ve got at the USA.”

“That’s the idea, all right,” Jake agreed. Koenig didn’t know anything about the uranium bomb. Featherston didn’t tell him anything, either. That secret couldn’t be too tightly held. He did say, “Starting day after tomorrow, Richmond’ll be a better place. You go in right at sunup like usual?”

“That’s what I’ve got in mind. We’ll have all day to move ’em out then. Yankee bombers aren’t likely to complicate things by daylight, either,” Koenig answered, and Jake nodded. As far as he was concerned, the difference between day and night was largely arbitrary. He’d always been a night owl, and spending so much time underground only encouraged him to catnap around the clock.

He was asleep at sunrise the day the cleanout started, but he got a wakeup call: literally, for the telephone by his cot jangled. That telephone didn’t ring unless something big was going on. He grabbed it in the middle of the second ring. “Featherston,” he said hoarsely, and then, “What the fuck have the damnyankees done to us now?”

“Not the damnyankees, Mr. President.” Ferd Koenig’s voice was on the other end of the line. “It’s the goddamn niggers. We’ve got…” He paused, maybe looking for a way to sugarcoat what came next, but he almost always did speak his mind, and this morning proved no exception: “We’ve got an uprising on our hands.”

Jake sat bolt upright. “What’s going on? Fill me in fast.”

“Damn smokes must’ve known we were coming for ’em,” the Attorney General answered. “We’ve already had, I dunno, six or eight people bombs go off. They’ve got rifles and grenades and Featherston Fizzes and a couple of machine guns, anyway. They mined the streets into the colored quarter, the sneaky bastards, and they blew two armored cars to hell and gone. It’s a
fight,
sir, nothing else but.”

“Son of a bitch. Son of a motherfucking bitch,” Jake Featherston said. “All right, if they want a fight, they can damn well have one. Let me get hold of the War Department. If we have to, we’ll blow up the whole nigger part of town”—basically, southeast Richmond—“and all the coons inside it. That’ll do, by God.” He sounded as if he looked forward to it. The reason for that was simple: he did.

“All right, Mr. President. I wanted to let you know,” Koenig said.

“Well, now I know. Get off the line, and I’ll get you what you need to finish the job.” Jake waited till the Attorney General hung up, then called Nathan Bedford Forrest III. He wasn’t surprised to find the chief of the General Staff at his desk. “Forrest, the niggers are raising a ruckus. What can we pull from north of here to squash those stinking, backstabbing shitheels flat?”

“Well, sir, there is a problem with that,” Forrest said slowly. “If we pull too much or make it too obvious what we’re doing, the damnyankees are liable to try and break through up there. They’re liable to make it, too—we’re already stretched pretty damn thin north of the city.”

“They won’t do it.” Jake sounded very sure. He wondered why. Then he found an answer: “They’re building up out West, not right here. You know that as well as I do.” He even thought he was telling the truth. And he added, “Besides, we can’t let the niggers get away with this kind of crap, or we’ll have trouble from here to fucking Guaymas. I want men. I want armor. I want artillery. And I want Asskickers. By the time they all get done, won’t be a nigger left on his feet in there.”