The Grapple (30 page)

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.

“I’m not afraid,” Edith said. “God will watch over all of us. I know He’s on our side.” Everybody in every war since the world began was convinced God was on his side. Half the people in every war since the world began ended up being wrong. Jeff didn’t know how to say that, either. He did know Edith wouldn’t listen if he tried, and so he let it go.

M
ajor Jerry Dover didn’t know what the hell had happened to Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant. Dead? Captured? Deserted? He couldn’t say, and he didn’t much care. With Oliphant out of the picture, keeping central Kentucky supplied landed on his shoulders. He could do it. Without false modesty, he knew he could do it better than his thickheaded superior did.

Oliphant, of course, was a Regular. He went to VMI or one of the other Confederate finishing schools for officers. No doubt he was a good enough subaltern during the Great War. But it wasn’t the Great War any more, and Oliphant had had trouble figuring that out.

“Trucks!” Dover shouted into the telephone. “We need more trucks up here, dammit!” He might have been back at the Huntsman’s Lodge, screaming at a butcher who’d shorted him on prime rib.

“We’re sending up as many as we’ve got,” said the officer on the other end of the line, an officer much more safely ensconced down in Tennessee. “Damnyankees are giving us a lot of trouble, you know.”

That did it. Dover blew up, the same way he would have at a cheating butcher. “Give me your name, damn you! Give me your superior’s name, too, on account of I’m going to tell him just what kind of a clueless git he’s got working for him. You want to know what trouble is, come up where you can hear the guns. Don’t sit in a cushy office miles and miles away from anywhere and tell me how rough you’ve got it. Now give me your name.”

Instead of doing that, the other officer hung up on him. Jerry Dover said several things that made the other logistics officers in the tent outside of Covington, Kentucky, look up in amazement. Then he called back. Someone else down in Tennessee picked up the telephone.

“Who was the last son of a bitch on the line?” Dover demanded.

“Brigadier General Tyler just stepped out,” the other man replied. “Who are you, and who do you think you are?”

“Somebody who’s looking for Tyler’s superior,” said Dover, who didn’t back away from anybody. He had a short-timer’s courage: he was a man with no military career to wreck. They wouldn’t shoot him—the damnyankees were much more likely to do that. They wouldn’t jail him for long. The worst they were likely to do was cashier him, in which case he’d go home and be better off than he was now. “I’m going to get what I need up here in Kentucky, or I’ll know the reason why.”

“I’m Major General Barton Kinder,” the officer said. “Now, one more time—who the dickens are you?”

“I’m Major Jerry Dover, and I want Brigadier General Tyler to pull his trucks out of his asshole and get ’em on the road up here,” Dover said.

A considerable silence followed. Then Kinder said, “A major does not speak that way to a general officer.”

“So sue me,” Dover said. “All I know is, the damnyankees are building up like you wouldn’t believe on the other side of the Ohio. We’re lagging, on account of we can’t get what we need where we need it. And one of the reasons we can’t is that you guys won’t turn loose of your trucks. If we get swamped, you reckon anybody in Richmond’s going to give a rat’s ass that you’ve got all your fucking trucks?”

The silence lasted even longer this time. “I could have your head, Major,” General Kinder said at last. “Can you give me one good reason why I shouldn’t?”

“I can give you two, sir,” Dover said. “You give me the boot, you’ll get somebody up here who doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing, and that’ll screw up the war effort. There’s one. And two is, ten minutes after that new sucker gets here, he’s gonna be on the horn screaming his head off to you, wondering how come you’re not shipping him the shit he needs.”

“You can’t possibly be a Regular,” Major General Kinder said after yet another pause.

“Not me,” Jerry Dover agreed cheerfully. “I come out of the restaurant business. But I’m mighty goddamn good at what I do. Which counts for more…sir?”

“The restaurant business, eh? No wonder you’re such a foulmouthed son of a bitch,” Kinder said, proving he’d had at least one other restaurant manager serve under him. “All right, Major. We’ll see what we can do.”

“Thank you very much, sir.” Dover’s respect for military courtesy rose in direct proportion to how much his superiors were inclined to do what he wanted.

“You almost pushed it too far, Major,” Barton Kinder said. “I wouldn’t try that again if I were you.” He hung up before Dover could answer, which might have been lucky for all concerned.

One of the other logistics officers, who couldn’t possibly have heard what Major General Kinder said, told Dover, “Boy, you like to walk close to the edge, don’t you?”

“The damnyankees can blow me up. The damnyankees
will
blow me up if we give ’em half a chance—maybe even if we don’t,” Dover answered. “If a brass hat on my own side wants to throw me in the stockade or take the uniform off my back, what the hell do I care? The worst thing my own people can do to me is leave me right where I’m at.”

“I wish I could look at it that way.” The other man had a VMI class ring on the third finger of his right hand, so he was a career officer. That meant he was missing…

“Freedom!” Dover said. He was no Party stalwart, but the slogan rang true here. “Isn’t that what this damn war’s all about? If we aren’t free to do what we want and tell everybody else to piss up a rope, what’s the point?”

Before the VMI graduate could answer, the world blew up. Alarms started howling and screeching. Bombs started dropping. Shells started bursting. Men started screaming, “Gas! Gas!”

“Fuck!” Jerry Dover said, with much more passion than he’d used to say,
Freedom!
He had to rummage in his desk for a gas mask. As he fumbled it on, he knew what this was. He knew what it had to be. The Yankees had been building up for a long time. They weren’t building any more. They were coming.

Invasion! No word could rouse greater dread in the CSA. For the first two summers of the war, the Confederates had had everything their own way. The United States had a lot of debts to pay. Now it looked as if they were laying their money on the table.