The Grapple (16 page)

Shame he didn’t have one of their automatic rifles—submachine-gun cartridges don’t matter so much,
Martin thought.
Well, the guy who plugged him will get his cigarettes and whatever else he has that’s worth taking.
And that was what a man’s life boiled down to: cartridges and cigarettes. Yeah, it sure was a tough war.

Artillery and the barrels pounded the Confederates ahead. The gun bunnies were in good form; hardly any rounds fell short. More soldiers in butternut came out of their holes with hands high. Chester did let them surrender. When men gave up in a group, it was too easy to have something go wrong if you tried to get rid of all of them at once.

Hillsboro fell that afternoon. The enemy pulled back when U.S. barrels threatened to cut off his line of retreat to the Ohio. He did a professional job of it, moving his guns out hitched to trucks and commandeered motorcars. He even paused to fire a few Parthian shots as he went south.

“We licked him here,” Private Rohe said, inspecting what was left of Hillsboro. “We licked him, yeah, but he ain’t licked yet.”

Chester was thinking about the same thing. “As long as we keep licking him, the rest doesn’t matter. Sooner or later, he’ll be licked whether he likes it or not.”

“Yeah?” Rohe weighed that, then nodded. “Yeah. Sounds right, Sarge. So when do we go over the Ohio?”

“Beats me,” Chester said. “Let’s bundle the other guys across first. Then we can worry about us, right?” Rohe nodded again.

M
ajor Jerry Dover watched from the south bank of the Ohio as trucks and infantrymen crossed the bridge back into Kentucky. The span was laid about a foot below the surface of the river. The damnyankees still hadn’t figured out that trick. When no one was on the bridge, it was invisible from the air. U.S. bombers didn’t keep coming over and trying to blow it to hell and gone.

The foot soldiers on the bridge looked like men walking on water. Dover turned to Colonel Travis W.W. Oliphant and said, “If we keep it up, sir, we can start our own religion.”

“What’s that?” Colonel Oliphant didn’t get it.
I might have known,
Dover thought with a mental sigh. Then the light dawned on his superior. Oliphant scowled. “I don’t find that amusing, Major. I don’t find that amusing at all,” he said. “I find it the next thing to blasphemous, as a matter of fact.”

“Sorry, sir,” Dover lied.
Damned stuffed shirt.
It wasn’t as if he didn’t know as much. He did. Any man who got huffy over not one initial but two couldn’t be anything but a stuffed shirt.

Colonel Oliphant went on trumpeting and wiggling his ears and pawing the ground. After a little while, Dover stopped listening to him. He was watching the stream of men and machines to make sure all the field kitchens safely returned to the CSA. Oliphant was supposed to be doing the same thing. He was too busy ranting.

“If we make God turn His face away from us in disgust, how can we prevail?” he demanded.

Dover thought about Negroes disappearing in Atlanta. He thought about the people he lost from the Huntsman’s Lodge in cleanouts. He wondered what was going on since he put on the uniform and went away. Was Xerxes still there? He could hope, but that was all he could do. “Sir, do you know about the camps?” he asked Colonel Oliphant in a low voice.

“What?” The other officer stared at him as if he were suddenly spouting Choctaw. “What are you talking about?”

“The camps,” Dover repeated patiently. “The camps where niggers go in but they don’t come out.”

He wondered if Travis W.W. Oliphant would deny that any such things existed. A little to his surprise, Oliphant didn’t. “Yes, I know about them. So what?” he said.

“Well, sir, if God will put up with those, I don’t think He’ll get too disgusted about a bad joke of mine,” Dover said.

Oliphant turned red. “The one has nothing to do with the other, Major,” he said stiffly. “The Negroes deserve everything that we’re giving them. Your so-called joke, on the other hand, was completely gratuitous.”

“God told you the Negroes have it coming, did He?” Jerry Dover asked.

“See here, Dover, you don’t have the right attitude,” Colonel Oliphant said. “Whose side are you on, anyway?”

“I’m on the Confederacy’s side…sir,” Dover answered. “If you think a stupid joke will put us in bad with God, I’m not so sure you are, though.” He’d managed the Huntsman’s Lodge too damn long. He wasn’t inclined to take guff from anybody, even if the guff-slinger wore three stars on either side of his collar while Dover had only one.

“I will write you up for this insubordination, Major,” Oliphant said in a low, furious voice. “You’ll get a court-martial, by God—yes, by God!”

He failed to impress Dover, who said, “Go ahead. One of three things will happen. They’ll throw my ass in the stockade, and I’ll be safer than you are. Or they’ll take the uniform off my back and ship me home, and I’ll be a lot safer than you are. Or—and here’s my bet—they’ll tear you a new asshole for wasting their time with this picayune shit, and they’ll leave me the hell alone. So sure, court-martial me, Colonel. Be my guest. I’ll thank you for it.”

Travis W.W. Oliphant’s mouth opened and closed several times. He might have been a freshly hooked perch. Subordinates were supposed to react to the threat of a court-martial with terror, not gloating anticipation. After his wordless tries, he finally managed to choke out, “You’re not a proper soldier at all, Dover.”

“That depends, sir. If you want me to keep people fed, I’ll do it like nobody’s business,” Dover said. “If you feed me bullshit and tell me it’s breakfast, I’m gonna puke it all over your shoes.”

Colonel Oliphant retreated in disorder, shaking his head. No summons to a court-martial ever came. Dover hadn’t expected one.

Since he wasn’t going to the stockade, he had plenty to do. The Confederate units that got out of Ohio were in a horrible tangle. They had to try to improvise a defense where they’d thought they wouldn’t need to. The CSA hadn’t had much time to fortify Kentucky before the war broke out, and neglected it afterwards. Confederate thinking was surely that Ohio was more important.

But now Ohio was back in the damnyankees’ hands. Whatever happened next would happen because the United States wanted it to, not because the Confederate States did. How good was the Confederacy at playing defense? Nobody knew, probably including Jake Featherston.

When supplies didn’t come up from farther south fast enough to suit him, Dover acquired an evil reputation with farmers all over northern Kentucky. He requisitioned what he needed, paying in Confederate scrip.

Some of the farmers’ screams reached Richmond. They got Dover a letter of commendation in his promotion jacket. Colonel Oliphant ignored it. Colonel Oliphant ignored Jerry Dover as much as he could from then on out, too.

That suited Dover down to the ground. He got more work done without Colonel Oliphant than he would have with him. He moved depots closer to the river than Oliphant liked, too. He didn’t think Oliphant was a coward—he’d seen the man blazing away at strafing U.S. fighters with a submachine gun, cool as you please. But the colonel’s ideas about logistics formed during the Great War, and didn’t move forward with the easy availability of telephones and wireless sets and trucks.

Front-line soldiers appreciated what Dover did, regardless of whether Travis W.W. Oliphant understood it. Dover got to the front himself whenever he could. The best way to make sure things worked as you wanted them to was to check them with your own eyes. He knew that from the restaurant business.

And he promptly caught one potbellied supply sergeant diverting rations to the local civilians—for a nice little rakeoff, of course. Of course. He landed on the enterprising noncom like a thousand-pound bomb. After the sergeant went off in irons—nobody wasted time being nice to mere noncoms—things elsewhere along the line of the Ohio tightened up remarkably.

Because of all his time at the Huntsman’s Lodge, Dover knew better than to believe he’d worked miracles. He didn’t labor under the delusion that he’d changed human nature. Thieves and grifters were going to keep right on being thieves and grifters. But he forced them to be careful for a while, which was better than a poke in the eye with a carrot.

“Way to go, Major,” a first lieutenant running a company right on the southern bank of the river told him. “We’ve got more grub here than I reckoned we’d ever see.”

“Good,” Dover said. “Good you’ve got it now, I mean. Not so good you gave up thinking you ever would.”

“Yeah, well, what can you do? Shit happens,” the lieutenant answered. “We were up on the other side of the border for a long time. We could swap smokes with the damnyankees for some of their rations, and we could requisition on the farms when we ran low. But that don’t go over so good when you’re requisitioning from your own people. So we were making do and getting by down here, but it’s a damn sight better now.”

“Dammit, this country grows enough food. This country cans enough food,” Dover said—and requisitioning from his own side bothered him not a bit. “We ought to be able to get that stuff to the people who need it the most.”

“We ought to be able to do all kinds of shit,” the lieutenant said, and paused to light a cigarette. “We ought to still be up at Lake Erie. We ought to still be in Pittsburgh. Fuck, we ought to be in Philadelphia.” He looked at Dover. He did everything but blow smoke in Dover’s face. “And if you want to report me for defeatism, go right ahead…sir. It’s not like I give a good goddamn.”

“I’m not going to report you. I think you’re right.” Only later did Dover wonder if the other officer was trying to entrap him. No hard-faced men in gray trenchcoats swooped down on the tent where he slept during the wee small hours. No one hauled him away for bright lights and hard knocks and endless rounds of questions.

That didn’t keep him from almost getting killed. Just as the Confederates were trying to strengthen their defenses on the southern bank of the Ohio, so the damnyankees were building up north of the river. The first two summers of the war, the Confederates struck when and where they chose. This time, the United States enjoyed the initiative. What they would do with it remained to be seen.

One of the things they did with it was strike at the C.S. positions south of the Ohio from the air. Bombs blasted field fortifications. Fighters streaked low to shoot up anything that moved. Confederate airplanes were bound to be doing the same thing on the other side of the river, but that didn’t help Dover when a Yankee fighter strafed his Birmingham.

“Oh, shit!” the driver said when he saw the airplane in the rearview mirror. He jammed the gas pedal to the floor, which shoved Dover back in his seat. Then he did something his passenger thought smarter than hell, even if it almost put Dover through the windshield: he screeched the brakes, hoping to make the fighter overshoot.

It almost worked, too. Most of the U.S. fighter’s machine-gun bullets chewed up the asphalt in front of the Birmingham. Most—but not all. A .50-caliber slug almost blew off the driver’s head. Bone and blood and brains showered Jerry Dover. Two more bullets, or maybe three, slammed into the engine block. Flames and smoke spurted up from under the hood.

If the driver weren’t already stopping, the auto would have gone off the road at high speed, and probably rolled over and exploded. As things were, it limped onto the soft shoulder. Dover yanked open the door, jumped out, and ran like hell. He managed to get clear before the fire reached the gas tank. A soft
whoomp!
and the Birmingham was an inferno.

“Jesus!” Dover looked down at himself. He was as spattered with gore as if he were wounded himself. He could
smell
it. His stomach heaved, but he kept breakfast down.

Looking back at the pyre that marked his driver’s last resting place, he felt guilty about not getting the man out. The rational part of his mind said that was ridiculous—you couldn’t possibly live with nothing left of your head from the ears north. He felt guilty even so, maybe for living where the other man died.

Another Birmingham painted butternut stopped. The officer inside stared from the burning motorcar to Jerry Dover. “You hurt, pal? You need a lift?” he asked.

“I’m all right. I do need a lift,” Dover answered automatically. Then he said, “Christ, what I really need is a drink.” The officer held up a silvered flask. Dover ran for the other Birmingham.

C
incinnatus Driver rolled into Cincinnati, Ohio. His name didn’t have anything much to do with the town, even if he was born in Covington, Kentucky, right across the Ohio River. Negroes in the CSA had long been in the habit of giving their babies fancy names, either from the days of ancient Greece and Rome or, less often, from the Bible. When you didn’t have much but your name to call your own, you got as much out of it as you could.

Cincinnati looked like hell. The Confederates made a stand here before pulling back across the Ohio into Covington. As the USA taught the CSA in Pittsburgh, attacking a built-up area could be hellishly expensive. The bastards in butternut did their damnedest to make it so here.