The Grapple (2 page)

“Reckon not.” When Spartacus grinned, his teeth gleamed white in his dark face. “Reckon the ofays don’t think even a nigger’d be dumb enough to come back so soon.”

Nick Cantarella laughed out loud. “I like it. Fuck me if I don’t.” He’d grown up in New York City, and sounded like it. Sometimes he and Spartacus had trouble understanding each other. For that matter, sometimes Moss, who was from Chicago, had trouble understanding Cantarella. He rarely did with Spartacus. The Negro might drawl and slur, but at least he spoke slowly. Cantarella’s harsh consonants and clotted vowels came at machine-gun speed.

“Got me a couple people lookin’ the place over,” Spartacus said. “Don’t seem like nobody doin’ nothin’ special there. They reckon they done got hit once, so they’s immune now.” He grinned again. “It don’t work dat way.”

“All right by me,” Moss said.

But the raid didn’t come off. Spartacus didn’t want to move till he had everything just the way he wanted it. From a Regular Army commander, Moss might have thought that too cautious. But Regular Army commanders had men to spare, and regularly proved it. Spartacus didn’t. He needed to be careful not to walk into a trap.

While he was waiting and getting ready, the situation changed. Two companies of soldiers who wore yellowish khaki uniforms and helmets of unfamiliar shape came into the area. “Mexicans!” Nick Cantarella said in disgust. “Goddamn bean-eating greasers! Wonder how the hell Featherston pried ’em outa Francisco José.”

“Screw that.” Spartacus didn’t let the Mexican soldiers faze him. “What I wonder is, can them fuckers fight?”

“When the U.S. Army broke through in Pennsylvania last fall, it broke through against the Mexicans,” Cantarella said.

“Uh-huh, but y’all got barrels an’ airplanes an’ all that good shit.” Spartacus was nobody’s fool. “All we got is us, an’ we ain’t got so many of us.” He frowned in concentration. “Make them come at us, mebbe, an’ see how good they is.”

“Always better to meet them where you want to, not where they want to,” Moss said.

“Make sense,” Spartacus agreed. “Now we got to cipher out how them greasers can reckon they is doin’ what they wants when they is really doin’ jus’ what we aims to have ’em do.”

Arranging to have a letter intercepted in Plains turned out to be the easiest thing in the world. Moss’ only worry was that the Mexicans would decide it was too obviously a fraud. It told a fictitious comrade in the town where Spartacus’ band would be and what they planned to do for the next four days. One of the blacks sneaked into Plains at night and dropped the envelope that held the letter not far from the little hotel where Francisco José’s soldiers were garrisoned. Another black, one who lived in town, brought word the envelope had been found.

As Spartacus hoped, the Mexicans moved down the road from Plains toward Preston, the next town farther west. They marched in good order, with scouts well forward and with men out to either side to make sure they didn’t get hit from the flank. But the scouts saw nothing the guerrillas didn’t want them to, and the flank guards weren’t out far enough.

Spartacus approached field fortifications with the eye of a man who’d seen plenty of trench warfare. He had eight or ten riflemen dug in at the top of a tiny swell of ground. Jonathan Moss was one of them. He clutched his Tredegar with sweaty palms and hoped none of the blacks in the trench with him noticed how nervous he was.

The one thing he felt he could tell them was “Don’t open up too soon. We want to make the Mexicans bunch up in front of us, remember.” The Negroes nodded. Some of them still automatically acted deferential toward whites when they weren’t trying to kill them. That was a funny business.

Moss had only a few minutes to wonder about it before the Mexicans’ scouts came into sight. Their pale khaki might make good camouflage in northern Mexico, but it didn’t do so well against the green woods and red dirt of Georgia. The guerrillas waited till the scouts got close, then shot all three of them down. Moss thought he hit one of them, and also thought they went down before they were sure where the killing fire came from.

Those gunshots brought the rest of the Mexicans at a trot. They came in loose order, so nobody in front of them could pick off too many men at once. They would soon have overwhelmed the Negroes in that trench—if those were the only men Spartacus had. But their commanding officer did what the guerrilla leader hoped he would: in concentrating on what lay ahead, he forgot all about what might might be waiting off to the flank.

And he paid for it. What waited off to the flank was an artfully concealed machine gun. The Negroes didn’t take it with them everywhere they went; it was heavy and clumsy to move. But when they could set it up ahead of time…

When they could set it up ahead of time, it was the concentrated essence of infantry. The Mexicans hurried forward to deal with the roadblock in front of them. The machine-gun crew couldn’t have had a better target for enfilading fire if they’d set up the enemy themselves.

When the machine gun started stuttering, the Mexicans toppled like tenpins. They were close enough to let Moss hear their cries of fear and dismay and agony. Some of them tried to charge the machine-gun position. That was brave, but it didn’t work. The gun itself might have held them at bay. In case it didn’t, other blacks with rifles were there to help protect it.

Realizing they’d run into a trap helped break the Mexicans. When they took heavy casualties without taking the machine gun, they fled east, back toward Plains. Some of them threw away their weapons to run faster. The guerrillas galled them with gunfire till they got out of range.

After the Negroes emerged from cover, they methodically finished off the wounded Mexicans. Some of the guerrillas carried shotguns or small-caliber hunting rifles. They replaced them with bolt-action Tredegars taken from Francisco José’s men. A handful of the Mexicans carried submachine guns. Those also went into the blacks’ arsenal. None of the dead men had the automatic rifles that gave Confederate soldiers so much firepower. Moss wasn’t much surprised; the Confederates didn’t have enough of those potent weapons for all their own front-line troops.

Nick Cantarella went up to Spartacus, who was pulling clips of ammunition from the equipment pouches on a dead man’s belt. “We better haul ass outa here, and I mean now,” the U.S. officer said. “Those greasers’ll be back, either by themselves or with the local Freedom Party stalwarts. Ain’t gonna make the same trick work twice, not here.”

“You don’t reckon so?” The guerrilla leader didn’t sound convinced. “Them Mexicans ain’t smart, an’ the ofays who yell, ‘Freedom!’ all the goddamn time, they’s dumber.”

“Quickest way to end up dead is to think the guy you’re fighting is a damn fool,” Cantarella said. “Second quickest way is to get greedy. You try both at once, you’re askin’ for it, you hear what I’m sayin’?”

Spartacus looked at him. Jonathan Moss thought another quick way to end up dead was by pushing the Negro too far. Spartacus didn’t take kindly to listening to whites. But Cantarella had the certainty that went with knowing what he was doing. He wasn’t trying to show Spartacus up, just to give good advice. And he wasn’t much inclined to back down himself.

Muttering to himself, Spartacus looked along the road toward Plains. “Reckon mebbe you’s right,” he said unwillingly. “We done stuck ’em pretty good, an’ that’ll have to do.” He raised his voice to a shout: “Let’s git! Time to move out!”

The Negroes and their white advisers streamed away from the ambush. Moss didn’t see how Spartacus could have wanted much more. He wondered if the Mexicans would push hard after the guerrillas again, or if one introduction like this would show them that wasn’t a good idea.

When he asked Nick Cantarella, the infantry officer only shrugged. “Have to find out,” he said. “Pretty plain they never saw combat before. Whether they can’t stand up to it or whether they figure they’ve got something to prove now—well, we’ll see before long, I figure.”

“Guerrillas did well,” Moss remarked.

“Yeah.” Cantarella looked around, then spoke in a low voice: “Wouldn’t’ve thought the spooks had it in ’em. But if your ass is on the line, I guess you do what you gotta do, no matter who you are.”

“We just did,” Moss said. Nick Cantarella blinked, then nodded.

S
cipio was almost too far gone to notice when the train stopped. The Negro and his wife and daughter were scooped up in Augusta, Georgia, a week earlier—he thought it was a week, but he could have been off by a day or two either way.

Along with so many others from the Terry—Augusta’s colored district—they were herded into a boxcar and the door locked from the outside. It was too crowded in there to sit down, let alone to lie down. Scipio wasn’t off his feet for a minute in all that time, however long it was. He couldn’t make it to the honey buckets that were the only sanitary facilities, so he fouled himself when he couldn’t hold it any more. He wasn’t the only one—far from it.

He got a couple of sips from a dipper of water that went through the miserable throng, but nothing more. If the boxcar held any food, he never saw it. By the time the train finally got wherever it was going, his nose told him the car held dead bodies.

Had they made this journey in high summer, everyone would have died. He was as sure of that as he was of his own name—surer, since he’d gone by Xerxes for many years. Scipio was still a wanted man in South Carolina for his role in the Red Negro uprisings during the Great War.

But it was February, so heat and humidity didn’t add themselves to starvation and overcrowding.
What a mercy,
Scipio thought.

“Bathsheba?” he croaked through a dust-dry throat. “Antoinette?”

He heard no answer from either of them. Maybe they were dead. Maybe they were just too dry to talk. Maybe they couldn’t hear his husk-filled voice. Or maybe the noise other people were making covered their replies. His ears weren’t what they had been once upon a time. He was getting close to seventy. He’d been born a slave, back in the days before the Confederate States reluctantly manumitted their Negroes.

There was a bitter joke! Technically free, blacks didn’t have a prayer of equality with whites even in the best of times. Here in the worst of times…Scipio wasn’t worried about seeing another birthday now. He wondered if he would see another day, period.

Then what seemed like a miracle happened. The door to the boxcar opened. A cold, biting wind blew in. Fresh air hit Scipio almost as hard as a slug of whiskey would have. His eyes opened very wide. He thought his heart beat a little faster.

“Out!” White men’s voices, harsh as ravens’ croaks, roared out the word. “Come on out o’ there, you goddamn shitty niggers! Form two lines! Men on the left, women and pickaninnies on the right! Move! Move! Move!”

A few people stumbled out of the boxcar. A few corpses fell out. That eased the pressure that had held Scipio upright for so long. He started to sag to the planking of the floor. If he did, though, he didn’t think he’d be able to get up again. And the way these ofays—guards; he could see they were guards—were screaming at people to come out, he could guess what would happen to a man who couldn’t rise.

He wanted to live. He wondered why. After what he’d gone through, dying might have come as a relief. But he stumbled forward and awkwardly got down from the boxcar.

“Men on the left! Women and pickaninnies on the right!” the guards yelled again. Then one of them smacked a black man with a club he pulled from his belt. “You dumb fucking coon, don’t you know which one’s your right and which one’s your left? Get your lazy ass over where you belong!” Blood pouring down his face, the Negro staggered into the proper line.

Somebody touched Scipio’s hand. There stood Bathsheba, with Antoinette beside her. They looked like hell, or maybe a little worse. Scipio tried not to think about what he looked like himself. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered except that they were all alive.

“We gots to get in our line,” Bathsheba said in a voice like ashes. “The good Lord keep you safe, darlin’. We see you when we can.”

His wife had always been a churchgoing woman. She’d got Scipio to go with her a good many times. They were captured in church, in fact. Education and Marxism had corroded Scipio’s faith. If they hadn’t…Well, the trip he’d just finished would have turned St. Thomas Aquinas into an atheist. Somehow, though, it hadn’t shaken Bathsheba, not that way.

“You move, old man.” The Mexican-looking guard who gave the order had three stripes on the left sleeve of his gray uniform tunic. “You move, or you be sorry.” He didn’t sound particularly mean. He just sounded like a man doing his job—and a man who would do it, whatever that took. Was it better that he didn’t seem to enjoy tormenting his captives? Or did that make it worse?

The guard sergeant (no, in a gray uniform he’d have some kind of silly Freedom Party rank) waited to see if Scipio would obey, or maybe if he could obey. His wife and daughter had already gone off to their line. Nothing held him here except exhaustion, thirst, and starvation.

“I goin’,” he said, and discovered his feet still worked after all. The Mexican guard nodded and went to prod another sufferer into moving.

Standing in line wasn’t easy. Several men begged for water. The guards ignored them. One of the Negroes fell over. A man in a gray uniform kicked him. When the Negro didn’t respond, the guard peeled back his eyelid, then felt for a pulse. The white straightened, wiping his hand on his thigh. “Son of a bitch is dead as belt leather,” he said. “Gotta haul his worthless carcass outa here.”

A skinny black man in ragged shirt and dungarees out at the knee dragged the corpse away by the feet. A crew of similar wraiths were pulling bodies out of the train cars. Once, one of them called, “This here fella ain’t dead.”

A guard stood over the live Negro and fired a burst from his submachine gun. “Sandbagging fucker is now,” he said. The man who’d announced the survival hauled away the body as if such things happened whenever a train came in. They probably did.

“Jesus God, you are the smelliest, most disgusting bunch of niggers I ever seen!” a guard officer shouted.
What else could we be?
Scipio thought. He knew how filthy he was. He knew he didn’t have any choice about it, either. None of the lurching unfortunates in the line had any choice. The officer went on, “Strip naked and we’ll hose you down, get the worst shit off you.”