The Grapple

by Harry Turtledove

  “So you were thinking about French leave, were you?” McDougald said, and O’Doull winced. Undeterred, McDougald went on, “Can’t say as I blame you.”

  “I was tempted,” O’Doull admitted. “I don’t think Quebec would have let the USA extradite me. But I put the uniform on, and I can’t very well take it off again till things are done.” Nicole had a different opinion, but he didn’t mention that.

  “Hey, Doc!” That shout from outside the aid tent warned another casualty was coming in. This time, though, Eddie added, “Can you work on a civilian?”

  The tent wasn’t far south of Sparta, Tennessee. Not all the Confederate civilians had fled fast enough. O’Doull had already patched up several. Chances were they wouldn’t be grateful, but he figured C.S. surgeons had done the same up in Ohio for equally ungrateful U.S. citizens. So he answered, “Sure, Eddie, bring him in. I’ll do what I can for the miserable bastard.” He paused and turned to McDougald. “Or do you want me to pass gas while you do the honors?”

  “Sure. Why not? Thanks, Doc,” McDougald answered.

  But when Eddie and the other corpsmen brought in the casualty, it turned out not to be a him but a her. She was about thirty, groaning the way anyone else with a blood-soaked bandage on the belly would have. “Aw, shit,” O’Doull said softly. Most of the time, he didn’t get reminded that whole countries were at war, not just armies. When he did, it was like a slap in the face.

  “You take the case, Doc,” Granny McDougald said. “All I know about female plumbing stops about nine inches deep.”

  “God, what a braggart you are,” O’Doull said. Eddie snorted. The wounded woman, fortunately, was too far gone to pay any attention to the byplay. “Get her up on the table,” O’Doull told the corpsmen. “I’ll do what I can for her.”

  She feebly tried to fight when McDougald put the ether cone over her mouth and nose. How many soldiers had done the same thing? More than O’Doull could count. He and Eddie held her hands till she went limp.

  “Get a plasma line into her,” O’Doull said. “She’s lost a lot of blood.”

  “Already doing it,” McDougald said, and he was. “I’ll put a cuff on her, too, so we can see what we’ve got.” With unhurried speed, he also did that. “Pressure is…100 over 70—a little low, but not too bad. Pulse is…85. A little thready, maybe, but I think she’s got a chance.”

  “Let’s see what’s in there.” O’Doull opened her up—actually, he extended the wound she already had. “Shrapnel, sure as hell,” he said, and then, “I’m going to have to do a hysterectomy.”

  “Your case, all right,” McDougald said. “I wouldn’t even know where to start.”

  “I haven’t done all that many myself,” O’Doull said. He reached for a scalpel, and then, after he felt the womb, for forceps. “Here’s what did it, all right.” He held up a jagged piece of metal about the size of a half-dollar. “Must have been nearly spent, or it would’ve torn her up worse than this.”

  “Happy day. I’m sure she’s real glad of that,” McDougald said.

  “Yeah, I know,” O’Doull agreed. “She’s got a tear in her bladder, too, but I can fix it. Guts don’t seem bad. With any luck at all, she’ll make it.”

  “That’d be good,” McDougald said. “She’s harmless now. She can’t have any kids to shoot at U.S. soldiers when we try this again in 1971.”

  “Christ!” O’Doull’s hand almost jerked. “There’s a cheery thought.”

  “It’ll happen unless we really knock ’em flat and sit on ’em,” McDougald said. “You hope we will, but what are the odds?”

  “Beats me,” O’Doull said. “But we’d have to be crazy to give them a third chance to cream our corn for us.”

  “Yeah? And your point is…?”

  O’Doull winced again, but went on suturing. “What are we supposed to do? We can’t occupy the whole CSA. They’ll shoot at us from behind trees and throw Featherston Fizzes at us forever if we try. But how do we hold ’em down without occupying them?”

  “Kill ’em all,” McDougald said. “Resettle the place from the USA.”

  “Congratulations,” O’Doull told him. “You get an A in Jake Featherston lessons.”

  “Them’s fightin’ words,” McDougald said. “Put up your dukes.”

  “Later,” O’Doull said. “Let me finish sewing this gal up first.”

  “This is a funny business, isn’t it?” McDougald said. “She’s not bad-looking, and there are you messing with her private parts, but she’s not a broad or anything. She’s just a patient.”

  “Yeah, that crossed my mind, too.” O’Doull paused for a moment to make sure a suture was good and tight. “Once upon a time, between the wars, I went to a medical conference in Montreal, and I got to talking with this hotshot gynecologist. I asked him if he ever got tired of looking at pussy all day. He kind of rolled his eyes and said, ‘Oh, Jesus, do I ever!’”

  The medic laughed. “Well, all right. I guess I believe that. Of course, a lot of what he’s looking at belongs to little old ladies. The young, healthy, pretty gals mostly don’t bother coming to him.”

  “I wasn’t finished yet.” O’Doull put in another stitch, then went on, “A couple of years later, this guy’s wife divorced him. Not easy to do in Quebec—it’s a Catholic country. She had to prove infidelity, and she did—with three different patients of his. So not all the young, pretty ones stayed away.”

  That made Granville McDougald laugh some more. “See, I know what happened. You asked the wrong question. Maybe he got tired of looking, but do you ever get tired of touching?”

  “Good point.” O’Doull looked down at the wounded woman. “I do believe she’ll pull through. Haven’t had to try that particular surgery for quite a while.”

  “You looked like you knew what you were doing, whether you really did or not,” McDougald said.

  “Thanks a lot, Granny. You really know how to make a guy feel good about himself.” As O’Doull started closing the outer wound and the incision that had widened it, a new thought struck him. “Where are we going to put her? Can’t just dump her with the wounded POWs, you know.”

  “No, that wouldn’t work,” McDougald agreed. “Where’s the closest civilian hospital?”

  “Beats me. Somewhere north of us—that’s all I can tell you. Oh, there are bound to be some farther south, too, but passing her through the lines won’t be easy. And if we keep moving forward, we’re liable to blow wherever she’s staying to hell and gone.”

  “Be a shame to waste your hard work,” McDougald said. “Tell you what we ought to do—we ought to just send her back to the division hospital and let them figure out what to do with her. They’ve got more room for her and more people to deal with her than we do, anyway.”

  O’Doull had dealt with the military bureaucracy long enough to know a perfect solution when he heard one. “We’ll do that, all right,” he said. “Fixing her up was my worry. Let the guys in back of the line figure out where she’s supposed to go.”

  She went off to the rear in an ambulance with the wounded soldier on whom O’Doull had operated not long before. “They’ll probably be pissed off,” McDougald remarked.

  “Too damn bad,” O’Doull answered. They both stood outside the tent, watching the ambulance head off toward Sparta. “What’s the worst they can do? Write me a reprimand, right? Like I give a shit.”

  “There you go, Doc,” McDougald said. “That’s one nice thing about coming in for the duration—you don’t care what the brass hats who run things think of you. Must be nice.” He sighed wistfully.

  “You’re in about the same place, aren’t you?” O’Doull pulled out a captured pack of Raleighs. “They probably won’t bump you up to lieutenant, and you’d really have to screw up big for them to take your stripes away. You’re free.” He lit a cigarette and smiled as he inhaled.

  “Let me have one of those, would you?…Thanks.” McDougald leaned close for a light, then took a deep drag of his own. “You�
��re right and you’re wrong, Doc. Yeah, I can tell ’em where to head in, I guess. But I don’t really want to most of the time, ’cause this is my outfit. I’ll be here till they don’t want me any more. You’re freer than that.”

  “I suppose.” One of O’Doull’s hands touched the oak leaf on his other shoulder. He didn’t feel very free. “If it weren’t for the honor of the thing, I’d rather walk. That’s what the fellow said when they tarred and feathered him and rode him out of town on a rail, isn’t it?”

  “You know who told that joke the first time?” McDougald asked, and O’Doull had to shake his head. “Abraham Lincoln, that’s who.”

  “Did he?” O’Doull decided he wouldn’t tell it again. Eighty years ago, the things Lincoln did—and the things he didn’t do—made sure the USA and the CSA would go at each other till the end of time. Few Presidents were better remembered: Washington and Jefferson, perhaps (their memories somewhat tarnished in the USA because they were Virginians), and undoubtedly Teddy Roosevelt. But only James G. Blaine came close to Lincoln as a failure, and Blaine wouldn’t have had the chance to botch the Second Mexican War if Lincoln hadn’t botched the War of Secession. Yes, that was one joke Leonard O’Doull would forget.

  Jefferson Pinkard eyed the letter in front of him with several different kinds of pained incomprehension. He understood that it was from Magdalena Rodriguez down in Sonora. But he didn’t understand much that was in it because, although she tried to write English, what they thought of as English in Sonora wasn’t the same as it was in the rest of the CSA. Still, he knew what she had to be asking: why the devil did her husband go and shoot himself?

  “I wish to Christ I knew,” Pinkard muttered. Every once in a while, a guard couldn’t stand what he was doing, and he ate his gun or got rid of himself some other way. Pinkard knew that—nobody knew it better. If it weren’t true, he wouldn’t be married to Chick Blades’ widow. But that Hip Rodriguez should blow off the top of his head…“Goddammit, he fucking hated niggers!”

  Still muttering, Jeff wondered if he ought to call in another guard from Sonora or Chihuahua to get an exact translation. After a few seconds, he shook his head. Whatever was in the letter would be all through the guard barracks in nothing flat if he did. He shook his head again. He didn’t want that to happen. Hipolito Rodriguez was a good man. He didn’t deserve to get his name dragged through the mud any more than it had to be. And that wasn’t Jeff’s only reason….

  “He was a friend, dammit,” Jeff said. And that scared him a couple of different ways. Anything that happened to Hip might happen to him, too. Ever since Rodriguez shot himself, the weight of the ceremonial .45 on Jeff’s hip seemed larger and more ominous than it ever had before. And when he picked up a submachine gun to walk through Camp Determination, he often shivered. What was Hip thinking when he turned his the wrong way?

  And Jeff hadn’t realized how much having a real friend here mattered till he suddenly didn’t any more. He could talk about stuff with Hip without fearing that Ferd Koenig or Jake Featherston would find out what he said. He could use his war buddy as a back channel to the guards—and they could use Rodriguez as a back channel to him, too. It worked well for everybody.

  Except now it didn’t. And under all that lay the hole one friend’s death left in the life of another who survived. Hip and Jeff went through desperate and deadly times together. No one else remembered them—no one else Jeff knew, which was all that mattered. When he and Hip talked, they both understood the mud and the blood and the stinks and the fear and the occasional flashes of crazy fun that lit up the horror and the wild drunken furloughs they’d got to take too seldom. Now all that stuff was locked inside Jefferson Pinkard’s head. He could explain it to other people, but that was the point. He never needed to explain it to Hip. Hip knew.

  The telephone rang. Pinkard jerked in his swivel chair. “Son of a bitch!” he burst out. His hand shook as he reached for the telephone. I’m jumpy as a goddamn cat, he thought. Can’t let anybody see that, or I’m in big trouble. “Pinkard here.” His voice came out as a satisfactory growl. “What’s up?”

  “Sir, we’ve got a new shipment coming in.” The guard officer at the other end of the line sounded both pleased and more than a little astonished. “Should be here in an hour or two.”

  “Good God!” Pinkard said. “Why the hell didn’t somebody tell us sooner?”

  “Only thing I can think of, sir, is that they didn’t want the damnyankees listening in,” the officer replied.

  Jeff grunted—that did make some sense. “Could be,” he said. “And maybe they’ll let up on this place for a while anyway. They’ve had their damn propaganda offensive. It’s not like they really give a rat’s ass about niggers. I mean, who does, for Christ’s sake?”

  “Not me, sir,” the youngster on the other end of the line replied with great conviction.

  “Didn’t reckon you would,” Pinkard said. “Let everybody know what’s what. We want to give these coons a nice, juicy Camp Determination hello—and then a nice, juicy good-bye, too.”

  If he had to, he aimed to raise hell to make sure the guards were ready. Because of the way U.S. airplanes had pummeled the railroads coming west to Snyder and the camp, things had been painfully slow lately. It would have been easy for the men in gray uniforms to slack off. But they didn’t, which made Pinkard proud. He could tell when the call reached the barracks. Guards exploded out, almost as if they were in a comedy film.

  But it wouldn’t be funny when that train got here. Pinkard was at the railroad spur watching when it pulled into the camp. He didn’t say anything. He would if he had to, but the men in charge of the welcoming committee—he chuckled when he thought of it that way—deserved the chance to handle things themselves till they showed they couldn’t.

  Engine puffing, brakes squealing, the train stopped right where it was supposed to. The engineer was on the ball, then. That was good, because he didn’t fall under Jeff’s command. Doors opened. The familiar rank stench that rolled out of the jam-packed cars was even richer and riper than usual: the weather was warming up.

  “Out!” guards screamed, gesturing with their submachine guns. “Move, you lousy, stinking coons! Move!”

  “Men to the left!” officers added. “Men to the left, women and brats to the right!” One of them kicked a dazed black man, who fell with a groan. “Get up!” the officer roared. “Get up, you dumb fucking prick! You too goddamn stupid to know which is your left and which is your right?”

  The Negro probably was. How many days had he been stuck in that jam-packed car, with nowhere to turn around, nowhere to sit down, nowhere to ease himself, nothing to eat, nothing to drink? How many bodies would the guards and the Negro trusties find when they went through the train? There were always a good many. Because summer was here, there would probably be more than there had been on runs earlier in the year.

  A submachine gun stuttered out a quick burst. Jefferson Pinkard nodded to himself. Every trainload, a few Negroes thought they could beat the odds by playing possum. Every trainload, they found out they were wrong.

  “No, you stupid fuck, you can’t carry your suitcase into the camp!” Every time, some Negroes managed to bring things along. What was confiscated was supposed to go straight into the war effort. Some of it did. The guards took what they wanted first, though. That was one of the perquisites that went with this job.

  Many of them barely able to stay on their feet, the black men shambled through the gate and into the southern half of the camp. The women and little children went into the northern half. Every time, men and women waved to one another and promised they would be together again soon. Yeah, you will, all right—in hell, Jeff thought.

  He sighed. Sure as hell, the senior female guard officer would come around and complain that her girls didn’t get a chance to help with the unloading. She’d done that at least half a dozen times. She wanted them to get what she thought was their fair share of the loot.

  “Too damn
bad,” Pinkard muttered. In case something out here went wrong, he didn’t want a bunch of flabbling women trying to fix it, even (or maybe especially) if they carried submachine guns, too. They were all right with barbed wire to back them up. They even had advantages over men. Fewer of them had affairs with Negro women. But when they did, they really fell in love with their colored partners. That happened much less often with the men.

  By now, the female guards knew how to get the colored women and children into the asphyxiating trucks and the bathhouse on that side of the camp without panicking them. The ones who couldn’t manage that were gone. Jeff had had to be firm about that; the guards in skirts had powerful backers in Richmond. But nobody was more powerful than Ferd Koenig and Jake Featherston, and he’d got his way.

  Camp Determination got another shipment of Negroes the next day, and two more the day after that. It seemed like old times again. Barracks started filling up as prisoners came in faster than the camp could process them. That was how Jeff thought of it, and that was how it went down on every report. It seemed so much more…sanitary than talking about killing.

  There was some trouble with the prisoners from the last trainload on the second day. As they lined up to “get deloused and bathed,” a man shouted, “You ain’t gwine give us no baths! You gwine kill us all!”

  He wasn’t wrong, either in general or in particular. Two guards emptied their submachine guns at him. By the time they got done, he had more holes than a colander. They hit other prisoners, too—only fool luck kept them from hitting other guards. Nobody could stay smooth and polite after that. The only way the guards got the Negroes into the bathhouse was by threatening to kill them all on the spot if they didn’t get moving.

  “An ugly business,” Jeff said when he got to the bottom of it. “I hope that damn troublemaking nigger cooks in hell forever. All his fault.”