The Grapple

“Where they at now?” Pyrrhus asked. “Sure don’t see ’em around none.”

“Po’ birds got their fuckin’ population reduced,” Gracchus answered. “Might as well be niggers.”

Two nights later, a Negro sneaked out of Madison, Georgia, the town closest to the tumbledown sharecropping village, with word that a truck convoy had stopped there for the night and would go on to the northwest in the morning. “You ain’t goin’ back,” Gracchus said. “You comin’ wid us. You lyin’, you dyin’.”

“Give me a gun. I want a shot at the ofays my ownself,” the Negro replied.

“I gives you a gun,” Gracchus said. “I gives you one after we gits away. You kin shoot the ofays then.”

“You don’t trust me none,” said the town Negro, whose name was Jeroboam.

“Bet your ass I don’t,” Gracchus said. “I don’t know you from a cowflop. Ain’t got no reason to trust you-yet. But you give me one, we git on fine.”

Jeroboam knew the road that led to the front. Like a lot of rural roads, it was badly potholed; money’d gone into guns and barrels and murder camps and main highways, not the roads that meandered between them. One of those potholes let the guerrillas plant explosives without digging under the roadbed from the side, which would have taken longer and been much too conspicuous once done.

Gracchus placed his men in the high grass and bushes to either side of the road southeast of the bomb. The CSA had too much to do to bother clearing weeds, either. With any luck at all, the white Confederates would pay for their neglect.

Jeroboam lay in the bushes only a couple of strides from Gracchus. He was bound and gagged; nothing he did or said would warn the men in the approaching truck convoy-if there was an approaching truck convoy. He hadn’t squawked when Gracchus told him what they were going to do. Cassius hoped that argued he was truthful. If it didn’t, it argued that he was a good actor.

With autumn here, fewer bugs bothered Cassius than would have a few months earlier. He scratched anyway. He knew he was lousy. The only thing he had to kill lice was kerosene, a cure almost worse than the problem. He’d always been clean; his mother was neat, his father downright fastidious. Now they were almost surely dead, and he had nasty little bugs crawling over his scalp.

“Heads up!” somebody called. Cassius flattened himself into the grass. Why did people say that when they meant duck down? He supposed it came from football or some other game.

Then, catching the low rumble of approaching trucks, he stopped worrying about things that didn’t matter. How much protection did they have with them? If four or five armored cars and half-tracks were in the convoy, the plan was to blow up the lead vehicle and then just slip away. Getting into an expensive skirmish was the last thing Gracchus wanted.

Closer…Closer…The machine in front was a truck. It was, in fact, a captured U.S. truck-blockier than C.S. models-with a coat of butternut paint slapped on over the original green-gray.

Gracchus had the plunger whose wires led to the explosives in the roadway. He jerked down on it at just the right moment. The truck went up in a fireball that engulfed the one behind it, which was following too close. The other trucks in the convoy slammed on the brakes. As soon as they did, Cassius and the rest of the black guerrillas started shooting.

He’d never fired a rifle till he joined Gracchus’ band. He sure knew what to do with one now. He fired again and again, working the bolt on the Tredegar and slapping in a fresh clip when the one he was using ran dry. The rifle butt slammed against his shoulder again and again. He’d be sore tomorrow…assuming he was still alive.

The drivers had rifles and submachine guns of their own, and started shooting back. And then Cassius heard an unmistakable machine gun banging away, and ice walked through him. That sure sounded as if it came from a weapon most likely to be mounted on an armored vehicle. He hoped the guerrillas had some Featherston Fizzes, but getting close enough to throw one could prove more dangerous to the man with it than to his intended target.

And then he heard something else: a deep rumble from the northwest, rising swiftly to multiple screams in the air. Yankee fighter-bombers had spotted the convoy with the burning trucks corking its way forward. The airplanes gleefully swooped down for the kill.

Cassius had imagined hell on earth, with the Confederate military playing a star role in the roaster. Now he saw it: truck after truck smashed by bombs or by machine-gun and ca

Only one thing was wrong with the fire and brimstone visited upon the convoy-some of it slopped over onto Gracchus’ band. Not all the bombs hit right on the road. Neither did all the shells and bullets. Chances were the U.S. pilots didn’t even know the Negroes were there. If they knew, they didn’t give a damn. Their mission was to smash up enemy transport. They did that up brown. Everything else was just a detail.

To them, it was a detail. It was liable to get Cassius killed. He hugged the ground while bullets smashed down much too close and blast tried to pick him up and throw him away. Somebody close by screamed, “No! No! No!” After a little while, he realized he was making those noises.

The U.S. warplanes couldn’t have lingered more than ten minutes. They came, they saw, they destroyed. And the truck convoy was much more thoroughly wrecked than either Gracchus or Jeroboam could have imagined.

“Shitfire!” Gracchus cried in a mix of awe and outrage. “Ain’t even nothin’ left fo’ us to steal!”

“Hell you say,” Pyrrhus answered, and paused to shoot a dazed and bloodied Confederate truck driver who staggered toward him. As the white man fell, the guerrilla went on, “Almost got myself squashed by a big old crate of rations-landed in these bushes here.”

“Well, that’s somethin’.” Gracchus sounded as if he didn’t know how much it was. Cassius didn’t, either. You could eat Confederate rations and you wouldn’t be hungry afterwards. Past that, he had nothing good to say for them. He’d heard even Confederate soldiers traded cigarettes or coffee with the enemy to get food better than their own.

“Mother!” a dreadfully wounded Confederate screamed. “Motherrr!” Cassius drew a bead on him and shot him through the head.

“Why you go an’ do dat?” a Negro asked. “Shoulda let the damn ofay suffer.”

“I’d shoot a dog,” Cassius said.

“Yeah, but a dog, he wouldn’t shoot you,” the other rebel said.

After a moment, Cassius decided he had a point. Instead of admitting it, he changed the subject, calling out to Gracchus, “You go

“Reckon I better,” the guerrilla leader said. “He wasn’t lyin’, that’s fo’ damn sure. An’ we ought to write a nice thank-you to them Yankees. They done a lot of work fo’ us.” He laughed. “Reckon they done mo’ work than we coulda did our ownselves.”

He wasn’t wrong. “Wonder how many of us those U.S. pilots hit,” Cassius said, and laughed at himself. He was sure he was the only rebel in the band-maybe in the state-who would have said those pilots. To the other Negroes, it would have been them pilots. Like it or not, Cassius was his father’s son.

The guerrillas had lost one man dead and two more wounded, neither seriously. “Watch what happen to them trucks, an’ do Jesus! I don’t hardly mind gettin’ shot,” one of the injured men said. The dead guerrilla had stopped a 20mm ca

Carrying the rations and other small bits of loot, the black rebels made their getaway. Behind them, the shattered convoy sent up great dark plumes of smoke. Before long, whites would come out from Madison to see what had happened-not that they could be in much doubt-and do what they could for anyone left alive.