Silver Stars Read online

  The bra and boxers look is a bit too daring for Rio and Jenou, but Cat seems to have a way of deflecting unwanted male attention, like she’s wearing a sign that reads: Don’t bother. Even the ever-amorous Tilo is content to toss horseshoes with her, though the shoes in question are actually brass rings roughly cut from discarded 155 brass and the peg is a bayonet.

  Rio and Jenou both have brown-tanned faces, necks, and forearms, but the rest of them blazes a lurid white with just a tinge of pink where the skin is beginning to burn.

  “What was what like?” Rio repeats the question slowly. She has a wet sock laid over her eyes to afford some shade. There is a half-empty bottle of Coca-Cola beside her. It was almost cold once and now is the temperature of hot tea. Jenou has a book held up to block the sun, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter, in a paperback edition.

  It is the summer of 1943 in Tunisia, and it is hot. Desert hot. Completely immobile—except when they swat at a fly—both young women are still sweating.

  “You know,” Jenou insists. “The first time. I’m just trying to get an idea.”

  “What are you, writing a book?” Rio says sharply. “Suddenly you’re reading books and now you’re trying to plumb the depths of my soul?”

  “My usual appetite for fashion and Hollywood gossip isn’t being satisfied,” Jenou says, adopting a light, bantering lilt before restating her question in a more serious tone.

  Rio sighs. “I don’t know, Jen.” She pronounces the name with a soft j, like zh. Jenou’s name is inspired by the word ingenue, a perfectly inappropriate reference point for Jenou, who is far from being the innocent the name suggests.

  Jenou is blond, with hair cut short to just below the ear. General Patton has decreed that all female soldiers will have hair cut to above the bottom of their earlobe. The general is improvising—army regulations have not quite caught up with the realities of female soldiers. In addition to being blond, Jenou is quite pretty, just shy of beautiful, and has a pinup’s body.

  Jenou remains silent, knowing the pressure will build on Rio to say something. And of course she’s right.

  “It was . . .” Rio searches for a word picture, a metaphor, something that will convey enough meaning that Jenou will not feel the need to ask any more. Thinking about it takes her back to that moment. To the sound of Sergeant Cole’s voice yelling, Shoot!

  Richlin! Suarez! Lay down some fugging fire!

  Rio remembers it in detail. It had been as cold then as it is hot now. Her breathing had become irregular: a panicky burst followed by a leaden thud-thud-thud.

  She remembers lining up the sights of her M1 Garand. She remembers the Italian soldier. And the pressure of her finger on the trigger. And the way she slowed her breathing, the way she shut out everything, every extraneous sound, every irrelevant emotion. The way she saw the target, a man in a tan uniform lined up perfectly on the sights.

  The way her lungs and heart seemed to freeze along with time itself.

  The moment when her right index finger applied the necessary seven-point-five pounds of pressure and the stock kicked back against her shoulder.

  Bang.

  The way she had first thought that he had just tripped. The way the Italian had seemed to be frozen in time, on his knees, maybe just tripped, maybe just caught his toe on a rock and . . . And then the way the man fell back.

  Dead.

  “Like it wasn’t me,” Rio says at last. “Like someone else was moving me. Like I was a puppet, Jen. Like I was a puppet.”

  This is the third time, not the first, that Jenou has asked about that first killing. Rio is vaguely aware that it has become important to Jenou that Rio remain Rio. She understands that Jenou does not have the sort of home you get sentimental over, and that as a result Rio is home to Jenou. Sometimes she intercepts a look from Jenou, a passing betrayal of inner doubts. Jenou, who Rio would never have thought capable of any sort of reflection, has developed a sidelong, contemplative gaze. A judging gaze tinged with worry. And sometimes Rio looks for ways to reassure Jenou, but at this particular moment it is just too damned hot.

  “Doing my job,” Rio says with a hint of wry humor. “Rio Richlin, Private, US Army, sir! Shootin’ Krauts, sir!” She executes a lazy salute.

  A truck rattles by, and a dozen male GIs whistle and yell encouragement along the lines of “Hey, sweetheart!” and “Oh baby!” and “Bring those tatas here to papa!”

  Rio and Jenou ignore the catcalls as just another bit of background noise, like the coughing engine of a Sherman tank lurching toward the motor pool, or the insect buzz of the army spotter plane overhead.

  “Hey, I got a letter from Strand,” Rio says, wanting to change the subject and dispel her own lingering resentment.

  A dozen soldiers, mostly men, march wearily past, coming in from a patrol. “Which of you broads want me between your legs?”

  Jenou raises a middle finger without bothering to look and hears a chorus of shouts and laughs, some angry, most amused.

  “Well, dish, sweetie. How is tall, dark, and handsome doing?” Jenou asks.

  “He says he’s fine. And he’s looking for a way to get here.”

  “From Algiers? Kind of a long walk.”

  “I think he was hoping for a train. Or a truck. Or a plane.”

  “He’d fly his own plane over here if he really loved you.”

  Does he? Does he still? Am I still the girl he fell for?

  Rio reaches blindly to give Jenou a shove. “I don’t think the army just lets you borrow a B-17 whenever you want one.”

  “He could offer to pay for the gas.”

  “Let’s roll over. This side’s parboiled.”

  They roll over, Rio recoiling as bare flesh touches the metal skin of the vehicle.

  Suddenly a siren begins its windup and both girls sit up fast, shield their eyes, and scan the horizon.

  “Aw, hell,” Jenou says, pointing at two black dots rushing toward them from the direction of the sea.

  The cry goes up from a dozen voices. “Plane! Plane! Take cover!”

  They climb down quickly—much more quickly than they climbed up.

  “Under the track?” Rio wonders aloud, looking toward the nearest ditch, which is already filling up with scrambling GIs.

  “The Kraut will aim for the track!” Jenou yells.

  “He’ll see it’s one of his own and burned out besides,” Rio counters in a calmer tone. They crawl madly for the shelter of all that steel and lie facedown, breathing dust, almost grateful for the shade. Antiaircraft guns at the four corners of the camp open up, firing tracer rounds at the dots, which have now assumed the shape of Me 109 fighters with single bomb racks.

  Bap-bap-bap-bap-bap! The antiaircraft guns blaze, joined by small arms fire from various soldiers firing futilely with rifles and Thompsons.

  The Messerschmitts come in fast and low, and starbursts twinkle on their wings and cowling. Machine gun bullets and cannon shells rip lines across the road and into the tents. A voice yells, “Goddamn Kraut shot my goddamn coffee!”

  The planes release one bomb each, one a dud that plows into the dirt between two tents and sticks up like a fireplug, smoking a little. The second bomb is not a dud.

  Ka-BOOM!

  The front end of a deuce-and-a-half truck, clear at the far end of the camp, explodes upward, rises clear off the ground on a jet of flame before falling to earth, a smoking steel skeleton. The engine block, knocked free by the power of the bomb, twirls through the air, rising twenty feet before falling like an anvil out of a Bugs Bunny cartoon as GIs scurry out of the way. Rio does not see where it lands.

  The planes take a tight turn and come roaring back overhead, machine guns stitching the ground like some mad sewing machine.

  And then they head off, unscathed, racing away to the relative safety of their base in Sicily.

  Rio and Jenou crawl out from beneath the half-track and gaze, disgusted, at the caked-on dirt that covers their fronts from toes to knees to face.

/>   “They could have waited till we toweled off,” Jenou says.

  “We best go tell Sarge we’re still alive,” Rio says.

  The air raids are fewer lately, as the Royal Air Force planes with some help from the Americans have claimed control of the North African skies. But now Rio hears a distant shriek of pain and thinks what every soldier thinks: Thank God it isn’t me, followed by, At least some poor bastard is going home.

  A term has become common: million-dollar wound. The million-dollar wound is the one that doesn’t kill or completely cripple you but is enough to send you home to cold beer and cool sheets and hot showers.

  A team of medics, three of them, rush past, with only one taking the time to turn and run backward while yelling, “I have some training in gynecology; I am happy to do an examination!” as he grabs his crotch.

  He trips and falls on his back, and Rio and Jenou share a satisfied nod.

  The US Army, Tunisia, in the summer of 1943.

  2

  FRANGIE MARR—CAMP MEMPHIS, TUNISIA, NORTH AFRICA

  Several miles away there is a different scream. This scream comes and goes, rises, falls, lapses into silence, then starts up again.

  It’s a battlefield sound, but they are not on the battlefield, they are in a camp very much like Rio’s. Tents stretch away toward the west in long green lines across the dried mud and gravel. Austere, lifeless hills rise in the far distance, like red waves rushing toward a shore, but frozen in time. The only immediately noticeable difference between this encampment and the one where Rio and Jenou sunbathe is that here all the soldiers—except for the officers—are black. It is a colored artillery battalion, its 105mm and 155mm howitzers parked in a well-spaced, random arrangement so as to make air attack a bit more difficult for the Krauts.

  There is a Sherman tank ahead. It weighs 72,750 pounds.

  Corporal Frangie Marr, army medic, does not know this fact, but it doesn’t matter much because she’s spent some time in close proximity to tanks and she does not need to be convinced that they are large and terrifying and very, very substantial.

  The Sherman, the 72,750-pound Sherman, is oddly perched with its nose pointed up at about a seventy-degree angle, which aims its 75-millimeter main gun almost straight up in the air, as if someone has decided to use the tank to shoot at airplanes.

  “Gotta help him, Doc, get him some happy juice. Poor bastard, he’s in a bad way!” The staff sergeant takes Frangie’s arm—not bullying, just urgent—as he pulls her along, practically lifting her off her feet as they leap over a half-dug latrine ditch.

  “What happened?” Frangie asks, panting a little. She is mentally inventorying the medical supplies she has in her bag and the extras stuffed into the ammo pouches in a belt hastily slung over her shoulder.

  “Green kid sacked out in a bomb crater beside the road, and the Sherman pulled off to check something, a bad bearing, or maybe the driver just needed a piss.” The sergeant takes a beat and says, “Sorry, I meant maybe he had to answer nature’s call. Anyway, side of the crater collapses, tank slips, and that’s all she wrote.”

  As they hustle along the scream grows louder and the tank larger. Several dozen men are gathered around, including the tankers, distinguished by their leather helmets and white faces. The tankers stand a little apart and smoke and ignore the angry muttering of the gathered troops, who naturally blame them for crashing their tank.

  “Make a hole, make a hole,” the sergeant says. He releases Frangie’s arm and uses both hands to pry men apart. At last Frangie—far and away the smallest person of either race—sees the tank up close and has the distinct impression that it is in a very precarious, certainly temporary, position. All 72,750 pounds of it is held in place only by the bite of the treads into soft, crumbling earth. With a good firm push it could even topple onto its back like an upended turtle. But the more likely scenario is that it will slide down onto the still-unseen screaming man.

  Frangie squats beneath the shade of the tank’s sky-tilted prow and tilts her head sideways, but she cannot see the man trapped beneath. She goes counterclockwise around the tank to the back, and the once-muffled moans of pain are now more clearly audible. She has to lower herself onto her belly and stick her head over the lip of the crater to see a man’s helmeted head a few feet away. He is facedown with his head and shoulders free but is pinned at the bottom of his shoulder blades by some—but surely not all—of that massive weight.

  The sergeant squats beside her and says, “Hang on, Williams, Doc’s here.” Then more quietly he says to Frangie, “We were going to dig him out, but we’re worried the damned thing could slip back farther. We called for a tractor but that could take a while, nearest engineers are twenty miles away.”

  “He could go into shock,” Frangie says through gritted teeth. “Hey, Williams, are you bleeding?”

  The answer is a scream of pain that rises, rises, and then stops. Followed by a twisted, barely comprehensible voice saying, “I don’t know. Give me a shot, Doc. I can’t . . . Oh, Jesus!”

  “I’m going to help you,” Frangie says, and twists her head sideways to see the sergeant looking at her skeptically. She understands his skepticism. In fact, she is pretty sure she has just told a lie.

  “Can’t you run chains or rope to the front of the tank and pull it forward?”

  “That could make it settle deeper.”

  “What am I supposed to do, crawl down there?” It’s a rhetorical question that the sergeant answers with a blank look.

  Why am I doing this? I could be killed.

  Several curses come to Frangie’s mind, but as the words form she sees her mother’s face, and worse still, Pastor M’Dale’s disappointed look, and she swallows the curses. She tosses the belt with the medicine-stuffed cartridge pockets aside. Then she buttons her uniform to the top button, hoping to avoid pushing ten pounds of Tunisian red dirt down her front. She pulls a morphine ampule from her breast pocket and clutches it in her left hand.

  There are many ways Frangie does not want to die, and being crushed face-first in the dirt by a tank rates high on her list. But it’s too late now to say, “This is not my problem.”

  Keep me strong, Lord.

  “Grab my ankles,” Frangie says.

  The sergeant summons two beefy soldiers and each takes a leg.

  Using her elbows, Frangie moves like a half-crippled insect down the slope of the crater. The tank blocks the sun, and she can feel its mass poised above her, inch-thick steel plates, mud-clogged treads to left and right. The rear of the tank is a louvered grille that radiates the stifling heat of the engine, which, added to the hundred-degree air temperature, makes the crater a place where you could bake a biscuit.

  Frangie imagines her body being squeezed through those louvers, like so much meat in a sausage grinder, cooking even as she . . .

  Fear. It’s been creeping in, little by little, tingling and twisting her stomach, but now it is beginning to seem that she is actually going to do this, and at that point the fear sets aside all subtlety and comes rushing up within her.

  Lord, help me to help this man.

  And don’t let that tank slip!

  She should add a prudent and humble “Thy will be done,” but if God’s will is to crush her with a tank, she doesn’t want to make it any easier on Him.

  Frangie has known fear in her life. Fear of destitution when her father was injured and lost his job. Fear of hostile whites, a fear made very real by the history of her home state and city. Just twenty-two years have passed since white rioters burned down all of the Greenwood district, once known as the black Wall Street, blocks from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

  And since enlisting she has felt fear (mixed with anger) as she endured various threats by white men who hated the very idea of a black soldier. Then, too, there were the dark mutterings of many of her fellow colored soldiers, who equally despised the idea of a woman in uniform.

  But right now her fear is focused on the fact that her head an
d now shoulders too are right in line to be crushed if the tank slips.

  I’m a roach beneath a shoe.

  She is far enough down that Williams can look at her and she can see his face, though it is so transformed by pain and terror that she doubts his own mother would recognize him.

  Don’t cry, don’t cry or it will scare him.

  But I want to cry.

  “I think we best get him out of here,” Frangie calls back to the men holding her ankles. She tries to keep panic out of her voice—Williams doesn’t need to be reminded that he’s in danger—but fear raises her tone an octave and she sounds like a child. A scared child.

  “Just give me the shot, Doc! Oh God!”

  “Just hang on, Williams, hang on.”

  The problem is clear. If she can dig out enough dirt beneath Williams she may be able to pull him free, or at least do so with some help. But with every spadeful she will increase the odds of the tank sliding.

  “The tractor will get here sooner or later,” the sergeant says.

  “It’s the later that’s a problem,” Frangie says. Her voice is strained, she is very nearly talking upside down, and grit has already found its way to her mouth, sucked in with each breath. She tries to spit, but her mouth is as dry as the dust she inhales. “I can scoop the dirt that’s just right under him.”

  There’s a moment’s pause as the sergeant confers in low tones with someone else, perhaps an officer.

  “Give it a try, Doc,” comes the verdict.

  “Pass me an entrenching tool,” she says. She is fully, blazingly aware of the possibilities. She’s always had a good imagination, and imagination is not a help at times like this. She can imagine the sounds. She can imagine the cries of warning from the men watching her. She can imagine them yanking her back, but too slowly, too slowly to stop that hot louvered grille from turning her head into thick, sizzling slices of salami.

  An entrenching tool—a foldable shovel—is passed down to her, blade open and locked in place by its adjustable nut. She is head down, hardly the best position for digging.

  Williams lets loose another scream.