Silver Stars

by Michael Grant

  22

  FRANGIE MARR—GELA BEACH, SICILY

  “I’ve got a request for a field medic,” Dr. Frame says. “Some of our boys are heading up to the front. There are three qualified medics who could be seconded to a company and go up.”

  “I’ll do it,” Frangie says quickly.

  Dr. Frame steps close and in a low whisper says, “You aren’t my first choice, Marr. You’re good, you give a damn, and you work your ass off. I’d rather keep you here.”

  For what feels like an embarrassingly long time, Frangie just stares at the caduceus on his collar. It is without a doubt the best compliment anyone has ever paid her. Ever. And for a terrible few seconds she feels she might start crying. And when she remains silent—not trusting herself not to start blubbering—Frame shrugs and says, “But I guess the boys at the front deserve the best care. Some of the field medics . . .” He lets that hang and shakes his head in a woeful way.

  Frangie nods, the maximum she can do right then. She turns away quickly, just as a tear goes rolling down over her cheek. And an hour later—there is paperwork to be done—she presents herself to Fourth Platoon of the all-black 407th Battalion, and its new platoon sergeant, Walter Green.

  “You my medic?” Green asks, and his face is all welcome and smiles. “Thank the good Lord. At least there’ll be someone I know by name.” He grabs her arm in a friendly sort of way and guides her to meet a white officer, a lieutenant who can hardly be twenty-two. The lieutenant is sitting on the hood of a broken-down jeep.

  “Lieutenant Waterstone? This is Corporal Marr, the medic they sent us.”

  “A girl?” the lieutenant says with no attempt to hide a condescending smirk. He looks her up and down and adds, “A girl and a midget besides.”

  But from Green’s posture Frangie gets the impression that this may be a bit of an act on the lieutenant’s part.

  “Yes, sir, she’s a small one,” Green says complacently.

  Waterstone hops down from the jeep, and Frangie sees that he is at best three inches taller than her. In fact, the three of them standing together are practically an advertisement for Short Folks Monthly.

  “You know what I think?” Waterstone says, chin thrust out in a belligerent echo of the Mussolini posters all over Gela town. “I think short people got something to prove, so they tend to be a bit tougher than your tall, lanky folk like Private Jellicoe, here.”

  Private Rufus “Jelly” Jellicoe is the lieutenant’s runner, no more than nineteen, six foot three inches tall and most of that in his legs. He grins at Frangie and gives her the inevitable up-and-down, followed by an even wider smile.

  “All right, Jelly, show her what we have by way of medical supplies. Marr, we’re moving out in three hours. We’re supposed to start some trouble on the flank of a Kraut tank column, so you make sure you got what you need. Jelly will give you a hand.”

  The march to the front is hot and dusty and, worst of all, passes by a melon field where previous units have left nothing but rinds now black with flies. The grumbling has that combination of profane bitterness and wry resignation common to all GIs, with some extra remarks about “crackers” and “rednecks” who don’t even leave a single damn melon behind, the greedy sons of bitches.

  They are to help capture a stretch of road, but by the time they are in position word comes that the Germans have withdrawn. And now, from his lofty perch, General Patton has given orders for a quick march over the hills to Palermo, the largest city in Sicily, and from there to Messina along the northern coast. There are rumors of tension between the American commander and the British commander, Montgomery, rumors that delight the gossip-starved GIs. The word quickly comes down that this race to Palermo is very much about sticking one to the Brits for taking over some road the Americans were to use. And while there is some grumbling about that, there’s also a keen competitiveness with the condescending British. They’ve all been expecting to fight Germans, and now it seems they are to be part of a footrace.

  This sounds just fine to Frangie, who has very little to do unless there’s a fight, and the soldiers seem to embrace the idea as a sort of lark. The main hope in the short run is that they can capture an intact melon field, or better yet some hidden store of Sicilian wine. At the very least they hope to spend the night in some comfortable villa like the ones the senior officers seize for their headquarters. And then, if they reach Palermo, the reasoning goes, surely there will be wine and women, and Messina can take care of itself.

  A column of trucks picks them up—a wonderfully welcome luxury—and drives them back the way they’ve come, then west toward a spot north of Agrigento, where they join a column that stretches all the way back to the beach. Tens of thousands of GIs, hundreds of tanks, hundreds of trucks, all watched over by newly arrived American P-38 fighter planes zooming overhead.

  The plan of advance is to move at top speed—never better than fifteen miles an hour and usually much slower—up the road until they run into opposition. The column is shelled from time to time, and when this happens they all dive off the trucks and into a ditch—if one is available—or simply into what is mostly empty, hilly grassland. When the shelling is done, the column starts off again, no recovery time, no licking of wounds, just push the burning vehicles aside and go, go, go!

  By the time evening rolls around they are well into the hills, far from the beach, and moderately far from Agrigento. Sergeant Green’s platoon—Frangie’s platoon too, she corrects herself—is sent down a side road to a tiny village that will command a view of the main column when the sun comes up the next morning. Nothing has been heard from the village, but the officers do not like its position athwart their line of march.

  But the journey is all by truck, so to Frangie it’s all pretty much the same. On the ride she tries to get to know the men in her truck, and they are all men with just one woman GI aside from Frangie. The squad sergeant is Peter A. Lipton, known by everyone as Pal. He’s a fidgety man in his late twenties, old to be wearing buck sergeant’s stripes, and his face forms a permanent scowl. The lone woman, Annette Johnson, is the corporal, a seemingly emotionless woman and almost as burly as Cat Preeling. Neither Lipton nor Johnson has any interest in Frangie—she’s “the new guy,” frequently abbreviated to FNG, as in Fugging New Guy, or less frequently, Bambi, after the Disney cartoon movie (which Frangie has not seen).

  But she strikes up an easy conversation with a fellow Oklahoman named Andy Hinkley. Private Hinkley is from Broken Bow, Oklahoma, a small town near the Arkansas border, which he cheerfully describes as “six Nigra families being eyeballed by a thousand crackers, half of which own sheets with eye holes.”

  Frangie has never been to Broken Bow, and Hinkley has never been to Tulsa, but they are two Sooners in a truckload weighted heavily toward Tennessee boys.

  “Is it true ya’ll ride buffaloes and shoot Injuns?” one of the Memphis boys asks, looking to start any kind of trouble, anything to beat the boredom.

  “Injuns were mostly run off back when,” Hinkley says, not interested in arguing but certainly ready to go jab for jab. “My grandpap was shot by an Injun arrow. Right in the neck. Would have killed a Memphis boy, sure, soft living and all, but being a tough old Okie, my grandpap just pulled it out and threw it right back so hard it pierced the Injun chief right through the eye. Went straight on through and killed the medicine man too.”

  Frangie laughs, a sound that brings smiles to more than one face. She has a great laugh; a whole body laugh that doubles her over.

  “Which eye was that?” Memphis demands.

  “Why, it was his left eye. Grandpap had already cut out his other one with a bowie knife, which—”

  “Here we go.” Memphis rolls his eyes.

  “A bowie knife, I say, which Grandpap took off Jim Bowie himself in a card game in Baton Rouge.”

  The tale of Hinkley’s grandfather, elaborated on in a free-form saga that makes little allowance for time and space, what with Grandpap also having been
taught to handle a sword by the Marquis de Lafayette, learning to speak Comanche from Pocahontas (by whom he had three natural children), and surviving the Battle of Little Big Horn by passing himself off as a lunatic.

  It all reminds Frangie of riding on a hay wagon at a church social when she was just seven. Then she had teased her big brother, Harder, who even as a young teen was a skeptical soul and willing to voice doubts about God and even President Roosevelt, so long as someone could be found to argue with him.

  “Your grandpap gets around,” Frangie says to Hinkley when he finally runs out of steam, somewhere in the Chinese opium wars.

  “Well, we’re a rambling bunch, us Hinkleys. Look at me. Here I am in Sicily.”

  “Well, I guess that proves it,” Frangie says.

  “Can’t argue with facts,” Hinkley says solemnly.

  Ahead is the first village they’ve come across, maybe six or seven miles off the main road. It’s like many Sicilian villages, built on a hill, approached by a steep, serpentine road that leaves them exposed to possible fire from above.

  A squad is dismounted and sent ahead on foot in a cautious reconnaissance. Frangie watches their progress until they round a corner and disappear from view.

  A rush of rag-clad children appears and surrounds the trucks, begging and staring. One little boy wants to touch one of them and Frangie obliges by shaking his hand. The boy grips her hand and with his other hand touches the black skin of her arm, rubs it like he’s trying to get the color to come off.

  An ancient man, gnarled, his spine twisted, armed with a well-used walking stick, hobbles to Lieutenant Waterstone, standing beside his jeep. There follows a conversation of sorts, in hand gestures and frustrated looks. Some of the urchins go over to offer more hand gestures, but at least one of the girls can read a map and points with great certainty to the map, then up at the road, then back at the map.

  Sergeants Green and Lipton are summoned forward, and they confer with the lieutenant and with various gesturing, nodding Sicilians who have grown into a small crowd. Moments later Frangie’s squad and another are summarily tossed off their comfortable trucks and made to march steeply uphill into the town.

  “Locals say there’s a couple 88s right in the town square up ahead,” Sergeant Green explains as three dozen GIs surround him. “We’re going ahead. Now listen. The locals are behaving themselves, so you all watch who you’re shooting and don’t shoot unless you see a Kraut or Eye-tie uniform.”

  They form a column in two sections, one walking ahead, one hanging back a few hundred yards. Frangie is with this second group. They enter the town proper, walking along streets so narrow and overhung with balconies that the trucks would never have made it. Here, too, children walk along, importuning in singsong voices, at first charming and then irritating the GIs. After a quarter mile, though, the urchins fall away and a tingle climbs Frangie’s spine. The streets are empty but for a single old woman in black carrying a net bag containing wine, a ripe pepper, and two onions.

  From within the homes close on either side, Frangie hears the sounds of laughter and argument, the clatter of pots and pans, and she smells wonderful, exotic smells, garlic and basil and frying fish. But the shutters have been closed up, and aside from an occasional eye peeking through a slat, there is not a Sicilian to be seen.

  No one has to tell the GIs to be alert, the air practically vibrates with menace. They near what has been described to them as the town center. Lieutenant Waterstone consults his map again, and sends half his force, including Pal Lipton’s squad, down an alley, intending to flank what they believe is the German position.

  Silence but for the sound of boots on cobblestones. Every rifle at the ready. Eyes searching, searching every doorway, balcony, window, and roofline.

  A sudden loud, braying laugh and out of a doorway steps a German soldier. He has a slice of pizza in one hand, a bottle of white wine in the other, his Schmeisser slung over his shoulder.

  The German freezes. Gapes. Reaches for his weapon. Thinks better of it, turns to run, and Walter Green, late of Iowa, takes quick steps, runs, grabs, and hauls him backward, off-balance, by his uniform collar. Green has his knife. There’s a blur, a pitiful yelp that becomes a gurgling sound, and a fountain of blood. The blood sprays across the cobbles and up the wall beneath a defaced picture of Mussolini.

  Green bears the man’s weight for a moment and lowers him almost kindly to the ground, where the rest of the German’s blood fills the gaps between cobblestones, first spraying, then pulsating, then trickling.

  But a second German has escaped, disappearing at a run up steep, narrow steps.

  Frangie steps around the dying German, forcing herself to look down at him, trying not to step in his blood, and that’s when the firing starts. There’s a loud bang, and Frangie Marr suddenly sits down.

  Noise everywhere, guns firing, yelling, the rush of men toward cover. Frangie feels stupid sitting, ridiculous, gotta get up, and Lipton twists and collapses. The wall behind Frangie is chewed by machine gun fire while other bullets spark as they strike the hard cobbles to go singing away.

  Frangie tries to stand, but her legs aren’t working quite right, and neither is her mind, which is not making sense of things, not quite figuring anything out. She knows she should try to help Lipton, who is bellowing in pain and being dragged off the middle of the street by Jelly, who trips, slips, turns to get back to his sergeant but is scared off by bullets everywhere, everywhere. It’s like someone kicked over a bee’s hive, zipping and buzzing. And now Frangie’s crawling toward Lipton, hands slipping in the dead German’s blood. No, no, can’t be, he’s way back there, but her hands are definitely red with blood.

  Can’t even crawl, stupid leg.

  Lipton is yelling, “Get back, goddammit!”

  Well, he doesn’t mean her, he wouldn’t blaspheme that way at her, so she crawls on, fuzzy in her mind, until she reaches him. On automatic, without a conscious plan, she yanks up his shirt and sees the brutal belly wound, blood seeping, not spurting. Nothing to do but bandage him up, and she sets about this task with rote movements, movements that are muscle memory now, the pinching out of bits of uniform cloth, the sulfa, the careful folding of . . .

  Very tired, that’s what she is, very tired.

  And now a bullet wound that’s taken off a chunk of a man’s shoulder, and then . . . and a bleeder . . . pressure . . .

  A little rest.

  Just a little rest.

  Frangie means to lie back, but she falls and her helmet smacks the cobbles, jarring her so she tries to . . .

  Can’t . . . arms . . . Can’t . . . um . . . Should . . .

  The sky is a narrow band of royal blue, late afternoon shifting toward evening’s navy blue.

  Frangie closes her eyes.

  23

  RAINY SCHULTERMAN—POSITANO, ITALY

  The Italians dine late, eight o’clock, as Rainy knows from her own study. So at eight o’clock she goes out looking for a meal and the instant she steps out on the street, she notices a man with a round, pockmarked face following her.

  She is stared at a bit in the trattoria she chooses—unaccompanied women are even rarer in Italy than in the States—but as a tourist this eccentricity is passed off with a shrug by the locals who, after all, can’t expect foreigners to understand anything, really. Harder to explain are the obvious bruises on her head and face, but perhaps her rumored ex-beau is the sort to slap a woman around a bit, hardly unusual.

  She eats a small green salad, a dish of ravioli, an excellent piece of fish—she is unable to translate the species name—and a small dish of intensely flavored berry gelato.

  This takes two hours, during which she pretends to read a book she found in the hotel lobby, Agatha Christie’s Appointment with Death. It is not a reassuring title.

  After dinner she walks down through the town, paying particular attention to the church. Her watcher will expect that. Then she makes the steep climb back to the hotel, retrieves her
key at the front desk, and returns to her room. She leaves the light on for twenty minutes, then turns it off.

  Darkness.

  She stands listening at the window. Water drips in the little sink. Someone in the room to her right is humming. Hooves clatter on cobblestones. The wind rises, singing through the ironwork of her balcony railing. A truck. The buzz of flies or mosquitoes, hopefully not the latter. A quick, flitting sound as a bat zooms past, banking sharply.

  And far deeper, way down at the threshold of hearing, so it’s more a feeling than a sound, the slow, inexorable rhythm of the sea trying with infinite patience to swallow the land.

  Midnight.

  Rainy sits in the dark, waiting. Waiting for every light to go out in the town below. Waiting and thinking. About her father, who, without meaning to, has basically gotten her into this fix; her mother, who Rainy imagines haranguing her postmortem after she’s killed by the Gestapo, telling her in Yiddish-English-Polish that she brought this on herself; Aryeh, a million miles away on the other side of the world on God knows what hellish island.

  I wish I believed in praying. I’d pray for Aryeh.

  And myself.

  And she thinks, too, about Halev. And, strangely, about Captain Herkemeier, an early supporter of her . . . what to call it? Job? Career? Both Halev and the captain are very smart, very perceptive men and for some reason this strikes her as funny, and in a bad impression of John Wayne’s cadence she says, “That’s how I like ’em, pilgrim: smart and perceptive.”

  The sound of her own voice is reassuring.

  Two a.m. She stands at the balcony door, hidden from view but able to see out. Barely a light anywhere. No sound of traffic. The humming from next door has become snoring.

  Rainy gets her bag and stuffs the silenced .22 into it, barely, with about two inches of silencer sticking out and looking like a piece of plumber’s pipe. She steps all the way out on the balcony and looks down: three balconies, all dark. She goes to the bed, strips off the sheets, and carefully knots them end to end. Not long, but maybe long enough. She tugs at the knot a few times—it would be a long fall if the knot came undone.