Silver Stars

by Michael Grant

Her hands tremble on her lap. Tears blur her vision. Words are impossible.

  “It’s a first, Rainy. There’s never been a female Silver Star recipient.”

  She nods.

  “They’re flying you to England to get the award. Probably from some general. They’ll make a big deal about it in the press, it being the first time women soldiers have—”

  “There are others?”

  He nods. “Word is three women are getting it. You and two others.”

  She takes this in and nods again. “That’s better. I don’t want to . . .” But her thoughts trail off and leave her words hanging.

  “This is a big deal, Rainy. This will mean something.”

  She nods, yes, yes it is a big deal, she understands that.

  “They’ll probably ship you home, have you do interviews and sell war bonds for the duration, and—”

  “No.” It comes out fast, automatic, uncensored.

  “No? What do you mean no, you can’t refuse a Silver Star!”

  “I’m not shipping out,” she says. “I’m not going home.”

  Now Herkemeier takes a seat, pulling a chair close to her so their knees almost touch. “Rainy, you’ve been through hell. You’ve done enough, more than enough. My God, a Silver Star is barely adequate to—”

  He stops when he sees that she is shaking her head, side to side.

  “I’m not quitting,” Rainy says. “I’m not quitting. I didn’t enlist to sell war bonds and talk to reporters.”

  “Rainy, listen to me, this is the sort of thing that advances the cause of women in the military, not to mention . . .”

  She holds up a quieting hand. She tries to master her emotions and fails, so her voice is heavy with feeling and all too near to tears. “I am not done, Jon. I am not done.” The second repetition rises in tone and volume. “You think I’m going home? You think I’m just going to go back to my old life? You think I’m going to run? Like those bastards have licked me?” Tears stream down her face, unnoticed by her, but her voice is hard, even harsh. “I’m not done, Jon. I am not done!”

  “Rainy, what do you mean?”

  She leans forward until her tear-streaked face is within inches of his. Her eyes are bright and feverish. She knows what she must look like, what she must sound like, but she doesn’t care.

  “I came to kill Nazis,” she grates. “I came because I thought killing Nazis was the right thing to do, the good thing to do, but that’s all over now, because it’s not really about right or good, is it? I’ve seen what they are. You haven’t. All due respect, I’ve seen them, I’ve seen them.” Her voice rises again, edging toward hysteria. “I’ve smelled the evil stink that comes off them. I’ve—”

  Herkemeier leans back, unable to face her intensity, not knowing what to do or say in the face of this combination of rage and tears.

  “Day after day, and week after week, I watched those bastards murder people, people whose blood drained down and I saw it, and I heard it, and I listened to the screams and sometimes I screamed too. I screamed and I cried, and I told myself if somehow, by some miracle, if I ever . . .” Sobs break up the flow of words. “I swore. There was a woman, Jon, they raped her, night after night. And an Italian partisan, they tore his fingernails out and . . . him screaming and crying and those bastards laughed.” She stops herself, mastering her emotions, trying to find the old Rainy, the controlled Rainy, the calmly determined Rainy. But when her words come they still tumble out, forming no sentence, and making only the rawest emotional sense. “I swore. It was a holy oath. I don’t care if . . . It was a holy oath. If I ever . . . I would not stop. Never, never, never, never! I would chase them. To hell. I would . . . I would find them . . . I would kill them. I would kill them until there were none left to kill!”

  The silence that follows seems to vibrate from the walls. Her hands are twisted together on her lap. Her lips are drawn back, a dog with teeth bared.

  Now too quiet, almost inaudible, so Herkemeier has to lean forward, she says, “Don’t let them do it, Jon. Don’t let them send me home. I’m not done. If they send me home, I’ll use a fake name and sign up for infantry.”

  Herkemeier’s expression is shocked, but beneath that he is sad. He shakes his head slowly and looks at her with infinite pity. “Rainy, you’re not fighting this war alone.”

  “Not alone,” she says. “Not alone, but I am still fighting this fugging war and no one is stopping me.”

  Herkemeier sighs and stands up, moving heavily as if he were an older man. “Sergeant Schulterman,” he says, “you will go and receive this medal.”

  She waits, ready to rage.

  Then, with a heavy sigh, he says, “Afterward . . . well, I’m being reassigned to England myself, that’s where the action is moving. Afterward, if you still feel this way—and I hope for your sake you don’t, Rainy—but if you do, come see me.”

  Rainy feels a fierce surge of some emotion that is like joy but much darker. A rational part of her knows she may be sealing her fate. A part of her even groans inwardly at what her parents or even her brother would say, if she told them. But they were not there with her in the cell, or in the interrogation room. They were not there. Herkemeier was not there. The voices screaming in the night were there, and now they were in her, in her memory, and she knows with terrible certainty that those voices will always be with her.

  I will not forget you. I will kill Nazis for you. For each of your voices shrieking in the night, for each of you whose blood I watched spilling down that wall.

  As if reading her mind, Herkemeier says, “Revenge is a dangerous quest, Rainy.”

  He leaves, downcast and worried. But his mood doesn’t concern Rainy, because she knows she has convinced him.

  He’ll help me. He’ll help me kill Nazis.

  “Hah!” she cries, exultant now. A Silver Star? That will help her get the tough assignments. It will help her get close to them, within range of them. It will make it possible, with Herkemeier’s help, to hurt them.

  Rainy cocks an eye at Pip. “You think I’ve gone round the bend, don’t you, Pip? Well . . . Well, maybe I have. But you know what, old Pip my friend? I feel a hell of a lot better.”

  37

  FRANGIE MARR, RAINY SCHULTERMAN, RIO RICHLIN—RINGWOULD, KENT, UK

  The ceremony is to take place in Dover proper, but given that Dover has been bombed repeatedly—though not recently—plus the fact that there is scarcely a spare bedroom to be found in a town overrun with GIs, Frangie, Rainy, and Rio are housed in a pub’s rented rooms, in the tiny village of Ringwould, just northeast of Dover and south of Deal.

  It is the land of the famous white cliffs. The army driver who picks them up at the airfield drives along the shore for a while so they can admire the cliffs—which are indeed snowy white except where creeping foliage has added splashes of green.

  Their room—just one room—has two single beds and a chair. Staring at the room, it is Frangie who is most uncomfortable. Her first thought is that she should volunteer to sleep in the chair. She is, after all, a Negro, and neither of the white girls with her is likely to want to share a bed.

  But she can practically hear Harder in her ear telling her that she’s acting like a second-class citizen. British hotels are not segregated—which is not to say that the English aren’t racists, but their treatment of blacks tends to be condescending and insulting without quite reaching the levels of open hatred Frangie would have expected in the South, and, if Harder’s right, much of the north, back home.

  Rio solves the problem. “I got the floor.”

  “The floor?” Frangie protests. “What do you mean?”

  Rio shrugs. “I’ve been sleeping in mud. Cold mud. A nice, clean floor is pure luxury.”

  “Still cold, though,” Frangie says. “I can see my breath in here.”

  “Yeah,” Rio says. “But there’s a fireplace.” Wood and kindling have been piled in the fireplace, and Rio drops to her knees and sets about lighting it with her
Zippo. “There you go.”

  “Did you open the flue?” Frangie asks, as smoke begins to fill the small room.

  “The what?”

  Frangie reaches past her to an iron knob set in the wall that opens the flue. Smoke swirls then is sucked up the chimney.

  “We’re here for tonight and tomorrow night,” Frangie says. “I’ll take the floor tomorrow night.”

  Frangie and Rio are easy together, having a long acquaintance. Rainy is also slightly known to both of them from Tunisia, but this Rainy is somehow different than the determined, confident young intelligence sergeant they’d known back then. This Rainy is polite but quiet. And more than quiet—distant, as if nothing is quite real to her, as if she’s sleepwalking.

  They toss their bags onto the floor, and Rio excuses herself to the bathroom down the hall.

  Rainy sits on the edge of one bed and belatedly says, “I could take the floor.”

  “We could draw lots,” Frangie suggests, wishing the whole matter settled. It is beyond strange to be spending a night in a white pub with two white women. It feels transgressive and maybe a little bold. It also feels very insecure—either of these two could tell her to get out, to find somewhere else to stay, to go sleep in the park, if they chose to.

  Harder has lectured her on the internalization of anti-Negro feeling. She had daydreamed through most of that, like most of his lectures, but bits and pieces of what he’s said have stuck. She can’t deny that she’s doing just what he said: unconsciously collaborating in our own oppression. But at the same time, there’s a question of fairness—she knows little of what Rainy has endured, but suffering is all over the Jewish girl’s face. Her eyes, which Frangie recalls being alert with a questing intelligence, are still intense, but now there’s something hard in them as well. Something very hard that frightens Frangie a little. In any event, Rainy Schulterman looks like she needs a decent bed and a good sleep.

  As for Rio Richlin? The freckle-faced farm girl Frangie first met back in basic training is still there, somewhere beneath the leathery hide of the tough soldier she’s become. And she’s seen Rio since then, so the change seems less sudden. Frangie’s not even put off by the fact that even now, with the three of them in fresh-pressed class-A uniforms, Rio has her curved knife strapped to her thigh.

  Rio has changed, but Rainy is almost a different person.

  Something happened to that girl.

  Rio returns from the bathroom and grins. “It flushes,” she says with great satisfaction. “Civilization.”

  They repair to the pub proper, finding a table in a corner. It’s early for drinking or eating, so the room is empty but for a foursome of British Marines chain-smoking and nursing pints of ale and two old men playing chess.

  The room is warm, both in temperature and style, with dark wood beams contrasting with whitewashed plaster walls. The bar boasts three taps and a few sparse bottles of harder stuff. Rio appoints herself to provide the first round and comes to the table carrying three pints of golden-colored ale.

  “I think I’ll just have tea,” Frangie says.

  “Tea.” Rio snorts. “Come on, Marr, don’t be a party pooper.”

  “Is this a party?” Frangie wonders aloud.

  Rio raises her glass to her lips, takes a drink, smacks her lips, and says, “It is now.”

  Frangie relents and tastes the ale, which is cool rather than cold, and very bitter, but somehow pleasant despite that.

  Rainy drains half her glass and says nothing.

  “So, here we are,” Rio says. “Three heroes.” The tone of irony is unmistakable. She clinks her glass against both of theirs and says, “To warm rooms and cold beer.”

  “Yes. I mean, cheers,” Frangie says.

  “We should eat,” Rio says. She’s trying to inject some life into the glum group—Frangie awkward and skittish, Rainy just . . . in another world. “Barkeep! What’s for chow?”

  The barman has dealt with enough GIs to know that “chow” is food. He comes from behind the bar, a middle-aged man with a wooden leg, and stands beside their table. “We’ve got shepherd’s pie with very little mutton, steak and kidney pie with more crust than meat, and fish and chips.”

  “Is the fish real fish?” Rio asks.

  “That it is, miss. Jerry isn’t sinking fishing boats at least, and we still get the occasional potato from the north.”

  “That’s it then, fish and chips.” Then, frowning, she adds, “Please,” a word she obviously knows but which now seems strange, a relic of ancient times.

  The barman stumps away, and Rio follows him with her eyes. “Probably lost that leg in the last war,” she says in a low voice.

  “Below the knee,” Frangie says, her experienced eye taking in the bend of his knee. “That’s best. I mean, if you have to lose a leg.”

  They sit in awkward silence for a while until both Rio and Rainy are well into their second pint and Frangie is a quarter of the way through her first. Even Rainy makes an effort to be slightly more conversational.

  “So,” Rainy says. “Zero eight hundred tomorrow.”

  Rio nods. “Yep.”

  “Aren’t you nervous?” Frangie asks.

  Rio sighs, sits back in her chair, and says, “Nah. Not about the ceremony. Just about what comes after.”

  “And what’s that?” Frangie asks.

  “You must have gotten the same talk we did,” Rio says. “You know, tour the country playing hero and getting folks to buy war bonds.”

  “Not the whole country,” Rainy says acidly. “College towns, parts of New England, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. New York, of course. The parts of the country where women soldiers are more . . . acceptable.”

  Frangie shakes her head, eyes down to conceal her amazement at their lack of understanding. “No, I didn’t get that offer.”

  “Well, they probably just haven’t gotten around . . .” Rio lets it trail off as the truth begins to dawn. “Because you’re a Negro?”

  Frangie shrugs, wondering if there’s even any point. But she likes Rio. She admires Rio’s courage, and her refusal to pretend to be something other than what she is. And, too, she likes the fact that she can be the tough warrior and yet completely naive at the same time. There is still something girlish about Rio, notwithstanding what Frangie knows about her.

  A fallen woman.

  Well . . . judge not that ye be not judged.

  “Well, Rio,” Frangie begins, “I guess if you take all those places where maybe folks can stand the idea of women soldiers, you’d have to subtract at least half because as much as folks don’t like women soldiers, they like colored women soldiers even less.”

  Rio surprises them all (including herself) by banging a palm down on the table and making the glasses jump. “You’re wearing the damned uniform! You’re fighting the same damn war!”

  “Yes, but I am the wrong color.”

  “Wrong color,” Rio snorts. “And the Krauts are the right color?”

  “Dog and pony show,” Rainy says. She taps out a cigarette, offers one to each of the others, and lights it. “You think they’ll send you around looking like you do, Richlin? They’ll slather on the makeup, they’ll stuff your bra, and they’ll find a way to show off your legs. They won’t want some woman who looks like you do.”

  “Like I do?”

  Rainy leans across the table on her elbows, smoke rising from her lips. “You know what you look like, Richlin? You look like mama’s sweet little baby girl who kills Krauts. It’s in your eyes. You know it, you’ve seen it in other soldiers, you know the look. Well, they are not going to want that look. They are not going to want scary Corporal Richlin, they’re going to want sweet Rio the milkmaid.”

  “Nah, people aren’t that stupid,” Rio says. “They know—”

  “They know shit,” Rainy snaps. “People back home don’t know a damned thing about the actual war. Anyway, the way they look at it, the whole point of fighting the war is to keep all the things they like abou
t America. And killer milkmaids and Negroes who walk around with a Silver Star on their chest, well, that’s not what they think we’re fighting for.”

  Rio blinks. Until this moment it has never occurred to her that she represents something . . . unacceptable. Unacceptable even to many of the most open-minded people. Rainy’s cynicism has the ring of truth, and now she can imagine it. Back in Gedwell Falls, in the town square, local girl Rio Richlin on a bunting-bedecked bandstand talking about how many Krauts she’s killed.

  People would applaud, no doubt. But then, when she’d climbed down off that bandstand and walked around town, people would give her sidelong looks, and avoid her, and talk behind her back.

  “Well . . . well, damn,” Rio says, deflated.

  “I’ll get this round,” Rainy says, and gets up to go to the bar.

  “She’s laying it on thick,” Frangie says, “but she’s not wrong.” Then, in a whisper, “Is she all right? There’s something . . .” She shrugs and looks uncomfortable.

  “That’s right, you don’t know,” Rio says with a significant look. “They rescued her—not meaning to, you understand, some platoon that just happened to be the ones to liberate Gestapo HQ.”

  Frangie is shocked. “What was she doing in Gestapo HQ?”

  Rio shakes her head. “You don’t want that answer. I know, and I wish I didn’t. I’ll just say, whatever stories you’ve heard about those Gestapo assholes, the truth is worse.”

  Frangie sneaks a look at Rainy, leaning against the bar and waiting as the barman pours three beers. “The poor girl.”

  Rio follows the direction of Frangie’s gaze and says, “Yeah. Sergeant Schulterman is not having a good war.”

  Frangie has not kept pace with the other two as the beer flows. She’s just starting her second by the time Rio and Rainy are well into their fifth, sweating, cursing freely, and slurring angry words.

  At one point Rainy, voice sullen and brutal, says, “I’m not going home. I’m not. Fug that. I’ll go home when they’re all dead. Every fugging Nazi. I’ll go home after I’ve stuck a pistol into Herr Hitler’s fugging mouth and pulled the fugging trigger.”