Front Lines

by Michael Grant

  The square is the heart of Gedwell Falls. Here are the newsstand, the telegraph office, the five-and-ten-cent store, the barber shop, a hat store, the fabric store, and one of the two full-service grocery stores. Cars and trucks, ranging from newish ’38 models to dusty old pickup trucks dating to back before the Depression, are parked angled-in in front of the businesses.

  At one corner of the square is a raised, circular covered bandstand. In spring and summer an oompah-pah band sometimes plays marches and classics for folks in folding chairs set up on the grass. It’s the venue for beauty contests, the awarding of prizes in flower shows, and speeches by campaigning politicians.

  Rio leaves Jenou and heads across the square alone. A warm wind blows across her neck. She’s wearing a pink sweater and a faded-blue frock that frets a little in the chilly breeze.

  There comes the sound of footsteps behind her. She glances back and sees Strand Braxton gaining on her. He looks very focused, and Rio wonders where he’s rushing to.

  It seems he’s rushing to catch up to her since he slows upon seeing that he’s been noticed. Then, as if forcing himself to go on, he gains speed again, looking very determined, even grim. Rio stops and waits, mystified. Strand is somewhat out of breath when he reaches Rio, who now waits at the foot of the bandstand steps and tries very hard to appear nonchalant. She leans casually against a railing that’s too low to lean casually against.

  The sun is setting, orange fingers reaching through the clouds, and as she turns to face him, Strand Braxton is silhouetted against that sunset. It is such an absurdly cinematic moment that Rio almost laughs. But her appreciation of the perfectly artistic framing is undercut by a rush of anxiety.

  I have nothing clever to say to him.

  “Hello there, Rio,” Strand says.

  “Hello, Strand.”

  With that out of the way they stare awkwardly at each other for a few moments until the tension becomes too great for Strand and he finally says, “So, I guess you know I got called up. Oh, and I never said how sorry I am about . . . you know.”

  “About Rachel.”

  “Precisely,” he says, and digs his hands into his pockets.

  “Thank you.”

  A new silence threatens, and already Strand looks slightly panicky.

  Taking pity, Rio says, “Are you worried? About going away, I mean?”

  “Worried?” He makes an incredulous face, like nothing could be further from his thinking. But then he rethinks his reaction. He blinks, looks down at the ground, and when he raises his face again a wry look has replaced the phony nonchalance. “I suppose I am. Worried, I mean, a little, anyway. They say most fellows from Gedwell Falls get sent somewhere south to train, and I’ve never been fifty miles from this spot.”

  “Maybe I’ll see you there,” she says, striving for a nonchalant tone of her own.

  That makes him draw back in confusion. “Pardon me?”

  “I’m enlisting,” Rio says.

  What?

  What?

  Why did I say that?

  She is on the point of laughing and saying it was all a joke. But she can’t. She doesn’t really want to take it back.

  “But . . . why?”

  “I guess because this is the biggest thing that will ever happen in my life,” Rio says, the words coming just ahead of the thoughts. “Any of our lifetimes. I guess . . . I guess I just want to do my part.”

  There’s a rushing sound in her head and a panic clutch in her throat as she realizes the enormity of what she’s just committed herself to.

  Strand is talking, but she hasn’t heard him. “I’m sorry, Strand, what did you say?”

  Strand smiles sheepishly. “I said, well, that throws everything out.”

  “What does it throw out?”

  They are physically closer without either having consciously decided to be. She has to tilt her head just a little to make eye contact; she’s tall, but he still has a few inches on her. Strand has lashes any girl would die for. She notices that, notices the fineness of his nose, focuses on random details as her heart beats fast for him, and faster still from panic.

  Why did I do that?

  “It throws out . . . Well, here’s the thing. I’ve been talking to some of the guys who are getting called up or enlisting, and almost all of them say they’ll write home to some girl. But I don’t really have a girl to write to.”

  “You won’t be writing to Hillary?”

  “Hillary?” A confused frown. “Her? No, she and I . . . I mean, we had one date. But she’s seeing someone else. And anyway, we were always just friends.”

  So much for Jenou’s gossip.

  “I see.” What she saw was a boy even more handsome up close than at a distance, which she thinks must be unusual—didn’t most people look better from a distance? And didn’t most people think about enlisting in a war rather than just blurting it out like a ninny?

  He’s panicked her, that’s what it is. He and Jenou. The fear of being left behind. Nonsense, all of it—a whirl of motivations, none of which can be pulled into the light of day and examined in any reasonable way as long as she’s looking at the line of his chin, and the sculpted look of his lips, and just the general large and strong and yet gentle feeling of . . .

  Take it back, Rio. You have to take it back.

  Is he seeing her up close now and noticing her nose is too small? She fights the urge to touch her dark hair, which is probably sticking up in some unattractive way. Why didn’t she check her hair in the bathroom mirror of the diner?

  She feels she might faint. It’s all too much, way, way too fast. She’s confused, her thoughts zooming like rockets, leaving random trails of sparks and smoke and . . .

  “So, anyway,” Strand goes on, struggling with every word, “I know we don’t really know each other all that well. But I was wondering whether you might go see a movie with me tomorrow night. Then I could write to you when I’m away. But now if you’re going away as well, so . . .” He looks exhausted suddenly, as if he’s used up the last of his courage getting the conversation this far.

  “I imagine soldiers can write to each other,” Rio says, sounding chirpy and false to herself. “I mean, wherever you are, and wherever I am, we could still write letters back and forth. Couldn’t we?”

  What are you doing? Enlisting? Or going on a date?

  But she can hear Jenou’s voice in her head, and that voice says, “Oh come on now, honey; you know exactly what you’re doing.”

  Rio’s suggestion gives Strand an infusion of energy, perhaps a little too much energy, as he practically shouts, “Yes! Yes, we could, couldn’t we? After all, it’s not as if you’ll be off in the trenches somewhere. They’ll keep the girls here in the States. Or perhaps send some to England, but in any case, you’ll be able to write.” He claps his hands, then seems surprised by those very hands, stares at them for a second in confusion, sticks them into his pockets, and goes on. “We could compare notes on . . . on army life. Of course we could. Why not?”

  “And it would make sense for us to know each other a little better before embarking on this correspondence,” Rio says.

  Embarking on this correspondence?

  That sends his eyebrows up.

  “Yes, that was an interesting phrase,” Rio admits ruefully. “I meant, a movie, like you said, we could go to a movie.”

  “Yes! That’s it, of course, because I did mention a movie, didn’t I? Tomorrow night. That’s what you meant, wasn’t it?”

  “Of course!” she says, and it comes out as a squeak.

  Well-raised boy that he is, Strand walks her the rest of the way home, but the only conversation takes place between voices in Rio’s own head. She has just upended her entire life based on a diner conversation with her best friend and an awkward exchange with a boy she barely knows.

  Now, right now, here at her front door where she must say good evening, is the time to take it all back.

  But I do want to go to a movie with him.
I do want to.

  “Good night, Strand.”

  “I’ll come by at seven, if that’s all right with you.”

  “That would be perfect.”

  Rio rushes inside, closes the door behind her, and leans against it.

  She is going on a date.

  And also, going to war.

  3

  FRANGIE MARR—TULSA, OKLAHOMA, USA

  “I don’t want you to go, baby.”

  Dorothy Marr tugs at the fabric, lines it up, glances at the spool of thread, presses the pedal, and ree-ree-ree-ree-ree-ree.

  “I know that, Mother,” Frangie Marr says. “But you can’t pay the bills on your own. We’ll end up in the street if I don’t.”

  Just about eighteen hundred miles east and a little south of Gedwell Falls, seventeen-year-old Frangie Marr sits with her mother on the screened porch where her mother hauls her battered sewing machine on hot, humid nights like this.

  The screens have been torn and patched and torn again, and the mosquitoes have memorized every last one of the holes. Unseasonably warm weather has released the insects from their slumber, and Frangie slaps one that lands on her arm, leaving a spot of her own blood that she flicks away.

  She’s a tiny thing, Frangie Marr, that’s what people always say about her and have since she was twelve. Her adolescent growth spurt came late and petered out early. Until age fourteen she’d been just four foot ten. Now she is five foot one—if she cheats a bit and sort of lifts herself up in her shoes.

  Her mother presses the pedal on the sewing machine and runs a dozen stitches. The rabbity sound of the machine has always been part of Frangie’s life, though it used to be slower before they had electricity and the machine was foot powered.

  “You should get some sleep, Mother.” Frangie is tired of this conversation; she’s had it before. Each time her mother tells her she doesn’t have to go, and each time Frangie says she does. It feels like her mother is pushing off the responsibility, like she wants to be able to say, “I told her not to go.” Maybe Frangie’s being unfair thinking that, but she feels what she feels.

  “Can’t sleep, sweetie, you know I have to get this dress done for tomorrow morning. You know Miss Ellie.”

  “Oh, I know Miss Ellie,” Frangie says. “That is one complaining white woman.” This is safer territory for conversation. Frangie complains about her mother’s customers, and her mother in turn says things like, “Oh, she’s not so bad,” or “Well, she has her ways.”

  Sure enough: “She’s all right,” Dorothy Marr says with a tolerant smile. “At least she pays on time. And she had that ham sent around for Easter.”

  Yes, she pays on time, and when Frangie was younger Miss Ellie would rub her head and say, “Need me some pickaninny juju.”

  Frangie despised that and despised the woman. If she’d actually had any juju she’d have used it for her family or for herself, not transferred it to a skinny, mouse-haired, flint-eyed white woman. When Miss Ellie wasn’t rubbing Frangie’s head for luck she was making remarks like, “I reckon I could scour my pans bright with that brushy Nigra hair of yours.”

  At times like that Frangie’s mother would press her lips tight into something that was not quite a smile, but not a readable expression of disapproval either. One did not talk back to white folk or object to words like pickaninny or Nigra, no, not even when it was your own daughter being referred to with casual condescension and unearned familiarity.

  Maybe it’ll be different in the army.

  Frangie raises her glass of barely sweet tea and says, “To getting paid.”

  Her mother winces. “I always wanted you to finish school, Frangie. I saw you maybe going to college. Maybe being a doctor. That’s what you’ve been saying since you were four years old.”

  “Aren’t a lot of colored doctors around.” Frangie has to say it to show she’s not some silly dreamer. She dreams all right, but she can’t set herself up to look foolish when she fails. That particular dream is for her, just for her, not even for her mother.

  “Used to be before the trouble. Used to be black doctors, black lawyers, even that old professor.”

  “And what happened?” Frangie asks rhetorically. “White folks rioted and burned everything down. All those doctors and lawyers and such left Oklahoma for good.”

  “More than twenty years ago,” her mother says. “You weren’t even born.”

  “You were though.” Frangie isn’t sure whether or not she should just drop it. She’s overheard whispers at times about what her mother, then just fifteen years old, endured at the hands of the mob.

  “You don’t know nothing about that,” her mother said, shutting down the conversation.

  A moth beats itself against the screen, not as clever as the little mosquitoes. Survival by adaptation, that’s what they said in the science books that her school did not allow. Frangie figures in a few thousand years moths will all have died off in the face of the screened-porch challenge, but mosquitoes? They have already adapted.

  “Things are changing, maybe,” Dorothy Marr says, uncomfortable with her daughter’s silence. “There are plenty of colored folks being called up to this war, that’s going to mean something.” Then, as if realizing what she is saying, she stops herself and says, “But that doesn’t mean—”

  Frangie laughs. She has a musical laugh that always brings smiles to the faces of even her sternest teachers. “I won’t be enlisting for the sake of colored folk, Mother. I’ll be enlisting because Daddy can’t work. Let’s be practical.”

  “Please don’t ever say that to him.” Her mother glances meaningfully toward the interior where Frangie’s father sits listening to a radio program, some horror story judging by the wobbling organ music being played between bits of dialogue. Her father loves radio plays, the more gruesome the better.

  “I would never,” Frangie says.

  “His pride . . .”

  “His pride. He gets his hip crushed on the job, and the city gives him a severance that’s half what a white man would get. Doesn’t even cover the cost of whiskey to dull the pain.”

  “It ought to be your brother going,” Dorothy says, whispering the last word. Frangie’s brother, Harder, is much older, nearly twenty-one now, but he is no longer welcome in the home, and never to be spoken of within her father’s hearing.

  Harder is with the union, and he’s a communist, a revolutionary, at least he talks like one. Communists are levelers who want everyone to have the same—no rich, no poor, no bosses, and no differences between races. All that might be okay, but commies are also atheists, who reject Jesus and most likely other folks’ religions, too, all of them, not just some, and that’s unacceptable, intolerable to Frangie’s father.

  “Well, it isn’t him, is it?” Frangie snaps. Then she laughs to take the edge off the sound of bitterness. A little thing with a great laugh, that’s Frangie Marr. Occasionally she would also be called cute, but that’s because no one ever calls her pretty. Cute she is, with hair still wild and natural—getting it straightened costs a half dollar and only lasts a couple weeks—and a lower lip that sticks out just a bit farther than its mate and gives her a pugnacious air. The feature that makes people look at her twice, sometimes with suspicious glances, is her eyes. They are too large, wide-set, slanted a bit. And they judge, those eyes do, they watch and they take note and they judge all that they see, and lots of folks do not like that much.

  To the innocent, her eyes are arresting. To a person with something on his conscience, they seem too knowing.

  Her mother sews another few dozen stitches, the machine making its crazed sound. “Life is hard.”

  “Pay for a private is fifty dollars a month, and they have it set up where you can send almost all of that home. They call it an allotment. Well, I guess forty dollars a month would help a lot around here, especially with one less mouth to feed.”

  Her mother can’t answer that and stares down at her work. The sewing machine bulb creates a sphere of lig
ht illuminating calloused, nimble fingers, a seamed, worried face, and the gleaming steel of the rapidly stabbing needle.

  Of course the money will help. It will be the difference between scraping by and ending up on the street begging relatives to take them in.

  “If only your father was well, he could get on at the bomber factory once it gets running,” Dorothy says.

  Just then Frangie’s little brother, Obal, comes tearing out onto the porch to report breathlessly on his doings with friends and how his best friend, Calvin, found a broken-down bike in the dump. He thought maybe they could get it fixed up well enough for him to deliver papers, or maybe even telegrams, which pays better.

  “I would help him whenever he couldn’t do the work. I could make a quarter maybe, fifty cents sometimes.”

  Down the street toward central Greenwood the juke joint is warming up as the night ever so slowly cools. The ramshackle building with its single, blinking red florescent letter, R for Regent’s Club, vibrates with the sound of drums and trumpet.

  “Diz is playing,” Frangie says wistfully. “I’d give just about anything to be able to play a horn like that.”

  “Jazz,” Dorothy says dismissively. “Devil’s music.” But there isn’t a lot of intensity behind that judgment, and Frangie notices her mother has a tendency to move in her chair in response to the rhythm coming down the street.

  “I’m going to do it,” Frangie says, as if waiting for an argument.

  Her mother does not argue, and Frangie thinks, My God, I am actually going to do this. There’s something familiar in the sense of abandonment that wells up within her, and then she remembers the day when her mother first dropped her off at school. She turned and walked away while little Francine—as she was called then—bawled her eyes out and got a smack on the butt from her teacher. “Well, maybe it will be no worse than school,” she tells herself.

  “I’m going for a walk,” Frangie says. “Can I bring you back anything?”

  “No, sweetheart.”

  There is something final about that word coming from her mother. Sweetheart. It’s a word she uses when comforting Frangie. She used it when her grandmother, Meemaw, died. “People die, sweetheart, even the ones we love.”