Front Lines

by Michael Grant

  “Don’t listen to your officers, listen to your noncoms. It’s the sergeants that keep their men alive, the good ones, anyway. You find a sergeant you trust and stick to him like glue. An officer will throw your life away for nothing, but a good sergeant . . .”

  “Yes, sir,” she says, not even realizing that she’s fallen into the military style of address, nor that she is standing at something like parade rest that is not quite attention, but not the casual stance of a teenage girl talking with her father either.

  “I’m your father. That’s your mother in there,” he says, his voice gone rough. “We’re your family. Whatever happens, we’re your family. Whatever happens, this is your place, this house, this town.”

  He is seeing the Stamp Man too, she knows. And perhaps seeing much more.

  “I know that, sir,” she says.

  “You’ll need that.” He nods to himself. “You’ll need to know that. When you’re scared. Or hurt. No matter what: we are your family.”

  Rio can’t answer. This is as open as her father has ever been with her, the first time he has ever addressed her as an adult. This is him baring his soul within the limits his notions of masculinity allow. A tear rolls down her cheek, but she can’t wipe at it without giving herself away.

  “You’ll need that,” he says again, almost a whisper.

  The doorbell rings at 0900 sharp.

  “Strand!”

  “It’s too early, isn’t it?” he asks.

  He seems taller than she remembers, and his shoulders are definitely wider and stronger. But then, she supposes, she looks more muscular to him as well, and it makes her cringe a little.

  “Not too early at all, Strand.”

  “I figured you woke up at, what, 0700?”

  “Nonsense. I woke up at 0600—I’m real army, not air corps,” she teases. “You know, in the real army we don’t even have butlers to bring us our coffee in bed every morning.”

  “Oh, here we go,” he says, playing along. “Now I have to listen to this from you. It’s not true our butlers bring us coffee in bed. That is a dirty lie, a regular army falsehood. Our butlers lay the silver and the china out on a very nice table on the veranda, and then they bring us our coffee.”

  “It’s awfully good to see you, Strand.”

  “You look swell,” he says.

  “So do you,” she says. It takes her a moment to register that this is something she would never have said before. It’s forward and blunt. She doesn’t exactly regret it, but she does make a mental note to think about it later. “Speaking of coffee, will you come in and have a cup?”

  “Oh, I don’t want to use up your ration.”

  “Nonsense, we always have coffee for men in uniform,” Rio’s father says, coming down the stairs. He sticks a hand out, and Strand shakes it. “Am I to take it that you are here to court my daughter, young man?”

  He pitches the tone perfectly between deadly serious and downright dangerous, so Strand swallows hard and shoots a panicky look at Rio.

  “Father is having fun with you, Strand. Come in, come in.”

  “How’s air corps life?” Tam asks Strand.

  “It’s fine, sir, aside from the matter of getting enough planes, which is FUBAR.”

  Rio, who has heard that term and knows what it means, sees horror in Strand’s eyes and is torn between two wildly different emotions: fear of what may come next, and delighted amusement at the predicament Strand has just walked into.

  Just let it go, Mother . . .

  “What is FUBAR?” Millie asks.

  Strand looks helplessly at Rio, who stares guiltily and paralyzed at her mother’s innocent expression. It’s her father who comes to the rescue.

  “It stands for ‘Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition,’” he says, casting a wry look at Strand, who rediscovers his ability to breathe. “It’s a common soldier’s term.”

  Yes, Rio thinks, though the F is usually taken to be a word that is a bit less appropriate for a mother’s ears.

  “I’m off to the store; I’m already late,” Rio’s father says. “Oh, by the way, remind me that I need to clean my shotgun later. My twelve-gauge shotgun.” He softens this with a manly hand on Strand’s shoulder.

  “Very funny, Father.”

  There. He seems like my dad again.

  They take their coffee in the kitchen, seated around the comfortable old table where Rio’s mother has laid out her dairy accounts and is industriously recording gallons of milk and dollars earned.

  “I was wondering, well . . . ,” Strand begins.

  “Yes?”

  “The thing is, my uncle’s plane is being seized by the War Department. It’s a tough break for him, although they’re paying him more than the plane is worth. Anyway, he has it for another few days, and I thought, well . . .”

  Sooner or later, Rio tells herself, she is going to have to get Strand to stop letting half his sentences trail off. “I’d love to.”

  But her mother isn’t so sure. “Is it a two-seater?”

  “Ma’am, the Jenny is designed with two completely separate cockpits. Also, ma’am, you’ll be relieved to learn that it no longer has its machine guns from the last war.”

  “No crazy flying tricks or loop-de-loops!”

  Strand makes the cross over his heart. “Cross my heart and hope to die,” he vows. “It’ll be more dangerous getting to the field than flying: we have to ride bikes. Those things are unstable.”

  Mrs. Richlin insists on making some sandwiches, as well as a tight-sealed Mason jar of lemonade, all packed into a small basket along with a checkered tablecloth to put down for a picnic.

  “I don’t have a blanket to spare,” she says, looking a bit prune faced as she does so. “Careful if you lie on the grass, Rio—I’ll have to get the grass stains out of your dress.”

  Rio carries the picnic lunch in her bike’s basket; in Strand’s basket is his prized camera. It’s a four-mile ride from Gedwell Falls out into the countryside. The weather is that tenuous Northern California warm that turns chilly in the shadow of any passing cloud, and the hills are brilliant green from recent rain, though they will soon be the color of straw again. It’s mostly an uphill ride on the way there, the sort of exercise that Rio might once have found tiring but now barely notices.

  I could run this in full pack. Backward.

  She’s changed into a flannel skirt, white cotton blouse, and pink cardigan, and feels faintly ridiculous. She’s used to her uniform trousers and the careless freedom they offer, but somehow she doubts that Strand wants to go riding or flying with a girl who looks like a soldier. Anyway, Jenou always says Rio’s legs are her best feature; she might as well deploy them.

  Deploy. Another word the army has insinuated into her brain.

  “How are you liking being home?” Strand asks as they ride side by side. There has never been much traffic out this way.

  “I feel strange, a little,” Rio says. Her voice pitches high to reach him over the breeze and the sounds of sprockets and chains. “It’s home, but it doesn’t feel quite the same. I suppose it’s me that’s changed while home has stayed the same.”

  “Yes, the same for me. There they all were, my folks, and my old pals, and all the old places, and I would never say I miss barracks life, but the truth is, I have new pals now, and I’m even used to the chow.”

  “Have you started flight training?”

  “No, that’s up next. I mean, we’ve done some work on navigation and aeronautics.”

  “Aeronautics? That sounds very impressive.”

  “Yes. I just wish I understood what it is exactly.”

  Rio laughs. “I feel the same about small unit tactics.”

  “Talk about impressive sounding!”

  “We’re meant to care a great deal about enfilade and defilade.”

  “Which are . . . ?”

  “Well, of course, being air corps you wouldn’t be expected to understand such things,” she teases. “Enfilade is where you
don’t wish to be. It means the bad guys can shoot at you along your longest axis. If you’re lined up like the upright of a letter T, see, you don’t want Japs or Krauts to be the cross of the T.”

  “I should think not.”

  “And defilade is when you’ve gotten yourself behind some cover and can shoot at the bad guys.”

  “So as to not be in enfilade,” Strand said. “I think I’ve got it.”

  “Yes, well, it’s a very different matter when you’re in the woods and all tangled up in blackberry thorns and some sergeant is shouting at you.”

  We’re so easy together.

  “Sergeants shouting?” Strand jokes. “Why, I never. In the air corps the noncoms are all very polite and helpful, offering to iron our uniforms and such.”

  “Is that before or after the butler brings you coffee?”

  “I hate to say it, though, but some of them are all right.”

  “Some are,” Rio admits.

  They have the identical tone when discussing sergeants: rueful, reluctantly admiring, perversely proud of their toughness.

  A truck comes rattling by loaded with empty barrels. The driver stares at them, unsmiling, not approving of them at all, so naturally they both grin and wave enthusiastically.

  “So what is aeronautics?”

  “I’m not quite sure, but the essence of it appears to be that you should not crash the army’s airplanes, or the army will be very cross with you.”

  “I’ve heard it’s months of training, so maybe the war will be over before you can be deployed.”

  “Yeah, well, predictions of quick and easy wars have a history of being wrong, Rio.”

  “It’s almost as if it’s a fairy tale meant to encourage us to sign up,” Rio says dryly.

  “You’re becoming cynical.”

  “Or realistic.”

  A perverse part of her wants to tell Strand about seeing the Stamp Man, but that would just make him worry, and what’s the point in that? Besides, this is supposed to be fun.

  They reach the airfield, which is nothing but three battered old biplanes parked on a dusty field. There’s a cylindrical fuel tank standing aboveground on a rusted iron platform, surrounded by brand-new barbed wire. And there is a large tin shed that is the field’s closest approximation of a hangar. A triangular flag on a pole rustles fitfully, suggesting the breeze is out of the west. Strand points to a plane painted yellow. Written in uneven script along the fuselage is Braxton Air Service.

  “That’s ours, and that is the whole of Braxton Air Service. But my uncle has ambitions, you know, or had, anyway. He’s a bit at loose ends now.”

  They park the bikes on a grassy spot with bare cover provided by two tall palm trees. Each time the breeze blows the palm trees sway, causing them to be alternately in cool shade and brilliant sun. They spread the tablecloth and set down the picnic basket. But Rio is more fascinated by the plane than she is hungry and, after a few minutes’ rest, heads toward it, confident that Strand will follow.

  “I’m afraid I may have misled your mother,” Strand says, wincing. “I didn’t lie, I was careful not to, when she asked about the cockpit. The Jennies do have two cockpits; however, my uncle has adapted the passenger cockpit to carry the insecticide tank for spraying. So I’m afraid there’s just the one cockpit, and we’ll have to squeeze in together.”

  “Oh, indeed?” Rio says archly.

  “Unless you’d rather not.”

  There is no safe and proper way to answer that directly. The fact is that so much physical contact would be just the sort of thing to give Millie Richlin fits.

  Up close the Jenny is a fragile-looking thing with the upper wing longer than the lower, a wooden frame with fabric stretched and lacquered to form the surfaces. The propeller is polished wood, and the top of the engine and its muffler stick rudely out of the cowling.

  “It’s not exactly a P-38,” Strand admits. “But there’s the advantage that I actually know how to fly this one.”

  “How is it different?”

  “Well, for one thing, this engine here will be lucky to hit one hundred and twelve horsepower, while the P-38 has two engines with thirty-two hundred horsepower total and a ceiling of almost forty-five thousand feet, whereas this old girl will be struggling at half a mile.”

  “Forty-five thousand feet! That’s eight miles up. Why do you want to be eight miles up?”

  “Because that’s where the German bombers fly. Of course they’re much lower when they drop bombs—you can’t hit anything from eight miles up. The idea is to ride that P-38 up there and wait until you see a nice fat Heinkel or Junker poking along a mile below you as it comes in for a bomb run. Then you come swooping down, guns blazing.”

  There are of course accompanying hand gestures. And even a sound effect: taka-taka-taka-taka!

  “Is that what you’ll be doing?”

  He shrugs. “I’d like to fly a fighter, the P-38, or the P-40, if I have the stuff for it. Otherwise, I guess if I don’t wash out altogether, I’ll be driving a bus: a B-24 or B-17. Bombers.”

  He indicates the hard spots where it is safe to place her feet. Rio climbs cautiously and slides into the snug, wood-ringed space with its handful of gauges and knobs.

  Strand leans over her and shows her the throttle and choke. “We’ll just set these . . . All right, that should do it. I’m going to go start her up. All you have to do is push this in about halfway once I give you the sign. Oh, and don’t fly it away.”

  Rio raises her hands. “I won’t touch a thing except . . . whatever that is.”

  Strand walks around the wings to the propeller. He turns it slowly by hand a couple of times, pumping fuel to the cylinders. Then he swings the propeller hard.

  The engine sputters and sputters some more, then catches and chugs along, sounding very much like any average car with a bad muffler. The propeller spins until it is just a faint blur and Rio feels the wind of it on her face.

  Strand climbs up and awkwardly wedges himself behind her. Her back is against his chest, and her bottom is pressed back against something she doesn’t want to think about at the moment, though thanks to her famous latrine raid she has a far-too-clear picture in her mind. Strand’s arms reach around her and his long legs twine through hers to reach the pedals. His camera is on her lap, and all in all there is scarcely room to take a deep breath.

  She pulls on the goggles he gives her, and they are off, bouncing across the grass, picking up speed. Ten miles an hour. Twenty. Thirty.

  The engine roars to a higher pitch, though it still seems pitifully unlikely to enable actual flight, and yet suddenly the bouncing is gone, the wheels spin in air, and they are aloft.

  Rio looks over the side, wind whipping her hair and making her cheeks vibrate. The ground falls away, trees shrink to become bushes, a tractor looks like a toy, cows are reduced to black-and-white mice.

  “I’m flying!” Rio exults.

  “Is this your first time up?” Strand says. His mouth is quite near her ear, and she can hear him clearly. She can also feel the rise and fall of his every breath, and even, when she focuses her attention, the beat of his heart.

  “My very first!” she shouts into the wind.

  “You’re taking it well,” he says. “Some girls might be nervous.”

  “I’m not some girls.”

  “Sorry? Couldn’t hear you.”

  “I said, I’m not some girls!”

  She feels rather than hears his laugh.

  They fly over hills and over lakes. They fly over farms and orderly vineyards and then turn toward Gedwell Falls.

  “Take the stick.”

  “No!”

  “Just hold it steady, I’m going to take some pictures.” He takes her hands in his and places them on the long, upright wooden baton. She instantly feels the life of the plane in her hands and with it the urge to move the stick, to make the plane obey her, which she sensibly resists.

  Strand twists to one side, holding the camera with hi
s left and straining to get his right arm around her to reach the shutter. He has to reach beneath her arm, pressing his strong bicep against her breast.

  She wonders if he can feel her heart accelerate. She wonders if he notices that she is no longer breathing. Certainly he cannot see the blush that spreads up her neck to her cheeks, but he is certainly noticing something, because there are subtle changes in his breathing as well, and he squirms a little to lessen contact that she might find . . . improper.

  She is in the air. She is in the arms of a boy, no, a man. Something dark and insistent is awake in her, a feeling like pressure, a feeling like hunger. She has never been this physically close to a man, never felt this, never known she would or could feel this. And she would never have believed how much she does not want it to end.

  “Shall we make a strafing run on your house, then do some loops over town square?” Strand asks.

  “Not unless you want my mother to have a heart attack!”

  “God forbid!”

  They fly for an hour, all the aviation fuel they can afford, and finally land back in the field.

  Once on the ground, Strand begs her to stand beside the plane. “I want a picture.”

  “Of me or the plane?”

  He takes several shots: Rio with her hand resting on a strut, Rio back up in the cockpit, and quite by accident Rio slipping so she ends up sitting with legs splayed out on the ground beneath the plane.

  So much for avoiding telltale grass stains.

  “That last one was pretty good, but would you mind tripping again? I’d like to—”

  She gives him a playful shove. He takes her hand and, in a single deft motion, draws her to her feet and into his arms.

  And kisses her.

  It doesn’t last long, that kiss. But when it is done she senses that a profound change has occurred in her world. She has imagined being kissed, but she has never before craved it. Now she wants very badly to kiss him back, to put her arm around his neck and pull him down to her, and for the kiss to go on longer, much longer.

  But Rio Richlin is a good girl; she is not Jenou, though she bitterly regrets that fact at the moment. Instead she laughs with forced gaiety to conceal a needier emotion and dances away.