Purple Hearts

by Michael Grant

  Rainy sits. This time she pours herself a schnapps as well as one for Frangie.

  Frangie raises her glass and says, “There’s a special Jewish toast, isn’t there? I heard it once.”

  “Did it sound like someone clearing their throat? Was it l’chaim?”

  “Why yes, that is it. What does it mean?”

  “To life,” Rainy says and clinks her mug against Frangie’s.

  “L’chaim,” Frangie says. Then, “I pronounced that wrong, didn’t I?”

  “Oh absolutely,” Rainy says, laughing. Then falling serious again, she says, “This can’t go on.”

  “Do you mean this battle? This war? Or what’s going on back home to colored folks?”

  “Yes,” Rainy says.

  28

  RIO RICHLIN—CLERVAUX, LUXEMBOURG

  Rio leans back against the cool stone of the castle wall and lets her eyes close. She knows how this will play out. She doesn’t need to see it.

  “Lieutenant Horne, I’m ordering Richlin to try and break out with as many of her people as she can,” Mackie says.

  The inside of the castle is chaos and blood. Blood fills and freezes in the cracks between cobblestones. The dead are lined up in a row in the courtyard. The air smells of smoke, and Rio’s eyes sting. The town is lost.

  “I’ll lead that breakout,” Horne says.

  Mackie shakes her head. “No. Richlin’s the—”

  “She’s my sergeant!” Horne protests angrily.

  Mackie turns on him the gaze that had once reduced Rio to a puddle on the barracks floor. “Lieutenant, I have rank, and I have Colonel Fuller’s approval.”

  “But . . . I can’t be taken prisoner! How will that look?”

  “The same as it’ll look for me,” Mackie says grimly. “I’m sticking it out. And so are you. Richlin?”

  Rio opens her eyes. “Right here, Captain.”

  “You have your orders.” She hands Rio a small packet. “Letters from the colonel and a few pieces of mail. Get them to the general if you can.”

  Rio comes away from the wall and executes a more careful, more exact salute than she has in a while. “Thank you, Captain.”

  Mackie shakes Rio’s hand. “Good luck. You’ll need it.”

  Rio turns and trots down the circular stairway, down the tower, and out into the courtyard without so much as a glance at Lieutenant Horne.

  Her platoon—scarcely more than a squad now—gathers around. “Okay, here’s the deal. Captain Mackie has asked me—some others, too, but that’s their problem. Anyway, we are to try to break out and get some documents to HQ. Wherever the hell that may be at this moment. We go as soon as it’s dark.”

  “What are the odds?” Rudy J. Chester asks. The question is on every face.

  “Bad. People who stay here will probably survive and be taken prisoner. Those who come with me have a higher chance of dying, a lower chance of being a POW. This is volunteers only.”

  She is down to fifteen people not including herself.

  Jenou raises a hand.

  “All right, Castain.”

  “I was just raising my hand to go to the bathroom,” Jenou says, breaking the unbearable tension.

  In the end seven volunteer to go with her—not surprisingly they are almost all members of her old squad, the soldiers who know her best: Jenou, Geer, Jack, Beebee, Molina, Mazur the mad bazooka man, and Rudy J. Chester. Rio solemnly shakes hands with all of those who will stay behind, and accepts various letters home.

  “I’m just tired,” Jenny Dial says by way of apology. Her wound is bleeding through the bandage on her leg.

  “You’ve done enough, Dial. You fought your war, and you’ll fight some more before surrender.”

  Dial looks like she might start crying.

  “This is hard,” Rio says to all of them. “This is a hard day. But if everyone keeps their head we’ll be okay. All right, back to work. People coming with me, I want to see light packs—food, water, socks, ammo. Wrap everything for quiet. We move out in an hour.”

  But they almost don’t get the chance. The American lines are crumbling. The castle itself is on fire in parts, and the whole town is layered in smoke. But a desperate sally by defending troops buys Rio just enough time.

  She leads her people down dark, cobbled streets illuminated by fire and obscured by smoke. She’s studied the maps carefully, but they don’t really offer much guidance. What she knows is that she has to get across the river, run into the woods, and hope that somehow advancing Germans don’t see them.

  The riverbanks are covered in snow—snow that leaves big fat footprints. Rio has them walk backward down the short slope, leaving footprints pointed the wrong way. She steps into the water and has to stifle a yelp: the water is freezing cold and the current is strong.

  Rio makes a chopping gesture, showing where she thinks they can land on the other side. They are able to keep their feet only for a few steps before letting the water rise to their necks and abandoning themselves to the current.

  They dog-paddle and float and finally climb up the other side, ice crystals already forming on their sodden uniforms. Chester drops to his knees, but Rio grabs the collar of his uniform and drags him back up. And now they climb, hand over hand, grabbing tree trunks to lever themselves up another few feet.

  Rio squats and raises a fist. A German patrol is sauntering along, obviously unconcerned since their forces are already pushing into the town. They pass and Rio leads the way forward, peering into near-total darkness to find the ravine she’d used to come down this same slope. But there are no landmarks in the forest, and she sits everyone down for a few minutes as she doubles back and forth before practically falling into the ravine.

  “Okay, let’s go.”

  They descend into the cut and start climbing again.

  Three times they stop and listen as German voices and footsteps are heard. And it is becoming clear that more and more German troops are being moved down toward the town.

  Suddenly, Geer disappears from view with a yelp of surprise. Rio crawls toward him and is surprised in turn when his head pops up, seemingly out of the ground.

  “There’s a hole down here,” he hisses.

  “How big?”

  “Big enough.”

  “Molina. Find a branch and try to hide our tracks,” Rio says in a terse whisper. “Geer in the entryway. Everyone else: sack out. We may be here a while.”

  By now they are all veterans, and if any one order is instantly followed it is the order to sleep. Frightened as they each are, they are even more exhausted.

  Molina spends a half hour crawling in the snow with a leafless branch confusing their tracks. Fresh snow falls and soon all sign of their passage will be invisible even in daylight.

  When Molina crawls back in she’s shivering so hard she can’t speak. Jenou and Chester make her the filling in a human sandwich, holding her between them until her core body temperature can rise to something just short of corpse.

  Mazur, carefully shielding his flashlight so only a dim and narrow beam emerges, plays the light around the room. And it is definitely a room of some sort, made by human hands. But it has been a very long time since any human has been here. The ground shows evidence of animal burrows, mostly in the form of animal excrement that adds an extra pungency to the funk of eight unwashed bodies in a hole no larger than a child’s bedroom.

  Geer trades the door position with Chester, then digs out a hole in the dirt floor. “Richlin, I’m thinking we can put a spirit stove in a hole and have at least a little light. No smoke, no smell, at least not enough for the Krauts to find us.”

  The light is indeed dim. Rio vetoes the notion of making a small pot of coffee—the Krauts might not smell a spirit stove, but they’re quite likely to notice the smell of coffee wafting up from the middle of the woods.

  Molina snores in a corner beneath the few warm things anyone can spare for her. Jenou writes in her journal for a few minutes then passes out. Geer lies b
ack and is out before he reaches full horizontal. Jack takes the burning cigarette from Mazur’s slack mouth and sits beside Rio, alone near the entrance.

  He holds a flask out for her.

  “Bless you,” Rio says fervently, and takes a swig of the cognac.

  “What do you make of our chances?” Jack asks.

  Rio scratches her armpit and her neck, considering. “Well, Stafford, we know where we are, but we don’t know where the Krauts are. Or where our lines are. So I’d say our chances are not good.”

  “Ah. Yes.” He is silent, but Rio senses he has something to say.

  “Spit it out, Stafford.”

  He winces. “Just for the duration of this conversation, do you suppose I could call you Rio and you could call me Jack?”

  Rio shifts uncomfortably, having the feeling that this is going to be a difficult talk. She is in a strange fugue state, simultaneously tinglingly alert and desperately weary.

  “Sure, Jack.”

  “Well, it’s like this, Rio. I was wondering what you intend to do after this is all over.”

  Rio shrugs. “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. Every day that passes I know less and less about the world later, after, that whole world . . . and I know more and more about this.” She indicates the room with a wave that widens to encompasses the whole war. “It’s like my head will only hold so much, and all of this has kind of shoved all of that other stuff out of my brain.”

  “I suppose what I really mean is . . .” He draws a deep breath. “. . . whether you plan on marrying that pilot.”

  Rio’s eyes have closed, and she pries one open to look at him. Some other time, some other place, she might have been missishly coy, might have told him it was none of his business. But coyness is one of those things her brain no longer contains. And if she were Diane Mackie, she might have managed to be so stern, so unapproachably, perfectly military that Jack would not have dared even bring this up. This is a personal conversation at the worst possible time and in the worst possible place.

  One thing she does know, and it makes her heart sink: Jack isn’t asking because he’s interested in Strand, he’s asking whether Rio will be free of romantic obligations.

  “I don’t know about Strand,” she says. “He’s . . .” She hesitates, feeling that she is somehow betraying Strand even by having this conversation. But again, with her future about evenly divided between death and a POW camp, she doesn’t really care. “I suppose it comes down to the fact that Strand . . . Captain Braxton . . . well, he lost his nerve.”

  Jack frowns. “What does that mean?”

  “He’s AWOL in Paris. And last I was with him, he wasn’t intending to go back.”

  “He deserted?”

  That word still burns when Rio thinks it. She can’t yet bring herself to apply that terrible word to Strand. All combat soldiers have bad times when they can’t take it, have to be pulled off the line. Frontline soldiers do, from time to time, just walk away. But they almost all return, and their brothers and sisters don’t hold it against them because everyone knows it could be them next.

  But true desertion is a different story. There are deserters, even from frontline units, thousands of them, but no one has a kind thing to say about those who save themselves at the expense of others who must do their dying for them.

  “I’m sorry,” Jack says.

  “Mmm. Are you?”

  Jack says nothing.

  “Look, Jack, I know what you’re asking.”

  “Do you?”

  “I’m your sergeant. I’m the one who has to send you out on patrol, maybe get you killed. I can’t . . . I mean, I don’t know, Jack, I don’t really know how to be ‘Sarge’ and ‘Rio.’ And until this is over I have to be ‘Sarge.’”

  Jack nods. “The truth is, Rio, I’m afraid I’ve fallen—”

  “No!” Rio snaps, and places a hand on his arm. Then, more gently, “No, Jack. No.”

  He subsides, seeming smaller. “A man facing death wants hope, Rio. Or Sarge. Am I a complete ass to even hope?”

  She squeezes his arm. “Hope is good. Now, get some damn sleep, Stafford.”

  “Right, Sarge.”

  Rio relieves Chester at the entryway, her sleepiness banished for the moment. She can shut Jack down, but she knows what he meant to say, what he may even sincerely feel.

  It seems crazy, sitting in a stinking hole in a Luxembourg forest, to even daydream about after. Just a month before, “after” had seemed imminent. People talked about the war being over by Christmas. Well, Christmas was less than two weeks away, and it sure didn’t seem likely.

  And yet her mind returned unbidden to thoughts of after. Thoughts of Gedwell Falls. Her mother’s arms and emotion. Her father’s handshake and repressed tears. Parades? Would there be parades like there had been after that last war? Would anyone feel like celebrating?

  At times in the past Rio had pictured a nice little cottage. She knew just the street she wanted to live on. At times she walked through her imaginary cottage trying to picture the furniture she would like, the curtains she would pick out, the rugs. . . . But it never quite worked, and the imaginary cottage had become less and less detailed and specific over time, rather than the reverse.

  She imagined herself at home, timing her dinner preparations for the moment when Strand would return from his job—whatever that was.

  Kiss, kiss. What’s for dinner, sweetheart?

  Oh, you know how I love your meatloaf!

  And what would she do with the rest of her day? Tidy up? Do laundry? Care for their children, help them with their homework, make their school lunches, attend PTA meetings and . . .

  The little underground chamber seems to shrink by the minute. She has to steady herself with slow, deep breaths.

  What would Mackie—Captain Diane Mackie—do after? Did she have a home? A husband? My God, did she have children? That is a startling thought.

  What about Jedron Cole? What would he be doing after? Rio grins at the memory of his gap-toothed smile.

  She indulges in a fantasy of locating him after the war, taking him out for beer, and giving him a gift of a box of cigars. He had been her sergeant, and she had admired him, but she’d had no notion of the weight of responsibility he had carried.

  Thank you, Jedron Cole. Thank God for you.

  She imagined Cole asking her what she was doing now with the war over.

  Cooking dinner, Jed. I’m cooking dinner. And I’m baking a pie!

  Suddenly, she hears movement outside, at least two pairs of boots trampling snow and bushes. She pulls back and goes person to person warning them to be completely silent. Geer pushes dirt over the spirit stove, plunging them into absolute darkness, with only a hint of gray coming down through the hole. Outside, day has come but there is no sunlight peeking through the eternal clouds.

  Slowly, moving inch by inch, Rio pushes forward. She gathers snow and packs it onto her mesh-covered helmet. Slowly . . . slowly . . . she pushes her head out of the hole. The Germans are behind her, and she turns with infinite slowness to see two soldiers apparently brewing tea or coffee and having a snack.

  Pickets—a Kraut outpost.

  There is no longer any sound of gunfire from Clervaux. The town is taken, the Americans there either dead or being rounded up and marched to a POW camp.

  Rio retreats into the hole and in a voiceless whisper says, “Listen up. They’ve got pickets out.” For Chester and Molina’s benefit she explains. “If they’ve got a thin line of pickets out we should be able to move come dark.”

  Hours pass. Hours during which they must dig themselves a small slit trench and add to the stink of the chamber. Hours during which they take painstaking care to silently open cans of C rations. Hours during which they sleep.

  At last, darkness falls. Rio slithers out to find there are still two German soldiers, though probably not the same two. Being good, disciplined German soldiers they’ve dug themselves a hole—a hole that, had they dug another
few feet, would have had them breaking through into the roof of the chamber.

  Rio sees their helmets, both aimed away, downhill. She hears one man’s heavy, regular breathing.

  She loosens her koummya in its scabbard. Crawl. Stop. Listen. Crawl. Stop. Listen.

  She’s close enough to smell them and is grateful to realize that if the wind was blowing the other direction it would be them smelling her.

  Crawl. Stop. Listen.

  Crawl. Stop. Listen. Slow breathing. Draw koummya. Test grip. She wipes her hand dry on the side of her leg. Takes the koummya again.

  Crawl.

  Two feet. He must smell her or hear her or sense her at any moment and one gunshot will alert the Germans and dash any hope of escape.

  Crawl.

  And . . .

  And . . .

  Lunge!

  She hurls herself forward, lands hard on her chest, but with her left grabbing the rim of the German helmet, yanking it hard and stabbing the point of the koummya into his throat.

  She pulls the knife out and feels his blood cover her hand.

  She swings her legs over the side of the foxhole and drops in as the second German snaps awake, holds up his hands to block the blow that’s coming, and cries out in pain as the koummya stabs through his upraised palm.

  They are in a space no more roomy than a phone booth, with a dying, gurgling German tangled around their legs. The second German starts to yell, but Rio punches him in the nose, which turns his cry into a grunt.

  She stabs at him, but he’s fully awake and parries her thrust, taking another cut in the process.

  He’s bigger than she is. Stronger. And he’s no raw recruit. He reaches for his rifle, but it’s out of reach, so he fumbles for his own knife and Rio stabs again, the blow again deflected from its intended target—his throat—and stabbing a bare inch into his collarbone.

  She has mere seconds before his greater strength and her own desperate need for silence defeat her. She collapses, literally sitting on the dying German at her feet, and stabs upward.

  The koummya goes deep into the German’s crotch, and she levers herself up to clamp her hand over the scream that rises within him while simultaneously digging the koummya deeper, deeper, working the blade back and forth to cut up whatever internal organs the blade can reach.