Rio hesitates a moment then closes the door behind her. Is she sending him a signal she doesn’t mean to send?
Or do I mean to send that exact signal?
“Should we taste that bubbly?” she says, striving to find a voice that sounds less like Rio the GI and more like Rio the girl from Gedwell Falls. This new-old voice sounds false to her, but Strand is not here to see her as she is now.
Is he?
“It would be a waste of a generous tip not to,” Strand agrees. He pops the cork and pours. Strand and Rio both drain their glasses and take the refill more slowly.
Strand sits in the only chair and pulls it close to the bed, where Rio perches on the edge of the mattress.
There’s nowhere to sit but the bed, Rio assures herself, but the shower and the distinct memory of Strand’s bicep have set off some turmoil within.
I can sit on a bed without it meaning anything.
A bed. With a man. In a hotel room.
With the door closed!
“I can’t believe you’re actually here,” Rio says, trying in vain to ignore the bickering voices in her head.
“I’m amazed at my own resourcefulness,” Strand says.
They fall silent, looking awkwardly in the direction of each other’s feet.
“So, really,” Strand says at last. “How has it been? Have you seen action?”
“I thought we weren’t talking about the war,” Rio teases, then relents. “Some.”
“Some?” He draws a packet from his pocket and carefully unfolds a piece of newspaper. “Do you know about this?”
She takes the paper from his hand, impatient, and is confronted with a grainy photo of a woman soldier holding what looks like a six-shooter straight out of a cowboy movie.
“Oh. That.” She reads quickly through the accompanying text. It’s the story of a small action, just a minor vignette in the war really, but one that stars Rio Richlin. “Gosh, I hope my folks haven’t seen this.”
“It went out on the wires and may have been picked up by the Gedwell Falls Democrat-Press, I don’t know. A buddy saw this in the New York Herald Tribune when he was home on leave. I talk about you a lot, so . . . I guess he recognized the name. There aren’t a lot of girls named Rio, let alone one who can handle a six-shooter.”
Rio sags back onto the bed and lets it bounce her back up to a seated position. “I’m . . . sorry.”
“Sorry?” He is genuinely puzzled. “Sorry for what? Sounds like you single-handedly wiped out a Kraut mortar team.”
Rio snorts. “Single-handed? Any time you read ‘single-handedly’ it’s bullsh—it’s an exaggeration. I was just the one that climbed down the rope. And the gun wasn’t even mine, I borrowed it off the reporter who . . .” She realizes that makes no difference to the story, but she is mortified to have the story out in the wider world, and annoyed to have Strand showing it to her.
They drink some more Champagne. Conversation rises and falls, with each silence more awkward and pregnant with meaning than the preceding one. Rio is looking more and more frequently at his lips, which are, according to that great expert Jenou, eminently kissable. And in doing so the memories of every kiss they have shared comes welling up, bringing a wave of feeling, a wave of . . .
She leans forward just as he leans forward and their lips meet. It’s an awkward stance, both leaning, so Rio takes his quite wonderful bicep and draws him to sit beside her on the bed. They kiss some more, quite a bit more, and Rio’s heart is pounding, but Strand does not press for anything more intimate. Rio is certain—almost certain, nearly certain, kind of certain—that she would rebuff him if he did.
After a while they move to a more comfortable position, side by side on the bed with their backs against thin pillows that barely soften the brass tubes of the headboard. Rio unlaces her relatively mud-free but far-from-clean boots and kicks them off. When they land they sound like they weigh ten pounds each. Strand leans down and carefully unlaces his polished shoes and places them next to each other on the floor.
“Tell me about flying, Strand. Bombers, right?”
“Turns out I couldn’t take the G-force for a fighter. You get into a dogfight, take those tight turns, and it presses all the blood down out of your head. They say it’s worse in big guys, tall guys like me. Fighter pilots tend to be more compact.” He sounds abashed and seems almost to be gritting his teeth. It’s a story he’s had to tell before, Rio guesses. Everyone wants to fly fighters—the Battle of Britain and the romance of the Spitfire pilots have settled that.
“I like you less compact,” she says, and kisses him again. It is a tender kiss, a gentle kiss, one with less animal need and more affection. Love? Maybe. She isn’t sure how she’ll know if it’s love.
Maybe when you stop thinking about Jack Stafford.
She kisses him again, this time putting more heat into it, as if trying to push the thought of Jack out of her thoughts. But Strand has cooled now. In fact he seems distracted.
“Tell me about it,” Rio says again, feeling like a hypocrite since she herself dislikes being asked about her actions.
He shrugs. “Mostly we sit around the bar—the officers’ club—or else lounge in the briefing room being lectured by captains and majors and such. There’s a lot of big maps on the wall and all sorts of exceedingly dull talk of course adjustments and radio direction finding.”
He’s striving for nonchalance and failing.
“Don’t you ever fly?”
“Occasionally.” His tone is transparently false. “Sure, there are missions. Sometimes, though, we don’t even find the target and have to dump our loads in the water.”
“And other times?” she presses.
He rolls away from her then, ostensibly to fetch the half-empty bottle and refill their glasses. But he does not return to his place beside her. Instead, he paces the ten linear feet available to him.
“Sometimes we reach the target and deliver the package.” He smiles and adds, “Bombs away!” He has a hand motion to go with it, wiggling fingers emulating the bombs as they fall from the bomb bay.
“Is it rough?”
He shrugs. “The flak isn’t so bad, but we do run into the occasional 109 or Focke-Wulf.”
She sees something in his eyes, though he looks away. “Have you lost anyone?”
Strand shoves his fingers back through his hair and paces to the window. “I, uh . . . my tail gunner. This Indian kid, Sioux from North Dakota, we called him Poke, on account of calling him Pocahontas at first when he was still green, and then that got to be Poke.”
“What happened?”
“A 109. Nobody spotted him, Kraut just dropped down out of the sun. Ground crew says we only took one round. We’ve come in all shot up, two hundred holes, and everyone safe, and then one lousy round . . .” Then, after a stretched and painful silence, he adds, “Just last Thursday. So it’s . . . um . . . kind of raw, I guess.” He smiles as if it’s something he should apologize for.
There’s nothing to say, so Rio nods.
“I haven’t lost anyone before. Buddies, sure, you remember Bandito? You met him on the Queen? Well, his crate went down, we saw some chutes, so maybe he’s sitting in a POW camp, but see, it’s different when it’s your own crew.”
“Nothing you could have done,” Rio says.
This causes Strand to bang the meaty part of his fist against the wall. “I know that,” he snaps. “Doesn’t change anything, because you still have to go over and over it in your head. It sounds crazy, I know, me being the youngest pilot and well, you know me and I’m not . . . But the guys—see, to them I’m the skipper. It’s my fault because who else is there to blame?”
She goes to him as he gazes idly out of the window, stands behind him, and slips her arms around his chest. He puts his hands over hers. She brushes his ear with her lips, and he twists in her grip to face her. He kisses her, soft at first, gentle and almost melancholy. But she opens her mouth and touches his tongue with hers, and it is as if
someone has attached them both to electric wires.
They kiss madly, almost violently. Rio pulls his tie off and throws it toward the bed and goes to work on the buttons of his uniform. She is disappointed to find the OD T-shirt beneath, more OD is not what she craves. Having never before formed the thought, she suddenly now knows that she wants very badly to see and touch and taste bare flesh.
What am I doing?
She pushes his shirt down and off impatiently, then forces him to bend forward so she can draw the offending T-shirt from his body.
Whatever I’m doing, I don’t seem to be stopping.
She has always imagined this moment as a type of surrender. That’s certainly been Jenou’s notion: you surrender at long last to the man and he . . . But that is not what is happening right here, right now. She is not surrendering, she is pushing the pace, she is practically forcing herself on him.
One more step and it will be too late . . .
Okay, then: one more step.
Finally Strand begins to undress her, so much more carefully, slowly, uncertainly than she had done to him, and hesitation again and again. He stops, breathing hard, when she is down to her bra.
“I . . . uh . . . how is this thing attached?” His voice is octaves lower than normal.
Rio laughs shakily. “It’s an army bra, so it makes no sense.” She reaches the snaps at the sides, pulls them free, and shrugs the bra to the floor.
For a moment she has forgotten to be self-conscious about her body, which has always been described unhelpfully by Jenou as “boyish.” But all of that, all of that shyness, all of that modesty, all the lessons incessantly drilled into her head by her mother, seem very far away and unimportant now. Because now she’s a teapot coming to full boil, not entirely right in the head, not at that moment, not when he stops breathing, not when he starts again but with a ragged, desperate urgency.
My God, it’s happening. It’s happening right now.
Her mouth is as dry, her heart as fast, her breath as shallow as when she stood blazing away at the Krauts. In fact, some distant part of her observes, she was calmer then. This is like some mad race inside her head, with animal desire and indifference to consequence pushing to overwhelm modesty and chastity and even the vague notion that she is meant to be passive, resisting, saying no.
“Do you . . . ,” she says, but finds her voice breaking. In a lower octave she says, “Do you have a French letter?” using one of a dozen common euphemisms for a condom.
Strand strains to raise his head. His expression is comical, a battle between shocked disapproval and urgent longing. “Are you? Do you? Should we . . . ,” he babbles before ending lamely, “You could get pregnant.”
“That’s why I’m asking about the . . . the thing,” she says, irritated by this conversational delay.
“No, I mean . . . I mean, if you were in a family way they’d send you home.”
It’s like a dash of cold water in her face. Does Strand actually believe she would do that? Use pregnancy to escape the war?
But that dash of cold water is a mere dribble of spit to the fire inside her. “Find it. Put it on,” she says, and watches with bold attention as the job is carried out.
The deed is done with a great deal more wild thrusting than Rio expects. The springs of the bed squeak loudly in telltale rhythm.
There is some pain, but nothing to compare with the punch she took from the Texan’s fist. It takes much longer than it takes a bull, she notes, and it is more fascinating than it is pleasurable.
They lie side by side then, talking for a long time, not about the war or even the army, but about home. Rio talks about her parents, acutely aware that there is something transgressive about discussing parents while naked beside a man to whom she is not even engaged, let alone married.
A line has been drawn in the sand of her life. Before and after. Some part of her mind dreads the inevitable confession to Jenou. If Jenou has become annoying in asking about killing Krauts she will become an absolute Sherlock Holmes in ferreting out every last detail of this first.
I am no longer a virgin.
Am I a woman now?
They make love again, more slowly this time, cautiously, learning about each other’s bodies.
Two hours later, as Rio lies in bed beside a dozing Strand, staring up at a bug on the flaking ceiling and wondering whether she has just done something very stupid, a siren wails.
Air raid?
But no, not an air raid, because moments after it stops—without being punctuated by explosions—she hears a loudspeaker. She goes to the window and looks out onto the street. There’s a jeep driven by an MP coming slowly up the street. A passenger is speaking into a microphone with the loudspeaker mounted on the windshield.
“All US military personnel are ordered to return to their assigned posts immediately.”
The time for romance, sex, and possibly love is over.
The war is starting again.
She retrieves her koummya from the nightstand.
And is . . . relieved.
PART II
OPERATION HUSKY
THE INVASION OF SICILY
This is our war, and we will carry it with us as we go from one battleground to another until it is all over, leaving some of us behind on every beach, in every field. We are just beginning with the ones who lie back of us here in Tunisia. I don’t know if it was their good fortune or their misfortune to get out of it so early in the game. I guess it doesn’t make any difference once a man is gone. Medals and speeches and victories are nothing anymore. They died and the others lived and no one knows why it is so. When we leave here for the next shore, there is nothing we can do for the ones underneath the wooden crosses here, except perhaps pause and murmur, “Thanks, pal.”
—Ernie Pyle, war correspondent
JOURNALS AND LETTERS SENT
JENOU’S JOURNAL
Looks like they’re getting the war started up again. Sitting here at the dock, GIs cheek by jowl, thousands of us waiting to stand in line to board our ship, which is who knows where. The usual madhouse. I feel I could walk dry-footed from ship to ship from the dock out to the far end of the harbor.
Rio’s been mum since coming back from her time with Strand. Something clearly happened—that girl thinks she’s got a poker face, but Auntie Jen sees all. Something happened between them. Did she tell him about kissing Jack? Did he tell her about some slut of a nurse he’s passing his time with? Did he propose? Did they—?
I could worm it out of her, but I want to wait and see how long it takes her to tell me. It’ll be a measure of our friendship. Rio’s more closed-in than she used to be, once upon a time Rio would tell me everything. Now she’s as tight as a tick. Her old impulsiveness has become recklessness. Her old impish sense of humor has coarsened. Well, so has mine, I admit, but she started off sweet, and I never was sweet, not since I was thirteen anyway.
I admit it: it hurts my feelings to have Rio cold toward me. No, that’s wrong, I don’t mean cold, that’s too much. She’s just not quite as there as she used to be. I suppose I’m afraid that she is becoming someone who will no longer care for me as a friend. That would be hard. Much of the time I feel as if I’m only holding on because I’m here in this miserable shit hole dump with her.
So often the people talk about home, about wherever they’re from and how they long to get back there. I wonder if anyone’s noticed that I never join in. I’m in no hurry to get home, though I’d sure like to be somewhere other than here. It’s confusing. What do I do, where do I go when this war is over?
I suppose it’s a little pathetic, but once I talked Rio into volunteering that was sort of the end of my plans. What’s next for Jenou when the war is over? I suppose I’ll have to get married. Pity I have no eligible males in my sights. And honestly, I don’t really care about men, for once in my life. Maybe I’ve seen too much of them.
They’re calling our group to board. Swell.
Dear Mother and Fa
ther,
I am unable to tell you anything about where I am or what I’m doing. But of course I am safe and sound, well-fed, and surrounded by great guys and girls.
I’m not sure whether this will get to you anytime soon, but I wanted to tell you first of all that it may be a while before I can write again.
And mostly I wanted to tell you that I love and miss you both. Even though it’s perfectly pleasant here, I would far rather be home with you.
Love,
Rainy
Dear Mom, Dad, and Obal:
Well, we are finally XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX. Destination? I don’t know. Right now we’re all standing in line, and I’m writing this on the side of a truck. I’ve been assigned to a platoon as medic, which is what I signed up for. And everyone says it’s beautiful where we’re going.
You should not worry about me at all, really. I suppose you’re seeing newsreels and listening to the radio and hearing all sorts of things about how it’s going for us, but pay no attention to all that, it’s mostly wrong, I think. I have plenty to eat, and I am getting along well. I’ll be working under with a sergeant named Walter Green who I know, and who has been kind and very proper toward me. He’s from Iowa. I didn’t even know there were colored folks in Iowa. Walter says now he’s here there aren’t many left, that’s for sure.
Okay, they’re saying time’s up if we’re going to get our letters out. So I love you all very much and miss you all terribly.
Your soldier girl,
Frangie
PS: Obal, I forgot to tell you I had to crawl under a tank!
Dear Mother and Father,
I don’t have much time, so this will just be a quick note. All is well, nothing very much going on, though we XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, so it may be a while before I can write again.
I’m in good health and good spirits. I guess there was a news item that mentioned me, but you know that’s all exaggerated. The biggest danger I ever face is sunburn. Well, that and the chow.
I saw Strand, which was nice. He seems fine, though a little worn down, maybe. He lost a man, and I suppose that’s twice as tough when you’re the one in charge. Well, that’s war, I guess. But if you run into his folks don’t tell them that, just tell them he was healthy and fine when I saw him.