Rio’s little finger brushes something hard and too smooth to be rock. She says, “Got one.” She carefully feels her way past it and places her helmet gently over the mine to mark it. At last she reaches Jack, and now the cold has overcome the warming effect of adrenaline, and both are shaking so badly they can barely speak.
“I think it doesn’t go off until I lift my foot,” Jack says.
“I heard that was bullshit,” Rio says as calmly as she can. She lowers herself to the ground and begins to probe with numb fingers. Jack’s mine is not hard to locate. It is a cylinder about six inches tall, topped by a stem that adds a couple more inches and holds the trigger.
“You didn’t step on the trigger,” Rio says, exhaling relief. “Your toes are just up against it. Don’t move, and I’ll disarm it.”
For this she needs a pin of some sort, and the only pin she can find is one from her own grenades. “I gotta toss it,” she says to Jack. “So squat down but don’t move your foot yet.”
“You think you know how to—” Jack begins, but Rio has pulled the pin and whips her grenade away, as far as she can throw it. It lands, they wait, counting, then . . .
“Dud,” Jack says. “Possibly a result of us drowning the lousy thing.”
Rio awkwardly slips the pin into the hole on the mine’s stem, just as she’d been taught to do a million years ago in basic training.
“Thank you, Sergeant Mackie,” she chatters under her breath. “It’s safe, Stafford. You can move.”
But of course they can’t move far, not in a minefield. And anyway their small reserve of ambition to move on is now all used up. Rio lies down in the mud and Jack lies beside her, and without needing to discuss it they press their bodies together to hold on to what body heat there is.
“I s-s-spose a fire w-would be bad,” Jack says.
“Not for the s-s-snipers.”
“Nothing to burn anyway.”
For a time they work at scraping out a shallow depression, but the mud just slides back in. And then the rain starts up again, rain that forms a crust of ice on their clothing but melts on contact with the soil to add to the soupiness of the mud.
“Pigs in mud,” Rio says, disgusted by the state of her own body and uniform. The only thing not black with dirt on Jack is his red hair. “We sh-sh-should sleep.”
“G-g-o ahead, I’ll keep watch.”
“Kinda doubt anyone is going to sneak up on us, Stafford; we’re in a minefield.”
“Excellent point,” Jack concedes. “You know,” he says in a lighter tone, “this could be quite romantic if you weren’t covered in filth and didn’t stink like one of my socks.”
“You’re not exactly Prince Charming yourself,” Rio says, and both stifle laughter.
For a while they lie side by side on the ground, gazing up at falling rain or away toward bright yellow explosions and the deadly streaks of tracer rounds. Both are freezing except for the places where their bodies meet.
“Do you miss England?” Rio asks after a while.
She feels his shrug. “I’ve barely been there in years, aside from our training stop. But yes, I suppose I do.”
“You could probably transfer to the British Army now.”
“Trying to get rid of me?”
She doesn’t answer directly but says, “I miss home.”
“Not enjoying scenic Italy? You live in some sort of rustic splendor, I recall.”
“Gedwell Falls. Northern California, the part where Hollywood isn’t. Small town. Me and Jenou and Strand.”
“Yes, the pilot last seen singing ‘White Christmas’ while everything around us was blowing up. I remember him vaguely. Is he all right?”
Now he feels her shrug. “I got a letter from him. He’s in England, recovered, waiting to be sent out again.”
“Bomber pilots.” He sighs. “If only I’d thought to join the Air Corps.”
“What? And miss this?”
They lie silent for a long while until Rio begins to suspect that he has fallen asleep, which outrages her: what kind of person can sleep in this? They are spooned now, Rio behind him, her body pressed to his back, one arm draped over him, and Rio thinks it’s quite nice in an awful sort of way. Then he begins to twist around, bringing them face-to-face, so apparently he can’t sleep either.
“Tell me one thing, Corporal Richlin. Are you engaged to him?”
Part of her wants to laugh. The question comes out of the blue, and she doesn’t have a ready answer.
“I don’t know,” she admits.
“Do you . . . do you intend to be?”
“That’s up to him, isn’t it?” she evades.
“I see. If he asks. If he proposes. I don’t wish to . . .” He seems unable to find words for what he doesn’t wish to do.
“I don’t know,” she says again. “I don’t know anything, Stafford. Jack. I don’t know why I’m here or what’s happening or if I’ll be around tomorrow or dead like Suarez. Or Cassel. Or Magraff. Jesus. I can’t even . . . I mean, what’s the point, Jack? What’s the point of thinking about later?”
“It’s what keeps me going, I suppose. Later has got to be better than now.”
His face is inches from hers; she can see the glitter of his eyes. They speak in whispers.
“We should catch some Zs,” Rio says, mostly as a way of shutting him up.
“Just tell me, Rio.”
“Tell you what?”
“Do you love him?”
She takes a long time to answer as she spools through memories of Strand. Their first awkward date. The plane ride they took. The picnic. Their first kiss. And the hotel room in Tunis.
What can she say? What can she say when she has slept with Strand? Can she answer anything other than, of course I love him?
In the end she says, “I’m not sure love is a thing I can do anymore.” She means it to be airy and flippant, but it sounds sad.
“Love isn’t a thing you do or don’t do, Rio. Love is everything, and it swallows you whole or it’s not love.”
Is he seriously flirting with her? Here? Now? With both of them side by side in a freezing hog wallow?
She forces a small laugh and twists away from him, pressing her back against him, feeling his warmth on her numb backside. “And how do you know so much about love, Jack Stafford?”
He lays his free arm over her and wraps it chastely around her belly. “I just do,” he whispers to the curve of her neck. “I just do.”
33
RIO RICHLIN—MONTE CASSINO, ITALY
The first crossing is accomplished only by a small American force, which is then stranded when the main force falls back in disorder, and is then killed or captured by the Germans.
Rio has missed this particular tragedy by the time she and Jack make it back to the platoon.
“What. The. Hell,” Geer says on seeing them stumbling through the rain. Geer is in a deep hole with Pang. The two of them are standing in eighteen inches of water. Pang is patiently bailing with his helmet while Geer is shoving mud into a sort of dike meant to keep water from simply flowing unimpeded into their foxhole.
“We thought you two were dead or captured,” Pang says, and grins.
Jenou and Cat are in a second hole—there are foxholes of various depth and complexity dug all along the sector, many of them having started as shell craters. Cat has managed to find a few sticks and has used them to give some angle to her shelter half, creating a sort of sagging, pitched roof so rain runs off onto the ground . . . before draining right back into the hole.
Jenou climbs sloppily out of their hole and runs to Rio. She runs with arms outstretched and Rio goes to receive her hug, but at the last minute Jenou passes Rio and embraces Jack.
“We missed you!”
“Oh, very funny,” Rio mutters.
Jenou relents and throws an arm around her friend and says in a low voice, “Goddamn, Rio, you scared the hell out of me.” Then in a yell, “Stick! We picked up a couple of replacements
!”
Stick appears, a sodden, mud-covered, and exhausted man. But he has energy enough to smile and clap both Jack and Rio on the back. “Where have you clowns been?”
“We spent the night in a minefield,” Rio explains.
“Might have been better off staying there. We’re getting ready to make another push.”
“Everything okay?” Rio says it with an emphasis Stick understands to mean, Has anyone else been wounded or bought the farm?
“You saw Magraff?” Stick asks in a low voice.
Rio and Jack nod.
“We thought it was her and the two of you. Although Castain kept saying you’d just lit out for Berlin to shoot old Adolf all by yourselves. Damn, you have no idea how good the two of you look! Now, dig a hole.”
“It’s just like the parable of the Prodigal Son,” Jack says. “Except for the part about digging a hole.”
“The Krauts haven’t forgotten we’re here,” Stick says gloomily. “They hit us every few—”
He stops because the whine of falling shells is suddenly audible and with a soggy BOOM! a section of mud erupts.
Stick runs for his hole, Jack dives in with Geer and Pang, and Rio slides down into the soupy filth with Jenou and Cat.
“They better not blow off my roof!” Cat warns loudly, as if the Germans can hear, and as if they’d take heed.
The barrage lasts only a few terrifying minutes. A man from another squad is hit while trying to use the latrine. They hear his screams mixed with cursing. “I was just trying to take a shit, you Kraut bastards!”
When the shelling stops, Rio asks, “I don’t suppose there’s any chow?”
“They set up a field mess back past where we picked up the boats, but it got blown to hell,” Jenou says. “Beebee’s got a little fire going, don’t even ask me how.” She rises cautiously, lifts a corner of Cat’s rain cover, and nods in the direction of a scrap of canvas showing above the lip of a crater.
“Guess I’ll see if he’s got any coffee on,” Rio says. “Then I guess I’ll dig a hole.”
“You’re welcome to join us in our warm, comfortable, dry establishment,” Cat says. “So long as you dig out that end and help us bail.”
Rio slithers up out of the hole, not an easy maneuver, and runs to the crater where Beebee has managed to set up a tidy lean-to atop a flat rock that’s been exposed at the bottom of the crater. It’s not dry, nothing is dry, but he has managed to get a small hidden fire going and has a pot of coffee brewing over an empty can filled with sand and gasoline.
Beebee looks up and says, “Hah! That’s five bucks Geer owes me. He bet you were captured. Coffee?”
He pours a few inches into her canteen cup, and she drinks it with reverence—the first warm thing she’s felt in twenty-four hours, aside from Jack.
“First one’s free,” Beebee says. “A refill costs three smokes.”
Rio carries her steaming cup back to Jenou’s hole and proffers a sip to her and Cat. For the next hour she digs out the right side of the hole, then bails for a while.
“Now it’s just like the Plaza Hotel,” Cat says contentedly.
“The very finest of mud-filled holes anywhere,” Jenou agrees.
They are still joking around, Cat and Jenou, partly no doubt energized by Rio’s reappearance. But Rio sees something dark and dangerous in their eyes. She wonders if they see the same on her face.
“We’re going up again?” Rio asks.
Jenou nods. “Stick says the captain asked about pulling us off the line for a while, but no dice. We’re fighting this war alone.”
“The engineers have a Bailey bridge slung, so no boats this time, but we’ll be crossing in single fugging file,” Cat says. And then she mimes a machine gunner. “Bap-bap-bap-bap. Like ducks in a shooting gallery.”
Both Jenou and Cat are doing their best to put on a brave face, but Rio sees the signs of deep strain. No one has slept in at least thirty-six hours. Nor has there been a hot meal. Or a single instant of escape from the rain and the filth. And with all of that, the artillery, and Magraff’s death, and the assumed deaths of Rio and Jack, strain is understandable.
The squad is down to nine: Geer, Pang, Cat, Jenou, Beebee, Stick, Rio, Sergeant Cole, and Jack.
There comes the supersonic screech of artillery falling, and for ten minutes the three young women crouch in freezing water, keeping their heads down below the horizontal flight of jagged shrapnel. As long as a shell doesn’t land right beside them or drop right down into the hole they survive, but it’s like playing dice with life itself. The odds are against coming up snake eyes, but it is possible, all too possible.
When the shelling stops, Stick calls out from his hole to take roll.
“Just like school,” Jenou says, and yells, “Present!”
Then they are called to help unload an ammo truck, hauling wooden crates off the tailgate, humping them awkwardly to deposit them up and down the thin line formed by the platoon. They unload quickly, despite their weariness—no one wants to be standing next to an ammo truck when the German gunners spot it through the rain.
But with the job done, Rio is sick with exhaustion, both sleepy and bone-weary.
“Ammo,” Cat says.
“Yep,” Jenou says.
This big of a distribution of ammunition—loose .30 caliber for the M1 Garands and the BAR, shorter .30 caliber carbine rounds, grenades in fragmentation, smoke and incendiary models—signals an action is coming.
The three of them mechanically top off their rifle and carbine clips and stuff loose bullets and grenades in wherever possible. For once Rio is not worried about topping off her canteen. There is no shortage of water.
Now they have a nice, fresh ammo crate the size of a footstool, which they set atop the mud at the bottom of their hole. It clears the water by three inches and they decide to rotate, each getting an hour in turn to sit on it.
Rio goes second, and the instant her butt hits wood she’s asleep, her body jerking automatically when she starts to fall forward.
When Cat rouses her Rio sees Jenou leaning, one foot in the slurry, one foot bare. When Jenou pulls off her sock, Rio sees puffy white flesh coming off with it. Jenou’s big toe is swollen and she wonders aloud whether piercing it would release pus and lessen her pain. Or whether any puncture wound in these conditions is likely to lead to far worse infection.
An hour’s disturbed sleep has done little to clear Rio’s mind, rather it deepens her descent into a sort of dream state. Her thoughts are fragments of memory, images without narrative: her family, Strand, the induction center, Jack, a much younger Jenou, dry hills. It’s that last image that captures her attention, and for a while in imagination she is hiking up a hill covered in desiccated, yellowed grass, set off by a small stand of trees. The sky is blue. A red-tailed hawk rides the wind, looking for an unwary mouse. A biplane floats overhead, and there’s Strand waving down at Rio as she rides a black-and-white cow to the top of the hill.
Rio jerks awake. “What?”
She has slumped right down into the slurry, and Jenou is shaking her shoulder.
“Time,” Jenou says.
Darkness has fallen. The rain is a slow drizzle, almost a mist now, as if the sky is down to the last of its moisture. Rio crawls up out of the hole and to her left and right more soldiers rise from the mud, like a parody of creation: And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground . . .
But not dust, mud.
The squad forms up on Stick, and the platoon as a whole forms up to either side of Cole, who is beside Lieutenant Stone. Rio hasn’t seen the lieutenant in a while, and he does not look good. His earlier restless energy seems to have been sucked right out of him. Beyond them in the dark the rest of the division is on the move. They slog forward, a long line of men and women, silent but for the squelch of their boots, back to the river.
The engineers have managed to set up two narrow pontoon bridges. The Germans haven’t blown them up, which is ominous, for it can only
mean the Germans are waiting until they have living targets.
“Okay,” Cole says. “We’re second across, behind First Platoon.”
“Can’t believe Stone didn’t volunteer us,” Cat says.
“He’s growing up fast,” Stick says, and it’s almost enough to make Rio smile. Dain Sticklin, who started in basic with her and Jenou, is now the wise sergeant.
First Platoon steps onto the swaying, unsteady bridge, holding the guide rope, which is very little help. The German gunners wait patiently until the lead element is almost across, and then the fire comes pouring down, knocking GIs left and right into the water, where they flounder and cling and try to swim, or float away, dead.
“Now!”
And Cole’s platoon rushes down the bank, and they start yelling, yelling to keep their courage up, piling pell-mell toward the bridge to get it over with, a headlong rush to destruction. But now they have a bit of luck, as an American mortar lands a lucky shot and knocks out the nearest machine gun nest.
Rio runs, staggers as the bridge moves beneath her, rights herself, and runs, with Jenou just ahead and Pang behind. A second machine gun sends a line of tracers arcing toward them, but it’s farther away and by some miracle the squad reaches the opposite shore, where they flop down, panting.
The next squad isn’t so lucky. Rio sees two of their people knocked like bowling pins into the churning water.
Allied artillery has opened up well beyond the river, hitting the Germans in the rear, doing nothing to stop the small arms fire but playing hell with the Kraut mortars, which, nevertheless, keep firing. Beebee cries out in pain as a piece of hot shrapnel scrapes a quarter inch of flesh from his thigh.
“We gotta push in!” Cole yells.
Stick says, “Come on,” and they are up and clambering hand over hand up a slippery slope, smoke suddenly everywhere, smoke torn by renewed rain. Ahead there must be a German position, a dark lump revealed only by the light of tracer rounds.
Rio is on her belly now, almost swimming through the mud, legs pistoning, elbows digging, her rifle in the crooks of those elbows.
“Smoke!” Stick shouts, and Jack and Jenou both throw smoke grenades toward the presumed but invisible machine gun. The smoke billows, blinding Rio at least as much as it must be blinding the Germans, but she crawls on until stopped by a soft but heavy obstacle.