Front Lines (Front Lines #1)(44)

“Come on, Clara, you can do this!”

The sergeant and the corporal are both yelling now, and the machine guns seem to be firing even more steadily. Clara is doing worse than trembling now; her whole body is quivering like a cornered animal about to make a desperate run for it.

Frangie has a terrible feeling, a sinking in her stomach, a knowledge born of small clues that add up to an awful certainty: Clara is on the edge of panic.

There’s a soldier behind Clara, trying now to get past her, and hesitation has let someone from the fourth row close in on Frangie as well.

“Clara! No!” Frangie yells, but if Clara hears, it does not stop her. She pushes up off the ground.

“Stop shooting!” Frangie yells. “Stop shooting!” She shoves her carbine aside and tries to scramble to Clara. “Get down, Clara, get—”

Clara is looking in Frangie’s direction when the bullet hits Clara’s helmet with a dull metallic clang, spinning Clara’s head, and spraying blood and sharp little shards of metal onto Frangie’s face.

“Man down! Man down! Cease fire! Cease fire!” the sergeant shouts, and the firing stops. Frangie fights her way to her feet, pushing through the wire, tangling in a coil that won’t let go of her boot, and stumbling to drop beside Clara. She tosses Clara’s helmet aside and at first sees only a smear of blood covering the side of Clara’s face.

Clara says, “What happened? What happened?”

“Let me look at it, don’t move!” Frangie yells.

Clara’s fighting her, limbs thrashing, so Frangie straddles her, using her small weight to hold the panicky girl down, twisting her head to see the injury.

“It’s just your ear,” Frangie says. “It’s nothing.”

It’s not nothing. Clara’s ear is almost entirely gone, and what’s left is hamburger that will have to be cut away. But Frangie does not see any deeper damage. Clara will not die. She’ll want to wear her hair long for the rest of her life, but she will not die.

It is no easy task for Frangie and Sergeant Kirkland to extricate Clara from the barbed wire and then manhandle her back to the starting line where they drop her, none too gently, on the ground. Frangie kneels beside her and, in an unusually authoritative voice, demands water. She is handed a canteen, which she pours over the wound.

“Yeah, it’s just your ear, Clara. Another inch and it would have been curtains. Anyone got a handkerchief?”

No one has a handkerchief, but someone produces a clean OD T-shirt that Frangie folds quickly and presses down over the wound. The shirt turns red, but the blood is only seeping, not pumping.

It takes half an hour for an ambulance to arrive with two stretcher bearers to take Clara away to the surgery that will leave her disfigured—but in no danger—and out of the army.

“Like I said, that’s one way to get out of the army,” Sergeant Kirkland says. “You handled that well, Private Marr.”

It is almost the first time he has referred to her by name rather than as Okaninny.

That evening, after chow, Sergeant Kirkland calls her from the barracks. “Captain wants to see you.”

This is not happy news. Privates are not called to see the captain. Ever. She searches the sergeant’s face for a clue, but he’s already done an about-face and Frangie rushes to catch up to him.

“What’s up, Sarge?”

“Captain wants to see you.”

“I know, but why?”

“The ways of officers are not for mere enlisted men to question,” Sergeant Kirkland says, then in a less pompous voice adds, “and sure as hell the orders of a white West Point captain are not for colored noncoms to question.”

Captain Dan Oberdorfer is in his forties, with crew-cut red hair and a fireplug build that causes his uniform to fit like a sausage casing. Many rumors surround Oberdorfer: that he had carnal knowledge of a general’s daughter, that he once punched a visiting foreign observer, that he is a drunk or a homosexual or even an escaped lunatic. The rumors are all by way of explaining how a seemingly competent white officer ended up training colored troops.

The sergeant and Frangie snap salutes as they enter his office and stand five feet from the front edge of his battered old gray steel desk. The captain returns the salute properly, then says, “What the hell are you here for, Kirkland?”

“Sir, you ordered me to present Private Marr.”

“Ah. So I did. At ease.” He has a heavy accent of a type that Frangie cannot identify. He looks at Frangie and lifts a folder from his desk. “I see here, Private Marr, that you are the worst goddamn soldier on this post.”

“Sir?”

“You can’t shoot, you can’t throw a grenade far enough to avoid blowing yourself up, you can’t manage five miles in a pack without falling out from heat exhaustion, you got marked down on the last inspection for your bunk, your foot locker, your uniform, and your weapon. In short, you are one piss-poor soldier, even for a coon. Even for a woman coon. What are you, four feet tall? You’re a goddamn midget with not enough strength to level a goddamned rifle, and yet it says here you enlisted.”

“Yes, sir.” The words are automatic. She feels as if she’s falling, as if she just stepped off the edge of a cliff. Sergeant Kirkland has yelled at her, as have other sergeants, but this attack is categorical and brutal.