Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(117)

Rio surprises them all (including herself) by banging a palm down on the table and making the glasses jump. “You’re wearing the damned uniform! You’re fighting the same damn war!”

“Yes, but I am the wrong color.”

“Wrong color,” Rio snorts. “And the Krauts are the right color?”

“Dog and pony show,” Rainy says. She taps out a cigarette, offers one to each of the others, and lights it. “You think they’ll send you around looking like you do, Richlin? They’ll slather on the makeup, they’ll stuff your bra, and they’ll find a way to show off your legs. They won’t want some woman who looks like you do.”

“Like I do?”

Rainy leans across the table on her elbows, smoke rising from her lips. “You know what you look like, Richlin? You look like mama’s sweet little baby girl who kills Krauts. It’s in your eyes. You know it, you’ve seen it in other soldiers, you know the look. Well, they are not going to want that look. They are not going to want scary Corporal Richlin, they’re going to want sweet Rio the milkmaid.”

“Nah, people aren’t that stupid,” Rio says. “They know—”

“They know shit,” Rainy snaps. “People back home don’t know a damned thing about the actual war. Anyway, the way they look at it, the whole point of fighting the war is to keep all the things they like about America. And killer milkmaids and Negroes who walk around with a Silver Star on their chest, well, that’s not what they think we’re fighting for.”

Rio blinks. Until this moment it has never occurred to her that she represents something . . . unacceptable. Unacceptable even to many of the most open-minded people. Rainy’s cynicism has the ring of truth, and now she can imagine it. Back in Gedwell Falls, in the town square, local girl Rio Richlin on a bunting-bedecked bandstand talking about how many Krauts she’s killed.

People would applaud, no doubt. But then, when she’d climbed down off that bandstand and walked around town, people would give her sidelong looks, and avoid her, and talk behind her back.

“Well . . . well, damn,” Rio says, deflated.

“I’ll get this round,” Rainy says, and gets up to go to the bar.

“She’s laying it on thick,” Frangie says, “but she’s not wrong.” Then, in a whisper, “Is she all right? There’s something . . .” She shrugs and looks uncomfortable.

“That’s right, you don’t know,” Rio says with a significant look. “They rescued her—not meaning to, you understand, some platoon that just happened to be the ones to liberate Gestapo HQ.”

Frangie is shocked. “What was she doing in Gestapo HQ?”

Rio shakes her head. “You don’t want that answer. I know, and I wish I didn’t. I’ll just say, whatever stories you’ve heard about those Gestapo *s, the truth is worse.”

Frangie sneaks a look at Rainy, leaning against the bar and waiting as the barman pours three beers. “The poor girl.”

Rio follows the direction of Frangie’s gaze and says, “Yeah. Sergeant Schulterman is not having a good war.”

Frangie has not kept pace with the other two as the beer flows. She’s just starting her second by the time Rio and Rainy are well into their fifth, sweating, cursing freely, and slurring angry words.

At one point Rainy, voice sullen and brutal, says, “I’m not going home. I’m not. Fug that. I’ll go home when they’re all dead. Every fugging Nazi. I’ll go home after I’ve stuck a pistol into Herr Hitler’s fugging mouth and pulled the fugging trigger.”

Rio laughs savagely at this and nods agreement. Frangie’s attention is drawn to a group of four young GIs, all privates, all in crisp, clean army uniforms with nary a stripe on their sleeves. They are all young men and obviously in tearing high spirits.

Until they spot the three women.

One of them, a gangly youngster with a mean grin, comes over, leans on their table, and says, “Ladies. You look lovely this evening. But there seems to be a Nigra stinking up your table and—”

In less than three seconds Rio has knocked his hands away, which causes him to topple forward off-balance, grasped the back of his head, and accelerated his fall, slamming his face hard onto the table surface. Blood spurts from his nose. He yells, and Rio shifts her grip to one of his ears, which she twists viciously.

“See that ribbon on her uniform, you pimple?” Rio says, turning his head to look at Frangie. “That’s a goddamned Purple Heart. You come back tomorrow and there’ll be a goddamned Silver Star alongside it, you snot-nosed little shit.”

The other three start forward, ready to come to the aid of their companion, but they stop upon seeing a look from Rio. Frangie thinks it’s about the same look that a doomed gazelle sees on the face of a lioness.

“He’s just a little frisky, Corporal,” one of the cleverer among them says quickly. He retrieves his bleeding friend and guides him toward the men’s restroom.

“Thanks,” Frangie says. “But it doesn’t bother me. It’s water off a duck’s back.”

“Really?” Rainy asks her, peering with the special intensity of the inebriated. “That doesn’t bother you?”

“Maybe a little,” Frangie mutters. “You get used to it.”