Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(72)
But the journey is all by truck, so to Frangie it’s all pretty much the same. On the ride she tries to get to know the men in her truck, and they are all men with just one woman GI aside from Frangie. The squad sergeant is Peter A. Lipton, known by everyone as Pal. He’s a fidgety man in his late twenties, old to be wearing buck sergeant’s stripes, and his face forms a permanent scowl. The lone woman, Annette Johnson, is the corporal, a seemingly emotionless woman and almost as burly as Cat Preeling. Neither Lipton nor Johnson has any interest in Frangie—she’s “the new guy,” frequently abbreviated to FNG, as in Fugging New Guy, or less frequently, Bambi, after the Disney cartoon movie (which Frangie has not seen).
But she strikes up an easy conversation with a fellow Oklahoman named Andy Hinkley. Private Hinkley is from Broken Bow, Oklahoma, a small town near the Arkansas border, which he cheerfully describes as “six Nigra families being eyeballed by a thousand crackers, half of which own sheets with eye holes.”
Frangie has never been to Broken Bow, and Hinkley has never been to Tulsa, but they are two Sooners in a truckload weighted heavily toward Tennessee boys.
“Is it true ya’ll ride buffaloes and shoot Injuns?” one of the Memphis boys asks, looking to start any kind of trouble, anything to beat the boredom.
“Injuns were mostly run off back when,” Hinkley says, not interested in arguing but certainly ready to go jab for jab. “My grandpap was shot by an Injun arrow. Right in the neck. Would have killed a Memphis boy, sure, soft living and all, but being a tough old Okie, my grandpap just pulled it out and threw it right back so hard it pierced the Injun chief right through the eye. Went straight on through and killed the medicine man too.”
Frangie laughs, a sound that brings smiles to more than one face. She has a great laugh; a whole body laugh that doubles her over.
“Which eye was that?” Memphis demands.
“Why, it was his left eye. Grandpap had already cut out his other one with a bowie knife, which—”
“Here we go.” Memphis rolls his eyes.
“A bowie knife, I say, which Grandpap took off Jim Bowie himself in a card game in Baton Rouge.”
The tale of Hinkley’s grandfather, elaborated on in a free-form saga that makes little allowance for time and space, what with Grandpap also having been taught to handle a sword by the Marquis de Lafayette, learning to speak Comanche from Pocahontas (by whom he had three natural children), and surviving the Battle of Little Big Horn by passing himself off as a lunatic.
It all reminds Frangie of riding on a hay wagon at a church social when she was just seven. Then she had teased her big brother, Harder, who even as a young teen was a skeptical soul and willing to voice doubts about God and even President Roosevelt, so long as someone could be found to argue with him.
“Your grandpap gets around,” Frangie says to Hinkley when he finally runs out of steam, somewhere in the Chinese opium wars.
“Well, we’re a rambling bunch, us Hinkleys. Look at me. Here I am in Sicily.”
“Well, I guess that proves it,” Frangie says.
“Can’t argue with facts,” Hinkley says solemnly.
Ahead is the first village they’ve come across, maybe six or seven miles off the main road. It’s like many Sicilian villages, built on a hill, approached by a steep, serpentine road that leaves them exposed to possible fire from above.
A squad is dismounted and sent ahead on foot in a cautious reconnaissance. Frangie watches their progress until they round a corner and disappear from view.
A rush of rag-clad children appears and surrounds the trucks, begging and staring. One little boy wants to touch one of them and Frangie obliges by shaking his hand. The boy grips her hand and with his other hand touches the black skin of her arm, rubs it like he’s trying to get the color to come off.
An ancient man, gnarled, his spine twisted, armed with a well-used walking stick, hobbles to Lieutenant Waterstone, standing beside his jeep. There follows a conversation of sorts, in hand gestures and frustrated looks. Some of the urchins go over to offer more hand gestures, but at least one of the girls can read a map and points with great certainty to the map, then up at the road, then back at the map.
Sergeants Green and Lipton are summoned forward, and they confer with the lieutenant and with various gesturing, nodding Sicilians who have grown into a small crowd. Moments later Frangie’s squad and another are summarily tossed off their comfortable trucks and made to march steeply uphill into the town.
“Locals say there’s a couple 88s right in the town square up ahead,” Sergeant Green explains as three dozen GIs surround him. “We’re going ahead. Now listen. The locals are behaving themselves, so you all watch who you’re shooting and don’t shoot unless you see a Kraut or Eye-tie uniform.”
They form a column in two sections, one walking ahead, one hanging back a few hundred yards. Frangie is with this second group. They enter the town proper, walking along streets so narrow and overhung with balconies that the trucks would never have made it. Here, too, children walk along, importuning in singsong voices, at first charming and then irritating the GIs. After a quarter mile, though, the urchins fall away and a tingle climbs Frangie’s spine. The streets are empty but for a single old woman in black carrying a net bag containing wine, a ripe pepper, and two onions.
From within the homes close on either side, Frangie hears the sounds of laughter and argument, the clatter of pots and pans, and she smells wonderful, exotic smells, garlic and basil and frying fish. But the shutters have been closed up, and aside from an occasional eye peeking through a slat, there is not a Sicilian to be seen.