Silver Stars (Front Lines #2)(95)

“I’m just doing my job,” Rio insists.

“Your job? I’m your friend, Rio. Remember? You and me? Jen and Rio?”

Rio kicks the side of the boat in frustration. “What do you want from me, Jenou?”

Jenou stares for a moment, meeting Rio’s angry gaze before dropping her own, so she ends up looking at Rio’s koummya. “I don’t think I’m going to make it, Rio. I feel it. You know? I feel it here.” She taps her chest. “If I’m going to buy it, I want to know I’ve got a friend who will mourn for me.”

“Christ, Jen, you’re not going to die,” Rio says dismissively.

Jenou’s belligerence is all gone, the flash of anger burned out. In a soft voice she says, “What if I do, Rio? What if you do?”

“What the hell is the point of worrying about it? I don’t see Geer or Pang or Stick moping.”

“No,” Jenou admits. “They’re all busy being men.” She says that last word with a strange mix of condescension and affection. “We’re not men, Rio. We don’t have to be men.”

Rio shakes out a cigarette and arches her body over it, shielding it so her Zippo will light. The flame lights her face, an eerie light, like something out of a Dracula movie. “Don’t we?” Rio asks, exhaling smoke. “You ever think maybe it’s the other way around? Maybe men are that way because they grow up expecting they might someday find themselves in some shithole getting shot at?”

Jenou draws back, confused, and Rio plows ahead, angry in her own turn now. “You think if we grew up imagining the day we’d be ass-deep in mud with our buddies getting picked off, we’d be sharing our deepest emotions? You and me, we grew up imagining our first kiss and planning our weddings. They grew up playing cowboys and Indians, playing war. So yeah, they keep their distance from each other, they don’t expose themselves to . . .”

“To what?”

“Pain.” The word comes through gritted teeth. She grabs Jenou’s collar and yanks her close, close enough that no one else can hear. “It tears my guts out, Jen. Cassel. Suarez. It’s like a . . . it’s pain, that’s all. And you want me to be little Rio from Gedwell Falls and share my every thought with you? You think I don’t know you could get hit? You think every goddamn patrol we go out on, every fugging little village, you think I forget it could be you next?”

Rio releases Jenou and steps back. She takes a deep drag on her cigarette, but a drop of rain has extinguished it. “We’re in this now, Jen. We can’t go home. We’re here, and we’re in this, and any moment some Kraut could . . . Grab a fugging bottle of wine . . . make the wrong step . . . and what do you want to do, have a nice chat about it? You want me to spill my guts to you and tell you I’m scared too? Want to ask me again what it was like, shooting those Eye-ties?”

Jenou says nothing, and Rio yells, “Stick! These two look okay!” Then, her energy gone for now, she says, “Jen, you don’t get it. It could be you. Or it could be me. You really think the smart move is for us to get closer?”

Jenou shakes her head slowly. “Okay, Rio, have it your way. I just have one question, and I want the truth.”

“Yeah?”

“What was it like. For you. The first time you killed a man?”

Rio is quiet for a moment, ignoring Stick who is coming over with the rest of the squad. In a barely audible voice she says, “It was . . .” She shakes her head, smiles ruefully, and says, “I liked it. That’s the truth of it. I felt powerful. And I liked it.” She forms a bitter half smile. “That’s what you wanted me to say, isn’t it?”

The two friends look into each other’s eyes. Jenou nods very slightly and says, “See, that’s the thing, Rio. You were made for this. You talk about the men growing up expecting something like this, well, you didn’t expect it, but you took to it fast enough.”

“I’m just trying to get by.”

“We’re all just trying to get by, but we aren’t all Killer Rick.”

“You want to feel bad every time you kill one of those bastards who are trying to kill us?”

Jenou shakes her head. “No, Rio. We’d all go nuts. I’d go nuts. I’m just . . . I’m scared, and I want to make sense of it all. It’s got to mean something, doesn’t it? If I get it, I want to die thinking it made some kind of sense.”

“Yeah, well, after it’s all over you can write a book about it. Call it Jenou Castain: My Wartime Adventures in Africa, Sicily, and Italy.”

They are silent for a while as Stick breaks the squad in two to carry the boats, and they wait for the signal. Then, with forced humor, Jenou says, “Of course they might make a movie of the book. I’d have to be played by Veronica Lake.”

“Yeah? And who plays me?”

“John Wayne in a dress,” Jenou says instantly.

This is somehow both preposterous and funny, and despite the rain and the cold and the exhaustion and the fear of what is coming, Rio’s slow smile appears.

“Fug you, Jenou.”

“Yeah, fug you too, Rio.”

“Just keep your head down,” Rio says, and reaches for Jenou’s cold hand. “You’ll be okay.”

“Whatever you say, Corporal.” The hand squeeze is quick and furtive.