Purple Hearts (Front Lines 3)

He releases her. “I put a bandage on the side of your head, but I’m a gunner, not a medic.”

He’s a bespectacled, early twenties white boy with brown eyes and a mouth permanently quirked so he always looks amused. F

rangie didn’t see quite what he—or any of them—should find amusing. They are in a column of several dozen soldiers being marched along in the freezing cold, with snow in their faces, as SS swagger alongside, occasionally punching or kicking a straggler.

Manning is dead.

Deacon is dead.

“I’m Frank Pepper,” the white man says, holding out his hand. “From Memphis, Tennessee.”

Frangie shakes his hand, frowning as she does it, because it is one thing for a white man from California or New York to shake her hand, but it’s a whole different thing for a southern white boy.

“Frangie Marr. Tulsa.”

“Oklahoma, huh? Cowboys and such?”

“No.”

Manning. Dead.

Deacon. Dead.

“Maybe you can tell I just got here,” Pepper says. “One day in the damn war and I’m a prisoner. That beats all.” He shakes his head, regretful but philosophical.

“Well, thanks for helping me.”

“You’re thinking it’s funny, a southern boy helping you out.”

“I guess I am,” Frangie admits.

He leans close and whispers, “I’m not exactly a soldier. I’m a musician. Stand-up bass.” He mimes plucking a bass. “Blues, jazz, boogie-woogie, if you’re going to play music—real music—it’s Nigra music.”

“You play with colored musicians?”

He looks around absurdly, as though the SS will be upset by this. And perhaps, Frangie thinks, they would be. These are, after all, committed, indoctrinated Nazis for the most part. And the similarities between Nazis and white-sheeted night riders with ropes are obvious.

“I can sit in with colored players, they don’t mind so long as you can lay down a rhythm. Guess who I played with? Albert Ammons! It was just one set, but man, what that fat ole colored boy does with the ivories!”

The SS guards are now veering them into a snow-covered field where they are told to wait, standing.

“Probably bringing up some trucks to take us to the POW camp,” Pepper says. “Fine with me! My dogs are killing me!”

There is a low barbed wire fence, and they are made to climb over it, ripping uniform trousers and tripping the clumsy or the exhausted. The field is surrounded on three sides by forest, stark, leafless trees with branches silvered by snow. Some SS men head across the snow to the borders of the field.

Frangie does a quick count, something like seventy-five or eighty-odd GIs stand shivering and breathing steam.

“Yeah, I reckon we’re going to Germany,” Pepper says. “And probably not a phonograph or a radio anywhere. At least it’s got to be warmer than this.”

But Frangie is not sure. Her stomach is twisting in knots. There’s something in the air, on the faces of the SS, in this place.

They’re going to kill us.

The thought comes fully formed and undeniable. It is a truth Frangie feels deep down, down beyond the reach of Pepper’s optimistic chatter.

She wants to tell him, wants to say the words, but saying them will make them real, and she wants desperately to believe that her instincts are wrong.

A German staff car and a covered truck push through the barbed wire and stop at the edge of the road.