Several curses come to Frangie’s mind, but as the words form she sees her mother’s face, and worse still, Pastor M’Dale’s disappointed look, and she swallows the curses. She tosses the belt with the medicine-stuffed cartridge pockets aside. Then she buttons her uniform to the top button, hoping to avoid pushing ten pounds of Tunisian red dirt down her front. She pulls a morphine ampule from her breast pocket and clutches it in her left hand.
There are many ways Frangie does not want to die, and being crushed face-first in the dirt by a tank rates high on her list. But it’s too late now to say, “This is not my problem.”
Keep me strong, Lord.
“Grab my ankles,” Frangie says.
The sergeant summons two beefy soldiers and each takes a leg.
Using her elbows, Frangie moves like a half-crippled insect down the slope of the crater. The tank blocks the sun, and she can feel its mass poised above her, inch-thick steel plates, mud-clogged treads to left and right. The rear of the tank is a louvered grille that radiates the stifling heat of the engine, which, added to the hundred-degree air temperature, makes the crater a place where you could bake a biscuit.
Frangie imagines her body being squeezed through those louvers, like so much meat in a sausage grinder, cooking even as she . . .
Fear. It’s been creeping in, little by little, tingling and twisting her stomach, but now it is beginning to seem that she is actually going to do this, and at that point the fear sets aside all subtlety and comes rushing up within her.
Lord, help me to help this man.
And don’t let that tank slip!
She should add a prudent and humble “Thy will be done,” but if God’s will is to crush her with a tank, she doesn’t want to make it any easier on Him.
Frangie has known fear in her life. Fear of destitution when her father was injured and lost his job. Fear of hostile whites, a fear made very real by the history of her home state and city. Just twenty-two years have passed since white rioters burned down all of the Greenwood district, once known as the black Wall Street, blocks from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
And since enlisting she has felt fear (mixed with anger) as she endured various threats by white men who hated the very idea of a black soldier. Then, too, there were the dark mutterings of many of her fellow colored soldiers, who equally despised the idea of a woman in uniform.
But right now her fear is focused on the fact that her head an
d now shoulders too are right in line to be crushed if the tank slips.
I’m a roach beneath a shoe.
She is far enough down that Williams can look at her and she can see his face, though it is so transformed by pain and terror that she doubts his own mother would recognize him.
Don’t cry, don’t cry or it will scare him.
But I want to cry.
“I think we best get him out of here,” Frangie calls back to the men holding her ankles. She tries to keep panic out of her voice—Williams doesn’t need to be reminded that he’s in danger—but fear raises her tone an octave and she sounds like a child. A scared child.
“Just give me the shot, Doc! Oh God!”
“Just hang on, Williams, hang on.”
The problem is clear. If she can dig out enough dirt beneath Williams she may be able to pull him free, or at least do so with some help. But with every spadeful she will increase the odds of the tank sliding.
“The tractor will get here sooner or later,” the sergeant says.
“It’s the later that’s a problem,” Frangie says. Her voice is strained, she is very nearly talking upside down, and grit has already found its way to her mouth, sucked in with each breath. She tries to spit, but her mouth is as dry as the dust she inhales. “I can scoop the dirt that’s just right under him.”
There’s a moment’s pause as the sergeant confers in low tones with someone else, perhaps an officer.
“Give it a try, Doc,” comes the verdict.
“Pass me an entrenching tool,” she says. She is fully, blazingly aware of the possibilities. She’s always had a good imagination, and imagination is not a help at times like this. She can imagine the sounds. She can imagine the cries of warning from the men watching her. She can imagine them yanking her back, but too slowly, too slowly to stop that hot louvered grille from turning her head into thick, sizzling slices of salami.
An entrenching tool—a foldable shovel—is passed down to her, blade open and locked in place by its adjustable nut. She is head down, hardly the best position for digging.
Williams lets loose another scream.