Front Lines (Front Lines 1)

“You want to hear a story, Private Marr?” Kerwin asks.

“I got time on my hands,” Frangie says ruefully.

> “See, there’s this old boy doesn’t like the ladies taking part in this here war, and he makes some rude suggestions to Private Richlin. Well—”

“Oh come on, Cassel, don’t tell that story. I sound like some kind of crazy person.”

“Well, now I have got to hear it,” Frangie says.

For the next hour they swap stories, some funny, some not, and Rio’s still grinning when the proctor finds them. He’s a senior NCO armed with a clipboard and a pistol. He fires a round in the air, and the pig just stares at him. The NCO levels the pistol at the pig, which snorts derisively and finally trots off into the woods.

“What’s going on here?” the proctor asks, drawling the words.

“These are my prisoners, Sergeant,” Frangie answers.

Kerwin says, “Uh, Sergeant? I don’t suppose you need to mention any details of this to anyone else, do you?”

“You mean you being caught by a tiny little Nigra girl and getting chased up a tree by a pig? My lips are sealed, Private.”

Rio is prepared to believe this until later, when the badly beaten Blue Team is at chow and Jack slices into his ham steak, holds up a piece on the end of his fork, and says, “Richlin, I do hope this isn’t a friend of yours.”

Rio accepts the ribbing with good nature, just as the entire platoon has had to endure ridicule for losing the day’s exercise to a colored platoon. She’s still digesting the fact that she, little Rio Richlin from Gedwell Falls nowhere, is seen as ornery.

Well. Maybe I am.

15

FRANGIE MARR—CAMP SZEKELY, SMIDVILLE, GEORGIA, USA

“I got those Szekely blues, just as blue as I can be,” Frangie sings to herself, freely adapting the W. C. Handy song “St. Louis Blues.” “Oh, my sergeant’s got a heart like a rock cast in the sea. Or else he wouldn’t have been so mean to me.”

She has not felt much like singing lately, but tomorrow is to be her first time off-post since coming to this steamy backwater, and she’s walking toward the barracks, coming from the laundry with fresh uniforms and a spring in her step. Frangie’s lucky that for her home is just a sixteen-hour bus and train ride away. For most of the soldiers at Camp Szekely, a three-day pass means staying with one of the black families in Smidville that will host lonesome soldiers for fifty cents a night.

Smidville isn’t much of a town, and what there is of it is whites only. For black soldiers there’s a juke joint out on the highway where for two dollars you can get pretty drunk and listen to some amateur musicians playing jazz or blues. But that’s one thing for the men, a whole different matter for females: an unaccompanied woman at a juke joint is looking for trouble. Even an accompanied woman might not be so safe.

Most of the few women soldiers on the post live too far off to get home and back, so they stay in the barracks, even when they have a chance to get away, but Frangie has done her research and timed it all out, and there’s a bus that will carry colored passengers in the last three rows to Atlanta, where she can catch a train to Tulsa. She’s got leave coming; leave that, if everything works just right, will let her spend almost a day and a half with her family.

“If I feel tomorrow like I feel today, I’m gonna pack my trunk and make my getaway.” Normally she sings in the church choir, the old standards like “Onward Christian Soldiers” and “Hard Trials” and “Go Down, Moses.” Fond memories of warm nights practicing with the choir prompt her to begin a spontaneous rewrite of “My Way’s Cloudy.”

“Old Captain’s mad, and I am glad, send them angels down! We’re comin’ on to ’43, send them angels down. We’re marchin’ on to gay Paree, oh send them angels down!”

A day and a half without marching or KP or any of the other strains and indignities of military life sounds pretty good.

“Hey there, Private, that’s a pretty voice you have. You want a ride back to barracks? Sweet thing like you shouldn’t have to walk all that way carrying a box.”

He’s a white sergeant, driving an open jeep at walking speed, now keeping pace with her. A tingle of fear goes up her spine. His voice slurs from drink.

“No thanks, Sergeant. I don’t mind the walk.”

“Well, isn’t that a hell of a thing. A white man offers you a ride and you turn him down?”

She glances at him. He’s a tall man with a thin face and blue eyes that don’t quite want to focus on a single point. “I don’t want any trouble, Sergeant. I like to walk.”

“Trouble? Who said anything about trouble?”

“It’s not far.” Maybe it wasn’t far to walk, but now she is measuring the length of this dusty, deserted, hard-pack street with a whole different appreciation for distance. How far can she run before dropping her bundle? Can the jeep follow her across the parade ground if she gets off the road?

She accelerates her walking pace. He notices.