At last comes the word.
Stick pulls back a corner of the tattered shelter half over the hole Rio is sharing with Jenou and Jack and says, “They’re taking us off the line. Move out in five.”
It should be time for relief, even exultation. But emotion is an impossible luxury now. So they pack up their gear and clamber up out of their hole and trudge downhill, downhill for the first time in . . . in forever.
Rio walks asleep, or very near to it. One foot moves in front of the other with the regularity and mindlessness of a machine. She walks past rows of bodies laid by the side of the road, bloated, decayed, gruesomely torn bodies that have lost their power to move her.
Off the road, in ditches, on the stony sides of ridges, lie the German dead. All have been stripped of souvenirs, so their uniforms lie unbuttoned and askew. Here and there a dead Kraut has been propped against a tree or a rock so some grim joker can stick a cigarette in his mouth, or scrawl a clever sign and hang it around hi
s neck.
One German, his head gone, has been leaned against a blasted German 88 and a cardboard drawing of Adolf Hitler has been propped on the stump of his neck to suggest a dead Führer.
After an eternity they stumble onto waiting trucks and are hauled like cattle to the rear staging area a mile away at the edge of a town that is now little more than a rock quarry.
And suddenly, there is hot food. There are proper tents with channels dug around them like moats to keep out the water.
Rio makes it no farther. She falls face-first onto a cot and is asleep before her body hits the canvas. No dreams. Nothing. She is destroyed, finished, drained of every last ounce of energy, a body without a mind.
When she wakes it is to the sound of hail pelting the roof of the tent. She is still in her vile uniform, her boots still on her feet, weighed down now with dried mud rather than wet.
Her body is a single, unified mass of aches and bruises as she sits up, blinks owlishly in the gray half-light, and sees Jenou in the next bunk, writing in the back of Magraff’s sketch pad. That fact should surprise Rio, but what draws her attention with far greater force is that Jenou is wearing a clean uniform. A damp uniform, but a clean one.
“D’jget that?” Rio mutters, tongue woolly.
“Well, hello, sleeping beauty,” Jenou says.
“Fresh gear?”
Jenou nods. “Uniforms, hot chow, and a shower, which is available for women from ten a.m. to . . . Well, you could just make it.” Jenou sets down the pad, stands up, gives Rio her hand, and hauls her to her feet. “Follow me.”
The shower is a fifty-five-gallon drum raised on a platform, with four pieces of pipe welded in place, each ending not in a showerhead, but in a simple valve that releases a moderate stream of icy cold but mud-free water. The four shower pipes are set up in a canvas-walled enclosure. An official stenciled sign reads: GI Janes Only, 10 to 2. An unofficial, handmade sign below reads: Any male organ found on the premises between 10 and 2 will be removed and sent to the mess tent.
Rio finds a scrap of soap resting in a mess kit on the ground. But before she can employ soap she first lets the water sluice away unbelievable layers of filth, filth in every crack and every orifice.
And then: soap.
Rio is crying by the time she lathers the soap and covers her hair, her face, her body—every inch of her body. Soap! Soap! The smell of it. The feel of it. It’s a small, slippery piece of humanity and civilization. She lathers and rinses, and then does it all again.
When at last she can no longer take the cold, she finds Jenou standing by with a neatly folded and astoundingly clean uniform.
From there it’s to the mess hall tent, where Rio would have happily devoured her weight in SOS without a complaint. But the cooks have done better, layering on scrambled eggs (powdered) and sausages and wonderful, fluffy, freshly made biscuits with butter(!) and jam(!). And of course, there is coffee. Coffee! The magical beverage. There’s a great, steaming tureen of coffee, all the coffee in the world, and it’s hot, and it’s not made from instant, and it contains no tiny pieces of gravel or leftover corned beef.
Rio eats and drinks like an animal, shoveling, swallowing without chewing, until she is full. And then she keeps eating and drinking but uses her fork and spoon.
Jenou doesn’t say much, just sits patiently, watching her friend eat and drink. When Rio is at last sated, Jenou says, “You’re going to want to sleep some more.”
“I slept plenty,” Rio says.
“Uh-huh,” Jenou says, and leads her back to the tent. Rio says she just wants to close her eyes for a minute and wakes up ten hours later.
It is night when she opens her eyes. For a while she can’t tell where she is. It takes a while before vague memories of soap and food come floating up to her conscious mind.
She sits up and looks around her. Jenou, asleep, snoring lightly. Cat, asleep, snoring not so lightly. Jack sitting in his cot, writing a letter by the light of a small candle. Beebee counting something on his cot and arranging things in short stacks: packs of smokes. Stick, passed out, facedown in his cot.
“Where’s Geer? And Pang?” Rio asks, dreading the answer.
Jack sets his letter aside and smiles crookedly at her. “She lives! As for Geer and Pang, I believe they are playing poker in another tent. Quite healthy, I assure you, though I imagine they’ll both be broke when they get back.”