“Well, I guess that proves it,” Frangie says.
“Can’t argue with facts,” Hinkley says solemnly.
Ahead is the first village they’ve come across, maybe six or seven miles off the main road. It’s like many Sicilian villages, built on a hill, approached by a steep, serpentine road that leaves them exposed to possible fire from above.
A squad is dismounted and sent ahead on foot in a cautious reconnaissance. Frangie watches their progress until they round a corner and disappear from view.
A rush of rag-clad children appears and surrounds the trucks, begging and staring. One little boy wants to touch one of them and Frangie obliges by shaking his hand. The boy grips her hand and with his other hand touches the black skin of her arm, rubs it like he’s trying to get the color to come off.
An ancient man, gnarled, his spine twisted, armed with a well-used walking stick, hobbles to Lieutenant Waterstone, standing beside his jeep. There follows a conversation of sorts, in hand gestures and frustrated looks. Some of the urchins go over to offer more hand gestures, but at least one of the girls can read a map and points with great certainty to the map, then up at the road, then back at the map.
Sergeants Green and Lipton are summoned forward, and they confer with the lieutenant and with various gesturing, nodding Sicilians who have grown into a small crowd. Moments later Frangie’s squad and another are summarily tossed off their comfortable trucks and made to march steeply uphill into the town.
“Locals say there’s a couple 88s right in the town square up ahead,” Sergeant Green explains as three dozen GIs surround him. “We’re going ahead. Now listen. The locals are behaving themselves, so you all watch who you’re shooting and don’t shoot unless you see a Kraut or Eye-tie uniform.”
They form a column in two sections, one walking ahead, one hanging back a few hundred yards. Frangie is with this second group. They enter the town proper, walking along streets so narrow and overhung with balconies that the trucks would never have made it. Here, too, children walk along, importuning in singsong voices, at first charming and then irritating the GIs. After a quarter mile, though, the urchins fall away and a tingle climbs Frangie’s spine. The streets are empty but for a single old woman in black carrying a net bag containing wine, a ripe pepper, and two onions.
From within the homes close on either side, Frangie hears the sounds of laughter and argument, the clatter of pots and pans, and she smells wonderful, exotic smells, garlic and basil and frying fish. But the shutters have been closed up, and aside from an occasional eye peeking through a slat, there is not a Sicilian to be seen.
No one has to tell the GIs to be alert, the air practically vibrates with menace. They near what has been described to them as the town center. Lieutenant Waterstone consults his map again, and sends half his force, including Pal Lipton’s squad, down an alley, intending to flank what they believe is the German position.
Silence but for the sound of boots on cobblestones. Every rifle at the ready. Eyes searching, searching every doorway, balcony, window, and roofline.
A sudden loud, braying laugh and out of a doorway steps a German soldier. He has a slice of pizza in one hand, a bottle of white wine in the other, his Schmeisser slung over his shoulder.
The German freezes. Gapes. Reaches for his weapon. Thinks better of it, turns to run, and Walter Green, late of Iowa, takes quick steps, runs, grabs, and hauls him backward, off-balance, by his uniform collar. Green has his knife. There’s a blur, a pitiful yelp that becomes a gurgling sound, and a fountain of blood. The blood sprays across the cobbles and up the wall beneath a defaced picture of Mussolini.
Green bears the man’s weight for a moment and lowers him almost kindly to the ground, where the rest of the German’s blood fills the gaps between cobblestones, first spraying, then pulsating, then trickling.
But a second German has escaped, disappearing at a run up steep, narrow steps.
Frangie steps around the dying German, forcing herself to look down at him, trying not to step in his blood, and that’s when the firing starts. There’s a loud bang, and Frangie Marr suddenly sits down.
Noise everywhere, guns firing, yelling, the rush of men toward cover. Frangie feels stupid sitting, ridiculous, gotta get up, and Lipton twists and collapses. The wall behind Frangie is chewed by machine gun fire while other bullets spark as they strike the hard cobbles to go singing away.
Frangie tries to stand, but her legs aren’t working quite right, and neither is her mind, which is not making sense of things, not quite figuring anything out. She knows she should try to help Lipton, who is bellowing in pain and being dragged off the middle of the street by Jelly, who trips, slips, turns to get back to his sergeant but is scared off by bullets everywhere, everywhere. It’s like someone kicked over a bee’s hive, zipping and buzzing. And now Frangie’s crawling toward Lipton, hands slipping in the dead German’s blood. No, no, can’t be, he’s way back there, but her hands are definitely red with blood.
Can’t even crawl, stupid leg.
Lipton is yelling, “Get back, goddammit!”
Well, he doesn’t mean her, he wouldn’t blaspheme that way at her, so she crawls on, fuzzy in her mind, until she reaches him. On automatic, without a conscious plan, she yanks up his shirt and sees the brutal belly wound, blood seeping, not spurting. Nothing to do but bandage him up, and she sets about this task with rote movements, movements that are muscle memory now, the pinching out of bits of uniform cloth, the sulfa, the careful folding of . . .
Very tired, that’s what she is, very tired.
And now a bullet wound that’s taken off a chunk of a man’s shoulder, and then . . . and a bleeder . . . pressure . . .
A little rest.
Just a little rest.
Frangie means to lie back, but she falls and her helmet smacks the cobbles, jarring her so she tries to . . .
Can’t . . . arms . . . Can’t . . . um . . . Should . . .
The sky is a narrow band of royal blue, late afternoon shifting toward evening’s navy blue.
Frangie closes her eyes.