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Rio shrugs. “I enjoyed shooting at targets. I didn’t think I would, but I did. At targets.”
“Deadeye Richlin,” Jenou teases.
“I’ll shoot a Jap or a German,” Tilo says. “I hope I don’t have to shoot any Italians. My mother’s Italian. She hates that Mussolini and his crowd, but regular old Italians aren’t all big fans of his either. Not like it is with the Germans. You ever see them in those rallies? They love Hitler. They want to take over the world. Italians don’t want to take over a damned thing. They want to eat some noodles and drink some wine and make love to a beautiful, blond-haired private.”
He bats his long-lashed eyes at Jenou, and she is not entirely dismissive.
“Best if we get sent to kill Japs,” Luther says. “That’s like shooting a dog.”
“Forgive me, but is shooting dogs a form of sport in America?” Jack, of course.
Kerwin says, “Naw, not sport. Geer shoots dogs for dinner.”
That earns enough laughter that Luther switches back to his own table, taking his kitten with him.
“I don’t know,” Rio says. “I don’t know if I can do it. I don’t want to do it, I know that much. I just want to drive a truck or maybe a jeep.”
“She’s a surprisingly good driver,” Jenou confirms. “I don’t believe she’s killed more than three, maybe four garbage cans with her driving. And a few mailboxes. But no people. So far.”
“Stop picking on me or I’ll eat your creamed crap on toast.”
Jenou shoves her tray toward Rio. “That’s not so much a threat as it is a kind offer.”
Rio casts her mind back to the day’s training. In her mind’s eye she tries to envision the paper target as a man. Tries to imagine herself actually taking aim and killing an actual man. Tries to imagine what the bullet would . . . and then she stops herself and her thoughts swerve elsewhere, to Strand, who seems with each passing day to become more distant, more of an old photograph in her mind instead of the boy who had held her hand in the movie theater.
Rio goes blank and daydreamy and only after a while realizes that in her funk she has let her gaze settle on Jack Stafford.
She blinks and looks away, feeling warmth rise up her neck and into her cheeks.
Conversation turns to other things, but while Rio laughs and jokes, she can still feel the wooden stock in her hands, the butt plate kicking against her shoulder, and the thrill of seeing that little hole drilled in the distant target.
She does not want to shoot at a human being, not even a Jap, not even as payback for what they had done to Rachel. But she is disciplined when it came to firing position, she has twenty-twenty vision and a steady hand, she hits what she shoots at, and the simple truth is, that feels good.
Before she is done with Camp Maron she will earn a Marksman rating with the M1 rifle, and then a Sharpshooter rating, only falling short of the coveted Expert rank.
She is a decent driver, despite Jenou’s teasing. A decent driver.
But a hell of a shot.
13
FRANGIE MARR—CAMP SZEKELY, SMIDVILLE, GEORGIA, USA
“Some of you actually volunteered to join this great patriotic endeavor to kill the Japanese and the Italian and the German for Uncle Sam.” Sergeant Morton Kirkland is a man who does not share the common taste for derogatory nicknames for enemies. Frangie has never heard him refer to a Jap or a Kraut. “But most of you are draftees, here against your will. Many of you would like to go home.”
Some of those who enlisted would like to go home, too, Frangie thinks. But neither she nor any of the several dozen men
and half-dozen women speaks up to say so. Sergeant Kirkland isn’t a bad fellow, but he’s a yeller, an old-school drill instructor, complete with an inventive list of insults and insulting nicknames for various recruits: Flounder, Cheesedick, Pustule, Stumbles, and for Frangie, Okaninny, a word combining her home state, Oklahoma, with either “ninny” or “pickaninny”—he hasn’t made that clear.
While Sergeant Kirkland won’t refer to the enemy as Japs, he will refer to recruits as bedbugs.
They are in a field of red Georgia clay, a large swath of which is garlanded with barbed wire. The wire is stretched across wooden stakes set about eighteen inches above the ground. It looks like a crude device meant to trip an enemy, like something left over from the last war. In places the carefully stretched wire is crossed by random snakes of coiled wire, so the whole thing taken together is nearly impenetrable. The course is the better part of an acre, bounded on one side by a log-and-dirt berm that rises about two feet high.
Frangie’s company has not been told what they are to do here—Sergeant Kirkland plays things close to the vest and has a flair for the dramatic. But Frangie cannot help but notice a corporal and a PFC unloading boxes of what looks like ammunition from a wagon-wheeled caisson.
“Well, you bedbugs, those of you who want out of the army, today is the day!”
The closest thing Frangie has to a friend in the company is Clara Moore, a stooped and rather dull girl from Enid, Oklahoma, and thus a fellow Okie. Sergeant Kirkland calls her Moo Cow. It’s not the nicest name, but it’s not the most insulting either. Clara raises her hand, which causes the sergeant to freeze in midword and stare at her with a look that could melt a tank.
