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“You my medic?” Green asks, and his face is all welcome and smiles. “Thank the good Lord. At least there’ll be someone I know by name.” He grabs her arm in a friendly sort of way and guides her to meet a white officer, a lieutenant who can hardly be twenty-two. The lieutenant is sitting on the hood of a broken-down jeep.
“Lieutenant Waterstone? This is Corporal Marr, the medic they sent us.”
“A girl?” the lieutenant says with no attempt to hide a condescending smirk. He looks her up and down and adds, “A girl and a midget besides.”
But from Green’s posture Frangie gets the impression that this may be a bit of an act on the lieutenant’s part.
“Yes, sir, she’s a small one,” Green says complacently.
Waterstone hops down from the jeep, and Frangie sees that he is at best three inches taller than her. In fact, the three of them standing together are practically an advertisement for Short Folks Monthly.
“You know what I think?” Waterstone says, chin thrust out in a belligerent echo of the Mussolini posters all over Gela town. “I think short people got something to prove, so they tend to be a bit tougher than your tall, lanky folk like Private Jellicoe, here.”
Private Rufus “Jelly” Jellicoe is the lieutenant’s runner, no more than nineteen, six foot three inches tall and most of that in his legs. He grins at Frangie and gives her the inevitable up-and-down, followed by an even wider smile.
“All right, Jelly, show her what we have by way of medical supplies. Marr, we’re moving out in three hours. We’re supposed to start some trouble on the flank of a Kraut tank column, so you make sure you got what you need. Jelly will give you a hand.”
The march to the front is hot and dusty and, worst of all, passes by a melon field where previous units have left nothing but rinds now black with flies. The grumbling has that combination of profane bitterness and wry resignation common to all GIs, with some extra remarks about “crackers” and “rednecks” who don’t even leave a single damn melon behind, the greedy sons of bitches.
They are to help capture a stretch of road, but by the time they are in position word comes that the Germans have withdrawn. And now, from his lofty perch, General Patton has given orders for a quick march over the hills to Palermo, the largest city in Sicily, and from there to Messina along the northern coast. There are rumors of tension between the American commander and the British commander, Montgomery, rumors that delight the gossip-starved GIs. The word quickly comes down that this race to Palermo is very much about sticking one to the Brits for taking over some road the Americans were to use. And while there is some grumbling about that, there’s also a keen competitiveness with the condescending British. They’ve all been expecting to fight Germans, and now it seems they are to be part of a footrace.
This sounds just fine to Frangie, who has very little to do unless there’s a fight, and the soldiers seem to embrace the idea as a sort of lark. The main hope in the short run is that they can capture an intact melon field, or better yet some hidden store of Sicilian wine. At the very least they hope to spend the night in some comfortable villa like the ones the senior officers seize for their headquarters. And then, if they reach Palermo, the reasoning goes, surely there will be wine and women, and Messina can take care of itself.
A column of trucks picks them up—a wonderfully welcome luxury—and drives them back the way they’ve come, then west toward a spot north of Agrigento, where they join a column that stretches all the way back to the beach. Tens of thousands of GIs, hundreds of tanks, hundreds of trucks, all watched over by newly arrived American P-38 fighter planes zooming overhead.
The plan of advance is to move at top speed—never better than fifteen miles an hour and usually much slower—up the road until they run into opposition. The column is shelled from time to time, and when this happens they all dive off the trucks and into a ditch—if one is available—or simply into what is mostly empty, hilly grassland. When the shelling is done, the column starts off again, no recovery time, no licking of wounds, just push the burning vehicles aside and go, go, go!
By the time evening rolls around they are well into the hills, far from the beach, and moderately far from Agrigento. Sergeant Green’s platoon—Frangie’s platoon too, she corrects herself—is sent down a side road to a tiny village that will command a view of the main column when the sun comes up the next morning. Nothing has been heard from the village, but the officers do not like its position athwart their line of march.
But the journey is all by truck, so to Frangie it’s all pretty much the same. On the ride she tries to get to know the men in her truck, and they are all men with just one woman GI aside from Frangie. The squad sergeant is Peter A. Lipton, known by everyone as Pal. He’s a fidgety man in his late twenties, old to be wearing buck sergeant’s stripes, and his face forms a permanent scowl. The lone woman, Annette Johnson, is the corporal, a seemingly emotionless woman and almost as burly as Cat Preeling. Neither Lipton nor Johnson has any interest in Frangie—she’s “the new guy,” frequently abbreviated to FNG, as in Fugging New Guy, or less frequently, Bambi, after the Disney cartoon movie (which Frangie has not seen).
But she strikes up an easy conversation with a fellow Oklahoman named Andy Hinkley. Private Hinkley is from Broken Bow, Oklahoma, a small town near the Arkansas border, which he cheerfully describes as “six Nigra families being eyeballed by a thousand crackers, half of which own sheets with eye holes.”
Frangie has never been to Broken Bow, and Hinkley has never been to Tulsa, but they are two Sooners in a truckload weighted heavily toward Tennessee boys.
“Is it true ya’ll ride buffaloes and shoot Injuns?” one of the Memphis boys asks, looking to start any kind of trouble, anything to beat the boredom.
“Injuns were mostly run off back when,” Hinkley says, not interested in arguing but certainly ready to go jab for jab. “My grandpap was shot by an Injun arrow. Right in the neck. Would have killed a Memphis boy, sure, soft living and all, but being a tough old Okie, my grandpap just pulled it out and threw it right back so hard it pierced the Injun chief right through the eye. Went straight on through and killed the medicine man too.”
Frangie laughs, a sound that brings smiles to more than one face. She has a great laugh; a whole body laugh that doubles her over.
“Which eye was that?” Memphis demands.
“Why, it was his left eye. Grandpap had already cut out his other one with a bowie knife, which—”
“Here we go.” Memphis rolls his eyes.
“A bowie knife, I say, which Grandpap took off Jim Bowie himself in a card game in Baton Rouge.”
The tale of Hinkley’s grandfather, elaborated on in a free-form saga that makes little allowance for time and space, what with Grandpap also having been
taught to handle a sword by the Marquis de Lafayette, learning to speak Comanche from Pocahontas (by whom he had three natural children), and surviving the Battle of Little Big Horn by passing himself off as a lunatic.
It all reminds Frangie of riding on a hay wagon at a church social when she was just seven. Then she had teased her big brother, Harder, who even as a young teen was a skeptical soul and willing to voice doubts about God and even President Roosevelt, so long as someone could be found to argue with him.
“Your grandpap gets around,” Frangie says to Hinkley when he finally runs out of steam, somewhere in the Chinese opium wars.
“Well, we’re a rambling bunch, us Hinkleys. Look at me. Here I am in Sicily.”
