Michael Grant - Purple Hearts

“I’m sorry to hear about Lefty.”

“You’ll be sorry to hear about me soon,” he says with surprising savagery. He clasps his hands together and Rio sees that he is trembling. “Sorry. I didn’t mean . . . Never mind me. I’m usually in a foul mood before a mission.”

“There’s nothing wrong in being afraid,” Rio says. “In fact—”

“Who says I’m afraid?” he snaps.

“Everyone is afraid, Strand.”

He snorts derisively. “Everyone but you, Rio. Look at you. What would your mother have to say about that wicked knife? Have you sent them a copy of your citation? You charged a squad of Wehrmacht by yourself !” His voice rises toward shrill. “You blew up my old plane and saved the Norden bomb sight and came near to being blown up yourself. My God, Rio, you’ve become the very model for all the rabble-rousers who support this whole crazy notion!”

“Crazy notion?” The strange thing is that as she speaks those two words, she recognizes the silky menace in her tone. It’s pure Mackie, her sergeant during basic training. If things were not so tense she might laugh at the comparison. Mackie could terrify a recruit just by the way she walked .

“Yes!” Strand says. “Yes! I’ll say it: crazy notion. Just because you’ve become a good soldier does not mean that it makes any sense for women to be in this war!”

“You have women pilots, women air crew. I saw a rather pretty redhead . . .”

“Sally? At least she would have the sense to go home if the opportunity came up. She agrees with me, with, well, everyone really. Women are meant to be the gentler sex. That’s the grand design. Women aren’t meant to . . . to . . .”

“Kill Germans?” The same Mackie menace.

“My God, Rio, listen to yourself. You positively sound as if you are threatening me!”

Rio jumps to her feet. “You’re shouting at me, Strand.”

His look is cold. His hands remain clasped, squeezing to stop the trembling. “You’ve made me a laughing stock. Fellows ask me when we’re married whether I’ll be doing the cooking and cleaning.”

When we are married?

“I don’t recall agreeing to marry you. For that matter, I don’t recall you asking.”

He frowns, puzzled. “It’s understood, surely? You gave yourself to me; did you think I wouldn’t do the right thing?”

“So . . . you would marry me from a sense of obligation? Duty?”

“No, no, of course I didn’t mean that.” He retreats quickly, but the resentment still comes through. “I love you. Of course I love you. I just sometimes wish . . .” He hangs his head. “I just wish sometimes you were still the sweet, innocent young beauty I gave a ride to in my uncle’s old Jenny.”

“That was a long time ago,” Rio says. Her voice gentles at the memory. Strand’s uncle had a Jenny, a Curtiss JN-4 biplane he used as a crop duster. Strand had already known how to fly and he took her up over Gedwell Falls in what was the most thrilling moment of her life. Up till then.

She had squeezed into a single cockpit with Strand, leaning back against him, feeling for the first time what a man’s body felt like.

She wouldn’t, couldn’t lie to herself: many times she had wished she was back there, back then , being that version of herself. It wasn’t her lost virginal naiveté that made her nostalgic, but rather the feeling that she had changed so much there was no longer any going back. The male soldiers would return home some day and would be seen as more than they had been, stronger, braver. But the women? No one knew how women who had been to war would be received.

Strand pictured her in an apron. So had she, once. And who knew, maybe she would see herself that way again.

Mrs. Strand Braxton?

Mommy?

Baking cupcakes for the PTA fundraiser? Wearing a nice summer dress to church? Excusing herself from men’s conversation after dinner to go to the parlor with the other ladies to talk about hairstyles and movie stars and brag about little Strand Jr.’s A-plus in algebra?

That had been her mother’s life, a life that had once been inevitable, but now felt very, very far away.

But even as she drifts toward those melancholy thoughts, a part of her mind is elsewhere, wondering if she could transfer Rudy J. Chester out of her squad; wondering if Lupé was as tough as she acted; wondering whether Geer is working them hard in her absence.

The silence stretches on too long.

“I guess we won’t figure out what’s what until it’s all over,” she says.

Strand snorts derisively. “There probably won’t be an after, Rio. The Old Man says the Luftwaffe isn’t what it used to be, but just about every mission a bird goes down. It’s a matter of mathematics. Every mission . . . a Kraut fighter, ack-ack, mechanical breakdowns . . .”

“You can’t think about that,” Rio says. “You just have to focus on your objective.” She very nearly pronounces it OB-jective, the way Sergeant Cole always did.

Suddenly Strand stands too. He turns cold eyes on Rio. “No, that’s you , Rio. Not me. Me, I think about it. I’m not a machine.” He makes an effort to end things pleasantly. “Speaking of machines, I need to go and see to mine. It’s good to see you, Rio.”

“Yes. Take care of yourself, Strand. Goodbye.”

That last word is to his back.

3

RAINY SCHULTERMAN—FOURAS, NAZI-OCCUPIED FRANCE

Rainy Schulterman—very recently commissioned Second Lieutenant Rainy Schulterman—parallels the shore in an inflatable boat paddled through the misty night by four American sailors, one of whom is seething and muttering to himself, while the other three stifle laughter beneath broad, conspiratorial grins.

Rainy is not laughing. Landing on French soil in the summer of 1944 is about as dangerous a thing as you can do short of actual combat. This is her second mission into enemy territory. The first one had been a fiasco—unqualified officers making foolish plans had landed her in the last place on earth she or any other member of Army Intelligence wished to be: a Gestapo jail.

Rainy had been afraid then. She is afraid now. Fear often speaks in her mother’s voice, asking why? Why are you doing this, Rainy? You’ll get hurt, Rainy. You’ll die, Rainy.

But she has learned something about fear: you must always listen to it, but you need not give in to it.

Rainy grits her teeth and wishes the sailors would act a little less like, well, boys . Maybe they aren’t worried about being picked up by the Gestapo or the Sicherheitsdienst (SD) or even the Abwehr, but she is. The Sicherheitsdienst, the intelligence arm of the SS, are animals like the Gestapo. From the Abwehr she would have expected firm but proper treatment—if she were wearing a uniform—the Abwehr are soldiers, after all. But Rainy is not wearing a uniform, she is dressed in widow’s weeds, a worn old black dress shaped as stylishly as a potato sack, an obviously hand-knitted black sweater, a droopy, patched overcoat and chunky black oxfords. The Abwehr might hang her on the spot as a spy, while the Gestapo or the SD would torture her and then put her up against a wall.

That thought comes with vivid memories of men and women who she had not known, shoved against a wall she had not been able to see. She had heard their cries, their pleas for mercy, and their brave patriotic songs cut short by the crash of rifle fire. But all she had been able to see from her vantage point was their blood running down over the filthy window of her cell.

The remaining member of the little boat’s crew is an older man. He’s the one seething and, from time to time, shaking his head. Rainy shifts down the bench.

“Don’t let it trouble you,” she says in a barely audible whisper near the older rower’s ear. “I don’t.”