Jane Smiley - Some Luck

Some things were not comfortable — he could feel a broken bedspring in the small of his back, and his head hit the wall two or three times — but his cock, in the center of things, was utterly alive, reaching here and there inside her, feeling something like a wall and something like an edge, and something like a hollow — the whole anatomy of her. She squeezed him; he had never felt that before; it was like an embrace. Once she had her bra off, she brought her hands back to his chest, and then, just as he sensed he was about to come, she reached behind herself and tickled his balls. He arched his back and shot into her. He could feel the condom fill and his own semen ooze around the head of his dick. He might have cried out.

It was only now that he recognized how experienced she was — she tilted to the side and rolled him on top of her without letting him come out, then eased off of him so that the condom remained in place. She was good at it. Finally, she got up, disposed of the condom, and washed her hands. The last thing she did was lean over him and smooth his hair off his forehead. No one had done that since he was sick in bed with a virus and his mother was feeling his head for a fever. She handed him a wet towel. It looked clean enough.

Frank wasn’t very graceful about leaving her at the same spot where he’d found her. It was late now, after ten. They’d been together for six hours or more, which Frank knew was bad business for a whore, or, yes, a puttana —that’s what they were called in Italy. He actually tried to kiss her, which some other whores standing around laughed at. She put her hand on his shoulder and pushed him away, though gently. After that, he turned right around and walked away, so as not to see other men approaching her. He had never felt jealous before.

He came back the next day and the next, but she wasn’t there. The fourth day, they embarked for Saint-Tropez. On the boat, he listened to Ruben, Hernandez, and Sergeant Koch talk about the whores they had done in Corsica — they expected better ones in France, though Ruben had enjoyed one of his four especially, he called her “the Laugher.” She had let him tie her up, and giggled the whole time. One of Hernandez’s whores had seen his cock and asked him if he was “un nègre.”

When they got to France, he also didn’t know where the Germans were, but there were plenty of Yanks and plenty of Frenchmen. The day was sunny. Cruisers and destroyers were everywhere, and Frank counted seven aircraft carriers. The planes made patterns as if they were in air shows. The commando raiders had done their jobs. The paratroopers fell from the sky, and even the gliders came floating in. Frank and his squad marched down the ramps of the transports and into the warm, calm water, which hit them about mid-thigh. They splashed onto the beach and spread out. And then they ran inland, and a day later they were all the way to Le Muy.

WHEN THEY GOT TO the Rhine, three months after Saint-Tropez, Frank was a little surprised at how narrow it was. There were rivers and streams all around Strasbourg, and plenty to look at in the town, even though the Allies had bombed it over and over, and the Germans had burned what they could, but the Rhine itself was narrow and flat, neatly confined between built-up banks on both sides, and with quaint old bridges that ran across it. The Germans on the other side were quiet, and Frank suspected typical Jerry treachery — they would be as quiet as rabbits until they had the GIs in their sights, and then they would open fire with everything they had. But Ruben was ready, and Cornhill, who was back in the unit, was, too. They got to the bridge at midnight — an elaborate stone construction — and, step by nervous step, they made their way across. It didn’t take long, and there seemed to be no sentries in the German pillboxes they could easily see — even more suspicious. Private Ruben was practically capering by the time he set foot on German soil, but he was short and hard to shoot; Frank didn’t know if his immunity was due to quickness, small size, or nothing at all. Frank and Private Cornhill were more cautious, but there continued to be no response. Private Cornhill whispered, “Think they’re all passed out, Corporal?”

“We’re lucky if they are, Private.”

They caught up with Private Ruben, and the three of them squatted down and duck-walked toward the first pillbox, taking cover in darkness, frozen weeds, and a line of leafless trees. When they got right up to it, Private Ruben took out two grenades, but he didn’t pull the pins.

Which was a good thing, because the pillbox was empty and cold. It looked like there hadn’t been a soul in there for weeks, if ever. There wasn’t even a shell casing or a piece of paper lying around. The Jerries had certainly cleaned up after themselves when they left.

An hour later, they had gone to the next one, which was a hundred yards up the river. No one and nothing there, either. When they walked back toward the bridge, they just strolled along, standing upright, sometimes trotting because of the cold, but never taking precautions — it was the ultimate test. They would get shot if there were anyone at all around to shoot them.

All the patrols reported the same thing — no one. And as the artillery and the engineers and the rest of the Seventh Army massed behind them, Frank began to get excited — Germany tomorrow, Berlin soon after that. It was the end of November. Three years of war was plenty.

By midmorning, when Frank woke up from his snooze, the invasion was ready; the Rhine was theirs. General Devers, inspecting their formations, looked eager. Frank didn’t know why the general had been assigned to take his army into the Riviera, and then march it up the Rhone, with only enough action (at least compared with Italy) to keep them sharp. They waited.

The next afternoon, when all the men had found out that they were not going, that Eisenhower himself had refused to let them go, they had several explanations. Cornhill’s was that Ike must know that there was a big force of Germans awaiting them in the backcountry across the river — it would be like the Kasserine Pass; maybe Rommel himself was there.

“Rommel is dead,” said Frank.

“Do you really believe that?” said Cornhill. “I don’t. That’s obviously a trick. Ike is being cautious, and he should be.”

Ruben took another view, that Ike was so shit-scared of the Germans that he couldn’t believe the evidence of his own eyes. They weren’t there, but they had been there so often that they had to be there. Ruben didn’t like Ike at all — he’d seen his type before, always saying what if, what if. “Is that the kind of guy you want in a fight?” Frank could see that Ruben and Cornhill didn’t actually disagree.

Frank simply put it down to another map problem — the army almost never knew where it was going, and they were always surprised when they found what was there. Three years of superior officers had made him 100 percent suspicious of everything superior officers had to say. He trusted only Devers, and why was that? Devers said, “We’re going here,” and they went there. Devers said, “Expect this and that,” and this and that came to pass. But the rumor was that Ike didn’t like Devers, and Frank figured this was the reason — Devers didn’t have his head up his ass, and everyone else did.

ALL ROSANNA KNEW was that Frank was in France and that nothing in France was good. Did he write? Was he allowed to write? He had written two letters in the summer, from Corsica, and then two more in the fall, one written in a town called Besançon, which was a kind of lace, as she remembered, and another from Lyons. In Lyons, he wrote about some Roman ruins. His letters were masterpieces of saying nothing. That he was alive was her business, what he was doing was not her business. She didn’t even know if he was involved in what they called the Battle of the Bulge (though what “the bulge” was, Rosanna could not figure out). She hoped he wasn’t, because the Battle of the Bulge was very terrible, and apparently, when the Germans found Americans or other Allies, they just shot them, didn’t even take them prisoner. They said they were going to take them prisoner in order to have them put down their weapons, and then they mowed them down. It was a good thing that Rosanna didn’t leave the farm much, because every time she went into town, people asked her how Frankie was and where he was, and Rosanna had to say that she didn’t know. Yes, her brother had stopped writing for a while after he got over there, but then he had started again, and now he wrote every week, nice long letters about this and that, some of it pretty gruesome. Angela, who had taken to her bed, was up and about now, and was typing the letters for a book. She thought it would be a best-seller, and maybe they would make it into a movie. “That’ll be the day,” thought Rosanna, but she kept this thought to herself. Every time Angela or, for that matter, her own mother speculated about who would play Gus, Rosanna just said, “That would be good.”