And he was, because on the day I met the girl, Brave Richards said, “Just go. Keep your Luger. I’ll cover for you. Just tell me all about it afterward.”
If, in this confession of fear and discomfort during my war, I have portrayed myself as lacking in valor, I offer this evidence of my Galahad-like heart: I had no intention of laying a hand on that girl. And I needed Richards to know it, that I risked death and dishonor not to nick my willy, but simply to walk with a pretty girl on a road at night, to feel that sweet normalcy again.
“Richards,” I said. “I’m not gonna touch her.”
I think he could see I was telling the truth, because he looked pained. “Then Christ, let me go with her.”
I patted his shoulder, grabbed my rifle, and ran down the road to catch her. She was a fast walker, and when I came upon her, she had edged over to the side of the road. Up close, she was older than I’d thought, maybe twenty-five. She took me in warily. I put her at ease with my bilingual charm: “Scusi, bella. Fare una passeggiata, per favore?”
She smiled. “Yes. You may walk with me,” she said in English. She slowed and took my arm. “But only if you stop wiping your ass on my language.”
Ah. So it was love.
Maria’s mother had raised three sons and three daughters in this village. Her father had died early in the war and her brothers had been conscripted at sixteen, fifteen, and the last at twelve, dragged off to dig Italian trenches and, later, German fortifications. She prayed that at least one of her brothers was alive somewhere north of what was left of the Linea Gotica, but she didn’t hold out much hope. Maria gave me the quick history of her little village during the war, squeezed like a washcloth of its young men by Mussolini, then squeezed again by the partisans, again by the retreating Germans, until there were no males between the ages of eight and fifty-five, the town bombed, strafed, and picked clean of food and supplies. Maria had studied English at a convent school, and with the invasion found work as a nurse’s aide at an American field hospital. She was gone weeks at a time but always returned to the village to check on her mother and sisters.
“So when this is all finished,” I asked, “do you have a nice young man to marry?”
“There was a boy, but I doubt he’s alive. No, when this is over I will care for my mother. She is a widow whose three sons were taken from her. When she’s gone, maybe I’ll get one of you Americans to take me to New York City. I’ll live in the Empire State Building, eat ice cream every night in fancy restaurants, and grow fat.”
“I can take you to Wisconsin. You can get fat there.”
“Ah, Wisconsin,” she said, “the cheese and the dairy fields.” She waved her hand in front of her face as if Wisconsin lay just beyond the scrub trees alongside the road. “Cows, farms, and Madison, moon over the river, and the college of Badgers. It is cold in the winter but in the summer there are beautiful farm girls with pigtails and red cheeks.”
She could do that for any state you named, so many American boys in her hospital had taken time to reminisce about the place they came from, often before they died. “Idaho? The deep lakes and big mountains, endless trees and beautiful farm girls with pigtails and red cheeks.”
“No farm girl for me,” I said.
“You will find one after the war,” she said.
I said that after the war I wanted to write a book.
She cocked her head. “What kind of book?”
“A novel. About all of this. Maybe a funny novel.”
She became somber. Writing a book was an important thing to do, she said, not a joke.
“Oh, no,” I said, “I don’t mean to joke about it. I don’t mean that sort of funny.”
She asked what other kind of funny there was and I didn’t know what to say. We were within sight of her village, a cluster of gray shadows that sat like a cap on the dark hill in front of us.
“The sort of funny that makes you sad, too,” I said.
She looked at me curiously and just then, a bird or a bat flushed from the bushes ahead and we both started. I put my arm around Maria’s shoulder. And I can’t say how it happened, but suddenly we were off the road and I was on my back and she was lying on top of me in a grove of lemon trees, the unripe fruit above me like hanging stones. I kissed her lips and cheeks and neck and she quickly undid my pants and held me between her two hands, stroking me expertly with one soft hand and caressing me with the other, as if she had read some top secret army manual on this maneuver. And she was exceptional at it, far better than I’d ever managed to be, so that in no time I was making snuff ling noises and she pressed against me and I smelled lemons and dirt and her, and the world fell away as she shifted her body and aimed me perfectly away from her pretty dress, like a farmwife directing a stream of cow’s milk, toward the unripe lemons, all of this happening in less than a minute, without her having to so much as loosen the bow in her hair.