There are many ways Frangie does not want to die, and being crushed face-first in the dirt by a tank rates high on her list. But it’s too late now to say, “This is not my problem.”
Keep me strong, Lord.
“Grab my ankles,” Frangie says.
The sergeant summons two beefy soldiers and each takes a leg.
Using her elbows, Frangie moves like a half-crippled insect down the slope of the crater. The tank blocks the sun, and she can feel its mass poised above her, inch-thick steel plates, mud-clogged treads to left and right. The rear of the tank is a louvered grille that radiates the stifling heat of the engine, which, added to the hundred-degree air temperature makes the crater a place where you could bake a biscuit.
Frangie imagines her body being squeezed through those louvers, like so much meat in a sausage grinder, cooking even as she . . .
Fear. It’s been creeping in, little by little, tingling and twisting her stomach, but now it is beginning to seem that she is actually going to do this, and at that point the fear sets aside all subtlety and comes rushing up within her.
Lord, help me to help this man.
And don’t let that tank slip!
She should add a prudent and humble “Thy will be done,” but if God’s will is to crush her with a tank, she doesn’t want to make it any easier on Him.
Frangie has known fear in her life. Fear of destitution when her father was injured and lost his job. Fear of hostile whites, a fear made very real by the history of her home state and city. Just twenty-two years have passed since white rioters burned down all of the Greenwood district, once known as the black Wall Street, blocks from her home in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
And since enlisting she has felt fear (mixed with anger) as she endured various threats by white men who hated the very idea of a black soldier. Then, too, there were the dark mutterings of many of her fellow colored soldiers, who equally despised the idea of a woman in uniform.
But right now her fear is focused on the fact that her head and now shoulders too are right in line to be crushed if the tank slips.
I’m a roach beneath a shoe.
She is far enough down that Williams can look at her and she can see his face, though it is so transformed by pain and terror that she doubts his own mother would recognize him.
Don’t cry, don’t cry or it will scare him.
But I want to cry.
“I think we best get him out of here,” Frangie calls back to the men holding her ankles. She tries to keep panic out of her voice—Williams doesn’t need to be reminded that he’s in danger—but fear raises her tone an octave and she sounds like a child. A scared child.
“Just give me the shot, Doc! Oh God!”
“Just hang on, Williams, hang on.”
The problem is clear and insoluble. If she can dig out enough dirt beneath Williams she may be able to pull him free, or at least do so with some help. But with every spadeful she will increase the odds of the tank sliding.
“The tractor will get here sooner or later,” the sergeant says. “It’s the later that’s a problem,” Frangie says. Her voice is strained, she is very nearly talking upside down, and grit has already found its way to her mouth, sucked in with each breath. She tries to spit, but her mouth is as dry as the dust she inhales. “I can scoop the dirt that’s just right under him.”
There’s a moment’s pause as the sergeant confers in low tones with someone else, perhaps an officer.
“Give it a try, Doc,” comes the verdict.
“Pass me an entrenching tool,” she says. She is fully, blazingly aware of the possibilities. She’s always had a good imagination, and imagination is not a help at times like this. She can imagine the sounds. She can imagine the cries of warning from the men watching her. She can imagine them yanking her back, but too slowly, too slowly to stop that hot louvered grill from turning her head into thick, sizzling slices of salami.
An entrenching tool—a foldable shovel—is passed down to her, blade open and locked in place by its adjustable nut. She is head down, hardly the best position for digging.
Williams lets loose another scream.
“Listen, Williams, I can’t have you unconscious or flaking out. So you can either die in a morphine haze or maybe get out of here. Hang on. Just hang on.”
She draws the shovel to her, turns it awkwardly, and stabs it weakly into the dirt beneath Williams’s face. It is immediately apparent that this will never do because she has nowhere to put the dirt she digs out. It will pile up but then tumble right back down.
The sergeant, looking down from what feels like a very distant height, sees the problem and says, “Get me a poncho. Now!”
In less than a minute the sergeant has flapped the poncho down, like a housewife making a bed, to cover the ground to Frangie’s left.
Frangie digs out another spadeful, and Williams screams.
Another spadeful, and another, and Williams screams as the sergeant carefully draws the poncho and the dirt up the slope. He empties it and returns the poncho.
This process is repeated a dozen times. The blood is rushing to Frangie’s head and hands, making her eyes tear up and her nose run and causing her legs to go numb. The heat is appalling, and she can smell her own hair singeing. After twenty minutes Frangie has herself pulled back up just long enough to clear her head.
“Water,” she gasps. She upends a proffered canteen and some sensible fellow drains a second canteen over her head. Then she slithers back down and the slow, slow digging proceeds anew.
Finally she notices that Williams is screaming less. She asks for and is passed a flashlight. In the light she can peer ahead and see that a small gap has opened between Williams’s back and the bottom of the tank. His shirt is soaked red.
With infinite care despite the trembling in her hand she walks her fingers down his back until she finds the place where a shattered rib sticks out. She feels around the hole, there shouldn’t be an artery there, but she has to be sure. Has he lost so much blood he’ll go into shock?
“Pass me a rope. Put a loop in it!” Frangie calls, spitting dirt. “All right, Williams, I’m giving you the shot now.” She stabs down into his shoulder and squeezes the blessed pain relief into him. “Before you flake out, try to raise your hands together.”
This brings a fresh cry of agony, but Williams can sense the possibility of life now, and he does it. He has big hands, the calloused hands of a man who has picked cotton since the age of five. Frangie passes the rope over them and tugs to tighten the knot.
“Okay, Sarge, pull me up first,” she yells.
She is yanked up like a cork popping from a bottle of champagne.
The sergeant takes over. “Okay, boys, on the rope and pull, but slow and easy.”
They pull and Williams slides up the side of the ditch and is dragged several feet away to cries of relief from his comrades, followed quickly by relieved insults and hectoring. Frangie leaps to kneel beside him. She tries not to think about the fact that within five seconds the tank slips with a muffled but earth-rumbling sound to crush the narrow gap beneath its thirty tons of steel.
Thank you, Lord.
She uses scissors to cut Williams’s shirt from tail to collar and examines