Purple Hearts. Майкл Грант

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      Guadalupé has had a mere thirteen weeks of basic training from an Arizonan sergeant who had precisely zero affection for ‘wetbacks,’ and who, as far as Lupé could tell, had no direct experience of anything war-related. Just the same, she was not a standout at basic, and to Lupé that was a victory. Lupé does not want to be here at this replacement depot, or in any other army facility, especially not in England getting ready for the invasion everyone says is finally coming.

      Her only outstanding quality at basic had been her endurance. She had grown up on a ranch in southern Utah, a family-worked ranch. She started riding horses at age three, learned to accurately throw a lasso by age five, and by age twelve was doing about ninety percent of a full-grown ranch hand’s work. Plus showing up for school most if not all of the time.

      But Lupé has another talent which did not come out during training. She’d shot an eight-point mule deer buck right through the heart when she was nine at a distance of three hundred yards. She’d killed a cougar with a shot her father advised her not to take because it was near-impossible.

      Guadalupé Camacho could shoot.

      In fact, she shot well enough to consistently fail to qualify with the M1 Garand rifle and the M1 carbine while making it look as if she were trying her best. She failed because she did not wish to go to war and shoot anyone, and she was worried that had she shown any ability she would be shipped off to the war. So on the firing range she amused herself by terrifying instructors with near-misses and general, but carefully-played incompetence.

      It turned out not to matter. The pressure was on to move as many recruits as possible to the war in Europe, so Lupé was marked qualified with the M1 Garand, the M1 carbine, the Thompson submachine gun and the Browning automatic rifle—the light machine gun known as the BAR. She had in fact never even fired the Thompson, and with the BAR she legitimately could not hit much of anything—it was nothing like a hunting rifle—but various sergeants stamped various documents and thus she was qualified.

      Stamp, stamp, staple, staple, and it was off to war for Guadalupé Camacho, Private, US Army.

      Lupé had been drafted very much against her will. She was not a coward, nor lacking in patriotism, but she was needed at home. She had already missed the spring round-up, and if she didn’t get out of the army and back to Utah she would miss the drive up to the Ogden railhead. It was to be an old-fashioned cattle drive this year—trucks, truck tires, truck spare parts and most of all truck fuel were hard to come by. You could buy everything on the black market, but Lupé’s father simply did not do things like that. Besides, Lupé knew, he’d been pining for the days of his youth when cowboys still occasionally ran cattle the old-fashioned way. So her father, looking younger than he had in twenty years, had decided to do it with horses and ropes and camping out under the stars, bringing some extra hands up from below the border—Mexican citizens not being subject to the rapacious needs of the US military.

      Lupé felt she was missing the opportunity of a lifetime.

      She looks around her now, trying not to be obvious, sizing up the others in the truck. Five men, one woman. The woman draws her eye: she is an elegant-looking white woman with blonde hair and high cheekbones and an expression like a blank brick wall. Closed off. Shut up tight.

      The only one who returns her gaze is a cheerful-looking man, or boy really, with red hair and a complexion that would have doomed him out under the pitiless sun of the prairie. He is gangly, with knees so knobby they look like softballs stuffed into his trousers. He has long, delicate fingers unmarked by scars or callouses.

      Not the sort of man she’s been raised around. The men she knows are Mexican or colored or Indian for the most part, compact, quiet, leathery men who can go days without speaking more than six words. Cowboys. Men whose list of personal possessions started with a well-worn saddle and ended with a sweat-stained hat. Some also owned a Bible and/or a Book of Mormon, because Guadalupé’s father was a Latter-Day Saint and he tended to hire fellow Mormons on the theory that they were less likely to get rip-roaring drunk. They were also less likely to get ideas about his young daughter.

      Guadalupé’s mother had died of the fever shortly after her birth. Her father, Pedro, who everyone called either Pete or Boss or (behind his back) One-Eyed Pete, was determined to raise his daughter to be a proper lady.

      A proper lady who could rope, throw and tie a two-hundred-pound calf in thirteen seconds. Not exactly rodeo time, but quick just the same. A proper lady who could cook beans and rice for twenty men and laugh along as they farted. A proper lady who could string wire, castrate a bull calf, cut a horn, or lay on a branding iron.

      Now instead of putting her skills and talents to work, Lupé sits in the back of a truck beneath a threatening British sky being eyeballed by a city boy with red hair and a happy grin.

      The truck lurches off, rattling through the hectic camp, weaving through disorganized gaggles of soldiers and daredevil jeeps before heading out into the English countryside.

      “Hey,” the redhead says.

      “Me?”

      “What are you, some kind of Injun?”

      Lupé blinks. “No.”

      “What are you then?”

      “My folks come from Mexico. I come from Utah.”

      “Utah, huh? Well, that beats all,” he says and shakes his head. Then he leans forward and extends his hand. “Hank Hobart, from St. Paul, Minnesota. Pleased to meet you.”

      She’s been expecting hostility—there are a lot of Texans in the army, and few of them are ready to be civil to Mexicans. So she is non-plussed by his open expression and the outstretched hand. She takes it and feels a softness she’s never felt before in any hand, male or female.

      “What do you do, Loopy?”

      “Guadalupé,” she corrects. Then, “Or Lupé.”

      “Loopy. That’s what I said, isn’t it?” He seems sincere, as though he hears no difference between his pronunciation and hers, which is more loo-pay than his loo-pee.

      “Okay, Hank. I live on a cattle ranch.”

      His blue eyes go wide and his pale eyebrows rise to comic heights. “You’re a cowgirl?”

      “I guess so,” she says, feeling uncomfortable since that title is generally earned by many long years of work. Where she comes from “cowboy” means a whole lot more than major or captain.

      “Guess what I do?” Hank asks. He’s tall, lanky, and so pale he’s practically translucent, and he owns an almost comically large nose that belongs on a statue of some noble Roman.

      Lupé shakes her head. “No idea.”

      “I play trombone in an orchestra.” He mimes moving a trombone slide.

      This is so far from anything Lupé might have guessed that for a moment she can only frown and stare.

      “You like jazz?” Hobart asks.

      Lupé shrugs. “Like Tommy Dorsey?” It’s a lucky guess. There is no radio on the ranch, and what she knows of music is restricted to cowboy tunes and church hymns. But some of her school friends have radios, and she’s heard a few of the big names.

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