｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆ ( 𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐚 ) chapter two — HARD PLACES BREED HARD MEN
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─ 🧳🕸📺📀🦟🌪🎞⌛️ PLATOON. 1966 ｡･:*:･ﾟ★,｡･:*:･ﾟ☆
STELLA'S A BITCH, they say behind concealed palms, and over midnight cigarettes. Marianne's old — Shelley's really the one you want, some say, but others disagree. Shelley's not a fox the way Stella is, and she doesn't come across as nearly as much of a challenge as her fellow nurse, who's somehow gained an infamous reputation overnight, see: even though she looks innocent she's really a perverted demon! (a quotation straight from the mouth of O'Neil, who would know the right thing to say if it slapped him in the face.)
Some remember Bangkok better than others. Most were so high it was just five sleazy days filled with prostitutes and pot. There's a sort-of irony in Elias' few memories of that week compiling mainly of her and her brown bobbed hair. Dance-on-the-table Stella, made-merry-with-most-of-the-platoon Stella . . . some had even started calling her Mrs Syphilis because she'd kissed so many men that night and never spoke to them again.
Men like this are the harshest kind; they're no doves, that's for sure. When she passes, they reach for her body with touch-starved claws and undress her with their eyes — and she hasn't even met half of them yet. They're the hangnails of America's errant youth, the sore, uneducated strays that join the army to make themselves feel like they're worth something. Stella's not worth anything, apart from the dollars she slides Tony Link for dope.
"Thanks for your service . . . you offer any other kind of service?"
Or, that's what the enlisted men would ask her, if not for the rain. The only other time she'd seen rain like this was that night in Bangkok, and it gave her goosebumps. Mother nature has opened her heavens upon the Vietnamese jungle, and they're feeling her power in full force. The downpour thrums against tin roofs and collects in the ridges and grooves of the Base Camp's arid terrain. She hasn't spoken to a single soldier since her arrival, and the torrential rain keeps it that way. She stands on the deck of the women's quarters, the glow of her cigarette embers creating a tiny pinprick of orange light that Elias Grodin can see from the sheltered awning of the NCO club.
A wall of rain is between them, but he knows she's watching him, and vice versa. He watches the smoke from her cigarette plume from her mouth and coil into the empty space above her head like a thin grey serpent. But what makes a bitch a bitch? he thinks to himself as he raises his hand up in a wave. When she ignores him, stamps out her cigarette and disappears into the barracks without a glance over her shoulder, he thinks, Maybe something like that. But he only laughs softly to himself. After all, hard places breed hard men, and even harder women to withstand those men.
