Fire in the Hills by Donna Jo Napoli Read Free Book Online

they didn’t take boys.”
    â€œThey took me,” said Roberto. “I keep getting taken by the Germans. It’s happened three times now.”
    The first boy shook the gun in front of Roberto’s eyes. “Stand up.”
    Roberto got to his feet. Now he took a look at the second boy; that boy carried a shovel in each hand. These two boys had ambushed a German truck convoy. Alone. What gall. Like the orphan rebels against the Germans in Naples. No, even more exaggerated than that. Like David against Goliath.
    â€œTurn around.”
    Why? But who cared why? Roberto turned around.
    The boy cut the rope from his wrists.
    â€œSo, No One, do you know, is there anyone else alive here?”
    Was Kurt still alive? He’d gone off somewhere in the bushes ahead. But Roberto owed him, for shooting the boy back in the piazza in Naples. Shooting him so he didn’t have to burn up in the fire. He crossed his arms over his cold chest and rubbed his shoulders and upper arms. “No.”
    â€œYou cold?” asked the second boy.
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œWant that German’s shirt?” He kicked the boot of the dead man beside Roberto.
    â€œNo.”
    â€œAll right, then.”
    The boys gathered the guns and ammunition from the dead. Then each took a shovel and dug a shallow grave. They rolled the dead soldier into it and covered him up. Then they did the same to the three other dead soldiers.
    They walked along the paved road a way and then turned up a dirt path. No one talked. They came to a wide pine and brushed away needles at the foot of it to expose a metal trunk. They stashed the guns and ammunition there. All but the older boy’s pistol. Then they continued up the road. They came to a peasant house in the middle of farmland.
    The main room of the home had a stone-flagged floor. A carbide lamp hissed gently over a table. Salami and garlic and onions hung from roof rafters in the corner.
    A woman came through one of the doorways. She saw Roberto and clapped her hands together and shook them at the boys in exasperation. “What have you brought me?”
    â€œHe was a prisoner of the Germans.”
    â€œYou went near the Germans again? Are you crazy? Will you never get any sense into your thick skulls?” She rushed over and smacked the older boy on the back of the head. Then she smacked the younger one. “You think you know what you’re dealing with. But you don’t.”
    She put her hands to her mouth now and tilted her head toward Roberto, and her eyes looked so sad. “Where do you belong, boy?” Her words were kind, as though this was a normal world where adults worried about the sense in their sons’ skulls and people cared about the fate of a lost boy. She spoke like anyone’s mother anywhere.
    It was too normal to bear.
    Roberto stood there and cried.

10
    R OBERTO LAY IN THE GRASS. The ground beside him moved. A mole burrowed up, saw him, and disappeared under again. A jay screamed and screamed in the nearest willow tree. Roberto got up and looked. A snake dropped from the yellowing leaves.
    Evening was coming fast. And night here was dark.
    That was a good thing about this place. The darkness of the night. At night in Venice the moon reflects off the water. And everywhere he’d been since, the night had somehow glowed. Off the snow, off the water. But here the moon and stars were absorbed by the fields. Night was black. The newness of that offered relief from any chance of memory.
    He would have liked to sleep outside in that blackness. But Rina, the mother of this family, wouldn’t hear of it. She made him sleep on a mattress stuffed with corncobs—the same kind everyone else in the family slept on. Roberto’s was old and pressed thin with wear. It had been discarded but not yet burned, lucky for him. Rina placed it in the barn, with the oxen.
    Roberto walked between a willow and a poplar, part of a line of trees