Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel by James Lee Burke Read Free Book Online Page A

Cross. He was wearing a black cap and a black jacket and had a face that was as one-dimensional and expressionless as bread dough in a pie pan. He sank down into the turret and pulled the hatch shut as the two MG-34 machine guns mounted beneath the cupola began firing.
    The Tiger in front of me was one of many. The forest was being denuded. The trees were dropping so fast they didn’t have adequate space to fall, colliding perpendicularly like kitchen matches tumbling out of a spilled box. I saw our BAR man firing at the viewing slit on a Tiger, then a spray of 7.92 rounds danced across his field jacket. He dropped his weapon and began walking into the trees, one hand pressed to his chest, as though he had heartburn. He fell to his hands and knees, his back shaking each time he coughed, chaining the snow with red flowers.
    I cannot say with any degree of accuracy what occurred in the next few minutes. Someone was yelling for a medic. I saw Private First Class Jason Steinberg and three other men get hit by automatic weapons fire and run over by a Tiger. I remember picking up the BAR man and trying to pull him into a hole. I also remember shooting two Waffen SS at close range with my .45. I saw German infantry coming out of the fog behind the tanks, some of them wearing belted leather overcoats, small lightning bolts painted on the sides of their helmets. Then I was on one knee behind a boulder, firing a carbine that had a splintered stock and wasn’t mine. Half my face was printed with wood splinters, one ear wet with blood, though I had no memory of a bullet striking the stock.
    The Tigers smashed over our foxholes, their cannon firing into a snowfield behind us, one as white and smooth and glazed under the moon as the top of a wedding cake. The eruption of flame and sound from the barrels of the 88s was surreal, so loud and powerful that I couldn’t hear the creaking of the treads eating up anything in their path, the explosions literally shaking the senses, as though my eyes, my brain, my organs were being emptied one by one on the snow. Out in the field, I could see two Sherman tanks burning. Three of the crew members were trying to run across the field to a distant woods, their legs locked knee-deep in the snow, their shadows as liquid and dark as India ink, their arms flailing under the stars as rounds from a machine gun danced toward them.
    Behind me I heard a fir tree that must have been sixty feet tall topple through the canopy. I stared at it, stupefied, perhaps a bit like a condemned wretch watching the blade of a guillotine fall on his neck. The fog inside the forest and the screams of the wounded being executed and the guttural commands of the SS noncommissioned officers all melded into the creaking sounds of the Tigers, clanking like a junkyard across the snowfield. The tree crashed with the weight of an anvil on my helmet, razoring the rim down on my nose, mashing me into the earth.
    Hours later, I woke at the bottom of a shell hole, my body covered by the branches of the fir. The canopy of the forest was gone, and the sky was clear and black and patterned with constellations, the temperature close to zero. I thought I could hear a mewling sound, like a baby’s, coming from under the snow, not five feet away.

Chapter
    3
     
    I FOUND AN E-TOOL and started digging. The snow had been as tightly compacted as wet sand by tank treads. One foot down, the blade of the collapsible shovel struck a log, then another one, and I realized I was digging into someone’s reinforced foxhole. The opening had been squeezed shut, as though someone had drawn the string on a leather bag, sealing a trapped infantryman inside a frozen cocoon that was hardly bigger than an obese woman’s womb. I folded the shovel into the position of a garden hoe and began chopping at the rocks and snow and dirt and broken timber until I had created a hole large enough to stick my hand inside. My fingers touched an unshaved face that was as cold