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

and rough as stone.
    The trapped man’s knees had been pushed almost to his chin. He was trying to speak, but his teeth were chattering so violently he could not form individual words. I grabbed him by the wrists and dragged him over the cusp of the foxhole and wiped his face. Tears had frozen in his eyelashes. He raised his right hand and placed it against my chest, as though reassuring himself that I was real. His mitten was cut away from his trigger finger.
    “Are you hit?” I asked.
    “Dunno, sir,” he replied.
    “Where’s your Thompson?” I said.
    “Dunno.” He looked around and shook his head. “Where’s everybody?”
    “Dead,” I said. “They shot the wounded. Can you walk?”
    He had lost his steel pot, and his hair was studded with chips of ice that resembled rock salt. He stared at the splintered trees on the ground and at the blackened areas where German infantry had thrown potato-mashers over the tops of their tanks into our midst. He looked at the Tiger tracks leading right across the hole I had pulled him from.
    “Did you hear me, Sergeant? We’re behind enemy lines.”
    He seemed unable to fathom my words. I pointed toward the west and the lights flickering at the bottom of the sky. The intermittent flashes looked like heat lightning, or electricity bursting silently inside a bank of thunderheads. “That’s our artillery. Neither of us is in good repair. We don’t want to be captured.”
    He lifted his eyes to mine, as though remembering a dream. “What happened to Steinberg?”
    “He got it.”
    “How?”
    “Under a King Tiger.”
    “He was alive?”
    “I don’t know,” I lied.
    He tried to get to his feet, one knee giving out, then the other. He began swinging his arms. “The bastards left us?”
    “No, they all died. They died right here.” I found a knit cap and beat the snow crystals off it and fitted it on his head. “Pull yourself together. This will probably become a staging area. We don’t want to be here when that happens. Are you hearing me, Sergeant?”
    “I cain’t walk, Lieutenant. My legs are dead.”
    “You will walk whether you want to or not. Place your arm over my shoulder and put one foot after another. It’s just like Arthur Murray dance steps.”
    He tripped, then held on to my shoulder as tightly as he could. “There you go,” I said. “We’re the boogie-woogie boys from Company B. Am I right?”
    “Yes, sir.”
    “We have to find a safe place before daylight. One way or another we’ll find our lines. Do you believe me when I say that?”
    “Yes, sir,” he said, limping along next to me, through the shattered trees and the detritus of battle. “Lieutenant, I got to explain why I was crying when you pulled me out. It wasn’t because of the tank.”
    “It doesn’t matter.”
    “Yes, sir, it does. A Kraut is just a man, nothing more, nothing less. When I was a baby, I got wrapped up in a rubber sheet. A nigra woman hanging wash looked through the window and rushed inside and saved my life. My face was already blue. I’ve had nightmares about it ever since. I’m in a tunnel, and my arms are pinned at my sides, and I’m hollering for my mother. It’s the worst thing ever happened to me, sir. Being down in that hole was like living it all over again.”
    “I understand, Sergeant.”
    “No, sir, you don’t. Nobody does. I’ve been afraid of closed-in places all my life. I wanted to die in that hole and have it over with. If I’d had a weapon, I would have punched my ticket.”
    His breath was labored, his hip knocking against mine. I held him around the waist and used my other hand to keep his arm tight across my shoulders. I could see the eastern edge of the woods and a snowfield blazing as brightly as a flame under the moon. I had no idea where we were. The war had not only moved on, it seemed to have lost interest in us. In the distance, I could see a serpentine river shining like black oil, and beyond the opposite shore, a railroad