Yellow Birds by Kevin Powers Read Free Book Online

reason to speak, he will not understand the words, and I thought, Thank you, I am tired and do not know what to say. By then, in every instance, we had passed each other. And it felt good, somewhere behind my breastbone, to sense that this separation was explicable, a mere failing of language, and my loneliness could proceed with a different cause for a little while longer.
    I reached a traffic circle where a pair of silver cabs idled. I tapped on the first one’s driver-side window. The cabbie, a man with large eyes and a small, almost lipless mouth, sat up. He rolled his window down and leaned his head out ever so slightly. My hands were in the front pockets of my jeans and I leaned in to him as well. “K-town,” I said quietly. For a moment we were very close, almost touching, and he said something that I didn’t understand. “No sprechen,” I said. He sighed and smiled and waved his hand toward the backseat of his taxi and I got in.
    And that’s when it began, on that short ride in to Kaiserslautern. We rode in silence, without pleasantries, and the radio stayed off. I leaned my head against the window and watched as my breath condensed on it. I took my finger and made rudimentary lines in the fogged-over glass; first one, then another, until I had made the shape of a square, a smaller window inside the window. As I looked out onto the trees that edged the road, my muscles tensed and I began to sweat. I knew where I was: a road in Germany, AWOL, waiting for the flight back to the States. But my body did not: a road, the edge of it, and another day. My fingers closed around a rifle that was not there. I told them the rifle was not supposed to be there, but my fingers would not listen, and they kept closing around the space where my rifle was supposed to be and I continued to sweat and my heart was beating much faster than I thought reasonable.
    I was supposed to be happy, but I cannot recall feeling much of anything except a dull, throbbing numbness. I was very tired and the blur of the silver trees on the side of the road became a comfort that described both newness and continuity at once. I wanted to get out and run my hands along the bark. I was sure that it was smooth and although it was still raining in the odd hovering way that it had been, I wanted to go out in it. To let it fall on my dark neck and hands, to feel it.
    We rode the rest of the way into town like that, in silence, a few trembles held just so in my hands. He dropped me on a wide street. The sun hovered half hidden above the pale buildings in the rain. A few streetlights were on and gave off a thin glow through the gray afternoon, and after I paid the driver for the trip I began to walk toward the edge of town. I passed in and out of circles of light made by the sun through the clouds and the useless lamplight. By the time I reached the end of Turnerstrasse, the lights had adopted their own rhythm. My passage through them became more regular, something firm to which I could commit myself. I figured Sterling and some of the other guys would worm their way out to the bars to raise hell. I hoped I wouldn’t see them, and not just because I’d gone AWOL. The mere thought of him made bile well up in a kind of raw, acidic burn at the back of my throat.
    I passed a large cathedral on my right, and there was a dull cold in the air so I slipped inside. The interior of the cathedral was lit in a fashion that reflected the pale light outside its doors. I found a pamphlet in the foyer that gave the history of the church in German and in English, and I spread it out as wide as I could in an attempt to hide behind it. I ducked into a pew in the back of the church’s transept. An after-school tour had started and although it was conducted in German, I tried to follow along as best I could from the pamphlet I held.
    The cathedral was old. The sun had moved so that its light through the reds and blues of the high stained glass did not wash over the marble