Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel (6 page)

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 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 embankment and a water tower. If the sky remained clear, our planes would be in the air at dawn, blowing up fuel depots and nailing every armored unit they could spot. But where were we going to hide when the starlight faded from the heavens and the sun broke on the horizon, and what would we eat?

We trudged across the snowfield, clinging to each other, our eyes tearing, our ears like lumps of cauliflower, the wind as sharp as a barber’s razor when I turned my face into it.

W
E STAYED IN
the woods the entire day. A flight of bombers with a fighter escort passed high overhead, vapor trails barely discernable. Later we could hear the explosions of bombs through the earth, probably blockbusters designed to blow gas and water mains before the incendiaries were dropped in strings that looked like cords of firewood. The forest contained no signs of either human or animal life. I could only assume the animals had been killed and eaten. That there were no human footprints except our own was more than disconcerting. As the sun descended, shadows formed in the sculpted, funnel-shaped tracks we had left in the snow, creating a trail not unlike ink dots leading to our hiding place.

Just before sunset, a lone Messerschmitt painted with zebra stripes came in low across the field, close enough for me to see the pilot’s goggled face as he swooped past us. The area around his wing guns was black with burnt gunpowder. It seemed grandiose to believe that the pilot of a Luftwaffe fighter plane would have interest in two escapees from a one-sided slaughter, weak with hunger and in the first stages of frostbite. Less than one minute later, I heard his guns rattling as he strafed a target by the river, and I realized that others had probably survived the massacre. For a committed hunter, no target was too small or insignificant.

As soon as night fell, Sergeant Pine and I made our way down to the river and pushed a rowboat free of the ice and frozen reeds along the bank and rowed to the far side. We huddled at the base of the train tracks. I was exhausted and colder and hungrier than I had ever been, the kind of hunger that is like a rat eating a hole through the bottom of your stomach. To the east was another wooded area, and beyond it lighted buildings of some kind, perhaps factories manned by slave labor, operating twenty-four hours a day. I climbed up the embankment and placed my ear to one of the rails. For me, at that moment, the sound inside the steel could only be compared to the warm and steady humming of a woman’s circulatory system when you rest your head against her breast.

The headlight on the locomotive wobbled past us. Most of the cars looked empty, rocking on their undercarriages as we ran alongside the tracks, gravel skidding under our feet. I jumped aboard a boxcar whose interior was blowing with chaff and smelled of grain and livestock, then I reached down and grabbed the sergeant by the wrist and pulled him through the door, the riparian, marshlike countryside dropping behind us. I prayed that we were headed north, into Belgium. I prayed that a great deliverance was at hand.

The train gained speed and began to bend around a long curve that took us due east. Far up the line, I could see the glow of the firebox in the cab and sparks fanning from the smokestack. I lay down in the back of the boxcar and covered myself with a pile of burlap bags, too tired to care where the train took us. As I closed my eyes, I heard the sergeant push the sliding door shut. Soon I was fast asleep, the boxcar’s wheels clicking on the tracks, the floor rocking like a cradle.

I woke at sunrise with a start, the way you do when you realize that the problems surrounding you are real and that your sleep has only placed them in abeyance. The train had picked up considerable speed; the boxcar was one that Depression-era hoboes called a flat-wheeler because it had no springs and bounced a passenger all over the floor. “Where are we?” I said.

Sergeant Pine had slid back the door three inches from the jamb. “It sure ain’t Kansas, sir,” he replied. “I’d say we’re in the outhouse.”

I crawled to the door and looked out. The countryside was shrouded with fog that resembled and smelled like industrial smoke, rather than vapor from rivers and lakes, the sun a lemon-colored piece of shaved ice on the horizon. There were bomb craters, rows of them, in fields that could have contained no military importance. “Sometimes the flyboys pickle the load before they get to the Channel,” Pine said.

“We need to get off the train,” I said.

“Sir, I found something at the other end of the car. There wasn’t just livestock in here. There’s human feces stacked in the corner. It’s frozen. That’s why there wasn’t any stink,” he said. “You think there were POWs in this car?”

“GIs or Brits would have marked up the walls,” I said.

“You’re saying maybe this train carries Jews, sir?”

“Who else would it be?”

“I’m not sure, Lieutenant. I don’t know if I believe those stories.”

“You saw the SS at work.”

“That doesn’t make the stories true.”

“Maybe not.” The train was going faster and faster, the boxcar shaking, the lines of chaff on the floor eddying back and forth like seawater sliding across sand.

“I’ve never been this hungry. I’d eat the splinters out of the wall. You reckon we’re going to get out of this, sir?”

“If not, it won’t be for lack of trying.”

“Can I ask what you did in civilian life, Lieutenant? The reason I ask is you were having a dream. You said something about Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow, the outlaws. Dreaming about those two has got to be a new one.”

“I knew them. Friends of my grandfather killed them. My grandfather was a Texas Ranger who put John Wesley Hardin in jail. I went to school in Texas and Louisiana and have a degree in history from Texas A&M and plan to go to graduate school and become an anthropologist. Does that help you out?”

“Jesus Christ, sir.”

“What is it now?” I said, my attempt at affability starting to slip.

“Look yonder,” he replied. He pointed through the crack in the door.

Two fighters made a wide turn in the sky and came in low, right down on the deck, directly out of the sun, the muzzles of their fifty-caliber machine guns winking. A white star inside a blue red-rimmed disk was painted on their wings. I saw dirt spout in a straight line across a cultivated field just before I heard the rounds smack like a bucket of marbles into the sides of the boxcars. It was thrilling to see my countrymen appear almost miraculously in the sky, their wings emblazoned with an insignia we associated with the light of civilization. Unfortunately, our countrymen were shooting at us as well as at the enemy.

The planes roared overhead and made another turn and came in for a second pass, this time with rockets mounted under their wings. The rockets caught the locomotive dead-on, blowing the cab and the boiler apart, the coal car jackknifing and taking half a dozen boxcars down the embankment with it.

Our boxcar rolled to a slow halt and was stock-still on the tracks. The sergeant and I pushed open the sliding door and began running down a ditch that led to a canal overgrown on both banks with scrub brush and gnarled trees, so grotesque in their disfiguration that I wondered if they had been sprayed with herbicide. The current in the canal was brown and sluggish, more like sewage than creek water, the air as thick and gray as the inside of a damp cotton glove. Above the canal was a narrow, rutted road, bone-white in color, a viscous green rivulet running down its center. I thought I heard a sound like a metal sign clanging in the wind. I climbed up the embankment to see farther down the road, with no success. The wind changed direction, and the sergeant cupped his hand over his nose and mouth, trying not to gag. “God, what’s that smell?” he said.