Free Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel by James Lee Burke Page A

Corps had stopped conducting only daylight raids, which cost them terrible losses; like the RAF, they had commenced flying at night, lighting the target area with incendiaries.
    It felt unnatural to be a spectator in the war and not a participant. We were being sheltered and cared for by people who would be summarily executed if we were discovered in their cellar. We were eating their food, burning their fuel, sleeping on the blankets and quilts they gave us, and in Rosita’s case, wearing their clothes (the wife had given her a pair of trousers, a warm jacket, kneesocks, and a cute fur hat). The cellar was warm and dry, and we could sleep as much as we wanted, or stay up late at night and talk, the way people talk around campfires when their newfound companionship allows them to put aside pretense about their lives. It was a respite that I didn’t feel I deserved. West of us, my countrymen were still dying. Sometimes when I fell asleep on my pallet with a quilt pulled over my head, the preserve jars on the cellar shelves would begin rattling, and I knew that someone who had taken my place was huddling at the bottom of a foxhole, knees pulled up in the embryonic position, trying to control his sphincter while German 88s were demonstrating what a firestorm was all about.
    On the eighth night, the reverberations of the artillery shells were stronger, the clouds on the eastern horizon flickering with light from the ground. Pine was sound asleep at the back of the cellar, behind the stairs. Rosita was sitting on her pallet, her back to the wall, glancing up each time the house trembled.
    “You never hear the one that gets you,” I said. “At least that’s what survivors say.”
    “Is it true?”
    “I don’t think it is. An eighty-eight-millimeter comes in like a train. You can hear it powering out of the sky. One of ours, a 105, sounds like automobile tires coming toward you at high speed on a wet highway. The sound can come right into your foxhole with the shell attached.”
    “Are you going back to the war?”
    “I don’t have a lot of say about that. I’d like to finish it, though.”
    “Why do you always address me as Miss Rosita?”
    “Because in the American South, you don’t call a lady by her first name without expressing a form of deference. You’re obviously a lady. Actually, you’re a little more than that. You don’t belong in a category.”
    “You should go back home if you have the opportunity. You would be a very good university teacher.” Then she seemed to revisit my last remark. “I am not categorical? That is an unbelievable thing to say to a woman.”
    She had gained weight, and the shadows had gone out of her cheeks. The cast in her eyes was unchanged, however. It was different from what survivors of the Great War called the thousand-yard stare. I had seen that. The eyes were unseeing, as though someone had clicked off a switch inside the person’s head, shutting down his faculties. The expression was glazed, the facial muscles dead. None of these applied to Rosita. The look in her eyes was acceptance; she had seen the evil her fellow humans were capable of, and she did not try to find explanations for it. She also knew that few would want to believe the events she had witnessed, and her attempts to describe them would only make her a pariah. The truth would not make her free; it would become her prison.
    “Lieutenant, you make me uncomfortable when you look at me like that.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “Do I still remind you of a woman outlaw?”
    “We grow them tough in Texas.”
    “I don’t know what that means.”
    I got up from my pallet and sat next to her. My proximity seemed to make her flinch inside, though I had carried her in my arms for days. Her face was inches from mine. “The woman outlaw represented something greater than herself. When people’s homes in Kansas and West Texas and Oklahoma were being tractored out, a few outlaws fought back. In reality, Bonnie Parker