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

was a murderer and treated my grandfather with disrespect, and that’s why I shot at her.”
    “I’m a symbol of other people? How degrading.”
    “No, not a symbol. You have a huge soul. It dwarfs the souls of others. It certainly dwarfs mine. I’ve never seen eyes like yours. They’re the color of sherry with light shining through it. You’re the kind of woman who’s beautiful inside a camera’s lens no matter what pose she takes.”
    I hadn’t meant to say the things I did. My cheeks were hot, my throat dry.
    “You’re a romantic,” she said. “I think you see things in others that don’t exist. You might be a famous writer one day.”
    “You winked at me, didn’t you?”
    “I did what ?”
    “When you said Viva la República and No pasarán .”
    “Like this?” she said.
    I felt chills all over.
     
    E ARLY THE NEXT day Charlotte ran down the cellar steps, waving her arms. Before Rosita could translate, Charlotte threw open the cellar door and pointed joyously at the bluest, most beautiful sky I had ever seen.
    “Better come look at this,” I said to the sergeant, who was shaving with Armin’s straight razor in a pan of water.
    He walked up behind me into the sunlight shining through the door. “Great God in the morning!” he said.
    The sky was filled with khaki-colored C-47s, more than I had ever seen, hundreds if not thousands of parachutes blooming one after another from one horizon to another. Three American paratroopers came down right behind the barn, rolling with the impact, then collapsing and gathering up their chutes. Pine and Rosita and I and our hosts went into the yard, the grass green and soggy, snow melting and sliding down the barn roof. A paratrooper came down forty feet from us and began pulling his chute from a mud puddle.
    “Where the hell have you guys been?” Pine said.
    “You know how it is, Mack. The traffic can be a bitch,” he said.
     
    F OR SOME REASON the German army was always praised for its efficiency and its practicality and even, by some, its ruthlessness. Their occupation of an area left no one in doubt about who was in charge. Their methodology was as subtle as a hobnailed boot stepping on an anthill. Unfortunately, unlike Roman imperialists, they didn’t have a culture that transferred readily to the subjects of the countries they conquered.
    The cultural and social changes caused by the United States Army’s occupation of an area, for good or bad, were immediate, overwhelming, and almost cartoonish. The cultural assimilation that usually took place was mind-numbing. Fully equipped field hospitals were in business in hours, showers and sit-down latrines were built, water tankers and ambulances and long convoys of deuce-and-a-half trucks showed up out of nowhere. GIs played touch football in a pasture pockmarked by shell fire; they jitterbugged in a café with local girls who, days earlier, were thought to be the enemy, a Benny Goodman record playing on a hand-crank Victrola.
    I should have been overjoyed to be back among my own. At first I was. Then I felt my initial happiness begin to fade, as though I were about to step aboard a passenger train that would take me away from home. The following day I couldn’t find Rosita. I asked Pine where she was.
    “Some guys from G-2 were talking to her,” he said.
    “What does G-2 want with Rosita?”
    “Search me, sir,” he said. “They caught some SS in Wehrmacht uniforms. Some of the women guards in those camps have posed as inmates.”
    “G-2 thinks she’s an imposter?”
    “She’s probably okay, Loot.”
    “When did you last see her?”
    “An hour ago. They put her on a truck with some other women.”
    “Why didn’t you tell me?”
    “Sir, the doc says I’m going to lose a couple of toes. I probably won’t be seeing you for a while.”
    We were standing in the sunshine outside a mess tent, the wind ballooning the canvas top. I looked at the lean cut of his jaw and the moral clarity in his eyes