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.
WE 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.