Wayfaring Stranger by James Lee Burke

Author:James Lee Burke
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2014-07-14T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter

18

OUR DRIVEWAY WAS unpaved. Maybe that seems a silly observation to make in regard to the place where we lived in the Heights in the year 1947. But it was one detail of many I noticed on that late afternoon when I parked my car next to our screened porch and wondered how I should confront Rosita with the movie reel that sat in a tin box on the seat to me. The grass was a pale green, the chrysanthemums blooming in the flowerbeds, the driveway little more than a pattern of white rocks, like an ancient road protruding from the dirt, the lawn scattered with pecans in their husks.

There was another detail about our neighborhood that I had not given great weight to, and that was the absence of fences between the houses. It was an era of trust, of a boy on a bicycle sailing the evening paper up on the porch, radios in a window blaring with the overture from William Tell at six-thirty Monday through Friday evening all over the land. I didn’t want to go inside. I didn’t want to hurt my wife. I didn’t want to discover she was someone other than the truthful person I thought she was.

She was making sandwiches in the kitchen, trimming off bread crusts on a chopping board. She glanced at me and at the can in my right hand, then resumed slicing. “Where have you been?”

“Somebody dropped a movie reel in my car. I took it to a photo shop owned by a friend and watched it.”

“Your friend didn’t have a telephone?”

“I asked my friend to leave the room while I watched it.”

“It must have been interesting material.”

I set the can on the drainboard. “There’s a swastika on it.”

“Get it away from me.”

“Have you seen a film can like this one?”

“Not that I remember.”

“You’re in the film, Rosita.”

“How nice,” she said, the blade of her knife moving along the edges of the bread. “Now take it out of my sight, please.”

“You didn’t have to hide your past from me.”

“No one has any idea what went on in the camps,” she said. “You couldn’t begin to understand what they did to us and what we did to one another.”

“Why didn’t you tell me about the film?”

“Because it’s inconsequential in terms of other things that happened.”

“You told me you spat in an SS colonel’s face when he asked you to be his mistress.”

“Because that’s what I did.”

Then I spoke the worst words that ever passed through my lips. “That’s not what you’re doing in the film.”

She set the butcher knife down and stepped back, as though untangling herself from thoughts she didn’t believe herself capable of. “Do you want to know the colonel’s name?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“Because if I find out who he is and learn that he’s alive, I’ll go wherever he is and kill him.”

“Tell me what you think you saw.”

“Think I saw?”

“Tell me!” She shoved me in the breastbone.

“I won’t discuss it.”

“You watched him fuck me. What else did you see?”

“Don’t you use that language.

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