Wayfaring Stranger: A Novel by James Lee Burke

and regretted my anger. I couldn’t quite accept the fact that we were parting.
    “You’ll be headed back to Louisiana.”
    “Yes, sir, I will. I owe you, Lieutenant.”
    “It doesn’t work that way. We do our job and go home, and then we eventually forget about all this.”
    He was shaking his head before I finished speaking. “We’re going to be rich men, sir. I know everything there is to know about pipelining. I was hustling skids on the pipeline when I was thirteen years old. It’ll take some capital, but we’ll pull it off.”
    “I’m afraid I’m not connecting here.”
    “Know the secret to the Tiger tank’s structural success? It’s the rolled-steel and electro-welding process. When the war is done, the big peacetime score will be in oil and natural gas. That means pipelines, thousands and thousands of miles of them, all over the country. Oil might as well stay in the ground if you cain’t get it to the refinery.”
    “I’m sure you’re correct,” I said.
    “You all right, sir?”
    “Never better,” I said, looking at a deuce-and-half driving down the road, the back loaded with prisoners who may have been SS in civilian clothes.
     
    I RECEIVED TREATMENT FOR frostbite but nothing else. I rejoined the regiment and stayed with it all the way to the Elbe River, where we met the Russians on April 25, 1945. We got wonderfully drunk with them. We punched holes in canned beer with our bayonets, and the Russians drained the fuel from the rockets at a nearby V-2 base. In the morning we woke up with hangovers and the Russians woke up dead.
    I thought my hangover would fade as the day warmed and the flowers opened along the banks of the Elbe and the hilarity of the previous night slipped into memory, left behind with all the other departures from sanity that wars allow us to justify. I had never been much of a drinker and thought the weakness in my joints and the spots that swam before my eyes were the result of exposing an inexperienced metabolism to too much alcohol. By evening I began to sweat, and my hair was sopping wet and cold as ice in the wind, and I entered the first stages of a hacking cough that I believed was either bronchitis or walking pneumonia.
    There was no transition in the progression of my illness. By nightfall I was burning up and doubling over each time I coughed. I wrote in my notebook, I feel like there’s a chunk of angle iron in my chest. Maybe I’ll be better in the morning. No word about Rosita. A captain in G-2 said many Jewish survivors were being placed in displaced persons camps, but he could find no record of her. I think of her constantly. I see her eyes in my sleep. The coloration and the inner light that shows through them are like none I have ever seen. I don’t think I will be able to rest until I find her.
    I just coughed blood on my hand.
    A medic came into my tent in the morning and took my temperature and placed a stethoscope on my chest. He was a tall, bony kid from Alabama and said he had worked in an X-ray unit in a Mobile hospital before he enlisted. He hung the earpieces to the stethoscope on his neck. “Is there a history of respiratory problems in your family, Lieutenant?” he asked.
    “As a matter of fact, there is.”
    “You smoke a lot?”
    “Never took it up. What are we talking about, Doc?”
    “You’re wheezing like a busted hose in there, sir.”
    “We’re not talking about pneumonia, are we?”
    “No, sir, we’re not.” He lifted his eyes into mine. “There’s a new drug available that’s supposed to work miracles.”

Chapter
    6
     
    T HE TUBERCULAR UNIT was in a converted eighteenth-century French mansion in vineyard country, one with a wide stone porch that allowed a wonderful view of the gardens and poplar trees and the low green hills in the distance and a meandering river and the white stucco farmhouses with red Spanish tile where the owners of the vineyards lived. The miracle drug I was given was called streptomycin. I took