Coyote’s cheek brushed against mine. “I vill stay vith you until you go. I vill usher you in to your freedom. I vant to vatch.”
His excitement was sick, demented. His fascination with death—freedom—was anything but normal and healthy. Then before I knew it, his lips were on my cheek, and he gave me a tender kiss.
“Ze journey is now yours,” he whispered. “Take it my friend.”
Friend. If he were any kind of friend, he would have untied me and ushered me out of the cellar. But friends like Coyote make better enemies.
As I tried to remain awake, wrestling with weighted eyelids and a soupy mind, Coyote remained nearby, quiet. I couldn’t see him but could hear the even rhythm of his lungs drawing in air and releasing it again, the soft hiss of breath passing through his nose. I didn’t want to give him the pleasure of watching me die, knowing that when I gave in to sleep, he would hasten my freedom either with violence or something less brutal like suffocation or strangulation.
At some point during the night I lost my will to fight, my determination to rain on Coyote’s freedom festival and surrendered to sleep, hoping my passage to freedom would be quick and without too much enduring pain.
21
I awoke, startled by an illuminated face just inches from my own. Blankly, my mind a vacuum, I stared at the angelic visage. It wasn’t a face I recognized, not Dad or Pop or Henry or any of my new German friends. Not Coyote. At first, I thought I was dreaming, that I’d successfully found freedom and escaped to a far better place than what I’d left behind, a place where people were actually kind and caring and generous, where angels trod and lions reclined with lambs. But when I tried to move and was immediately scolded by an angry throb in my head and a bone-aching gnaw in my shoulders, I knew that place was far from within my reach. But the face, the face of a man, was still there, gleaming. Clean shaven with soft lines and full lips and cerulean eyes that seemed to glow, there was an intensity in the set of his jaw and tightness of his brow that reminded me of the magnitude of my situation.
As the fog cleared from my mind and my surroundings focused I noticed the light that illuminated the man in front of me. It wasn’t a yellowish light that might be cast by a candle or bulb, it was white like the light of day at high noon. And it didn’t seem to come from any single source but rather spilled over him like soft water. On closer inspection, I also noticed he wasn’t holding any light and no light source was nearby. As odd as it felt, it seemed the light was coming from him, as if his skin radiated it, oozed it like sweat or oil.
Darkness still encroached upon us from every corner of the cellar but my visitor and everything a foot out from him glowed like the moon reflecting the brilliant white light of the sun. I marveled at this, at the iridescent quality about the stranger’s face, as one would (and should) upon meeting an alien with skin that glowed like the moon’s surface, sans craters (his complexion was perfect, as smooth and creamy as buttermilk).
I opened my mouth to question him about who he was, how he got into the cellar, and where the light was coming from when he beat me to it. “Come, we must go now. Quickly.”
When he spoke, three things registered in my less-foggy mind and seemed entirely out of place. One, I noticed he looked stereotypically German: short, flax-blonde hair parted neatly to the left and those bluer than blue eyes. Two, he was clothed in the same gray uniform with black belt and boots that my captors wore. And three, he spoke English, with only a hint of a German accent.
He motioned with his hand for me to follow. “Come. Quickly.”
I was about to tell him I couldn’t because I was tethered to the table leg when my hands slipped free from behind me and fell to my sides. Shoulders feeling like they were filled with cement, I brought my hands slowly in front of me and examined my ropeless wrists. A band of reddened skin encircled them where the rope had dug in.
“Come.” His voice was urgent and he bit the word off like you would snap a crisp carrot between your teeth.
I climbed to my feet, my shoulders, back, hips, buttocks, and knees protesting every movement. The stranger led the way through the cellar, and I followed close behind, basking in his glow as if it were a patch of warm sunlight on an overcast chilly day. He led me to the cellar door that opened to the outside world, the same door that Henry had led me to.
“My family,” I whispered, reaching for the stranger’s shoulder then deciding against it. I didn’t know what would happen if I touched him and my hand contacted the odd glow, and now wasn’t the time to find out. I pulled my hand back. “I can’t leave without my family.”
He turned to me and his blue eyes looked like a cloudless sky on a crisp autumn day. I almost expected to see geese pass through them or a single cottony cloud drift by. He held my gaze for a second, just a second, but it was enough to pucker my skin with goosebumps. There was something about those eyes, something . . . powerful, compelling, and if I’d thought of it then I would have said supernatural.
“The time is not right.” He said it in an almost musical way, half-singing the words. “All things must happen in their own time, in his time.”
It made no sense to me, this stranger’s cryptic talk, and I found myself getting irritated. I leaned a little closer and instinctively placed my hand on his upper arm. A warm vibration raced through my hand, traveled up my arm, and settled in my chest. The feeling was similar (I say similar because I’d never felt anything like it prior to that moment and haven’t since) to laying your hand on the hood of an idling car and letting the vibration cascade through your body.
Immediately, I pulled away. He looked at my hand, then met my eyes again. There was no emotion in his look, only that sense of compulsion.
Feeling the remaining hum of the vibration in my chest, I whispered, “When they find me gone, they’ll kill my family. I can’t leave them here.”
The stranger reached out to touch me, and I pulled my shoulder away, not wanting to experience the peculiar vibration again. He paused, his hand hovering inches from my arm, met my eyes with that powerful stare and nodded ever so subtly. For some reason beyond my comprehension, beyond my ability to adequately explain with words, and despite the uniquely German features and dress, I found myself trusting this strange rescuer. Slowly, he placed his hand on my shoulder. At first I felt nothing, no warmth, no vibration, no buzz or hum or pulsation. But seconds later I felt warmth under his hand, as if it were made of cast iron and he’d just drawn it from a hot stove. The warmth radiated from below his palm and spread throughout my body like hot water, spilling across my shoulders, down my back, down my chest, covering my abdomen then legs.
“In due time,” he said, his voice like perfectly sounded notes from an orchestra. “In his time.” He paused and ministered to me through his eyes, calmed my spirit. “Now come.”
He ascended the concrete steps, lifted the door to the outside and exited the cellar first. I followed, close on his heels. The outside world was dark, the twisted branches of the trees painted black against the deep charcoal sky. The area was quiet too. No rodents foraged, no owls hooted.
My rescuer tapped me on the shoulder and motioned for me to follow him. In a crouch, hunched at the waist, I scurried behind him, following his glow as if it were a lighthouse and I a ship lost in the fog. When we passed the tree line, the stranger’s radiance dimmed and eventually snuffed out altogether. It reminded me of a candle’s flame when the wick burns all the way down and the flame slowly dies. All that’s left is an orange glow and a trail of smoke curling into the air. When his glow expired, though, it left behind no orange ember, no afterglow, and no trail of smoke.
Darkness crept in around us like a gaggle of demons, and I lost sight of the stranger. I stood in silence, listening for his footsteps, for the crunch of dry leaves beneath his booted feet, but heard nothing.
“Hey, where are you?” I asked.
There was no answer. I reached out with my hands and felt the dark air. The last time I saw him, right before his
light extinguished, he was only two feet from me. Now I felt nothing, only empty space.
“Where are you?” I said again, still whispering so as not to awaken my German hosts and call undue attention to myself.
When no answer came a second time, a sliver of ice slipped down my back.
My rescuer was gone, and I was alone.
22
Like a blind man in a room full of moving obstacles, I groped around in the darkness for an undeterminable amount of time, pushing past and through bony hands that pulled at my jacket and pants and sinewy tentacles that entwined my legs. More than once, I tripped on a fallen branch and found myself on my hands and knees in the leaves.
The air was cool, almost chilly, and damp, saturated with the odor of decomposing nature. If I looked up, I could see the slate gray sky above, broken by a tangle of twisted branches towering overhead, forming a webbed canopy that seemed to lower and close in on me from above. My lungs tightened, as if those bony hands that merely fumbled at my jacket had found their mark and worked their way into my chest, becoming one with my ribs and refusing to expand when my diaphragm struggled to contract. I was on foreign soil, a land populated by unfeeling giants, ravenous beasts, and tentacled creatures that only the most imaginative storyteller could conjure. In my ears, behind the drums, blood thumped out a steady staccato rhythm.
After some time—I had no idea how long it had been since I witnessed my rescuer’s dimming and lost contact with him—I found myself once again on my knees, lost. I realized I no longer knew which way led back to the house, back to the company of the Nazis. If I kept aimlessly meandering through the woods, sooner or later I’d stumble into the clearing and find myself back on the second floor, bound and this time no doubt gagged, listening to a bear of a man curse me in German while showering me with his Nazi spittle.
I wanted to see Dad and Pop and Henry again, sit in a room with them and laugh and tell stories and reminisce about bygone days when innocence ruled the day and life was simple and predictable. I wanted to hear Dad’s booming laugh and listen to Henry’s wisecracks and Pop’s wisdom. I wanted to be with them, as they were, before this cursed hunting trip where we had become the prey. But I didn’t want to be with them in that second-story room that smelled of body odor and urine and reeked of violence and hate. I wanted to share a warm fire in our living room back at the farmhouse, watch as the orange light of the flames danced on their faces and illuminated their smiling eyes. I wanted security and love and safety and the wellbeing that can only come from time spent with family.
It’s human nature to mentally escape when no physical retreat is possible. Our mind finds a safe, secure place to hide, hoping in some supernatural way that our body will be able to follow. Truth is, we hadn’t sat around a glowing fire and reminisced about bygone days since I was a child, maybe eight or nine. I hadn’t shared a real conversation with my dad in years. Those days were gone, replaced by work that couldn’t wait and blockaded by walls of disappointment and inadequacy that had been erected on both sides. But my mind remembered them in detail, down to the fibers of Dad’s flannel shirt and the way he used to look at me. He seemed happier then, and kinder. And in a very real way I wanted to wander out of this darkness and find myself in a crease in time where I was eight again and the house that loomed just beyond my reach was our farmhouse, a flickering fire waiting in the living room, and Dad in his chair, feet propped, hands clasped over his belly, eyes warm like he was really proud of me.
The sound of a creaking door snapped me out of my dream, transported me back to the present. The scrape of dry metal had come from my right. I whipped my head around and found that I was closer to the house than I had thought. Two first floor windows glowed like demon eyes and silhouetted against one of them, standing on the front porch, was one of the Germans.
No more than thirty feet inside the tree line, I ducked to my left to find concealment behind a large trunk. My foot landed on a dry branch and snapped it clean. The sound echoed through the still, damp air. From the porch, a light sprang to life, swept right then left. I pressed my back against the tree, thankful for the decades of undisturbed growth the mammoth had enjoyed. It was wide and I hoped wide enough to hide all of me. The light moved on the ground around me like a phantom engrossed in some ritual dance or an alien’s eye probing this new planet. Back and forth it ran, looking under leaves and branches, exploring thickets and shrubs, climbing the sturdy, wrinkled trunks of oaks and maples.
Then it stopped. Half the beam highlighted a maple fifteen feet ahead of me and to my right. The other half was on the tree to which I was pressed. My heart was in my throat. A bead of sweat broke from my brow, ran down the side of my nose and caught on the corner of my mouth. I licked at it, tasting the saltiness of my fear. Suddenly, the figure on the porch hollered something in German. His gruff voice pierced the silence like a clap of thunder. I heard the door creak open and booted footsteps on the porch. German voices spoke too low to understand.
Holding my breath, I waited for something to happen . . . something. I knew I’d been spotted, that the corner of my shoulder had fallen under the light, but if I held still, maybe the Germans on the porch, with the disadvantage of distance and only half a beam from the flashlight, would decide my shoulder was just a knot in the tree, a bump in the bark, and stay on the porch. I quickly decided that if that was not the case, if I heard the sound of boots clomping down the porch steps, I would have to make a run for it. I knew I could outrun three of the Nazis, but the smaller one I wasn’t sure about. I’d have to take my chances. But until I heard that sound, the sound of my enemy in pursuit, I’d remain motionless, breathless, part of the tree.
A few seconds passed. The Germans continued to mutter on the porch, but no advance on their part had yet to be made. I continued to hold my breath. I wanted to melt into the bark, become one, literally, with my arborous protector.
Then I heard it, the hard clop of boots on wood. The light disappeared for a moment, and I almost bolted, but just as I was about to lunge into the darkness it appeared again, on the same tree ahead of me and to my right. The light bounced steadily, undulating with each step its owner took. They were in the grass now, crossing the clearing. I had only seconds before they were upon me. If I made a run for it, I still had a chance to lose my pursuers in the darkness. I tried to swallow but my throat wouldn’t cooperate, those bony hands had somehow made their way to my esophagus as well.
When the Germans were so close I could hear the whisper of their legs brushing through the knee-high grass, I slapped the trunk and took off.
I heard one of them holler for me to stop as the light bounced all about me. Clenching my jaw, pumping my arms like I was chopping wood, I tore into the darkness. A gunshot ripped through the night, and I momentarily braced myself for the impact of the bullet, but it never found me. Another gunshot and bark exploded from an oak just feet to my left. I dug my boots into the soft soil and turned right, tearing through thickets and serviceberry, stepping high so as not to catch my toe on a fallen branch.
Occasionally, the beam of the flashlight would dance around my feet or find a tree ahead of me, but for the most part I ran in the dark. My lungs burned like I was breathing in shards of glass, my legs ached. I had to stop. I had to rest my spasmodic diaphragm and let the lactic acid drain from my muscles.
Dodging behind a tree, I bent double and rested my hands on my knees, sucking in air. Moments later I heard the crunch of leaves and snapping of branches—my pursuers still hot on my trail. I lunged forward, caught my foot on a branch and landed hard on my knees. Pain stabbed through my ankle and shot up my shin. The Germans were getting closer. The light bounced around me, and I heard one of them say something in a gruff, breathless voice.
I climbed to my feet, feeling like every movement jammed a hot poker deeper into my ankle, and was snared by the arm. At first I thought it was a tangle of thickets that had grabbed hold of my sleeve. But when I tried to pull away I realized it was a
hand.
“Come with me. Quickly!”
It was the stranger, my rescuer, but he had no glow about him this time.
23
Like two jailbirds finally pulling off the great escape, we stole through the woods, shrouded in darkness. Remarkably, in spite of my injury and fiery pain that tore through my entire lower leg with each step, my advance was light and almost noiseless. My guide deftly wove us in and out of underbrush, between stoic trunks, over decaying limbs. Changing direction often—at once left, then right, then left again—his steps were sure and quick, as if he were running through his own backyard under the watchful gaze of a mid-day sun. He seemed to know exactly where he was going, as if he’d been there a hundred times before. And if it weren’t for his firm grasp on the sleeve of my jacket, I would have surely lost him again.
Occasionally, I heard a German bark out some indecipherable order or curse, but even those were growing faint. We were losing them. And I was glad for it. The muscles in my legs were swollen with lactic acid and begging for a respite, the pain in my ankle and lower leg had found its way to my hip, and my lungs were having difficulty keeping pace with my galloping heart. For some reason I thought of Aaron and wondered if half way around the world, this very instant, he was engaged in the same activity as I, if he was running feverishly through the Ardennes Forest, dodging immovable objects, escaping the death grip of a handful of Nazi goons. Two brothers, separated only by geography, sharing a similar race for survival. It was possible.
After five minutes or so, my guide stopped abruptly and turned toward me. I parted my lips to ask why he’d stopped but his hand found my mouth before I could utter a single syllable. He held a finger to his lips and shook his head slowly. I nodded in agreement, and he removed his hand. For a few long seconds we both stood statue-still, listening for any indication that our pursuers were still pursuing. I heard nothing—no leaves, no branches, no breathing—though I was sure if the Germans were anywhere within a fifty-foot radius they would certainly hear my heart thumping like a kettle drum against the stillness of the night.
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