The Wilson Deception by David O. Stewart Page B

in an ooze that coated everything, crusted on his clothes and his skin, left him smelling of earth, cordite, excrement, and whatever gas either side most recently released. For the first time in months, he had no lice. The earth didn’t shudder with detonations. The sky didn’t recoil from terrible blasts. He could lie still, feel his muscles and his breathing. During exercise period the sun warmed his face. Breezes came, even to prison yards. After eighteen months of living with dozens of other soldiers, solitude was a joy. He had seen other prisoners reading. Maybe soon his mind would be quiet enough so he could read. Maybe then he’d be able to think, too.
    But when his father visited him, Joshua’s façade of resignation and acceptance crumbled. One look at the old man’s deeply lined face, at his pain and his anger and his disappointment, told Joshua that he’d been spinning lies for himself. The army was turning his life inside out, punishing him, punishing his family, for something he didn’t do. Suddenly, Joshua could feel the hurt because it sat across a wobbly table from him and throbbed. He and his father hadn’t said much. They never did. But that fierce old man brought him back.
    Squealing train brakes made Joshua wince. They were stopping for the eighth or ninth time. He had lost count. Either the French railways were in tatters or a trainload of American soldiers and prisoners commanded very low priority. Joshua watched an old woman walk alongside a cart pulled by a brown donkey. He couldn’t make out the cart’s load, but it seemed almost more than the donkey could manage. Perhaps, he wondered, the donkey used the same struggling stride no matter how heavy the load. A play for sympathy. If your job involved hauling a cart all day, that would be a smart move.
    The train started up with a lurch that seemed too dramatic for the low speeds the engineer favored. After another ten minutes, they pulled in to Troyes, pulling past the passenger platform in the dim twilight.
    The boxcar doors rumbled open, pulled from the outside by two of the three guards responsible for the half-dozen prisoners. They were changing trains, the guards yelled. The prisoners jumped down. The guards lined them up single file and herded them to the train station. Inside the station, Joshua’s shoulders relaxed with the smell of coffee and tobacco and the yeasty funk of people in damp clothes. He took the aromas in through his pores, storing up the sensations.
    A high wall clock with Roman numerals chimed the quarter hour. The civilians in the station were mostly women in faded head scarves. They paid little attention to the American prisoners, who were mushed out a side door of the station, leaving its warmth to the soldiers who entered behind them.
    A guard nudged Joshua and pointed him toward a vile-smelling pissoir . Two years before, he would have shied from pissing in semipublic. Another life. The cold air was sharp as it reached his private parts. He relaxed gradually, felt the warm flow. Standing, lost in his own regrets, he finished and closed his pants, then turned. The guard was gone.
    In his place stood a tall, fair-haired fellow with a trim mustache, hands in his pockets. He looked to be on his way to a cocktail party. “Sergeant Cook, walk a few steps with me.” He nodded away from the train station. When Joshua turned that way, the man added, “Don’t run. That would ruin a good deal of very careful planning.”
    They walked a few hundred feet, side by side, when the man slowed. A squared-off truck stood near the curb. In no hurry, the man opened the rear door and indicated Joshua should climb up.
    The truck fell dark when the door closed behind him, Joshua still on his knees on the truck bed. Hands thrust a bundle into his arms. A familiar deep voice told him to be quiet and listen.
    His father spoke, his voice tense and urgent in the darkness.
    â€œYou have to