Via Dolorosa(68)

“Get her away!” Nick shouted, now moving back through the men. His gun was still on the woman.

“Out!” Angelino yelled at the woman. “Leave!”

Still holding onto Myles Granger’s arm, the woman cried something—moaned something—sobbed something at him. She spoke to him. There was a sense of urgent begging in her voice, emphasized by the sincerity of a hand placed first above her heart, then gradually sliding down to the center of her belly, her gut, her soul.

“Out!” Angelino yelled, pointing his rifle at the woman.

“Ma’am,” pleaded Bowerman. “Ma’am, please, you need to get back up there and out of the street.” He sounded like a crossing guard his first day on the job. “Ma’am, please…”

Nick approached and wrapped fingers around the woman’s wrist. With a tug he managed to pull her off Myles Granger. The amputation seemed to jerk Granger back into reality: he stumbled backward, and would have lost his balance had Bowerman not been right behind him to catch him around the shoulder.

“Back,” Nick told the woman, illustrating with his hands that he wanted them all out of the street. “Back.”

“You okay, Granger?” Bowerman asked the kid.

Granger nodded, though he still looked green. He was still staring at the woman. She, in return, was still staring at him.

“Shoot the bitch!” Karuptka shrilled from across the street.

“Granger,” Bowerman was saying. “Granger, man—you okay?”

“Yeah,” Myles Granger finally managed.

“Look at me, bro.”

“Yeah…”

“Look at me,” Bowerman repeated.

Myles Granger looked at Bowerman. Nick looked, too. For a moment, it looked as though nineteen-year-old Myles Granger was going to collapse into tears. Then, equally surprising, the kid started to laugh. Uncontrollably, he started to laugh—a deep belly-laugh.

“All right, come on,” Nick said. The woman had receded out of the street; she stood now surrounded by a corral of other robed women, watching the men in the street like deities about to pass judgment. “Come on, guys.”

“Shoot the bitch,” Karuptka snarled again, his voice lower and tinged with a bitter twist of humor now.

“Cool it, Vic.” Nick nodded at Myles Granger. “You okay?”

“Yeah, Lieutenant. Yeah.”

But Myles Granger was not all right. Something inside him had been knocked funny by that woman, and nothing was all right. He spent the rest of the afternoon in an unnerving, reflective haze, his eyes always just slightly out of focus. By dusk of that same day, they had established camp within the protective embrace of what structures remained standing just outside the city’s marketplace. Sporadic radio transmissions warned of gunfire less than a half-mile from where they now camped, on the other side of the market square. Their packs off, he watched Granger for a few moments as the kid stood aloof and apart from the others, staring off into the distance. He went to Granger, smoking a hand-rolled cigarillo, and paused beside him.

“Looking at anything in particular?”

“Sorry, Lieutenant,” Myles Granger said. It was an utterance—hardly a voice. He seemed embarrassed, caught off-guard.

“Why don’t you stick around here with the others,” he told Granger, and ambled back toward camp where he bedded down beside Bowerman and tried not to smell the grease and fuel burning.

Come morning, they were ready to cross the marketplace. The men were ready. Karuptka was bulletproof, his face a patchwork of pale and pasty leukoderma and deep brown sun-poisoned turrets. Angelino’s eyes were squinty but watchful, creased at their corners like folded newspapers.

“Granger,” he said. He had to say his name twice. “You awake?”

Granger had been staring off into space. At the second call of his voice, the kid snapped his head up and looked temporarily startled.

“Get up, kid,” Nick said.

Myles Granger didn’t say much of anything. He simply stood, strapped on his gear, shouldered his M-16, and looked as though he were in the process of being swallowed alive by his helmet.

“Walk with me for two seconds,” Nick said, hanging back until Granger looked sturdy enough to take a step.

“What’s up, Lieutenant?”

“What’s with you?”

“Sir…?”

“What the hell happened to you, man?”

“Nothing, sir…”

“You feeling okay?”

“Sure.”

“Because I really need you to feel okay. You got me?”

“Yes, sir.”

“All these guys, they need you to feel okay.”

“Yes, sir.”

“You got something on your mind? Something bothering you?”

In the split second before the kid answered, he could tell that yes, something was bothering young Myles Granger very much. “No, sir,” Myles Granger lied. “I’m fine, sir.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

Turning away from the kid, Nick shook a cigarette out of his pack and held it out toward him. “Smoke this,” he told Granger, “and try to get a grip.”

Smirking, once again embarrassed, his head tilted down, Myles Granger pulled a cigarette from the pack and poked it between his thin, white lips. “Yeah,” the kid said. “Thanks.”