Wiedersehen

WIEDERSEHEN / Miller Williams When open trucks with German prisoners in them passed in convoy through the small town I dreamed in, my fourteenth year, of touchable breasts and cars and the Cards and the Browns, we grabbed the shirts we twisted and tied for bases and chased the trucks past all our houses slow as we could run. We tossed the baseball up to one of the guards who sometimes pretended to keep it but threw it back. Once I threw it badly. A German caught it. A boy barely older than I was and blonder and nearly as thin. He grinned and I thought how much the baseball belonging to John Oscar Carpenter must have cost. The guard didn't seem concerned about the baseball or me. We ran for blocks behind the flatbed truck. The side rails rattling made the same sense the Germans did calling and tossing the ball to one another. We ran in silence needing our breath to breathe and knowing that begging raises the value of things. At the edge of town the convoy speeded up. Everyone stopped but me and the truck pulled away. I looked back once to see the seven others standing on the curb of the last street loose and surprised as a group on a picnic looking into a river where someone has drowned. When I turned back to the trucks, pumping my arms, the pain in my side coming to punish me hard, to burn the blame away and make us even, even John Oscar Carpenter and I, the young German hauled back and let the ball 18 · The Missouri Review fly in a flat arc from center field. I caught it. I held it in the hand I waved as truck by truck the convoy shifted gears. "Wiedersehen," he yelled. A word I knew. I turned and pegged the ball to home in time. I wondered if he had killed the Rogers boy or thrown the hand grenade at Luther Tackett that blew his arm away. I had done something nobody ever had done. It was large and frightful. We walked in amazement a while and went to our houses. Your grandchildren, German, do they believe the story, the boy in Arkansas, blonder than you? Miller Williams The Missouri Review · 19 ...