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Page 47.

Tim awoke, retching.

His head was filled with fumes from poorly burned gasoline fuel, and his bones ached from being banged around on the steel floor of an old, tiny Citroen truck. Only a faded, worn carpet scrap separated him from the metal floor of the truck. A canvas awning over the top shielded him from the hot sun that shone through pinholes in the canvas, blinding him and searing his skin wherever the sun’s rays struck. The air was dry and hot, like inside a furnace. His stomach seemed to want to jump out through his mouth. He jerked onto all fours, retching. Already, a thin watery puddle full of clotted milk bits covered the floor near him, and the smell was like rotting baby vomit baked in animal urine and old diesel spillage. At least, that was his muddled sense of what was coming out from inside him and mingling with the already not very charming contents of the truck.

The truck, in any event, had stopped moving. He’d been dimly and sickeningly conscious of movement throughout the early dawn hours and into the ever-hotter daylight as the vehicle bumped over old French military roads.

Each time he retched, the goat collar around his neck gave a series of spastic rattles, almost in a musical rhythm. It made men laugh harshly outside the truck where he couldn’t see them. He didn’t need to see them. He remembered their cruel faces from the night before.

His ankles were tightly bound together, and rubbed raw where they touched. Sand had gotten in the wounds, and flies buzzed mercilessly around the serum and hopped around over his vomit, annoying his eyes. The flies buzzed hungrily around the cream stuck to his cracked lips, and he made sputtering, spitting noises to blow them away.

When the men outside heard him, their tone changed from laughter to serious haggling. One threw aside the canvas flap on the back of the cargo container, letting in harsh sunlight. There was a crash as the tailgate went down, and a common roar of disgust at the sight and smell of him. A hand reached in, grabbed him by the collar, and yanked. Half-throttled, coughing, too weak to fight, he slid out over his vomit and landed on a mixture of hot sand and gravel and sharp little protruding rocks outside.

He was in a sooq, a market square. All around, two and three story mud buildings cast merciful shade, and he crawled out of the hot sunlight into the shade of several men’s hems. A stick descended on his back, in a half-hearted whipping motion, as a white-bearded man negotiated unyieldingly with a shadowy man in a gray wool robe.

He was thirsty, and tried to get the man’s attention.

The man hit him sharply on the back with the stick, making him cringe with pain. He tried to double over backwards, which was physiologically impossible, but he writhed with his hands reaching behind his back and his mouth open in pain. The goat bells rattled, and people around him laughed. Drifting in and out of delirium, he saw again the shark dismembering his fellow sailor under the water. He saw again the awkward pose of body—was the man already dead, or just numb with shock?—and then the plier-like attack of that shark—the darting, snapping grab, the floating pieces of the torso...

He found himself sobbing helplessly at the loss of all his shipmates, the realization that he hated Hitler for the first time in a flesh and blood visceral way for causing all this when he could be sitting in a miserable, damp, drafty factory by the East River in Fair Haven, toiling over a Seth Thomas engine, and listening to the alcoholic shop supervisor tormenting him about not taking a full hour for lunch...it was all jumbled together in a blender of sobs and emotions and thirst and despair...