They were rough men who'd handled him with surprising gentleness. The fishermen had wrapped him in a blanket and given him a glass of red wine. He could still remember how it burned his throat as he drank.

And when they came to shore, they had dutifully handed him over to the Germans.

That was what had really happened. But in his dream the truth always evaporated, replaced instead by a much happier reality, where they were all alive, and gathered beneath the wing of the Lovely Lydia, trading jokes about the Arab merchants outside their dusty North African base, and boasting about what they would do with their lives and their girlfriends and wives when they got back to the States. He had sometimes thought, when they were still alive, that the men on the Lovely Lydia were the best friends he would ever have, and then sometimes thought that they would never see each other again, once the war was over. It had never really occurred to him that he would never see them again because they were all dead, and he was still alive, because this had never really seemed a possibility.

In his bunk, he thought: They will be with me always.

One of the prisoners in another bed shifted, the wooden slats creaking and obscuring the man's words as he talked in his sleep, the noise dissolving into an almost girlish moaning sound.

I lived and they died.

He cursed often at his eyes, and how they'd betrayed them all by spotting that convoy. He thought incongruously that if only he'd been born stone blind, instead of blessed with especially acute eyesight, then they'd all still be alive. It did no good, he knew, to think like that. Instead, he vowed that if he survived the war, one day he would travel all the way across the country to West Texas, and after he arrived there, he would drive deep into the scrubland and arroyos of that harsh land and take up a rifle and begin to kill jackrabbits.