The German (30 page)
A car stops before my house. It is a familiar car. The car belongs to a man whose face is unremarkable. I would not notice this face in a crowd.
“Ernst,” the man says, and I realize I still don’t know his name.
“Have a drink,” I say, handing the bottle to him. “Drink. Have a cigarette.”
“What happened to you?” he asks.
“Happened?” I ask. “Nothing happened. Everything is normal. Everything is as it will always be.”
“You’ve been in another fight,” he says.
The unremarkable face wears a frown. He pities me, and it makes me sick. My fist clenches. Pain from my mutilated fingers stabs, but I keep it at my side. He is weak, so fucking weak. He’s not worth my hate but like all others it is bestowed upon him. The pain from my wounds turns liquid, spreading over my skin like acid. Every nerve erupts with agony and I close my eyes against it. When I open them, the man kneels at my side.
“Did you come to fuck?” I ask.
His face burns red and he jerks his head around to see if there is anyone in the street to hear.
“I…just…. I wanted to see you.”
“Ah, good, yes. You wanted to see me.”
“Can we go inside?” he asks.
“It stinks inside,” I tell him. “We’ll talk here. You can see me here.”
“Yeah,” he says, but he is not certain. His eyes widen with fright and he quickly stands moving to my left side. “Jesus, Ernst, you’re bleeding.”
I look at my shirt and blood stains the cloth at my shoulder. My wounds are seeping. The unremarkable man is concerned, but I am not. Much more blood than this has escaped me in the past. I take another drink from the bottle and offer it to him.
“Did you hear me?” he says. “You’re bleeding. What happened to you?”
“Like you said, I was in another fight.”
“Was it the same man?”
I do not know what he means. What man?
“Did he come after you again?”
Then it occurs to me he means Carl Baker’s cousin: the coward Udo – the man who did not fight well.
I put the bottle on the table, ignoring the unremarkable man. I take a cigarette and light it and lean back in my chair.
“Do you want me to leave?” he asks.
“Yes, I want you to leave,” I tell him.
“Can I come see you again?”
“Yes, you can come see me again.”
“You really are a strange man, Ernst.”
“Yes, I am a strange man,” I say, blowing a cloud of smoke into the air. Through the smoke I see Tim Randall’s house. The sight of it infuriates me. I am drunk, I realize, but that simply frees my tongue. “And who are you?”
“Excuse me?”
“Who the fuck are you?” I say harshly. “Another coward in a nation of cowards? A terrified child afraid to offend his parents? A cocksucking piece of filth who wants his pleasures kept in secrecy because he cannot say I am a man, and I am this kind of man, and to hell with the masks you want me to wear? What kind of man is that? What does he call himself?”
The children’s torture is on my skin; their despicable words ring in my ears. I feel their breath and their spit and their hands and their blades and the tiny fires they use to sear my skin.
All moments are this moment because nothing has changed. Everything that has happened or will happen occurs in this time. Past and future are the same variegated smear of fluids leaking from an infected wound. At the center of this wound is this moment, this oozing agonizing second, and when it passes, another moment, equally as impure and painful occurs.
The unremarkable man is angry now. He rights himself and straightens his back as if with pride. What does he know of pride?
I was a fucking captain.
I was….
It doesn’t matter. Ernst is dead.
“You really are shithouse crazy.”
“Yes, I am shithouse crazy.”
He leaves quickly. Drives away without pause. This is better. This is good. I walk back into my home where it smells of blood and sweat and piss and shit.
I have another drink. Light another cigarette and I sit down to my journal.
I will write no more. If all moments are the same moment, recounting each is the exercise of a lunatic. Individual lives are not worth documenting. Only the corpse registry and the carvers of stones care about names. My name is Ernst and I am meaningless.
Tom rushed through his morning routine, forsaking time with Pilar and wolfing down his breakfast, suddenly uncomfortable under the watch of Estella’s beautiful brown eyes. The city was quiet when he arrived, an hour earlier than was usual for him. In the office he met Walter, who told him the night had been uneventful, and Tom was grateful for it. He made it through most of the morning without interruption, reading reports and cross-referencing Ford vehicle registrations with a list of German names. He tried to keep Estella and Ernst Lang out of his thoughts as he poured over the documentation, attempting to see the Cowboy appear in the list. The change in his day came a few minutes after eleven when Gil limped into his office, wearing a frown.
“Those boys are here to see you,” Gil said. “Burl Jones is with them.”
“What do they want?”
“They want to change their statements.”
The burn in Tom’s stomach returned with a flash and he closed his eyes to keep his temper in check.
“Send them home,” he said. “We already have their statements.”
“They said we got it wrong.”
“We got it wrong? All we’ve got is what they told us?”
“I’m just telling you what Burl told me.”
“Son of a bitch,” Tom muttered. “Send them in.”
Burl Jones led his son and two of the other boys into the room. The Randall kid wasn’t with them, but Ben Livingston and Austin Chitwood entered dressed like they were going to church, hair smoothed down to a shiny sheet with pomade, heads slightly bowed and hands crossed over their crotches like proper and respectful Christian boys. The display disgusted Tom.
Behind the boys, Burl Jones stood in his everyday suit, which had a smudge of dust on the left shoulder. He removed his hat and stood straight and said, “We just come from Buck Taylor’s place.”
Of the dozen or so lawyers in Barnard, Taylor was the only one that Tom couldn’t stand the sight of. He was a pretentious old whale with white hair, yellowed at the temples. He walked around Barnard like he owned the sidewalks and was more than happy to chatter nonsense at a jury just to hear himself talk. But he won his cases, nearly all of them, and Tom didn’t like receiving the information that Taylor was defending the little monsters standing before him.
“And where is Buck?” Tom asked.
“He’ll be along,” Burl said.
“He tried to touch us,” Austin Chitwood announced with a voice that trembled so badly it sounded near to a giggle. “The German bastard tried to….”
Hugo shoved his friend to quiet him down.
“That’s enough boys,” Burl Jones said.
Tom examined the elder Jones’s face, and what he encountered was a sorrowful and confounded expression, not the hard defiance he usually found there. The man chewed on serious thoughts and he stood distracted. Something had gotten into Burl’s head and it was eating away like a worm through damp dirt.
No one spoke again until Buck Taylor walked into the office, wearing a lightweight, blue cotton suit. His full face shimmered with perspiration, and a smile as phony as a three-dollar bill showed rows of white teeth.
“Tom Rabbit,” he said as if they were dear old friends, “it’s been a long time.”
“Yes, it has,” Tom agreed. “What can I do for you, Buck?”
“It’s a sad business,” Taylor said. In a dramatic display the lawyer lost his smile and slapped a fat palm to the back of his neck. He looked at the floor, shaking his head slowly as if he was about to reveal a tragedy. “I think it would be best if my clients waited outside. Burl, why don’t you take the boys down the street for some sodas? I’ll be over directly.”
Burl nodded. The boys filed out and the man followed them.
Tom recognized Taylor’s ploy. Burl and those boys were just for show. The lawyer had wanted Tom to see the boys, the children of the community. Buck had told them to dress in their proper Sunday attire and instructed them in contrition and manners. Tom wondered if the lawyer would have gone to such trouble if he’d seen Ernst Lang bound to his bed, humiliated and bleeding. Tom figured the lawyer would.
“We already have the boys’ statements,” Tom said. “I’d imagine your discussion at this point should be with the judge.”
“I’ll be headed over to Jeff’s when I’m finished up here,” Taylor said, making sure Tom understood the lawyer’s familiarity with the judge. “But we don’t really need to involve him in this.”
“I imagine he’ll want to be involved, what with the trial and all.”
“A trial isn’t going to help anyone, and I would strongly suggest you listen to what I have to say, and then take the appropriate action.” Buck took a deep breath, and Tom knew he was about to launch into a speech. “Those boys are the victims here, plain and simple. They were lured into the trap of a deviant with unnatural intentions. Plied with liquor. The great state of Texas has rather conclusive laws in regard to sodomy, Tom. They are not matters of etiquette or points of view, but concrete legislation meant to protect our children and our homes. To refute this legislation is to condone the most unnatural of acts including incest, bigamy, and bestiality, and succeeds in nothing but ignoring the moral sense of the people in your community and striking down the very foundations of the home. Furthermore….”
“Stop,” Tom said. “Just cork it, Buck. I’m not a jury and I’m not one of your buddies from the Ranger Lodge, so just tell me what’s on your mind and let me get back to work.”
“Is it true you questioned one Ernst Lang in regard to the recent murders of Harold Ashton and David Williams?”
“Yes.”
“And in the course of this questioning did Mr. Lang admit to being a homosexual?”
“He did, but….”
“Whoever has carnal copulation with a beast, or in an opening of the body, except sexual parts, with another human being for the purpose of having carnal copulation shall be guilty of sodomy. That is the law, Tom. It’s as clear as the Good Book, and there you were with a confessed criminal, but you took no action.”
“With what evidence?” Tom barked.
“You had an eyewitness account from Hugo Jones, and an admission of guilt. That man should not have been allowed to walk our streets like some wild boar seeking to devour the innocence of those fine young boys.”
“They attacked Lang in his home and tied him to a bed and they burned him with cigarettes and they cut into him like a piece of barbecue.”
“They acted in their own defense,” Taylor said, nonplussed by Tom’s irate tone. “All three of those boys were in the presence of a rattlesnake, and like all rattlesnakes it was only a matter of time before he struck. Austin Chitwood is ready to swear that Lang attempted to touch his privates, and both the Jones and Livingston boys will concur.”
“There’s nothing in those boy’s statements about Lang attacking them. They got a bad idea and some juice in their balls and they decided Lang was a murderer, even though they didn’t have a shred of proof. Then they knocked him cold, bound him and tortured him. So don’t give me this horseshit. All of their statements match up.”
“We’ll be submitting new statements,” Taylor said evenly.
“And they’ll go in the trash.”
The lawyer began walking past the front of Tom’s desk the way he might pace before a jury box. His smile had returned and he slicked back a yellow wing of hair over his left ear.
“The initial statements are meaningless,” he said. “As I noted to Burl, children enduring that level of trauma just want to pretend the incident never happened. This ridiculous talk about them ambushing Lang is clearly drivel. But in that version of the events, they remain unspoiled by lewd, unnatural,
and illegal
behavior. It’s to be expected they would create a scenario that is less repugnant to them, even if it requires turning the guilt on themselves. I know a dozen doctors who’ll support this theory should the case proceed to trial, but I strongly suggest you have this Lang man withdraw his charges so my clients – no, so this entire community – can avoid the humiliating stain of Lang’s perverse carnal practices. Further, I suggest you press charges against the man and get him off the streets so he’s not again tempted to act on his sickness.”
“Here’s what I think,” Tom said. “I think your clients found out we were in pursuit of the Cowboy at exactly the same time they were torturing Lang, and they’re changing their stories because the only thing that could have saved their asses here is the man’s confession, which was extracted under duress and doesn’t hold an ounce of credibility.”
“And what do you think a jury will make of this?” Taylor asked. “Four upstanding young men, two of whom are only a year away from heading overseas to fight for their country, accosted in the most humiliating way any man might be by an admitted deviant?”