The German (32 page)

Ma called me to come out of my room when Deputy Burns returned. The big man looked as miserable as any man I’d ever seen, except perhaps Mr. Lang near the end of his time with me and Hugo and the others. He asked me to slowly and with as much detail as I could muster tell him what I’d seen, and I did. Burl Jones went to the door of the German’s house; there were five gunshots; and Mr. Jones walked away. Deputy Burns had to have asked me a dozen times if I was sure about who I’d seen. I was, and I told him so.

Then Deputy Burns left and the hearse pulled away and the police cars followed it, and in a matter of minutes, only Doc Randolph remained. He sat on the steps of the German’s porch with his head down. I watched him until Ma told me to come away from the window.

That night my mother stayed home from work again. After supper she told me I could listen to the radio for an hour and then I was to go to bed. Rita Sherman didn’t come over that night, and Ma, exhausted from so many days of strife, fell asleep at the kitchen table while she was writing a letter to my daddy, even though he was still missing.

I don’t know why I went back to the German’s house. Maybe I was still searching for clues, a piece of evidence that would link him to wrongdoing so that I could shrug off the repugnance I felt for my actions. If he were a criminal or connected to criminals, then my behavior might find justification and pardon.

Stepping into his dark living room, waiting for my eyes to adjust, I saw the two chalk sketches, outlining where the bodies had fallen. They were easy enough to identify from the shape, and I stood over the thicker, shorter drawing and looked down at the empty space between the lines where dark smudges stained the wooden floor, and the scent of rose water drifted into my nose. I thought about what this man was – not
who
, but
what
. Anger surged in to replace my grief and guilt, and I looked between the chalk lines and saw nothing but justice. The only thing left of the man was darkness and stains filling lines of white. He was a deviant. A faggot. A foreigner. He wasn’t worth the half a penny the chalk had cost to draw him. These hateful thoughts were too brief, though, as the longer I gazed at the outline, the more my mind filled it in with specifics of my neighbor’s appearance. For a moment he grinned at me from the floor, his terribly scarred face appearing playful and not frightening at all. Then the room fell away from me, because I’d finally learned the lesson the German had tried to teach me in this very room, and the weight of it struck my chest like a fist. If I thought of the man as a queer, or a Nazi, or “the German,” or anything but my neighbor Ernst Lang, I could live with what I’d done. But the frame of chalk represented more than just a shape, a figure, a series of arcs and lines; it was where my good neighbor, a man who had done me no harm, took his last breath and where his final thoughts faded as his soul moved on. He had been real, and he had been principled, and he had possessed a life whether mundane or exceptional that I had helped end.

I don’t know how long I remained in his house that night, certainly not as long as it felt, and I don’t know why I stole his diary, but before I left Mr. Lang’s house for the last time, I carried it securely under my arm.

That evening, Burl Jones was arrested for the murder of Sheriff Rabbit and Ernst Lang. I never heard another word about what we’d done to my neighbor, at least not outside my own head. The matter was dropped and seemingly forgotten by everyone in town as the focus shifted to the murder of the city’s respected sheriff. Rarely was Mr. Lang’s name mentioned in the newspaper articles, covering the crime. Often enough he was referred to as “the other man,” or “the second victim,” or “a bystander.”

Sleep provided my only sanctuary in the weeks following Mr. Lang’s death. Dreams didn’t invade my rest, and the sharp-nailed fingers of nightmares were spared me, and would have proved redundant considering the thoughts that haunted me during my waking hours. Unfortunately, my ability to sleep found considerable opposition in the racing thoughts given me by guilt.

Bum died the day after Mr. Lang. My best friend never woke up, so I never got the chance to apologize. I cried as much for him as I had for my missing father, but even the thin hope I held for my daddy’s return was denied me with Bum. He was dead and he wasn’t coming back, and his Spy Commander tin spyglass would rust away in a box in an attic as his sorrowful parents continued with their lives in the rooms below. Bum’s ma spent the entire funeral looking around confused as if unable to understand why she sat in church on a Friday afternoon with so many other people – all staring at a minister and a polished box and a handful of flowers captured in a cheap glass vase. At the repast, she acted like she was the hostess of a fancy party, and her cheerful banter verged on hysteria until Clay Craddick led her upstairs so she could rest. Fatty appeared similarly confused on those occasions he stopped eating and actually lifted his head to observe the men and women in his daddy’s living room. That night Ma told me Bum was at peace, and he was with God in Heaven, and his soul would know eternal joy. I believed her, but only because I had to believe her, otherwise I could never have lived with what I had done.

Some nights when sleep eluded me, I would retrieve Mr. Lang’s journal from under my mattress and I’d try to read what was written there, imagining that if I stared at the words hard enough and long enough they would resolve into recognizable phrases. They never did. The lines and swirls and dots remained meaningless.

The worst days of summer were on us and I spent my waking hours in a feverish lethargy, feeling nauseated and bone tired, and on the one afternoon I attempted to cool off in the lake, I slipped on a rock and went face down in the water, and instead of trying to right myself I swam deeper and further out and after a time I became so confused I didn’t know which direction the surface was. Panic gripped me like the jaws of a coyote, and water trickled down the back of my throat and I spluttered, and for a moment, I looked to the green-tinged water engulfing me and saw innumerable dark shapes shifting and moving amid the gently waving fronds of plants, and I imagined the shapes were my daddy and Bum and Mr. Lang, but they were also Harold Ashton and David Williams, and maybe it would be better if I just stayed where I was and accepted their welcome because all that existed outside of the lake was scorching heat and pain. But I began floating upward, and with no conscious effort to fight my ascension, I surfaced, choking and rubbing my eyes to see the shore waiting only a handful of yards away.

As we entered September the promise of school loomed, and on the first Sunday afternoon of the month Ma suggested we go to the pictures at the Palace Theater, because they were playing a comedy with Bob Hope and Dorothy Lamour. Many of the faces at the theater were familiar. Not a single one of them meant a thing to me. I knew who they were, but I might as well have been looking over a field of pale gray flowers for all of the interest I took in the particulars of the population. Brett Fletcher had parked his wheelchair by an ashtray near the stairs. Austin Chitwood stood with a brown-haired girl and they both laughed like donkeys, and seeing him didn’t so much as flick the numbing sickness in my belly. Estella Hernandez walked with her aunt across the lobby. Arm in arm with the ashen-haired woman, the girl’s pregnancy was noticeable if not obvious. I saw friends from school but could barely work up a greeting for them, and they quickly returned to their parents and siblings, confounded by my reticence. Ma spoke to women from the factory, and they tried to cheer me up, but their voices raked across my ears like rusted blades, and their joyful laughter struck me as repulsive and inappropriate, though I couldn’t expect them to share my list of regrets and losses. Rex Burns had Regina Mason on his arm. Maybe they were out celebrating Rex’s appointment as Barnard’s new sheriff, but he didn’t look like he was in much of a celebrating mood. His frequent smiles failed to clear the clouds from his eyes. He noticed me at Ma’s side and gave me a nod. He’d lost his best friend, too.

In the paper that morning he’d made a pledge to bring the Cowboy to justice within the month. It wouldn’t take that long, but the Cowboy’s apprehension would have nothing to do with the efforts of the Barnard Sheriff’s Department.

Before the newsreel started Ma leaned over to tell me that Emily Owens’s nephew would be coming home soon. She told me this because Dexter Owens had been reported missing in action back in April, and Ma took this as a promising sign that Daddy would also be found and sent home to us. The news seemed to cheer her, so I acted happy about it, but I didn’t believe Fred Randall was going to be found or come home to his family. We weren’t going to see him again. I could never tell Ma that I believed her husband was a hunk of rotting, punctured meat left in a field for the birds to pick over.

The features and cartoons and the Bob Hope film played out as smears of gray movement and random abrasive noises. When the audience laughed, it sounded like a thousand men screaming, and their applause cracked and popped like synchronized gunfire, and by the time the theater lights came back up, I felt like shouting at the smiling faces, wanting to know what right they had to be happy in this miserable, hateful world where a boy like Bum Craddick got his throat cut and my daddy lay dead in a field. And it wasn’t their fault, and I knew it wasn’t their fault, but they had no right to smile or laugh or feel anything but the full-of-empty nothing I felt.

That night I pulled the German’s diary out from beneath my mattress and held it against my chest and prayed that when I opened it, the words would make sense. I couldn’t help but think that something in Mr. Lang’s journal would explain everything that had happened to me that summer. The book had to hold the answers. Things had to happen for a reason. If they didn’t, then misery would always be a moment away.

~ ~ ~

I spent much of the next day in my room, holding Mr. Lang’s diary and casting furtive glances through my window at his now empty house. The sight of the house took only seconds to unnerve me, and I’d walk back to my bed and open the leather-bound enigma, reading the numbers and the occasional name. Eventually Ma came in and sat on the bed next to me, and she offered to stay home from the factory if I wanted her to, but I said no, and she offered to call her parents and have them come over, but I said no to that too. I received the usual instructions to keep the doors locked and ask who was there if anyone knocked at night while she was gone. Then she kissed me on the forehead and left.

Thirty minutes later, I carefully tied Mr. Lang’s diary with my book strap and slung it over my back before retrieving my bicycle from the backyard. On Bennington Avenue, I turned north.

After another night of fleeting sleep, the cloak of exhaustion hung over my shoulders like a cape made of mud. The high heat of late afternoon worked into my skin and muscles and added further discomfort to the fatigue, gnawing at my muscles and joints. Already my vision blurred at the edges, and despite a bright and clear day, every house, tree, bush, and person seemed to exist beyond a sheet of old glass – colors deadened by a patina of dust. I pedaled all the way to the northern edge of the city, adjusting my book strap when it cut into my already pained muscles. At the farm road I stopped and wiped sweat from my neck and brow, and I looked to the west, knowing I’d reached the halfway mark of my journey, but feeling like the trek had already taken days.

I had to know what was in Mr. Lang’s journal, and the only man I could think of to translate the volume was Brett Fletcher, who’d learned a fair amount of German while stationed overseas. If he couldn’t do it, or wouldn’t do it, I’d find one of the merchants in town – maybe Mr. Baker – to help.

The pedals fought my efforts, seeming to push back against the soles of my feet as I struggled to complete the ride out to the Fletcher place. When the house appeared on the right side of the road ahead, a fresh trickle of energy ran through me. The pedaling came easier and even the scratchy discomfort of my sweaty clothes seemed to ease, and I imagined this was the kind of relief a man in a desert felt upon seeing a distant oasis or mirage. My vision remained uncertain, though. The house and acreage beyond frayed at the edges like a watercolor landscape smeared at the edges.

I was surprised to find that none of the local kids had gathered on Brett’s porch for an afternoon of storytelling. Likely, the heat had kept them all at home or had driven them to the lake.

Movement at the corner of my eye caused a reflexive turning of my head toward a low line of shrubs, and though the bushes carried the same feathery edges of everything else I viewed, I thought I saw someone crouching behind the shrubs, eyes fixed on me. Distracted by the certainty I was being watched, I wasn’t paying attention to the ground. The front wheel of my bike went into a hole and I jerked forward and nearly fell off the seat completely before righting the handlebars and bringing the thing to a stop. When I looked back at the shrubs, no face hovered above the leafy mounds, so I convinced myself that my fatigued mind had drawn the face there in the first place. If I couldn’t dream during my brief bouts of sleep, my mind seemed determined to deliver dreams while I was awake.

At the house, I leaned my bike against the railing of Brett’s porch and then climbed the steps into the shadows, relieved to have the baking sun off of my neck. I rang the bell and as I waited, a shock of fear ran along my neck, causing my skin to pucker. The unexpected panic came from an image that presented itself without warning. A man had waited behind the low hedge and now raced across Brett’s front yard, eyes wild and arms outstretched to scoop me up. The fancy struck my mind fully formed, and I spun on my heels to confront the man I expected to see racing up the porch steps to me, except no man attacked from the yard. I looked back at the row of shrubs and thought I saw a speck of white amid the green leaves, but upon focusing on the spot, I found nothing but a break in the foliage.