The German (6 page)

Jeffrey hurries across my threshold, and I know that he is eager for me to close the door, so my neighbors do not see him in my home. I imagine his car is parked several streets away and if asked on the stroll back to it where he has been, he will tell the inquisitor he’s been to the lake to look at the water, the sky, and the stars.

He wears a nervous grin on his smooth, handsome face, so different from my own scarred visage, and he asks that I turn out the lamp, which I do, and he mutters a rapid apology for not having greeted me properly in the mercantile, to which I simply shrug because I am not concerned with this man’s treatment of me, as it has grown from shamed soil, and in my darkened living room he removes his hat and places it on the sofa, and he unbuttons his shirt which he drapes over the hat, and he opens the front of his trousers, and his body is a ghost, floating in the gloom before me. The ritual is familiar, and I do not protest it – despite its cold and precise repetition. He will never fully undress in my presence, nor will he embrace or kiss me, but the blood is in my cock and I unbutton my shirt and unsnap my trousers, and remove my undergarments and stand naked in the middle of the room with my clothes discarded on the sofa beside his hat and shirt. I cross to Jeffrey. When my chest presses against him he takes a shocked step back as if in disgust, but he reaches out to touch my hardening cock. His fingers run over the shaft quickly and he feels all around it before his shaking hand reaches lower to cup my scrotum. Then he returns to my prick, touching it without grace or delicacy like a blind man uncertain of what has been put in his grasp but desperate to know its every contour.

He pulls his own cock through the split in his shorts. It is thick and long and as pale as his shorts. Already his breath comes in rapid gasps.

I step away from his clumsy touch and he asks what is wrong, and I tell him to sit in the rocking chair beside the sofa, and he doesn’t understand because this is a new demand and he cannot fathom its meaning, and his fear fills the room like radio static, but I tell him to be calm and sit. In the gloom his expression is difficult to read, but not difficult to know – bravery has many faces, but weakness is singular. With a very calm tone, low yet commanding I tell him again to sit in the chair and he shuffles toward it. Once he has sat down, I approach him and kneel between his legs. I take his cock in my mouth, and he groans and shakes and ejaculates. His trembling stops and he tries to stand to make his embarrassed escape, but I keep him in my mouth and shove his chest with my hand. He is a strapping man, but I am stronger, and the chair works to my favor. Several more times he tries to rise from the chair, but I keep him in place with my palm. He calms and allows me to proceed.

After his third ejaculation and my first I am done with him. When he tries to climb from the chair, I let him. He says nothing but rapidly shoves his prick back into his shorts and yanks up his trousers, and in a minute he is dressed and then he is gone.

His visit frustrates me, reminding me enough of nights in Munich to spark nostalgic longing. But it is only the mechanics that remind me. None of the men in this place bring joy or passion or warmth. There is no union. They accomplish pleasure but it resonates with torment – doubt, regret, and guilt. This thing that brings them such misery is the thing that once gave me greatest peace, and I wonder how two men can perceive the same act so differently. Perhaps it is the difference between digging in the garden to plant a beautiful tree and digging one’s own grave.

I pour a glass of whiskey and carry it into the living room, where I dress. Presentable, I switch the lamp back on and carry my drink to the porch. There I sit and listen to the night – frogs, a cricket, a car rumbling many streets away. Across the street, my neighbor Tim and his fat friend are visible through the window of his house. They are alone as Tim’s mother works a swing shift at the factory and will not be home for hours. The two boys sit on the sofa talking, perhaps listening to the radio. I turn away and look to the west. At the lake’s edge, someone moves, merely a smudge of shadow against the plum-colored surface. Likely a lover sneaking away – though not my lover. Many people meet at the lake after sunset. They kiss behind the shelter of trees, seeking warmth and forgetfulness.

And again my thoughts drift, remembering a hole, deep and dark, with water pooling at the bottom like blood in an open wound.

The news about Harold Ashton upset Ma. She’d spent the entire afternoon on the phone exclaiming and protesting the information pouring in from her friends all over town. She even considered calling into the factory and taking the night off to stay home to a keep a watchful eye. Bum’s parents didn’t seem to have the sense to be worried about him, which was okay by me. My mother called Mrs. Craddick and the fuzzy-brained woman was just fine with Bum spending the night at our house, so long as he got home first thing in the morning to help her with chores in the yard. Only slightly comforted that I wouldn’t be in the house alone, my mother grabbed her hat and handbag, then she checked the locks on the back door and all of the windows before hurrying out to the factory for her shift.

We messed around in the house until suppertime, and then I fixed Bum and me beef sandwiches and glasses of milk. We wolfed those down before heading to the backyard to play war with sticks, but we quickly tired of the game and ended up sitting on the back steps talking about Harold Ashton and speculating on his killer. With the limited information at our disposal – because my mother had given no details, not even mentioning the note the rest of the city was already talking about – we imagined a number of horrific fates for the older boy (though granted, none as horrific as what had really happened to him).

When it started getting dark we went inside and turned on the radio and settled in for the week’s installment of
The Adventures of the Thin Man
. The show never did much for me but Bum liked the way Nick and Nora Charles spoke, the sounds of their voices, so even if the mysteries weren’t particularly exciting, he looked forward to the show. I fidgeted throughout, asking questions about the story and the characters and the stuff I was too bored to follow.

Full dark had settled by the time the announcer insisted we tune in next week for the next exciting episode, and I muttered, “No, thank you.”

“You know, it’s dark,” I said, ignoring his question and looking at the window as if to prove my point. Across the street, I noticed Mr. Lang sitting in the shadows of his porch, the light from his front window spilled over his shoulders, casting his head in silhouette. My impulse was to wave, but I quelled it and turned away. “We should check our orders and start the assignment.”

Bum’s mouth dropped open. He shook his head. “Not me,” he said. “You want to go out in the dark and get yourself scalped, go on ahead. Besides, we promised your ma we’d stay put, and you just know that some neighbor will see us out there and tell her. I’m not getting tanned just to peek in somebody’s window. We never see anything good anyhow.”

An entire city waited out there like a cave where any manner of treasure might be found. What could we possibly hope to experience just sitting around my living room? Bum argued and pouted and even crossed his arms and sat on the floor like a lump. We played the usual game of dares and double-dares, but these childhood threats to honor had no effect on my friend. He remained committed to staying inside, far away from whatever might prowl the night, so I took a different tack.

“Well, I’m going,” I told him.

Bum’s face screwed up with concern and then relaxed, calling my bluff. “No, you’re not.”

I asked for the tin spyglass and Bum pointed to where it lay by the sofa. I retrieved it and carried it with me through the living room and into the kitchen. Without pause, I unlocked the back door, opened it and walked down the steps, stomping across the backyard. At the low fence, I paused and looked back, hoping my best friend would be chasing at my heels like a good dog, but the kitchen doorway was empty. Defiantly, I hopped the low fence into the Findleys’ yard and ran to the corner of their house. This time when I checked the open kitchen door, Bum stood on the threshold, looking out. Maybe he saw me, and maybe he didn’t, but I remained perfectly still in the shadows, thinking that if he decided to follow now, I’d hide and give him a good scare for being a pain. He didn’t come out, though. He leaned forward, craning his neck to search the yard, and then he pulled back and closed the door, making it clear he would not be joining me on the night’s mission.

A car passed on Crosby Street ahead, and I pressed hard against the Findleys’ house. Trepidation lit in my veins, and I heard my mother’s scolding voice telling me how important it was to be responsible with my father gone. I didn’t want to go back and admit defeat to Bum, but neither did I want to walk the streets of Barnard alone. Even before Harold Ashton’s murder, the idea would have unnerved me. Unlike the downtown streets my neighborhood didn’t have arc lamps. Dark houses like tombs lined the road, and the spaces between them were filled with thick camouflaging shadows within which any manner of villain might hide. But I’d made such a show for my friend, and pride won out so I left the side of the Findleys’ house and walked across their yard to Crosby Street.

As I moved from one shadow to the next, the news of Harold’s murder worked deeper into my bones. When I considered meeting his killer in one of the neat backyards or in the alleys between the houses, I imagined myself brave, recalling episodes of
Gang Busters
and
Crime Files
, where a single cop managed to subdue half a dozen crooks with his smarts and a good right hook. The misguided illusion so engulfed me I considered the tin spyglass in my pocket an effective weapon.

Passing onto Worth Street from between two white houses, I made a right and headed for Bennington, which would lead north to town. Only then did it occur to me that I had no destination. Yes, I had written a name on the slip of paper Bum kept in his shirt – though the rules stated it should have been hidden away in a shoe – but I no longer considered the home of Abigail Dougherty a feasible destination.

Abigail lived on the far side of Main Street. Since her husband had been drafted in February, she’d lived alone in a house on Forrester Avenue, and the older boys said she walked by her windows wearing almost nothing at all. They even said that men who worked the same factory shift as my mother stopped by her house when their shifts ended in the middle of the night to mess around with Mrs. Dougherty. Bum had been talking about making her a suspect in our game for weeks, but he’d never managed to build enough courage to write her name on the assignment form. I’d done it for him as a kind of gift. But the idea of sneaking through another fifteen blocks of shadows cowed me.

We’d already investigated most of my neighbors to one degree or another: we’d seen Mr. Klavin washing clothes in his undershirt; we saw Morton Clooney’s widow, Mavis, sitting in her living room sobbing into a kerchief, only to laugh hysterically a moment later and point a finger at her Crosley radio as if encouraging what she’d heard there; and Mr. and Mrs. Thrombolt on Worth Street danced in their dining room; and Cleta Ferguson told her children stories around the kitchen table; and Stella Jackson undressed in her bedroom and lay on her bed in nothing but a slip, fanning herself with a red and gold fan; and Wesley Smalls eagerly picked his nose, sending the snot to the carpet for his dog to eat; and Myrtle Pearlman sat quietly on her sofa knitting a child’s sweater, though her only baby had died at birth. These had been the neighbors that had struck Bum and me as interesting. Everyone else was just a neighbor. So where was I supposed to go?

Uncertain and beginning to convince myself that I’d already proved my courage to Bum, I hid between the side of an ugly brown house and a thick shrub, deciding to wait another ten minutes before heading back. I tried to kneel but the tin spyglass dug into my leg, so I removed it from my pocket and set it in my lap once I’d gotten comfortable in the dirt.

After two minutes, I felt restless and eager to get home, but before I managed to get to my feet, voices on Bennington Street stopped me. They began like the whispers of angry ghosts, sounding rough and distant, but the speakers were heading north on Bennington, towards where I sat. The voices came clearer, and though I couldn’t see the boys approach, I already knew one of them and my vague fears solidified behind my ribs when I heard Hugo Jones’s low, gravelly voice.

“Daddy says it’s a German, and he knew it before that swamp-assed Sheriff Tom Rabbit knew it.”

A German, I thought. Ma hadn’t said anything about that, and I wondered if Hugo’s information could be trusted or if it was just more of his hot air.

“Town’s crawling with Germans,” another boy replied. I thought it might be Ben Livingston talking, because he was always with Hugo, but I couldn’t be sure. “How we supposed to know which one did it?”

“Kill ’em all if we have to,” a third boy said. This voice I recognized. It belonged to Austin Chitwood, another of Hugo’s gang. “Just line ’em up and mow ’em down.” He made machine-gun noises and then started cackling like the idiot he was.