The German (17 page)

That didn’t mean I was ready to go inside just yet, though. I turned back to Mr. Lang’s window, and without saying a word, I started walking toward it.

“Look, Bum,” I whispered, “we’re just going up to the window. I know he’s home because he let a friend in a while ago. If anyone tries to jump us, we’ll make a racket and he’ll come out and help.”

“Why don’t we just go up to the front door?”

But we were already in Mr. Lang’s side yard. I put a finger to my lips and continued toward the window. From behind us, I heard a branch snap and my skin shriveled up. Then I looked through a part in Mr. Lang’s curtains, and what I saw there drove away the momentary fear, bringing instead a physiological vibration, humming and buzzing through my veins.

Mr. Lang and another man were on the German’s bed. Both were naked, their skin appearing slick and smooth in the dull light cast by a bedside lamp. The man was bent forward, clutching a pillow and facing away from the window, and Mr. Lang knelt behind him, hands resting on the man’s buttocks as he moved his hips forward and back. My mind crackled as the details of this union scored my thoughts like memories delivered by a branding iron. Mr. Lang’s sweat-slathered chest, bulging with strain. His guest’s thick legs, covered in filaments of pale hair with rivulets of sweat drawing trails along the muscles. A muscular arm flexing against a pillow. The arc of the man’s back. The force of the German’s thrusts. The scene was confusing, exciting, and my breath stopped as the union of these men roared locomotive fast through the tunnels of my eyes. Only a second before I’d been ready to run at the sound of a twig snap, but in that instant, watching those two men, I didn’t think anything could move me.

At my side, Bum mumbled desperately. “I don’t want to see this.”

I couldn’t reply. The sight through the gap in the curtains emptied me of reason.

Then a hand wrapped around my mouth, and the coiling emotion in my belly hardened into absolute terror. I was lifted from my feet and yanked around. In that instant, I saw that someone else had Bum and was similarly spinning him. My heart climbed to the back of my throat and my heart raced as if I were falling from the edge of a cliff. Once the rotation was complete, I found myself in front of Hugo Jones, whose face was lit by the orange glow of a burning cigarette.

He withdrew the smoke and lifted a finger to his lips.
Shh.

Then he walked past where I struggled against the hands holding me. I tried to spot Bum again, but couldn’t turn my head. My fear receded by a fraction as I came to realize that Ben Livingston or Austin Chitwood held me and not the murderous Gray Cowboy, but I didn’t feel safe. Hugo and his friends might not have been killers but they weren’t kind, as Hugo had proven only the day before, and while I thought these things, I was again being hoisted in the air and turned, this time facing Mr. Lang’s house again.

Hugo Jones stood at the window. His back as straight and rigid as a brick wall. He shook his head so slowly the motion was barely perceptible. He seemed to be as enrapt by the scene in the bedroom as I had been.

The two boys did as they were instructed, waddling away from Mr. Lang’s house with Bum and me in their grasp. In the middle of the grassy field, Austin Chitwood made us promise with nods of our heads that we’d keep quiet. We agreed eagerly. Then Ben Livingston released me, and Austin released Bum and the two of us tore off across the grass, making a straight line to my front door.

Bum, reeling from fear, muttered his anger distractedly. He stood frozen in the living room, incredulous that I should be so reckless and further, that I should involve him in my irresponsible behavior.

Electric currents of emotion bombarded me, distracting my thoughts and crackling in my ears so I could barely hear my friend’s words. The sensual and the terrible battled. Scorched images of my neighbor and his guest smoldered in my mind. I knew what I had seen and could even name it, but the act struck me as wholly foreign, and for all of its erotic power, recalling the union of Mr. Lang and that stranger also left me feeling sickened and sad. I felt a profound disappointment in my neighbor, as though he’d lied, making me believe he was one thing, when in fact he was a different thing entirely. My heart continued to race like a hummingbird’s from the encounter with Hugo that had followed. How could I defend myself to Bum? He was right about everything and I told him so.

“We need to talk,” Hugo said, strutting across the room to stand by the fireplace. Ben and Austin remained by the front door, arms crossed like guards at a bank vault. “Your ma’s still at work?”

Though a lie might have served me better, I remained too shaken to form one. I nodded my head. After throwing a quick look at Bum, who had turned paler than a fish belly, I returned my attention to the older boy.

“I want you two to keep your mouths shut about what you saw,” Hugo said. His tone was soft and familiar, like an older brother offering a sincere warning. He stood by the fireplace with authority. His cheeks burned red beneath the purple smudges of acne. “Kids like you shouldn’t have to see a thing like that. If I thought you could forget it, I’d tell you to give it a try, but you can’t unsee a thing.”

“W-we didn’t see a-anything,” Bum spluttered.

“You saw,” Hugo said. “And that’s about the worst thing a man can see. A man treating another man like a woman isn’t natural. In fact, it’s flat-out evil. But it could be worse. Damnation, you two are lucky to be alive.”

I didn’t understand what he meant. Had he seen something different through the bedroom curtains than I had? Had he seen my neighbor kill that man? Hugo’s voice was colored with concern, not threat, and I felt certain he was acting in a protective manner. He stood silently, nodding his head. Then he withdrew a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. He pinched the cigarette between his fingers and pulled it from his lips. He waved his hand back and forth, fingers directed at my front door and the two boys standing there, drawing gray-blue trails of smoke in the air.

“We’ll take things from here,” Hugo said. “You two just keep quiet until we figure out what to do about this, and you keep yourselves away from that pervert or he’s likely to do you the way he did Harold and those other boys.”

“Did he kill that man?” I asked.

“Maybe so,” Hugo replied earnestly. “A man that can do what we saw is capable of doing anything. But he sure as shit isn’t going to kill anyone else. You just stay away from him, and you lock that front door good and tight after we leave. If that Nazi bastard comes over here, you pick up your daddy’s gun and protect your home.”

Then the three boys left. Hurriedly I closed the front door and locked it tight the way Hugo had instructed. Bum remained stricken in the center of the room, white and motionless like a statue. I ran past him and through the kitchen and locked the back door, and then I checked the windows to make sure they were latched. The heat would build oven hot, but Hugo’s conviction had become my own. Though he hadn’t divulged what he’d seen in that room – beyond the same scene I’d witnessed – it must have been serious.

“It’s all locked up,” I told Bum after I was finished.

“I think I want to go to sleep,” he replied distantly. Then he turned around and walked into the hall, disappearing around the corner.

As for me, I couldn’t sleep. I paced the living room thinking about the atrocities occurring so close to my home, perpetrated by a trusted neighbor, a man I’d thought of as my friend until I’d seen him for what he was. The pleasant sentiments I’d harbored for the man evaporated as I marched to and fro across the carpet, because of what this German was and the crimes I was coming to believe he’d committed. Rape and murder? Hugo hadn’t revealed what he’d seen but it was clear the older boy believed the German was the Cowboy the papers had been writing about – a brutal killer of boys –and I wished Ben hadn’t dragged me away from that window, so I could have seen the damning evidence. Amid my agitation a quiet voice in a distant chamber of my mind insisted that Hugo and I were wrong. The voice spoke to the German’s generosity and kindness. It reminded me that the man had tended my cuts after his accuser had beaten me. Except the voice was so calm, serene like the rustle of wind across the tops of trees – all but drowned by the torrent of indictments leveled at the German that bellowed through my thoughts.

When I finally went into my room I stepped over Bum, who lay on the floor, wrapped in a blanket and facing the space beneath my bed. I went to the window. If I leaned close to the glass, I could see through the gap between my house and the Reddings’ house next door, giving me an unobstructed view of Mr. Lang’s porch across the street, and I sat there on the windowsill, eyes fixed, until Ma got back from her shift at the factory. Then I climbed into bed and pretended to be asleep when she opened the bedroom door to check on me. Once the door closed, I remained in bed. Then the soft strains of “I’ll Walk Alone” drifted through the walls. I must have fallen asleep soon after, but in the middle of the night I woke and returned to my position at the glass.

The twin states of somnolent and agitated played against one another. My eyes badly wanted to close, but there was a strong possibility that my neighbor Mr. Lang was a murderer – he certainly wasn’t normal – and my curiosity evolved into a kind of resolve; it was my responsibility to watch his house, my duty. What if he decided to cross the street in the middle of the night and snatch Bum or me? What if he hurt Ma? As I sat there I remembered what he’d done to that man in his room, could still picture Mr. Lang’s chest, swollen with strain and covered in a shimmering layer of sweat. And though I could not recall the expression the German had worn, I imagined it would be cruel and twisted like the grinning façade of a torturer who enjoyed his craft.

The lights went on in the German’s living room after I’d been at the window for what seemed like hours. The sudden burst of illumination startled me, and I leapt off the sill and went to Bum to shake him awake.

Then I returned to my post, peering through darkness to the rectangle of light open at the front of the German’s house. Two men stood on the threshold. They shook hands and the other man left, walking casually to the street and passing from my line of sight.

July 24, 1944 – Translated from the German

Last night the man with the unremarkable face returned. He did not wait for cover of darkness, but rather arrived near seven as I was preparing a late supper of eggs and bacon, and he joined me for the meal and for a drink after and we sat on the sofa and spoke like friends, and I thought on how long it had been since I’d shared such a conversation, and it seemed like a very long time. When living in New Orleans, I’d met a man named Richert who was handsome and intelligent and showed great strength, and he asked me to visit him in Barnard, Texas, and I agreed because I loathed New Orleans, despite its indulgences. There was much laughter in New Orleans, much frivolity, and much celebration, but it all seemed to mask something foul beneath, like a lace handkerchief draped over the face of a leper. And I took the train to Austin, Texas, and Richert met me at the station and drove me to Barnard, and a sense of calm settled on me in this place. A time away from big cities enticed me.
Peace
enticed me. Richert and I became frequent companions and we spoke as friends. At times I grew restless because conflict was as ingrained in me as the color of my eyes, but after so many years of struggle, I believed I could let it go – wanted to let it go. Richert gave me a car, because he had three, and he paid for much of my house beside the lake because he had a family estate and could buy what he pleased, and though we rarely walked in public together, we spent much time in each other’s company. When he died from a weakness of the heart of which he’d never spoken, his will spoke of me as his “faithful servant” and I was to retain the car and the house and even a small sum of money. At the time the generosity of his request was overshadowed by the humiliation and insult of it. I was no man’s servant. I had led armies and held onto the pride of having done so. I loathed his memory, and then I destroyed it for myself, finding flaw with his every physical and mental attribute. I thought to sell his tarnished gifts and find some new home, but the comfort of this place, the heated days and serene nights kept me. Was he the last man with whom I’d shared both cock and mind, and if so how had I not noticed until now, and why did it suddenly strike me as a loss?

The unremarkable man reveals bits of his life as we chat. He is a machine-parts salesman from Houston, who is negotiating deals with the factory. He remains unmarried though his sisters and mother continue a search for his bride. Speaking of this amuses him, but there is fear in his eyes. I think to comment on his inexperience with women as it seems to mirror his inexperience with men, which he displayed so clearly the night before, but I keep my thoughts to myself, fearing the insult will end this talk among friends. He remembers fishing when he was a boy and an uncle who sucked his cock when they were alone in the woods, and he blames this uncle for etching confusion into his mind. Speaking of this visibly hurts him, so I pat him on the leg and tell him we should go outside for a time to catch the evening air, and he agrees.