The German (22 page)

“I was hoping you’d say that.”

Then he makes a terrible joke about fat sausages and though the humor is low and predictable, I find myself laughing along and adding euphemisms of my own, and the conversation sparks many fond memories for me, memories of laughter and warmth, of time spent sharing opinions and bawdy insinuations with men who did not fear being overheard – men who claimed their identities and did not secrete them away behind rigid masks. For several minutes I lose myself to the heartening exchange and think how very much I want the unremarkable man in my home and my hands so that we can continue speaking as friends without the concern of his family’s interruption, but too soon he announces the return of his sister and apologizes that he must hang up, and I tell him it was nice that he called and I hope to see him when he visits the city next.

He tells me, “You’re a dream come true.”

And I am without words, so I hang up the phone aware that I share his sentiment.

A moment of remorse comes and goes as I cross my kitchen to the back door and grab the pan of chicken feed from its shelf. I am very happy but across the street my neighbor Tim is terribly sad. He did not share bitterness with his father as I had mine, and my heart – a second before light with the unremarkable man’s voice – clenches tightly in my chest and I grieve for the boy, and this reaction astounds me with its suddenness and its clarity because I’ve always found the tragedies of war unsurprising and I have seen intimates murdered in the streets and fallen in fields and have felt their blood run through my fingers, and my thoughts were never for the companion lost, but rather trained on the enemies that had taken them. Vows of retaliation blossomed on those occasions not grief, and now I remember so few of their names.

The fat hens greet me at the door to their pen and I shake the shallow tin above their heads, scattering feed over the dirt, and I smile at the birds as they turn from me and waddle and cluck and peck at the dry kernels and seeds.

“You eat good,” I tell them. “Today I don’t hate you so much.”

Watching my birds, my mind wanders. The emotions that delight me are not new, but they are so poorly maintained I’m surprised they continue to function.

I remember affection so easily attained that it seemed perpetual, a constant in which only faces and bodies changed. I remember seeing a poor sketch of my face on a tattered newspaper beneath the words “The Traitor is Dead.”

I remember a marble pool filled with steaming water and beautiful men, and the feeling of my heart racing as I decide on my next companion. Moisture beaded on flesh, captured on hair like smooth crystals. Steam making the chamber a hazy vision. My eyes fall on a sinewy youth with wisps of blond hair pasted to his chest. Others have noticed this boy, and an ugly old man with a mole on his neck has cornered him and chats heatedly even as the boy tries to escape his attentions, and it is my intention to swim across the pool and interrupt this old man’s unwholesome seduction and claim the sinewy youth as my own, knowing none in this place would question or deny me, but before I push away from the pool’s wall, another young man appears on the marble ledge above me, and he is very broad and smooth and muscular, and he has shaved his mustache very thin and cropped his hair in the manner of mine, and were it not for his brawn and the unmarred skin of his cheeks, I might have thought myself looking at a mirror image of myself at his age. He is bold and drops into the water next to me and apologizes for splashing my face. Close to me the resemblance to my younger self remains strong, and I look at this boy with a profound sense of desire, because he appears the way I wish I could appear. Unlike this boy, my face is scarred and my body is tremendously soft from years of opulent meals, and I know that my merit as an intimate is directly related to the position of authority I hold. He makes no pretense at seduction but flatly states he wants to share a room with me, and I cast a look at the blond boy and his ugly suitor and find they are embracing.

The owner of this bath is an old acquaintance and keeps his finest room available to me, and I lead this boy to it. Along the way, he tells me his name is Ernst and he knows my name is Ernst, as well, and he knows of my position and comments often on my accomplishments, going so far as to remark on my commission in Bolivia. Despite his admiration, I grow tired of his voice and once we are in the room, I push him to the bed and fall on top of him and silence his accolades with my lips, and we fuck violently and then tenderly and then violently again and then, exhausted, I order one of the servants of the bath to bring us champagne. I was drunk when I met this boy and feel the sharp edges of sobriety returning. The champagne arrives and I place a second order for whiskey, and this youthful Ernst and I drink and talk and smoke cigars and the champagne is gone and much of the whiskey, and we fuck again and agree to meet in the baths a week later.

That night is much like the first. The next the same, and I think to invite him on holiday with me to Bad Wiessee but before I suggest this rendezvous he tells me he loves me and adores me, and I tell him that is woman’s talk – the talk of wives – and I need no wife. Further, I sense he has grown too near to me, reciting much of my history as if it were his own. I’ve endured obsession once before and found it to be less than congenial, so my resolution to silence its echo is adamant. I regret this decision only because the boy’s company brings lightness to my heart, but the misery on his face when I speak of distance is a cold spike in my chest, freezing all that it pierces, and I leave, refusing to see him again.

A strange thought follows this memory, and it is of this other, younger Ernst taking a blade to his face so that it will more resemble mine. This fancy – so like a memory – disturbs me, and I wonder if a boy’s life could ever be so sad that he would willingly trade it for another man’s.

I chuckle at the pecking chickens and scatter more feed for them as I am feeling generous, and I put away these bizarre notions. The unremarkable man’s voice returns to me, bringing happiness and a profound calm, and the past and my place in it are forgotten as I recall our conversation and our moments of intimacy. I tell myself he is not unremarkable at all.

He tells me I am a dream.

The day after the telegram arrived the house was dreadfully quiet. Ma didn’t listen to her records or the radio; she didn’t do anything at all except sit in the kitchen, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes until Rita arrived, and then the two whispered and sampled the leftover salads and hot dishes prepared by our neighbors. Anger remained ticking in my head and I felt hollowed out and simultaneously bloated as if my stomach had expanded and hardened to stone, crushing the other organs to make room for the vast nothing at my center. Rita barged into my bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed, fixing a motherly frown of concern on me. With her make-up applied so thickly, her lips like bloody open wounds, she resembled a particularly cruel clown, even though her eyes were soft and warm and veined from crying. She rattled off a list of chores – picking up the yard, straightening my room, sweeping the porch – like these things were gifts she was giving me. My only response was a shrug and she grew stern, telling me that my mother shouldn’t be bothered with such petty tasks. I got angry with her but I said nothing.

I didn’t want to pick up the yard or sweep the porch, because I didn’t want to be out front in view of my neighbor, the German. He’d see the pain on my face – or maybe he’d see the depth of the emptiness inside of me – and he’d take pride in knowing I hurt. Instead I picked up my room, and though it was an effort of half measures, I’d done something. Rita returned and nodded at the progress and pointed at the tumbling stack of comic books by the bed.

“I don’t understand why you read those awful things,” she said.

“Then don’t read them,” I responded, taking great joy in the astonishment my comment had brought to Rita’s face.

Her dismay quickly resolved into simmering anger and she put her hands on her hips and pursed her ugly wound-red lips. “You pick those up or I’ll burn them.”

“And I’ll get my daddy’s rifle.”

Another flare of shock lit her face, making her eyes grow wide and her mouth open in an
O
of disbelief.

My mother arrived just then and she told Rita to leave me be, and Rita was outraged, launching into her account of what had happened. Ma interrupted her.

“Just leave him be,” she said, sounding exhausted. She grasped her friend’s arm and led her into the hall.

Rita cast a final furious glance my way and then followed my mother back to the kitchen. Then the house was silent again.

I couldn’t stand it. The quiet fell around me like a tomb and then like a coffin, pressing in on my back and chest and shoulders all at once until I couldn’t breathe. I ran out of my room and through the house until I reached the porch, and after checking to make sure the German wasn’t watching me, I raced to the street and sprinted away.

~ ~ ~

I’d thought to distract myself with the shops downtown, but this turned out to be a mistake. It seemed everyone in town knew me and had heard the fate of my father, which was wholly impossible, yet every pair of eyes that fell on me seemed to hold pity, and these compassionate glances only fueled my anxiety. Why did people have to look at me? Why couldn’t they mind their own business?

I walked to the Ranger’s Lodge, where they’d found the body of David Williams, and from there I continued to Santa Anna Street and headed south to the small white clapboard bus station. A gray bus pulled away from the loading platform as I approached, leaving two women in long green dresses standing in a cloud of dust. The women put their hands on their wide-brimmed hats as if to hold them in place through a wind gust, and they bent low, using the hats as screens against the powdery haze. Once the dust had settled both women grasped the handles of their suitcases and carried them off the low wooden platform, heading across the street toward St. David’s Church. I stepped onto the planks and walked to the far side to take a seat on a long and narrow wooden bench.

I’d sat on this bench while my mother said goodbye to Daddy, and I’d watched them kiss – quickly and discreetly at first, and then more passionately as Ma’s tears drew shimmering lines down her cheeks – and this is where I’d waved goodbye to my father as he climbed into the bus. He never turned to see my farewell gesture, but his own hand was lifted high, the back of it presented as the shadows of the bus engulfed him, and he took a seat on the far row across the aisle so that I couldn’t see him through the window, and the bus pulled away, raising one of a thousand clouds of dust that would dot Barnard in the course of that day. Looking around the station platform I thought how desolate this side of the city looked, barren like a ghost town. Even the church across the street looked solemn and vacant, sitting on a bed of cracked clay earth. This was where I’d seen my father for the last time. Our final moments had been spent in this bleak, dusty, and dismal spot, and his last words to me were “See you soon.” I thought about the notes he’d sent me, scraps of paper included in the real letters he sent to Ma, and they struck me as inadequate and cheap, and he should have told me about himself – anything about himself and what he was going through – but his notes had almost nothing to do with him or with me:
We’re giving them a good run, Timmy. Be sure to behave yourself and mind your mother. Your father, Fred Randall.
And it wasn’t enough, because it wasn’t anything at all. I let myself hate him then. The anger flared. Then it died, receding to the beetles-in-the-walls ticking sound I’d grown accustomed to.

The stationmaster, who might have looked like a movie star were it not for the kidney shaped birthmark covering his neck and jaw, came outside and removed his cap. He noticed me on the bench and asked if he could help me. I got up and walked in the direction of town without replying.

I came upon Hugo and Ben and Austin as I rounded the corner onto Main Street. The three stood outside of Delrubio’s. Hugo and Austin, who fidgeted like he was attached to an electric wire, smoked cigarettes in the shade, and Ben leaned against the drugstore’s brick wall, his Stetson pushed low to shade his eyes. Hugo noticed me and lifted his hand in a half-wave and called me over. This seemed to amuse Austin Chitwood, until Hugo slapped the laughter out of the guy by backhanding him in the chest. Austin coughed out a thick cloud of cigarette smoke and hacked around the question, “What in the hell, Hugo?”