The German (3 page)

“Yes,” he replied. “Hank Carter sold two more of my chairs to a couple from Leander who would like a third for the woman’s mother.”

“Neat,” I said too exuberantly.

Mr. Lang seemed confused by my choice of words, but he smiled and nodded and agreed, “Yes, it is
neat
.”

I liked Mr. Lang’s voice and frequently found myself searching for topics to keep a conversation going. He didn’t sound like the Germans in movies, with their clipped and harsh vibrato delivery. He spoke slowly in a low register that softened the edges of his accent.

Then the German wandered away, humming a tune I didn’t recognize as he climbed the low rise of grass to the road above, scrubbing his head with the towel like he was trying to put out a fire. As I watched him go, Bum leapt into the water with a great crash.

“Ah,” he said upon surfacing. “That takes the rust off.”

Eager to get out of the hot day and join my friend, I yanked off my shirt and dropped it next to Bum’s, and then I waded in. The morning sweat and dust washed away and the clamp of lethargy at the back of my head loosened, and I began to think Bum’s idea of spending both day and night up to our chins in the lake wasn’t so bad after all.

We swam a bit but refused any real exertion, preferring to just paddle lazily or float on our backs looking heavenward. Soon enough we stopped this pretext of activity and just stood on the rocks near the shore, the soothing water’s surface cutting me across the collarbone while it licked close to Bum’s chin.

“Do you think we’ll have to go to the war?” Bum asked. He wiped water from his round cheeks and looked at me.

“I don’t know,” I told him. “If it goes on long enough, I suppose. But it won’t last that long. The radio said it would be over before Christmas. We got the Krauts on the run and the Japs won’t be far behind.”

“Yeah, but they said that last year, before Mudbug got sent to the Pacific, and now Fatty’s getting ready to head off to training.”

“I bet Fatty doesn’t even finish training before it’s done.”

Bum’s brother, Fatty, didn’t belong in the service. Like his mama, Fatty’s brain moved as slow as a bicycle with flat tires. He’d stopped school just before the sixth grade, because he couldn’t keep up with the mathematics. A few years back, he took himself a job out to the paper mill, where he pushed rolls of paper on a cart from the warehouse to the cutting room.

“Fatty’s gonna get himself killed,” Bum said. “Daddy never let the dummy handle any of his rifles, because he figured Fatty would shoot himself in the head looking to see how fast the bullet came out. The dope can’t even wind a wristwatch.”

Concern weighed down Bum’s face, and I wanted to get his mind off of his brothers, because nothing I told him would stick or help. Bum knew what was what, and I figured he had it pretty much right: if they sent Fatty overseas, he’d probably never see home again. Mudbug on the other hand might just come back a hero. He sure was mean enough. “It’ll be over soon,” I said.

“I don’t know what I’d do if I had to go,” Bum said. “I wish I was more like Mudbug or Harold Ashton.”

I’d never thought much about true combat. The kids all talked brave – myself included – all of us eager to show the Axis the way real men fought, and during those patriotic bull sessions, I’d felt certain that if someone were to put a rifle in my hands and drop me in Berlin, I’d take out the entire Nazi party in the same time it took Ma to fry up a chicken, but all I knew of fighting came from the movies and the radio and Brett Fletcher, who spun some harrowing yarns from the wheelchair on his porch. War struck me as something involving adults, but Bum didn’t see it that way. He had brothers, and one by one the government had requested their services. First Mudbug and then Fatty. It would be Mule’s turn next and then Bum. It was like a saboteur’s bomb counting down, only instead of ticking off seconds, it had been synchronized to the sons of Clayton and Louise Craddick.

We stood on those rocks for a while and didn’t say much. The water didn’t feel quite as good as it had, and my feet were starting to ache, toes clamped to the rough wads of stone beneath them. I felt a chill and looked away from Bum.

Across the water I noticed two men standing on the shore at the Blevins place just below the tree line. The glare and distance made it difficult to make the figures out, but one of them wore a hat with a familiar shape.

Jerome Blevins was an old-time moonshiner who owned two hundred acres to the west of Barnard, which hadn’t done him a bit of good during the Depression. Though he maintained a good amount of his hill-country cheapness, his lot in life had improved greatly over the last few years. He let the paper folks take some of his trees, and he herded cattle, and while the rest of the country worried about invasion from across the oceans, Jerome had convinced himself the Mexicans were the ones who’d bring the end of civilization with them over the borders.

Bum and I spent another few minutes speculating on the men and their purpose, and then we forgot about them and waded out of the lake to lie down in the tall grass on the shore. Unlike most days, when he would talk about every little thing that crossed his mind, Bum lay quietly, and I knew he was worried about his dim-witted brother, Fatty. I couldn’t think of any further words of comfort for my friend, so I tried to distract him with old knock-knock jokes and making funny voices, which he always said I did better than any of the other kids. He laughed a bit, but it wasn’t Bum’s usual full-throated chuckle.

“Fatty’s going to be okay,” I finally said. “They’ll probably send him out with Mudbug, and you know Mudbug isn’t going to let anything happen to him.”

“Mr. Fletcher says that if the Germans catch you, they put you in a cage and torture you, and then once you’re dead they eat your skin and make furniture from your bones.”

“He’s just trying to scare the little kids.”

“But do you think it’s true?” Bum asked.

I told him that I didn’t think it was true. People didn’t do that to one another, but Bum wasn’t convinced, and of course, neither of us knew what they’d found on Jerome Blevins’s property while we soaked away the morning in Kramer Lake.

Mornings and weekends were the only times Sheriff Tom Rabbit rode his chestnut mare, Pilar. In the pink glow of daybreak, he trotted her through fields of tall tanned grasses, enjoying the peace, the quiet, and the scent of air that wasn’t heavy with dust and car fumes. Riding soothed him, from the gentle rocking in the saddle to the rhythmic clop of Pilar’s hooves on the hard packed earth as she carried him across the flats north of his home to a squat ridge of hills. At the edge of his property, atop a hillock where the mesquite knotted, creating a tangled fence, Sheriff Rabbit climbed off his mount and looked to the west, gently stroking Pilar’s neck as he surveyed the direction a hundred western novels and films made him associate with the future. A string of bruised clouds ran across the horizon, but a sheet of pure radiant blue hung overhead and stretched the innumerable miles to the cumulus. If the clouds intended storm, it would miss Barnard by miles, and though the farmers likely wished for a bit of water after such a dry spring and early summer, Sheriff Rabbit felt just fine with the clouds’ decision to pass on by. The streets in Barnard hadn’t been poured with an eye toward rain, so when a downpour hit, the water gathered on the roads, a lot of it muddy runoff from the ranchlands to the east, and then got held between the sidewalk curbs, making any travel through town a messy and complicated event. Of course he didn’t have to worry about starving if the crops didn’t come in.

He fished a sugar cube out of his shirt pocket to feed to Pilar. Then he remounted his horse and turned her nose to the south before clicking his tongue to get her moving.

He felt no urgency to get back to the house and entertained no illusions about his necessity in the office. Things in Barnard had been quiet for months. Nights offered the prerequisite bar brawls and the occasional theft, but no crimes of note had stained the pages of the
Barnard Register
since Molly Jenkins had confessed to the murder of her husband, John, back in ’42. The crazy old lady had poisoned her spouse of thirty-five years with arsenic and had called Sheriff Rabbit to “Come on out and pick this bag of manure up off my kitchen floor.” With Tom being something less than an expert in the science of poison, old Molly would have gotten away free and clear if she hadn’t confessed. John Jenkins had been a sickly old man, coughing like a bad engine, and not a soul would have batted an eye at his demise, but Molly had wanted credit for the killing. After nearly three-dozen years of black eyes and split lips and more egregious injuries which she’d recounted in great detail in her confession, Molly wanted everyone to know that she’d gotten the last word in on the marriage.

As for last words, hers were: “John better watch his tail when I get there,” before the state sent the juice through her chair.

But the Molly Jenkinses were rare, and Tom was glad of it. Still he couldn’t bring himself to crow about the peaceful state of his city.

The only reason things were so quiet was because of the war, and no matter how much Tom appreciated the ease of his days, he understood that a lot of people were sacrificing themselves for his benefit. Most boys of hell-raising age were overseas or in hospitals or dead. In addition to the abbreviated population, the shadow of war hung over everyone, making imperatives of courtesy and kindness. No one knew which family might have just received a telegram from Washington, DC; bad news traveled fast, but was hardly instantaneous, and most of the petty triggers for arguments were avoided as men and women focused their energies on concern for the welfare of their country and their families. Even the animosity toward the Germans in town had subsided considerably. Early on, folks hadn’t easily distinguished expatriates of that nation from the Nazi leaders running it. Suspicions and tempers had run high. Carl Baker had taken a nasty beating at the hands of Burl Jones, who’d spent a night in jail for the assault, and Bruno Gerber got his arm cut with a razor outside of his hardware store by an unknown assailant wearing a potato-sack mask. Miscreants had whitewashed obscenities and accusations on the sides of German-owned shops and homes, and a number of windows had been broken. But that had been early in the war, when patriotism seemed to require retaliation against the kin of Hitler and Goering. Since those early months, a sense of unity had begun to emerge between the lifelong residents of Barnard and their immigrant neighbors.

A pleasant breeze greeted Sheriff Rabbit at the gate to Pilar’s corral. He leapt off the horse and untied the rope holding the gate closed, then he led the mare inside to the barn. He unbridled her, removed the saddle, placing it carefully on the sawhorse by her stall. After throwing some hay and oats into a trough, Tom checked her water and decided it was more than enough to get her through the hot day ahead. Then he went inside to see what his housekeeper had prepared for breakfast.

Estella, a small-boned girl with raven black hair and eyes the color of chocolate, met him at the back door with a cup of coffee and while he took his seat at the small table in the corner, she scurried around the kitchen, scraping eggs and potatoes out of skillets and pulling toasted bread from the oven. She dropped everything on a plate and presented it to him with a crock of butter for the toast. He thanked her, and Estella bowed. Then she hurried out of the kitchen to attend to housework, leaving him to eat in peace.

Truth was he wished she’d stay and share the meal with him. Ever since Glynis had died, Tom found himself missing the soothing sounds of a woman’s voice. Three years gone now; he had forgotten what Glynis’s voice sounded like and the realization disturbed him. He could picture her face well enough, and if his memory failed him in that regard he could peruse the handful of photographs he kept in a tin beside the bed, or the portrait of her he kept framed on the mantle, but even though he could remember a hundred things she’d said to him, he could not remember the way those words had sounded coming from her mouth, and he considered this theft one of time’s crueler consequences.

Tom sopped up the butter from his eggs and the grease of his potatoes with a wedge of toast. Meal finished, he drank the rest of his coffee and left the kitchen. At the front door he retrieved his sheriff’s hat from a hook and placed it on his head.

“Goodbye, Estella,” he called.

The Mexican girl appeared at the top of the stairs and waved, smiling shyly in farewell. He wished she’d say something, but she rarely did. Estella was embarrassed by her poor English, so more times than not, she gestured her side of a conversation.

Tom left the house and got in the Packard Six the city had given him to do his job. He opened the glove box and reached for the pack of cigarettes he kept there. Lighting up, he pulled out of the drive and headed for the farm road, which would take him into town and what he imagined would be another quiet day.