The German (34 page)

Brett Fletcher’s story came out in bits and pieces over the next few months. His last name was really Fleischer, which his family – like many families – had changed when coming to America. When Brett was no older than I was that summer both of his parents succumbed to pneumonia, leaving him in the care of a stern – some said insane – old woman named Elsa: his grandmother. Many of the adults in Barnard knew these facts in the abstract way you know the family history of a neighbor, but he was never suspected of the Cowboy’s crimes, not only because folks believed Brett had been crippled in battle and was confined to his chair, but also because he was a valued citizen, a true American, a patriot. Doc Randolph speculated that Brett’s loathing of the German people was the result of the abuse he took from Elsa Fleischer, a woman who regularly beat the boy, humiliated him, and on occasion tied him to his bed and threaded a knitting needle through his urethra, leaving it there for hours at a time. As an adult, Brett was impotent and frustrated and hateful, believing it was his duty to turn the world against the men and women who shared his – and more specifically his grandmother’s – heritage.

Of course his paralysis was a lie – in part. Brett had never spent a day near combat. There had been no mortar shell, no explosion. He’d run a Jeep off the road in Edinburgh while drunk, and the doctors had made a hasty diagnosis, taking Brett’s temporary paralysis as a permanent affliction, and they’d filled out the reports to send him home, and no one had questioned Brett’s story, because he hadn’t served with any of the other men from Barnard, and since his grandmother’s death, there had been no one at home to receive a telegram explaining the truth of his injury. He came home a fractured hero and had brought his war with him.

We know these things because the Cowboy kept a journal of his own. Deputy Burns found it in a trunk where Brett kept personal items, including an old dress, belonging to Elsa Fleischer, which Brett had shredded with a knife.

One morning while the glass of milk warmed on the table next to my bed, I read the
Register
and saw a passage attributed to Deputy Burns. He speculated that Barnard’s Cowboy had died as the result of my struggles. Burns suggested that I’d thrown Brett off balance, causing him to fall backward, breaking his neck on the stove. It couldn’t have happened that way, but since no one came forward to claim responsibility for saving me, and there was no hard evidence to prove a conflicting theory, that became the story. Like Brett Fletcher, a lie made me a hero.

I returned to school and suffered the accolades of my classmates. I didn’t feel at ease with them, never knew what to say. Their faces and excited conversations were immature. Shallow. Bum was gone, and though I could call many of the boys and girls I shared classes with friends, I felt close to none of them.

If there was any light during this difficult time, it came in the form of a telegram. The note arrived on a Thursday afternoon and informed my mother and me that Daddy had been found alive and was in a French hospital and would return to us soon. My mother was ecstatic, sobbing and laughing and holding me every chance I would allow, but I remembered what my grandfather had told me. He’d said that the man who had left Barnard would never return. Whether the injuries he’d sustained were severe or minor, whether he’d seen the faces of the enemy or not, the experience would irrevocably alter Fred Randall.

Though happy for the news of my father’s return, my grandfather’s claims haunted me. I believed what he’d said because I’d been in battle myself. Young men – including my best friend – had died. I’d seen an innocent man tortured. The memories of his abuse and his subsequent murder fouled my body like a disease, eating away at my mind and muscles until sometimes I felt I should return to the lake and the black forms that swam beneath its surface. They waited for me there, people I had known and some that I had loved – phantoms of my guilt.

At night they emerge from the water, stalking over the grassy field, leaving bits of themselves on the ground. They gather at my bedside – Bum, Harold, David, the father I’d known before the war, and my neighbor Mr. Lang – and they gaze down on me, whispering revelations of who they were and who I am.

And the strongest voice belongs to the German, who looks upon me with concern and warmth, and he tells me, “If you can stand up, you’ll live.”

I go to school and then to college, and when it becomes clear that a wife is not in my future, I take Ernst Lang’s example and let those who care to know that I am a certain kind of man: one no more or less important than any other man. As I grow older I move away from Texas and make a family of my own, finding love with a man named Charles who I meet in Central Park. We live in New York and watch the Civil Rights struggles and the Vietnam War and the Stonewall Riots, and I am struck by how similar all conflicts are, as if each generation must prove itself with fresh arguments and fresh blood, having learned nothing from the previous generation.

In time, Ma and Daddy die and then many years later Charles dies, leaving me alone, and I think it is greedy to mourn his death as we’ve shared so much, but I do mourn him because I’m human, and though life has given me a mile of gold, I want another inch of it, another foot. A second mile.

The millennium comes and goes. Sixty years pass since the events of that summer. One morning, I am watching the news, and a photograph appears on the television screen that chills me to my core.

Charges of misconduct are being filed against soldiers stationed in Baghdad. In a prisoner of war facility called Abu Ghraib, Americans are said to humiliate, sodomize, and torture a number of their Iraqi prisoners. Worse still, photographs of these soldiers show their great amusement at the dehumanizing tactics employed. Then a photograph of an inmate, standing on a box with his arms extended as if being crucified flashes on the television set. He wears a dark hood and a dark tunic that seems to have been made from a threadbare blanket. And suddenly I am again standing in a room on Dodd Street with my neighbor bound spread eagled on his bed, quaking in terror as the brown bedspread conceals his face so he cannot see the nature of his binding and those who have bound him.

It all comes back with such force, my breath locks in my throat. The odors of the room fill my nose, and the sounds of a desperate man wheezing and whispering harshly in German, and young men laughing ring in my ears, achingly like a saw on tin. Guilt resurfaces: a bloated corpse, frightening me with its ugliness. I cannot follow the story on the news because the pain it brings is personal and feels all too fresh, and though I turn the television off, the memories remain. I think of an innocent man whose face is smeared in blood and who will die a victim of ignorance and lies, and he stays with me throughout the day and into the weeks that follow, and I realize that he has always been with me, as is the case with anyone we have loved.

One afternoon, I leave the apartment on Broadway and begin walking in an attempt to dilute the memories with the city’s sounds and motion. As I near Lincoln Center, I pass a restaurant’s patio, where young and attractive people gather for expensive coffees and complicated pasta dishes, and I see a man sitting with his arm on the patio railing. He is speaking with a younger man who wears his hair in a nest of dark spikes. The younger man has his back to me, but he seems to be in the process of laughing, and the man I am facing smiles broadly, shrugs and continues speaking.

The man is thickly built with short brown hair and scars like a line across his nose and cheeks. In addition to the mustache I remember, he now wears a Van Dyke that is lightly salted with gray, and were it not for the miscellaneous impossibilities, I would swear this man once lived across the street from me in the city of Barnard, Texas. So great is this impression I feel a twinge of fear should he recognize me, but even if Ernst Lang had survived Burl Jones’s bullets, he would be a hundred years old or more and certainly would not look so close to the way he had the last time I’d seen him.

Knowing I gaze on nothing more than a normal man, given attributes I ascribe to a long dead German – perhaps because of the hours I have spent thinking about him in the preceding months – I still cannot take my eyes off of him. His joy is palpable, and his eyes twinkle mischievously, the way they did when he climbed onto his sofa to explain the power of names to two little boys.

I stand there and smile. I want to approach him and even take a step forward before I stop myself. Then quickly I turn and hurry back the way I have come.

When I was a boy, I lived across the street from a German. His name was Ernst and he helped me once. He might have even saved my life, but that isn’t something I will ever know for certain. If nothing else, I have tried to live an honest life because of what he taught me. There are many things I never told the German. So I will tell him now.

I am sorry, and I am grateful, and goodbye.

Wherever you are, live and rest in peace.

~ ~ ~

Lee Thomas is the Lambda Literary Award and Bram Stoker Award-winning author of the novels
Stained
,
Damage
, and
The Dust of Wonderland
, and the critically-acclaimed short story collection
In the Closet, Under the Bed
. In addition to numerous magazines, his short fiction has appeared in the anthologies
Darkness of the Edge
,
Supernatural Noir
,
Horror Library, Vol. 4
, and
Inferno
, among others. Current and forthcoming titles include the novellas
The Black Sun Set
,
Crisis
, and
Focus
(co-written with Nate Southard). Lee lives in Austin, Texas, where he is working on a number of projects. Find him online at www.leethomasauthor.com.