by R.J. Ellory
Fear sat inside me like a ball of muscle, like I had an extra heart—a heart that knew fear and hopelessness and the feeling that life could throw something right at you, right out of left field with a curve like a billowed sail, and there was nothing, just nothing in the whole goddamned world you could do about it. Bit my nails and thought about Virginia Grace Perlman. Closed my eyes and could see the white soles of her new shoes over the sharp brow of a small hill. Smell of pine in the air, pine and something earthy, something that hung beneath everything like a shadow.
It took me a while to figure out what it was. It was the coppery smell of spilled blood that had seeped into the earth.
I took a walk up there a while later; I stood amidst the trees and looked down toward my own house and the Krugers’. I saw Elena out on the back steps rubbing something on her bruised shoulders to keep the sun’s cruelty at arm’s length. I wanted her to see me. I would’ve called out her name if there had been a chance she’d have heard.
I wanted to let her know that as long as I could see her she was safe.
No one’s gonna come get you, not while I’m here, not while I’m watching. I was too late last time, but if there’s another time, the Guardians are gonna be ready.
I wanted to let her know that everything was going to be fine.
It wasn’t, and I knew I was kidding myself. It was the war; it was the Germans and what they were doing to the Jews; it was the fact that five girls had died within the space of less than three years, and the sheriffs of three counties still no wiser than they were when Alice Ruth Van Horne was found naked in a field at the end of the High Road.
Late that same night I couldn’t sleep, but twisted and turned in the sheets like a boy dreaming of drowning. I rose in the nascent dawn and stood at the window, looking out across the fields.
I watched and waited, every once in a while holding my breath as I squinted out through half-closed eyes and made colors flat, perspective disappear. A one-eyed man sees everything flat, my dad had once told me. He can’t judge distance. Misestimates proximity of one thing to another. I tried not to think of my father, the sound of his voice, the smell of him—bitter apples, coal tar, cigars. I waited and watched, and then waited some more. I tried to breathe deep to close out the sound of bugs and trees, of the wind and the stream, so that I could hear other things. The things that came from darkness.
I tried to be a Guardian.
Everything was still like cemeteries, like empty shacks, like stagnant ponds that looked as if they’d support your weight if you dared to walk across them.
I heard a creaking sound.
Needles rushed suddenly across my lower back up my spine and down the hairs on the nape of my neck. I turned toward my bedroom door, and for just a brief moment, I imagined I saw the handle begin to turn. A narrow and frightened sound escaped my lips—an involuntary sound, the sound of my body reacting to something my mind didn’t want to understand.
I watched. I waited for the door to swing slowly open, but nothing happened. I closed my eyes, realized I had clenched my fists so hard I was digging small crescents in my palms with my fingernails.
I opened my hand and saw the thin line of healed skin where we’d cut ourselves and made an oath, to protect, to keep our eyes and ears open.
Whoever was out there had perhaps heard us, had read our minds, had perceived what we were doing, and in seeing me there, standing there amidst the others, had singled me out as the ringleader, the trou blemaker.
I’ll show him, he’d thought. I’ll show him how it feels to be afraid.
And he’d taken Virginia Perlman and killed her just for me.
I opened my eyes, turned back toward the window.
And I saw him.
My breath stopped cold and hard. I scrunched my eyes tight, willed myself to think clearly, to close down my imagination and see nothing but what was right there in front of me.
I opened them again.
Still there. A dark figure standing motionless at the end of the road that led away from our front yard.
Just standing there. Listening perhaps, watching the fields and paths for the sign of someone alone, another girl, someone he could steal away into darkness.
I felt tears coming, felt the sheer paralysis of being able to do nothing, not even to cry out, my hands clenched and ready to beat against the glass of the window, and yet terrified, stricken dumb . . .
And then he turned as if to face me.
Gunther Kruger paused for a moment, and then he started to walk away, back toward his own house, his long coat swaying around his legs like a cloak.
The sense of relief was overwhelming.
I started to cry, not in fear or terror, but in deliverance.
I watched him disappear between the houses, and then I heard the sound of a door opening and closing.
A Guardian, I thought, and for a moment imagined him as one of us, standing out there in the darkness to ensure that no one came along the High Road to steal his daughter into the night.
It was a long while before I slept, but when I did I slept without dreams.
The following day the Guardians met in the trees near the broken-fence field.
“We have a problem,” Hans Kruger told me. He stood close, a little distance between us and the others. “My sister,” he said. “She thinks we’re up to something. She thinks we’re involved in something, and unless I say she can come she’s going to speak to my father.”
“So tell her you’re not doing anything ”
Hans laughed abruptly, and I wondered for a moment if he hadn’t already told her about the Guardians. Perhaps he sought some sense of approval from her; perhaps he believed he could shine like his elder brother in her eyes. “You know Elena as well as anyone,” he said. “She’s crazy for things like this. She gets the idea there’s something going on she won’t let it go until she knows all about it. You remember that time with the raccoon we buried?”
I remembered it all too well, how she’d whined and cajoled until we told her what we were going to do, and then she insisted she come with us even though she screamed when she saw it, screamed and cried because the raccoon had been hit by a truck or some such and had lost much of its hind.
I nodded. “I remember,” I said.
“So what am I going to do?” Hans asked, and then he turned as someone came through the trees and appeared at the edge of the path.
Elena Kruger, all of eleven years old, her hair tied in symmetrical pigtails that jutted from the side of her head, a bright bow tied at each end like a bunch of irregular petals, and smiling like she knew everything there was to know in the world.
“Elena!” Hans snapped.
“I saw you come down here,” she said. “I saw you all coming down here and I want to know what’s going on . . . you have to tell me what you’re doing or I’ll tell.”
I stepped ahead of Hans. “Let me handle this,” I said emphatically.
I walked toward her, my expression stern, an expression of authority, and I stood before her, a good head and a half taller, and I looked down at her the way Miss Webber sometimes looked down at me.
“You have to go home,” I said.
“Don’t have to do anything you say,” she sniped.
“Elena, I’m serious. This is not something you can be involved in. You have to go home now and not say anything to anyone.”
She tilted her head to one side. She batted her eyelids and looked at me with an expression that made me blush inside.
“Elena, I mean it. This is serious business.”
By this time the others had started toward us. I could feel their eyes on my back, and then Maurice Fricker stood beside me and looked down at Elena Kruger. “What the hell’s she doing here?”
“Could ask you the same thing, Maurice Fricker,” Elena said. “I know your brother, know your mom and dad too, and if you don’t tell me what’s going on I’m going to run all the way to your house and tell them I saw you smoki
ng cigarettes.”
Maurice raised his hand. “Why, you little—”
I stepped between them, right up close to Elena; I took her arm and swiftly guided her away from the gathered crowd.
We walked a little way toward the trees, and then I slowed and stopped. “Sit down,” I said. “Sit down here and listen to me.”
I told her who we were. I told her about the Guardians. I told her about the promise we’d made to keep our eyes and ears open for anything that happened. I told her why, and then I explained how she could never be part of such a thing. She was there to be protected, not to protect.
“But I’ve got ears and eyes like anyone else,” she said, and for a moment she looked like she was going to cry.
I glanced back toward the five boys. Ronald Duggan was standing with his hands on his hips, his face like someone had slapped him. Hans just looked awkward, like the appearance of his sister was somehow his fault and responsibility alone.
I turned back to her. “Elena, I mean it. You can’t get involved in this. This is dangerous for you.”
She shook her head. “Because I’m a girl, isn’t it?”
I laughed. “No, for Christ’s sake, Elena, it’s not because you’re a girl.”
“Then why? Why can’t I be part of this?”
I looked back at the gathered crowd. They were waiting for me to get mad at Elena and send her home. They were waiting for me to say something harsh and direct and meaningful. I could do no such thing; not to Elena Kruger.
“Elena . . . the thing is that you’re too important to me.” I turned and looked at her. There was something in her eyes I had never seen before. I was trying to plan what I was saying, but there was no control, and the words kind of fell out in spite of myself. “I care for you too much, Elena. I can’t bear the thought of something happening to you. You have to trust me on this. You have to understand that making sure nothing happens to you is the most important part of my job. I watch the road toward our houses. I make sure nothing happens. I will make sure that nothing happens to you, and the idea of you out in the darkness somewhere, it doesn’t matter who might be with you, the idea of you out there in the darkness where something could happen to you is just too much for me to stand.”
I stopped talking. I was looking down at my fingers twisted together, feeling the butterflies in the base of my gut.
I turned slowly as I felt her hand on my arm.
Elena Kruger, eyes wide and tearful, hair tied in pigtails, some long distant memory of a skinny little girl with bruises on her arms, leaned up and kissed me on the cheek.
I looked at her. Saw innocence, naïveté, the sense of blind trust in her eyes.
“Okay,” she whispered, and then she slowly rose to her feet, brushed the dust from her skirt and smiled.
“My Guardian, right?” she said, and in her voice was a tone of triumph. “My Guardian, Joseph Vaughan.” A look in her eyes as if she now trusted me with her life.
I felt my cheeks color up and I had to look away.
“I won’t say a thing,” she said, and then she turned and ran away.
I stood up and watched her disappear down between the trees.
Yes, I thought. I’ll be your Guardian. Whatever happens, I’ll be there.
Late August. The Germans arrested a further five thousand Jews in France; Marines landed on Guadalcanal and the Gilbert Islands; someone threw a stone through Gunther Kruger’s car windshield. Sheriff Dearing organized the posting of notices on trees and gates around Augusta Falls. The notices showed the silhouette of a man—just a shape, like an upright shadow—and beneath the shadow were the words: DON’T TALK TO STRANGERS. DON’T GO WITH STRANGERS. STAY ALERT. STAY SAFE.
Seemed to make things worse, not better. Reminded everyone that something was in our midst, and if you happened to forget about it the notices were right there to remind you. Whether he was a boogeyman or not, he now seemed more real than ever.
Then on August twenty-seventh, a Thursday, a single gunshot punched a hole through the window of the Krugers’ bedroom window.
Gunther Kruger called out Sheriff Dearing. Sheriff Dearing was sorely concerned, had never heard of anything like it, at least not directed toward white folks, but he never questioned whether the shot had been an accident.
Friday night there was a ruckus out near the cottonwood grove, and when Mr. Kruger walked up there come morning he found someone had killed his dog, cut it open from throat to tail and left it to bake in the sun.
He called Sheriff Dearing out a second time; Sheriff Dearing asked questions about folks Kruger might have upset, about whether someone had a mind to seek vengeance for something. Had he cut into someone’s land, edged a fence ten yards closer than he should have, let his dog kill some chickens on someone else’s patch?
“This isn’t about chickens or fences or anything else, and you know it!”
Sheriff Dearing said how Mr. Kruger should mind his manners when speaking to an officer of the law.
“So do something,” Kruger insisted. “My wife and children are in danger from these maniacs . . . America is the land of justice and freedom.”
Sheriff Dearing told Mr. Kruger that he better have a mind to say nothing negative about America or the American people.
“But American people have put a stone through my automobile window. A shot was fired through my upstairs window, and could have hit me or my wife or any of my children, and now an American has killed my dog, and left him out for everyone to see. You know how much my daughter loved that dog?”
Sheriff Dearing raised both his hands, looked like he was surrendering up on something, and he backed away a step and started shaking his head. He told Kruger that there was nothing to be gained from such inflammatory accusations, and that if Kruger was of a mind to be so slanted, well, there wasn’t a great deal of anything gonna be accomplished by Sheriff Dearing standing there talking. They could talk ’til the sun went down and neither of them would be any further forward.
“But at least if you stayed until dark we might see another American violate my home and my family,” Kruger said, stuttering his words out rapid-fire, dimes from a slot-machine jackpot, and that was pretty much all that was needed to see Sheriff Dearing in his car and off down the dirt road to the highway without glancing back.
I wondered if someone had seen Gunther Kruger out that night, the night I saw him from my window. Seen him out there and made five out of two plus four.
Sheriff Dearing should’ve said nothing, but it was Saturday night, and Clement Yates, who’d once been temporarily deputized and helped Dearing catch a runaway from the juvenile home in Folkston, was having a birthday. Clement possessed a flat and unremarkable face, aside from his right eye which was slanted up at the corner with a neat scar, like someone had caught his brow with a fish hook and finally tugged it free. More than that, he was a little slow, and the slope of his mouth, the slackness of his jawline, gave the impression that he had in fact swallowed that hook, the line and sinker too, and was even now waiting patiently to consume the rod. When Clement had an idea, there was a dawning light in those dull eyes, a light like St. Elmo’s fire, and more than likely there would be an announcement on the wireless.
There were a good few men down at the Falls Inn, which was nothing more than two beer tables, one pump, a corner booth for couples, a plank board table for sitting and eating, a sawdust-and-spit floor and a moose head on the wall with its right eye missing. The name of the place was a pun. The owner was Frank Turow, and the first day he opened he slipped and fell down the cellar steps and near busted his back. Frank carried a strange face, as though his skull had never hardened; a sharp push, a backyard tussle, something such as this had brought undue pressure to bear against his face. Features yielded, stayed such a way thereafter. Neither handsome nor ugly, but the indecisive middle ground inhabited by all those enduring double takes and puzzled glances.
Attending Yates’s birthday, aside from Sheriff Dearing and Yates him
self, were Leonard Stowell and Garrick McRae, Lowell Shaner—the one-eyed Canadian who’d walked with the seventy-man line in March after the murder of Garrick McRae’s daughter, Frank Turow, who was all of sixty-eight years old and tough as a floorboard, six feet of stringy muscle and agile enough to bury any of them who had a mind to dare him, and finally Gene Fricker, father of Maurice, fellow Guardian. Gene Fricker worked at the grain store, smelled like a canvas sack of damp seed; he was heavy-set, slow like Yates, but slow in a methodical and diligent kind of way, never stupid, but selectively ignorant of those things that didn’t interest him. Seven men, two kegs of rough beer that tasted like yeast dissolved in raccoon piss, and tongues loosened by camaraderie, one-upmanship and, most of all, unhinged by a bottle of Calvert that Turow had preserved for the occasion.
“It’s not an American,” Yates said.
“What’s not?” Leonard Stowell asked.
“This one here who’s doin’ these things to these kids.”
Haynes Dearing raised his hand. “Enough already. I’m still the law, and I’m layin’ it down. This here’s a birthday party for Clement Yates, and that’s all it’s gonna be. We ain’t rattlin’ our cans about nothin’ like that this evenin’. We got Leonard Stowell and Garrick McRae here, both of them lost little ’uns.” Dearing raised his eyes and then nodded at each man in turn. “Different news for a different day, agreed?”
“Didn’t come here to say nothin’ about nothin’,” McRae said, “but while that pie is on the table I’ll cut a slice . . . I agree with Clement, birthday or no birthday, it ain’t no American.”
“Last one was a Jewish girl,” Frank Turow remarked.
“Ain’t important what kind of girl she was,” Lowell Shaner said. “Fact of the matter was that she was someone’s daughter, and I was out there on the line after Garrick’s daughter was murdered . . . I was out there watching grown men who’d never even seen her before, and I saw those men darn near break down in tears. They went out there ’cause they wanted to help . . . and I’ll tell you something right here and now Sheriff—”