An Honorable German

by Charles L. McCain

  “We want nothing from you, Malachi. We ask only how one must journey to New Orleans. For a ship. That’s all we want. To learn how we may travel to New Orleans for a ship. That’s all.”

  Not wanting to challenge him by staring, Max flicked his eyes to a photograph on the mantel—a younger Malachi in his doughboy uniform with the silver bars of a lieutenant. “Yes, that’s me,” Malachi said. “I was a lieutenant. An officer. You know what they called that war, the first one? The ‘war to end all wars.’ And here it is ain’t twenty-five years later and you people has started it up again. As far as Malachi is concerned, we should just shoot every damn one of you German sons of bitches.”

  Max looked down.

  Silence now, the faint hissing of the lantern the only sound. Malachi still gripped the sawed-off shotgun but slowly pointed it in the air and set the hammers to half cock so it wouldn’t go off accidentally. “I didn’t plan this,” Max said. “We didn’t plan to escape. We never would have involved you. It just happened and… I thought… I thought you may help us.”

  “Help you? Help you? Why in the name of Jesus would I help you? You ain’t the one who’s in danger. Don’t you understand nothing? All they gonna do is beat up on you two. But they’ll hang me from the nearest tree. Didn’t think of that, did you?”

  Holding his arms down with his palms out, Max looked up and said, “No, Malachi, I’m sorry. I never thought of that. I just never… I don’t even understand it. We’re the enemy.”

  Malachi looked at both of them for a moment, then shook his head. “’Cause you’re white and I’m colored and it don’t matter that you’re Krauts. You’re white Krauts. I’d just as soon shoot both of you as look at you but then I’d be in hell’s own trouble for killing two white Germans.” He stared at them.

  Max looked away, trying to think of something to say. They had to get Malachi to help them. He slowly moved his hands up in surrender. “We just need to get to New Orleans. For a ship. That’s all I’m asking. Will you tell us how to get there?”

  Malachi gripped the shotgun with both hands, brought it down from his shoulder to his waist, pointed it directly at Max and Carls. “Get out.”

  Max bit his lower lip. “Can you at least tell us what direction New Orleans is in?”

  “Get out,” Malachi said, pulling both hammers back to full cock; a pull of the two triggers and both barrels would fire. Max kept his hands up, palms out. “We’re leaving. We wish you no harm.” They backed away slowly. Carls turned to open the door.

  “Stop!” Malachi said. They froze.

  “Shit. Someone could have seen you headed this way. If you’re caught anywhere near here, they’re gonna come for me next.” He shook his head violently. “Damn you. God damn you.”

  Malachi walked backward to a large dresser at side of the room. “Y’all take off them stinking clothes.” Holding the shotgun on Max with one hand, he rummaged in a drawer and pulled out a worn pair of bibb overalls, threw them at Carls. Then he balled up an old black suit of clothes and threw them at Max along with a white shirt. “Used to wear this suit when I played in Berlin. It should come close to fitting you.” He reached again into the drawer and flung a tie at Max.

  While Max and Carls stripped to their skivvies and put on their new clothes, Malachi moved to the small kitchen area.

  “You,” Malachi said to Max, “tell the big man to pick up one of those watermelons by the door. Hurry up.” Malachi reached under a counter and pulled out an Adluh flour sack, which he threw at Max. “Fold up your old clothes and puts them in the sack then puts the watermelon in on top.”

  Carls held the sack open while Max quickly folded their filthy uniforms and stuffed them in, followed by the watermelon. “Now you look like some dumb-ass rednecks on the way to visit some of your redneck kinfolk.”

  Max straightened his suit. “New Orleans?”

  “Take the Panama Limited from Jackson—it’s ten miles due east of here. Follow the road you come in on till it cross Highway 22, then turn east. Get as far away from here as you can. You hear me? As far as you can. You got money for tickets? It’s three dollars to New Orleans.”

  “I have eleven dollars,” Max said.

  “That’ll do.”

  Using both hands, Malachi brought the shotgun to his shoulder and took steady aim at Max’s face. “Now get your goddamn selves out of here.”

  _________

  Their strategy was simple. Max spoke English well enough to pass as an American from another part of the country. “Just tell ’em you’re from Brooklyn if they ask about the accent. Them buckras is so stupid they won’t know the difference,” Malachi had said. “And don’t keep looking around like you got the nerves. Just walk straight and steady like you own the place. That’s how white folks do.”

  _________

  At the station Carls was to stay at a distance from Max, find a seat, and pretend to sleep. With his bib overalls, dirty shirt, and the smell of sweat all over him, he looked the picture of a Mississippi dirt farmer. They reached the rail station in the late afternoon, 4:15 by the gilt clock on the King Edward Hotel across the street from the station.

  Max bought the tickets without trouble, spreading his six dollars on the smooth wooden counter and telling the clerk, “Two coach for New Orleans.” He felt a strange fear she was going to look up and say, “Ausweiss, bitte,” but the woman behind the barred window didn’t even look up as she passed the tickets through. So different from the Reich, where identification papers and leave papers and permits were required to travel anywhere on a train.

  “Luggage, sir?”

  Max spun around and saw a colored man smiling at him from beneath a red leather cap. A police check?

  “Do you have any luggage you need carried, sir?”

  “No. No, thank you. I don’t have any luggage.”

  Couldn’t he see that Max had no luggage? Was it suspicious not to have any? But the colored man was just a porter, Max realized, not a police officer. Still, his heart raced. There were plenty of real policemen stationed around the terminal, and he had to keep steady. Get hold of yourself. Where was Carls? Max scanned the crowd, but he knew that standing in the middle of the huge waiting room staring about made him stick out. He needed a newspaper to hide behind. A newsstand stood on the far side of the cavernous room, he could see the sign: NEWSPAPERS, MAGAZINES, CIGARETTES, CIGARS, CANDY, ICE COLD COCA-COLA.

  He walked across the terminal, eyes straight ahead. American soldiers were everywhere in the station in their strange-looking khaki uniforms. It felt odd to move through them unnoticed, but they all seemed to be sleeping or playing cards.

  At the newsstand he took a paper from the stack by the register and saw his own picture staring up at him. NAZI SUB CAPTAIN AT LARGE, the headline shouted, and, below that: Top U-Boat Ace Escapes from Work Detail. Luckily, the photograph was from his identity card issued at the transit camp in Virginia months back. It was grainy and didn’t look much like him since he had lost more weight in the time since the picture was taken. Nor was he in uniform now like he was in the picture. Instead he wore the ill-fitting black suit Malachi had given him that made him look like an undertaker. He dropped the paper and ducked into the coffee shop next door, finding a stool at the counter.

  “What’ll it be, hon?”

  “Coffee.”

  The waitress stared at him over half-moon glasses and smiled. “You ain’t from around here. You a Yankee?”

  “Ship captain. From New York.”

  “Honey, you’re a long way from New York, but I reckon with the war on, we got more Yankees down here in Jackson than any time since y’all burned the place down.”

  Max smiled. He had no idea what she was talking about. “It’s the war. Changes everything.”

  “You got that right, hon.” She walked away to a large urn and returned with the coffee. “Two bits, hon, pay the cashier.”

  How much was two bits? Damn these Americans and their stupid slang for everything. He sip
ped the coffee. It was hot and strong; real cream, too. People over here had no idea how good they had it. The light tap on his shoulder made his whole body go tense, and he spilled coffee on his hand. He turned slowly around on his stool to see a soldier standing with a cigarette in his mouth.

  “Say, bud, got a match?”

  “A match?”

  “A match, pal, a light.”

  “No.” Max turned back to the counter, wiped his hand off with a napkin. His heart was thudding against his chest. Would the Americans be looking for them even here, at the train station in the middle of Jackson? They would certainly be beating the swamps and combing the pine forests, but would they imagine that Max and Carls would have the guts—or the stupidity—to walk right into the state capital and catch a train?

  He finished his coffee and paid the cashier without speaking, dropping two quarters on the register and stepping back out into the crowded terminal. Two uniformed policemen walked toward him and both saluted. Max’s arm began to jerk up by reflex but he stopped, looked over his shoulder and saw an American army colonel behind him, returning the policemen’s salutes.

  Max crossed to the far end of the terminal and there was Carls, sitting quietly as he was told but fast asleep. Max dropped heavily onto the wooden bench across from Carls, then closed his eyes and tried to sleep. How long before the train came? Thirty minutes, maybe. Longer? Were American trains on time like German trains? Or like German trains had been before the war. He put his head back and thought for a while that he might actually drop off, but the tension was too much. It didn’t matter how tired he was. It seemed a week before the announcement came over the loudspeaker: “Panama Limited 5:45 to Brookhaven, Macomb City, Hammond, and New Orleans now boarding gate seven. All aboard.”

  Max blinked, felt for the tickets, found them. He stood and nudged Carls, leaving one ticket on the bench. Carls was to follow him at thirty paces—just close enough to keep him in sight. Max walked slowly across the terminal and through the two large doors leading to the cement platform of track seven. As he walked down the platform toward the train he glanced around and saw Carls hanging back, watching him. Max went to the nearest car, the last one on the train, standing aside at the metal steps to let a Negro woman board in front of him. She gave him a skeptical look. He ignored her and climbed into the rail car.

  Fortunately it was almost deserted, only a few Negroes scattered about, so Max knew he wouldn’t have to talk with anyone. He settled into one of the plush seats. If they could get to New Orleans unnoticed, maybe they could get aboard a ship—even a ship to Mexico. It wasn’t totally out of the question. Neutral ships called in New Orleans all the time. It was one of the biggest ports in America, with ships from all over the world. The very activity around the port would serve to disguise them.

  Max closed his eyes again and kept them closed for five minutes before he felt the cold steel of a pistol barrel pressed against his left temple.

  “Hands up,” said a voice. “Real slow.”

  Max put his hands in the air.

  The two policemen he had almost saluted were standing over him in the aisle. One held the pistol to his head while his partner did the talking. “Pretty ballsy, you Krauts coming here to get a train,” he said. “And you almost got away with it, didn’t you? Almost. But I gotta tell you, son, down here white never goes with colored. Even a Yankee would know not to sit in the nigger car.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  ABOARD A TRAIN BOUND FOR NEW MEXICO

  ONE WEEK LATER

  14 JULY 1944

  NIGHT. THROUGH HIS RIGHT EYE MAX SAW THE STARS, BRILLIANT and seemingly so near in the clear air of the desert. His left eye ached and wasn’t working very well, still swollen from the beating Stoddard’s guards had delivered when Max and Carls were returned to Camp Taylor by the police. Sitting in the rail car with the Negroes had been a foolish mistake. Max had seen the separate restaurants and bathrooms for Negroes, and he should have guessed that colored people would be forced to ride in separate railway coaches as well.

  Carls sat beside him in the closed compartment, both of them handcuffed like convicts—a strict violation of the Geneva Convention, but Max could see how much that meant in the American wilderness. Stoddard’s men had made that clear as day in a back room in the camp warehouse. Both of Max’s eyes had been blackened, lips split, a tooth chipped, balls kicked till they swelled, the bottoms of his feet strapped. A week later he was still sore every time he moved, waking each morning stiff as a board before his bruised muscles gradually loosened up. The guards had been even harder on Carls because he struggled with them, tossing one across the room and breaking the noses of two others. Besides beating him all over, they shattered his nose in return and the big man was in terrible pain until an escort aboard the train became concerned enough to summon a doctor during a thirty-minute stop in Baton Rouge. The doctor set Carls’s nose, gave tetanus injections and pain pills to both men. “This is a disgrace,” he told the young escort officer.

  It was a disgrace, but the doctor didn’t know the half of it. Colonel Stoddard had come in after the beating and forced Max to watch as the special protection orders were ripped from his file. Stoddard put a match to the orders and dropped them into a metal wastebasket, watching the papers burn as if they were his promotion orders. “I’ll let your own people do for me what I’m not allowed to do myself,” he said. “I warned you boys not to make me look the fool, but you don’t care a thing for old Colonel Stoddard and he’s never gonna make full colonel now.”

  So now Max and Carls were headed to New Mexico, probably to the very same camp Lehmann and Heinz had been shipped to—the camp for Nazi troublemakers. Leutnant Lehmann would no doubt be very pleased to see Max arrive. True, Max could write an angry letter to the Swiss Red Cross, but it hardly seemed worth the effort: he’d be dead at the hands of his own countrymen before the complaint ever reached Geneva.

  He leaned his head against the train window, the glass cool against his cheek. Max had never imagined that the desert would be this flat or this immense or this cold. It went on forever, big as the sea itself, and seeing it made him ache for the bridge of a ship with the salt wind in his face and spray breaking over the prow. Instead he was handcuffed in a rail car filled with unwashed men smelling of a U-boat.

  At least Carls was doing better. Max had tried to focus on worrying about him since they boarded the train in Jackson two days before, escorted in shackles through the same station where they’d been captured on the way to New Orleans. The painkillers seemed to have done Carls some good. But the big man had paid dearly for standing by Max. Just as Malachi had paid dearly for even letting them into his home. He had been dealt with the way troublesome Negroes had been dealt with for centuries in the American South: dragged from his jail cell by an angry white mob and lynched. Max felt sick, he tried not to think about it. But that didn’t work. When he learned of Malachi’s fate, Max had wondered if he should kill himself, as Captain Langsdorff had done. How else could an honorable man atone for causing the death of another? But what had Langsdorff’s suicide accomplished? It left his crew stranded in a foreign country without a leader and left a sorrowful mother, a grieving widow, and two fatherless children back in Germany. Max thought of his father in Bad Wilhelm, of Mareth in Mexico City, of Carls. Killing himself would not bring someone back from the dead. There was nothing he could do for Malachi but grieve for him as he had already grieved for so many in this war.

  As he watched from the train, a fire flared in the distance and was gone. It might have been a campfire, like the old days in the far west—sleeping beneath a star-spangled sky, tracking wild beasts across the plain, living simply off the bounty of the land.

  At dawn, a guard—a new man Max had not seen before—came on duty with coffee for them. Max held the tin cup in his shackled hands, swaying to the rhythm of the train as he drank.

  “Smoke?” the guard asked.

  “Yes,” Max said, including Carls with a
nod of his head. “Thank you.”

  The young guard reached out and placed the cigarettes directly into their mouths, then lit them. Even so, it was no simple trick to smoke and drink coffee at the same time while wearing handcuffs.

  “You guys don’t look so tough, for Nazis,” the American said pleasantly. “I seen some other Nazis and they looked tougher.”

  Max looked at the youngster. “We are not Nazis. We are German navy men.”

  “Well, I guess you boys ran up against somebody who ain’t too fond of German navy men.”

  “Yes.”

  The guard smiled. “Camp you’re going to’s full up with Nazis. That’s what it’s for: Nazis and rabble-rousers. They’re always running around yelling, ‘Heil Hitler’ this and ‘Heil Hitler’ that.”

  Max drew on his cigarette and turned again to look out the window. The pink light of sunrise washed over the scrub of the desert and shone bright on the sandstone hills.

  “You the U-boat skipper? The other fella told me you were a Nazi U-boat captain. Killed hundreds of people.”

  “I was on active duty in the German navy when I was captured,” Max said. “I am not a member of the Nazi Party, nor have I ever been.”

  “Kill anybody?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “What’s it like?”

  Max looked at the guard. Were the Americans raiding grammar schools for soldiers? But then, why not? Everyone else was doing it: the Germans, filling out their divisions with sixteen-year-old boys press-ganged from a dozen countries; the British, handing out commissions in the infantry to nineteen-year-olds, so terrible was the attrition of junior officers in the front lines; in Russia, six-year-old boys served as scouts and toothless grandmothers planted bombs on the rail lines. Sooner or later the world would run out of people to kill. He faced the dusty eternity of the desert again without answering, and the guard didn’t ask a second time. But Max knew the answer and it troubled him for the rest of the journey: killing men hadn’t felt like much at all.