by Thomas, Lee
Big Lenny nodded distractedly and then backed into the kitchen. There was a sheet of paper by the phone and a pencil lay across it. The man called for his wife and then set to writing. When Kathy appeared with a toddler in her arms, the little girl riding the hump of her mama’s belly, Big Lenny told her to keep the kids corralled until the sheriff said otherwise.
“Please,” Tom added.
“Yes, Sheriff,” Kathy replied sibilantly. She covered her mouth after speaking and dropped her eyes, and then hurried from the kitchen.
“She’ll keep them out of your way,” Big Lenny said, scribbling on the pad. “If she’s good at anything, she’s good at herding this barnyard we got here.”
“I’m sure she’s a fine mother,” Tom said. “My men should be along shortly. I’m going into the backyard. You send them on back when they get here.”
“Yes, sir,” Big Lenny said.
Tom reached for the doorknob, and then stopped himself, fearing his prints might smear those of the killer: if the Cowboy had left any. For all of his rationalization to Big Lenny, Tom didn’t believe a single consoling word of it, though he was glad it sounded sensible in his ears. Another boy was gone. He’d not been able to stop it. Tom walked through the kitchen and back into the messy living room with all of the curious faces and by the time he reached the front door he all but ran, and when he hit the porch he veered left and hurried to the rail. He jumped it smoothly and ran between the houses. The first sob bucked in his chest as he reached the gate to the backyard. By the time he opened the gate and got it closed behind him, his jaws were clenched and his eyes squeezed tight as he fought to keep from bawling like a child.
Fourteen: Tim Randall
Ma’s favorite record that summer, at least the one she played the most, was “I’ll Walk Alone.” Whenever she sat down to write a letter to my daddy Dinah Shore’s voice filled the house with bittersweet emotion, crooning to some nameless beau who was presumably stationed overseas. The song always needled at me. Ma looked miserable whenever she played it.
She hadn’t received a letter from Daddy in weeks, so she wrote him twice as many. Rita Marshall showed up just before noon to tell us that Little Lenny Elliot was missing, and my mother collapsed under the news, and I could tell she was considering calling her mother to come watch me again or maybe taking another night off of work, but she didn’t. Instead, she sat me down and asked me to stay in the house and to promise I wouldn’t break curfew, which I did. She looked so tired and scared I had to promise. When she left the house that evening, she carried a letter to my daddy against her purse, stamped and ready for the mailbox.
Bum and I went to the lake to cool off after supper, and we kept the water up to our chins. Late in the afternoon, I noticed a tall man walking up to Mr. Lang’s door. He didn’t look familiar, certainly no one from the neighborhood, and the sight of him reminded me of the other men who had visited my neighbor in the previous months – their arrival after sunset, their visits so brief.
In the twenty-four hours since I’d sat in his living room, with iodine drying in my wounds and Mr. Lang bouncing on his sofa to emphasize his point about Taters, I’d found myself inordinately interested in the man. I thought about him constantly, so bobbing in the lake and keeping up my end of the conversation with Bum, I watched his house, wondering about the stranger he’d just welcomed over his threshold.
When it got dark, Bum and I climbed out of the water and dried off. We dressed, but instead of heading back to the house and keeping my promise to Ma, I dropped down on the grass and just looked at the lake, which had deepened to the shade of a plum’s skin.
“We should get inside,” Bum said.
I knew he was worried about the Cowboy, and I had more than a little fear about the killer myself, but we were close to the house and our neighbors’ houses and they’d hear us if we kicked up a fuss. Plus, we were in the middle of the grassy patch between the road and the lake. It wasn’t like the Cowboy could sneak up on us, and we both knew better than to let a stranger get too close. I explained all of this to Bum, who reacted as I’d expected him to, with a shaking of his head and a soft-spoken line of reasoning, attempting to disassemble my argument point by point.
And then he added, “Plus, we’re breaking curfew and that’s against the law, and if we get caught our folks are going to beat us ’til next Wednesday.”
He had a point, though Ma had only whipped me once since my father had gone to war. Still I wasn’t ready to go back into the stifling, motionless air of the house just yet. A gentle breeze blew from the lake to take the edge off the heat, and the stars twinkled above our heads like an upended city hanging from the heavens. Bum threatened to go inside without me, but he didn’t. After the night I’d called his bluff and gone wandering on my own, he knew better than to test my resolve.
“I’m getting eaten alive out here,” he muttered, slapping a palm against his neck.
“You do anything but complain?” I asked.
“You give me any reason to do anything else?” he replied.
“Fine,” I said. I climbed to my feet and turned back toward Dodd Street.
Except for a dim rectangle of light on the lake-facing side Mr. Lang’s house was dark. A shadow played against the curtains – oddly rhythmic in its motion. Curiosity fell over me in a wave, as I stood transfixed by the window.
“Did you hear that?” Bum whispered, grabbing my arm.
“Hear what?”
“Someone in the bushes.”
I hated taking my eyes away from Mr. Lang’s window, but the fear in Bum’s voice sounded authentic. I scanned the shrubs to our left and saw nothing but tufts of black against a blacker background. The shrubs on our right looked little different. Listening intently, I heard the common noises of crickets and somewhere across the lake an owl hooted in the night.
“You’re nuts,” I told him.
“Someone’s here,” he insisted. “Let’s go back inside. Please, Tim.”
My friend could have been pulling my leg and telling a tale to get his way. I knew full well no one could move around brush that thick without making a good amount of noise, and I hadn’t heard a thing, which wasn’t to say the prospect hadn’t shaken me. A low blaze of fear began to burn in my stomach. The fates of Harold, David and most recently Little Lenny Elliot hadn’t faded from my memory, so I had to agree that distancing ourselves from the field was a good idea.
That didn’t mean I was ready to go inside just yet, though. I turned back to Mr. Lang’s window, and without saying a word, I started walking toward it.
“Where are you going?” Bum asked.
“On our last mission of the summer,” I replied.
“Mission? Tim, I’m not kidding. Someone is out here.”
“And they’ll think we’re going to Mr. Lang’s for help, if you keep your voice down.”
“We should go inside.”
“Look, Bum,” I whispered, “we’re just going up to the window. I know he’s home because he let a friend in a while ago. If anyone tries to jump us, we’ll make a racket and he’ll come out and help.”
“Why don’t we just go up to the front door?”
But we were already in Mr. Lang’s side yard. I put a finger to my lips and continued toward the window. From behind us, I heard a branch snap and my skin shriveled up. Then I looked through a part in Mr. Lang’s curtains, and what I saw there drove away the momentary fear, bringing instead a physiological vibration, humming and buzzing through my veins.
Mr. Lang and another man were on the German’s bed. Both were naked, their skin appearing slick and smooth in the dull light cast by a bedside lamp. The man was bent forward, clutching a pillow and facing away from the window, and Mr. Lang knelt behind him, hands resting on the man’s buttocks as he moved his hips forward and back. My mind crackled as the details of this union scored my thoughts like memories delivered by a branding iron. Mr. Lang’s sweat-slathered chest, bulging with strain. His guest’s thick legs, cove
red in filaments of pale hair with rivulets of sweat drawing trails along the muscles. A muscular arm flexing against a pillow. The arc of the man’s back. The force of the German’s thrusts. The scene was confusing, exciting, and my breath stopped as the union of these men roared locomotive fast through the tunnels of my eyes. Only a second before I’d been ready to run at the sound of a twig snap, but in that instant, watching those two men, I didn’t think anything could move me.
At my side, Bum mumbled desperately. “I don’t want to see this.”
I couldn’t reply. The sight through the gap in the curtains emptied me of reason.
Then a hand wrapped around my mouth, and the coiling emotion in my belly hardened into absolute terror. I was lifted from my feet and yanked around. In that instant, I saw that someone else had Bum and was similarly spinning him. My heart climbed to the back of my throat and my heart raced as if I were falling from the edge of a cliff. Once the rotation was complete, I found myself in front of Hugo Jones, whose face was lit by the orange glow of a burning cigarette.
He withdrew the smoke and lifted a finger to his lips. Shh.
Then he walked past where I struggled against the hands holding me. I tried to spot Bum again, but couldn’t turn my head. My fear receded by a fraction as I came to realize that Ben Livingston or Austin Chitwood held me and not the murderous Gray Cowboy, but I didn’t feel safe. Hugo and his friends might not have been killers but they weren’t kind, as Hugo had proven only the day before, and while I thought these things, I was again being hoisted in the air and turned, this time facing Mr. Lang’s house again.
Hugo Jones stood at the window. His back as straight and rigid as a brick wall. He shook his head so slowly the motion was barely perceptible. He seemed to be as enrapt by the scene in the bedroom as I had been.
Finally he backed away from the glass.
When he turned to us, his eyes appeared as black pits in his face.
“Take those two back to the lawn and let ’em loose,” he whispered. “We got bigger fish to fry.”
The two boys did as they were instructed, waddling away from Mr. Lang’s house with Bum and me in their grasp. In the middle of the grassy field, Austin Chitwood made us promise with nods of our heads that we’d keep quiet. We agreed eagerly. Then Ben Livingston released me, and Austin released Bum and the two of us tore off across the grass, making a straight line to my front door.
Bum, reeling from fear, muttered his anger distractedly. He stood frozen in the living room, incredulous that I should be so reckless and further, that I should involve him in my irresponsible behavior.
Electric currents of emotion bombarded me, distracting my thoughts and crackling in my ears so I could barely hear my friend’s words. The sensual and the terrible battled. Scorched images of my neighbor and his guest smoldered in my mind. I knew what I had seen and could even name it, but the act struck me as wholly foreign, and for all of its erotic power, recalling the union of Mr. Lang and that stranger also left me feeling sickened and sad. I felt a profound disappointment in my neighbor, as though he’d lied, making me believe he was one thing, when in fact he was a different thing entirely. My heart continued to race like a hummingbird’s from the encounter with Hugo that had followed. How could I defend myself to Bum? He was right about everything and I told him so.
“If it weren’t after curfew, I’d go home right now,” he said.
I was about to apologize again when Hugo knocked on the screen door and let himself and the other two boys into my house.
“You can’t be here,” Bum said as if he were talking to a leprechaun that had suddenly appeared through the living room carpet.
“We need to talk,” Hugo said, strutting across the room to stand by the fireplace. Ben and Austin remained by the front door, arms crossed like guards at a bank vault. “Your ma’s still at work?”
Though a lie might have served me better, I remained too shaken to form one. I nodded my head. After throwing a quick look at Bum, who had turned paler than a fish belly, I returned my attention to the older boy.
“I want you two to keep your mouths shut about what you saw,” Hugo said. His tone was soft and familiar, like an older brother offering a sincere warning. He stood by the fireplace with authority. His cheeks burned red beneath the purple smudges of acne. “Kids like you shouldn’t have to see a thing like that. If I thought you could forget it, I’d tell you to give it a try, but you can’t unsee a thing.”
“W-we didn’t see a-anything,” Bum spluttered.
“You saw,” Hugo said. “And that’s about the worst thing a man can see. A man treating another man like a woman isn’t natural. In fact, it’s flat-out evil. But it could be worse. Damnation, you two are lucky to be alive.”
I didn’t understand what he meant. Had he seen something different through the bedroom curtains than I had? Had he seen my neighbor kill that man? Hugo’s voice was colored with concern, not threat, and I felt certain he was acting in a protective manner. He stood silently, nodding his head. Then he withdrew a cigarette from his pocket and lit it. He pinched the cigarette between his fingers and pulled it from his lips. He waved his hand back and forth, fingers directed at my front door and the two boys standing there, drawing gray-blue trails of smoke in the air.
“We’ll take things from here,” Hugo said. “You two just keep quiet until we figure out what to do about this, and you keep yourselves away from that pervert or he’s likely to do you the way he did Harold and those other boys.”
“Did he kill that man?” I asked.
“Maybe so,” Hugo replied earnestly. “A man that can do what we saw is capable of doing anything. But he sure as shit isn’t going to kill anyone else. You just stay away from him, and you lock that front door good and tight after we leave. If that Nazi bastard comes over here, you pick up your daddy’s gun and protect your home.”
Then the three boys left. Hurriedly I closed the front door and locked it tight the way Hugo had instructed. Bum remained stricken in the center of the room, white and motionless like a statue. I ran past him and through the kitchen and locked the back door, and then I checked the windows to make sure they were latched. The heat would build oven hot, but Hugo’s conviction had become my own. Though he hadn’t divulged what he’d seen in that room – beyond the same scene I’d witnessed – it must have been serious.
“It’s all locked up,” I told Bum after I was finished.
“I think I want to go to sleep,” he replied distantly. Then he turned around and walked into the hall, disappearing around the corner.
As for me, I couldn’t sleep. I paced the living room thinking about the atrocities occurring so close to my home, perpetrated by a trusted neighbor, a man I’d thought of as my friend until I’d seen him for what he was. The pleasant sentiments I’d harbored for the man evaporated as I marched to and fro across the carpet, because of what this German was and the crimes I was coming to believe he’d committed. Rape and murder? Hugo hadn’t revealed what he’d seen but it was clear the older boy believed the German was the Cowboy the papers had been writing about – a brutal killer of boys –and I wished Ben hadn’t dragged me away from that window, so I could have seen the damning evidence. Amid my agitation a quiet voice in a distant chamber of my mind insisted that Hugo and I were wrong. The voice spoke to the German’s generosity and kindness. It reminded me that the man had tended my cuts after his accuser had beaten me. Except the voice was so calm, serene like the rustle of wind across the tops of trees – all but drowned by the torrent of indictments leveled at the German that bellowed through my thoughts.
When I finally went into my room I stepped over Bum, who lay on the floor, wrapped in a blanket and facing the space beneath my bed. I went to the window. If I leaned close to the glass, I could see through the gap between my house and the Reddings’ house next door, giving me an unobstructed view of Mr. Lang’s porch across the street, and I sat there on the windowsill, eyes fixed, until Ma got back from her shift at the facto
ry. Then I climbed into bed and pretended to be asleep when she opened the bedroom door to check on me. Once the door closed, I remained in bed. Then the soft strains of “I’ll Walk Alone” drifted through the walls. I must have fallen asleep soon after, but in the middle of the night I woke and returned to my position at the glass.
The twin states of somnolent and agitated played against one another. My eyes badly wanted to close, but there was a strong possibility that my neighbor Mr. Lang was a murderer – he certainly wasn’t normal – and my curiosity evolved into a kind of resolve; it was my responsibility to watch his house, my duty. What if he decided to cross the street in the middle of the night and snatch Bum or me? What if he hurt Ma? As I sat there I remembered what he’d done to that man in his room, could still picture Mr. Lang’s chest, swollen with strain and covered in a shimmering layer of sweat. And though I could not recall the expression the German had worn, I imagined it would be cruel and twisted like the grinning façade of a torturer who enjoyed his craft.
The lights went on in the German’s living room after I’d been at the window for what seemed like hours. The sudden burst of illumination startled me, and I leapt off the sill and went to Bum to shake him awake.
Then I returned to my post, peering through darkness to the rectangle of light open at the front of the German’s house. Two men stood on the threshold. They shook hands and the other man left, walking casually to the street and passing from my line of sight.
“What’s going on?” Bum asked dreamily.