by Thomas, Lee
“You boys had the right idea,” Brett said. “The only shame is that you stopped yourselves short. More folks should be following your example. Maybe soon enough they will.” He scratched his ear and gave me a big smile. “What most folks don’t understand is that evil runs in the blood. It passes down from father to son like the color of your eyes and the hair on your head. Now I don’t claim to know all the scientific talk for such things, but those Germans come from rotten seeds, and their souls are sick with it from the moment they claw their way from between their mother’s legs. Some of them learn to cover it up good and proper, but most are only one step away from demon. Burl Jones had the right idea, and instead of sitting in that jail, they ought to be throwing a parade in his honor, and you boys should be riding right up front with him.”
“I don’t know about that,” I muttered. Brett’s ideas made me uncomfortable because they reminded me of things Hugo had said.
“You’re young yet,” Brett said. “With a few more years under your belts, you boys would have done the right thing and seen to it that Nazi piece of filth never got out of his bed, but Hugo’s daddy finished things up, so no harm done. We need more folks like Burl these days, a whole lot more. People need to understand that those bastards might have fled Germany, but that don’t mean they left their evil behind. No, sir. They brought it with them, carrying the dark seeds like another piece of luggage. You move down the street, it don’t change who you are, if you know what I mean.”
“Yes, sir,” I said.
Brett chuckled and slapped his thigh with a broad hand. “You do have some growing up to do yet. Maybe if you’d seen what I’ve seen you wouldn’t be so shy. Now I told a story at the Fourth of July celebration, and I know you heard it because I saw you there. The thing is I didn’t tell it right. I didn’t tell it truthfully because I thought the truth of it might have been too grim for the youngsters. But I think you’re man enough to hear it.”
“Sir?” I asked. I didn’t want to hear one of his stories. I wanted to know what the German had written in his journal.
“Before seeing the real action, I was stationed near Edinburgh, Scotland at a prisoner of war camp, where the English kept their German prisoners. Most of my day was spent speaking to that filth, trying to get information, but those fuckers just smiled at me and shrugged and acted like I’d asked them over for supper. I didn’t blame them. They had it good. Truth is I’ve never seen the like of it. The military had commandeered a fine old hotel to use as the prison, and those Nazi sons of bitches slept on fine beds and ate the same rations as my squad. Why would they say one goddamned thing? They were practically on vacation.
“As for the girls, well I don’t need to tell you how a lady is drawn to a uniformed man. No sir. The local women all but flocked to the edges of the camp to peer through the fences, and there were these two girls. Oh, they were the sweetest looking little things. Two sisters with the brightest eyes you’ve ever seen and pigtails, just as lovely as a spring morning. Many was the afternoon they’d stop by the hotel with a basket of cookies they’d spent all morning baking, and they thanked us for protecting their country. Maisie and Edeen. Those were their names. Well the security at this fancy prison wasn’t good. In fact, many times I complained about the lax conditions but the commanding officer was a brittle twig of a man who didn’t like his orders questioned so nothing was ever done about it. At least, not until he was forced to do something about it.
“I knew it would happen soon enough, and one day four of the Nazi bastards escaped into the hills. The commanding officer all but shrugged, certain his men would bring them back in no time at all, and I cursed up a storm, but the twig just sneered and dismissed me.
“His attitude changed fast enough when they found those two girls. A lot of attitudes changed because of that, I’ll tell you.
“The girls had been strangled and opened up just like the Ashton boy, and there was this note, see. The note accused the girls of fraternizing with the enemy – which meant Allied soldiers, you understand – and it went on to say that the killers would murder every child in Edinburgh before they were through. Well, those four men were captured the next day, and I don’t need to tell you things didn’t go too well for our prisoners after that. That very night we took every one of the escapees into the hills and tied them to trees, and we showed them what we thought of their ‘Master Race’ by cutting off what made them men and letting them bleed out on the forest floor.
“I honestly thought we’d be seeing that same kind of justice after those boys were killed, but that’s the difference, you see. Most men can be driven to kill if it’s to defend themselves or their kin or if they get angry enough. The lousy Germans do it because they don’t know anything else. Until folks realize that, they’ll be in danger. Do you see what I mean?”
“I guess so,” I told him, which brought another chuckle from my host.
“Well, whether you see now or not, you will soon enough.” He slid the pad of paper to the side and opened the journal again. Lifting the pencil, he began whistling tunelessly, knocking the wooden pencil against his chin. He gazed into the journal for some time, writing nothing, before he said, “Why don’t you go fetch us a couple of cold pops from the refrigerator? I know my whistle could use wetting.”
Though thirsty myself, my first inclination was to decline the beverage and excuse myself from Brett’s house, because the weird light in his eyes when he talked about those murdered girls and the Germans he’d helped tie to trees tightened my skin. He looked pleased about these things, as if he were describing a cool dip in the lake or a particularly good piece of barbecue. But I knew Brett often got lost in his stories, and he had trouble getting around, even his own house, so I agreed and followed the hall to the kitchen at the back of the house.
I pushed open the white door and stepped inside. To my right was the back door and through the glass I saw the polished black nose of a Ford jutting from a narrow stall in the yard. Next to the door a proper suit coat and a duster hung from pegs, and above this was a shelf. A gray Stetson sat on the projection, displayed like a trophy. But I wasn’t thinking about the Cowboy. I don’t know that I was thinking at all. I crossed the dirty wooden floor to the refrigerator, and I grabbed the handle. After opening the door it took me a moment to realize exactly what I was seeing, and once I did the blood fell out of my face, leaving my skin tingling with cold.
Ben Livingston stared back at me from the compartment. He’d been folded and tucked in tightly with his head against his knees, facing out. He was naked and dead and my mind took far too long to manage the sight.
I didn’t hear Brett coming up behind me. My first warning of his presence was the rough cord he slipped over my head and wrapped around my neck. And just as I understood what was happening, the rope bit into my skin and compressed my windpipe, locking my last breath in my chest.
“You’re doing your neighbors a service, Tim,” Brett said. His hot breath covered my ear and neck like flowing blood. “After I collect the other two, I’m going to use you boys to create a monument to the German evil, and the people in this city will have no choice but to kill every Kraut motherfucker in sight.”
I kicked my legs and scratched at the rope encircling my neck. My chest hitched violently, reflexively constricting to draw oxygen it would never receive. Brett’s voice lowered to a rasping growl, his words punctuated by an animal’s panting. Flecks of spit landed on my ear.
“You boys were heroes,” Brett said. “Which is what makes your sacrifice so powerful. Because of you, we’ll finally see the eradication of the….”
My head grew light. A high-pitched sound rang in my ears. The spasms in my chest became unbearable. Brett continued talking, but his voice faded to a buzzing in my ears, no more substantial than the beating of a mosquito’s wings all but lost amid the shrill, persistent tone, and the louder the tone became the paler the world became until all was bleached and deafening.
~ ~ ~
The first thing I saw upon gaining consciousness was Brett Fletcher’s face. He lay on the floor facing me. His eyes met mine, but there was nothing behind them. Blood dripped from his mouth and a small split high on his cheekbone. I tried to cry out, but the ache in my throat refused me this release. Instead I choked on the sound and gasped harshly, drawing air over tender tissue. Still dizzy, I managed to roll across the floor, far enough from Brett so that his hands couldn’t reach me on the chance that I’d misread his condition. I managed to stop gagging by taking shallow breaths through my nose, and a sweet, rich scent like roses tickled my nostrils.
The refrigerator door provided the leverage I needed to get to my feet. I closed it immediately to seal the terrible sight of Ben Livingston away. Then I returned my attention to my attacker. From this new angle, I saw the jagged knot below his ear, and though I didn’t realize it then, someone had snapped his neck, and the days of the Cowboy had come to an end.
Confusion and fear sent me around in tiny circles as I tried to figure out what I should do. Eventually, the right answer came to me and I called the operator and asked her to connect me with the sheriff’s office. It seemed as if I spent a very long time on the phone, and before I even hung up, I heard sirens squalling on the farm road. I wandered out of the kitchen, still too dazed to make sense of where I was or what had happened, and in the middle of the living room, I found Brett’s empty wheelchair.
Except the chair wasn’t empty. Mr. Lang’s journal lay on the seat and a scrap of paper jutted from it like a bookmark. I lifted the journal and absently sat in Brett’s chair before pulling the note from between the closed pages. I read the simple line of neatly printed words over and over and was still reading them when the police came in and started speaking to me, and again, even when they were grasping my shoulders and shaking me to get my attention. The note read:
Where will you go if not into flame or earth?
Thirty-One: Tim Randall
The week that followed became a series of twisted and blurred events. I spent those days mostly in bed accosted by recent, unpleasant memories and covered in a perpetual sheen of sweat. Ma put her hand to my brow a number of times and smiled, told me I wasn’t feverish, but I thought she was wrong – the fever burned in my head and my chest; it simply hadn’t surfaced to my skin. When I wasn’t in bed, I lay curled on the sofa, hearing the radio but unable to listen to it as the stories became tedious and insignificant moments after they began. I had stories of my own, and they lacked the distant comforts of these fictions. Deputy Burns and other policemen came and went in a parade. They vacillated between extreme concern for my ordeal and joy for my having survived and admiration for my having stopped our city’s monster, even though I had done nothing to subdue Brett Fletcher. They treated me like a hero, but I knew I was nothing more than an incomplete victim. Ma stayed home with me for the entire week and lost her job at the factory. Every morning she brought me a glass of milk and a copy of the Barnard Register to show me my name printed small and black on the page. She told me how proud she was of me; my crimes forgotten.
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.”
Epilogue: New York City
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.