The German Read online

  Lethe Press

  Maple Shade, NJ

  Copyright © 2011 Lee Thomas. all rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, microfilm, and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in 2011 by Lethe Press, Inc.

  118 Heritage Avenue • Maple Shade, NJ 08052-3018

  www.lethepressbooks.com • [email protected]

  isbn: 1-59021-309-2

  isbn-13: 978-1-59021-309-4

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover photo: Nadya Lukic.

  Cover design: Lee Thomas / execution: Alex Jeffers.

  Author photo: Michael J. Hall.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Thomas, Lee, 1965-

  The German / Lee Thomas.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-59021-309-4 (alk. paper)

  1. Young men--Crimes against--Fiction. 2. Texas--History--1846-1950--Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3620.H6317G47 2011

  813.6--dc22

  2010033904

  Praise for Lee Thomas

  “The German is a smart and bravely conceived thriller, rich with historical detail that draws readers into its WWII-era story of small-town violence and repressed sexuality. Lee Thomas populates his fictional town with believable, multi-faceted characters, and he shifts perspectives effortlessly to give the most complete view of the story. And at the story’s dark heart is the German of the title: a mysterious, seemingly detached narrator whose hypnotic voice reveals layers of complexity as the story unfolds. By the time the book races towards its exciting, agonizing conclusion, readers won’t know who the real monsters are.”

  —Norman Prentiss

  Bram Stoker Award Winner, author of Invisible Fences

  “A worthy successor to Clive Barker, Lee Thomas has a firm grasp of both the epic and intimate aspects of horror fiction.”

  —Bentley Little

  author of The Disappearance

  “...Thomas’ prose is an absolute delight, rich in imagery, precise and elegant... [L]ike all the best horror, [he] expands our knowledge—and our fears—about what it means to be human.”

  —Rue Morgue Magazine #99

  (on In the Closet, Under the Bed)

  “Lee Thomas is a fantastic writer with a gift for invoking our most intimate fears—and preying on them mercilessly.”

  —Christopher Golden

  Bram Stoker Award-winner, author of The Chamber of Ten

  For Ed Burleson, my first friend in Austin,

  and as always,

  John Charles Perry

  Acknowledgements

  I’d like to thank the early readers of this book for their encouragement and insights. They include Nate Southard, Steve Berman and Howard Morhaim. Thanks guys, much appreciated. For the dark rainbow rising: Jameson Currier, Vince Liaguno, Chad Helder, Paul G. Bens Jr., Michael Rowe, Norman Prentiss, Tom Cardamone, Robert Dunbar, and again, Steve Berman. To the members of Who Wants Cake? past and present: a finer bunch you’ll not find.

  And finally a special acknowledgement to the works of Jack Ketchum, a guy who knows what pain is and how much is required to bend a human being to the monstrous.

  “All revolutions devour their own children.”

  —Ernst Röhm

  “No matter how a man alone ain’t got no bloody fucking chance.”

  —Ernest Hemingway, from To Have and Have Not

  Contents

  The German

  Acknowledgements

  Table of Contents

  Prologue: Munich

  One: Tim Randall

  Two: Sheriff Tom Rabbit

  Three: The German

  Four: Tim Randall

  Five: Sheriff Tom Rabbit

  Six: Tim Randall

  Seven: The German

  Eight: Tim Randall

  Nine: The German

  Ten: Sheriff Tom Rabbit

  Eleven: Tim Randall

  Twelve: The German

  Thirteen: Sheriff Tom Rabbit

  Fourteen: Tim Randall

  Fifteen: The German

  Sixteen: Sheriff Tom Rabbit

  Seventeen: Tim Randall

  Eighteen: The German

  Nineteen: Tim Randall

  Twenty: The German

  Twenty-One: Sheriff Tom Rabbit

  Twenty-Two: Tim Randall

  Twenty-Three: Sheriff Tom Rabbit

  Twenty-Four: Tim Randall

  Twenty-Five: Sheriff Tom Rabbit

  Twenty-Six: Tim Randall

  Twenty-Seven: The German

  Twenty-Eight: Sheriff Tom Rabbit

  Twenty-Nine: Tim Randall

  Thirty: Tim Randall

  Thirty-One: Tim Randall

  Epilogue: New York City

  About the Author

  Prologue: Munich

  Date Unknown – Translated from the German

  I remember a hole, deep and dark, with water pooling at the bottom like blood in an open wound. I rub my chest and scabs flake away like bits of autumn leaf, tumbling down to float on the dark water. My thoughts twist tight, wrung like damp linen, each crease made permanent by the wrapping tension.

  Gazing along my cold body, clothed only in white drawers, I am disturbed by the hole in the ground and the holes in my torso: three neat apertures from which my blood has poured. But no more. Membranes of skin already seal my muscle and bone from the elements. I can feel the slow knit of flesh. Itching. Burning. That hole. A grave. Meant for me. Rain is in the air, and I observe the sky and the field of granite markers about me as I inhale the scents. Earth. Stone. Grass. From my body a different odor pours. It is foul like the mingling of dirt and rot. Dropping my chin, I again observe the mementos of bullets decorating my chest.

  I remember a small cell. It reeks of sweat and tobacco. A man looks at me along the length of his pistol barrel. Outside, a firing squad is being ordered to shoot. The rifle reports fill my cell like thunder roll. The air about me shifts as though disturbed by the gunfire, creating a draft and sending chills over my perspiring body. The man before me is shouting, but I don’t remember the words.

  Then I am in this cemetery with frigid air running over my bare skin. I shiver against it. Hug myself and wince as I feel my chest contract and the knitting membrane tear so slightly, but I am very, very cold, so I continue the embrace. I have never known such chill. I look skyward and observe an ashen blanket of clouds. The dim light might be that of early morning or late afternoon. I cannot say. I try my voice, whispering a meaningless prayer. It is rough. My throat feels clogged with dirt. Speaking makes it ache so I stop.

  The chill works through my skin. It presses into my wounds painfully like frozen needles. Looking around the cemetery and finding it vacant – save the tall markers – I walk to the east. I was born and raised in this city. A lifetime ago. Bits of that life come back to me as I work my way between the markers toward the eastern wall.

  I question the memories flooding me: the faces of so many men. They called me son and soldier and commander. They called me brute and traitor and deviant.

  I remember laughter as they marched the accused to the wall.

  ~ ~ ~

  While walking I realize the gloom is night’s approach, not its retreat. Purple shadow stains the sides of the house before me. Clotheslines run like white veins through the murk connecting the house to the fence at my back. I steal a shirt from the line and a pair of trousers, and then crouch behind a shed. Still I am frozen to the core. My stomach rumbles pain
fully. Days since my last meal. Base needs conflict with a maddening belief in my own inhumanity. Has the assumption of death reduced me to animal instinct or has it refined my desires, focusing my thoughts on what truly matters, what is irrevocably true? A man must be clothed, must be sheltered, must be fed. All the rest, the aspirations and pride, seem pale and foolish to a man squatting cold and hungry behind a ragged shack in the yard of a stranger.

  A lunatic’s memories are presented as pantomimes behind my eyes.

  I consider entering this house and demanding food. Once I would have commandeered the property and taken what was needed, but the knitting membrane within my wounds reminds me of the tragedy of arrogance. Besides, a friend’s home is near by. I can think of few others to trust, and this man has no political affiliation. Our common history explored the intimacies of men not the ideologies.

  Hesitantly, I stand. My gaze roams over the yard and the low fence separating this home from its neighbor. Then on I look to the next yard and the next.

  A man with black hair stands in the center of this distant yard. He is the friend whose companionship drew me. Tall and slender, he stands motionlessly, dark eyes staring from a pale face. We stand there for uncounted seconds observing one another as if we are the only two men remaining in the world. He cocks his head to the side, a gesture familiar to me. Then his face melts and his mouth opens like a chasm and his eyes stare in dread, and I take his changed expression as a warning, imagining some villain creeping up at my back, but when I turn to face the threat, I find only the shed and the low fence and another yard strung with white drying lines. His fearful expression is for me, and I think it rude and strange that this man I once knew as an intimate should show such revulsion at my face. I lift my hand to wave and indicate I mean no harm, and he flees.

  Confounded, I look skyward at the blanket of storm clouds, now black in the late dusk. I remember standing in a cell and a man with the dull countenance of a bull firing his pistol, but I do not remember the shove of bullets or the tearing of my skin, though these things must surely have followed the bright flares from the pistol’s mouth if only because of the evidence left on my chest.

  And I tell myself this cannot be. I am not dead, nor have I ever been. There is another explanation for the wounds and my waking at the side of a grave, and were I not so cold and hungry my reason would puzzle the situation out, except I am cold and I am hungrier than I can tolerate, and the baffling perfume of dirt and decay rolls off my skin to fill my nose, and I sense that I am wholly alone for the first time in my life.

  Wandering. I steal another shirt to layer with the first and confiscate three pair of socks, but my blood is still ice. Finally the hunger overwhelms me and I break into a house through the back door, and in the kitchen I open the icebox and remove a plate. A hunk of pork sits amid a gray pool of congealed grease and I devour both meat and savory fat. There is a bread box and inside is a half loaf of very brown bread. This too is consumed and my stomach settles, comforted by the meal. I drink water from a jug and then search the house for additional garments as the cold remains in my bones. In a bedroom with walls decorated by prints of purple flowers, an armoire produces a number of suits and a coat, which I quickly take from the hook. The sleeves are too long, and the coat will not close over my chest, but it is wool and heavy, and already traps warmth against my body. I steal a pair of brown leather shoes that are too big for my feet even with the layers of socks. In a small toilet down the hall a teardrop shaped bottle catches my eye. I remove the stopper and the scent of roses wafts from the glass lips. I pour the perfume into a palm and rub it over my cheeks and neck and across my chest beneath the layers of coat and shirts, and my wounds protest the stinging liquid, but the grave scent is masked. I return to the kitchen and drink more water and then leave the house through the door I entered.

  Outside I pause with no destination clear in my mind. I dare not seek shelter with friends, because I no longer know who my friends are. Going home could mean further confrontation with those who had me imprisoned, and my face is too well known to allow sufficient anonymity on these streets. The stolen pockets carry no money, and the private resources I might access are secured in a foreign bank. I leave the yard and walk to the darkened road, and I look first to the north and then to the south – uncertain.

  Where is a dead man to go if not into flame or earth?

  The Barnard Register, D-Day 1944

  INVASION!

  Allied Troops Begin a Sweeping Campaign Across Northern France

  Great invasion is underway in Havre-Cherbourg region.

  One: Tim Randall

  We got it wrong. All of it.

  Everyone who knew Harold Ashton was convinced he had run off to join the war. It was after all, a patriotic and reasonable thing for young men to do, particularly when the country faced such icons of villainy as Hirohito, Mussolini and Hitler. Many heroes had been born in Barnard, Texas, and now an entire generation of them was noticeably absent from the streets and the shops and the beds of their loved ones. Dozens of Barnard’s finest boys were buried in graves across the ocean in Europe – some underneath markers of wood and stone, and others lay anonymously beneath low rises of dirt in nameless fields. Others still fought, like the Richardson brothers, who were somewhere in Normandy, and Delbert Himmelmann who was stationed in the South Pacific. Of course, some men had returned. Ervin “Eagle-eye” Seagle came home the fall before, missing a foot, an ear, and half of his teeth. Stanley “Uncle Stan” Moffat stepped off the train in Austin, looking like the strapping man who had left the city two years before, only to proceed to his house in Barnard and blow a good part of his skull apart with the Parker shotgun his papa had given him. Brett Fletcher returned with a broken back after a mortar turned over the Jeep he was driving. Brett was the first casualty from Barnard, Texas, and he’d been home for a year before the allies landed at Omaha Beach. When asked about his injury, Brett cursed it, not because the doctors had told him he’d never walk again, but because it had taken him away from the cause, the battle, the moral imperative. “I still had me some work to do,” he often complained to the groups of boys and girls who frequently visited his farmhouse out on Bennet Road. Harold Marker Ashton was a regular visitor to Fletcher’s porch, where he’d looked on in wonder as the man in the wheelchair spun verbal tapestries of heroism. Often enough, Harold told his friends and his mama that he couldn’t wait to face off on the Krauts or the Japs and show them what a boy from Barnard, Texas, could really do. So when he went missing on the night of June 7th, folks naturally assumed Harold had tired of waiting, and he’d run away to enlist. He was nearly seventeen years old and big for his age. The flimsiest of lies would have convinced any recruitment officer he was mature enough to fight. His mother sat at the kitchen table on the morning of June 9th and cried. She couldn’t have been prouder of her brave son.

  Many residents of Barnard felt the same way. Despite grief and fear, it was a good fight. The good fight. And the war brought the community together, just as it had the entire nation.

  Minor tensions remained in the city of Barnard, certainly. How could they not? Though most residents had never seen an Oriental face outside of a movie theatre or a magazine, nearly one quarter of Barnard’s population was of German descent, and petty squabbles became amplified by misunderstanding and doubt. Such uncertainty was to be expected, but rarely had the speculations erupted into overt violence. If anything, it was all treated as a source of humor like the time Cedric Palmer called Old Man Reinhardt a “Goddamn Kraut” for buying the last ham from the butcher one Saturday afternoon. Palmer laughed and slapped his knee. The butcher, who certainly heard the comment – because he was meant to and a German himself – produced a crooked smile in return.

  I never noticed this passive animosity on my street. The four-block stretch that ended at Kramer Lake was quiet and peaceful with folks helping their neighbors and smiling politely as they passed on the sidewalks. The houses were of a neat ranch-styl
e design, and all but two were painted white.

  Mrs. Reginald Watley had painted her house blue because she’d thought it pleasant, and Ernst Lang owned the yellow house at the end of Dodd adjacent to a broad grassy slope, running to the water’s edge.

  Mr. Lang had lived on Dodd Street for over seven years, moving to America after fleeing the encroaching rise of the Nazi regime. He made furniture, mostly rocking chairs, that he sold at the hardware store in town. His accent remained strong, but he spoke English very well. Though he mostly kept to himself, Mr. Lang was a respected member of the community and could be counted on by his neighbors to help with the odd chore or errand when asked politely. Even Mildred McDowell, who had lost a son and a husband to the war, tolerated him as a neighbor.

  As for me, I looked on the German with a bit of awe. He was not tall, but his brawny build and scarred face gave him an authority that his stature couldn’t diminish. Further, he was a good man. He helped me once. He might have even saved my life, but that isn’t something I’ll ever know for certain.

  I will always regret that night in August. What we did to that man was unforgivable.

  ~ ~ ~

  The day they found Harold Ashton’s body on the far side of Kramer Lake was the first scorcher of the summer. My best friend, Bum, and I had gotten an early start and spent the morning riding our bikes through the city, traveling south toward the fairgrounds and the stockyards and looping up to the east of town. Barnard was shaped like an anvil, with Kramer Lake scalloping the west side and ranchlands pushing in from the east. We pedaled along the smooth gray city roads and their shabbier cousins, the farm roads, to see the factory where my mother worked to support the family while my daddy was overseas, and the greasy stink of the place – an odor that seemed to have worked into my mother’s pores and oozed from her every garment – rolled through the hot morning air. In town we walked our bikes over the sidewalks, peeking in windows that revealed the exact same things we’d seen a hundred times before. Sun-baked buildings and windows smeared with glare drew us, and we saw Milton Teague running his barber’s razor over a strop and Hattie Barnes adjusting the sapphire-blue hat on a mannequin’s head. We didn’t go into any of the shops. Our journey was less about a destination than it was simply to be going and doing and seeing, but as the morning progressed, the beating sun turned up the fire, and Bum complained about feeling like a Sunday roast, and I told him it wasn’t so bad, but I was just playing tough. Often enough, Bum and I calibrated the weather by how much lemonade it would take to cool off, and leaning against our bikes in downtown Barnard, we agreed that that sweltering Wednesday in the latter part of June was building up to be a two-galloner – no question in our twelve-year-old minds.