The German Read online

  I suggested we stop in at Delrubio’s Drug Store for a soda, but Bum wanted the lake, and though I usually won such arguments, I had to admit the cool water sounded good to me. Besides, a pitcher of tea waited in the icebox at home, and I knew where my mother kept her secret tin of sugar. Rationing had made the sweet crystals valuable and had made me a sneak.

  Bum wrestled with his bike until he got the seat under his plump backside, and we set off toward the west side of town.

  My best friend was a pudgy kid who had attached to me like metal to a magnet on our first day of school. We’d spent most of the summer together, because Bum didn’t like being at home. When he was at home he holed up in his bedroom, reading books he’d checked out from the Barnard library to avoid his troublesome family. And yes, Bum was his real name: Bum Craddick. His daddy had a sad sense of humor; so all eight of the Craddick kids were saddled with unfortunate names. The worst was his oldest brother, whose birth certificate read Mudbug Francis Craddick. Their mama let it happen, but she was slow. Folks around Barnard said she was “touched in the head.” My mother said only insanity could explain why such a pretty girl would marry an ox like Clayton Craddick.

  There were times I envied Bum’s family, having so many brothers and sisters. I didn’t have close family to speak of except my mother and her family, and Daddy, of course, but he was off fighting. I wondered what it would be like to share the house with other kids. Then, Bum would come on by with his knees scraped up or an eye blackened – wounds caused by one of his older brothers – and I’d figure things were okay the way they were.

  Before the war, my mother was always home. When I woke up, breakfast waited for me on a plate, and after the dishes were done, she swept and dusted and mopped and did laundry, and sometimes she would sit in the kitchen with her best friend Rita Sherman, talking and listening to music drifting in from the RCA console in the living room. She still did all of these things, but now Ma rushed through the chores so that she could accomplish them all before her shift at the factory started. As for my daddy, he had worked as a sales manager at the stockyards before going overseas, and his job required him to take frequent trips to Dallas, Houston, and Austin, and even when his work didn’t take him out of town, we didn’t see much of him. He liked to spend his evenings at the Longhorn Tavern talking with “the boys” or playing cards over to Deke Williams’ house. What little time we had spent together had been on the edge of Kramer Lake where we’d fished for catfish and bass, or up north in the scrublands hunting wild pigs. Those excursions had been rare and had all but dwindled to nothing before he’d been called to service. He gave me my bicycle when I was seven, but didn’t have the time to teach me how to ride, so I’d done it myself, leaving a lot of my knee and elbow skin on the street in the process, and for Christmas one year he gave me a baseball glove, but he’d never had the time to toss me a ball. I hated thinking that he’d never get the chance – hated thinking he’d never come home.

  The summer had been dry. Too dry, some folks said. The old men who gathered at Milton’s Barbershop to play pinochle talked about drought and what it would do to the crops. I didn’t know much about that. I just knew the dust was heavy, and the gnats were swarming, and nothing really came into focus no matter what the time of day.

  Though eager to get to the cold water, we didn’t race across town. We pedaled lazily, knowing relief wasn’t too far off.

  “The lake’s gonna feel good,” Bum said. “We ought to just stay out there ’til dark.”

  “We’d get eaten alive.”

  “It’d be worth it. Skeeter bites ain’t nothing compared to riding around in this. All the dirt sticking to my neck and arms. Feel like I got scabbed over head to toe.”

  “We’d miss lunch.”

  “It’ll keep. Right now, I about want to spend the whole night up to my neck.”

  “Don’t we have more important things to do tonight?” I asked.

  Bum’s face lit up with a smile. He arched his eyebrows and said, “Spy Commander?”

  “Roger and out,” I replied in my best military tone.

  Spy Commander was a game we’d built around a cheap tin spyglass Bum had received for his birthday. Whenever the notion hit us, we’d write the name of a neighbor on a scrap of paper, and that was our assignment. Since my mother worked the swing shift and since Bum stayed over at my house more times than not that summer, Bum and I could go out late at night, and we’d carry the spyglass like it was government issue. Then we’d find an advantageous angle – a tree branch, some shrubs, the roof of a shack – and we’d observe whoever’s name appeared on our assignment sheet, the glass taking us through windows and into living rooms, kitchens and bedrooms. We didn’t know our game was against the law, though I guess we both knew it was wrong. I suppose it wouldn’t have been any fun if it weren’t.

  At home, I reminded Bum to be quiet, because my mother would be asleep for at least another hour, and I fixed us glasses of tea, retrieving the secret sugar tin from my daddy’s tackle box, which Ma kept in the pantry. Only a half-inch of sugar covered the bottom of the tin. I showed it to Bum and he shook his head and I returned it to the pantry, knowing that even a spoonful would likely be missed.

  With our glasses empty and placed carefully in the sink, we crept to my room and changed into our swimming shorts, and then left the house, wandered down to the field at the lake’s edge. Only a few people lounged on the grass or splashed in the water. The men that remained in town were at work, and so were many of the women. Besides, most folks gathered at a park on the southern edge of the lake for sunbathing and swimming, which made this little patch something of an oasis for the neighborhood. I saw Little Lenny Elliot talking excitedly with a bunch of older kids on the right, and Mrs. Lafferty lying on her back on a plaid blanket in a blue bathing suit that was so tight it looked like her thighs and chest were attempting to escape like a butterfly from a chrysalis. I didn’t immediately recognize any of the people in the water, except for my neighbor, the German.

  Mr. Lang bobbed with his back to us, looking across the lake at the finger of land owned by Jerome Blevins. A great mane of pine and oak rose over the low hills there in the west, sweeping north and south along the lake’s perimeter.

  As we approached the water my neighbor turned around. When he saw us, he lifted his burly arm in a wave.

  “Hello, Mr. Lang,” I called. Bum echoed me.

  “Boys,” the German replied.

  I always enjoyed seeing my neighbor. Sometimes I thought he was the only man left in my neighborhood, which more and more resembled a land of women and children. He pushed through the water toward the shore and climbed over a narrow beach of rocks to the grass. After yanking a towel from the limb of a pecan tree, he began scrubbing his face and hair. “The water’s good,” he said.

  “I bet,” Bum said, already peeling off his shirt.

  “Are you going back in?” I asked.

  “No. No, you boys can have it,” he said.

  “Maybe you’ll come back later.”

  “Ernst is done for today. I have a chair to finish.”

  “Another rocker?”

  “Yes,” he replied. “Hank Carter sold two more of my chairs to a couple from Leander who would like a third for the woman’s mother.”

  “Neat,” I said too exuberantly.

  Mr. Lang seemed confused by my choice of words, but he smiled and nodded and agreed, “Yes, it is neat.”

  I liked Mr. Lang’s voice and frequently found myself searching for topics to keep a conversation going. He didn’t sound like the Germans in movies, with their clipped and harsh vibrato delivery. He spoke slowly in a low register that softened the edges of his accent.

  “Oh and thanks again for helping Ma with the gutters.”

  “You are welcome. Now you and your friend enjoy the lake.”

  “We will.”

  Then the German wandered away, humming a tune I didn’t recognize as he climbed the low rise of grass to the r
oad above, scrubbing his head with the towel like he was trying to put out a fire. As I watched him go, Bum leapt into the water with a great crash.

  “Ah,” he said upon surfacing. “That takes the rust off.”

  Eager to get out of the hot day and join my friend, I yanked off my shirt and dropped it next to Bum’s, and then I waded in. The morning sweat and dust washed away and the clamp of lethargy at the back of my head loosened, and I began to think Bum’s idea of spending both day and night up to our chins in the lake wasn’t so bad after all.

  We swam a bit but refused any real exertion, preferring to just paddle lazily or float on our backs looking heavenward. Soon enough we stopped this pretext of activity and just stood on the rocks near the shore, the soothing water’s surface cutting me across the collarbone while it licked close to Bum’s chin.

  “Do you think we’ll have to go to the war?” Bum asked. He wiped water from his round cheeks and looked at me.

  “I don’t know,” I told him. “If it goes on long enough, I suppose. But it won’t last that long. The radio said it would be over before Christmas. We got the Krauts on the run and the Japs won’t be far behind.”

  “Yeah, but they said that last year, before Mudbug got sent to the Pacific, and now Fatty’s getting ready to head off to training.”

  “I bet Fatty doesn’t even finish training before it’s done.”

  Bum’s brother, Fatty, didn’t belong in the service. Like his mama, Fatty’s brain moved as slow as a bicycle with flat tires. He’d stopped school just before the sixth grade, because he couldn’t keep up with the mathematics. A few years back, he took himself a job out to the paper mill, where he pushed rolls of paper on a cart from the warehouse to the cutting room.

  “Fatty’s gonna get himself killed,” Bum said. “Daddy never let the dummy handle any of his rifles, because he figured Fatty would shoot himself in the head looking to see how fast the bullet came out. The dope can’t even wind a wristwatch.”

  Concern weighed down Bum’s face, and I wanted to get his mind off of his brothers, because nothing I told him would stick or help. Bum knew what was what, and I figured he had it pretty much right: if they sent Fatty overseas, he’d probably never see home again. Mudbug on the other hand might just come back a hero. He sure was mean enough. “It’ll be over soon,” I said.

  “I don’t know what I’d do if I had to go,” Bum said. “I wish I was more like Mudbug or Harold Ashton.”

  I’d never thought much about true combat. The kids all talked brave – myself included – all of us eager to show the Axis the way real men fought, and during those patriotic bull sessions, I’d felt certain that if someone were to put a rifle in my hands and drop me in Berlin, I’d take out the entire Nazi party in the same time it took Ma to fry up a chicken, but all I knew of fighting came from the movies and the radio and Brett Fletcher, who spun some harrowing yarns from the wheelchair on his porch. War struck me as something involving adults, but Bum didn’t see it that way. He had brothers, and one by one the government had requested their services. First Mudbug and then Fatty. It would be Mule’s turn next and then Bum. It was like a saboteur’s bomb counting down, only instead of ticking off seconds, it had been synchronized to the sons of Clayton and Louise Craddick.

  We stood on those rocks for a while and didn’t say much. The water didn’t feel quite as good as it had, and my feet were starting to ache, toes clamped to the rough wads of stone beneath them. I felt a chill and looked away from Bum.

  Across the water I noticed two men standing on the shore at the Blevins place just below the tree line. The glare and distance made it difficult to make the figures out, but one of them wore a hat with a familiar shape.

  “What’s that all about?” Bum asked.

  “Can’t tell,” I said. “That might be Sheriff Rabbit, but can’t see the other man.”

  “Looks like Sheriff Rabbit,” Bum agreed.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Just think it is.”

  “Jerome probably caught himself another Mexican,” I said.

  Jerome Blevins was an old-time moonshiner who owned two hundred acres to the west of Barnard, which hadn’t done him a bit of good during the Depression. Though he maintained a good amount of his hill-country cheapness, his lot in life had improved greatly over the last few years. He let the paper folks take some of his trees, and he herded cattle, and while the rest of the country worried about invasion from across the oceans, Jerome had convinced himself the Mexicans were the ones who’d bring the end of civilization with them over the borders.

  Bum and I spent another few minutes speculating on the men and their purpose, and then we forgot about them and waded out of the lake to lie down in the tall grass on the shore. Unlike most days, when he would talk about every little thing that crossed his mind, Bum lay quietly, and I knew he was worried about his dim-witted brother, Fatty. I couldn’t think of any further words of comfort for my friend, so I tried to distract him with old knock-knock jokes and making funny voices, which he always said I did better than any of the other kids. He laughed a bit, but it wasn’t Bum’s usual full-throated chuckle.

  “Fatty’s going to be okay,” I finally said. “They’ll probably send him out with Mudbug, and you know Mudbug isn’t going to let anything happen to him.”

  “Mr. Fletcher says that if the Germans catch you, they put you in a cage and torture you, and then once you’re dead they eat your skin and make furniture from your bones.”

  “He’s just trying to scare the little kids.”

  “But do you think it’s true?” Bum asked.

  I told him that I didn’t think it was true. People didn’t do that to one another, but Bum wasn’t convinced, and of course, neither of us knew what they’d found on Jerome Blevins’s property while we soaked away the morning in Kramer Lake.

  Two: Sheriff Tom Rabbit

  Mornings and weekends were the only times Sheriff Tom Rabbit rode his chestnut mare, Pilar. In the pink glow of daybreak, he trotted her through fields of tall tanned grasses, enjoying the peace, the quiet, and the scent of air that wasn’t heavy with dust and car fumes. Riding soothed him, from the gentle rocking in the saddle to the rhythmic clop of Pilar’s hooves on the hard packed earth as she carried him across the flats north of his home to a squat ridge of hills. At the edge of his property, atop a hillock where the mesquite knotted, creating a tangled fence, Sheriff Rabbit climbed off his mount and looked to the west, gently stroking Pilar’s neck as he surveyed the direction a hundred western novels and films made him associate with the future. A string of bruised clouds ran across the horizon, but a sheet of pure radiant blue hung overhead and stretched the innumerable miles to the cumulus. If the clouds intended storm, it would miss Barnard by miles, and though the farmers likely wished for a bit of water after such a dry spring and early summer, Sheriff Rabbit felt just fine with the clouds’ decision to pass on by. The streets in Barnard hadn’t been poured with an eye toward rain, so when a downpour hit, the water gathered on the roads, a lot of it muddy runoff from the ranchlands to the east, and then got held between the sidewalk curbs, making any travel through town a messy and complicated event. Of course he didn’t have to worry about starving if the crops didn’t come in.

  He fished a sugar cube out of his shirt pocket to feed to Pilar. Then he remounted his horse and turned her nose to the south before clicking his tongue to get her moving.

  He felt no urgency to get back to the house and entertained no illusions about his necessity in the office. Things in Barnard had been quiet for months. Nights offered the prerequisite bar brawls and the occasional theft, but no crimes of note had stained the pages of the Barnard Register since Molly Jenkins had confessed to the murder of her husband, John, back in ’42. The crazy old lady had poisoned her spouse of thirty-five years with arsenic and had called Sheriff Rabbit to “Come on out and pick this bag of manure up off my kitchen floor.” With Tom being something less than an expert in the science of poison,
old Molly would have gotten away free and clear if she hadn’t confessed. John Jenkins had been a sickly old man, coughing like a bad engine, and not a soul would have batted an eye at his demise, but Molly had wanted credit for the killing. After nearly three-dozen years of black eyes and split lips and more egregious injuries which she’d recounted in great detail in her confession, Molly wanted everyone to know that she’d gotten the last word in on the marriage.