Pasadena (58 page)

Bruder’s chest rose and fell with slow breath and he stroked his chin, as if his fingers were feeling for the shaved beard. He grunted, a pain passing through him.

“And Mrs. Nay never spoke of it,” said Blackwood.

“Cherry doesn’t know.”

“I thought she knew everything.”

“Almost. It was another promise I made long ago. Another promise to hold tightly to the truth. Another promise no longer worth keeping.” Slowly, Bruder pushed himself up from the chair, and he motioned for Blackwood to follow him. They moved to the doorway with the sheet strung along the rod. Bruder pulled it back, and together they peered into the narrow room on the backside of the chimney. There was a small window covered with gunnysack cloth and a kerosene lamp flickering a low flame, and on the bed a tiny, flour-white man was curled like a cat. His beard fluttered as he slept, and his eyelids were as thick as window shades, and his hands cradled an onion.

“Is it Dieter?” said Blackwood.

Bruder nodded.

“He must be a hundred years old.”

“Nearly.”

“I didn’t know he was still alive.”

“Did someone tell you he was dead?”

“How long has he been like this?”

“Twenty or twenty-five years.”

“Who takes care of him?”

“Sieglinde mostly. Pal, too.”

Bruder let the sheet fall and returned to his rocker. Blackwood followed, but stopped at the window and watched a pelican soar over the ocean and then plunge for chub. There were five rows of waves crashing, a surfboard riding one of them, and beyond the waves were the buoys and a shark’s wake and then the Pacific was endless and blue.

“He has seen a lot of history, hasn’t he?” said Blackwood.

“And much of the history you’ve heard from Cherry and me begins with him.” Bruder paused. “If I didn’t tell you, Mr. Blackwood, no one would ever know the truth.”

“I can keep a secret, Mr. Bruder.”

“I could take it to my grave.”

“Is that fair?”

“Fair to whom?”

“I don’t know. But if you have something to say, I should think you’d want to share it with at least one man before—” But Blackwood stopped himself; he knew enough not to try too hard.

“Why should that be you?”

“Because one day I might be in possession of your land.”

“It always comes back to that, doesn’t it, Mr. Blackwood?”

“Back to what?” Now Blackwood didn’t know what Bruder was talking about. There was no way he could. Even so, he sensed everything going his way and he nearly expected to depart Condor’s Nest with the deed to the Pasadena rolled up in his glove compartment. Blackwood was so certain of his prowess as a negotiator that he was startled when Bruder interrupted his thoughts by saying, “Dieter gave me his daughter.”

Blackwood’s eyes screwed up. “Sorry?”

“Yes, he gave Linda to me. In a trade.”

“Mr. Bruder? I’m not sure I’m following you.”

“It has to do with the war.”

“Like so many things these days.”

“I’m talking about the previous war, of course. That one really kicked off the century, didn’t it.”

Blackwood said yes, but he didn’t know what precisely he was agreeing to. As he waited for Bruder to continue, Blackwood suddenly thought of Edith Knight: he should try to look for her again. He decided just then that he would hire a private investigator out of Boston, sending the man up to Maine. Blackwood would instruct him to search from Portland down east, in every steepled village on every rocky cove. Across from Blackwood, Bruder was turning in his rocker, seeking a comfortable position before he began another story. As Bruder prepared to—to use Mrs. Nay’s word—
unload
, Blackwood realized that
one day he too would become overwhelmed by the need to stare his own history in the bruised eye. He shuddered, afraid of himself for the first time. What had Blackwood done? Who had Blackwood become?

“May I take you back to the beechwood forest, Mr. Blackwood?”

“I’m listening, Mr. Bruder.”

“You recall how I first met Dieter?”

“Along the stream. He sold you the tin cup that saved Willis Poore’s life.”

“Yes, exactly. Dieter was a one-man supply store walking up and down the lines. He was selling tin cups and tin bowls and tin canteens, and entrenching spades and haversacks packed with field dressings and iron rations, and vials of morphine and tobacco kept dry in bullet shells. Anything a soldier might need when cut off from a supply line.”

“Is it why he went to Europe?”

“Dieter never forgot that fortunes were made in supplying desperate men.”

“I can understand that,” said Blackwood.

“Because I met Dieter that day by the stream, Willis Poore recovered long enough to be picked up by an ambulance. He was transported to a hospital outside Paris, where he convalesced under the care of hobble-skirted nurses. He told me afterward that his bed lay in a shaft of sunlight and that he would close his eyes and feel the warmth on his face and dream he had returned to California. Every day his mind would carry him back to the rancho, and his strength returned and the wound on his nape closed and healed and buckled and scarred. While in the hospital he was promoted to captain and given his medal, and when the nurses came to sponge him down he’d show it to them, and soon he learned how its gleam brought a profoundly respectful smile to anyone who looked at it, and especially to those who fingered it against his breast. Captain Poore was released days before the Armistice, and he spent the winter roaming the cold alleys of Paris, and like many doughboys he succumbed to the whistles and calls shot from darkened doorways. It was there, I presume, that he first acquired his taste for the whore.”

“Mr. Bruder!”

“You’ve never sampled the wares yourself, Mr. Blackwood?”

“Indeed I have not.” And this was true, technically speaking.

“Don’t think you’re a better man for it.”

“I do not.” And then: “But what does this have to do with our deal, Mr. Bruder?”

Bruder ignored the question. “And while Willis was lying atop the ticking-striped mattress in the convalescent hospital, I was left to defend the burned-out depot. A platoon of soldiers arrived as reinforcement, and they were shocked when they saw the destruction, barracks burned to ashes. Every time a new soldier arrived he’d say, ‘That was a hell of a gun the Germans shot. You must’ve done something to make them really mad at you.’ I’d made my deal and so I said nothing, and the men would kick the char and soon we got to work on rebuilding the depot. Within a couple of days you would never have known what had happened there unless you stumbled across the pile of blackened rubble dumped in the forest.

“It was only a few days later that the line gave up some territory and the front moved closer to our station. Now we could hear the battle day and night, and the howitzers traced the sky and the wounded stumbled into our depot, and soon we were no longer fixing trucks, we were fixing men.

“Every night around eleven o’clock, Dieter would arrive in the forest, his tinware clanging like cowbells, and the men one by one would slip away into the beechwood stand and buy themselves some tobacco or morphine or whatever it was they could afford and needed. Supplies were low and the road that had first brought me to the depot was under siege, and we never knew what was coming or when. Every soldier who’d been in France more than a week knew that in the woods behind the lines were traveling salesmen. And not just Dieter. Most of them were Frenchmen, and some were boys too young to shave, and they were quick to adapt to the soldiers’ needs, always supplying a demand. When canned beef was low at a camp it could be found in the forest, and when supplies of scurvy pills were gone they could be bought for a dime. The doughboys called the salesmen Vultures, and when things were calm, sometimes word would arrive at a camp or a station that five hundred yards into the forest, a Vulture had arrived with girls for sale. That business went on, French maidens lying atop mounds of moss, and soldiers would pay for what they needed most. They’d hand over every last
centime
for a turn. Why the face, Mr. Blackwood? It was war, and the men needed comfort and the girls needed food, and other than
the syphilis there was nothing more tragic about this than about everything else.”

“The Vultures!” said Blackwood. “What terrible men!”

“Mr. Blackwood, you of all people should think before you condemn.”

At some point during Bruder’s tale, Pal and Sieglinde had slipped into the cottage and curled their legs up onto the window seat. They were leaning their heads upon the panes, their faces turned toward the ocean, but both boy and girl were silent, as if Bruder’s story had sent their minds traveling too. Sieglinde’s knives and whetting stone sat on the floor beside her, but she ignored the work; her face, in the light through the window, was—Blackwood imagined—identical to her mother’s.

“As I was saying, I was at the depot and one night the guns fell silent. At this point, as you might imagine, I was having trouble sleeping. To tell the truth, never again in my life would I sleep through a full night. It was a moonlit evening at summer’s end and I got up, took my rifle, and went for a walk. If I told you I wasn’t looking for a certain thing, I’d be lying. It was very late, and typically the Vultures had come and gone by midnight, but I went to see anyway. I followed a path and I leapt across the stream and still I found no one. I walked for almost an hour. Then I gave up on finding one of the men and his girls, and I stroked the coins in my pocket and told myself to hold them in reserve for another night. The sky was as blue and dark as the ocean, and the moonlight seeped through the forest’s canopy, and there was something about this night that carried me on, and the fear that I typically bore had fallen away. It occurred to me that perhaps the battle that had been waging had ended and that word had yet to reach us of the outcome. I continued walking, thinking I should scout for information. The line wasn’t far, and I knew that if I walked another half mile or so I would come across something to tell me what was going on, some sort of battle debris: the abandoned clips of ammunition, the pockmarked shells, the scraps of military leather, shredded and mildewed, the bits of flesh as pale and bright as bread crumbs on a path.

“The forest became even more dense, and I pushed my way through the low branches and stomped upon the soft ferns and sometimes the sticks cracking beneath my boot echoed in a way that startled me, and I would stop and stare into the silvery darkness and wonder if anyone
was there. But no one
was
there, and I continued, and there’s a funny thing about fear: once you recognize that you’re afraid, you become less so, as if you’ve somehow thrown a saddle across its bucking back.

“I kept walking, and after a quarter of an hour, through the stand of trees, I saw something move. It was dark and small and at first I thought that perhaps it was a bear, but then I figured that every bear along the front must have been killed long before. Then there was a second figure and a third, one large and one small, but they were only black outlines in the forest and a careless eye wouldn’t even have seen them. I’m sure
you
would have, and I saw them too and I dropped to my knees. I wasn’t close enough to sense what was going on, but then one of the figures moved away from the other two and walked twenty or thirty yards into the forest, until it seemed to sit upon a felled tree. Then there was a glow like a firefly and soon I could smell the burning tobacco.

“I didn’t know what I had come across, but I held my rifle tightly and thought that maybe I was somewhere I shouldn’t be. In the distance I could see the cigarette burning, the orange glowing brighter as a pair of lips sucked upon it. Back over where the two others were, they were standing close and making some strange motions and it was impossible to tell what was going on. Suddenly, one dropped to the forest floor and the other followed, and soon horrible cries were traveling through the forest, grunts and pleas and it was then that I heard a voice.

“It was a girl’s voice, and she was crying in both German and French,
‘Nein, nein, nein … non!’
I moved closer, and the forest rustled beneath me, and then the heaving and the panting stopped and I held still and it seemed as if the glowing orange tobacco was the only thing alive in the night. For a few minutes I didn’t move, and the figures in the dark held still, and after a long while someone said, in German,
‘It’s nothing, there’s nothing there.’
And soon the girl repeated her cry, and I heard her French accent, and then I realized what I had stumbled across.

“Just as there were Vultures on the Allied side of the front, there were Vultures on the German side as well, and at some point I had crossed the line, for in the final months of the war the front slithered back and forth, and there were points in the forest where no one knew
who
was in control. And it was at such a point that I had found a Vulture selling a French girl to a German soldier.

“My heart was racing, but I wasn’t shocked. I realized that I had simply
come face-to-face with my enemy. In some ways, certainly every soldier awaits this moment, and I inched forward, carefully sweeping the way with my hands, and every time a twig snapped I prayed to God the soldier wouldn’t hear me. But by now he was so engaged in the act of raping the girl that he wouldn’t have heard anything—he was moaning and grunting and drowning out the owls. I knew I wouldn’t have much time, and soon I found myself no more than ten yards from the mossy clearing in the forest.

“I arranged myself as silently as possible and aimed my rifle, and as I peered through the sight the moon appeared from behind the clouds and the soldier’s face came into my view. He was a common infantryman with a spiked helmet camouflaged by a field-gray cover. Beside him was his backpack of stiff, undressed hide, and his ten-pound rifle and bayonet were propped against it, and he was so young in the face that under any other circumstances one would have assumed that the gun and the bayonet were toys. His cheek was flushed, and his nose was small and round, like a lamb’s. But he was thrusting himself violently against the girl, and his black bluchers dug into the soil. Then his neck stretched like a turtle’s and his lips parted and he gasped embarrassingly and I witnessed him reach his moment of pleasure. All of him shook and trembled, and I thought that perhaps this was his first time.