The Captive (25 page)

"It goes up into the big trees?" Barry said.

"You can get up to Manzano Peak, but it is very bad the last mile or so," the dark faced man said.

"Do you know of any camps up there?"

"The Boy Scouts have some cabins at the spring."

"How far?"

"Maybe eight, ten mile," the Indian said. "The road is bad."

"Thank you very much," Barry said, wondering if he should pay for his information, but the Indian was already turning away. Barry thought the man had said one more thing, but he didn't hear it clearly.

"What was that?" he said.

"Better to come back this way too," the Indian said, turning  to look at Barry's little car that was steaming furiously. "Other road might break your horse in two," he said,  smiling faintly and pointing at the Model-A.

Barry wanted to ask about what he meant by the other road, but if this road went to the high country he would take it now, before it got darker.

The road was indeed terrible, shelves of rock jutted into it at angles to the track, ruts as deep as creek beds broke the hard clay into a wagon trail, and the continuous upward climb made the little car wheeze and pop until Barry thought several times it would simply quit and he would have to walk the rest of the way. It was full dark now, and Barry became increasingly aware of the distinctive noise a  Model-A Ford makes. There would be no surprise for those in camp if he drove all the way. Perhaps Bill had left the clues purposely, meant he should get that card and find Bruno, and was now waiting somewhere in the impenetrable dark along this track with a rifle on his lap. He shook off the fear, watching the odometer so he could stop about a mile before the end of the road and walk the rest of the way. He was having the night frights. Bill couldn't have arranged things like that. At that moment he saw a sidetrack take off to the right and stopped the car to investigate. The silence closed around him like a solid, like the blackness inside a cave. He looked up as he got out of the car, seeing the stars gleaming like diamonds with hardly a twinkle in the empty sky. The road was only a lighter black ahead of him. He felt the Beast wanting to come out and thought,
OK, you're the tracker in this safari.

I shift.

The world snaps into being around me, my ears picking up everything from the soft wind through the pines to the sounds of scuttling creatures in the forest. There is a deer across the road, treading delicately, making her way more by sound than sight. My spatial sense picks her out, and the forest stretches away on every side, felt almost as Barry would see a photographic negative. I extend my senses through the trees, seeking other life, noises of human beings. I do not think this sideroad has been used. No. Nothing has passed here for months, no tracks, no scent. I take a quick scouting trot along the sideroad to make sure. Nothing human  has passed this way. Barry is eager to drive on. I feel more secure in my own form and wish we could be separate somehow, make a real team, but it may be miles yet before we come to the camp. I give in and trot back to the car.

As he drove the suffering little car on up the rocky track into the darkness, Barry was aware that too much time was passing. The cops would have waked up, called in on their radio long ago.

"Some desperado I am," he said into the passing night wind. "I didn't even think to break up their radio." There would be swarms of State Cops all over these mountains soon. He would have to watch in front and behind, for they would be approaching him carefully now, probably shoot first and ask questions later after his unsociable behavior with those two young cops.

"I wish that hadn't been necessary," he said aloud.

The wind in his ears sounded different. Was there a car engine somewhere? He shut off his lights and stopped suddenly,  flicking off the key, but the little car backfired three or four times before it stopped. Silence again. Maybe he was close enough. The Indian had said eight or ten miles, and it had been about seven by his odometer. He'd better hoof it from here. He sat a moment with the car door open listening  to the steam escape from the little car's radiator.

"I'll get you lots of water when we get back," he said to the car, thinking as he looked into the solid darkness, "if we get back."

As he leaned forward to get down out of the car there came the blinding glare of headlights from ahead of him, the roar of a car engine accelerating and the explosion of several different guns going off at once. He threw his body backwards  across the seat, grabbing for the opposite door handle, squirming out like a snake as the windshield and back window  of the Model-A dissolved in bursts of glass and pieces of steering wheel, the bullets whacking into the seats and sides of the car. He fell to the ground on the low side of the road and rolled until he hit a tree trunk. He heard shouts, and the light and gunfire were redirected toward him. Now the bullets made cracking sounds over his head.

I shift.

Continuing the direction of Barry's roll, I claw my way into a low profiled run, belly to the ground, snaking through the trees, fast but concentrating on staying low rather than making top speed. I hear the bullets around me going whack! and thunk! into the soft wood of the pines. The light changes direction several times, sweeping the area, a small spotlight, evidently, but it is soon foiled by the thickness of the forest. A heavy Whump! sounds behind me, and a glare flashes off the trees. I look back and see that Barry's little car is on fire. I turn uphill and run parallel to the road until I can sense that the humans are far back and to my left, and then I sneak silently back to the road where it is fully dark and away from the lights and the glare of the fire. I lie flat at the edge of the forest, sensing in both directions. They are all down to my left where the little car is sitting tilted in the rushing flames, its empty windshield seeming to peer upward at me out of the fire with a last reproach. Only then do I drop the little brown teddy bear that I have been clutching in my jaws as tenderly as if it were my own cub.

Renee figured it was Monday now. They had been taken from the house on Friday, so this was the fourth day. Oh God, she thought, finishing the breakfast dishes in the old basin, what can we do, and how long is this insanity going on before we are taken somewhere else? She had no idea what the Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund was or what it did or who this Fritz Kuhn was they talked about. She had supposed it was a fraternal organization for German Americans  when she read about it in the papers, but these people did not all look German, and hardly anyone spoke German, although Ludwig did whenever he talked to the few in the other group who could understand him.

Outside she heard the shouting, a few German words, somebody saying "Achtung" over and over and the rattle of boots as the men who had been sitting on the porch clumped down the stairs.

"They're playing soldier again, Mommy," Mina said, standing at a side window. Out the window, Renee saw the men in two lines, putting their arms on each others' shoulders  to get their ranks straight and then coming to attention when Ludwig appeared with his ridiculous little sideways walk, like a crab, she thought. And he can't see straight, the crooked man. She remembered Mother saying cross-eyed people could see around corners. Today he had put on his little green uniform with the funny tilted hat and the swastika on the arm. How impressive he must think he looks, she mused, watching him stand as tall as he could in front of the little troop. They were all very military, chins back,  stomachs in, chests out. Bill was at the far end of the line. Ludwig said loudly, "Ruhrt Euch!" and only two of the men moved. He stood with his hands on his hips and bawled, "Stand at ease!"

They assumed that position, and Ludwig began to  harangue them. He was on the uphill side which made him taller than the line of men.

"We are here today, my countrymen and former Deutscher-Amerikaners," and he paused, smiling slyly, "to reaffirm our ties to the Vaterland and to the ideals of the National Socialist Movement in the world. I said
former
Deutscher-Amerikaners, because we are no longer German Americans. We are now members of the Amerika-Deutscher Volksbund. We are, properly speaking, American
Germans
, members of the Nordic race who are always and everywhere Germans in their hearts." He paused, but evidently applause  was not in order. No one moved.

"As you know, the largest rally in our history will be held at Camp Siegfried on Long lsland, New York, in one week. I am sure all of you are eager, as I am, to affirm our  solidarity, our Deutschtum, with our Comrades in the East and to offer our service to our Fuehrer in Amerika, Bundesleiter Kuhn, who will be there in person. If some of you are  wondering about your lack of German language, I assure you that the Volksbund is just that, a people's organization, and no one will be made to feel uncomfortable in the interim while he takes up the study of the Mother Tongue. We are all Germans together, united in the battle against world  Jewry, Communism, and racial pollution."

He paused and held up a pamphlet. "You will all want to purchase this little book, copies of which I have brought with me,
Protocols of the Elders of Zion
, the true account of the Jewish conspiracy to amass and control all the wealth in America and the world. It tells about the slimy octopus of World Jewry that has spread its tentacles into every part of our lives to slowly strangle us in a world wide depression that even now has set the stage for the Communists to deliver  the final blow and
take
our land from us. It is the goal of National Socialism all over the world to destroy this  secret organization of Jews and their cohorts from Moscow, who deceive the workers by telling them they will own the factories. They only want to take for themselves what you have, and their lies will end by making us all slaves in our own land."

His voice was gaining in volume and going up in pitch now. "On that day, on
Der Tag
when we are led by our great Fuehrer in Germany, Adolf Hitler, on the day when he shows us how to solve this problem that holds us in the grip of World Jewry, on
Der Tag
we will know what to do. We will be ready! Our cadres, our
Ordnung Dienst
, our youth groups, the
Jugend
, our rank and file members of the
Volksbund
will rise up and destroy these enslavers who have destroyed our jobs, polluted our racial purity with their  long-nosed and swarth-skinned lechers, and told us their lies through the control of our newspapers, moving pictures and radio. Then we will know what to do, my friends, when Der Fuehrer rises up in his holy wrath and points the way with the sword of his power." He stopped and looked along the line of men, now coming under the influence of his speech as he warmed to his hate.

"Do you know why this country cannot pull itself out of this depression? Do you know why all the seeming reforms in this country have a red tinge to them? Do you know why the help our government gives us never gets us on our feet again? I will tell you. Do you know of that man in the White House in Washington, that Franklin D. Rosenfeldt? Yes, that is his real name. He is a Jew! Do you know his "brain trust," his advisers like Jew Brandeis, Jew Morgenthau, Jew Frankfurter, Jew Lehman? It should not be called the
New
Deal. It should be called by its real name, the
Jew
Deal!" He paused while a rustle of laughter ran through the line of men who were now more attentive than they had been.

"And he was reelected last year! We put him back in the middle of his Jewish web of spiders who can now suck us dry. We have been woefully misled, my countrymen, woefully  misled. We have been betrayed by the newspapers and the radio that are in the hands of the Jews, lulled by the perverted lust of the Hollywood Jews who make filthy moving  pictures to keep our minds away from the Jewish hand that is always in our pockets. My friends, there is a Jew behind it when you find your money gone, your taxes raised, your prices raised when wages cannot follow, your job destroyed.  There is a Jew inside of this cancer that eats our country from within, and it is our duty to cut that cancer away before we are all destroyed along with our homeland by the International Conspiracy of Jewish Pigs!" His voice had gained in volume and pitch until he screamed the last epithet. Renee turned away but she could still hear him out there, Nordic purity, racial pollution, conspiracy, and she heard the local catchwords, "greasers," "spics" and the old faithful word for the Negroes whom she heard described not only as subhuman but as sex maniacs.

And suddenly she saw her daughter, standing at the window,  listening without much comprehension, perhaps, but enough to know the sound of hatred being peddled wholesale.

"Now that they're all out there saying silly things, why don't we play a game in here, just you and me?" Renee said.

Mina was instantly alert. "What shall we play?"

"Let's pretend that this is your house and you are the mommy and I'm the little girl," said Renee, moved almost to tears to see the light come back into her daughter's eyes. They played for a long time before any of the men came into the cabin to order them around some more.

Since Mina had run down the hill, she and her mother were not allowed their walk in the woods, but were grimly escorted to the privy when necessary and only allowed to stand outside on the porch while a guard kept watch over them. They were crouched now by the porch rail, trying to entice a squirrel with pieces of bread, while all of the men except for their bored guard were back of the cabin firing their rifles and pistols at targets nailed to the trees. The sound of firing was sporadic, and although it was a hundred yards away, the noise kept the squirrel from coming up on the porch. Renee was on her knees trying to get the little animal onto the first step. Mina had gone in for another piece of bread, and their guard was slouched against a car fender smoking one of an endless chain of cigarettes. Suddenly there was a movement from around the corner of the cabin and the squirrel leaped away and zipped up the nearest pine trunk, pausing halfway up to peer around at the large man who had come stomping onto the scene. He held a 30-30 loosely at his side and looked at Renee with a hard face.