John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

The two men didn’t seem to understand what was happening. Except that, now and then, the older one glanced nervously over his shoulder at the guards.

They came to another steel-mesh fence; the sentry let the German Shepherds tug him along between the inner and outer fences.

The trail veered left, hooking back toward the chapel, and they turned to follow it. They walked along silently for another hundred feet and stopped when they came to a small clearing. The brush had grown up thickly around the clearing. To one side was a wooden bench cut from a log. Watson smiled wearily at the Nazis and said, “Sit down, boys.” They looked dubiously at the log; the dampness would stain their uniforms. But they sat.

Suddenly the older one, licking his lips, looked up and said, “Maybe we shouldn’ta come here like this. Guess we shoulda called. But we got the runaround when I tried to write. I figured I had to go right to Reverend Crandall. But if you say we leave, well, I guess we’ll sure leave.”

“Nobody said anything about your having to leave,” Watson said neutrally. He took a neatly folded handkerchief from his coat pocket and blew his nose on it. “You see,” he went on, “we have us a problem.” His shift into rustic speech mannerisms was more friendly than mocking. “Now, it’s like this. You had access to things you weren’t supposed to have access to. Just a mix-up. Ours really. But people at your level of activity aren’t supposed to be seen in association with Reverend Crandall. It’s not good public relations. You’re not even supposed to know how to find him. I just hope and pray no one was watching when you folks drove up dressed like that: Now, we can’t take the chance that you’ll leave here and tell some more of your people where to find Rick. And then again, you represent a security risk in other ways. We don’t want people running around who might feel rejected, and become disgruntled with the Reverend. Especially not people with a bombing record.” He looked at the young man, who went pale. “You see, young man, we know all about you already. We know where your friends and family are… How many others did you tell?”

“Nobody else!” the older Nazi said indignantly. “I knowed it was top secret.”

Watson smiled. He glanced at Sackville-West. The old man shrugged.

“I believe you.” Watson said. “But… we’ll have to look into that.”

It had taken the younger one a while to get the upshot, but he burst out, “You saying we oughta be ashamed to come here dressed like this? This uniform symbolizes our martyrdom to the Aryan cause! We’re pariahs and we know it and we do it ’cause it’s right! All over the world people are interbreedin’ with animals! White women and men having congress with black animals and stinking up their blood with the blood of monkeys!”

“Very colorful way to put it.” Watson said, dabbing daintily at his nose with the handkerchief. “You know, in a way I almost agree with you.”

“Almost!” The young Nazi looked at the impassive faces around him, at the faceless helmets, and let his exasperation carry his voice into shrillness. “Hey now, I got to get this straight. Do you folks believe in the Triumph of the White Race or not ?”

Watson looked musingly into his handkerchief. “I suppose you deserve an answer at least… My boy, the answer is yes and no. I believe in it, but not the way you believe in it. You see, I happen to believe that Negroes are in fact an inferior race, in a certain sense. For example, some claim they don’t pan out on the genetic scale for intelligence quotients. But you know that conclusion could be disputed, and I’d be willing to listen to evidence that maybe they’re as intelligent as we are, after all. Maybe they are. Maybe they’re not a bit inferior. I don’t know. Rick Crandall doesn’t know. And what’s more, we don’t care. We happen to think, first of all, that miscegenation—interbreeding—is a bad thing, leading to genetic impurity, but not because the other races are low but because it creates too many uncontrollable variables in the genetic process.”

“Genetic process! You people believe in evolution ?” the younger one sputtered.

The older one had put his elbows on his knees and his head in his hands. He groaned and shook his head. “Best not get us in any deeper, Elwood.”

“Well now, we believe that genetics is God’s Tool,” Watson said. He chuckled at some private joke and went on, “Now, in the beginning, could be that God created the world in seven days. Like it says in the Book. But after that, after he sent Adam and Eve out of Eden, he used genetics to do some of his work here…” He cleared his throat, and Swenson, watching him, felt sure that Watson didn’t actually believe in Creationism of any sort. Swenson felt light-headed. He almost laughed aloud.

“We in fact believe,” Watson went on, warming to his subject, “that racism, as it’s called, ought to be an instrument of administrative policy in the coming world government. And we know precisely how to use the social phenomenon that historians call ‘fascism’ to further that ambition. But you gentlemen have made the fatal error of mistaking the means for the end. And the… trappings you’ve chosen are no longer appropriate. They are socially poisoned by the awkward people who wore them before.”

“Awkward?” the young man was shocked. “You talking about Adolf Hitler ?”

His outrage was palpable.

The older Nazi groaned, “Dammit, Elwood, shut up. Shut the hell up.”

“Hitler?” Watson shrugged. “Hitler was a madman. Worse, he was unsubtle and inefficient—Well, you could argue that he very efficiently got rid of the six million Jews, and, of course, he did us all a favor—those people are too smart for their own good, or ours. But otherwise—”

The young man sprang up with tears in his eyes. “I ain’t gonna listen to any more of this!”

“You won’t have to,” Watson said gently. He stepped back.

Sackville-West stepped back, well out of the way. Swenson mechanically followed suit.

Not you, Swenson, you’re going where they’re going.

Swenson froze.

And then he realized he’d heard it in his mind. No one had spoken to him. The voice was a product of his suppressed terror, the twisting fear that he had been brought out here to be executed—

The two Nazis jumped to their feet and turned to run. The guards pointed their guns and opened up, and the terrible thing was, there was almost no sound.

The automatic weapons were fitted with suppressors. They made only soft, stammering hisses as the two Nazis exploded with blood under the impact of scores of rounds, as if magic made them open up with little faucets of red, made them dance and spin… in the quiet morning…

Then they’d fallen, slumped over the log side by side.

Swenson thought, I should be happy. Two more Nazis dead. Killed by their own kind. Steinfeld didn’t even have to waste bullets on them.

But he felt only a kind of gnawing numbness.

He seemed to see the body of a beautiful, copper-skinned young man dead in a ditch, riddled with bullets.

And then he visualized the painting of Saint Sebastian, skewered with arrows…

Oh, no, he thought. Oh, God, no. I’ve got an erection.

And the sickness passed.

A fourth guard strolled up, carrying two body bags. “Where will he take them?” Swenson heard himself ask dazedly.

“We have a crackerjack incinerator here,” Watson said. “Just the best.”

“Waste of time, all that speechmaking.” Sackville-West said. He was notorious for his taciturnity.

Watson smiled and said, “Where’s your feelings, Sacks? They had their hearts in the right place, after all. Anyway, I thought our friend Mr. Swenson here could use some clarity on where we stand.”