LITMIR.BIZ

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week to check for fires and illegal ejecta, such as goods, especially munitions cases, from the navy base.

      The county commission wanted to charge a fee to leave garbage at the dump, but even though collecting it would mean a little more in wages for him, Berger was against it. He dreaded contact with people. At fifty-five he looked seventy. Wizened with yellowish gray hair and a long head, he wore a pointed beard of the same hue. It added to his aura of elderly peculiarity. That put people off, kept them away. Which was fine with him. It reduced the chances that they would ask about his thick accent.

      Explaining! He always shook his head at the idea. How should he explain? He had sunk to nothing more than a junkyard denizen and wanted nothing from others.

      Berger was not asleep. On the contrary, he was fully aware of the boy on the ridge and watched him from under his eyebrows, just over the rims of his Wehrmacht-issue smoked glasses. “Go away,” he said quietly, to himself. The boy, thankfully, was too far away to hear. Berger’s accent, his rich Bavarian consonants, tended to attract children. That, he did not want in the least.

      He detested children, especially the boys. They taunted him, calling him Hamburger from a safe distance. Die kleine Scheissen! They knew they could stand just ten feet away, and he would be powerless to catch them and give them the beating they deserved.

      Taunt him! Feldwebel Hans Berger, tank commander during Germany’s glorious drive for Moscow, until the disaster at the Kursk salient. Then fleeing on foot among infantry, his tank having lost its track to a mine, a piece of Soviet shrapnel slashed open his knee to the bone. For two days he crawled along the muddy ground, hiding in every stinking hole he could find to evade the Soviet advanced guard as his roughly bandaged wound festered. Finally, a German counterattack brought paratrooper units close enough for him to find help. He was bundled off to the rear for medical treatment and then on to Warsaw for surgery. But it had been bungled or it was too late or the damage was just too great. It left him crippled. Now his leg was stiff as a crutch, a crutch he could not set aside. Or throw at the little monsters.

      While he was recovering from the leg surgery, the Germans retreated, and conditions became hectic, nearly chaotic, for the splendid Wehrmacht. Berger took advantage. He deserted, hitching rides to Danzig and then to Rostock and across to Denmark under forged orders. He lighted in Sweden for the duration of the war and then took a berth as a cook on a cargo ship. He deserted it in Maracaibo. Every change of country, every painful movement along the way, was driven by his overwhelming fear of the Russians. Get away, as far as possible—that was his destination. And as far as possible, physically and politically, meant the United States. Well, he had finally made it, only to be called a hamburger by ignorant, undisciplined American brats.

      The boy waited a long time without moving. Berger also did not move. Perhaps this one he would lure close and catch. Then he would work out his vengeance against them all at one time. He would wait to see.

      With no discernible trigger, the boy was suddenly descending the slope in modest strides that left long projectile-shaped footsteps behind him and sent small fans of dirt sliding before. At the bottom he stopped just outside the turnaround and drew in a deep breath. Looking sidelong in the direction of Berger’s trailer, the boy veered and continued, although not straight for the trailer. Instead, he headed for the shack that stood to one side.

      This is a first, Berger thought disgustedly. Now one is to go so far as to steal my food! The shack held the icebox where Hans stored his perishables, mostly meat. He curled his fingers around the long-handled, three-prong pitchfork that was propped next to him against the trailer. It was his only weapon, but it would be enough. No one would blame him for protecting his property, even if a boy was hurt by it. Or perhaps not just hurt. The boy had wild hair, coarse features, and cheap clothing. A poverty child, Hans saw. Someone no parent cared much for, if there even were parents. Probably unloved, cast off, feral. Hans could focus half a lifetime of disappointment, pain, and abuse from others on this one unneeded boy. Who would ever know?

      The intensity of Hans’s desire for blood vengeance made his heart thump. A long-dormant warmth came to his face. So strong, so profoundly vicious was the desire that it took Hans aback. He was surprised to find himself already on his feet, using the pitchfork, tines upward, as a staff, and on course to head off the boy. Hans had to struggle with dizziness to remain aware of what he was doing. It was almost as if the boy were drawing him, compelling him to his vengeance.

      Junior halted in the middle of the turnaround. The old man approached, dragging one leg over the dirt, jabbing the pitchfork handle in the ground and pulling himself forward. His face was twisted in an odd way. Junior had no experience in reading human expressions. A normal person, however, would have recognized the conflict in the old man’s face, two overwhelming emotions battling for supremacy: utter hatred and terrified shame. To Junior the old man seemed merely mistaken. He was not the one destined for Junior. The old man had done nothing to attract him.

      Junior held up his hand at the old man, reciting from the book, “Better to starve free than be a fat slave.” The man stiffened in place. He blinked as if coming fully awake from a dream. Neither budged.

      On the ridge above the dump Jurgen was finally invited to peck at the dead lizard, although little was left but bone. The strangers hopped backwards to let him in, and he approached ducking his head in thanks. But the strangers did not stick around. With a parting squawk each, they took to the air. Watching them go, Jurgen felt abandoned, and when he looked around for Junior, the boy was not in sight. Jurgen, never wholly alone in his life before, was suddenly forlorn. For a moment he spread his wingtips to the ground and shivered, bleating and rolling his eyes at the sky. Then he pulled himself together at last and tucked in his wings. He hop-flew to the top of the steep slope, casting his eyes over the smoking knolls and dales of the dump.

      There in the clearing below was Junior. Jurgen recognized the brown hair sticking up from Junior’s head like a dark crest. At the same time Jurgen sensed trouble. Another figure was poised near Junior, holding a stick with three sharp points. Between Junior and this other one there was palpable tension. It frightened Jurgen as keenly as had the loneliness. Gathering all his strength, he stepped, bounded up, and flapped as the earth sloped away, then glided downward in a sweeping 270-degree arc. The heads below faced upward.

      Berger spied the shadow as it slid by the boy and looked up to see the crow itself swing around, rear back flaring its wings, and land on the boy’s shoulder. For a second it looked remarkably like a symbol from his past, the black Nazi eagle. He squeezed his eyes shut, then peered between the lashes. Everything was too bright.

      Off. Garish. Spooky. The light, the tousled, ill-featured child before him, the bird. Hans had never seen a crow land on a human, except on a corpse to tear out flesh. This one alighted, ruffled, settled in as if it belonged. It was all too schaurig. Seltsam. Hans struggled for English: infernal.

      The boy said, “He is Jurgen.”

      The crow emitted a two-part squawk-caw that sounded so like the name Jurgen that Hans nearly fumbled the pitchfork while taking a half step backwards.

      “Heigh-ho, hi-ding-do,” said the boy, beaming hideously at the bird.

      “Junior,” the bird replied.

      To the old man the boy said, “I am Junior.”

      Hans was now thoroughly fuddled and alarmed. Though there was no overt threat from the boy, or even a hint of taunting, he felt the urge to run. Run in any way that he could manage, however painful and perilous. But at the height of this panic, just when he was about to give in to it, the boy’s stomach gurgled loudly, protractedly, like the very last water in a bathtub as the drain sucks it down.

      Hans relaxed.

      The orphan was hungry. Of course he was! That was why he had come to the dump. That was why he was on his way to break into the shack. Scavenging. A empty-headed orphan, a gleaner at his dump. Han’s intense hatred and shame abruptly dissipated, although not the encounter’s surreal mood.

      Hesitantly, Hans beckoned to the boy with his free hand. He pointed at his card table. “I have food, child,” he said.

      Junior

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