The Best American Essays 2013 Page 9

  One snowy night several months later, I was hitchhiking through Amherst, Massachusetts, and a carful of students from Hampshire College picked me up and let me stay with them. In the morning they talked me into applying to the college. I was accepted, and that provided a thin strip of pride on which to stand while I made contact with my family. My mother was happy to pay for school. Being sixteen and in college is an easier thing to talk about. It was a solution that worked for both of us and looked like redemption but didn’t last. The dissonance between my emotional world and the one around me was still too great, and soon I left again, but in a more sanctioned way. I hitchhiked in Europe and settled in Vienna for a few years. I lived among artists in the Lower East Side squats. These are narratives we know. Unlike those of other young women on the road, my story was now recognizable.

  When I got home from West Virginia, a letter from Rhoades was waiting. It said he would see me if I promised never to say that I had seen him or what had passed between us. It was just the kind of promise a sexual predator or child molester would try to extract. He also wanted $500. I wrote him back and told him that journalistic standards wouldn’t allow me to pay for interviews. I expected that to be the end of it, but I got another letter. Young was right. Rhoades liked to think of himself as an “expert,” and now Rhoades suggested he be paid as one. But an expert in what, I thought—killing? At the bottom of the yellow legal paper, scrawled in all caps, he wrote, “IT WASN’T ME!!!” I looked at the letter. He may be right, but certainly not because he’s innocent. I imagined for a moment flying to Illinois. I go through the paperwork, get fingerprinted and led through a channel of air-locked doors into a room with him. He’s there with his neatly pressed shirt and colossal arrogance. We do the interview, but I don’t take notes. It doesn’t matter what he says. After all, it’s just going to be his word against mine. And who’s going to believe him? That’s where my fantasy ends, in a game of “Who Is Credible Now?”

  The same week that I got the letter from Rhoades, the senior officer from the Berkeley County sheriff’s department who had been fishing returned. He said that no girls had ever been found in a dumpster at the Martinsburg, West Virginia, truck stop, and I had no reason not to believe him.

  One story Debra Davis told still haunts me. She was on a trip with her husband, Bob, the last she ever took in his truck. They were heading west on I-10 and stopped somewhere in Arizona at a busy truck stop. By the restaurant door was a young woman with a baby, trying to get a ride. Debra said she looked about eighteen or nineteen and desperate. Debra wanted to give her money or do something. Her own sister had been on the street, and she was overwhelmed by the woman at the door and didn’t want to just walk away. Rhoades saw what Debra was looking at. He came around behind her and grabbed her shoulders. He turned her slowly toward the girl and pointed. “You see that, Debbie,” he whispered in her ear. “She’s one of the invisible people.”

  MATTHEW VOLLMER

  Keeper of the Flame

  FROM New England Review

  ON THANKSGIVING MY FATHER asked me if I wanted to visit the Nazi. That’s what my father—a dentist to whom the Nazi had entrusted the care of his teeth—called him, what he’d always called him: “The Nazi.” As in: “Did I tell you who came into the office this week? The Nazi.” And: “Did I tell you that I talked to the Nazi?” And: “You’ll never guess what the Nazi told me.” And so on.

  The Nazi to whom my father referred was not a real Nazi—and, as far as I knew, my father didn’t call him “the Nazi” to his face. Neither had this so-called Nazi served under Hitler in World War II. Back then, the Nazi my father knew had yet to be born. And though my father had a pretty good idea of where this Nazi’s sympathies might lie, all my father said about him was that he had money, that he’d written a book about the Wewelsburg castle in southern Germany (the one that Heinrich Himmler had attempted to restore); that he’d built a castle of his own in a remote location in the mountains of southwestern North Carolina; that he, like my father, had an affinity for snakes, had fed white mice to copperheads he’d kept in terrariums; that he’d taken to leashing one of these serpents and walking it as one would a dog; and, finally, that his curatorial impulses and an affection for artifacts once belonging to members of the Third Reich had led him to build a private underground museum in the belly of the aforementioned fortress—a vault of ominous artifacts that my father convinced me I needed to see.

  I’d spent a good part of my childhood visiting my father’s dental patients, many of whom lived deep in the mountains, in houses that might or might not have electricity or phones. During one visit I’d watched a man yank intestines from a slaughtered hog. I’d been towed, with my sister, down a gravel road on a wooden sled roped to an ox. I’d gathered eggs in shit-strewn barns, run cobs of corn through grinders that worked by cranking a handle and spinning a wheel so that the kernels poured out of one rusted chute and naked cobs out of another. I’d been bucked from the back of a horse; I’d been charged—no kidding—by a yak. I’d sat on a quilted bed in the front room of a house owned by a man who, at sixty-some years of age, had not only installed his first phone but had also been receiving, as a result, vulgar calls from a woman who lived down the road, words so filthy he claimed he wouldn’t repeat them.

  But I had never before visited the Nazi.

  After my father and I had driven out of town, on a narrow two-lane road winding past ramshackle houses and trailers using sheets for window curtains, over narrow bridges spanning rushing streams and onto a gravel road where we passed multiple signs announcing that we were now on private property and that potential trespassers would be shot; after we’d reached the heavy-duty chain-link fence running the length of this property; after my father had dialed the Nazi’s number on his cell phone; and after the front gate glided backward on lubed wheels—we drove inside and the house came into view. The Nazi’s house did, in fact, resemble a castle. It wasn’t exactly Neuschwanstein, but it had rock walls and turrets and wooden doors with wrought iron hinges and arched windows. It had a fountain and an impressive series of stairs leading to the front door. The whole thing looked like something a government—though certainly not our own—had erected centuries before.

  We left the truck. I had the feeling we were being watched, that our movements were being recorded—that somewhere inside the castle, a bank of TVs flickered, monitoring different zones of the Nazi’s estate.

  My father grabbed me by the arm. “See that house over there?” he said. He pointed to the mountain opposite the one where we were standing. Glass glinted through the trees. I could make out a roof.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “He bought that.”

  “Who bought it?”

  My father said the Nazi’s name.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Privacy,” he said.

  “Privacy?” I repeated. “What does that mean?”

  My father shrugged. “I guess he doesn’t want anyone seeing what he does over here.”

  I frowned. “What does he do?” I said.

  My father made a face and shrugged.

  I could not think about the Nazi, could not reflect upon him and his ilk, without also thinking about other people with similar ideas who had retreated to secret places in our mountains. While these mountains—which belong, in name, to the Blue Ridge—might have lacked the remote and indifferent grandeur of, say, the Rockies, they had other notable qualities, and precisely because they exist in a temperate region and are well watered by frequent rains, they have produced a semi-penetrable jungle of trees and shrubs—more varieties of plants, in fact, than anywhere else on the continent, home to all manner of wild creatures, from bear and deer and grouse to ticks, serpents, wasps, and skinks. So dense are these forests during the warmer months, so thick and verdant, that in many wild places a human who wishes to pass through them must do so either by crawling on his or her belly or by peeling back layers of briars and limbs and leaves.

  It mak
es sense that these mountains have been—for centuries—a place for people who want to hide from the rest of the world, people who believe in boundaries and in drawing imaginary lines along a piece of earth and not only calling it theirs but believing firmly in the right to defend that piece of earth, and convinced that anyone who crossed that boundary had committed a crime that justified the firing of bullets or buckshot in someone’s general direction. This is not to say that all or even most people in the mountains will shoot trespassers, or that mountain people are not, on the whole, friendly or kind or generous or selfless, but it is to say that there are many people who seek out remote coves and hollows and other secret places with the explicit intent to do things that are not done within the sightlines of others, and that these mountains have had a reputation for attracting people with strange ideas. Take Nord Davis, for instance—the leader of a Christian militia who not only believed that the Holocaust was a fabrication devised in part to create sympathy for the Jews but who also believed, thanks to a rather acrobatic interpretation of the book of Genesis, that Adam and Eve were white-skinned and blond-haired, that dark-skinned people were animals without souls, and that Jews were the literal spawn of Satan, who had possessed one of these dark-skinned people and beguiled (or, in Davis’s interpretation, impregnated) Eve. Mr. Davis, who is now dead, also apparently took credit for ending the Vietnam War and ran a 130-acre military training facility not far—as the crow flies, anyway—from where the Nazi’s castle now stands.

  The Nazi’s garage door—like the front gate—opened automatically, by some unseen force, and after it slowly retracted itself, my father and I entered. Seconds later another door opened, and the man himself—the Nazi—appeared. I’d been nursing the image of a slight man with pale skin: a malnourished weakling with a head of dark and greasy hair. But this guy was not small. He was tall and hearty, with a head of dirty blond locks cut in a quasi bowl cut, with long bangs that flapped around when he moved. In a lineup of possible Nazis I would not have chosen this man—a fact that probably reveals my own naive, preconceived notions about Nazis and their possible permutations. His wife, on the other hand, looked like she might’ve been created in a laboratory funded by the Third Reich: her hair—so blond it was nearly white—fell in a luminous sheet down her back. She was tall and wide-eyed, her lips crimson. She introduced and immediately excused herself, and our tour began.

  The interior of the Nazi’s home could not have been described as regal, but it was without a doubt immaculate. Not only had it recently—if not immediately prior to our entering—been cleaned, but it was also completely clutter-free. There were no stacks of bills or mail on the counter, no dish of change, no stray pens, no stacks of coasters, no knickknacks on the windowsills, no stained-glass butterflies affixed to the windowpane above the kitchen sink. No family photographs—no photographs of any kind—hung from the walls. Papers and pictures and notes and calendars had not been affixed via magnets to the fridge, whose door remained utterly blank. Empty tabletops—devoid even of napkin holders or salt and pepper shakers—gleamed. The place felt sanitized, sterile. Here, at the home of the Nazi, a person seemed unlikely to catch any sort of disease. Rooms had been reduced to the bare minimum. Stuff—if stuff existed here—lived behind closed doors.

  I’d expected the Nazi to be effusive, perhaps even charismatic. I’d been told on several occasions that the Nazi had enjoyed seeing photographs my father displayed in his dental office of my towheaded, fair-skinned son, and that he, the Nazi, had jokingly and not-so-jokingly congratulated my father for laying claim to a grandchild with such striking Aryan features. Today, though, the Nazi didn’t mention my son, made no inquiries concerning my family or me. The Nazi was not, it appeared, interested in small talk. He knew why we’d come, understood the nature of our visit, which had less to do with the sharing of personal information and more to do with viewing “the collection.” And so, immediately after exchanging lukewarm pleasantries, the Nazi led us out of the kitchen.

  In the living room, as we stood upon plush white carpet, the Nazi cleared his throat and began pointing to various objects as he spoke—an oil painting of a Prussian king, an innocent-looking set of china that, upon closer inspection, revealed swastikas orbiting the rims, and a mantel into which some apparently profound sentence—in German—had been engraved. Meanwhile, the Nazi was giving a history lesson, explaining how the founders of the Third Reich had taken it upon themselves to do away with the Catholic Church and ignite a renaissance, to pay homage to their true heritage, which was pagan.

  I tried to listen, to take it all in, so I could remember it later—I had a movie camera in my pocket, a digital HD recorder the size of a cell phone, but I was too timid to ask if I could take pictures and too chicken to attempt to capture footage surreptitiously. I kept zoning out, trying to figure out how I could ask my most burning question, which was, basically, “So, like, are you really a Nazi?” Only I couldn’t think of a polite way to word it. Also, I knew that the artifacts in the living room were just the tip of the iceberg, and I wanted him to hurry up and get to the good stuff, which, as my father had told me before we arrived, was downstairs.

  In order to go down, we had to go up. That is, we had to climb to the second floor, to a balcony overlooking the living room. Up there, the Nazi opened an impressive wooden door—all the doors in the house were arched and hinged with wrought iron—to reveal yet another door, this one constructed from what appeared to be bomb-shelter-grade metal, and upon whose surface the words Danger: High Voltage had been emblazoned. The Nazi unlocked and then swung open this hatchlike door, and we descended a steep spiral staircase, passing near the top a recessed statue: a sculpted head of a soldier wearing an SS helmet. Down, down, down we went, around and around we wound, so far in fact I could feel a significant change in temperature. Once we’d reached the bottom, the Nazi unlocked an iron gate and swung it open.

  Until I’d entered the Nazi’s house, the only genuine Third Reich artifact I’d seen had been the one I owned, the one my grandfather, who’d served as a major during World War II, had given to me. I could no longer remember the occasion—my grandfather was long dead and now buried in the family plot in the woods behind my parents’ house—but somehow and under some circumstance—perhaps he was cleaning out a drawer in my presence—he had given me a button, upon which the Totenkopf, or death’s-head skull, had been engraved, and which, as the story went, my grandfather had plucked from the field jacket of a dead Nazi. Now the button lived, as it had for the past couple of decades, in a black plastic box with crimson felt lining, a box that once housed a Remington Micro-Screen Rechargeable Electric Razor. Now the box held a bunch of coins that my missionary relatives had brought back from foreign countries, a smooth stone that I’d picked up from the Mauthausen concentration camp, which I’d visited with my family as a teenager, on a trip through Europe, and the Totenkopf button. Over the years I had opened the box and I had held the button in my hand, and I had imagined my grandfather yanking it off the coat in which the dead body lay, and I had thought to myself, This came from a real Nazi. It wasn’t just a button. It was a relic from an evil empire—the guys who, in Raiders of the Lost Ark, had gotten their faces melted off because they wanted to see something they shouldn’t have. They had—in Hollywood and real life—gone too far, wanted far too much.

  The Nazi flipped a switch. The resultant clack reverberated. Light flooded the room, revealing a cathedral-like space with thirty-foot-high ceilings and a marble floor bearing the image of a sun wheel, which, if you aren’t familiar with sun wheels, resembles a swastika whose ends appear to have been lovingly bashed in to give the thing, overall, a more rounded shape.

  At one end of the room hung a massive tapestry bearing the image of the Tree of Life, which had, the Nazi claimed, as a pre-Christian pagan symbol been important to the founding members of the Third Reich. Beneath this, a pulpitlike table displayed two wooden boxes, each bearing lightning-shaped S’s. These boxes, the Nazi
had explained, had been made especially to hold copies of Mein Kampf and served as gifts for SS officers on their wedding days: a token of the Führer’s appreciation.

  Elsewhere: glass shelves of Hitler Youth daggers, polished and dangerously sharp; an SS officer’s ring, into which had been carved a grinning Totenkopf; ceramic platters embossed with Runic symbols; a hand-carved wooden plate depicting the Wewelsburg Castle, where Himmler hoped to reconvene the Arthurian Knights of the Round Table; a chair from the same castle’s great hall, leather bolted to its back and seat; a set of silver, whose handles had been engraved with Sig runes, and which had purportedly come from the Eagle’s Nest—the alpine chalet presented to Hitler on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday.

  My father glanced over his shoulder at me and emitted a wheeze-burst of laughter—an exhalation intended to express disbelief. He had led me to an underground vault containing the artifacts of the last century’s most brutal regime, and he now seemed downright giddy. I, on the other hand, didn’t know what to think or what to say. I found it difficult to process what any of this meant. That is, I didn’t know why it was here, how it had gotten from where it had been made to where it was now. Were we in the presence of some kind of monster? Or had he created this space for stuff he deemed historically significant, buried it in a moisture-controlled vault because he fancied himself one of history’s unbiased curators? Was this the product of an obsessive and sympathetic mind, one which interpreted the mainstream records of history as having been unduly cruel to the Third Reich, which had been a movement, in his eyes, about nationalism, about ancestors, about revering and honoring the past? I didn’t know. And, honestly, I was afraid to ask.