Basketball Nazis

 

1.

A few weeks after the old couple were gone, Nazis moved into their home.  This isn’t exactly correct.  The phrase “moved into” suggests an orderly process by which the Nazis moved their Nazi-stuff into the home where the elderly people had once lived – that is, an event involving a moving van and burly men lugging davenports up stairs to doors too narrow and, therefore, posing problems in practical geometry, others gingerly carrying boxes full of crockery or stooped to heft thuggishly heavy crates of books.  Nothing of this kind occurred.  One day, the Nazis simply appeared.  No one saw them move anything into the old house and, so, the surmise in the neighborhood was that they were simply residing among the old and dusty furniture, the archaic kitchen equipment, and faded wallpaper that the old folks had left behind.  

The Nazi-house was roomy and, even, had a regal appearance.  It stood among other fine large houses overlooking the boulevard where there was even an grassy island between coming and going lanes.  The building’s front facade was stucco, colored mustard yellow after the manner of certain European palaces that I had seen back in my tourist days.  The door was atop a vanilla swirl of steps that made a semi-circle protruding from the center of the structure and this entry was stopped with a heavy door made from polished dark-red wood.  The door stood within an ornate frame under a stylish pediment, painted green to match the wooden shutters next to the windows.  The house was tall with an unusual brooding cornice like a coiled spring supporting a heavy steep roof shingled in grey slate.  The place was strictly symmetrical with every feature on the front of the house doubled around the axis of the elaborate door and, for some reason, this gave the structure an archaic appearance. Behind the house, we knew that there was a deep backyard planted with tall flame-shaped evergreens for privacy and a lathe bower adorned with flowering vines behind the white picket fence along the alley.  The only asymmetrical feature was the little shed of the garage annexed to side of the home, a cramped, shadowy cubbyhole only large enough for a single car – the old woman had never learned to drive and the house was built just before cars became common in our town.  

I admired the home from the sidewalk on my daily walks with my dog.  Sometimes, I looped through the alleyway.  Often, the old lady would be sitting in the bower where there was a swing hung from rusty chains.  The swing creaked under the old lady.  She used to sit in the flowery arbor, under the buzz of bees, with her daughter who was not quite right in the head.  The old woman spoke softly to her daughter who never said a word in reply – perhaps, she couldn’t speak.  Bees buzzed in the flowers and the air smelled of lilacs. 

2. 

I wanted to tell you that the Nazis “occupied” the home left vacant by the old people.  But the verb “occupied” in the context of this sort of Nazis has a vaguely comical effect that I think I should avoid.  There is nothing funny about Nazis.  

3.

Before we knew they were Nazis, we thought the people who had moved into the house were just ordinary young people, apparently two couples in their early twenties, with, at least, four children.  Their living arrangement was uncertain, perhaps, even to the Nazis themselves: I was never able to determine which woman belonged with which young man and the children, to my eye, looked all alike so that it was impossible (for me at least) to figure out who was father or mother to whom.  The children didn’t seem neglected and, perhaps, some kind of community of women and their kids existed within the household.  

The two boys were well-built.  One of them had shaved his head, or, perhaps, was prematurely bald.  The other had his hair cut in military style so that his ears protruded aggressively.  This man had a sort of spiky mohawk crowning his skull and, also, a blonde duck-tail of longer hair over his neck.  The women might have been sisters.  They were both scrawny with short hair.  During warm weather, the women wore next to nothing but this wasn’t attractive, at least to me, because there was nothing much to see.  

The Nazi household had a passel of cars, one for each adult, but, it seemed, that, at least, two of the vehicles were always ailing, up on blocks along the curb line or expired in puddles of greasy red and black fluids.  The cars were never parked in the driveway because the first renovation made by the Nazis was to install a big white backboard and basketball hoop over the eaves on their garage so that they could play there.  When the weather was fine (and, even, when it rained), the two Nazi boys spent hours on their driveway shooting baskets and, sometimes, playing pick-up games with other young people in the neighborhood.

Evidently things were not always harmonious in the Nazi family.  About once a month, the cops were called to mediate some kind of domestic dispute.  Sometimes, tow trucks came as well to yank disabled cars away so that they could be repaired.  People gossiped that the old folks who had once lived in the house would have disapproved of the situation.  But I’m not so sure – most probably the Nazis were somehow related to the elderly people previously living in the house.  The Nazis didn’t seem to be employed – or, perhaps, they had jobs that weren’t like the work done by ordinary people – because they always seemed to be around the place, quarreling with the skinny women, tending to their shrubbery and flowers, and, of course, endlessly shooting hoops.  It wasn’t clear how they were able to pay for the privilege in living in such a fine home and there was, I suppose, a hint of envy in our disapprobation for their casual and negligent lifestyle.   

4.

I was walking my old, ailing Labrador on the day a hearse pulled up to the mustard yellow home on the boulevard.  This was before the Nazis took over the place.  Some cars not familiar to me were parked along the curb.  There was something about the way that the cars had been parked, some slight disarray in their orientation with respect to the edge of the road, that suggested a crisis in  the home.  People stood on the sidewalk at the street corner a block away muttering to one another and furtively looking down the road to the house.  A police car was parked there as well next to the sleek grey hearse in the driveway.  

The people on the sidewalk were waiting for the body to be removed from the home.  I thought this was vulgar and continued on my way.  Only a few weeks before, the old man who lived in the house had gone into a nursing home.  He was crippled with red glaring eyes.

  

I think one of the Nazi girls was standing in the little knot of people on the street corner.  Although my memory is inexact, I recall a skinny young woman with a tattoo on her bare shoulder, scarcely dressed, holding by the hand a blonde urchin wearing dirty-looking pajamas.  I recall a peculiar, proprietary glint to her eye.

5. 

Some Black people lived in the house next to the Nazis.  This home was smaller and less ostentatious than the Nazi-house and, also, surrounded by derelict cars. 

As much as I hate to say it, the Black family was ridiculously Black.  The people in the household were like cartoon caricatures of African-Americans with comically exaggerated features: frizzy hair and broad lips, nervous, powerful-looking folks who spoke with an accent almost impenetrable to us.  I hasten to observe that most of us are not racists, although, sometimes, we act that way.  

At first, the Nazis seemed friendly with the Black family.  The Nazis and the African-Americans had basketball in common and, at all hours of the day and late into night, they shot hoops together.  Some coolers full of beer were dragged out next to the driveway and everyone got drunk.  The skinny blonde women, smoking cigarettes, sat on the vanilla-colored steps with their skinny toddlers.

For the first few weeks, the Nazis competed with the tall Black men in games involving shooting baskets from a notional free-throw line scribbled on the asphalt driveway in pink chalk.  Then, the games evolved into one-on-one competitions.  This play, then, led to actual basketball games played by opposing teams.  Team sports are, not exactly, the root of all evil but close to it.  The Nazis recruited a couple of friends and the Black dudes invited their cousins to fill out their team.  

When Nazis play basketball, needless to say, there are lots of fouls.  Elbows got thrown and people were pushed to the asphalt, scraping their knees and forearms.  Of course, there was no ref.  By the end of the first game, hostility between the Black kids and the Nazis was simmering.  In the middle of the second game, a fight erupted.  The cops had to be called.  The police said that they didn’t want any more “race riots” and that the two households should stay apart.  The Black family didn’t have a basketball hoop and there was nowhere on their property to erect such a thing.  So they moved their game over to a public park with a basketball court.  The police didn’t like Black people gathering together in public places and, so, one rainy night, when no one was around, the basketball hoop was quietly taken down and removed to an unknown location.  

6.

At the time of the basketball fight, no one knew that the families living in the old people’s house were Nazis.  This was discovered later. 

In warm weather, the garage door next to the mustard-yellow house was left open.  The door had been pulled down during the experiment in interracial sport to keep the basketball from going out of bounds inside the cluttered garage.  As a result the yellow garage door was somewhat scuffed where the ball had bounced against it.  After the riotous game, the Nazis left the garage door open, possibly because the garage door was unsightly due to the marks made by the basketball or, perhaps, for another more disquieting reason. 

Someone urged me to look closely at the inside of the garage when I was strolling past it with my dog. Of course, I had often glanced in that direction before and never noticed anything unseemly.  But I followed this instruction and, observing more carefully, noticed that there was a card table against the inside wall of the garage stacked with all sorts of car parts, oil pans, and tools.  On the wall behind the table, several strollers of the kind that can be folded for travel were hanging on hooks next to a couple of cracked child car-seats from which steel buckles were dangling in a vaguely sinister way.  A little farther back in the garage, in the shadow where the sunlight didn’t enter, I saw a swath of red fabric.  This was a banner emblazoned with an enormous black swastika.  The flag was placed in a way as to be inconspicuous from the sidewalk until you actually noticed the thing.  Then, it was unmistakable and, obviously, an affront.  You couldn’t say that the Nazis were exactly displaying the banner, but they had positioned it to be evident if you knew where to look and had the temerity to eyeball the inside of their garage.  It seemed to be a sort of warning.

We took counsel among the other neighbors as to what should be done about the swastika.  Ultimately, we concluded that it was none of our business.          

7.

In our town, there are three species of Nazis.  First, there are heritage Nazis.  These are mostly middle-aged men with German-sounding last names who have developed an unseemly interest in the European theater of World War Two.  Heritage Nazis collect firearms and Hitler-era regalia.  Some of them believe in the prophecies of Nostradamus and that the Earth is hollow.  Photographs of corpses in concentration camps, they say, show the victims of a typhoid epidemic.  Second, there jailhouse Nazis.  They have unsightly swastika tattoos on their wrists or the back of their hands.  Jailhouse Nazis are members of the Aryan Brotherhood who joined the group in jail as protection against Black gang members.  This kind of Nazi is poorly educated, without much in the way of ideology, and prone to conversion to religious sects in which people speak in tongues or handle snakes.  Finally, there are apocalypse Nazis, true believers who proclaim that the “Storm” (as they call it) is imminent.  When the Jews and Catholics and the brown and black people become truly dominant, then, a White Fuehrer will arise again and the world will end in a cross-fire hurricane of blood, fire and steel. 

Of course, it’s important to know what kind of Nazi you are dealing with.  

When mobs came to tear down our statue of the general mounted on his horse in our memorial park, all three kinds of Nazis appeared to oppose them.  As our recent President said, there were very bad people on both sides.   

8.

The ball was thrown too hard and it ricocheted down off the backboard and across the sidewalk, knocking my dog off her feet.  The basketball rolled onto the boulevard.  Ordinarily, I would have stepped to the side and stooped to pick it up, but, to be honest, I was upset about the incident.  I glared at the basketball Nazis who had been playing “Horse” I suppose and they looked down at me, twisting their faces into menacing, inexpressive masks.  

Then, the Nazi with the big ears and bald head waved to me.  “Sorry, mister,” he said.  He loped down the driveway and, onto the street, ignoring an oncoming car that had to slow for him as he picked up the ball.  “Is your dog okay?” he asked.  “I think so,” I said.  “Well, the ball kinda got away from me,” the bald Nazi said.  The Nazi with the Mohawk standing under the backboard nodded.  I pointed at the banner hanging down next to the fractured car-seats.  “Nice Hakenkreuz”, I said.  “What is that?” the bald Nazi asked  “Hooken-croys?” the Nazi with the Mohawk repeated.  “The mark on that flag, up there, in your garage,” I replied.

“Would you like to look at it?” the bald Nazi asked.

“Sure, if you’ll let me.”

I led my dog up the blacktop and, then, under the big full moon of the backboard, scuffed I could see with lunar lakes and craters made by impacts with the ball.  

“Is it authentic?” I asked.

“Oh yes,” the Mohawk Nazi said.  “My grandpa liberated it from the Germans.”

“It’s a Party Headquarters banner,” the bald Nazi said.  “I looked it up on the internet.  The real thing. Original fabric and grommets.”

“So this must be party headquarters,” I said.

“Not exactly,” the Mohawk Nazi replied, but he winked at me.

“It’s interesting,” I told him.

“We have some other collector’s items,” the bald Nazi said.  “Would you like to see them?”

“Of course.”

The bald Nazi led me through the garage.  It smelled of spilt oil and gasoline.  A door led into the back yard.  The fence was overgrown with thistles and spiky-looking golden rod.  One of the girls in a skimpy bathing suit was reclining on an aluminum-frame lawn chair with a baby beside her crawling in the grass.  The baby’s head was bubbly with red mosquito bites.  An inflatable child’s pool with a hose hanging over its edge sat in the center of the lawn.  The bald Nazi asked the girl if there was any lemonade left.  I averted my eyes because the young woman was mostly naked.  She went into the house and the Nazi led me to the chair-swing in the bower.  The chain-links groaned as we sat down and I was worried that the whole arbor might collapse under our weight.  

The Nazi asked me what I thought about Hitler.

“Good and bad, I guess.”

“Well, we need a leader like that today,” he said.

“I’m not so sure about that.”

“Yes, you are, dude,” he said.  “I can tell.”  

The nearly naked girl brought us tall glasses of lemonade.  It was very weak, almost tasteless.  Bees roamed in the lilacs and roses enshrouding the bower.

The Nazi was polite.  He asked me about my dog. 

“I would like to get a dog,” the Nazi said.  He mentioned something about a pit-bull.

I said: “If you want my advice, don’t get a dog like that if you have small children.”

“I think they’re very intelligent,” he replied.  “Easily trained.  And good for security.”

The Nazi asked me if I had attended the protest at the statue of the general on horseback.  

“I observed from a distance,” I said.

“Good man,” the Nazi told me.

I drank the cold no-flavor lemonade.  My dog yawned and stretched out on the grass.  The Nazi said that he wanted to show me something.  “I’ll be back in a jif,” he said.

He went into the house.  The baby began to cry and the mostly naked girl put the kid on her hip and followed the bald Nazi into the house.  

I sat in the bower, moving slightly on the swing.  I recalled the many times that I had walked down the alley in fine weather, my dog sniffing along the fence-line, and the old woman seated among the flowers talking softly to her mentally retarded daughter.  I wondered if the old woman was in heaven.  What had happened to the daughter?

The Nazi came across the dry, sun-scorched lawn.  For a moment, his reflection shone in the flat plane of shallow water in the child’s swimming pool.

He held a thick black book.  “Are your hands clean?” he asked.  I looked down at my thumbs and knuckles: “I think so.”

The bald Nazi handed me the book.  It was a German edition of Mein Kampf.  The printing date was 1937.  

“German,” I said.  

“Me-inn Kamp,” he told me.

I corrected his pronunciation.  I recalled a poem that we had been forced to memorize in High School German.  It’s strange how things like that remain with you, even when you’re an old man.

“Ich weiss nicht was soll es bedeuten dass ich so traurig bin,” I recited, “Ein Maerchen aus alter Zeit dass kommt nicht aus der Sinn...”

“Beautiful,” the Nazi said.  “Such a beautiful language.”

“It is,” I told him.

“Is that the Fuehrer?” the Nazi asked.

“No, it’s a poem, the Lorelei.” 

“Beautiful,” the Nazi said.  “I wish I knew German.”

“It’s a good language,” I said.

“Can you translate this book?”

“No need,” I said.  “I’m sure there are plenty of English translations.”

“I would like to read it in the original,” the Nazi told me.

He said that he hadn’t taken any languages in High School.  He was more of a Vo-Tech kind of student.  After High School, he had enlisted in the Navy and served on submarines.  “Nukes,” he said.  He told me that he was assigned the galley.  “If you want to know what is really good,” he said, “you should cook some French fries and eat them with mayonnaise.  I know it sounds weird but it’s really good.”

“I’ll have to try it,” I said.

The bald Nazi told me that he had brought the German book with him to a rally, not in our town, but at the State Capitol.  Although his intentions were peaceful, the patriots with him were set upon by thugs wearing all black clothing with black bandanas wrapped around their faces.  

“It was just a scuffle, but I will tell you that some of those Communists got a pretty good spanking.”  

He told me that one of the Communist thugs snatched the German book out of his hands and, then, tossed it to and fro among the others in his mob.  “It was like they were playing keep-away from me,” he said.  “And you can imagine how I felt.  To see the book up in the air, flying here and there with its pages all open and ruffling in the wind.”

The Communists darted away, carrying the book to a fountain on the mall.  Then, one of them pitched the book into the water filling marble basin.  

“It sunk right there, below the water,” the Nazi said.  “I ran as fast as I could, knocking a couple of them down and, then, waded into the fountain.  The book was sunk straight to the bottom.”

I looked down at the book that lay across my lap.  “Do you see?” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“There’s not a single water-mark on the book,” the bald Nazi said.  “It was submerged in the bottom of the fountain for at least a minute, a minute and a half, and when I pulled it out of the water, it was drenched.  The water was freezing cold and it just rolled off the book.”

“There’s no sign of damage,” I said.

“No damage at all and, yet, I tell you the book was under the water for a good two minutes.”

“Strange,” I said.

“Some kind of miracle,” the Nazi replied.

The bald Nazi told me that he had gone all around the world on submarines carrying nuclear warheads.  He had seen and met every kind of person.  

“I will tell you this,” he said.  “I’m a lover.  I’m not a hater.  I love every kind of race and creed on earth.  I’ve seen them all.  But the White race is the best.  I mean that’s just objectively true.”

I nodded.  

There was no more lemonade in my glass.  The ice cubes had melted also.  I said that I should be on my way.  The old dog moaned a little when I pulled on her leash to go.

“Come over any time, man,” the bald Nazi told me.  “We can talk politics.”

“I will,” I said.  But I didn’t walk by his house any more.  I adjusted my route to go another way when I walked my dog.    

9.

I didn’t expect the Nazis to be enthusiastic about Christmas lights but, in fact, they made quite a display at their place.  Perhaps, their intent was anti-Semitic, hallowing the birth of Jesus Christ to the shame of the Jews.  Or, maybe, they were simply responding to the exuberance of the lights at their next-door neighbor’s house.  The African-Americans set up streamers of silver LED lights on their eaves, bright spikes like icicles.  They outlined their door in candy-cane colored bulbs and set up a twelve-foot high Santa Claus inflated by a fan at its base.  Not to be outdone, the Nazis placed a manger on their front lawn and trimmed every window frame in the array on their symmetrical facade with red, green, and blue light.  They planted a projector hidden under a shrub near the sidewalk to splash white snowflake lights on the front of their house.  The snowflakes whirled in circles so that it made you dizzy to look them.  A manger with life-size plastic figures, bloated by air blown into them, stood beside the vanilla half-ellipse of steps.  A sheet of glacial blue “falling rain” lights was draped over the front door, glistening there like a show of meteors.  From a speaker set behind the billowing manger, the song “O Holy Night!” played on a continuous loop.  Snaky tangles of electrical cord were gathered next to the steps 

Taken together, the two houses made quite a spectacle and, during the week before Christmas, people drove into town from the country to see the display.  When I passed by, early one morning, a couple days before Christmas, I saw the illumined balloons deflated in the clear, cold dawn light.  Santa lay on his side, punctured it seemed, a smear of red and white across the snow smeared on the lawn where the Black people lived.  The manger with its pink larval Christ child was also limp, figures sprawled on the grey frozen grass between dirty veins of snow.  I supposed that the Christmas carol was still playing, although I didn’t roll down my window to listen.  The debris in front of the two houses looked like something left over after a battle: fallen banners and plumage, smashed bodies stirring listlessly in the frigid wind.  At first, I was shocked; it looked as if the Nazis and the Black people had fought one another, at last to the death, with the result that their Christmas decorations were mutually destroyed.  But, in fact, it was just economy – shutting off the blower fans for the cold light of day.  And, that night, there was a sleet storm and the inflatables remained plastered to the lawn, adhered in place under a glaze of ice.  

But the bulbs and LED lights remained in place and illumined the houses after dark and the hymn still sounded in the night.  Three days after Christmas, the Black family took down its lights.  When I passed, I saw them perched on ladders on their slippery lawn.  The Nazis kept up their display.  

On the coldest night of the year, a week into January, the home where the basketball Nazis lived burned.  I suspected that the fire was retribution, but the newspaper said that the electrical circuits in the old home were simply overloaded and shorted out into the wall boards so that whole place took fire.  The boulevard was blocked by fire trucks and cop cars with their red spinning lights spearing the darkness. 

The old mustard-yellow house must have been dry as tinder inside because it burned with a huge billowy flame and, when the slate roof sagged heavily and, then, crashed like an avalanche into the home, a flock of bright sparks took flight like burning sparrows, some of the embers alighting on the roof next door.  A beam of bright water blasted the corner of that house and knocked out the glass in some of the windows.  Fire belched out of the front door at the Nazi house.  The Nazi boys and their children stood across the street, huddled together behind the barricade of firetrucks and squad cars.  As always, the two young women were scarcely dressed, wearing wispy undergarments and barefoot in the snow.  Several elderly ladies came from their houses with blankets and covered the girls up.  The Nazis watched their home burn as if it were a bonfire.  Flames are fascinating, decorative, wild and bright.   

10.

After the fire, the Nazis were gone.  A lot of people came to gawk at the burned house.  The impressive front door had fallen outward and lay in a bright spatter of broken glass.  Some of the mustard-yellow facade remained upright, only partly veiling a wilderness of blackened spars and tilted joists scaled with char.  I thought it vulgar to stare and so hurried by the house on the morning after the blaze.  I thought I heard the hymn “O Holy Night!” playing faintly, but that must have been my imagination – surely there was no electrical power in the ruins.  The garage was collapsed into a blackened brittle-looking heap crowned by the white disk of the basketball backboard.

A day later, after interest in the fire had faded a little, I walked along the alley behind the house.  The ragged, burned structure was all bearded in ice and the firefighting vehicles had crushed the picket fence.  I stumbled over the smashed lathe where the bower had been.  My dog tugged at the leash and wanted to inspect the ruins, although as soon as I approached, she tucked her tail between her legs and flattened her ears against her skull.  A dead pit bull covered with oozing scabrous burns lay on its side near the back door.  – Das hat die Lorelei getan, I thought.  

A book lay atop a glistening puddle of ice.  The wind was idly turning the pages of the book.  I could see that it was the black volume that the bald Nazi had shown me the summer before.  Miraculously, the book seemed untouched by the devastation around it.  It wasn’t imprinted neither with burn marks nor traces of the floods of water that had put out the fire.  I thought I should pick up the book and rescue it from the ruin.  But, then, it seemed to me that it would be better if I didn’t touch the thing.