Free The Cannibal by John Hawkes

fogged goggles. Herr Snow came upon the scene like a fat indignant
     judge, his face white with rage. He wrenched the weapon from the Baron’s hand and beating
     him without mercy across the shoulders and buttocks, drove him screaming from the grove,
     tiring his thick arm with the work. “You’re a god damn fool,” he told his son.
    Ernie walked in a dark trimmer’s night for a long while and in the
Sportswelt
heard the bees buzzing with a low vicious hum. Since he was a Shylock,
     his face grew tight and bitter and Herr Snow took to keeping a lighted candle by his bed.
     Even asleep, Ernie’s feet jiggled up and down as they had danced in the grove, the bulk of
     the noble crushing swiftly down on him, and in a frenzy Ernie jabbed quicker and quicker at
     the raging white face of his father, fell back weeping beneath the heavy broadsword.
    “Well,” and the words pushed themselves over the end of a wet sausage, “why
     didn’t you take her home yourself? You’ll not get any women just sitting with me.” Ernie
     made a move to leave.
    “Wait. Just let me tell you that once your motherlooked
     at me, there was no other man.” He held the stein like a scepter. “You want to go for
     these,” his hands made awkward expressive movements around his barrel chest. Herman Snow had
     not only used his hands but had made tender love to the silent woman and asked dearly for
     her hand on his knees that were more slender in those days. He thought her sad face more
     radiant than the sun, and worshipped her as only a German could. On the evenings when she
     had a headache he stroked her heavy hair and said,
“Ja, Liebling, ja, Liebling,”
over and over a hundred times in his softest voice. They had taken a trip on a canal barge
     owned by his brother. Herman had propped her in the stern on coarse pillows, away from the
     oil-smeared deck forward and the guttural voices of the crew, and she had looked warmly with
     interest on the passing flat country as if they were sailing on the Nile. Herman gazed into
     her face, held one of the strong hands.
    “A little aggression is needed,” said the old man. Ernie lost his head in
     the stein and remembered the fat Merchant, like Herman, like papa, sprawled out in the alley
     with a string of women behind him and children gorging themselves on attention, sprawled
     like a murdered Archduke, his face in the bile. The hall was finally game, the troops
     screamed and stamped feet, dolls with skirts drawn above pink garters perched on elephant
     knees suggesting the roar of mighty Hannibal. Old Herman made fast excursions into the
     crowd, urging, interested. “Hold her tighter, more beer, more beer,” and returned to the
     stoop-shouldered Ernie with his face alive in enjoyment. Several times Ernie thought he
     could hear Stella’s voice above the howling, and like an assassin under floodlights, he
     shivered.
    “Don’t be such a fearful
Kind,”
said Herman,
     puffing with excitement, “join the chase.” He smiled momentarily at his son above the
     strenuous noise of the orchestra. When he left the table again to encourage a maenadic
     blonde and an old general, Ernie rushed from the prosperous Valhalla.
    Rain filled his eyes with warm blurred vision, filled his outward body with
     the heat of his mind, and running until his breathing filled his ears, he clattered past
     opulent swaying wet branches, past windows opening on endless sleep. “Ernst, Ernst,” the
     summer evening cried and he dashed zig-zag up the broad boulevard, raced to outrun the
     screaming, raced to catch the dog who rode with her away, raced to coincide with Princip in
     Sarajevo. He ran to spend energy, tried to run his own smallness into something large, while
     far in the distance he thought he heard the carriage wheels. If he could spread before her
     the metal of magnificence, if he could strike lightning from the sky, if he could only
     arrest her for one brief moment in the devotion he felt