Sample Pages: Vogel Flies South (page 1 of 3)
CHAPTER ONE
I took the train from Berlin to Paris. Between books, I thought of my father. My first memory of him is seeing him standing, wearing a black policeman's uniform. He had just returned from South Korea and he had taken a job with the Tyler police force. He had served in the German army in the second World War, and when he came to the United States, he had joined the United States Army and then went to Korea. He was young then and very thin, much thinner than I am now. I look like my mother's father, taller, darker than my father. My father's family is German. He has pale blue eyes and he laughs easily. I, on the other hand, look like my mother's father, a black Irishman with a hot temper. He married a Scottish woman newly arrived from Edinburgh. He was a plumber by trade.
My second memory of my father is watching him buttoning his shirt and attaching his badge. There were two preforated holes in the shirt for the badge and he snapped the catch and secured it. His gun hung on the corner of the rocker in his bedroom and the windows were open. I was summer. Summer in Tyler, Texas, is hot and muggy. The sprinklers were circling outside and the wasps banged against the screens. In my memory, it is always summer in Tyler.
I sat on the floor, my back against the bed. I loved to watch my father dress. Unlike me or my brother, my father was neat. His shirts were ironed and he always wore an undershirt, even in the summer. He hardly sweated. I thought it was because he was German; he seemed to be from a cooler climate and somehow that always gave him balance.
He tied his tie in a double Windsor, and he carefully combed his hair. He wore his hair short. I had a thick head of hair then, a tumble of curls that could not be controlled. My father liked my hair cut every three weeks, but my mother didn't like the cost and didn't think it was necessary. Instead, I would go months without a cut and my hair would grow thicker: even though I tried to comb it, it was an unruly growth.