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The first Volkswagen anybody remembered seeing in Fort Stockton arrived on a Thursday afternoon in 1952, although for several years afterward there remained disagreement over whether it had actually arrived or merely been blown in from somewhere west of town.

It came east on Highway 290 making a determined little mechanical noise that suggested a sewing machine had swallowed a coffee can full of bolts. The automobile was brown, round, astonishingly small and possessed of an appearance that caused people to assume, incorrectly, that they were looking at the front of it no matter which direction it happened to be traveling.

The driver continued through town until he reached the Lucky Lady Lounge, where he pulled to the curb and switched off the engine.

The resulting silence attracted almost as much attention as the car.

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Three cowhands standing outside the Lucky Lady studied it. One walked around to the back, found no engine where he expected one, then walked around to the front and found no engine there either.

“What is it?” his companion asked.

“Foreign.”

“How can you tell?”

“Nothing’s where it’s supposed to be.”

This satisfied all three men.

The driver’s door opened and a tall, thin man unfolded himself from the automobile. He appeared to be somewhere in his late thirties, although the face suggested considerably more mileage than the rest of him. His dark hair was thinning at the temples. He wore gray trousers, a white shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows, suspenders and shoes that had once been expensive enough to resent what West Texas dust was doing to them.

He closed the door, looked back at the little brown automobile and sighed.

Then he went inside.

The Lucky Lady in those days was still several renovations away from becoming the institution it would eventually become. The bar was dark, the beer was cold, the ceiling fans were mostly decorative and the men’s room contained a handwritten sign asking patrons not to kick the plumbing because management had already tried that.

Hank was behind the bar.

The stranger sat on a stool.

“Beer,” he said.

Hank heard the accent immediately.

“What kind?”

The stranger considered the question.

“Cold.”

Hank nodded.

That was an acceptable brand in Fort Stockton.

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The man drank the first beer quickly and ordered another. The second took longer. During the third he began looking less like somebody who had been driving across Texas and more like somebody recovering from it.

By the fourth, he finally noticed that most of the men in the Lucky Lady had been looking through the front window at his automobile.

One of the cowhands pointed outside.

“That yours?”

The stranger turned on his stool.

“Ja.”

“What is it?”

“A Volkswagen.”

Nobody reacted.

He tried again.

“Volkswagen.”

Still nothing.

“It means people’s car.”

A ranch hand named Virgil Culpepper looked through the window.

“How many people?”

The German stared at him.

Virgil nodded toward the Volkswagen.

“How many people does it take to make it a car?”

The stranger smiled for the first time.

It was not much of a smile, but it was enough.

“Four people can ride.”

“At the same time?”

“Ja.”

That drew several men closer.

The German reached for his beer.

“My name is Otto von Liptinschtien.”

Hank stopped wiping the bar.

“Say that again.”

“Otto von Liptinschtien.”

Hank considered the possibilities.

“Otto it is.”

Otto raised his glass.

“Otto it is.”

Outside sat the strangest automobile Fort Stockton had yet encountered. Its split rear windows looked vaguely like spectacles. The body was finished in Medium Brown, although West Texas sunlight gave it several additional shades depending upon where you stood. It rode on sixteen-inch body-colored steel wheels with bright hubcaps and narrow tires. There were rubber-covered running boards, little vent windows, a Talbot mirror mounted on the left side and semaphore turn signals that emerged from the body when Otto intended to change direction.

The interior was upholstered in beige cloth with brown piping. There were two individual front seats, a rear bench, square-weave carpeting, a mohair headliner and two gloveboxes, which struck Virgil as excessive storage for a car apparently too small to carry anything worth putting away.

The steering wheel was a large two-spoke affair Germans called the Batwing. The speedometer went to 120 kilometers per hour, a number that sounded extremely impressive until Otto explained kilometers.

The odometer showed about seventy-two thousand of them.

Forty-five thousand miles.

Most remarkable was the engine.

It displaced 1,131 cubic centimeters and produced twenty-four horsepower.

When Otto revealed this, a silence fell over the bar.

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“Twenty-four?” somebody asked.

“Ja.”

“Total?”

Otto nodded.

A rancher at the far end lowered his beer.

“My tractor’s got thirty-eight.”

“Congratulations.”

“What happens if you turn on the air conditioner?”

“There is no air conditioner.”

The rancher thought about that.

“Probably wise.”

Otto ordered a fifth beer.

By then somebody had gone outside and returned with the news that the engine was in the back.

This caused another migration to the window.

“The engine’s behind you?” Virgil asked.

“Ja.”

“Why?”

Otto looked at him.

“Because if it were in front, it would not be in back.”

Virgil stared for a moment, then smiled.

“I like this German.”

Otto explained the four-speed transmission. It had no synchronizers. Shifting properly required a little patience, a little skill and an understanding that machinery had opinions.

“You must double-clutch sometimes.”

“Every time?”

“If you wish not to hear expensive noises.”

Someone asked how fast it would go.

Otto took another drink.

“Perhaps sixty miles per hour.”

“Downhill?”

“That helps.”

“With a tailwind?”

“That also helps.”

“What about uphill?”

Otto looked into his beer.

“We do not discuss uphill.”

The men laughed.

Otto did too.

The fifth beer did something the first four had not. It loosened whatever knot had been holding the German together since he walked through the door.

Hank asked where he had come from.

“California.”

“Before that?”

Otto looked at him.

“Germany.”

There was nothing remarkable about the answer. Plenty of Europeans had come to America after the war. But 1952 was not very far removed from 1945, and Germany was still a word that could change the temperature of a room.

A man near the end of the bar asked the question everybody else had decided not to.

“You fight?”

Otto stopped with the glass halfway to his mouth.

“Ja.”

The Lucky Lady became quieter.

Otto shook his head.

“What’d you serve on?”

“Navy.”

For several seconds Otto said nothing.

Then he looked toward the window, where his little Volkswagen sat in the afternoon sun.

“Unterseeboot.”

Nobody understood.

“U-boat,” he said.

That they understood.

A few men shifted on their stools.

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One had served in the Pacific. Another had a brother who never came home from Europe. Hank himself had spent enough of the war around men in uniform to know that seven years was not enough time to make every memory historical.

“Army?”

Otto seemed to understand that too.

“I was not officer,” he said quietly. “I was machinist. Engine room.”

Nobody asked which boat.

Maybe that was luck.

Maybe it was manners.

Maybe everybody in the room understood there were some questions a man ought to be allowed to answer only if he wanted to.

Otto finished his beer.

“You Americans,” he said, “you saw pictures. Newsreels. German U-boats. Very powerful. Very dangerous.”

A few men nodded.

Otto gave a small, humorless laugh.

“Very terrible place to live.”

He asked Hank for another beer but did not drink it immediately.

Instead, he began talking.

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A Type VII U-boat, he explained, was not what most people imagined when they thought of a submarine. It was really a surface vessel that could disappear underwater for a while when circumstances required it. Most of the time it traveled on the surface, running diesel engines and charging batteries. Underwater it ran on electric motors, slowly and carefully, because every hour submerged used up the electricity that eventually had to be replaced.

“So you came back up,” Hank said.

“You must.”

“Even if somebody’s waiting?”

Otto looked at him.

“Especially then it is unpleasant.”

The inside of the boat was barely large enough for the machinery, torpedoes and provisions, never mind the fifty men expected to live among them.

“You could not walk past another man,” Otto said. “You turn sideways. He turns sideways. You decide which of you is thinner.”

Virgil nodded.

“Like the men’s room here.”

Hank pointed at him.

“Our men’s room has a window.”

“Then,” Otto said, “it is luxury.”

That got a laugh, including one from Otto.

But the laugh did not last.

The first days of a patrol were crowded with food. Sausages hung wherever they could be hung. Bread occupied spaces intended for men. Vegetables appeared in corners, passageways and bunks. There was food everywhere because there was nowhere else to put it.

At first, Otto said, they ate well.

Then the fresh food disappeared.

The bread went stale.

The vegetables went bad.

The sausages ran out.

After a couple of weeks came the tins.

Then more tins.

Then tins that tasted remarkably similar to the tins before them.

Fresh water was for drinking and machinery, not bathing. A man might wash his face. Anything more ambitious was considered extravagance.

“Eight weeks?” somebody asked.

“Sometimes.”

“Without a bath?”

“Ja.”

The men at the Lucky Lady contemplated this.

These were cowhands, roughnecks and ranchers. None possessed an exaggerated fear of perspiration. Several regarded deodorant as an Eastern affectation.

Eight weeks still impressed them.

“One change of underwear,” Otto said.

Virgil put down his beer.

“Now you’re lying.”

Otto shook his head.

“One.”

“For eight weeks?”

“Ja.”

“Good God.”

“No,” Otto said. “He did not come down there.”

That was the biggest laugh yet.

Even Hank had to turn away.

Otto smiled, but the smile faded as quickly as it had arrived.

The smell, he said, was impossible to explain to anyone who had not experienced it. Diesel fuel seeped from machinery. Batteries gave off their own odors. Dampness lived everywhere. Clothing never completely dried. Men sweated, vomited, coughed and slept in bunks another man had just left.

They called it hot-bunking.

When one sailor went on watch, another crawled into the bed he had vacated.

“Still warm?” Virgil asked.

“Always.”

“That doesn’t sound so bad.”

“It was also wet.”

“Never mind.”

Men developed rashes. Skin infections. Scabies. Their gums suffered when fresh food disappeared. Cuts healed poorly. Salt water and sweat worked into every irritated place.

And always there was the noise.

Engines.

Pumps.

Fans.

Valves.

Men climbing past one another.

Metal expanding.

Metal contracting.

The boat itself groaning under the pressure of the Atlantic.

“You learned every sound,” Otto said. “After weeks, you know them. This pump. That valve. Diesel. Electric motor. Propeller shaft.”

He tapped the bar with one finger.

“And then you hear sound you do not know.”

Nobody interrupted him.

“That is worst sound.”

Above them, Allied destroyers hunted.

The U-boat would dive.

The engines stopped.

Electric motors took over.

Men whispered.

Doors were secured.

Valves closed.

The boat descended into black water where nobody could see what waited above.

Then came sonar.

Otto described the ping.

A simple sound.

One pulse.

Then another.

The men in the Lucky Lady had heard sonar in war movies, where it sounded technological and almost reassuring.

Otto did not describe it that way.

“Each ping means somebody is looking for you.”

He stared at the beer.

“And sometimes they find you.”

Then came the depth charges.

The first explosions might be distant. A dull concussion traveled through the hull and through every man inside it. The next could be closer.

Lights flickered.

Cork insulation shook loose.

Pipes leaked.

Gauges trembled.

Men watched valves and seams and prayed that German engineering had included just a little more strength than the people dropping explosives above them believed it had.

“You cannot run?” Hank asked.

“Very slowly underwater. Maybe three, four knots if trying to stay quiet.”

“And you can’t fight back?”

“Not against destroyer above you.”

“So you sit there.”

“Ja.”

“And wait.”

Otto nodded.

“You wait.”

Nobody in the Lucky Lady said anything for a while.

Otto explained how the war changed.

At first the U-boats had victories. Convoys were vulnerable. Commanders became famous. Newspapers at home celebrated them. Young men volunteered.

The propaganda showed sleek submarines and smiling crews.

It did not show the underwear.

It did not show the sores.

It did not show fifty frightened men sitting beneath the Atlantic listening to propellers overhead.

Then the Allies improved.

Radar.

Sonar.

Escort carriers.

Long-range aircraft.

Better convoy tactics.

More destroyers.

More depth charges.

The Atlantic grew smaller.

By 1943, Otto said, the crews understood the arithmetic.

Boats went out.

Boats did not return.

Friends disappeared.

A bunk that had belonged to someone you knew became empty forever, except nobody on your own boat had room to leave anything empty.

“Did you know your chances?” someone asked.

Otto nodded.

“Of course.”

“How bad?”

Otto looked around the room.

“Very bad.”

He did not give them percentages.

He did not need to.

The men of the U-boat service eventually suffered catastrophic losses. Roughly three out of every four who served would not survive the war.

Otto had.

He seemed almost embarrassed by that.

“My last patrol,” he said, “I was twenty-seven years old. I felt seventy.”

His boat had survived depth charges. Mechanical failures. Aircraft. Storms. Days submerged when every breath seemed borrowed from the next man.

He remembered once sitting on the deck after surfacing at night.

Just sitting.

The Atlantic was calm.

Stars overhead.

Fresh air.

Nobody shooting.

Nobody shouting.

Nobody vomiting.

Nobody sweating into his bunk.

For perhaps ten minutes, Otto said, the world had been beautiful.

Then the watch officer ordered him below.

“I hated him for this.”

Otto smiled faintly.

“Not because he was bad officer. Because I had remembered there was sky.”

That sentence settled over the Lucky Lady.

Even Virgil left it alone.

Otto finally drank the beer Hank had poured for him.

When the war ended, he said, he wanted nothing to do with submarines, uniforms, admirals, governments or any machine into which fifty men could be inserted without sufficient windows.

He eventually made his way to America.

California first.

Work.

A room.

Then citizenship papers underway.

Then the Volkswagen.

“Why that car?” Hank asked.

Otto turned toward the window.

“It is German.”

“So was the submarine.”

“Yes.”

“Seems like you’d have learned.”

Otto laughed.

“This one has windows.”

The tension broke.

Men smiled.

Somebody bought Otto another beer.

The conversation gradually drifted back toward the automobile because automobiles were safer territory than wars, and because men in Fort Stockton could tolerate only so much introspection before somebody had to discuss carburetors.

Otto told them the Volkswagen was air-cooled.

“No radiator?”

“No.”

“No water pump?”

“No.”

“Where’s the fan?”

Otto explained.

“Twenty-four horsepower?”

“Still twenty-four.”

“Four speeds?”

“Ja.”

“None synchronized?”

“Correct.”

Virgil shook his head.

“Germany loses a war and decides to keep suffering voluntarily.”

Otto laughed hard enough to cough.

By then nearly everyone in the Lucky Lady had gone outside at least once to inspect the car. They had discovered the engine beneath the rear deck. They had examined the spare tire in front. They had operated the semaphore turn signals repeatedly until Otto finally asked them to stop before they wore out the future.

One man sat behind the wheel.

Another inspected the little heater.

Virgil climbed into the back seat and immediately climbed out again.

The Volkswagen became less foreign with every beer.

Not larger.

Just less foreign.

Eventually the sun dropped toward the Davis Mountains and Otto decided he needed a room for the night. Hank told him about a motel two blocks away and wisely suggested that the Volkswagen remain exactly where it was until morning.

Otto agreed.

He stood from the stool, steadied himself and looked once more through the window at the little brown car that had carried him across California, Arizona, New Mexico and most of West Texas.

“Good automobile,” he said.

Nobody challenged him.

Not immediately.

Otto thanked Hank. He thanked the men for listening. Then he walked slowly toward the door.

Before leaving, he stopped.

“For many years,” he said, “I do not tell this story.”

Nobody spoke.

“Tonight I tell.”

Hank nodded.

“Sometimes that’s what a bar’s for.”

Otto considered this, then looked around the Lucky Lady.

“That and beer.”

“Mostly beer.”

Otto smiled and stepped outside.

The door closed behind him.

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Through the window, the men watched the former German submariner walk past the Volkswagen without touching it and continue toward the motel.

For several seconds nobody said anything.

It had been quite a story.

War had a way of becoming cleaner with distance. Battles became arrows on maps. Ships became tonnage. Men became statistics. Victories got dates and defeats got explanations.

But somewhere underneath all that were fifty men sharing bunks in a steel tube beneath the Atlantic, listening to someone above them trying to kill them.

One cowhand at the end of the bar finally looked at his friend.

“Tough story.”

His friend nodded.

The cowhand looked through the window at the Volkswagen.

“But I suppose it got him conditioned to drive that car across Texas.”

For two full seconds, the Lucky Lady remained silent.

Then Hank laughed.

Virgil laughed.

The rancher with the thirty-eight-horsepower tractor laughed.

Within moments the entire bar was roaring.

Outside, Otto stopped halfway down the sidewalk.

He turned around.

Through the window he saw them laughing and knew immediately what had happened.

He didn’t know exactly what had been said.

He didn’t need to.

Otto looked at the Volkswagen.

Then back at the Lucky Lady.

He shook his head and continued toward the motel.

The next morning, shortly after eight, he returned.

Half a dozen men were already waiting.

They wanted to see him start it.

Otto climbed behind the Batwing steering wheel, switched on the ignition and brought the 1,131cc flat-four to life.

Twenty-four German horsepower awakened behind him.

The engine chattered industriously.

Virgil leaned through the open window.

“You sure it’ll make El Paso?”

Otto looked at him.

“It made Fort Stockton.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Otto selected first gear.

The gearbox protested.

Virgil smiled.

“Missed it.”

“No synchronizers.”

“Sure.”

Otto tried again.

This time the gear engaged.

He pulled away from the curb.

At the corner, a semaphore indicator popped from the side of the Volkswagen.

Three men pointed at it.

Otto turned onto the highway and accelerated west.

Slowly.

Very slowly.

The brown Volkswagen grew smaller against the road until eventually Fort Stockton swallowed it into the heat shimmer.

For years afterward, whenever somebody claimed to have seen one of the strange little German cars in Pecos County, somebody else would remember Otto von Liptinschtien.

They remembered the submarine.

They remembered the depth charges.

They remembered the stink and the shared bunks and the single change of underwear.

They remembered the twenty-four horsepower.

Mostly, though, they remembered the strange contradiction of a man who had survived one of the most claustrophobic and lethal forms of warfare ever devised, crossed an ocean, started over in a country that had once been his enemy, and then voluntarily purchased an automobile roughly the size of the forward torpedo room.

Years later Volkswagens became common.

Fort Stockton learned about air-cooled engines.

People learned to recognize the unmistakable shape.

Children called them Bugs.

College students bought them.

Young couples drove them.

Mechanics discovered that the engine could be removed remarkably quickly, which immediately caused several Fort Stockton men to distrust it because anything that easy to repair was clearly concealing something.

Eventually somebody even bought one with more than twenty-four horsepower.

By then nobody stared when a Volkswagen came down Dickinson Avenue.

But the first one was different.

The first one had arrived brown and buzzing on a Thursday afternoon in 1952, carrying a German veteran who had spent eight weeks at a time without fresh air and several thousand miles without a synchronized transmission.

Otto had survived both.

And somewhere west of Fort Stockton that morning, with the desert ahead of him and the little flat-four hammering away behind his back, Otto von Liptinschtien shifted into fourth gear.

It went in cleanly.

No grinding.

No protest.

Just a smooth little mechanical click.

After everything else he had lived through, it probably felt like progress.

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