“My father’s dead,” Dan said. “I’ll be in charge of the group, but my uncle’ll be looking in on ’em, too.”
“How old are you, son?”
“Almost eighteen.”
“Seventeen, in other words.”
“Yes sir.”
“Yes sir.” The sergeant shook his head. “Well, I guess that’s between you and the army.” He checked Dan’s name off. “Best, T.... Feder, D. . . . Fentzel, W....”
L.C. pulled the sacks down off the trailer, which was standing on the turnrow. The Germans waited together in a loose group, not saying a word. Every now and then they’d glance at the far end of the field, as if trying to estimate the distance from turnrow to turnrow.
One of them was taller than all the rest by several inches, but his ears were so tiny, they looked like they belonged on a six-year-old. His hollowed-out cheeks might’ve made him appear haunted if he hadn’t been teetering on the verge of laughter since the moment he walked through the gates. The only other one who stood out in any way was a blond guy who would’ve been handsome but for the deep purple stain covering the right side of his neck and most of his cheek.
“You wear the sack like this,” Dan said, feeling foolish because the sergeant had told him that no one in the detachment spoke English. He looped the strap over his head, allowing it to rest on his shoulder. “The sack drags along behind you.” He took a few steps to demonstrate, then turned and nodded at L.C., who began distributing the sacks.
All of the prisoners put them on correctly except the tall one with little ears, who worked the loop down around his waist.
Dan tapped himself on the shoulder. “Like this.”
Chuckling silently, the tall prisoner just shook his head.
“All right,” Dan said, “suit yourself.”
He gripped a lock of cotton, pulled it loose, transferred it to his left hand and dropped it in his sack even as his right hand reached for another boll. “You use both hands, like that,” he said. “You need to drop the cotton in the sack without looking back. Otherwise, it’ll take you all day to pick a row, and you’ll get a bad crick in your neck, too.” He held his right hand up so they could see he’d bound his fingertips with white adhesive tape. “The burrs’ll tear your fingers and make ’em bleed unless you tape ’em. I got a roll here y’all can use. And one other thing: your back’ll hurt like the devil from all the stooping.”
L.C. laughed. “Shit, Dan,” he said. “If it was me, I believe I’d try to tell ’em something positive.”
“Yeah?” Dan said. He looked at the Germans, then gestured at the sky. “Well, sometimes it rains. And when it does, y’all can stay at the prison.”
They set out into the field, Dan and L.C. flanked on either side by four of the POWs. The guy with the stain on his face was trying to pull the bolls off and then separate the cotton from them, and he kept getting stuck. Once, when he pricked himself badly, he put his finger in his mouth to suck it, and the prisoner with the funny ears laughed and said something in German that made a couple of the others laugh, too.
“That cat back yonder looks like he’s having a hard time,” L.C. said.
Dropping his sack, Dan stepped across a couple rows and walked back to where the man’d fallen behind. “Look,” he said. He pulled a boll loose and showed it to the German. “This part of it, the stem? It’s still green. That’s why it’s sticking you. See? Green. I don’t know what that word is in your language.”
The German shaded his eyes and looked ahead toward the others; then he stepped closer. “Grün,” he whispered.
Taken aback, Dan said, “What?”
The prisoner smiled. Sweat was streaming down his discolored face and onto his neck, soaking the front of his shirt. Though Dan knew it was silly, he looked a little more closely, to see if the liquid produced by the man’s pores might not be purple, too.
“Grün,” the prisoner whispered again. “Almost same word in your language and their.”
TEN
KIMBALL HAD drawn his first breath somewhere in California, and he seemed to believe this conferred a mark of distinction—for which, from time to time, he felt the need to offer an apology. “Dad and I were down in L.A. that weekend,” he was saying while he drove. “L.A., by the way, isn’t as you probably imagine it. Hollywood’s Hollywood, and Beverly’s Beverly, but Pasadena’s Pasadena and no rose at all. What I’m saying is this shit about California being the Golden State’s only partly true. It’s a little bit golden—I’d be the last to deny it—but don’t kid yourself: it’s mostly made of copper.” Sometimes he sounded as though he feared that once the war ended, Marty and his relatives would load up the jalopy and head for the Imperial Valley, in which case he didn’t want their disillusionment on his conscience.
There were days when Marty felt like leveling the Lee-Enfield and spraying his brains all over whatever field they were driving past at that moment. What prevented him was the realization that Kimball would never see the results, whereas he would have to.
While Kimball ran his mouth as if it were an entry in the Belmont Stakes, Marty stared at the countryside. Tin cans, most of them bereft of their labels, littered the ditches, and the road signs were rusted and full of bullet holes. Some of the tenant shacks that’d had folks in them two years ago were abandoned now, their roofs falling in, floor joists collapsed. You could drive for miles without seeing a single windowpane intact.
Ever since he’d gotten home, he’d been feeling like the whole world was in a state of rot and decay, and he kept smelling odors that reminded him of rancid meat. He’d lie on his cot every night, doing his best not to think about smells, or trying to think of nice ones—the scent of honeysuckle, say, or perfume. But when he finally got all the stink out of his nostrils and fell asleep, the dreams would start. They always involved naked bodies, or at least parts of naked bodies. Sometimes the parts looked as if they’d come off not a person but a statue, because they were hard and smooth and white as chalk. Once, he’d dreamed that he saw his buddy Raymond’s head and torso protruding from a pile of pale arms, legs, buttocks and shoulders. None of the other parts looked like they belonged to Raymond, but in that kind of jumble, you couldn’t say for sure.
Last night in his dream, he’d reached out to fondle a woman’s breast, but the second he touched her flesh, his hand went right through it, into her heart and out her shoulder blade, and then her body caved in beneath his weight, both of them dissolving into white dust. He woke up soaking wet, and his sweat stank like death.
Up ahead, near a bend in the road, seven or eight prisoners were in the field, their cotton sacks dragging along behind them. The land was worked by a man named Ed Mitchell, who farmed on the Sixteenth Section and still plowed with mules.
Kimball pulled the scout car to the shoulder. Mitchell was out in the field himself, dragging a sack, followed by his wife and three black kids with their mother. He looked up, saw the car and dropped his sack.
Marty climbed out, but Kimball said, “All this dust has got my hay fever in overdrive.” He withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and polished his nose. “I’ll just wait right here.”
Marty jumped the ditch and walked over to Mitchell, who grinned shyly, displaying two rows of grayish teeth as oddly canted as old gravestones. “Boy,” he said, “I don’t know whether to shake your hand or salute you.”
“A handshake’ll do,” Marty said, and they shook. “Them Jerries been behaving?”
“They ain’t bad. Not atall.” Mitchell pulled out a tin of Blood Hound snuff. “Want some?”
“Believe I’ll pass, but much obliged.”
Mitchell took a pinch, put it in his mouth and stuck the tin back in his pocket. “I been listening, trying to see if I can understand anything they say, but I can’t puzzle it out. Don’t sound like nothing I ever heard.”
“Any of ’em pick a hundred pounds yet?”
“That’n over yonder.” He pointed a long, skinny finger at a chunky young man
with rosy cheeks, who, Marty had noticed, was surprisingly agile in the soccer matches they sometimes played after supper. “That little devil weighed up nearly two eighty yesterday,” Mitchell said. “And hadn’t never seen a cotton stalk till this time last week.” He shook his head. “It’s a damn shame to be so far from home, no older’n he is. He’s a good-natured boy, too.”
The sensation Marty had been experiencing lately—that something in his chest was dissolving, moving from one state to another, from solid to viscous liquid—came on strongly. When would it stop? When he turned into a puddle on the side of the road? “It probably ain’t all that long,” he said, “since he was pumping bullets into some other good-natured boys.”
“Yeah, but if he done that, I bet it was because they made him.”
“Mr. Mitchell, can’t nobody make somebody kill somebody else. If you do it, you do it. If you don’t, you don’t. Two fingers can’t pull the same trigger.”
For a moment or two, a wall of woods on the horizon absorbed Mitchell’s attention. He studied it with wonder, as if the trees had sprung up recently and caught him unawares. “You ain’t seen old Danny boy, have you?” he finally asked.
“Yes sir. Saw him the day I got back.”
“Reckon you heard about his daddy.”
“Yes sir.”
Mitchell pursed his lips. “Sad story.”
“Why you reckon he did it?”
“Well, there’s them that says this—and there’s them that says that.”
“What do you say?”
“I don’t say nothing, because it ain’t nothing I know a thing about.”
“If you knew anything, would you say it?”
“Well,” Mitchell said, “I can’t say as I would.”
Understanding that for the time being he’d just heard Ed Mitchell’s last word on that or any other subject, Marty asked him to let them know if any problems developed, told him good-bye, then went back and climbed into the scout car.
As he and Kimball drove past Dan’s house later that afternoon, he checked to see if Shirley Timms might be in the yard or on the porch, but she wasn’t.
He’d spotted her downtown the day after he got back. He’d been standing before the magazine rack in the Piggly Wiggly, staring down at the very spot where he used to sit chewing bubble gum and reading Marvel Comics, and when he finally looked up, she was just going by on the other side of the plate-glass window. She’d aged, he could tell, but was still a pretty woman.
One day when he was twelve or thirteen, he’d been out in the pasture behind the Timms house with Dan, hitting fly balls, and his friend had jammed a pitch in on his knuckles, the seams tearing the skin off in three or four places. Mrs. Timms bathed his knuckles in some kind of salty solution, then held a cold cloth pressed against them for several minutes, and while doing that she said he had nice hands. “Some folks would say too nice for a young man. But if you ask me, every man ought to have hands like these.”
If she noticed the flame that lit his cheeks, she never let on. She waited till he quit bleeding; then she painted the skinned areas with Methylate, applied a bandage and suggested he run along. For a good while afterwards, he kept wishing he could call her by her first name, rather than having to say Mrs. Timms. And he couldn’t be around Dan’s father, whom he’d always liked, without feeling vaguely resentful.
Mr. Timms never picked up on the resentment. He grinned at Marty when they met on the street, slapping his back and asking how football practice was coming, wondering if Loring would ever figure out how to beat Indianola. Folks considered Jimmy Del Timms a little unusual, mostly because it didn’t seem to worry him that he’d never made much money, but everybody respected him. He’d won the Distinguished Service Cross during the First War, been wounded twice and cooped up for six weeks in some underground prison.
He always had a smile ready up until a couple years ago. He certainly hadn’t been smiling the last time they’d crossed paths, one Saturday in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. His shirtfront was unevenly buttoned, his hair uncombed, and his khaki pants had dirt caked on both knees, as if he’d lately been kneeling in a mud hole. “Let me have a word with you,” he said.
It occurred to Marty that he might want him to talk to his father or grandfather and help secure a loan. By then, the Timms place was failing, and everybody knew it.
But Jimmy Del Timms didn’t want to borrow anything. Instead, he wanted to give something—namely, advice—and as they sat in the cab of his pickup that morning, two days before Marty was to leave for the induction center, he offered it, staring through the windshield the entire time at the redbrick wall of the grocery store.
“Don’t never volunteer for nothing, Marty. There’s two other words mean the same thing as volunteer. One word’s fool. The other one’s corpse. You’ll know I’m wrong the day you see a general officer volunteer—volunteer himself, I mean. Then you can say Jimmy Del Timms was a lying son of a bitch. Send me a postcard from wherever you’re at, and I’ll gladly write back and own up.
“Probably there ain’t no way to get around fighting it. Never is. There’s better and worse in the world—I ain’t one to deny it—but a bullet can’t tell the difference and a shell don’t give a shit. Somewhere in Berlin, there’s a gold-hearted German, but to me right now, he ain’t fit to piss on. That’s a goddamn shame, or call it whatever you take a notion to.
“So where can you run to, where can you hide? A boy like you ain’t no cotton-eyed joe that can skulk around the rear and clean latrines. You’re tall, you got a military chin and you’ll look good when they line you up and point you toward the Krauts and kick you in the ass. Just make sure when they put their boot up your butt, it comes out with shit on the toe.”
Marty had a lot to do before he went to Jackson, was already scared to death and didn’t want to hear any more. Telling Mr. Timms he needed to go, he climbed out of the truck and started to walk away. But unlike Billy Barsotti—who’d swaggered around town the week after he enlisted, running his mouth about the horrors he’d wreak on the Japs or the Germans just as soon as he got a chance—he knew perfectly well there was a possibility he’d never return, just as Billy Barsotti would not return, having died on the Yorktown at Midway. And if he failed to come back, Jimmy Del Timms might not remember much about him except that he hadn’t felt like listening the last time they met.
He turned and walked back to the truck. Dan’s father was still sitting there staring at the wall, but at least he’d quit talking.
“Mr. Timms? If I write to you, will you write me back?”
“You won’t write, Marty.”
“Yes sir, I will. I promise.”
“Naw, son.” He stuck his hand out the window, and Marty took it, careful not to look him in the eye, because he knew that whatever he saw there would only scare him worse. “You may send me a card with your name on it, and it may be in your handwriting,” Jimmy Del Timms said. “But it won’t be you that wrote it.”
The same pickup truck they’d sat in that morning—a couple years older, with a few more nicks on its fenders—was parked on the turnrow near a green cotton trailer. The yellow rolling store stood on the side of the road, and Marty could see Dan moving around inside, straightening up.
“You aim to get out here?” he asked Kimball.
He laughed. “That’s funny. Where I come from, you don’t aim anything but a gun.”
“Yeah? You ever aimed one?”
“What?”
“You ever aimed a gun?”
“During basic, I—”
“I ain’t talking about basic. I’m talking about aiming a gun at somebody with an intent to squeeze the trigger.”
“I told you, my dad pulled strings. Yours must’ve, too, or else you wouldn’t be here right now.”
“My daddy didn’t pull shit.” He hopped out of the scout car, jerked the rifle from its boot and experienced a moment of intense satisfaction when Kimball’s eyes doubled in size and his mouth dro
pped open in the shape of an egg. “Tell you what— I’ll just stay out here and pick cotton and let one of them Afrika Korps fuckers ride back to town with you. How’s that sound?” Slinging the rifle onto his shoulder, he started for the school bus.
Dan stepped out, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “Man, I took a sneezing fit about the time I crossed that little bridge over Choctaw Creek this morning and like to run right in the water.”
“Has everybody in the world but me got trouble with their nose?”
“I sure do.”
“You reckon Choctaw Creek’s deep enough to drown in?”
“Could be. Why?”
Marty turned and nodded back at the scout car, where Kimball was climbing out, stepping carefully to avoid stirring up dust.
“He in charge of you, or you in charge of him?”
“Ain’t neither one of us in charge of nobody, including ourselves. You got a lesson or two to learn, pal.”
“You in charge of them Germans, ain’t you?”
“Nominally.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know, but the fellow I heard say it was always getting laid.”
Kimball straggled up, then reached out to shake hands with Dan. “Name’s Kimball,” he said. “I’m from California.”
While he explained what Dan could expect in basic training, Marty let his eyes scan the field. One of the prisoners, the tallest, had pulled his sack off, and it was lying on the ground at his feet. He did a rapid set of knee bends, then began bobbing up and down in a series of toe touches.
“What’s that lanky bastard up to?” Marty asked.
“He’ll do it every once in a while,” Dan said. “Keeps at it for a few minutes, then puts the sack on and goes back to work.”
The prisoner with the disfigured face was picking toward them, not far away, and he looked determined to avoid breaking a sweat. He’d study a boll for a moment or two before reaching for it, and after pulling the fiber free, he’d hold it to his nose and sniff it. “Him over there,” Marty said, pointing, “the one with the fucked-up face, he ever give you a hard time?”
Prisoners of War Page 5
