Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  “No. He’s actually the only one you can talk to.”

  “How’s that? You been studying German?”

  “I reckon I picked up a few words in the last week,” Dan said. “But you don’t have to know German to talk to him.”

  Kimball raised his forearm, holding his wrist much too close to Marty’s face. “Almost sixteen hundred, Stark. We better get our asses back.”

  Marty shoved his hand aside. “What the hell you mean, you don’t have to know German?”

  The force of the question seemed to take Dan by surprise, and for an instant Marty wondered what his friend might’ve heard. He wouldn’t put it past his father to get in touch with Eastland, to see what he could find out, and the senator would get answers. And while his dad would hardly broadcast the results of that inquiry, Mrs. Bivens might—if it came up in a tender, postcoital moment.

  “Well,” Dan said, “that fellow with the purple face can speak English.”

  On the twelfth of July, just east of Gela, someone spoke English well enough to lure Raymond Sample and two lost paratroopers from the Eighty-second into a grove of olive trees. Whoever it was had cried Jesus and Sweet Mary, mother of God, without the trace of an accent, calling for Berea, Ohio, to open its arms and welcome him home. Then he fired a burst from a Schmeisser that sounded like an outboard motor starting up. And for a moment, lying there spread-eagled, Marty convinced himself he was back on the lake near Loring with Dan and his daddy and the no-good uncle, who carried whiskey in a quart jar and caught nothing but a gar, which Jimmy Del Timms insisted a true sportsman would just knock in the head.

  ELEVEN

  THIS’LL BE your jack panel,” Miss Edna Boudreau said, “and it’s brand-new. You won’t have any problem with the plugs getting stuck like they do in the older ones.” She glanced over her shoulder at Cassie Pickett, who sat in a tall swivel chair, wearing a pair of headphones. “Cassie, will you kindly move over so I can get close enough to show Shirley the procedures?”

  Cassie, who looked like she’d eaten her last full meal back in the Roaring Twenties, cast an appraisive glance at Miss Edna’s hips, as if to suggest that they, not the position of her chair, were the problem. She rose, though, and pulled the chair over a few inches.

  “When a call comes in,” Miss Edna told Shirley, “you’ll see a blinking light beside the number. At that point, what you do is plug your headset into the jack and then you just say ‘Operator’ . . . pause . . . ‘May I help you?’ Got it?”

  “I believe so.”

  “Let me hear you say it.”

  Shirley felt like a first grader. Indeed, the building housing the telephone company had served as Loring’s first school-house, back in the 1880s. It had heavy oak floors and low water-stained ceilings; it was as if the odor of anxious little bodies still hung in the air. “This is the operator,” she said. “May I help you?”

  “Not ‘This is the operator.’ Just ‘Operator’ . . . pause . . . ‘May I help you?’ Would you like to know why?”

  Surely Miss Edna’s talents were being misused, Shirley decided: she belonged in the military. But she didn’t want to be rude. “Sure,” she said. “Why?”

  When Miss Edna propped her fists on her hips, her belly pushed at the buttons on her blouse. “You may not realize it, but when you say ‘This . . . is . . . the’—well, on average, it’ll take you close to two seconds. Now, two seconds might not seem like much, especially if you’ve got only one light blinking, but when three or four folks on your panel are trying to place calls at the same time, the seconds add up.” She pointed at a pair of jacks in the lower left-hand corner. “These two, numbers five four four and five four six, are the lines to Camp Loring. You don’t want them waiting to reach the War Department because you’re saying ‘This . . . is . . . the.’”

  “If time’s so precious,” Shirley said, “shouldn’t I eliminate the pause, too?”

  She could tell, from looking at the woman’s face, that Miss Edna didn’t have much hope for her. She hadn’t wanted to hire Shirley to begin with and had given in only because Fred Harney, who ran the local branch of Southern Bell, had ordered her to, and that was because Alvin promised him extra gas coupons for his Stutz Bearcat, which he liked to race on the levee every weekend. Shirley also knew all too well why Miss Edna hadn’t wanted her around. If she’d committed half the sins folks like Miss Edna thought, she probably would have been content to lie down and die, figuring she’d lived her life, and two or three others, to the fullest.

  “The pause,” Miss Edna said, “is just a small touch of nicety, which is only right and proper. Some people might disagree with what I’m about to say, Shirley, but I believe that especially in times like these, it’s important to preserve at least a little decorum.”

  That afternoon, Cassie Pickett poked her in the ribs. When Shirley looked over, Cassie pulled off her headset and gestured for Shirley to take it. Shirley slipped hers off and put Cassie’s on.

  She recognized one voice right away, but the other took a little longer.

  “Why don’t you come over tonight?” Vera Bivens said. “You haven’t been over here in so long, and I get so lonesome, always waiting.”

  A little hemming and hawing on the other end, a word or two about work and bad weather.

  “You remember how you found me last time?” Vera said.

  There was a long silence. Then Kent Stark said, “Well, I reckon I might could come over.”

  “You might could?” Vera said, sounding a good bit like a kitten.

  “Yeah, I think I can. I think I can.”

  And Vera said, “You’re the little engine that could, Kent.”

  TWELVE

  A SHORT, neat-looking fellow who always wore clean clothes, even in the field, and liked to keep a good hat, John Burns lived over on the Young place. He’d never been out of Loring County, except for one time when old Walter Young carried him over to Sunflower to pick up a tractor.

  The Saturday-night dances were held at Burns’s. Four or five men would seine bait before sunup, then get out there on the banks of Lake Loring with those cane poles and catch as many fish as they could before they had to hit the field. That evening, the women would fry the fish in iron skillets over an open fire, using last winter’s hog lard. They’d make corn bread, too, and mix up some cabbage slaw. They did the cooking out behind the house, so that old man Young wouldn’t see them if he happened to take a notion to drive down the road.

  “White folks know the nigger’s got to eat,” John Burns always said, “but they hates to see him having a good time doing it.” About the only thing they disliked more than seeing colored people having a good time, he claimed, was hearing them having it. So he never let the music start till people had eaten their fill and downed a few drinks, and that was past the white folks’ bedtime.

  L.C. was sitting in the dark on an overturned washtub, a tin plate in his lap and a tin cup in his hand, a warm feeling spreading from his stomach into his arms and legs. He’d eaten a mess of fish already and meant to eat more, so he stood up and walked past the fire.

  They’d pulled the back door off Burns’s cabin, propping it on a couple of spindle oil drums and laying out the food. He picked at a piece of fish, pulling a hunk loose to see whether or not the flesh had a yellow tinge.

  “What you doing, L.C, looking for the hook?” The woman who’d spoken, a big dark-skinned lady named Doll, had her arm around John Burns, who was a good six or seven inches shorter than she was.

  “He ain’t looking for no fishhook,” Burns said. “He trying to see is that one of them gasper gools.”

  “Scared of ’em, is you, honey?”

  The flesh was white and flaky, most likely striped bass, and L.C. dropped it onto his plate. “Ain’t a question of being scared of ’em,” he said. “I just don’t like the taste.” What he didn’t say, because Burns would have laughed at him, was that he didn’t believe in catching gasper gools to begin with. When a boat passed over them i
n shallow water, they’d rub those little horny knots on their foreheads together, making gooling sounds, like they were trying to tell you something.

  He often felt like animals or trees were speaking to him, sometimes even a place. When he was little, old folks’d talked about something bad happening in a patch of low ground out by Payne’s Deadening, sixty or seventy years ago. Nobody ever told him exactly what it was, but he’d been over there many times, and though he’d never seen anybody, hadn’t seen anything alive except a few hundred mosquitoes, he never felt alone when he stood on that ground.

  Wherever he was, he couldn’t help wondering who’d stood there before him. Once, when he was a little boy and they lived on the Stancill place, his momma’d found him barefoot in a cotton field, staring down at his feet as they disappeared in the rich black gumbo; he felt as if he’d grown right out of the dirt itself, as if the land, rather than a man whose face he’d never seen, had fathered him, so he asked his momma to name everybody she’d ever noticed picking cotton in that field.

  “Don’t get dreamy,” she scolded. “Folks gone think you just lazy. They don’t know you got nothing to dream with.”

  He had plenty to dream with. What he lacked was the means to turn the dream into a fact. He thought his hands might offer the means, but his feet still seemed like they were stuck in that gumbo. Even if he found some way to pull them loose and set out on Highway 47 north, he wouldn’t make it far before an MP or one of those roving fools from the Office of Civil Defense stopped him. Once that happened, it wouldn’t be any time before they’d discover he didn’t have a draft card and put him in uniform. And he’d be damned if he meant to die like a dog for folks who thought he was a mule.

  He ate another piece of fish and let Doll pour him another sip of bootleg whiskey. After the women cleared the dishes away, Burns and another man lifted the door off the oil drums and laid it flat on the ground. L.C. went off to pee in the bushes. When he returned, he sat down in a ladder-back chair, placed both feet on the door and pulled his guitar out of the cottonseed sack.

  One of the men said, “When you gone learn you some of that bottleneck?”

  “He don’t need no bottleneck,” John Burns said. “This nigger got fifteen fingers.”

  L.C. set the guitar on his left knee, which everybody thought looked funny, but it was the way old Fulsome Carthage had taught him to play. Fulsome had also told him not to wrap his thumb around the top of the fretboard like most folks did. “You wants to keep it flush with the neck,” he’d said, offering a demonstration. He made L.C. clip the nails on his left hand down to nothing, while growing a monstrous one on his picking thumb. He mixed up an awful concoction that smelled strongly of cat piss, said it would strengthen the nail and told L.C. to drink it three times a week. When he’d asked what was in it, Fulsome said, “It best behoove you not to know.”

  He began to pick a rolling riff, not knowing where he was going or how he meant to get there, stomping down hard on that weather-beaten door, closing his eyes and thinking about feet you couldn’t tell from the dirt they stood on, a man growing right up out of the ground.

  “I mean!” a woman yelled.

  “Sing about the bush and the bower,” John Burns said. He used both terms for the place between a woman’s legs, though L.C. had told him bower didn’t cut it, that as far as he was concerned, it sounded like something off a battleship. Burns claimed that was all right, since you entered it a man and came out destroyed. But L.C. had more on his mind than bush and bower.

  go down to the deadenin’

  see the cottonmouth crawl

  see the Devil with a cane pole

  on his shoulder y’all

  spirit fish be talkin’

  say it time to go

  Devil say he gone catch you

  ain’t gone see no She-car-go

  “How come y’allways studying Chicago?” Burns hollered, shaking his rear right in L.C.’s face. “Up there, your young ass’ll turn to black ice.”

  man say peoples fightin’

  got to do your turn

  day that bullet find you

  you gone have to face that worm

  death tap you on the shoulder

  done too late to move your feet

  this train bound for Hades

  it time you take a seat

  John Burns was twirling his shirt in the air as he and Doll were banging hips. Over near the outhouse, a pair of bodies writhed and squirmed together, and Cooter Sam, from the Moreli place, was doing the Lucky Duck, waddling with his woman to the woodpile and back.

  Catching L.C.’s eye, John shook his head. “You gets less out of being a nigger,” he said, “than anybody I knows.”

  In the morning, he lay on a thin pallet, with a pounding headache, listening to John and Doll, no more than a few feet away, in the bed across the room. The floor sounded like it could cave in at any minute.

  Forty-nine percent of L.C. wanted to crawl over to the door and disappear as fast as he could, but this was an instance of majority rule. Doing his best not to make any noise, he shifted his position, raising his head. Moaning, Doll lay on her back, palms locked around her ankles, while Burns pumped away between her legs. If he’d been engaged in such activity, L.C. would have kept his eyes shut, but Doll’s were wide open and staring straight at him.

  THIRTEEN

  WALKING HOME, hoping not to find his momma there, he passed a church. The parking lot was covered up with pickup trucks and cars. There was even a tractor, a fairly new Oliver, and he wondered which white man it belonged to.

  Brother So-and-So’s truck broke down, he imagined folks would say, but he cares so much for the Lord that he got his whole family on that tractor and brought ’em down to church. With enemies like him, the Devil don’t have a prayer.

  The Devil didn’t have a prayer, not because some redneck drove his tractor to church, but because the Devil didn’t pray. White folks, of course, would never see that. They believed everything had been made in their own image, and since they prayed, it stood to reason the Devil did, too.

  The Devil was in each and every one of them, just as sure as he was in old Adolf Hitler, but the white folks didn’t know it. The Devil had been in that glance that passed between him and Doll, in what he would have done to her, and she to him, if John Burns had wandered off. It wasn’t that different, as far as he could see, from what you did when you pointed a gun at another man’s heart and pulled the trigger. Wanting, you willed yourself to take. One day they called it loving, another day rape.

  When he stepped onto the porch, the floorboards sighed, and in that pitch he heard absence. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, listening. Must have taken herself off to church.

  He stepped inside and, when his eyes adjusted to the darkness, saw her sitting near the woodstove, in her lap the raggedy old black Bible that one of her mistresses had given her. At the sight of it, he knew he ought to have had a lot more fun last night. Because what fun he’d had wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the misery he was about to endure.

  “You know where you gone end up?” she said. “A few miles south, down in the state penitentiary. Just like your no-good daddy.”

  “You never told me my daddy went to jail.”

  “I never told you your daddy went to Hell, neither, but I imagine that where he at now.”

  He walked over and laid his guitar down on his cot, then picked up a box of matches and lit the coal-oil lamp standing on the drink crate that served as his bedside table. He sat down and pulled off his shoes. “Since you ain’t never told me who he was, don’t tell me where he’s at.”

  For a minute, her face lost all expression. When her cheeks went slack like that, you could see how pretty she must’ve been. Nice caramel-colored skin—not too dark, not so light you had to wonder if she was part white. “Don’t you be telling me what to say or not say about that particular nigger. I say what I want.”

  “Yeah, I guess so. Reckon you do what you want,
too. I’m proof of that.”

  She stood, laid the Bible on the table, walked over and drew back her hand.

  “Hit me on the other side,” he said. “I’m still sore on my left cheek from last week.”

  “So split the difference,” she said, and slapped him hard across the bridge of his nose.

  His eyes stung, and blood began to trickle from one nostril. “I ain’t gone end up down south of anywhere,” he said. “I’m gone end up north. And it won’t be no few miles.”

  “North?” she said. “North?” She laughed. “Chicago, Illinois. Right? Detroit, Michigan. Pie in the Sky, Pennsylvania.” Grinning, she shook her head, reached for his hand and, between her thumb and forefinger, pinched a wad of his skin. “ ’Less you get north of this,” she said, “you ain’t going nowhere.”

  FOURTEEN

  SWEE SPATS A NATTER,” Dan said. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and laid it on the floor because the seat was hard and his hip was about to kill him. “You ever heard tell of that?”

  L.C. perched on the drink box, looking down the aisle at the group of sweaty Germans. Since all of the passenger seats had been removed, most of them lay on their backs or leaned against the display cases. The only exception was the tall one who was always doing his calisthenics out in the field. He sat up straight, in the very center of the aisle, hands resting on his knees.

  Dan had no choice but to return them to camp in the rolling store. His mother took the truck to town every day, now that she had a job, and his uncle was over in Greenville, cooking up some deal he said would be even more profitable than the sanitary napkins. He’d promised to get back before quitting time, but he hadn’t made it.