Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  Outside, the streetlights had come on. A brisk wind was blowing in from the west, and looking above the buildings on the far side of the street, he saw a purple mass of clouds. “I wouldn’t mind if it rained tonight,” he said. “We just keep doing the same drills over and over. It don’t amount to much.”

  She walked along beside him, step for step. They weren’t really touching yet, but once or twice her elbow grazed his. He’d thought they never would share a sidewalk again.

  “That’s what you do in the army, isn’t it?” she said. “Just the same things day after day?”

  “Yeah. Till somebody starts shooting, anyway.”

  “Nobody’ll ever shoot at you. The war’ll be over by next summer.”

  “Who told you that?”

  “That’s what everybody’s saying.”

  “Yeah, well, let’s hope everybody’s right,” he said. “What’d you mean—what you said about my momma?” He knew what Shirley thought, of course, but he couldn’t believe she would’ve said anything to Marie.

  “She stopped my mother in Woolworth’s. Not long after we broke up. She really gave her what-for, about me being two-faced and all, and Mother started crying. She told your mother it wasn’t me and it wasn’t her, that it was Daddy that made me break it off. And then your mother—well, she used foul language about Daddy and asked where he was right then, like she meant to go after him, too. When Mother said he was at work, your momma grabbed her arm and stuck her face in Mother’s and asked if she was so G-D sure about that.”

  The shoes Mrs. Lindsey was wearing during the encounter probably cost more than all the clothing his mother owned, but you couldn’t call Shirley Timms a coward. Tomorrow, he might feel a little proud of her, though it wouldn’t do to show it now. “Seems like everybody’s going crazy,” he said. “You probably remember me mentioning L.C.? Now, I’ve known him since I was seven or eight. Me and him’s tromped cotton together, pitched baseballs back and forth for two, three hours at a time. But the other day my wallet went missing, and I’m pretty sure he stole it.”

  “Sooner or later, that’s what they’ll do. You can’t even blame them. None of ’em have any money or ever will. Mother’s been through more housekeepers than I can count, and I don’t even know what the current one’s called.”

  She allowed him to take her hand. And right when things were going the way he wanted them to, some flaw in his makeup—the same flaw, he decided later, that had provoked his remark about L.C. not having a grandfather, or his telling Marty about the prisoner speaking English—made him say, “So, was your daddy at work?”

  Right in front of Delta Jewelers, while the wind whipped her hair, Marie stopped walking and backed away from him, her hands clenched at her sides into tight little fists, until a parking meter halted her retreat. “Oh God,” she said. “Everything Mother said about you was true.”

  “And what was that?” he asked, knowing he wasn’t going to like the answer.

  “Jesus. It really does run in your family.”

  She turned and ran back down the street, then slowed as she neared Kelly’s. Stepping off the curb, she pulled her sweater tightly around herself, strode purposefully across the street and disappeared into the alley between Woolworth’s and the Western Auto.

  Yeah, Dan thought, sticking his hands into his pockets, and plenty of things run through some other families, too.

  EIGHTEEN

  HEADED TOWARD the football field, he nearly bumped into Marty, who darted out of the pool hall with a big bag of popcorn tucked under his arm. You could tell he’d been drinking. His tie had come unknotted, his zipper was partway open and there was a dark stain where he’d spilled beer on his class A’s.

  “You going to drill?” he asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Who’s y’all’s commanding officer?”

  “Captain Hobgood.”

  “Ralph Hobgood? From the Highway Patrol?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He drill y’all in how to write a traffic ticket?”

  He was loud and insistent and thick-tongued, and Dan had never liked talking to anybody in that shape. “We do close order,” he said. “And last month we went to the firing range down at Camp Shelby.”

  “We did all that shit in boot camp,” Marty said, falling in beside him. “It’s completely useless. The one thing you really need to know, they don’t teach that.”

  “And what might that be?”

  As if to reclaim some vestige of dignity, Marty handed Dan the bag of popcorn, then zipped himself up and started knotting his tie. “I couldn’t say,” he said. “I just know I never learned it.”

  Armed with a 1917 Enfield, Dan and seventeen other State Guard members stood at midfield while Corporal Bunch, under the watchful eye of Captain Hobgood, demonstrated the proper use of a Thompson submachine gun. A handful of high school girls, and another of old men, sat in the bleachers on the home side, glancing up into the stadium lights every few minutes, wondering when to head out in order to beat the rain. Marty sat alone on the visitors’ side, a row from the top, and kept right on eating his popcorn.

  Corporal Bunch was in his late twenties, a tall, broad-shouldered man who worked in the shop at Loring Chevrolet. He’d moved up from around Yazoo City a few years ago, and nobody knew much about him except that he had both “military experience,” which accounted for his Guard rank, and a “chronic condition,” which accounted for his exemption from active duty. Nobody liked him. If Captain Hobgood met you on the street, he’d call you by your first name. But Bunch would say, “Step out, there, Private,” then grin like you were supposed to find this funny.

  “The Thompson submachine gun fires forty-five-caliber ammo,” he now informed them. “It’s the most advanced weapon of its type. This thing will kick the living shit out of the Schmeisser.”

  “Watch your language, Corporal,” Hobgood called. “There’s young ladies over yonder.”

  “Right, sir,” Bunch barked. He held the Thompson at port arms and slapped the stock. “Say that some months from now y’all find yourselves in a street-fighting situation in downtown Berlin. We use mortar fire on the buildings, call in some tanks and artillery to blast holes in ’em, then you pitch a grenade in there and, right after the explosion, jump through the hole and spray the sorry—you spray the enemy with fire from this exquisite weapon. Well, the problem, gentlemen, is that this thing packs a punch. Even if y’all got forearms made of tempered steel like yours truly, the barrel’s bound to climb. So the designers of this lovely lady built her with a detachable stock. Now, y’all no doubt noticed the sling’s attached to the stock and the barrel. So what you gone do is detach the stock—” he popped it loose—“and then let gravity work her magic.”

  The stock hit the ground.

  “And then you gone plant your foot firmly on that baby—” he stepped onto the stock with one boot, then dropped into a shooter’s crouch—“and you gone squeeze—”

  “Goddamn it, Bunch!” Hobgood snapped. “Is that thing loaded?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “With live ammo?”

  “No sir.”

  “Give me that son of a bitch.” Hobgood snatched the Thompson out of his hands, then jerked on the sling until the corporal lifted his foot. Jamming the stock into place, Hobgood said, “Y’all can just forget all that shit. You jump into a room full of Germans, you got worse problems than a bucking barrel. The last thing in God’s world you want to do is get yourself where you can’t move because your foot’s stuck on the stock of your goddamn weapon. Might as well step on your own dick.”

  The captain was breathing hard. He’d fought in the First War, got captured and stuck in that underground cell with Jimmy Del Timms and two other men from Loring County, neither of whom made it home. For many years, every so often he’d come out to the house, where he and Dan’s father would sit together on the porch steps, not saying much, occasionally mentioning a name and shaking their heads. Dan once heard them talking
about a wagon that had pulled up outside the prison every morning—they could see the wheels through a small window up close to the rafters. Three Germans would enter the basement; the one with the stethoscope around his neck figured out who’d died during the night, then motioned for the others to wrap a chain around the bodies, which were then hauled up to the street through a coal chute. A great many of the prisoners, Hobgood included, had pneumonia. They wasted away on bread and water, an infrequent bowl of meatless soup. When they were finally liberated, only twelve men out of nearly a hundred had survived.

  Hobgood finally got his breathing under control. He glanced up at the girls in the bleachers, but they were chattering among themselves and paying no mind to the men down on the field.

  “We gone do some drill now,” Hobgood announced. “It’s useful, since moving’s the most important thing you’ll ever do.”

  Shortly afterwards, the storm rolled in and the bleachers emptied out. Though Dan expected Hobgood to order them back to the armory, for some reason he kept drilling them, and Marty continued to sit there, even as the rain pounded down.

  “To the rear, march!”

  Dan stepped out with his left foot, then executed a perfect pivot and headed back with the others toward the west goalposts. He didn’t exactly enjoy this part of it, but he didn’t hate it, either. When you were marching, nothing mattered except where you put your foot, and he always put his in the right place.

  “Left flank, march!”

  The rain fell in sheets. A thunderclap shook the ground, making everybody jump and look up into the night sky streaked with gold and silver.

  “Column right, march!”

  The principal wasn’t going to like having the field all torn up, but it belonged to the American Legion, not the high school, so State Guard drill took precedence over football.

  “Step it up there, Kennison,” Corporal Bunch hollered. “A little rain don’t stop the—”

  Suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck the press box and the stadium lights went out, the air thick with the green-peanut odor of nitrogen and sulfur. As they stood there paralyzed, lightning hopscotched eastward from the far end of the field, each strike followed by another, as if a giant were strolling the Delta.

  “Drop them rifles and scatter!” Hobgood yelled.

  Dan flung his weapon aside, bent over and sprinted for the vistors’ sideline. Another bolt shattered the darkness, and he threw himself forward, landing in a puddle and sliding onto the cinder track.

  When he looked up, Marty was perched above him in the gray electric light, still sitting in the same row and pawing through the bag of popcorn for a kernel dry enough to eat.

  NINETEEN

  FRIDAY MORNING, while waiting for Dan to bring the pickup back so she could go to work, Shirley decided to curl her hair. For a good while now, she’d been letting herself go, even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. She came from Irish Protestant stock, and nobody in her family’d ever had it easy. Her father was born with only one good arm; on the end of his right one, he wore an ugly metal hook. But when you knocked him down, which a few men had done, he didn’t just get up. He got up and knocked you down, too, and then he did his level best to claw your eyes out with that hook. If there had been anybody whose eyes needed clawing out, Shirley might’ve done it, but the only eyes she saw any fault in were her own. Last night, while Dan slept in the bedroom next door, she’d brought herself to orgasm. Though she’d bitten down hard on the pillowcase, she couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard her cry out. The hell of it was, she hadn’t even enjoyed it much, the greatest pleasure being the utter helplessness she’d felt.

  Once or twice at night, she’d heard him doing the very same thing—the telltale creaking of the bedsprings as he did his best to keep quiet. A few months from now, wherever they sent him for training, he’d do it on leave with a living, breathing partner. The act would finally take place in tawdry surroundings, and when he looked back—if he lived long enough to— he’d probably be surprised that he thought it was anything special.

  The only man she’d ever known who felt the same way she did about making love was Alvin. Any day on which he did it was by definition a good day, no matter how many other things went wrong. He never rushed. Sometimes he wouldn’t even put himself in—he wanted to sit and touch and look for hours. He loved the parts of her body men normally didn’t notice: her armpits, her knees, her heels and ankles. He loved them so much, in fact, that he would no longer touch them.

  Some people had electric curling irons, but she wasn’t about to squander any money on that when the old kind worked just fine. She lit the coal-oil lamp on her bedside table and stuck the iron in the glass chimney. While it was getting good and hot, she walked over to the dresser and opened the middle drawer, reaching for a clean pair of panties, and she saw motion down in all that soft fabric.

  The snake had dull brownish skin, its body a little thicker than a broom handle. Back when they moved into the house, Jimmy Del had told her that cottonmouths hated dry spaces or being very far off the ground, so odds were that any snake she ever saw inside was just a chicken snake. “Stay calm and call me,” he’d said, but that was no option now. If she let the snake escape, she’d worry every time she opened a drawer or a cabinet and might as well just run out the front door now and keep going.

  She looked around the room but saw nothing that could serve as a weapon, so she hurried into the hallway, jerked open the closet door and grabbed Jimmy Del’s shotgun from where it stood propped in the corner. She hadn’t fired it in years, but she shucked the action and heard a shell slide into the chamber, then ran back into the bedroom and got as close to the drawer as she dared. The snake raised its head, the alert eyes indicating an intelligence that she hoped wasn’t there. When it opened its jaws, she squeezed the trigger.

  The blast knocked her backwards and blew the snake to bits. She stood there rubbing her shoulder and poking the barrel through what used to be her underwear drawer. Blood and snake guts were soaking into her panties and stockings. The whole dripping mess had fallen through the splintered wood into the next drawer, where she’d folded the white blouse Alvin had bought her last Christmas.

  Shaking, fighting the urge to sit down and cry, she pulled everything out of the undamaged top drawer; then she got Jimmy Del’s handcart off the back porch and rammed it under the dresser and wrenched and pulled until its weight shifted and she could roll it down the hall and off the edge of the back porch.

  Back inside, she took a bath and then, because she’d made herself a promise to curl her hair, marched back into the bedroom and picked up the curling iron, not thinking how hot the rods must’ve gotten by now. Spinning around, she looked in the mirror at the very moment her hair caught fire.

  TWENTY

  THE OFFICE of the local draft board—or “seelective service,” as the chairman, Jasper Sproles, called it—was located in a glass-fronted building right across Second Street from the courthouse. Under a poster proclaiming the urgency of the cause, a couple white boys fresh out of high school sat nervously in stiff-backed chairs, accompanied by their mother, whom Alvin knew well enough to nod at. Three or four Negroes stood off to one side, holding their caps, waiting to be called.

  Jasper was just coming out of his private office. He grinned at Alvin and raised one finger, then leaned over and whispered something to his clerk, who happened to be the mayor’s wife. When he finished, he looked up and said, “Alvin, whyn’t you come on back here? You and me’s just gone take a minute or two, and then I’ll get to these good folks.” He smiled politely at the white boys and their mother, ignoring the black men altogether.

  His desk was littered with files and applications for deferments, as well as a number of personal letters with return addresses that Jasper said Alvin would most likely recognize. Some folks were reluctant to put their name on an envelope going to the selective service office, he said, but anonymity was a big joke anyway. Buddy Baker, the director of th
e Office of Civil Defense for Loring County, could walk into the post office and order any piece of mail opened if he deemed it necessary. When Alvin asked if that was federal policy, Jasper laughed and said it unofficially was, state by state.

  Jasper found many things funny, not least of all the fact that a man who’d had two businesses foreclosed back in the thirties was now in a position to decide if the banker’s grandson would go to college or hide in a foxhole. Kind of interesting the way things sometimes work out, he said. For instance, McNabb’s Paste and Glue Company, which he’d married into, was only moderately successful until it started producing the glue that went on the flaps of every envelope licked at the War Department.

  This morning’s post had brought Jasper even more entertainment. “You know much about Mennonites?” he asked.

  “I know what they are,” Alvin said. “Don’t know as I’ve ever met one, though.”

  “Oh, you’ve met ’em, all right, you just didn’t know it. Fact is, we’re surrounded by Mennonites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even got a Quaker. If my mail’s any indication, it’s amazing there’s any Baptists and Methodists left, not to mention the purely unrepentant.”

  “They claimin’ conscientious objection, I reckon.”

  “Oh yeah, right up until you tell ’em they’ll most likely get assigned as medics, at which point they want to have a rifle and a chance to shoot back.”

  “Last time around,” Alvin said, “you and me would’ve pulled the same kind of stunt, I imagine, if we’d had to.”

  “Would we?”

  “I imagine.”

  “You don’t believe in nothing, do you?” Jasper said.

  “I believe in about as many things as you do.”

  “Well, that’s why if old man Gaither walks in here and puts a bullet in me for sending his grandson on a surfing vacation to Honshu, I’d choose you as my replacement.”