Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  “How long you reckon it’ll take him to get here?” Dan asked.

  “He’ll land on this levee about the same time Tōjō says he’s sorry,” one of the pilots said, laughing and leaning against the fender of the pickup next to Dan’s. He looped his arm around a much older woman, a tough-looking brunette with deep lines around her mouth, but when she shrugged him off, he appeared not to notice. “Parker’s the worst pilot at the base. They’re training a group of women ferry pilots over there, and every damn one of ’em can already fly better than he does.”

  “What’s a ferry pilot?” the brunette said.

  “They fly new planes from the factories to their designated bases so we don’t waste real pilots that could be out flying combat.”

  “Are you an example of a real pilot?” she asked.

  “Sure am, hon.”

  “Then how come you’re not flying combat?”

  Another pilot, standing near the foot of the levee, scanning the sky, hollered, “There’s Parker.”

  The night was cool and still, a perfect night to be out having a good time. Listening to the bullfrogs croaking down in the bar pits, Dan was reminded of the nights when, after ballgames, they’d gone out to Lake Loring and sat on the banks, listening to similar sounds.

  “The son of a bitch sees us,” a man yelled.

  The women, particularly the young one who wore the plaid dress, had made all the men want them, whether they’d invested much heart in their efforts or not. Even the hard brunette with all the lines on her face. If she were two or three years older, she could’ve been Dan’s mother, but he wished he had the nerve to throw his arm around her shoulder. She could step out from under his arm, too, and he wouldn’t care. If only he could hold her for a moment.

  “He’s lining up.”

  An evening like this could overwhelm a young man far from home, and even one who lived nearby. Now he wished he was up there in that cockpit, centering the nose cone on an imaginary spot and angling downward.

  “The stupid son of a bitch means to try it.”

  A red light flashed on the left wing, a green one on the right. The drone of the propeller changed pitch.

  “This’ll be the crowning achievement of the poor bastard’s life.”

  They were out there, just as the girl in the plaid dress had said they would be, five or six Jerseys. Good grazing land lay beyond the levee, and the noise and the lights must have spooked them.

  “There’s cows on the levee!”

  Debate would be waged later. If Parker had just plowed into them, everything might’ve worked out fine. The landing gear would’ve collapsed as the propeller carved a little steak, and Parker himself would’ve probably emerged bruised and battered. Whoever owned the cattle would’ve had to be paid off, because he’d had a grazing permit and the cows weren’t anywhere they didn’t belong. Parker would’ve been grounded for thirty days, his pay docked to help cover the damage to the trainer, but his status among his peers would’ve been immeasurably improved.

  But Parker would not have been Parker, the assembled pilots agreed, if he’d had the faintest notion of how to behave. So it was exactly in his character to slam a foot down hard on the left rudder pedal, spinning the AT-6 off the levee and right into the brunette’s Chevrolet.

  TWENTY FIVE

  DRIVING BACK at two in the morning, with the odor of burning metal in his nostrils and the airman’s cries still ringing in his ears, Dan said, “What’d you do over there in Sicily? To make ’em send you home?”

  Marty hugged the armrest. “I don’t know. I know what they told me I did. But it don’t seem like me.”

  “You don’t remember it?”

  “Yeah, I remember it. In bits and pieces. But it still don’t seem like me. And this may sound crazy to you, but it wasn’t me. I remember stuff I did when I was ten, and it was me. Shit I ain’t proud of. Like one time my cousin from Jackson came to visit, and he had a straw hat on and everybody thought he was so cute that they just carried on and on until I couldn’t stand it. I grabbed that hat and stomped it flat on the porch, and when he started bawling, I shoved him off and jumped on him with both feet. I would have killed him, I reckon, but my granddaddy like to beat the hell out of me. I remember other stuff I did two or three years ago, and that was me, too. But what I remember back on that damn island, that’s different. I can see the fellow that did it, and he’s got my face, moves like me and whatnot, but I ain’t him.”

  “Did you run?”

  “Run? Everybody’s running all the time.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Yeah,” Marty said, “I ran like you mean. I sobbed and shit and pissed on myself, too, and when a buddy of mine lay on the ground just a few feet away, shot all to pieces but still able to holler, I buried my head in the dirt. I done all of that, and I remember it just fine. It was me. That ain’t why they sent me home, though. If they sent folks home for that, wouldn’t be nobody left.”

  The highway was empty, a long, straight stretch through the heart of the Delta, a road they’d traveled together more times than either of them could count. Whatever he was going to learn, he might as well learn now. “So why did they send you home?”

  The voice that answered was one he’d never heard before. “They say I shot some Germans that was already dead.”

  TWENTY SIX

  DAN’S GROUP of prisoners waited just inside the gate, the only ones left. When the little sergeant with the northern accent saw the pickup pull onto the shoulder, he swatted the air with his clipboard, then glanced at his watch, as though he wanted Dan to understand that by keeping the army waiting, he was undermining the war effort. Last night, Marty had told him the sergeant didn’t do anything all day long but sit at a table in the duty hut, drawing up lists. He made lists of prisoners who’d reported to the infirmary, of those who’d received or written a letter and probably, Marty said, of anybody who’d experienced a bowel movement in the last twenty-four hours.

  “Son, when you join up,” the sergeant said as Dan climbed out of the truck, “you’ll learn one thing. Late ain’t great. The army don’t wait, not for nobody.”

  “Looks like you waited for me.”

  The sergeant shook his head. He glanced at the Germans, who were watching him through the wire mesh. “Can you gentlemen of the Teutonic persuasion imagine what Oberkommandur So-and-So’d do if confronted by such disrespect? I got a good mind to rescind this young man’s right to my stable of Prussian ponies.”

  Dan was in no mood for one-upmanship. He had a headache and had felt nauseated ever since he woke. He couldn’t eat his breakfast. Drink had something to do with his queasiness, but drink was not the whole story. The remnants of night lingered, and they were full of noise: metal tearing, flame whooshing into the air, a boy crying for somebody to please call his grandpa in Ponca City, Oklahoma. And one more noise, which he had not heard and could therefore only imagine: the sound a high-caliber slug would make when you pumped it into a body at close range.

  “If you don’t want me to take the prisoners, just say so, and I’ll turn around and go home.”

  “Don’t nobody appreciate sharp wit down here?” the sergeant said. “I guess when a comedy comes to town, the picture show stays empty.” He looked at his clipboard and began shouting out names.

  The prisoners strapped on their sacks and started picking. Normally, Dan left as soon as they were in the field; he always dropped the truck off for his mother, then stocked the rolling store and headed out on his route. But today, he decided, the route could wait. He’d do it if he felt like it, and if he didn’t, he wouldn’t. Alvin could survive the loss of a day’s income. He could survive the loss of anything. Or anybody.

  He stood on the turnrow, watching the prisoners, who moved so slowly, they might have been figures on canvas, the work of an artist’s brush. A notion he’d heard expressed more than once over the last couple weeks was that the prisoners were happy. They didn’t want to be back with their u
nits, hugging the ground while bullets whizzed by inches above their heads. They were worried about their families—anybody would be—but until the war ended, they wouldn’t trade where they were for where they’d been, no sir, not for one minute. Dan would have agreed with that as late as yesterday, but now he found it hard to believe. He figured wherever they’d been, whatever they’d seen and done, was with them right now out in the cotton field, half a world away from all the fighting.

  At the gate this morning, he’d looked straight into the eyes of the tall fellow with the miniature ears. For all his Nazi swagger, the prisoner hadn’t been able to stand the gaze of a seventeen-year-old. He’d dropped his head and shuffled his feet. As soon as they reached the field, the first thing he did was jump out onto the turnrow and snap off a few toe touches, grunting like a hog—working off his anger, Dan bet, at having his weakness exposed.

  “The world ain’t upside down,” Marty had said last night as they drove back to Loring, “because the damn’s thing’s round. It don’t have top nor bottom. But there ain’t shit for sense in nothing. The whole purpose in shooting a German’s to kill him, but if you shoot him after somebody else done the job, everybody gets nervous.

  “Course, if you shoot him without knowing somebody did it once already, that ain’t a problem at all. So what I pointed out to this little major that served as the division psychiatrist was that what’s left of the German don’t know the difference between a bullet that was fired with one intent and a bullet that was fired with another. ‘Well,’ the major tells me, ‘it’s not the German we’re concerned with.’

  “Now if that makes any sense to you, buck, I reckon you’re normal. Because where I was, I didn’t think we was concerned with anything in the world but Germans. Germans was all I heard about for so long, I got to where I used them to fall asleep, counting Krauts instead of sheep. And every time one went over the fence, I potted him right in the nozzle. But I never once asked myself if it was a live German going over the fence or a dead one. Truth is, I’ve seen dead bodies do stranger things than jump a fence.”

  Dan walked over to the truck and got in. Hearing the door slam, most of the prisoners glanced in that direction, then went right back to work. For several seconds, he sat there on the turnrow, pumping the accelerator until he was sure he’d flooded the engine. Then he switched on the ignition. The engine coughed once or twice. He pumped the accelerator a few more times and hit the ignition again, with the same result.

  He opened the door, hopped out and slammed it good and hard, as if pissed off, then hurried around to the front of the truck to pop the latch and raise the hood. Leaning over, he loosened the nut on the sediment bowl. The smell of gasoline almost made him choke. He stood there for a few moments, pretending to examine the engine. Finally, he shook his head and started into the field.

  Most of the prisoners had picked about halfway down their rows, but the tall one was way out in front. The guy with the disfigured face, as always, brought up the rear. Dan would’ve bet that if you threw this particular collection of Germans into an attack, they’d arrange themselves in roughly the same order.

  “Hey,” he said, stopping a step or two away from the last prisoner. “Schultz, is it?”

  All of them quit picking and straightened up to watch.

  The prisoner wiped sweat from his eyes. “Jah?”

  With his thumb Dan gestured at the pickup. “It won’t start. No go. Can you take a look at it? My truck?”

  “Jah. Maybe I look.” He shrugged, then slipped the canvas strap off his shoulder.

  “Don’t know what’s wrong with it,” Dan said as they walked back to the turnrow. “Acts like it’s low on fuel, but the gauge reads half-full.”

  When they reached the truck, Schultz leaned over the engine, sniffed once, then looked at the sediment bowl and saw the gas seeping out around the fitting. “There.” He pointed.

  “Damn. Bad filter?”

  “No, just loose. I fix.” He reached in and tightened the nut. “Now try.”

  Dan walked around to the driver’s side and got in. When he hit the ignition, it sputtered, then caught. A cloud of smoke billowed up from the tailpipe. He sat there for a moment or two, waiting to see if the engine would die, but it didn’t.

  He got out and walked around to the front of the pickup again and slammed the hood down. “Thanks,” he said.

  Schultz reached up and touched his forehead in a onefinger salute, then turned back toward the field.

  “Hey,” Dan said, “you’re pretty good with automotive stuff.”

  The others were nearing the ends of their rows, all except for the tall guy, who’d already turned around and started back.

  “Automotive,” Schultz said. “Yes. In my own home I fix.”

  “What town did you live in over there in Europe?”

  Rather than answer his question, Schultz said, “With camp guard you are friends, yes?”

  Dan moved up beside him. A hundred yards away, the tall prisoner had stopped picking. He stood erect, fists propped on his hips, a dark cutout against the sun. He seemed to be staring right at them.

  “Yeah, me and Stark’s friends,” Dan said. “I’ve known him for a long time. What about you and that tall fellow out yonder?”

  “Voss.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I don’t know long time. But I know enough.”

  “You and him friends?”

  “No,” Schultz said. “Not friends.”

  Crossing his arms, Voss shook his head as if in disgust.

  “Is he a Nazi?” Dan asked.

  Schultz toed a big clod. “I don’t know word,” he said, “to say what is Voss. Or your guard friend.”

  “You don’t know the English word?”

  “No word in no language. Your. Mine. Their.”

  “I heard tell you’re Polish,” Dan said. “Is that so?”

  “Polish?” Schultz said. “I don’t know. Maybe no word for me, neither.” He looked down at the ground, where the clod slowly dissolved beneath the toe of his work shoe. For a moment, he seemed captivated by the sight of the clod being broken up, transformed from something substantial into hundreds, if not thousands, of particles.

  TWENTY SEVEN

  DETERMINED TO appear at work, Shirley had risen right after Dan left the house to pick up his work detail. She’d heard him come home in the middle of the night, stumbling into something, maybe the coffee table. In the kitchen, he turned on the tap, and the drain began to gurgle. After a minute or two he shut off the flow.

  Floorboards sighed as he moved toward the bathroom. The hinges on the toilet seat creaked. His stream splashed into the bowl, full of beer and vigor. Then the seat crashed back down and she heard her son grunt.

  “They talk to you a lot about evacuation,” Jimmy Del had said the night before she went to Jackson with Alvin. He’d sat there in the darkness, propped up against the headboard, smoking a cigarette while she lay with the covers pulled up to her neck. “They tell you to discharge your bowels at every opportunity. That was the first sign to me that things wasn’t what I thought. It give me a creeping feeling. I was a private, but I didn’t have no privacy. My bowels wasn’t mine—they belonged to the United States. I wasn’t no more than a sausage, and I should of known it before somebody went and told me. That’s what they’ll make of that boy in yonder, too,” he said, gesturing with the tip of his cigarette, “unless somebody does something to stop it. Me, I got a little idee.”

  He never said what his little “idee” was, or, if he did, she failed to hear him. She pulled the covers up over her head, pressing the heavy quilt around her ears, doing her best to muffle the sound of his voice, which droned on until she finally fell into herself.

  Dan appeared late, at a quarter till nine. Waiting on the front porch, she made no effort to conceal her annoyance. With her charred hair on display—she’d decided to forgo the plastic net—she knew she must have cut a ridiculous figure.

  “One thing your
grandfather always told me,” she said, “was that if I went out and got skunk-drunk, I’d better be able to live with the odor. You’ve made me late for work. Where were you? Asleep in the bushes?”

  His skin looked as if it had been pasted onto his face. “I’ve been doing something for the military.”

  “The military?” she said. “That’s a new one. Is the army paying boys to barf their breakfast?”

  Her question infused his cheeks with much-needed color. On some level, it felt good to rouse a male to anger, since anger was a form of engagement.

  “I didn’t barf my breakfast. I never ate any. And by the way, I’m not a boy.”

  “Well then, that’s one thing we got in common, because I’m not a boy, either.” She held her hand out for the keys.

  “The army asked me to help ’em collect some information,” he said. “One of those POWs I’m working’s got ’em suspicious he may not be what he says he is.”

  “What does he say he is? Or is that a military secret?”

  “He claims he’s Polish.”

  “Is this a joke?” she said.

  He actually stomped his foot, and he looked so much like the child he’d once been that she wanted to throw her arms around him, to protect him from himself. But the time for that had passed.

  “No, it’s not a joke,” he said. “Or if it is, then I guess it’s on me.”

  “Oh, Danny.” She shook her head. “Just let me have the keys.”

  When he handed them to her, she walked over to the truck and climbed in. Driving off, she looked in the rearview mirror and saw him tentatively place a foot on the lowest of the front steps, as if doubtful that it could support his weight.

  In the fall of ’43, she saw sex as a sentence, believing that women bore their femininity, the urge to be touched and held and talked to, like men bore arms. She watched women weep over nothing at the grocery store, saw them walking down the sidewalk late at night, glancing furtively in other people’s windows. Once, when she was just a little too slow to unplug her headset after connecting two parties, she heard Margaret Strawbridge, whose husband was on a carrier in the Pacific, talking to her sister long-distance. “Me and the kids ate us some cottage cheese and fruit last night,” she said. “Peach halves. And I looked down at one of ’em on my plate, and I thought, That’s me, and stupid as it was, I had a minute there where I got scared that if I didn’t scoop another one up real quick and lay it right beside the first one, I wouldn’t see Bud no more. And so I did it. There’s nothing for us to do but wait and hope for a chance to put things back together.”