Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  “Yeah, I know, and I aim to keep my distance from them, too. Be all right if I set down?”

  “Do it matter if it’s all right or not?”

  It did matter, at least to him, so he remained on his feet. L.C. watched him for a minute or two and then, as if he couldn’t bear to maintain the same posture Dan was in, he sprawled backwards onto his cot, locking his hands behind his neck. “You looking at a latter-day nigger,” he said.

  “You plan on joining the Mormons?”

  “Naw, just planning to act like I’m white. Time’s coming when a lot of niggers, not just the frontwards, gone behave that way. You remember the fellow say man’s the end result of the monkey? Well, what you seeing now’s a evolved mule.”

  “You don’t put faith in anything, do you, except your sense of humor?”

  L.C. unlocked his hands, clasped his knees and rocked forward. “Not a damn thing. But look to me like you can’t even count on that.”

  Dan sat down on Rosetta’s bed. To give his hands something to do, he patted the mattress. “My grandma used to own this quilt,” he said.

  “We didn’t steal it. She give it to Momma. Right before she died.”

  “I didn’t say you stole it.”

  “Well, right when you seen it, what you think then?”

  Again, he felt like throwing himself on L.C., because in reality he was a goddamn thief, even though he’d taken no material possessions. Earlier he’d robbed Dan of the right to pity himself, and now of the will to say he was sorry. “You know why I came over here?”

  “You wanted something.”

  “I wanted something?” Dan said. “What the hell could I hope to get from you?”

  “I couldn’t say. My mind don’t work that way.”

  While Dan looked on in disbelief, L.C. lifted the guitar, set it down on the wrong knee and began to pluck the bass strings. “You know what I been studying on lately? After the Devil get through tempting Jesus and Jesus tell him to get lost, Saint Luke say the ‘Devil departed from him for a season.’ Now where you reckon he went?”

  “I don’t have no idea.”

  L.C. thumped the top of the guitar, then lifted both feet and brought them crashing down onto the floorboards.

  good Lord tell the Devil

  get thee behind me

  Devil beg for shelter

  say winter comin’

  on so cold

  old Satan bound to wander

  got to see the Ritz

  get him some rest

  bellhop slam the door shut

  say this place don’t take

  no Devil for a guest

  The music sounded ragged, like L.C. was making it up as he went along. And it occurred to Dan as he sat there on Rosetta’s bed, understanding he would not do what he’d meant to, that almost everybody he knew, including his mother and Marty Stark, L.C. and Rosetta, Captain Hobgood and Frank Holder, Lizzie and the prisoner with the ruined face, who claimed to be Polish, the Germans out there in the cotton field, so far away from their homes, maybe even Alvin—all of them were doing the same thing now every day of their lives, just trying to keep rhythm with times so irregular, searching hard for a melody and a few simple words that made any sense at all.

  Both towers at Camp Loring were occupied that morning, and the guards manning them had replaced their rifles with Thompson submachine guns. Rather than clustering around the gates, grouped loosely in their work details, the prisoners remained in formation. Guards stood along the perimeter, their eyes scanning the ranks.

  Dan waited on the side of the road with Frank Holder, Bob Brown and several other farmers. Once or twice, he saw Holder cut his eyes over at L.C., who was sitting in the cab of the pickup truck, but each time Frank was quick to drop his head.

  “What they expecting these fellows to do?” Bob Brown said. “Riot and take over the courthouse?”

  “They caught some of ’em planning an escape,” Dan told him.

  “Where was they aiming to escape to?”

  “Sounds like they meant to head for the Gulf Coast.”

  “Far as I’m concerned,” Bob Brown said, “they’re welcome to it.”

  A man called Roberts said, “What you got against the Gulf Coast?”

  “Too damn close to New Orleans.”

  “So what’s wrong with New Orleans?”

  “They’s too many mongrels down there,” Brown said. “Can’t tell what nobody is. Nigger and white’s all mixed up together, and half of them don’t speak no English. Send these Germans down there, they just might clean things up.”

  “Yeah,” said Roberts, “they done a real good job sanitizing Poland. Maybe we ought to let ’em spray a little cleaning fluid on you.” Then he walked off and stood near the fence by himself.

  Bob Brown shook his head. “What’s got into him this morning?”

  If the others had any idea, they kept it to themselves and waited silently until the little sergeant walked over, unlocked the gates and stepped out.

  His swagger was absent today. Serious and subdued, he spoke in a low voice, hugging the clipboard instead of brandishing it. “The army don’t want to alarm you fellows,” he said. “We’re glad to be hiring out these prisoners to pick your cotton, and happy that you’ve been so pleased by the results. Most of them are just good solid workers, not your UAW types. If they’d been at Flint a few years ago, up where I’m from, we wouldn’t of had no strike. Your German generally does what the authorities tell him—and in this case, the only authority that matters is the United States Army. But a few of them probably had some Nazi thinking beat into their heads, a bunch of Adolfology, as my pop likes to put it, and it looks like they meant to go for an illegal stroll.”

  Consequently, the sergeant explained, some procedures were being altered. Nineteen of the details would leave camp that morning under guard, and only seven would go unguarded. Also, sometime around lunch, the guards would be rotated. And any contractor whose detail was unguarded at any time was responsible for notifying the camp immediately if any of the prisoners went missing. Finally, instead of remaining in permanent work details, men would be shuffled from group to group, so the farmers would no longer see the same bunch of prisoners from one day to the next.

  The last statement drew a collective groan. “I’m used to my boys,” one of the men said, and Bob Brown added that he’d begun to think of his group almost as if they were kin. His wife had been knitting gloves and socks for each of them, intending to pass the gifts out right before Christmas.

  The sergeant said he could understand their dismay and that he would personally see to it that these young men received their presents. Then, after answering a couple more objections with assurances that everything would go along just fine, he walked back over to the gates and began calling names.

  While waiting to hear which prisoners he’d be getting, Dan saw Frank Holder walk toward the pickup, where L.C. was sitting. Holder’s hands were clenched into fists, but he held them in an odd position, both of them pressed tightly against the small of his back, lacking only a pair of handcuffs to complete the picture. He stopped a foot or two from the truck, and for a good while L.C. stared at him through the glass. Then he rolled the window down three or four inches.

  Dan couldn’t hear what Holder was saying. Whatever it was, it took no more than a minute or two. When he finished, he just stood there with his hands held behind him. It was a long time before L.C. nodded and rolled the window back up, without ever saying a word. Then Holder shoved his hands into his pockets and started back toward the gates.

  The prisoner with the marked face was the only member of Dan’s original group who left camp with him that morning. According to the sergeant, one of the new men, whose soft, smooth skin made him look a lot younger than he must have been, had picked close to three hundred pounds one day for Ed Mitchell. All eight of them rode in back of the pickup, huddling into the collars of their camp-issued jackets. Kimball followed along behind in a scout car, aft
er Marty left with Frank Holder’s detail.

  On the way to the field, Dan asked L.C. what Holder had said.

  L.C. looked out the window. “Claim he sorry for beating up on me.”

  “Well, maybe he is.”

  “Then me and him got one thing in common,” L.C. said. “I’m sorry about it myself.”

  “You know his son got killed, don’t you?”

  “Tell me what in the hell,” L.C. said, “his son getting killed got to do with beating the shit out of me.”

  The cab of the pickup truck was small and only a couple feet separated them, but it might as well have been a thousand miles. Dan could’ve answered his question, but when he thought about explaining the connection that probably existed in Holder’s mind between his son’s death in North Africa and L.C.’s living presence in a rolling store on a road near Loring, Mississippi, he realized how pointless it would be, starting with the stuff about defending your country. While L.C. and Frank Holder both inhabited the same general location, anybody with even one good eye could see they lived in two different countries. He didn’t know that he’d fight for the one L.C. had been assigned to, and wasn’t sure if Holder would, either. “I guess it don’t have nothing to do with it,” he said.

  Only scrap picking remained. The field had a ragged look, the cotton dangling from the stalks, buffeted that morning by the wind. The air smelled of wood smoke. It was the season when Dan’s father had always worried, because the crop yield was never what he’d hoped for and cotton prices were always lower than he’d convinced himself to expect. But his father wouldn’t have to worry this year, having left all his worries to somebody else.

  Until now, Dan hadn’t felt any anger at him. He believed he’d taken his life because his own brother had been sleeping with his wife off and on for God knows how many years, and he couldn’t stand it anymore. Now, though, he wasn’t so sure. Driving home the other night after his conversation with Lizzie, he’d gotten mad at Ralph Hobgood for telling him what his father had said. But he’d woken up the next morning mad at Jimmy Del Timms, and he was still mad at him. Because it seemed to him that in trying to make one life count for two—if, in fact, that’s what he’d had in mind—his father had been successful, though not in the way he’d intended.

  After the Okie pilot crashed his plane on the levee, Marty Stark said the most intense moment of his life had come when he gazed into the eyes of a man who meant to kill him. “For just a second, before an officer hollered at him and he ran off down the road, he’d decided to blow my head off. And as I knelt there in that stinking water, I told myself, ‘All right, this son of a bitch is fixing to do something that’ll force him to carry me with him wherever he goes. Every time he looks at his son, if he has one, he’ll see the man he murdered. Looks into a woman’s eyes, he’ll see mine, and when he shoves into her real hard and she whimpers, it’ll be me that’s whimpering too.’ Taking another person’s life don’t just mean you killed them. It means they’re upon you.”

  Dan now felt as if he were some combination of himself and his father, with double sets of virtues and vices, with his own sins to atone for as well as ones he’d never even had the pleasure of committing. He’d tried and failed to apologize to L.C. that morning, but he might just as well have told his mother he was sorry for blaming his father’s death on her and Alvin. Maybe he needed to apologize to his uncle, too.

  He parked the truck on the turnrow and climbed out. L.C. also got out, though there wasn’t anything for him to do except wait beside the truck while Dan distributed sacks.

  “There’s not much cotton left out there,” Dan told the prisoners. “Today and tomorrow ought to about finish it on this place.” He couldn’t tell how many of them had understood him, and it didn’t really matter. After strapping on their sacks, they moved off, stooping over and picking smoothly, as if they’d grown up in these fields.

  Kimball climbed lazily out of the scout car, leaving his rifle stuck in the boot, and walked over next to Dan. “Guess you heard about the big excitement,” he said.

  “Yeah.” Dan kept his voice low, because the prisoners weren’t that far away. “I’m surprised they put Schultz back out here. I figured they’d send him to a different camp.”

  “Your buddy tried to get ’em to.” Kimball pulled a pack of chewing gum from his pocket, withdrew a stick, unwrapped it and laid it on his tongue. He put the pack back in his pocket without offering a stick to Dan or L.C., whose presence he hadn’t even acknowledged. “Stark’s an odd one,” he said. “He always like that?”

  “Like what?”

  Kimball’s jaws clicked while he worked at the gum. “So goddamn jumpy.”

  “He used to be about the calmest fellow around.”

  “That so?”

  “Yeah. That is so. One year, we were five points down to Indianola, starting on our own three-yard line with four or five minutes left. Playing for the conference title. Well, we had three fourth-down plays on that drive. No time-outs, folks in the stands going crazy, coach standing stock-still on the sideline, praying—but Marty’s just as cool as ice water. Called most of the plays right at the line and finally carried the ball in himself after breaking two or three tackles.”

  “He’s not breaking any tackles lately, so I imagine that’ll prove the high point of his earthly existence.” Kimball stretched, then yawned. “I stood watch last night,” he said, “and maybe I’ll pull off the road somewhere and take a little nap. That be all right with you?”

  “I don’t give a shit. But won’t you get in trouble if they catch you?”

  Kimball laughed. “Nah, I’m trouble-free. Huggins has some pretty good connections, and if the army fucks with him or any of his pals, somebody’ll fuck with the army.”

  He walked back over to the scout car and drove off. Dan stood there for another few moments, watching the prisoners as they picked toward the far end of the field. Then he looked at L.C. and said, “Well, let’s go sell some neck bones and cracklings.”

  They drove by the house, where Dan’s mother got behind the wheel and dropped him and L.C. off at Alvin’s, and they stocked the rolling stores and headed out on their routes. The morning remained cold and gray, but the sun popped out in the afternoon, and they sold a fair number of sodas and even some ice cream.

  Around a quarter to four, they off-loaded their Deepfreezes back at Alvin’s, and Dan told L.C. that if he’d help him weigh up, he’d treat him to a hot dog and soda after they dropped the prisoners off. Shoving his hands into his pockets, L.C. said that would be okay.

  They drove back down to the field, where the Germans waited on the turnrow, two or three of them sitting on their stuffed cotton sacks, the rest standing. Several yards away, Schultz squatted by himself, his sack only half-full.

  L.C. helped the Germans hang their heavy canvas bags from the scales, and Dan recorded the weights in his notebook. As always, Schultz was last.

  “Forty-one pounds, dead even,” Dan said.

  The others had already climbed into Alvin’s truck, so nobody except L.C. noticed when the prisoner stepped close to Dan and pressed two cards into the palm of his hand.

  Dan looked down and discovered his State Guard ID and his driver’s license.

  “They don’t find these,” the prisoner said. “Now you have back. All right?”

  “Sure,” Dan said. “Thanks.”

  “All right, yes. You maybe need.” Dipping his head slightly, the prisoner walked around to the back of the truck and climbed over the tailgate.

  THIRTY EIGHT

  MARTY PULLED the bottle out from under the seat, screwed the top off and took another swallow. He’d been drinking off and on all afternoon, sitting on the turnrow in the scout car, his feet flat on the ground, the Enfield resting on his knee.

  Lately, whenever he’d had a good bit to drink, he imagined himself alone with Shirley Timms. The setting varied every time, but their conversations always began with him confessing that as a kid he’d dreamed abou
t calling her by her first name. While he fully intended to then profess a romantic interest, she always seized on his opening statement and told him to go right ahead and call her Shirley, and in that moment all his other needs evaporated. It was uncanny, the way it always happened. “Shirley,” he’d say, and everything else would just fall away. He guessed this ought to worry him, and knew damn well that the psychiatrist who’d examined him a few months ago would’ve considered it evidence of some malaise. But the truth was, he couldn’t get too worked up about it. If saying a woman’s first name could satisfy you, why not be grateful for such a cheap and simple solution?

  What he could get worked up about was the sight of the tall prisoner they’d reassigned to Frank Holder. You could tell that lanky bastard’s heart was full of mayhem. Once, he dropped his sack near the end of a row and stood there, hands on hips, staring at Marty and looking as if he couldn’t control his breathing, his shoulders rising and falling like pistons.

  Gesturing with the bottle, Marty said, “Hey,Voss—want a little nip?”

  The German’s mouth twisted into the semblance of a grin.

  “I mean it. Just back off and I’ll stand it at the end of your row, and when I get back over here where I can point my trusty peashooter right at your navel, you can have you a sip. Don’t drool in the bottle, though, ’cause I still got an itchy finger from combat.”

  Voss turned his chin up, as if to give Marty a clear view of all the snot in his nostrils, and fired a ball of spit straight up into the air.

  The wad hung for an instant at the top of its arc—long enough for Marty to flick off the safety and raise the rifle. He didn’t hit it, but neither did he miss by much. At the report, Voss dived between the cotton stalks, doing his best to burrow with his elbows. Spread out in the field behind him, the others flattened themselves, too.

  “On your feet, Adolf!” Marty laughed, but it sounded shrill even in his own ears. “Ain’t you a lucky son of a bitch, playing out here where all the cotton and the corn and taters grow?”