Prisoners of War Read online

“How come?”

  “I believe she thinks he’s getting ready to run off.”

  “Where would he run to?”

  “I don’t know. He talks a good bit about Chicago and Detroit, places like that.”

  “Well, if he leaves here, it won’t be any time till he gets picked up.” She took another swallow. “He hasn’t got a selective service card, and he’s eighteen.”

  “He didn’t register?”

  “Of course not. Your uncle cut a deal for him.”

  “Who with?”

  Instead of answering, she said, “He could do the same thing for you, and it’d be a whole lot easier. He might not even have to make a deal at all. Because you’re the only man in the—”

  “The day I turn eighteen,” he said, “I’m gone.”

  “Well, I believe you’ve said as much before.”

  The needle on the record player reached the end of the song, so she got up and flipped the record over and Acuff started singing “The Great Speckled Bird,” with a weeping steel guitar in the background.

  When she bent over to pick up her glass, he could see down the front of her dress. She had small breasts, and there was a bunch of freckles near the top of her brassiere. As a boy, he’d often tried to get a glimpse of her naked. Now the sight of her secrets just embarrassed him, as if he’d walked into the bathroom and found her sitting on the toilet.

  She took another sip, then set the glass back on the table. “Get up and dance with me,” she said.

  “It’s not the kind of music you dance to.”

  “You can dance to anything,” she said, “as long as you’ve got a partner.”

  She took his hand. At first he resisted, but she wouldn’t let go, so he finally stood, and she pulled one of his arms around her waist. He didn’t know a thing about dancing, but he let her push him gently around the room while she hummed along with the music. Her breath smelled sweet, like her mouth was full of sugar. The top of her head grazed his chin, and her hair was damp. Once or twice he felt her heart beat.

  “Lord,” she said, “I’d forgotten what it’s like to be with a boy your age. You always shut your eyes and make believe he’s older.”

  That night, he dreamed of his father.

  They were riding in the pickup, as they often were in dreams, and his father was looking out the window he’d rolled halfway down. He was saying something about rain, how there’d been too much or too little—Dan couldn’t be sure which, because the wind was whipping in and his father’s voice was muffled. He sat staring at the back of his father’s head, his neck burned bronze by the hot Delta sun.

  He was young in the dream, maybe only eight or nine, and he’d decided that when his father turned around, he’d ask if they could drive all the way to the Western Auto and get a new baseball bat, since his old one was a piece of junk. He wouldn’t sound too insistent about it, wouldn’t act like it meant the world to him or anything. He’d just raise the topic and see what his father said; and if he said no, or said nothing, as he sometimes did, that would be all right, too.

  Finally, his father turned around. But it would not be accurate to say that he faced him, because his father’s face was gone.

  THREE

  THE NEXT AFTERNOON, just east of town, he saw a man in uniform walking along the side of the road. The soldier’s back was to him, but as Dan got closer, something about the man began to seem familiar. He was tall, and he walked with his right fist propped on his rib cage, so his arm stuck out like the handle on a coffee cup. He had a duffel bag slung over his left shoulder. Once or twice, he moved his head in a circle, as if trying to work a kink out of his neck.

  When the rolling store stopped and the door swung open, Marty Stark looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, and a front tooth had been chipped. He’d lost a lot of weight. Dan hadn’t heard anything about him getting wounded, and couldn’t imagine why in the world he’d been shipped home. A little over two months ago, at the hardware store, Mr. Stark had told him that Marty had gone ashore in Sicily with Patton’s Seventh Army.

  “What the hell are you doing here?” Dan blurted.

  “Just walking down the road.”

  “You must’ve dropped thirty pounds. Army wouldn’t feed you?”

  “Au contraire, son. Army’s fed me plenty.” He let the duffel bag slide off his shoulder, then heaved it up into the bus. “Been feeding me a mouthful of chickenshit every day for fifteen months, but that won’t keep the weight up.” He stepped back and glanced at the black clouds billowing from the tailpipe. “Engine sounds like a dog trying to puke,” he said. “What’re you doing driving this high-tailed heap?”

  “Just helping out.”

  “Helping who out?”

  “Uncle Alvin.”

  “How come you ain’t in the cotton patch? Your old lady sell the farm?”

  It was hard for Dan to think of his mother as anybody’s old lady, and even harder to believe Marty thought of her that way. He’d once told Dan he considered her the nicest-looking woman in Loring, Mississippi, and didn’t care if she was nearly forty, that he still wouldn’t mind running off with her somewhere. Dan had come within an inch of saying he wasn’t the only one to harbor that ambition.

  “Can’t sell what you don’t own,” he said. “Bank owns the place now. But me and Uncle Alvin’ll get the picking done this year. He’s already made arrangements for a POW detail from Camp Loring.”

  Quietly, Marty said, “I heard about your daddy.”

  “Yeah, I figured.”

  “I sure am sorry.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  Marty pointed at the silver insignia on Dan’s shirt pocket. “You in the State Guard?”

  “For now. I’ll be eligible to join up in December.”

  “Ain’t no reason to rush it.”

  That was easy enough to say as long as you weren’t driving a rolling store all day, then going home every night to the house Dan lived in. “Your daddy said you’d been in heavy combat,” he said. “What’s it like?”

  “Plain combat wasn’t strong enough—he had to stick something else in front of it?” Marty planted a boot on the bottom step. “Let’s put it this way, pal. It didn’t have much in common with an opening kickoff.”

  “I didn’t figure it would have.”

  “You didn’t? I sure did. And boy, was I one dumb monkey. Too stupid for the circus but just right for the zoo.” He jammed his hands in his pockets, then pulled them out and looked down at them—first at the left one, then at the right, as if he didn’t know why they weren’t in his pockets—before putting them back in again. “I come off that LST, and you know what I asked myself? ‘Where are the fucking cheerleaders?’ Can you believe it? ‘Where’s the band, and the water boy? And how come the other team can see me when I can’t see hide nor hair of them? Where are the goddamn referees, huh?’ And you know what? Ain’t one of them questions been answered yet. Not a damn one.” The engine idled, burning gas, but he made no move to climb the steps. Again he worked his head around in a circle, then moved it up and down a couple times. “Man, I been on that train all the way from New Jersey. Every tooth in my head’s about to come loose.”

  “You get a medical discharge?”

  “Naw, no such luck.” Grabbing the handrail, he finally climbed up inside. “I’m traveling under delayed orders. Got till Friday morning before I report to my next posting.”

  “So where’s that at?”

  Marty slid the lid of the drink box open, reached in, sloshed some bottles around and pulled out an RC, stuck the neck in the opener and popped off the cap. Turning the bottle up, he started swigging, stopping only when the drink was all gone.

  He set the bottle down and wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “I’ll be out at the Fritz Ritz,” he said, “guarding the fucking Krauts.”

  Dan pulled over at the end of the Starks’ driveway. Mr. Stark’s white Cadillac stood parked near the house, and his pickup truck was there, too. Their black lab, Lucy, lay on
the veranda, her head lifted now as she watched the rolling store.

  Marty shouldered his duffel bag and told Dan he’d be in touch in a few days, once he got squared away, that when he had liberty they’d go over to Greenville to drink some beer and shoot pool. Then he stood there at the top of the steps, looking out over the yard where he’d played as a boy, as if unwilling now to set foot in it.

  FOUR

  AT FIRST GLANCE, the camp didn’t amount to much more than three or four rows of tents and five or six buildings, surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence. At the MP training center, he’d been told that all camps had to be situated at least five hundred feet from any road, but only a shallow ditch separated this one from Highway 47. The fences, which were supposed to be at least eight feet high, might’ve been six and a half feet but were probably less; a bad pole-vaulter could have made it over with no trouble, and a good high jumper would have had a decent chance.

  Guard towers stood on the north and south sides of the camp, both of them empty that morning. Anybody caught in there during a thunderstorm was in for an exciting time, since somebody, probably an army engineer, had put on tin roofs.

  His father parked a short distance from the gates. “Well, Martin,” he said, “you got everything you need?”

  His mother had asked him the same thing his first night back, posing her question while he stood before the mirror in his old bedroom, getting ready to go down to the colored part of town and find himself a whore. He’d always heard they were down there, standing on the street corners, their dark legs exposed. He wanted to take his clothes off in a hot, dirty room with a woman he didn’t know, especially one who had all the reason in the world to hold a thousand things against him. A woman whose sinew would ripple beneath his body with disgust.

  That night, he’d told his mother that no, he didn’t have everything he needed. When she asked him what was missing, he meant to make a joke and say he needed to rent Clark Gable’s face. But after remembering how Raymond Sample’s had just disappeared, his features dissolving into a scarlet mass of meat, he couldn’t keep his lips from quivering like they had on the Niscemi road, and he said he was missing himself. That much he could say to his mother, though he wished he hadn’t, because it made her cry. But he couldn’t say it to his father, however much he wished he could.

  “No, sir,” he said. “Don’t have my discharge papers, and I sure do need ’em.”

  His father stared hard into the distance. “The army can’t discharge you from responsibility, Martin. You got to face that for the rest of your life, whether you wear a uniform or not.”

  The only uniform his father had ever worn was the dark suit he put on every Sunday morning, when he went to church and listened to the preacher condemn folks for drinking liquor, or lying, or coveting their neighbors’ wives; then he went back home and took it off, and felt free to get drunk, screw Mrs. Bivens from down the street and lie about it all day long.

  But some uniforms were not shed so easily. Some uniforms stuck to you.

  Marty reached under the seat for the pint bottle he’d left there last night. He drank the last inch or so, then put the bottle back. Now his father was looking at him, and that was all he’d really wanted.

  “Showing up with whiskey on your breath’s not likely to stand you in good stead with your commanding officer. For your information, he’s a graduate of the United States Military Academy.”

  “Yeah, but he’s stateside.”

  “You’re stateside.”

  “But I want to be, and he doesn’t.”

  “How do you know where he wants to be?”

  “I know exactly. He wants to be about a hundred yards beyond the last rung of a ladder barrage, where he can feel the ground shaking under his feet when them eighty-eights hit. Maybe even a little closer, so he can dodge some nonlethal debris while he barks orders into a field telephone. He wants to wave his arms around and point at a little rise in the distance with a machine-gun barrel poking up over it, then watch his boys run right at it. And when the two or three of ’em that don’t have their guts falling out their shirtfronts get close enough to pitch a few grenades and cause a little weeping and moaning someplace like Hamburg, he wants to run forward his own self. That’s where he wants to be. Not in Loring, Mississippi, commanding what looks like a run-down church camp.”

  His father was thumping the wheel with an index finger.

  “I was hoping for bedpan duty,” Marty said. “Could’ve got it, too, if the division psychiatrist hadn’t worried about me running loose in a base hospital, drinking all that rubbing alcohol. I figure if you can handle Mississippi ’shine, anything else ought to slide right down.”

  “Martin,” his father said, “I don’t know what to say to you.”

  “Well, to start with, you might tell me about how my great-granddaddy helped roll up Howard’s flank at Chancellorsville. You could put him on a big white stallion, with a bunch of gold braid on his uniform and a cavalry saber that’s got engraving on the hilt, and he’s right there beside Stonewall Jackson and Little Sorrell when them Tarheels get all confused in the darkness and bring old Stonewall down. Hell, you could let Stonewall speak his dying words to him. What was it, now? ‘Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees’? Nobody I ever saw die said anything like that.”

  “Go on and get out, Martin,” his father said, then glanced over his shoulder to see if the lane behind him was clear. “I need to get down to the headquarters. Picking season’s coming, like it or not.”

  Marty climbed out, shut his door, then walked around and opened the trunk. Reaching for his duffel bag, he noticed the corner of a red foil wrapper sticking out from under the mat next to one of the wheel wells, and he pulled it loose. A Trojan, designed for both comfort and protection.

  Lifting the mat, he discovered four more, all of which he stuffed into his pocket. Then he hoisted the duffel bag onto his shoulder, slammed the trunk shut and snapped off a salute while staring at the rearview mirror.

  If his father noticed, he didn’t let on. He put the car in gear, made a U-turn and drove back toward town, quite possibly to visit Mrs. Bivens.

  FIVE

  THE COMMANDING officer—Captain Munson—appeared to be about thirty, a short sandy-haired man decked out in class A’s, his tie tucked in between the second and third buttons.

  Two color photographs in easel frames occupied a corner of his desk, positioned at an angle, so you could see the faces while awaiting your orders. One picture showed an attractive young woman whose chin was propped against her fist, the other a little red-haired girl with an enormous smile that revealed she was missing all but one of her front teeth. Just a few inches from the second photo lay a bone-handled .45, snug in its canvas holster.

  Munson made a point of staring at the file open before him. He paged backwards through it a couple times, as if he couldn’t quite believe something he’d read and was looking to correct his misunderstanding. Finally, he raised his head. “This is a little bit unusual.”

  “What is, sir?”

  “Sending a man to pull MP duty in his hometown. Especially one with your particular . . . experiences.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Though I’m sure Fourth Service has good reasons.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Any idea what those reasons might be?”

  “No sir.”

  Munson frowned. “Your father owns that big plantation out on Choctaw Creek?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I believe I know him by sight. Drives a white Cadillac, if he’s the man I’m thinking of. I believe I’ve seen him at—” Munson never finished his sentence, interrupted by a burst of guttural syllables.

  The captain gazed at him as if wondering whether he would piss or shit himself, weep or foam at the mouth. If the son of a bitch actually knew how it felt when piss ran down your leg—how you initially assumed it couldn’t be what it was, that surely somebody had stolen up behind you and
poured warm water under your waistband—he might have had the good grace to keep his eyes averted.

  You never got so scared you couldn’t be embarrassed, but he wouldn’t know that. He’d assume that if a shell burst nearby, the stain on the seat of your pants would cease to matter once you discovered you were still alive. He probably even figured that later you and your pals would float a few jokes about Hershey bars and hip pockets.

  Munson watched him for another moment or two, then rose and stepped over to the window. Three shirtless POWs who’d been painting the quarters next door were laughing, horsing around, one of them cocking a dripping brush as if intending to fling a few gobs on his buddy. The skin stretched tautly over their bodies, revealing bone and muscle.

  Munson rapped his knuckles on the windowpane. The prisoner brandishing the brush whispered something, and one of the others laughed; then they all bent over and went back to work.

  Satisfied, the captain turned and leaned against his desk. “All right, Private,” he said. “There’s not likely to be much around here that’ll surprise you. Reveille’s at oh-five-thirty. Breakfast at oh-six hundred. Prisoners return to their tents after breakfast. They shave and use the latrine, police the grounds, and at oh-seven-thirty they go to their work assignments.

  “Once the farmers begin picking cotton, we’ll need every available man in the fields. The contractors provide the prisoners’ lunches, which they’ll eat wherever they’re hired out. They leave work locations at sixteen hundred, get back here, shower and put on their German uniforms, then eat dinner at eighteen hundred. After dinner, they’re free till lights-out.

  “As of today, we have three hundred and four prisoners. Most of these fellows were captured in North Africa, though a few trickled in last week from Sicily. My own opinion is that the vast majority are probably neither strongly anti-Nazi nor strongly pro-Nazi, but most of them were in the Afrika Korps, so officially we assume they’re all Nazis.