“What you say?” L.C. asked.
“Swee Spats a Natter.”
“What about it?”
“This morning I was over on the Teague place, and this little colored boy that was out in the field with his momma comes over and asks me if I got any Swee Spats a Natter. At least I think that’s what he called it. I told him I didn’t know what the hell that was.”
“Course you do.” L.C. pointed at the display case containing patent medicines. “Yonder’s two bottles of it.”
Dan slowed so he could look over his shoulder. “Where?”
L.C. bounced down off the drink box, slid open the glass door and lifted out a blue bottle, then held it up to Dan. Sweet Spirits of Niter, the label read.
“Might as well be speaking different languages,” L.C. said. “We don’t understand y’all, and y’all don’t understand us.” He stuck the bottle back into the display case and closed the door. “Just like these Germans.”
It had rained hard yesterday, and the road was a mess. Ordinarily, Dan wouldn’t have set men to picking in such wet conditions. But before leaving that morning, Alvin had told him that rain was forecast again for the end of the week. “Better get that cotton while you can,” he’d said. “They got them tower driers over at the gin now—it don’t matter if the stuff’s a little damp.” So Dan had collected the prisoners first thing, before his mother took the pickup into town.
The closer he got to the highway, the worse the road looked. Tractors and cotton trailers had churned it into a huge batch of fudge, everybody trying to beat the next front. Several times the wheels spun on him, and he came close to getting stuck.
His uncle had bought the buses from some school district way up north, someplace that must’ve had a fair amount of snow, because they both had four-wheel drive. And given this mess, he decided to engage it.
Once all four wheels were pulling, the driving was much easier. But a few minutes later, when he turned onto Highway 47 and tried to disengage, something went wrong. The steering suddenly stiffened—he could hardly turn the wheel. Hearing a grinding noise, he let off the accelerator. Instead of slowing gradually, the bus slammed to a quick halt, as though he’d leaned on the brakes.
“Goddamn,” he said. “The transmission’s all screwed up.”
In some strange way, it encapsulated everything that had gone wrong since that day last winter when he’d walked into the house and found his father’s body. From that time on, it had been like he was trying to go backwards and forwards at once, like his own internal gear works were grinding themselves to bits.
He thought he might lay his head against the wheel and start crying. He was stuck six miles from town with a busload of POWs, and the only person who might help him, L.C., was just as alien to him as the Germans. For a moment, he felt the only thing to do was get mad. “If a cousin to one of them fellows sends me home in a box,” he said, nodding his head to the back of the bus but looking at L.C., “you won’t shed a goddamn tear, will you?”
To his surprise, L.C. slammed his fist down on the drink box, and several of the Germans flinched. “Why you ask me that? Just ’cause you done tore up your uncle’s transmission? See, that’s how y’all do. Everything come right back round to you. I been in a box my whole life, but has your ass shed any tears?”
Breathing hard, Dan rose as L.C. balled his hands into fists. Dan’s first thought was that he’d have to make up some story to explain any cuts or bruises on his face, since otherwise there was no telling what folks might do to L.C. and Rosetta.
But before L.C. could swing, a curious thing happened. The German with the angry purple stain on his face stood up and, stepping around the tallest prisoner, walked forward and gestured at the empty driver’s seat. “Maybe I try?”
Since that first day in the field, he’d spoken to Dan four or five times, but only when the others were some distance away. He never said a lot—Very hot this day . . . Here is many cotton—so Dan couldn’t tell how much English he really knew, nor had he figured out why he referred to German as “their” language.
Marty had warned him not to believe anything a prisoner told him. “They’ll dupe you,” he said. “They fooled a buddy of mine, and he ain’t coming home.” And he meant to find out exactly where this one had been captured, have them check his Solbuch up at the base camp in Como, because there were a few things about him that didn’t seem right.
Now all Dan could do was stare at him, not knowing what to say.
“Cat want to see can he get it going,” L.C. said. “It was me, I’d let him. I sure as hell don’t know how to make it run right, and you don’t, neither.”
Dan glanced at the rear of the rolling store, where every one of them was sitting up straight, watching. If they wanted, he knew, they could commandeer the bus. The question was, Where could they go, especially with the transmission locked up?
He stepped aside and let the German sit down. For a time, the prisoner studied the dashboard, then bent and looked underneath it at the pedals. Then he sat up, grabbed the stick and threw the transmission into reverse.
When the bus lurched backwards, Dan sprawled onto the floor. L.C. managed to stop himself from falling by grabbing the handrail. Bottles and canned goods tumbled off the shelves and rolled into the aisle.
Dan heard glass breaking, and several of the Germans hollering, then realized he was hollering, too.
He struggled to his feet just as the prisoner jammed the gears again. This time, the bus hurtled forward, and he smacked his head on the door. L.C. toppled backwards over the railing, his feet sticking up in the air.
The prisoner drove on for a few hundred yards, shifting from second to third, picking up speed, then slowing gradually, the bus rolling smoothly over the pavement. Finally, he pulled onto the shoulder.
Dan sat on the floor, feeling a great purple bruise forming on his forehead. L.C. sprawled on the steps, rubbing his collar-bone. The aisle was littered with dented cans and broken bottles. For once, the tallest German wasn’t smiling. Face pale as buttermilk, he’d wrapped his arms around one leg of the drink box, which was anchored to the floor with steel bolts.
The prisoner got out of the driver’s seat. “Sorry so rough,” he said.
Wincing, L.C. stood and climbed the steps, then reached down and offered Dan a hand. “Maybe we’d be better off,” he said, “over there in the fight.”
After signing the prisoners back into the camp, Dan dropped L.C. at his mother’s house, where he didn’t say a word, just trudged off across the field.
Alvin was at his store, in high spirits, sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigarette and drinking an Orange Crush.
“I had to slam the brakes on to keep from hitting a cotton trailer,” Dan said. “A bunch of stuff went flying off the shelves. Broke a few bottles and dented some cans pretty bad.”
His uncle waved a hand as if brushing a fly away. “Don’t worry about it.” He puffed on his cigarette, and he had that peculiar gleam in his eyes. “I just made me a dandy little deal with a condom distributor. Every rubber in the Delta has to pass through my hands.”
“Before use, or after?” Without waiting for Alvin’s reply, he went inside, grabbed a hunk of Day’s Work, then laid it down on the counter.
Rosetta peered at him over the Memphis paper, its banner headline announcing that British troops were advancing on Salerno. “Your momma told me you don’t never walk out of here with no chewing tobacco. Say that nasty habit gone ruin a person’s teeth.”
“She’s not one to talk about habits.”
“Your momma do the best she can,” Rosetta said, “and you may understand that someday. Then again, maybe not. You about as dumb as L.C.” She folded the paper and eyed the plug of tobacco. “You want it, you gone have to pay for it, ’less your uncle come in here and make me give it to you.”
“I aim to pay for it,” he said, reaching for his wallet, though he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to. Finding his hip pocket empty, he remembere
d pulling the wallet out and laying it under the seat. “Just a minute,” he said, “I’ll be right back.”
The wallet wasn’t on the floor up front, so he crawled up and down the aisle, looking under every counter and display case, but the damn thing was gone. With it went four dollars, his driver’s license, a picture of his daddy and his State Guard ID.
FIFTEEN
ORDERED TO PATROL the perimeter after supper, Marty paused near the fence to look at a thicket, about a hundred yards away, at the edge of Otis Heslep’s field. On the far side of the trees was the field itself, and beyond it a gravel road and Red Gillespie’s place. If you flew over Loring County, everything would be broken up into neat, orderly squares, this man’s world ending where that one’s began, much as it had been since the early settlers moved in, poisoning and then burning the trees and clearing the land.
He was no stranger to the notion of boundaries, of lines that separated, but until now he’d always thought of them as flimsy, just some vague notion of how things ought to be. Yet there was a big difference between being on the outside of a fenced enclosure and being on the inside, between being in uniform and out of it, between one uniform and another. And between those who’d answered the call to murder and those who’d never heard it, the difference was huge.
The majority of the guards, like Kimball, had fathers who could, and would, demand favors. One of them, a boy from Tampa named Huggins, told Marty that his daddy had chosen the University of Florida over Yale because his grandfather refused to let him take his valet up to Connecticut, for fear that northern exposure would corrupt his black character. Huggins didn’t know whether his family had interceded with the army on his behalf, and he didn’t much care. It wouldn’t have bothered him one bit, he said, to serve overseas. He’d been in the ring, beaten the shit out of others and gotten the shit beat out of him, and his little brother had once shot him on a squirrel hunt. Somebody somewhere had a reason for keeping him stateside, and he guessed it was a good one. The Hugginses owned a company that used to manufacture tennis nets but now was turning out camouflage helmet netting. And if the war lasted long enough, he might have to go home and take over, since neither his father nor his grandfather was in particularly good health.
The few guards who’d seen action rarely talked to one another, though every now and then Marty would catch himself staring at one of them and sometimes he’d feel somebody studying him. Whenever that happened, both men would look away, as if the fleeting glimpse alone had already revealed too much.
Four or five days ago, in the latrine, he’d been watching his urine splash into the trough when a guard named Brinley walked up beside him and unzipped. Kimball, the camp gossip, claimed that he’d been in the Philippines with MacArthur, but that a wound, possibly self-inflicted, got him evacuated to Australia a few days before Homma drove the Americans and Filipinos onto the Bataan Peninsula. The unit Brinley had belonged to, he said, was completely wiped out.
For the longest time, as they stood side by side at the urinal, Brinley failed to produce. Marty had been out in the sun all day, driving from field to field with Kimball, and when they got back to camp, he’d drunk about a gallon of water; had his bladder not been full, he would’ve shaken himself, zipped up and left, to spare Brinley the embarrassment. But that, evidently, was the furthest thing from Brinley’s mind. When Marty finally finished and turned to go, he realized Brinley had not come there to piss but to jerk off, and even that endeavor wasn’t working out. “I could do it,” he said, “if I could just concentrate. But Christ Jesus, I just can’t.”
Marty had no idea what he ought to say. But he knew, as surely as he’d ever known anything, that to simply walk away would be even more indecent than Brinley’s behavior.
“I had an aunt back in Saint Joe,” Brinley said, giving up and tucking himself in, “my father’s sister. A real nice woman, big and kind of tall, most people would probably say a little homely, because her face was on the rough side. She taught little kids Sunday school—taught me one year, too, but she was always careful not to favor me over any of the others. That’s just the kind of person she was. She clerked in the Woolworth’s on North First, and sometimes, when the woman who took tickets at the theater was sick, she’d fill in for her.
“I guarantee you she never had a dirty thought in her life, probably never said a cussword or took a drink. Never did anything bad to anybody—I mean, this was just a real good person we’re talking about. But that don’t count for much, does it? She died about two years ago. My dad wrote me a letter when I was in basic. She was only fifty when she got some kind of cancer and they amputated a leg. That didn’t save her, though. It took her a long time to die, and while she was sick, my uncle Owen started running around with other women. He wasn’t even there the night she died.
“And that’s who I’m trying to think about,” Brinley said. “Thinking about doing it with her after she’s already lost her leg and Uncle Owen don’t have no use for her. I know it’s wrong, and that’s why I can’t concentrate. The rest of the time, when I’m not trying to do it, she’s all I think about.”
“I meant to go to a whore,” Marty said. “A colored one. They’re down there on Church Street every night. At least that’s what folks say.”
“I been with colored women,” Brinley said. “In California, before I shipped out. Hell, out there you can’t always tell what somebody is. Got Mexican mixed in with colored and sometimes Nip, too. I fucked a Nip in Long Beach. Never thought a thing about it.”
“I wanted a colored whore because I figured she’d hate me.”
“Makes sense that she would. Not saying anything against you, understand, but you’re from around here, and you all don’t treat colored people too good.”
“That’s a fact.”
“Funny they’d send you back home, though—and thank God they didn’t do it to me. Saint Joe’s the last place in the world I’d like to be.”
“I guarantee you there’s worse places than Saint Joe, wherever the hell it is. But I reckon that’s something you know, ain’t it?”
Brinley’s face, which had displayed such innocent bafflement at his inability to masturbate, now took on an altogether different cast, hard and sharp. “There ain’t no good places left,” he said. “Not for people like you and me.”
He left Marty standing alone in the latrine, somehow feeling as if he were the one who’d gotten caught milking cock. They hadn’t spoken again since. Whenever they passed each other, on the way to the mess hall or Supply, Brinley ignored Marty, just as Marty ignored him.
In the twilight, at the southwest corner of the compound, the one person he couldn’t ignore—and had begun to think about night and day, much as Brinley thought about his dead aunt— sat with his back against the fence, arms clasped around his knees while he gazed at the sky.
Marty had gone to the trouble of listing, on a sheet of lined paper, everything about the German that struck him as suspicious. For one thing, when Marty addressed him, he would just stare back like a calf mesmerized by the sight of a painted gate, yet Dan claimed he’d spoken English to him, and Dan didn’t lie. And he never put on the German uniform in the evenings, content instead to loom around the camp in his dirty, sweaty prison clothes. You never saw another prisoner have anything to do with him. Most important, though, there was Marty’s own certainty that he and this man with the ruined face were somehow linked.
Sometimes he was sure he was the soldier who’d pointed a Gewehr at him while he knelt in the ditch on the Niscemi road, begging for his life. The rifle had what looked like a silencer on it, which was absurd, since the din all around was deafening, the pop and crackle of small-arms fire melding with the low-frequency whooshing sound of mortar rounds, followed by the dull thunk of concussion. The German’s face, it seemed to him now, had been discolored, a purple band spreading from his neck and onto his cheek, and his eyes, in recollection, devoid of malice. The middle joint on the trigger finger whitened, and Marty sh
ut his eyes. When a voice hollered “Hands!” he thought of his own helpless hands, already in the air, and the other man’s—the hands that were about to destroy him. A lifetime passed before he understood that what he’d actually heard was “Hans!” When he opened his eyes, he was alone and, in a manner of speaking, still alive.
He paused before the German, who looked at him for a moment, then cleared his throat, got up and brushed dirt off the seat of his pants. Then, instead of nodding and walking away briskly as he usually did when their paths intersected, he just stood there.
Marty’s fingers grazed the stock of the rifle hanging from his shoulder. “I got a feeling you’re a liar,” he said. “Sometimes I think you killed a buddy of mine. Sometimes I think you almost killed me. Sometimes I think you didn’t do either one. But there’s still something about you that don’t seem right.”
“Not German,” the man said softly.
Whatever internal mechanism kept time in Marty’s body all but failed. “Not German? Then what the fuck are you?”
“Polish. I am Polish. From border place.” The prisoner raised both hands in front of his chest and brought them together as if squeezing an accordian. “They make me to fight. But I kill no one. No one.”
When he put out his hand, Marty stepped backwards and jerked the rifle off his shoulder.
“No,” the man said, shaking his head, eyeing the hole in the end of the quivering barrel. “No. I mean not to harm. Please.”
“Please? You asking me to show a little faith in you? Jesus, have you picked the wrong fellow.” As best he could, Marty leveled the rifle at him, though he couldn’t keep his hands from shaking. “Go on! Turn your ass around. We’re going to see the captain.”
He poked the prisoner with the tip of the barrel, then shoved him as hard as he could with the butt, and with a shout, the German fell forward onto his hands and knees.
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