Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  From different directions, Kimball and Huggins both came running, Kimball shirtless and with shaving cream on his face. Instead of a rifle, Huggins carried a tennis racket that was missing half its strings.

  Marty stood over the prisoner, pointing the barrel at the back of his head.

  Because of the shaving cream, Kimball resembled a stunned young Santa. “Stark?” he said. “What the fuck is going on?”

  The trigger teased him as no woman ever would. “This son of a bitch don’t know who he is.”

  “Well, these days,” Kimball said, “who the hell does?”

  Huggins swatted an imaginary ball. “I do,” he said.

  SIXTEEN

  AT EASE,” Munson said. Kimball relaxed, but Stark didn’t, because he couldn’t, and Huggins didn’t need to. Huggins never really came to attention to begin with, most likely because he knew his grandfather had gone to college with Henry Stimson. Word had come down to Munson that all this private would need, if he wanted to reach the secretary of war, was a nickel and a pay phone, and he’d get the nickel back.

  The rest of his face as inflamed now as the scarred part, the prisoner stood at attention between Kimball and Stark. Stark’s rifle was at sling arms, but he kept caressing the stock with his fingers—a fact Munson noted with some nervousness. “What’s the problem?” he said.

  “This prisoner, sir,” Stark said. “I spoke to him the day I reported for duty. Spoke English to him, I mean. And he acted—”

  “Would you speak German to me, Private?”

  “Sir?”

  “I asked if you’d speak German to me?”

  “No sir.”

  “Of course not. Because I’m not German.”

  “No sir.”

  “So why would you speak English to him?”

  “Well, sir, I can’t speak German.”

  “You’re not here to carry on conversations with the prisoners, Stark. If you’re lonely, I’m sure that Huggins and Kimball would be happy to chat with you about the fortunes of your favorite football team or the vicissitudes of romance, whatever you’d like. But these Germans are here to be prisoners, and you’re here to help them fulfill their obligations as captured enemy soldiers. Is that understood?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Stark’s cheeks, Munson realized, were about the same shade now as the German’s. In the small-unit seminar at West Point, commanders were always urged to pay attention to what they liked to call “the stress points”—the fingertips, the mouth, the jaws—because it was your duty to help keep a man from exploding, unless you wanted him to explode. In this case, Munson didn’t. He hoped that if Stark ever exploded, he’d be so far away that he’d never even have to hear about it. “So,” he said, easing off a little, “you spoke English to him.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “And what happened?”

  “He acted like he couldn’t understand me. But the fact is, he speaks at least some English. He talks some with the fellow he’s working for—and that’s Dan Timms, who I’ve known all my life—and just now he spoke it to me. He told me that he’s not German. Says he’s Polish and the Germans made him fight. I think he’s lying, sir, but I don’t know why. I just got a funny feeling about him. I think—sir, I know it’s not my business to make decisions, but I think maybe we ought to look at his Solbuch. There’s something creepy about him, and the way he’s been acting proves it.”

  Munson himself had a friend or two in the War Department. They claimed to be working feverishly to wrangle him a combat assignment, to get him transferred out of this backwater that would always be considered a stain on his record, just as he claimed to be itching for action. But in truth, he wanted to stay right here, or another place like it, until the war was over.

  His best friend at West Point, a guy from Medford, Oregon, who could bring a tear to the eye of the crustiest topkick when he sang “Danny Boy,” had died during the Torch landings in November. Munson knew a lot of men who’d died, and more still who were going to. In some instances, he knew their wives or girlfriends, their parents or children, and where they’d grown up, what kind of music they liked, what their favorite foods were. Much as he loved them, he didn’t want to join their ranks. He wanted to live a long time, to see his daughter grow up and get married, to watch while his wife’s hair turned gray, and his along with it. He longed for no greater glory now than the rigors of old age.

  Nevertheless, he’d always done his job and would continue to, no matter the consequences. And from those same friends in the War Department, he knew that plans for reeducating POWs were already being hatched. The first step would be to identify the anti-Nazis, who could then be separated from the rest, given training and ultimately be used to de-Nazify the others. His duty was to investigate. If he uncovered information that drew favorable attention and got him promoted into a combat assignment—well, that would be the hand fate dealt him. And he’d play it.

  He stepped closer to the prisoner. “Do you speak English?”

  “Little.”

  “Little, sir,” Kimball snapped.

  “Shut up, Kimball,” Munson said. “I can guarantee you that no man who served in the Afrika Korps requires instruction in military etiquette from you.” He looked into the prisoner’s face. “Are you Polish?”

  “Polish, yes.”

  He walked over to his desk and picked up a pad and a pen. “What unit did you serve in?”

  “Schutzen Regiment Hundred Four.”

  “Where were you captured?”

  “Name of place . . . I don’t know. English capture.”

  “What’s your name?”

  The prisoner told him.

  “Spell it.”

  The prisoner hesitated. “Please?” He extended his hand.

  Munson gave him the pad and pen. The prisoner stepped over to the desk, laid the pad on it, wrote his name.

  Munson looked at what he’d written. Gerard Szulc. “I’ve seen your name on the roster,” he said, “but there it’s spelled S-C-H-U-L-T-Z. ”

  “I write Polish. German spell different. My family Polish.”

  “From what I know, if your family’s Polish, you wouldn’t have been in the Afrika Korps.”

  “Like I told you, sir,” Stark said, “there’s something spooky about him.”

  Munson decided to ignore him, though if Kimball had interrupted, he would have rescinded his privileges for a couple weeks. “You’re anti-Nazi, I take it?” he asked the prisoner.

  “Not Nazi. Yes. No one in family.”

  “What about the other prisoners?”

  This time, he didn’t answer.

  “Just the ones in your own work detail, say. Are any of them Nazis?”

  The man moved his feet but still didn’t speak.

  “Are you afraid to answer that question?”

  “Afraid, yes.”

  “Why?”

  Again he remained quiet.

  “Okay, Schultz.” Munson thumped the pad against the desktop. There was no point in prolonging the encounter. Besides, he wanted to be alone, so he could write his wife a letter, as he’d done every night they’d been apart; some days, he’d written two, one in the morning, another that evening. “We’ll check out what you’ve told us. It may be that some other people will want to talk to you. In the meantime, for better or worse, you’re a field hand. You’ll pick that cotton till your thumbs fall off.”

  He told Kimball and Huggins to escort the prisoner out. “But don’t go with him any farther than the rec area. Just leave him there and get back to your own business. Stark, you stay.”

  He waited until the others had left, then he glanced at the pad once more before putting it in his desk drawer. “Stark,” he said, “on the subject of what is or is not creepy?”

  “Yes sir?”

  “I believe you are.”

  “Yes sir. Whatever you say, sir.”

  “Do you find yourself creepy?”

  “At certain times, sir.”

&nbs
p; “When?”

  “Most times, I guess. These days.”

  “Were you always that way?”

  “I don’t believe so, sir. In fact, I know I wasn’t.”

  “Stop touching that rifle stock.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “This instant.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I don’t want to see you fooling with it like that again. If you have need to lay your hands on it, then lay your hands on it, by God. It is not a woman’s breast, Stark. Are we goddamn clear on that?” Despite the fact that he’d always been regarded as a calm person, and was doing his best to remain calm now, he was screaming. And as he advanced on Stark, stopping when their faces were only inches apart, it crossed his mind to wonder how he’d behave in dense undergrowth, in unknown country, with dark shapes closing in from all sides.

  SEVENTEEN

  WEDNESDAY EVENING, Dan put on his State Guard uniform and drove the truck to town. Alvin had loaned him a few dollars, and he meant to do something he hadn’t done in a good while—treat himself to a burger and a shake. He loved a good burger more than just about anything, and Kelly’s were the best, but he’d been staying away from the snack bar. To begin with, he didn’t have money to waste on restaurant food. More importantly, he didn’t want to encounter Marie Lindsey, as he stood a fair chance of doing at Kelly’s.

  Tonight, though, he wasn’t feeling so cautious. Having his wallet stolen had reminded him that there wasn’t much point in denying these little pleasures. You could hold off and hold off, and the next thing you knew, you might not have anything to buy your pleasure with. You might not even have yourself to please.

  Marie wasn’t in the snack bar, but one of her friends, Sally Mankins, was sitting in a back booth with Tom and June Gaither, whose father had just taken over from their grandfather at the bank. The three of them were still in high school, and when Dan saw the schoolbooks stacked up beside their empty soda glasses, he felt a flush of anger. With Gaither’s luck, the war would end before he ever had to go fight, and in another year or so, they’d all be strolling around the Ole Miss campus, doing whatever college kids did.

  That was the thing about the war: if it ended, he’d be stuck right here for the rest of his life; if it didn’t, he’d be trying to kill people who in most cases wouldn’t be so different from him, and he hadn’t really understood this until he got out in the field with the Germans. His father had attempted to tell him as much, but the way he’d put it didn’t make any sense at the time. “If everybody went naked,” he said, “war wouldn’t work.”

  He and Dan were out back, stacking firewood under the eaves, and the house was empty. Shirley had gone to Jackson to see her ailing sister, and Alvin had business down there anyway, probably with a bootlegger.

  “It’s the uniform does it,” his father said. “Once they put it on you, you start thinking, I’m green and they’re gray— or they’re green and I’m gray. Or blue. Or brown.

  “Course, the uniform itself ain’t enough. Too many folks got exactly the same one, and how can that be worth having? So they’ll try to instill unit cohesion, but ain’t enough if you only cohere with folks from Loring County, or from Mississippi. You got to cohere with folks from Blytheville, Arkansas, and Bossier City, Louisiana, maybe even some from Illinois. So a bunch of you’ll get the same kind of patch on your shoulder— and it’ll have something to do with making bones.”

  Dan had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Some people thought his daddy was drunk a good bit of the time, but he hardly ever drank. “Sir?” he said.

  “Making bones, Danno, making bones. See, if that patch was a color, it’d have to be red. And anybody wearing it has got to be ready to give up all the red they got in ’em. For their momma, their daddy, for their sister or aunt Sue. Make yourself a bone—but not till you’ve made some other folks bones first.

  “Now, my job in the war was looking after a bunch of four-legged Fords, otherwise known as mules. And even that was about making bones. They sent me over there in the belly of a transport in the spring of ’17, me and a whole drove of the poor beasts. You should’ve seen how they crammed ’em into that ship. Put ’em on a pallet and lowered it down there into the hold and shut ’em up in stalls, and don’t let nobody ever tell you a mule can’t get seasick. Every day, for twenty-four straight days, them mules puked and shit, and I puked and shit right alongside ’em. Difference was, I had to clean up their mess.

  “I made bones out of them mules,” his daddy said, a few flecks of white foam on his lips. “I made bones out of boys like myself, and they made a bone out of me.”

  Two days later, on the afternoon his mother was due back from Jackson, Dan got off the school bus, walked into the house and found his father in a pool of red, still clutching his pistol.

  Lizzie was behind the counter, wearing the same outfit she always had on. It looked like a nurse’s uniform. Dan had never once seen her out of it, not even on those few occasions when they’d met in the street. She was the face of Kelly’s snack bar, a small dark-haired woman who could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty.

  “Hadn’t seen you in a while, soldier,” she said, setting a glass of water before him.

  “I’m not a soldier. Not yet anyhow.”

  “You will be. Before long, they’ll have stray dogs in uniform. Fact is, they already got one or two.” She glanced at the far end of the snack bar, where the little sergeant from Camp Loring was snickering over a stack of comic books. She shook her head, then leaned over the counter as if intending to say something mean, and her breasts almost spilled out of her blouse.

  He must have taken too long to look up. “They better put you in the artillery,” Lizzie said. “You’re pretty good at zeroing in on targets.”

  He couldn’t decide whether to act like he didn’t know what she meant or to hang his head and apologize. “Sorry,” he finally mumbled.

  When she laid her hand on top of his, he almost jumped off the stool. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “What do you want?”

  “A burger,” he blurted. “And a shake.”

  “Hot and cold. You got it, Captain.” She turned and walked over to the grill, where the elderly Negro fry cook stood turning burgers. “One more,” she said.

  The burger was big and juicy, the milk shake so thick, he had to eat it with a spoon. He was just finishing when he heard the door open. In the mirror behind the counter, atop the inverted stacks of cups, his eyes met Marie’s. Her hair looked different, like she might have dyed it. He didn’t remember it being such a white shade of blond.

  “When she gets to be about thirty,” his mother had told him last fall, “Marie won’t be worth having. Every woman reaches that point sooner or later, but for her, it’ll be sooner.” That was all she had to say on the subject, and he was glad, because by then Marie had been wearing his letter sweater for more than a month. She wore it to school every day until the Monday after his father’s suicide, when she handed it back to him, washed and neatly folded, in the hallway between classes and said she couldn’t see him anymore. When he asked her why, she said she was sorry, then turned and walked into the girls’ bathroom.

  At that point, he made what the principal told him was the worst mistake of his life: he pushed the door open and barged in after her, shouting and kicking the doors to the stalls, knocking one right off the hinges. Girls began screaming, cowering in the corners, and it took the chemistry teacher and the baseball coach to haul him out of there. Later, in his office, the principal said he wasn’t going to expel him, because he was so close to graduating, but that if Dan didn’t get hold of himself, he’d end up like some of the other men in his family. That was a hard thing to say, he added, and he knew it was a hard thing for Dan to hear right now. Then he got up from his desk—a big man who doubled as the football coach, and who’d paddled boys so hard that they had to ice their butts down—and put his arms around him, pulling him to his chest. “Aw, Danny,” he said. “Godda
mn it, son. Goddamn it.”

  Marie wouldn’t say Goddamn it now, but Dan bet she was thinking it, wondering, in her surprise, why she’d picked tonight to come to the snack bar. Spooning up the last of his milk shake, he let her have a few seconds to decide what to do. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gaither leaning across the table, whispering something to his sister and Sally Mankins, probably hoping to find a way to help Marie save face.

  But evidently, she decided to save face herself. Instead of turning and walking out, she came over to the counter and sat down beside him. Lizzie looked at her sharply, then grabbed a stack of dirty dishes and piled them in the sink.

  “Hey, Dan.”

  “How you doing, Marie?”

  “Not too bad.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “You got drill tonight?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I thought so. Y’all do it every Wednesday night, don’t you?”

  “Three out of every four.”

  “How long before you go in the army?”

  “I aim to join up at the end of the year. That’s when I turn eighteen.”

  “On December seventeenth,” she said. “Did you think I’d forgotten?”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “I didn’t forget.” She pulled a paper napkin from the holder on the counter and began tearing off bits. “I’m not as bad as your momma says I am.”

  Before he could reply, Lizzie said, “This ain’t the time to be tearing napkins to pieces. Those are the last ones we’ve got. If you’re nervous, why not bite your nails?”

  For a moment, all conversation stopped. Lizzie went right on washing dishes, her hands submerged in soapy water. Marie looked as if she’d been hit in the belly with a baseball bat.

  Dan said, “Why don’t we go take a walk?”

  Marie said nothing, just nodded, and he dropped some coins on the counter. “Thanks, Lizzie,” he said.

  She never looked up. “Sure thing, Captain. March hard.”