Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  “You’re nuts.”

  “How come?”

  “You know how come.”

  “You mean because you’re not respectable like I am?”

  “To some folks.”

  “Like who?”

  “Them that believe the line between what’s strictly legal and what’s not isn’t just a thin streak of bullshit.”

  Jasper threw his head back and laughed so loudly, they could probably hear him across the street in the courthouse. “You’re something, Alvin,” he said. “Lordy.”

  “You didn’t ask me to come by just so you could point that out.”

  “Naw, I sure didn’t. You know old Frank Holder, don’t you?”

  “Know him when I see him.”

  “That very often?”

  “Comes in the store from time to time, buys hisself a cold drink or a plug of tobacco. Don’t usually say much. At least not since his boy got killed.”

  “A person might conclude that a man like Frank couldn’t cause him no problems,” Jasper said. “And in normal times, that’d probably be so. Thing is, these times ain’t normal, and Frank’s wife, Arva, is kin to Senator Bilbo.” He smiled broadly. “Now you probably wasn’t paying a lot of attention along about November of last year when the senator addressed his colleagues on the subject of colored participation in the war effort, but he allowed as how he found it unseemly that a state like ours, with a colored population of close to fifty percent, should send only white men to the front. Said he wanted to see some coloreds in uniform, too, even if all they did was drive trucks and clean latrines. And ever since, the seelective service has been real careful to send up a fair number of our darker brethren.”

  He then explained, at tedious length, that Senator Eastland could always be reasoned with, since he owned a cotton plantation and knew what work needed to get done. “But old Theodore don’t own much of anything, so if he found out about some colored boy that hadn’t even registered—especially one that strikes some folks as cheeky—he might get hisself all worked up, you know.”

  “Are you telling me, Jasper, to bring L.C. in and sign him up so you can pack him off to the army?”

  “Aw, Alvin, you know I ain’t one to cave in to pressure.”

  “That’s right. You’re more likely to apply it, particularly when there’s something you want.”

  “What could I want that I don’t got?”

  “Seems to me I recall you like that bootleg whiskey.”

  “Yeah, and that case you brung over when we talked about your boy last spring was good stuff. But fact of the matter is, I could get another case just like it by sundown. See, I own a big chunk of a thriving business. I can’t be bought, ’cause the war’s done let me purchase myself. I hope it does the same for you. And that colored boy, too. Till it does, though, he needn’t attract no undue attention. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you ought not to, neither. An august individual might question your patriotism.”

  He rose, so there was nothing Alvin could do but rise with him. And even though he knew he ought to keep his mouth shut, he said, “I need to ask you something, Jasper.”

  “Fire away, Alvin—fire away.”

  “If you were colored, would you die for this country?”

  The man’s face broke into a wide grin. “Not unless somebody shot me.”

  TWENTY ONE

  FOR A GOOD MANY years now, on Friday evenings Alvin had let Rosetta go home, trusting L.C. to operate the register. That first night, he told him not to let any of his friends beg candy or drinks from him, and after that he never mentioned it again.

  “Mr. Alvin know a thief when he see one,” L.C.’s momma said, “because that’s what he is. And he know you ain’t.”

  L.C. was only thirteen at the time, so he didn’targue with her, but how could Alvin tell he wasn’t a thief when he didn’t know that himself? He figured he’d steal whatever he could, whenever, so it had puzzled him, as the years went by, to discover that the urge to steal, even from white folks, just wasn’t in him.

  John Burns regarded this as a serious deficiency. Once, L.C. had wandered over to his place to drink a little whiskey, and when he walked in, the first thing he saw, hanging right there on the wall, was a black suit tailored for somebody about half a yard taller than his friend. “That old man Young’s,” he said, “ain’t it?”

  “Was his,” Burns said.

  “Aim to have it took up?”

  “You think I wear that ugly thing, you dreaming.”

  “Why you hook it, then? You aim to sell it?”

  “Hell no, I gone bury it. See, when old man Young went over yonder to Arkansas for a week, he done locked the back door and left the front open. Now what that tell you?”

  “That he done forgot to lock his front door.”

  “You a waste at school, nigger, you can’t do no better than that. What it say is, old Young thinks no white folks steal and no nigger ever go to the front door. So when he come back, he can lay awake in that bed to wonder how that shit done happen.”

  L.C. doubted Young would have to wonder very long before deciding what happened. But since tractor drivers and hoe hands were now scarce, he wouldn’t run Burns off like he would’ve a few years back. Instead, he’d determine what that suit had cost him, multiply it by two or three and take that sum out of John Burns a nickel at a time, week after week, year after year. To get even, the only thing Burns could do was watch for another unlocked door.

  Alvin had left plenty of doors unlocked when L.C. was around, including the one to his office safe. He’d send him in there to sweep up when it was hanging open, leaving the office himself so as not to get in the way. L.C. never told Burns about it, because he’d think he was crazy for not seizing the opportunity.

  The thing was, L.C.’s feelings about Alvin Timms were complicated. There were times he hated him—like the day last spring when Alvin came back from town in a high mood and told him not to worry, that he’d cooked up some deal with the draft board to keep him from having to register. He’d wanted to escape the draft, but not because Alvin needed him to pick cotton, sweep the floor and sell Popsicles; that robbed him, at least for a while, of the biggest hope he’d ever harbored, along with all the others, and you couldn’t help but hate a man for taking that from you.

  But at other times, Alvin gave back some of what he’d taken. Late on Friday nights, after they’d turned the porch light off and latched the front door and nobody else was around, he’d pull out a bottle of whiskey and pour two glasses and, after L.C. had a swallow or two, ask if he’d mind making a little music.

  The first time, it threw L.C. into the worst kind of confusion, which Alvin must’ve realized. “I was over on the Young place the other night,” he explained, “heard the singing over by them shotgun houses and recognized your voice. Sat on the road in my pickup to listen awhile. I ain’t never heard anything quite like that before, and I sure did like it.”

  L.C. sang that night, slapping his knee for rhythm, and the next Friday night, too. Before long, he was carrying the guitar to the store on Fridays, leaving it in the closet in Alvin’s office. Just as John Burns craved the bush and the bower, Alvin Timms loved to hear about the Devil and his various guises, how the old one would make himself pretty if you thought he was ugly, then uglify himself right back.

  “You ever seen Satan?” he finally asked one night.

  “Not that I know of,” L.C. said.

  “You believe he’s out there?”

  “Could be.”

  “I believe he’s in here,” Alvin said, rapping himself on the chest. “I think I’ve had him in me since the day I was born.”

  L.C. picked a riff. Dark and slow. “What make you say so?”

  “There’s stuff inside me that nobody else could’ve put there.”

  L.C. thought he knew what Alvin meant. He’d heard his momma say stuff—just talking to herself—about Alvin and his brother and Dan’s momma.

  “You know what I’m tal
king about?” Alvin said.

  “No sir.”

  “I think you do. And just between the two of us, I believe you got the Devil in you, too.” Alvin poured himself another shot of whiskey, then drank it down and set the glass on his desk. “But I’m here to tell you, L.C., I hope it ain’t so. Because that old boy can cause some real trouble.”

  Tonight was Friday. But instead of heading for his office like he usually did after the last bunch of field hands had been in and bought some Vienna sausages and as much hoop cheese as they could afford, Alvin hoisted himself onto the countertop. “L.C.,” he said, “you and me’s got to talk.”

  L.C. paused with the broom in his hand, feeling, already, like the worst kind of fool, a white man’s dream of the ideal darky. His guitar was standing in Alvin’s closet, right where he’d put it this morning.

  “You know Mr. Frank Holder?”

  Not Frank Holder, which is what he would’ve called him back there in the office with the two whiskey glasses on the desk. Mister Frank Holder.

  “Yes sir.”

  “Hasn’t nothing happened between you and him, has there?”

  What in the name of God, he wondered, could happen between him and a white man? “No sir.”

  “You stop over there on his place on your route, don’t you?”

  “Yes sir. Stop there sometimes, anyway. Hadn’t lately.”

  “And you can’t think of no reason why he’d get it in his head you was smartin’ off?”

  Slowly, L.C. leaned his broom against the counter. Alvin’s gaze lit on the handle for a second or two, then flicked back to L.C.’s face.

  “I can think of one thing I might’ve did.”

  “All right. So what was it?”

  L.C. scratched his head. “Well, maybe two—naw, now I don’t want to be lying . . . it seem closer to three weeks ago. . . . Yes sir, it sure was three weeks ago that I stopped on my route there one day, long about three-thirty in the afternoon, and looked Mr. Frank Holder right square in the eye.”

  For a long time, Alvin said nothing. Then he shook his head, chuckled and jumped down off the counter. “Okay,” he said. “Come on, let’s drink us some whiskey. Where you gone end up, you’ll need a little alcohol in your bloodstream.”

  The next morning, when he walked out onto the porch, the sunlight almost knocked him over. Dimly, he recalled that before Alvin had driven off and left him there in his office, they’d sung “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

  He wanted to slip off somewhere and rest till his momma left the house for work; then he could get in the bed and give his head a chance to quit hurting. Hoping to God he wouldn’t run into her, he set off the longer, roundabout way and was crossing the gravel road when he saw a pickup coming toward him. As it got a little closer, he recognized it. He raised his hand, intending to wave it down, but Dan just nodded and drove on by.

  TWENTY TWO

  WAKING , Marty had discovered, was a lot like being born: unsettling but unavoidable. Light seeped in through the folds in the tent flaps, until it became a fact he had to acknowledge. Sooner rather than later, this being the army, you had to climb out of the cot, pull your clothes on and step outside. What you didn’t have to do—and he began each day that fall knowing he wouldn’t—was pick up a newspaper and read the new figures, the ones that told you how many more were dead. They didn’t list how many others might as well be.

  In the shower, he did his best to banish the chill he always woke with, letting the hot spray knead his neck and chest while Huggins and Kimball and one or two others hollered back and forth, the topic the same as always.

  “You know whose bank I wouldn’t mind making a deposit in? That little dark-haired thing down at the snack bar.”

  “Lizzie?”

  “I never note their names. To me, they’re all just Honey. ”

  “That woman’s probably forty, man, maybe more. Jesus Christ.” Kimball’s horror sounded genuine. “What’s the matter with you? You got the urge for a gray cootie?”

  “California must have the worst educational system in the country if you got cooties confused with pubic hair.”

  “Whatever it is, I don’t want to see anything gray when I look down there.”

  “You’re not supposed to eyeball it, you’re supposed to rout it out.”

  Kimball gestured at Huggins’s crotch. “With what you got, about the only thing you could rout out is somebody’s ear canal.”

  When Huggins made thrusting motions with his hips, Kimball hurled a soap bar at him, and a few minutes later, as Marty stood in a corner, toweling off, they were still in the showers, laughing and belittling each other.

  His main concern now was the one of identity.

  With so few guards in camp, nobody got liberty very often. But the last time they’d turned him loose, he’d gone home and, while his mother sat downstairs, scrounged through the attic until he found his father’s 1920 Loring Separate School District yearbook. He’d turned to the student portraits and, not even looking at any of the faces, torn out those pages.

  Back at camp, he’d sat on his cot, examining the photographs and, without referring to the names listed in the margins, trying to see how many he could correctly identify. About half the time he succeeded, because it was the mother or father of one of his high school friends and the family resemblance was obvious. But the man he thought was Harvey Finch, whose son Teddy he’d played basketball with, turned out to be somebody named Zenus McGhee, whom he’d never even heard of.

  Still, he was batting about .500, if you wanted to see it in those terms, though that didn’t seem too good, given that he’d known most of these people, in various incarnations, all his life. He thought he should give this test to somebody else— Dan, maybe—but was sure Dan would have said he was crazy.

  So it disconcerted him when he walked into the tent after showering and found Sergeant Case flipping through the yearbook.

  “Give me that,” he said, snatching it out of his hands.

  “Hey, hey—what’s this?” Case said. “You ever heard about the chain of command? You know, treating your superiors with respect? I got a good mind to make you do some push-ups.”

  Marty jammed the yearbook into his footlocker and snapped it shut. “If I push anything up, it’ll be you.”

  Backing away, Case leveled a finger at him. “And you’ll end up in the stockade. Or the fucking nuthouse.”

  “Either one’d be an improvement on this, unless you’re in there with me.”

  Case backed all the way out of the tent, then stuck his head in through the fly.

  Marty couldn’t help but crack up. His NCO looked like one of those clowns at the county fair: hit him on the head and win a nickel or take a ride for free.

  “Captain wants to see you,” Case said. “Right now. So get your loony ass moving.”

  To see Munson without a file at hand was almost like seeing him naked, and this morning he was also out of uniform, with a robe over his pajamas, and suffering from the flu. On his upper lip was a bright red cold sore.

  He pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his robe and blew his nose. “You ever find yourself in a position, Stark, where you really wanted to do the right thing, and you had what looked like two clear choices—not three or four, not five or six, just two—but you still couldn’t tell which was which?”

  “Yes sir. I guess everybody’s been in that position at one time or another.”

  “And that’s the position I’m in right now. You say you recall being there yourself?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Care to tell me about it?”

  “No sir. Not really.”

  “Would it surprise you to know that my being in that position has something to do with you?”

  “No sir.”

  “It wouldn’t.”

  “No sir.”

  “There’s not much that surprises you, is there, Stark?”

  “Not really, sir. Not anymore.”

  “Would it s
urprise you,” Munson said, “to know that some documents relating to the prisoner you’re so interested in are missing?”

  Word was, Patton took his own pulse whenever he came under shelling and somehow had learned to hold it steady. That was one skill, among many, that Marty Stark would never master. “No sir.”

  “I didn’t think it would. And frankly, that worries me.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.”

  “The prisoner himself has nothing to do with the screwup. In combat situations, rules are often forgotten. A lot of things are forgotten on the battlefield.”

  “Yes sir. They sure are, sir.”

  “That’s right. Soldiers forget their training. Our men have been told, for instance, not to hunt souvenirs, yet they do. They swipe medals, steal decorations, sometimes even steal identification and documents. And because of this, it turns out that registering some of these prisoners can be a real nightmare.”

  Marty said, “Sir . . . if I could ask a question?”

  Munson waited.

  “Where was he captured?”

  “We don’t know. His Solbuch’s gone. And unfortunately, that’s not all.”

  He explained that the prisoner’s serial number began with 81, indicating capture in North Africa. The problem was, no record of the serial number could be located at base camp; an entire box of files was missing, and his must have been in it. Right now, the army didn’t even know which convoy had brought him over. The processing center had either lost or misplaced every shred of information on him. Practically speaking, he didn’t exist.

  Munson paused to see if Marty would offer an observation. When he failed to, the captain asked, “What does this news suggest to you, Stark?”

  “Nothing, sir.”

  “Nothing?”

  “No sir.”

  “In other words, you’re buying my explanation—that some poor, dumb, overworked clerk screwed up somewhere in New Jersey, but that in the end these records will be found, proving this prisoner’s exactly who he claims he is?”