Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  “Yes sir.”

  “That’s good, Stark,” Munson said. “That’s exactly the answer the army wants to hear.”

  “The army, sir?”

  “That’s right, it’s what the army wants.” Munson blew his nose on the handkerchief again, then gazed at it with disgust. “And believe it or not, Stark, the army also wants to ask you a favor.”

  TWENTY THREE

  September 29, 1943

  Camp Loring, Miss.

  Dear Stella,

  First of all, since I know you like to envision the circumstances under which I’m writing, I should let you know that it’s midafternoon. I’m sitting on my cot, wearing, if you can believe this, a pair of pajamas and a robe cadged from the infirmary. I’ve been running a slight fever—well, not that slight, above 102—so I’m spending the day in my quarters.

  I can’t help wondering what it would be like to be sick when you were actually on the front lines. That’s a strange thing to think about, isn’t it? (And that’s all I’m doing, thinking on the page.) I remember that when I was growing up, Mrs. Jorgenson, who lived down the street from us in Wynoka, was diagnosed with cancer. (The only reason we knew this was that her doctor, another neighbor, told my father.) Of course, anybody could see that something was wrong with her; she began to lose weight, and her skin gradually took on a strange cast, almost greenish.

  She and Mr. Jorgenson were childless. They ran the only drugstore in town, and each of them had been known to slip some of us kids candy. They liked children, in other words, and everyone agreed it was sad they never had any. My impression, and everyone else’s, was that they were totally devoted to each other. You would see the two of them walking together in the park on Sunday afternoon, strolling along the creek, throwing bread on the water for the ducks. Or they’d ride around the countryside in their Model A, carrying a picnic basket with them and stopping wherever they felt like it, then spreading a blanket on the ground and having a leisurely lunch.

  They were in their mid-forties when she got sick. When it became apparent that she wasn’t going to recover, everybody wondered if Mr. Jorgenson would live long after she passed away. I think we all believed it would be one of those situations where the health of one person in the marriage determines that of the other.

  In fact, he didn’t live very long after she died—less than four years, if I recall this accurately, so he was probably no more than forty-nine or fifty when he died. It would make a more symmetrical story if he’d died of cancer himself, just as she had, but in fact he was up in a big oak tree in their front yard on a Saturday morning, pruning some branches, when the limb he was standing on suddenly collapsed. Somehow or other, he managed to come down right on top of his head. It didn’t kill him, but he was unconscious when a neighbor walked by and saw him, and by the time they got him to the hospital, there was some type of swelling in his brain. His head actually grew misshapen. He was in a coma for the better part of two months, and then passed away quietly one afternoon.

  But the point of this story is that during the time when Mrs. Jorgenson’s condition was growing worse and worse, you’d see the two of them at local sporting events. At a basketball game, say, when we scored a basket, Mrs. Jorgenson would scream at the top of her voice, and Mr. Jorgenson would, too, just as if neither of them knew that she would soon be gone.

  You will probably think the connection I’m trying to make here is tenuous, and I’m probably not making it too well. But I sometimes wonder if, in life-and-death situations, the only thing that matters is staying alive. If it is, would a person stop loving the taste of smoked salmon—even if, like me, he’d always enjoyed it more than any other food in the world? In other words if, in his rations, you gave him smoked salmon (not likely, of course, in this army), would he notice what it was and take pleasure in it? Or would he just shovel it down and get on about the business of keeping his head low? I’ve never thought about things like this before. It is uncharacteristic of me, probably a waste of time bought and paid for by the army, and I would never express such thoughts to anybody but you. Put it down to the fever, if you will.

  Speaking of fever, the guard I’ve been worried about shows signs of cooling off. I know that from time to time he drinks when he’s on duty, and you can rest assured I’m keeping an eye on that. But whereas a week or two ago after the incident I mentioned, I believed he posed a risk to the prisoners and perhaps even to the other guards, he has caused no further trouble. It’s not my business to say if it was a good idea or a bad one to assign him to a camp in his hometown, but at any rate he’s in a position to be particularly useful if, as I have some reason to hope, he so chooses.

  Now, regarding your father’s proposal: please tell him I’m flattered. I suppose that he’s making a certain kind of sense—that “selling” the army is not that different, in the end, from selling real estate. But I’m not a recruiter. The people I “sell” the army to—since they are already in the ranks—have no choice but to buy what I’m selling. I’m afraid that if our livelihood were ever to depend on my ability to move a given piece of property, we’d surely starve.

  But you don’t need to say no just yet, because, for one thing, this war’s far from over. I’m glad civilians are optimistic, since it would make prosecuting the war much harder if they weren’t. But if they knew more about the enemies we’re fighting, they’d realize that some of these people, at least, are a long way from giving up. Maybe some of them never will.

  I don’t want to end, though, on a somber note. So I’ll conclude by saying that I wish I was holding you in my arms, that I wish I could pick Elizabeth up and twirl her in the air, and that if I were with the two of you just now, it wouldn’t matter to me one bit if I looked out the window and realized I was in Philadelphia!

  How’s that for devotion?

  Love to you, as always,

  Robert

  TWENTY FOUR

  DAN WALKED into the living room, to find his mother sitting on the couch in her bathrobe, a plastic net on her head and a listless look in her eyes. She’d been like that all weekend, and then this morning she hadn’t gone to work, even though she’d told Miss Edna Boudreau she’d be in on Monday. He hoped the phone company wouldn’t fire her. Knowing she had a job, even one that didn’t pay well, had eased his conscience. She still hadn’t given up hope that he might not enlist, that the war would end before the army called him up.

  “Anything you need?” he said, fingering the keys in his pocket.

  “Yeah. I need my hair back, so that I can stand to look at myself, since nobody else ever does.”

  When he’d played football in high school, he discovered he couldn’t get mad unless somebody hit him in the nose. When that happened, he’d kick, bite, gouge and grab the other fellow by the nuts if, in his blind rage, he could find them.

  In a manner of speaking, she’d just poked his nose. His father had been willing to look at her right up until the day he took his life. “You want somebody to look at you?” he said. “Get up off the couch and go to town. Somebody’ll look at you then. Quit sniveling around, waiting for you know who.”

  She crossed her arms over her chest, regarding him with the kind of intense interest she’d probably shown him in the cradle. “I do know who,” she said. “Do you?”

  He withered. “Hell,” he said, “I don’t know.”

  “What don’t you know?”

  “Look, I didn’t mean anything.”

  “Oh yes you did. You meant one hell of a lot.”

  “I’m going to Greenville,” he said, “with Marty Stark. Shoot some pool, maybe. You want anything?”

  “I want you to tell me who I’ve been sniveling around after.”

  He didn’t answer, and couldn’t look at her now.

  “Do you know why I’m sniveling around?”

  “Just forget it.”

  She rose and stepped around the coffee table. He smelled whiskey mixed with Vaseline. “Go to Greenville, Danny,” she whispered. �
��Right this minute.”

  He’d offered to swing by the camp, but Marty said he’d be downtown anyway, so they met in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot.

  “Last time I talked to your daddy was right here,” Marty said as soon as he climbed into the truck. “On a Saturday morning. Right before I left for the induction center. I don’t reckon he ever mentioned it?”

  “No. But that last year or so, he was pretty closemouthed. Except right at the end.”

  Dan pulled into the street, drove through town and turned onto the highway. Except for his rolling-store route—which, after all, never took him out of the county—he hadn’t been anywhere, not even to Greenville, for close to a year. His father used to talk about all of them visiting New Orleans one day, maybe even spending a night at the Ponchartrain, but that had never happened.

  The sun was almost down. In one or two fields they saw a few pickers, old black men mostly, some women and children, a handful of teenagers. The Negro schools didn’t open for fall until everything but the scrap picking was done, and that wouldn’t be for several more weeks.

  “I used to love this time of year,” Marty said.

  “Beats the other times, I guess.”

  “You sound like you already been at the front.”

  That, Dan thought, depended on how you defined the term. He hadn’t been where they were fighting, and he figured when he got there, he’d have a new set of problems. Then maybe the old ones would matter a lot less.

  Over close to the levee, two or three miles north of Greenville, there was a restaurant and bar that Marty said he’d been to a couple years ago. “Ain’t got pool tables,” he said, “but the truth is, I don’t know how to shoot pool. I tried it once when they let me loose during basic. Hit some fellow in the ass with the butt of my cue stick. He spilled his drink on the woman he was bird-dogging and decided to nail me instead.”

  Inside, behind a burnished wood bar, a big fellow with a red mustache plinked down cold bottles of Jax without asking for proof of drinking age. Marty ordered two bowls of salted peanuts, which they carried with their beers over to a booth.

  Five or six pilots from the air base sauntered around the place, all of them wearing the dark khaki tops and beige bottoms of the Army Air Corps, feeding coins into the jukebox and bragging about stunts they’d performed. Every time an unaccompanied woman walked through the door—and three or four did—the airmen drew straws to see who’d get the first shot. Mostly, winning cost them money. They bought the women beers and, in return, got conversation only.

  Conversation, though, was what Marty wanted. Specifically, to talk about his commanding officer. After they’d each downed a couple beers, he said, “He’s from someplace up in Minnesota. One of those little towns where everybody’s a son. Munson and Brunson, Swanson or Johnson. Word around camp is, his father taught high school. I don’t know what subject. Biology or some shit. They say Munson did pretty well at West Point, was even a champion marksman with the fortyfive. But somewhere along the line, somebody made a determination.”

  “What kind of determination?”

  “That he couldn’t cut it. Or that he wouldn’t anyway. But I got a feeling they’re wrong. I think he’d cut it, right up to the minute it cut him. And I guess that’s what you need to win a war—somebody that’s eager to bleed.”

  “What about somebody that just wants to do what’s right?”

  Marty grinned, lifted his beer, took a swallow and shook his head. “I knew that’s what you’d say. I told Munson so just the other day.”

  “You talked to the captain about me?”

  “Sure did, buck. For a solid hour, maybe more. He’s got the Life and Times of Timms down cold. He knows about that goal-line tackle you made against Belzoni after that swivel-hipped dago— what was that little bastard’s name? Number twenty-nine.”

  “Joey Malatesta.”

  “After that little bastard faked me out of my britches. He knows you’re good in English, bad in math, worthless with women and completely without guile.”

  “What the hell is guile?”

  “You don’t need to know—you ain’t got none.”

  One of the flyboys cleared his throat and sidled over to the door. A young woman in a plaid dress had walked in, clutching her purse strings so tightly, her knuckles had blanched.

  “Allow me, ma’am,” the airman said, “to introduce you to a gentleman who this very afternoon flew a magnificent AT-six underneath the Greenville bridge.”

  “Why would anybody do that?” the woman said. “I don’t want to meet anybody who’d do that.”

  Marty burst out laughing.

  The pilot looked at him, red-faced. “You hear something funny, bub?”

  “Naw, I just choked on a peanut.” He kept his mouth shut until the man had cajoled the woman into sitting down with him and his buddies. “What you got that I don’t have,” he then told Dan, “is a quality Munson prizes: you just want to do what’s right, and you think you know what that is.”

  “Sounds like you think I’m the dumbest piece of shit in the outhouse.”

  “Don’t take offense, buck. Me and you’s pissed in the same bushes many a night.”

  “How come the captain’s so interested in me?”

  “Well, he’s mostly interested in that prisoner with the boiled face, and hoping you might learn a little something. Guy claims he’s not a German, you know. Says he’s from Poland. He ever mention that to you?”

  “No, he’s been pretty quiet lately.” In fact, the POW hadn’t said much of anything for two or three weeks—since the day he’d popped the gears on the bus. The next day, Dan had approached him near the end of a row, intending to thank him, but the guy’d kept his eyes fixed on the cotton stalks. Dan had looked up, to find the tall prisoner who always did exercises staring right at them. “How the hell could he be Polish and serve in the German army?” he asked.

  “Bastard’s probably lying.”

  “Don’t y’all have any records on him?”

  “Army says everything relating to him’s missing. They can’t even find a record of his serial number. All the insignia’s been stripped off his uniform, too, but apparently nobody found that odd till now. He don’t have a thing in his duffel bag except the German uniform he never puts on, a shaving kit, a couple knitting needles and some thread and a small stuffed bear with an ear tore off. He ain’t written a letter, or got one.”

  “How come the army don’t send somebody down here to investigate?”

  “That’d make sense, wouldn’t it?”

  “Would to me.”

  Grinning, Marty grabbed a handful of peanuts. “Well, that’s why the army don’t do it.” He stuffed the nuts in his mouth and started crunching.

  An argument had broken out among the airmen, clearly being staged for the benefit of the women at their table. The pilot who’d exchanged words with Marty bristled at the suggestion that he lacked the skill to land a training craft on top of the levee. “I could do it in the dark,” he said.

  “Go on, you crazy Okie. You couldn’t land on it in broad daylight if you had Charlie Lindbergh holding your hand.”

  “Why would anybody want to land on the levee?” the young woman in the plaid dress asked. “There’s cows out there.”

  Shaking his head, Marty drained his third beer, then motioned at Dan’s bottle, which was almost empty. “Want another one?”

  “I don’t know. I got to get them Germans in the field tomorrow morning. What time is it?”

  “It’s still early. “ Marty rose, went to the bar and returned with four bottles, rather than two.

  Dan sat there eyeing them. “You’re drinking a lot, ain’t you?”

  “Maybe, but not nearly enough.” He turned a bottle up and chugged about half of it before stopping, then wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve and explained the plan. If Dan was willing to talk, he said, he and Munson could meet briefly somewhere in town, maybe at the armory. The captain didn’t want him coming i
nside the camp, because the prisoners might start to wonder if he was something besides a labor contractor.

  Dan couldn’t help but feel flattered, but he didn’t intend to validate Marty’s notion that he was eager to please. “Sure, I can talk to him,” he said, “but what exactly does he want me to do?”

  “He wants you to sound out our Polish friend. If he drops his guard any, you can try to find out when and where he was captured, that kind of thing. I got a feeling they’re hoping to turn him. See, there’s plenty of gung ho Nazis in that camp, and as far as those boys are concerned, Paulus didn’t surrender at Stalingrad and’s already halfway to Moscow. So the brass is starting to wonder what to do with bastards like that when the war is over. Send ’em back the way they are,” Marty said, “and they’ll start the same shit again.”

  “You really think they’re so much worse than we are?”

  “When it comes to Germans—”

  Just then, the pilot from Oklahoma jumped up from the table. “You’re on! Fifty bucks says I put that baby down on the levee like you was parking your momma’s car.”

  Marty smiled. “When it comes to Germans, I don’t think a goddamn thing.”

  As a condition of the bet, the airmen agreed to commandeer vehicles and train their headlights on the berm, and one of them had approached Dan and Marty’s booth. “You guys wouldn’t be the owners of that pickup parked next to the propane tank, would you?”

  Dan said, “Yeah, it’s mine.”

  “Come on out and watch the spectacle. Beer’s on us.”

  “I need to get home pretty soon.”

  “Consider it training,” Marty said, standing up. “You’ll spend plenty of time these next few years seeing matériel misused and abused.”

  They parked a handful of pickups and cars in a row on the east bank of the levee, their headlights shining upwards at a fortyfive-degree angle. The night sky was perfectly black.