Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  “He say to stop it. Sir.”

  “He did?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Well, that’s real good. He’s a gentleman and a scholar.” He gestured with his thumb at the other man. “This here is Mr. Johnson. Works for Senator Bilbo, who I reckon you’ve heard of. ”

  “He the one from Louisiana they call the Kingfish?”

  “Naw, you got him confused with old Huey Long, who been dead about ten years.” Holder turned to Johnson. “You remember what Bilbo said about Huey after he got shot?”

  “That may be a story I’ve heard,” Johnson said. “But I won’t know till you tell it.”

  “He said wouldn’t nobody need to shoot Huey if they’d carried him over here to Mississippi. Said he would of killed his own self just trying to get out of the state.”

  Johnson grinned. “Sounds like Theodore all right.”

  “You like that story, boy?” Holder asked L.C.

  “Well, yes sir, it sound like a good story to me. But y’all right certain Mr. Bilbo ain’t no kind of Kingfish?”

  “Well, I’d sure say the senator’s a pretty darn big fish,” Johnson said. “Though he don’t hold with kings nor princes.” He placed a polished shoe on the bottom step. “I need to get on here and take a look around.”

  “Yes sir,” L.C. said. “You gentlemen want me to get out?”

  “No,” Holder said, “we want you to set right there. Need to conserve your strength. I imagine a healthy-looking boy like you’s itching to join the armed forces. No point in using up none of that energy climbing on and off a rolling store.”

  Johnson moved down the aisle, picking items up and looking them over. Holder remained standing at the foot of the steps. He was a big man. Not just tall and heavy, but thick and hard. L.C. never doubted for one minute that given the right conditions, he could kill you. But if you went ahead and played dead in his presence, he wouldn’t go to the trouble.

  “Mr. Holder?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You ever been down to Jackson, sir?”

  Holder pulled a match from his pocket, studied it for a moment, then stuck it in his mouth. “What you think?”

  “Why, I imagine you have, sir.”

  “Then how come you to ask me?”

  “Thought maybe you’d seen that mummy.”

  “What mummy?”

  “I heard they got one down there in the capitol building’s supposed to be three or four thousand years old. Say it’s about five feet long, wrapped up in white tape.”

  “I don’t know nothing about no mummy.”

  “What I been wondering is, if they use white tape, do that mean for sure that mummy ain’t a nigger?”

  Johnson said, “This isn’t a rolling store. It’s a rolling treasure chest.” He placed a can of motor oil back on the shelf. “Been doing lots of business, I reckon?”

  “Yes sir. Business pretty brisk.”

  “Sell a lot of sugar, do you?”

  “Yes sir, it’s one of our fastest-moving items.”

  Johnson strolled back down the aisle and stopped beside him. “How many of them little bags of sugar back yonder you think you’ve sold today?”

  That was a troublesome question, because L.C. had probably sold fifteen or twenty. A white woman whose name he didn’t know had flagged him down, telling him Alvin said to let her have as many as she needed, and she needed plenty. He’d sold three or four bags to field hands, five or six to housewives and two to Reverend Selmon, who’d said that sugar mixed with a small amount of grain alcohol was a very effective remedy for back pain.

  “Seem like I must have moved four or five of them sugars today, sir,” he told Johnson.

  “Seem like?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “You can’t say for sure?”

  “No sir, not right off.”

  “Your boss hadn’t told you that stuff’s rationed?”

  “Oh, yes sir. Mr. Alvin real strict about that.”

  “Strict, is he? Well then, I reckon you’ll have four or five ration coupons for sugar on board here, won’t you?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Let’s see ’em.”

  He kept coupons in a cigar box underneath his seat. He hadn’t bothered to open the box since sometime last week, when he’d stuffed it with a new batch. Alvin had said nobody off the local rationing board would ever bother him, but it was smart, just the same, to keep the coupons up-to-date.

  He reached under the seat and pulled out the box. Before he could raise the lid, Johnson snatched it out of his hands.

  While Johnson pawed through the coupons, Frank Holder looked away. L.C. had sold him tobacco illegally at least three times that he could remember, and he’d sold his wife sugar once or twice.

  “A bunch of these coupons are from last month and the month before.”

  He said what Alvin had told him to say if anything like this ever happened. “I’m color-blind, Mr. Johnson. Sometimes I can’t tell blue from green, and them coupons all look alike.”

  “That’s how come they code ’em with different pictures. You can tell a tank from a battleship, can’t you?”

  “Well, sir, I could if I was looking at ’em. But my eyesight ain’t real good to start with, and them pictures is awful small.”

  “You know there’s a ten-thousand-dollar fine for willfully disobeying the rationing laws?”

  “Yes sir. I done heard about that.”

  Johnson crammed a wad of coupons in his pocket and dropped the cigar box on the floor. He glanced at Holder, then looked at L.C. “How old are you?” he said.

  The taste of the lies he’d told lingered, and it was bitter. The next one, if he told it, would taste even worse. So rather than claim, like a lot of Negroes who’d been born on plantations, that he didn’t know how old he was, he looked the man straight in the eye and said, before he had time to think much about what he was doing, “Sir, that ain’t none of your business.”

  Johnson blinked. He held L.C.’s attention for only a second or two, though, because Frank Holder’s reaction was a lot more dramatic and much less expected. He began to make spitting noises. At first, L.C. thought he was trying to fight off a sneeze; then he remembered the day old Fulsome Carthage, the man who’d taught him to play guitar, had suffered a heart attack on the front porch. He’d slumped over, his eyes wide open, and was making noises like the ones coming from Holder now.

  But Holder wasn’t experiencing a heart attack, at least not in the traditional sense. He was weeping, crying in the stiff-lipped manner befitting a man his size, and as he climbed the steps and reached out to shove Johnson aside, L.C. began to feel as if he ought to say he was sorry, though he had no idea what he should be sorry for.

  “You bastard,” Holder said. “My boy was worth two hundred of you.” The fist that slammed into L.C.’s jaw felt like a mechanical object.

  He toppled out of the seat and lay on the floor, looking up at Johnson’s startled face.

  “I got a good mind to step on this impudent darky,” Johnson said. In preparation, he lifted his foot off the floor, so that he was standing on one leg when Holder shoved him again, sending him crashing into a display case.

  Still sobbing, Holder grabbed L.C.’s arm and pulled him to his feet. L.C. saw the tears in his eyes, big glistening drops. Frank Holder had the blues, bad and low-down, and he must have thought the only way to get rid of them was to give them to somebody else.

  Toward that end, he rammed L.C.’s head into the dashboard. He pulled him back and rammed him again, then spun him around and punched him between the eyes, knocking him down the steps.

  L.C. lay on the side of the road, trying to collect his wits enough to get up and run, but Holder was already on him. Once more the big man grabbed his arm and pulled him up. He drew his fist back to hit him, but before he could bring it forward, a voice said, “Now Frank, I’m uh gonna give uh you thirty-four seconds to get out of my sight uh.”

  Holder was so overwrought t
hat he’d failed to hear the pickup, and neither had L.C. But both of them heard Angelo Moreli shuck a round into the chamber of his shotgun.

  “You probably think uh now that’s a strange figure. So I’m uh gonna tell you how I come up with it.” The Italian stepped closer to Holder, leveling the barrel at the big man’s chest. “My oldest son’s uh fourteen. Next oldest, twelve. My daughter, she’s uh eight. Total, thirty-four. That’s the number I keep in my head. Before I do anything I may regret uh, I count uh to thirty-four. You real lucky you didn’t piss me off about two years ago, or you’d uh already be dead.”

  Moreli had said everything in a perfectly pleasant tone, those laugh lines crinkling near his eyes. But if L.C. had been the one with the gun pointed at his chest, he would never have imagined that the Italian might be joking. Neither, apparently, did Frank Holder.

  He dropped his fist and let go of L.C. He didn’t bother to issue a threat about what he meant to do tonight or tomorrow, nor did he ever stop sobbing. He just turned and plodded over to his pickup, the spitting noises still issuing from his mouth.

  He got into the pickup truck and cranked it. At that point, Johnson stuck his head out the window of the bus. “Hey,” he said, “what about me?”

  Holder, without even looking at him, pulled into the road and drove off.

  Moreli stood there beside L.C., watching the pickup disappear, the flag flapping from its side planks. When the truck was completely out of sight, he rested the stock of the shotgun on the ground. “You don’t got uh no olives in your store?”

  THIRTY

  HOLDER PARKED the pickup in front of his house and got out. His intention was to grab his shotgun, drive back to Moreli’s place and kill him. Then he’d hunt down and kill the Negro boy. If he could find Johnson, he might shoot him, too, because the truth was he didn’t like him either, any more than he liked Theodore G. Bilbo, who reminded him too much of his wife’s daddy. He might have entertained the notion of shooting Bilbo as well, but he was probably in Washington.

  He threw the door open so hard, it slammed into the wall.

  Arva was sitting on the couch, a piece of paper lying across one knee. Her left hand clutched a wadded handkerchief, which usually meant she’d been crying again, but her eyes were dry, and she was smiling for the first time in months. She’d have a smile on her face, too, on Christmas Eve, when he would walk in and find her sitting in exactly the same place, with that same piece of paper lying on her knee once again, her body already growing stiff and cold.

  “What is it?” he said.

  “A lost letter—it didn’t come till now.” Her hand was steady as she passed it to him. But his, as he read it, was not.

  Last night, the letter began, a nigger in a trucking company saved the lives of me and another boy.

  THIRTY ONE

  WHOEVER DESIGNED the towers had made a royal mess of it. In addition to having tin roofs, they were accessible only by extension ladders that you pulled up after yourself, so you couldn’t be overwhelmed by prisoners in an attempted escape. The towers were cramped to begin with, and the ladders and the enormous searchlight mounted on a gimbal placed severe restrictions on movement; aiming a rifle at somebody below would be no easy matter. He’d pointed that out to Munson after pulling his first watch, but the captain’d just told him it was doubtful he’d ever have reason to fire his weapon.

  He hated tower duty. Sergeant Case rotated guards in and out each night in four-hour shifts, and Marty’s almost always lasted from midnight until four. He usually couldn’t fall asleep anyway until around eleven; after pulling one of those shifts, he never managed to doze off again before roll call.

  Lack of sleep, though, was not his main worry. Unlike Kimball, who enjoyed playing with the searchlight while standing watch, Marty hated being in an exposed position at night. Even when you swept the beam across the compound, you couldn’t tell that much about what was going on at ground level. Somebody could always slip from shadow to shadow, and you wouldn’t even know anybody was there. But they’d know exactly where you were.

  Crossing the rec area, he shivered. The temperature had begun dropping at night, the air carrying the sharp, crisp odor of burning leaves. He used to love it when the cool weather came on, the way a big fire in the front room left your nostrils feeling baked.

  If he wanted to, he suspected, he could go over to his father’s house and stretch out in front of that fireplace tonight and stay there as long as he wanted without anything too bad happening. Rather than risk disgrace by having his son stand court-martial, his father would go crawling to Eastland and work something out with the senator. They could get him declared essential labor, as no small number of planters’ sons had been, and win his discharge, maybe even making up a story about an illness or a wound.

  But Marty wouldn’t take that route now, just as he hadn’t taken it fifteen months ago, and while he’d been puzzled at first by his reluctance to do so, he now believed he understood why it had never been a real option. Evidently, some folks carried within themselves a sacrificial gene, and he supposed he’d gotten his from his mother. Meanwhile, the country itself was like a giant machine, one that ran on a high-octane blend of blood and bones. Guys like him and Dan Timms and his buddy Raymond Sample, whose body lay in a hole on an island of death, were just meant to be chewed up and spit out by the times.

  The previous weekend, on Front Street, he’d bumped into his former baseball coach, and he’d been surprised to hear him say how good the town was looking, how many businesses had been revived, how many construction projects were being planned for the postwar years. “Look around you,” the coach had said, waving his arm at the street, teeming that evening with cars and pickup trucks and people, too, both black and white. “The paste and glue factory’s brought a lot of money into town. Jasper Sproles has been trying to keep it a secret, but he’s planning to open up a second bank to compete with the Gaithers. He’s already got investors lined up. And y’all doing your part out there at the camp. The farmers couldn’t be happier with those German boys—everybody I talk to says one of them’s worth any three niggers he ever saw. There’s talk of asking the War Department to let ’em stay on if they want after Hitler gets whupped.” He went on and on, throwing in heaps of praise for Marty and his fellow soldiers, all of whom, he said, ought to pat themselves on the back. For when this thing was over, not only would they have kicked the living shit out of the Krauts and the Japs but they would have restored the country to prosperity, too.

  By the time the coach hustled off down the street to find his wife, Marty had no choice but to face a fact he’d somehow contrived to conceal from himself. Very few folks walked around thinking they could smell a rotting body, because no rotting bodies were nearby. The war might be hell for those who fought it, but barring the loss of a loved one everybody else was faring just fine. And only a truly churlish person would break up that party.

  When he rounded the corner of the supply shed, the searchlight hit him in the face. He jumped as if electrocuted, then threw his arm up in front of his eyes as Kimball’s laugh rang out.

  Standing there in the hot white light, his legs rocking beneath him, Marty slung the rifle off his shoulder. He snatched the bolt back, then pushed it forward and locked it down, chambering a round. He slid his foot forward and dropped into a crouch, whipping his forearm through the hasty sling.

  “Jesus Christ, are you crazy?” The searchlight shot straight up, thrusting into the night sky. There was a clattering sound as a hard object fell from the tower; then Kimball hit the floorboards like a sack of cotton seed.

  Once his legs had quit shaking, Marty flicked on the Enfield’s safety and swung the rifle back onto his shoulder. Breathing deeply, he walked over to the base of the tower, where Kimball’s rifle lay, the muzzle clogged with mud.

  For several minutes, Kimball refused to climb down and wouldn’t even lower the ladder, just kept whispering the word crazy.

  “If your ass don’t appear i
n the next thirty seconds,” Marty finally said, “I’m leaving. I got smarter things to do than stand around.”

  “Wait,” Kimball said. “I’ll come down.”

  He lowered the ladder and descended, looking over his shoulder the whole time, ready to jump if he had to. When he reached the ground, Marty offered him his rifle. Kimball took it and backed away, still shaking his head.

  “Before you fire that thing,” Marty said as he stepped onto the ladder, “you might want to clean the muzzle. It’s not nearly so accurate when it’s full of dirt.”

  In the tower, he stayed on his feet, though he knew Kimball and Huggins and some of the others sat down with their backs against the railing and dozed whenever they felt like it. He kept his rifle at sling arms, rather than propping it against the railing like Kimball did, because he didn’t want to have to fumble for it in the dark. He left the searchlight on but rarely moved it.

  While standing watch, he thought a good bit about the implications of remaining upright. A couple of days after his company had hit the beaches near Gela, they overran a tiny village. The houses, some of which had been badly damaged by shell fire, were little more than stone huts, crammed with chickens, pigs, children and corpses. In the first dwelling he entered, he jerked open a closet door, to find a body standing stiffly behind a row of ragged dresses and coats, the man’s bulbous eyes wide open, flies buzzing around his shattered jaw-bone, now visible after a piece of shrapnel had sheared off part of his face. He was just an old man, the grandfather of the children they’d found in the house, one of whom told a lieutenant who spoke Italian that the old man’d been dead three days. Apparently, they thought that as long as you remained on your feet, you were, in some sense, alive.

  The lieutenant who explained the upright corpse to Marty did so in an offhanded manner, as if he’d seen stranger sights in his life, then said to move out, because there were other huts to examine, other villages to overrun. But Marty remained standing in front of the closet, unable to peel his eyes off the dead man.