“I don’t believe that,” Dan said. “Folks are attached to this place.”
“Maybe,” she said, “but once you boys turn into soldiers, you’ll leave here and go places you’ve never even heard of, and when you come back, it’ll be with a whole different set of expectations. And some,” she said, “won’t even remember who they were before they left.”
“I hope I can,” Dan said. “Not that I think I’m anything special. I’d just like to know what I add up to when it’s all said and done, and I don’t reckon I can do that by forgetting everything up till now.”
“I wish you’d stay just the way you are, Danny, because you’re about the nicest boy that’s ever walked in that door.” Here she paused. “You know, I caught you looking down my blouse the last time you were in here, and you were stupid enough to think I didn’t like it.”
“But you did like it?”
“You’re still in what my momma liked to call the yes-or-no stage of manly behavior.”
“You find me manly?”
She grinned, revealing a silver filling. “Yes,” she said, “and no.”
“No?”
“You don’t do that part first, hon. You start out with yes and work your way around to no.”
“Sounds backwards to me.”
“Well, it would, because you’re a man, although a very young one, and men do tend to see everything backwards. But it’s a lot more interesting if you start with yes. The truth is, you remind me of the fellow I married.”
“Actually, that sounded like the no part.”
She forked up a piece of cake and chewed it, then took a sip of her coffee. “You want to hear this?” she asked, setting the cup back down.
“Yeah.”
“Then don’t interrupt.” She told him they’d met over in Arkansas, after he’d come back from the First War, just like Dan’s daddy. They stayed married for almost six years and ran a commissary on a big plantation south of Pine Bluff. “Then one day, Lee up and disappeared. Didn’t say a word, never wrote, never called or sent a telegram. Hadn’t shown the slightest sign of dissatisfaction the whole time I’d known him.”
“You reckon maybe somebody killed him?”
“No, because when he left, he took both pairs of pants he owned and both shirts, along with his winter coat and tackle box, the family Bible and a box of needles he had for vaccinating hogs.”
“And you say he looked like me?”
“Not the least bit. He was a whole lot shorter and thinner. He told me that when he went to enlist back in ’17, he had on four or five layers of clothes, and once he started peeling them off for the exam, one of the doctors said, ‘Hey, this fellow’s disappearing right before my eyes.’ Just like he disappeared later before mine, I guess.”
“So if me and him don’t look anything alike, how come I remind you of him?”
She took another sip of her coffee, then reached over and took both his hands in hers. “When a woman does this,” she said, “you better watch out. She wants something from you. That’s the good news.”
He was beginning to think he could probably do a lot more with her, if he wanted to, than look down her blouse. She might be sitting there hoping he’d kiss her, or planning to ask him over to her house.
“You want to hear the bad news?” she asked him.
“Is this the no part?”
“More or less.”
“I reckon now’s as good a time as any.”
“What she wants from you may not be what you want from her. Probably isn’t, most of the time.”
“That’s a sure no, all right,” he said. “No question about it.” When he saw the moisture creeping into her eyes, his first impulse was to flee. What stopped him was the knowledge that had their roles had been reversed, she never would’ve walked out and left him alone.
“That’s why you remind me of Lee,” she said. “I’m sitting here telling you I don’t want what you want, and you’re sitting there giving me what I do want. Lee did that, too, until he couldn’t give it anymore. And even then he didn’t pitch a fit or make a list of all the times I’d let him down, like most of the men I’ve known. He just took what he had to have and slipped on out the door.”
They slipped out the door, too, but not until a quarter past ten, by which time they’d covered a lot of ground. He’d learned that her mother and her stepdaddy were both buried in a country graveyard near Dumus, Arkansas, and that she had a brother who worked at a sawmill in Crossett. If she left here, she said, she’d most likely live with him and his family for a while, try to find a job in a restaurant or maybe even a truck stop. Eventually, if she could manage it, she’d like to get a little house in the country, with enough land to raise a garden and have some chickens and maybe a couple hogs.
He told her about the strange conversation he’d had after drill with Ralph Hobgood, how the captain had stood there gazing at the goalposts and said his father’d claimed he’d do anything to keep him out of the army.
She spat out a single word: “Bastard.” Then she took both his hands in hers again and squeezed them so hard they hurt. “Danny,” she said, “the person who pointed a gun at your daddy’s head was your daddy. The person who just pointed a gun at yours was Ralph Hobgood. If it was me, I’d shove that barrel in the opposite direction.”
Standing on the street in front of the snack bar, he made a halfhearted attempt to get invited to her place. If she was scared to drive home this late, he said, he could drop her off and then come pick her up again in the morning.
She stroked his cheek. “That’s as good a way as any to try to pull it off.”
“Pull what off?”
“You know what,” she said. “And believe me, Danny, I’m flattered. But it wouldn’t solve a thing for either one of us. My pages have been scribbled all over, to the point where anything else just feels like more scrawling.”
THIRTY FIVE
AFTER A SLOW START, the Germans’ farmwork had improved. It didn’t hurt that, in accordance with the Geneva Convention, they received eighty cents per day, as long as they met the minimum daily quota of a hundred pounds apiece. Right now, Dan knew, they were being compensated in camp scrip, but Marty said the army had set up a savings plan so they could take partial payment in hard currency when the war ended, if they chose. Whatever the reason, they’d become zealous about picking cotton, especially the tall guy named Voss, who had such little ears.
They were in the habit of weighing up three times every day: once around ten-thirty, again at two, then a final time when they quit for the day. Dan’s route brought him back near his fields in late morning, so he usually handled the first weigh-up, while Alvin drove over and took care of the second. Then, after Dan finished his route, he weighed their cotton one last time and hauled them back to Camp Loring.
A fair amount of horseplay occurred that morning as the POWs waited near the trailer in unusually high spirits. In mid-October, for the second time in two months, the Allies had flown a raid over some town in Germany called Schweinfurt, where there was a big armament factory, and according to the sketchy news in the paper and on the radio, their losses had again been terrible. You could never be sure how much the prisoners knew, but reports of this disaster—already dubbed “Black Thursday”—might have reached them by now.
Voss hoisted his sack onto his shoulder and bounced up and down on the balls of his feet, humming what sounded like a polka, while Dan broke out the scales. Then the lanky German hung the sack, stood back and watched it being weighed.
“Seventy-six pounds, six ounces.”
One of the other prisoners wagged his finger at Voss, who grinned and bent over and stood still as each of the others, except Schultz, strode up behind him and gently kicked him in the rear. After taking his punishment, Voss freed his sack, hurled it up into the trailer, then climbed in after it and dumped out the cotton.
One by one, the others followed, hanging their sacks from the scales, then stepping back to watch while Da
n weighed them. Voss remained in the trailer. After Dan recorded the weights, each would hand his sack up to Voss, who’d empty it and then fling it over the side plank.
Schultz was the last to weigh up. As he stepped back so Dan could balance the scales, Voss climbed out of the trailer and jumped down, stirring up dust where he landed.
“Thirty-four pounds.”
One of the other prisoners shook his head and said something to Voss in German, and Voss said something back as they strapped on their sacks.
For a moment or two, Schultz watched the others heading off into the field. Then he turned back to the trailer and detached his sack from the scales.
“I’ll get up there in the trailer,” Dan told him, “and you pass me the sack.”
“I climb,” Schultz said. “Is okay.”
Three good-sized pieces of two-by-four had been nailed to the front end planks. Schultz gripped the top one, planted his foot on the bottom one and swung himself into the trailer, reached over the side plank and grabbed the sack, then dumped the cotton and packed it down.
Dan was already walking back to the rolling store when the chunk of two-by-four came loose. He didn’t see it happen, just heard the loud squawk of a nail tearing free from the wood and, a second later, the German’s groan. Climbing out, he’d apparently fallen straight down onto the iron tongue. When Dan ran around to the front of the trailer, he was splayed across it, face contorted in pain as he struggled for breath.
“Jesus,” Dan said.
Schultz’s lips scarcely moved: “Side pain.”
Dan gripped him under one arm and helped him sit up, then gently probed his rib cage. “Does that hurt?”
“Hurt. Yes.”
“We better get you back to the camp. Can you walk if I help you?”
“Yes, I think.”
Dan helped him to his feet and, with the German’s arm looped around his shoulders, walked him over to the rolling store.
The other prisoners had quit picking. The one who’d wagged his finger at Voss started to lift the strap off his shoulder, but after looking over at Voss, he let his arm fall and stood watching while Dan started the engine and pulled into the road. Once the others disappeared from view, Schultz relaxed considerably, his shoulders no longer hunched in pain. For a mile or so, he sat quietly, observing the cotton fields passing in a blur. Then, as they neared the highway, he shifted his position, so Dan could see his face.
“Please?” he said. “One moment?”
“Yeah?”
“Not hurt,” the German said.
“What?”
“Not hurt.” To prove it, he patted his rib cage. “I lie.”
Dan let off the accelerator. “Why?”
“I have desire to talk.”
“To me?”
“To you, yes. But also with American officer. From prisoner camp. Very important.”
“How come you didn’t just say so?”
“Other prisoner must not to know. Please. I tell to Kommandant. Everything.”
When he reached the highway, Dan turned the bus around and drove the prisoner to his own house, where he picked up the receiver and heard his mother’s voice on the other end saying, “Danny? Danny? Is that you?”
Waiting for the captain to arrive, Dan offered the prisoner a glass of water, which he accepted with gratitude, ducking his head. He sat on the couch, drinking, his eyes roaming the walls, taking in all the pictures, including the one of Shirley in a porch swing, sitting between Alvin and Jimmy Del Timms. She’d hung it up a month or so after the funeral, and when Dan asked her why he’d never seen it before, she said it was because his father hadn’t liked it.
He believed then that what his father hadn’t liked was Alvin’s proximity to Shirley, the way her head inclined toward him rather than toward the man who became her husband, and the position of Alvin’s hand—in suspended motion, as if it had just been removed from her knee. Though he didn’t discount that as a reason now, he’d begun to wonder if his father’s aversion might not also have involved the uniform he wore.
Dan had never actually seen the uniform. The only time he’d asked to, his father claimed he’d burned it. He’d earned medals and citations, as well—Dan had learned as much by listening to him talking with Ralph Hobgood those afternoons on the porch—but nobody, as far as he knew, had ever been granted a glimpse of them. After his father’s death, they’d never surfaced.
The POW nodded at the photo. “Your father?”
“Yeah.”
“Which one?”
“The soldier. The other one’s my uncle Alvin—the fellow that comes and weighs y’all’s cotton sometimes.”
“Brother is twin?”
Dan had never thought they resembled each other all that much. But in the photograph, he had to admit, the similarity was striking. “No. My father was a year older.”
The prisoner stood and walked over to examine the picture more closely. “In First Division your father was?”
“I think so.”
“Big Red One.” He stuck his hands in his pockets. “Where is father now?”
“Dead.”
Either Dan looked older than he was or the prisoner was bad at math, because he said, “Killed in last war?”
Dan didn’t know what he’d say until it was said—and then, whether it was a lie. “No. In this one.”
The POW returned to the couch and sat down, and they both fell silent, neither meeting the other’s eye until fifteen minutes later, when the scout car pulled into the yard and Marty climbed out, followed by Captain Munson.
“Escape . . .” As the prisoner searched for a word, the skin on his cheekbones wrinkled, sending red ripples through the ugly stain. “Escape meeting,” he finally said. “They have each day.”
“When?” Munson asked.
“After night meal.”
“Where?”
“In different place. This tent or that one.”
Munson had withdrawn a pencil and a small notebook from his pocket, but he hadn’t written a word. “How many are planning to go?”
“I don’t know. Four, I think. Maybe more go.”
“Where in the world do they plan to escape to?”
“Meksyk Gulf.”
The captain shook his head, as if he’d never heard anything quite so ridiculous. “They want to go for a swim or what?”
The prisoner shrugged. “Wait for Boot.”
“You’re telling me they’ve already arranged their own transportation?”
“Voss say Boot to come. I don’t know.”
“It’s close to three hundred miles from here to the Gulf. How do they plan to get there?”
“Steal auto.”
“The countryside’s crawling with military police and Civil Defense patrols. The first time they got stopped, they’d be asked for their papers.”
The prisoner wet his lips, and for a moment or two he hesitated. “They make many dokument.”
“What kind of documents?”
He glanced at Dan. “Driver license. Military name card.”
Dan said, “It was them that stole my wallet?”
The prisoner dipped his head. “I steal. Sorry.”
“You took this young man’s driver’s license,” Munson said, “and his identification card?”
“Yes, I take.”
“Why?”
“I, too, think to go. Now, no.” He told them, in his fragmented English, how he’d stolen a bottle of ink from the duty hut, snatched a potato from the mess hall and used a nail to engrave printing plates made from cast-off linoleum—he pronounced it lee-no-LAY-oom—that he’d discovered behind the supply shed. He’d been hiding in the showers, making documents of his own, when Voss caught him. “They force me to make for them,” he said. “Now they have.”
Munson laid his pad and pencil on the coffee table. “Where in the name of God did you get the idea to forge documents using ink and potatoes?”
“In Polish school, how children mak
e picture.”
The entire time Munson was questioning the prisoner, Marty had been standing by the front door, his arms folded over his chest. Now he cleared his throat. “Sir?”
At first, Dan thought the captain meant to ignore him, and he hated seeing his friend embarrassed. But Munson finally responded. “You want to say something, Stark?”
“Yes sir.” For once, Marty looked like a soldier. His uniform was freshly laundered, his bearing erect. “If those fellows are unsupervised out there in my buddy’s cotton patch—well, shouldn’t one of us get over there and keep an eye on ’em?”
“If you were one of those fellows,” the captain said, “and accustomed to not seeing anybody except the occasional MPs driving by in a scout car, then suddenly an armed guard’s scrutinizing your every move—what would that suggest to you?”
“I see what you’re saying, sir.”
“Stark,” the captain replied, “you may make a soldier yet. In a year or two, the way things are going, you might be commanding me.”
“I sincerely doubt it, sir.”
“Well, you never can tell. Who would have thought that our guest here would be running a printing press under our noses?” He smoothed the creases from his shirtsleeves, then leaned back in his chair and cocked his head. To the prisoner, he said, “If you’d managed to escape, where did you plan to go?”
The prisoner’s hands lay in his lap. For a moment or two, he gazed at them while gently massaging the base of his left thumb with his right index finger. His answer, when he gave it, was not the one the captain wanted, or at least not one he appeared to believe, but it made perfect sense to Dan.
“I don’t know,” the prisoner said. “Just leave here. Go anywhere.”
THIRTY SIX
AWAITING ROLL CALL, the prisoners congregated inside the gates. If any of them noticed that for the first time in months the towers were being manned before dusk, they didn’t let on. They stood around laughing, bullshitting one another, happy that the hot weather was over.
Prisoners of War Page 17