Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  Earlier that afternoon, Marty and Kimball had found forged documents stashed in the hollow metal legs of Voss’s cot. The driver’s license didn’t look too bad, except that Schultz had put only one p in Mississippi and must have gotten confused when converting from the metric system: John Klein, according to the license, stood six foot six, and while that was probably close to Voss’s actual height, his weight was given as eighty-five pounds.

  The Mississippi State Guard card issued to John Klein could conceivably have satisfied a Civil Defense officer. If it failed to, another document, typed on the Royal in the duty hut, stated that Klein was “nationality of Switzerland” but had lived in the United States since 1936. For good measure, the document alleged that he was “loyal to American cause,” and bore the official stamp of the United States Army.

  They found a second driver’s license in another prisoner’s cot. Other documents, all variations on those issued to John Klein, turned up as well. In all, it appeared, at least four and possibly five men were planning to escape.

  You could tell the captain was shaken—reporting this to Fourth Service Command would hardly make his stock rise with the brass—but at the same time he was impressed. “You weren’t in intelligence, were you?” he’d asked Schultz earlier, as they left the tent with the forgeries in hand.

  “Intelligent, no, I was not,” Schultz said.

  Case and Kimball laughed at that, but Munson didn’t, and neither did Marty.

  No documents pertaining to the prisoner’s own background had turned up, but Marty no longer doubted that he was what he claimed to be—a Pole who’d served in the Wehrmacht. The remaining question had nothing to do with the prisoner’s origin. It was a more fundamental question, one that defied boundaries of the type imposed by nations or advancing fronts: who was this guy? To answer that, you had to know not only where he’d been but also his ultimate destination.

  The Pole was often wrapped in gauzy light. It had surrounded him the first time Marty saw him, that day Schultz— or Szulc—caught his shirt on tin siding, and again the night he emerged from the shadows and walked to the tower. They’d looked at each other for a good while then, but you couldn’t say with certainty exactly how long, because time, in the ordinary sense, had stopped flowing.

  Marty’s drill sergeant back in basic had been a Jew from the East Coast, a man who, at the age of thirty-five, had left a teaching position at the University of Delaware to join the army, where he once more became a master of instruction. Most men’s lives, he was fond of saying, broke down into a series of “incremental moments,” and the tragedy of human existence was that virtually nobody could predict when those moments would occur. Generally, they passed before you knew you’d lived through them, assuming of course that you did live through them. Though not all incremental moments involved physical danger, a great many of them did.

  “What I’m here to teach you,” he’d said, “is how to survive an incremental moment. The first thing you’ve got to develop is a willingness to trust your senses. A dog smells fear. You guys have spent most of your lives learning not to be dogs. Now it’s time to accept your own canine nature. You want to smell what others can’t smell. You want to hear what they don’t hear. You want the pores of your bodies to open up and let sensory data rush in, and you want to respond without thinking. If your senses tell you that a form—not a man, I repeat, a form—in your immediate vicinity poses a threat to you, you turn into one big fang, dripping saliva. Everything you see and hear and smell is real. The one statement you can never allow your brain to communicate to your arms and legs, your feet or your hands, is as follows: This can’t be happening. It can be, and it will be, and if you fail to recognize that, you will not survive those incremental moments. If you do survive them, you’ll most likely never again be able to experience reality in the very limited way that most men and women customarily do. You may come to mourn your inability to do so, and you may blame me for that, but all I can say is, I’d rather be a living dog, able to feel the grass beneath its paws, than a dead man with a bullet and a worm in his well-adjusted brain.”

  Marty’s senses kept telling him that the Pole was more than just another prisoner, that the mark on his face was an identifying trait, that no moment spent in his presence was ordinary. He didn’t know why this was so. He just knew that since first setting eyes on the man, he’d sensed a connection between them. He didn’t know why it existed, but he was beginning to believe that he’d survived that day on the Niscemi road, despite failing to trust his senses and either pull the trigger or turn and run, so that he might have another chance. And that other chance had something to do with the Pole.

  That afternoon Case had led the prisoner off to the infirmary, where they planned to keep him for the evening. While Kimball lingered by the scout car, Marty followed Munson. “Sir?” he said. “Could I speak with you?”

  “What is it, Private?”

  “Shouldn’t we get that fellow out of here, send him somewhere else?”

  The captain had placed the forgeries in an accordion file, which he clutched against his chest. “What would you have me do, Stark? Let you march him out into the cotton patch and shoot him?”

  “No sir. That’s what I’m scared those Germans’ll do.”

  The Pole himself had suggested as much. That was why he’d decided to confess, he said. They wanted him dead, and before leaving, he believed, they meant to kill him. They hadn’t trusted him since the day he came to camp. They hadn’t even trusted him before that. “In my unit,” he said, “two time German soldier shoot me. Both time miss. Officer once try. To English I escape. Happy capture.”

  Now Munson said, “You’ve done a one-eighty on our prisoner, haven’t you, Stark?”

  “I guess so, sir. I believe him anyway.”

  “You’re real big on belief, aren’t you?”

  “Yes sir. I guess I am.”

  “Yet you don’t strike me as the churchgoing type.”

  “No sir, I’m not, though I was raised to be. But there’s different kinds of belief, sir. I believe this is the ground I’m standing on. I don’t know it—I just act like I do.” He realized he ought to stop talking, but for some reason he couldn’t. “If I didn’t act on my belief that this stuff beneath my feet was the ground, there’s no telling what I might do. I imagine the same’s true for you. Sir.”

  “You’re one of the more complicated people I’ve come across, Stark. I even have a feeling that if I’d met you under a different set of circumstances, I probably would’ve enjoyed knowing you. But right now,” he said, stepping closer and slapping his thigh with the file, “you’re annoying the living hell out of me. I’ll decide what to do with that fellow. I’ll decide it in my own good time, after consulting my superiors, and until that time, I don’t want to hear a word about him out of you. Is that clear, Stark?”

  “Yes sir.”

  Munson turned and headed for his quarters.

  “But sir?”

  The captain didn’t exactly stop, but he did slow his pace.

  “Sir, I got a feeling the ground’s gone open up.”

  The prisoners formed themselves into perfectly straight lines, and the sergeant called off all the names himself, one at a time, rather than sending the guards among the labor detachments to check them group by group. The new procedure was the first indication the prisoners received that something out of the ordinary might have happened.

  Stationed along the fence, to the right of the gates, Marty got a good view of Voss. Half a head higher than anybody else, he stood in the third position, in the second row, legs together, shoulders back, his chest jutting forth. He stared straight ahead, but once or twice his tongue flicked out and mopped his lips.

  Case continued alphabetically, and when he’d checked off the last name, he handed the clipboard to Huggins, who carried it into the captain’s quarters. For a moment or two, nobody moved or said a word. Marty raised his eyes and gazed across the rec area at the south tower
, where Brinley stood impassively, his fist wrapped around the muzzle of his rifle.

  The door to the captain’s quarters opened, and Munson stepped out, followed by Huggins. The captain wore his side arm and carried the accordion file. He strode across the yard, ignoring Case’s brisk salute.

  He handed the file to Huggins, then addressed the prisoners. “When you men were processed as POWs,” he said, speaking loudly and clearly, for the benefit of those who understood English and would be expected to inform the rest, “you received from the Red Cross a document prepared by your government, titled ‘Memorandum Addressed to German Soldiers.’ It urged you to remain physically fit and stay informed of the rights guaranteed you by the Geneva Convention, and it also reminded you that it was your duty, as a soldier, to do everything within your power to escape.

  “What it didn’t tell you is something you had ample opportunity to observe for yourselves, when you made your train journeys from New Jersey or Maryland or wherever your processing center was to the place where you find yourselves right now. This is one big country. But just in case you didn’t study a lot of foreign geography in school, let me provide a few points of comparison.

  “The distance between New York City and Los Angeles is almost exactly three times the distance between Paris and Warsaw. The distance from the front gates over there to, let’s say, the Gulf of Mexico isn’t nearly so great, a mere four hundred and fifty kilometers. But the Gulf Coast might as well be on Jupiter, because the probability that any of you men could get there is zero.

  “We’ve got military police on all the major roads, and Civil Defense patrols on all the minor ones. You men couldn’t be expected to know too much about Mississippi, but this state’s home to the meanest law-enforcement officers in the nation. Hunting season’s a big deal down here, too, and I doubt the local sportsmen would mind a little target practice.”

  He stuck his hand out, and Huggins gave him back the file. The captain withdrew the forged documents, all of which had been clipped together. He waved the stack in the air. “Some of you men—not a lot, just a few—were apparently planning to take a vacation. I assure you that’s all it would have been. A day away at most, but probably not even that. Some of you had phony driver’s licenses, a few forged Mississippi State Guard cards, a couple of grammatically incorrect affidavits that attempt to explain why the bearer—whose English, if he speaks any, identifies him as a foreigner—ought to be regarded as a loyal American, exempt from active duty in the military for a variety of reasons, including my own personal favorite”—he riffled the documents until he located the one he wanted— “‘total pain in bottom back.’” He stood there staring at the stack of forgeries and shaking his head, as if unable to imagine how anybody with any sense could concoct such an escapade.

  The truth was that there weren’t nearly as many MPs or Civil Defense officers out there as Munson said, and the locals weren’t uniformly hostile to the Germans. The other afternoon, while Marty was on duty at the gate, one of the returning prisoners had climbed out of Bob Brown’s pickup truck with a watermelon in his arms. When asked where the hell he’d gotten it, the German said, “Farmer give,” so Marty let him carry it on in. Later, he learned that the prisoners didn’t know exactly what a watermelon was. After some discussion, they split it open, scooped the pulp out and boiled it until they were left with sugar extract. Then they stripped the skin off and boiled the rind, along with the sugar, and made themselves a marmalade, which they spread on their bread at breakfast.

  These were resourceful people, who would make something out of whatever you gave them. If he wanted, Munson could stand up there and shake his head, as though confronted by a bunch of wayward children, but they were neither wayward nor children. If the goals they’d set seemed unrealistic, their pursuit of them was nothing to scorn.

  “Just as the Geneva Convention guarantees prisoners of war certain rights,” the captain continued, “it also specifies what their captors can do to punish them in the event of an attempted escape. There’s a wide range of options available. Prisoners can simply be issued a reprimand. They can be forced to perform extra fatigue duty during their free time. They can be ordered to work without pay, placed on restricted diet, or confined to the camp stockade for up to thirty days.

  “The Kommandant of one of your camps, if confronted with a similar situation, would most likely begin with the harshest-possible response under international law—if, in fact, he felt himself limited by law. But I’m not going to do that. I’m going to begin with the most lenient response, which is to tell all of you, but especially the men in whose cots these illegal documents were discovered, that this is a warning. If we find any further evidence of an attempt to leave this camp, for any purpose other than authorized work details, the prisoners involved will be locked up in that little brick building behind the showers, which Sergeant Case informs me is infested with red ants big enough to eat a man’s flesh and then carry off his bones.”

  The captain looked down at the stack of documents again, shaking his head at the display of groundless optimism.

  Munson had almost reached his quarters when he heard the footsteps on the gravel. Rather than stop, he opened the door and stepped inside, then turned and looked out, his face still in shadow. “A lot of these farmers down here, they’ve got their backs to the wall, Stark,” he said before the private could request permission to speak. “They’re not like your father— they don’t have enough money to make sure their crops get in on time, year after year. They need these fellows. If we start taking the Germans out of the fields whenever one of them makes a wrong move, they won’t take long to realize that’s a surefire way of not having to work, which in turn will hurt the local economy and make the farmers lose faith in us as a source of labor. The army doesn’t want that—can’t have it. So every one of these guys picks cotton tomorrow morning.”

  “What about—”

  “I told you not to mention him again.”

  “You’re not going to put him back in the field with them, are you, sir?”

  Munson sighed. He laid the file down on the window ledge, then stepped out into the waning sunlight. “He’s just one man, Stark, and he’s on the wrong side.”

  THIRTY SEVEN

  THE TEMPERATURE had dipped into the thirties overnight and couldn’t have been much higher than forty when Dan stopped the pickup on the side of the road and climbed out. Rosetta’s chimney belched black smoke, and a piece of loose siding rattled in the wind. He knew she would’ve left the house around six-thirty, just like she did every morning but Sunday, to walk up the road to Alvin’s store. When it started to get cold, she’d always put on two of everything—a second old blouse, a second old skirt and sometimes, under the skirts, a pair of khaki pants.

  He hadn’t gone very far across the field before he heard the noise, a lot of groaning and grunting and some kind of percussion, though it didn’t quite sound like a drum. He never missed a step, just kept on walking, and coming closer, he realized L.C. was picking the guitar. He didn’t strum it like a country picker, and there was nothing you could recognize as a chord or a melody. But these observations didn’t interest him much, since he wasn’t there for entertainment. He’d come to apologize to L.C. for thinking he’d stolen his wallet.

  He’d barely set foot on the bottom step, when the music stopped. He paused, the plank creaking beneath his weight. Before he could mount the next one, the door opened.

  L.C. wore his work clothes, including the coat Rosetta had made him from discarded cotton sacks. He still had a few scabs on his face, and one front tooth was missing. Frank Holder had sure left his mark.

  “Ain’t time yet,” L.C. said. “Your uncle done told me don’t start the route now till round about eight. Say folks been getting in the field later and later.”

  “I ain’t here about the route.”

  “What you want, then?”

  “Can I come in?”

  “Reckon you can do whatever you like
. Last I heard, your uncle owned the house. Land, too.” He turned and stepped inside, and Dan followed.

  Colored people, he’d noticed, rarely used the word live when they talked about the place where they lay down at night. The verb they chose was almost always stay. “Hey. Where you stay?” As if living, in the true sense of the word, was impossible. But on the inside, Rosetta’s house looked like a place where people lived just as well as they could. A Prince Albert can, mashed flat and nailed down, patched a hole in the floor, and old newspapers whistled where she’d crammed them into chinks. Her cot stood against one wall, a quilt that had once belonged to Dan’s grandmother stretched tautly over the mattress, the outlines of corncobs visible beneath the quilt’s ragged surface. L.C.’s cot, on the other side of the room, was neatly made, too. The guitar lay across it.

  On the wall above the fireplace hung a sheet of butcher paper, on which somebody had used crayons to draw a picture. In the center, the figure of a man was bent under the weight of an awful-looking cross. A bunch of other folks walked along beside him, waving their fists, their mouths open, their ugly expressions suggesting they were shouting. What was striking about the picture, beyond the artist’s ability to make the forms look real, was that Jesus’s face was way too dark, whereas the faces of the folks in the crowd were perfectly white, their features sketched in simple lines, with no shading added. “Who drew that?” he asked.

  “Momma.”

  “She made Jesus colored.”

  “How you know he wasn’t? You ever seen him?”

  “No, can’t say as I have. And don’t want to anytime soon.”

  “Worse people’s on the loose than Jesus.”