Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  THIRTY NINE

  THOUGH MUNSON had always enjoyed football and was a fair tailback himself, it was the last thing on his mind when he picked up the phone and placed his call. But it was all the person on the other end cared to discuss. If Munson hadn’t put any money yet on the Army-Navy game, he said, he might want to, because word coming out of the Point was that Red Blaik had a big surprise to spring on the middies. Nobody would say exactly what it was, but Navy’s winning streak was sure to stop at four.

  “Thank you, sir,” Munson said. “I’ll put a dollar down, if I can find anybody around here to bet with. What I was calling you about, though, is the situation with our intended escape.”

  “Did you get them back in the fields today?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Any problems?”

  “They should be back at camp in a little while. As far as I know, everything’s gone smoothly.”

  “Good. You’ve done a fine job there, Munson, and it won’t go unnoticed. We’re working to get you out of there, I believe I mentioned?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Just be patient. You’ll get to hit the beach before it’s over— I can almost guarantee it.”

  “Thank you, sir. But what I wanted to ask is whether or not there’s been any decision about transferring this guy who tipped us off. We kept him in the infirmary last night, because of course he’d faked that accident, but—”

  “You did send him back to work today, right?”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Fine. If you let them start thinking they can claim they’re hurt or sick or whatnot, they won’t hit a lick. And like I told you, we don’t want to lose the confidence of our labor contractors. You’ve done a good job, Munson. On all fronts.”

  “Thank you, sir. But my question now is what to do with him tonight. Because since I put him back in the field today, I can’t really send him back to the infirmary.”

  “Of course not. You’d look dumb as shit—like you’d buy any bag of trash he’s selling.”

  “Yes sir. But if I put him back in with his tentmates tonight—”

  “So don’t. Use your brain, Captain. Today you broke up the regular work details, right?”

  “That’s correct, sir.”

  “And the fellows trying to escape were in his tent, weren’t they?”

  “Two of them were, but a couple were in another tent. And those are just the ones we’re sure of.”

  “So tonight you adopt the same tactics. Change everybody’s tent assignments. Break up the cliques. Put your mystery man in with a new bunch of guys—or leave him where he was and put a new bunch in with him. End of story, right?”

  “Yes sir. I hope so anyway.”

  “Of course it will be.”

  “Sir, I don’t suppose we’ve ever located any papers on the prisoner?”

  “No, and we may not for a while. Some of these guys we’re using as file clerks can hardly read, let alone file. Even so, your prisoner’s nobody important, because if he were, his papers would’ve have been handled by somebody with an actual IQ. Now tell me something, Munson.”

  “What’s that, sir?”

  “Did you ever, even in your worst nightmares, think the Naval Academy would defeat us four years in a row?”

  FORTY

  RIFLE HANGING OFF his shoulder, Marty stood just inside the tent, slurping bourbon-laced coffee from a GI mug. The tent was badly lit, a single lightbulb dangling from the socket ring that held the sheet-iron tubing in place.

  “Come on there,” he said, “hurry up.”

  The men who were leaving stuffed their belongings into their packs, while the one who would stay sat on his cot, both hands resting on his knees, and studied the potbellied stove that stood in the center of the tent, providing what warmth there was.

  Voss had been surly ever since Munson announced tent assignments were being changed. Earlier, in the mess hall, he’d banged his fist on the table, knocking pinto beans all over the floor. Now he moved about the tent in a cold, silent fury, grabbing one item after another and shoving them into the canvas pack. The last thing he produced was the big yellow can stashed beneath his cot. Because it had surfaced during the search for forged documents, Marty already knew what was in it: German butter, probably two or three years old by now and rancid as hell. Normally, Marty wouldn’t have given a damn if Voss wanted to lug the can around with him, but the bastard had spit at him that afternoon. He’d enjoyed seeing Voss throw himself on the ground, and he’d laughed when the German finally stood up and began to brush the dirt off his knees and elbows.

  “Hey, Adolf.”

  Voss turned to look at him.

  “Our butter’s not good enough for you? Why you got to tote that shit around?” He nodded toward Voss’s cot. “Just leave it over yonder.”

  The can must have weighed five pounds, but Voss flicked it back and forth, from one huge hand to the other, then held it out with a flourish and said something in German.

  Marty understood: If you want it, come take it. Suddenly, the tent seemed crowded.

  He drained his mug and dropped it on the ground, then unslung his rife. He meant to tell Voss one more time to put the can down and step away from the cot. Once the German complied, Marty would open the door to the stove, shove the can inside and shut the door. Before long they’d hear the container pop open, and if it was loud enough, a few of them might flinch. A moment later, they’d smell the burning butter.

  But before he issued his order, Schultz said, “He won’t give.”

  “What?”

  “Won’t give. To him this can mean something. He fight for it.”

  They all stood there looking at the Pole: Voss with the can of butter in his hand, Marty with his rifle, the other men with various keepsakes—a pair of leather slippers, a tiny square pillow hardly big enough for a man to rest his head on, a roll of toilet paper so brown from age and dust that it looked as if it had already been used, and such a large assortment of dolls and stuffed animals that you might have thought you’d entered a nursery.

  FORTY ONE

  FROM HABIT, Szulc lay on his stomach, his head pressed into the cot, his arms at his sides as he shrank, once again, into himself. He knew from long experience that a man could reduce the size of his body. In the desert, even if pausing for only an hour, they’d always dug slit trenches, just deep enough that a tightly compressed body would lie below ground level; he’d seen men two meters tall withdraw into a depression hardly large enough to hold a child.

  Different bodies produce different sounds. On the far side of the stove, on the cot that had been Voss’s, lay a big Bavarian with a deviated septum. He did not snore so much as whistle, making music in his sleep. A pair of feet protruded from the cot next to his, small and white, and they remained in constant motion, the ankles grinding against each other.

  The awareness that his body could produce a sound he hadn’t willed was appalling. He’d heard bodies gurgle, or suck, or expel great bursts of tainted air. They sometimes rattled, or jingled like a box filled with coins. Bodies could honk and shriek, hit a note and sustain it. On Bloody Sunday of the Dead, when they’d repulsed the initial British advance on Tobruk, he’d held a tone so long himself that Hauptmann Fischer slapped him and then, having failed to still his voice, shoved him to the ground and forced him to fill his mouth with sand.

  “That horrible stain on your face,” Fischer asked, lying on top of him to keep him from rising, “where did you get it?”

  He spat out the sand. “At birth.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  “Not physically.”

  “A psychic wound? How modern.”

  Fischer’s breath tickled the back of his neck. As he hugged the ground and listened to the British shells exploding, he performed a calculation: the number of hours in the average day— four, he estimated—spent with dirt or sand against his face, times 365 would equal 1,460 hours, which divided by twenty-four came to sixty days and twenty hours.<
br />
  Almost the same as being buried for two months. Except that, in a strictly medical sense, he was not yet dead.

  FORTY TWO

  MARTY ROSE a few minutes before midnight, stumbled into somebody’s footlocker, then stepped outside the tent in his underwear. The night was clear and cold, a big moon shining just beyond the south tower. No sign of Kimball up there, which probably meant he was taking his evening nap.

  Stepping into the shadows, he opened his fly and let loose. His urine stank of coffee and whiskey, and burned him badly. He shook himself off, went back inside and got dressed. Then he lifted his mattress, pulled out the half-pint bottle and stuck it in his pocket, grabbed his rifle and a big flashlight and left, fully armed, to stand his watch.

  If you had asked him, as Munson did, what made him detour down the dirt path between the long rows of prisoners’ tents rather than take the direct route to the south tower, he couldn’t have told you, though he would’ve said he’d never done it before. If you’d questioned him further and demanded to know why he’d stopped outside the last tent on the left—one of three tents that stood empty, waiting for a new group of prisoners scheduled to arrive any day—he couldn’t have answered that question, either, except to say that he had no idea.

  In turn, you wouldn’t have known that shortly after setting off again, taking five or perhaps even six strides toward the tower, he turned and retraced his footsteps. Neither did he know why he’d done that.

  He could have said that as he stood before the empty tent, he pulled the bottle from his pocket, tucked the flashlight under his arm, screwed the cap off the bottle and took a swig. The whiskey seared his throat and nostrils, making him cough. That had made him think about Raymond Sample—which itself was inexplicable, since Sample, a Mormon from Heber City, Utah, had never taken a drink in his life. Marty screwed the cap back on, stuck the bottle in his pocket, then reached for the tent flap and pulled it open.

  Dark and cold, the tent reminded him of a cave his father had taken the family to see during a vacation in the mountains. A guide had explained the difference between stalactites—calcareous icicles that hung from the ceiling—and stalagmites— similar material that instead rose from the floor. Both types of deposit were bone white, ice-cold, and unpleasant to touch. The guide had shined his flashlight around the enormous underground vault, revealing hundreds, if not thousands, of forms.

  But when Marty thumbed the button on his flashlight, the beam revealed only one form, suspended from the socket ring at the top of the tent.

  The angry stain on the face was streaked with blue. The tongue, protruding a couple inches, exhibited a bluish tinge, too. A deep gash in the forehead had bled a little, but not much. Both eyes were open, the left one rotated slightly upward, as if something on the tent ceiling demanded immediate attention.

  On the floor, beneath the dangling feet, their toes splayed out like claws, were two items: a dirty rag and a ceramic GI mug that, when Munson examined it a few moments later, stank of cheap whiskey.

  FORTY THREE

  THE ODORS of that midnight would remain with Munson always: the scent of whiskey, the acrid smell of smoldering leaves and a hint of roasted garlic, though he had no idea where that came from.

  “You saw nobody, either when you left your tent or on your way over here?”

  “Not a soul.”

  He didn’t bother to correct him—not a soul, sir—because he was beyond the urge to provide correction, as Stark was beyond the point at which he might accept it.

  “And you didn’t hear anything?”

  “Not a sound.”

  He turned to Case, who stood beside the door with a handkerchief clamped to his mouth. “Sergeant, are you going to be sick?”

  “No sir.”

  “Then put that handkerchief away.”

  “Yes sir.” Case folded it primly and tucked it in his pocket.

  “Who’d we have in the towers?”

  “Kimball and Huggins, sir.”

  “Neither of them reported seeing or hearing anything?”

  Stark cleared his throat. “They couldn’t see or hear anything. Soon as they get tired of playing with the spotlight, they sit down and go to sleep.”

  “Case, go get both of them. Post guards around the perimeter, and put somebody who’s awake up in those towers right now.”

  He waited until Case left, then walked over and poured himself a cup of coffee. Then he remembered the mug, which was standing on top of his desk, right beside the manual on courts-martial. He walked back over to the desk and gestured at the mug. “Any idea where this came from?”

  “It’s mine. Or at least I was using it.”

  “How’d it end up in that tent?”

  “I imagine somebody carried it in there.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “Whoever hung that Polish fellow.”

  “How do you suppose they got it in the first place?”

  “I left it in the poor bastard’s tent.”

  “When?”

  “Earlier tonight. When I went in there to move Voss and them others.”

  “So why does it smell like whiskey?”

  “Because that’s what it had in it.”

  Munson lifted the gray mug, turned it over and looked at the bottom. “If I were guessing, I’d say this is what made that gash in his head. Wouldn’t you?”

  “I don’t give a shit what made the gash in his head.”

  “Why’s that?”

  “The gash in his head ain’t what killed him. It was the rope around his neck did that.”

  “What makes you so certain?”

  “Because the head wound barely bled. They hung him first and hit him later.”

  Munson then made a remark he would regret for the rest of his life: “You sound like an expert.”

  He never actually saw Stark rise. He was in the chair one minute, his hands at rest in his lap, and on his feet the next. Like one of those western shoot-outs, where you never saw the gun-slinger draw. “Yes, I am a fucking expert,” he said. “Want me to tell you something—Captain, sir?”

  “No, Private Stark,” Munson said, “I don’t want you to tell me anything. I just want you to sit back and—”

  “Me and my friend Bubba Garrett did it,” Stark said, “when we were in seventh grade. Bubba’s daddy used to own the meat-packing plant, that big old red building across from the compress, but when it failed, they moved to Biloxi, and I ain’t seen him in years. He may be dead now, for all I know. Anyhow, we got us some navel oranges one day, put ’em in his daddy’s freezer and left ’em till they froze solid as rocks. Then we took ’em out back and used ’em like baseballs. And the sound a body makes when you fire a slug into it from four or five feet away— well, sir, it’s the same sound them oranges made when the bat hit ’em. Halfway between splat and thunk . . . Splunk.”

  Munson looked down at the mug in his hands and thought of his father. A big difference between him and his father, who had taught junior-high science, was that his father had never looked at anything—whether it was an object, like the ceramic mug, or a living creature, such as a beetle or a sunflower—without asking himself a whole series of questions, most of which had to do with origins. How had the thing achieved—that was always the word he used—its existence? Existence was always a bit of a miracle, as far as his father was concerned. And he’d viewed the demise of anything, even an object like the mug, much less a human life, as tragic.

  When Munson looked at the mug, he saw something that had been designed to contain coffee but which had recently been put to the wrong use. He didn’t worry about how it had achieved its existence, and the only reason he wouldn’t just send it back to the camp kitchen and forget about it was that it had become a piece of evidence. He had no idea how Marty Stark viewed a mug, or a beetle or sunflower, or a corpse dangling from a rope, but to him, each of them must’ve seemed qualitatively different.

  Munson wished his father were alive and could somehow b
e summoned to this room, because he believed he would’ve known what to say to Marty Stark. There was a set of words, if they could only be found, that could cool Stark’s fever and still his mind; he also knew that he was not the man to speak them.

  But he did his best. What the moment seemed to require was someone as different from himself as a man could possibly be, so he asked himself what the last thing he’d naturally do under these circumstances might be. And once he’d arrived at the answer, he set the mug down, stepped around his desk and put both arms around Stark. “It’s all right, Marty,” he whispered. “It’s all right.”

  “No sir,” Stark said, “it’s not.”

  FORTY FOUR

  THINGS WERE NOT all right the next morning at formation, though to Munson’s dismay he’d been ordered to behave as if they were. His request for ten more guards had been denied— no extra men available—but the provost marshal, en route from base camp, would convene an investigating board once the prisoners returned from their work details.

  Among the group of men Munson now stood facing was at least one murderer—in all likelihood, three or four. “Though in a strictly military sense,” the voice on the phone had said, “whoever killed that prisoner did exactly what they’d been trained to do. The prisoner was a traitor, pure and simple, and the killers exacted summary justice. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We could learn a thing or two about professionalism from those men.”

  You could also learn a thing or two from the voice on the phone about the country you lived in. Because now, rather than keeping the prisoners under lock and key until the murderers were discovered, he was about to send them back to the fields to pick cotton. If principle wasn’t indispensable, apparently commerce was.

  He waited while Case called names, and when the sergeant yelled “Schultz,” he let his eyes roam the ranks. The men stood at attention, most of them staring straight ahead, more than a few looking half-asleep. After what seemed like two or three minutes, Case made a mark on his roster and hollered “Schussler,” continued through “Zintsch,” then stuck the pen in his shirt pocket, walked over and handed his clipboard to Munson.