Prisoners of War

by Steve Yarbrough

  Who stood there looking down at the names, at the check-marks beside them, the single blank spot. He’d never been given to righteous indignation, but that morning he felt it. The problem was where to direct it. He’d already bawled out Kimball and Huggins, both of whom claimed, of course, they’d been on their feet for the duration of their duty. When he told them to get their worthless asses out of his sight, he understood that it would be no time at all before Huggins made a phone call.

  He couldn’t place the entire blame on them, though, because whoever killed the Pole, if that’s what he was, would have found a way to do it sooner or later. He couldn’t blame Stark, and didn’t want to. He couldn’t really blame himself, since he’d been following orders. And from that day several years ago when he’d received the letter granting him admission to West Point, he hadn’t once blamed the army for anything.

  He’d spent four years marching to class beneath the gray arches, drilling for hours on the Plain, standing one inspection after another, somebody constantly jaw-to-jaw with him, yelling and criticizing, and he doubted a single day had passed without his hearing the word grave or gravity: “These are grave actions. . . . Don’t underestimate the gravity of the situation.” Yet for all the gravitas, he’d never quite conquered the feeling that what he was engaged in was play, much like what he’d done with his best friends, at age eight or nine, in the backyards of Wynoka, Minnesota. Back then, he’d marched along, stiff and stylized to the point of parody, occasionally hurling himself into a pile of leaves while someone hid in the bushes and made spitting noises, imitating the sound of a German machine gun.

  He still felt as if he were a boy. But unlike his childhood friends, a great many of the prisoners arrayed before him, if not all of them, had been killers the day they arrived at Camp Loring and weren’t playing any games, though it now seemed that both he and the army had behaved as if they were.

  “You men are about to finish picking cotton,” he said, starting to move along the ranks, walking slowly, careful to take deep breaths so his voice would have that sturdy timbre the army liked. “By most accounts, you’ve done a good job. I’ve even learned that some of the farmers around here are planning to make Christmas packages for you. I hope that over in your country somebody’ll be making packages for our men in the German camps. Somehow, I doubt that’ll be the case, but who knows?

  “We have another holiday before Christmas, and it’ll be coming up pretty soon. You may have heard of it. We call it Thanksgiving. People eat turkey and thank God for their good fortune. You’ll be getting turkey, too. You’ll get that and you’ll get mashed potatoes and two kinds of dressing, stewed beets and carrots, with some cranberry sauce on the side.”

  He had no idea where his speech would take him, but he found solace in the sound of his own voice, which up until that moment he’d always been suspicious of, fearful it might break. The only thing he feared now was the silence that would ensue if he quit talking.

  “After the Thanksgiving meal,” he said, “you’ll get a good night’s sleep, believe me. Then the next morning you’ll get up and go to the latrine, where you may notice that your urine’s bright red from all the beets you’ve shoveled down your throats. When you see that red liquid draining out of your own bodies, I hope you’ll ask yourselves what it feels like to know your life’s in the process of expiring. Then I want you to imagine you suffered that realization somewhere far away from home, in a dark, cold place, with a rope around your neck.”

  He’d reached the end of the front row. The last man in line, a slim brown-eyed guy who looked oddly feminine, refused to meet his gaze. At first, Munson thought the man had looked away out of guilt—that he’d taken part in the murder or knew who had—but then he heard the noises that had drawn the prisoner’s glance: boards creaking, the grating sound of metal on metal.

  Then he turned around and looked for Case. “Sergeant? Who’s in the south tower?”

  The little burger place in Greenville stood between the tobacco store and the barbershop. Barely big enough to contain the grill and a few seats at the counter, it reeked of smoke and onions. Marty’s father had taken him there when he was eight or nine, ordered him a cheeseburger with fries and told the man behind the counter he’d be back in a little while. It wasn’t until Marty bit into the cheeseburger that he remembered being there a few years earlier, and that his father had left him then, as well. Now, as he crouched out of sight in the tower and lined his clips up on the floor, then jerked the bolt back on the Thompson to chamber the first round, it seemed to him that on the second trip to Greenville he’d understood his father had gone off somewhere to meet a woman. But he might be confusing that day with a later one. In fact, his father took him to the burger place many times and always disappeared. At some point, surely, there must have been a moment when he suddenly realized what his father was up to. But how could you say when, exactly, awareness occurred?

  How could you say precisely when somebody quit being alive and started being dead? It didn’t, he knew, necessarily have shit to do with when your heart stopped beating. Raymond Sample hadn’t died the moment those bullets from the Schmeisser destroyed his face. He’d been dead at least since finding the little girl whose body had been ripped in half. You could even argue that he’d died somewhere in Utah, when he grew up to become the kind of person who couldn’t hear another human being crying out in pain and not run off into the darkness to help him.

  The Pole hadn’t died in the tent—that just happened to be the place where he took his last breath. Brinley, who was up in the north tower right now, had probably died in the South Pacific. Jimmy Del Timms had died somewhere in Europe back in 1918 and then impersonated the living for the better part of twenty-five years. Dan was probably already dead, too, though there was no way he could know it.

  Peeking over the ledge, he surveyed the scene. The Germans were assembled in perfectly straight ranks, most of them staring dead ahead; Voss, by virtue of being the tallest, was easy enough to spot. Munson and Case, Kimball and Huggins and the other guards formed a loose perimeter, in ragged contrast to the disciplined mass in the middle. The country might win the war, and he hoped it would, but that would require different men than these and a different man than him. For once, whether by accident or by design, the army had made the proper move and sent them all where they could do the least damage.

  “The Thompson,” his drill sergeant had said, “is known as a blow-back weapon. You jam the clip in the magazine, snatch the bolt back to chamber the round, then squeeze that trigger. And as long as you keep the pressure on, each round fired blows the bolt back and chambers another round. This weapon offers zero accuracy but can create maximum mayhem. Basically, men, the Thompson’s perfect for somebody who can’t shoot straight and can’t think straight, somebody who’s got himself cornered and can’t see a way out.”

  Raymond, always good at injecting a little humor, pretended to be intrigued by the terminology. “Sarge,” he said, “if you use a blow-back weapon in one of them incremental moments you’re always talking about, would you say you was having a blow-back moment?”

  “Sample,” the sergeant said, “that would be as good a term as any.”

  Frank Holder had removed the American flag from the side planks of his truck. The flag was cheap, made of thin cloth, and you could see clean through the stars and the stripes. He might’ve left it on there if the flag had been made of thicker, heavier material, not so chintzy-looking.

  Holder himself was feeling even heavier than he was— almost as if he were made out of lead. His motions had grown leaden. When he walked, he barely had the sense that he was moving. He’d dragged many a heavy cotton sack along dirt rows in his life, and lately felt like he was always pulling that weight along behind him. He guessed that’s how folks end up. Everything you’d ever done that you wished you hadn’t, or hadn’t done and wished you had, everything you’d ever lost or wanted and never got—all of it attached itself and dragged you down, more
of it all the time, until you flat gave out.

  He couldn’t sleep much and had given up trying. What he did, for several hours every night, was walk the roads near his house, pacing along with his hands clasped behind his back or, if they started getting cold, jammed into his coat pockets. He’d walk toward that place in the road ahead where everything came together in a big ball of darkness. He never quite got to that spot, because light kept creeping in, but he knew he’d get there eventually.

  Last night, he had walked the roads from shortly after the moment when Arva fell asleep until the sun began to color the eastern horizon. Even so, he wasn’t hungry—he never had much appetite anymore—so he decided to skip breakfast and drive out to Camp Loring.

  Since it was way too early and none of the other farmers would show anytime soon, he pulled over about a hundred yards short of the gates and sat there in his pickup, surrounded by silence. The morning was as quiet as any he’d ever seen. Finally, for the first time in twenty-four hours, he closed his eyes. He kept them closed until a loud noise startled him, and then, without pausing to consider what he was doing or why, he opened the door, climbed out and knelt by the side of the road.

  In Wynoka, Minnesota, when Munson was growing up, a doctor bought the house next door. A small-town general practitioner, he was a friendly and responsive man who set broken bones, stitched up cuts and gashes, delivered a few hundred babies and otherwise attended to all his patients’ needs. Always on call, he was frequently awakened at night and often had trouble getting back to sleep. And if he ran out of firewood in the middle of a sleepless night, he’d go outside and chop some—still unaccustomed to town life, having grown up on a farm out in the country. The first time he did it, Munson’s mother leaped out of bed and crashed into the wall, certain that somebody had gone wild with a shotgun. The second time, she raised the window and screamed at him. He waited about half an hour, then began chopping again in a tentative, almost experimental way—a single lick here, two more licks there—as if coaxing the log to split apart.

  The first bursts that issued from the tower reminded Munson of those halfhearted taps with the ax. Two or three rounds were followed a few seconds later by two or three more. Nothing for a moment, then a slightly longer burst.

  By that time, most of the prisoners were facedown on the ground. A few men at the rear had broken ranks and run for shelter at the mess hall or the showers.

  Munson froze, still waiting for Case to answer his question, but only until a long burst threw up dirt across the rec area; then he dived behind a galvanized garbage can at the corner of the latrine. A second later, the wind was knocked out of his lungs as someone—Case, it turned out—flopped down on top of him.

  “Jesus Christ,” the sergeant gasped. “That crazy bastard.” Then his face began to change color, tending toward purple, but he said nothing more.

  Munson only gradually realized that he’d locked his hands around the man’s throat. Letting go, he said, “Goddamn it, Case, who’s up there?”

  “Thark,” he gurgled.

  “You put Stark in the tower?”

  Then a burst came from the opposite direction.

  “Who’s in the other one?”

  Case pressed his face against the wall. “Brinley.”

  When one of the Germans hollered, Munson peeked out and saw two prisoners leap up and race toward the mess hall, immediately drawing fire from both sides of the compound. As the men hurled themselves inside, a window shattered, tin siding buckled and, a moment later, someone began moaning.

  Munson tried to recall what he knew about the Thompson. It fired roughly six hundred rounds per minute, and the clips in the camp held fifty rounds apiece. A five-second burst would empty the clip. His best guess was that Stark had already fired thirty to forty rounds, Brinley no more than fifteen or twenty.

  “How many clips did they draw this morning?”

  Case gnawed his lip. “I don’t know.”

  “What?”

  “They just went in there and got whatever they wanted.”

  Munson shoved him in the chest. “You didn’t sign the ammo out?”

  “I never expected no trouble.”

  Brinley fired a long burst that emptied his clip, then Stark opened fire again. One second, Munson’s ear said. Eight to ten rounds.

  “Look at those Germans,” Case said, shaking his head. “That’s what I call trained.”

  As indeed they were. Facedown in their perfectly formed ranks, they hugged the ground, motionless and silent, as though realizing that the quickest way to die was to force themselves upright.

  Munson was awash in uncertainty that morning, but there were a few things he did know.

  He knew, for instance, that no matter how long he remained in the army—and he’d stay until the war ended—his military career was finished. He knew that if by some chance, many years from now, he happened to spot one of the men he’d served with, in a train station or a bus depot, he would do his best to avoid contact, that if need be he’d hide in the washroom. He knew that from this moment forward, there would be things he could never tell his wife or daughter, and that if they asked about his experiences at Camp Loring, he’d change the subject. He knew, too, that many of his classmates at West Point, and no small number of officers, had marveled at his accuracy on the pistol range. More than once he’d emptied an entire clip of .45-caliber ammo right into a silhouette’s midriff at a distance of twenty-five yards. Nobody could figure out how he’d acquired his skill, since his father had never owned a gun and he hadn’t fired one himself until the day he stepped foot on the range.

  “Captain?” Case said as Munson unsnapped the strap on the holster and withdrew his sidearm. “Sir?”

  In the tower, Marty Stark stood straight and tall, as if for once in his life he meant to cooperate fully.

  FORTY FIVE

  AGRAVEL ROAD bisected the cemetery. On the west side lay the graves of Loring’s founders, as well as those of their sons and daughters and grandchildren and even a few great-grandchildren. The east side had been added some hundred years later, and over there, in a small plot across the ditch from the paste and glue factory, was Jimmy Del Timms.

  Dan hadn’t worn a hat, and his overcoat wasn’t much use against the cold rain that blew in during the graveside service. He didn’t see the point of watching them lower the box, so he turned and walked back to the pickup, leaving Shirley and Alvin to crowd in under the funeral parlor’s tent, along with pretty much everybody else in town, including Marie Lindsey, whom he hadn’t seen since the night he made her mad outside the snack bar.

  He climbed into the truck and sat looking through the rain at his father’s headstone. He’d been buried nine months ago. It had been raining then, too, another cold, damp day, but there hadn’t been much of a crowd: just Shirley and Alvin, Ralph and Mrs. Hobgood and three or four other folks who’d kept liking Jimmy Del Timms even after he started acting funny.

  Dan couldn’t help but wonder who’d attend his funeral, if he got shot up and they found enough of his body to ship it home. He knew Lizzie would be there, if she hadn’t left town yet, and Alvin and Shirley and Ralph. Something told him that Marie herself might show up, that she wasn’t really mean, that in fact many of her flaws, if not all of them, were the result of being seventeen. A fair number of his own, he believed, resulted from the same affliction.

  The crowd beneath the tent began to break up, the mourners straggling back toward their cars and trucks, making their way through the moss-covered markers, careful not to step on graves. Alvin hung back for a few minutes, standing off to one side with Jasper Sproles, who looked anxious to get indoors.

  When Shirley opened the truck door, Dan jumped out and let her slide into the middle of the seat, then climbed back in beside her.

  “Well, that’s that,” she said, pulling a handkerchief from her purse and blotting her face with it. “God, his poor mother.”

  Back at the church, Mrs. Stark had been wedged in
to a sitting position between Marty’s father and one of his uncles. You could see that if she were left on her own, she’d just curl up and cry. Mr. Stark himself betrayed no emotion, but the uncle kept sniffling and rubbing his eyes.

  The worst part of it, most folks agreed, was that the family might never know exactly what had happened. Marty’s father had received a phone call from Camp Loring, asking him to meet a military escort at the funeral home. When he got there, some provost marshal nobody had ever seen before informed him his son had been killed, along with another guard and a prisoner. Several POWs had been wounded, too, and the whole event was “under investigation.” The officer was curt, according to the funeral director. When Mr. Stark began to bluster that inside five minutes he’d have Senator Eastland on the phone, the provost told him that the army had already been in touch. Then he stood and walked out, followed by the MPs who’d delivered Marty’s body.

  To Dan, the curious thing was that a lot of the same people who said they felt so sorry for the Starks had begun to make up lies about Marty. Folks said he’d graduated from high school only by stealing exams from teachers’ desks and that Mr. Stark had paid off the principal to keep the whole thing quiet. He used to drink before football games, they claimed, and without the alcohol, he didn’t have the courage to take a lick. Somebody said that when he was a lifeguard at the swimming pool, he’d pulled a little girl’s drawers down. It was as if, in order to believe in their own essential virtue, they needed for Marty to have been bad all along.