Prisoners of War (10 page)

SEVENTEEN

WEDNESDAY EVENING, Dan put on his State Guard uniform and drove the truck to town. Alvin had loaned him a few dollars, and he meant to do something he hadn’t done in a good while—treat himself to a burger and a shake. He loved a good burger more than just about anything, and Kelly’s were the best, but he’d been staying away from the snack bar. To begin with, he didn’t have money to waste on restaurant food. More importantly, he didn’t want to encounter Marie Lindsey, as he stood a fair chance of doing at Kelly’s.

Tonight, though, he wasn’t feeling so cautious. Having his wallet stolen had reminded him that there wasn’t much point in denying these little pleasures. You could hold off and hold off, and the next thing you knew, you might not have anything to buy your pleasure with. You might not even have yourself to please.

Marie wasn’t in the snack bar, but one of her friends, Sally Mankins, was sitting in a back booth with Tom and June Gaither, whose father had just taken over from their grandfather at the bank. The three of them were still in high school, and when Dan saw the schoolbooks stacked up beside their empty soda glasses, he felt a flush of anger. With Gaither’s luck, the war would end before he ever had to go fight, and in another year or so, they’d all be strolling around the Ole Miss campus, doing whatever college kids did.

That was the thing about the war: if it ended, he’d be stuck right here for the rest of his life; if it didn’t, he’d be trying to kill people who in most cases wouldn’t be so different from him, and he hadn’t really understood this until he got out in the field with the Germans. His father had attempted to tell him as much, but the way he’d put it didn’t make any sense at the time. “If everybody went naked,” he said, “war wouldn’t work.”

He and Dan were out back, stacking firewood under the eaves, and the house was empty. Shirley had gone to Jackson to see her ailing sister, and Alvin had business down there anyway, probably with a bootlegger.

“It’s the uniform does it,” his father said. “Once they put it on you, you start thinking,
I’m green and they’re gray—
or
they’re green and I’m gray.
Or
blue.
Or
brown.

“Course, the uniform itself ain’t enough. Too many folks got exactly the same one, and how can that be worth having? So they’ll try to instill unit cohesion, but ain’t enough if you only cohere with folks from Loring County, or from Mississippi. You got to cohere with folks from Blytheville, Arkansas, and Bossier City, Louisiana, maybe even some from Illinois. So a bunch of you’ll get the same kind of patch on your shoulder— and it’ll have something to do with making bones.”

Dan had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Some people thought his daddy was drunk a good bit of the time, but he hardly ever drank. “Sir?” he said.

“Making bones, Danno, making bones. See, if that patch was a color, it’d have to be red. And anybody wearing it has got to be ready to give up all the red they got in ’em. For their momma, their daddy, for their sister or aunt Sue. Make yourself a bone—but not till you’ve made some other folks bones first.

“Now, my job in the war was looking after a bunch of four-legged Fords, otherwise known as mules. And even that was about making bones. They sent me over there in the belly of a transport in the spring of ’17, me and a whole drove of the poor beasts. You should’ve seen how they crammed ’em into that ship. Put ’em on a pallet and lowered it down there into the hold and shut ’em up in stalls, and don’t let nobody ever tell you a mule can’t get seasick. Every day, for twenty-four straight days, them mules puked and shit, and I puked and shit right alongside ’em. Difference was, I had to clean up their mess.

“I made bones out of them mules,” his daddy said, a few flecks of white foam on his lips. “I made bones out of boys like myself, and they made a bone out of me.”

Two days later, on the afternoon his mother was due back from Jackson, Dan got off the school bus, walked into the house and found his father in a pool of red, still clutching his pistol.

Lizzie was behind the counter, wearing the same outfit she always had on. It looked like a nurse’s uniform. Dan had never once seen her out of it, not even on those few occasions when they’d met in the street. She was the face of Kelly’s snack bar, a small dark-haired woman who could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty.

“Hadn’t seen you in a while, soldier,” she said, setting a glass of water before him.

“I’m not a soldier. Not yet anyhow.”

“You will be. Before long, they’ll have stray dogs in uniform. Fact is, they already got one or two.” She glanced at the far end of the snack bar, where the little sergeant from Camp Loring was snickering over a stack of comic books. She shook her head, then leaned over the counter as if intending to say something mean, and her breasts almost spilled out of her blouse.

He must have taken too long to look up. “They better put you in the artillery,” Lizzie said. “You’re pretty good at zeroing in on targets.”

He couldn’t decide whether to act like he didn’t know what she meant or to hang his head and apologize. “Sorry,” he finally mumbled.

When she laid her hand on top of his, he almost jumped off the stool. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “What do you want?”

“A burger,” he blurted. “And a shake.”

“Hot and cold. You got it, Captain.” She turned and walked over to the grill, where the elderly Negro fry cook stood turning burgers. “One more,” she said.

The burger was big and juicy, the milk shake so thick, he had to eat it with a spoon. He was just finishing when he heard the door open. In the mirror behind the counter, atop the inverted stacks of cups, his eyes met Marie’s. Her hair looked different, like she might have dyed it. He didn’t remember it being such a white shade of blond.

“When she gets to be about thirty,” his mother had told him last fall, “Marie won’t be worth having. Every woman reaches that point sooner or later, but for her, it’ll be sooner.” That was all she had to say on the subject, and he was glad, because by then Marie had been wearing his letter sweater for more than a month. She wore it to school every day until the Monday after his father’s suicide, when she handed it back to him, washed and neatly folded, in the hallway between classes and said she couldn’t see him anymore. When he asked her why, she said she was sorry, then turned and walked into the girls’ bathroom.

At that point, he made what the principal told him was the worst mistake of his life: he pushed the door open and barged in after her, shouting and kicking the doors to the stalls, knocking one right off the hinges. Girls began screaming, cowering in the corners, and it took the chemistry teacher and the baseball coach to haul him out of there. Later, in his office, the principal said he wasn’t going to expel him, because he was so close to graduating, but that if Dan didn’t get hold of himself, he’d end up like some of the other men in his family. That was a hard thing to say, he added, and he knew it was a hard thing for Dan to hear right now. Then he got up from his desk—a big man who doubled as the football coach, and who’d paddled boys so hard that they had to ice their butts down—and put his arms around him, pulling him to his chest. “Aw, Danny,” he said. “Goddamn it, son. Goddamn it.”

Marie wouldn’t say
Goddamn it
now, but Dan bet she was thinking it, wondering, in her surprise, why she’d picked tonight to come to the snack bar. Spooning up the last of his milk shake, he let her have a few seconds to decide what to do. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gaither leaning across the table, whispering something to his sister and Sally Mankins, probably hoping to find a way to help Marie save face.

But evidently, she decided to save face herself. Instead of turning and walking out, she came over to the counter and sat down beside him. Lizzie looked at her sharply, then grabbed a stack of dirty dishes and piled them in the sink.

“Hey, Dan.”

“How you doing, Marie?”

“Not too bad.”

“Well, that’s good.”

“You got drill tonight?”

“Yeah.”

“I thought so. Y’all do it every Wednesday night, don’t you?”

“Three out of every four.”

“How long before you go in the army?”

“I aim to join up at the end of the year. That’s when I turn eighteen.”

“On December seventeenth,” she said. “Did you think I’d forgotten?”

“Well, I don’t know.”

“I didn’t forget.” She pulled a paper napkin from the holder on the counter and began tearing off bits. “I’m not as bad as your momma says I am.”

Before he could reply, Lizzie said, “This ain’t the time to be tearing napkins to pieces. Those are the last ones we’ve got. If you’re nervous, why not bite your nails?”

For a moment, all conversation stopped. Lizzie went right on washing dishes, her hands submerged in soapy water. Marie looked as if she’d been hit in the belly with a baseball bat.

Dan said, “Why don’t we go take a walk?”

Marie said nothing, just nodded, and he dropped some coins on the counter. “Thanks, Lizzie,” he said.

She never looked up. “Sure thing, Captain. March hard.”

Outside, the streetlights had come on. A brisk wind was blowing in from the west, and looking above the buildings on the far side of the street, he saw a purple mass of clouds. “I wouldn’t mind if it rained tonight,” he said. “We just keep doing the same drills over and over. It don’t amount to much.”

She walked along beside him, step for step. They weren’t really touching yet, but once or twice her elbow grazed his. He’d thought they never would share a sidewalk again.

“That’s what you do in the army, isn’t it?” she said. “Just the same things day after day?”

“Yeah. Till somebody starts shooting, anyway.”

“Nobody’ll ever shoot at you. The war’ll be over by next summer.”

“Who told you that?”

“That’s what everybody’s saying.”

“Yeah, well, let’s hope everybody’s right,” he said. “What’d you mean—what you said about my momma?” He knew what Shirley thought, of course, but he couldn’t believe she would’ve said anything to Marie.

“She stopped my mother in Woolworth’s. Not long after we broke up. She really gave her what-for, about me being two-faced and all, and Mother started crying. She told your mother it wasn’t me and it wasn’t her, that it was Daddy that made me break it off. And then your mother—well, she used foul language about Daddy and asked where he was right then, like she meant to go after him, too. When Mother said he was at work, your momma grabbed her arm and stuck her face in Mother’s and asked if she was so G-D sure about that.”

The shoes Mrs. Lindsey was wearing during the encounter probably cost more than all the clothing his mother owned, but you couldn’t call Shirley Timms a coward. Tomorrow, he might feel a little proud of her, though it wouldn’t do to show it now. “Seems like everybody’s going crazy,” he said. “You probably remember me mentioning L.C.? Now, I’ve known him since I was seven or eight. Me and him’s tromped cotton together, pitched baseballs back and forth for two, three hours at a time. But the other day my wallet went missing, and I’m pretty sure he stole it.”

“Sooner or later, that’s what they’ll do. You can’t even blame them. None of ’em have any money or ever will. Mother’s been through more housekeepers than I can count, and I don’t even know what the current one’s called.”

She allowed him to take her hand. And right when things were going the way he wanted them to, some flaw in his makeup—the same flaw, he decided later, that had provoked his remark about L.C. not having a grandfather, or his telling Marty about the prisoner speaking English—made him say, “So,
was
your daddy at work?”

Right in front of Delta Jewelers, while the wind whipped her hair, Marie stopped walking and backed away from him, her hands clenched at her sides into tight little fists, until a parking meter halted her retreat. “Oh God,” she said. “Everything Mother said about you was true.”

“And what was that?” he asked, knowing he wasn’t going to like the answer.

“Jesus. It really does run in your family.”

She turned and ran back down the street, then slowed as she neared Kelly’s. Stepping off the curb, she pulled her sweater tightly around herself, strode purposefully across the street and disappeared into the alley between Woolworth’s and the Western Auto.

Yeah,
Dan thought, sticking his hands into his pockets,
and plenty of things run through some other families, too.

EIGHTEEN

HEADED TOWARD the football field, he nearly bumped into Marty, who darted out of the pool hall with a big bag of popcorn tucked under his arm. You could tell he’d been drinking. His tie had come unknotted, his zipper was partway open and there was a dark stain where he’d spilled beer on his class A’s.

“You going to drill?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“Who’s y’all’s commanding officer?”

“Captain Hobgood.”

“
Ralph
Hobgood? From the Highway Patrol?”

“Yeah.”

“He drill y’all in how to write a traffic ticket?”

He was loud and insistent and thick-tongued, and Dan had never liked talking to anybody in that shape. “We do close order,” he said. “And last month we went to the firing range down at Camp Shelby.”

“We did all that shit in boot camp,” Marty said, falling in beside him. “It’s completely useless. The one thing you really need to know, they don’t teach that.”

“And what might that be?”

As if to reclaim some vestige of dignity, Marty handed Dan the bag of popcorn, then zipped himself up and started knotting his tie. “I couldn’t say,” he said. “I just know I never learned it.”

Armed with a 1917 Enfield, Dan and seventeen other State Guard members stood at midfield while Corporal Bunch, under the watchful eye of Captain Hobgood, demonstrated the proper use of a Thompson submachine gun. A handful of high school girls, and another of old men, sat in the bleachers on the home side, glancing up into the stadium lights every few minutes, wondering when to head out in order to beat the rain. Marty sat alone on the visitors’ side, a row from the top, and kept right on eating his popcorn.

Corporal Bunch was in his late twenties, a tall, broad-shouldered man who worked in the shop at Loring Chevrolet. He’d moved up from around Yazoo City a few years ago, and nobody knew much about him except that he had both “military experience,” which accounted for his Guard rank, and a “chronic condition,” which accounted for his exemption from active duty. Nobody liked him. If Captain Hobgood met you on the street, he’d call you by your first name. But Bunch would say, “Step out, there, Private,” then grin like you were supposed to find this funny.

“The Thompson submachine gun fires forty-five-caliber ammo,” he now informed them. “It’s the most advanced weapon of its type. This thing will kick the living shit out of the Schmeisser.”

“Watch your language, Corporal,” Hobgood called. “There’s young ladies over yonder.”

“Right,
sir,”
Bunch barked. He held the Thompson at port arms and slapped the stock. “Say that some months from now y’all find yourselves in a street-fighting situation in downtown Berlin. We use mortar fire on the buildings, call in some tanks and artillery to blast holes in ’em, then you pitch a grenade in there and, right after the explosion, jump through the hole and spray the sorry—you spray the enemy with fire from this exquisite weapon. Well, the problem, gentlemen, is that this thing packs a punch. Even if y’all got forearms made of tempered steel like yours truly, the barrel’s bound to climb. So the designers of this lovely lady built her with a detachable stock. Now, y’all no doubt noticed the sling’s attached to the stock
and
the barrel. So what you gone do is detach the stock—” he popped it loose—“and then let gravity work her magic.”

The stock hit the ground.

“And then you gone plant your foot
firmly
on that baby—” he stepped onto the stock with one boot, then dropped into a shooter’s crouch—“and you gone squeeze—”

“Goddamn it, Bunch!” Hobgood snapped. “Is that thing loaded?”

“Yes
sir.”

“With live ammo?”

“No
sir.”

“Give me that son of a bitch.” Hobgood snatched the Thompson out of his hands, then jerked on the sling until the corporal lifted his foot. Jamming the stock into place, Hobgood said, “Y’all can just forget all that shit. You jump into a room full of Germans, you got worse problems than a bucking barrel. The last thing in God’s world you want to do is get yourself where you can’t move because your foot’s stuck on the stock of your goddamn weapon. Might as well step on your own dick.”

The captain was breathing hard. He’d fought in the First War, got captured and stuck in that underground cell with Jimmy Del Timms and two other men from Loring County, neither of whom made it home. For many years, every so often he’d come out to the house, where he and Dan’s father would sit together on the porch steps, not saying much, occasionally mentioning a name and shaking their heads. Dan once heard them talking about a wagon that had pulled up outside the prison every morning—they could see the wheels through a small window up close to the rafters. Three Germans would enter the basement; the one with the stethoscope around his neck figured out who’d died during the night, then motioned for the others to wrap a chain around the bodies, which were then hauled up to the street through a coal chute. A great many of the prisoners, Hobgood included, had pneumonia. They wasted away on bread and water, an infrequent bowl of meatless soup. When they were finally liberated, only twelve men out of nearly a hundred had survived.

Hobgood finally got his breathing under control. He glanced up at the girls in the bleachers, but they were chattering among themselves and paying no mind to the men down on the field.

“We gone do some drill now,” Hobgood announced. “It’s useful, since moving’s the most important thing you’ll ever do.”

Shortly afterwards, the storm rolled in and the bleachers emptied out. Though Dan expected Hobgood to order them back to the armory, for some reason he kept drilling them, and Marty continued to sit there, even as the rain pounded down.

“To the rear, march!”

Dan stepped out with his left foot, then executed a perfect pivot and headed back with the others toward the west goalposts. He didn’t exactly enjoy this part of it, but he didn’t hate it, either. When you were marching, nothing mattered except where you put your foot, and he always put his in the right place.

“Left flank, march!”

The rain fell in sheets. A thunderclap shook the ground, making everybody jump and look up into the night sky streaked with gold and silver.

“Column right, march!”

The principal wasn’t going to like having the field all torn up, but it belonged to the American Legion, not the high school, so State Guard drill took precedence over football.

“Step it up there, Kennison,” Corporal Bunch hollered. “A little rain don’t stop the—”

Suddenly, a bolt of lightning struck the press box and the stadium lights went out, the air thick with the green-peanut odor of nitrogen and sulfur. As they stood there paralyzed, lightning hopscotched eastward from the far end of the field, each strike followed by another, as if a giant were strolling the Delta.

“Drop them rifles and scatter!” Hobgood yelled.

Dan flung his weapon aside, bent over and sprinted for the vistors’ sideline. Another bolt shattered the darkness, and he threw himself forward, landing in a puddle and sliding onto the cinder track.

When he looked up, Marty was perched above him in the gray electric light, still sitting in the same row and pawing through the bag of popcorn for a kernel dry enough to eat.