Prisoners of War (12 page)

TWENTY TWO

WAKING , Marty had discovered, was a lot like being born: unsettling but unavoidable. Light seeped in through the folds in the tent flaps, until it became a fact he had to acknowledge. Sooner rather than later, this being the army, you had to climb out of the cot, pull your clothes on and step outside. What you didn’t have to do—and he began each day that fall knowing he wouldn’t—was pick up a newspaper and read the new figures, the ones that told you how many more were dead. They didn’t list how many others might as well be.

In the shower, he did his best to banish the chill he always woke with, letting the hot spray knead his neck and chest while Huggins and Kimball and one or two others hollered back and forth, the topic the same as always.

“You know whose bank I wouldn’t mind making a deposit in? That little dark-haired thing down at the snack bar.”

“Lizzie?”

“I never note their names. To me, they’re all just
Honey.
”

“That woman’s probably forty, man, maybe more. Jesus Christ.” Kimball’s horror sounded genuine. “What’s the matter with you? You got the urge for a gray cootie?”

“California must have the worst educational system in the country if you got cooties confused with pubic hair.”

“Whatever it is, I don’t want to see anything gray when I look down there.”

“You’re not supposed to eyeball it, you’re supposed to rout it out.”

Kimball gestured at Huggins’s crotch. “With what you got, about the only thing you could rout out is somebody’s ear canal.”

When Huggins made thrusting motions with his hips, Kimball hurled a soap bar at him, and a few minutes later, as Marty stood in a corner, toweling off, they were still in the showers, laughing and belittling each other.

His main concern now was the one of identity.

With so few guards in camp, nobody got liberty very often. But the last time they’d turned him loose, he’d gone home and, while his mother sat downstairs, scrounged through the attic until he found his father’s 1920 Loring Separate School District yearbook. He’d turned to the student portraits and, not even looking at any of the faces, torn out those pages.

Back at camp, he’d sat on his cot, examining the photographs and, without referring to the names listed in the margins, trying to see how many he could correctly identify. About half the time he succeeded, because it was the mother or father of one of his high school friends and the family resemblance was obvious. But the man he thought was Harvey Finch, whose son Teddy he’d played basketball with, turned out to be somebody named Zenus McGhee, whom he’d never even heard of.

Still, he was batting about .500, if you wanted to see it in those terms, though that didn’t seem too good, given that he’d known most of these people, in various incarnations, all his life. He thought he should give this test to somebody else— Dan, maybe—but was sure Dan would have said he was crazy.

So it disconcerted him when he walked into the tent after showering and found Sergeant Case flipping through the yearbook.

“Give me that,” he said, snatching it out of his hands.

“Hey, hey—what’s this?” Case said. “You ever heard about the chain of command? You know, treating your superiors with respect? I got a good mind to make you do some push-ups.”

Marty jammed the yearbook into his footlocker and snapped it shut. “If I push anything up, it’ll be you.”

Backing away, Case leveled a finger at him. “And you’ll end up in the stockade. Or the fucking nuthouse.”

“Either one’d be an improvement on this, unless you’re in there with me.”

Case backed all the way out of the tent, then stuck his head in through the fly.

Marty couldn’t help but crack up. His NCO looked like one of those clowns at the county fair: hit him on the head and win a nickel or take a ride for free.

“Captain wants to see you,” Case said. “Right now. So get your loony ass moving.”

To see Munson without a file at hand was almost like seeing him naked, and this morning he was also out of uniform, with a robe over his pajamas, and suffering from the flu. On his upper lip was a bright red cold sore.

He pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his robe and blew his nose. “You ever find yourself in a position, Stark, where you really wanted to do the right thing, and you had what looked like two clear choices—not three or four, not five or six, just two—but you still couldn’t tell which was which?”

“Yes sir. I guess everybody’s been in that position at one time or another.”

“And that’s the position I’m in right now. You say you recall being there yourself?”

“Yes sir.”

“Care to tell me about it?”

“No sir. Not really.”

“Would it surprise you to know that
my
being in that position has something to do with you?”

“No sir.”

“It wouldn’t.”

“No sir.”

“There’s not much that surprises you, is there, Stark?”

“Not really, sir. Not anymore.”

“Would it surprise you,” Munson said, “to know that some documents relating to the prisoner you’re so interested in are missing?”

Word was, Patton took his own pulse whenever he came under shelling and somehow had learned to hold it steady. That was one skill, among many, that Marty Stark would never master. “No sir.”

“I didn’t think it would. And frankly, that worries me.”

“I’m sorry, sir.”

“The prisoner himself has nothing to do with the screwup. In combat situations, rules are often forgotten. A
lot
of things are forgotten on the battlefield.”

“Yes sir. They sure are, sir.”

“That’s right. Soldiers forget their training. Our men have been told, for instance, not to hunt souvenirs, yet they do. They swipe medals, steal decorations, sometimes even steal identification and documents. And because of this, it turns out that registering some of these prisoners can be a real nightmare.”

Marty said, “Sir . . . if I could ask a question?”

Munson waited.

“Where was he captured?”

“We don’t know. His
Solbuch
’s gone. And unfortunately, that’s not all.”

He explained that the prisoner’s serial number began with 81, indicating capture in North Africa. The problem was, no record of the serial number could be located at base camp; an entire box of files was missing, and his must have been in it. Right now, the army didn’t even know which convoy had brought him over. The processing center had either lost or misplaced every shred of information on him. Practically speaking, he didn’t exist.

Munson paused to see if Marty would offer an observation. When he failed to, the captain asked, “What does this news suggest to you, Stark?”

“Nothing, sir.”

“Nothing?”

“No sir.”

“In other words, you’re buying my explanation—that some poor, dumb, overworked clerk screwed up somewhere in New Jersey, but that in the end these records will be found, proving this prisoner’s exactly who he claims he is?”

“Yes sir.”

“That’s good, Stark,” Munson said. “That’s exactly the answer the army wants to hear.”

“The
army,
sir?”

“That’s right, it’s what the army wants.” Munson blew his nose on the handkerchief again, then gazed at it with disgust. “And believe it or not, Stark, the army also wants to ask you a favor.”

TWENTY THREE

September 29, 1943
Camp Loring, Miss.

Dear Stella,

First of all, since I know you like to envision the circumstances under which I’m writing, I should let you know that it’s midafternoon. I’m sitting on my cot, wearing, if you can believe this, a pair of pajamas and a robe cadged from the infirmary. I’ve been running a slight fever—well, not that slight, above 102—so I’m spending the day in my quarters.

I can’t help wondering what it would be like to be sick when you were actually on the front lines. That’s a strange thing to think about, isn’t it? (And that’s all I’m doing, thinking on the page.) I remember that when I was growing up, Mrs. Jorgenson, who lived down the street from us in Wynoka, was diagnosed with cancer. (The only reason we knew this was that her doctor, another neighbor, told my father.) Of course, anybody could see that something was wrong with her; she began to lose weight, and her skin gradually took on a strange cast, almost greenish.

She and Mr. Jorgenson were childless. They ran the only drugstore in town, and each of them had been known to slip some of us kids candy. They liked children, in other words, and everyone agreed it was sad they never had any. My impression, and everyone else’s, was that they were totally devoted to each other. You would see the two of them walking together in the park on Sunday afternoon, strolling along the creek, throwing bread on the water for the ducks. Or they’d ride around the countryside in their Model A, carrying a picnic basket with them and stopping wherever they felt like it, then spreading a blanket on the ground and having a leisurely lunch.

They were in their mid-forties when she got sick. When it became apparent that she wasn’t going to recover, everybody wondered if Mr. Jorgenson would live long after she passed away. I think we all believed it would be one of those situations where the health of one person in the marriage determines that of the other.

In fact, he didn’t live very long after she died—less than four years, if I recall this accurately, so he was probably no more than forty-nine or fifty when he died. It would make a more symmetrical story if he’d died of cancer himself, just as she had, but in fact he was up in a big oak tree in their front yard on a Saturday morning, pruning some branches, when the limb he was standing on suddenly collapsed. Somehow or other, he managed to come down right on top of his head. It didn’t kill him, but he was unconscious when a neighbor walked by and saw him, and by the time they got him to the hospital, there was some type of swelling in his brain. His head actually grew misshapen. He was in a coma for the better part of two months, and then passed away quietly one afternoon.

But the point of this story is that during the time when Mrs. Jorgenson’s condition was growing worse and worse, you’d see the two of them at local sporting events. At a basketball game, say, when we scored a basket, Mrs. Jorgenson would scream at the top of her voice, and Mr. Jorgenson would, too, just as if neither of them knew that she would soon be gone.

You will probably think the connection I’m trying to make here is tenuous, and I’m probably not making it too well. But I sometimes wonder if, in life-and-death situations, the only thing that matters is staying alive. If it is, would a person stop loving the taste of smoked salmon—even if, like me, he’d always enjoyed it more than any other food in the world? In other words if, in his rations, you gave him smoked salmon (not likely, of course, in this army), would he notice what it was and take pleasure in it? Or would he just shovel it down and get on about the business of keeping his head low? I’ve never thought about things like this before. It is uncharacteristic of me, probably a waste of time bought and paid for by the army, and I would never express such thoughts to anybody but you. Put it down to the fever, if you will.

Speaking of fever, the guard I’ve been worried about shows signs of cooling off. I know that from time to time he drinks when he’s on duty, and you can rest assured I’m keeping an eye on that. But whereas a week or two ago after the incident I mentioned, I believed he posed a risk to the prisoners and perhaps even to the other guards, he has caused no further trouble. It’s not my business to say if it was a good idea or a bad one to assign him to a camp in his hometown, but at any rate he’s in a position to be particularly useful if, as I have some reason to hope, he so chooses.

Now, regarding your father’s proposal: please tell him I’m flattered. I suppose that he’s making a certain kind of sense—that “selling” the army is not that different, in the end, from selling real estate. But I’m not a recruiter. The people I “sell” the army to—since they are already in the ranks—have no choice but to buy what I’m selling. I’m afraid that if our livelihood were ever to depend on my ability to move a given piece of property, we’d surely starve.

But you don’t need to say no just yet, because, for one thing, this war’s far from over. I’m glad civilians are optimistic, since it would make prosecuting the war much harder if they weren’t. But if they knew more about the enemies we’re fighting, they’d realize that some of these people, at least, are a long way from giving up. Maybe some of them never will.

I don’t want to end, though, on a somber note. So I’ll conclude by saying that I wish I was holding you in my arms, that I wish I could pick Elizabeth up and twirl her in the air, and that if I were with the two of you just now, it wouldn’t matter to me one bit if I looked out the window and realized I was in Philadelphia!

How’s that for devotion?

Love to you, as always,
Robert