Prisoners of War (2 page)

TWO

BEHIND THE WHEEL, his mother posed a threat to herself as well as everybody else, so he drove home. When they pulled into the yard, he cut the motor, and for a minute or two they just sat there. More often than not, neither one of them wanted to go inside the house, preferring instead to postpone walking through the door into all that silence.

He thought of that instant as one of confrontation and imagined she did, too, though what she confronted, he suspected, was a lot different from what he had to face. He believed, too, that she could name her problem and could’ve recited in her mind a whole set of specific actions or nonactions that had brought it to pass. Whereas his problems were vague, ill-defined. He didn’t like where he was, and he didn’t like what he’d most likely become if he managed to survive the war that was waiting for him a few months down the road. But he didn’t know where else, or what else, he’d rather be. His imagination, he guessed, was a lot like an acre of buckshot. Nothing much grew there.

He opened his door and got out, as did his mother. Brushing a loose strand from her eyes, she looked at him across the hood of the truck. “I thawed out a couple pork chops,” she said. “How does that sound?”

“All right.”

“Just all right?”

“It sounds good,” he said.

“Good,” she said. “I’m glad you think so.”

Inside, she stepped quickly into the kitchen. He kicked off his shoes and set them on a few sheets of old newspaper in the corner of the living room. His father had always done that when he came in from the field, and Dan wanted everything left just the way it had been when his father was alive.

The one time he and his mother had fought was the day he saw her boxing up a bunch of his father’s pants and shirts, getting ready to carry them to the church for the clothing drive. He’d pulled the box from her hands, dumped the clothes on the bed, thrown the box on the floor and stomped it flat. She slapped his face that day, then burst into tears and locked herself in the bathroom. She didn’t come out for hours, no matter how hard he begged. When she finally did emerge, her eyes were dry and her voice steady. “Okay, have it your way,” she said. “But if you mean to be treated like the man of the house, you need to go ahead and be one.”

She’d opened a bottle of his uncle’s whiskey, and Dan had sat beside her on the couch, sipping at his drink while she poured herself one after another. He’d drunk beer a couple times but had never tasted whiskey and didn’t know how it burned in your nose; his mother laughed every time he took a swallow.

She told a lot of stories that night about folks he’d never heard of, people she’d known growing up down in Jackson or met at dances she’d been to. Some colored musicians from New Orleans, she said, used to come through once a year, and she and a few of her friends would slip off to a roadhouse just outside Raymond and watch them play instruments she’d never seen before. One of them had some kind of long silver pipe that made the eeriest sounds you’d ever heard; he’d get down on his knees while he played, blowing sound right into the floor.

She talked until she began to slur her words, then yawned and tried to stand. After helping her to bed, he walked out back and made himself throw up, just to get the taste out of his mouth.

Tonight they ate without saying much, and while he was clearing the dishes, she went into the living room and stuck a Roy Acuff record on the phonograph. “Come on in here,” she called. “Let’s listen to some music.”

He figured she’d have the whiskey out again, and he was right. A bottle and a pair of glasses stood on the coffee table, next to the illustrated Bible that had belonged to his grandmother. He walked over, picked the bottle up and set it on an end table.

She watched him the whole time. “Jesus turned the water into wine,” she said.

“He didn’t turn it into moonshine.”

“This is
not
moonshine.” She examined the label on the bottle. “This is bonded whiskey, a hundred and one proof, made legally in Claremont, Kentucky.”

“Maybe it’s legal to make it there, but it ain’t to drink it here.”

She poured some into one of the glasses. “Well, then go ahead and turn me in.” She lifted the glass and took a swallow, then coughed and held a hand to her mouth, her eyes watering.

He realized she didn’t like the taste of it, either, and sat down on the couch. “Rosetta’s worried about L.C.”

“How come?”

“I believe she thinks he’s getting ready to run off.”

“Where would he run to?”

“I don’t know. He talks a good bit about Chicago and Detroit, places like that.”

“Well, if he leaves here, it won’t be any time till he gets picked up.” She took another swallow. “He hasn’t got a selective service card, and he’s eighteen.”

“He didn’t register?”

“Of course not. Your uncle cut a deal for him.”

“Who with?”

Instead of answering, she said, “He could do the same thing for you, and it’d be a whole lot easier. He might not even have to make a deal at all. Because you’re the only man in the—”

“The day I turn eighteen,” he said, “I’m gone.”

“Well, I believe you’ve said as much before.”

The needle on the record player reached the end of the song, so she got up and flipped the record over and Acuff started singing “The Great Speckled Bird,” with a weeping steel guitar in the background.

When she bent over to pick up her glass, he could see down the front of her dress. She had small breasts, and there was a bunch of freckles near the top of her brassiere. As a boy, he’d often tried to get a glimpse of her naked. Now the sight of her secrets just embarrassed him, as if he’d walked into the bathroom and found her sitting on the toilet.

She took another sip, then set the glass back on the table. “Get up and dance with me,” she said.

“It’s not the kind of music you dance to.”

“You can dance to anything,” she said, “as long as you’ve got a partner.”

She took his hand. At first he resisted, but she wouldn’t let go, so he finally stood, and she pulled one of his arms around her waist. He didn’t know a thing about dancing, but he let her push him gently around the room while she hummed along with the music. Her breath smelled sweet, like her mouth was full of sugar. The top of her head grazed his chin, and her hair was damp. Once or twice he felt her heart beat.

“Lord,” she said, “I’d forgotten what it’s like to be with a boy your age. You always shut your eyes and make believe he’s older.”

That night, he dreamed of his father.

They were riding in the pickup, as they often were in dreams, and his father was looking out the window he’d rolled halfway down. He was saying something about rain, how there’d been too much or too little—Dan couldn’t be sure which, because the wind was whipping in and his father’s voice was muffled. He sat staring at the back of his father’s head, his neck burned bronze by the hot Delta sun.

He was young in the dream, maybe only eight or nine, and he’d decided that when his father turned around, he’d ask if they could drive all the way to the Western Auto and get a new baseball bat, since his old one was a piece of junk. He wouldn’t sound too insistent about it, wouldn’t act like it meant the world to him or anything. He’d just raise the topic and see what his father said; and if he said no, or said nothing, as he sometimes did, that would be all right, too.

Finally, his father turned around. But it would not be accurate to say that he faced him, because his father’s face was gone.

THREE

THE NEXT AFTERNOON, just east of town, he saw a man in uniform walking along the side of the road. The soldier’s back was to him, but as Dan got closer, something about the man began to seem familiar. He was tall, and he walked with his right fist propped on his rib cage, so his arm stuck out like the handle on a coffee cup. He had a duffel bag slung over his left shoulder. Once or twice, he moved his head in a circle, as if trying to work a kink out of his neck.

When the rolling store stopped and the door swung open, Marty Stark looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, and a front tooth had been chipped. He’d lost a lot of weight. Dan hadn’t heard anything about him getting wounded, and couldn’t imagine why in the world he’d been shipped home. A little over two months ago, at the hardware store, Mr. Stark had told him that Marty had gone ashore in Sicily with Patton’s Seventh Army.

“What the hell are you doing here?” Dan blurted.

“Just walking down the road.”

“You must’ve dropped thirty pounds. Army wouldn’t feed you?”

“
Au contraire,
son. Army’s fed me plenty.” He let the duffel bag slide off his shoulder, then heaved it up into the bus. “Been feeding me a mouthful of chickenshit every day for fifteen months, but that won’t keep the weight up.” He stepped back and glanced at the black clouds billowing from the tailpipe. “Engine sounds like a dog trying to puke,” he said. “What’re you doing driving this high-tailed heap?”

“Just helping out.”

“Helping who out?”

“Uncle Alvin.”

“How come you ain’t in the cotton patch? Your old lady sell the farm?”

It was hard for Dan to think of his mother as anybody’s old lady, and even harder to believe Marty thought of her that way. He’d once told Dan he considered her the nicest-looking woman in Loring, Mississippi, and didn’t care if she was nearly forty, that he still wouldn’t mind running off with her somewhere. Dan had come within an inch of saying he wasn’t the only one to harbor that ambition.

“Can’t sell what you don’t own,” he said. “Bank owns the place now. But me and Uncle Alvin’ll get the picking done this year. He’s already made arrangements for a POW detail from Camp Loring.”

Quietly, Marty said, “I heard about your daddy.”

“Yeah, I figured.”

“I sure am sorry.”

“Yeah, me too.”

Marty pointed at the silver insignia on Dan’s shirt pocket. “You in the State Guard?”

“For now. I’ll be eligible to join up in December.”

“Ain’t no reason to rush it.”

That was easy enough to say as long as you weren’t driving a rolling store all day, then going home every night to the house Dan lived in. “Your daddy said you’d been in heavy combat,” he said. “What’s it like?”

“Plain
combat
wasn’t strong enough—he had to stick something else in front of it?” Marty planted a boot on the bottom step. “Let’s put it this way, pal. It didn’t have much in common with an opening kickoff.”

“I didn’t figure it would have.”

“You didn’t? I sure did. And boy, was I one dumb monkey. Too stupid for the circus but just right for the zoo.” He jammed his hands in his pockets, then pulled them out and looked down at them—first at the left one, then at the right, as if he didn’t know why they weren’t in his pockets—before putting them back in again. “I come off that LST, and you know what I asked myself? ‘Where are the fucking cheerleaders?’ Can you believe it? ‘Where’s the band, and the water boy? And how come the other team can see me when I can’t see hide nor hair of them? Where are the goddamn referees, huh?’ And you know what? Ain’t one of them questions been answered yet. Not a damn one.” The engine idled, burning gas, but he made no move to climb the steps. Again he worked his head around in a circle, then moved it up and down a couple times. “Man, I been on that train all the way from New Jersey. Every tooth in my head’s about to come loose.”

“You get a medical discharge?”

“Naw, no such luck.” Grabbing the handrail, he finally climbed up inside. “I’m traveling under delayed orders. Got till Friday morning before I report to my next posting.”

“So where’s that at?”

Marty slid the lid of the drink box open, reached in, sloshed some bottles around and pulled out an RC, stuck the neck in the opener and popped off the cap. Turning the bottle up, he started swigging, stopping only when the drink was all gone.

He set the bottle down and wiped his mouth on his shirtsleeve. “I’ll be out at the Fritz Ritz,” he said, “guarding the fucking Krauts.”

Dan pulled over at the end of the Starks’ driveway. Mr. Stark’s white Cadillac stood parked near the house, and his pickup truck was there, too. Their black lab, Lucy, lay on the veranda, her head lifted now as she watched the rolling store.

Marty shouldered his duffel bag and told Dan he’d be in touch in a few days, once he got squared away, that when he had liberty they’d go over to Greenville to drink some beer and shoot pool. Then he stood there at the top of the steps, looking out over the yard where he’d played as a boy, as if unwilling now to set foot in it.