Prisoners of War (9 page)

FIFTEEN

ORDERED TO PATROL the perimeter after supper, Marty paused near the fence to look at a thicket, about a hundred yards away, at the edge of Otis Heslep’s field. On the far side of the trees was the field itself, and beyond it a gravel road and Red Gillespie’s place. If you flew over Loring County, everything would be broken up into neat, orderly squares, this man’s world ending where that one’s began, much as it had been since the early settlers moved in, poisoning and then burning the trees and clearing the land.

He was no stranger to the notion of boundaries, of lines that separated, but until now he’d always thought of them as flimsy, just some vague notion of how things ought to be. Yet there was a big difference between being on the outside of a fenced enclosure and being on the inside, between being in uniform and out of it, between one uniform and another. And between those who’d answered the call to murder and those who’d never heard it, the difference was huge.

The majority of the guards, like Kimball, had fathers who could, and would, demand favors. One of them, a boy from Tampa named Huggins, told Marty that his daddy had chosen the University of Florida over Yale because his grandfather refused to let him take his valet up to Connecticut, for fear that northern exposure would corrupt his black character. Huggins didn’t know whether his family had interceded with the army on his behalf, and he didn’t much care. It wouldn’t have bothered him one bit, he said, to serve overseas. He’d been in the ring, beaten the shit out of others and gotten the shit beat out of him, and his little brother had once shot him on a squirrel hunt. Somebody somewhere had a reason for keeping him stateside, and he guessed it was a good one. The Hugginses owned a company that used to manufacture tennis nets but now was turning out camouflage helmet netting. And if the war lasted long enough, he might have to go home and take over, since neither his father nor his grandfather was in particularly good health.

The few guards who’d seen action rarely talked to one another, though every now and then Marty would catch himself staring at one of them and sometimes he’d feel somebody studying him. Whenever that happened, both men would look away, as if the fleeting glimpse alone had already revealed too much.

Four or five days ago, in the latrine, he’d been watching his urine splash into the trough when a guard named Brinley walked up beside him and unzipped. Kimball, the camp gossip, claimed that he’d been in the Philippines with MacArthur, but that a wound, possibly self-inflicted, got him evacuated to Australia a few days before Homma drove the Americans and Filipinos onto the Bataan Peninsula. The unit Brinley had belonged to, he said, was completely wiped out.

For the longest time, as they stood side by side at the urinal, Brinley failed to produce. Marty had been out in the sun all day, driving from field to field with Kimball, and when they got back to camp, he’d drunk about a gallon of water; had his bladder not been full, he would’ve shaken himself, zipped up and left, to spare Brinley the embarrassment. But that, evidently, was the furthest thing from Brinley’s mind. When Marty finally finished and turned to go, he realized Brinley had not come there to piss but to jerk off, and even that endeavor wasn’t working out. “I could do it,” he said, “if I could just concentrate. But Christ Jesus, I just can’t.”

Marty had no idea what he ought to say. But he knew, as surely as he’d ever known anything, that to simply walk away would be even more indecent than Brinley’s behavior.

“I had an aunt back in Saint Joe,” Brinley said, giving up and tucking himself in, “my father’s sister. A real nice woman, big and kind of tall, most people would probably say a little homely, because her face was on the rough side. She taught little kids Sunday school—taught me one year, too, but she was always careful not to favor me over any of the others. That’s just the kind of person she was. She clerked in the Woolworth’s on North First, and sometimes, when the woman who took tickets at the theater was sick, she’d fill in for her.

“I guarantee you she never had a dirty thought in her life, probably never said a cussword or took a drink. Never did anything bad to anybody—I mean, this was just a real good person we’re talking about. But that don’t count for much, does it? She died about two years ago. My dad wrote me a letter when I was in basic. She was only fifty when she got some kind of cancer and they amputated a leg. That didn’t save her, though. It took her a long time to die, and while she was sick, my uncle Owen started running around with other women. He wasn’t even there the night she died.

“And that’s who I’m trying to think about,” Brinley said. “Thinking about doing it with her after she’s already lost her leg and Uncle Owen don’t have no use for her. I know it’s wrong, and that’s why I can’t concentrate. The rest of the time, when I’m not trying to do it, she’s all I think about.”

“I meant to go to a whore,” Marty said. “A colored one. They’re down there on Church Street every night. At least that’s what folks say.”

“I been with colored women,” Brinley said. “In California, before I shipped out. Hell, out there you can’t always tell what somebody is. Got Mexican mixed in with colored and sometimes Nip, too. I fucked a Nip in Long Beach. Never thought a thing about it.”

“I wanted a colored whore because I figured she’d hate me.”

“Makes sense that she would. Not saying anything against you, understand, but you’re from around here, and you all don’t treat colored people too good.”

“That’s a fact.”

“Funny they’d send you back home, though—and thank God they didn’t do it to me. Saint Joe’s the last place in the world I’d like to be.”

“I guarantee you there’s worse places than Saint Joe, wherever the hell it is. But I reckon that’s something you know, ain’t it?”

Brinley’s face, which had displayed such innocent bafflement at his inability to masturbate, now took on an altogether different cast, hard and sharp. “There ain’t no good places left,” he said. “Not for people like you and me.”

He left Marty standing alone in the latrine, somehow feeling as if he were the one who’d gotten caught milking cock. They hadn’t spoken again since. Whenever they passed each other, on the way to the mess hall or Supply, Brinley ignored Marty, just as Marty ignored him.

In the twilight, at the southwest corner of the compound, the one person he couldn’t ignore—and had begun to think about night and day, much as Brinley thought about his dead aunt— sat with his back against the fence, arms clasped around his knees while he gazed at the sky.

Marty had gone to the trouble of listing, on a sheet of lined paper, everything about the German that struck him as suspicious. For one thing, when Marty addressed him, he would just stare back like a calf mesmerized by the sight of a painted gate, yet Dan claimed he’d spoken English to him, and Dan didn’t lie. And he never put on the German uniform in the evenings, content instead to loom around the camp in his dirty, sweaty prison clothes. You never saw another prisoner have anything to do with him. Most important, though, there was Marty’s own certainty that he and this man with the ruined face were somehow linked.

Sometimes he was sure he was the soldier who’d pointed a Gewehr at him while he knelt in the ditch on the Niscemi road, begging for his life. The rifle had what looked like a silencer on it, which was absurd, since the din all around was deafening, the pop and crackle of small-arms fire melding with the low-frequency whooshing sound of mortar rounds, followed by the dull thunk of concussion. The German’s face, it seemed to him now, had been discolored, a purple band spreading from his neck and onto his cheek, and his eyes, in recollection, devoid of malice. The middle joint on the trigger finger whitened, and Marty shut his eyes. When a voice hollered “Hands!” he thought of his own helpless hands, already in the air, and the other man’s—the hands that were about to destroy him. A lifetime passed before he understood that what he’d actually heard was
“Hans!”
When he opened his eyes, he was alone and, in a manner of speaking, still alive.

He paused before the German, who looked at him for a moment, then cleared his throat, got up and brushed dirt off the seat of his pants. Then, instead of nodding and walking away briskly as he usually did when their paths intersected, he just stood there.

Marty’s fingers grazed the stock of the rifle hanging from his shoulder. “I got a feeling you’re a liar,” he said. “Sometimes I think you killed a buddy of mine. Sometimes I think you almost killed me. Sometimes I think you didn’t do either one. But there’s still something about you that don’t seem right.”

“Not German,” the man said softly.

Whatever internal mechanism kept time in Marty’s body all but failed. “Not German? Then what the fuck are you?”

“Polish. I am Polish. From border place.” The prisoner raised both hands in front of his chest and brought them together as if squeezing an accordian. “They
make
me to fight. But I kill no one.
No one.
”

When he put out his hand, Marty stepped backwards and jerked the rifle off his shoulder.

“No,” the man said, shaking his head, eyeing the hole in the end of the quivering barrel. “No. I mean not to harm. Please.”

“Please?
You asking me to show a little faith in you? Jesus, have you picked the wrong fellow.” As best he could, Marty leveled the rifle at him, though he couldn’t keep his hands from shaking. “Go on! Turn your ass around. We’re going to see the captain.”

He poked the prisoner with the tip of the barrel, then shoved him as hard as he could with the butt, and with a shout, the German fell forward onto his hands and knees.

From different directions, Kimball and Huggins both came running, Kimball shirtless and with shaving cream on his face. Instead of a rifle, Huggins carried a tennis racket that was missing half its strings.

Marty stood over the prisoner, pointing the barrel at the back of his head.

Because of the shaving cream, Kimball resembled a stunned young Santa. “Stark?” he said. “What the fuck is going on?”

The trigger teased him as no woman ever would. “This son of a bitch don’t know who he is.”

“Well, these days,” Kimball said, “who the hell does?”

Huggins swatted an imaginary ball. “I do,” he said.

SIXTEEN

AT EASE,” Munson said. Kimball relaxed, but Stark didn’t, because he couldn’t, and Huggins didn’t need to. Huggins never really came to attention to begin with, most likely because he knew his grandfather had gone to college with Henry Stimson. Word had come down to Munson that all this private would need, if he wanted to reach the secretary of war, was a nickel and a pay phone, and he’d get the nickel back.

The rest of his face as inflamed now as the scarred part, the prisoner stood at attention between Kimball and Stark. Stark’s rifle was at sling arms, but he kept caressing the stock with his fingers—a fact Munson noted with some nervousness. “What’s the problem?” he said.

“This prisoner, sir,” Stark said. “I spoke to him the day I reported for duty. Spoke English to him, I mean. And he acted—”

“Would you speak German to me, Private?”

“Sir?”

“I asked if you’d speak German to me?”

“No sir.”

“Of course not. Because I’m not German.”

“No sir.”

“So why would you speak English to him?”

“Well, sir, I can’t speak German.”

“You’re not here to carry on conversations with the prisoners, Stark. If you’re lonely, I’m sure that Huggins and Kimball would be happy to chat with you about the fortunes of your favorite football team or the vicissitudes of romance, whatever you’d like. But these Germans are here to be prisoners, and you’re here to help them fulfill their obligations as captured enemy soldiers. Is that understood?”

“Yes sir.”

Stark’s cheeks, Munson realized, were about the same shade now as the German’s. In the small-unit seminar at West Point, commanders were always urged to pay attention to what they liked to call “the stress points”—the fingertips, the mouth, the jaws—because it was your duty to help keep a man from exploding, unless you wanted him to explode. In this case, Munson didn’t. He hoped that if Stark ever exploded, he’d be so far away that he’d never even have to hear about it. “So,” he said, easing off a little, “you spoke English to him.”

“Yes sir.”

“And what happened?”

“He acted like he couldn’t understand me. But the fact is, he speaks at least some English. He talks some with the fellow he’s working for—and that’s Dan Timms, who I’ve known all my life—and just now he spoke it to me. He told me that he’s not German. Says he’s Polish and the Germans made him fight. I think he’s lying, sir, but I don’t know why. I just got a funny feeling about him. I think—sir, I know it’s not my business to make decisions, but I think maybe we ought to look at his
Solbuch.
There’s something creepy about him, and the way he’s been acting proves it.”

Munson himself had a friend or two in the War Department. They claimed to be working feverishly to wrangle him a combat assignment, to get him transferred out of this backwater that would always be considered a stain on his record, just as he claimed to be itching for action. But in truth, he wanted to stay right here, or another place like it, until the war was over.

His best friend at West Point, a guy from Medford, Oregon, who could bring a tear to the eye of the crustiest topkick when he sang “Danny Boy,” had died during the Torch landings in November. Munson knew a lot of men who’d died, and more still who were going to. In some instances, he knew their wives or girlfriends, their parents or children, and where they’d grown up, what kind of music they liked, what their favorite foods were. Much as he loved them, he didn’t want to join their ranks. He wanted to live a long time, to see his daughter grow up and get married, to watch while his wife’s hair turned gray, and his along with it. He longed for no greater glory now than the rigors of old age.

Nevertheless, he’d always done his job and would continue to, no matter the consequences. And from those same friends in the War Department, he knew that plans for reeducating POWs were already being hatched. The first step would be to identify the anti-Nazis, who could then be separated from the rest, given training and ultimately be used to de-Nazify the others. His duty was to investigate. If he uncovered information that drew favorable attention and got him promoted into a combat assignment—well, that would be the hand fate dealt him. And he’d play it.

He stepped closer to the prisoner. “Do you speak English?”

“Little.”

“Little,
sir,”
Kimball snapped.

“Shut up, Kimball,” Munson said. “I can guarantee you that no man who served in the Afrika Korps requires instruction in military etiquette from you.” He looked into the prisoner’s face. “Are you Polish?”

“Polish, yes.”

He walked over to his desk and picked up a pad and a pen. “What unit did you serve in?”

“Schutzen Regiment Hundred Four.”

“Where were you captured?”

“Name of place . . . I don’t know. English capture.”

“What’s
your
name?”

The prisoner told him.

“Spell it.”

The prisoner hesitated. “Please?” He extended his hand.

Munson gave him the pad and pen. The prisoner stepped over to the desk, laid the pad on it, wrote his name.

Munson looked at what he’d written.
Gerard Szulc.
“I’ve seen your name on the roster,” he said, “but there it’s spelled S-C-H-U-L-T-Z. ”

“I write Polish. German spell different. My family Polish.”

“From what I know, if your family’s Polish, you wouldn’t have been in the Afrika Korps.”

“Like I told you, sir,” Stark said, “there’s something spooky about him.”

Munson decided to ignore him, though if Kimball had interrupted, he would have rescinded his privileges for a couple weeks. “You’re anti-Nazi, I take it?” he asked the prisoner.

“Not Nazi. Yes. No one in family.”

“What about the other prisoners?”

This time, he didn’t answer.

“Just the ones in your own work detail, say. Are any of
them
Nazis?”

The man moved his feet but still didn’t speak.

“Are you afraid to answer that question?”

“Afraid, yes.”

“Why?”

Again he remained quiet.

“Okay, Schultz.” Munson thumped the pad against the desktop. There was no point in prolonging the encounter. Besides, he wanted to be alone, so he could write his wife a letter, as he’d done every night they’d been apart; some days, he’d written two, one in the morning, another that evening. “We’ll check out what you’ve told us. It may be that some other people will want to talk to you. In the meantime, for better or worse, you’re a field hand. You’ll pick that cotton till your thumbs fall off.”

He told Kimball and Huggins to escort the prisoner out. “But don’t go with him any farther than the rec area. Just leave him there and get back to your own business. Stark, you stay.”

He waited until the others had left, then he glanced at the pad once more before putting it in his desk drawer. “Stark,” he said, “on the subject of what is or is not creepy?”

“Yes sir?”

“I believe you are.”

“Yes sir. Whatever you say, sir.”

“Do you find yourself creepy?”

“At certain times, sir.”

“When?”

“Most times, I guess. These days.”

“Were you always that way?”

“I don’t believe so, sir. In fact, I know I wasn’t.”

“Stop touching that rifle stock.”

“Yes sir.”

“This instant.”

“Yes sir.”

“I don’t want to see you fooling with it like that again. If you have need to lay your hands on it, then
lay your hands on it,
by God. It is
not
a woman’s breast, Stark. Are we
goddamn
clear on that?” Despite the fact that he’d always been regarded as a calm person, and was doing his best to remain calm now, he was screaming. And as he advanced on Stark, stopping when their faces were only inches apart, it crossed his mind to wonder how he’d behave in dense undergrowth, in unknown country, with dark shapes closing in from all sides.