Prisoners of War (11 page)

NINETEEN

FRIDAY MORNING, while waiting for Dan to bring the pickup back so she could go to work, Shirley decided to curl her hair. For a good while now, she’d been letting herself go, even though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t. She came from Irish Protestant stock, and nobody in her family’d ever had it easy. Her father was born with only one good arm; on the end of his right one, he wore an ugly metal hook. But when you knocked him down, which a few men had done, he didn’t just get up. He got up and knocked you down, too, and then he did his level best to claw your eyes out with that hook. If there had been anybody whose eyes needed clawing out, Shirley might’ve done it, but the only eyes she saw any fault in were her own. Last night, while Dan slept in the bedroom next door, she’d brought herself to orgasm. Though she’d bitten down hard on the pillowcase, she couldn’t believe he hadn’t heard her cry out. The hell of it was, she hadn’t even enjoyed it much, the greatest pleasure being the utter helplessness she’d felt.

Once or twice at night, she’d heard him doing the very same thing—the telltale creaking of the bedsprings as he did his best to keep quiet. A few months from now, wherever they sent him for training, he’d do it on leave with a living, breathing partner. The act would finally take place in tawdry surroundings, and when he looked back—if he lived long enough to— he’d probably be surprised that he thought it was anything special.

The only man she’d ever known who felt the same way she did about making love was Alvin. Any day on which he did it was by definition a good day, no matter how many other things went wrong. He never rushed. Sometimes he wouldn’t even put himself in—he wanted to sit and touch and look for hours. He loved the parts of her body men normally didn’t notice: her armpits, her knees, her heels and ankles. He loved them so much, in fact, that he would no longer touch them.

Some people had electric curling irons, but she wasn’t about to squander any money on that when the old kind worked just fine. She lit the coal-oil lamp on her bedside table and stuck the iron in the glass chimney. While it was getting good and hot, she walked over to the dresser and opened the middle drawer, reaching for a clean pair of panties, and she saw motion down in all that soft fabric.

The snake had dull brownish skin, its body a little thicker than a broom handle. Back when they moved into the house, Jimmy Del had told her that cottonmouths hated dry spaces or being very far off the ground, so odds were that any snake she ever saw inside was just a chicken snake. “Stay calm and call me,” he’d said, but that was no option now. If she let the snake escape, she’d worry every time she opened a drawer or a cabinet and might as well just run out the front door now and keep going.

She looked around the room but saw nothing that could serve as a weapon, so she hurried into the hallway, jerked open the closet door and grabbed Jimmy Del’s shotgun from where it stood propped in the corner. She hadn’t fired it in years, but she shucked the action and heard a shell slide into the chamber, then ran back into the bedroom and got as close to the drawer as she dared. The snake raised its head, the alert eyes indicating an intelligence that she hoped wasn’t there. When it opened its jaws, she squeezed the trigger.

The blast knocked her backwards and blew the snake to bits. She stood there rubbing her shoulder and poking the barrel through what used to be her underwear drawer. Blood and snake guts were soaking into her panties and stockings. The whole dripping mess had fallen through the splintered wood into the next drawer, where she’d folded the white blouse Alvin had bought her last Christmas.

Shaking, fighting the urge to sit down and cry, she pulled everything out of the undamaged top drawer; then she got Jimmy Del’s handcart off the back porch and rammed it under the dresser and wrenched and pulled until its weight shifted and she could roll it down the hall and off the edge of the back porch.

Back inside, she took a bath and then, because she’d made herself a promise to curl her hair, marched back into the bedroom and picked up the curling iron, not thinking how hot the rods must’ve gotten by now. Spinning around, she looked in the mirror at the very moment her hair caught fire.

TWENTY

THE OFFICE of the local draft board—or “seelective service,” as the chairman, Jasper Sproles, called it—was located in a glass-fronted building right across Second Street from the courthouse. Under a poster proclaiming the urgency of the cause, a couple white boys fresh out of high school sat nervously in stiff-backed chairs, accompanied by their mother, whom Alvin knew well enough to nod at. Three or four Negroes stood off to one side, holding their caps, waiting to be called.

Jasper was just coming out of his private office. He grinned at Alvin and raised one finger, then leaned over and whispered something to his clerk, who happened to be the mayor’s wife. When he finished, he looked up and said, “Alvin, whyn’t you come on back here? You and me’s just gone take a minute or two, and then I’ll get to these good folks.” He smiled politely at the white boys and their mother, ignoring the black men altogether.

His desk was littered with files and applications for deferments, as well as a number of personal letters with return addresses that Jasper said Alvin would most likely recognize. Some folks were reluctant to put their name on an envelope going to the selective service office, he said, but anonymity was a big joke anyway. Buddy Baker, the director of the Office of Civil Defense for Loring County, could walk into the post office and order any piece of mail opened if he deemed it necessary. When Alvin asked if that was federal policy, Jasper laughed and said it unofficially was, state by state.

Jasper found many things funny, not least of all the fact that a man who’d had two businesses foreclosed back in the thirties was now in a position to decide if the banker’s grandson would go to college or hide in a foxhole. Kind of interesting the way things sometimes work out, he said. For instance, McNabb’s Paste and Glue Company, which he’d married into, was only moderately successful until it started producing the glue that went on the flaps of every envelope licked at the War Department.

This morning’s post had brought Jasper even more entertainment. “You know much about Mennonites?” he asked.

“I know what they are,” Alvin said. “Don’t know as I’ve ever met one, though.”

“Oh, you’ve met ’em, all right, you just didn’t know it. Fact is, we’re surrounded by Mennonites, Jehovah’s Witnesses, even got a Quaker. If my mail’s any indication, it’s amazing there’s any Baptists and Methodists left, not to mention the purely unrepentant.”

“They claimin’ conscientious objection, I reckon.”

“Oh yeah, right up until you tell ’em they’ll most likely get assigned as medics, at which point they want to have a rifle and a chance to shoot back.”

“Last time around,” Alvin said, “you and me would’ve pulled the same kind of stunt, I imagine, if we’d had to.”

“Would we?”

“I imagine.”

“You don’t believe in nothing, do you?” Jasper said.

“I believe in about as many things as you do.”

“Well, that’s why if old man Gaither walks in here and puts a bullet in me for sending his grandson on a surfing vacation to Honshu, I’d choose you as my replacement.”

“You’re nuts.”

“How come?”

“You know how come.”

“You mean because you’re not respectable like I am?”

“To some folks.”

“Like who?”

“Them that believe the line between what’s strictly legal and what’s not isn’t just a thin streak of bullshit.”

Jasper threw his head back and laughed so loudly, they could probably hear him across the street in the courthouse. “You’re something, Alvin,” he said. “Lordy.”

“You didn’t ask me to come by just so you could point that out.”

“Naw, I sure didn’t. You know old Frank Holder, don’t you?”

“Know him when I see him.”

“That very often?”

“Comes in the store from time to time, buys hisself a cold drink or a plug of tobacco. Don’t usually say much. At least not since his boy got killed.”

“A person might conclude that a man like Frank couldn’t cause him no problems,” Jasper said. “And in normal times, that’d probably be so. Thing is, these times ain’t normal, and Frank’s wife, Arva, is kin to Senator Bilbo.” He smiled broadly. “Now you probably wasn’t paying a lot of attention along about November of last year when the senator addressed his colleagues on the subject of colored participation in the war effort, but he allowed as how he found it unseemly that a state like ours, with a colored population of close to fifty percent, should send only white men to the front. Said he wanted to see some coloreds in uniform, too, even if all they did was drive trucks and clean latrines. And ever since, the
see
lective service has been real careful to send up a fair number of our darker brethren.”

He then explained, at tedious length, that Senator Eastland could always be reasoned with, since he owned a cotton plantation and knew what work needed to get done. “But old Theodore don’t own much of anything, so if he found out about some colored boy that hadn’t even registered—especially one that strikes some folks as cheeky—he
might
get hisself all worked up, you know.”

“Are you telling me, Jasper, to bring L.C. in and sign him up so you can pack him off to the army?”

“Aw, Alvin, you know I ain’t one to cave in to pressure.”

“That’s right. You’re more likely to apply it, particularly when there’s something you want.”

“What could I want that I don’t got?”

“Seems to me I recall you like that bootleg whiskey.”

“Yeah, and that case you brung over when we talked about your boy last spring was good stuff. But fact of the matter is, I could get another case just like it by sundown. See, I own a big chunk of a thriving business. I can’t be bought, ’cause the war’s done let me purchase myself. I hope it does the same for you. And that colored boy, too. Till it does, though, he needn’t attract no undue attention. And if you don’t mind me saying so, you ought not to, neither. An august individual might question your patriotism.”

He rose, so there was nothing Alvin could do but rise with him. And even though he knew he ought to keep his mouth shut, he said, “I need to ask you something, Jasper.”

“Fire away, Alvin—fire
a
way.”

“If you were colored, would you die for this country?”

The man’s face broke into a wide grin. “Not unless somebody shot me.”

TWENTY ONE

FOR A GOOD MANY years now, on Friday evenings Alvin had let Rosetta go home, trusting L.C. to operate the register. That first night, he told him not to let any of his friends beg candy or drinks from him, and after that he never mentioned it again.

“Mr. Alvin know a thief when he see one,” L.C.’s momma said, “because that’s what he is. And he know you ain’t.”

L.C. was only thirteen at the time, so he didn’targue with her, but how could Alvin tell he wasn’t a thief when he didn’t know that himself? He figured he’d steal whatever he could, whenever, so it had puzzled him, as the years went by, to discover that the urge to steal, even from white folks, just wasn’t in him.

John Burns regarded this as a serious deficiency. Once, L.C. had wandered over to his place to drink a little whiskey, and when he walked in, the first thing he saw, hanging right there on the wall, was a black suit tailored for somebody about half a yard taller than his friend. “That old man Young’s,” he said, “ain’t it?”

“Was his,” Burns said.

“Aim to have it took up?”

“You think I wear that ugly thing, you dreaming.”

“Why you hook it, then? You aim to sell it?”

“Hell no, I gone bury it. See, when old man Young went over yonder to Arkansas for a week, he done locked the back door and left the front open. Now what that tell you?”

“That he done forgot to lock his front door.”

“You a waste at school, nigger, you can’t do no better than that. What it say is, old Young thinks no white folks steal and no nigger ever go to the front door. So when he come back, he can lay awake in that bed to wonder how
that
shit done happen.”

L.C. doubted Young would have to wonder very long before deciding what happened. But since tractor drivers and hoe hands were now scarce, he wouldn’t run Burns off like he would’ve a few years back. Instead, he’d determine what that suit had cost him, multiply it by two or three and take that sum out of John Burns a nickel at a time, week after week, year after year. To get even, the only thing Burns could do was watch for another unlocked door.

Alvin had left plenty of doors unlocked when L.C. was around, including the one to his office safe. He’d send him in there to sweep up when it was hanging open, leaving the office himself so as not to get in the way. L.C. never told Burns about it, because he’d think he was crazy for not seizing the opportunity.

The thing was, L.C.’s feelings about Alvin Timms were complicated. There were times he hated him—like the day last spring when Alvin came back from town in a high mood and told him not to worry, that he’d cooked up some deal with the draft board to keep him from having to register. He’d wanted to escape the draft, but not because Alvin needed him to pick cotton, sweep the floor and sell Popsicles; that robbed him, at least for a while, of the biggest hope he’d ever harbored, along with all the others, and you couldn’t help but hate a man for taking that from you.

But at other times, Alvin gave back some of what he’d taken. Late on Friday nights, after they’d turned the porch light off and latched the front door and nobody else was around, he’d pull out a bottle of whiskey and pour two glasses and, after L.C. had a swallow or two, ask if he’d mind making a little music.

The first time, it threw L.C. into the worst kind of confusion, which Alvin must’ve realized. “I was over on the Young place the other night,” he explained, “heard the singing over by them shotgun houses and recognized your voice. Sat on the road in my pickup to listen awhile. I ain’t never heard anything quite like that before, and I sure did like it.”

L.C. sang that night, slapping his knee for rhythm, and the next Friday night, too. Before long, he was carrying the guitar to the store on Fridays, leaving it in the closet in Alvin’s office. Just as John Burns craved the bush and the bower, Alvin Timms loved to hear about the Devil and his various guises, how the old one would make himself pretty if you thought he was ugly, then uglify himself right back.

“You ever seen Satan?” he finally asked one night.

“Not that I know of,” L.C. said.

“You believe he’s out there?”

“Could be.”

“I believe he’s in here,” Alvin said, rapping himself on the chest. “I think I’ve had him in me since the day I was born.”

L.C. picked a riff. Dark and slow. “What make you say so?”

“There’s stuff inside me that nobody else could’ve put there.”

L.C. thought he knew what Alvin meant. He’d heard his momma say stuff—just talking to herself—about Alvin and his brother and Dan’s momma.

“You know what I’m talking about?” Alvin said.

“No sir.”

“I think you do. And just between the two of us, I believe you got the Devil in you, too.” Alvin poured himself another shot of whiskey, then drank it down and set the glass on his desk. “But I’m here to tell you, L.C., I hope it ain’t so. Because that old boy can cause some real trouble.”

Tonight was Friday. But instead of heading for his office like he usually did after the last bunch of field hands had been in and bought some Vienna sausages and as much hoop cheese as they could afford, Alvin hoisted himself onto the countertop. “L.C.,” he said, “you and me’s got to talk.”

L.C. paused with the broom in his hand, feeling, already, like the worst kind of fool, a white man’s dream of the ideal darky. His guitar was standing in Alvin’s closet, right where he’d put it this morning.

“You know Mr. Frank Holder?”

Not
Frank Holder,
which is what he would’ve called him back there in the office with the two whiskey glasses on the desk.
Mister
Frank Holder.

“Yes sir.”

“Hasn’t nothing happened between you and him, has there?”

What in the name of God, he wondered, could happen
between
him and a white man? “No sir.”

“You stop over there on his place on your route, don’t you?”

“Yes sir. Stop there sometimes, anyway. Hadn’t lately.”

“And you can’t think of no reason why he’d get it in his head you was smartin’ off?”

Slowly, L.C. leaned his broom against the counter. Alvin’s gaze lit on the handle for a second or two, then flicked back to L.C.’s face.

“I can think of one thing I might’ve did.”

“All right. So what was it?”

L.C. scratched his head. “Well, maybe two—naw, now I don’t want to be lying . . . it seem closer to three weeks ago. . . . Yes sir, it sure was three weeks ago that I stopped on my route there one day, long about three-thirty in the afternoon, and looked Mr. Frank Holder right square in the eye.”

For a long time, Alvin said nothing. Then he shook his head, chuckled and jumped down off the counter. “Okay,” he said. “Come on, let’s drink us some whiskey. Where you gone end up, you’ll need a little alcohol in your bloodstream.”

The next morning, when he walked out onto the porch, the sunlight almost knocked him over. Dimly, he recalled that before Alvin had driven off and left him there in his office, they’d sung “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot.”

He wanted to slip off somewhere and rest till his momma left the house for work; then he could get in the bed and give his head a chance to quit hurting. Hoping to God he wouldn’t run into her, he set off the longer, roundabout way and was crossing the gravel road when he saw a pickup coming toward him. As it got a little closer, he recognized it. He raised his hand, intending to wave it down, but Dan just nodded and drove on by.