Prisoners of War (13 page)

TWENTY FOUR

DAN WALKED into the living room, to find his mother sitting on the couch in her bathrobe, a plastic net on her head and a listless look in her eyes. She’d been like that all weekend, and then this morning she hadn’t gone to work, even though she’d told Miss Edna Boudreau she’d be in on Monday. He hoped the phone company wouldn’t fire her. Knowing she had a job, even one that didn’t pay well, had eased his conscience. She still hadn’t given up hope that he might not enlist, that the war would end before the army called him up.

“Anything you need?” he said, fingering the keys in his pocket.

“Yeah. I need my hair back, so that I can stand to look at myself, since nobody else ever does.”

When he’d played football in high school, he discovered he couldn’t get mad unless somebody hit him in the nose. When that happened, he’d kick, bite, gouge and grab the other fellow by the nuts if, in his blind rage, he could find them.

In a manner of speaking, she’d just poked his nose. His father had been willing to look at her right up until the day he took his life. “You want somebody to look at you?” he said. “Get up off the couch and go to town. Somebody’ll look at you then. Quit sniveling around, waiting for you know who.”

She crossed her arms over her chest, regarding him with the kind of intense interest she’d probably shown him in the cradle. “I
do
know who,” she said. “Do you?”

He withered. “Hell,” he said, “I don’t know.”

“What don’t you know?”

“Look, I didn’t mean anything.”

“Oh yes you did. You meant one hell of a lot.”

“I’m going to Greenville,” he said, “with Marty Stark. Shoot some pool, maybe. You want anything?”

“I want you to tell me who I’ve been sniveling around after.”

He didn’t answer, and couldn’t look at her now.

“Do you know
why
I’m sniveling around?”

“Just forget it.”

She rose and stepped around the coffee table. He smelled whiskey mixed with Vaseline. “Go to Greenville, Danny,” she whispered. “Right this minute.”

He’d offered to swing by the camp, but Marty said he’d be downtown anyway, so they met in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot.

“Last time I talked to your daddy was right here,” Marty said as soon as he climbed into the truck. “On a Saturday morning. Right before I left for the induction center. I don’t reckon he ever mentioned it?”

“No. But that last year or so, he was pretty closemouthed. Except right at the end.”

Dan pulled into the street, drove through town and turned onto the highway. Except for his rolling-store route—which, after all, never took him out of the county—he hadn’t been anywhere, not even to Greenville, for close to a year. His father used to talk about all of them visiting New Orleans one day, maybe even spending a night at the Ponchartrain, but that had never happened.

The sun was almost down. In one or two fields they saw a few pickers, old black men mostly, some women and children, a handful of teenagers. The Negro schools didn’t open for fall until everything but the scrap picking was done, and that wouldn’t be for several more weeks.

“I used to love this time of year,” Marty said.

“Beats the other times, I guess.”

“You sound like you already been at the front.”

That, Dan thought, depended on how you defined the term. He hadn’t been where they were fighting, and he figured when he got there, he’d have a new set of problems. Then maybe the old ones would matter a lot less.

Over close to the levee, two or three miles north of Greenville, there was a restaurant and bar that Marty said he’d been to a couple years ago. “Ain’t got pool tables,” he said, “but the truth is, I don’t know how to shoot pool. I tried it once when they let me loose during basic. Hit some fellow in the ass with the butt of my cue stick. He spilled his drink on the woman he was bird-dogging and decided to nail me instead.”

Inside, behind a burnished wood bar, a big fellow with a red mustache plinked down cold bottles of Jax without asking for proof of drinking age. Marty ordered two bowls of salted peanuts, which they carried with their beers over to a booth.

Five or six pilots from the air base sauntered around the place, all of them wearing the dark khaki tops and beige bottoms of the Army Air Corps, feeding coins into the jukebox and bragging about stunts they’d performed. Every time an unaccompanied woman walked through the door—and three or four did—the airmen drew straws to see who’d get the first shot. Mostly, winning cost them money. They bought the women beers and, in return, got conversation only.

Conversation, though, was what Marty wanted. Specifically, to talk about his commanding officer. After they’d each downed a couple beers, he said, “He’s from someplace up in Minnesota. One of those little towns where everybody’s a son. Munson and Brunson, Swanson or Johnson. Word around camp is, his father taught high school. I don’t know what subject. Biology or some shit. They say Munson did pretty well at West Point, was even a champion marksman with the fortyfive. But somewhere along the line, somebody made a determination.”

“What kind of determination?”

“That he couldn’t cut it. Or that he wouldn’t anyway. But I got a feeling they’re wrong. I think he’d cut it, right up to the minute it cut him. And I guess that’s what you need to win a war—somebody that’s eager to bleed.”

“What about somebody that just wants to do what’s right?”

Marty grinned, lifted his beer, took a swallow and shook his head. “I knew that’s what you’d say. I told Munson so just the other day.”

“You talked to the captain about me?”

“Sure did, buck. For a solid hour, maybe more. He’s got the
Life and Times of Timms
down cold. He
knows
about that goal-line tackle you made against Belzoni after that swivel-hipped dago— what was that little bastard’s name? Number twenty-nine.”

“Joey Malatesta.”

“After that little bastard faked me out of my britches. He knows you’re good in English, bad in math, worthless with women and completely without guile.”

“What the hell is guile?”

“You don’t need to know—you ain’t got none.”

One of the flyboys cleared his throat and sidled over to the door. A young woman in a plaid dress had walked in, clutching her purse strings so tightly, her knuckles had blanched.

“Allow me, ma’am,” the airman said, “to introduce you to a gentleman who this very afternoon flew a magnificent AT-six underneath the Greenville bridge.”

“Why would anybody do that?” the woman said. “I don’t want to meet anybody who’d do that.”

Marty burst out laughing.

The pilot looked at him, red-faced. “You hear something funny, bub?”

“Naw, I just choked on a peanut.” He kept his mouth shut until the man had cajoled the woman into sitting down with him and his buddies. “What you got that I don’t have,” he then told Dan, “is a quality Munson prizes: you just want to do what’s right, and you think you know what that is.”

“Sounds like you think I’m the dumbest piece of shit in the outhouse.”

“Don’t take offense, buck. Me and you’s pissed in the same bushes many a night.”

“How come the captain’s so interested in me?”

“Well, he’s mostly interested in that prisoner with the boiled face, and hoping you might learn a little something. Guy claims he’s not a German, you know. Says he’s from Poland. He ever mention that to you?”

“No, he’s been pretty quiet lately.” In fact, the POW hadn’t said much of anything for two or three weeks—since the day he’d popped the gears on the bus. The next day, Dan had approached him near the end of a row, intending to thank him, but the guy’d kept his eyes fixed on the cotton stalks. Dan had looked up, to find the tall prisoner who always did exercises staring right at them. “How the hell could he be Polish and serve in the German army?” he asked.

“Bastard’s probably lying.”

“Don’t y’all have any records on him?”

“Army says everything relating to him’s missing. They can’t even find a record of his serial number. All the insignia’s been stripped off his uniform, too, but apparently nobody found that odd till now. He don’t have a thing in his duffel bag except the German uniform he never puts on, a shaving kit, a couple knitting needles and some thread and a small stuffed bear with an ear tore off. He ain’t written a letter, or got one.”

“How come the army don’t send somebody down here to investigate?”

“That’d make sense, wouldn’t it?”

“Would to me.”

Grinning, Marty grabbed a handful of peanuts. “Well, that’s why the army don’t do it.” He stuffed the nuts in his mouth and started crunching.

An argument had broken out among the airmen, clearly being staged for the benefit of the women at their table. The pilot who’d exchanged words with Marty bristled at the suggestion that he lacked the skill to land a training craft on top of the levee. “I could do it in the dark,” he said.

“Go on, you crazy Okie. You couldn’t land on it in broad daylight if you had Charlie Lindbergh holding your hand.”

“Why would anybody want to land on the levee?” the young woman in the plaid dress asked. “There’s cows out there.”

Shaking his head, Marty drained his third beer, then motioned at Dan’s bottle, which was almost empty. “Want another one?”

“I don’t know. I got to get them Germans in the field tomorrow morning. What time is it?”

“It’s still early. “ Marty rose, went to the bar and returned with four bottles, rather than two.

Dan sat there eyeing them. “You’re drinking a lot, ain’t you?”

“Maybe, but not nearly enough.” He turned a bottle up and chugged about half of it before stopping, then wiped his mouth on the back of his sleeve and explained the plan. If Dan was willing to talk, he said, he and Munson could meet briefly somewhere in town, maybe at the armory. The captain didn’t want him coming inside the camp, because the prisoners might start to wonder if he was something besides a labor contractor.

Dan couldn’t help but feel flattered, but he didn’t intend to validate Marty’s notion that he was eager to please. “Sure, I can talk to him,” he said, “but what exactly does he want me to do?”

“He wants you to sound out our Polish friend. If he drops his guard any, you can try to find out when and where he was captured, that kind of thing. I got a feeling they’re hoping to turn him. See, there’s plenty of gung ho Nazis in that camp, and as far as those boys are concerned, Paulus didn’t surrender at Stalingrad and’s already halfway to Moscow. So the brass is starting to wonder what to do with bastards like that when the war
is
over. Send ’em back the way they are,” Marty said, “and they’ll start the same shit again.”

“You really think they’re so much worse than we are?”

“When it comes to
Germans
—”

Just then, the pilot from Oklahoma jumped up from the table. “You’re on! Fifty bucks says I put that baby down on the levee like you was parking your momma’s car.”

Marty smiled. “When it comes to Germans, I don’t think a goddamn thing.”

As a condition of the bet, the airmen agreed to commandeer vehicles and train their headlights on the berm, and one of them had approached Dan and Marty’s booth. “You guys wouldn’t be the owners of that pickup parked next to the propane tank, would you?”

Dan said, “Yeah, it’s mine.”

“Come on out and watch the spectacle. Beer’s on us.”

“I need to get home pretty soon.”

“Consider it training,” Marty said, standing up. “You’ll spend plenty of time these next few years seeing matériel misused and abused.”

They parked a handful of pickups and cars in a row on the east bank of the levee, their headlights shining upwards at a fortyfive-degree angle. The night sky was perfectly black.

“How long you reckon it’ll take him to get here?” Dan asked.

“He’ll land on this levee about the same time Tōjō says he’s sorry,” one of the pilots said, laughing and leaning against the fender of the pickup next to Dan’s. He looped his arm around a much older woman, a tough-looking brunette with deep lines around her mouth, but when she shrugged him off, he appeared not to notice. “Parker’s the worst pilot at the base. They’re training a group of women ferry pilots over there, and every damn one of ’em can already fly better than he does.”

“What’s a ferry pilot?” the brunette said.

“They fly new planes from the factories to their designated bases so we don’t waste real pilots that could be out flying combat.”

“Are you an example of a real pilot?” she asked.

“Sure am, hon.”

“Then how come you’re not flying combat?”

Another pilot, standing near the foot of the levee, scanning the sky, hollered, “There’s Parker.”

The night was cool and still, a perfect night to be out having a good time. Listening to the bullfrogs croaking down in the bar pits, Dan was reminded of the nights when, after ballgames, they’d gone out to Lake Loring and sat on the banks, listening to similar sounds.

“The son of a bitch sees us,” a man yelled.

The women, particularly the young one who wore the plaid dress, had made all the men want them, whether they’d invested much heart in their efforts or not. Even the hard brunette with all the lines on her face. If she were two or three years older, she could’ve been Dan’s mother, but he wished he had the nerve to throw his arm around her shoulder. She could step out from under his arm, too, and he wouldn’t care. If only he could hold her for a moment.