Prisoners of War (19 page)

“Oh, Alvin,” Shirley said as she finally stepped across the room and wrapped her arms around his neck, drawing him close, “I don’t want to be a grown man’s momma.”

But having told him what she didn’t want to do, she found herself standing there massaging his shoulders, trying to soothe him as if, in fact, he were her son.

“That feels good,” he said. “Real good.”

She could see his reflection in the window. He’d closed his eyes. He was sitting there, lost in the sensation produced by her hands. “You got anything here to drink?” he asked.

“Stronger than coffee, you mean?”

“Little bit stronger, maybe.”

“Yeah.” She took a bottle of whiskey out of the cabinet under the sink, and they walked into the living room and sat down on the couch.

“Kind of strange,” he said, pouring two drinks, “for folks like us to be sitting around the table with the likes of Miss Edna.”

That was a phrase he’d used before—
folks like us
—and one she’d never liked, so she asked him now what he meant by it. But before he could answer, she said, “And don’t rear back with your hands behind your neck.”

“Why?”

“I hate it.”

“I’m comfortable like that.”

“Well, maybe that’s why I hate it.”

“You don’t like to see me comfortable?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “It just sometimes seems like there’s a connection between you finding comfort and me not feeling any.”

He laid his hands on his knees and sat there stiffly.

“You look like the father in one of those family scenes in
The Saturday Evening Post.
All you need is a turkey on the table and a napkin around your neck.”

He laughed then, and she did, too. “You know any Scripture?” he asked.

“ ‘Thou shalt not kill.’ ”

“Something more domestic.”

“ ‘Covet not they neighbor’s wife.’ ”

The smile dissolved. “He wasn’t really my neighbor. Not unless you give that word a pretty broad definition.”

“I think whoever wrote that Scripture probably did define it broadly, don’t you?”

“Yeah, I reckon.”

“If Scripture’s your guide, though,” she said, turning her glass up and taking the first swallow of whiskey she’d had in a couple weeks, “it’s strange that it keeps guiding you straight to my front door.”

“Least it ain’t guiding me to your back door.”

“Like it was before?”

“Yeah.” He studied the contents of his glass, then had a drink. “Like it was before.”

They sat there for a while, sipping their whiskey, neither one of them speaking. Before too long, Dan would probably come home, and while she had no urge to be alone, she didn’t want him to find her and Alvin sitting together on the couch. She’d just about made up her mind to say he needed to leave, when he pulled back his shirtsleeve and looked at his watch.

“Well, guess I better be going. Best time to talk to Rosetta’s probably early in the morning. Her mood usually sours as the day wears on.”

He finished his whiskey and set the glass back down on the coffee table, then leaned over and took Shirley in his arms. Her initial impulse—to pull back, to press her palms firmly against his chest and push him away, to order him out of her house and tell him not to show his face there again—was one she easily resisted.

“You never knew old lady McGregor, did you?” he whispered.

She didn’t know who in the name of God he was talking about, and she didn’t care. He smelled of sweat and whiskey and tobacco. The odor was thick, it had substance, and as she inhaled it, the moment seemed to thicken along with it. “Who?” she murmured.

“Ina May McGregor. She taught me and Jimmy Del back in fifth and sixth grade. Talking about definitions made me think of her. She was real big on making you memorize a word and then use it in a sentence to prove you knew what it meant. She’d give you twenty of those suckers a week, and we’d spend most of every Friday standing up there at the front of the room, every blessed one of us, using all twenty of them words, one right after another. And every time you come up empty, she’d make a black mark. Jimmy Del said he was getting to hate the whole English language, and I reckon I felt pretty much the same. At the time, it seemed to me like I wouldn’t need to know a single one of them words, and now, damn near thirty years later, I still don’t think I ever used more than three or four of them.”

He said the one he had the most trouble with, the one he never did get and didn’t know the meaning of today, was
lugubrious.
He kept thinking it had something to do with providing light, but Mrs. McGregor said he was thinking of
luciferous,
and then gave him a black mark.

“But as big as she was on definitions,” he said, “even Ina May always told us that at any given time, a particular word might mean a good bit more, or a good bit less, than the dictionary said.”

THIRTY FOUR

HOBGOOD MADE them slog through muddy drills at the football field, then dismissed everybody but Dan. While the others straggled off toward the armory, the captain said, “Son, are you still bent on enlisting in December?”

“Yes sir. My birthday’s the seventeenth.”

“You know, you probably wouldn’t have to do that, at least not right away, if you’d rather stay home another year or two and help your momma. You’re the only surviving male on the farm, and the selective service board can make allowances.”

“Yes sir, I understand that, but she already knows I mean to join up, and that’s why she took the job at the phone company.”

Hobgood gazed away at the goalposts, as if contemplating the chances of a field goal. “The day before your daddy . . . before he passed away, Danny, he come by the Highway Patrol office, and me and him sat and talked, like we did from time to time. He told me he hated like hell for you to see some of the things me and him saw, to do the kinds of things we did. Them things had to be done, and now they’ve got to be done again, but some of them are pretty hard to come back from. The last thing your daddy said was that he felt like he’d served the country enough for you and him both, and he’d do anything he could think of to keep you out of the army. And then, Danny, he said that word again.
Anything.
”

After hearing that, he needed somebody to talk to, and at this hour, Lizzie was probably the best bet.

The snack bar was only partially lit. He would’ve backed the truck away from the curb and driven home, but she was standing at the counter, wiping it down with a sponge, when she looked up, saw him and waved him in.

“How’s soldiering?” she said. “You still got that fool mechanic from the Chevy shop playing corporal?”

He climbed onto a stool. “Yeah. But Captain Hobgood don’t let him demonstrate weapons anymore.”

“All Gerry Bunch needs to know about a weapon,” she said, bearing down on the sponge, “is how to turn it on himself and pull the trigger.”

“Sounds like you’re not partial to him.”

“You could put it that way.”

“What’d he do? Leave the plug out of your oil pan?”

She quit wiping and stared across the street at the darkened Western Auto. “Forgetting to put something in,” she said, “has never been his problem.”

He was afraid to glimpse himself in the mirror behind the counter. His face probably looked as if he’d contracted roseola.

Lizzie threw the sponge in the sink, washed her hands, then dried them on a towel. “You want a piece of cake and a cup of coffee?” she asked.

He nodded.

“I wouldn’t mind the same thing myself.”

She brought out two pieces of pound cake, a pot of coffee and two cups, and they sat down across from each other in the booth at the rear. When he got back from the war, she explained, this place would look a whole lot different. Mr. Kelly had remodeling plans, getting rid of the counter and the booths and turning the place into a regular restaurant.

“And what’s a regular restaurant supposed to look like?”

“I guess there’s a bunch of little square tables with checkered cloths on them and a vase of petunias in the middle, and whoever waits on customers looks like she just came from church.”

“What do you mean, whoever waits on them? Ain’t that you?”

She stirred her coffee. “I’ve about had it,” she said. “I been in here from eleven in the morning till eight or nine in the evening every day for sixteen years, except Sundays and holidays. I guess I’d stay on if nothing changed, but when it does, I don’t want to be here. Because it’s kind of like my home, you know, except I don’t own it. Of course, I don’t own a home, either, just rent.”

He couldn’t imagine Kelly’s without her in it, and he said so. But she told him that there wasn’t any point in thinking you couldn’t imagine this or that. Someday soon folks were going to wake up and realize that the world wasn’t the one they’d always known. Mr. Kelly, for instance, never had to compete with anybody for business, since the Loring Hotel was the only other place downtown that served food, and nobody in his right mind would step foot in that dining room. Now Kent Stark and a few others planned to open a full-service restaurant in the old post office building, and Kelly said that if he didn’t adapt, they’d take all his customers in no time.

“I don’t believe that,” Dan said. “Folks are attached to this place.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but once you boys turn into soldiers, you’ll leave here and go places you’ve never even heard of, and when you come back, it’ll be with a whole different set of expectations. And some,” she said, “won’t even remember who they were before they left.”

“I hope I can,” Dan said. “Not that I think I’m anything special. I’d just like to know what I add up to when it’s all said and done, and I don’t reckon I can do that by forgetting everything up till now.”

“I wish you’d stay just the way you are, Danny, because you’re about the nicest boy that’s ever walked in that door.” Here she paused. “You know, I caught you looking down my blouse the last time you were in here, and you were stupid enough to think I didn’t like it.”

“But you did like it?”

“You’re still in what my momma liked to call the yes-or-no stage of manly behavior.”

“You find me manly?”

She grinned, revealing a silver filling. “Yes,” she said, “and no.”

“No?”

“You don’t do that part first, hon. You start out with yes and work your way around to no.”

“Sounds backwards to me.”

“Well, it would, because you’re a man, although a very young one, and men do tend to see everything backwards. But it’s a lot more interesting if you start with yes. The truth is, you remind me of the fellow I married.”

“Actually, that sounded like the no part.”

She forked up a piece of cake and chewed it, then took a sip of her coffee. “You want to hear this?” she asked, setting the cup back down.

“Yeah.”

“Then don’t interrupt.” She told him they’d met over in Arkansas, after he’d come back from the First War, just like Dan’s daddy. They stayed married for almost six years and ran a commissary on a big plantation south of Pine Bluff. “Then one day, Lee up and disappeared. Didn’t say a word, never wrote, never called or sent a telegram. Hadn’t shown the slightest sign of dissatisfaction the whole time I’d known him.”

“You reckon maybe somebody killed him?”

“No, because when he left, he took both pairs of pants he owned and both shirts, along with his winter coat and tackle box, the family Bible and a box of needles he had for vaccinating hogs.”

“And you say he looked like me?”

“Not the least bit. He was a whole lot shorter and thinner. He told me that when he went to enlist back in ’17, he had on four or five layers of clothes, and once he started peeling them off for the exam, one of the doctors said, ‘Hey, this fellow’s disappearing right before my eyes.’ Just like he disappeared later before mine, I guess.”

“So if me and him don’t look anything alike, how come I remind you of him?”

She took another sip of her coffee, then reached over and took both his hands in hers. “When a woman does this,” she said, “you better watch out. She wants something from you. That’s the good news.”

He was beginning to think he could probably do a lot more with her, if he wanted to, than look down her blouse. She might be sitting there hoping he’d kiss her, or planning to ask him over to her house.

“You want to hear the bad news?” she asked him.

“Is this the no part?”

“More or less.”

“I reckon now’s as good a time as any.”

“What she wants from you may not be what you want from her. Probably isn’t, most of the time.”

“That’s a sure no, all right,” he said. “No question about it.” When he saw the moisture creeping into her eyes, his first impulse was to flee. What stopped him was the knowledge that had their roles had been reversed, she never would’ve walked out and left him alone.

“That’s why you remind me of Lee,” she said. “I’m sitting here telling you I don’t want what you want, and you’re sitting there giving me what I do want. Lee did that, too, until he couldn’t give it anymore. And even then he didn’t pitch a fit or make a list of all the times I’d let him down, like most of the men I’ve known. He just took what he had to have and slipped on out the door.”

They slipped out the door, too, but not until a quarter past ten, by which time they’d covered a lot of ground. He’d learned that her mother and her stepdaddy were both buried in a country graveyard near Dumus, Arkansas, and that she had a brother who worked at a sawmill in Crossett. If she left here, she said, she’d most likely live with him and his family for a while, try to find a job in a restaurant or maybe even a truck stop. Eventually, if she could manage it, she’d like to get a little house in the country, with enough land to raise a garden and have some chickens and maybe a couple hogs.

He told her about the strange conversation he’d had after drill with Ralph Hobgood, how the captain had stood there gazing at the goalposts and said his father’d claimed he’d do anything to keep him out of the army.

She spat out a single word: “Bastard.” Then she took both his hands in hers again and squeezed them so hard they hurt. “Danny,” she said, “the person who pointed a gun at your daddy’s head was your daddy. The person who just pointed a gun at yours was Ralph Hobgood. If it was me, I’d shove that barrel in the opposite direction.”

Standing on the street in front of the snack bar, he made a halfhearted attempt to get invited to her place. If she was scared to drive home this late, he said, he could drop her off and then come pick her up again in the morning.

She stroked his cheek. “That’s as good a way as any to try to pull it off.”

“Pull what off?”

“You know what,” she said. “And believe me, Danny, I’m flattered. But it wouldn’t solve a thing for either one of us. My pages have been scribbled all over, to the point where anything else just feels like more scrawling.”