Prisoners of War (16 page)

TWENTY NINE

IN FRONT OF L.C., a green cotton trailer rattled along, moving so slowly it might not reach town before Thanksgiving. He waited until he crossed the rusty bridge that spanned the Sunflower River, then pulled around. The driver of the tractor towing the trailer was a Negro who lived on the Vaiden place. L.C. waved, and Cecil waved back.

For a long time now, he’d been passing any slow-moving vehicle without waiting to see who was driving it, despite the lengthy lecture Alvin Timms had given him about proper comportment at the wheel. He said white folks, whether rightly or not, believed that if a colored person passed them, he was trying to get beyond his station. L.C. probably didn’t know it, but lots of them thought that once a colored person got in front of them, he’d slam on his brakes, hoping to provoke a rear-end collision and collect damages from their insurance company. L.C. couldn’t help smiling, and Alvin said, “It may be funny now, but it won’t be for either one of us if it ever happens.”

“Mr. Alvin?” L.C. said. “Let me ask you something. When was the last time you saw a nigger get in a wreck with a white person and the police say the white person at fault?”

“I ain’t saying what I’ve seen,” Alvin said. “I’m saying what folks think. But just for the sake of argument, L.C., when was the last time you saw a ghost?”

For once, L.C. couldn’t think of an appropriate response, so he just kept his mouth shut.

He drove on down the main road another mile or so, then turned off onto a side road that ran back down to the riverbank, through land belonging to Mr. Angelo Moreli. Moreli was Italian, the son of an immigrant who’d come to this country around 1900, when big landowners like the Starks and the Stancills briefly tried to work white foreigners instead of Negroes. The experiment hadn’t lasted long at all, because a few of the foreigners, like Moreli’s father, figured out how to get a little land of their own, which meant there was less for the Starks and the Stancills.

Even though he’d been born here, Moreli spoke with a funny accent, saying,
I’m uh gonna go uh
rather than just
I’m gonna go.
He was a chubby fellow with dark hair and a pencil-thin mustache, and his eyes always had little creases around them, as if he were about to start laughing. For whatever reason, he generally treated the Negroes who worked for him a lot better than most.

There were twelve or fifteen folks picking cotton that afternoon, spread out from one end of the field to the other. Cooter Sam, who always did the Lucky Duck at the Saturday-night dances, was way out in front, picking two rows at the same time. He claimed he’d once weighed up four hundred pounds in a single day, and when you saw him picking, you had to figure he might’ve been telling the truth.

L.C. hit the horn. A few of the pickers looked up and went right back to work, because they didn’t have any money, but the others dropped their sacks and trudged toward the turnrow.

A couple children bought Popsicles; one or two folks bought candy bars. An elderly lady whose skin had the texture of worn leather wanted a plug of chewing tobacco but didn’t have enough money for the whole thing, so he sliced her off a good-sized chunk.

Cooter Sam bought a Dr Pepper. While L.C. made change, Sam asked when that worthless white man he worked for meant to let him start selling hard liquor.

“You
looks
like hard liquor,” a young woman told Sam.

“Child, he just the kind of nigger bring a smile to the white folks’ face,” another woman said. “Work like a mule to make a dime and then crawl like a ant to give it right back.”

Rather than respond to the insult, Cooter Sam trained his gaze on a distant plume of dust. “Somebody coming.”

“Probably the dago.”

“Ain’t no dago.”

“How
you
know?”

“Seen the dago go yonder.” Sam gestured in the opposite direction. “Ain’t seed him come back.”

L.C. handed him a nickel and closed the cash box. The field hands started to straggle back into the field, all except Sam, who stood there drinking his Dr Pepper while keeping his eye on the road. A moment later, L.C. heard a vehicle pull up, the engine cut off and two doors slam shut. Sam’s Adam’s apple bobbed faster and faster, and then he wiped his mouth on his forearm and handed L.C. the empty bottle.

L.C. refused to look over his shoulder, though Cooter Sam’s eyes indicated it was some sort of trouble, and then he saw Frank Holder walk around in front of the bus with a man he didn’t recognize.

“I reckon them Eyetalians got some funny practices,” Holder said. “I put a picker in the field, I expect him to pick. I don’t expect him to stand around shooting the breeze.”

“Yes sir,” Cooter said. “How you, sir?”

“Not so good.” Holder tucked his thumbs into the straps of his overalls. “You got a son?”

“No sir.”

“I don’t, neither. Used to, but he died defending this country. There’s plenty more like him dying right now, good American boys, best we got. There’s others that ain’t gone die, because they’re like me—so dad-durn mean that when a bullet gets near ’em, it turns around and heads back. Them boys’ll march into Rome real soon, and when they get there, they gone want some fresh duds. So why don’t you get right back out yonder? We can’t sew them young men no new clothes if we ain’t got no cotton.”

L.C.’s pulse pounded. “Go on, Cooter,” he said. “Mr. Holder probably want to do business, and I need to get back on my route.”

Holder waited until Sam was a good distance away, then said, “You tell Mr. Alvin what I said about you mouthing mumbo jumbo?”

“Yes sir.”

“And what’d he say?”

“He say to stop it. Sir.”

“He did?”

“Yes sir.”

“Well, that’s real good. He’s a gentleman and a scholar.” He gestured with his thumb at the other man. “This here is Mr. Johnson. Works for Senator Bilbo, who I reckon you’ve heard of. ”

“He the one from Louisiana they call the Kingfish?”

“Naw, you got him confused with old Huey Long, who been dead about ten years.” Holder turned to Johnson. “You remember what Bilbo said about Huey after he got shot?”

“That may be a story I’ve heard,” Johnson said. “But I won’t know till you tell it.”

“He said wouldn’t nobody need to shoot Huey if they’d carried him over here to Mississippi. Said he would of killed his own self just trying to get out of the state.”

Johnson grinned. “Sounds like Theodore all right.”

“You like that story, boy?” Holder asked L.C.

“Well, yes sir, it sound like a good story to me. But y’all right certain Mr. Bilbo ain’t no kind of Kingfish?”

“Well, I’d sure say the senator’s a pretty darn big fish,” Johnson said. “Though he don’t hold with kings nor princes.” He placed a polished shoe on the bottom step. “I need to get on here and take a look around.”

“Yes sir,” L.C. said. “You gentlemen want me to get out?”

“No,” Holder said, “we want you to set right there. Need to conserve your strength. I imagine a healthy-looking boy like you’s itching to join the armed forces. No point in using up none of that energy climbing on and off a rolling store.”

Johnson moved down the aisle, picking items up and looking them over. Holder remained standing at the foot of the steps. He was a big man. Not just tall and heavy, but thick and hard. L.C. never doubted for one minute that given the right conditions, he could kill you. But if you went ahead and played dead in his presence, he wouldn’t go to the trouble.

“Mr. Holder?”

“Yeah?”

“You ever been down to Jackson, sir?”

Holder pulled a match from his pocket, studied it for a moment, then stuck it in his mouth. “What you think?”

“Why, I imagine you have, sir.”

“Then how come you to ask me?”

“Thought maybe you’d seen that mummy.”

“What mummy?”

“I heard they got one down there in the capitol building’s supposed to be three or four thousand years old. Say it’s about five feet long, wrapped up in white tape.”

“I don’t know nothing about no mummy.”

“What I been wondering is, if they use white tape, do that mean for sure that mummy ain’t a nigger?”

Johnson said, “This isn’t a rolling store. It’s a rolling treasure chest.” He placed a can of motor oil back on the shelf. “Been doing lots of business, I reckon?”

“Yes sir. Business pretty brisk.”

“Sell a lot of sugar, do you?”

“Yes sir, it’s one of our fastest-moving items.”

Johnson strolled back down the aisle and stopped beside him. “How many of them little bags of sugar back yonder you think you’ve sold today?”

That was a troublesome question, because L.C. had probably sold fifteen or twenty. A white woman whose name he didn’t know had flagged him down, telling him Alvin said to let her have as many as she needed, and she needed plenty. He’d sold three or four bags to field hands, five or six to housewives and two to Reverend Selmon, who’d said that sugar mixed with a small amount of grain alcohol was a very effective remedy for back pain.

“Seem like I must have moved four or five of them sugars today, sir,” he told Johnson.

“Seem like?”

“Yes sir.”

“You can’t say for sure?”

“No sir, not right off.”

“Your boss hadn’t told you that stuff’s rationed?”

“Oh, yes sir. Mr. Alvin real strict about that.”

“Strict, is he? Well then, I reckon you’ll have four or five ration coupons for sugar on board here, won’t you?”

“Yes sir.”

“Let’s see ’em.”

He kept coupons in a cigar box underneath his seat. He hadn’t bothered to open the box since sometime last week, when he’d stuffed it with a new batch. Alvin had said nobody off the local rationing board would ever bother him, but it was smart, just the same, to keep the coupons up-to-date.

He reached under the seat and pulled out the box. Before he could raise the lid, Johnson snatched it out of his hands.

While Johnson pawed through the coupons, Frank Holder looked away. L.C. had sold him tobacco illegally at least three times that he could remember, and he’d sold his wife sugar once or twice.

“A bunch of these coupons are from last month and the month before.”

He said what Alvin had told him to say if anything like this ever happened. “I’m color-blind, Mr. Johnson. Sometimes I can’t tell blue from green, and them coupons all look alike.”

“That’s how come they code ’em with different pictures. You can tell a tank from a battleship, can’t you?”

“Well, sir, I could if I was looking at ’em. But my eyesight ain’t real good to start with, and them pictures is awful small.”

“You know there’s a ten-thousand-dollar fine for willfully disobeying the rationing laws?”

“Yes sir. I done heard about that.”

Johnson crammed a wad of coupons in his pocket and dropped the cigar box on the floor. He glanced at Holder, then looked at L.C. “How old are you?” he said.

The taste of the lies he’d told lingered, and it was bitter. The next one, if he told it, would taste even worse. So rather than claim, like a lot of Negroes who’d been born on plantations, that he didn’t know how old he was, he looked the man straight in the eye and said, before he had time to think much about what he was doing, “Sir, that ain’t none of your business.”

Johnson blinked. He held L.C.’s attention for only a second or two, though, because Frank Holder’s reaction was a lot more dramatic and much less expected. He began to make spitting noises. At first, L.C. thought he was trying to fight off a sneeze; then he remembered the day old Fulsome Carthage, the man who’d taught him to play guitar, had suffered a heart attack on the front porch. He’d slumped over, his eyes wide open, and was making noises like the ones coming from Holder now.

But Holder wasn’t experiencing a heart attack, at least not in the traditional sense. He was weeping, crying in the stiff-lipped manner befitting a man his size, and as he climbed the steps and reached out to shove Johnson aside, L.C. began to feel as if he ought to say he was sorry, though he had no idea what he should be sorry for.

“You bastard,” Holder said. “My boy was worth two hundred of you.” The fist that slammed into L.C.’s jaw felt like a mechanical object.

He toppled out of the seat and lay on the floor, looking up at Johnson’s startled face.

“I got a good mind to step on this impudent darky,” Johnson said. In preparation, he lifted his foot off the floor, so that he was standing on one leg when Holder shoved him again, sending him crashing into a display case.

Still sobbing, Holder grabbed L.C.’s arm and pulled him to his feet. L.C. saw the tears in his eyes, big glistening drops. Frank Holder had the blues, bad and low-down, and he must have thought the only way to get rid of them was to give them to somebody else.

Toward that end, he rammed L.C.’s head into the dashboard. He pulled him back and rammed him again, then spun him around and punched him between the eyes, knocking him down the steps.

L.C. lay on the side of the road, trying to collect his wits enough to get up and run, but Holder was already on him. Once more the big man grabbed his arm and pulled him up. He drew his fist back to hit him, but before he could bring it forward, a voice said, “Now Frank, I’m uh gonna give uh you thirty-four seconds to get out of my sight uh.”