Prisoners of War (17 page)

Holder was so overwrought that he’d failed to hear the pickup, and neither had L.C. But both of them heard Angelo Moreli shuck a round into the chamber of his shotgun.

“You probably think uh now that’s a strange figure. So I’m uh gonna tell you how I come up with it.” The Italian stepped closer to Holder, leveling the barrel at the big man’s chest. “My oldest son’s uh fourteen. Next oldest, twelve. My daughter, she’s uh eight. Total, thirty-four. That’s the number I keep in my head. Before I do anything I may regret uh, I count uh to thirty-four. You real lucky you didn’t piss me off about two years ago, or you’d uh already be dead.”

Moreli had said everything in a perfectly pleasant tone, those laugh lines crinkling near his eyes. But if L.C. had been the one with the gun pointed at his chest, he would never have imagined that the Italian might be joking. Neither, apparently, did Frank Holder.

He dropped his fist and let go of L.C. He didn’t bother to issue a threat about what he meant to do tonight or tomorrow, nor did he ever stop sobbing. He just turned and plodded over to his pickup, the spitting noises still issuing from his mouth.

He got into the pickup truck and cranked it. At that point, Johnson stuck his head out the window of the bus. “Hey,” he said, “what about me?”

Holder, without even looking at him, pulled into the road and drove off.

Moreli stood there beside L.C., watching the pickup disappear, the flag flapping from its side planks. When the truck was completely out of sight, he rested the stock of the shotgun on the ground. “You don’t got uh no olives in your store?”

THIRTY

HOLDER PARKED the pickup in front of his house and got out. His intention was to grab his shotgun, drive back to Moreli’s place and kill him. Then he’d hunt down and kill the Negro boy. If he could find Johnson, he might shoot him, too, because the truth was he didn’t like him either, any more than he liked Theodore G. Bilbo, who reminded him too much of his wife’s daddy. He might have entertained the notion of shooting Bilbo as well, but he was probably in Washington.

He threw the door open so hard, it slammed into the wall.

Arva was sitting on the couch, a piece of paper lying across one knee. Her left hand clutched a wadded handkerchief, which usually meant she’d been crying again, but her eyes were dry, and she was smiling for the first time in months. She’d have a smile on her face, too, on Christmas Eve, when he would walk in and find her sitting in exactly the same place, with that same piece of paper lying on her knee once again, her body already growing stiff and cold.

“What is it?” he said.

“A lost letter—it didn’t come till now.” Her hand was steady as she passed it to him. But his, as he read it, was not.

Last night,
the letter began,
a nigger in a trucking company saved the lives of me and another boy.

THIRTY ONE

WHOEVER DESIGNED the towers had made a royal mess of it. In addition to having tin roofs, they were accessible only by extension ladders that you pulled up after yourself, so you couldn’t be overwhelmed by prisoners in an attempted escape. The towers were cramped to begin with, and the ladders and the enormous searchlight mounted on a gimbal placed severe restrictions on movement; aiming a rifle at somebody below would be no easy matter. He’d pointed that out to Munson after pulling his first watch, but the captain’d just told him it was doubtful he’d ever have reason to fire his weapon.

He hated tower duty. Sergeant Case rotated guards in and out each night in four-hour shifts, and Marty’s almost always lasted from midnight until four. He usually couldn’t fall asleep anyway until around eleven; after pulling one of those shifts, he never managed to doze off again before roll call.

Lack of sleep, though, was not his main worry. Unlike Kimball, who enjoyed playing with the searchlight while standing watch, Marty hated being in an exposed position at night. Even when you swept the beam across the compound, you couldn’t tell that much about what was going on at ground level. Somebody could always slip from shadow to shadow, and you wouldn’t even know anybody was there. But they’d know exactly where you were.

Crossing the rec area, he shivered. The temperature had begun dropping at night, the air carrying the sharp, crisp odor of burning leaves. He used to love it when the cool weather came on, the way a big fire in the front room left your nostrils feeling baked.

If he wanted to, he suspected, he could go over to his father’s house and stretch out in front of that fireplace tonight and stay there as long as he wanted without anything too bad happening. Rather than risk disgrace by having his son stand court-martial, his father would go crawling to Eastland and work something out with the senator. They could get him declared essential labor, as no small number of planters’ sons had been, and win his discharge, maybe even making up a story about an illness or a wound.

But Marty wouldn’t take that route now, just as he hadn’t taken it fifteen months ago, and while he’d been puzzled at first by his reluctance to do so, he now believed he understood why it had never been a real option. Evidently, some folks carried within themselves a sacrificial gene, and he supposed he’d gotten his from his mother. Meanwhile, the country itself was like a giant machine, one that ran on a high-octane blend of blood and bones. Guys like him and Dan Timms and his buddy Raymond Sample, whose body lay in a hole on an island of death, were just meant to be chewed up and spit out by the times.

The previous weekend, on Front Street, he’d bumped into his former baseball coach, and he’d been surprised to hear him say how good the town was looking, how many businesses had been revived, how many construction projects were being planned for the postwar years. “Look around you,” the coach had said, waving his arm at the street, teeming that evening with cars and pickup trucks and people, too, both black and white. “The paste and glue factory’s brought a lot of money into town. Jasper Sproles has been trying to keep it a secret, but he’s planning to open up a second bank to compete with the Gaithers. He’s already got
investors
lined up. And y’all doing your part out there at the camp. The farmers couldn’t be happier with those German boys—everybody I talk to says one of them’s worth any three niggers he ever saw. There’s talk of asking the War Department to let ’em stay on if they want after Hitler gets whupped.” He went on and on, throwing in heaps of praise for Marty and his fellow soldiers, all of whom, he said, ought to pat themselves on the back. For when this thing was over, not only would they have kicked the living shit out of the Krauts and the Japs but they would have restored the country to prosperity, too.

By the time the coach hustled off down the street to find his wife, Marty had no choice but to face a fact he’d somehow contrived to conceal from himself. Very few folks walked around thinking they could smell a rotting body, because no rotting bodies were nearby. The war might be hell for those who fought it, but barring the loss of a loved one everybody else was faring just fine. And only a truly churlish person would break up that party.

When he rounded the corner of the supply shed, the searchlight hit him in the face. He jumped as if electrocuted, then threw his arm up in front of his eyes as Kimball’s laugh rang out.

Standing there in the hot white light, his legs rocking beneath him, Marty slung the rifle off his shoulder. He snatched the bolt back, then pushed it forward and locked it down, chambering a round. He slid his foot forward and dropped into a crouch, whipping his forearm through the hasty sling.

“Jesus Christ, are you crazy?” The searchlight shot straight up, thrusting into the night sky. There was a clattering sound as a hard object fell from the tower; then Kimball hit the floorboards like a sack of cotton seed.

Once his legs had quit shaking, Marty flicked on the Enfield’s safety and swung the rifle back onto his shoulder. Breathing deeply, he walked over to the base of the tower, where Kimball’s rifle lay, the muzzle clogged with mud.

For several minutes, Kimball refused to climb down and wouldn’t even lower the ladder, just kept whispering the word
crazy.

“If your ass don’t appear in the next thirty seconds,” Marty finally said, “I’m leaving. I got smarter things to do than stand around.”

“Wait,” Kimball said. “I’ll come down.”

He lowered the ladder and descended, looking over his shoulder the whole time, ready to jump if he had to. When he reached the ground, Marty offered him his rifle. Kimball took it and backed away, still shaking his head.

“Before you fire that thing,” Marty said as he stepped onto the ladder, “you might want to clean the muzzle. It’s not nearly so accurate when it’s full of dirt.”

In the tower, he stayed on his feet, though he knew Kimball and Huggins and some of the others sat down with their backs against the railing and dozed whenever they felt like it. He kept his rifle at sling arms, rather than propping it against the railing like Kimball did, because he didn’t want to have to fumble for it in the dark. He left the searchlight on but rarely moved it.

While standing watch, he thought a good bit about the implications of remaining upright. A couple of days after his company had hit the beaches near Gela, they overran a tiny village. The houses, some of which had been badly damaged by shell fire, were little more than stone huts, crammed with chickens, pigs, children and corpses. In the first dwelling he entered, he jerked open a closet door, to find a body standing stiffly behind a row of ragged dresses and coats, the man’s bulbous eyes wide open, flies buzzing around his shattered jaw-bone, now visible after a piece of shrapnel had sheared off part of his face. He was just an old man, the grandfather of the children they’d found in the house, one of whom told a lieutenant who spoke Italian that the old man’d been dead three days. Apparently, they thought that as long as you remained on your feet, you were, in some sense, alive.

The lieutenant who explained the upright corpse to Marty did so in an offhanded manner, as if he’d seen stranger sights in his life, then said to move out, because there were other huts to examine, other villages to overrun. But Marty remained standing in front of the closet, unable to peel his eyes off the dead man.

The lieutenant sighed, stepped over and laid a hand on his shoulder. “Where you from, Private?”

“Sir?”

Evidently, the lieutenant didn’t like the look on his face or the tone of his voice, because he repeated the question sharply. “I said
where are you from?
”

“Mississippi. Sir.”

“Where in Mississippi?”

“Loring.”

“That doesn’t tell me much.”

One of the flies lit on the old man’s tongue, which was swollen and distended, a big piece of blood sausage.

“It’s in the Delta. Sir. North of Jackson.”

“What’s the main form of wildlife down there?”

“Sir?”

“Wildlife. You know—creatures of field and forest.”

“We got deer.”

“You ever shoot one?”

“Yes sir.”

“What happened to it?”

“It died.”

“Well, that’s what happened to Giuseppe Verdi there,” the lieutenant observed. “He died because somebody fired a weapon in his direction. And he’s just as dead standing up as he’d be lying down.”

Marty didn’t argue with the lieutenant, but somehow made his feet move and got through the door into the dusty lane, where he saw Raymond Sample step out of another hut, one in which an entire family had been killed when a shell smashed through the roof. He’d found the body of a little girl in there, both legs separated from her trunk. “You tell me,” he said, “what the big difference is between them and us.”

At the time, Marty took the question in the most obvious way and answered it in kind, saying, “They were on the wrong side.” Now, however, he understood the question differently, and would have answered it differently if Raymond had been with him there in the tower.
Our hearts are still beating,
he would have said,
and theirs aren’t.

On that island, it was the only difference that mattered.

Around 0200, fog settled in, blanketing the camp, muffling sound and dampening the tower’s floorboards and railings. Instantly, it got a lot colder, and before long he was fairly uncomfortable.

Having nothing better to do, he swung the searchlight over the compound, letting it pass quickly over the other tower. Through the swirling mist, he saw Brinley, who didn’t seem to realize he’d been illuminated: he stood with his back to the light, perfectly still, his rifle nowhere to be seen. He was probably over there thinking about his dead aunt, and it was a safe bet that if he had his hands on anything, it was not his weapon.

Marty rotated the beam past the duty hut, the captain’s quarters, the supply shed, the infirmary, the mess hall. He swept it over the long rows of tents where the prisoners lay sleeping, played it over his tent, too, in hopes of disrupting Kimball’s dreams of California. He moved on to the latrines, then the showers—and it was there, near the entrance to the shower room used by the prisoners, that his eye detected motion.

Swinging backwards, the beam froze a figure in frosty gray light.

The prisoner made no attempt to hide, though he could easily have ducked around a corner. Instead, after a few seconds had elapsed, he stepped forward, his motions stiff and mechanical.

Marty swiveled the searchlight, keeping the prisoner in the center of the circle. The man took another step, and then another, each step distinct from the one that had preceded it and the one that would follow. You could almost hear his bones creaking.

Marty kept moving the light, until finally his hands began to shake. “Don’t you take another step,” he called, but the prisoner with the stained face came closer and closer. Marty might have swung the rifle off his shoulder for the second time that night, if not for his reluctance to turn loose of the searchlight. For whatever reason, it suddenly seemed important to achieve the clearest-possible view of the other man’s face.

A short distance from the base of the tower, the prisoner stopped moving. For a few seconds, he stared straight ahead, as if he were looking at something on the far side of the fence, beyond the camp’s perimeter. Then he slowly rotated his head.

You could say, if you wanted to, that the dense fog, electrified by the blazing searchlight, had the effect of distorting his features, that his eyes were not as far back in their sockets as they looked, that the stain on his neck and cheek was merely that and not the suppurating wound it appeared to be. You could note, if you so chose, that under his own power he had just crossed the rec area, a distance of some sixty or seventy yards, and that as he came ever closer, his chest rose and fell with each step he took. You could consult medical books, theological texts, works of philosophy or psychology, assemble a jury of preachers and rabbis, doctors and lawyers, prophets and linguists, and they could vote and publish their findings, but to Marty that wouldn’t have mattered. He knew damn well what he was seeing, since he’d seen it before.