Prisoners of War (18 page)

THIRTY TWO

JASPER SPROLES loved showy cars, and his love sometimes led—as love sometimes will—to his falling prey to the unscrupulous. Back before he got rich, he’d bought a used Ford roadster from Ben Pope at Loring Auto, despite Alvin’s warning that Ben was little more than a bandit dressed in a suit. The car, one of the fancy 1932 models with a customized V-12 under the hood, ran fine for almost a week. Then, over on the outskirts of Greenville, the engine caught fire. The mechanic who examined it discovered that somebody had filled the crankcase with transmission fluid to boost the oil pressure—one way, he said, to get a bad engine running long enough for the car to be sold. Jasper Sproles rode Trailways home. When he attempted to get his money back, the dealer claimed ignorance and reminded Jasper that, in any case, he’d bought the roadster “as is.”

All three of Ben Pope’s sons were among the first in Loring to receive draft notices. When their father appeared at the selective service office to plead, on various grounds, for their exemptions, Jasper grinned and said, “Uncle Sam needs ’em, Ben. And he’ll take ’em as is.”

Jasper had a fine car now, a Buick Century convertible, one of the last ones built before the War Production Board prohibited the manufacture of civilian automobiles. Alvin was eating breakfast and reading the Memphis paper when the car pulled into his driveway. He took his time chewing his toast, knowing that you didn’t want anything caught in your throat when you dealt with Jasper Sproles.

It was raining again, but Jasper wasn’t wearing a raincoat and didn’t seem too worried about the prospect of getting wet. He climbed out of the Buick and walked across the yard, stepping in three or four puddles, bending his legs slightly, as was his habit, and moving a lot faster than it appeared. On the playground, Alvin had once heard his grammar-school teacher tell the principal, “That Sproles boy aims to walk when other folks run, but he still plans to beat them to their destination.” She’d made the remark in a disparaging manner, as if she expected Jasper to come in last in every endeavor. But it had struck Alvin, even then, that being able to walk when other folks had to run was not such a bad thing. After crossing the finish line, they’d be winded and you wouldn’t.

He dabbed his mouth with a napkin, drained his coffee cup, then went to the front door.

“You know I wouldn’t be here,” Jasper said before the screen had even been unlatched, “if there wasn’t a big mess.”

Alvin stepped aside to let him enter, but Jasper meant to talk first and engage in niceties later, or not at all. “The can of worms you done opened,” he said, “is so damn stinky, a mud cat won’t bite ’em.”

“You want to come in, Jasper? Or you want to stand out there on the porch, so that everybody passing by’ll have his imagination ignited by the sight of you and me talking?”

“Piss on them,” Jasper said, though he did step inside.

Alvin shut the door and motioned at the kitchen. “I got the pot on. Want you a little coffee?”

“Naw, I don’t want no coffee. Did, I’d buy a cup. I can buy a cup of coffee.”

“Yeah, I know you can, Jasper. You can buy lots of coffee. So what’s your problem this rainy morning?”

Jasper looked into the living room, where several weeks’ worth of newspapers lay scattered across the furniture. “You ain’t gone ask me to sit down?”

“You want to sit down, Jasper?”

“Naw, I’d just as soon stand. But I don’t want you to leave a single stone unturned when it comes to making me feel welcome, Alvin, because you’ve caused me a slew of problems, and I’m mad as a crippled rattler.”

Sighing, Alvin walked into the living room, shoved some newspapers off the couch and sat down. Jasper had followed him out of the hallway but remained on his feet, studying the bookshelves that lined the walls. There were a few books, but most of the space was taken up by tall stacks of magazines—
Harper’s, The Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Collier’s.

“It’s too goddamn dark in here,” Jasper said.

“You want me to open the blinds?”

“No, I like it dark. What are you doing with all them magazines? I never figured you for a reader.”

“Got to find my entertainment somewhere.”

“That’s the problem with you, Alvin. For all your underhanded ways, the only thing that really interests you’s having a big time. You was always like that. Me, I ain’t out to have fun. I’m out to conduct business. What good can them magazines do you? They tell you anything about dealing with a bootlegger?”

“No, and I wouldn’t want ’em to. I
know
how to deal with a bootlegger—been doing it half my life. I want the magazines to tell me about some fellow living out in the Hamptons, wearing the latest all-wool pacesetter, taking a train into Manhattan on Saturday night to meet a chorus girl for a drink in the Village.”

“Now that’s just about as useful as a three-legged mare.” Jasper threw his hat down on the coffee table and took a seat in an armchair. “You ever heard of an individual named Benny L. Johnson?”

“Can’t say as I have. Not that the name’s particularly unusual.”

“Naw, the name ain’t unusual, and that’s one thing that bothers me—its ordinariness. My name’s one you remember. Jasper Sproles. You ever run across anybody else called that?”

Alvin shook his head.

“Naw, and you won’t. Not unless he’s some chintzy place like them Hamptons you’re so hepped up about.” Jasper crossed his legs, then shifted around in the chair, trying to get comfortable. “The bastard works for Bilbo. And apparently he come up here the other day investigating you and your colored boy.”

“Oh,” Alvin said. “So he’s the one.”

“Yes, the very goddamn one. And he didn’t like the reception he got in Loring County, so he wasted no time getting back to Jackson and on the blower to Washington. Then just yesterday, I got a phone call myself. Some son of a bitch comes on the line asking if it’s me, and I say yes, and then he tells me to hold on, and another son of a bitch comes on the line and asks me the same damn question, and I tell
him
yes, too, and that son of a bitch says to hold on, and then the biggest son of a bitch of all’s on there, name of Theodore G. Bilbo.”

According to Jasper, the senator hadn’t fooled around. He said the list of folks he’d have to work through if forced to follow official channels was so long, he’d get tired just reading it. “Got the secretary that’s under the secretary to the secretary’s secretary,” the senator said. “I ain’t a young man, nor a very healthy one, neither, and if I have to put myself out, my disposition’s gone fray. I say that because, unlike some, I know Theodore G. Bilbo mighty well.”

The senator didn’t appreciate having his personal representative mistreated. Mr. Johnson had been sent to Loring County to ferret out misconduct, of which he’d discovered no moderate amount. In the process, he’d been attacked and beaten by a colored draft evader and then had his life threatened by some Italian who could be living here as some kind of spy. The senator deemed it outrageous that a man like Jasper, who’d secured a lucrative federal contract, would aid and abet those who either opposed or refused to support the United States government.

“He made it pretty clear,” Jasper said, “that he wants that boy in uniform. Either there or in jail.”

“How soon?”

“Sounded to me like yesterday may be too late.”

“Well, I guess we’ve got Frank Holder to thank.”

Jasper’s jaw locked so hard, it must have ground a layer off his molars. “Yeah,” he said, rapping the arm of his chair, “and the hell of it is, there ain’t no easy way to settle that score. The poor bastard’s son’s already dead.”

He eventually left, but not until he’d been prevailed upon to sample four or five different bourbons and eat a box of bonbons.

Before going, he told Alvin that L.C. would be receiving a notice within “the next few days”—the bonbons, rather than the bourbon, having pushed the timetable back—unless, of course, he chose to show up and volunteer. After Alvin said he’d talk to L.C. and his momma, Jasper warned him that any shady dealing he was involved in—“and let’s face it, Alvin, you’re a fellow that ghosts the darkest corners”—had better be curtailed, at least until Benny L. Johnson and his master turned their attention elsewhere.

Promising to take precautionary measures, Alvin then presented Jasper a case of brandy, which he himself carried through the rain to the Buick, because his guest’s legs were wobbly and his hands had gone numb.

THIRTY THREE

LATE THAT AFTERNOON, after spending a few hours back in bed and then taking a long bath, Alvin climbed into his pickup, intending to drive by the store and talk to Rosetta, if she happened to be alone.

A couple of cars and three or four trucks were parked out front, and several Negro kids were running around and hurling mud pies at one another. When Alvin pulled in, they stopped playing and, dropping their heads, shuffled into the grass along the road ditch. He sat there for a moment, letting the engine idle and watching the children whose fun his mere presence had disrupted. Every minute or two, one of them would cast a swift glance in his direction, then look back down.

He put the truck in gear and pulled into the road too fast, throwing up a storm of gravel. Looking in his rearview mirror, he could see the kids running back to the parking area and waving their arms.

He’d made love for the first time, when he was seventeen years old, to a woman named Ernestine Grider, whose husband had bled to death after a gin saw caught his arm and pulled him in. She was small, thin and angular, with dark hair that had started to turn gray at the roots. To call her face plain would have been kind but misleading. The night
The Wizard of Oz
opened in Loring and the Wicked Witch of the West appeared on-screen, more than one person in the darkened theater thought she looked just like Ernestine.

She’d taught Alvin and his brother at Sunday school. She spoke with a nasal twang and was reputed to be stern, so nobody wanted to be in her class. Yet from the first time he found himself in the same room with her, Alvin had not been able to look at her without feeling a certain warmth in his temples.

Once, on the steps of the post office, when he was thirteen or fourteen and had begun to miss church, she asked him if he’d kept up with his Bible reading, and though he knew she expected him to say yes, he couldn’t bring himself to lie. When he said “No ma’am,” the lines deepened around her mouth and in a very low voice, she said, “To tell you the truth, Alvin, I haven’t, either, but I wouldn’t want anybody to know it.” She laid her hand on the back of his neck that day, and he almost said to her right then and there, on Front Street, what he would say at her kitchen table a few years later, after his father sent him over to pay for a mule.

“Mrs. Grider, I get a funny feeling when I see you.”

He said that to her over the cup of coffee she’d inexplicably offered him as he stood on her front porch with his cap in his hands. After he said it, those deep lines reappeared. She reached over and touched him again, laying her hand atop his, and he looked down and saw how red and rough her knuckles were. “Alvin,” she said, “the day’ll come when you’ll think twice before you make a statement like that to a woman like me. But we’re not there yet, I guess. Which accrues to my advantage as well as your own.”

It was quick, and it was messy, but he didn’t have the sense to know it. Lying next to him in bed, with the covers pulled up to her neck, she said, “You’re going to disappoint me real bad, Alvin, if you start thinking you love me and coming over here after tonight, because it would be the worst thing in the world you could do. It would be as bad, in its own way, as what we just did was good.”

He did not disappoint her: he never went to her house again. But whenever he saw her on the street, he stopped to talk, asking how her farm was doing or, later on, after she remarried, how her husband, who’d come from Alabama, was liking Loring. In a manner of speaking, he supposed he’d come to love her, not least because she’d taught him an important lesson about the limits of engagement and the art of restraint.

What he’d learned back then from Ernestine Grider had come in useful in his dealings with Shirley. And
dealings,
he thought, driving down the road toward her house, as he so often had, at all hours of the day and night, was exactly the right word. An air of negotiation, of proposal and counterproposal, surrounded their every encounter. When a straightforward declaration of intent might have sufficed, they were both too wary to make it.

The pickup truck wasn’t there, since it was Wednesday and Dan had probably taken it to town for Guard drill. What surprised him was the green Plymouth, which someone had parked next to the porch.

His mouth went dry. His first urge was to let the clutch out and stomp the accelerator, dig two deep ruts in the road and make as much noise as he could in hopes of ruining whatever pleasure she might be having. Then he looked at the car more closely and realized that he’d seen it before, standing on the street in front of the telephone company.

He parked the truck and got out. He could hear female voices and laughter inside the house. “And Miss Edna, my momma said she hadn’t never, and my daddy said he hadn’t never, neither. Uncle Luther comes driving into the yard, and first thing they notice is the windshield’s gone. Second thing’s Aunt Becky’s feet, hanging from the open door. He’d done got mad at her again and kicked the windshield out, and she’d rode twenty miles, ready to jump every inch of the way.” Another round of laughter.

From habit, he checked his clothes to make sure they were straight; then he climbed the steps and knocked on the front door.

Shirley opened it. For a few seconds, she made no move to unlatch the screen, but simply stood there looking at him through the thin wire mesh, and he thought she might not invite him in.

“Hello,” she finally said.

“Got guests?”

She shrugged. Her hair had started growing back, in tightly matted clumps. “Dan has the pickup, and I needed a ride home, so Miss Edna and Cassie came over. You want to join us?”

“I probably got about as much business going to a prayer meeting,” he said, “but just now my own company leaves plenty to be desired.”

She had a fire going in the living room, but they were all in the kitchen, where Miss Edna Boudreau was peeling pumpkins and passing them on to Cassie Pickett, who cut them into wedges. Shirley said they’d decided to do some baking. The Boy Scouts were sponsoring a scrap-metal drive over the weekend, and the operators at the phone company had offered to provide pies and cakes as prizes.

Miss Edna, looking up long enough to assess his usefulness or lack thereof, noticed that he still had two hands and didn’t appear to be blind. “Go over there to the corner, Alvin, and bring the rest of the pumpkins.”

Afterwards, he was rewarded with a seat at the table. Shirley had made a pot of coffee, and they all drank some, the women continuing to work on the pumpkins and Alvin popping up every few minutes to carry the seeds and peelings to the garbage can out back.

Miss Edna, it developed, was not a bad storyteller, and she was more than willing to tell one on herself. Back in 1933, she said, before her father passed away, she had ridden with him down to Jackson in his Model A. They stopped at a red light in Yazoo City—“right there at the foot of Valley Hill”—and while they were waiting for it to change, she noticed a billfold lying in the street.

“I’m not here to tell you I was starving,” she said, “nor am I about to claim that going hungry might not have done me good. But things were, as the saying goes, tight. So I told Daddy to hold on and I’d pick up that billfold. I opened my door and jumped out, and as soon as I reached for it, the billfold scooted across the street about two or three feet.

“There was a big old magnolia tree right next to the street, and if I’d been more alert, I might have noticed that the trunk was plenty big enough to hide behind. But I didn’t have eyes for anything but that billfold. I decided my senses had betrayed me, that it hadn’t really moved, and that the next time I reached for it, my hand would close around it.

“When the billfold took off again, I let myself get a little unbalanced. Now if that happened to you, Shirley, or to you, Cassie, it stands to reason you’d recover. Alvin wouldn’t have seen the billfold to begin with, because this happened about nine in the morning, and he’d have been in bed. But I was there and I did see it, and when I tried to pounce on it, I went sprawling face-first into a mud hole. I looked up and saw some little smarty-pants running off down the sidewalk with that billfold bouncing along behind him on a string.”

Shirley laughed, and Cassie did, too. Alvin tried to summon a grin, but it wouldn’t answer the call.

“What’s the matter?” Miss Edna said. “Did I offend you with that remark about the hours you keep?”

“No ma’am. I’m not one to take offense too easy.”

“That’s good,” Miss Edna said. “If I had any reason to hoot with the night owl, I imagine I’d do it.”

“I bet you’d hoot
real
loud, Miss Edna,” Cassie said, and Miss Edna allowed that she most likely would.

Shirley stood over the stove, making pumpkin puree, her face damp from the steam. Cassie, in the meantime, mixed sugar, salt and flour in a big green bowl, and Miss Edna sat at the table, rolling crusts. While she worked, she talked to Alvin, asking him how his business was coming along and whether or not he thought he’d wind up in jail. If he ever did, he should contact her uncle Coleman down in Jackson, because he specialized in winning acquittal for folks that were guilty. “Mostly,” she said, “he deals with the more dramatic criminals—murderers and bank robbers and some of the bigger bootleggers and pimps—but as a favor to me, he probably would agree to handling a petty graft case.”

“Sounds like you got a fairly low opinion of me, Miss Edna.”

After glancing at the stove, where Shirley and Cassie were tasting the puree, she leaned toward him over the crust she’d just rolled, as if she meant to tell a risqué joke. “Alvin,” she whispered, “low and high don’t figure in.”

He dropped his voice and leaned forward, too. “They don’t?”

“Not at all. It’s just that I see you for what you are.”

“And what’s that, ma’am?”

Her mouth curled into an expression most men would call a lopsided grin, but he knew he was seeing something beautiful: Miss Edna Boudreau in remission from herself.

“Why, it wouldn’t be so darned interesting if it had a single name,” she said. “You’re one thing today and another thing tomorrow. A snake sheds its skin. You just shed Alvin Timms.”

Once the pies were in the oven, Miss Edna said she was sure folks would be pleased with their efforts but that she needed to get back to town because it was close to eight o’clock now and she went to bed at nine. On her way out, she told Alvin to let her know if he ever wanted her uncle’s phone number.

For a while, he and Shirley sat on opposite sides of the table, neither of them willing to speak. Eventually, she said, “What’s wrong?”

“Who says anything’s wrong?”

“You wouldn’t have come over if nothing was wrong. You know that just like I do.”

“Time was, I’d come over because something was right.”

“Yeah,” she said. “But as you yourself said not too long ago, things used to be different.”

There wasn’t much point in arguing, so he didn’t. “Senator Bilbo’s office sent somebody up here from Jackson to check out me and L.C., and Jasper Sproles, too. I don’t know exactly what happened, because L.C.’s not saying a word and Rosetta ain’t saying much more. But Jasper informed me the boy’s got to go in the army. Either that or he’s going to jail, and me and Jasper may end up there with him. Ain’t a thing in the world for me to do but go tell Rosetta. And I’d rather take a fiery poker in the rump.”

Shirley got up, walked over to the sink and drew herself a glass of water. She stood with her back to him, drinking. She’d lost weight in recent weeks, and her dress fit her like a pup tent.

She set the glass down in the sink. “Well, if he has to go fight,” she said, “I guess he has to go. Like so many other boys. Dan, for instance.”

“They won’t let colored boys fight,” Alvin said. “If they’d let them fight, it wouldn’t be so bad. But the government learned its lesson in the First War. They let colored folks fight then, and they came home wanting to be treated like white people. That’s just not in the cards, not then and not now. What the army means to do is put ’em in uniforms and send ’em as close to the front as they can, where they’ll have the pleasure of digging toilets or toting ammo. They’ll be exposed to fire theirselves, but the army won’t let ’em shoot back. They don’t aim to put a gun in a colored boy’s hands. He might take a notion to bring it home.”

“Well, what are you doing with him?” Shirley said. “You make him drive a bus around the county, selling Popsicles and MoonPies, and every Friday night he entertains you for the price of a little whiskey. You don’t pay him one cent more than you have to, so he won’t ever have enough to quit working for you. That’s not much of a life, either, if you ask me. But it never crosses your mind that he might want something more. Because then you’d have to deal with all the implications, and that’d make you feel bad.” She shook her head. “Jesus, you’ll have to give him up, won’t you? Just like you gave me up. You’re running out of toys, Alvin. Before long, you won’t have a damn thing to play with.”

He realized then exactly how she saw him, how she explained his actions, past and present, to herself. A creature of convenience, he hadn’t quite lost his sense of right and wrong, and was burdened by the need to grope for explanation and justification. It was this need, more than anything else, which kept people like Miss Edna and even someone as cunning as Jasper Sproles from recognizing him for the complete deformity he knew himself to be.