Prisoners of War (23 page)

FORTY ONE

FROM HABIT, Szulc lay on his stomach, his head pressed into the cot, his arms at his sides as he shrank, once again, into himself. He knew from long experience that a man could reduce the size of his body. In the desert, even if pausing for only an hour, they’d always dug slit trenches, just deep enough that a tightly compressed body would lie below ground level; he’d seen men two meters tall withdraw into a depression hardly large enough to hold a child.

Different bodies produce different sounds. On the far side of the stove, on the cot that had been Voss’s, lay a big Bavarian with a deviated septum. He did not snore so much as whistle, making music in his sleep. A pair of feet protruded from the cot next to his, small and white, and they remained in constant motion, the ankles grinding against each other.

The awareness that his body could produce a sound he hadn’t willed was appalling. He’d heard bodies gurgle, or suck, or expel great bursts of tainted air. They sometimes rattled, or jingled like a box filled with coins. Bodies could honk and shriek, hit a note and sustain it. On Bloody Sunday of the Dead, when they’d repulsed the initial British advance on Tobruk, he’d held a tone so long himself that Hauptmann Fischer slapped him and then, having failed to still his voice, shoved him to the ground and forced him to fill his mouth with sand.

“That horrible stain on your face,” Fischer asked, lying on top of him to keep him from rising, “where did you get it?”

He spat out the sand. “At birth.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Not physically.”

“A psychic wound? How modern.”

Fischer’s breath tickled the back of his neck. As he hugged the ground and listened to the British shells exploding, he performed a calculation: the number of hours in the average day— four, he estimated—spent with dirt or sand against his face, times 365 would equal 1,460 hours, which divided by twenty-four came to sixty days and twenty hours.

Almost the same as being buried for two months. Except that, in a strictly medical sense, he was not yet dead.

FORTY TWO

MARTY ROSE a few minutes before midnight, stumbled into somebody’s footlocker, then stepped outside the tent in his underwear. The night was clear and cold, a big moon shining just beyond the south tower. No sign of Kimball up there, which probably meant he was taking his evening nap.

Stepping into the shadows, he opened his fly and let loose. His urine stank of coffee and whiskey, and burned him badly. He shook himself off, went back inside and got dressed. Then he lifted his mattress, pulled out the half-pint bottle and stuck it in his pocket, grabbed his rifle and a big flashlight and left, fully armed, to stand his watch.

If you had asked him, as Munson did, what made him detour down the dirt path between the long rows of prisoners’ tents rather than take the direct route to the south tower, he couldn’t have told you, though he would’ve said he’d never done it before. If you’d questioned him further and demanded to know why he’d stopped outside the last tent on the left—one of three tents that stood empty, waiting for a new group of prisoners scheduled to arrive any day—he couldn’t have answered that question, either, except to say that he had no idea.

In turn, you wouldn’t have known that shortly after setting off again, taking five or perhaps even six strides toward the tower, he turned and retraced his footsteps. Neither did he know why he’d done that.

He could have said that as he stood before the empty tent, he pulled the bottle from his pocket, tucked the flashlight under his arm, screwed the cap off the bottle and took a swig. The whiskey seared his throat and nostrils, making him cough. That had made him think about Raymond Sample—which itself was inexplicable, since Sample, a Mormon from Heber City, Utah, had never taken a drink in his life. Marty screwed the cap back on, stuck the bottle in his pocket, then reached for the tent flap and pulled it open.

Dark and cold, the tent reminded him of a cave his father had taken the family to see during a vacation in the mountains. A guide had explained the difference between stalactites—calcareous icicles that hung from the ceiling—and stalagmites— similar material that instead rose from the floor. Both types of deposit were bone white, ice-cold, and unpleasant to touch. The guide had shined his flashlight around the enormous underground vault, revealing hundreds, if not thousands, of forms.

But when Marty thumbed the button on his flashlight, the beam revealed only one form, suspended from the socket ring at the top of the tent.

The angry stain on the face was streaked with blue. The tongue, protruding a couple inches, exhibited a bluish tinge, too. A deep gash in the forehead had bled a little, but not much. Both eyes were open, the left one rotated slightly upward, as if something on the tent ceiling demanded immediate attention.

On the floor, beneath the dangling feet, their toes splayed out like claws, were two items: a dirty rag and a ceramic GI mug that, when Munson examined it a few moments later, stank of cheap whiskey.

FORTY THREE

THE ODORS of that midnight would remain with Munson always: the scent of whiskey, the acrid smell of smoldering leaves and a hint of roasted garlic, though he had no idea where that came from.

“You saw nobody, either when you left your tent or on your way over here?”

“Not a soul.”

He didn’t bother to correct him—
not a soul, sir
—because he was beyond the urge to provide correction, as Stark was beyond the point at which he might accept it.

“And you didn’t hear anything?”

“Not a sound.”

He turned to Case, who stood beside the door with a handkerchief clamped to his mouth. “Sergeant, are you going to be sick?”

“No sir.”

“Then put that handkerchief away.”

“Yes sir.” Case folded it primly and tucked it in his pocket.

“Who’d we have in the towers?”

“Kimball and Huggins, sir.”

“Neither of them reported seeing or hearing anything?”

Stark cleared his throat. “They couldn’t see or hear anything. Soon as they get tired of playing with the spotlight, they sit down and go to sleep.”

“Case, go get both of them. Post guards around the perimeter, and put somebody who’s awake up in those towers right now.”

He waited until Case left, then walked over and poured himself a cup of coffee. Then he remembered the mug, which was standing on top of his desk, right beside the manual on courts-martial. He walked back over to the desk and gestured at the mug. “Any idea where this came from?”

“It’s mine. Or at least I was using it.”

“How’d it end up in that tent?”

“I imagine somebody carried it in there.”

“Any idea who?”

“Whoever hung that Polish fellow.”

“How do you suppose they got it in the first place?”

“I left it in the poor bastard’s tent.”

“When?”

“Earlier tonight. When I went in there to move Voss and them others.”

“So why does it smell like whiskey?”

“Because that’s what it had in it.”

Munson lifted the gray mug, turned it over and looked at the bottom. “If I were guessing, I’d say this is what made that gash in his head. Wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t give a shit what made the gash in his head.”

“Why’s that?”

“The gash in his head ain’t what killed him. It was the rope around his neck did that.”

“What makes you so certain?”

“Because the head wound barely bled. They hung him first and hit him later.”

Munson then made a remark he would regret for the rest of his life: “You sound like an expert.”

He never actually saw Stark rise. He was in the chair one minute, his hands at rest in his lap, and on his feet the next. Like one of those western shoot-outs, where you never saw the gun-slinger draw. “Yes, I am a fucking expert,” he said. “Want me to tell you something—Captain, sir?”

“No, Private Stark,” Munson said, “I don’t want you to tell me anything. I just want you to sit back and—”

“Me and my friend Bubba Garrett did it,” Stark said, “when we were in seventh grade. Bubba’s daddy used to own the meat-packing plant, that big old red building across from the compress, but when it failed, they moved to Biloxi, and I ain’t seen him in years. He may be dead now, for all I know. Anyhow, we got us some navel oranges one day, put ’em in his daddy’s freezer and left ’em till they froze solid as rocks. Then we took ’em out back and used ’em like baseballs. And the sound a body makes when you fire a slug into it from four or five feet away— well, sir, it’s the same sound them oranges made when the bat hit ’em. Halfway between
splat
and
thunk
. . .
Splunk.”

Munson looked down at the mug in his hands and thought of his father. A big difference between him and his father, who had taught junior-high science, was that his father had never looked at anything—whether it was an object, like the ceramic mug, or a living creature, such as a beetle or a sunflower—without asking himself a whole series of questions, most of which had to do with origins. How had the thing
achieved
—that was always the word he used—its existence? Existence was always a bit of a miracle, as far as his father was concerned. And he’d viewed the demise of anything, even an object like the mug, much less a human life, as tragic.

When Munson looked at the mug, he saw something that had been designed to contain coffee but which had recently been put to the wrong use. He didn’t worry about how it had achieved its existence, and the only reason he wouldn’t just send it back to the camp kitchen and forget about it was that it had become a piece of evidence. He had no idea how Marty Stark viewed a mug, or a beetle or sunflower, or a corpse dangling from a rope, but to him, each of them must’ve seemed qualitatively different.

Munson wished his father were alive and could somehow be summoned to this room, because he believed he would’ve known what to say to Marty Stark. There was a set of words, if they could only be found, that could cool Stark’s fever and still his mind; he also knew that he was not the man to speak them.

But he did his best. What the moment seemed to require was someone as different from himself as a man could possibly be, so he asked himself what the last thing he’d naturally do under these circumstances might be. And once he’d arrived at the answer, he set the mug down, stepped around his desk and put both arms around Stark. “It’s all right, Marty,” he whispered. “It’s all right.”

“No sir,” Stark said, “it’s not.”

FORTY FOUR

THINGS WERE NOT all right the next morning at formation, though to Munson’s dismay he’d been ordered to behave as if they were. His request for ten more guards had been denied— no extra men available—but the provost marshal, en route from base camp, would convene an investigating board once the prisoners returned from their work details.

Among the group of men Munson now stood facing was at least one murderer—in all likelihood, three or four. “Though in a strictly military sense,” the voice on the phone had said, “whoever killed that prisoner did exactly what they’d been trained to do. The prisoner was a traitor, pure and simple, and the killers exacted summary justice. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: We could learn a thing or two about professionalism from those men.”

You could also learn a thing or two from the voice on the phone about the country you lived in. Because now, rather than keeping the prisoners under lock and key until the murderers were discovered, he was about to send them back to the fields to pick cotton. If principle wasn’t indispensable, apparently commerce was.

He waited while Case called names, and when the sergeant yelled “Schultz,” he let his eyes roam the ranks. The men stood at attention, most of them staring straight ahead, more than a few looking half-asleep. After what seemed like two or three minutes, Case made a mark on his roster and hollered “Schussler,” continued through “Zintsch,” then stuck the pen in his shirt pocket, walked over and handed his clipboard to Munson.

Who stood there looking down at the names, at the check-marks beside them, the single blank spot. He’d never been given to righteous indignation, but that morning he felt it. The problem was where to direct it. He’d already bawled out Kimball and Huggins, both of whom claimed, of course, they’d been on their feet for the duration of their duty. When he told them to get their worthless asses out of his sight, he understood that it would be no time at all before Huggins made a phone call.

He couldn’t place the entire blame on them, though, because whoever killed the Pole, if that’s what he was, would have found a way to do it sooner or later. He couldn’t blame Stark, and didn’t want to. He couldn’t really blame himself, since he’d been following orders. And from that day several years ago when he’d received the letter granting him admission to West Point, he hadn’t once blamed the army for anything.

He’d spent four years marching to class beneath the gray arches, drilling for hours on the Plain, standing one inspection after another, somebody constantly jaw-to-jaw with him, yelling and criticizing, and he doubted a single day had passed without his hearing the word
grave
or
gravity:
“These are grave actions. . . . Don’t underestimate the gravity of the situation.” Yet for all the gravitas, he’d never quite conquered the feeling that what he was engaged in was play, much like what he’d done with his best friends, at age eight or nine, in the backyards of Wynoka, Minnesota. Back then, he’d marched along, stiff and stylized to the point of parody, occasionally hurling himself into a pile of leaves while someone hid in the bushes and made spitting noises, imitating the sound of a German machine gun.

He still felt as if he were a boy. But unlike his childhood friends, a great many of the prisoners arrayed before him, if not all of them, had been killers the day they arrived at Camp Loring and weren’t playing any games, though it now seemed that both he and the army had behaved as if they were.

“You men are about to finish picking cotton,” he said, starting to move along the ranks, walking slowly, careful to take deep breaths so his voice would have that sturdy timbre the army liked. “By most accounts, you’ve done a good job. I’ve even learned that some of the farmers around here are planning to make Christmas packages for you. I hope that over in your country somebody’ll be making packages for our men in the German camps. Somehow, I doubt that’ll be the case, but who knows?

“We have another holiday before Christmas, and it’ll be coming up pretty soon. You may have heard of it. We call it Thanksgiving. People eat turkey and thank God for their good fortune. You’ll be getting turkey, too. You’ll get that and you’ll get mashed potatoes and two kinds of dressing, stewed beets and carrots, with some cranberry sauce on the side.”

He had no idea where his speech would take him, but he found solace in the sound of his own voice, which up until that moment he’d always been suspicious of, fearful it might break. The only thing he feared now was the silence that would ensue if he quit talking.

“After the Thanksgiving meal,” he said, “you’ll get a good night’s sleep, believe me. Then the next morning you’ll get up and go to the latrine, where you may notice that your urine’s bright red from all the beets you’ve shoveled down your throats. When you see that red liquid draining out of your own bodies, I hope you’ll ask yourselves what it feels like to know your life’s in the process of expiring. Then I want you to imagine you suffered that realization somewhere far away from home, in a dark, cold place, with a rope around your neck.”

He’d reached the end of the front row. The last man in line, a slim brown-eyed guy who looked oddly feminine, refused to meet his gaze. At first, Munson thought the man had looked away out of guilt—that he’d taken part in the murder or knew who had—but then he heard the noises that had drawn the prisoner’s glance: boards creaking, the grating sound of metal on metal.

Then he turned around and looked for Case. “Sergeant? Who’s in the south tower?”

The little burger place in Greenville stood between the tobacco store and the barbershop. Barely big enough to contain the grill and a few seats at the counter, it reeked of smoke and onions. Marty’s father had taken him there when he was eight or nine, ordered him a cheeseburger with fries and told the man behind the counter he’d be back in a little while. It wasn’t until Marty bit into the cheeseburger that he remembered being there a few years earlier, and that his father had left him then, as well. Now, as he crouched out of sight in the tower and lined his clips up on the floor, then jerked the bolt back on the Thompson to chamber the first round, it seemed to him that on the second trip to Greenville he’d understood his father had gone off somewhere to meet a woman. But he might be confusing that day with a later one. In fact, his father took him to the burger place many times and always disappeared. At some point, surely, there must have been a moment when he suddenly realized what his father was up to. But how could you say when, exactly, awareness occurred?

How could you say precisely when somebody quit being alive and started being dead? It didn’t, he knew, necessarily have shit to do with when your heart stopped beating. Raymond Sample hadn’t died the moment those bullets from the Schmeisser destroyed his face. He’d been dead at least since finding the little girl whose body had been ripped in half. You could even argue that he’d died somewhere in Utah, when he grew up to become the kind of person who couldn’t hear another human being crying out in pain and not run off into the darkness to help him.

The Pole hadn’t died in the tent—that just happened to be the place where he took his last breath. Brinley, who was up in the north tower right now, had probably died in the South Pacific. Jimmy Del Timms had died somewhere in Europe back in 1918 and then impersonated the living for the better part of twenty-five years. Dan was probably already dead, too, though there was no way he could know it.

Peeking over the ledge, he surveyed the scene. The Germans were assembled in perfectly straight ranks, most of them staring dead ahead; Voss, by virtue of being the tallest, was easy enough to spot. Munson and Case, Kimball and Huggins and the other guards formed a loose perimeter, in ragged contrast to the disciplined mass in the middle. The country might win the war, and he hoped it would, but that would require different men than these and a different man than him. For once, whether by accident or by design, the army had made the proper move and sent them all where they could do the least damage.

“The Thompson,” his drill sergeant had said, “is known as a blow-back weapon. You jam the clip in the magazine, snatch the bolt back to chamber the round, then squeeze that trigger. And as long as you keep the pressure on, each round fired blows the bolt back and chambers another round. This weapon offers zero accuracy but can create maximum mayhem. Basically, men, the Thompson’s perfect for somebody who can’t shoot straight and can’t think straight, somebody who’s got himself cornered and can’t see a way out.”

Raymond, always good at injecting a little humor, pretended to be intrigued by the terminology. “Sarge,” he said, “if you use a blow-back weapon in one of them incremental moments you’re always talking about, would you say you was having a blow-back moment?”

“Sample,” the sergeant said, “that would be as good a term as any.”

Frank Holder had removed the American flag from the side planks of his truck. The flag was cheap, made of thin cloth, and you could see clean through the stars and the stripes. He might’ve left it on there if the flag had been made of thicker, heavier material, not so chintzy-looking.

Holder himself was feeling even heavier than he was— almost as if he were made out of lead. His motions had grown leaden. When he walked, he barely had the sense that he was moving. He’d dragged many a heavy cotton sack along dirt rows in his life, and lately felt like he was always pulling that weight along behind him. He guessed that’s how folks end up. Everything you’d ever done that you wished you hadn’t, or hadn’t done and wished you had, everything you’d ever lost or wanted and never got—all of it attached itself and dragged you down, more of it all the time, until you flat gave out.

He couldn’t sleep much and had given up trying. What he did, for several hours every night, was walk the roads near his house, pacing along with his hands clasped behind his back or, if they started getting cold, jammed into his coat pockets. He’d walk toward that place in the road ahead where everything came together in a big ball of darkness. He never quite got to that spot, because light kept creeping in, but he knew he’d get there eventually.

Last night, he had walked the roads from shortly after the moment when Arva fell asleep until the sun began to color the eastern horizon. Even so, he wasn’t hungry—he never had much appetite anymore—so he decided to skip breakfast and drive out to Camp Loring.

Since it was way too early and none of the other farmers would show anytime soon, he pulled over about a hundred yards short of the gates and sat there in his pickup, surrounded by silence. The morning was as quiet as any he’d ever seen. Finally, for the first time in twenty-four hours, he closed his eyes. He kept them closed until a loud noise startled him, and then, without pausing to consider what he was doing or why, he opened the door, climbed out and knelt by the side of the road.

In Wynoka, Minnesota, when Munson was growing up, a doctor bought the house next door. A small-town general practitioner, he was a friendly and responsive man who set broken bones, stitched up cuts and gashes, delivered a few hundred babies and otherwise attended to all his patients’ needs. Always on call, he was frequently awakened at night and often had trouble getting back to sleep. And if he ran out of firewood in the middle of a sleepless night, he’d go outside and chop some—still unaccustomed to town life, having grown up on a farm out in the country. The first time he did it, Munson’s mother leaped out of bed and crashed into the wall, certain that somebody had gone wild with a shotgun. The second time, she raised the window and screamed at him. He waited about half an hour, then began chopping again in a tentative, almost experimental way—a single lick here, two more licks there—as if coaxing the log to split apart.

The first bursts that issued from the tower reminded Munson of those halfhearted taps with the ax. Two or three rounds were followed a few seconds later by two or three more. Nothing for a moment, then a slightly longer burst.

By that time, most of the prisoners were facedown on the ground. A few men at the rear had broken ranks and run for shelter at the mess hall or the showers.

Munson froze, still waiting for Case to answer his question, but only until a long burst threw up dirt across the rec area; then he dived behind a galvanized garbage can at the corner of the latrine. A second later, the wind was knocked out of his lungs as someone—Case, it turned out—flopped down on top of him.

“Jesus Christ,” the sergeant gasped. “That crazy bastard.” Then his face began to change color, tending toward purple, but he said nothing more.

Munson only gradually realized that he’d locked his hands around the man’s throat. Letting go, he said, “Goddamn it, Case, who’s up there?”

“Thark,” he gurgled.

“You put
Stark
in the tower?”

Then a burst came from the opposite direction.

“Who’s in the other one?”

Case pressed his face against the wall. “Brinley.”

When one of the Germans hollered, Munson peeked out and saw two prisoners leap up and race toward the mess hall, immediately drawing fire from both sides of the compound. As the men hurled themselves inside, a window shattered, tin siding buckled and, a moment later, someone began moaning.