Prisoners of War (3 page)

FOUR

AT FIRST GLANCE, the camp didn’t amount to much more than three or four rows of tents and five or six buildings, surrounded by a double barbed-wire fence. At the MP training center, he’d been told that all camps had to be situated at least five hundred feet from any road, but only a shallow ditch separated this one from Highway 47. The fences, which were supposed to be at least eight feet high, might’ve been six and a half feet but were probably less; a bad pole-vaulter could have made it over with no trouble, and a good high jumper would have had a decent chance.

Guard towers stood on the north and south sides of the camp, both of them empty that morning. Anybody caught in there during a thunderstorm was in for an exciting time, since somebody, probably an army engineer, had put on tin roofs.

His father parked a short distance from the gates. “Well, Martin,” he said, “you got everything you need?”

His mother had asked him the same thing his first night back, posing her question while he stood before the mirror in his old bedroom, getting ready to go down to the colored part of town and find himself a whore. He’d always heard they were down there, standing on the street corners, their dark legs exposed. He wanted to take his clothes off in a hot, dirty room with a woman he didn’t know, especially one who had all the reason in the world to hold a thousand things against him. A woman whose sinew would ripple beneath his body with disgust.

That night, he’d told his mother that no, he didn’t have everything he needed. When she asked him what was missing, he meant to make a joke and say he needed to rent Clark Gable’s face. But after remembering how Raymond Sample’s had just disappeared, his features dissolving into a scarlet mass of meat, he couldn’t keep his lips from quivering like they had on the Niscemi road, and he said he was missing himself. That much he could say to his mother, though he wished he hadn’t, because it made her cry. But he couldn’t say it to his father, however much he wished he could.

“No, sir,” he said. “Don’t have my discharge papers, and I sure do need ’em.”

His father stared hard into the distance. “The army can’t discharge you from responsibility, Martin. You got to face that for the rest of your life, whether you wear a uniform or not.”

The only uniform his father had ever worn was the dark suit he put on every Sunday morning, when he went to church and listened to the preacher condemn folks for drinking liquor, or lying, or coveting their neighbors’ wives; then he went back home and took it off, and felt free to get drunk, screw Mrs. Bivens from down the street and lie about it all day long.

But some uniforms were not shed so easily. Some uniforms stuck to you.

Marty reached under the seat for the pint bottle he’d left there last night. He drank the last inch or so, then put the bottle back. Now his father was looking at him, and that was all he’d really wanted.

“Showing up with whiskey on your breath’s not likely to stand you in good stead with your commanding officer. For your information, he’s a graduate of the United States Military Academy.”

“Yeah, but he’s stateside.”

“
You’re
stateside.”

“But I want to be, and he doesn’t.”

“How do you know where he wants to be?”

“I know
exactly.
He wants to be about a hundred yards beyond the last rung of a ladder barrage, where he can feel the ground shaking under his feet when them eighty-eights hit. Maybe even a little closer, so he can dodge some nonlethal debris while he barks orders into a field telephone. He wants to wave his arms around and point at a little rise in the distance with a machine-gun barrel poking up over it, then watch his boys run right at it. And when the two or three of ’em that don’t have their guts falling out their shirtfronts get close enough to pitch a few grenades and cause a little weeping and moaning someplace like Hamburg, he wants to run forward his own self. That’s where he wants to be. Not in Loring, Mississippi, commanding what looks like a run-down church camp.”

His father was thumping the wheel with an index finger.

“I was hoping for bedpan duty,” Marty said. “Could’ve got it, too, if the division psychiatrist hadn’t worried about me running loose in a base hospital, drinking all that rubbing alcohol. I figure if you can handle Mississippi ’shine, anything else ought to slide right down.”

“Martin,” his father said, “I don’t know what to say to you.”

“Well, to start with, you might tell me about how my great-granddaddy helped roll up Howard’s flank at Chancellorsville. You could put him on a big white stallion, with a bunch of gold braid on his uniform and a cavalry saber that’s got engraving on the hilt, and he’s right there beside Stonewall Jackson and Little Sorrell when them Tarheels get all confused in the darkness and bring old Stonewall down. Hell, you could let Stonewall speak his dying words to
him.
What was it, now? ‘Let us cross over the river and rest in the shade of the trees’? Nobody I ever saw die said anything like that.”

“Go on and get out, Martin,” his father said, then glanced over his shoulder to see if the lane behind him was clear. “I need to get down to the headquarters. Picking season’s coming, like it or not.”

Marty climbed out, shut his door, then walked around and opened the trunk. Reaching for his duffel bag, he noticed the corner of a red foil wrapper sticking out from under the mat next to one of the wheel wells, and he pulled it loose. A Trojan, designed for both comfort and protection.

Lifting the mat, he discovered four more, all of which he stuffed into his pocket. Then he hoisted the duffel bag onto his shoulder, slammed the trunk shut and snapped off a salute while staring at the rearview mirror.

If his father noticed, he didn’t let on. He put the car in gear, made a U-turn and drove back toward town, quite possibly to visit Mrs. Bivens.

FIVE

THE COMMANDING officer—Captain Munson—appeared to be about thirty, a short sandy-haired man decked out in class A’s, his tie tucked in between the second and third buttons.

Two color photographs in easel frames occupied a corner of his desk, positioned at an angle, so you could see the faces while awaiting your orders. One picture showed an attractive young woman whose chin was propped against her fist, the other a little red-haired girl with an enormous smile that revealed she was missing all but one of her front teeth. Just a few inches from the second photo lay a bone-handled .45, snug in its canvas holster.

Munson made a point of staring at the file open before him. He paged backwards through it a couple times, as if he couldn’t quite believe something he’d read and was looking to correct his misunderstanding. Finally, he raised his head. “This is a little bit unusual.”

“What is, sir?”

“Sending a man to pull MP duty in his hometown. Especially one with your particular . . . experiences.”

“Yes sir.”

“Though I’m sure Fourth Service has good reasons.”

“Yes sir.”

“Any idea what those reasons might be?”

“No sir.”

Munson frowned. “Your father owns that big plantation out on Choctaw Creek?”

“Yes sir.”

“I believe I know him by sight. Drives a white Cadillac, if he’s the man I’m thinking of. I believe I’ve seen him at—” Munson never finished his sentence, interrupted by a burst of guttural syllables.

The captain gazed at him as if wondering whether he would piss or shit himself, weep or foam at the mouth. If the son of a bitch actually knew how it felt when piss ran down your leg—how you initially assumed it couldn’t be what it was, that surely somebody had stolen up behind you and poured warm water under your waistband—he might have had the good grace to keep his eyes averted.

You never got so scared you couldn’t be embarrassed, but he wouldn’t know that. He’d assume that if a shell burst nearby, the stain on the seat of your pants would cease to matter once you discovered you were still alive. He probably even figured that later you and your pals would float a few jokes about Hershey bars and hip pockets.

Munson watched him for another moment or two, then rose and stepped over to the window. Three shirtless POWs who’d been painting the quarters next door were laughing, horsing around, one of them cocking a dripping brush as if intending to fling a few gobs on his buddy. The skin stretched tautly over their bodies, revealing bone and muscle.

Munson rapped his knuckles on the windowpane. The prisoner brandishing the brush whispered something, and one of the others laughed; then they all bent over and went back to work.

Satisfied, the captain turned and leaned against his desk. “All right, Private,” he said. “There’s not likely to be much around here that’ll surprise you. Reveille’s at oh-five-thirty. Breakfast at oh-six hundred. Prisoners return to their tents after breakfast. They shave and use the latrine, police the grounds, and at oh-seven-thirty they go to their work assignments.

“Once the farmers begin picking cotton, we’ll need every available man in the fields. The contractors provide the prisoners’ lunches, which they’ll eat wherever they’re hired out. They leave work locations at sixteen hundred, get back here, shower and put on their German uniforms, then eat dinner at eighteen hundred. After dinner, they’re free till lights-out.

“As of today, we have three hundred and four prisoners. Most of these fellows were captured in North Africa, though a few trickled in last week from Sicily. My own opinion is that the vast majority are probably neither strongly anti-Nazi nor strongly pro-Nazi, but most of them
were
in the Afrika Korps, so officially we assume they’re all Nazis.

“We’ve had one or two instances in which a group of prisoners administered beatings that may have been ideologically motivated, but various factors indicate to me that they weren’t much more than pranks. We found one guy who’d been whipped pretty good and then shackled to a toilet seat with his pants down around his ankles—that kind of thing. Whoever tied him up had enough rope to hang him twice if they’d wanted to, but clearly they didn’t. Of course, we never found out who was responsible. The man who’d been beaten wouldn’t talk.

“At the training center, they probably told you the prisoner-to-guard ratio’s never supposed to be worse than ten to one. Well, right at this minute, we’ve got eighteen MPs here, nineteen counting you. That’s about sixteen to one. It’s not going to get any better—and, in fact, it’s going to get worse. Soon. They also probably told you that the War Manpower Commission says contract labor goes out in groups of twenty men. But they didn’t have the Mississippi Delta in mind. Most of the contracts we’ve made are with these small farmers, and eighty cents a day per man is pushing them to the limit. For the most part, we’ve got the prisoners set to go out in groups of eight or ten.

“All the groups are going to be unguarded at least part of the time, and Sergeant Case has worked out a rotation. We’ll have single guards accompanying some detachments, whereas other groups will leave in the morning with the contractors, unguarded, and a roving pair of MPs will be checking on them throughout the day. We’ll vary the arrangements from one day to the next, so the prisoners themselves never know in advance if they’ll be on their own or not.

“Mostly, it’s public perception we’re worried about—that and the actual welfare of the prisoners. We don’t want folks to think we’re coddling the enemy, because we’re not. But we also don’t want to have to report any acts of violence against POWs to the Swiss, because they’re bound by the Geneva Convention to pass those on to Berlin. And we’re worried about the safety of our guys in the German camps.

“The truth is, there’s nowhere for these fellows here to go if they do manage to run off. We don’t want them walking into a train station in their prison uniforms and getting everybody worked up, but we’d rather not have to report that we shot them while trying to foil an escape. So what I’m saying to you, Private Stark—and I’m going to say it loud and clear, and I want you to tell me if you’ve got any questions about it in your own mind—is that Fourth Service Command has chosen, for whatever reason, to take a lot of responsibility and place it squarely on your young shoulders. If you think you can’t handle it, then you’d better say so right now.”

“I don’t think I can handle it, sir,” Marty said. “In fact, I know I can’t.”

“I see,” Munson said. He moved over to a bookshelf mounted on the wall and stood there examining—or pretending to examine—the titles arrayed before him. Hardy’s
Light Infantry Tactics,
Fuller’s
Generalship: Its Diseases and Their Cure,
Sandusky’s
A Company Leader’s Guide to Decisions in the Field.
Plenty of theory for a man spared practice.

“I appreciate your honesty, Private,” he said. “But if there’s anything good about war, it’s this: it gives each of us a chance to overcome our limitations.”

“Hilfe! Ich hab mich verfangen!”

On his way to Supply to draw arms, Marty halted and looked in the direction the shout had come from. Off to his right, at the corner of the latrine, a prisoner had gotten the back of his shirt caught on a jagged piece of tin siding. Unable to free himself, he stood there, hollering for somebody to come let him loose. Which apparently nobody had any intention of doing. The three men painting the barracks near the CO’s quarters glanced his way but kept right on working, as did the two guys repairing a busted sewer pipe.

In an effort to free his shirt, the prisoner had turned his back to Marty, who walked over, reached out and grasped the fabric. Surprised, the man jumped and looked around, the shirt tearing loose.

The POW was tall and blond, with thick wavy hair. His glasses, which he’d knocked askew in his agitation, sat on his nose at an angle. An angry purple stain, either a birthmark or a rash, covered the right side of his neck and part of his jaw, a single streak flaring up toward his eye. For an instant, the two men stood there, their faces inches apart, and Marty was suddenly far away, on his knees in a ditch where the red water smelled like fish, and this man was standing over him, pointing a rifle at him and screaming, and Marty was begging and pleading.
Don’t shoot! Dear God, please!

“Danke schön,”
the POW mumbled, straightening his glasses, starting to walk away.

“Wait,” Marty said.

The man kept going, his footsteps stirring dust.

“Hey, wait!”

The prisoner stopped, and when he turned around, a glow—almost like a halo, except that it surrounded his whole body—began to emanate from him. Marty felt as if the ground beneath his feet had suddenly tilted, that he was standing at the bottom of an incline, with the other man on top. “Sicily?” he said, the word emerging as little more than a whisper.

For a moment or two, the prisoner just stared, then he said,
“Ich verstehe Sie nicht.”

“Sicily.” Louder this time.

The man held his hands out, palms-up, as if for some reason he believed it was important to show they were empty.

“Sicily. Was that where you got captured?”

“Ich kann nichts verstehen.”

“Were you
captured
in
Sicily
?” Marty moved a step closer, and the aura surrounding the other man’s body seemed to dissipate. “You were, weren’t you?”

The prisoner glanced over at the men painting the barracks, who’d put down their brushes and were watching.

“Nein,”
he said.
“Nein. Nicht in Sizilien. . . . In Nord-Afrika.”

His eyes never straying from the prisoner’s face, Marty Stark slowly dropped to his knees.