Prisoners of War (8 page)

THIRTEEN

WALKING HOME, hoping not to find his momma there, he passed a church. The parking lot was covered up with pickup trucks and cars. There was even a tractor, a fairly new Oliver, and he wondered which white man it belonged to.

Brother So-and-So’s truck broke down,
he imagined folks would say,
but he cares so much for the Lord that he got his whole family on that tractor and brought ’em down to church. With enemies like him, the Devil don’t have a prayer.

The Devil didn’t have a prayer, not because some redneck drove his tractor to church, but because the Devil didn’t pray. White folks, of course, would never see that. They believed everything had been made in their own image, and since they prayed, it stood to reason the Devil did, too.

The Devil was in each and every one of them, just as sure as he was in old Adolf Hitler, but the white folks didn’t know it. The Devil had been in that glance that passed between him and Doll, in what he would have done to her, and she to him, if John Burns had wandered off. It wasn’t that different, as far as he could see, from what you did when you pointed a gun at another man’s heart and pulled the trigger. Wanting, you willed yourself to take. One day they called it loving, another day rape.

When he stepped onto the porch, the floorboards sighed, and in that pitch he heard absence. He shifted his weight from foot to foot, listening. Must have taken herself off to church.

He stepped inside and, when his eyes adjusted to the darkness, saw her sitting near the woodstove, in her lap the raggedy old black Bible that one of her mistresses had given her. At the sight of it, he knew he ought to have had a lot more fun last night. Because what fun he’d had wasn’t nearly enough to make up for the misery he was about to endure.

“You know where you gone end up?” she said. “A few miles south, down in the state penitentiary. Just like your no-good daddy.”

“You never told me my daddy went to jail.”

“I never told you your daddy went to Hell, neither, but I imagine that where he at now.”

He walked over and laid his guitar down on his cot, then picked up a box of matches and lit the coal-oil lamp standing on the drink crate that served as his bedside table. He sat down and pulled off his shoes. “Since you ain’t never told me who he was, don’t tell me where he’s at.”

For a minute, her face lost all expression. When her cheeks went slack like that, you could see how pretty she must’ve been. Nice caramel-colored skin—not too dark, not so light you had to wonder if she was part white. “Don’t you be telling me what to say or not say about that particular nigger. I say what I want.”

“Yeah, I guess so. Reckon you do what you want, too. I’m proof of that.”

She stood, laid the Bible on the table, walked over and drew back her hand.

“Hit me on the other side,” he said. “I’m still sore on my left cheek from last week.”

“So split the difference,” she said, and slapped him hard across the bridge of his nose.

His eyes stung, and blood began to trickle from one nostril. “I ain’t gone end up down south of anywhere,” he said. “I’m gone end up
north.
And it won’t be no few miles.”

“North?” she said.
“North?”
She laughed. “Chicago, Illinois. Right? Detroit, Michigan. Pie in the Sky, Pennsylvania.” Grinning, she shook her head, reached for his hand and, between her thumb and forefinger, pinched a wad of his skin. “ ’Less you get north of
this,”
she said, “you ain’t going nowhere.”

FOURTEEN

SWEE SPATS A NATTER,” Dan said. He pulled his wallet out of his pocket and laid it on the floor because the seat was hard and his hip was about to kill him. “You ever heard tell of that?”

L.C. perched on the drink box, looking down the aisle at the group of sweaty Germans. Since all of the passenger seats had been removed, most of them lay on their backs or leaned against the display cases. The only exception was the tall one who was always doing his calisthenics out in the field. He sat up straight, in the very center of the aisle, hands resting on his knees.

Dan had no choice but to return them to camp in the rolling store. His mother took the truck to town every day, now that she had a job, and his uncle was over in Greenville, cooking up some deal he said would be even more profitable than the sanitary napkins. He’d promised to get back before quitting time, but he hadn’t made it.

“What you say?” L.C. asked.

“Swee Spats a Natter.”

“What about it?”

“This morning I was over on the Teague place, and this little colored boy that was out in the field with his momma comes over and asks me if I got any Swee Spats a Natter. At least I think that’s what he called it. I told him I didn’t know what the hell that was.”

“Course you do.” L.C. pointed at the display case containing patent medicines. “Yonder’s two bottles of it.”

Dan slowed so he could look over his shoulder. “Where?”

L.C. bounced down off the drink box, slid open the glass door and lifted out a blue bottle, then held it up to Dan.
Sweet Spirits of Niter,
the label read.

“Might as well be speaking different languages,” L.C. said. “We don’t understand y’all, and y’all don’t understand us.” He stuck the bottle back into the display case and closed the door. “Just like these Germans.”

It had rained hard yesterday, and the road was a mess. Ordinarily, Dan wouldn’t have set men to picking in such wet conditions. But before leaving that morning, Alvin had told him that rain was forecast again for the end of the week. “Better get that cotton while you can,” he’d said. “They got them tower driers over at the gin now—it don’t matter if the stuff’s a little damp.” So Dan had collected the prisoners first thing, before his mother took the pickup into town.

The closer he got to the highway, the worse the road looked. Tractors and cotton trailers had churned it into a huge batch of fudge, everybody trying to beat the next front. Several times the wheels spun on him, and he came close to getting stuck.

His uncle had bought the buses from some school district way up north, someplace that must’ve had a fair amount of snow, because they both had four-wheel drive. And given this mess, he decided to engage it.

Once all four wheels were pulling, the driving was much easier. But a few minutes later, when he turned onto Highway 47 and tried to disengage, something went wrong. The steering suddenly stiffened—he could hardly turn the wheel. Hearing a grinding noise, he let off the accelerator. Instead of slowing gradually, the bus slammed to a quick halt, as though he’d leaned on the brakes.

“Goddamn,” he said. “The transmission’s all screwed up.”

In some strange way, it encapsulated everything that had gone wrong since that day last winter when he’d walked into the house and found his father’s body. From that time on, it had been like he was trying to go backwards and forwards at once, like his own internal gear works were grinding themselves to bits.

He thought he might lay his head against the wheel and start crying. He was stuck six miles from town with a busload of POWs, and the only person who might help him, L.C., was just as alien to him as the Germans. For a moment, he felt the only thing to do was get mad. “If a cousin to one of them fellows sends me home in a box,” he said, nodding his head to the back of the bus but looking at L.C., “you won’t shed a goddamn tear, will you?”

To his surprise, L.C. slammed his fist down on the drink box, and several of the Germans flinched. “Why you ask
me
that? Just ’cause you done tore up your uncle’s transmission? See, that’s how y’all do. Everything come right back round to you. I been in a box my whole life, but has your ass shed any tears?”

Breathing hard, Dan rose as L.C. balled his hands into fists. Dan’s first thought was that he’d have to make up some story to explain any cuts or bruises on his face, since otherwise there was no telling what folks might do to L.C. and Rosetta.

But before L.C. could swing, a curious thing happened. The German with the angry purple stain on his face stood up and, stepping around the tallest prisoner, walked forward and gestured at the empty driver’s seat. “Maybe I try?”

Since that first day in the field, he’d spoken to Dan four or five times, but only when the others were some distance away. He never said a lot—
Very hot this day . . . Here is many cotton
—so Dan couldn’t tell how much English he really knew, nor had he figured out why he referred to German as “their” language.

Marty had warned him not to believe anything a prisoner told him. “They’ll dupe you,” he said. “They fooled a buddy of mine, and he ain’t coming home.” And he meant to find out exactly where this one had been captured, have them check his
Solbuch
up at the base camp in Como, because there were a few things about him that didn’t seem right.

Now all Dan could do was stare at him, not knowing what to say.

“Cat want to see can he get it going,” L.C. said. “It was me, I’d let him. I sure as hell don’t know how to make it run right, and you don’t, neither.”

Dan glanced at the rear of the rolling store, where every one of them was sitting up straight, watching. If they wanted, he knew, they could commandeer the bus. The question was, Where could they go, especially with the transmission locked up?

He stepped aside and let the German sit down. For a time, the prisoner studied the dashboard, then bent and looked underneath it at the pedals. Then he sat up, grabbed the stick and threw the transmission into reverse.

When the bus lurched backwards, Dan sprawled onto the floor. L.C. managed to stop himself from falling by grabbing the handrail. Bottles and canned goods tumbled off the shelves and rolled into the aisle.

Dan heard glass breaking, and several of the Germans hollering, then realized he was hollering, too.

He struggled to his feet just as the prisoner jammed the gears again. This time, the bus hurtled forward, and he smacked his head on the door. L.C. toppled backwards over the railing, his feet sticking up in the air.

The prisoner drove on for a few hundred yards, shifting from second to third, picking up speed, then slowing gradually, the bus rolling smoothly over the pavement. Finally, he pulled onto the shoulder.

Dan sat on the floor, feeling a great purple bruise forming on his forehead. L.C. sprawled on the steps, rubbing his collar-bone. The aisle was littered with dented cans and broken bottles. For once, the tallest German wasn’t smiling. Face pale as buttermilk, he’d wrapped his arms around one leg of the drink box, which was anchored to the floor with steel bolts.

The prisoner got out of the driver’s seat. “Sorry so rough,” he said.

Wincing, L.C. stood and climbed the steps, then reached down and offered Dan a hand. “Maybe we’d be better off,” he said, “over there in the fight.”

After signing the prisoners back into the camp, Dan dropped L.C. at his mother’s house, where he didn’t say a word, just trudged off across the field.

Alvin was at his store, in high spirits, sitting on the front porch, smoking a cigarette and drinking an Orange Crush.

“I had to slam the brakes on to keep from hitting a cotton trailer,” Dan said. “A bunch of stuff went flying off the shelves. Broke a few bottles and dented some cans pretty bad.”

His uncle waved a hand as if brushing a fly away. “Don’t worry about it.” He puffed on his cigarette, and he had that peculiar gleam in his eyes. “I just made me a dandy little deal with a condom distributor. Every rubber in the Delta has to pass through my hands.”

“Before use, or after?” Without waiting for Alvin’s reply, he went inside, grabbed a hunk of Day’s Work, then laid it down on the counter.

Rosetta peered at him over the Memphis paper, its banner headline announcing that British troops were advancing on Salerno. “Your momma told me you don’t never walk out of here with no chewing tobacco. Say that nasty habit gone ruin a person’s teeth.”

“She’s not one to talk about habits.”

“Your momma do the best she can,” Rosetta said, “and you may understand that someday. Then again, maybe not. You about as dumb as L.C.” She folded the paper and eyed the plug of tobacco. “You want it, you gone have to pay for it, ’less your uncle come in here and make me give it to you.”

“I aim to pay for it,” he said, reaching for his wallet, though he’d hoped he wouldn’t have to. Finding his hip pocket empty, he remembered pulling the wallet out and laying it under the seat. “Just a minute,” he said, “I’ll be right back.”

The wallet wasn’t on the floor up front, so he crawled up and down the aisle, looking under every counter and display case, but the damn thing was gone. With it went four dollars, his driver’s license, a picture of his daddy and his State Guard ID.