Prisoners of War (25 page)
He turned his attention to the gas cans, playing his light over the caps on each of them, instantly noticing the red stains. He leaned over, twisted off a cap, shined the beam at the opening and looked into the container. “That’s refund gas,” he said.
“Yes sir,” Dan said. “Me and my uncle run a farm.”
“I understand Mississippi’s big farm country. This is, too. But around here, we’ve had a problem with people buying that refund gas and then filling their trucks and cars with it.” He used the flashlight to gesture at L.C. “Step up front there if you will and raise the hood.”
After L.C. did as he’d been told, the deputy leaned over the engine and screwed the nut off the carburetor, then removed the top and shined his light inside. “I’m deeply disappointed in you boys,” he announced. “In addition to depriving the military of much-needed rubber, you’re ensuring that somewhere a tractor’s been idled.”
Suddenly, the light was in Dan’s eyes. The deputy trained the beam there forever, blinding him, making him want to throw his hands up in front of his face.
“You look like you’re old enough to be in the army.”
“I will be. In just a few weeks.”
The deputy played the light over him inch by inch. “Let me see some identification.”
Dan didn’t know why he was shaking. It was cold, but no more so than it had been earlier. Fumbling, he pulled out his wallet, removed his driver’s license and handed it to the deputy.
He held the card under the light. “Yes, I see you’re about to turn eighteen. I’m sure you’ll make a fine soldier.” He handed Dan’s card back but kept L.C.’s. “Of course, if the date on your friend’s license is accurate, he’s already eighteen.” He swung the light around and shined it on L.C.’s face, just as he’d shined it on Dan’s. “I imagine you’ve got your selective service card with you?”
“Yes sir.”
“I’d like to have a look at it.”
Dan didn’t know if L.C. could see him through the glare or not, but when he answered, he seemed to be speaking to Dan and not the deputy. “It’s back yonder. In the truck bed. Tucked into my Bible.”
While they were in Illinois, not Mississippi, all Dan’s instincts told him that any deputy sheriff would take more satisfaction from shining his light in a colored person’s face than in a white person’s. He wouldn’t choose to sacrifice that pleasure, even for safety’s sake.
And indeed, when Dan said, “I’ll get it,” the deputy said, “You do that,” and continued to direct the hot white beam on L.C., his back turned to the truck. He was still in that position when the brick struck his skull.
FORTY SEVEN
TENTACLES OF GRAIN ELEVATORS, stockyards and feed mills reached out from Chicago’s South Side. As Dan and L.C. got farther in, driving through midday snow flurries, a widening maze of overhead tracks blocked what little light there was. Brownstones rose up on either side of the street, the second-floor windows even with the tracks. Everything was stained with coal dust.
“What you aim to do up here?” Dan asked.
L.C. was watching people hurrying along the sidewalk with their heads down, most of them bundled up in scarves and gloves and heavy overcoats. “Try to get a job.”
“What kind of job?”
“Whatever they is. Fellow I know over on the dago’s place, he got a brother supposed to be here.”
“You know his address?”
“Not yet.”
Dan drove on, following Alvin’s instructions. The tooth L.C. had broken for him the previous night was starting to ache a good bit, and his nose felt like it was broken, too. L.C. had gotten the better of the fight, though Dan had managed to reopen one of the cuts he’d suffered at the hands of Frank Holder.
They’d pulled the deputy back into his car so he wouldn’t freeze to death. Then L.C. tied his wrists together with strips he’d cut off the tarp, and Dan drove the cruiser behind a corn-crib alongside the road. They stayed on backroads for thirty or forty miles, trying to put some distance between themselves and the event. And then, when Dan saw a secluded spot near an abandoned farmhouse, he swerved in, jumped out and ran around in front of the truck. He was about to open the passenger door when it kicked open on its own, and L.C. screamed, “Don’t you even try it.” Dan was already raising his fist, crying something about being turned into a common criminal by somebody too gutless to go fight like everybody else. L.C. quickly slipped aside and cracked him over the ear, and the next thing Dan knew, they were rolling across the frozen ground, spitting and kicking. At some point, he called L.C. a nigger, and L.C. called him one, too, and said he’d root for both the Germans and the Japs until he knew which ones they’d sent Dan to fight.
Long before they ran out of physical energy, they both were low on spirit. When they finally collapsed against the truck, each of them bloody and heaving, Dan said, “Well, goddamn it, L.C., I know it ain’t easy being colored, but this is still the best place around.”
“What—this fucking field we in?”
“This country. America.”
“It might could be,” L.C. said. “But I ain’t gone say till I done seen all the others.”
A few minutes later, they helped each other up, scooped up a little snow to wash off their faces and got back on the road. In the first good-sized town they came to, they stole an Illinois plate off a parked truck and slipped theirs under the seat. In the next town, Dan went into an all-night diner and ordered sandwiches and more coffee, L.C. waiting outside with the engine running.
Dan let him out on Fifty-fifth Street, in an area swarming with sailors. They emerged from restaurants and beer parlors, heading into a stiff wind that blew in off the lake, a fair number of them drunk, their arms thrown over one another’s shoulders, some of them singing, a few looking like they could barely walk.
L.C. reached into the back of the truck, lifted out his guitar and suitcase, then stuck his head inside once more. “Don’t matter what you do with that Bible,” he said, “but don’t let my momma know I ain’t got it. And study that map and find you a different way back. Deputy woke up this morning with the blues
and
a headache, and that’s a nasty combination.”
He started to close the door then, already shivering in the ice-cold wind in his threadbare coat. Dan figured he’d never see him again. “L.C.?” he said.
The dark, impassive face finally broke into a grin. In that instant, Dan’s mind formed an image, labeled it L.C. and filed it away.
“Just can’t say it, huh?” L.C. said. “Me neither. Ain’t that something. Done knowed one another ten years.”
He shut the door and moved off into the crowd.
FORTY EIGHT
HEADING SOUTH, he took a route through Indiana, reaching Indianapolis well after dark. He found a diner there and went in and sat down in a booth at the back. The waitress who took his order, a cute redhead who bore a certain resemblance to his mother, asked where he was from. When he told her, she smiled and said she thought so, that for Christmas last year she’d visited her sister out in Long Beach, California, where she’d gone out with a boy from Mississippi. He was a sailor, she told him, a tall, skinny guy who was just about to ship out, the worst dancer she’d ever seen, but a good sport. She couldn’t remember his name, she admitted, but she did recall the name of the place he came from: Indianola. It had stuck with her, probably, because it was so similar to Indianapolis. Dan said he knew the town well, that he might even have played ball against her friend. That was something, she said a little later, when she brought him the bill. She’d met two different guys from a part of the country she’d never seen, and to think they might’ve been on the same football field just a few years before. He agreed it really was something—and laid a dollar tip on the table.
He got back in the truck and drove on awhile longer, then pulled onto a side road and slept for a couple hours before setting out again. The radio didn’t pick up much in southern Indiana, but he didn’t care. The little towns he passed through were fascinating. One of them, no more than five or six houses and a gas station that looked like it might be out of business, nevertheless displayed a huge sign near its lone intersection:
EXLEY, INDIANA
HOME OF THE 1913 INDIANA STATE
BASKETBALL CHAMPIONS
He wondered where those men were now in November 1943. There sure weren’t enough houses for all of them. Some might be out in the countryside, farmers like their fathers before them, men in their mid- to late forties sleeping peacefully beside their wives, with sons and daughters Dan’s age or even older. Some might have moved away, to nearby towns, to big cities like Indianapolis or Chicago, maybe even as far away as California. Most likely, some of them had fought in the First War. It was possible, too, that one or more had died a long way from home. But it gave him a warm feeling, as he drove south that night, headed back to his own hometown, where, in less than a year, he’d seen both his father and his best friend buried, to know that the people of Exley, Indiana, had not forgotten their champions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
During the writing of this novel, the following sources were invaluable: Stephen E. Ambrose,
Citizen Soldiers;
Carlo D’Este,
Bitter Victory;
Ladislas Farago,
Patton;
Paul Fussell,
Doing Battle;
Judith M. Gansberg, Stalag U. S. A.; Jeffery E. Geiger, German Prisoners of War at Camp Cooke,
California;
Victor Davis Hanson,
The Soul of Battle;
Marie M. Hemphill,
Fevers, Floods and Faith;
John Keegan,
The First World War
and
The Second World War;
David M. Kennedy,
Freedom from Fear;
Robert Kotlowicz,
Before Their Time;
Arnold Krammer,
Nazi Prisoners of War in America;
Colonel Reiner Kriebel and the U. S. Army Intelligence Service, Inside the Afrika Korps, edited by Bruce L. Gudmundsson; Harold P. Leinbaugh and John D. Campbell, The Men of Company K; David Maraniss, When Pride Still Mattered; George S. Patton, War as I Knew It; Hortense Powdermaker, After Freedom; Merrill R. Pritchett and William L. Shea, “The Afrika Korps in Arkansas,”
The Arkansas Historical Quarterly,
vol. 37, no. 1; Ron Robin,
The Barbed Wire College;
Ben Shephard,
A War of
Nerves; Richard S. Warner, “Barbed Wire and Nazilagers: PW Camps in Oklahoma,”
The Chronicles of Oklahoma,
vol. 64, no. 1; and Richard Wittingham,
Martial Justice.
I would also like to thank the following people who provided support and guidance: Linnea Alexander, George Booker, David Borofka, Luis Costa, Scott Ellsworth, David Engle, Lillian Faderman, Victor Hanson, Brad Huff, Phyllis Irwin, Paul Mousseau, Michael Ortiz, Trudy Pace, Amber Qureshi, Annette Trefzer, Dick Warner, Jack Wise and John Yarbrough.
Thanks to Patricia Henley for the drive through Indiana, to Sloan Harris for being the greatest agent alive, and to Ewa, Magda and Tosha for living all these years with a writer.
Lastly, special thanks to my friend and editor, Gary Fisketjon, an artist in his own right.
STEVE YARBROUGH
Prisoners of War
Steve Yarbrough’s honors include the Mississippi Authors Award, the California Book Award, and a third from the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters. The author of two previous novels and three collections of stories, he is a native of the Delta town of Indianola and now lives in Fresno, California.
ALSO BY STEVE YARBROUGH
Visible Spirits
The Oxygen Man
Veneer
Mississippi History
Family Men
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, MARCH 2005
Copyright © 2004 by Steve Yarbrough
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Yarbrough, Steve, [date]
Prisoners of war / Steve Yarbrough.
p. cm.
1. World War, 1939–1945—Prisoners and prisons, American—Fiction.
2. World War, 1939–1945—Mississippi—Fiction. 3. Delta (Miss.: Region)—
Fiction. 4. Germans—Mississippi—Fiction. 5. Prisoners of War—Fiction.
6. Race relations—Fiction. 7. Teenage boys—Fiction.
8. Mississippi—Fiction. 9. Soldiers—Fiction. 10. Escapes—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3575 A717P75 2003
813’.54.—dc21 2003040071
eISBN: 978-0-307-42732-8
v3.0