Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough Page A

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.

FIFTEEN

    ORDERED TO PATROL the perimeter after supper, Marty paused near the fence to look at a thicket, about a hundred yards away, at the edge of Otis Heslep’s field. On the far side of the trees was the field itself, and beyond it a gravel road and Red Gillespie’s place. If you flew over Loring County, everything would be broken up into neat, orderly squares, this man’s world ending where that one’s began, much as it had been since the early settlers moved in, poisoning and then burning the trees and clearing the land.
    He was no stranger to the notion of boundaries, of lines that separated, but until now he’d always thought of them as flimsy, just some vague notion of how things ought to be. Yet there was a big difference between being on the outside of a fenced enclosure and being on the inside, between being in uniform and out of it, between one uniform and another. And between those who’d answered the call to murder and those who’d never heard it, the difference was huge.
    The majority of the guards, like Kimball, had fathers who could, and would, demand favors. One of them, a boy from Tampa named Huggins, told Marty that his daddy had chosen the University of Florida over Yale because his grandfather refused to let him take his valet up to Connecticut, for fear that northern exposure would corrupt his black character. Huggins didn’t know whether his family had interceded with the army on his behalf, and he didn’t much care. It wouldn’t have bothered him one bit, he said, to serve overseas. He’d been in the ring, beaten the shit out of others and gotten the shit beat out of him, and his little brother had once shot him on a squirrel hunt. Somebody somewhere had a reason for keeping him stateside, and he guessed it was a good one. The Hugginses owned a company that used to manufacture tennis nets but now was turning out camouflage helmet netting. And if the war lasted long enough, he might have to go home and take over, since neither his father nor his grandfather was in particularly good health.
    The few guards who’d seen action rarely talked to one another, though every now and then Marty would catch himself staring at one of them and sometimes he’d feel somebody studying him. Whenever that happened, both men would look away, as if the fleeting glimpse alone had already revealed too much.
    Four or five days ago, in the latrine, he’d been watching his urine splash into the trough when a guard named Brinley walked up beside him and unzipped. Kimball, the camp gossip, claimed that he’d been in the Philippines with MacArthur, but that a wound, possibly self-inflicted, got him evacuated to Australia a few days before Homma drove the Americans and Filipinos onto the Bataan