Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough Page B

Peninsula. The unit Brinley had belonged to, he said, was completely wiped out.
    For the longest time, as they stood side by side at the urinal, Brinley failed to produce. Marty had been out in the sun all day, driving from field to field with Kimball, and when they got back to camp, he’d drunk about a gallon of water; had his bladder not been full, he would’ve shaken himself, zipped up and left, to spare Brinley the embarrassment. But that, evidently, was the furthest thing from Brinley’s mind. When Marty finally finished and turned to go, he realized Brinley had not come there to piss but to jerk off, and even that endeavor wasn’t working out. “I could do it,” he said, “if I could just concentrate. But Christ Jesus, I just can’t.”
    Marty had no idea what he ought to say. But he knew, as surely as he’d ever known anything, that to simply walk away would be even more indecent than Brinley’s behavior.
    “I had an aunt back in Saint Joe,” Brinley said, giving up and tucking himself in, “my father’s sister. A real nice woman, big and kind of tall, most people would probably say a little homely, because her face was on the rough side. She taught little kids Sunday school—taught me one year, too, but she was always careful not to favor me over any of the others. That’s just the kind of person she was. She clerked in the Woolworth’s on North First, and sometimes, when the woman who took tickets at the theater was sick, she’d fill in for her.
    “I guarantee you she never had a dirty thought in her life, probably never said a cussword or took a drink. Never did anything bad to anybody—I mean, this was just a real good person we’re talking about. But that don’t count for much, does it? She died about two years ago. My dad wrote me a letter when I was in basic. She was only fifty when she got some kind of cancer and they amputated a leg. That didn’t save her, though. It took her a long time to die, and while she was sick, my uncle Owen started running around with other women. He wasn’t even there the night she died.
    “And that’s who I’m trying to think about,” Brinley said. “Thinking about doing it with her after she’s already lost her leg and Uncle Owen don’t have no use for her. I know it’s wrong, and that’s why I can’t concentrate. The rest of the time, when I’m not trying to do it, she’s all I think about.”
    “I meant to go to a whore,” Marty said. “A colored one. They’re down there on Church Street every night. At least that’s what folks say.”
    “I been with colored women,” Brinley said. “In California, before I shipped out. Hell, out there you can’t always tell what somebody is. Got Mexican mixed in with colored and sometimes Nip, too. I fucked a Nip in Long Beach. Never thought a thing about it.”
    “I wanted a colored whore because I figured she’d hate me.”
    “Makes sense that she would. Not saying anything against you, understand, but you’re from around here, and you all don’t treat colored people too good.”
    “That’s a fact.”
    “Funny they’d send you back home, though—and thank God they didn’t do it to me. Saint Joe’s the last place in the world I’d like to be.”
    “I guarantee you there’s worse places than Saint Joe, wherever the hell it is. But I reckon that’s something you know, ain’t it?”
    Brinley’s face, which had displayed such innocent bafflement at his inability to masturbate, now took on an altogether different cast, hard and sharp. “There ain’t no good places left,” he said. “Not for people like you and me.”
    He left Marty standing alone in the latrine, somehow feeling as if he were the one who’d gotten caught milking cock. They hadn’t spoken again since. Whenever they passed each other, on the way to the mess hall or Supply, Brinley ignored Marty, just as Marty ignored him.
    In the twilight, at the southwest corner of the compound, the one person he couldn’t