Read Online Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough - Free Book Online

too, or else you wouldn’t be here right now.”
    “My daddy didn’t pull shit.” He hopped out of the scout car, jerked the rifle from its boot and experienced a moment of intense satisfaction when Kimball’s eyes doubled in size and his mouth dropped open in the shape of an egg. “Tell you what— I’ll just stay out here and pick cotton and let one of them Afrika Korps fuckers ride back to town with you. How’s that sound?” Slinging the rifle onto his shoulder, he started for the school bus.
    Dan stepped out, wiping his nose on the back of his hand. “Man, I took a sneezing fit about the time I crossed that little bridge over Choctaw Creek this morning and like to run right in the water.”
    “Has everybody in the world but me got trouble with their nose?”
    “I sure do.”
    “You reckon Choctaw Creek’s deep enough to drown in?”
    “Could be. Why?”
    Marty turned and nodded back at the scout car, where Kimball was climbing out, stepping carefully to avoid stirring up dust.
    “He in charge of you, or you in charge of him?”
    “Ain’t neither one of us in charge of nobody, including ourselves. You got a lesson or two to learn, pal.”
    “You in charge of them Germans, ain’t you?”
    “Nominally.”
    “What the hell does that mean?”
    “I don’t know, but the fellow I heard say it was always getting laid.”
    Kimball straggled up, then reached out to shake hands with Dan. “Name’s Kimball,” he said. “I’m from California.”
    While he explained what Dan could expect in basic training, Marty let his eyes scan the field. One of the prisoners, the tallest, had pulled his sack off, and it was lying on the ground at his feet. He did a rapid set of knee bends, then began bobbing up and down in a series of toe touches.
    “What’s that lanky bastard up to?” Marty asked.
    “He’ll do it every once in a while,” Dan said. “Keeps at it for a few minutes, then puts the sack on and goes back to work.”
    The prisoner with the disfigured face was picking toward them, not far away, and he looked determined to avoid breaking a sweat. He’d study a boll for a moment or two before reaching for it, and after pulling the fiber free, he’d hold it to his nose and sniff it. “Him over there,” Marty said, pointing, “the one with the fucked-up face, he ever give you a hard time?”
    “No. He’s actually the only one you can talk to.”
    “How’s that? You been studying German?”
    “I reckon I picked up a few words in the last week,” Dan said. “But you don’t have to know German to talk to him.”
    Kimball raised his forearm, holding his wrist much too close to Marty’s face. “Almost sixteen hundred, Stark. We better get our asses back.”
    Marty shoved his hand aside. “What the hell you mean, you don’t have to know German?”
    The force of the question seemed to take Dan by surprise, and for an instant Marty wondered what his friend might’ve heard. He wouldn’t put it past his father to get in touch with Eastland, to see what he could find out, and the senator would get answers. And while his dad would hardly broadcast the results of that inquiry, Mrs. Bivens might—if it came up in a tender, postcoital moment.
    “Well,” Dan said, “that fellow with the purple face can speak English.”
    On the twelfth of July, just east of Gela, someone spoke English well enough to lure Raymond Sample and two lost paratroopers from the Eighty-second into a grove of olive trees. Whoever it was had cried
Jesus
and
Sweet Mary, mother of God,
without the trace of an accent, calling for Berea, Ohio, to open its arms and welcome him home. Then he fired a burst from a Schmeisser that sounded like an outboard motor starting up. And for a moment, lying there spread-eagled, Marty convinced himself he was back on the lake near Loring with Dan and his daddy and the no-good uncle, who carried whiskey in a quart jar and caught nothing but a gar, which Jimmy Del Timms insisted a true sportsman would