Free Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough

offer the means, but his feet still seemed like they were stuck in that gumbo. Even if he found some way to pull them loose and set out on Highway 47 north, he wouldn’t make it far before an MP or one of those roving fools from the Office of Civil Defense stopped him. Once that happened, it wouldn’t be any time before they’d discover he didn’t have a draft card and put him in uniform. And he’d be damned if he meant to die like a dog for folks who thought he was a mule.
    He ate another piece of fish and let Doll pour him another sip of bootleg whiskey. After the women cleared the dishes away, Burns and another man lifted the door off the oil drums and laid it flat on the ground. L.C. went off to pee in the bushes. When he returned, he sat down in a ladder-back chair, placed both feet on the door and pulled his guitar out of the cottonseed sack.
    One of the men said, “When you gone learn you some of that bottleneck?”
    “He don’t need no bottleneck,” John Burns said. “This nigger got fifteen fingers.”
    L.C. set the guitar on his left knee, which everybody thought looked funny, but it was the way old Fulsome Carthage had taught him to play. Fulsome had also told him not to wrap his thumb around the top of the fretboard like most folks did. “You wants to keep it flush with the neck,” he’d said, offering a demonstration. He made L.C. clip the nails on his left hand down to nothing, while growing a monstrous one on his picking thumb. He mixed up an awful concoction that smelled strongly of cat piss, said it would strengthen the nail and told L.C. to drink it three times a week. When he’d asked what was in it, Fulsome said, “It best behoove you not to know.”
    He began to pick a rolling riff, not knowing where he was going or how he meant to get there, stomping down hard on that weather-beaten door, closing his eyes and thinking about feet you couldn’t tell from the dirt they stood on, a man growing right up out of the ground.
    “I
mean
!” a woman yelled.
    “Sing about the bush and the bower,” John Burns said. He used both terms for the place between a woman’s legs, though L.C. had told him bower didn’t cut it, that as far as he was concerned, it sounded like something off a battleship. Burns claimed that was all right, since you entered it a man and came out destroyed. But L.C. had more on his mind than bush and bower.
    go down to the deadenin’

see the cottonmouth crawl

see the Devil with a cane pole

on his shoulder y’all
     
    spirit fish be talkin’

say it time to go

Devil say he gone catch you

ain’t gone see no She-car-go
     
    “How come y’allways studying Chicago?” Burns hollered, shaking his rear right in L.C.’s face. “Up there, your young ass’ll turn to black ice.”
    man say peoples fightin’

got to do your turn

day that bullet find you

you gone have to face that worm
     
    death tap you on the shoulder

done too late to move your feet

this train bound for Hades

it time you take a seat
     
    John Burns was twirling his shirt in the air as he and Doll were banging hips. Over near the outhouse, a pair of bodies writhed and squirmed together, and Cooter Sam, from the Moreli place, was doing the Lucky Duck, waddling with his woman to the woodpile and back.
    Catching L.C.’s eye, John shook his head. “You gets less out of being a nigger,” he said, “than anybody I knows.”
    In the morning, he lay on a thin pallet, with a pounding headache, listening to John and Doll, no more than a few feet away, in the bed across the room. The floor sounded like it could cave in at any minute.
    Forty-nine percent of L.C. wanted to crawl over to the door and disappear as fast as he could, but this was an instance of majority rule. Doing his best not to make any noise, he shifted his position, raising his head. Moaning, Doll lay on her back, palms locked around her ankles, while Burns pumped away between her legs. If he’d been engaged in such activity, L.C. would have