Free Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough Page B

removed, most of them lay on their backs or leaned against the display cases. The only exception was the tall one who was always doing his calisthenics out in the field. He sat up straight, in the very center of the aisle, hands resting on his knees.
    Dan had no choice but to return them to camp in the rolling store. His mother took the truck to town every day, now that she had a job, and his uncle was over in Greenville, cooking up some deal he said would be even more profitable than the sanitary napkins. He’d promised to get back before quitting time, but he hadn’t made it.
    “What you say?” L.C. asked.
    “Swee Spats a Natter.”
    “What about it?”
    “This morning I was over on the Teague place, and this little colored boy that was out in the field with his momma comes over and asks me if I got any Swee Spats a Natter. At least I think that’s what he called it. I told him I didn’t know what the hell that was.”
    “Course you do.” L.C. pointed at the display case containing patent medicines. “Yonder’s two bottles of it.”
    Dan slowed so he could look over his shoulder. “Where?”
    L.C. bounced down off the drink box, slid open the glass door and lifted out a blue bottle, then held it up to Dan.
Sweet Spirits of Niter,
the label read.
    “Might as well be speaking different languages,” L.C. said. “We don’t understand y’all, and y’all don’t understand us.” He stuck the bottle back into the display case and closed the door. “Just like these Germans.”
    It had rained hard yesterday, and the road was a mess. Ordinarily, Dan wouldn’t have set men to picking in such wet conditions. But before leaving that morning, Alvin had told him that rain was forecast again for the end of the week. “Better get that cotton while you can,” he’d said. “They got them tower driers over at the gin now—it don’t matter if the stuff’s a little damp.” So Dan had collected the prisoners first thing, before his mother took the pickup into town.
    The closer he got to the highway, the worse the road looked. Tractors and cotton trailers had churned it into a huge batch of fudge, everybody trying to beat the next front. Several times the wheels spun on him, and he came close to getting stuck.
    His uncle had bought the buses from some school district way up north, someplace that must’ve had a fair amount of snow, because they both had four-wheel drive. And given this mess, he decided to engage it.
    Once all four wheels were pulling, the driving was much easier. But a few minutes later, when he turned onto Highway 47 and tried to disengage, something went wrong. The steering suddenly stiffened—he could hardly turn the wheel. Hearing a grinding noise, he let off the accelerator. Instead of slowing gradually, the bus slammed to a quick halt, as though he’d leaned on the brakes.
    “Goddamn,” he said. “The transmission’s all screwed up.”
    In some strange way, it encapsulated everything that had gone wrong since that day last winter when he’d walked into the house and found his father’s body. From that time on, it had been like he was trying to go backwards and forwards at once, like his own internal gear works were grinding themselves to bits.
    He thought he might lay his head against the wheel and start crying. He was stuck six miles from town with a busload of POWs, and the only person who might help him, L.C., was just as alien to him as the Germans. For a moment, he felt the only thing to do was get mad. “If a cousin to one of them fellows sends me home in a box,” he said, nodding his head to the back of the bus but looking at L.C., “you won’t shed a goddamn tear, will you?”
    To his surprise, L.C. slammed his fist down on the drink box, and several of the Germans flinched. “Why you ask
me
that? Just ’cause you done tore up your uncle’s transmission? See, that’s how y’all do. Everything come right back round to you. I been in a box my whole life, but has your ass