Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough

unknown country, with dark shapes closing in from all sides.

SEVENTEEN

    WEDNESDAY EVENING, Dan put on his State Guard uniform and drove the truck to town. Alvin had loaned him a few dollars, and he meant to do something he hadn’t done in a good while—treat himself to a burger and a shake. He loved a good burger more than just about anything, and Kelly’s were the best, but he’d been staying away from the snack bar. To begin with, he didn’t have money to waste on restaurant food. More importantly, he didn’t want to encounter Marie Lindsey, as he stood a fair chance of doing at Kelly’s.
    Tonight, though, he wasn’t feeling so cautious. Having his wallet stolen had reminded him that there wasn’t much point in denying these little pleasures. You could hold off and hold off, and the next thing you knew, you might not have anything to buy your pleasure with. You might not even have yourself to please.
    Marie wasn’t in the snack bar, but one of her friends, Sally Mankins, was sitting in a back booth with Tom and June Gaither, whose father had just taken over from their grandfather at the bank. The three of them were still in high school, and when Dan saw the schoolbooks stacked up beside their empty soda glasses, he felt a flush of anger. With Gaither’s luck, the war would end before he ever had to go fight, and in another year or so, they’d all be strolling around the Ole Miss campus, doing whatever college kids did.
    That was the thing about the war: if it ended, he’d be stuck right here for the rest of his life; if it didn’t, he’d be trying to kill people who in most cases wouldn’t be so different from him, and he hadn’t really understood this until he got out in the field with the Germans. His father had attempted to tell him as much, but the way he’d put it didn’t make any sense at the time. “If everybody went naked,” he said, “war wouldn’t work.”
    He and Dan were out back, stacking firewood under the eaves, and the house was empty. Shirley had gone to Jackson to see her ailing sister, and Alvin had business down there anyway, probably with a bootlegger.
    “It’s the uniform does it,” his father said. “Once they put it on you, you start thinking,
I’m green and they’re gray—
or
they’re green and I’m gray.
Or
blue.
Or
brown.
    “Course, the uniform itself ain’t enough. Too many folks got exactly the same one, and how can that be worth having? So they’ll try to instill unit cohesion, but ain’t enough if you only cohere with folks from Loring County, or from Mississippi. You got to cohere with folks from Blytheville, Arkansas, and Bossier City, Louisiana, maybe even some from Illinois. So a bunch of you’ll get the same kind of patch on your shoulder— and it’ll have something to do with making bones.”
    Dan had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Some people thought his daddy was drunk a good bit of the time, but he hardly ever drank. “Sir?” he said.
    “Making bones, Danno, making bones. See, if that patch was a color, it’d have to be red. And anybody wearing it has got to be ready to give up all the red they got in ’em. For their momma, their daddy, for their sister or aunt Sue. Make yourself a bone—but not till you’ve made some other folks bones first.
    “Now, my job in the war was looking after a bunch of four-legged Fords, otherwise known as mules. And even that was about making bones. They sent me over there in the belly of a transport in the spring of ’17, me and a whole drove of the poor beasts. You should’ve seen how they crammed ’em into that ship. Put ’em on a pallet and lowered it down there into the hold and shut ’em up in stalls, and don’t let nobody ever tell you a mule can’t get seasick. Every day, for twenty-four straight days, them mules puked and shit, and I puked and shit right alongside ’em. Difference was, I had to clean up their mess.
    “I made bones out of them mules,” his daddy said, a few