Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough Page A

flecks of white foam on his lips. “I made bones out of boys like myself, and they made a bone out of me.”
    Two days later, on the afternoon his mother was due back from Jackson, Dan got off the school bus, walked into the house and found his father in a pool of red, still clutching his pistol.
    Lizzie was behind the counter, wearing the same outfit she always had on. It looked like a nurse’s uniform. Dan had never once seen her out of it, not even on those few occasions when they’d met in the street. She was the face of Kelly’s snack bar, a small dark-haired woman who could have been any age between thirty-five and fifty.
    “Hadn’t seen you in a while, soldier,” she said, setting a glass of water before him.
    “I’m not a soldier. Not yet anyhow.”
    “You will be. Before long, they’ll have stray dogs in uniform. Fact is, they already got one or two.” She glanced at the far end of the snack bar, where the little sergeant from Camp Loring was snickering over a stack of comic books. She shook her head, then leaned over the counter as if intending to say something mean, and her breasts almost spilled out of her blouse.
    He must have taken too long to look up. “They better put you in the artillery,” Lizzie said. “You’re pretty good at zeroing in on targets.”
    He couldn’t decide whether to act like he didn’t know what she meant or to hang his head and apologize. “Sorry,” he finally mumbled.
    When she laid her hand on top of his, he almost jumped off the stool. “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “What do you want?”
    “A burger,” he blurted. “And a shake.”
    “Hot and cold. You got it, Captain.” She turned and walked over to the grill, where the elderly Negro fry cook stood turning burgers. “One more,” she said.
    The burger was big and juicy, the milk shake so thick, he had to eat it with a spoon. He was just finishing when he heard the door open. In the mirror behind the counter, atop the inverted stacks of cups, his eyes met Marie’s. Her hair looked different, like she might have dyed it. He didn’t remember it being such a white shade of blond.
    “When she gets to be about thirty,” his mother had told him last fall, “Marie won’t be worth having. Every woman reaches that point sooner or later, but for her, it’ll be sooner.” That was all she had to say on the subject, and he was glad, because by then Marie had been wearing his letter sweater for more than a month. She wore it to school every day until the Monday after his father’s suicide, when she handed it back to him, washed and neatly folded, in the hallway between classes and said she couldn’t see him anymore. When he asked her why, she said she was sorry, then turned and walked into the girls’ bathroom.
    At that point, he made what the principal told him was the worst mistake of his life: he pushed the door open and barged in after her, shouting and kicking the doors to the stalls, knocking one right off the hinges. Girls began screaming, cowering in the corners, and it took the chemistry teacher and the baseball coach to haul him out of there. Later, in his office, the principal said he wasn’t going to expel him, because he was so close to graduating, but that if Dan didn’t get hold of himself, he’d end up like some of the other men in his family. That was a hard thing to say, he added, and he knew it was a hard thing for Dan to hear right now. Then he got up from his desk—a big man who doubled as the football coach, and who’d paddled boys so hard that they had to ice their butts down—and put his arms around him, pulling him to his chest. “Aw, Danny,” he said. “Goddamn it, son. Goddamn it.”
    Marie wouldn’t say
Goddamn it
now, but Dan bet she was thinking it, wondering, in her surprise, why she’d picked tonight to come to the snack bar. Spooning up the last of his milk shake, he let her have a few seconds to decide what to do. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Gaither leaning