Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough

that weekend,” he was saying while he drove. “L.A., by the way, isn’t as you probably imagine it. Hollywood’s Hollywood, and Beverly’s Beverly, but Pasadena’s Pasadena and no rose at all. What I’m saying is this shit about California being the Golden State’s only partly true. It’s a little bit golden—I’d be the last to deny it—but don’t kid yourself: it’s mostly made of copper.” Sometimes he sounded as though he feared that once the war ended, Marty and his relatives would load up the jalopy and head for the Imperial Valley, in which case he didn’t want their disillusionment on his conscience.
    There were days when Marty felt like leveling the Lee-Enfield and spraying his brains all over whatever field they were driving past at that moment. What prevented him was the realization that Kimball would never see the results, whereas he would have to.
    While Kimball ran his mouth as if it were an entry in the Belmont Stakes, Marty stared at the countryside. Tin cans, most of them bereft of their labels, littered the ditches, and the road signs were rusted and full of bullet holes. Some of the tenant shacks that’d had folks in them two years ago were abandoned now, their roofs falling in, floor joists collapsed. You could drive for miles without seeing a single windowpane intact.
    Ever since he’d gotten home, he’d been feeling like the whole world was in a state of rot and decay, and he kept smelling odors that reminded him of rancid meat. He’d lie on his cot every night, doing his best not to think about smells, or trying to think of nice ones—the scent of honeysuckle, say, or perfume. But when he finally got all the stink out of his nostrils and fell asleep, the dreams would start. They always involved naked bodies, or at least parts of naked bodies. Sometimes the parts looked as if they’d come off not a person but a statue, because they were hard and smooth and white as chalk. Once, he’d dreamed that he saw his buddy Raymond’s head and torso protruding from a pile of pale arms, legs, buttocks and shoulders. None of the other parts looked like they belonged to Raymond, but in that kind of jumble, you couldn’t say for sure.
    Last night in his dream, he’d reached out to fondle a woman’s breast, but the second he touched her flesh, his hand went right through it, into her heart and out her shoulder blade, and then her body caved in beneath his weight, both of them dissolving into white dust. He woke up soaking wet, and his sweat stank like death.
    Up ahead, near a bend in the road, seven or eight prisoners were in the field, their cotton sacks dragging along behind them. The land was worked by a man named Ed Mitchell, who farmed on the Sixteenth Section and still plowed with mules.
    Kimball pulled the scout car to the shoulder. Mitchell was out in the field himself, dragging a sack, followed by his wife and three black kids with their mother. He looked up, saw the car and dropped his sack.
    Marty climbed out, but Kimball said, “All this dust has got my hay fever in overdrive.” He withdrew a handkerchief from his pocket and polished his nose. “I’ll just wait right here.”
    Marty jumped the ditch and walked over to Mitchell, who grinned shyly, displaying two rows of grayish teeth as oddly canted as old gravestones. “Boy,” he said, “I don’t know whether to shake your hand or salute you.”
    “A handshake’ll do,” Marty said, and they shook. “Them Jerries been behaving?”
    “They ain’t bad. Not
a
tall.” Mitchell pulled out a tin of Blood Hound snuff. “Want some?”
    “Believe I’ll pass, but much obliged.”
    Mitchell took a pinch, put it in his mouth and stuck the tin back in his pocket. “I been listening, trying to see if I can understand anything they say, but I can’t puzzle it out. Don’t sound like nothing I ever heard.”
    “Any of ’em pick a hundred pounds yet?”
    “That’n over yonder.” He pointed a long, skinny finger at a chunky