Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough Page A

young man with rosy cheeks, who, Marty had noticed, was surprisingly agile in the soccer matches they sometimes played after supper. “That little devil weighed up nearly two eighty yesterday,” Mitchell said. “And hadn’t never seen a cotton stalk till this time last week.” He shook his head. “It’s a damn shame to be so far from home, no older’n he is. He’s a good-natured boy, too.”
    The sensation Marty had been experiencing lately—that something in his chest was dissolving, moving from one state to another, from solid to viscous liquid—came on strongly. When would it stop? When he turned into a puddle on the side of the road? “It probably ain’t all that long,” he said, “since he was pumping bullets into some other good-natured boys.”
    “Yeah, but if he done that, I bet it was because they made him.”
    “Mr. Mitchell, can’t nobody make somebody kill somebody else. If you do it, you do it. If you don’t, you don’t. Two fingers can’t pull the same trigger.”
    For a moment or two, a wall of woods on the horizon absorbed Mitchell’s attention. He studied it with wonder, as if the trees had sprung up recently and caught him unawares. “You ain’t seen old Danny boy, have you?” he finally asked.
    “Yes sir. Saw him the day I got back.”
    “Reckon you heard about his daddy.”
    “Yes sir.”
    Mitchell pursed his lips. “Sad story.”
    “Why you reckon he did it?”
    “Well, there’s them that says this—and there’s them that says that.”
    “What do you say?”
    “I don’t say nothing, because it ain’t nothing I know a thing about.”
    “If you knew anything, would you say it?”
    “Well,” Mitchell said, “I can’t say as I would.”
    Understanding that for the time being he’d just heard Ed Mitchell’s last word on that or any other subject, Marty asked him to let them know if any problems developed, told him good-bye, then went back and climbed into the scout car.
    As he and Kimball drove past Dan’s house later that afternoon, he checked to see if Shirley Timms might be in the yard or on the porch, but she wasn’t.
    He’d spotted her downtown the day after he got back. He’d been standing before the magazine rack in the Piggly Wiggly, staring down at the very spot where he used to sit chewing bubble gum and reading
Marvel Comics,
and when he finally looked up, she was just going by on the other side of the plate-glass window. She’d aged, he could tell, but was still a pretty woman.
    One day when he was twelve or thirteen, he’d been out in the pasture behind the Timms house with Dan, hitting fly balls, and his friend had jammed a pitch in on his knuckles, the seams tearing the skin off in three or four places. Mrs. Timms bathed his knuckles in some kind of salty solution, then held a cold cloth pressed against them for several minutes, and while doing that she said he had nice hands. “Some folks would say too nice for a young man. But if you ask me, every man ought to have hands like these.”
    If she noticed the flame that lit his cheeks, she never let on. She waited till he quit bleeding; then she painted the skinned areas with Methylate, applied a bandage and suggested he run along. For a good while afterwards, he kept wishing he could call her by her first name, rather than having to say
Mrs. Timms.
And he couldn’t be around Dan’s father, whom he’d always liked, without feeling vaguely resentful.
    Mr. Timms never picked up on the resentment. He grinned at Marty when they met on the street, slapping his back and asking how football practice was coming, wondering if Loring would ever figure out how to beat Indianola. Folks considered Jimmy Del Timms a little unusual, mostly because it didn’t seem to worry him that he’d never made much money, but everybody respected him. He’d won the Distinguished Service Cross during the First War, been wounded twice and cooped up for six weeks in some underground prison.
    He always had a smile ready up