Prisoners of War by Steve Yarbrough Page B

until a couple years ago. He certainly hadn’t been smiling the last time they’d crossed paths, one Saturday in the Piggly Wiggly parking lot. His shirtfront was unevenly buttoned, his hair uncombed, and his khaki pants had dirt caked on both knees, as if he’d lately been kneeling in a mud hole. “Let me have a word with you,” he said.
    It occurred to Marty that he might want him to talk to his father or grandfather and help secure a loan. By then, the Timms place was failing, and everybody knew it.
    But Jimmy Del Timms didn’t want to borrow anything. Instead, he wanted to give something—namely, advice—and as they sat in the cab of his pickup that morning, two days before Marty was to leave for the induction center, he offered it, staring through the windshield the entire time at the redbrick wall of the grocery store.
    “Don’t never volunteer for nothing, Marty. There’s two other words mean the same thing as
volunteer.
One word’s
fool.
The other one’s
corpse.
You’ll know I’m wrong the day you see a general officer volunteer—volunteer himself, I mean. Then you can say Jimmy Del Timms was a lying son of a bitch. Send me a postcard from wherever you’re at, and I’ll gladly write back and own up.
    “Probably there ain’t no way to get around fighting it. Never is. There’s better and worse in the world—I ain’t one to deny it—but a bullet can’t tell the difference and a shell don’t give a shit. Somewhere in Berlin, there’s a gold-hearted German, but to me right now, he ain’t fit to piss on. That’s a goddamn shame, or call it whatever you take a notion to.
    “So where can you run to, where can you hide? A boy like you ain’t no cotton-eyed joe that can skulk around the rear and clean latrines. You’re tall, you got a military chin and you’ll look good when they line you up and point you toward the Krauts and kick you in the ass. Just make sure when they put their boot up your butt, it comes out with shit on the toe.”
    Marty had a lot to do before he went to Jackson, was already scared to death and didn’t want to hear any more. Telling Mr. Timms he needed to go, he climbed out of the truck and started to walk away. But unlike Billy Barsotti—who’d swaggered around town the week after he enlisted, running his mouth about the horrors he’d wreak on the Japs or the Germans just as soon as he got a chance—he knew perfectly well there was a possibility he’d never return, just as Billy Barsotti would not return, having died on the
Yorktown
at Midway. And if he failed to come back, Jimmy Del Timms might not remember much about him except that he hadn’t felt like listening the last time they met.
    He turned and walked back to the truck. Dan’s father was still sitting there staring at the wall, but at least he’d quit talking.
    “Mr. Timms? If I write to you, will you write me back?”
    “You won’t write, Marty.”
    “Yes sir, I will. I promise.”
    “Naw, son.” He stuck his hand out the window, and Marty took it, careful not to look him in the eye, because he knew that whatever he saw there would only scare him worse. “You may send me a card with your name on it, and it may be in your handwriting,” Jimmy Del Timms said. “But it won’t be you that wrote it.”
    The same pickup truck they’d sat in that morning—a couple years older, with a few more nicks on its fenders—was parked on the turnrow near a green cotton trailer. The yellow rolling store stood on the side of the road, and Marty could see Dan moving around inside, straightening up.
    “You aim to get out here?” he asked Kimball.
    He laughed. “That’s funny. Where I come from, you don’t
aim
anything but a gun.”
    “Yeah? You ever aimed one?”
    “What?”
    “You ever aimed a gun?”
    “During basic, I—”
    “I ain’t talking about basic. I’m talking about aiming a gun at somebody with an intent to squeeze the trigger.”
    “I told you, my dad pulled strings. Yours must’ve,