Prisoners of War Read Online Free PDF

time, and he didn’t want
you,
boy,” he’d said, jabbing Biggie so hard in the chest that he almost lost his balance, “because you already had the look of a poor man in your eyes. He wanted him a nice fresh
baby.
”
    There was scarcely a day, hardly an hour even, when Frank failed to recall that conversation. Every time it came surging back in on him, he wanted to fall to his knees, and if he was where nobody could see him, he did exactly that. He’d knelt down in the cotton patch and in the outhouse; he’d even climbed out of his pickup to kneel in the middle of the road. He wasn’t praying when he dropped down, just assuming what he saw as the proper posture for a man who’d called the son he loved names.
    He’d been thinking about that conversation shortly before the colored boy who worked for Alvin Timms stopped the bus near his barn. Holder and three of his hands were in the lot, all of them hot and sweaty, trying to shore up sagging joists in the feed shed. Termites had eaten a good bit of the floor, and as he lay on his back looking up through the rotten boards, sweat stinging his eyes, he found himself thinking that the world, when you got right down to it, was just crawling with vermin. If you added up the creatures that served some purpose, like building something or growing food, then added up the ones that were only here to eat and shit, to hurt and kill, you’d see how far out of balance things really were. He was getting to the point where he didn’t give a damn at all and would just as soon knock the shed down as shore it up. It could cave in while he was under it, for all he cared.
    Then the colored boy parked Alvin’s bus on the side of the road and honked the horn—not once, but twice.
    His son was dead, the termites were eating his feed shed, his cotton crop was so scrawny that he hated for anybody to see it and a nigger felt like he could pull up to his barn and make a ruckus. “Now if that don’t beat the blue-butted devil,” he said. “He think he’s in Chicago?”
    If he’d been the kind of man who reasoned things through, he might have realized that L.C. couldn’t see him because he was under the shed, that he could only see three colored men standing in the yard, that if he’d known a white man was within range of that horn, he would never, under any circumstances, have blown it. But Frank Holder applied reason to hard objects only, to a pump that wouldn’t prime or a hoe that needed filing.
    He pressed his palms against the ground and shoved himself backwards; then, as soon as he’d cleared the shed, he rolled over and bounced up. He was a big man—huge, most folks would’ve said—and when he began to move in a particular direction, people got out of the way. His hired help scattered fast.
    The boy sat at the wheel, fingertips drumming his kneecap, his eyes clamped shut. He was humming.
    Frank smacked the side of the bus with an open hand. He figured that would make the boy’s eyes pop open like those doors on cuckoo clocks, but for some reason they stayed shut. So he slammed the bus again, setting it rocking on its axles. Then the boy took notice.
    “You think that horn’s a trumpet, or
what
?”
    “No sir,” the boy said.
    “Think you one of them nigger bandleaders?”
    “No sir.”
    “I like to rose up and hit my head when that damn thing went off. What you in such a goddamn hurry about?”
    “Mr. Alvin say tend to business and then get on home.”
    “Mr. Alvin does, does he?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “Mr. Alvin know you’re sitting on the bus with your eyes shut and chanting mumbo jumbo?” The boy just looked at him, and his silence was enraging. “Mr. Alvin tell you that when a white person asks you a question, you supply an answer and make it fast?”
    “Yes sir.”
    “So let’s try again, just like before. Because some folks seem like they need to practice. Ready? One, two, three. Mr. Alvin know you’re sitting on the bus with your eyes shut and