Every once in a while, Moss sat in, but only every once in a while. The gods might have designed poker as a way to separate him from his money. In a poker game, you were either a shark or you were bait. In the courtroom, he’d been a shark. In the air, he’d been a shark-till a Confederate took a bite out of his fighter. At the poker table, he was bait.
Other captured officers came in out of the rain. Some of them sat down on their bunks. Some of them lay down. Two or three went to sleep. Some men seemed to go into hibernation here, sleeping fourteen or sixteen or eighteen hours a day. Geneva Convention rules said officers didn’t have to work. The sleepy ones took not working to an extreme. Moss didn’t know whether to envy them or to give them a good swift kick in the ass to get their motors started.
As it happened, he didn’t have to boot them today. Confederate guards took care of that. They burst into the barracks, submachine guns at the ready. “Everybody up!” they shouted. “Out of the sack, you lazy fuckers!” Even the yelling didn’t roust one POW. He could have slept through the Trump of Doom, but not through getting thrown out of bed onto the floor.
“What the hell?” he said plaintively, picking himself up.
No one paid any attention to him. The guards didn’t pay attention to any of the prisoners once they were out of the bunks. They paid attention to the bunks themselves, and to the number of slats that held each one up. They were not top-quality human material, to put it mildly-if they had been, they would have been up at the front. Some of them seemed to have trouble counting to eight. Good thing there aren’t eleven slats, Moss thought. They’d have to take off their shoes.