Ken's War Page 2

  Bellamy slowed the jeep.

  “Are my quarters nearby?” Paderson asked.

  “You’re lookin’ at your hooch right there.” Major Bellamy spat and parked the jeep in the middle of the dirt road. He was the only man on earth whose whiskers were heavier than Ken’s dad’s. Wiry hairs furred his forearms and knuckles.

  A white house with gray tiles covering its low sloped roof, that mimicked the slopes of the forested mountains behind it, was no larger than the combined space of the living room and dining room of the Padersons’ barracks house back in Pennsylvania. The west wall, with its two rectangular windows oriented horizontally low to the ground, was as aloof as a blank stare.

  Bellamy found the key to the only exterior door of the house. The interior—plain, white, empty but for shadows and mildew—was as uncommunicative as the exterior. He gave a tour while remaining in one spot in the middle of what Ken supposed was where you cooked meals, ate them and watched TV. But there was no TV. In fact, he stepped outside and checked the roof, no antenna.

  Bellamy pointed to a door with what looked like waxed paper stretched between the wooden frames. He said, “Behind that shoji, that’s one bedroom. This shojii opens to the other bedroom.”

  “What’s show-gee?” Ken asked.

  “Toilet paper,” Bellamy answered. “These here doors are made of toilet paper. Each room at six tatamis is large enough for one futon and your ditty bag.”

  The Padersons looked in upon two very small rooms, the floors covered entirely with straw mats. Apart from bare light bulbs hanging from wires in the ceiling, the mats were the only furnishing in the so-called bedrooms. When his dad was irritated, he squeezed his lips together. They were squeezed together now.

  “What’s in here?” Ken pointed to a door.

  “You live here,” Bellamy said. “Don’t ask me. Go look.”

  Ken opened the door. A rectangular porcelain basin with a drain hole at one end had been sunk into the floor. Oddly, there were ridges like tread marks on both sides of the basin rim. A cord hung from the low ceiling. He looked expectantly to his dad for information, but he was as perplexed as Ken.

  “Don’t know what that is?” Bellamy asked.

  “A sink?” Ken guessed.

  “The head. The loo, latrine, shitter, pot, crapper, privy, can, W.C., thunderbox, throne, john, toilet.”

  “Get out! What’s this?” A large square stainless steel tub with sides that came up to Ken’s first ribs squatted in the corner.

  “Bathtub. Or you can twaddle on down to the ofuro in the village.” Bellamy’s eyebrows lifted suggestively.

  “Dad, what’s a furro?”

  “Let’s get on with it.” Paderson jerked his sleeve away from Ken’s tugs. “Show me the warehouse.”

  Furro must be a Japanese swear word, Ken thought.

  Bellamy led them down a footpath running along the top of a dirt bulwark bordering the rice paddy, through a grove of pines, and onto a shelf of black rock overlooking terraced rice paddies which shone like hammered silver flecked with green. A man standing in one of the silver ponds beat a sack against the corner of a bamboo shack that stood crookedly on a dirt mound. Each soft whapping sound reached Ken’s ears a delayed moment after the man had whapped the sack against the hut. From a nearby tree, a bird took flight, its black wings pumping the air. He marveled at its slow, spiraling ascension and placed his hopes on that bird. Hopes that he’d be OK here and would soon be riding in an airplane, flying off the island, returning to the familiar landscape he called home.

  “I didn’t realize the depot would be this small.” Pointing to a Quonset hut near the black rock ledge, Paderson asked Bellamy, “What kind of capacity requirements planning and lot-sizing techniques do you utilize?”

  Bellamy spat.

  Paderson went on. “With our troops in Vietnam, priority control and safety stock levels are crucial. I brought along implementation procedures for cycle time reduction and FIFO—”

  “Don’t jack me off with that war college shit. Your task is simple. Receive it. Store it. Ship it. Don’t complicate things. You got yourself a boondoggle here courtesy of Uncle Sam.”

  Ken could have told Bellamy that his father didn’t want a boondoggle. Not here.

  A man wearing wrinkled, sweat-stained fatigues, and whose regulation haircut had grown out months, if not years ago, yelled with mock annoyance. He shooed a flock of laughing, squawking Japanese children out of the Quonset hut. Like geese flying in formation, the children fluidly changed course and veered toward Ken who was too stunned to dodge out of their path. They clamored over him. Pinched his arms. Tugged at his clothing. They fingered his hair and shouted incomprehensible syllables that sounded like “Guy jean! Guy jean!” He raised his arms to repel them.

  The shaggy-haired man in fatigues with private first class insignias on his shoulders and “Abernathy” on his nametag shouted more strange syllables, causing the children to scatter and dissolve into the murky pine grove. Their voices trailed after them like twinkling lights.

  “What’d that man say, Dad?”

  “Hell if I know,” Bellamy answered Ken’s question. “It’s all Greek to me.” He laughed at his own stupid joke.

  “What’s that dirtball doing here?” Captain Paderson asked, jabbing his thumb toward Abernathy.

  PFC Abernathy approached Bellamy and calmly looked at Paderson and Ken. After a long pause he said, with no particular emotion, “This isn’t Kansas, Toto.” His face broke into an easy smile.

  Paderson’s disapproving glare snuffed Ken’s chuckle that escaped like a lonely hiccup.

  Directing his question to the wild-haired man, who in his mind had to go by the nickname Wizard, Ken asked, “What’s guy jean? Those Jap kids kept saying guy jean and pulled my hair and stuff.”

  “Gaijin is foreigner. We will be gaijin regardless of how long we live in the Land of the Rising Sun.”

  “I can’t stand them,” Ken said. “They pulled my hair.”

  “They pulled your hair because it’s red. It dates back to the days when seafaring Dutch merchants traveled here and set up a trading post in Nagasaki harbor. Since that time red hair has been associated in the Japanese mind with the Dutch propensity to maintain a prophylactic level of insobriety. Red hair equals drunkenness.” At last a man, who in spite of his ragtag, non-regulation appearance, could answer your questions. Now if only Ken could understand it.

  The three men walked toward the Quonset hut.

  “You got bombs and guns in there?” Ken wanted to know. He followed them into the hut.

  Inside the Quonset hut were shelves and wooden crates with USARJ stenciled on them. Paderson, Ken and Bellamy sidled up and down the narrow aisles. Paderson disapproved of the slanted shelving system until Bellamy told him that small innovations like rims on the cantilevered shelves and joints that flexed, instead of breaking under stress, prevented inventory damage, and destruction during earthquakes.

  Earthquakes?

  “Inventory,” Paderson said, and spat, an act Ken, who’d never seen him spit before except at the sink when brushing his teeth, concluded was a custom practiced in Japan. Ken tried to work up saliva, but his mouth was too dry to spit.

  The inventory consisted of ten box lots of cream of tartar, four hundred cans of black olives (with pits), fifteen doors belonging to the driver’s side of camouflaged jeeps, and gallons and gallons of isopropyl alcohol, among other equally uninteresting things.

  “The Army’s trash comes home to roost.” Bellamy looked directly at Paderson and bared his teeth in an ape-like smile.

  “Where’s the staff duty roster, then?” Paderson asked.

  “There’s your staff.” Bellamy thrust his chin at the scruffy man in sweaty fatigues sitting at an abused desk. “Don’t let Private First Class Abernathy’s Section Eight get-up fool you. He ain’t crazy. If TAACOM requisitions it, he can locate it. He can find ice cubes in the desert. Hot rum toddies in the Arctic. A whore in a...” Bellamy g
rinned stupidly for Ken’s benefit. “Pardon my French.”

  Having been an army brat his entire life, Ken was fluent in French. He eased on over to Wizard who, with the delicate movements and concentration of a dentist, was cutting food on a plate and feeding tidbits to a enormous, orange cat dancing on its hind legs. Neither Paderson nor Ken had eaten for a long time, not counting the lieutenant colonel’s green tea. Whatever Wizard was slicing with his knife twitched.

  “It’s still alive!” Ken said.

  Wizard seemed not to have heard. He sliced a filet off the quivering fish. He rolled the slice into a cylinder with his chopsticks and dipped it into a little dish of green goop. His eyes closed with apparent ecstasy as he chewed the raw fish. He opened his eyes, but didn’t focus on anything—his gaze was distant and glassy. “Would you care for a taste? Neko likes it.” Neko: sumo wrestler of the cat world.

  Ken shook his head emphatically. “Nah, give the fish to the cat.”

  The phone rang.

  “Hold it!” Listening, Wizard sat up straighter and straighter as he transcribed the message on a pad of paper. He yelled for Bellamy.

  “Yo!” came Bellamy’s response from deep among the shelves.

  “Typhoon alert. Condition 6.”

  “Heard already,” Bellamy replied. “I’m heading back to Okinawa right about...now.”

  Wizard told Ken, “Condition 6: destructive winds and severe rain can hit within six hours. Do not travel. Tie down loose items. Tape your windows. Stock up on fresh water and nonperishable foods. Have candles and flashlights at the ready.”

  “Is a typhoon the same as a hurricane?”

  “More or less. Without the trailer courts. Last year a typhoon caught us unawares. The winds drove the rain sideways.” Wizard slashed his hand through the air horizontally. “The rice crop was washed away. Do you see that brown stain along the wall?”

  Ken nodded.

  “That’s from the mudslide.”

  “We don’t get mudslides back in Pennsylvania,” Ken said as a way to point out the superior qualities of his country.

  Wizard went on. “Trees blown by the winds blocked the paths and roads so that before victims could be rescued, branches had to be cleared away. The only structure left standing in the village was the torii at the Shinto temple. People were crushed in their collapsed houses and animals were injured or killed by flying debris. A boy, about your age I’d estimate, was discovered alive thirty-five hours after the typhoon had hit. He was trapped under his pregnant mother’s corpse. She was trapped under a fallen railroad bridge. The only way to save the boy was to saw the mother’s body in half.” He flipped the fish over and carved a thin filet off its shivering side.

  Ken heard a squeak come from the vicinity of the flayed fish.

  “The rescue team had no other options,” Wizard said. “They cut through her stomach and the fetus.”

  “What’s this?” Paderson yelled.

  Ken jumped when his dad’s voice blasted behind him.

  “How long have these been in storage?” Paderson lobbed a can of tomatoes to Wizard Abernathy who caught it easily.

  He checked a folder in a rusty file cabinet. “That shipment arrived 29 June,” PFC Abernathy said.

  “OK. Spoilage shouldn’t have set in yet.”

  “29 June 1954.”

  “What do you do around here if you’re not managing inventory?”

  “I follow orders.”

  “Follow this, then,” Paderson said. “RFT403, get me form Number RFT403.”

  Abernathy handed Paderson a Request for Transfer Form that had been lying ready on his desk. He winked at Ken and advised Paderson, “Press hard or the bottom three carbons won’t imprint.”

  As Captain Paderson signed the forms, the last letter N of his surname sprouted a dark tail that whipped into the margin and imprinted deeply into the very bottom sheet of paper.

  Waiting for a clue as to what to do, Ken and his dad sat with their chins in hands on their luggage that took up a surprisingly large proportion of floor space in their new quarters. They were too bushed to bother unpacking. Besides, there were no bureaus or closets in the house to accommodate their clothing, toiletries and the books Ken had insisted on carrying.

  “Dad, I’m starving.”

  “Me too. Do you know how to cook?”

  “Yeah. Toast. Hotdogs. Peanut butter sandwiches.”

  “Sammiches. You used to say sammiches. I didn’t think you’d ever get it right.”

  “I’m a lot older now.”

  Paderson allowed a lopsided grin. “Let’s see what provisions we’ve got here.” In the small cupboards they found rice and powdered milk that was infested with insect larvae. “All that food in the warehouse and nothing to eat. I’ll ask Abernathy what’s to eat around here. Wait right here. I don’t want you going anywhere without me until I recon the area.”

  Ken watched his dad go out the door, turn left at the corner of the house and walk out of sight.

  At a point in time, somewhere between the moment when the lieutenant colonel had sent Ken off with little Michael and when Bellamy had told Paderson not to jack him off, a notion that had been swirling in Ken’s mind solidified into a truth. No one told him. No one had to. He’d intuited the hard truth: not only was the world upside-down over here, but the usual rules governing his behavior in his father’s presence had also changed. The Rules of Engagement, as the army called it, had been revised. What threat could his dad hold over his head now, here? Maybe his dad really was a “shit heel” like the guys on post back in PA had said. “Too weak to keep his woman.”

  He shut the door behind him, but left it unlocked and started walking down the dirt path in the opposite direction from the warehouse, toward the village Bellamy had driven them through earlier that day. Maybe there’d be a little store in the village that sold bread and milk and eggs. He’d watched Grandma make scrambled eggs. Japan had eggs, he supposed. Crap. He didn’t have Japanese yen in his pocket.

  A strengthening wind scattered white clouds that had been rubbing the knuckled mountains. Cool air rolled down the slopes, pushing the sultry weather off the island and the blue sky reflected in the rice paddy had turned to flat slate. Plump raindrops plopped on the dirt. In the distance he saw a woman grappling with white garments whipping at her from a clothesline. The wind and the rain were the beginnings of the typhoon about which the Wizard had warned them.

  Ken had never experienced a typhoon. He sprinted back to the house and checked his watch twelve times within ten minutes, waiting for his dad to return. Wind whistled threats through the gaps around the windows. The pitch dropped to a moan when the door opened.

  “We’ll make a food run tomorrow,” his dad said as he shut the door behind him. “This is the only food that poor excuse of a soldier in the warehouse had.” Two cans of snails in oil. “I hope they broke the mold when they made him. He’s not one of us. He’s too different. He’s gone native.”

  “Everything’s different here, Dad.” His father didn’t argue with Ken about his statement, more proof that yes, everything was different. Together they listened to the wind and ate the snails, swallowing the creatures whole so as not to be too conscious of the rubbery consistency.

  Lying on a straw mat in his room, his eyes wide open, Ken tried to hear what his dad was doing in the next room, but the rain lashing furiously at the panes drowned out any rustlings his dad might be making. The roof tiles rattled. Lightning strobes lit his small room with a strange psychedelic blue glow. Trapped thunder bounced and rumbled between the mountains, shook the house, and kept him awake through the night. Images of a pregnant Japanese woman being sawn in half while her trapped son screamed at rescue workers to “get me out of here” filled his mind.

  The next morning his dad was standing at his doorway, his presence seeping into Ken’s half-dream, and fully waking him. A greenish dawn illuminated the window.

  “That was a helluva storm,” Paderson said. His fingernails
rasped on his whiskers.

  “Typhoon. No worse than a thunder boomer back home,” Ken said. He let his head fall to the pillow where he slept a sound, dreamless sleep for the next seven hours.

  Chapter Three

  ~ Forget Your Training ~

  He sat on the edge of the stainless steel tub waiting for it to fill with warm water. Filling the tub took a long time. Mindful of keeping his cast above the water, he stepped in. Instead of being rejuvenated by the warm water, he felt the negligible strength he had leech out. After the water had cooled, he stepped out of the tub only to discover no towel was around for him to dry himself. He shivered. The effort of putting on his clothes drained him of energy, energy he needed to cope with strangeness. His clothing, soft with several days’ wearing, made him feel like himself again, if only on the surface.

  When he’d felt sick before, his grandma used to give him ginger ale and his mom fed him baby aspirin that tasted like candy, but didn’t do any good. He and his dad hadn’t packed those things. If that guy in the Quonset warehouse could find anything you wanted, finding soda pop in Japan should be a cinch for him. Ken headed for the hut.

  Wizard was at his battered desk opening mail. His cat, Neko, was scattering envelopes onto the floor with her tail.

  “Morning,” the private said, “I wondered when you’d be making your rounds.”

  “You’re awful old to still be a private first class,” Ken told Wizard. Neko poured herself off the desk and scooted outside.

  “You’re awful old to be so ill-mannered.” He opened a bottle and poured orange soda into two glasses filled with chipped ice.

  “Soda pop! Where’d you find that?”

  “I’ll never reveal my sources. You can push bamboo under my fingernails and set them afire, but I won’t betray my sources.”