Ken's War Page 3

  He knew Wizard was pulling his leg with that fake Kraut accent, but Ken was unable to round up the energy to laugh, even for politeness’ sake. He sipped soda, rested his head in his hand, and watched Wizard’s Adam’s apple work like a pump under the stubble on his throat.

  “Your bones and your eyeballs are achy,” Wizard said. “You think about exploring the pine forest or climbing the mountain or playing in the waterfall, but after eating breakfast you’re too sluggish.”

  “This is my breakfast,” Ken said. And it tasted sickeningly sweet.

  “What are those hash marks on your cast?”

  Ken self-consciously touched the cast on his arm. “I’m counting down the days to when Dad and I return to the barracks in Pennsylvania.”

  “Where’s your mom?”

  “She’s in the States, waiting for us at the house.” Where she’d have a bowl of warm oatmeal topped with lumps of brown sugar ready for him in the mornings, and he’d watch cartoons, and later he’d take the car for a spin. He thought he saw a skeptical look flit across Wizard’s face. In a rush Ken said, “She said she needed time to herself, and she didn’t want to live in Japan. She said she had a lot of odds and ends to take care of. She said it’d be better if Dad and I left her alone for a little bit.”

  The more reasons she’d given Ken in trying to explain why she wasn’t joining them in Japan, the less convincing the combined weight of them became. This list of lightweight reasons wasn’t convincing Wizard either, Ken could see. “She said she needed a vacation.”

  “A vacation from what?” Wizard’s gently probing blue eyes swelled Ken’s throat up with an embarrassing sadness, a sadness like he’d experienced when his parents had finally told him about his grandparents.

  “She said it’s only temporary.”

  “Everything’s temporary.” It was said somberly, yet with assurance. “The body is a physical demonstration of one’s state of mind. Oriental healers know of the mind-body connection. An unnamed angst floats through the body like a ship searching for a port, although we fool ourselves that we are healthy and everything’s copasetic. Then a form of additional stress is introduced such as a death in the family that renders the vessels of our spirits vulnerable. Seizing the opportunity, the floating angst settles in an organ or system of the body to become an illness—cancer, kidney stones, ulcers—thereby giving us a describable condition about which to feel justifiably depressed.”

  Ken crunched ice chips between his molars. This baloney had nothing to do with him.

  “You’re suffering from failure to adapt. Quit resisting. Accept. Everything’s temporary.”

  “This stinking place would make anybody puke.” His piss pot attitude failed to provoke Wizard into agreeing that this place certainly was a stinking Jap hellhole. Ken tried out another word. “What’s furro?’”

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  “Furro. Furro. Furro.” He laid the stress on differently each time.

  Wizard enunciated slowly, “Ofuro. A public bath.” He checked his watch and, smiling at what he saw, removed it and his fatigues. “What’s wrong?”

  “You’re a Nazi!”

  “Not in this life.” Confounded, Wizard blinked rapidly and then with sudden comprehension clutched his carved jade pendant hanging from a rawhide cord around his neck. “This is the symbol for the wheel of life in Buddhism.” He flipped it around and said, “Turned this way, it’s the sign Hitler appropriated to represent the Aryan race.” He flipped the green jade numerous times, saying, “Nazi-Buddah-Nazi-Buddah-Nazi-Buddah.”

  “No wonder I’m sick. This place is upside-down and backwards.” Ken also understood why this man was still a private. He was goofy in the head.

  Wizard put on a stiff blue and white robe. Ken watched him walk in that unsoldierly gait of his out of the hut and down a gravel path toward the village until he disappeared around a bend. Two crows landed on a pine bough, shaking dry needles onto Ken’s hair. He raked the needles out of his hair with his fingers and scrambled to catch up with Wizard who, evidently expecting his arrival, instructed Ken to “Forget your training. Do what I do.”

  A family of monkeys in the treetops bounded ahead of them, waited until the two humans got close, and bounded ahead again. Around them fissures in the earth wheezed, emitting steam and slightly noxious odors. Imitating the commander on a TV show he used to watch, he hooked his thumbs in his belt loop. The cocky bearing helped him feel less flustered in this otherworldly terrain.

  Wizard led Ken through the men’s entrance of a wood-paneled changing room. Women and girls entered the door in the other side of the small stone building. The smooth slate floors had been polished by thousands of bare soles. Water gurgled down bamboo spouts. Somewhere water slapped against the sides of a pool.

  Wizard hung his robe, “yukata” he called it, on an iron hook. Ken stuffed his socks in his sneakers and hung his clothes on an iron hook too. He hopped out of his underpants and held an insignificant square cloth in front of him. The other men didn’t look at him. They didn’t not look at him. He sat on a low stool between Wizard and an old man. Like them, he scrubbed and scrubbed.

  “Use this soap on your body,” Wizard instructed quietly. “That’s the hair soap. Rinse completely and thoroughly.”

  Ken rinsed and wrestled with trying to jam his wet legs back into his pants. Wizard shook his head minutely and walked naked through another door leading to the outside. Unclothed, Ken followed. The upper torsos of children, young women, grannies, young men and wrinkled, ancient men standing in a gray slurry materialized in the mist. As far as he could tell, everyone was completely naked. Ken had never seen his own mom and dad naked, not even by accident, and here these Japs acted like it was normal to take a bath in front of anybody and everybody. The only way to hide his nakedness was to submerge himself quickly. Which he did.

  The water at first felt scalding hot, but its silky geothermal warmth soon blurred the boundaries of what he normally thought to be the farthermost extent of his physical self and the edges of the outside world. He held his cast above water level, but grew too mellow to sustain the effort. The waters drew the aches out of his joints. The constant, vague queasiness that had fluttered in his stomach for days dissolved into a gooey, calm feeling. Relaxed and safe, he stared at a pattern of scarlet maple leaves floating on the thick liquid.

  “That gentleman asked you a question,” Wizard was saying, referring to an old man who was climbing out of the communal bath. Gray water sluiced off his body.

  “Huh?”

  “Are you a little boiled octopus?” The old man was amused with his own question.

  “Huh?”

  Wizard spoke in Japanese and shared a chuckle with the old man.

  After a short time or a long time, he didn’t know which, Ken asked, “Don’t the Japs hate us?”

  “Why would they?”

  He grimaced. “You know. Hiroshima and Nagasaki.”

  Wizard’s concentration turned inward, leading Ken to believe that he wasn’t going to dish out a pat, flawed answer, an answer with so many ‘becauses’ you knew it couldn’t be true. “The bombings are a ghastly scar on the national psyche,” Wizard allowed. “I think the Japanese people are fierce, proud, forward looking and at the same time they have their ancient traditions and customs to keep them grounded and to give them strength and continuity. Hating hinders progress and healing. No, I don’t think they hate us.”

  Ken wanted to believe this strange soldier, but didn’t know if he could just yet.

  An infant warbled happily and splashed water. A young woman massaged an elderly woman’s upper arms. Several men murmured quietly. A wizened one gazed at the puzzle pieces of sky showing between the branches overhead.

  “They seem like nice enough people,” Ken said.

  “One man makes love,” Wizard said. “Many men make war.”

  Ken stepped up stairs a stonemason had carved in a submerged boulder. He scurried to retrieve his s
quare modesty cloth that was drying on a stone. Just as he was about to pick his cloth up, a monkey leaped down from a tree, snatched the cloth and clambered back up the tree. The monkey waved the white cloth. With an intelligent glint in its eyes, the monkey chattered at Ken, naked and pink. Ken thumped his chest and chattered back, which made the monkey scratch its head and then leap into the branches for cover. Bathers in the pool giggled softly, and, as the days passed into weeks, they began teaching the red-headed gaijin a few Japanese words and phrases.

  Standing several feet in front of the Quonset hut, Ken hit pinecones with a stick, sending them flying down into the rice paddy valley. The cast on his arm hindered his natural grace and newfound enthusiasm. He dropped the stick and raced into the hut.

  “Is there a doctor around here?” he snapped.

  “Depends on what ails you,” Wizard replied.

  He raised his arm, confined in its gray, soggy cast. Wizard handed him a serrated knife.

  Ken didn’t take the knife. “Where’s Dad?”

  “Do you want him to cut your cast off?”

  “Nuh-uh.”

  “You can do it.”

  He sawed vigorously, creating plaster crumbs, and stopped sawing when the knife snagged the inner gauze layer next to his skin. With scissors, he snipped through the rank smelling gauze, being careful not to cut his white, wrinkly skin. The cast lay on the desk, its two halves sprung open like a discarded larval shell. No longer anchored by the plaster, his arm felt light. Because of a Christmas-morning feeling in his stomach, he sensed, but only dimly, that a weight more significant than the cast had been shed.

  “Would you deliver this to Captain Paderson for me?” Wizard handed him an envelope with a USARJ - 9th TAACOM return address. “His request for transfer was denied.”

  “Did you read Dad’s mail? I’m telling Dad you read his mail.”

  “You’ve been involved in espionage and intrigue too long for me to slip one past you,” Wizard said using his fake Kraut accent. “Last night after you were asleep I boiled water in this very teakettle and steamed open the envelope.” In the distance cantankerous gears coughed. That would be his dad’s jeep. “If his request had been approved the envelope would have a different return address on it. His request didn’t make it past the colonel’s rubber stamp. You’ll be going home without your father.”

  That queasy feeling returned and convulsed his stomach, but the feeling was washed away with a wave, not entirely unpleasant, of tingly electricity. He and his mom could live together without his dad’s looming presence. Then everything would be OK again—no more of his parents’ bickering and sniping. His mom always was nicer to Ken, nicer to everybody when his father wasn’t around. His parents’ good moods worked the other way too, Ken had noticed lately. His dad was nicer to him, less tetchy, some of the time anyhow, when Tricia wasn’t twitting him about keeping a tight inventory of paperclips and erasers at the barracks warehouse.

  Two crows swooped down from the pine boughs outside the Quonset hut door and tussled in the dust. What could the birds be fighting about, or were they playing? The crows cawed and took flight. One black feather twirled to the ground.

  Paderson appeared in the doorway and smacked the doorframe. He stood with his hands on his hips. He flipped a hostile look at Wizard. “What’s this I hear about my son fraternizing with the Japs?”

  The way he’d said the word hit Ken like a slap, a slap he didn’t deserve. “Don’t call them Japs, Dad.”

  Paderson turned his head slightly, in the way a man who’s hard of hearing cocks his head favoring his good ear. But Ken knew his Dad had heard what he’d said quite well; you only had to watch the muscles twitching like a burrowing animal under his jaw and throat to know he’d heard. Ken felt his ears grow hot, but he did not waver: He met his dad’s gaze full on until finally Paderson let his hands drop from his hips. He began talking to Wizard with a pretended airiness about an incoming shipment of overstock.

  Ken strode to the door, turned to face his dad, and pressed his palms against opposite sides of the rough wooden doorway. He felt strong enough to break the door frame. “Japanese,” he told his dad who still didn’t let on he’d heard. “Call them Japanese. Not Japs.”

  Chapter Four

  ~ Conflict is Our Destiny ~

  This latest upheaval, the arrival of a Japanese housekeeper, happened without any clues that change was coming. And like the other big changes in his life, he could not have predicted it because nothing in his experience or imagination up to that point had prepared him. No hints floating on the air or in his dad’s demeanor cued him that another person was going to try to adjust the way he viewed the world, tell him what was what. He hadn’t yet made up his mind if he liked Maeda or not. She wasn’t like any other grownup he’d met.

  Maeda didn’t walk. She glided. Her bamboo-slim figure was wrapped and tied tightly in a brown kimono. She bent gracefully at the knees and hips as she placed blue bowls and rectangular plates on the table. Her diminutive hands adjusted each dish to satisfy an exacting standard she envisioned. Her black eyes, resembling two merry tadpoles swimming toward each other, were cast downward, not with nervousness, but with an unknowable emotion. Never at any time since that first day when Wizard had introduced the Japanese housekeeper to Ken and Captain Paderson, did one wisp of glossy black hair fall free from the intricate bun that was secured in place with lacquered wooden combs. Her face was a pale, tranquil pool. When he was in a good mood, the curve of her mouth was called a smile. When he was crabby, the curve of her mouth was a pout, even though she wasn’t the one who’d changed her outlook.

  “Do you want wasabi?” Her utterance was a downy feather.

  “No, I don’t want wasabi,” Paderson replied, “and I don’t want the raw fish that you insist on serving with it.”

  “Give me some wasabi, please.” Ken pronounced each syllable of the Japanese word for ground horseradish with care. He avoided his dad’s censorious glare.

  Happy to have something to do, Maeda briskly mixed the green paste with soy sauce for him. Paderson stabbed his chopsticks into his rice so they stood upright at attention. Maeda’s expression was unreadable, but Ken had learned that chopsticks standing in rice symbolized death when Maeda had told him so the one time he’d committed the same blunder. It was “unexpected” she’d told him. He learned quickly that unexpected was a code word English-speaking Japanese people used when they were surprised at someone’s barbaric behavior, or when a loss of face had occurred. He held his tongue, though, and didn’t tell his dad of his breach of manners, for his dad had been venting his temper on both of them ever since he’d read Tricia Paderson’s letter, the one she’d mailed way back in October, but hadn’t arrived until this morning as they’d sat down for breakfast.

  The ripped envelope and letter lay on the table along with the newspaper clipping Tricia had sent of Sandy Koufax smiling, showing many white straight teeth. Ken needed someone to tell him what changes his mother’s letter was going to bring to him. He knew what the letter meant to his father.

  His dad said, “Koufax refused to pitch the first game because of some Jew holiday. He’d be hit with insubordination in the army for shenanigans like that.” Paderson impaled a slice of daikon radish on a chopstick.

  Maeda stood silently a few steps away from the table, waiting for her services to be called upon, witnessing what must seem to her to be bizarre American family behavior, Ken surmised. She approached the table carrying two plates with something pink and shiny on them. Ken rose to intercept the plates she held in her hands, and take them back to the kitchen area, but he failed to do so before his dad saw the raw tuna.

  “I told you, no Jap food,” Paderson said.

  “Why’d you hire her if you don’t like her cooking?” Ken asked.

  “To take care of you.”

  “I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

  Paderson harumphed. For a time, no one said a word.

  “Take it
easy, Dad. It can’t be that bad. Wizard eats raw fish.” That endorsement, he knew before he could stop himself from saying it, was not going to help his case at all. He held his breath and, chewing only two or three times, gulped a hunk of sashimi. The raw tuna tasted surprisingly tender and refreshing. Not a bit slimy or fishy.

  His father shook his head. “And to think they call us barbarians.”

  Ken dredged the remaining chunks of tuna in flour and salt and fried them in oil. He served the tuna this way to his father. Maeda stood by quietly, hands tucked up inside her kimono sleeves. Peeved, Paderson flung open a drawer and rooted around noisily until he found a fork. An unhappy man, he shared his black outlook with every glance, with every gesture.

  Without his dad spelling it out, Ken got the message: the consequence of pissing off his dad or ding-donging at him was going to bring on a prolongation of this murderous mood. He opened the history book that had arrived mysteriously with other schoolbooks in last month’s mail.

  “Did you finish your homework?” Paderson asked.

  Ken scanned the subtitles in the history book from a self-study program in which his mom had enrolled him, a dead give-away that she didn’t plan on him returning to the States for a least a marking period or two. “Seems like history is about a bunch of wars.”

  “Conflict is our destiny.”

  “I’ll ace the test on this chapter,” Ken said. “No sweat.”

  His father lowered his head slowly and semaphored a warning: Don’t get too cocky.

  “I’m bored.” Ken slapped the history book shut and looked around at the too small kitchen-dining area. Maeda waited silently against the wall for a chance to be helpful. “There’s nothing to do here.”

  Paderson pushed his empty plate to the center of the table. “It’s nice outside. Go do what you’d normally do.”

  If he planned to stay for the long haul, or at least until his dad got a transfer, he may as well “adapt.” That was the word Wizard had used. Adapt. Explore. Find a friend his age. Those were the things he’d normally do. He headed for the door.