Ken's War Page 5

  Disgusted at this pathetic display and drunk with residual adrenaline, Ken shouted, “Crybaby!”

  He plucked a stone from the mud and hurled it near David, as a final warning.

  He'd collected a lot of facts that teachers don't teach you in school—bats weren’t blind, dogs wouldn't attack you if you acted like the pack leader, and he’d have hell to pay because David Marshall’s father was Ken’s dad’s CO—but teachers never quizzed them on that stuff.

  He had trotted home. Exhilarated. Famished. Victorious.

  After beating up the CO’s kid back in the states, he’d braced himself for the walloping his dad was going to give him. A beating would have been fair punishment, considering, but his parents were too distracted, ensnarled again in their private battle into which he wasn’t enlisted. This time, though, their fight didn’t have the same tone as the others.

  There were frequent telephone calls. Terse conversations. Tight faces. Long sighs. This time sudden silence cloaked the barracks bungalow when he opened the back door and strolled into the kitchen. His mom’s makeup was smeary. His dad’s forehead was ridged, his stubble sprouting upon his ashen skin. His parents took their argument behind the closed bedroom door. Ken tried to listen to what they were arguing about, but his mind snarled, couldn’t receive the message that was undecipherable in its finality and terror. His parents’ voices, venomous and bitter, stoked his dread. No. It couldn’t be true. That’s why they weren’t telling him anything. If it were true, they would tell him. They’d have to tell him.

  He didn’t tell his mom and dad that his arm hurt like hell.

  When he woke up the next day, his sheets were all twisted and his arm still hurt like hell. His mother didn’t scold him, in fact she didn’t say much to him as she drove him to post infirmary to get a cast put on his left arm. That whack David had given him with a board had snapped his ulna bone.

  Then a few days later, their little family of three was sitting at the dining room table. Funny the details one remembers: they were eating baked beans on new dishes. White dishes.

  They’d told him almost a full month after he’d returned home from his summer vacation at Grandma and Grandpap Paderson’s farm, in time for the Labor Day parade and the start of school. He’d ridden the train the entire way to Lancaster and back by himself like a “young man.” He wasn’t even worried on the bus trip back from the Harrisburg train station to the Molly Pitcher hotel bus station. He avoided lavatories, though.

  He couldn’t remember how exactly the subject came up. Just that he was expecting his dad to blow his top about the fight with David Marshall. His mom looked at him funny, then. He thought she was going to scold him for stabbing too many beans on his fork when what she said was, “Look, Ken, honey, we didn’t think you were old enough to be put through all that.”

  Through all what? He didn’t ask. He concentrated on lifting the forkful of beans to his mouth.

  “Your grandparents have passed.” The captain scraped baked beans into a neat pile at the rim of his plate. That abrasive sound.

  Passed?

  “The doctor found cancer in your grandpap’s stomach,” his mother said. “It took him fast. Grandma Beatrice died a week later.” She refused to look at Ken. In a stern voice she added, “Heart attack, she had a heart attack. Your grandmother died of a broken heart. It happens to old people. One of ‘em can’t live without the other. A crying shame that they got too dependent on each other.”

  His eyes burned as he tried to adjust his inner universe to accommodate the news his parents had withheld from him until now. On the wall behind his dad, the framed jigsaw puzzle picture of a mountain in the tropics blurred.

  “If you want to lay flowers at their tombstones, I’ll drive you to the cemetery this Sunday,” his dad said. He ladled baked beans onto his plate, ringing the spoon against the bowl.

  Ken didn’t hear what his parents were saying next. He was remembering what he’d been told back when it had happened, when his grandparents had passed, had died. That baloney his mother had told him about his dad going to an APICS seminar for a full week was a lie, and Ken had fallen for it because APICS had something to do with warehousing. His mom said she was meeting Daddy at a hotel in Lancaster after his seminar. She said Ken was old enough to stay home without a babysitter for one night. Just call the Garstons next door if you need anything. Meatloaf’s in the fridge, she’d said as she folded her black cocktail dress she wore to parties into her overnight bag.

  What a doofuss he’d been not figuring it out. Black dresses were for funerals. He felt his cheeks trembling. His parents’ mouths were moving, nonsensical sounds poured off their ugly lips. He picked up the white bowl of baked beans and shattered it against the wall. Beans and sauce snailed down the green wallpaper.

  “I could’ve gone to the funeral!” He shrieked into the stunned silence. “I would’ve behaved!”

  “Obviously not!” his mom chirped righteously. “You were too close to them.”

  His dad shot up from the table. His right hand flew to his belt and began unhooking the buckle.

  Ken’s buttocks clenched involuntarily. He could dash to his room and lock his door, or fly out the front door and not come back till after they’d cooled down and were worried about him running away. Ken’s eyes were riveted on his dad’s gleaming U.S. Army buckle. A beating he’d endure. The pain would be physical pain, the kind he could cope with. He would hole up in his bedroom to make them both feel guilty, and he could hate his dad for thrashing him. Gripping the edge of the dining table, he stayed seated in the chair, waiting for his dad to yank him up and whup his ass, but silent messages were flying across the table between his parents.

  “Clean up the beans,” his mom told him. She stacked smeared dishes, and guided her husband away from the table. Captain Paderson left the dining room and turned on the evening news. After a moment she had said, “We were simply trying to protect you, Kenny, from the way I felt when my parents died. The way your dad feels now. We honestly did what we thought was best.”

  He knew he could leave and not be reminded to clean up the beans he’d thrown on the wall. And he left, giving the screen door a hard shove so it slammed resoundingly.

  Getting his parents’ “best” was worse than not getting the truth.

  Chapter Six

  ~ Fujiyama ~

  “I follow you,” Maeda said, meaning she wanted Ken to follow her. Maeda’s wooden zori clop-clopped on the cobbled street to the bus station. She’d declined to tell him where they were going. The thrill of secrecy was heightened when they’d quietly left the house before dawn, while his father slept in his area of the house partitioned by the shojii. Ken didn’t know if she had cleared this trip with the captain or not. The possibility that she hadn’t secured Paderson’s approval for this venture endeared him to her as much as the possibility that she had gained the captain’s approval. Both avenues were rife with risks.

  The sun was hinting at rising over serrated hills carpeted with bamboo and pine. He could look up from this moment of his life and see the rim of the sun, crackling with potential, ready to light up the valley. Things could turn out good, or turn out bad.

  An odor that he first had thought was a decaying animal carcass or cat shit invaded his nostrils. The stench was from the fetid, over-ripe ginkgo nuts. Fallen ginkgo leaves, shaped like yellow goose feet, stampeded the gravel path he and Maeda were walking along. A middle-aged woman was placing ginkgo leaves, one at a time, into a red lacquered basket. The air was cool enough for her every breath to augment the low-hanging mist. She stood up straight with one hand pressed against her lower back and regarded Ken and Maeda openly.

  They greeted her. “Ohayo goziamasu.” The leaf collector didn’t reply, but stooped down and selected only the leaves that suited her particular purpose. The pearl in Ken’s core stirred. Would Grandpap have known what you do with ginkgo leaves?

  Ken had learned a smattering of Japanese words and phrases and had ascer
tained through his relationship with Maeda, and through observing her interactions with his dad and others, that it wasn’t only possible to lose face by doing something stupid like blowing your nose at the table, but that one could also give face and take face from another person. He’d taken Maeda’s face when he’d fried tuna for his dad. Wizard had explained that Ken’s act was tantamount to criticizing her cooking. But that’s the thing, Ken had quipped, she doesn’t cook it! He’d tried to give face to her in various ways—by teaching her how to cook simple western-style foods so she in turn could gain face in front of Paderson, by over-complimenting her efforts, and by sticking close to the house so she wouldn’t worry where he was.

  He looked up from the leaf-strewn path and discovered that he was lagging. He caught up to Maeda as she bought two bus tickets. He let her hold his hand as they boarded the bus. They bumped along past villages, some smaller than, some larger than the one near his house. In all of the villages, people had hung fish out to dry. From the bus they watched a man wearing rolled up pants wade like an egret in a rice paddy. The sun rising over the rice farmer’s back silhouetted his task of plucking rice plants out here and transplanting them there. This crop of rice was the second of the year. Maeda handed Ken a carton, one of two she’d bought from a hawker at the bus station.

  “Bento.” She started opening his boxed lunch.

  “I know. I can do it.”

  “Sushi inside,” she said.

  “I know.” He ate sticky rice wrapped in sheets of seaweed called nori. He jiggled rubbery stuff between his disposable bamboo chopsticks and aimed for his mouth. The stuff had no taste whatsoever. Pink, white and green sugary candy molded into tealeaf shapes melted on his tongue. When they finished eating, he let Maeda wipe his mouth with a hankie she kept hidden up her kimono sleeve. With her spine as straight as a bamboo pole, she closed her eyes and appeared to doze off.

  Occasionally, people, especially children, stared at him. They did not smile. He was convinced they were talking about him, improvising stories about how a Western teenager came to be in the care of a Japanese woman, referring to him in their fictions as high nose, foreign devil, or worse. At a bus stop, a clutch of boys boarded the bus. He put his guard up. They reminded him of the gang he’d seen kill a boy. What was more disquieting was that they did not look at him. He scooted closer to Maeda. Her eyes flickered open briefly and closed again. She didn’t move away from the press of his body against her. The boys sat in front of Ken and Maeda and opened their schoolbooks. The bus picked up speed only to slow down again and pull in at a train station.

  Stepping off the bus and clop-clopping toward the train station ticket window, Maeda said, “We have few time.” The statement was her polite way of telling him, don’t dawdle. Pots of cascading yellow chrysanthemums lined the station platform. Moss grew on the steep roof. Maeda and Ken joined the people boarding the train, its plumes of black smoke chuffing out the stack. The tracks were narrower than tracks in America. Immaculate too. No Nehi bottles or cigarette butts. When he focused only on the hills in the distance, he could hardly tell the train was moving. Except for the rhythmic vibrations and rattles, they were standing still in time. He rested his head against the window.

  He awoke and half-remembered blinking at his own reflected eyeballs superimposed in the train window onto nighttime Japan. While the train cut through broken coastlines, they had napped on and off, eaten several meals, drunk quarts of green tea, and stretched their legs at village stations where passengers disembarked and other people climbed aboard. The hour was noon according to his watch, but he didn’t know what day it was.

  Maeda gently shook him and pointed out the window on the left side of the moving train. He looked out the window. Tucked in the hills, rows and rows of manicured bushes with glossy, dark green leaves absorbed the sun’s rays. So what? Big deal, he thought. She pointed again and wiggled in her seat. He smiled, looked out the window, and tried to pretend that he cared about a bunch of tea bushes as much as she did.

  There it was! The mountain from the jigsaw puzzle! Soaring up to the sky. The mountain that was depicted on the framed jigsaw puzzle in his old dining room hadn’t been in Hawaii as he’d once thought.

  “Fujiyama,” Maeda said, softening the F to sound like a breath.

  Fujiyama had snagged a white cloud necklace on her snow-capped crest. The dazzling sun illuminated spears of snow radiating down her colossal slopes. Cranes soared on the thermals rising from the compacted towns clustered at Fujiyama’s foothills. As the train approached the mountain, the symbol of Japan loomed ever larger, ever larger, allowing no place for self-pity amid this mighty beauty.

  This was what she’d brought him to see.

  On the return trip to Kyushu, the American redhead and his Japanese housekeeper got off the train at the bus station close to their village and entered a nearby darkened doorway with short red curtains hanging from the lintel. Wet, slurping sounds originated from shadowy figures seated at booths in nooks in the cramped, dim shop. His mom, if she were present to hear this noise, would have cracked sarcastic remarks about the Japanese people’s bad table manners, and she would have warned Ken not to slurp, not to even think about slurping. His eyes adjusted to the darkness and he saw adults, not ornery children, hunched over large earthenware bowls, slurping on purpose. Here a slurp, there a slurp, everywhere a slurp, slurp, he whispered to himself.

  A man scuffed toward them and set two steaming bowls of noodles on the wooden table in front of them. Ken had eaten with Maeda numerous times during this journey, so he knew to say, “Itadaki masu,” before eating. Maeda raised her loaded chopsticks to her lips. Long noodles dangled into the broth. She fed the noodle tails to her chopsticks with a spoon to maintain a continuous feed, slurping all the while in a most ladylike manner. Hot soup steamed his face. He gave it a try. Broth gurgled down the wrong pipe. He choked. After he recovered and was breathing almost normally, he tried slurp-eating again, this time with more success. The watery sound, however, wasn’t right, it was too timid. He slurped, he decided, with a Yankee accent. That thought struck him as humorous. Slurp with a Yankee accent. He almost laughed out loud.

  Maeda told him she wanted to buy greens and pork for their dinner later at home. While shopping with her, he learned why she never returned from the market with the ingredients his father had ordered her to buy. Nothing on the market tables, in the stalls, on the shelves or in the cubicles resembled Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, not to mention a plain ol’ humble potato. Normal foods just weren’t available here, not even to Wizard, who wrangled the random carton of Jell-O gelatin or cans of corned-beef hash from U.S. Army commissaries. You could only eat so much of that canned stuff anyhow before your taste buds hankered for fresh food.

  He kept within range of Maeda as she chatted with vendors whose language and skin were rough compared to hers. Vegetables soaked in wooden buckets of brine. An old woman arranged gingerroots, shaped remarkably like her bowed legs, in a bin beside persimmons stacked in pyramids on a green cloth. Seafood displayed on ice in neat rows resembled no creatures or parts of creatures Ken had learned about from watching TV nature shows or perusing encyclopedias. A wooden barrel in the main thoroughfare where shoppers streamed around it appeared to be full of wood shavings, cedar maybe. The curls were reddish. Through pantomime and a patois of Japanese and English, Maeda explained that the curls were dried fish shavings used for soup stock.

  They continued roaming between sacks of rice, dried kelp, ginkgo nuts, packets of green tea, bamboo shoots, tofu in sundry states and shapes, and millions of miles of noodles—thin ones, transparent ones, brown ones, beige flat ones. Food was plentiful. His dad would just have to adapt to Japanese food.

  They emerged from the canopied street market and onto a busy cobbled street. Ken heard a rhythmic thunking sound. It reverberated through his feet and up through his body. Rather than being edgy, as he might have been before seeing Fujiyama, he was curious and ran ahead of Maeda.

>   Two beefy men took turns whacking giant wooden pestles against a wooden mortar as high as the tops of their thighs. Decades of pounding had indented the mortar surface into an accommodating curve. The men grunted with each swing as the giant pestles came down and kneaded a green glutinous glob. The men whacked and grunted, whacked and grunted, their pestle blows hurling flecks of the green substance from the mortar. Their secondary objective, Ken supposed, was hitting the mixture of rice and green tealeaves with sufficient force to send gummy bits onto passersby. Ken stepped closer to the men whose bare chests were sweaty in spite of the cool weather. Gummy, green dots flew onto his tan shirt. He picked one globbit off his sleeve, pressed it between his thumb and finger, tested its stickiness.

  At a canopied stall beside the grunting men, a woman was selling green balls the size of chicken eggs. She rolled them in a brown powder and wrapped them in paper. She presented one to Ken.

  “Mochi.” Maeda nodded and smiled, encouraging him to repeat the word.

  “Mochi,” he said to please her.

  “Mochi.”

  “Mochi! Mochi!”

  Maeda handed the lady a coin. They bowed with the quick economy acceptable between vendor and customer. The green ball, the consistency of raw pie dough, tasted slightly sweet. The brown powder, he decided, was pulverized peanuts. The center was filled with red azuki beans.

  “It’s not snot,” he informed them in serious tones.

  The vendor and Maeda exchanged indulgent smiles. The men whacked and grunted, whacked and grunted. No one had understood that he’d said a gross word. This was his license to inform everyone what he’d discovered and to use any kind of words he wanted to. He strode down the sidewalk, holding his sticky hand aloft, and announced, “It’s not snot! It’s not snot! It’s not snot! It’s not snot!” He laughed out loud. His laughter seesawed and hiccupped on a high note at the end. He’d forgotten what his laughter sounded like. And what it felt like to be himself again. He felt good.