The Wreckage (19 page)

There was something Abbott and Costello-ish about the pair. Harris a good head taller than his companion, a straight man’s seriousness about him even in his cups. Anstey thin as a rake but hissing with energy like a gas lamp. Ants, the bigger man called him. Antsy.

Wish got drunk watching them carry on. Found out they’d hooked up at the same enlistment office he’d spent the afternoon searching for. The two of them fell to talking as they waited, Anstey said, decided to head across the pond instead, join the British army.

“Citizens of the Commonwealth,” Wish said.

Harris raised his glass. “The Brits pay better money,” he said. He was the schemer of the two, the instigator.

Anstey said, “We’ll see action a lot sooner than the crowd signing up here ever will.” So jacked up with the thought of what lay ahead he could just sit still on his stool. He looked at Wish and said, “What about you, soldier?” Saluted again.

The extra money made no odds to Wish, but the thought of getting as far from Newfoundland as he could was incentive enough.

Wish watched the dot of Anstey’s fag drift back and forth in the dark beneath the barracks, the red flare of it as he took a drag. It made him think of Mercedes’ father stretched out on his daybed in the back kitchen, an arm behind his head, night closing in on their conversation. The man four years buried now. And all the absent and dead of Wish’s life—his parents, Lilly and Hiram and Mercedes, Tom and Billy-Peter Keating—suddenly folded into his memory of that figure across the room, fading to a voice and the dark ember of a cigarette.

As if he would never come closer to them again than this.

There was no staying clear of the interpreter.

In the weeks after his arrival he set about claiming the camp, making impromptu inspections of the barracks, the hospital, the workstations, like a dog pissing to mark the corners of his territory.

He interrogated prisoners and guards to glean details of camp life, making a map of the place in his head. Which POWs worked in the shipyard, which in the coalmines and which in the kitchen, which guards were selling cocoa and beef and medicine from the Red Cross supplies kept in the storeroom. Wish saw him chatting with Osano, offering the civilian guard a cigarette.

In the middle of April the interpreter walked through the barracks handing out file cards and pencil stubs. “Each prisoner will be allowed a maximum of forty words,” he shouted. “All letters will be screened and censored if necessary. You have five minutes.” He went to the door and stood waiting.

Harris said, “You think these will actually be sent anywhere?”

They’d been permitted to send a note home only the once, when they first arrived at #14, in 1942. And the letters from Mercedes gave no indication she’d seen it. “Even if they are,” Wish said, “I got me doubts about the logistics of the British Army.”

Anstey and Harris stretched out on their berths, writing carefully in block letters, counting words on their fingers. They looked like children at their homework. Harris’s huge feet hung over the edge of the bunk. Wish printed his name, rank and serial number across the top. That was all the soldiers were meant to include, but he and the two Canadians included the addresses they were writing to as well.
Mercedes Parsons, c/o Hiram Keeping, Georgestown, St. Johns, Newfoundland
, he wrote, underlining the last word three times.
Enjoying sunny Pacific but hospitality a bust, home as soon as vacation over. Health continues good. Starved for fish cakes and sight of you. Have your letters, pls. keep writing. Wait for me
.

The cards were collected after precisely five minutes.

“They’ll never make it out of camp,” Wish said.

The next morning after roll call, the interpreter stood before the line. He took filing cards from his uniform pocket and looked down at them. “Corporal James Harris,” he said.

Harris stepped forward and stood at attention.

The interpreter turned the card over. “Halifax, Nova Scotia,” he said. “Canada.”

“Yes sir,” Harris said.

“Private William Anstey.”

“Sir.”

“Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Canada.”

“Yes sir.”

“Canadians.”

“Yes sir,” they both replied.

A node of discomfort started buzzing in Wish’s stomach.

“Sir,” Harris said, “is there a problem with those cards?”

The interpreter stepped up and slapped him across the face. He looked from one man to the next. “Canadians,” he said again.

Both men said, “Yes sir.”

The interpreter smiled at them. “I am very pleased,” he said, “to meet you.”

He turned away then, having marked the two of them, and Koyagi dismissed the entire company.

They talked among themselves that evening, lying in the barracks after the suppertime cigarette, waiting for roll call.

“You should steer clear of us,” Harris told Wish. “Eat with some of the other fellows.”

“He’ve already seen us ganging around together,” Wish said. Although the thought had crossed his mind.

Anstey said, “He got some special kind of dislike for us, that’s sure enough.”

“Maybe he had a run-in with the Canadian troops in Hong Kong.”

The man lying nearest the door through to the officers’ berths called across to them. “Interpreter,” he said. All the prisoners got to their feet and bowed as the soldier walked down the room, accompanied by another guard. He stopped in front of Wish.

“Private Furey.”

Wish straightened up to look at him.

“That is your name?”

“Yes sir. Aloysious Furey, sir.”

The interpreter ordered the other prisoners out of the barracks and the guard herded them toward the exit. When he and Wish were alone he said, “I have been speaking with Mr. Osano.”

“Who, sir?”

The interpreter backhanded him across the face. “I have been speaking with Mr. Osano.” He waited a moment before going on. “Your business venture will continue. But there will be a”—he pretended to be searching for the correct word—“a new tax,” he said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir.”

The interpreter produced a box of matches from his pocket. He called the guard back into the barracks and waved the matches around, shouting and pointing at the berth and then at Wish. The guard butt-ended Wish in the stomach with his rifle, then kicked and shoved him outside, past the prisoners gathered around the entrance.

He was ordered to stand in the square with his arms outstretched, and a box filled with water was placed in his hands. He tried to guess the weight of it, ten or fifteen pounds he thought, a medium-sized codfish. The interpreter standing at his shoulder as the minutes ticked by. The seconds were leaden and seemed to drop into the box as they passed, his arms beginning to waver as the heft of it grew. After twenty minutes it was as if he’d fallen back into a malarial fever. His entire body shook, his hair and shirt drenched in sweat. The second the box dipped the interpreter laced into his back with a bamboo stick, forcing him to keep it raised to shoulder height. The rush of adrenaline holding it there a few more minutes.

They repeated the steps of this dance half a dozen times, and for a while Wish was able to take in details of the event. The interpreter used his left hand to swing the bamboo stick, which explained the name Lefty. He wore his pistol on the right, which meant he was right-handed and simply unable to swing with enough force from that side to satisfy himself. So the injury likely had something to do with his back.

That was the last rational thought he could manage. By the time the interpreter ordered him to set the box down, he couldn’t think of his own name. He laid it as gently as he could manage and stood straight again, sucking air through his nostrils.

The interpreter said, “I could have you shot for this violation.”

He was handsome in a way that made his arrogance more obnoxious. He had a mole high on the left cheekbone that seemed curiously precious, as if it had been drawn there with an eyebrow pencil. His eyes steady behind the wire-rimmed spectacles, a smile on his face.

He said, “I trust we have an understanding.”

Wish bowed in front of him. Every muscle in his body quivering as if he were plugged into an electrical outlet. He held the bow, acquiescing, and at the same time he was placing the interpreter on the chart in his mind, on the far edge of a ring among the outer planets. Somewhere beyond human.

“I see you are a friend of the Canadians,” the interpreter said, still smiling. “They are associates of yours.”

“We’re in the same outfit, sir.”

The interpreter shouted an order to the guard, who singled out Harris and Anstey among the prisoners pretending not to watch the punishment. The three of them were marched to a line of individual cells made of bamboo, the ceilings too low for even Anstey to stand upright inside. The guard beat them across the backs and shoulders with a bamboo stick as they hustled inside, their heads covered with their hands.

They spent four nights in the cells. They were each given one ball of rice a day, laced with salt. Half of one cup of water each morning. The interpreter visited regularly to look in on them through the bamboo slats and to ask how they were enjoying the accommodations. He drank tall glasses of water where they could see him, a display of such childish cruelty it was difficult to credit. He seemed cartoonish to Wish, as if he had picked up his manner from watching crooks and hooligans in Hollywood films.

Talking was strictly forbidden, but they managed whispered conversations at night.

Anstey said, “He’s off his head, that one.”

“I don’t know if it’s that simple,” Wish said.

“What is it, then?”

“There’s something in him don’t seem real.”

“The bastard seems real enough to me,” Anstey whispered.

Harris said, “He’s the Jap to beat all Japs, for certain.”

That was more or less what Wish meant. There seemed something made up in everything about the interpreter.

They spent hours talking about food, recalling the meals they’d eaten in their lives, daydreaming the dishes ahead of them. It was a kind of mental torture not much different than the interpreter’s gulping water just out of their reach. But they couldn’t help themselves.

“Tell you where I’d like to go I gets out of here,” Anstey said. “One of those garden parties in Renews Wish goes on about.”

“Don’t torture me,” Harris said encouragingly.

Wish panned across those tables in his mind, every square inch laden with plates and trays and bowls. He listed the dishes aloud. Salt fish and fresh. Roast chicken and pork and salt meat. Pease pudding and cabbage and turnip. Onion pudding. Big crystal bowls of potato salad and jelly salad and coleslaw. Fruitcakes and pound cakes and figgy duff for dessert. Partridgeberry pie and custard pudding. “A dime to load up your plate as high as you like,” he said.

“Jesus,” Anstey whispered.

They were quiet a while then, their hunger sharpened by the thought of all the food they’d passed up in their lives.

Anstey said, “You and your missus, Wish.” He seemed to be trying to move on to something less provoking to his stomach. “You didn’t have much time together before you joined up, did you.”

“Not much, no.”

“You had her before you come over, I hope.”

“Fuck, Ants,” Harris said. “Who put the hole in your manners bag?”

“I’m only saying, Harris. It’d be a shame if he didn’t and never. You know,” he said, “got the chance.”

“Shut your mouth, would you? Jesus. Don’t mind him, Wish.”

He didn’t respond, and that was the end of the conversation. But he spent some time afterwards thinking of the night he’d knelt in front of Mercedes out behind the house in the Cove. There was nothing sexual in the memory for him. He was too exhausted, too parched and hungry for that. But the thought he might never get the chance to properly lay down with her tormented him.
Consummation
, the Monsignor called it. Wish never understood why priests always wanted a grand word for ordinary things and came to think it was just a way of putting people in their place. But it was the priest’s word he reached for when he tried to explain to Mercedes why they should wait. There was something high-minded and pure in it that seemed necessary in the circumstances. And he was afraid now, lying on the dirt floor of a bamboo cage halfway around the world, that it would never be his and hers together.

He shouldn’t have hooked up with Harris and Anstey in that bar, the two of them drunk and no real idea what England was or the army or where they’d end up. If one useless bastard in Halifax had given him sensible directions to the enlistment office. He shouldn’t have listened to Hiram and run off to Halifax in the first place. If he hadn’t hauled Hardy down the stairs, none of this. If he hadn’t knelt to say the rosary over poor drowned Aubrey Parsons. Hadn’t chased after a Protestant girl whose mother would never have him. He shouldn’t have hooked up with Hiram at all, was the truth of it, shouldn’t have left Renews.

He lay awake through hours of this kind of suffering at night while the camp was quiet and Harris and Anstey slept or lay silently running over their own lists. There was a sickening sense of inevitability to the rain of incident and circumstance when Wish looked back on it. He started to feel that even the subtlest shift—if he’d woken earlier on the day he first saw Mercedes, if he’d drunk one beer more or less in the Halifax bar—even the most inconsequential change would have been enough to alter the chain of events and his life now would be completely different. God’s hand was there in the details, Lilly always said, turning you left or right. And there was some vague comfort in thinking God was to blame.

After he and Tom and Billy-Peter off-loaded the statue of Jesus on the St. John’s waterfront, they had a few glasses of shine on deck. From where they were moored they could hear the Salvation Army street service. A young man waving the
Good News
and shouting over the noise of commerce on the docks.

Tom went below to sleep as soon as it got dark and the two younger men set off to see what they could of the town. They found a tavern by the spilled light and noise as a door opened into the road, the room crowded with soldiers. They were Canadians, 1st Battalion of the Black Watch. They were drinking with a reckless intensity, every one of them gregarious and expansively friendly. They stood drinks for the two Newfoundlanders. A soldier named Kent leaned across the table, pointing a finger at them both. He had a head that looked like it had come in a box, flattop haircut, a bizarrely square jaw.