Ken's War (3 page)

“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 grinned 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.”

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.”

“Fur
ro. Fur
ro
.
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.”