Ken's War (12 page)

Alice sniveled about not getting a Barbie
house for Christmas. Becky said she hated cranberry sauce with
walnuts in it. Her mom never put walnuts in cranberry sauce. Mammaw
said she’d give Tricia the girls’ mom’s cranberry relish recipe,
and what did she think about Ken getting a haircut, had she thought
about that?

Holm ordered Tricia to refill the pepper
grinder and don’t forget to enroll Ken in school before January,
enough of this skylarking all day. Pap-pap gobbled up the last of
the turkey filling. Mammaw blew smoke into the succotash. Carl
hammered his highchair tray with a metal spoon.

If she was his mom and he was her son, how
come she was allowing these hateful people gathered ‘round their
table to wreck his Christmas? She wouldn’t have put up with this
kind of horseplay—smoking at the table, ding-donging about the
food, whining about the gifts—if he’d tried it. She never did
before, that’s for sure.

“Who wants the wishbone?” His mom’s high
voice was nearly lost in the din.

“I do! I do! I do!” The two girls grappled
for the bone and toppled a lit candle.

His mom grabbed the bone from the sisters’
greasy hands, and dabbed a napkin at the hardening wax. Becky
yanked the bone from Tricia, and held it out for Alice to pull
on.

The wishbone snapped.

“I got my wish! I got my wish!” Becky
warbled.

“You didn’t say ready, set, go,” Alice the
arbiter of rules and loser shot back.

“That’s enough, girls,” Holm said. For a
moment, Pap-pap’s loose dentures working on a turkey wing was the
only noise.

“I wish you all’d just die!” The wish was
Ken’s. Seven pairs of eyeballs rolled toward him.

Mammaw broke the silence with a creaky
invocation. “Lordy, Lordy.”

“Aren’t you going to discipline your son?”
Holm asked.

Tricia’s eyes darted frantically from her new
husband’s face to her in-laws’ and then settled on Ken. “I knew
your father would raise you like this.”

“You raised me too!”

“Go to your room if you can’t be civil.”

“I don’t
have
a room.”

Baby Carl’s face puckered up, reddened and
let out a shriek.

The house was bigger and quieter, now that he
was in it by himself. You could hear yourself think, for Pete’s
sake. One thing for sure, he wasn’t going to stand at the bus stop
with those toad-faced sisters.

He absently picked up the unclothed Barbie
doll lying in rigor mortis on the kitchen chair. Her hard lines,
her frozen flinty gaze pissed him off.

And he definitely wasn’t going to play sissy
card games again with those girls. Period.

He twiddled Barbie’s ponytail.

That morning his mom had sat in this chair,
brushing Becky’s hair. She’d gathered the girl’s hair into a
ponytail resembling the doll’s hairdo. His mother’s eyes had become
soft, unfocused; her hands stroking, brushing in the mutually
soothing manner that an old man caresses his favorite dog. Becky
had sat silently, mimicking the grooming gestures with her hands,
with her Barbie.

Barbie’s head popped off in Ken’s hand. He
blinked, surprised, and yet satisfied, too.

“Don’t lose your head,” he said in a gravelly
voice. A cold draft fingered its way under the porch door, across
the kitchen floor and wrapped itself around his feet. He twirled
the doll head around and around by the ponytail. In a high-pitched
voice he squealed, “No, please, no!”

He popped her arms off.

In the gravel voice, he said, “Yes, bad Ken
is here.”

“Please, no, no, no!” Two shapely, rigid legs
popped off.

He stared at the plastic limbs and torso.
Using big scissors his mother called poultry shears, he cut each of
the four limbs in half. He arranged body parts like so much tiny
cordwood.

He remembered to breathe. He pulled his
tongue in and regarded his handiwork. The scissors clanged against
the tabletop.

He glanced at the grease-spattered clock on
the kitchen stove, and wondered if his mom was coming home to make
lunch for him. He was hungry. The sisters. Where was their real
mother? What had happened to her?

The garage door rumbled open. Car doors
slammed shut. His mother’s voice intertwined with the girls’ bright
silk ribbon voices.

Ken scooted away from the kitchen table. On
his way to the front door, he stuffed plastic body parts down
between the sofa cushions. Quickly, quietly he shut the front door
behind him. The tongue of the door latch settled into the strike
plate. Dread, an oily sludge, spread throughout his chest, making
his breaths short and shallow.

Ken loped across the driveway and onto the
front porch. “The Holms Welcome You” was painted on a plaque
attached to the wall beside the porch light. He opened the front
door slowly.

Odors of baby poop and cigarette stink rushed
out. He walked right into Holm’s grasping hand. The man lifted Ken
off the floor by the front of his shirt. They were eye to eye. Holm
shook Barbie’s torso in Ken’s face, then threw him onto the sofa.
It careened against the wall. Becky could be heard whimpering
upstairs.

“What the hell did you think you were doing?”
Holm’s late afternoon stubble glowed bluish-green. His face
flattened. The blades in his eyes severed Ken's ability to
construct coherent thoughts.

“I was only—”

“You’re a guest in this house, boy. Do you
understand that? I can kick you out on your ass so fast you won’t
know which end is up!”

“Yeah, but—”

“Yeah. But. There is no yeah, but.”

Ken knew the man was right. No “yeah, but”
existed to explain away what he’d done.

Tricia stepped into the living room. Maroon
glop oozed from under a white towel wrapped around her head like a
mummy’s bandage. A thought formed, a fantastical one at that: Holm
must have axed her head. She was in shock. Feeling no pain.

Frightened, Ken yelped, but swallowed it
before the sound was fully delivered. She was dying her hair again.
He couldn't squelch it. He sniggered.

“You think this is goddamned amusing, boy?”
Fist raised, Holm stepped toward Ken.

Tricia sprung at her husband and grabbed his
fist with both hands. The power of his swing, intended for Ken,
drove her to the floor. The towel fell loose from her head,
revealing wet, red snakes of hair. Lying there, with her head
propped on her palm, she gave her husband that inverted grin of
hers. Her eyes without make-up were reptilian.

Holm stared at her. “Didn’t you know what
your boy was doing? What kind of kid does that? Where were you when
this was happening?” His fists opened and closed at his thighs.

“Hit me,” she uttered from the floor. “Hit
me.”

For the first time in his life, Ken’s mother
was truly frightening the bejeezus out of him. He pushed himself
deeper into the sofa cushions to put distance between him and her
snake hair, her grin.

Holm suddenly found it necessary to brush
dandruff off his shoulder, his motions reminiscent of a cornered
cat unexpectedly becoming fastidious and grooming its haunches.
Tricia got up with slow ballet movements. A song faintly entered
the living room from the kitchen radio. Static scratched the air.
Music. Then static. If the focus was going to shift, it had to
shift now.

“You stole my mother!” Ken opened himself up.
There was no undoing it.

The three inhaled as one. His mom’s shoulders
relaxed ever so slightly.

“Stole your...?” Holm asked, incredulous. He
grimaced and rubbed his eyes, squeezing skin between his
fingers.

With abrupt movements, Tricia re-wrapped the
stained towel around her hair. The effort of it punched her words
out. “You spoil those girls, you know.”

“That has nothing to do with your boy.”

“It has to do with respect. For me,” Tricia
said. “They don’t listen to me because they know you won’t back me
up.”

“It's not like that.”

“Do you know what it's like?”

“You’re twisting this to make me look
bad.”

“You don't need help in that department,
believe you me.”

“What's been bugging you lately?” Holm asked
her.

“You think it's only been lately?” Tricia’s
smile looked mean.

“Christ sakes. Why do you always have to
bring that up? I said I was sorry.”

“Tell me you're not this dense. Let me put it
in terms you can understand.”

“I understand plenty.”

“You’re botching this marriage up royally.”
She was not talking about Holm’s disobedient daughters, or chopped
up Barbie, or even bad Ken. It had nothing to do with him. They
were picking over some bone they’d dug up. He was a handy excuse
for them. A convenient trigger.

Oddly, he felt cheated, shortchanged because
the answer to a question that balanced on the blade edge had been
shelved. Could he, would he have physically defended himself
against Holm? If this man had defeated him, their respective
positions in the scheme of Ken’s world would have been reinforced
for the foreseeable future. If he had, somehow in some meaningful
way, challenged the man, peace would prevail, and the requirement
to obey his mother’s new husband would be irreversibly waived.

Ken sat still in the very heart of the
unanswered question. No one was paying attention to the pungent
odor of something burning in the kitchen.

His mom blinked and gazed at him as though
he'd materialized from between the sofa cushions.

“There are moments,” she said wearily, “when
I think I'd be better off without you.”

“Who?” the man asked.

Yeah, who?
Ken wondered.

Tricia flopped onto the sofa beside Ken. “Go
play with your soldiers. OK, honey?”

He got up and headed for the back porch.
“Donate my soldiers to the poor kids.”

“You love those soldiers.”

“Not anymore,” he told his mother. “I’m too
old for them.”

“You did grow a lot over there, in Japan,”
she said softly.

He knew that if he told her what he was
really thinking—that he was so miserable not even his model
soldiers lifted his mood—he would jinx it. So he kept quiet and
wished like crazy that she’d send him back to Japan. Even that
would be better than staying here with his mom and her new husband
and his stupid girls.

Chapter
Ten

~ Too Much Fire ~

Wizard stepped into the Quonset hut and laid
his clipboard on top of a box sitting on his desk. “Why the long
face?”

Ken plopped into a chair next to Wizard’s
desk, and hugged his elbows. “It’s official: my mom has a new
family. And they stink.” When Ken had gently, oh so gently floated
the idea of his going back to Japan, his mom pretended to be
disappointed. Her new husband suddenly became concerned about what
“Carrot Top” wanted and quickly arranged Ken’s flight to
Okinawa.

“You’re suffering from a serious case of the
blues, my man.”

Wizard never tried to erase your feelings
with slogans like
The darkest hour is before the dawn,
which, by the way, if you couldn’t fall asleep until eight in the
morning because your body was all screwed up from flying around the
world to Japan, you knew wasn’t true. Because Wizard accepted
fluctuating temperaments without judgment or argument, Ken didn’t
feel obligated to clamp his teeth onto this slimy mood like he
would if his mom had tried to cheer him up, or his dad had told him
to buck up.

“What are you going to do?” Wizard asked.

“I’m going to learn kung fu!” Ken swatted
dust motes with the blades of his palms. Neko meowed and streaked
out the door.

“At the dojo?”

“No. From...from a bum living in the bamboo
grove.” Ken described the troll-like man he’d met that early
morning after getting separated from Maeda at the bonfire.

Wizard tapped his lips with the pencil. “What
led you to believe he is a bum?”

“He wears white pajamas covered with patches,
and he hasn’t had a haircut for a long, long time.” Ken shrugged, a
little embarrassed. Wizard smiled. They both ran their hands
through their long hair as an acknowledgement of the flawed
conclusion Ken had drawn.

“The bum you’re describing is Sikung Wu.
Sikung is a title meaning teacher of teachers. He’s associated with
the
Chi gung
Research Institute of Beijing—”

“He’s Chinese?”

“He is. He holds honorary Ph.D.s from Oxford
and Johns Hopkins. He speaks six languages fluently. He exclusively
teaches
chi gung
practitioners who’ve previously earned
black sashes.”

“He said he’d teach me!”

“What exactly did Sikung say?”

“I said I wanted to learn the stuff he was
doing and he said, ‘What’s stopping you?’” Ken didn’t mention that
this conversation had occurred before he’d gone to the States. A
lot could have changed since then.

“Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. Sikung’s question
was, possibly, rhetorical and could mean a myriad of things. How
will you reciprocate?”

“Huh?”

“If he has in fact agreed to instruct you in
the art of
chi gung
, it’s not kung-fu, you will wear the
own.”

“Own? A white uniform?”

Wizard drew
kanji
on a notepad.
“
On.
Incurred obligations. For example, Japanese children
receive
on
from their parents, which is repaid with
unconditional filial duty. Students wear the
on
from their
teachers called
shin no on
.”

“He didn’t say anything about money.”

“Different people repay obligations in
different ways. One student typed documents for Sikung. Another,
I’d heard, bought him a roundtrip ticket to visit his family in
China. Being taught by a master isn’t like signing up for swimming
lessons at the YMCA. Sikung learned his art from his father, who’d
learned it from his father and so on. The
chi gung
style he
performs is over 6000 years old. He selects students more mindfully
than most people pick a spouse.”