Ken's War (14 page)

The jab, intended to be comical, knocked Ken
back two steps. Unconsciously trying to erase the ghost-print of
the master’s power he massaged his shoulder. A livid bruise would
bloom soon.

“What do you mean?” Ken asked. “What should I
do?”

“Each morning before dawn, sit under the
waterfall and pay your attention.”

What a gyp
, Ken thought.

For eight consecutive mornings, he’d crept
out of the house, hunkered down naked under the waterfall and tried
to figure out what Sikung had meant by “water principle.” Ken knew
the facts: Water, two molecules of hydrogen combined with one
molecule of oxygen, froze at 32 degrees Fahrenheit and boiled at
212. In school the teachers had shown filmstrips of sketches
explaining condensation and cloud formation. None of this had
anything to do with disabling your enemy by ramming the heel of
your hand into his nose.

While he sat beneath the rushing, roaring
waters that pounded his head and shoulders, a black bird—a crow or
a raven—settled on a pine branch overhead. Soon more birds joined
the one. The flock jockeyed for space, and perched equidistant from
each other in a row on the branch. A thought, not the kind one
thinks of purposely, but the kind that flies in of its own accord
entered his mind.

The Pennsylvania State Parks Commission might
have sold or even given surplus and outdated supplies to its
employees. He had no proof that his grandfather was a thief and had
stolen the picnic table, the bathroom mirror, the toilet paper
dispenser and toilet paper. He only had what TV detectives called
circumstantial evidence. And, for that matter, since he was giving
kinfolk the benefit of the doubt, he’d only heard gossip and
innuendoes about his dad from doofusses and dirtbags.
I’d be a
dope to believe them,
Ken reflected dismally.

Who were these men? His people. His family.
His blood. They ushered him into the domain of males, showed him
how to build campfires in the woods, and then disperse the cold
ashes afterward, showed him how to burn a homer past the
outfielder’s reach, taught him to stand up for himself. Yet, still
he accused them of thievery, oh, not to their faces like a man, but
silently, so the accusation festered within him. Finally, finally
he understood how Japanese people could feel shame in spite of no
other soul being aware of the dishonorable thoughts they
harbored.

From this day on, he was going to try to be a
good son. He wouldn’t make his dad ask for a second cup of coffee.
Oh, no siree, he’d pour it before his father had time to plunk the
empty mug down on the kitchen table. And that was just the
beginning of the ways he’d become a good son, a good soldier.

The water pounding on his skull had given him
a headache. This was stupid sitting in butt-numbing water. He
jumped out of the waterfall and hurried home before his dad woke up
and growled for fried eggs.

Chapter
Eleven

~ The Water Principle ~

Wizard’s smile was infectious. Ken grinned
back goofily, but he didn’t know what was so dang amusing. He
accepted a box from Wizard’s outstretched hands.

The box, decorated with embossed
chrysanthemums and flecked with gold was too beautiful to rip open
greedily. Cautiously, he lifted the lid off the box. Fibrous paper
with ferns embedded in the weave lined the inside of the box. Ken
pulled out a blue and white
yukata
bearing the same oriental
medallion designs as Wizard’s
yukata
. He slipped on the
stiff, boxy garment. The Japanese robe fit as well as a
yukata
could fit.

“I’ll have room to grow.” His mother’s
words.

“Let’s take it out for a test drive,” Wizard
said.

Ken felt a mite ridiculous yet proud striding
behind the wild-haired private, the two of them wearing identical
yukata
, the two of them with long hair flowing with every
step.
I’m an American with freckles on my arms, walking to an
ofuro in Kyushu, Japan.
Who would be awed by this? Who would
exclaim, ‘You don’t say! Tell me, what’s it like?’

Ken didn’t need coaching in bathhouse
procedure. He soaped, scrubbed, rinsed and soaped, scrubbed and
rinsed again before dipping into the warm silky water beside
Wizard. He rested his arms on the rock ledge behind them. He didn’t
look people in the eyes, but he did wonder why the men didn’t get
boners. A flash of whiteness in the maple trees caught his
notice.

“Hey!” He clapped both hands over his mouth.
Shouting at a public hot springs was cruder than burping during the
Lord’s Prayer.

“It’s two weeks old,” Wizard said.

The suckling monkey clung to its mother’s
breast. Pink skin showed through the baby’s fine white fur. Sated,
the monkey let the nipple flop out of its mouth, and turned its
pink eyes to observe movements in the pool below.

“How can gray parents have a white baby?” Ken
whispered.

“It’s an albino. Albinism is a color
deficiency.”

“I know, but how’s the deficiency
happen?”

“I don’t recollect reading an explanation. If
I were to venture a guess, I’d say the genetic code for
pigmentation is lacking in the monkey’s DNA.”

“Looks like he came out of the oven too
soon.”

Wizard chuckled and said the critter did look
underdone. The mother macaque clasped her baby to her chest, and
bounded into the forest. Wizard and Ken rested their heads on the
rim of the pool. Through a curtain of red eyelashes, Ken observed a
girl lowering herself into the bath. Her parents slipped in on
either side of her. The way the young girl tucked a lock of black
hair behind her ear evoked a mishmash of flashbacks of chalk dust
in blackboard trays back home, and of Maeda when she thought no one
was watching her.

“My mom sent me a newspaper clipping,” Ken
heard himself saying. “It was about how Walt Disney died back in
December. Now kids in America won’t get to watch
The Wonderful
World of Disney
on Sunday nights. It’s a kids’ show. Mom thinks
I’m still a kid.”

“After a month here,” Wizard said, his voice
thick with tranquility, “I didn’t miss television one iota. In
fact, my disposition improved without TV.”

He was thankful Wizard hadn’t fired back a
smart remark reminding Ken how he’d complained in the past that he
was bored here without television to watch. The Japanese girl
quietly swished water over her shoulders. Her hands moved like
little birds through her black hair.

“Ouch!” Ken squeaked. “Your toenails are
sharp!”

“You’re ogling,” Wizard said without moving
his lips.

“No, I wasn’t. Besides, she looks like a
brownnoser that
asks
to clap erasers after class.” He shut
his eyes and held onto the image of her tiny breasts, sweet
promises for the future.

“Wizard,” he whispered, “I’ll be seventeen in
June. Is seventeen an adult?”

“For what purpose? Drinking, driving,
enlisting?”

Ken shrugged. He felt like an adult
already.

Wizard hung Ken’s
yukata
on top of his
on a hook on the hut wall, and began counting box lots of asphalt
shingles that had arrived that day, noting the quantity on an
inventory control form.

“It’s odd,” Wizard said absently, “the
fallout of war, that is.”

As the war intensified, activity in the
warehouse increased. Day by day the formerly rare task of shipping
stock out became more commonplace. Last week it was canvas material
for field hospital stretchers. They’d shaken out the mouse poop and
insect carcasses, and crated up another shipment for a hospital in
Cao Nam, Vietnam.

Ken stroked Neko’s bumpy spine. His fingers
were wrinkled from soaking in the mineral waters twice in one day.
What was really odd, in Ken’s estimation, was how Wizard followed
orders without balking and truly reveled in being posted here, all
the while ignoring the army’s dress code, letting his hair grow
like a spiky sisal plant and “fraternizing with the Japs” as his
dad put it.

“Do you know anything about the water
principle?” Ken asked Wizard.

“Sikung Wu took you on as a student after
all.”

“Not exactly. He told me to study water, but
I already know everything. I passed the quiz on that stuff last
year.”

“Open the cabinet and get yourself a
notepad.”

He did.

“At the top write the words water principle.
Allow your mind to roll down any avenue it chooses, and you write
whatever presents itself about water, or any topic. I’ll check with
you when I finish filling in these inventory forms. In
quadruplicate.”

Ken wrote and doodled. Mostly he doodled,
although he didn’t know if doodling was allowed in Wizard’s mind
exercise. He drew a Chinese man sitting under a spigot dripping
water on his head. The man’s face was contorted with agony. Ken
wrote the words “Chinese water torture” in a speech balloon above
the victim’s head.

“That doesn’t look like homework to me unless
the curriculum changed since I was in school.”

“Oh, hi, Dad.”

“Homework?”

“Nah, I’m just fooling around.”

“Need help?” When his parents used to argue,
and it was obvious his dad was losing the battle, he’d hold his
hands up and say, “I’m just a warehouse man,” and leave the room or
change the subject. No point in asking his dad about the water
principle. He was just a warehouse man.

“Where’s that fish knife?” his dad said with
fake jocularity. “Someone around here needs a haircut!”

Under his breath Ken muttered, “Get off my
back.”

Paderson dropped a stack of ringed notebook
binders on Wizard’s desk. Wizard slammed the binders into the
cabinet.

“Hold your horses, Abernathy,” Paderson said.
“I want the information in those binders read and comprehended, and
completed competency tests posted to the assessment center at the
rate of two per week.”

“Yes, Captain. Which shipment of incoming
boxes do you want me to let sit in the rain, and which supply
requisition should I delay while I get me some head-u-cation?”

“Watch your step.”

“Yes, Captain. I was out of line.” Wizard
saluted his superior officer. They stepped outside and carted boxes
onto a supply truck.

The words “U.S. Army Logistics and Supply
Correspondence Course” were stenciled on the binders’ spines. “The
United States Army Logistics and Supply Command is the backbone of
the Army,” the introduction announced gleefully. The information
within the binders was organized the same way as Ken’s school
booklets. The sentences were written in simple subject/verb/object
formats, with complex sentences thrown in after every fifth or
sixth sentence, supposedly to shock students into wakefulness with
the sudden variation. Black and white photos, line drawings and
charts illustrating “key concepts” broke up the monotony of words,
words, and words. Each chapter had its own easy-peasy quiz. You
didn’t have to read the whole chapter. You just read the questions
first and then searched for the answers. The test writers had tried
to trick people by burying words like
not, always,
and
never
in the questions. Ken completed the end-of-unit
self-quiz on Procurement Efficiency in less than fifteen
minutes.

Captain Paderson and Wizard took a break from
stacking boxes on shelves. Wizard flipped open three pop bottles
and poured ginger ale into ice-filled tumblers.

“What did you come up with on the water
principle?” he asked Ken.

“Nothing. Just junk.”

“Is this for your science class?” his father
asked.

“Yes,” he answered too forcefully. Momentary
indecision passed over Wizard’s face, and transformed into the
neutral countenance he affected while soaking in the hot
springs.

Paderson said, “Water freezes at thirty-two
degrees. Dew point is—”

“I know all that junk, Dad.” Ken pretended he
didn’t notice his dad’s lips zip tight.

“I’ll tell you something you don’t know,
then, wise guy. When you were a baby, water almost killed you.”

Ken frowned. This was news to him.

“We were living in an old townhouse off
barracks. The unit next door was abandoned. One night around two
a.m., Tricia was rocking you in the kitchen because you were
colicky. She kept the rocking chair in the kitchen. She was rocking
you when we heard a big crash. I thought a drunk had driven his car
into the side of the house. Your mom thought a branch from the box
elder tree had fallen down because earlier that evening we’d had a
storm and a dead branch was hanging loose over the roof.”

Hearing his dad tell a story about him was
like traveling through unfamiliar territory without a guide,
feeling his way along, not sure where the pitfalls and booby traps
were. He couldn’t remember a recent conversation with his dad that
didn’t end with a command or a restriction.

Ears flattened, Neko slithered out the door,
and suddenly the Quonset hut shelves creaked and concentric rings
danced on the surfaces of the ginger ale in their glasses. Ken’s
chair tried to walk out from under him. He jumped off it. Paderson
ran outside. Wizard smiled, shoved his hands in his pockets and
remained inside. Within seconds the earth quit shaking.

“Neat! Earthquake!” Ken’s voice cracked,
embarrassing him.

“A tremor. I’d estimate a three point fiver,”
Wizard said.

Paderson returned to the hut. “Earthquake,”
he said.

“Tremor,” Ken said, “What happened when you
and mom heard the crash?”

It took Paderson a second to remember what
they’d been talking about before the seismic temblors had rattled
him. “The ceiling in your nursery had caved in. Chunks of plaster
fell in your crib where you’d have been sleeping if your mom hadn’t
been rocking you. Chunks as big as footballs. Rainwater had seeped
into the apartment next door where the chimney pulled away from the
wall. The water traveled along the attic floor and rested in a low
spot over your crib. Water had soaked it for months or maybe years.
Eventually the rotting beams and plaster couldn’t bear the weight
of the water and boom!” Paderson slapped his thigh with his right
hand. Ken flinched.