Ken's War (4 page)

“No wonder I’m sick. This place is
upside-down
and
backwards.” Ken also understood why this man
was still a private. He was goofy in the head.

Wizard put on a stiff blue and white robe.
Ken watched him walk in that unsoldierly gait of his out of the hut
and down a gravel path toward the village until he disappeared
around a bend. Two crows landed on a pine bough, shaking dry
needles onto Ken’s hair. He raked the needles out of his hair with
his fingers and scrambled to catch up with Wizard who, evidently
expecting his arrival, instructed Ken to “Forget your training. Do
what I do.”

A family of monkeys in the treetops bounded
ahead of them, waited until the two humans got close, and bounded
ahead again. Around them fissures in the earth wheezed, emitting
steam and slightly noxious odors. Imitating the commander on a TV
show he used to watch, he hooked his thumbs in his belt loop. The
cocky bearing helped him feel less flustered in this otherworldly
terrain.

Wizard led Ken through the men’s entrance of
a wood-paneled changing room. Women and girls entered the door in
the other side of the small stone building. The smooth slate floors
had been polished by thousands of bare soles. Water gurgled down
bamboo spouts. Somewhere water slapped against the sides of a
pool.

Wizard hung his robe, “
yukata”
he
called it, on an iron hook. Ken stuffed his socks in his sneakers
and hung his clothes on an iron hook too. He hopped out of his
underpants and held an insignificant square cloth in front of him.
The other men didn’t look at him. They didn’t not look at him. He
sat on a low stool between Wizard and an old man. Like them, he
scrubbed and scrubbed.

“Use this soap on your body,” Wizard
instructed quietly. “That’s the hair soap. Rinse completely and
thoroughly.”

Ken rinsed and wrestled with trying to jam
his wet legs back into his pants. Wizard shook his head minutely
and walked naked through another door leading to the outside.
Unclothed, Ken followed. The upper torsos of children, young women,
grannies, young men and wrinkled, ancient men standing in a gray
slurry materialized in the mist. As far as he could tell, everyone
was completely naked. Ken had never seen his own mom and dad naked,
not even by accident, and here these Japs acted like it was normal
to take a bath in front of anybody and everybody. The only way to
hide his nakedness was to submerge himself quickly. Which he
did.

The water at first felt scalding hot, but its
silky geothermal warmth soon blurred the boundaries of what he
normally thought to be the farthermost extent of his physical self
and the edges of the outside world. He held his cast above water
level, but grew too mellow to sustain the effort. The waters drew
the aches out of his joints. The constant, vague queasiness that
had fluttered in his stomach for days dissolved into a gooey, calm
feeling. Relaxed and safe, he stared at a pattern of scarlet maple
leaves floating on the thick liquid.

“That gentleman asked you a question,” Wizard
was saying, referring to an old man who was climbing out of the
communal bath. Gray water sluiced off his body.

“Huh?”

“Are you a little boiled octopus?” The old
man was amused with his own question.

“Huh?”

Wizard spoke in Japanese and shared a chuckle
with the old man.

After a short time or a long time, he didn’t
know which, Ken asked, “Don’t the Japs hate us?”

“Why would they?”

He grimaced. “You know. Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.”

Wizard’s concentration turned inward, leading
Ken to believe that he wasn’t going to dish out a pat, flawed
answer, an answer with so many ‘becauses’ you knew it couldn’t be
true. “The bombings are a ghastly scar on the national psyche,”
Wizard allowed. “I think the Japanese people are fierce, proud,
forward looking and at the same time they have their ancient
traditions and customs to keep them grounded and to give them
strength and continuity. Hating hinders progress and healing. No, I
don’t think they hate us.”

Ken wanted to believe this strange soldier,
but didn’t know if he could just yet.

An infant warbled happily and splashed water.
A young woman massaged an elderly woman’s upper arms. Several men
murmured quietly. A wizened one gazed at the puzzle pieces of sky
showing between the branches overhead.

“They seem like nice enough people,” Ken
said.

“One man makes love,” Wizard said. “Many men
make war.”

Ken stepped up stairs a stonemason had carved
in a submerged boulder. He scurried to retrieve his square modesty
cloth that was drying on a stone. Just as he was about to pick his
cloth up, a monkey leaped down from a tree, snatched the cloth and
clambered back up the tree. The monkey waved the white cloth. With
an intelligent glint in its eyes, the monkey chattered at Ken,
naked and pink. Ken thumped his chest and chattered back, which
made the monkey scratch its head and then leap into the branches
for cover. Bathers in the pool giggled softly, and, as the days
passed into weeks, they began teaching the red-headed
gaijin
a few Japanese words and phrases.

Standing several feet in front of the Quonset
hut, Ken hit pinecones with a stick, sending them flying down into
the rice paddy valley. The cast on his arm hindered his natural
grace and newfound enthusiasm. He dropped the stick and raced into
the hut.

“Is there a doctor around here?” he
snapped.

“Depends on what ails you,” Wizard
replied.

He raised his arm, confined in its gray,
soggy cast. Wizard handed him a serrated knife.

Ken didn’t take the knife. “Where’s Dad?”

“Do you want him to cut your cast off?”

“Nuh-uh.”

“You can do it.”

He sawed vigorously, creating plaster crumbs,
and stopped sawing when the knife snagged the inner gauze layer
next to his skin. With scissors, he snipped through the rank
smelling gauze, being careful not to cut his white, wrinkly skin.
The cast lay on the desk, its two halves sprung open like a
discarded larval shell. No longer anchored by the plaster, his arm
felt light. Because of a Christmas-morning feeling in his stomach,
he sensed, but only dimly, that a weight more significant than the
cast had been shed.

“Would you deliver this to Captain Paderson
for me?” Wizard handed him an envelope with a USARJ -
9
^th
TAACOM return address. “His request for transfer was
denied.”

“Did you read Dad’s mail? I’m telling Dad you
read his mail.”

“You’ve been involved in espionage and
intrigue too long for me to slip one past you,” Wizard said using
his fake Kraut accent. “Last night after you were asleep I boiled
water in this very teakettle and steamed open the envelope.” In the
distance cantankerous gears coughed. That would be his dad’s jeep.
“If his request had been approved the envelope would have a
different return address on it. His request didn’t make it past the
colonel’s rubber stamp. You’ll be going home without your
father.”

That queasy feeling returned and convulsed
his stomach, but the feeling was washed away with a wave, not
entirely unpleasant, of tingly electricity. He and his mom could
live together without his dad’s looming presence. Then everything
would be OK again—no more of his parents’ bickering and sniping.
His mom always was nicer to Ken, nicer to everybody when his father
wasn’t around. His parents’ good moods worked the other way too,
Ken had noticed lately. His dad was nicer to him, less tetchy, some
of the time anyhow, when Tricia wasn’t twitting him about keeping a
tight inventory of paperclips and erasers at the barracks
warehouse.

Two crows swooped down from the pine boughs
outside the Quonset hut door and tussled in the dust. What could
the birds be fighting about, or were they playing? The crows cawed
and took flight. One black feather twirled to the ground.

Paderson appeared in the doorway and smacked
the doorframe. He stood with his hands on his hips. He flipped a
hostile look at Wizard. “What’s this I hear about my son
fraternizing with the Japs?”

The way he’d said the word hit Ken like a
slap, a slap he didn’t deserve. “Don’t call them Japs, Dad.”

Paderson turned his head slightly, in the way
a man who’s hard of hearing cocks his head favoring his good ear.
But Ken knew his Dad had heard what he’d said quite well; you only
had to watch the muscles twitching like a burrowing animal under
his jaw and throat to know he’d heard. Ken felt his ears grow hot,
but he did not waver: He met his dad’s gaze full on until finally
Paderson let his hands drop from his hips. He began talking to
Wizard with a pretended airiness about an incoming shipment of
overstock.

Ken strode to the door, turned to face his
dad, and pressed his palms against opposite sides of the rough
wooden doorway. He felt strong enough to break the door frame.
“Japanese,” he told his dad who still didn’t let on he’d heard.
“Call them Japanese. Not Japs.”

Chapter
Four

~ Conflict is Our Destiny
~

This latest upheaval, the arrival of a
Japanese housekeeper, happened without any clues that change was
coming. And like the other big changes in his life, he could not
have predicted it because nothing in his experience or imagination
up to that point had prepared him. No hints floating on the air or
in his dad’s demeanor cued him that another person was going to try
to adjust the way he viewed the world, tell him what was what. He
hadn’t yet made up his mind if he liked Maeda or not. She wasn’t
like any other grownup he’d met.

Maeda didn’t walk. She glided. Her
bamboo-slim figure was wrapped and tied tightly in a brown kimono.
She bent gracefully at the knees and hips as she placed blue bowls
and rectangular plates on the table. Her diminutive hands adjusted
each dish to satisfy an exacting standard she envisioned. Her black
eyes, resembling two merry tadpoles swimming toward each other,
were cast downward, not with nervousness, but with an unknowable
emotion. Never at any time since that first day when Wizard had
introduced the Japanese housekeeper to Ken and Captain Paderson,
did one wisp of glossy black hair fall free from the intricate bun
that was secured in place with lacquered wooden combs. Her face was
a pale, tranquil pool. When he was in a good mood, the curve of her
mouth was called a smile. When he was crabby, the curve of her
mouth was a pout, even though she wasn’t the one who’d changed her
outlook.

“Do you want wasabi?” Her utterance was a
downy feather.

“No, I don’t want wasabi,” Paderson replied,
“and I don’t want the raw fish that you insist on serving with
it.”

“Give me some wasabi, please.” Ken pronounced
each syllable of the Japanese word for ground horseradish with
care. He avoided his dad’s censorious glare.

Happy to have something to do, Maeda briskly
mixed the green paste with soy sauce for him. Paderson stabbed his
chopsticks into his rice so they stood upright at attention.
Maeda’s expression was unreadable, but Ken had learned that
chopsticks standing in rice symbolized death when Maeda had told
him so the one time he’d committed the same blunder. It was
“unexpected” she’d told him. He learned quickly that unexpected was
a code word English-speaking Japanese people used when they were
surprised at someone’s barbaric behavior, or when a loss of face
had occurred. He held his tongue, though, and didn’t tell his dad
of his breach of manners, for his dad had been venting his temper
on both of them ever since he’d read Tricia Paderson’s letter, the
one she’d mailed way back in October, but hadn’t arrived until this
morning as they’d sat down for breakfast.

The ripped envelope and letter lay on the
table along with the newspaper clipping Tricia had sent of Sandy
Koufax smiling, showing many white straight teeth. Ken needed
someone to tell him what changes his mother’s letter was going to
bring to him. He knew what the letter meant to his father.

His dad said, “Koufax refused to pitch the
first game because of some Jew holiday. He’d be hit with
insubordination in the army for shenanigans like that.” Paderson
impaled a slice of daikon radish on a chopstick.

Maeda stood silently a few steps away from
the table, waiting for her services to be called upon, witnessing
what must seem to her to be bizarre American family behavior, Ken
surmised. She approached the table carrying two plates with
something pink and shiny on them. Ken rose to intercept the plates
she held in her hands, and take them back to the kitchen area, but
he failed to do so before his dad saw the raw tuna.

“I told you, no Jap food,” Paderson said.

“Why’d you hire her if you don’t like her
cooking?” Ken asked.

“To take care of you.”

“I’m old enough to take care of myself.”

Paderson harumphed. For a time, no one said a
word.

“Take it easy, Dad. It can’t be that bad.
Wizard eats raw fish.” That endorsement, he knew before he could
stop himself from saying it, was not going to help his case at all.
He held his breath and, chewing only two or three times, gulped a
hunk of sashimi. The raw tuna tasted surprisingly tender and
refreshing. Not a bit slimy or fishy.

His father shook his head. “And to think they
call us barbarians.”

Ken dredged the remaining chunks of tuna in
flour and salt and fried them in oil. He served the tuna this way
to his father. Maeda stood by quietly, hands tucked up inside her
kimono sleeves. Peeved, Paderson flung open a drawer and rooted
around noisily until he found a fork. An unhappy man, he shared his
black outlook with every glance, with every gesture.

Without his dad spelling it out, Ken got the
message: the consequence of pissing off his dad or ding-donging at
him was going to bring on a prolongation of this murderous mood. He
opened the history book that had arrived mysteriously with other
schoolbooks in last month’s mail.