Ken's War (5 page)

“Did you finish your homework?” Paderson
asked.

Ken scanned the subtitles in the history book
from a self-study program in which his mom had enrolled him, a dead
give-away that she didn’t plan on him returning to the States for a
least a marking period or two. “Seems like history is about a bunch
of wars.”

“Conflict is our destiny.”

“I’ll ace the test on this chapter,” Ken
said. “No sweat.”

His father lowered his head slowly and
semaphored a warning: Don’t get too cocky.

“I’m bored.” Ken slapped the history book
shut and looked around at the too small kitchen-dining area. Maeda
waited silently against the wall for a chance to be helpful.
“There’s nothing to do here.”

Paderson pushed his empty plate to the center
of the table. “It’s nice outside. Go do what you’d normally
do.”

If he planned to stay for the long haul, or
at least until his dad got a transfer, he may as well “adapt.” That
was the word Wizard had used. Adapt. Explore. Find a friend his
age. Those were the things he’d normally do. He headed for the
door.

“Damn her!” His father boomed. “Damn it
all!”

Sparks burned through Ken’s veins and he
instinctively hunched his shoulders as he turned around in time to
see his dad sweep plates, bowls and cups off the table. The dishes
crashed on the floor. Together they stared at the broken dishes as
if they’d leaped off the table on their own. Ken kneaded his arm,
testing for soreness. He’d angered his dad, perhaps by eating
sashimi or being cocky or whining about being bored. Paderson
balled up the letter from his wife, Tricia, with the Koufax
newspaper clipping, slung it against the wall and stomped out the
door. No, Ken hadn’t angered his dad. The letter had.

Ken scooped up the letter and threw it away
with the fish skin and coffee grounds. He couldn’t blame his father
one little bit for being pissed off at Tricia. Ken and his dad both
had a right to be damn mad at her. Mighty damn mad. According to
the letter, among other tidbits that she supposed were important
news, she’d written that she had a boyfriend and she’d sold Ken’s
BB gun to a neighbor boy, since Ken wouldn’t be using it
anymore.

Maeda stooped to collect shards of blue
dishes off the floor. Kneeling beside her, picking up the pieces,
Ken discovered that even now at close range, he could not read
anything in her face, except perhaps that she was thinking of
something vaguely sorrowful.

In the days that passed, he didn’t learn what
impact his mom’s letter was going to have on him. Time would give
him the answer. He certainly wasn’t going to ask his dad and risk
setting off his hair-trigger temper. Instead, he woke up early
every morning and made a typical American breakfast for his father.
Then after the captain set off for work, Ken ate the Japanese
breakfast Maeda painstakingly prepared for him.

This morning’s breakfast of fish, rice,
pickled daikon, miso soup, seaweed and tea had been very much like
the previous breakfasts she’d made, and just as enjoyable.

Ken traipsed along the bulwark separating his
house from the rice paddy, but it wasn’t a paddy now really. More
of a great pan of cracked mud bristly with dried stubs of rice
stalks. Recently harvested rice straw was drying on ricks shaped
like African huts. A row of persimmon trees heavy with fruit lined
the eastern border of the field. A crow took flight from a leafless
persimmon branch. Bright red fruit quivered.

Ken entered the pine grove and walked past
the Quonset hut that was his dad’s warehouse. He heard Wizard
talking to his cat, Neko. He continued walking until Wizard’s voice
seemed more imagined than real. He climbed onto a black boulder and
sat on it for a long time. Perhaps he dozed off a bit, because when
he looked up, the sun had become considerably smaller and
hotter.

The village and the
ofuro
were to his
left. He wandered that way kicking gravel over the lip of the ledge
and into the valley, also fashioned from pans of cracked mud and
rice ricks. Not a living soul could be seen down there, not a dog,
not a chicken.

He heard their footsteps first. A group of
boys, five of them, trotted past a narrow alley between two houses.
Ken jogged between the houses and saw that the gang of Japanese
boys, wearing white martial arts uniforms, was following one boy
who wasn’t wearing a uniform. They were probably coming home from
the dojo that Wizard had spoken of. Might they know how to play
baseball? Could they speak a little English? Well, English wouldn’t
really be necessary. He could demonstrate how to throw a curveball
without talking.

The lead boy, the one not wearing a uniform,
walked briskly, never glancing back at the other boys to make sure
they were still behind him, and they in turn didn’t look back at
the
gaijin
trailing them. They speeded up their pace,
plucking up stones, and picking up branches from under trees along
the way, forcing the leader to quicken his step to stay ahead of
them. Ken was closing the distance between himself and the group
when the lead boy stopped in front of a farmhouse and turned to
face the gang.

A thrown stone bloodied the boy’s nose. A
large stick audibly arced down onto his shoulder. Ken flinched at
each ripe thunk of stick and stone smashing flesh and cracking
bone. The boy hadn’t been leading the gang. The gang had been
stalking the boy.

The victim tried to ward off the blows, but
his martial art didn’t work against rocks and sticks. The gang
huddled around him. An animal-like agonized scream ripped through
the air. The boy dropped to the ground. The attackers’ obscene
silence and the victim’s diminishing appeals went on until at long
last the gang stepped away from the body. Like a doll fallen from
the violet sky, the boy was misshapen, neck twisted, limbs angled
in the wrong directions. Fresh blood blackened the flat paving
stones in front of the farmhouse.

One of the boys’ eyes clicked on Ken, who was
too stunned to try to look fierce or to run. The gang departed,
melting into the darkening maze of the village.

The ululating sounds of large mammals baying
rang out through the chilling air. He shuddered and raced home,
feeling more like an animal with an acute sense of sight and great
speed than like a person who’d witnessed a brutal beating and had
done nothing to stop it.

He crashed through the door, dove onto his
futon, and hugged his knees to his chest. Maeda followed him into
the room.

“Where’s Dad?”

“He not tell me,” Maeda said.

Maeda laid a thick goose down comforter on
him. The weight of it barred the gruesome images from escaping the
theater of his imagination. He couldn’t stop shaking. He couldn’t
stop hearing the boy’s screams, seeing the limp corpse bleeding on
the paving stones, feeling the murderers’ eyes crawling over
him.

Maeda stroked his hair and made hissing
noises meant to soothe him. He tried to still himself, for her
sake.

“We have old story,” she began, “about old
times when only one road between two villages.” She named two
villages he’d never heard of and described a lord who suspected
that a rival was plotting to assassinate him and claim the lord’s
land for himself.

“The lord send a man to the village to learn
if the plan real. Because only one road between villages, the man
can meet the assassin and kill him first. The man like to drink
rice wine. He go in
nomiya
and drink too much
sake.
While he sleeping the killer travel to the lord and kill him. The
lord’s mama very sad. Every day she cut her arm, make blood get out
and let cat drink blood. This is her custom. She so heart break one
day she die. She can join with her son the lord. The cat also die
and be ghost. The ghost cat walk at night and make awful cry.
Sometime you can hear cat.”

Like a blind man, he tried to feel the
contours of meaning behind her story, but nothing useful came to
his mind.

“Listen,” she said. “Sometime you can hear
ghost cat.” She cupped her palm beside her ear.

The dry buckwheat that filled his pillow
instead of feathers protested in his ear. His frustration festered.
“What’d you tell me that stupid story for?”

“That lord’s mama miss son. Your mama miss
you too. Every day she bleed in her heart.” She patted his sweaty
hair.

He batted her hand, and rolled away from her.
He held his breath until he heard the rice paper door slide closed.
She was Japanese. She didn’t understand anything about Americans.
She’d misinterpreted his distress as homesickness for his mom.
Maeda was, for all intents and purposes, also unknowable, as
unknowable as that Jap gang who’d killed the boy.

Lying there, eyes wide open in the dark, even
the smell of his bed was foreign to him. He fought falling asleep,
but finally drifted off. Maeda returned to kneel, patiently, at the
foot of his futon. Or had he dreamed she was there?

Chapter
Five

~ The Fight ~

Ken’s fight with the officer’s kid back in PA
wasn’t the first time they’d gone at it. It was, though, the first
time Ken had won a battle against David Marshall. He was proud of
that.

This battle had escalated after a spit wad
skirmish during a boring history class.

In the hall, the school principal had said,
“Slow down, cowboy. Where's the fire?”

“Sorry,” Ken said. He rushed toward the boys’
lav.

“You know the rules.”

“Sorry.”

“How's your new teacher this year?”

“He teaches history funny.”

“Funny ha-ha, or funny strange?”

“Dunno.”

Ken Paderson did know this: Life was dull
without enemies.

In the boys’ lav relief came so forcefully it
was pleasantly painful. He stepped out of the stall and tripped,
falling onto the hard floor. Stunned, he looked up. Something
smacked his face. He didn't know what had hit him. Wet. Cool. He
swiped wads of wet toilet paper off his face.

David Marshall stood over him, armed with
more dripping toilet paper.

Disoriented with the aftershock of thinking
he’d been blinded by urine-soaked paper, Ken gripped the windowsill
and pulled himself up. His right kneecap was singing with pain
where he’d banged it on the floor when David tripped him. His
saliva tasted strange. Metallic.

“Bombs away!” David flung a wet wad at Ken.
Unfortunately, David was off-limits to serious counterstrikes,
because Lord help you if you pissed off David's dad, Lieutenant
Colonel Marshall. Lord help you more, though, if David thought you
were a sissy.

“Marshall, you're nothing but a sissy,” Ken
said.

“You're a shit heel like your dad,” David
shot back.

“Am not.” But he wasn't so sure about
that.

“Shit heel, shit heel, shit heel,” David
chanted, and ran out, hyena laughter ricocheting off the walls.

In the mirror, Ken’s reflected lip dripped
blood. The glossy red liquid on his face spurred him on. He liked
how he looked.

“How many stitches?” His father backed the
Chevy out of the barracks health clinic parking lot.

“Only four.” His reply came out as
on nee
four
. Ken’s numb bottom lip was a pink blur in his lower
peripheral vision.

“What’d you do?”

“Dunno.” Ken shrugged theatrically. You don’t
have to do anything in particular to rile David Marshall.

“What did you do to defend yourself?”
Paderson slowed down to let a group of war college students cross
the street. He saluted. “I asked you a question.” When they pulled
into the driveway, Ken and Paderson saw Tricia hanging towels on
the backyard laundry line. She grinned questioningly around a
clothespin clamped between her teeth.

“I asked you,” Paderson said, “'What did you
do to defend yourself?'” A sharp twist on the ignition key. Silence
replaced the car engine's murmur. The moment was drawn out for an
eternity. Until his dad said:

“You just took it! Didn’t you? You just took
it! What'd I tell you?”

“Thand up for mythelf.”

“You're damn right. Stand up for yourself.”
The captain turned in his seat. Ken braced himself for a wallop,
but instead his dad said, “When I was your age, I was smaller than
most of the other boys. In gym class I was the second to last when
we lined up by height. A kid named Donny Funkhauser and his goons
picked on me.”

“They did?” He was lightheaded with this idea
that goons picked on his dad. Why, they must've just walked up
behind him on the ball field, tapped his right shoulder and when he
turned to the right, they flew in from the left and socked him in
the jaw. Ken could see it as clear as day, what he didn't get was
why his dad was telling him this embarrassing detail from his
childhood, especially since he didn’t tell other stories, even
self-flattering stories about the old days.

“Those goons picked on me until I learned how
to fight back. Don't stand around like a dumb ox waiting to see
what they'll do to you next. Next time, stand up for yourself.
Defend yourself. If you don’t, you’ll be fair game for anybody and
his sister to pick on. Knock the bastard’s block off and he’ll
think twice about bothering you again. You gotta defend yourself.
That’s an order, soldier.”

“Yeth.”

“Yes, what?”

“Yeth, thir.”

“Yes, sir what?”

“Yeth, thir. Defend mythelf.”

The next day, with a stack of schoolbooks
wedged between his arm and hip, Ken leaped off the bus. The school
bus pulled away. The air smelled of diesel, ozone and earthworms.
It had rained on and off the whole day, drops streaming like tears
down the schoolroom windows. The clouds were filling up to rain
again. A premature dusk had descended, smothering wet black tree
branches and glossy leaves that released tiny showers with the
slightest breeze. The barracks’ red brick buildings were drenched a
darker shade of old blood.