Ken's War (8 page)

Sometimes though, he enjoyed the torment of
thinking about the old days. He sliced the envelope open with a
kitchen knife. The front of the card depicted a bronco busting
cowboy atop a layer cake with the glitter words, “It’s your
16
^th
birthday!”

Inside the card she’d written: “I deposited
$1,000 in your savings account. It’s part of the proceeds from the
sale of Grandma and Grandpap Paderson’s house and household goods.
Tell your dad I kept a few thousand, to which I’m entitled, and the
rest was used to pay his outstanding bills. Keep up with your
schoolwork. You have a baby brother now. I guess he’s a
half-brother since he’s Major Holm’s son. His name is Carl Gary
Holm, born May 9. Love, Mommy.”

He looked up at his father’s face, etched
with curiosity. “What’s it say?” Paderson asked.

“Why didn’t you tell me you’re not married
anymore?” He pushed past Maeda who’d come gliding toward him with
her handkerchief ready to soak up the tears welling in his
eyes.

He stepped outside where humid air coated him
like a waxy skin he couldn’t shed. There was no one to fight, no
ball to hit, no rock to hurl for any kind of relief. He picked a
scab off his knee and pictured his mom at the kitchen table writing
the message in his birthday card, convinced that what she was
telling him was for the best. With her tongue poking out between
her frosty lipsticked lips, she would have licked the adhesive on
the envelope flap. Then using the side of her fist, she would have
patted the sticky flap down to the rhythm of the throbbing pearl of
pain in his chest.

What did she need another son for?

When Ken returned to the house lost hours
later, he found Maeda singing and snipping flower shapes out of
rice paper with small scissors. She glued the shapes onto the
shojii
separating the kitchen from the sleeping area. The
flowers—ghostly gray shadows—patched over holes Paderson’s drunken
fingers had punctured through the translucent paper room
divider.

That’s how Ken knew his dad hated the
birthday message, too.

The tune Maeda was singing was the same song
she sang in the mornings when she rolled up Ken’s futon, carried it
outside, and spread it over the rocks to air in the sun. With a
stick she chased off the pack of stray dogs that came ‘round
sniffing, and cocking their hind legs up to mark their territory
that had been invaded by an interloper’s odor. He didn’t know. He
didn’t want to know if she had a son of her own somewhere, a son
who resented her attention to him, a guy jean
gaijin
.

“How come you sing when you work?” His tone,
full of belligerence and spite, shamed him.

She stopped singing but held her smile until
Ken felt his own scowl smooth itself out. She said, “If not do job
with happy, it is same as not do job.” She resumed snipping paper
flowers and singing the folk song in a wispy, girlish tremolo. He
skulked to his room and sprawled out on the straw
tatami
mats. In his palm he squeezed the stone he’d found in his
grandfather’s potato patch. He pressed a quartz point of the stone
as hard as he could into his thumb, and thought of the mighty
Fujiyama.

Chapter
Seven

~ Bonfire! ~

After Ken had asked his dad a zillion times
if they were going to the festival, his dad had bellowed, “Quit
ding-donging about it!”

The next morning Ken had told his dad, he
hadn’t asked, he’d told his dad that he was going to tag along to
the bonfire with Maeda. “I don’t care,” Paderson had said. “It’s a
fire. Nothing to write home about.” Ken needed to prove him
wrong.

Cool evening breezes blew embers and ashes
over the crowd’s heads. Stars pricked the sky. A crane, legs
folded, pumped its wings, its outstretched neck suggesting an
earnest intent to reach a lotus pond. Ken imagined that from the
bird’s perspective his red hair bobbed, a dot of unexpected color,
a lone autumn maple leaf, in the river of shiny black hair.

Japanese people—mostly men, a few women,
fewer children—moving as one toward the festival pressed against
his shoulders. If he were to lift both feet off the ground, the
compacted crowd would have carried him along. As it was, he could
take only short, hitched steps. He’d never before been this
squished for this long. Although no offense was intended, the heat
and pressure of bodies irritated him. Elbows jabbed him. Zori trod
the back of his sneakers so he had to shuffle and drag to work his
feet back into his shoes. Maeda squeezed his hand, as she had since
they’d dismounted the train, so tightly that his palm folded in
two. If not for her civilizing influence, and his desire to see the
bonfire, he would have punched, kicked and broken away from the
mob.

The horde parted to walk around a dinky fire.
He looked questioningly up at Maeda.
Is this the bonfire?
She shook her head vigorously.
No.
They streamed around
several more fires. One man leaped over a fire. Flames licked Ken’s
pants, heated his leg, and ignited his cuffs. He smacked out the
burning threads while walking. A deep, booming drumbeat persuaded
the throng to walk in cadence. It wasn’t a dry rat-a-tat sound. The
drumbeats surfaced from his deepest root and vibrated outward
through his body. The throbbing beat inspired chanting. Ken
couldn’t understand the words, if they were words, yet he shouted
with the people, “Da! Da! Da! Da! Da! DAH! Da! Da! Da! Da! Da!
DAH!”

The once cool breeze that had brushed the
tops of their heads was growing warm. It was too crowded for him to
remove his jacket. They were getting closer to the big bonfire. The
tang of burning leaves and wood exploded in his nostrils. Smells of
home. He hopped a few times to get a preview of what was ahead, but
saw only a sea of backs and heads and a temple roof.

He grabbed a metal post. Ouch! The radiant
heat from the bonfire had traveled from the metal face of the sign
down through the post. When he jerked his hand away, his other hand
pulled loose from Maeda’s grip. He lunged toward her. The crowd
washed her away. Her pale hand thrust back, between indifferent
bodies, and blindly grabbed his hand, pulling him to her side. She
was dainty but surprisingly strong.

They’d been propelled to the perimeter of a
circle marked off by smooth stones. The dirt had been swept clean
of pine needles and maple leaves. People blocked his view of the
fire. A tidal wave of shouting, clapping, cymbals, drums and gongs
rolled over them. He didn’t know what spurred the merriment. The
impassive expressions he’d grown accustomed to were now enthralled,
jubilant, manic. The crowd’s mood stepped up to a fervid pitch, the
instruments became more cacophonous. Cheering filled the glen. Why
was everyone so excited?

Maeda smiled down at him. She said something
in Japanese. Like so many of her sentences, it ended with
mash-te.
She didn’t know the English words to explain what
was happening.
I’m missing it,
he thought and stepped up on
a stone, craning to see what was going on.

The onlookers parted to make way for a large
wooden cart pulled by men wearing breechcloths, helmets and fierce
expressions. These men must have been special. They had darker skin
and bulging muscles. The team of men grunted and lugged the cart
carrying a long log, its one end on fire.

They stopped at the center of the circle of
stones. The crowd resumed chanting. The cart-pullers threw their
muscle and weight into the poles, turning the cart toward the
temple. The flaming end of the log swung around, sweeping
dangerously close to people crowding the edge of the circle. Ken
covered his head and ducked when the log swung by him. People
clapped and roared while others continued chanting.

Everyone followed the flaming log to the
temple. The raging heat from the bonfire couldn’t keep people back.
Faces were aglow. Vendors selling meat on skewers,
mochi
on
sticks, and beer did a brisk business in the firelight. Several
men, streaked with soot and sweat, controlled the fire. They
alternately fed it with wood and tamed the flames with buckets of
water. The flames appeared to be engulfing the temple. If they
weren’t, they soon would be. The ancient wood beams and eaves must
have been near combustion point.

A cheer rose from the crowd: he didn’t know
why. The mass shifted, squeezing him, tearing Maeda away from him.
Caught in an eddy of revelers, he was trapped in a dark cave of
perspiring, indifferent bodies.

“Maeda! Maeda!” His voice was lost in the
uproar. He tried to find his way back to the circle, to the spot
where they’d stood watching sweaty men pull the bullock cart. By
now, the stones had been dislodged. He followed heat and light,
fighting his way through arms, elbows, hips, to the bonfire where
he searched the crowd of faces for Maeda.
That mob will crush
her,
he thought.

His eyes touched upon each undecipherable
face painted in an orange light. One man’s eyes were impossibly
narrow. Another man’s gaze was dark and glassy with beer or rice
wine. People cheered passionately, their cheeks pulled into wide
zealous smiles. Other folks chanted with trance-like reverence.
Often, he saw a person who was an Asian version of someone back
home. Like that lanky man smoking a cigarette. He resembled Ken’s
old baseball coach, and that pudgy one over there looked like
Jackie Gleason. Then the flames would extinguish the familiar image
and reshape it. Black eye sockets, as hollow as a death mask,
turned lustrous, a slight chin licked with light expanded; wrinkles
carved into ravines by shadows were erased by a leaping ray.
Attractive and handsome faces looked distorted in the orange glow.
He shouted her name again and again until his throat was raw. The
greedy blaze stole his oxygen. He fought off a dizzy spell and
shouted once more.

“Maeda!”

No reply.

The food hawkers had trundled off with their
carts. The crowd had thinned out. Only a handful of men remained,
poking sticks in the embers. They didn’t seem to know a lost
Western teenager was standing behind them, under the temple eaves,
because if they did, they would have tried to help him or at least
slide hesitant, curious glances at him. A forceful breeze rushed
down the mountainside and churned the ashes. He zipped his jacket.
The men rose from their haunches and deserted the temple
grounds.

The metallic moon, at its zenith, cut sharp
shadows. If the man in the moon was smiling, his features were too
distant to see. Ken was alone, but not afraid.

Poor Maeda. She was probably beside herself
with worry, crying into her hankie. He pictured their tiny kitchen:
Maeda trying to save face for him as she told his dad what had
happened, his dad yelling, glowering. She, nervously tucking an
imaginary wisp of black hair back into her bun. His dad would mock
her accent, blame her, grab her by her silk collar.

A cat slinked ghostlike around the corner of
the darkened temple. Ken ran in the same direction the men had
gone, with the hope that he could find the local train station
where he and Maeda had disembarked hours ago. He could read the
kanji
for his village, so if there was a directional sign at
the train station, he would know the way home. He could follow the
tracks to the station in his village. From there, the walk to his
house would be a cinch. As it turned out, when he got to the
station, his village’s name was not listed on the sign.

Grandpap had told him stories about sailors
of yore consulting the North Star to navigate the seas, and how
moss grew on the north side of trees. Above Kyushu, the Big Dipper
hung low and upside-down. In any case, knowing which way was north
was useless. He didn’t know if the village he lived in was north,
south, east or west of here. And moss didn’t grow on bamboo anyhow.
The rails gleamed until they met and disappeared in the darkness
ahead. He followed the tracks in what he hoped was the correct
direction.

The moon, yellow and heavy, had swollen and
sunk to the treetops. When he sat to rest, the cold from the rails
penetrated his thin pants. His arm bone ached where it had been
broken. He searched the edge of the woods for something
recognizable to eat in case he got hungry. He remembered seeing an
old woman collecting ginkgo leaves and another old woman picking up
pine needles. The plant matter could have been for purposes other
than eating: folk medicines, handmade paper, an obscure tedious
handicraft.

You can eat teaberries, wild garlic, and make
sassafras tea from the tree roots...if you could build a fire and
had a pot for boiling water. Right now those were the only edible
plants that came to mind that he could forage from the woods, and
those plants probably didn’t grow in Japan. His stomach growled.
Maybe it would have been better not to think of food—trick his
stomach.

He decided to investigate, dig around for
roots to suck on. The loamy dirt brushed away easily from shallow
roots. The smell evoked a musty, old basement. These plants might
be Japanese poison ivy, he thought suddenly. At the same instant
that he hopped out of the scrub and onto the railroad bed, a
curdling scream slashed the darkness.

“I know you’re only a deer,” he shouted. When
he’d asked, Maeda had told him wild deer made that noise. “Sounds
like a woman’s getting strangled to death,” he’d said. Grandpap had
never told him that deer scream. How come? Maybe Pennsylvania
whitetails didn’t make that kind of noise.

That stupid song the music teacher had made
them sing surfaced. “Whenever I feel afraid, I whistle a happy tune
and...” He forgot the rest of the lyrics and was stuck singing the
same line over and over. Superstitiously, he pressed his thumb
against the talisman in his pants pocket. The quartz crystal
point’s familiar pain was reassuring, yet dull to his cold thumb.
As he warmed his hands against his body, the quartz pain sharpened
and drove the song fragment out of his mind.