A Million Shades of Gray

by Cynthia Kadohata

  “Y’Tin!” shouted Tomas. Y’Tin waved at Tomas. Tomas continued. “Go back to camp and get our things. Hurry, we need to get going.”

  It wasn’t that far back to camp, but Tomas’s tone annoyed Y’Tin. Tomas hadn’t talked to him that way since Y’Tin was in training. And he couldn’t believe that Tomas was yelling when they all should be quieter than that. Maybe Tomas didn’t understand how bad things were right now. He’d been isolated in the jungle with the elephants. So Y’Tin shrugged off Tomas’s yelling and returned to camp. He knew which things were his and Y’Juen’s. Everything else he put in Tomas’s bag.

  When he returned, Tomas took his bag and declared that they’d head west. “We need to put distance between us and the soldiers and then decide what to do,” he said. “Y’Tin, carry my bag. I need to concentrate.”

  Y’Tin didn’t see why Tomas couldn’t carry his bag and concentrate at the same time, and he also didn’t see why Tomas didn’t just hang his bag around Geng’s neck.

  The elephants lumbered through the jungle, their padded feet absorbing the noise of their footfalls. A bird called out—cawww! cawww!—from high atop a tree. Somewhere a monkey howled. Y’Tin spotted a bright green bamboo pit viper, and his pulse raced. He remembered that Shepard called the snake a “two-stepper” because when you got bit by one, you’d be dead in two steps. Y’Tin kept his distance.

  It felt as if they were making little progress because the elephants kept stopping to feed. It seemed they spent most of their waking hours eating and drinking or wishing they were eating and drinking.

  At first they traveled silently, Y’Tin’s mind racing about where they were going and where they were coming from. He thought his family would likely be heading west as well and for the same reason. Y’Tin knew that at some point one of them would have to find out for certain what had happened at the village and also where the villagers who had escaped were. But for now they needed to operate in panic mode. One thing his father said was that panic could be controlled and used. Supposedly, when you were panicked, you didn’t notice how hungry you were. Since Y’Tin felt ravenous for some meat, he figured he wasn’t panicked anymore.

  The next time the elephants stopped, the boys watched as the animals examined the possibilities. Their trunks moved here and there, as the elephants decided what they should eat. Lady tore at some grass, and after she’d made a pile of it, she pushed it this way and that. Finally, she picked some up and placed it into her mouth. Y’Tin was starving. He wished he could eat grass.

  “Should we go hunting?” Y’Tin asked. “I’m hungry.”

  “Eat another banana,” Tomas replied.

  An irrational anger surged in Y’Tin’s chest. He wanted meat. He did not want another banana. When his mother had meatless days, Y’Tin often dreamed that night of meat. Now it was all he could think of.

  Y’Juen was patting Dok’s hide and murmuring to her. Dok took a few steps away and stood there. She was missing Y’Siu. But Y’Tin’s mind was on meat. He wished that he and Y’Juen had had an opportunity to search the village for chickens. His mouth salivated as he thought of cooked chicken. He pulled a banana out of his bag and peeled it unenthusiastically.

  Tomas gave Y’Tin a sharp look. “At least we’re not starving. Don’t complain.”

  “I didn’t say anything.”

  “You were thinking something, though.”

  “So now I’m not supposed to think?” retorted Y’Tin.

  Tomas closed his eyes and took a big breath. Then he turned away from Y’Tin as if he couldn’t waste any more time on him.

  After the elephants ate their fill, the boys climbed up on them to ride. The jungle grew darker and darker. When Y’Tin could hardly see, Tomas said, “We’ll stop now.” They slid off the elephants. Y’Tin was still annoyed that Tomas hadn’t wanted to go hunting. Now all Y’Tin would dream about as he slept was meat. Tomas laid a hand on his shoulder. Y’Tin thought that was an apology until Tomas said, “We were thinking you should go back to scout tomorrow and see what happened to the people who were captured.”

  “Me?”

  “You’re such a good tracker,” Tomas said, slapping his shoulder. “We really admire that about you. With your tracking skills, you’ll be the safest.”

  So Y’Tin was elected.

  The boys lay on the jungle floor. Y’Tin spread the poncho over himself and Y’Juen. The ground was cold against Y’Tin’s bare back. If he’d had more time, he would have brought one of the shirts his father had bought in Ban Me Thuot.

  “My father once said that guerillas need half a day to fight or travel and half a day to hunt for food,” said Y’Tin. And, of course, if his father said so, it was true. But Y’Tin did not say more, sensing that Tomas might take offense at suggestions that weren’t asked for. Y’Tin was too tired for another quarrel. He remembered that a few years ago some boys from the village had gotten lost in the jungle. When they finally returned home, they mentioned that they had squabbled almost constantly with one another. At the time his father had said to Y’Tin, “The jungle changes a man.” But even knowing this did not make Y’Tin feel less mad.

  Far away, gunfire sounded. It went on and on. “It’s a battle,” said Tomas.

  Y’Juen asked, “Do you think it’s our village?”

  Tomas paused. Then: “No, it’s coming from another direction.”

  Lady slept a few meters away. She’d been subdued all day, and Y’Tin wondered if her pregnancy was making her tired. In the dim light he could see her stomach bulging. She looked as if she could give birth at any moment. He closed his eyes but still felt wide awake. He knew he must sleep to be strong for whatever might come next. He wondered whether his father was fighting somewhere at that very moment.

  Y’Tin did not even know if his mother had changed her mind about leaving the village at the last minute. He did not know if that was really Jujubee he had seen near the fence. He did not know how his aunts and uncles had fared. He felt a pain inside. He opened his eyes. He had to know what had become of everyone. He felt glad that he was the one who would go back to the village. He wanted to see it for himself. But he was annoyed that neither Tomas nor Y’Juen had talked to him before they decided. Y’Tin wondered vaguely when they had decided this. When had they become a “we”?

  Chapter Eight

  When Y’Tin awoke, his face was damp with dew. He felt something on his elbow and saw a centipede as long as his forearm. “Ah!” he cried. He jumped up and shook the insect off. Jujubee was allergic to centipede venom and had once gotten sick for a week after being bitten. Y’Juen had shoes, so he stamped it to death.

  “Thanks,” Y’Tin said.

  Tomas was also awake, brushing Geng. Geng loved being brushed, and Tomas tried to brush her several times a day. He looked Y’Tin’s way and said, “You’d better get started.”

  Y’Tin laid his forehead against Lady’s trunk and thought, Good-bye. I’ll be back. Then he slipped away on his mission. He was so nervous, his ears filled with pounding. He could hardly hear anything else. The pounding seemed to shake his whole body. He stood still and concentrated on silencing the pounding before setting off again.

  He put the danger out of his mind as he glided forward. He swam across the river and traveled through heavy bush, the plants scraping against his bare arms. Later, when he reached the halfway point to his village, he could feel something ominous in the air. He stood still, listening.

  Then he noticed human footprints in the moss. They were fresh and perpendicular to Y’Tin’s direction. A bug squirmed in one of them, meaning the print was so fresh that the squashed bug hadn’t even died yet. Y’Tin told himself to stay calm. The tracks were fresh, but they were going in a different direction. Then he heard voices. He froze. The pounding sound in his ears grew so loud, he couldn’t hear the voices anymore. But he knew the voices were there. There was such a din in his ears that for a moment he thought he was losing his mind. He fought the instinct to crouch lower. Instead, he
stayed as still as possible. He thought to himself over and over, I won’t die. It’s my destiny to take care of Lady. I won’t die. It’s my destiny to take care of Lady. The spirits were not with him—another centipede crawled over his foot. He closed his eyes and concentrated on staying still as the centipede paused on his ankle and then didn’t stir, as if it had fallen asleep. After about a half an hour, the centipede began crawling up his leg, and Y’Tin couldn’t stop himself from brushing it off.

  It was growing dark when he dared move again. He hadn’t moved before that because he wasn’t sure what he did or didn’t hear. He decided to set off again.

  The closer Y’Tin got to his village, the more certain he was of where he was going. He knew where he was by feeling the trees. He had spent countless hours in this part of the jungle, and he knew the trees almost as well as if he could see them. At the same time the area also felt strange, even new. He felt as if he had been gone for months.

  There were no signs of people as he slipped through the gate. For a moment he stood amazed. Nearly every house had been touched by fire. He had once walked through a section of jungle that had been bombed. The carcasses of two elephants and a monkey had lain on the ground, their flesh torn open. The village looked as if a bomb had hit it, and the houses looked like carcasses. All that was left of some of them were the stilts. Other houses were nearly intact. Others had lost only their roofs. Others were gone completely. The soldiers had taken the time to set every house on fire. Why did the soldiers hate them so much? Then his own heart filled with hatred. He had always been fascinated by the missions his father had gone on, but that was just because he was drawn to the adventure of it. This—right now—was the first time he really understood what his father had been fighting for with the Americans.

  He watched a few last embers twinkle in the darkness. For the first time in his life, Y’Tin questioned the spirits—after all, what did it matter which spirit had burned these houses? If it was Yang Lie, so what? If it wasn’t Yang Lie, so what again? He walked to where his house had been. Dead chickens lay in what had been the chicken coop. The chickens had burned to death. There were large empty rice-wine jars all over the place. Maybe burning a village was easier if you were drunk. And maybe killing people was easier if you were drunk.

  Y’Tin knew where he had to go next. He knew the people who had been captured were buried in the cemetery, but he had to make absolutely certain. He did not want to see the cemetery, but he had to. He walked through the gate and stepped along the edge of the jungle until he reached the cemetery. The large hole had been expanded far wider than it was before, and it was all filled in with dirt. He had no way of knowing how deep it was now. He stared a second. Then he dug at the dirt with his hands. He didn’t have to dig deep—only about a third of a meter. Then he accidentally touched someone’s skin and pulled his hand away with a shout. But he couldn’t stop himself from looking at what he had touched: It looked like an ear. He quickly swept the dirt back into place. It was too much; he couldn’t comprehend it. He suddenly felt faint and lay down on top of the hole, hugging his knees to his chest.

  When Y’Tin had seen the bombed-out area of the jungle, he had thought, Why drop a bomb? What sense did it make? Now he wanted to drop a bomb on the soldiers who had killed two hundred and fifty people, who had burned his village and probably other villages as well. And he wanted to talk to these soldiers. He wanted to ask them, How does it feel? The village is decimated—how does that feel? Two hundred and fifty people are lying in the dirt—how does that feel? Y’Tin was curious to hear the answers to these questions.

  Y’Tin didn’t like being this angry. He felt as if his heart was previously clean and now it was dirty with hatred. He wanted to see Lady, to lie on her back and cleanse his heart.

  Rain began to fall heavily, but he still didn’t move, just stared ahead. He didn’t know how much time elapsed before he could finally stand up again. He wiped the water from his face.

  Someone called out to him, “Hey! Hey!” His heart seemed to stop, and he ran back into the jungle, terrified. The voice called again. “Say! You are Rhade?”

  Y’Tin took a second to decide whether to reply. The man seemed to have a fine Rhade accent. “I am Rhade,” he answered loudly.

  “I’m from Ban Me Thuot.”

  The man stood in the shadows near the remnants of the fence. He was very tall, taller even than the village shaman had been. Also, he was dressed like a soldier.

  “Step forward,” Y’Tin demanded.

  “You first. You’re just a boy, aren’t you?”

  “Why are you here if you’re from Ban Me Thuot?”

  “The town was overrun. The war is nearly over.”

  Y’Tin didn’t trust the man and galloped into the jungle.

  “Wait! Where are you going? Come back! I’m all alone!”

  The bushes behind Y’Tin thrashed. Y’Tin ran faster, pushing through the jungle as branches scraped his face. He started to wonder whether it was a spirit and not a man at all who was chasing him. The man didn’t seem to be losing ground, though Y’Tin moved swiftly. Maybe the man was one of the spirits of the dead. “Ah,” Y’Tin groaned as a branch snapped into his left eye. He fell down, tripping over his feet. His eye was closed. He knew it was bleeding but couldn’t worry about it now. He shook off a fear that he would die—here, tonight.

  “Ahhhh,” the man groaned. Y’Tin thought he heard him thump down, and he felt satisfied that the man was also in pain. His intuition told him the man wasn’t from Ban Me Thuot. Both Shepard and Y’Tin’s father had told him that it was important to use intuition in a war. Anyway, it must have been a man, because a spirit would have caught him by now. After a moment the movement behind Y’Tin stopped, then started again. This time the movement was going away from him, not toward him.

  Y’Tin began creeping forward, using his hands to guard his eyes from another branch. He concentrated on not making a single sound. He moved his feet so gently forward that he could not even hear the crunch of leaves. He passed a coconut tree on an odd angle. He knew that tree. The reason it was at an odd angle was that Lady had almost pulled it down once to get a coconut. Sometimes he thought Lady pulled down trees just to see Y’Tin scramble out of the way.

  He listened for the man but could not hear a sound. If someone was behind him, that person was a master of staying quiet. Y’Tin crept forward. He liked to think he was a master of staying quiet himself.

  As Y’Tin reached less familiar territory, he had no sense of where he was. Every so often a touch of moonlight seemed to flicker in his vision. But he didn’t know whether the light was in his imagination. He didn’t think of himself as having a lot of imagination, so he decided that the moonlight was real. Then a gun fired somewhere behind him, and he wondered if someone had died.

  Y’Tin kept his hands in front of his face and felt the ground with his feet before he stepped forward. A vine hit his face, and he almost cried out. Step by slow step, he moved farther and farther from the village. Once, he felt so overcome with stress that he had to sit down for a few minutes. For no reason his heart suddenly beat as hard as if he were running. He sat on the cold, dark jungle floor. Because he was losing his sense of direction, he did not think he should go on; on the other hand he did not think he should stay here. Then slowly, he felt better—not good, but better. He pulled himself up and continued in what he thought was the direction away from his village.

  Even though he was getting exhausted, he didn’t stop. Then he lost all sense of direction and finally fell to the ground with no idea where he was. The soles of his feet—as hard as wood—felt tender. He did not understand why it had come to this. He did not understand why his people had been cursed. It wasn’t possible that all of the Rhade people had offended the spirits. Maybe the shaman had been right and it was simply time for the Rhade story to end.

  Y’Tin lay down on the mossy jungle floor. He hadn’t brought the poncho because it rustled too much when you moved. Ly
ing there, without cover, he felt completely alone for the first time in his life. Half of his village was dead. Half of his village was dead. He shivered, partly because he was cold and partly because he was afraid. He wondered if he would ever feel safe again or if safety was gone from his life forever.

  He felt pebbles under his back and pushed them away, but underneath them lay more pebbles. He turned on his side and pulled his legs against his chest. That felt better, warmer. Trying to make himself smaller, he pushed his face toward his bent knees. He missed Lady.

  A branch cracked and he stopped breathing. Something rustled the leaves and then headed away from Y’Tin. He let out his breath. He hoped he would live through the night.

  The next morning he woke up before sunrise. The green shades of the jungle seemed gray in the dim light. A million shades of gray, just like the hide of an elephant. His heart filled with relief that he had made it through the night. He closed his eyes and thanked Ai Die for letting him live and prayed that he would die of old age. Then he added that he hoped Lady would die of old age as well. Usually, elephants died by starvation because they grew only six sets of teeth during their lives. When their last pair wore down, the elephants starved. He had promised Lady that he would mash her food when her teeth gave out. After that thought, he amended his prayer once again by adding that he hoped his whole family would die of old age. Then he wanted to pray for his aunts and uncles, but he didn’t because he didn’t want to annoy Ai Die by asking for too much. He would pray for them later.

  With the sun, his sense of direction kicked in and he set off. As he neared the spot where he’d last seen Tomas and Y’Juen, his heart beat faster. But when he got there, the camp was empty. Panic rose in his chest and he waited until it subsided. His mind shut off and then, eventually, turned back on again. He thought about the possibilities and decided there were only two. Either he had come to the right spot or he had not. He scanned the ground, looking for footprints, and felt panic rising again. Then he found a place where the elephants had mashed down the grass. He squatted down. The footprints were covered over, as if Tomas and Y’Juen had hastily tried to hide their trail. But trackers who weren’t particularly talented disturbed the environment so much that trying to hide their trail actually made it easier to follow them. Y’Tin knew that. You just had to know how to look. He jumped up, caught sight of the direction they’d headed in, and broke into a trot.