No Surrender Soldier

by Christine Kohler

  Seto closed his eyes against tears and sweat that dimmed his focus. He pleaded with the wisps, “I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Fear made me shoot.”

  “What didn’t you know?” asked the one who wanted betel nut.

  “How young you were. Or that your knife was to cut shrimp trap line. Or… or…”

  The younger one, in his teen alto voice, helped Seto remember, “Or that your friends would cut our hands and feet, slice our guts, and leave us to rot?”

  Seto cried, “Please, have mercy! Let me be! Have mercy on me!”

  Seto knew not what to offer them. He had no shrimp or betel nut. His gods had no power to restore life. Broken, Seto filled a coconut shell with milk and tossed it to the ceiling.

  “Mercy is not ours to give.” They departed up through bamboo and earth. All that remained was the smell of burnt oil and dripping milk.

  Milk fell like gentle raindrops, but could not quench the fire Seto felt inside and out. Seto, drenched in sweat, lay down again.

  He trembled with night terrors.

  “Oh,” he cried in anguish, “what must I do to cleanse myself of this blood that I have shed by my hands? Hands made to be a tailor, not a butcher.

  “Oh, by the gods, if you grant me one wish, to return to Japan, I will offer sacrifice and prayers in pilgrimage to the mountain.”

  Yet he feared he would never leave this crypt alive.

  When fitful turns died down, Seto slumped upon his belly like a brown tree snake stalking prey, then snuggled his head on a coarse sack and lay still upon his mat.

  Gong. Gong.

  “It is but bamboo banging against its brother.”

  Gong, gong.

  Two spooks rose up through the tatami and seized Seto’s feet and hands. He wrestled with his comrade stragglers who died of poison. Or was it suicide? Not twenty yards away, their bones were sealed in a necropolis they dug with their own hands.

  “You’ve desecrated our graveyard and stolen from us all we had!” the ghost of Michi Hayato said.

  Seto’s body contorted with fear, as if shaken by seizures.

  “Over there,” he shouted and pointed to a neatly folded flag. White with a blood-red sun.

  “And my talisman of a thousand stitches,” the specter of Yoshi Nakamura accused.

  “It did you no good! You were dead! I took it, hoping each stitch would keep me from harm.” Seto’s fear stoked his fever hotter.

  “Please,” Seto begged, “leave me alone. What have I done to deserve your visits? Have I even once done something cowardly that turns you against me?”

  Demons laughed heartily. But Hayato and Nakamura gave no answer.

  “I am your superior,” Seto shouted louder, trying to summon a voice of authority. “I order you to leave!”

  Louder and louder laughter grew. Not like laughter of children frolicking by a river. Not laughter of newlyweds under their first moon. But rather shrill, shrieking, high-pitched siren laughter of eerie wind howling through grottos.

  “Here, take flag,” Seto bargained. “I wanted it to remind me of home. And thousand stitches, those stitches were sewn for good luck by your kinsman and friends. Take it! Take it!”

  The spooks trampled the flag and talisman, yet left no telltale rumples to show their presence. “How about your gun?” Hayato asked. “Would you sacrifice your gun?” Seto fetched the wooden butt and rusted barrel of his dormant soldier’s gun. It too had seen a thousand deaths in China and on Guam. Seto traced the Chrysanthemum. “It is for my emperor. When I return.”

  Hayato and Nakamura laughed a haunting laugh. The demons laughed. Gong. Gong. Wind sounded the gong.

  They departed.

  Seto stretched up on all fours like a cat and arched his sore back.

  “It must be the rat I ate,” he mused.

  Stretch. Reach. He doused his face in a little water he had boiled and saved for morning. Seto went to the toilet, then returned to his tatami.

  “Let me start afresh. Never have I been visited by more than these. My fever’s broke. The ghosts are gone. Now I shall slumber.”

  He smoothed the memorial paper under his pillow. Milk no longer dripped from his ceiling. He placed his comrade’s talisman on top of Japan’s flag, and cuddled his mother’s obi against his heart.

  He then lay down to sleep in peace.

  Drifting in and out. Out and in. Sleep fell in dreams and fits.

  He smelled cherry blossoms.

  “Tsuru,” he whispered his mother’s name.

  Cherry blossoms bloomed in Mount Mitake-san, where his mother prayed to conceive. The mountain granted her wish and gave her an only son.

  Three airplanes from the east droned overhead. Bombers.

  His mother’s plum kimono transformed into a billowing purple mushroom filling the heavens, with fire at her feet.

  Seto searched for his mother in the fog. He looked for her loom. Instead, barren cherry tree branches like gnarled bones fingered silkworm threads upon her web. He felt for her hair. Silver wisps fell beyond his grasp. He longed to taste ripened cherries. Pits lay strewn upon wasted ground as birds pecked rotted poisonous fruit.

  Seto curled in a fetal ball and embraced his mother’s obi. He had nothing to offer. She stained her obi with blood-pricked fingers. He soaked it with his tears.

  CHAPTER 9

  BATS

  JANUARY 6–13, 1972

  When Nana woke me Monday morning, Tatan slept so soundly his snoring could be heard throughout our six-room house.

  For once I was anxious to go to school. Since I couldn’t go to Tumon, and at home I’d be stuck babysitting Tatan, at least at school I’d get to see my friends.

  I scooped rice fried with scrambled eggs into a tortilla, rolled it, then shoved it in my mouth. Bobo whined and scratched at the kitchen door, wanting to be let in. I headed to my bedroom to grab a notebook and pens.

  “Why in such a hurry?” Nana asked. “No time for seconds, eh?”

  “I haven’t fed Simon yet.”

  “You have plenty of time,” Nana insisted. “Eat.”

  Tata, who was pouring coffee, twitched his bushy eyebrows up and down. “Hey, Kiko. Since when you so eager to go to school? She must be cute.”

  I caught myself from saying, She is, thinking about Daphne. Instead I wiped a smile off my face.

  Tata pulled Nana’s coarse shoulder-length hair aside and kissed the back of her neck. “Smells good.”

  Nana poked his big belly with her elbow. “Not in front of Kiko,” she whispered and giggled.

  Tata scooped up a rice and egg tortilla. He settled on a kitchen chair and tipped the chrome legs backward. “What about Tatan?”

  Nana pulled black knobs off the stove. “I’ll work harder at making the house safe. You put locks on the sheds, no? And those nice navy men said, ‘No more land mines,’ eh? What else can he get into? We’ll just make it safe so Tatan will be all right until Kiko gets home.”

  She handed me a block of knives from the counter and a handful of steak knives from the drawer. “Please lock these in the shed. Anyt’ing else?”

  I sighed and took the knives. “How about we hire a nurse?”

  “We sunk everyt’ing we had into the shop,” Tata said.

  Nana twisted her ring. “That and buying this house two years ago.”

  If I didn’t get out of there, Nana would have me rearranging the whole kitchen. “I got to slop Simon or I’ll be late for school.” I pulled from the fridge a can of leftovers—mostly corn and other vegetables—Nana had set aside for Simon. I darted for the door. “’Bye Nana. ’Bye Tata.” I scooted through the screen door. Bobo jumped up and scratched my bare legs, ’cause I wear shorts to school.

  “Kiko!” Nana hollered, then lowered her voice, probably so as not to wake Tatan. She followed me out the door. “Come home right away. No dawdling, you hear me?” She dumped a scoop of dog food into Bobo’s dish outside. “And stay out of the boonies. Your Tihu Gabe found strange-looking shrimp
traps in the river. Not like anyone around here would make. That’s too close to where you play baseball as far as I’m concerned.” The water from the spigot drowned out the rest of what she was saying. She turned it off after filling Bobo’s water bowl.

  I guess I could watch Tatan. Not like I’d be doing anything else after school. After locking up the knives in the shed with Tatan’s machete, I waved at Nana. Bobo followed me down the dirt lane but stopped at the end where I turned out of sight toward the bus stop.

  When Tomas and I arrived at school, the whole place was buzzing about more than what everybody got for Christmas.

  “Did you hear about Kiko Chargalauf?” the students said in the halls. “Heard he was arrested!… No, it was his tata, Ferdinand… Well, I heard they both got arrested, and thrown in jail, after they lobbed a live grenade at some tourists…. ”

  “Forget them.” Tomas placed his hand on my shoulder.

  I might have taken Tomas’s advice, but my eyes were glued on Daphne chattering away by her locker with a bunch of girls from our sophomore class. Great. Just what I needed. Her telling everyone she saw my crazy tatan naked at Las Posadas. Just my luck, Tatan would have to run naked in front of Mary the Mother of God. I’d threatened the boy who played Joseph I’d beat him up if he told. But Daphne? Would she tell? I was too embarrassed to ask. Still, I had a right to know.

  I walked over to Daphne, Tomas keeping pace with me, and asked, “Can I talk to you?” I looked at the other twittering girls who had hushed, and added, “Privately.”

  The giggling started up again but the girls moved on down the hall and left Daphne and me alone, except for Tomas.

  I studied her brown eyes. She didn’t shy away for once and held my gaze steady. I realized I was holding my breath. I let it out. “Have you told anyone about my tatan?”

  At first she looked puzzled. When I said, “At Las Posadas, when you came to our house as Mary,” a flicker of recognition lit in her eyes.

  “You didn’t tell, did you? About Tatan.” The bell rang. The halls were emptying.

  Daphne scowled. “You’d think that of me? Then you don’t know me at all!”

  Hurt, anger—it all crossed her face. Then the worst of it, tears welled up in Daphne’s eyes. The bell rang again. The halls were empty except for us. Tomas was at my elbow saying, “Let it go, man. We got to get to class.” He left.

  Daphne wiped her eyes and ran off to class. I stood there so long I had to go to the office and get a tardy slip.

  I had trouble concentrating in class. Between trying to figure out how I could talk to Daphne again and straighten things out, and wondering what Tatan was up to, I kept staring at the clock. By lunchtime I was torn about whether to go to the cafeteria and find Daphne, or go to the office and ask to call home. I went to the office first. Tatan didn’t answer the phone.

  I rushed to the cafeteria, but Daphne was already gone. Tomas wasn’t at our regular table either. I couldn’t find my lunch money, then realized I forgot to get it from Tata that morning. So I left the lunchroom without eating.

  Later in history class, the guy in front of me kept nodding off, his head bobbing up and down like a fishing cork. I was so tired from going to bed late, then not sleeping good, that I could have slept too. I wish they gave us siestas like in the old days. The open jalousie windows didn’t do any good this time of year. Guam was the same temperature year ’round—82 degrees. But at this time of the year it rained a lot. Since it wasn’t raining today, just threatening to, it was so muggy I could have sliced the air with a knife, like slicing sea cucumbers for sushi.

  I rubbed my eyes and rifled through my Guam history book. I needed to do something to stay awake while our teacher droned on, sounding like the bomber Sammy navigated. I flipped to a chapter we hadn’t gotten to yet: “THE JAPANESE OCCUPATION, December 10, 1941, to July 21, 1944.”

  . . . Concentration camps, forced labor, Merizo massacre, beheadings, rapes…

  I put my finger under the word rapes.

  There were war stories in the newspaper every July during Liberation Day, but I never read about any rapes before.

  I read over the section a second time to see if any names were mentioned, like there would be if it were a newspaper article about a crime committed nowadays. The only names I could find were of martyrs and heroes.

  The manamkos, when they told stories of long ago, they were good things, happy things, funny things that happened. If they talked of war, it was bragging rights about who was a hero, and who hid George Tweed, that American G.I. radioman, the longest, and who sneaked out in his hidden canoe and warned the Americans first of key Japanese positions.

  When the reporters wrote of war, it was those happy-ending stories that named people’s names in them. The kind of stories kids clipped and took to school for show-and-tell when they were little because they were proud their tatan and nana bihus were heroes.

  But not bad stuff. Not stories about murders, and people getting their heads chopped off, and people with body parts blown up by grenades the Japanese threw at unarmed Chamorros in Merizo caves. Those people were all dead. No one reported their names. Not the textbooks, not the newspapers. Not unless they came out alive or a hero.

  Bad stories didn’t list names. Not stories about… about rape. No one came out a hero in those stories. No one. And who wanted to read that they were a mestizo, mixed-blood, because some man raped their nana? Who wanted his nana’s name in the history book under a bold subtitle:

  WOMEN RAPED

  Tragedies happened to No Names. Not to people you knew. Not to your family. Especially not to your nana—

  “Kiko!” my haole history teacher called.

  I swear my body jumped a foot off the chair. I checked the rest of the class and realized I was practically the only one awake. “What?”

  “Name the four colonial powers that have ruled Guam since Ferdinand Magellan discovered the Mariana Islands in 1521.”

  I sighed, then rattled off on auto-pilot what every Guamanian knows, “Spain, United States, Germany, and Japan.” I looked out the jalousies and thought how never again would the words in my history book be just dry, lifeless facts, but rather real things that happened to real people. People I knew.

  *

  I checked the mailbox when I got home from school. Bills and ads, that’s all there was. No letter from Sammy. How hard could it be to scribble on a postcard and pop it into a mailbox? Sammy wasn’t good about writing home when he was away at engineering school or air force training either. Why would he worry Nana like this? Didn’t Sammy know he’s her favorite son? If Nana had her way, Sammy would never have left Guam. Now I got to be the one to see the disappointment on her face when she comes home to no letter from Sammy.

  I went in the house, dropped the mail on the kitchen counter, and found Tatan sacked out on the couch with the TV still on. I turned off M*A*S*H and he woke up, which wasn’t what I had intended.

  Tatan stood up and seemed to have trouble walking across the living room. He complained his muscles were sore, and didn’t know why. I knew it must be from digging all those holes, but wasn’t about to remind him.

  He followed me into the kitchen and practically fell into the kitchen chair, he had such trouble bending. I opened the fridge to get a snack. I found some chicken legs left over from the potluck. I slapped a cold chicken leg and cole slaw on a plate for Tatan, too, and put it on the table in front of him. He made a face and griped about not being able to use the stove. “It no work.”

  I didn’t want to get into that again. And there was no way I’d fire up the outside grill just for an after-school snack. Nana should be home in a couple of hours and she would heat up a warm dinner.

  Tatan picked at his chicken, not really eating any of it. I finished two chicken legs and was polishing off a heap of slaw when Tatan put his plate in the sink and looked out the window. “Who in blazes dug those holes in our yard? Want we should fall in and break our necks like chickens for dinner?�
��

  How could he honestly not remember? It was only two nights ago! I stood there with my teeth in my mouth, as my nana bihu used to say, and shook my head.

  Tatan turned and roared, “Kiko! Fill in those holes!” I didn’t move. “Now, I say!”

  *

  It was the second week of January, on a Thursday to be exact, when I knew I couldn’t stall any longer; I had to fill the holes. Nana asked two things every day first thing when she got home from work: “Any mail from Sammy?” and “Did you fill in those holes yet?”

  When I pleaded I was too busy to shovel dirt, she’d say, “I don’t see you studying your Catechism.”

  Tata said, “Your arm’s not broke,” when I whined I didn’t want to. Finally, Tata threatened, “You’re grounded until you do it!”

  I knew once Tata got that tone of voice I’d better do whatever it was I was told or I would be grounded for real. “No ifs, ands, or buts about it,” as Nana would say.

  So, since I intended to play baseball with Tomas that weekend, I knew by Thursday I’d better start packing those holes with dirt. And maybe, just maybe, I could get Tatan to help me. Provided Bobo didn’t dig the dirt out faster than we filled it back in.

  Bobo wasn’t waiting for me when I got home Thursday. That was odd. Oh well, Bobo was getting old. Maybe he didn’t hear me coming.

  “Tatan.” I shuffled my zoris off inside the door.

  “Tatan.” I dropped my notebook onto the kitchen table.

  “Tatan,” I called louder. Still no answer.

  I opened the refrigerator. I didn’t find anything to eat so I opened a can of Spam, sliced it, and put it between white bread spread with mayonnaise. Nana wasn’t home so I glugged milk straight from the carton.

  “Tatan!” I called as I searched throughout the house. He wasn’t sleeping on the couch or his bed. He wasn’t watching TV or listening to the radio. He wasn’t in the bathroom. Maybe he was out back with Bobo.

  I slipped my zoris on, went outside, and ran around the house, looking as far as I could in every direction.