Ken's War

by B. K. Fowler

  Maeda used her key to open the door. Without speaking she began dredging the pork chops in flour and salt and laid them in a hot frying pan the way Ken had taught her. He checked the sleeping area, but his dad wasn’t there. He wanted to ask if he should set the table for two people or one, to find out if his dad was expected soon or not, but Maeda let him know she didn’t want to answer questions. She drew her eyelids down to flat slits, her attention seemingly transfixed by grease spattering the wall. She set to wiping it with a damp rag.

  Paderson tromped through the doorway and dropped his duffel bag on the floor. He crossed the kitchen area in two sweeping steps, tossed a packet of mail on the table, and grabbed a Kirin out of the tiny fridge. He took a long pull on the beer and found himself. “Ahh.” He looked at the label on the beer can appreciatively as he slipped his tie out of his collar. He whipped his tie at Ken. “Did you manage to stay out of trouble while I was in Okinawa?”

  Ken glanced at their housekeeper. Maeda turned the pork chops over in the pan, elegantly, with chopsticks. The sizzling increased as heat seared the meat and then settled down to a reserved, quiet buzz. He knew what had happened. Maeda hadn’t asked Paderson for permission to take him on the trek to Fujiyama. She’d arranged their trip to coincide with Paderson’s absence. Ken was no longer unsure how he felt toward the Japanese woman. “Yeah,” he said. “Maeda kept me out of trouble.”

  Maeda set two plates of pork chops and greens on the table, bowed, backed away, and waited with her hands tucked up her kimono sleeves.

  Ken picked up an entire pork chop between his chopsticks and tore off a hunk with his teeth. His dad rested his left hand on the table next to the beer can. The white line on his ring finger was almost tan. With his right hand he rocked his fork to cut the meat. He popped a big piece in his mouth and chewed.

  The familiar back-slanted penmanship on the airmail envelope on top of the mail packet was Tricia Paderson’s handwriting. The letter was an uninvited guest at the table. They continued eating. Maeda continued waiting. The last letter from his mother had brought on a spell of heavy weather. Neither Ken nor his dad, as far as he knew, had received anything, not even a measly Christmas card or a box of store-bought cookies from her since that day over half a year ago when Paderson had sent their dishes crashing to the floor.

  “It’s not going to open itself,” Paderson said.

  “It’s probably just a birthday card.” Upside-down pineapple cake was what his grandma had always baked for him. One of those sent by airmail would be fine and dandy. He’d forgotten what homemade cake and Oscar Mayer Wiener hotdogs tasted like. It was funny how things that used to seem so important could be forgotten until an unexpected reminder prodded the craving into life again, a dispassionate life that could be swiftly dispatched if that’s what you needed to do to adapt.

  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 16th 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 brushe
d 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.

  Suddenly, the wholly formed knowledge arrived: his grandfather was a thief. The picnic table, the bathroo
m mirror, the squares of rough toilet paper, and who knew what else, had been stolen from the state park where he had worked. Why hadn’t Grandma scolded Grandpap about stealing? What if Grandpap would have gotten caught and been fired from his job?

  Now “Grandpap” and “thief” became fused together like “bacon and eggs” or “arrest and trial.”

  Ken plunked the quartz stone against a tree. It landed with a conclusive thud somewhere. He tried not to care where.

  A nocturnal bird or animal screeched. He stood for a while, trying to get used to the lightness of his pocket without the stone in it. He ran to the tree, searched in the underbrush by feel, retrieved his talisman and sprinted along the tracks. His breath burst out as clouds before him. He was very near, or very, very far from home. He pressed his ear against the railroad track, listening for the weight of things to come.

  Voices. Voices from behind him. He peered into the darkness. Shadows coalesced into substance. Figures floated toward him on a footpath that intersected with the tracks roughly ten feet back from where he was standing. He couldn’t quite make out who it was. He squinted to make their faces recognizable. It had to be Maeda, his dad, Wizard and a posse of village folks. They’d formed a search party.

  None of the figures was tall enough to be his dad. The people were short, wiry. Japanese boys. Six of them.

  “Ohiyo gozimasu?” he said. Good morning: A dumb thing to say.

  One boy stepped out from the edge of the woods. His skin was lustrous in the moonlight. Ken’s chest squeezed his breath. It was the boy the gang members had stoned and beaten to death. Five other boys stepped from the edge of the woods and into the moonlight. They formed a semi-circle behind their leader.