by B. K. Fowler
Ken pivoted and ran in the direction he’d been heading. Just as he looked over his shoulder, he saw them take chase. The sticks they wielded flashed like sabers in the moonlight. On the run, he scooped up a stick as big as a baseball bat lying along the railroad tracks. Whipping the air in front of him with the stick, he snarled, “Go away! Go away! Go away!”
“Gah way! Gah way! Gah way!” they yowled.
Ken bolted into the woods. He ran—eyes closed, arms windmilling in front of him, ripping through the plants. Brambles snagged his pants, vines snared his legs, twigs clawed his face.
A profound calm embraced him. The orderly bamboo trunks, each as thick as his neck, soothed him, combed his straggling thoughts. The scenery was tinted in shades of gray in the pre-dawn light. The sounds of the boys’ yelling and pursuing footsteps had faded and finally withdrawn like the stars. He felt secure here, like a flea snuggled deep in dog fur. He crawled into a bamboo lean-to and lay on a straw mat someone had placed on the dirt floor. A squirrel skittered over his toes. Startled, Ken looked outside the lean-to to see who or what was chasing the animal.
A bird screeched. The bird wasn’t chasing the squirrel, rather, it was scratching for insects among the dried bamboo leaves. The bird appeared to be a species of peacock, but not the usual blue and green kind you see strutting in zoos. This peacock was dark with a white streak running down its forehead, and bright orange-red wing feathers. The exotic bird screeched again and took flight, sweeping just above the floor of the bamboo grove and swooping out of sight into the shadowy green. A strange bird.
A man dressed in white appeared, standing on the spot the bird had been scratching. Ken tried not to be afraid of the man who’d materialized in the grove. The man didn’t resemble the other villagers. He didn’t look Japanese, really.
The bridge of his nose pushed deep into his face. His nostrils and nose tip formed three pudgy spheres. His eyelids bulged. A mole on his chin was as large as a lotus seed with black hairs kite-tailing out of it. His queue dusted his shoulder blades. The man was a dead ringer for one of those troll dolls the girls back home played with and braided their hair. Maybe he was an aborigine, an Ainu. If he was, he was away from his people who lived on Hokkaido.
The troll rested his fists at his hips, and with four sharp movements spread his feet shoulder-width apart. He performed a series of graceful patterns during which, eyes closed, he raised his hands prayer-like above his head, opened his arms and lowered them to his sides. He slowly raised one leg then lowered it with the foot angled up, reminding Ken of a wading egret. Arms extended in front of him, he held an invisible large vase in his hands. He rotated the vase end over end as if it was priceless. A kind of dignity, new to Ken, radiated from the man’s homely face.
After he’d finished these slow prayerful motions, the man sliced the air with his arms, swiveled his hands on his wrists, and kicked his legs out piston quick, his heels aiming at an imaginary foe. The man never acknowledged Ken during the fluid performance that lasted nearly an hour judging by the height of sun building nests of lights in the bamboo leaves overhead.
Ken wanted to learn the fast stuff. Not that slow ballet stuff. He wanted to be able to kick the shit out of people when he returned to the States, and here in Japan, if necessary. Some doofuss or other would step up and ask for it, he was sure of that. And he wanted to protect himself against the swarm of Japanese boys should they have a mind to kill him. Ken crawled out of the lean-to. He dug a divot out of the damp loam with his sneaker toe to create noise so the man would open his eyes and see him.
“Ohiyo goziamasu.” Ken bowed deeply.
“Zao.”
He’d never heard Maeda or anyone say zow. “I want to learn that stuff.”
Joints loose and flowing evenly, the man strode closer, his bearing erect, stomach flat. His eyes searched inside Ken, exploring his body, knowing his mind. The sensation was one of unreserved empathy. No pity in it. No desire to control or manipulate. No traps being set. No calculations of worth. No obligatory obedience in exchange. Ken was unafraid, but uncomfortable with this exotic intimacy.
“I want to learn that stuff,” Ken said softly.
“Who is stopping you?”
Ken blinked, not understanding the question. Thinking simplification would bridge the language gap, he said, “I want learn.”
“Speak the King’s English. I understand perfectly. I asked, ‘Who is stopping you?’” As he spoke, he took Ken’s left arm into his hands and held it firmly. The man swept his right hand back and forth, palm facing down about two inches above the tender spot on Ken’s wrist. The man’s palm generated warmth, soothing warmth as from a fire burning in a hearth. Soon, tingles traveled up Ken’s arm. The man manipulated Ken’s fingers, tugging and pulling them as if trying to lengthen them. Ken had never complained to his father about his achy wrist because he was afraid Captain Paderson would take him to an army doctor, a sawbones, a quack doctor sent to Japan because he didn’t sterilize his implements.
The homely man’s long, mole whiskers yielded to the gentle whims of a breeze. “Return to your father.”
Ken ran along a path with the breeze at his back. He didn’t have to worry about bad doctors anymore. The ache was a memory.
At last he recognized the path at the edge of the bamboo grove. It was the trail the villagers trod daily to fetch water from the public well. Women carrying infants on their backs stopped gossiping and glanced up at him as he raced by. A dog leapt at his thighs, muddying his pants with its paws. Stringy chickens complained and scattered.
Around this time of the day his dad usually ate breakfast or was gulping the dregs of his first cup of coffee, while Maeda quietly carried dishes to and fro, giving him sugar and powdered milk before he requested it. Their mouths would drop open and eyes pop when they saw that he was home, safe.
Ken opened the door, crashing it against the wall. “Dad! Maeda! I’m OK! I’m back!”
A kitchen almost as empty as the day they’d moved in mocked him. His dad’s watch ticked hollowly on the table. He must have been awfully worried judging by the battalion of dead soldiers crowding the kitchen table. Maybe Army buddies up from Okinawa helped snorkel down those Kirin beers during a break from the manhunt. His dad and Maeda were no doubt combing the mountain right this minute helping the search party, or filing a missing person report at the prefecture police station.
When they discovered him here in the house, he’d catch holy hell or be hugged to death. Or both.
A soft hiss—the kind of noise you make when you stub your toe and you suck in air to keep from swearing—came from his dad’s sleeping area. Two shadows embraced on the pearly shojii. Ken slid the door open. Her black hair waterfalled over one shoulder. The woman was sitting on her haunches, her squarish buttocks rested on her heels. Her toe pads were pale, perfect bleached peas. The possibility of his father being in bed with Maeda was too appalling, yet completely appealing to have entered Ken’s conscious mind until his intrusion upon this tableau that embarrassed and aroused him. Ken loved Maeda and it was the intensity of his love that rendered her too perfect for his father’s affections, such as they were. If his dad married Maeda, the union would ruin everything. If Maeda accepted Paderson’s love, she would be a less than the perfect goddess-creature Ken had built her up to be in his heart.
Captain Paderson, wearing only boxer shorts, pushed the Japanese woman away from him. He rubbed his day-old stubble and, glassy eyed, watched the woman, a stranger to Ken, bob around the tiny room plucking her clothes off the tatami floor.
“What do you want?” Paderson asked.
“I’m back,” Ken said.
His dad held his arms out and said without enthusiasm, “Great.”
“I’m all right.”
“How about rustling up some breakfast?”
“Where’s Maeda?”
“Not here.”
“Did she come—”
“And get that damn hair cut, or I’ll cut
it for you.”
Ken carefully slid the screen shut. His dad didn’t know he’d been out all night, lost in the forests of Japan. The woman pranced out of the sleeping area and padded through the kitchen with her head bowed. Two birdlike chirps surprised Ken, making him plunge his thumbs into an egg he was going to crack. He turned around to see what had made the chirps and saw that the woman had collided with Maeda, who’d just opened the door. The Japanese women bowed apologies as they sidled past each other, Maeda entering the kitchen, the other woman leaving the house.
He wiped his egg-smeared hands on his pants and looked at the housekeeper. Lines, like crazed porcelain, netted Maeda face. Mud defiled her blue kimono hem. A lock of loose hair encircled her neck. Maeda pulled him to her. His shoulder muffled her sobs, drank up her tears.
Holding her slight body up, he whispered, “Where were you? I didn’t know where you went! I looked and you were gone. Then everybody left. I walked all night.”
She stroked the back of his neck and made consoling noises.
“Where in the Sam Hill have you been?” Paderson roared.
“I looking for Ken. No Sam Hill.”
More angry than embarrassed, Ken pulled away from Maeda’s embrace. “Don’t yell at her!”
“Watch it, wise guy.”
“You should yell at me!” Ken shouted. “Not her!”
“Nobody yell,” Maeda said.
Ken and Maeda interrupted each other, sacrificing their own reputations in hopes of giving the other face. Nothing Ken said had the intended effect on his father. His reaction was the opposite of what Ken and Maeda desired. Paderson’s thin lips signaled that he’d heard enough. His voice swelled against the walls.
“You let my son wander around, lost in a foreign country in the middle of the night.” He laid a leaden hand on Ken’s shoulder and dragged him away from her side. “You’re discharged from service, woman. Pack your gear and leave.”
“Hai.”
“Do you understand what I mean?”
“Hai.” She collected nothing, bowed deeply at the door and unveiled a smile that perched on Ken’s heart.
“Don’t look at me like that, wise guy. You’re the one who said you were too old for a babysitter. You got your way. You’re on your own.”
He’d been feeling that way for a long, long time.
Chapter Eight
~ Escape Strategy ~
He stretched out on his futon, propped up on his elbows, and opened The Pearl. The book’s pages were yellow and soft from multiple readings. The house was quiet. No distant sounds of cars and trucks on highways, no TV, nothing. Only his sighs and the rustling of buckwheat husks in his pillow.
Usually the quaint life of the fisherman, who ate cornbread and beans and loved his family, comforted Ken the way putting on his favorite sweatshirt and drinking hot chocolate milk from a thick mug used to. Old Kino’s quandary of whether to sell the pearl or keep it refused to distract Ken from his own question. It wasn’t working. Steinbeck’s magic failed. The author’s words and their meaning slipped past his consciousness like the houses, football field and water tank used to spin past him unnoticed on his daily bus rides to and from school when he was thinking about weightier things.
He placed a palm nut on the seam of the futon. Beside the nut, a chunk of black lava, after the lava, another nut and then another chunk of lava. He wished he had his 1/16 scale army men. He used to tease out the process of lining up the warriors from different eras by moving one whole column over an eighth of an inch and then back again. The sound of the plastic soldiers on the maple floor in Grandma’s parlor signaled that the world would soon be under his control. Without an army to control and command, he felt unsettled.
He marked his place in the book where he’d tried to begin reading a few moments ago, laid it beside the nut and lava army, and set out in search of something substantial and conclusive.
Wizard was working intently on comparing sets of numbers on a sheet of paper on his clipboard to numbers written on leaves of paper arranged like cards for a game of solitaire on his desk. From time to time he sipped green tea and stroked Neko, asleep on his lap.
“Do you think my dad is a shit heel?” Ken wanted to know.
Wizard kept his head down, continued writing, but looked out of the corner of his eyes at the one who’d posed this question, apropos of nothing it might have seemed.
“Sometimes, I mean,” Ken added.
“It’s immaterial what my opinion is of him. He outranks me.”
“You know what I mean. I mean, like, if he wasn’t over you, if he was just a guy, you’d think he’s a shit heel, too. Right?”
“Too? Who thinks he is?”
This conversation was twisting back on him in a most uncomfortable way.
“It’s normal for you to have these feelings. You are at the age when Westerners individuate themselves from their parents and test out new ways of expressing their personalities. One way this is achieved, in your culture, is through rebellion and the righteous conviction that most things parents say and do are inane and designed solely to inconvenience the child.”
Ken had nothing to say to this gobbledygook, other than, “I want to go home, real bad.”
“You miss your mom.”
He said he did, but only to end this conversation and prevent another lecture.
He climbed the gnarled tree rooted onto the black stone ledge. From up there, he watched a dozen or more Japanese farmers, each one wearing a conical rattan hat, each one bent in the same position, working the rice paddies below. The words shared with a fellow being, the vocalized wish to return home uncapped bottled-up memories and desires he’d scrupulously suppressed.
Back home he wouldn’t be the different one. He’d trade baseball cards with guys his age who knew which cards were dogs and which ones to trade for a card and a ball. French fries, cheeseburgers, graham crackers dunked in Hawaiian Punch, popcorn with lots of salt and butter, heck, just butter on plain old white bread, oh, these delights set his mouth to involuntary chewing. Food, not normally the center of his thoughts, had taken on meanings larger than merely satisfying cravings for sugar or salt.
The best times of his life, his teen-aged years, were being wasted here. He felt his jaw clenching, like his dad’s did when he was righteously pissed off.
It was unfair to expect him to sacrifice living the life of a normal kid, sacrificing the stuff every American deserved. There might be an article or an amendment in the Constitution about sending a kid to live in a foreign country against his will, but his Webster’s unabridged dictionary with the Constitution in the supplemental pages was in the States. He’d have to come up with an angle to convince his dad that going home was the best thing for him. For everybody. And not a whole bunch of reasons either. One big, atomic reason. You don’t ping away at the enemy with birdshot. You bomb him good so he can’t counterattack and drain your resources.
Ken was infinitely pleased with his in-depth comprehension of warfare tactics his dad and others had taught him. He broke a twig off the tree and stripped off the thin outer bark. It peeled off in rings, tiny brown curls that the wind lifted from his palm and carried over the ledge.
The problem was he couldn’t recruit his mother to help him get home. He’d have to wage this campaign alone. She didn’t write in her letters that she missed him or anything like that, but surely she did, otherwise she wouldn’t bother writing and bugging him about keeping up with his schoolwork and sending him clothes (too small). And who was he to judge her? He only wrote when he wanted something—money, a book or a magazine, things like that—and his letters only took up about a fifth of a page of notebook paper.
He felt cheered thinking about his impending triumphant return home. He wouldn’t have to suffer more hot and humid days, Wizard’s lectures, his dad’s preoccupation with sucking up to officers and drinking himself angry at nights. He missed his old life, but he didn’t miss his mother terribly, or as much as people thoug
ht he should. She was, however, the bridge to a familiar life, and she was—it could not be ignored any longer—she was his last resort.
He climbed down from the tree root, picked up a round stone and threw it as hard as he could. He didn’t see it land. One farmer glanced skyward and, seeing nothing overhead but steely haze, bent again to tend to rice plants.
“What’s that smell?” his dad asked by way of a greeting.
“It’ll be ready in a minute,” Ken said. He placed pan-fried bream onto two dinner plates and dumped fake potatoes next to the fish. He set one plate of food and a bottle of ketchup on the table, and set the other plate at his place and sat down. A few years from now, when he’s a full-grown man, not a teenager who still had to depend on his father’s goodwill for sustenance and survival, he would ask him, if it mattered by that time, why the hell he’d forced Ken to go to Japan when both of them were completely against the idea from the time his mother had first proposed it. Why the hell hadn’t his dad stood up to her?
“Ketchup!” Paderson exclaimed. He poured copious amounts on his fish and on the food resembling fried potatoes. With a sharp twist of his wrist, the ketchup stopped flowing from the bottle as if frightened. “Where’d you find ketchup?”
“Wizard got it somewhere.”
“And potatoes? My God, potatoes.” He chewed luxuriously.
They weren’t potatoes. A root vegetable, maybe a relative of turnips, and if you sliced them thin, fried them crispy brown in lard and seasoned them with lots of salt and pepper and ketchup, you could fool yourself. Or your dad. It had taken a week to come up with a plan of attack and it was a doozy.
Ken launched a direct assault. “What do you think about the idea of me going to West Point?”
“West Point?”
“Yes, sir.”