Ken's War

by B. K. Fowler

  Ken opened the notebook at the top of the stack of binders Topker had patted. On the inside cover of Vol. I, in small print under the course title were words, words he’d overlooked before: by Captain A. Paderson. Methodically, he opened each binder, picking up speed as he progressed through Vol. II, III, IV...and saw the same byline on every frontispiece.

  Paderson returned from seeing Topker and Bellamy off. He squatted beside Ken.

  “Do you think you can manage a few days without me, soldier?”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  “I have to meet with the intelligence team for a briefing. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Abernathy will be here if you need anything.”

  Ken looked at Wizard who gave him a thumbs up. “Don’t worry, Dad.”

  “OK. You help Abernathy hold down the fort here.” Paderson gave Wizard a flurry of orders. “Get me the supply chain master flowchart and the up-dated logistics personnel directory. Call HQ for clearance to review personnel PF-16 reports. Ring Kelso at 9th TAACOM for copies of pharmaceutical-related supply forms for the past twelve-month period, and original copies of authorizing signatures. I want duty rosters for every depot with medical supply throughput.”

  “Yes, Captain.” Wizard hopped to it. Paderson trotted to the house to pack his duffel bag.

  Ken began scratching a hangman’s noose with his finger in the dust by the door, but scuffed the drawing away. Hangman required two players.

  “I thought I’d find you here.”

  The buoyant voice carried hints of America on it. He swung around to see who owned that voice, but saw only the Japanese girl from the ofuro. She was wearing a tan dress with a blue bow at the collar. The western dress struck him as out of place, the garment’s foreignness highlighted by traditional Japanese white tabi and zori on her small feet.

  “What do you want?” he asked. Her brows contracted; the expression helped Ken remember his manners. “Good morning,” he said in English and again in Japanese.

  “You speak Japanese extremely well,” she replied in American English with no trace of a Japanese accent. “You don’t need to use the honorific when speaking to a girl my age. It seems you learned Japanese from a female holding a service position.”

  Ken stuck his head in the warehouse and searched for Wizard to explain what the hell was going on here with this girl, but Wizard was on the phone telling some poor sucker he didn’t give a rat’s ass who would be inconvenienced, he needed those PF-16s yesterday.

  Ken closed his eyes and tried breathing into his abdomen, the way Sikung had instructed him. Breathing deeply helped him focus, even if he wasn’t inhaling quite the way the master had demonstrated.

  The girl walked to the ledge and looked out over the rice paddies and toward the mountain. No wonder he hadn’t heard her approach. Unlike other Japanese who shuffled along in their zori, making him want to shout, “Pick yer feet up!” she curled her toes, holding the zori close to her soles. If you listened, though, you could hear occasional faint whisking sounds when she walked. She was a puzzle piece that he couldn’t force-fit into the picture.

  “Are you Japanese or what?” he asked.

  Her ebony hair fanned out when she spun around. “I am an Issei.” He must have put on his stupid face because she added, “The majority of my friends and acquaintances don’t know what that means either. An Issei is an immigrant of Japanese ancestry.”

  He knew he still looked stupid.

  She smiled gently. “I’m American. I live in America with my family.”

  What’s she doing here in Japan if her family had immigrated to the States? He chewed on that and concluded that the genetic code for clear explanations was lacking in her DNA.

  “No big deal,” he said, not knowing what else to say. “My dad runs this warehouse. Well, it’s more of a shack and nothing much happens, except today—” He shut up. You couldn’t be too sure who was or was not in on the drug ring.

  She stepped up and gave him a firm handshake, which surprised him. No other Japanese person had done that. But then she wasn’t Japanese, she was American, or Issei or some such thing. “I am Yasuko Watanabe. It’s nice to meet you. I hope we can meet again soon.” She spoke like a character in a storybook illustrated with sunbeams and too many paragraphs starting with “By and by.”

  He wrinkled his nose and asked, “Do you always talk like that?”

  “I often speak Japanese.”

  “You talk like a schoolbook.”

  “Can you teach me to talk the way you do?”

  “There’s nothing to learn about it.”

  “I saw what you did.”

  “I did lots of things.”

  She reached for his wrist and traced her finger over the white scar where he’d cut himself with Wizard’s fish knife. He was ashamed. As his dad had mistakenly assumed, she probably also thought he’d tried to take the chicken-shit way and commit suicide. He jerked his hand away from hers. Her pity clung to his wrist like cobwebs.

  “Your father is American and doesn’t understand your act was honorable.”

  “Huh?”

  He recognized the smile, the smile Maeda, their former housekeeper, had graced Paderson and him with when she was embarrassed on their behalf. Wizard came to the door, greeted Yasuko and invited her to join them for lunch. Ken was disappointed when she said that she had to go home to eat lunch with her parents. Wizard struck off for a food stall in the village.

  “Please, will you meet me at the torii Friday night?” Yasuko asked Ken. “Okie dokie?”

  He shrugged. He didn’t know if a guy meeting an unaccompanied girl at the big red gate was local custom or Yasuko’s original idea.

  Back home, guys discussed the best techniques to work their fingers under a girl’s sweater to get to first base. In Japan, you saw a girl’s breasts before you were even introduced to her and, apparently, you waited till later for her to ask you on a date. The guys back home would never believe these upside-down customs. She wasn’t coy or snotty like stateside girls, who for the most part flustered him, yet he didn’t feel at ease with her. She unnerved him.

  He finally replied to her invitation. “Dunno.”

  “Dunno.” She savored the taste of the elision he’d taught her.

  From high up on the gnarly branch, he watched Yasuko walk down the path until she was out of view.

  He pulled the signed request-for-transfer form out of his back pocket and shredded the paper. The breeze sent his dad’s RFT403 sailing across the rice fields.

  Wizard, feet propped on the desktop, was tweezing tsukemono from a bento box with his silver-tipped chopsticks. He shoved an unopened box toward Ken. “For you.”

  “Do you think I’ve gone native yet?”

  The private’s ears twitched slightly under his wiry hair. “What’s this?” Wizard asked, pointing to his bowl of soup.

  “Bean-paste soup—misoshiru.”

  “This?”

  “Pickled vegetables—tsukemono.”

  “This?”

  “Buckwheat noodles—soba.”

  Wizard rested his chopsticks on his bento and awarded Ken two thumbs up.

  “Do you have a girlfriend?” Ken asked.

  “In fact I do. Etsu lives in Fukuoka, on the northwest side of the island.”

  “That’s decent.” A buckwheat noodle whipped his nose as he slurped it up.

  The phone rang. Wizard told Ken, “It better be Kelso with news about those documents your dad wants. Hello...Why? You made the same promise about Westmoreland’s ‘no tanks in the jungle’ policy. Today? How many? Are you sure they’re labeled properly? We don’t have adequate space here All right.” He turned to Ken and said, “When it rains it pours. Two trucks delivering crates of spare parts are coming in.” He raked his fingers through his wild hair and sagged.

  “I know how to process incoming inventory,” Ken said.

  Wizard jammed his hands in his pockets and waited to hear more.

  “It’s a cinch. I’ll do
the spare parts junk and you can continue carrying out dad’s orders about the stolen supplies.”

  Wizard shook his head. Ken pulled a binder down from the cabinet, opened Volume I to the pages with the post-test questions and the answers he had penciled in. He placed the open binder on the desk in front of Wizard.

  “Shut your mouth,” Ken advised the private, “or you’ll catch a fly.”

  “Who completed the competency test?”

  “Well, Neko can’t read so good...” Ken grinned.

  Wizard scrutinized the answers written on the post-test sheet, glanced up at Ken and checked over the answer key in another binder. He glanced up and down many more times as if a spastic puppeteer were yanking his head strings.

  Trucks loaded with spare parts rumbled up the gravel lane, raising clouds. He pressed Ken’s face between his perspiring palms. “You’re a lifesaver, man! What do I owe you?”

  “I owe you. This is my shin no on—my obligation to you, my teacher.”

  “I haven’t taught you anything worth knowing.”

  “That’s what you think.”

  After the men had delivered the spare parts to the Quonset hut, Wizard supervised Ken as he logged in part numbers on the designated forms, and stacked the parts on the warehouse shelves. Wizard admitted Ken didn’t need his help and soon found himself frantic in the center of a typhoon of phone calls.

  “Hey, partner,” Wizard said, his hair spikier than ever, “I have to make a run to Okinawa to help dim-bulb Kelso find the personnel files Captain Paderson requested.”

  “OK, partner.”

  “I’ll be back tonight.” Wizard frowned. His thoughts seemed to trouble him.

  “I can survive a few measly hours alone.” But that didn’t clear Wizard’s uneasy expression. “Dad won’t know about...” Ken twirled his hand at the papers and parts scattered on the desk and floor. “He will go ape shit if you don’t get those papers he needs.”

  Wizard rushed out the door.

  Hours of unsupervised time gave Ken the chance to cull certain items from the warehouse shelves, and plunk them into a duffel bag. A sack of yen-to-be, was how he thought of the olive drab sack slung over his shoulder. The bag’s contents jostled and poked his back as he walked past the torii where Yasuko wanted to meet him Friday. When he laid the bag on the ground, the contents clanked and rattled.

  As he was sitting on a stone wall at the outskirts of the village, he tried not to study the paving stones that had been stained with a boy’s blood. He waited. They would come.

  A flock of birds swooped up from the pine branches and sailed into the air, their wings thrumming him into alertness. Six Japanese boys, all ears and bones, approached. They weren’t wearing dojo uniforms today. One carried a blue drawstring sack with outlines of round shapes and stick shapes bulging against it. As soon as the gang saw him, they ran toward him, talking too fast for him to pick out any words. The leader made the motions of throwing things and swinging a club.

  “I don’t want to fight,” Ken said. He tried to say it in Japanese, but he didn’t know enough words to be understood. The boys made throwing and swinging motions again. Ken grabbed his duffel bag and jumped down from the wall. The boys swarmed on him and carried him off by his arms and ankles.

  This is it, he thought. This is the part where they beat me to bloody mush with the specially selected death-rocks and death-sticks from their blue sack. Dad and Wizard will find my bones picked clean by vultures in the woods. He kicked and squirmed and hollered, but couldn’t bust loose from their rubber band-like grips. The boys carried him away from the stone wall and to the other side of the temple grounds where they set him down. They wouldn’t let go of his arms and legs.

  “Basebar,” the leader said.

  Slowly the pieces came together. They’d plopped him onto a pitcher’s mound. The boys dumped the contents of their blue sack at Ken’s feet, and gestured for him to pick a mitt. After the equipment was divvied up, they took their positions at the bases and the outfield, and warmed up.

  Ken tossed a slow ball. The leader ran to the mound and demonstrated that Ken should throw fastballs. Which he did. And those boys, they’d stand poised with intense torque, and swing with power, meeting the sweet spot, sending the ball into the subtropical atmosphere. And they’d throw themselves into long slides, indifferent to the skin they’d left on the baselines. And they’d run, legs churning like pistons. Ken had never seen anybody play with such zeal and totality of purpose. Kamikaze baseball, he dubbed it.

  At a signal from the leader, the boys tossed their mitts, balls and bats into the blue sack. Ken opened his olive drab duffel and laid out a stapler with staples, a pack of asphalt shingles, a can of snails marinated in oil, and other samples of warehouse stock. The setting sun twinkled on the array. None of the goods bore marks identifying them as U.S. Army property. He wasn’t an idiot. None of the goods would be of practical use to soldiers fighting Vietcong. He wasn’t a traitor.

  The leader and Ken discovered, while negotiating on the first item, a metal cook-pot. That sales transactions required very little understanding of each other’s language, up to a point. They flashed numbers at each other with their fingers, although when they were within striking distance of a mutually agreeable price, their stubborn natures slowed progress.

  “Come on, this is stainless steel. No rust. It’s worth more than that,” Ken said.

  Takuya responded as if offended. His buddies copied his annoyance.

  “I’m the duck talking to a chicken,” Ken said. In quick succession he thrust a fist, a peace sign and his open palm at Takuya.

  Takuya’s friends jumped up and down and shouted, “Gu, choki, pa!”

  “Yeah, rock, scissors, paper.” His scissors lost to Takuya’s rock, and the pot was sold for less than he’d hoped. His scissors recouped the loss from Takuya’s paper on the sale of collapsible cups. They continued like this until Ken sold all his wares. There was more where that stuff had come from. He jogged home with the empty duffel bag flapping against his back.

  He sat on the boulder in the bamboo grove waiting for Sikung Wu to arrive, waiting, hearing night noises give way to roosters crowing, dogs barking, the village well handle creaking. After the five-thirty train whistle sounded, he realized that the chi gung master had been behind him, practicing his forms for who knew how long. This pissed Ken off. The old troll could have said, “Zow” or “How” or “Get lost” or something.

  Ken bowed and presented a gift to the master. Sikung was strong. Sikung was fast, and he knew your history and your secrets without being told. For these reasons, Ken was as on edge now as he’d been when the Japanese boys had carried him off to the baseball diamond.

  “This is for you,” Ken said, eyes locked on the ground between them. “I don’t want charity from you. I’ll pay for my lessons.”

  Sikung yanked the package out of his hands and ripped the fancy box apart, wings of paper floated to the ground. Sikung held the white martial arts uniform against his body and seemed pleased with the cut of the new jifu.

  “There’s something for you in the pocket,” Ken told him.

  Sikung’s eyes sparkled at the wad of money. He counted the money, licking his thumb to flip each note. The Chinese man’s display of greed disappointed Ken. He’d thought the master would raise objections and then, in the end, accept these worldly gifts with monkish restraint. Ken didn’t want a sneer to reveal his disappointment, but he could feel his nose crinkling. To hide his face, he collected the tattered wrapping paper from the ground and stuffed it in his pocket.

  “How long did it take me to count the money?” Sikung asked.

  “Isn’t it enough?”

  “Three seconds. It’s never enough. Three seconds of happiness while I count the money. Then,” snapping his fingers, “poor me. Humans become discontented. True contentment doesn’t come from money or possessions. True contentment comes from here.” He stabbed Ken’s sternum with his finger, knocking him back
a few steps. “Where does a boy come by money of this quantity?”

  “It’s my allowance.”

  Sikung waited.

  “My dad pays me for helping in the warehouse.”

  “You are the youngest civilian employee on the U.S. Army’s payroll. Is that what you expect me to believe?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Do not plant seeds which grow poison fruit, monkey boy.”

  Ken tucked his chin into his collar.

  “You are an arrogant, Yankee pipsqueak who thinks he can buy my time and expertise. Suppose I did deign to take on a student at this time? Do you think for one moment I’d accept you?” A pulsating hum in Ken’s head wasn’t loud enough to drown out Sikung’s words. “You are a liar and a thief. Your motives are dubious. I know about boys. They dream of becoming heroes, and they think the one path to glory is fighting and winning. That’s not the way.”

  He didn’t say, “I’m not arrogant.” He didn’t say, “I’m not a pipsqueak,” or any of the other rebuttals snarling in his head. He sighed. “What is the way?”

  “Breathe in,” Sikung replied flatly.

  Ken did.

  “Breathe out.”

  Ken farted. Loudly. “Sorry.”

  “You release excess bodily chi,” Sikung intoned. He taught Ken how to inhale down into his abdomen, and harmonize his breathing with the animal-inspired movements he’d memorized. Sikung, braiding Japanese, English and Mandarin Chinese, talked in a voice that suggested he’d talked about these concepts thousands of times. He talked about heavenly chi, bodily chi and earthly chi, and about remaining soft like water. Rigidity is the characteristic of death.

  To Ken the lesson was riveting, but sort of jumbled, similar to that Chicago radio station that faded in and out when his transistor radio picked it up one night in the States. He’d felt secretive and privileged then, too.

  When Sikung told Ken it was time to go, he felt taller, lighter, stronger, and quiet on the inside. He had no compelling need to fight enemies.

  “Sikung, am I arrogant?”