“Remy, don’t.”
“It’s all right. I gotta take off these bandages to get this cream on you. The Dutchie says it’s native aloe, good smuggled stuff. It’ll help you heal right.”
“Can’t you get a doctor to do that?”
“The docs find out I got this stuff, they’ll want me to share. And that ain’t gonna happen. Now get a hold.”
Tal rotated his face into the pillow. If he were going to grimace, Remy would not see.
His father picked at the edge of a cloth strip, then gently tugged. The bandage did not lift away. Scabs had woven themselves into the fabric.
“Hold your breath, son.”
Tal cursed into the pillow, and sucked in.
Remy plucked at both edges of the bandage, not in a rip but a steady peel. The clots broke free with the lifting cloth, snapping the crust. Tal seized on the cot, gnashing his teeth into the pillow. The hurt rivaled the worst of Nagata’s belt.
His father stroked the back of his head.
“One more.”
The second strip, lower on his back, came away with equal anguish. Blood trickled down the corduroy of his ribs. Remy mopped it with the bandage.
Tal did not unclench his teeth until Remy said, “All clear. Come on out.”
Remy poured lotion into his hands. He rubbed his slicked palms first across Tal’s neck, then over his shoulders. Tal flinched at the touch. Immediately the aloe relieved the gashes and flay marks. Tal breathed easier under the fragrance of the sabila. He noted, too, the first soothing wash of the guava liquor.
Remy spread the rest of the aloe over Tal’s back, then pocketed the bottle. When he was done, Tal found enough painful flexibility to roll onto one side, facing his father.
“I’ll get some more of that stuff,” Remy grinned. “The Dutchie tugs his earlobe when he’s got good cards.”
“You touch your lips.”
“Do I now? Anything else?”
“Why should I tell you?”
“Good boy. Don’t.”
“How long have I got to stay here?”
“Doc Lockett said a couple days. You’ll be moving a mite sore for a while. He says to let those cuts breathe, then we’ll put some fresh strips on ‘em. You go ahead and rest. I’ll keep the flies off your back.”
Tal closed his eyes. The aloe and bomber lotion lulled him toward sleep. He gazed up at Remy, who had not moved from his cot.
“Thanks.”
“No worries.”
His father strode behind Tal to wave away a fly. The air whipped by his hand made a breeze against the sabila.
“What were you thinking, boy?”
“I dunno. Maybe I wasn’t.”
“You definitely looked like someone who was thinking.”
Remy swiped again at the fly.
Tal asked, “Why do you gamble?”
“The way I figure it, there’s two worlds. The one we see and the one we don’t. It’s like fishing. We know what’s on top of the water, but not what’s underneath. Could be fish, could be rocks, or just nothing. Gambling’s like dropping a hook into a pond. If I win, I know I’m in the right place, doin’ the right things. When I lose, I suppose I need to be doin’ something different. It’s sort of the way God and I have worked out how to talk to each other. I play, and He lets me know what’s on His mind.”
Remy leaned closer to Tal’s injuries. When he spoke, Tal felt his father’s breath.
“I reckon you overplayed your hand a little out there today.”
“She didn’t even see me.”
“She’s a whore, boy.”
“Come around here,” he said.
Remy made no move. “She ain’t worth you being laid up like this.” Remy sucked his teeth. “Goddamit.”
Remy returned to his seat on the adjacent cot.
Tal said, “Don’t call her that again. She’s not a whore.”
“What is she, then? She screws Japs, that’s all I need to know.”
Tal flexed his jaw as he had under Nagata’s lash. She stood in her window on the third floor, Tal saw her there and never anywhere else. She wore only a red kimono, holding it shut across her naked belly and small breasts. From a hundred feet away or a thousand, she appeared sad and afraid, disgraced and innocent. He watched her because she was beautiful. He loved her because she endured.
His father scooted backward on the mattress, lifting his sandals off the floor. “I’m sorry I said that.”
“I don’t know what she is. I’m gonna find out.”
“Okay, kiddo.” Remy nodded. “What the hell, we’re all stuck here. She probably is, too.”
Remy popped to his feet. He yanked the white sheet away from a neighboring cot. The bare tick mattress showed rusty stains. Remy bit into the linen to start a rip, then tore away a long strip.
Mr. Goldstein, a hand quaking on his frail chest, asked, “What’re you doing, Tuck?”
“Watchin’ out for my boy, Mr. G.”
“Good,” the old man urged from his laboring throat. “Good. Keep him strong. Hell do something one of these days.”
“Sure as shootin’, Mr. G.”
Tuck tore another strip. The rest of the linen he respread over the mattress, doing his best to tuck away and conceal the missing portions.
“Listen.”
“What.”
“I talked to Lucas. He says you can move back in to number twelve. Till you’re up on your feet.”
Tal rolled back onto his stomach. Exhaustion and the guava mash were catching up with him.
“No.”
“You’re gonna be healin’ for a while. I can take care of you better if you’re with me.”
Tal shut his eyes for sleep, and against the sight of Mr. Goldstein wasting away.
“Remy?”
“Yeah?”
“Why do you think I got myself thrown out of your barracks in the first place?”
Tal let slumber approach. Above his dulling back, his father’s hand chased off another fly, cooling the aloe.
~ * ~
Chapter Four
S
HE SAT up to her elbows to watch the young soldier.
He laid his ticket on the table beside the door. The thin chit lay on a pile of ten, fifteen, she did not know; never did she count, Mama simply swept the vouchers away at the end of the day. The Japanese greeted her with a quick nod. “Songu.”
He set both hands to work undoing his pantaloons, then stopped to remove his cap. He held it by the brim, searching for a place to hang it or set it down. He put it back on his head, sheepish and uncertain. She watched him between her brown knees.
Carmen did not recognize him, he was not one of the camp guards. Early this morning, a long convoy had rattled past the camp. This boy was likely on his way to Manila. Someone in his unit brought him, perhaps on a dare, to the shuho of Los Baños.
The boy’s khakis dropped in folds around his boots and leggings. He wore a loincloth which he pushed down his thighs. At the edge of her tatami, he stood naked only at the hips. He had small tufts of hair above his penis. He looked down at himself, raw in this room smelling of Mamas bleach mop. Behind Carmen’s head, through the open window, a bird cawed. This drew the boy’s attention. He looked up, biting his bottom lip. He seemed to want to be out there instead, in the air, flying off. Carmen saw that this was his first time with a woman.
She pointed at his penis, not meeting his eyes.
“Saku”
Surprised—did he expect a corpse with no voice?—the soldier made a perfunctory bow. With both hands, he hauled up the accordion of his pantaloons to rummage in a pocket. He found the paper envelope. Without lowering his pants, he tore the packet open, then had to push down his breeches again to let his penis stand between the tails of his tunic. He held the rubber condom ring with fingertips. He halted, with no notion of how to put it on. Carmen wanted to send him away, push him out the window to give him his chance to fly. She remained motionless except to gaze down at
her own bare hips, the black tuft that was hers, and considered that if she had a penis there, she would not be on this mattress. That was the difference, but it seemed not enough to explain things.
The soldier held up the ring to her, asking for help. Carmen stared back deadpan. He drew his lips over his protruding teeth, determined to figure this out.
The Japanese boy did the wrong thing. He poked a finger into the rubber ring, pushing the condom out to its full, flaccid length. He lowered the sack to his penis and tried to tug it on like a sock instead of rolling it back. The condom slid on partially, leaving half its length dangling. His breathing became irregular with his frustration.
The boy’s glance rose from his own chaos to her vagina. With a grunt, he determined to get rid of the condom, pinching it at the tip to yank it off. The thing snapped when it jerked free.
Before the boy could bend his knees to the tatami, or Carmen could raise a hand to stop him, the soldier ejaculated. His stream landed in milky beads across Carmen’s stomach and inner thigh, onto her open robe. She looked down at the trail and thought nothing of the boy’s warm semen on her skin. She knew what would come next, the necessary trade for being done with him quickly. Averting her eyes, she sat up straight to make her face easy for him to reach.
The boy’s hand clapped against her temple, sweeping her off balance. She tumbled to her side, not catching herself but acting out the receipt of a great blow. She lifted a hand to her cheek and whimpered, to assuage his loss of pride. The boy stood over her, dripping.
The Japanese raised a finger to his bulging lips, making the signal for silence. Say nothing. Carmen nodded, aping fear.
He flung the condom to the floor and pulled up his loincloth and pantaloons. Carmen did not take her hand from her cheek, to show the sting was mighty. The soldier buttoned and buckled himself into place, glaring at her to drive home their compact, that he would not strike her again if she told no one. Carmen lowered her eyes, the final act of her role.
The soldier drew himself up, almost to attention, to leave her room and the shuho looking satisfied and commanding. Carmen supposed he was a year younger than she, perhaps two. He gazed down his nose and nodded approval, beginning the deception that would last the rest of his life. He spun on his heels and swept beyond the curtain. Carmen lowered her hand, bothering only to hope that his life would be short.
~ * ~
Papa dropped an empty straw basket inside the curtain. In Tagalog, he said, “Labanderiya” The old man surveyed the little room, Carmen on the mattress, on her knees at the open window. Continuing in their native tongue, he said, “Why don’t you jump? It might kill you.”
Carmen turned. She released her red haori, to let it hang loose and expose her belly, thighs, and waist, to taunt Papa and tell him he meant so little to her.
She asked, “Why don’t you jump with me?”
He rattled his head before glancing once behind him, down the hall to where his wife sat as hostess and guard.
“It might not kill me. Come. Laundry.”
Carmen stood from the tatami. She had not seen that boy Tuck in four days. She did not consider that he might be dead. She hadn’t seen his punishment, but knew that, whatever it had been, he’d chosen it. The boy was strong and measured himself against what the Japanese could dish out. She would see him again soon, striding about the camp, making himself visible. That was why she wore a red robe, to be easily spotted by him. But he was in hiding, and her robe needed washing.
She shed the robe into the basket. Naked in front of Papa, she took from a pile of clothes, neatly folded in a corner, a pair of discarded khakis and an undershirt. She stripped the yellow-stained sheet.
Papa led the way down the hall, approaching Mama at her station on the landing. The old woman flipped over Songu’s wooden tag.
On the board hung another tag, bearing the symbol
Carmen halted, basket in her arms. “What is that?”
“Another girl. Chosenjin.”
Mama used the Japanese word for a Korean.
“Where is she?”
“Talk less, Songu. Wash more.” Mama jerked her head at Papa for him to lead Carmen down to the laundry room.
A sudden commotion erupted in the south wing, across the foyer. The drape over the doorway of Hua’s former room billowed outward. A tin water bowl clattered into the hall. A girl’s screech followed, then a soldier backpedaled through the curtain to collect the bowl. The young man’s tunic was darkened with the thrown water and his dropped trousers coiled around his ankles. His penis was big enough to see beneath his shirttails, pink with no saku. He stumbled once, almost tripping, then lifted a hand to check his cheek for blood.
He bellowed, “Konoyaro koroshite yarou ka?” Carmen had heard the phrase often enough. Shall I kill you, bitch?
The soldier hobbled back into the room. Again the girl screamed. The metal bowl clanged again, like a gong. Someone had been struck with it.
“Chosenjin,” Mama repeated.
“Come.” Papa motioned Carmen to the stairs.
~ * ~
Carmen reached into the basin, sinking her arms to the elbows. She agitated the water, kneading the mass of socks and loincloths the camps guards had piled for her to launder.
She’d reused the gray wash water four times. Soap had become a rare thing, rationed beyond food. Papa sat at the top of the stairs to the basement laundry room, humming to himself. Every so often he clambered partway down the steps to make sure she was working and that her own sheets and crimson robe were placed aside, to be cleaned last.
She rinsed and wrung socks, a hundred pairs, it seemed, with pruney fingers, then tossed them into the straw basket. She recalled the times she and Hua had worked side by side, always without speaking. When did Hua decide to kill herself? Was it during any of the hours they were together scrubbing or doing laundry? At rare shared meals? Carmen wondered if she might have seen this change come over Hua, like the shadow of a crow, a sign of death. This troubled her, that she had not been aware of Hua’s decision to take her own life. Carmen could miss it in herself; the shadow might cross her and she would not know it.
A Korean. Carmen knew nothing of Korean. Again she would be sentenced to silence alongside another woman sharing the same miseries. Did that help push Hua to suicide? If the girls could have spoken, would Hua be alive? Could Carmen have stopped such a momentum as death?
She finished wringing the last sock, then tossed her sheets and robe into the tubs feeble suds. She sat aside to let her things soak. She’d stay confined in the basement until Papa grew bored and ordered her out. Then she would dawdle outside in the sunshine to hang the socks on the clothesline that ran beside Hua’s grave.
On the cool concrete, Carmen folded her legs. She sat on her heels, a prayerful pose, breathing in the must of the basement and the fading tang of the wash water. She imagined herself in Manila, in her Quiapo barrio. Her mother washed clothes with water from the fountain outside the Catholic church, with great clouds of suds boiling over. Carmen grilled cucuruchos on hot coals to sell to American soldiers who gave her tips. Her father and uncles tended the ponies that pulled their karomatas, hauling passengers and cargo, whoever paid. The smells of her barrio, sweat in the crowded boulevards, starch in the habits of American nuns, pork and peanuts on her grill, dung from the ponies, a flower in her mother’s hair, oil on her father’s hands—all were absent. She stared at the wan surface of the wash water and found no magic in the basin, no images of Quiapo for her there, only the scarlet shoulder of her floating robe. Carmen sensed nothing except a procession of Japanese, the two old collaborators who handed them tickets, and that she’d had a home, a family, and a time that were not here.
And that boy Tuck. He was near, but on the other side of the barbed wire.
At the thought of the boy, Carmen scooped her haori out of the tub. She wrung it over the basin. Some of the cloth’s red dye dripped out. The robe was her beacon, drawing the boy’s eye to her win
dow. What if the robe kept draining itself, all the way to white, and he could not see her? She feared she would not get another red robe.
The boy’s disappearance for four days did not worry her. Carmen knew he would come back to her. She grew frightened that she might vanish from him. She was not the boy, did not have his strength. She could not be certain she would always return. Hua would not.
Carmen tossed the robe into the straw basket with the soldiers’ socks. She swirled her soaking sheet and pillowcase in the basin, hoping to capture some of the robes lost red dye in her linens, to color them even the slightest shade of pretty pink.
Broken Jewel - [World War II 05] Page 4