42
The morning after his fall McKay awakened Bobby and said he’d have to help him get to the hospital because he couldn’t move very well or breathe because of the broken ribs. Bobby sat up straight in bed, and even after McKay left, he couldn’t shake the dream he’d been having. He dressed quickly. He hadn’t been to town for three years and now Pinkey and Madeleine were nowhere to be found and he’d have to take McKay in himself.
“Keep it pretty slow on these bumps,” McKay said, holding himself in pain as Bobby drove the truck toward the highway.
It was also the morning Velma Vermeer opened her blinds and saw the young boy running down the main street of Luster carrying a radio almost as big as he was. It was early—only the café was open—and she couldn’t imagine where the boy was going. She watched him cross the street. The top of the radio was rounded and the woven cloth over the speaker made the dark wood of the radio look like an arch. “L’Arc de Triomphe,” Velma thought. “He’s carrying victory.” The black striped cord and heavy plug bumped and dragged on the ground behind him as he disappeared into Rose’s boardinghouse.
Coming into town, someone stopped and waved a little frantically as they passed. Bobby craned his head. It was Velma Vermeer. “Oh, she’s gotten so thin and old,” he said. The front windows of the grocery store sported sale signs hand-painted in blue and he slowed the truck to read them.
“Come on, Bobby, you can look at those later,” McKay said. It was hot and he wiped the sweat from his forehead.
Bobby turned up the hill to the hospital. The dream still hounded him. As they came to the top Bobby rolled the window all the way down and looked out. The sky was clear, an impossible dark blue, almost indigo, and in the west thunderclouds rose to dizzying heights, sudden uncontainable growths.… At the front door of the hospital—also the emergency entrance—Bobby helped McKay out. Bobby had seen him with broken ribs before. After the nurse signed him in, Bobby went back outside. The band of clouds had become one immense cloud moving toward Luster. In the dream, the sky had been like that: cobalt blue, but with threatening clouds. Then, when it rained, the rain was black and came down in thick streaks like iron splinters and everything it touched turned black, and even after the rain stopped the tarnish would not go away.
A train’s whistle blew as it crossed the iron bridge over the Shoshone River. Bobby went back in. McKay was sitting, bare to the waist, as Doc Hoffman wound a thick piece of white tape around and around McKay’s ribs. McKay read aloud from the Billings Gazette:
TERRIBLE FORCE OF ATOMIC BOMB UNLEASHED ON JAPAN
August 7. The most terrible destructive force ever harnessed by man—atomic energy—is now being turned on the islands of Japan by the United States bombers. The Japanese face a threat of utter desolation and their capitulation may be greatly speeded up. Existence of the great new weapon was announced personally by President Truman in a statement issued through the White House at 11:00 A.M., Eastern War Time. He said the first atomic bomb, invented and perfected in the United States, had been dropped on Hiroshima 16 hours before. The power of the bomb, Secretary of War Stimson reported, “is such as to ‘stagger the imagination.’”
McKay looked up and saw Bobby standing at the door silently.
“How many ribs broken this time?” he asked.
“Not more than three or four,” the doctor said casually. “He’ll live.”
“Good,” Bobby said, then turned quickly from the room.
Outside, the big cloud had dissipated as if someone had poured water on it from above. It spread horizontally and clouds behind it were racing to catch up. The week before he had heard on the radio about the fire bombings of Tokyo, Osaka, Kobe, Yokohama … and had already assumed that the pickle factory where he had worked as a child had been bombed, like a single target, as if it were a munitions factory or a harbor or a bridge, but he had not yet thought of whole cities and everyone and everything in them—Buddhist temples, noodle shops, geisha houses, sake bars, Shinto shrines, houses with polished floors, and the families within them—all flattened.
The sky was completely dark. Another car pulled up to the front of the hospital. Bobby felt afraid. He had not seen a strange face since the war began, except for the two army men who had come to the ranch and now he wished he had not come to town at all.
He sat in the truck. Watching people come and go from the hospital, he felt sure he could tell what their ailments were—he had been treating people for such a long time with his potions: powdered bark and flower teas. Then he remembered the rattlesnake skins he had left on the clothesline. If it rained before they got home, they would be ruined.
He dozed for a short time and woke with the same sense of dread, only now the dream was replaced by a picture of the city where he had grown up: its two rivers running through the middle and the arched, iron bridges … and dense smoke touching the ruins softly.
“Bobby.” McKay opened the door on the passenger side and Bobby slid over behind the steering wheel.
The truck coasted down the hill, then Bobby turned left on Main Street, slowing.
“Bobby … do you think we could make the grocery store another day … I’m hurtin’ pretty bad.…”
Bobby nodded his head, perused each sale sign, then drove out of town.
McKay spent the next days reading the papers, since he could do no physical work. The news from Japan worsened, though it seemed sure now that a surrender would come. On Wednesday morning, August 8, 1945, the Billings Gazette ran an update on the bomb, saying it “devastated 60 percent of the city or 4.1 square miles of civilization,” though the American army had long since ceased to think of anything Japanese as “civilized.” On the same page, a story from San Francisco said the Japanese had labeled the bomb “barbaric.”
The next morning, Thursday, August 9, Velma Vermeer called the ranch—one of twenty or so calls she made that day—to notify McKay that a second atomic bomb had been dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki. It was a port city, she said, and that’s why they picked it. Also, President Truman was calling the atomic bomb “the most powerful weapon for war and peace” and hoped surrender was near.
McKay thanked her and hung up the phone. Bobby looked at him inquiringly.
“It was Velma,” he said. “They dropped another bomb … on ‘Nag …’”
“Nagasaki?”
“Yep … that’s it.”
“Ahhhh …,” Bobby said and sat down. “Very beautiful city … look like San Francisco … very many boats and ships. Houses all up on hill, looking down at them.…”
McKay nodded solemnly. He looked Bobby in the eyes. “This is terrible, isn’t it?” he said.
“But maybe peace now,” Bobby said bravely.
“Maybe so …”
A loud clatter on the roof made them look up. Then they saw the hail, big as golf balls, smashing onto the ground.
Earlier that morning when the sun was hot, Willard had walked to the horse pasture where he kept his mare, taken off his overalls, and sunk down in the mossy bathtub where the horses drank. The sudden darkness of the sky made him remember the eclipse and also wonder if maybe it wasn’t suppertime.
When the hail started Willard thought someone was throwing eggs. He saw the stones bounce on the ground and squealed delightedly. A moment before, the horses had run, tails in air, to the other end of the pasture, water streaming from their mouths. The hail came harder. Willard climbed out of the tub and dressed quickly. He tried to look up once, but a hailstone banged him on the forehead. Then the ground was white.
He ran. The stones battered his head, belly, shoulders, and his feet rolled over the tops of the ones that had not melted. He ran past the schoolteacher’s house and the horse trader’s, across an empty pasture, through a downed fence, across the road, past his own house, and into Mañuel’s yard.
Carol Lyman was pulling the blinds shut when she heard the scream. It sounded like a pig being butchered. Then the scream stopped and she heard the w
ord help being yelled. It wasn’t quite “help”—more like “hup.” She ran from the house. Willard stood on the other side of the fence with a dead rooster in his hands.
When Porfiria saw what had happened she raised the skirt of her apron to her face and mumbled something in Spanish as she walked into the yard. Everywhere, at her feet, hailstones big as golf balls were piled like ammunition. She bent over and picked one up. She was amply built, with big breasts and delicate ankles, and her flowered dress fluttered as she leaned down. She walked lightly through the rows of empty cages. The hailstones had lined up neatly where Willard had raked. Then she went to Willard and put her hand on Drumstick’s brown feathers. A hailstone had broken his neck. Another was still alive but his legs looked broken and he lay on his side and made a hissing sound. The night air was warm because it was summer and where the hailstones had melted, pools of water had formed.
Carol held Willard’s big head on her shoulder. Another neighbor, the horse trader, climbed in and quickly surveyed the scene. “By the gods,” he mumbled excitedly, “it tore the whole country to hell. Said the alfalfa’s nothing but damned sticks, by God, and them cornfields is all flattened to hell.”
Willard put his head down against the rooster who had won the fight for him. The bird’s lidless eye was open but unmoving and he stared past Willard at the sky.
43
Velma Vermeer dropped the shades against the setting sun shortly after five. As she pulled the cord, she noticed the same little boy carrying the big radio down the street. He walked out of the funeral parlor and headed south on Main Street, then she saw him go into the side door of the big Mormon church. After, she went into her living room and turned on the radio.
At five o’clock Mountain War Time, President Truman announced the Japanese acceptance of the surrender terms. They will be accepted by General Douglas MacArthur when arrangements can be completed.
“I have received this afternoon a message from the Japanese government in reply to the message sent to that government by the secretary of state on August eleventh. I deem this a full acceptance of the Potsdam Declaration, which specifies the unconditional surrender of Japan. Arrangements are now being made for the formal signing of surrender terms at the earliest possible moment. Great Britain, Russia, and China will be represented by high-ranking officials. Meantime, the Allied Armed Forces have been ordered to suspend offensive action.”
Velma returned to the switchboard. She thought of this as her most important duty: to inform the citizens of Luster that the war had ended. She told each person she contacted to spread the news, and very quickly the sidewalks outside her office began to fill with people. They were quiet and inquisitive at first, then, when she heard yelling and shouting, she opened her blinds and saw two grown men dancing in a circle in the middle of the street. The upstairs windows of Rose’s boardinghouse opened and she saw Dutch’s head pop out. He swung a flask back and forth like a flare and people yelled cheers up to him. Larry and Rose stood quietly in front of their grocery store and Willard, dragging his willow branch, walked through the streets gaping at the citizens gone wild. A man walked out of the florist shop and asked Rose if someone was getting married, and when the 5:20 train pulled in, two soldiers inside threw the windows up and asked if the news was true. Then one of them, elated, jumped out the window onto the platform and danced wildly, throwing his cap into the air.
As Velma pulled the shades all the way up, light from the setting sun stretched across the floor and touched the ancient switchboard. After the last call—to McKay—she pulled the earphones from her head and stood, clasping her hands, in front of her chest. “It’s over, Harry,” she said, as if that would make him come back. If you lose your husband during a war, but not in combat, does that make him a hero, she wondered. He was too delicate, she thought … for this life.… The switchboard lit up and she answered the call.
“Yes, that’s the news as of 5:00 P.M. Japan surrendered. The war is over.”
McKay saddled his roan colt and rode toward Pinkey’s cabin. “I ought to let the old fart know,” McKay told Bobby, “even though he probably doesn’t give a damn.…” Up above the breaks, there had been an early snow and the aspen leaves had curled and blackened. He passed the still where Snake River Pete made whiskey during Prohibition and let his horse drink from the spring. The still was there but Pinkey and the kids from town had long since drained it dry. McKay thought about the news of the surrender as he rode up and over a ridge into the next drainage. He didn’t feel like dancing in the streets—he knew that—and the relief of peace was overtaken by something else, a disorientation, as if the war had occurred in his inner ear and the inner ear had been damaged.
At the end of a war, when those who survived come home, things don’t go back to normal, he thought, because war is not something that happens far away. It happens everywhere, to everyone, and new things occur in the absence of others and there’s no way of making things the same again.
Pinkey opened the screen door and looked at the dark sky. It had been a week or two since he had broken all his stashes of whiskey, vowing never to touch booze again. Later, when the shakes came on, he had resorted to an old sheepherder trick—drinking vanilla, which didn’t work—and he writhed for a day in pain. Sitting in the dirt in front of his cabin, he had licked the broken pieces of whiskey bottles. For a while he couldn’t stand the smell of food. Then when the shakes died down he became ravenously hungry and made a pot of chili. He ate his fill—four bowls. Then he went outside. Everything looked bright. A full moon appeared on the horizon—a pumpkin moon—and the great orange globe made him smile.
Stepping away from the cabin, he listened. He thought he had heard something.… A fragile scent of dying leaves drifted through the air. He had to keep reminding himself that it was autumn and, looking, pulled his hat down low. There’s no time of year darker than this: an autumn night before it snows. Then he unbuttoned his pants and peed into the void.
“Pinkey?”
Pinkey jumped. “What the hell?”
“Evening,” McKay said, smiling.
Pinkey squinted at him. “You runnin’ away from home?”
“I just came up to tell you …”
“You ought to put a phone in up here … like them first-class outfits.…”
“The war’s over, Pinkey. Japan surrendered this afternoon.”
“Well I’ll be-go-to-hell.… Put that bronc up and come on in. I’ve got some chili on … and deer steaks.…”
“Poached?”
“Hell no. Fried.”
When news of the surrender reached Kai’s barrack, Kai ran out the door. He wanted to see for himself how people at the Camp would react. Nothing happened at first. He could hear radios carrying the news report, and after, an eerie silence. He went back inside. Mr. and Mrs. Nakamura sat on their bed, holding hands.
“Mom … it’s over. The war is over.…”
She looked at him blankly. “It’s just that we can’t believe …”
“What?” Kai asked impatiently.
“The emperor … he had to tell the people himself.”
“It’s not a disgrace,” Kai said. “It’s best that it ended.”
Kai sat on a chair facing them just as he had the day they told him he had a brother. “We can go home now,” he said slowly, hoping his father would hear. “We can get something planted.…”
Mrs. Nakamura rocked the old man’s head against her chest and gazed out the window at the dust blowing by.
The next morning an urgent knock woke Kai.
“Special delivery,” a young voice yelled.
Kai staggered out of bed, fumbling for his glasses, and signed for the two letters—addressed to him, not his parents, from Kenny:
Onamachi, Japan
Dear Kai,
I thought I better write and tell you what it’s like here; it’s bigger than any of our differences.
It took almost as much prodding and finagling to get assigned to
this Division as it did to get into the Air Corps. Always the same thing is implicit: Why does a Jap want to go around liberating American prisoners of war in his own homeland?
I’m in a town about a hundred miles south of Hiroshima. No bombs were dropped here because the location of the prison camp nearby on the island of Ikuno was known. Spent the day supposedly liberating American war prisoners, but they had already liberated themselves. Tried to bring order to the process, but some guys have gone wild as March hares: wild for food, clean clothes, and women.
On arrival I was met with bafflement. What nationality was I? Chinese? If I was Japanese-American, why was I with the U.S. military and why didn’t I speak Japanese? No amount of explaining could make them understand. Instead, we were shown to a hotel where a lineup of beautiful girls was paraded into the lobby for our “enjoyment.” The colonel dismissed them; that didn’t make the men very happy.
Met a merchant and his family who have a big three-story house at the edge of town. Just before the war ended they housed a regiment of Japanese soldiers; now they have opened their doors to us. He’s a kindly man. He showed me a picture before the war—he was standing in a room full of expensive kimonos and had a big paunch. Now his clothes hang on him. I don’t think there’s a person in the whole of Japan who isn’t suffering from malnutrition. We pay for everything we buy in food.
Mr. Shibota’s five children are quiet and polite except for one. He’s only fourteen, but he speaks some English. Here’s what he told me, paraphrased:
“The day the bomb was dropped my sister and I were on our way to school. The sun was rising. Then we looked around and saw another sun. That’s what the bomb was like for us—two suns. It wasn’t until the next day, the seventh, that we heard what happened, but still we don’t know what it was. My uncle lives in Hiroshima. The glass in his house blew all the way to the other side. He had been playing Gō with a friend. The whole house came down on him, so he was saved from the flash rays. The first thing he remembered was that he had no pants on, so he crawled around and found some diapers and put them on. Then he looked for his friend under the house and pulled him out. They walked around the city. They couldn’t recognize anything. They saw people walk into the river because of their burns and drink the water and die, and he saw many people with their skin hanging off. They walked away from Hiroshima that day and a farmer took them in. Another uncle had half his face exposed so the skin on one side was gone and the other side looked normal. He was walking over a bridge when he saw his brother. When he called out his brother didn’t recognize him. That’s all I know about the bomb. I have other relatives there and I think they’re all dead.
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