by Cullin Mitch
“Really?”
“Seems like you'd want to see it before it melts away.”
But unlike Hollis, Lon hadn't come to observe the transformed golf courses, the greens gone white. No, he insisted, doctor's orders had him walking at dawn, doing his usual route — from hole one to hole eighteen, hole eighteen to hole one, and home by the time his wife, Jane, finished cooking breakfast: “I couldn't care less about the snow. Doesn't mean a thing. It's just snow, you know.”
“Mm,” Hollis said, cupping his hands at his mouth and exhaling into them.
But Hollis knew the snow meant something more to Lon; he knew as much last evening when Lon had phoned, gleefully saying, “Hey, you and Debra go to your window and look. It's hell freezing over, it's the beginning of the end.” And soon Hollis was peering through parted kitchen curtains as he made chocolate pudding for Debra, surprised to discover the backyard had already become an otherworldly place; his cactus garden had grown fluffy, the swimming pool was a snowy lair.
“My goodness,” Debra had called from the living room, sounding tired and miserable, “have you seen what's going on outside?”
“Yes,” Hollis had replied, transfixed by what was raining into the backyard, altering the view which he had grown accustomed to enjoying. Even at night the cacti were apparent, the beds showcased in the broad beams of two floodlights, and he had always liked that his garden was visible from the kitchen and dining-room windows. For some reason, he found its nearness comforting. Often he would sit at the dining table for prolonged periods, drinking coffee while staring at the various things he had cultivated. Time evaporated during those meditative breaks, as it did last night when he had first glimpsed the snowfall. After a while he glanced at the stove clock, then he pivoted and walked from the kitchen, leaving the pudding to chill in the refrigerator, going to where Debra lingered wearily in front of the television (the TV Guide near her face, an index finger scanning a page, her body emitting a faint odor which hinted at sickness). Without acknowledging his presence, she shook her head, frowning: “Can you believe it? A week ago you were wearing shorts.” But he had assumed a smiling, sympathetic face, taking her into his arms from behind and holding her gently — the way one might handle something delicate and rare.
Later, while they watched a rerun of Law amp; Order, Debra had shivered and said, “Lord, I've always hated this kind of weather.” She was snuggled against him on the couch, draped in the same comforter she would eventually carry to their bed. “Pudding on a night like this,” she complained. “Doesn't seem quite right.”
Not right, Hollis had thought, when sun-washed vistas and mesas were promised in the sales brochure (astonishing views, sparkling air: The morning's dawn another perfect day), when the panoramic splendor of the Catalina Mountains loomed beautifully beyond the aquamarine waters of outdoor hot tubs. Then this morning — standing beside Lon on the buried golf course, gazing at the white expanse ahead of him — he truly felt displaced from where he actually stood, somehow removed from this region of cacti, diamondback rattlesnakes, and desert.
An insubstantial breeze roamed around, whisking up crystalline particles and spiraling them into sunlight as a shimmering, refracted mist. Yet it was a dry onshore wind Hollis was suddenly sensing, blowing cold from Siberia and southward along the Sea of Japan. Hidden beneath the layer of snow, he imagined, were the artifacts of warfare, a scattering of personal and military-designated debris. Like memories best forgotten, he thought. Like blank spaces in an old photo album where once images had existed. But how many discarded objects had been left behind as the troops concluded their tours of duty? What else had remained in that country where a heavy snowfall persisted, covering the hills and the mountains, sedating the hard fighting until, eventually, the storm had ceased?
4
Last week, while sitting at the kitchen table, Debra had said to Hollis, “Will you, please, tell me about us.” She had, under completely different circumstances, said something similar many months before as they strolled around the block one evening after dinner. By then he had stopped writing every night, had been unwilling to face those earlier years, specifically those few weeks he had spent fighting in Korea. There was a lot he just wasn't comfortable recalling, he had told her, and although he was doing his best to do so, it would probably take some time.
“Then skip the war for now,” she had suggested. “Why don't you write about us instead?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, everyone likes a love story, right?”
“I guess.”
“So write a love story, how we met and fell for each other, all that stuff.”
“Who'd want to read that?”
“Christ, Hollis, I would.”
“I don't know, Deb. You know, I'm sure I could write a little bit about my time in Japan.”
“Okay, do that — and then you should write a Hollis and Debra epic. Tell me some things I might not know about us, and you, and how you view our life — because I'd really like to hear your take on our story. It'd likely do us some good, anyway.”
“Maybe, we'll see.”
But, to date, the book project had ground to a halt. With just over six pages completed, none of the self-assessment or introspection Debra had wanted was offered; nor was there an inkling of a wartime saga or a love story in progress — nothing at all which came remotely close to shedding any new light on their relationship, or his military service. He had, at least, begun an opening chapter for his autobiography — a chapter entitled “Where I Went amp; How I Got There” — in which he managed to write the following: Japan.You probably will figure out I'm writing all of this as things come to me and because sometimes I think of certain memories when I am in the middle of writing on something else. It has been three weeks since I wrote anything here, but today Japan popped into my head and what I mean by “Japan” is not the Japan of now. I don't know too much about what the country is like these days. No, it is the Japan of nearly fifty years ago, the Japan I knew for a small time as a soldier before getting myself shipped over to Korea. It was the U.S.-occupied Japan I experienced. Anyway, I can tell you I never intended to write a word on my military service, because it was a whole other life for me and doesn't seem worth the trouble of dwelling on. But a while back my wife said I had traveled from Tokyo to Tucson, and she said I was fortunate to have seen quite a few other places in between those two T's. Her saying that got me thinking of Japan again and I had the urge to set my thoughts down for her to read someday and so I will try to remember my days in Tokyo, 1950. Funny, it sure doesn't feel like I was ever really there, but I really was. At the time I was a kid of twenty, and in a flash I had gone from a hick American town to the streets of the largest city in Asia if not the world. I can't say there is a bunch to tell about the place. It's not like anything extraordinary happened while I was there on account of us not being at war yet. But I will write down what I can remember because it involved my early life and my wife wants to know.
While Hollis went on to describe post-war Tokyo in some basic detail — the poverty of a defeated and compliant people, a city in the bustling throes of reconstruction, the pleasure districts frequented by American troops at night, the little walkways lined by the large glowing red lanterns and the cloth banners of bars and eating houses — it wasn't the busy streets of Japan his memory readily gravitated toward. Instead, his thoughts always jumped ahead to places and people he couldn't yet invoke with written words; and when he found himself reliving that part of his past — when he reluctantly turned his mind to that brief but jarring period of his youth — it was never the battle-scarred terrain of Korea he first envisioned. Rather, he recalled the coast of Japan's southern tip and the Osumi Strait, where a convoy of four transport ships pitched upon breaking waves, forging through heavy gray sheets of rain and white, frothy spray (the iron hulls rocking, the bows crashing into the ocean before rising upward once more as navy flags continued slapping against the wind). Somewhere a
head loomed the lighthouse on Cape Sata, and beyond that — dotted here and there with tiny islands, the choppy waters swelling even higher — was the East China Sea.
Then it was the stench of vomit Hollis remembered, a disgorging fume hanging below deck, mingling with the body odors and cigarette smoke of the troops; the fresh-faced men were all crammed together within the dank, submerged quarters — breathing the stagnant air, uniforms wrinkled and stained by sweat — everyone swaying to the gyrations of the ship, some resting on cots, many sitting against partitions, while others waited in line for the head so they could retch out whatever else was left inside their churning stomachs. Soon the convoy would change course, angling northward, heading for the southern coast of Korea; but until their destination was reached, the troops were kept sequestered in their turbulent limbo, passing the hours with conversation or card games, or attempting to write letters home, or reading again those letters from loved ones which had been brought on board like precious cargo.
But Hollis had no letters to safeguard, nor had he written anyone or received a single missive since leaving Critchfield. There wasn't a hand-wringing girlfriend awaiting his return, not even a childhood friend anxious for news about him. The closest person in his life at that point had been his mother, and he hadn't yet felt the desire to inform her of his enlistment (she had last seen him walking from the house on an overcast morning, holding a suitcase, telling her only that he would be in touch once he settled elsewhere and found steady employment). Although he didn't comprehend it fully, he was — as the communal rabble loitered nearby, few giving him much attention while he remained on his fold-down cot and apart from the casual gatherings of his fellow cavalrymen — a silent, inexpressive individual, alone on the journey and without another soul for an intimate.
To kill time, Hollis filled several pages of a small notepad, fashioning detailed drawings which summoned less confining environs. A decrepit two-story farmhouse overlooking a lush valley. Two deer pausing at the edge of a creek — a doe with its snout reaching toward the water, an alert buck with its neck and head poised upright. A bowling ball floating through the atmosphere of interstellar space, drifting between twinkling stars and the bright glow of a distant sun. Finally, he sketched himself far beyond the ship's stifling quarters, placing his uniformed likeness on the moon's imaginary surface — where his ungracefully lean, tall body, his dark stubble of a crew cut, his long, gawky face took shape among craggy lunar boulders (the wide peeking eyes, dagger-sharp antennae, and skeletal fingers of tiny alien creatures made half visible behind each large rock); he gazed nervously from the page, his M1 clutched and ready, his mouth as round as the letter O, with a caption scribbled above him which asked: how on earth did I end up here?
Yet even his drawings couldn't completely vanquish the caged-in, bustling reality of his surroundings, and periodically Hollis would set his pen and notepad aside, shutting his eyes so that sleep might guide him ashore. During those restful periods, his thoughts sometimes puzzled over the Korean peninsula, that Japanese stronghold before World War II now divided bitterly into northern and southern regions, whose separate governments were at odds with each other (Moscow having armed the north, Washington having done the same for the south): the communist North Korean army had at last pressed forward in a violent bid to unify the country; this was obviously a troubling turn of events for Douglas MacArthur's supreme commandership, causing the great general to deem the situation as being critical, an emergency which required the use of peacetime soldiers stationed in occupied Japan, as well as the need to extend all enlistment for twelve months, and, then, to herd hundreds of men aboard transports, and — with the sea lanes assaulted by thirty-foot waves, the typhoon weather nearly doubling the length of what was usually a three-day voyage — to send the troops sailing from Yokohama on a direct course toward frontline skirmishes.
More often than not, Hollis disregarded his uncertain thoughts of international police action and likely combat, eavesdropping instead on those close at hand, listening with eyes shut to a cacophony of voices — the bad jokes, the raucous laughter, the crass innuendoes — like a discordant choir accompanying the ship's creaking, metallic gyrations. The majority of them were younger men, most no older than eighteen or nineteen, while some had just barely reached seventeen, joining up after their parents had consented by signing the recruitment forms. Hollis, however, was already twenty, and although the age difference was minor, he felt displaced and out of rhythm with the quick, adolescent banter of his peers; they appeared, to him, like unruly kids left to fend for themselves, or perhaps wild things banded together by necessity and somehow holding one another in check.
“Look at that peckerwood, just look at him go.”
“Goddamn, man, that ain't right.”
“I fold, damn.”
“Yep, I hear you. I fold.”
“Hey, which one of your rotten crotches didn't ante?”
“Don't look at me.”
“This is bullshit. Who didn't ante?”
One blustering voice was interchangeable with another — all their voices cut from the same cloth yet remaining singular — like the uniforms they wore, like the equipment they toted, like the similar rankings they were assigned and the robotic drills which were now performed as second nature; with rarely an exception, every soul huddled in the foul belly of the ship, including Hollis, was a trained rifleman for the army personnel parlance, each classified to an identical set of numbers. Except the faces and bodies were different, some more so than others, and among them was a particular oddity: a Chinese American private from Seattle named Schubert Tang — two of the darkest eyes Hollis had ever seen, coarse black hair cropped short, shiest kid in the battalion but a skillful poker player, wire thin and delicate, with almost a girlish appearance — whose three older brothers had served before him in the Second World War.
So while the men horsed around, or suffered from seasickness, or bantered with the tacky obscenities of soldiers, only a couple of them stood out perfectly in Hollis's memory — one of whom was Schubert, a Browning Automatic Rifleman, that solitary Asian in a den of mostly white faces. At the outset of the crossing, it became apparent that Schubert was very intelligent and very friendly, if not also rather quiet, and who, in spite of being Chinese, would have made excellent officer material in the future. But he looked like the youngest of them all, much closer to fourteen than his actual eighteen years — with smooth, unblemished skin which, to the amazement of some, had never felt the touch of a shaving razor. Moreover, it was Schubert who understood where they were going, who knew a lot about that place called Korea, who had even been able to locate it on a map well before the rumblings of civil war had begun. In the middle of playing cards, questions were thrown at him concerning the country, especially since many, including Hollis, had assumed the differences between the Chinese and the Koreans were negligible; and as he spoke, answering and then elaborating on what had been asked, the game would be put on hold for a spell — every-one listening to him, sometimes straining to hear him because his voice was so soft, then ribbing him afterward that only a North Korean spy could possess such information.
But with every question asked, Schubert would become unusually talkative, offering long explanations which were given in painstaking detail. He told them it was okay to think of Korea as a bridge for China and Japan, but that the country also had its own rich history which stretched back five thousand years. The nation, he said, was born after a god named Hwanung, who descended from Heaven and turned a bear into a beautiful woman; the woman eventually gave birth to Hwanung's son, and it was that son who, as an adult, ended up building the capital of Korea. Subsequently, as the hours passed with the chaotic, metronome-like sway of the ship, more would be gleaned from Schubert. He told of the Korean king who, in 1420, created a phonetic language for his people, using eleven vowels and seventeen consonants, forming the written language of Hangul. The same king invented the sundial and water clocks. Yet while
he painted an alluring picture of that strange, unknown land, Schubert didn't avoid those recent junctures in history which, as a result, had set them sailing across the Sea of Japan: the annexation of Korea by the Japanese in 1910, the nation then humbled into a mere colony, a territory which remained under Japanese control until the Pacific War ended some thirty-five years later. And though he could go on endlessly and in great detail about where they were headed, the men did nothing to interrupt him, preferring instead to listen carefully to the shy Chinese kid from Seattle, perhaps regarding him as one who, by the sheer virtue of his otherness, might somehow hold the key to their survival.
There was, however, a soldier from Texas who truly stood above the rest — at least it seemed as such to Hollis — and whose gregarious presence was difficult to resist or shun. His name was Bill McCreedy, although he often referred to himself in the third person, saying things like “Boy, Creed sure wishes he could hunker down on a hamburger,” and “Scoot on over, give ol’ Creed a place to sit.”
From his cot, Hollis spied McCreedy making the rounds, pausing to borrow a cigarette off someone, striking up conversations with those who crossed his path, or leaning for a while against a bulkhead and, exhaling smoke through his nostrils, coolly surveying the groupings of fellow privates as if they were under his stern command. But he was well regarded by pretty much everyone; in fact, McCreedy had an affable yet dominating nature which attracted others to him, and whomever he spoke with was given the distinct impression they were, at that moment, his closest buddy. Moreover, he knew how to take the lead in any situation — playing poker, shooting the breeze, undertaking various work details — assuming the role of team captain without really trying, smiling as he barked out instructions or orders which were never questioned. His very aura suggested not only power and cunning but, like those who seemed destined for grander heights, an innate ability to get things accomplished his way, doing so with an effortless grin and a benign pat on the back.