The Wreckage

by Michael Crummey

  Harris said, “You think these will actually be sent anywhere?”

  They’d been permitted to send a note home only the once, when they first arrived at #14, in 1942. And the letters from Mercedes gave no indication she’d seen it. “Even if they are,” Wish said, “I got me doubts about the logistics of the British Army.”

  Anstey and Harris stretched out on their berths, writing carefully in block letters, counting words on their fingers. They looked like children at their homework. Harris’s huge feet hung over the edge of the bunk. Wish printed his name, rank and serial number across the top. That was all the soldiers were meant to include, but he and the two Canadians included the addresses they were writing to as well. Mercedes Parsons, c/o Hiram Keeping, Georgestown, St. Johns, Newfoundland, he wrote, underlining the last word three times. Enjoying sunny Pacific but hospitality a bust, home as soon as vacation over. Health continues good. Starved for fish cakes and sight of you. Have your letters, pls. keep writing. Wait for me.

  The cards were collected after precisely five minutes.

  “They’ll never make it out of camp,” Wish said.

  The next morning after roll call, the interpreter stood before the line. He took filing cards from his uniform pocket and looked down at them. “Corporal James Harris,” he said.

  Harris stepped forward and stood at attention.

  The interpreter turned the card over. “Halifax, Nova Scotia,” he said. “Canada.”

  “Yes sir,” Harris said.

  “Private William Anstey.”

  “Sir.”

  “Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Canada.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “Canadians.”

  “Yes sir,” they both replied.

  A node of discomfort started buzzing in Wish’s stomach.

  “Sir,” Harris said, “is there a problem with those cards?”

  The interpreter stepped up and slapped him across the face. He looked from one man to the next. “Canadians,” he said again.

  Both men said, “Yes sir.”

  The interpreter smiled at them. “I am very pleased,” he said, “to meet you.”

  He turned away then, having marked the two of them, and Koyagi dismissed the entire company.

  They talked among themselves that evening, lying in the barracks after the suppertime cigarette, waiting for roll call.

  “You should steer clear of us,” Harris told Wish. “Eat with some of the other fellows.”

  “He’ve already seen us ganging around together,” Wish said. Although the thought had crossed his mind.

  Anstey said, “He got some special kind of dislike for us, that’s sure enough.”

  “Maybe he had a run-in with the Canadian troops in Hong Kong.”

  The man lying nearest the door through to the officers’ berths called across to them. “Interpreter,” he said. All the prisoners got to their feet and bowed as the soldier walked down the room, accompanied by another guard. He stopped in front of Wish.

  “Private Furey.”

  Wish straightened up to look at him.

  “That is your name?”

  “Yes sir. Aloysious Furey, sir.”

  The interpreter ordered the other prisoners out of the barracks and the guard herded them toward the exit. When he and Wish were alone he said, “I have been speaking with Mr. Osano.”

  “Who, sir?”

  The interpreter backhanded him across the face. “I have been speaking with Mr. Osano.” He waited a moment before going on. “Your business venture will continue. But there will be a”—he pretended to be searching for the correct word—“a new tax,” he said.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir.”

  The interpreter produced a box of matches from his pocket. He called the guard back into the barracks and waved the matches around, shouting and pointing at the berth and then at Wish. The guard butt-ended Wish in the stomach with his rifle, then kicked and shoved him outside, past the prisoners gathered around the entrance.

  He was ordered to stand in the square with his arms outstretched, and a box filled with water was placed in his hands. He tried to guess the weight of it, ten or fifteen pounds he thought, a medium-sized codfish. The interpreter standing at his shoulder as the minutes ticked by. The seconds were leaden and seemed to drop into the box as they passed, his arms beginning to waver as the heft of it grew. After twenty minutes it was as if he’d fallen back into a malarial fever. His entire body shook, his hair and shirt drenched in sweat. The second the box dipped the interpreter laced into his back with a bamboo stick, forcing him to keep it raised to shoulder height. The rush of adrenaline holding it there a few more minutes.

  They repeated the steps of this dance half a dozen times, and for a while Wish was able to take in details of the event. The interpreter used his left hand to swing the bamboo stick, which explained the name Lefty. He wore his pistol on the right, which meant he was right-handed and simply unable to swing with enough force from that side to satisfy himself. So the injury likely had something to do with his back.

  That was the last rational thought he could manage. By the time the interpreter ordered him to set the box down, he couldn’t think of his own name. He laid it as gently as he could manage and stood straight again, sucking air through his nostrils.

  The interpreter said, “I could have you shot for this violation.”

  He was handsome in a way that made his arrogance more obnoxious. He had a mole high on the left cheekbone that seemed curiously precious, as if it had been drawn there with an eyebrow pencil. His eyes steady behind the wire-rimmed spectacles, a smile on his face.

  He said, “I trust we have an understanding.”

  Wish bowed in front of him. Every muscle in his body quivering as if he were plugged into an electrical outlet. He held the bow, acquiescing, and at the same time he was placing the interpreter on the chart in his mind, on the far edge of a ring among the outer planets. Somewhere beyond human.

  “I see you are a friend of the Canadians,” the interpreter said, still smiling. “They are associates of yours.”

  “We’re in the same outfit, sir.”

  The interpreter shouted an order to the guard, who singled out Harris and Anstey among the prisoners pretending not to watch the punishment. The three of them were marched to a line of individual cells made of bamboo, the ceilings too low for even Anstey to stand upright inside. The guard beat them across the backs and shoulders with a bamboo stick as they hustled inside, their heads covered with their hands.

  They spent four nights in the cells. They were each given one ball of rice a day, laced with salt. Half of one cup of water each morning. The interpreter visited regularly to look in on them through the bamboo slats and to ask how they were enjoying the accommodations. He drank tall glasses of water where they could see him, a display of such childish cruelty it was difficult to credit. He seemed cartoonish to Wish, as if he had picked up his manner from watching crooks and hooligans in Hollywood films.

  Talking was strictly forbidden, but they managed whispered conversations at night.

  Anstey said, “He’s off his head, that one.”

  “I don’t know if it’s that simple,” Wish said.

  “What is it, then?”

  “There’s something in him don’t seem real.”

  “The bastard seems real enough to me,” Anstey whispered.

  Harris said, “He’s the Jap to beat all Japs, for certain.”

  That was more or less what Wish meant. There seemed something made up in everything about the interpreter.

  They spent hours talking about food, recalling the meals they’d eaten in their lives, daydreaming the dishes ahead of them. It was a kind of mental torture not much different than the interpreter’s gulping water just out of their reach. But they couldn’t help themselves.

  “Tell you where I’d like to go I gets out of here,” Anstey said. “One of those garden parties in Renews Wish goes on about.”

 
“Don’t torture me,” Harris said encouragingly.

  Wish panned across those tables in his mind, every square inch laden with plates and trays and bowls. He listed the dishes aloud. Salt fish and fresh. Roast chicken and pork and salt meat. Pease pudding and cabbage and turnip. Onion pudding. Big crystal bowls of potato salad and jelly salad and coleslaw. Fruitcakes and pound cakes and figgy duff for dessert. Partridgeberry pie and custard pudding. “A dime to load up your plate as high as you like,” he said.

  “Jesus,” Anstey whispered.

  They were quiet a while then, their hunger sharpened by the thought of all the food they’d passed up in their lives.

  Anstey said, “You and your missus, Wish.” He seemed to be trying to move on to something less provoking to his stomach. “You didn’t have much time together before you joined up, did you.”

  “Not much, no.”

  “You had her before you come over, I hope.”

  “Fuck, Ants,” Harris said. “Who put the hole in your manners bag?”

  “I’m only saying, Harris. It’d be a shame if he didn’t and never. You know,” he said, “got the chance.”

  “Shut your mouth, would you? Jesus. Don’t mind him, Wish.”

  He didn’t respond, and that was the end of the conversation. But he spent some time afterwards thinking of the night he’d knelt in front of Mercedes out behind the house in the Cove. There was nothing sexual in the memory for him. He was too exhausted, too parched and hungry for that. But the thought he might never get the chance to properly lay down with her tormented him. Consummation, the Monsignor called it. Wish never understood why priests always wanted a grand word for ordinary things and came to think it was just a way of putting people in their place. But it was the priest’s word he reached for when he tried to explain to Mercedes why they should wait. There was something high-minded and pure in it that seemed necessary in the circumstances. And he was afraid now, lying on the dirt floor of a bamboo cage halfway around the world, that it would never be his and hers together.

  He shouldn’t have hooked up with Harris and Anstey in that bar, the two of them drunk and no real idea what England was or the army or where they’d end up. If one useless bastard in Halifax had given him sensible directions to the enlistment office. He shouldn’t have listened to Hiram and run off to Halifax in the first place. If he hadn’t hauled Hardy down the stairs, none of this. If he hadn’t knelt to say the rosary over poor drowned Aubrey Parsons. Hadn’t chased after a Protestant girl whose mother would never have him. He shouldn’t have hooked up with Hiram at all, was the truth of it, shouldn’t have left Renews.

  He lay awake through hours of this kind of suffering at night while the camp was quiet and Harris and Anstey slept or lay silently running over their own lists. There was a sickening sense of inevitability to the rain of incident and circumstance when Wish looked back on it. He started to feel that even the subtlest shift—if he’d woken earlier on the day he first saw Mercedes, if he’d drunk one beer more or less in the Halifax bar—even the most inconsequential change would have been enough to alter the chain of events and his life now would be completely different. God’s hand was there in the details, Lilly always said, turning you left or right. And there was some vague comfort in thinking God was to blame.

  After he and Tom and Billy-Peter off-loaded the statue of Jesus on the St. John’s waterfront, they had a few glasses of shine on deck. From where they were moored they could hear the Salvation Army street service. A young man waving the Good News and shouting over the noise of commerce on the docks.

  Tom went below to sleep as soon as it got dark and the two younger men set off to see what they could of the town. They found a tavern by the spilled light and noise as a door opened into the road, the room crowded with soldiers. They were Canadians, 1st Battalion of the Black Watch. They were drinking with a reckless intensity, every one of them gregarious and expansively friendly. They stood drinks for the two Newfoundlanders. A soldier named Kent leaned across the table, pointing a finger at them both. He had a head that looked like it had come in a box, flattop haircut, a bizarrely square jaw.

  “You fellows going to join up?” he said. He wiped at the line of perspiration across his upper lip and smiled. “Nothing like a uniform to the ladies, I guarantee.” He shook his square head. “A whiff of overseas and they want to make sure you get a proper send-off. I’m chafed sore.”

  After the tavern closed they were invited along to a house party on George Street. Soldiers again and a dozen local girls, the air blue with smoke. A gramophone in a corner was scratching out show tunes. Bottles of Old Sam on a rickety card table. “Bees to honey,” Kent said, indicating the mix of uniforms and young women.

  Hours later, Billy-Peter leaned over Wish where he sat in a chair by the gramophone. “It must be close to light,” he said. “The old man will want to be setting for home.”

  The girls in the room were just starting to surrender items of clothing, the soldiers had stripped down to their undershirts. It seemed the wrong time to be leaving. But he said, “All right,” and got to his feet to follow Billy-Peter out. They had to step back against the wall at the door to let a handful of arrivals go past them. Wish barely glanced at the newcomers, and he and Billy-Peter were halfway to the harbour before the face of the man with the waxed moustache registered. Hiram Keeping.

  He made some lame excuse—he’d left his handkerchief behind, he said—and told Billy-Peter he’d catch him up. Already with it in his head to see about hooking up with Hiram. To stay behind in St. John’s for good.

  If they hadn’t happened into that tavern full of soldiers. If Kent hadn’t invited them along to George Street that night. If Hiram hadn’t come through the door at that precise moment. If not for that goddamned moustache. There was no pattern or design to it all that he could make out. But he picked at the patchwork of seams in the fabric until he managed to fall asleep.

  By the fourth night he was severely dehydrated and his head was ringing with the lack. The inside of his eyelids felt like sandpaper. He worked his mouth unconsciously, trying to manufacture a little saliva. Could hear the dry-leather sound of Harris and Anstey at the same activity, even when they slept. He dreamt of water in all its forms, rivers and rattling brooks, rain guttering through city streets, lakes and deep black-water ponds on the barrens. He filled his cupped hands and dream glasses and dream tankards, drinking them down one after another and no relief to be had from the exercise. Each time he woke from those dreams he broke down and wept in a low, dry wail that seemed somehow unconnected to him. As if it was the night itself that was keening.

  Hunger was a physical strain, a weight he had dragged around for years now and sometimes managed to forget he carried, drunk or asleep. But four days of thirst just about undid him.

  Sometime before light Wish woke to find someone crouching outside the cell. He pushed himself up on his elbows. “Who is it?” he said.

  “Osano.”

  “Water,” he said. “Mizu.” He crawled to the bars. “Mizu.”

  Osano shook his head. “Asa,” he said.

  “Fuck tomorrow,” Wish whispered. He tipped his hand to his mouth repeatedly. “A drink. Mizu.”

  “Asa,” Osano repeated apologetically and he stood up then and left.

  They were released after the morning roll call and none of them could manage to stand straight. A distant drone of aircraft passing overhead, American bombers far enough away that no one in the camp even glanced up. Anstey had been delirious through most of the previous night, talking gibberish to himself. Wish and Harris put their arms around him as they crossed the square, the heat of the fever burning through his shirt. They hobbled unsteadily back to the barracks in a hunch, like three decrepit old men. The sound of the explosions reaching them from miles off as the planes dropped their ordnance on targets around Nagasaki.

  “The Yanks better get a move on now,” Harris said. “Or we’re done for.”

  Wish was still thinking
about Osano’s visit. The civilian had managed to parlay his involvement in the moonshining into some influence over the interpreter. Which had been enough to keep them from being killed outright or left to die in the cells. He tried to say something reassuring along those lines to Harris but his tongue was too dry and swollen to form the words.

  MERCEDES

  THEY LEFT THE CROWDS behind on the downtown streets, walking up past the Battery to Signal Hill. Passed Dead Man’s Pond on the right, the dank smell of standing water just off the road. Trucks filled with soldiers laboured by them occasionally, the men singing drunkenly or shouting as they passed, the truck slowing beside them and the soldiers reaching their hands to offer a ride. But Mercedes preferred to walk.

  Church bells had pealed out over the city mid-morning, the ships in the harbour sounding their whistles and sirens, cars driving through the streets with their horns blaring. Hiram closed up his shop and ran outside with only one arm of his coat on and his hat in his hand and he left Mercedes behind when she stopped at the Bashas’ store. The front door was already locked and she went around to the back entrance, let herself into the kitchen, where a celebration was under way. The Basha family and most of the other Lebanese in the city crammed into the space, several huge pots simmering on the stove, a bottle of rum open on the table. Rania hugged Mercedes and kissed her on both cheeks and everyone in the kitchen—men, women and children—stood to take their turn.

  They left the house in the afternoon and set off down Prescott toward the waterfront, where thousands of others lined the streets. Flags and bunting were hung from the buildings and people leaned out the open windows above the sidewalks. Long cheers rippled through the crowd, spontaneous renditions of “God Save the King” and the “Ode to Newfoundland.” But Mercedes felt strangely subdued for all the commotion and fuss.

  In the early evening she slipped away from the Bashas and wandered up toward the Kirk. At the top of Long’s Hill she caught sight of another gathering on the pavement, traffic backed up in both directions. She walked halfway up the hill before she heard the sound of his trumpet. Easily a thousand people surrounded him to listen. Mercedes had never gotten used to the crowds in St. John’s, the anonymous crush on the streets, the physical intimacy of it. Even walking among so many strangers was an unpleasantness for her. She covered her mouth and nose with her hand to mask the smell of them as she jostled her way toward the open circle of pavement where Johnny Boustani stood.