WISH
HARRIS WAS ALREADY SITTING beside Anstey when Wish walked down the row of berths in the hospital barracks. He’d soaked some of the bread supplied to the sickest men in broth and was trying to spoon it into Anstey’s mouth.
Anstey tilted his head. “That you, Wish?” he said.
“Thought you were going blind, Ants.”
Anstey was lying under two blankets, his head propped up on an overcoat rolled into a pillow. “I could smell you coming,” he said.
“Better or worse today?”
“Just colours still. And shapes. Coloured shapes.”
“Open up,” Harris said, holding the spoon to his mouth.
Anstey shook his head.
“Two more spoonfuls.”
“Waste of your time,” he whispered, “fussing over a dead man.”
“Shut up, Anstey.”
“Wish will be trucking me out to the French Temple before long.”
“Shut your mouth, I said.”
“Open or closed, Harris. You can’t have it both ways.”
Harris put the bowl on the floor between his feet. “Closed then, you miserable bastard.” He looked across at Wish. “Every man in this camp hungry enough to eat the leg off the Lamb of God and this little prick too contrary to drink a bit of soup.”
It was hard for them both to watch the life bleed out of Anstey like air seeping from a balloon. He’d never recovered from the time they spent in the cells in April, suffering repeated bouts of fever and dysentery. McCarthy made several requests to have him assigned to the hospital, but the interpreter intervened to keep him at work. Until Anstey’s vision started to fail. He’d lain in the hospital barracks the last two weeks of July and was no better for it. There was no medicine. Being excused from work and the bit of bread were the only allowances made.
Harris picked up the bowl again. “Come on, Ants,” he said. “Don’t make me beg.”
Anstey opened as wide as he was able and Wish could see the grey-greenish tinge to the roof of his mouth. The same as his mother’s before she died. Anstey’s breathing was shallow but rapid and he accidentally aspirated the spoonful of broth, launched himself into a coughing fit. Harris lifted him forward, holding him up as the wasted body convulsed. Anstey’s back studded by its chain of vertebrae, so prominent through the skin Wish could have counted them from across the room.
Harris eased him onto his back once the coughing ended and they all sat in silence while Anstey collected himself. It should have made Wish feel some kind of sadness to see his friend in that condition. But it was only a confirmation of helplessness that came over him and the useless bit of rage that accompanied it. Anstey let out a long breath of air and lifted his hand at the elbow to say he was all right.
Harris stiffened suddenly, his eyes flicking past Wish toward the door. “Lefty’s coming,” he whispered.
The interpreter walked the length of the barracks, looking neither left nor right. Wish and Harris stood, along with every patient capable of getting to his feet. Wish and Harris bowed as he approached, silently willing him to pass by. Knowing he would not.
The British doctor who provided most of the care to the sick men was out at the mess. Which was the reason the interpreter chose this moment to drop by, they knew. He stood at the foot of Anstey’s sickbed and carried on a conversation with the Japanese orderly at the far end of the hospital.
“I’m told you are quite capable of standing,” he said to Anstey.
Harris said, “He haven’t got energy enough to eat.”
“You act like women, you two.”
“He’s gone blind,” Harris said uselessly.
“Get him up!”
Harris bowed and then pulled the covers away from Anstey’s torso. Emaciated legs, knees the size of coconuts. “Come on, little buddy,” he said. “Come on.”
Wish moved to help but the interpreter raised a hand to stop him.
Anstey leaned heavily on Harris when he stood. He bobbed his head deferentially in the direction of the guard’s voice. He was having trouble keeping his feet even though Harris was holding most of his weight. The interpreter stood watching them awhile. He took out a packet of cigarettes and lit one. He waved the package at Wish. “Smoke?”
Wish kept his eyes on the floor, ignoring the question.
The interpreter waited until he was satisfied the sick man wasn’t about to collapse and continued down the aisle to the door at the opposite end.
Harris eased Anstey back into the berth. He said, “That fucker is number one on my hit list when this is all over. If I can still stand, so help me Christ.”
Wish and Harris went straight to their bunks after the evening roll call. Their barracks had room enough for eighty men and had been full when they arrived at the camp in ’42. Even with the arrival of the prisoners from Mushiroda, only a third of the beds were still occupied.
Wish said, “I wouldn’t give Ants much more than a few weeks.”
“You a doctor now, are you?”
“You seen the roof of his mouth, Harris, same as me. And that cough.”
“He sure as hell isn’t going to live on that maggot soup.”
“We’ll have to make a little midnight visit to the Red Cross storeroom, see if they got any more of those tins of beef stashed away.”
They lay in their berths until the barracks had settled. It was perfectly still outside and pitch black. Even the lights in the guardhouse over the gate were blacked out to avoid leading American planes to bombing targets. They walked to the back of the building and Wish crawled into the space underneath. He felt around until he found the stash of bottles and crawled back into the open air with two. They walked along the back of the barracks, beside the ten-foot fence topped with rolls of razor wire. They went past the hospital to a smaller storehouse beside the headquarters.
“I spose we’re dead men if it’s Lefty in there tonight,” Harris whispered.
Wish uncorked a bottle of shine and took a mouthful, then passed it to Harris. “No sense dying sober,” he said.
He whistled at the door, and they heard footsteps inside, the door opening a crack.
“White Lightning,” Wish said, shaking the bottle. “Aruko-ru.”
“Ikahodo?”
“Ni,” Wish said, holding up two fingers in the dark. “Ni hon.”
“Which one is he?” Harris whispered.
“Can’t tell. But he sounds thirsty enough. Yoi aruko-ru,” he said, shaking the bottle again.
The door opened wide, an arm extended and waving them inside. The guard closed the door behind them and flicked on a flashlight, turning it to the ceiling to give a faint glow of light in the windowless room. His mouth and nose were covered with a kerchief. Wish and Harris bowed to him and handed over the bottles. He set them on the floor against the wall and walked to a padlocked door at the back of the room. After he opened it he waved them inside.
The storeroom was stacked floor to ceiling with Red Cross parcels, most of which had already been rifled through and pilfered from. In one corner sat a large white metal box with the Red Cross symbol on the cover. It was strapped closed and clearly hadn’t been touched.
“Wish,” Harris called and he nodded toward the container. “Medical,” he said.
Wish turned to the guard and pointed at it. “Kono,” he said. Wish held up his hand, the fingers splayed. “Go hon.”
“No,” the guard said.
“Yoz aruko-ru,” he said. He held up both hands. “Juu.”
The guard shook his head. He pointed at the box and said, “Nishino.”
“Nani?”
“Nishino,” the guard repeated angrily. “Intapurita.”
“The interpreter?”
“Hai.”
Harris turned away. And with his back to the guard he said, “We could take him right now, Wish, you and me.”
“Don’t be stunned, Harris. Just look for a few tins of beef.”
The guard barked at them, suddenly
furious, impatient to have them out of the room and gone.
Wish raised his hands. “Okay,” he whispered. “Okay. Hurry the hell up, Harris, before he loses his head.”
“I don’t know why they bother covering their faces,” Harris said. “Every single one of the bastards looks alike to me.”
Wish used to think the same thing when they were first taken prisoner in Singapore. That sense only lasted a few weeks. But he had to admit that there was an absurd sameness to how they thought and acted that he couldn’t penetrate. Half the time he didn’t understand how their minds worked at all. There were obvious things, greed and pettiness and ridiculous little daily kindnesses as if they were all normal neighbours in a normal town. As often as not, though, he couldn’t guess how they arrived in those obvious places, the streets their minds travelled to get there.
During their second winter in the camp he and Anstey had gone to the cookhouse to collect a stash of rotten sweet potatoes hidden for them by the Dutch soldiers. They left Harris outside as a watch, but in the darkness of the kitchen they stumbled over Osano, already inside as if he had been tipped off and was waiting for them. He shone his flashlight directly into their eyes and ran at them, screaming obscenities. He slapped them both with his open hand.
Wish tried to calm him down. “Aruko-ru,” he kept repeating. “We alcohol,” he said. “Partners.”
Osano backed off finally and lectured them for several minutes, his face so contorted with emotion that it seemed he was trying to hold back tears. He reached into his shirt pocket and for the first time showed them that washed-out picture of his daughter or wife or mother, it was impossible to tell from the woman’s face how old she was. “Mitte,” he said, “mitte,” shining the flashlight on the picture.
“What is it he wants?” Anstey said softly.
“The fucker’s retarded,” Wish said. “Just keep smiling.” He looked at the photo, then smiled at Osano. “Some beautiful,” he said, pointing. “Kirie.”
He thought of Mercedes then and reached into his own pocket, bringing out the photograph to show the guard. He pointed at it and slapped his chest. “Okami,” he said. “Watasha no okami.”
Osano nodded and bowed to Wish and all three men felt a ridiculous wave of relief pass over them, as if some awful misunderstanding had been cleared up and the delicate line of civility and cooperation between them was re-established. They smiled and bowed to one another repeatedly.
“We go now,” Wish said. “Tachisaru.” He and Anstey backed slowly out of the room, still bowing.
Harris had bolted for the barracks when the shouting started and he was pacing the aisle when they got back. “What in Jesus’ name happened in there?” he said.
“You should have heard this one go on,” Anstey said, pointing to Wish, and he spoke a mouthful of gibberish that was meant to sound vaguely Japanese. “You learn to talk any more yellow,” he said, “and your skin is going to turn.”
It wasn’t until he had a chance to think it through that Wish realized they’d walked in on Osano stealing food. There had been a rare delivery of meat that afternoon, thirty kilos of beef for the prisoners. A couple of kilograms on the black market would bring a tidy little windfall. Which made sense to Wish. Even Osano’s yelling and striking them to cover his own indiscretion he could understand. But the guard’s perpetual sheepishness and deference around him afterwards was a mystery. As if Wish might still be able to hurt him somehow.
Harris was rustling through Red Cross parcels at the back of the room. “Got three tins,” he said. “And a quarter pound of chocolate.”
“That’ll have to do. Domo,” Wish said, bowing to the guard, who responded by holding his pistol tight to Wish’s temple all the way to the door.
Mid-afternoon Saturday the truck arrived with the urns from area POW camps. Wish and McCarthy and the Dutch officer walked out into the parade square to meet it. There was no sign of Osano. Wish looked into the box and counted eleven urns, besides the three from their own camp.
“Busy time,” van der Meulen said.
“Attention!” a voice called behind them.
The interpreter stood a few feet behind them. All three of the men bowed.
“Climb in,” he said.
There was no conversation at all as the truck drove up out of the valley. The interpreter stood facing out over the road ahead as if he was driving. Once the truck turned onto the open road and picked up speed, he sat against the cab, out of the breeze.
McCarthy said, “Where is Mr. Osano today?”
“The civilian guards have been relieved of their duties,” Nishino said. “How is your Canadian friend?” he asked Wish.
Wish refused to look at him and pretended he couldn’t hear the question over the noise of the engine and the wind.
“Private Anstey,” McCarthy said, “is in desperate need of medicines.”
“It’s unfortunate that they are in such short supply.”
“One round of M&B pills would be enough to keep him from dying.”
“As I said. Very unfortunate.”
The Dutch officer surprised them all then, saying, “We are not animals, you know.”
Nishino paused, as if he was seriously considering this notion. “Then you should act like men,” he said.
They drove on in silence until they pulled up beside the church. They carted as many of the urns inside in one trip as they could and Wish went back to the truck for the last two accompanied by the interpreter.
Lefty had become increasingly unpredictable as the summer progressed. There was a logic to his cruelty at first, parcelled out to advance his position in the camp or to carry out his peculiar vendetta against Harris and Anstey. But as rumours of American advances reached them in recent weeks, he seemed viciously unhinged. Wish thought there was a chance the interpreter might simply shoot him where he stood if he said anything now. Claim the prisoner was trying to escape. He felt surprisingly calm about it. There was even a blush of relief at the thought of everything ending right there in the church parking lot with Mary standing over him. His Mercedes. The Ocean Star.
“Your name,” Wish said. “Nishino, right?”
The interpreter’s head snapped back.
Wish bowed low to him, kept his eyes on his feet. “I’d love to get my hands on some of that Red Cross medicine you’ve got stashed away, sir.” Wish took the interpreter’s silence as encouragement to continue. “I’ll get you whatever you want for it.”
He was still looking down when the interpreter slapped him across the face. He fell back against the truck, juggled the urns in his arms to keep from dropping them. Pushed himself upright with his shoulders, bowed a second time.
“Get those urns inside the church.”
Wish was about to start past the guard, but stopped. You should act like men, the interpreter had told them. He said, “Where did you learn to talk like that, sir?”
“Like what? Like a Canadian?” The two men watched one another until Nishino said, “Inside.”
“Anstey is going to die without that medicine.”
“Soldiers die,” the interpreter said.
On Monday morning, Wish and Harris and a detail of other POWs were seconded from their work clearing debris at the shipyard. They were provided with picks and shovels black with coal dust from the mines worked by POWs at other camps in the area. The work detail set about digging a series of trenches inside the camp, five feet deep and three feet wide, that they covered with concrete. McCarthy and the ranking Dutch and American officers had been harassing Koyagi about the lack of bomb shelters to protect POWs for months. His capitulation on this point suggested the air raids were expected to continue. And treating prisoners as something more than expendable slave labour, however marginal the improvement, seemed a veiled admission by the Japanese of the possibility of defeat.
They worked alongside an American named Spalding who talked endlessly while he dug, as if speaking was a prerequisite for drawing breath. Wish couldn
’t begin to guess where he got the energy for it. The heavy work winded him. He had to lean on his spade and push words from his mouth. The effort felt no different than shovelling dirt.
Spalding was one of the few Americans Wish met in the camps who didn’t have all his teeth. His skin tanned dark as leather. “You’re the liquor boy,” he said to Wish that first morning.
Wish held a finger to his mouth.
Spalding made a dumb show of zipping his lips shut. “Where you from?”
“Newfoundland.”
Spalding gave him a look. “Newfun-what?”
“Newfoundland. Same as you says understand.”
“Sounds made up.”
Wish smiled. “God’s country.”
Spalding snorted. “That’s what my father used to say about North Dakota. God’s country. Don’t know what kind of a God he believed in to be talking so much bullshit.” He hefted a spadeful of dirt and tossed it up over the edge of the hole. “This ain’t so bad,” he said. “I spent all of nineteen years in Sherwood before I joined the army. I dragged a sled of milk around town in minus-forty when I wasn’t old enough to smoke. Bottles of milk froze solid. And then all summer pitching hay in a hundred-ten. Shit,” he said. “I always said I’d work in hell if the wages was right.”
Harris said, “So what do you think of the wages?”
Spalding shrugged as he tamped the spade head into the ground. “I ain’t complaining,” he said. And he grinned a gap-toothed grin at them both.
They visited with Anstey in the evenings, swapping gossip and rumours and talking aimlessly about home. At some point in the conversation the sick man would fall asleep or lie listening silently, too tired to carry on talking himself. If a lull carried on long enough he would say, “Tell me a story,” and Harris or Wish would scrounge some pointless recollection from their lives to fill the empty time.
Wish told Anstey about birding with Billy-Peter near Renews one late-fall afternoon when they were boys. They’d taken Patty’s dog along with them. She was fed scraps and maggoty fish and never enough of either, which made her a fitful retriever. She gorged on two or three downed birds before she was satisfied to bring the turrs back to them whole. But the boys were hunting for a lark more than for food. They used lead-pellet shotguns to shoot turrs on the wing. Wish brought one down near the boat and the dog went over the side, Billy-Peter rowing along behind her. Wish saw the dog’s head snap at the water and she turned to come back to them. Those peculiar orange eyebrows of hers. They hauled the dog aboard but there was no sign of the turr. “It must’ve sunk quick as that,” Billy-Peter said. It was a queer thing but there were plenty of other birds to shoot at and they thought nothing more about it.
The Wreckage Page 19