Ken's War (10 page)

He marked his place in the book where he’d
tried to begin reading a few moments ago, laid it beside the nut
and lava army, and set out in search of something substantial and
conclusive.

Wizard was working intently on comparing sets
of numbers on a sheet of paper on his clipboard to numbers written
on leaves of paper arranged like cards for a game of solitaire on
his desk. From time to time he sipped green tea and stroked Neko,
asleep on his lap.

“Do you think my dad is a shit heel?” Ken
wanted to know.

Wizard kept his head down, continued writing,
but looked out of the corner of his eyes at the one who’d posed
this question, apropos of nothing it might have seemed.

“Sometimes, I mean,” Ken added.

“It’s immaterial what my opinion is of him.
He outranks me.”

“You know what I mean. I mean, like, if he
wasn’t over you, if he was just a guy, you’d think he’s a shit
heel, too. Right?”

“Too? Who thinks he is?”

This conversation was twisting back on him in
a most uncomfortable way.

“It’s normal for you to have these feelings.
You are at the age when Westerners individuate themselves from
their parents and test out new ways of expressing their
personalities. One way this is achieved, in your culture, is
through rebellion and the righteous conviction that most things
parents say and do are inane and designed solely to inconvenience
the child.”

Ken had nothing to say to this gobbledygook,
other than, “I want to go home, real bad.”

“You miss your mom.”

He said he did, but only to end this
conversation and prevent another lecture.

He climbed the gnarled tree rooted onto the
black stone ledge. From up there, he watched a dozen or more
Japanese farmers, each one wearing a conical rattan hat, each one
bent in the same position, working the rice paddies below. The
words shared with a fellow being, the vocalized wish to return home
uncapped bottled-up memories and desires he’d scrupulously
suppressed.

Back home he wouldn’t be the different one.
He’d trade baseball cards with guys his age who knew which cards
were dogs and which ones to trade for a card
and
a ball.
French fries, cheeseburgers, graham crackers dunked in Hawaiian
Punch, popcorn with lots of salt and butter, heck, just butter on
plain old white bread, oh, these delights set his mouth to
involuntary chewing. Food, not normally the center of his thoughts,
had taken on meanings larger than merely satisfying cravings for
sugar or salt.

The best times of his life, his teen-aged
years, were being wasted here. He felt his jaw clenching, like his
dad’s did when he was righteously pissed off.

It was unfair to expect him to sacrifice
living the life of a normal kid, sacrificing the stuff every
American deserved. There might be an article or an amendment in the
Constitution about sending a kid to live in a foreign country
against his will, but his Webster’s unabridged dictionary with the
Constitution in the supplemental pages was in the States. He’d have
to come up with an angle to convince his dad that going home was
the best thing for him. For everybody. And not a whole bunch of
reasons either. One big, atomic reason. You don’t ping away at the
enemy with birdshot. You bomb him good so he can’t counterattack
and drain your resources.

Ken was infinitely pleased with his in-depth
comprehension of warfare tactics his dad and others had taught him.
He broke a twig off the tree and stripped off the thin outer bark.
It peeled off in rings, tiny brown curls that the wind lifted from
his palm and carried over the ledge.

The problem was he couldn’t recruit his
mother to help him get home. He’d have to wage this campaign alone.
She didn’t write in her letters that she missed him or anything
like that, but surely she did, otherwise she wouldn’t bother
writing and bugging him about keeping up with his schoolwork and
sending him clothes (too small). And who was he to judge her? He
only wrote when he wanted something—money, a book or a magazine,
things like that—and his letters only took up about a fifth of a
page of notebook paper.

He felt cheered thinking about his impending
triumphant return home. He wouldn’t have to suffer more hot and
humid days, Wizard’s lectures, his dad’s preoccupation with sucking
up to officers and drinking himself angry at nights. He missed his
old life, but he didn’t miss his mother terribly, or as much as
people thought he should. She was, however, the bridge to a
familiar life, and she was—it could not be ignored any longer—she
was his last resort.

He climbed down from the tree root, picked up
a round stone and threw it as hard as he could. He didn’t see it
land. One farmer glanced skyward and, seeing nothing overhead but
steely haze, bent again to tend to rice plants.

“What’s that smell?” his dad asked by way of
a greeting.

“It’ll be ready in a minute,” Ken said. He
placed pan-fried bream onto two dinner plates and dumped fake
potatoes next to the fish. He set one plate of food and a bottle of
ketchup on the table, and set the other plate at his place and sat
down. A few years from now, when he’s a full-grown man, not a
teenager who still had to depend on his father’s goodwill for
sustenance and survival, he would ask him, if it mattered by that
time, why the hell he’d forced Ken to go to Japan when both of them
were completely against the idea from the time his mother had first
proposed it. Why the hell hadn’t his dad stood up to her?

“Ketchup!” Paderson exclaimed. He poured
copious amounts on his fish and on the food resembling fried
potatoes. With a sharp twist of his wrist, the ketchup stopped
flowing from the bottle as if frightened. “Where’d you find
ketchup?”

“Wizard got it somewhere.”

“And potatoes? My God, potatoes.” He chewed
luxuriously.

They weren’t potatoes. A root vegetable,
maybe a relative of turnips, and if you sliced them thin, fried
them crispy brown in lard and seasoned them with lots of salt and
pepper and ketchup, you could fool yourself. Or your dad. It had
taken a week to come up with a plan of attack and it was a
doozy.

Ken launched a direct assault. “What do you
think about the idea of me going to West Point?”

“West Point?”

“Yes, sir.”

Paderson tilted his plate toward him and
scraped the remaining morsels of fish and fake-o potatoes into a
pile that he shoveled into his mouth. “You’re too young. Anymore of
those potatoes over there?” He tipped his head toward the pan on
the burner.

“Yeah.” Ken took four steps, enough to get
him to the pan. He slid the remainder of the fake potatoes onto his
dad’s plate. Dare he anticipate eating meals without having to
listen to forks scraping the shine off dinner plates? “I know I’m
too young right now to go to West Point, but I gotta prepare.”

The sound of chewing.

“What do you think, Dad?”

“Salt.”

Ken pushed the saltshaker toward his dad and
watched him shake crystals into his palm to measure the flow rate,
dump that onto his food and sprinkle more on. He paused, set his
fork down and opened his mouth wide, inserted a finger in his mouth
to dislodge a food particle stuck between two teeth. “Do we have
any toothpicks?”

Ken handed his father a little ceramic vase
full of toothpicks, each one with a decoratively lathed tip as if
the toothpick maker had thought he was crafting spindles for a tiny
railing, a whimsical thought that amused Ken.

His father’s jaw and mouth contorted
grotesquely to accommodate the toothpick and part of his hand,
giving full view of silver fillings in his bottom molars. Finally,
he closed his mouth, examined the invisible object he’d mined and,
gratified with what he saw, he looked up. He said, “Fishbone,” as
if this one word were the answer to an important question.

The words spilled out: “West Point doesn’t
accept students who graduate from my correspondence school. I have
to get a diploma from a real high school. In America.”

His father, cautiously chewing a bite of
fish, swallowed and pursed his lips. “That so?”

“Yes.”

“Says who?”

Ken had hoped that that particular question
wouldn’t come up, nonetheless he’d prepared for it. “I called
Colonel Topker and asked him and he called the West Point
admissions officer. That’s how I know.” The last bit sounded a bit
sassy, so he tried to dilute it by adding, “I didn’t ask Topker to
call West Point. I only wanted his opinion since he’s a graduate
and all, but he went ahead and called them.” The chances of his dad
checking his story with Topker were one in a million.

“You phoned a light colonel? And he talked to
you?”

“Yes, sir.”

Paderson made a sucking noise with the side
of his mouth. He was considering something. The pros and cons of
his son returning to the States, perhaps.

“So...?” Ken prompted him.

“So. The potatoes. Did Wizard track them down
too?”

“I did.”

“You did? How did you finagle that?”

“Where there’s a will there’s a way. So can I
go to West Point?”

“So. Your mother. Have you worked out the
logistics with her?”

Getting his mom’s cooperation was the weak
part of his strategy. “I didn’t want to make a transoceanic
telephone call to talk to her unless you said OK to my idea. Can
you clear it with her?”

Paderson guffawed. “I don’t have to
clear
it with her. I’ll call her and tell her tomorrow
morning when it’s evening in the States. It’s six a.m. on the East
Coast now. She’s asleep.” He regarded Ken as if detecting a subtle
change in his son that had occurred overnight—a change in posture
or demeanor, something? In all likelihood, his dad was probably
trying to ferret out if Ken had swallowed the refraction of the
truth his dad had shot off with macho bravado. Paderson
would
have to “clear it with her.” And they both knew
it.

No sooner had his dad shut the door behind
him than Ken, glad to be alive, did a victory jig in the small
kitchen, thrusting his arms in the air and drumming the table with
a fork and knife. “A direct hit! A direct hit!”

“What’s the ruckus?” His dad’s head appeared
from behind the partially opened door.

“Go! West Point! Go!”

“Go, West Point!” he father echoed.

Ken stabbed air with the fork.

“That was good grub, cadet.”

“Thank you, sir!”

When the door closed for the second time, it
shut down his jubilant mood. He’d achieved his mission too easily.
He’d expected to have to work on his dad for a couple of weeks,
wearing him down, ding-donging until Paderson, exasperated,
surrendered.

Wizard had, on one occasion at the
ofuro
, instructed him on the natural laws of the universe, a
phenomenon he termed yin and yang. “All things and events,” he’d
intoned, “have opposite states, not merely opposite states, but
complementary. There is no stability. The sun and the moon
complement each other. What if we had sun twenty-four hours a
day?”

“The world would burn up,” Ken had
replied.

“What if the moon shone twenty-four
hours?”

“Everything would die.”

“Correct. No condition is constant. Moon
follows the sun. Despondency follows happiness, and so on into
infinity.”

If that was the case, Ken had tolerated a
string of dark days. It was high time for his day in the sun.

Wizard had arranged everything, from the
plane ride from Kyushu to Okinawa, to the solicitous men and women
flying from Okinawa to the U.S. who’d fed him Oreos and taught him
how to play poker, to the grunt who’d met Ken at the airport and
drove him right up to his doorstep at the barracks in
Pennsylvania.

When he’d arrived at the barracks bungalow,
he’d intuited instantly that something was different, the way when
a man shaves off his mustache, you know he’s changed, but you can’t
pinpoint in what way.

Then as he turned the key in the front door
lock, he figured it out. The orange and yellow flowered curtains
weren’t hanging in the windows. Without curtains, the house looked
blind. Inside, his suitcase clunked hollowly on the floor, now
showing round indents the living room furniture legs had impressed
into the wood. The kitchen phone had been disconnected. The framed
jigsaw puzzle hung askew on the dining room wall. He opened the
basement door and hollered, “Mom? Mom? Mom?” and went down the
steps, fearful that a strange voice would reply.

He ran back outside and stood on the front
stoop where he used to sit and watch ants march into a hole in the
threshold. Major and Mrs. Garston’s porch light was burning next
door, but his old grade school teacher was the last person he
wanted to go to. She’d mollycoddle him like a baby and all. He
knocked on the door across the street. The people were strangers to
him. They’d never heard of a Captain Paderson or a Tricia
Paderson.

“Well, mercy me, it’s little Ken Paderson.”
Mrs. Garston made him sit in her kitchen and drink a glass of skim
milk while her husband called the post personnel bureau. In a
couple of hours, Major Holm, his mom’s new husband, showed up. He
picked Ken up and drove him down to Aberdeen, Maryland, where they
lived now.

During the ride, they passed an old fashioned
diner advertising the day’s special (chicken-fried steak, lima
beans and mashed potatoes), a camper van sales lot that sold ski
equipment in the winter, a Dunkin’ Donuts shop, a toy store and a
junkyard heaped with rusting, wrecked cars. The country was
accessorized with stuff he’d forgotten.

Holm caught him up on the old news, such as
how the worst power failure in history put nine states and part of
Canada in the dark for as long as 13 hours, and how 10,000
protesters against the Vietnam war marched down Fifth Avenue. And
how Baltimore set a World Series record by pitching thirty-three
consecutive scoreless innings. When you’re away from a place, you
kinda forget that things still happened, that records were broken,
that people got on with their lives.