“You going to knock or just stand there all day?”
Spalding stood at the side of the house, wiping his hands on a rag.
“Hello, Lucas.”
“I know you?”
“Been a while.” Wish came down off the step. “Nagasaki #14,” he said.
“Well Jesus,” Spalding said. “Jesus, Jesus. Liquor Man.”
Wish smiled at him, although it was impossible to say whether the American was happy to see him or not.
“You put on weight,” Spalding said.
“I was just passing through. Thought I’d look you up.”
Spalding smiled then, a little warily.
“Got your teeth all fixed up, Spalding.”
“Army paid for it after I got home,” he said. “Felt like I had a mouth full of rocks for the longest time. Missed all them open spaces.” He was still wiping grease off his hands with the dirty cloth. “Had to learn how to spit all over again. How’ve you been … ?”
“Wish Furey.”
“Right, right. And your buddy,” Spalding said. “Harris, was it?”
“He’s dead.”
“That right?” Spalding said. “You want something to drink?”
They walked along a concrete path to a shed at the back. A small wood stove throwing heat in the corner and a workbench covered with the disassembled parts of a hunting rifle. “Just getting her cleaned up for the season,” Spalding explained. “You a hunter?”
“Not since before the war. Used to go after a caribou in the fall, a few partridge.” He put out a hand to the workbench to steady himself. “You got that drink, Spalding?”
He pulled down a bottle of Canadian Club and an extra mug from a shelf over the bench, poured them both two fingers of rye. He passed the mug across. “You still making that rotgut of yours?”
After he swallowed a mouthful, Wish said, “Cheaper to buy it in the stores these days.” He looked around the shed, a single small window over the workbench, a bare bulb hung from the ceiling. A radio on the shelf beside the whiskey bottle whispered a static-laden version of “The Streets of Laredo.”
“Sit down,” Spalding said, gesturing to the only chair in the room, next to the stove.
“You don’t get a lot of company.”
“Not much for it.” Spalding hopped up to sit on the workbench.
“Married?”
“Well,” he said. “Technically. Hitched up after I got out of the service. Seemed like the thing to do after spending all that money to get the teeth fixed.” He grinned, as if to show them off.
“Where is she?”
“Gone to live with her people in Bismark. Years ago now.”
“You didn’t have youngsters at least.”
“A girl. She must be going on seven or eight now.”
“She come out all right?”
“Ten fingers, ten toes. If that’s what you mean.”
“You ever see her?”
He looked into his glass. “Like I said. I’m not much for company.” He picked up the bottle of rye and handed it across to Wish. “Help yourself,” he said.
Wish poured his mug half full and then drank off another mouthful. He said, “You don’t mind me being here, do you, Lucas?”
Spalding got down off the workbench and turned away from him without answering. He set about assembling the rifle, clicking the oiled parts together in smooth, practised motions. Wish watched him closely. The years had made little difference in the man, the same flattop army haircut, the same fiercely gaunt face. Though the nearly manic air he’d had about him was gone.
“What happened to Harris?” Spalding asked suddenly.
“He got sick.”
“Sick how?”
“Cancer, I spose. He put a bit of weight back on after we got out but he lost it all again and more besides. He was already halfways to gone when we got off the train out east. His hair all fell out. We weren’t home two months.”
Spalding nodded, wiping the cloth along the length of the rifle barrel.
“He finished it himself in the end,” Wish said.
Spalding went still. “He killed himself, you mean.”
Wish said nothing, and Spalding reached up a hand to switch the radio off.
“That what you came out here for, to tell me that?”
“I’d have come a long time ago if that was it,” Wish said. “I don’t know what I come here for.”
Spalding picked up the rifle and cracked the barrel, slid in two shells and snapped it shut. “When I had my medical done on ship, heading home, the doc told me I’d be lucky to see the other side of forty.”
“Me too.”
Spalding held the gun across his hips. “So far so good for the two of us, I guess.”
“I guess.”
“I’m going out after a buck tomorrow. You’re welcome to come along if you like.”
They watched one another awhile.
“All right,” Wish said finally. He drained the whisky in his mug. “I’ll come along.”
Spalding pulled up outside the widow’s place the next morning before daylight. Wish was at the front door waiting, stepped outside when he saw the headlights turn the corner at the bottom of the street. They headed east on 107 and the sun came up in their faces as they drove. “Got a thermos of coffee,” Spalding said, passing it across the seat.
Wish unscrewed the top and bent his face to the dark, acrid smell.
“Just coffee in there. Don’t drink when I’m hunting.”
They drove east as far as Cut Bank Creek and parked on the side of the road. “Hoofing it from here,” Spalding said. He’d brought an old pair of boots and a hat for Wish along with a hunting vest to wear over his Navy coat. They gathered the rifle and gear from the truck bed and started walking south along the river. The sun was above the horizon by this time but the day was crisp and dry with cold.
They were making for a thin stand of trees at a bend in the river that seemed to move away from them at the same rate they were walking. It was mid-morning by the time they finally stopped there and shared a white-bread potted meat sandwich washed down with mouthfuls of the lukewarm coffee.
“They come in through the trees to the river,” Spalding whispered. He was crouched with the rifle across his knees and looked directly at Wish. “You going to take the shot, we see one?”
“I’ll see how I feel, if that’s all right.”
Spalding looked off toward the river and watched the slow black current moving past them. “You ever make it back to God’s Country?”
“Not so far.”
“Thought you had a girl waiting for you out there?”
“It didn’t work out that way.”
“She wasn’t waiting or you didn’t go looking?”
“We going to hunt today, or just sit here jawing?”
“I’m going to finish this sandwich.” Spalding glanced up at the blue. “Fine day,” he said. “Days like this are almost enough to make me think the old man was right about North Dakota.” He said, “I never did tell you how I wound up in #14, did I.”
“No.”
He shifted on his haunches to make himself more comfortable. “We were in a camp in Thailand before we got shipped over. And there was a rumour going around before the transfer that it was a kind of holiday camp in Japan. But only the healthy POWs would be allowed to make the trip. And there were a bunch of tests done to determine who was healthy and who wasn’t, the last of which was a stool test.” He swore under his breath. “Army’s the same all over the world, I guess. Word was you had to produce a healthy stool to get out of there, present it on parade. Something firm enough to hold in your hand, let’s say. And half of us were still pissing out our asses, we never did get used to that dirty rice they gave us to eat. But we made up our minds we weren’t going to be disqualified on that account. The way we heard it they were planning to shoot the ones left behind.”
Spalding grinned. Wish still hadn’t gotten used to the full set of teeth. They made him wary of the man.
“The latrine in that camp was set over a running stream that carried everything off into a field outside the fence. And the day of the stool parade there was a couple hundred of us hanging around the far side of the johnny, waiting for a healthy soldier to take his morning constitutional.” He started giggling uncontrollably then, pressing his chin into his chest to try to restrain himself. “Grown men,” he said. “Fighting over turds.” He wiped at his eyes with the back of his hand. “And that’s how I wound up in #14. Got my hands on a solid one. Presented it at parade like it was the company colours.” He took a deep breath. “Fucking hell,” he said.
“You’re going to scare off the deer,” Wish told him.
“We didn’t do anything we have to be ashamed of, is all I’m saying. However it might look from here.” Spalding was staring off toward the river.
“You don’t think maybe some of us went above and beyond the call?”
Spalding spat into the grass. He lifted the rifle off his lap and held it in both hands, as if considering the weight of it. “You sure you don’t want to take it?” he asked.
Wish only watched him.
“I’m not going to do it for you,” Spalding said. “If that’s what you come out here for.”
Wish stood up slowly. “We should get a move on.”
“I guess we should,” Spalding said.
They never caught sight of a deer, first or last, though they were out all day. They went straight to the diner to eat when they drove back into Sherwood. They both ordered the special—liver and fried onions with mashed potato and mixed veg—and drank beer while they waited. They’d barely spoken to one another after their conversation that morning and for a while it looked like they might carry on that way, sitting in silence until the plates were brought to their table, and quiet while they ate, both men ravenous and concentrating on the food in front of them. After they were through they ordered more beer and lit cigarettes.
Spalding said, “I’ve never got over the food thing. Can’t leave a morsel on the plate. It’s all I can do not to pick it up and lick it clean.”
Wish leaned on the table toward him. “What else have you not got over?”
“Living here now,” he said. “It’s like sleeping in the bed I slept in when I was a youngster. It don’t fit me like it used to. It’s not how I remembered it over there at all.” Spalding lifted the bottle to his mouth. “What about you?”
“What about me?”
“Was she not waiting or did you not bother to look?”
Wish didn’t say a word.
“Never mind,” Spalding said. “None of my business.”
Wish picked up his coat where it lay on the seat and rifled through the pockets until he found the envelope and the front page of the
Chicago Defender
. He unfolded the newspaper and turned it so Spalding could see the picture, but the American hardly glanced at it.
“Remind you of anyone?”
Spalding drank a mouthful of his beer.
Wish shook the medal out on the table. Horizontal stripes of blue, white and red on the ribbon. A silver medallion. “Harris gave it to me before he died,” he said. He turned the medal over and pointed at it. “There’s something engraved on the back there. Do you see that?”
“Don’t look like much to me.”
“It’s Japanese, is what it is. Whoever owned this medal had something engraved on it in Japanese. Why would they do that?”
“How the hell would I know?”
“He learned to speak English in Canada.” Wish looked up at Spalding. “Nishino,” he explained. “The interpreter.”
“He told you that?”
“In so many words. That must be where he got his hands on this medal.”
“So what if he did?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know. Fuck,” Wish said.
Spalding tamped out his cigarette in the ashtray. He said, “What were you out there at the river for today?”
“Hunting deer, I thought.”
The American folded the newspaper in half to hide the mutilated face and leaned back in his seat. “Why are you carrying that thing around with you?”
Wish tucked the medal back in its envelope. “I don’t know.”
Spalding let that hang in the air, then said, “You can’t let that fucker get under your skin.”
Wish offered a strained smile. “What if he was always in there?”
“Well in that case.” Spalding paused. “I guess you’d have to see a priest about that,” he said.
“Priest fuck,” Wish said quietly. He reached into his pocket for a five-dollar bill, laid it on the table between them.
“Don’t crucify yourself with it, is all I’m saying.”
“Fill up the truck with the change,” Wish said and he got up from the booth. He took the sheet of newspaper and walked to the exit.
“Hey, Furey,” Spalding called after him.
He turned back with his hand on the door.
“Those are my boots.”
Wish looked down at his feet. “I’ll leave them in the truck,” he said.
2.
T
HE DOOR TO THE SHOP
in Georgestown was open and he let himself in without knocking. There was no sign of Hiram in the main room. Equipment was scattered about behind the counter and along one wall, a heavy coat of dust on the surface of the cameras and projectors and all along the counter. He went through to the darkroom, the door standing open. The developing trays were stacked on the floor, an acid stink of disuse to the room. The tiny office was as dishevelled as he remembered it, receipt and log books stacked among pulp novels and yellowing newspapers from a dozen years past. A scatter of empty glasses that smelled of alcohol.
He went up the stairs to the second floor, walked through the rooms he’d lived in, but they were choked with an untidy array of boxes and old furniture and outdated film equipment and felt completely foreign to him. He stood at the foot of the stairs leading to the third floor. “Hiram,” he said. It was warmer as he went up and there was a dank, closed-in smell of unwashed clothes and sleep. The bedroom was dark with a blanket hung over the window but there was enough light to see that the unmade bed was empty and clothes lay strewn about the floor and over the back of the single chair inside. A rank smell coming from behind the closed door of the wash closet. Hiram stretched out on the floor inside like a creature stranded on a beach by the tides. His face purple and bloated, a stench of piss and vomit. Wish took a shaving mirror from the washstand and held it under the man’s nostrils. Mist on the glass. He grabbed Hiram by the lapels of his coat, dragged him out the door to the bedroom where he manoeuvred the dead weight of him up onto the mattress one appendage at a time. “You fucking cow, Hiram,” he said.