~ Bonfire! ~
After Ken had asked his dad a zillion times if they were going to the festival, his dad had bellowed, “Quit ding-donging about it!”
The next morning Ken had told his dad, he hadn’t asked, he’d told his dad that he was going to tag along to the bonfire with Maeda. “I don’t care,” Paderson had said. “It’s a fire. Nothing to write home about.” Ken needed to prove him wrong.
Cool evening breezes blew embers and ashes over the crowd’s heads. Stars pricked the sky. A crane, legs folded, pumped its wings, its outstretched neck suggesting an earnest intent to reach a lotus pond. Ken imagined that from the bird’s perspective his red hair bobbed, a dot of unexpected color, a lone autumn maple leaf, in the river of shiny black hair.
Japanese people—mostly men, a few women, fewer children—moving as one toward the festival pressed against his shoulders. If he were to lift both feet off the ground, the compacted crowd would have carried him along. As it was, he could take only short, hitched steps. He’d never before been this squished for this long. Although no offense was intended, the heat and pressure of bodies irritated him. Elbows jabbed him. Zori trod the back of his sneakers so he had to shuffle and drag to work his feet back into his shoes. Maeda squeezed his hand, as she had since they’d dismounted the train, so tightly that his palm folded in two. If not for her civilizing influence, and his desire to see the bonfire, he would have punched, kicked and broken away from the mob.
The horde parted to walk around a dinky fire. He looked questioningly up at Maeda. Is this the bonfire? She shook her head vigorously. No. They streamed around several more fires. One man leaped over a fire. Flames licked Ken’s pants, heated his leg, and ignited his cuffs. He smacked out the burning threads while walking. A deep, booming drumbeat persuaded the throng to walk in cadence. It wasn’t a dry rat-a-tat sound. The drumbeats surfaced from his deepest root and vibrated outward through his body. The throbbing beat inspired chanting. Ken couldn’t understand the words, if they were words, yet he shouted with the people, “Da! Da! Da! Da! Da! DAH! Da! Da! Da! Da! Da! DAH!”
The once cool breeze that had brushed the tops of their heads was growing warm. It was too crowded for him to remove his jacket. They were getting closer to the big bonfire. The tang of burning leaves and wood exploded in his nostrils. Smells of home. He hopped a few times to get a preview of what was ahead, but saw only a sea of backs and heads and a temple roof.
He grabbed a metal post. Ouch! The radiant heat from the bonfire had traveled from the metal face of the sign down through the post. When he jerked his hand away, his other hand pulled loose from Maeda’s grip. He lunged toward her. The crowd washed her away. Her pale hand thrust back, between indifferent bodies, and blindly grabbed his hand, pulling him to her side. She was dainty but surprisingly strong.
They’d been propelled to the perimeter of a circle marked off by smooth stones. The dirt had been swept clean of pine needles and maple leaves. People blocked his view of the fire. A tidal wave of shouting, clapping, cymbals, drums and gongs rolled over them. He didn’t know what spurred the merriment. The impassive expressions he’d grown accustomed to were now enthralled, jubilant, manic. The crowd’s mood stepped up to a fervid pitch, the instruments became more cacophonous. Cheering filled the glen. Why was everyone so excited?
Maeda smiled down at him. She said something in Japanese. Like so many of her sentences, it ended with mash-te. She didn’t know the English words to explain what was happening. I’m missing it, he thought and stepped up on a stone, craning to see what was going on.
The onlookers parted to make way for a large wooden cart pulled by men wearing breechcloths, helmets and fierce expressions. These men must have been special. They had darker skin and bulging muscles. The team of men grunted and lugged the cart carrying a long log, its one end on fire.
They stopped at the center of the circle of stones. The crowd resumed chanting. The cart-pullers threw their muscle and weight into the poles, turning the cart toward the temple. The flaming end of the log swung around, sweeping dangerously close to people crowding the edge of the circle. Ken covered his head and ducked when the log swung by him. People clapped and roared while others continued chanting.
Everyone followed the flaming log to the temple. The raging heat from the bonfire couldn’t keep people back. Faces were aglow. Vendors selling meat on skewers, mochi on sticks, and beer did a brisk business in the firelight. Several men, streaked with soot and sweat, controlled the fire. They alternately fed it with wood and tamed the flames with buckets of water. The flames appeared to be engulfing the temple. If they weren’t, they soon would be. The ancient wood beams and eaves must have been near combustion point.
A cheer rose from the crowd: he didn’t know why. The mass shifted, squeezing him, tearing Maeda away from him. Caught in an eddy of revelers, he was trapped in a dark cave of perspiring, indifferent bodies.
“Maeda! Maeda!” His voice was lost in the uproar. He tried to find his way back to the circle, to the spot where they’d stood watching sweaty men pull the bullock cart. By now, the stones had been dislodged. He followed heat and light, fighting his way through arms, elbows, hips, to the bonfire where he searched the crowd of faces for Maeda. That mob will crush her, he thought.
His eyes touched upon each undecipherable face painted in an orange light. One man’s eyes were impossibly narrow. Another man’s gaze was dark and glassy with beer or rice wine. People cheered passionately, their cheeks pulled into wide zealous smiles. Other folks chanted with trance-like reverence. Often, he saw a person who was an Asian version of someone back home. Like that lanky man smoking a cigarette. He resembled Ken’s old baseball coach, and that pudgy one over there looked like Jackie Gleason. Then the flames would extinguish the familiar image and reshape it. Black eye sockets, as hollow as a death mask, turned lustrous, a slight chin licked with light expanded; wrinkles carved into ravines by shadows were erased by a leaping ray. Attractive and handsome faces looked distorted in the orange glow. He shouted her name again and again until his throat was raw. The greedy blaze stole his oxygen. He fought off a dizzy spell and shouted once more.
“Maeda!”
No reply.
The food hawkers had trundled off with their carts. The crowd had thinned out. Only a handful of men remained, poking sticks in the embers. They didn’t seem to know a lost Western teenager was standing behind them, under the temple eaves, because if they did, they would have tried to help him or at least slide hesitant, curious glances at him. A forceful breeze rushed down the mountainside and churned the ashes. He zipped his jacket. The men rose from their haunches and deserted the temple grounds.
The metallic moon, at its zenith, cut sharp shadows. If the man in the moon was smiling, his features were too distant to see. Ken was alone, but not afraid.
Poor Maeda. She was probably beside herself with worry, crying into her hankie. He pictured their tiny kitchen: Maeda trying to save face for him as she told his dad what had happened, his dad yelling, glowering. She, nervously tucking an imaginary wisp of black hair back into her bun. His dad would mock her accent, blame her, grab her by her silk collar.
A cat slinked ghostlike around the corner of the darkened temple. Ken ran in the same direction the men had gone, with the hope that he could find the local train station where he and Maeda had disembarked hours ago. He could read the kanji for his village, so if there was a directional sign at the train station, he would know the way home. He could follow the tracks to the station in his village. From there, the walk to his house would be a cinch. As it turned out, when he got to the station, his village’s name was not listed on the sign.
Grandpap had told him stories about sailors of yore consulting the North Star to navigate the seas, and how moss grew on the north side of trees. Above Kyushu, the Big Dipper hung low and upside-down. In any case, knowing which way was north was useless. He didn’t know if the village he lived in was north, south, east or west of here. And moss didn’t grow on bamboo anyhow. The rails gleamed until they met and disappeared in the darkness ahead. He followed the tracks in what he hoped was the correct direction.
The moon, yellow and heavy, had swollen and sunk to the treetops. When he sat to rest, the cold from the rails penetrated his thin pants. His arm bone ached where it had been broken. He searched the edge of the woods for something recognizable to eat in case he got hungry. He remembered seeing an old woman collecting ginkgo leaves and another old woman picking up pine needles. The plant matter could have been for purposes other than eating: folk medicines, handmade paper, an obscure tedious handicraft.
You can eat teaberries, wild garlic, and make sassafras tea from the tree roots...if you could build a fire and had a pot for boiling water. Right now those were the only edible plants that came to mind that he could forage from the woods, and those plants probably didn’t grow in Japan. His stomach growled. Maybe it would have been better not to think of food—trick his stomach.
He decided to investigate, dig around for roots to suck on. The loamy dirt brushed away easily from shallow roots. The smell evoked a musty, old basement. These plants might be Japanese poison ivy, he thought suddenly. At the same instant that he hopped out of the scrub and onto the railroad bed, a curdling scream slashed the darkness.
“I know you’re only a deer,” he shouted. When he’d asked, Maeda had told him wild deer made that noise. “Sounds like a woman’s getting strangled to death,” he’d said. Grandpap had never told him that deer scream. How come? Maybe Pennsylvania whitetails didn’t make that kind of noise.
That stupid song the music teacher had made them sing surfaced. “Whenever I feel afraid, I whistle a happy tune and...” He forgot the rest of the lyrics and was stuck singing the same line over and over. Superstitiously, he pressed his thumb against the talisman in his pants pocket. The quartz crystal point’s familiar pain was reassuring, yet dull to his cold thumb. As he warmed his hands against his body, the quartz pain sharpened and drove the song fragment out of his mind.
Suddenly, the wholly formed knowledge arrived: his grandfather was a thief. The picnic table, the bathroom mirror, the squares of rough toilet paper, and who knew what else, had been stolen from the state park where he had worked. Why hadn’t Grandma scolded Grandpap about stealing? What if Grandpap would have gotten caught and been fired from his job?
Now “Grandpap” and “thief” became fused together like “bacon and eggs” or “arrest and trial.”
Ken plunked the quartz stone against a tree. It landed with a conclusive thud somewhere. He tried not to care where.
A nocturnal bird or animal screeched. He stood for a while, trying to get used to the lightness of his pocket without the stone in it. He ran to the tree, searched in the underbrush by feel, retrieved his talisman and sprinted along the tracks. His breath burst out as clouds before him. He was very near, or very, very far from home. He pressed his ear against the railroad track, listening for the weight of things to come.
Voices. Voices from behind him. He peered into the darkness. Shadows coalesced into substance. Figures floated toward him on a footpath that intersected with the tracks roughly ten feet back from where he was standing. He couldn’t quite make out who it was. He squinted to make their faces recognizable. It had to be Maeda, his dad, Wizard and a posse of village folks. They’d formed a search party.
None of the figures was tall enough to be his dad. The people were short, wiry. Japanese boys. Six of them.
“Ohiyo gozimasu?” he said. Good morning: A dumb thing to say.
One boy stepped out from the edge of the woods. His skin was lustrous in the moonlight. Ken’s chest squeezed his breath. It was the boy the gang members had stoned and beaten to death. Five other boys stepped from the edge of the woods and into the moonlight. They formed a semi-circle behind their leader.
Ken pivoted and ran in the direction he’d been heading. Just as he looked over his shoulder, he saw them take chase. The sticks they wielded flashed like sabers in the moonlight. On the run, he scooped up a stick as big as a baseball bat lying along the railroad tracks. Whipping the air in front of him with the stick, he snarled, “Go away! Go away! Go away!”
“Gah way! Gah way! Gah way!” they yowled.
Ken bolted into the woods. He ran—eyes closed, arms windmilling in front of him, ripping through the plants. Brambles snagged his pants, vines snared his legs, twigs clawed his face.
A profound calm embraced him. The orderly bamboo trunks, each as thick as his neck, soothed him, combed his straggling thoughts. The scenery was tinted in shades of gray in the pre-dawn light. The sounds of the boys’ yelling and pursuing footsteps had faded and finally withdrawn like the stars. He felt secure here, like a flea snuggled deep in dog fur. He crawled into a bamboo lean-to and lay on a straw mat someone had placed on the dirt floor. A squirrel skittered over his toes. Startled, Ken looked outside the lean-to to see who or what was chasing the animal.
A bird screeched. The bird wasn’t chasing the squirrel, rather, it was scratching for insects among the dried bamboo leaves. The bird appeared to be a species of peacock, but not the usual blue and green kind you see strutting in zoos. This peacock was dark with a white streak running down its forehead, and bright orange-red wing feathers. The exotic bird screeched again and took flight, sweeping just above the floor of the bamboo grove and swooping out of sight into the shadowy green. A strange bird.
A man dressed in white appeared, standing on the spot the bird had been scratching. Ken tried not to be afraid of the man who’d materialized in the grove. The man didn’t resemble the other villagers. He didn’t look Japanese, really.
The bridge of his nose pushed deep into his face. His nostrils and nose tip formed three pudgy spheres. His eyelids bulged. A mole on his chin was as large as a lotus seed with black hairs kite-tailing out of it. His queue dusted his shoulder blades. The man was a dead ringer for one of those troll dolls the girls back home played with and braided their hair. Maybe he was an aborigine, an Ainu. If he was, he was away from his people who lived on Hokkaido.
The troll rested his fists at his hips, and with four sharp movements spread his feet shoulder-width apart. He performed a series of graceful patterns during which, eyes closed, he raised his hands prayer-like above his head, opened his arms and lowered them to his sides. He slowly raised one leg then lowered it with the foot angled up, reminding Ken of a wading egret. Arms extended in front of him, he held an invisible large vase in his hands. He rotated the vase end over end as if it was priceless. A kind of dignity, new to Ken, radiated from the man’s homely face.
After he’d finished these slow prayerful motions, the man sliced the air with his arms, swiveled his hands on his wrists, and kicked his legs out piston quick, his heels aiming at an imaginary foe. The man never acknowledged Ken during the fluid performance that lasted nearly an hour judging by the height of sun building nests of lights in the bamboo leaves overhead.
Ken wanted to learn the fast stuff. Not that slow ballet stuff. He wanted to be able to kick the shit out of people when he returned to the States, and here in Japan, if necessary. Some doofuss or other would step up and ask for it, he was sure of that. And he wanted to protect himself against the swarm of Japanese boys should they have a mind to kill him. Ken crawled out of the lean-to. He dug a divot out of the damp loam with his sneaker toe to create noise so the man would open his eyes and see him.
“Ohiyo goziamasu.” Ken bowed deeply.
“Zao.”
He’d never heard Maeda or anyone say zow. “I want to learn that stuff.”
Joints loose and flowing evenly, the man strode closer, his bearing erect, stomach flat. His eyes searched inside Ken, exploring his body, knowing his mind. The sensation was one of unreserved empathy. No pity in it. No desire to control or manipulate. No traps being set. No calculations of worth. No obligatory obedience in exchange. Ken was unafraid, but uncomfortable with this exotic intimacy.
“I want to learn that stuff,” Ken said softly.
“Who is stopping you?”
Ken blinked, not understanding the question. Thinking simplification would bridge the language gap, he said, “I want learn.”
“Speak the King’s English. I understand perfectly. I asked, ‘Who is stopping you?’” As he spoke, he took Ken’s left arm into his hands and held it firmly. The man swept his right hand back and forth, palm facing down about two inches above the tender spot on Ken’s wrist. The man’s palm generated warmth, soothing warmth as from a fire burning in a hearth. Soon, tingles traveled up Ken’s arm. The man manipulated Ken’s fingers, tugging and pulling them as if trying to lengthen them. Ken had never complained to his father about his achy wrist because he was afraid Captain Paderson would take him to an army doctor, a sawbones, a quack doctor sent to Japan because he didn’t sterilize his implements.
The homely man’s long, mole whiskers yielded to the gentle whims of a breeze. “Return to your father.”
Ken ran along a path with the breeze at his back. He didn’t have to worry about bad doctors anymore. The ache was a memory.
At last he recognized the path at the edge of the bamboo grove. It was the trail the villagers trod daily to fetch water from the public well. Women carrying infants on their backs stopped gossiping and glanced up at him as he raced by. A dog leapt at his thighs, muddying his pants with its paws. Stringy chickens complained and scattered.
Around this time of the day his dad usually ate breakfast or was gulping the dregs of his first cup of coffee, while Maeda quietly carried dishes to and fro, giving him sugar and powdered milk before he requested it. Their mouths would drop open and eyes pop when they saw that he was home, safe.
Ken opened the door, crashing it against the wall. “Dad! Maeda! I’m OK! I’m back!”
A kitchen almost as empty as the day they’d moved in mocked him. His dad’s watch ticked hollowly on the table. He must have been awfully worried judging by the battalion of dead soldiers crowding the kitchen table. Maybe Army buddies up from Okinawa helped snorkel down those Kirin beers during a break from the manhunt. His dad and Maeda were no doubt combing the mountain right this minute helping the search party, or filing a missing person report at the prefecture police station.
When they discovered him here in the house, he’d catch holy hell or be hugged to death. Or both.
A soft hiss—the kind of noise you make when you stub your toe and you suck in air to keep from swearing—came from his dad’s sleeping area. Two shadows embraced on the pearly shojii. Ken slid the door open. Her black hair waterfalled over one shoulder. The woman was sitting on her haunches, her squarish buttocks rested on her heels. Her toe pads were pale, perfect bleached peas. The possibility of his father being in bed with Maeda was too appalling, yet completely appealing to have entered Ken’s conscious mind until his intrusion upon this tableau that embarrassed and aroused him. Ken loved Maeda and it was the intensity of his love that rendered her too perfect for his father’s affections, such as they were. If his dad married Maeda, the union would ruin everything. If Maeda accepted Paderson’s love, she would be a less than the perfect goddess-creature Ken had built her up to be in his heart.
Captain Paderson, wearing only boxer shorts, pushed the Japanese woman away from him. He rubbed his day-old stubble and, glassy eyed, watched the woman, a stranger to Ken, bob around the tiny room plucking her clothes off the tatami floor.
“What do you want?” Paderson asked.
“I’m back,” Ken said.
His dad held his arms out and said without enthusiasm, “Great.”
“I’m all right.”
“How about rustling up some breakfast?”
“Where’s Maeda?”
“Not here.”
“Did she come—”
“And get that damn hair cut, or I’ll cut it for you.”
Ken carefully slid the screen shut. His dad didn’t know he’d been out all night, lost in the forests of Japan. The woman pranced out of the sleeping area and padded through the kitchen with her head bowed. Two birdlike chirps surprised Ken, making him plunge his thumbs into an egg he was going to crack. He turned around to see what had made the chirps and saw that the woman had collided with Maeda, who’d just opened the door. The Japanese women bowed apologies as they sidled past each other, Maeda entering the kitchen, the other woman leaving the house.
He wiped his egg-smeared hands on his pants and looked at the housekeeper. Lines, like crazed porcelain, netted Maeda face. Mud defiled her blue kimono hem. A lock of loose hair encircled her neck. Maeda pulled him to her. His shoulder muffled her sobs, drank up her tears.
Holding her slight body up, he whispered, “Where were you? I didn’t know where you went! I looked and you were gone. Then everybody left. I walked all night.”
She stroked the back of his neck and made consoling noises.
“Where in the Sam Hill have you been?” Paderson roared.
“I looking for Ken. No Sam Hill.”
More angry than embarrassed, Ken pulled away from Maeda’s embrace. “Don’t yell at her!”
“Watch it, wise guy.”
“You should yell at me!” Ken shouted. “Not her!”
“Nobody yell,” Maeda said.
Ken and Maeda interrupted each other, sacrificing their own reputations in hopes of giving the other face. Nothing Ken said had the intended effect on his father. His reaction was the opposite of what Ken and Maeda desired. Paderson’s thin lips signaled that he’d heard enough. His voice swelled against the walls.
“You let my son wander around, lost in a foreign country in the middle of the night.” He laid a leaden hand on Ken’s shoulder and dragged him away from her side. “You’re discharged from service, woman. Pack your gear and leave.”
“Hai.”
“Do you understand what I mean?”
“Hai.” She collected nothing, bowed deeply at the door and unveiled a smile that perched on Ken’s heart.
“Don’t look at me like that, wise guy. You’re the one who said you were too old for a babysitter. You got your way. You’re on your own.”
He’d been feeling that way for a long, long time.