A Million Shades of Gray (12 page)

That “we” again. It really bothered Y'Tin. Still, what was the harm if they were a “we” now? After all, he had always forgiven Y'Juen when he ran after the older boys. Y'Juen's insecurity wasn't his fault. His heart was good. But his father was always very, very hard on him, and it had weakened him rather than strengthening him.

Y'Tin thought again of the village boys who had gotten lost in the jungle and had bickered the whole time—how his father had said that was because the jungle changes a man. Y'Tin decided this was why he wasn't getting along with Y'Juen and Tomas. But that didn't explain why the two of them had turned on
him
. And then Y'Juen said, “Yes, Y'Tin, your attitude isn't helping matters any.”

Y'Tin's anger level soared sky-high.
His
attitude was fine. It was Y'Juen's and Tomas's fault that they weren't all getting along. Y'Tin decided that Y'Juen did not have such a good heart after all.

“Yes, we think you've been acting a bit different than we're used to,” Tomas said. “We all need to work together now.” Then, out of nowhere, Tomas said to
Y'Tin, “We wouldn't be in this situation if …”

“If what?”

“If it weren't for you.”

“What do you mean by that?” Y'Tin asked, jumping up.

“Your father worked for the Special Forces. You even went on a mission once.”

“Lots of men worked with the Americans,” Y'Tin retorted. He squeezed his hands into fists as hard as he could—that helped contain his anger.

“They brought danger. You said half the village is dead. If that's true, whose fault is it?” Y'Juen said, jumping up himself.

“The Americans were the only ones who treated us right,” Y'Tin responded.

“Then where are the Americans now?” Tomas asked.

The Americans were in America, as they all knew. Since they all knew it, why ask the question? The Americans had broken their promise to help them. Y'Tin knew it. He didn't know it for a long time. But now he knew it. Tomas and Y'Juen knew it, everyone in the village knew it. So why belabor the point?

Y'Tin decided that he would call Tomas and
Y'Juen “we” now in his mind, as one entity, as in “we doesn't know where the Americans are.” Let them be “we.” He would embrace their we-ness. He knew his father had done the right thing. His father had spent a long time thinking about it before joining the Americans. His father always spent a lot of time separating right from wrong. His ability to separate right from wrong was one of his main characteristics. He spent half his life thinking about it, just as his mother spent half her life thinking about the spirits. If “we” didn't know that, that was their problem. Its problem.

“Let's face it. Men like your father brought harm to the village,” Y'Juen said. “My father never worked with anyone but his family.”

“My father spends half his life separating right from wrong,” Y'Tin said angrily. “He would never harm the village.”

“Obviously, he's harmed all of us, including you. I have no respect for your father.”

Y'Tin charged into Y'Juen's chest, bowling them both over. Y'Juen rolled on top of Y'Tin, pinning him down, but Y'Tin worked an arm free and threw a punch. Y'Juen ducked and Y'Tin's fist arced past him, hitting the hard ground. Pain shot through
his fingers. They wrestled for what seemed like an eternity before Y'Tin put a headlock on Y'Juen. He squeezed hard. He wanted to squeeze Y'Juen's head off, but the headlock didn't seem to be having much effect. Then Tomas grabbed Y'Tin by the back of his loincloth and pulled him off. He held Y'Tin's arms back, and Y'Juen used the opportunity to throw a lazy punch at Y'Tin's stomach.

“You're both too scared to fight by yourselves!” Y'Tin cried out. “The only way you two girls can win is if you gang up on me.”

Y'Juen's face grew angrier, and he landed a second punch into Y'Tin's stomach. Y'Tin gasped for air.

“All right, all right,” Tomas said. He let go of Y'Tin's arms and shoved him away. “Let's stop fighting.” Y'Tin and Y'Juen locked eyes for a moment, and then Y'Juen walked away a few steps to cool off. Y'Tin closed his eyes to cool off himself.
We have to work together,
he said to himself.
We have to work together
. Tomas laid a hand on Y'Tin's shoulder, and Y'Tin tensed up. “Come on, we're all friends here. We can't be fighting.”

Y'Tin couldn't sleep that night. His face grew hot as he thought of Y'Juen, so he tried to push his “best friend” out of his mind. Y'Tin decided that
he couldn't forgive Y'Juen the way he usually did because Y'Juen had insulted his father. That was unforgivable.

Usually, the elephants formed a protective circle around Y'Tin, Tomas, and Y'Juen, as if the boys were calves in the wild. But that night Lady noticed Y'Tin awake and wandered over before falling asleep again. When Y'Tin sensed that Tomas and Y'Juen had also fallen asleep, a great relief washed over him. He wished they hadn't involved his father. Now he didn't feel he could ever be friends with them again, especially Y'Juen.

He tried to imagine what his father would do in the same situation. Once, his father had gotten mad at his friend Jake, but he never told anybody why. After that Ama was cordial to Jake, but Y'Tin could tell he never forgave him. He acted like he forgave him, but he really didn't. But another time Ama had gotten mad at his friend Y'Bier because Y'Bier had criticized Y'Tin's powerful auntie, who was Ama's sister. When Y'Bier apologized, Ama forgave him. So Y'Tin decided he might forgive Y'Juen if he apologized. On the other hand, maybe he would just pretend to forgive him. He'd have to wait until Y'Juen apologized before he decided. He
thought about all this for a long time, just as his father would have. He thought and thought.

Lady suddenly issued a huge snorting sound. She used to sleep silently. But as her pregnancy progressed, she had started to snort. Jujubee also snorted when she slept. So no matter where Y'Tin slept, he would hear snorting. That was fate. He smiled to himself as Lady gave another big snort. Then he laughed out loud suddenly, thinking of the time that he'd first built the hutch. He had left some sugarcane inside, and when he got back from school that day, the hutch had been demolished and the sugarcane was gone. The other elephants had been working, which meant that Lady was the culprit. So he had to rebuild the hutch. He laughed almost like a lunatic, so relieved was he to think of a happy moment. All his thoughts about Lady were happy. He had never gotten mad at her.

Next Y'Tin thought of his mother and father—how hard they worked, how fiercely they loved him, Jujubee, and H'Juaih. He hoped his father was already fighting a guerilla war from the jungle. He believed it to be true. His father had once told him that belief came from the heart, intuition came from your gut, and reasoning came from your
head. A “belief” meant what your heart thought was true, even if you had no proof. He believed in his heart that his mother and sisters were alive and that his father was fighting and, hopefully, winning. He figured if every man could kill three enemy soldiers, maybe the Dega would take back control of the Central Highlands. That wasn't too much to ask for, was it?

Y'Tin found the need to sleep overwhelming. Trying to stay up to think more just made him sleepier. A gunshot sounded from far away—Y'Tin had barely heard it. That was the last thing he heard before he fell asleep.

He dreamed of Jujubee. She was crying alone in the jungle, lost. Then there was a room, the ceiling slanted like in a longhouse, except it wasn't a longhouse. Then Y'Tin was in the room, counting bullets. He opened his eyes. It was dawn.

“You were talking in your sleep. Counting,” Tomas said.

“I dreamed my sister Jujubee was crying.”

Tomas rubbed his forehead for a moment. Then, “I'm worried about my family too. But my job now is to keep us and the elephants alive. I have a lot to think about, so you need to follow
orders and not fight with Y'Juen. I thought you two were friends.”

“We are. We were.”

“Well, whether you're friends or not, you both need to follow orders.”

Y'Tin paused before reluctantly saying, “All right.” For now he would pretend to forgive Y'Juen. Later he would decide for sure what he would do. Y'Tin continued, “I was thinking. If we each kill three enemy soldiers, and every other Dega kills three enemy soldiers apiece, maybe we can win this war.”

“We're not going to kill three enemy soldiers, Y'Tin. We don't even have guns.”

“I'm a good shot with my crossbow. Maybe I can kill five, and you and Y'Juen can kill only two apiece.”

Y'Tin had thought about killing a man before. After all, he had nearly killed a man when he went on that mission with Shepard. Everybody had thought about killing. This was, after all, a war. He was not afraid to kill a man. He was afraid only of a man killing him. His father had taught him that if you wanted to live in times of war, you should not fear killing a man, a woman, or even a child.

That day the boys started a systematic search for
the rest of their village folk. The search was in the shape of a fan instead of a circle. Y'Tin knew that if Tomas were a good tracker, he would want to make a circular search. He thought about mentioning this to Tomas but couldn't decide what to do. Actually, he had gone hunting with Tomas a few times and thought he was a pretty incompetent tracker. It had never mattered before, but now it did. Finally, about halfway through the day, Y'Tin announced, “We should really be making a circular search.”

Tomas acted like he hadn't heard Y'Tin, although he was looking right at him. Tomas was clearly annoyed. Y'Juen said, “You're not in charge. Tomas is.”

They were both incompetent trackers as far as Y'Tin was concerned. If they could read his mind, they would not like what they found. Y'Tin hated holding his tongue. He did not like worrying about everything he said to them.

They found many human tracks, but no fresh ones—the edges of the footprints were usually caved in rather than crisp and new. Also, there were only ten, twenty tracks in every trail they came across. So they couldn't have found their fellow villagers.

Every day they searched for fresher tracks, and every day they failed. Every day in their trek was different. Once, Y'Tin had seen some Special Forces soldiers playing chess. He hadn't understood why, with the same pieces in the same positions and with the same players, each game was so different. But now he understood. As they struggled to live in the jungle, every day was the same yet very different.

Then one day they found a huge number of footprints! At a glance it looked like two or three hundred people may have been making prints. Y'Tin's heart beat harder at the sight. He fell to the ground to examine the prints: They looked like they'd been made within the last week. “About a week old!” he exclaimed.

Y'Juen and Tomas slapped each other's shoulders. “It was a good thing we didn't listen to you!” Tomas said to Y'Tin. “It would have taken a lot longer to find this trail.”

That deflated Y'Tin's elation a little, but he ignored Tomas. When they reunited with their villagers, he wouldn't ever have to talk to Y'Juen and Tomas again if he didn't want to. Frankly, he couldn't wait. And while it was true that they had
found the trail in less than a week's time, Y'Tin knew that they were lucky to have found it without making a circular search. But there would be no convincing Tomas and Y'Juen of that now, so once again he held his tongue. What good was the truth when everybody thought you were wrong? He would have to ask his father about this someday.

That night he fell asleep and woke up abruptly in the black night. His heart was racing. He listened for a while but heard nothing threatening, so he drifted back to sleep. He woke up again to Tomas's calls. “Y'Tin. Y'Tin! Get up. Lady's missing.”

Y'Tin sat up sleepily. How could an elephant be missing?

“Y'Tin!”

Y'Tin's head cleared, and he saw in the dawn light that Lady was indeed gone. He jumped to his feet and looked in every direction. “Where is she?”

“I woke up and she wasn't here,” Tomas said.

At first Y'Tin wasn't sure what to do. How could you lose an elephant? But he saw her tracks clearly and started to follow them. She was making her own path through heavy jungle. What could have come over her?

He told the others he'd be back and jogged after her, easily following her path. An hour later he stepped into a clearing and there she was, grazing peacefully with the herd they'd seen before. She noticed him and hurried over. His relief at finding her instantly gave way to a flare of jealousy. His friends, his elephant—nothing was the same here in the jungle. Still, he would let her graze with them if it made her happy. But now that he was here, she didn't seem interested in the other elephants. He waited a moment to see what she would do, but she stayed by his side.

“Lady,
nao,
” he told her. She docilely followed him, the way she always did. Once they rejoined the others, the boys found a creek and bathed their elephants. Then they began their search again. They were in high spirits, because it was just a matter of time now before they would find who'd made those tracks.

During a dinner of coconut and cooked bamboo, Y'Tin wondered whether his family was eating meat tonight. He wondered whether Jujubee was thinking of him. And he wondered whether they missed him. Y'Tin was used to missing Lady every day when he went to school. But for the first time
in his life, he missed his family. He had to believe they were safe. But he couldn't shake free that glimpse of a little girl crying by the fence. Even if it wasn't Jujubee, he realized, it was another small girl who could be dead now … who
was
dead now.