The Wreckage (22 page)

The Bashas held a special meal that evening to celebrate. Johnny Boustani sat quietly in a corner and joined the toasts and sang along when the music began but he never looked in Mercedes’ direction through the evening. Amina sat beside him, in a kind of silent commiseration that went on under the noise of the entertainment. Every time she caught Mercedes’ eye her expression seemed to ask, “What about
him?”

Mercedes had thought that moving out of the Bashas’ house would mean seeing less of Johnny Boustani, but the opposite was true. It loosened the constraints that Rania’s surrogate motherhood had imposed. Twice a week Mercedes and Johnny went to the movies at the base theatre. The Basha Orchestra played dances at the USO and Club Commodore and the Old Colony Club, and when Johnny wasn’t sitting in with the band he and Mercedes danced or chatted with the Basha women or loitered outside for a cigarette.

“You treats him like a dog,” Amina said, “letting him follow you around like that.”

“I can’t help how he acts.”

“You’re inviting it.”

“Johnny Boustani falls in love with everyone,” Mercedes insisted. “Didn’t you tell me that?”

Judging by her father’s advice, Mercedes thought Johnny had one thing on his mind when they first met and had tried his best to sweet talk his way into it. He gave up on talk eventually, accepting the borders she’d set for him and walking the limits of them repeatedly, like a prisoner taking exercise in the yard. She thought it was enough to have told him where things stood in her heart and let him make up his own mind about his chances.

They could see the single headlight of the locomotive rounding the curve at the trestle and chugging slowly into the brightly lit station. The roar of the crowd rolling out over the harbour as the soldiers of the 5th Regiment stepped onto the platform. The brassy strains of the CLB Armoury Band striking up.

Mercedes said, “How long do they think it’ll last in the Pacific?”

“Eighteen months, some say. But it could go faster now we can throw everything at them.” And a moment later Johnny said, “I guess they’ll be shipping us out of here soon enough.”

She could hear the regret in his voice. “Why do you waste so much of your time on me, Johnny Boustani?”

“I’ll be the judge of how much time I’m wasting.”

“You know my mind.”

“Everyone knows Mercedes Parsons’s mind,” he said. “Mercedes not the least.”

“You been good to me. Don’t think I don’t appreciate that.”

He lurched away drunkenly before righting himself, heading back toward Cabot Tower. “Go to hell, Mercedes,” he said.

She tried to call him back but he ignored her. She looked out at the lights of the welcoming ceremony below and stood with her arms folded, sure he’d come for her when remorse got the better of him. Half an hour later she was walking among the groups of soldiers around Cabot Tower, asking after him. Several people had seen someone wander off onto the headlands and she debated heading home on her own. But he was drunk and staggering around in the dark and in the end she couldn’t leave him. She spent what felt like hours picking her careful way among the walking paths out there, calling his name until she heard him shouting “Johnny’s not here.” She kept calling and followed the sound of his denial, found him lying in the furze, staring up at the stars.

“Never had a bed so comfortable,” he said when she knelt beside him in the moss.

“You’re drunk.”

“What if I am?”

“I don’t trust drunk men.”

“You?” he said. “Living with Hiram Keeping?”

“Hiram’s different.”

“I’m not drunk.”

She shifted sideways to sit on the ground. The night was colder on the hill than in the city and she folded her arms around herself. “I’m froze to death, Johnny Boustani. Let’s go home.”

Johnny never took his eyes from the stars. He said, “I love you, Mercedes.”

She looked up at the sky herself then, picked out the Big Dipper, Orion. Concentrated hard on them.

“I’m in love with you, Mercedes,” he said again.

“You’re drunk,” she said.

He sat up suddenly to look across at her. “I know it’s not what you want to hear. But it’s a fact. I love you,” he said. “I
loves
you.”

“Don’t make fun.”

He lay back again, spreading his arms high at his sides. “Johnny Boustani,” he said, “second lieutenant, U.S. Army Intelligence Office. Casualty of war.” He started giggling. “Crucified by the love of a girl from the bay.”

“How many times do I have to tell you?”

“He’ll never come out of it alive, Mercedes.”

“Johnny.”

“It’s going to go bad for those fellows when we invade.”

Mercedes got to her feet and began walking away.

Johnny raised himself to his knees and shouted after her. “They’re going to fight to the last woman and child. That’s what the Japs are saying, Mercedes. And they’re not going to waste a morsel of food or a drop of water or a single man to keep any prisoners alive.”

“You’re making that up.”

“They’re dead men, Mercedes. Every one of them.”

“You
bastard.”
She had never spoken a word like it aloud.

“I’ll take care of you, Mercedes. I want you to know that.”

“Shut up, Johnny.”

“You could learn to love me, if you let yourself. If you let me take care of you.”

She was only a few yards away but the dark made the distance seem immense and she screamed across at him. “You’re a bastard, Johnny Boustani. Why are you telling me this?”

He leaned forward on his hands as if he was about to throw up. “I’m drunk,” he said.

She came back to him and took him by the ear, lifting his head to talk directly into his face. “Say it isn’t true,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Mercedes.”

She twisted his ear.
“Say
it.”

He looked at her a moment, his eyes slurring slowly back and forth. “It isn’t true,” he whispered.

“You don’t love me,” she said.

“Never did. Never will.”

She let go of his ear and his head sagged below his shoulders. He laid himself back on the ground, one joint at a time.

“I’m going home,” she told him.

He didn’t answer her and she walked off over the uneven ground. The wind had come up and she pulled her jacket tight at the throat with one hand. She looked back over her shoulder but there was no sign of movement in the dark. She stopped and tried out a number of other things she’d never spoken aloud before. “Goddamn it,” she said. She looked up at the sky again. “For the love of Christ Jesus.” She walked back to Johnny a second time and took him by the lapels of his jacket, dragging him to his feet. He put his arm over her shoulder and she half carried him across the headlands and down the road toward the lights of the city.

There was a new indoor pool in English Bay.

He happened on three boys he knew from the Japanese Language School, all members of the League of Divine Wind. They wore shorts and sandals, towels hung around their shoulders. They weren’t friends of his but they invited him along because they were pessimistic about their chances and wanted the comfort of numbers.

The manager was apologetic, shrugging helplessly as he explained the facility’s policy. The caustic smell of chlorine drifting out to them from the pool. He was an older man with a moon face under a straw hat, grey pants held high by suspenders. “Sorry, boys,” he said, and it seemed to make him lonesome to turn them away. It was almost possible to feel sorry for him. They walked all the way to a swimming hole near Steveston instead. Putting the place out of their minds.

But the refusal ate at him and the following Saturday he went back to the pool on his own. The old man shook his head again. “No Japs,” he said.

Nishino leaned against the doorframe while swimmers came and went and they chatted aimlessly awhile. He watched for a chink, a trap door, an open window in each word exchanged, in every casual detail. He told the manager he was living on a farm beyond Kitsilano and the old man smiled.

He said, “I lived in Kits for years before I moved into the city.”

The next week, Nishino brought a container of fresh strawberries from the farm. They ate the fruit together while the manager spoke about this and that, happy for the audience. He had an uncle who’d worked as a shift boss in a sawmill in the valley years before, and Nishino told him it was the very same sawmill where his grandfather first found work when he moved to British Columbia. It was a bald-faced lie but a safe one—the English had trouble telling one Japanese worker from another—and the manager seemed delighted by the information.

“You’re a clever little nip, ain’t you,” he said. And he apologized again, as he did regularly, for the pool’s policy. “People just won’t stand to share the place with your kind,” he said.

And then Nishino made his proposal. The pool opened at ten each day. The manager agreed to let him and his friends come down for a swim at seven-thirty in the morning, as long as they promised to be gone before it opened to the general public. “I won’t have enough paying customers to buy myself a quiff, they finds out I’m letting Japs in the water,” he warned.

The air in the poolroom was humid, as dense with moisture as the rainforest. They cannonballed and belly-flopped off the diving board in the deep end until their skin stung. Just after nine, the manager poked his head through the change-room door and shouted at them to finish up. They swam into the shallow end toward the stairs leading up to the deck. The other boys were halfway out of the pool when they glanced back to see him standing splay-legged with his hands on his hips, only his head above the surface. A look of stilled concentration on his face.

It came to them all then without discussion or plan. They walked back down the stairs and stood at arm’s length from one another. And after a few moments of willing it, all four boys pissed into the clear water of the pool.

WISH

H
ARRIS 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.

“Yo
z
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.