The Wreckage (23 page)

“Busy time,” van der Meulen said.

“Attention!” a voice called behind them.

The interpreter stood a few feet behind them. All three of the men bowed.

“Climb in,” he said.

There was no conversation at all as the truck drove up out of the valley. The interpreter stood facing out over the road ahead as if he was driving. Once the truck turned onto the open road and picked up speed, he sat against the cab, out of the breeze.

McCarthy said, “Where is Mr. Osano today?”

“The civilian guards have been relieved of their duties,” Nishino said. “How is your Canadian friend?” he asked Wish.

Wish refused to look at him and pretended he couldn’t hear the question over the noise of the engine and the wind.

“Private Anstey,” McCarthy said, “is in desperate need of medicines.”

“It’s unfortunate that they are in such short supply.”

“One round of M&B pills would be enough to keep him from dying.”

“As I said. Very unfortunate.”

The Dutch officer surprised them all then, saying, “We are not animals, you know.”

Nishino paused, as if he was seriously considering this notion. “Then you should act like men,” he said.

They drove on in silence until they pulled up beside the church. They carted as many of the urns inside in one trip as they could and Wish went back to the truck for the last two accompanied by the interpreter.

Lefty had become increasingly unpredictable as the summer progressed. There was a logic to his cruelty at first, parcelled out to advance his position in the camp or to carry out his peculiar vendetta against Harris and Anstey. But as rumours of American advances reached them in recent weeks, he seemed viciously unhinged. Wish thought there was a chance the interpreter might simply shoot him where he stood if he said anything now. Claim the prisoner was trying to escape. He felt surprisingly calm about it. There was even a blush of relief at the thought of everything ending right there in the church parking lot with Mary standing over him. His Mercedes. The Ocean Star.

“Your name,” Wish said. “Nishino, right?”

The interpreter’s head snapped back.

Wish bowed low to him, kept his eyes on his feet. “I’d love to get my hands on some of that Red Cross medicine you’ve got stashed away, sir.” Wish took the interpreter’s silence as encouragement to continue. “I’ll get you whatever you want for it.”

He was still looking down when the interpreter slapped him across the face. He fell back against the truck, juggled the urns in his arms to keep from dropping them. Pushed himself upright with his shoulders, bowed a second time.

“Get those urns inside the church.”

Wish was about to start past the guard, but stopped.
You should act like men
, the interpreter had told them. He said, “Where did you learn to talk like that, sir?”

“Like what? Like a Canadian?” The two men watched one another until Nishino said, “Inside.”

“Anstey is going to die without that medicine.”

“Soldiers die,” the interpreter said.

On Monday morning, Wish and Harris and a detail of other POWs were seconded from their work clearing debris at the shipyard. They were provided with picks and shovels black with coal dust from the mines worked by POWs at other camps in the area. The work detail set about digging a series of trenches inside the camp, five feet deep and three feet wide, that they covered with concrete. McCarthy and the ranking Dutch and American officers had been harassing Koyagi about the lack of bomb shelters to protect POWs for months. His capitulation on this point suggested the air raids were expected to continue. And treating prisoners as something more than expendable slave labour, however marginal the improvement, seemed a veiled admission by the Japanese of the possibility of defeat.

They worked alongside an American named Spalding who talked endlessly while he dug, as if speaking was a prerequisite for drawing breath. Wish couldn’t begin to guess where he got the energy for it. The heavy work winded him. He had to lean on his spade and push words from his mouth. The effort felt no different than shovelling dirt.

Spalding was one of the few Americans Wish met in the camps who didn’t have all his teeth. His skin tanned dark as leather. “You’re the liquor boy,” he said to Wish that first morning.

Wish held a finger to his mouth.

Spalding made a dumb show of zipping his lips shut. “Where you from?”

“Newfoundland.”

Spalding gave him a look. “Newfun-what?”

“Newfoundland. Same as you says understand.”

“Sounds made up.”

Wish smiled. “God’s country.”

Spalding snorted. “That’s what my father used to say about North Dakota.
God’s country
. Don’t know what kind of a God he believed in to be talking so much bullshit.” He hefted a spadeful of dirt and tossed it up over the edge of the hole. “This ain’t so bad,” he said. “I spent all of nineteen years in Sherwood before I joined the army. I dragged a sled of milk around town in minus-forty when I wasn’t old enough to smoke. Bottles of milk froze solid. And then all summer pitching hay in a hundred-ten. Shit,” he said. “I always said I’d work in hell if the wages was right.”

Harris said, “So what
do
you think of the wages?”

Spalding shrugged as he tamped the spade head into the ground. “I ain’t complaining,” he said. And he grinned a gap-toothed grin at them both.

They visited with Anstey in the evenings, swapping gossip and rumours and talking aimlessly about home. At some point in the conversation the sick man would fall asleep or lie listening silently, too tired to carry on talking himself. If a lull carried on long enough he would say, “Tell me a story,” and Harris or Wish would scrounge some pointless recollection from their lives to fill the empty time.

Wish told Anstey about birding with Billy-Peter near Renews one late-fall afternoon when they were boys. They’d taken Patty’s dog along with them. She was fed scraps and maggoty fish and never enough of either, which made her a fitful retriever. She gorged on two or three downed birds before she was satisfied to bring the turrs back to them whole. But the boys were hunting for a lark more than for food. They used lead-pellet shotguns to shoot turrs on the wing. Wish brought one down near the boat and the dog went over the side, Billy-Peter rowing along behind her. Wish saw the dog’s head snap at the water and she turned to come back to them. Those peculiar orange eyebrows of hers. They hauled the dog aboard but there was no sign of the turr. “It must’ve sunk quick as that,” Billy-Peter said. It was a queer thing but there were plenty of other birds to shoot at and they thought nothing more about it.

The dog went to lie behind the stove as soon as they got home and she was still lying there next morning and all through the day. Refused to eat or move. Growled when anyone came near. Stayed in that state three days and everyone had given her up for dead. She gave a low moan the afternoon of the third day and went slowly to the door, an odd stutter in her hind legs. Wish let her outside and she went to the edge of the woods where she circled, whining the whole time, her tail up high and squatting awkwardly as she turned. It would have been comical if the animal wasn’t in so much torment. He didn’t know what was happening or how to help and simply stood there as the dog passed the turr, beak first and all of a piece. Every feather in place and not a mark on it, looking strangely serene and composed for something so defiled.

Anstey fell asleep at some point in the story and he and Harris sat quiet awhile when he was through. He glanced down at the sick man, lying there motionless and half blind. Like something the world had swallowed whole and shat out.

By the following Wednesday they had completed a bomb shelter for every two barracks. On Thursday, the detail was marched through the gate to a flat stretch of land two hundred yards outside the fence and ordered to dig again. Six feet deep this time and twenty yards square, a length of twine tied to wooden posts set out to mark the boundary. In the hospital barracks that evening Harris mentioned the dimensions as he was spooning morsels of beef from a tin into Anstey’s broth.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“Another shelter, I guess.”

“Too big for a concrete roof. Give like glass if it was hit.”

“Okay,” Harris said. “What is it, then?”

Anstey lay still a long time while the two men waited for an answer. He was almost completely blind now and stared blankly at the ceiling. It unnerved them not to be able to read his eyes.

“I don’t know,” he said, in a way that made them think he had ideas he wasn’t willing to offer.

The next morning when they were marched back out to the site, a handful of civilian carpenters were already at work, laying posts fifteen feet from the hole. They stole glimpses of the raised wooden platform taking shape as they spaded deeper into the ground, the sound of hammers driving nails echoing off the camp walls behind them.

“What the hell are they putting up over there?” Wish asked finally.

Spalding stopped to glare at him. Went back to work, slamming the spade into the dirt furiously, as if he was falling behind in a digging competition.

“So?”

“That’s a machine-gun platform, is what that is,” he said, still shovelling.

Wish and Harris stood on their tiptoes to watch the carpenters at work and then looked around themselves at the hole they were standing in. Seeing it for what it was for the first time.

“Fuck,” Spalding was whispering. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” He dropped his shovel and started laughing suddenly, his hands on his hips. He said, “Things must be looking pretty bad for the Imperial Japanese Army.”

A Korean guard walked to the lip of the dig, yelling at him to get back to work.

“Well what’s the difference?” Spalding said loudly. He held his arms wide. “Now or later. No goddamn difference at all, is there?”

Harris stepped a few feet farther away from the American. Refusing even to look at the man. The guard was almost hysterical, the surge of words incomprehensible until Wish heard him start counting backwards from five.

“Three,” he repeated in English. “
Two
, Spalding.”

The American stooped to pick up his shovel. “Shit,” he said. He flicked a spadeful of dirt up near the guard’s feet. “This ain’t so bad,” he said.

Anstey gave up eating before they ran out of the meat they’d bought to feed him. Harris stubbornly fortified the soup each evening, sneaking a tin into the hospital to slip tiny chunks of beef into his bowl, passing it on to other patients when it was clear that Anstey wouldn’t be able to eat. Wish was surprised at himself for letting it go to others so easily. But they were all dead men, if the machine-gun platform was any indication. Food seemed beside the point.

They talked back and forth to one another, and to Anstey, although they couldn’t say if he heard a word most of the time. It was all rumours of the war’s progress and the desperate condition the Japs found themselves in. Something bizarre and monumental had occurred the day before,
Hiroshima
was the word they kept hearing, something unprecedented. There was a change in the demeanour of the guards at the camp, a peculiar glassy fragility had come over them.

“The Yanks are going to burn the fucking country to the ground when they get here, Ants,” Harris said. “The Japs know it too.”

There was a subdued sense of anticipation about them as they spoke, a viciously nihilistic hopefulness. They were resigned to dying in the lead-up to any American invasion and they lived for nothing but that inevitable event.

Ronnie Matthews came into the sick bay, walking quickly. “Lefty’s about,” he said.

“He’s coming in here?”

“Directly.”

Harris and Wish looked up and down the aisle. The doctor was sitting at one end with a Japanese orderly.

“What’s wrong?” Matthews asked.

“Beef tin,” Wish whispered.

The interpreter stepped inside and started straight for them. Matthews kept moving for the door at the opposite end of the building.

“Under the bed,” Wish said.

Harris dropped the tin as he got to his feet, kicked it out of sight.

The interpreter shouted, “What was that?”

Wish and Harris bowed but said nothing. The interpreter pushed them aside and reached under the bed, came up with the tin.

“This man,” he said, pointing to Anstey, “has stolen from the Red Cross supplies.”

The British doctor was coming down the aisle toward them. He said, “This man can’t sit up in his bed.”

“He will be moved to the cells until the commandant recommends appropriate punishment.”

“No fucking way,” Harris said, stepping between the interpreter and Anstey’s bed. “I stole it,” he said. “I stole the damn beef.”

Wish looked away from them.

“Wait here,” the interpreter said, and he went back toward the door.

“Jesus, Harris,” Wish said. “He’ll beat the hell out of you over this.” Wish looked to the doctor. “Tell him, for chrissakes.”

“Tell me what?” Harris said.

“Anstey’s already gone, you stupid cunt. He’s a dead man.”

“Not by that bastard’s hand, he’s not.”

There was an accusation in Harris’s voice that made Wish go calm, his skin crawling cold.

“We’re all dead men,” Harris said.

The interpreter came back down the aisle flanked by two guards. “You,” he said, pointing at Harris with the beef tin. “You stole this.”

“Yes sir.”

“No,” Wish said.

“Fuck off, Furey.”

“It wasn’t him, sir.”

“He’s a liar,” Harris shouted.

The interpreter held up his hands, displaying uncharacteristic composure until both men went quiet. “Who stole this ration?” he asked Wish.

“I did, sir.”

The interpreter waved the tin at Harris. “Did you steal this?”

“Yes sir,” he said. “I did.”

The interpreter looked back and forth between the two. His face was blank, neither surprised nor pleased nor offended. Just that peculiar glassiness. “Very well,” he said finally. “You will both come with me.”

All of the feeling had gone out of Wish’s legs and he couldn’t make himself move. Harris stepped past him to start for the door. Whispered “You stupid cunt” as he went by.