Ken's War

by B. K. Fowler

  “Sanny Claus brought this one for you.” Mammaw jabbed him with the corner of a wrapped box.

  He untied the ribbon, removed the wrapping paper and folded it carefully to be reused next year. Despite already knowing what was inside, he opened the box to make the old woman happy. Army soldiers. World War II army soldiers. You could buy World War II soldiers at any ol’ five ‘n’ dime store.

  “Your mother said you’d appreciate them,” Mammaw explained.

  His mom prompted him. “What do you say, Ken?”

  “Thanks.” He didn’t know what to call the old lady. “Thanks.”

  “This one’s from Gary and me. And the girls.” His mother handed him a present wrapped in wrinkled blue paper.

  When he’d asked for a three-speed bike five years ago, his mom had reminded him there was nothing wrong with his old bike. The rule was you weren’t allowed to get a new toy until the old one was worn out or you outgrew it. “What’s wrong with the one you have?” she’d asked, not wanting his answer. Losing or breaking didn’t count.

  When the lake had sucked his swimming goggles right off his face, no amount of begging got him new ones. Everything he owned—his clothes, one broken-in Wilson baseball mitt, a baseball, a deck of cards, a few thrice-read books, and one lump of black lava—fit in his suitcase lying on the floor under his cot in the upstairs hallway. Just about all his possessions were worn out and outgrown. Basically, he lacked everything pictured in the Sears Roebuck Christmas catalog. No telling what she’d bought him this year. Could be a chemistry set, boxing gloves, a dart board. A car would be too much to even think about, he knew that much.

  He opened the present.

  His mother grinned hard. “Go upstairs and try them on.”

  He came downstairs wearing the new clothes.

  Becky asked, “Where’s the flood?” She spluttered behind her fingers, and whispered to Alice who screwed up her face. Not only were the bottoms of the pants too high, the shirt cuffs exposed a good three inches of his wrists.

  “I’m glad to see I’m not the only person in this family who’s grown,” his mom said. “We’ll exchange them. I kept the receipts. Well. Let’s eat!”

  The scraping of chair legs on the floor, and squabbling about who was to sit beside whom, grated his nerves. The Holm clan sat down to their Christmas dinner around the table that used to, with no extra leaves inserted in the middle, fill the Paderson’s old dining room in the white bungalow at the barracks.

  The chairs must be Holm’s, he thought. They were made of real wood, the kind of furniture his mom aspired to own and show off to officers’ wives during afternoon teas. There was one problem, though. They were one chair short. Ken stood behind Becky, and thought about shoving her off her chair so she’d feel as crummy as he was feeling.

  “Bon appetit and Merry Christmas,” his mom said cheerfully. “Do you think the stuffing is too salty, Gary? Oh! Ken, honey. I didn’t see you standing there. Go upstairs and bring down the chair from the master bedroom.”

  The chair was a dainty brass affair with a curlicue back that looked real pretty but dug into your spine. Mammaw told her son to go fetch sofa cushions to pile on the seat to raise Ken up a little. “There. Now he’s a big boy,” she said. She lit a cigarette at the table, turned her head toward the kitchen and blew a plume of stink. Ken’s mom did a good job of hiding her disgust at the old woman’s bad table manners. If there was one thing he could count on his mom for, it was to know what habits were high-class manners and what habits were lowbrow.

  Alice sniveled about not getting a Barbie house for Christmas. Becky said she hated cranberry sauce with walnuts in it. Her mom never put walnuts in cranberry sauce. Mammaw said she’d give Tricia the girls’ mom’s cranberry relish recipe, and what did she think about Ken getting a haircut, had she thought about that?

  Holm ordered Tricia to refill the pepper grinder and don’t forget to enroll Ken in school before January, enough of this skylarking all day. Pap-pap gobbled up the last of the turkey filling. Mammaw blew smoke into the succotash. Carl hammered his highchair tray with a metal spoon.

  If she was his mom and he was her son, how come she was allowing these hateful people gathered ‘round their table to wreck his Christmas? She wouldn’t have put up with this kind of horseplay—smoking at the table, ding-donging about the food, whining about the gifts—if he’d tried it. She never did before, that’s for sure.

  “Who wants the wishbone?” His mom’s high voice was nearly lost in the din.

  “I do! I do! I do!” The two girls grappled for the bone and toppled a lit candle.

  His mom grabbed the bone from the sisters’ greasy hands, and dabbed a napkin at the hardening wax. Becky yanked the bone from Tricia, and held it out for Alice to pull on.

  The wishbone snapped.

  “I got my wish! I got my wish!” Becky warbled.

  “You didn’t say ready, set, go,” Alice the arbiter of rules and loser shot back.

  “That’s enough, girls,” Holm said. For a moment, Pap-pap’s loose dentures working on a turkey wing was the only noise.

  “I wish you all’d just die!” The wish was Ken’s. Seven pairs of eyeballs rolled toward him.

  Mammaw broke the silence with a creaky invocation. “Lordy, Lordy.”

  “Aren’t you going to discipline your son?” Holm asked.

  Tricia’s eyes darted frantically from her new husband’s face to her in-laws’ and then settled on Ken. “I knew your father would raise you like this.”

  “You raised me too!”

  “Go to your room if you can’t be civil.”

  “I don’t have a room.”

  Baby Carl’s face puckered up, reddened and let out a shriek.

  The house was bigger and quieter, now that he was in it by himself. You could hear yourself think, for Pete’s sake. One thing for sure, he wasn’t going to stand at the bus stop with those toad-faced sisters.

  He absently picked up the unclothed Barbie doll lying in rigor mortis on the kitchen chair. Her hard lines, her frozen flinty gaze pissed him off.

  And he definitely wasn’t going to play sissy card games again with those girls. Period.

  He twiddled Barbie’s ponytail.

  That morning his mom had sat in this chair, brushing Becky’s hair. She’d gathered the girl’s hair into a ponytail resembling the doll’s hairdo. His mother’s eyes had become soft, unfocused; her hands stroking, brushing in the mutually soothing manner that an old man caresses his favorite dog. Becky had sat silently, mimicking the grooming gestures with her hands, with her Barbie.

  Barbie’s head popped off in Ken’s hand. He blinked, surprised, and yet satisfied, too.

  “Don’t lose your head,” he said in a gravelly voice. A cold draft fingered its way under the porch door, across the kitchen floor and wrapped itself around his feet. He twirled the doll head around and around by the ponytail. In a high-pitched voice he squealed, “No, please, no!”

  He popped her arms off.

  In the gravel voice, he said, “Yes, bad Ken is here.”

  “Please, no, no, no!” Two shapely, rigid legs popped off.

  He stared at the plastic limbs and torso. Using big scissors his mother called poultry shears, he cut each of the four limbs in half. He arranged body parts like so much tiny cordwood.

  He remembered to breathe. He pulled his tongue in and regarded his handiwork. The scissors clanged against the tabletop.

  He glanced at the grease-spattered clock on the kitchen stove, and wondered if his mom was coming home to make lunch for him. He was hungry. The sisters. Where was their real mother? What had happened to her?

  The garage door rumbled open. Car doors slammed shut. His mother’s voice intertwined with the girls’ bright silk ribbon voices.

  Ken scooted away from the kitchen table. On his way to the front door, he stuffed plastic body parts down between the sofa cushions. Quickly, quietly he shut the front door behind him. The tongue of the door latch set
tled into the strike plate. Dread, an oily sludge, spread throughout his chest, making his breaths short and shallow.

  Ken loped across the driveway and onto the front porch. “The Holms Welcome You” was painted on a plaque attached to the wall beside the porch light. He opened the front door slowly.

  Odors of baby poop and cigarette stink rushed out. He walked right into Holm’s grasping hand. The man lifted Ken off the floor by the front of his shirt. They were eye to eye. Holm shook Barbie’s torso in Ken’s face, then threw him onto the sofa. It careened against the wall. Becky could be heard whimpering upstairs.

  “What the hell did you think you were doing?” Holm’s late afternoon stubble glowed bluish-green. His face flattened. The blades in his eyes severed Ken's ability to construct coherent thoughts.

  “I was only—”

  “You’re a guest in this house, boy. Do you understand that? I can kick you out on your ass so fast you won’t know which end is up!”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Yeah. But. There is no yeah, but.”

  Ken knew the man was right. No “yeah, but” existed to explain away what he’d done.

  Tricia stepped into the living room. Maroon glop oozed from under a white towel wrapped around her head like a mummy’s bandage. A thought formed, a fantastical one at that: Holm must have axed her head. She was in shock. Feeling no pain.

  Frightened, Ken yelped, but swallowed it before the sound was fully delivered. She was dying her hair again. He couldn't squelch it. He sniggered.

  “You think this is goddamned amusing, boy?” Fist raised, Holm stepped toward Ken.

  Tricia sprung at her husband and grabbed his fist with both hands. The power of his swing, intended for Ken, drove her to the floor. The towel fell loose from her head, revealing wet, red snakes of hair. Lying there, with her head propped on her palm, she gave her husband that inverted grin of hers. Her eyes without make-up were reptilian.

  Holm stared at her. “Didn’t you know what your boy was doing? What kind of kid does that? Where were you when this was happening?” His fists opened and closed at his thighs.

  “Hit me,” she uttered from the floor. “Hit me.”

  For the first time in his life, Ken’s mother was truly frightening the bejeezus out of him. He pushed himself deeper into the sofa cushions to put distance between him and her snake hair, her grin.

  Holm suddenly found it necessary to brush dandruff off his shoulder, his motions reminiscent of a cornered cat unexpectedly becoming fastidious and grooming its haunches. Tricia got up with slow ballet movements. A song faintly entered the living room from the kitchen radio. Static scratched the air. Music. Then static. If the focus was going to shift, it had to shift now.

  “You stole my mother!” Ken opened himself up. There was no undoing it.

  The three inhaled as one. His mom’s shoulders relaxed ever so slightly.

  “Stole your...?” Holm asked, incredulous. He grimaced and rubbed his eyes, squeezing skin between his fingers.

  With abrupt movements, Tricia re-wrapped the stained towel around her hair. The effort of it punched her words out. “You spoil those girls, you know.”

  “That has nothing to do with your boy.”

  “It has to do with respect. For me,” Tricia said. “They don’t listen to me because they know you won’t back me up.”

  “It's not like that.”

  “Do you know what it's like?”

  “You’re twisting this to make me look bad.”

  “You don't need help in that department, believe you me.”

  “What's been bugging you lately?” Holm asked her.

  “You think it's only been lately?” Tricia’s smile looked mean.

  “Christ sakes. Why do you always have to bring that up? I said I was sorry.”

  “Tell me you're not this dense. Let me put it in terms you can understand.”

  “I understand plenty.”

  “You’re botching this marriage up royally.” She was not talking about Holm’s disobedient daughters, or chopped up Barbie, or even bad Ken. It had nothing to do with him. They were picking over some bone they’d dug up. He was a handy excuse for them. A convenient trigger.

  Oddly, he felt cheated, shortchanged because the answer to a question that balanced on the blade edge had been shelved. Could he, would he have physically defended himself against Holm? If this man had defeated him, their respective positions in the scheme of Ken’s world would have been reinforced for the foreseeable future. If he had, somehow in some meaningful way, challenged the man, peace would prevail, and the requirement to obey his mother’s new husband would be irreversibly waived.

  Ken sat still in the very heart of the unanswered question. No one was paying attention to the pungent odor of something burning in the kitchen.

  His mom blinked and gazed at him as though he'd materialized from between the sofa cushions.

  “There are moments,” she said wearily, “when I think I'd be better off without you.”

  “Who?” the man asked.

  Yeah, who? Ken wondered.

  Tricia flopped onto the sofa beside Ken. “Go play with your soldiers. OK, honey?”

  He got up and headed for the back porch. “Donate my soldiers to the poor kids.”

  “You love those soldiers.”

  “Not anymore,” he told his mother. “I’m too old for them.”

  “You did grow a lot over there, in Japan,” she said softly.

  He knew that if he told her what he was really thinking—that he was so miserable not even his model soldiers lifted his mood—he would jinx it. So he kept quiet and wished like crazy that she’d send him back to Japan. Even that would be better than staying here with his mom and her new husband and his stupid girls.

  Chapter Ten

  ~ Too Much Fire ~

  Wizard stepped into the Quonset hut and laid his clipboard on top of a box sitting on his desk. “Why the long face?”

  Ken plopped into a chair next to Wizard’s desk, and hugged his elbows. “It’s official: my mom has a new family. And they stink.” When Ken had gently, oh so gently floated the idea of his going back to Japan, his mom pretended to be disappointed. Her new husband suddenly became concerned about what “Carrot Top” wanted and quickly arranged Ken’s flight to Okinawa.

  “You’re suffering from a serious case of the blues, my man.”

  Wizard never tried to erase your feelings with slogans like The darkest hour is before the dawn, which, by the way, if you couldn’t fall asleep until eight in the morning because your body was all screwed up from flying around the world to Japan, you knew wasn’t true. Because Wizard accepted fluctuating temperaments without judgment or argument, Ken didn’t feel obligated to clamp his teeth onto this slimy mood like he would if his mom had tried to cheer him up, or his dad had told him to buck up.

  “What are you going to do?” Wizard asked.

  “I’m going to learn kung fu!” Ken swatted dust motes with the blades of his palms. Neko meowed and streaked out the door.

  “At the dojo?”

  “No. From...from a bum living in the bamboo grove.” Ken described the troll-like man he’d met that early morning after getting separated from Maeda at the bonfire.

  Wizard tapped his lips with the pencil. “What led you to believe he is a bum?”

  “He wears white pajamas covered with patches, and he hasn’t had a haircut for a long, long time.” Ken shrugged, a little embarrassed. Wizard smiled. They both ran their hands through their long hair as an acknowledgement of the flawed conclusion Ken had drawn.

  “The bum you’re describing is Sikung Wu. Sikung is a title meaning teacher of teachers. He’s associated with the Chi gung Research Institute of Beijing—”

  “He’s Chinese?”

  “He is. He holds honorary Ph.D.s from Oxford and Johns Hopkins. He speaks six languages fluently. He exclusively teaches chi gung practitioners who’ve previously earned black sashes.”

  “He said
he’d teach me!”

  “What exactly did Sikung say?”

  “I said I wanted to learn the stuff he was doing and he said, ‘What’s stopping you?’” Ken didn’t mention that this conversation had occurred before he’d gone to the States. A lot could have changed since then.

  “Sorry, I shouldn’t laugh. Sikung’s question was, possibly, rhetorical and could mean a myriad of things. How will you reciprocate?”

  “Huh?”

  “If he has in fact agreed to instruct you in the art of chi gung, it’s not kung-fu, you will wear the own.”

  “Own? A white uniform?”

  Wizard drew kanji on a notepad. “On. Incurred obligations. For example, Japanese children receive on from their parents, which is repaid with unconditional filial duty. Students wear the on from their teachers called shin no on.”

  “He didn’t say anything about money.”

  “Different people repay obligations in different ways. One student typed documents for Sikung. Another, I’d heard, bought him a roundtrip ticket to visit his family in China. Being taught by a master isn’t like signing up for swimming lessons at the YMCA. Sikung learned his art from his father, who’d learned it from his father and so on. The chi gung style he performs is over 6000 years old. He selects students more mindfully than most people pick a spouse.”

  A bubble burst in Ken’s chest.

  Wizard cut twine off the box that was sitting on his desk. He opened the box, uncovering an object swaddled in newspaper. The object was an oriental mask. The wood lacquered mask represented a baldheaded male with earlobes hanging past its jaw. The tip of its broad nose was chipped.

  “Do they have Halloween here?” Ken asked Wizard.

  “This isn’t a Halloween mask.”

  Now that he was in Kyushu for the long haul, Ken couldn’t wait until he turned native and understood these ins and outs as well as Wizard did. Then he wouldn’t have to continually be asking questions. “Is it Buddha?”

  “It does resemble the Buddha, doesn’t it? It’s Shishiko, the boy who leads the lion in a Gigaku performance. It was, in fact, the Koreans returning from the T’ang court who had brought Chinese masked comedy pantomime to Japan about three hundred and fifty years ago. I bought this mask in an antique shop in Nara. The shopkeeper guaranteed it to be eighth century. I’m not too concerned with its provenance. I enjoy the mask’s expressive face.”