by Gary Paulsen
But this train went across the whole land and moved faster, and while there were still some wounded men riding to get home, this train was made for traveling faster and kept moving and you could sleep on it.
Plus they gave him his own bunk with a small window so he could look out from a bed that pulled down from the ceiling and see the country go by. Something like camping only not really but made him sometimes not think only of Edy and Sig and the farm. As they moved west, he saw wide-open country and twice actually saw cowboys on horses.
So, not so bad.
And there was a dining car where they fed you clean meals with shiny silver and white tablecloths with small warm biscuits that broke into three little parts that you could eat with a little square pat of butter that had a picture of a flower pressed into it and he thought Edy would love them.
All good.
And there was a club car that kept his mother busy drinking and talking to men who bought her drinks and bought him Coke in a clear glass with ice making the side of the glass drip with rivulets of cold water. It was clear that the men wanted him to leave after they bought him Cokes so they could talk to his mother and he didn’t have to stand on a table and sing and he would move off and be ignored, which turned him loose and left him pretty much the run of the train.
And there was more to see and do as they rolled across the country with mountains and rivers and a giant lake that made it seem like the train was moving on top of the water when he could see ahead as it curved so that he stopped crying from memory thinking of Edy and Sig and only choked up a bit if he remembered things too clearly. Like the time with the geese when he won or when they smoked fish and he fell asleep against Sig’s shoulder. He wondered about them, and about his grandmother, but already his life was full of abrupt and unexplained silences and departures. He knew you didn’t ask.
And then it was San Francisco.
They arrived at night in thick fog and though they were to take a ship across the ocean to the Philippine Islands the ship wasn’t quite ready to board so his mother found a very low-rent hotel on the edge of something called China Town, over a market that smelled of burned grease.
The people were kind enough, but he became ill, vomiting he thought from the smell of the grease, but then he developed pus-running sores all over his body and was told he had chicken pox.
In what a nurse who examined him called a full bloom. Like it was some kind of stupid flower. And his mother became cross with him as though he had contracted the pox on purpose just to ruin her trip on what she called “the luxury liner.” Her anger grew more pronounced when she was told by authorities that the boy could not leave for a foreign country until he was over the chicken pox. Which they said would infect whole populations and possibly kill millions and it might take two weeks to a month for him to get completely clear of the disease.
And the ship was due to leave in a week.
So.
There it was—they would be stuck for maybe a month smelling burned grease.
But his mother talked to somebody who talked to somebody else and she met the captain of the ship in a bar not far from the hotel where she left the boy in the room, and the people who had been very kind to him spent a lot of time ignoring him for fear they would get the disease he had all over his body. Their fear grew so that while they actually fed him twice a day—his mother was nearly always gone—they would come to his room and leave a steaming bowl of sticky white rice often covered with some kind of greasy meat or vegetables and two little wooden sticks to eat with at the base of his door and knock and leave. The sticks he found were chopsticks and he couldn’t come to grips with them except to scoop food off the lip of the bowl into his mouth. He thought they were overreacting to his sickness, but he admitted even to himself when he looked in a cracked mirror over a washstand that he was flat ugly. Like he was a walking sore with running pustules, and he thought if he had to do this for a month he would go right out of his little mind, as Sig would have said.
But there came a time in five or six days in the middle of a really dark night with thick fog when in the gloomy hotel room his mother and a man leaned over his bed and awakened him with gentle nudges.
“Just be very still,” his mother whispered. “Mr. Rigs is going to wrap you up and carry you.”
Not a blanket nor really a rug. A coarse tarp that smelled—as the man also smelled—of oil and grease and something else. Something new to him. Thick smell of new water. Salt water. And something of fish as well. Spoiled fish and salt water.
“Where—” he started to ask, but his mother cut him off, pulled the end of the tarp over his head so he couldn’t see.
“We’re going to the ship,” she said.
“But didn’t they say we couldn’t leave until…”
“Mr. Rigs is the captain of the ship and he said it would be all right. Now be still and be quiet.”
And they did this to him in that dark night. They put him in the back seat of a car sideways lying down, still covered with the tarp so he couldn’t see where they were going, and in a time the car stopped and Rigs pulled him out and carried him like a floppy tube of rug or supplies over his shoulder. The smells grew stronger then—of salt water and grease—and there was sound, a low rumbling of motors somewhere near. Then up a sloping walkway where he could feel a new movement even through the body and right shoulder of Rigs and the rumbling grew louder, much louder and all around him. Then down steep stairs and clumping down an alleyway where he hit his head in sliding bumps along the side, another short turn, pause, and Rigs put him down on his feet and unwrapped the tarp.
His eyes were immediately attacked by white light so bright it seemed to come into his vision like needles. Blank, explosive white light and he closed them, opened them, closed them again and finally his vision settled down and he could see where he was—which made no sense at all.
Some small, white-painted steel cell with two bunks on the side wall and a toilet and small sink on the end of the cell welded to the wall. One light, one impossibly bright light, hung from the ceiling, and because everything—walls, ceiling, bunks—was painted in flat white, it made the light seem even still brighter and made him think of an indoor sun.
There was no opening to the outside world that he could see and he didn’t have the faintest concept of where he might be. He was going to ask when Rigs pointed to the bottom bunk and said: “This is where you’ll live for a while.”
“But where are we?”
His mother was standing next to Rigs and she said, “We’re on the ship. The captain has let us come aboard in spite of some silly rules but you’ll have to stay in here until…”
“Until what?”
“Until I say it’s all right to come out,” Rigs said with authority in his voice. Now that the boy could see him he found that in some way he matched the smell of him. Grease and salt and some fish smell and he looked like he had been put together somehow with used parts. Stooped but strong and in the manner of his odor, coarse, but entirely accustomed to having his orders instantly obeyed.
Rigs turned then and left the small cabin, and the boy found his mother standing by the entry with a small man. He had jet-black hair, cut very short on the sides, longer on top, and wore a crisp white naval uniform. The boy was going to ask his mother what had become a list of mental questions, but she had an odd look in her eyes and a green cast to her skin and looked like she was going to vomit, and she turned and hurried off with Rigs.
“She is seasick,” the small man said, shaking his head and making a clucking sound. “We are still at the dock and just the harbor swell makes her sick. It sometimes happens to people who aren’t used to being aboard a ship where they never get over being seasick.”
“Who are you?” the boy asked openly and then remembered being with Sig and how sometimes it was easier to learn when you didn’t ask questions and kept your mouth shut but it was out there before he could stop it.
“I’m Ruben,” the man
said, smiling. “Take off your shirt, please.”
“What?”
“Take off your shirt and pants. I must see your sores and clean the scabs away.” And the boy saw now that Ruben had a box of cotton swabs and a bottle of what turned out to be alcohol and the boy finally did as he was told and Ruben began dabbing at his poxes.
It hurt some—hot little stings when the alcohol-soaked cotton first came in contact—but the boy thought of fighting the geese and stood for it and took the time to question Ruben.
He learned many things.
First, Ruben was a young man from the Philippine Islands, a Filipino, and had joined the United States Navy right after the start of the Second World War. His job on the ship was to be a steward, a helper, and that included odds and ends of medical work he had to do from time to time on the crew and/or passengers. He was very kind to the boy and seemed to have a soft smile to match his soft voice whenever he saw the boy, which was every day for the time the boy was confined in the small cell.
And it was a cell. The boat was most decidedly not a seagoing luxury liner as his mother thought. It was right on the edge of being an old crate—one of the so-called liberty ships made rapidly by the Kaiser Shipyards during the war—and had spent most of its life ferrying troops and equipment from island to island. It was mostly in usable shape but had some rough edges. “She is tired,” Ruben told him. “The ship is tired. She needs some rest.” The so-called room that the boy was kept in had been the cell—called the “brig”—for men who broke the law and had to be confined.
One of the first times he used the toilet in his cabin the boy flushed with the small lever on the wall and suddenly felt the ship move. Thinking he had done something wrong, the boy ran back to his bunk, but the movement did not stop, and it felt like they were first going sideways, then backward, then forward, all at once.
The room was so bright that the boy didn’t think he could ever close his eyes, but something from the rhythm of the engines and the motion of the ship relaxed him completely and he slept easily.
Although time was hard to keep in control—he could see no sun nor darkness and had no way to tell day or night—he would find later he had been kept there for ten days. He measured the days by counting meals, which Ruben brought him twice a day, and by Ruben taking the time each day to dab away his scabs.
His mother came down twice to see him in those ten days but was almost completely destroyed by her motion sickness, especially after they left San Francisco and moved (and “moved” was the right word) into the open Pacific Ocean. The ship rode gentle swells that came from the rear and helped slide it gracefully across the surface of the sea, and the boy found the motion to be enjoyable and so restful he slept during the sleep periods like he’d been hit with a soft hammer. But the same motion left his mother deathly ill. Every day Ruben updated him with reports about her. “She keeps near a bucket all the time,” Ruben told him. “She is a pretty woman but has to be close to a bucket.” The boy could tell from Ruben’s expression that he found this amusing although he was trying not to show it.
In many ways the boy did not mind the absence of his mother. The ship and the throbbing of its engine that came through the steel in the hull and the walls surrounded him and became a kind of music, a lullaby when he wanted to sleep, an assurance when he was awake and reading comic books.
Or eating candy.
There were many men on the ship and they all wanted to meet his mother, to know his mother, and they thought he could help them if they impressed him. They could not come to see him in what he came to know and understand as his medical confinement, but they quickly found out that Ruben saw the boy every day and they virtually accosted him with comic books and candy to give to the boy along with notes they hoped he would show his mother, but in the way of things the ship itself—herself?—had become his parent.
A mother ship?
Sometimes alone in his bunk he would hang on the edge of sleep and would push to the side so the top bunk would make a shadow from the overhanging light—which was never out—and press his hand flat against the steel of the wall and feel, know, the engine throbbing as if it were a warm, beating heart, that would take him into sleep.
Days passed, folded, and when Ruben had time he would tell the boy about his home in the Philippine Islands, in the great city of Manila, and weave stories—always happy stories—of his time there and the people. The boy went from initially knowing nothing to thirsting after more knowledge. From the start he had no concept of what the Pacific Ocean was—Ruben said it was the biggest thing on the whole planet—and going to the Philippines was in the nature of a fairy tale. He wanted once to know if there were magical genies there to answer three wishes, which he had seen in a comic book, and monsters. In the end, it turned out there were no genies to answer three wishes but there were, or had been, monsters, and he would see and live in what they had destroyed and left partially standing.
He had much more to ask about the Philippines but Ruben had many other duties aboard the ship—one of them was taking care of and tending to the boy’s mother. Emptying the bucket and bringing damp cloths for her forehead and forcing her to drink all she could to keep her from becoming critically dehydrated because she couldn’t stop vomiting.
Twice in the boy’s confined time Ruben came into the cell looking pushed, harried, and said: “We must clean the cabin now. Captain Rigs will inspect it.” And he worked with and drove the boy to make the bed and stack comic books neatly on the foot of the bed and they used damp rags he had brought to wipe down all the surfaces in the room. When he was done, he stood at attention near the door, made the boy stand the same as Rigs came in, looked briefly around the cell, rubbed a white-gloved hand on a surface near the bunk and looked at the dust on his finger, shook his head, and left.
The boy wanted to ask him how long he had to stay in the cell, wanted to ask him how far they had come and when would they get to Manila, but never got a word out. He turned to Ruben and said “Are we in trouble because his finger got dirty?”
Ruben shook his head. “He always finds something. He has to find something or he’s not the captain, right?”
SHARKS
The routine remained the same until the boy had in the end accepted that it would probably go on forever. Steel tray of food in the morning—powdered eggs, creamed corn, and white bread—followed by, if there was time and he didn’t mind, a conversation with Ruben while he used the alcohol-cotton swabs to dab at his sores, and then a day reading comic books and thinking about what Ruben had told him of the Philippine Islands. Until later in the day when he got another steel tray of food—very often fried liver, instant dry mashed potatoes, two more slices of white bread without butter, some absolutely god-awful desiccated string beans mixed with watery kidney beans, and a candy bar for dessert from the men who wanted to meet his mother. Twice Ruben brought him a can of pork patties cold in lard and a second can—the cans were colored olive-drab—with something called a pound cake for snacks. He was so fat-starved he actually enjoyed the pork and lard cold, and the pound cake tasted truly good. Sweet. And oddly fresh considering that both these cans were from leftover army rations.
The boy had accepted that the situation would last forever, or for however long it took to get to Manila, and on the tenth or eleventh day—he could not be sure of the time—Ruben came rushing into the cell and said: “Come quick. A plane is coming down.”
Which made no sense at all and the boy asked, “What plane?”
Ruben ignored the question. “Come quick. I must help. Please follow and find your mother so she can look after you.”
The boy did not need a second invitation and he ran out after Ruben, wearing shorts and an old T-shirt. They virtually loped through what seemed like endless white steel tunnels and up a metal ladder-stairway and through a side door until they were suddenly out in the open on the side deck of the ship.
Initially it was so bright and blinding that it was almost as
bad as when he was first introduced to the cell. He closed his eyes, wiped the sudden light-tears away, opened them, closed again, and finally got them to stay open.
All he saw was blue.
He had never seen the ocean before, had no real idea of what it would be like, and all he saw, all he could think, was the word “blue.” It was as if he and Ruben and the ship, his whole world, was at the bottom of a startling bright blue bowl that reached into the sky.
Blue.
And calm. Like it had been laid down with a ruler. The ship had stopped and the boy saw that they were lowering a large lifeboat down the side on ropes until it floated free. There were men in the lifeboat and they started an engine in the middle of the boat and other men were unfolding a portable stairway that went down the outside of the ship. Just as the boy looked toward the bow and saw his mother standing, leaning weakly against the side of the main cabin, he heard the sound of plane engines.
The plane passed over the ship quite closely—he could see rivets and other markings plainly—and made two gently dropping circles. It had four engines and numbers on the wings and American symbols—a circle with a star in the middle—painted on the bottom of the wings. Other than that it was shiny aluminum and looked clean. He would find later—would, in fact, see many of them in the Philippines—that they were military transport planes called C-54s. But for now all he could think was that it looked huge and that the engines, which he at first heard but did not really listen to, were running ragged and one of them was leaving a thin trail of yellow-black smoke.
He was and remained alone. His mother was barely able to stand where she was and Ruben went off to help other men get ready to …
What? he thought. Is the plane really going to land out here in the water?
And then?
Get the passengers out of the plane? Is that what they’re after? Why they put the lifeboat down?
Won’t the plane sink?
After that, nothing that happened looked or felt sensible to the boy.
