“If the colonel wishes it.”
“Oh, that he will,” Shiboru answered, nodding to the hall. “It seems the old man needs his medicine. He insisted on me coming here and getting the captain. Right off, too, with the needles and all. I suppose you’ll be by daily as Ono here was. I’ll let my men know.”
He snorted when I didn’t answer, and he said gruffly, “He’s in his house. You better go there now. The sentries will take care of this mess. She’ll come with me.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
“She’s got no reason to be here. I know what was going on, Kurohata, like everybody else. The doctor, having it special. In fact, maybe you, too? But no more, eh? Everybody’s bored with just the three others. They’re nearly useless now besides. Fucking skeletons. Can’t you fix them up or something? It’s almost better with your own hand. At least you don’t want to throw up when you’re doing it. But this one, she’s a doll. Skinny, but she’s a real beauty. Come here, doll. Come here to your big brother.”
I went to the storeroom to get the vials of the tincture, trying desperately to think of what to do. When I came back the guards were waiting to escort me to the commander’s house, but I stopped at the exam room to try to stall or convince him to leave her to me. It was strange, then, when I looked inside; I thought I saw her gazing at him almost tenderly, with a last human glimmer, and then I knew in an instant how terrible all the rest of it would be. She reached out with one hand and seemed to caress him, but he groaned instead, clutching one side of his face. When he let go there was a fine red line, from the corner of his eye down to his mouth. He started bleeding profusely. She had cut him, but not too deeply, as though she were trying only to mark him. She didn’t move away. Then he punched her hard enough on the mouth that some of her teeth flew out, like tiny white birds.
One of the sentries pulled me along, saying, “Don’t worry, the lieutenant has his certain way.” Outside, through the window, I could see that K had risen up again, bloody-mouthed, and he struck her again.
When I finally finished administering to the commander and returned to the infirmary there was no one there. I had injected him and sat with him as he requested but it still took nearly an hour until he fell asleep. Just before he did he suddenly realized that it was the first time I had administered his medicine, in place of Captain Ono. He wasn’t disturbed or even suspicious; he was already too deep in the thrall of the injection. All he wanted was that I sit beside him as he lay prostrate on his bedpad and gently pat him on the back with a slow, steady rhythm. After a few minutes he began half-humming a sentimental folk song, his faint voice breaking in beats as I patted, so that he sounded almost like an old woman consoling herself at day’s end.
As soon as he was asleep I went directly to the comfort house, but there, too, it was quiet, being late in the afternoon, when the girls were allowed to sleep before the evening and late night. Behind their communal tent I found Mrs. Matsui, crouched over a dented washing pail of gray water, wringing undershirts. I asked if she had seen Lieutenant Shiboru, and of course, K.
She nodded.
I asked where.
“Aren’t you going there, too?” she said, wringing out an undershirt.
“No, where?”
“They’re at the clearing.” She picked at her teeth with her fingernail. She was angry and even a little upset. “A whole bunch of them. I told that bitch this would happen to her. Stupid little bitch. ‘You’re going to get yourself killed,’ I told her, if she goes on like that. Or worse. But now see how it is? It has to be worse. Something worse.”
I ran up the north path by the latrines, toward the clearing, as it was known, which was where Corporal Endo had taken K’s sister. But I wasn’t halfway there when I met them coming back, singly and together and in small groups. The men. It was the men. Twenty-five of them, thirty of them. I had to slow as they went past. Some were half-dressed, shirtless, trouserless, half-hopping to pull on boots. They were generally quiet. The quiet after great celebration. They were flecked with blood, and muddy dirt, some more than others. One with his hands and forearms as if dipped in crimson. Another’s face smudged with it, the color strange in his hair. One of them was completely clean, only his boots soiled; he was vomiting as he walked. Shiboru carried his saber, wiping it lazily in the tall grass. His face was bleeding but he was unconcerned. He did not see me; none of them did. They could have been returning from a volleyball match, thoroughly enervated, sobered by near glory.
Then they were all gone. I walked the rest of the way to the clearing. The air was cooler there, the treetops shading the falling sun. Mostly it was like any other place I had ever been. Yet I could not smell or hear or see as I did my medic’s work. I could not feel my hands as they gathered, nor could I feel the weight of such remains. And I could not sense that other, tiny, elfin form I eventually discovered, miraculously whole, I could not see the figured legs and feet, the utter, blessed digitation of the hands. Nor could I see the face, the perfected cheek and brow. Its pristine sleep still unbroken, undisturbed. And I could not know what I was doing, or remember any part.
15
HOW SHIMMERS the Bedley Run pool in this flood of last August light, the groups of mostly mothers and children on this weekday crowded about the man-made shoreline where it curves in full beam of the sun. The whole town seems to be here. Thomas and I have set up our chairs on the sand down-shore, under the breezy shade of large maples, the part of the beach preferred by older folks and those concerned with overexposure to the rays, or others, like the handful of our town’s black families, who are enjoying their own lively, picnicking circle a few steps from us. Thomas has found them, or they have found him, and he plays with their children with a quiet, unflinching ease, something I have not seen in him until now, overexcitable as he often is. I have already given him the first lessons of flotation and breathing and treading, and as much as he was eager to try out the deeper water (with me at his side), he’s caught up now with his new friends, filling buckets of sand as they build a wall around their talkative mothers. I am happy for him, happy that I can sit close by and hover and let him do his child’s good business. I am pleased enough, too, that Sunny and I have so far remained on decent and civil terms, no matter if they are ones eternally provisional. They shouldn’t be, certainly not if we were real father and daughter, but maybe even those who share blood and love believe only their devotions are unconditional, to be sustained through every crucible.
I’m on the lookout for Renny Banerjee, actually, who called me earlier this morning to chat. He sensed my less-than-ebullient mood, and thus determined to take the afternoon off to visit me. I told him that I would be at the town pool, which he gleefully misread as a romantic meeting (for I had gone there only once, for a town event with Mary Burns), but when I told him I was watching a friend’s boy, he was curiously unprobing, as if he knew the legacies of my complications. But he also mentioned something he was supposed to tell me concerning a woman named Hickey.
“Mrs. Hickey?” I said to Renny, hardly able to speak aloud the words. “Is it that her boy…is it something about him?”
“The boy? Oh, no, Doc. It’s not the boy.”
“Thank goodness. He has a serious heart condition, you know, Renny. He’s in the PICU.”
“I recall that now. No, Doc, it’s about his mother. Apparently she was brought in last night to the emergency room. I’m sorry to have to tell you this. A nurse there told me you sort of knew her, and that I should probably tell you.”
“Yes.”