White Whale

He kept his voice so low, I might have missed it, except this was the guy I'd shared a room with for the better half of a year.

  "When?" I asked.

  "Before we even got here, Orca."

  My stomach twisted into knots.

  "You don't tell anyone," Fox said. "You know that. You don't repeat this to anyone."

  "What are we doing here? If they've already surrendered, why are we still killing them?"

  "Why are we in this war at all? You ever wonder about that? The Jerries were killing Jews years before we decided that was a bad thing. Why do we care now? Have you read the McCollum Memo? We knew months in advance the Nips were going to strike Pearl Harbor. Why did we let it happen? What the hell is going on here?"

  "Calm down," I muttered. I didn't want the guy in front of us overhearing.

  "Orca," Fox said. "Orca, I'm going insane."

  "We all are," I told him. I meant it as reassuring; which probably only proved my point. "We're all going insane."

  * * * * *

  We boarded the USS Battle Ready at the end of the week. Someone had given Two-Ply a harmonica and he stood above deck playing the most God awful tunes I'd ever heard. The sight of the ocean was all that kept me calm. It was the strangest shade of lilac, smooth, unblemished, a sister to the periwinkle clouds. I'd never seen anything like it.

  "Hey, Chief," Two-Ply said, with his usual dopey smile. "I'm gonna play you an Indian song."

  I tried and gave him a Look; except he was miraculously immune to them. He blew hot air into that harmonica and the noise that came out sounded more like a screaming elephant than any manmade song.

  "Wrong Indian," I let him know.

  It was a couple of days before we docked at Kure Pier No. 6. Sea foam lapped over the pearl-colored sand. The sheds dotting the harbor had probably belonged to a marketplace once. On the aluminum siding I could still make out the remnants of peeled Kanji lettering. The tents that fluttered in the wind bore American flags. I thought about what Fox had told me days ago and fought a wave of nausea.

  "Aw, man," Two-Ply said.

  He'd spotted the Quonset huts off to the side. So much for bungalows.

  "When do we go to Hiroshima City?" Milk asked, gazing around at the seaside port.

  The weedy lieutenant passed by us. He must have overheard, because he said: "It's still radioactive."

  "Radio-what?" Two-Ply said.

  Pogue squinted behind his eyeglasses. Fox's face went gray as chalk.

  We found out what radioactive meant four days later, when we rode trucks into the city. I don't know if I should even call it a city. If Minato had been a wasteland, Hiroshima was Hell. I got out of the truck and stared around me. The ground was pure black and steaming. I could feel the heat rising through the rubber soles in my shoes. For miles there were no buildings anywhere. We split up into squads. Milk and Two-Ply crowded around my elbows and we followed Fox to the shambles of a bridge. The stream beneath the bridge ran bone dry. A big black lump was stuck to the bottom of the trench. I realized it was a body.

  The farther we walked, the more bodies we saw. Fox's throat bobbed as he swallowed a wave of anxiety. I tried watching him instead of the ground. His hair tapered in a triangle at the back of his neck. I filled my head with triangles so I didn't have to think about corpses.

  We came up on the junky ruins of what might have been a fishery. A single concrete pillar stood intact. Irish darted forward, and with an effort he yanked open the crusted door to a basement. We went in, guns out, and maneuvered through the dark. We found a pair of girls huddled together in fear.

  "Here we go," Irish muttered. I guess he wasn't having fun unless shots were fired at him.

  For the next few hours we went around Hiroshima looking for survivors. But if it had been America's objective to produce survivors, we came up pretty short. We found about nine that day, and loaded them in the trucks to take them back to Kure. None of them resisted our manhandling them, which surprised me. When I think about it, they were probably shell-shocked.

  The second day was worse. In a giant crater by a dead orchard we found a woman whose skin had bubbled and melted partway off her face, her left arm. She screamed and cried as we carried her away. A stone settled in my stomach and my spine went numb. We drove the truck a little farther out and found a group of children hiding under the eaves of a collapsed wood shack. Two of the boys bore shiny red weals. A third was missing a leg. I don't know how he'd survived that. Maybe the heat from the blast had cauterized the wound on impact.

  Back at the army base the piers were overrun with maimed survivors. Nurses raced around with stretchers and IVs. The noise was so loud I couldn't hear myself think. My squad went back to our Quonset hut, and we sealed the door closed, and the aluminum drowned out some of the cries, some of the screams.

  "How many bombs did they drop out here?" Milk asked, sitting on his paper-thin bunk.

  "One," Pogue said, on the bunk above Milk's.

  Fox leaned back against the sloped wall. I saw the crease between his eyebrows and the sour color of his skin. I thought he was going to throw up. I thought he was going to scream.

  "But Hiroshima's not a military town," Milk said. He looked from one face to another. "Right?"

  "Quit asking questions," Irish said. "It ain't like we know the answers."

  "It was an atom bomb," Pogue said. Irish threw him a dirty look. "Different from a gravity bomb."

  "Different how?" Milk asked.

  "You wouldn't understand," Pogue said curtly.

  "Goddamn five-and-diver," Irish said.

  Fox muttered something no one caught. He went out the door. I followed him outside and grabbed his arm.

  "You're positive Japan already surrendered?" I asked him.

  He looked around quickly. No one could have heard us over the raw screams, the whistles, the bugle calls and loudspeakers. He nodded tersely. I saw how afraid he was, how sick he felt.

  "How do you know this?" I asked.

  "I'm not even supposed to tell you."

  "Then why did you tell me?"

  "Because you're you," he said. "Everyone spills their guts to you."

  I didn't know what to say to that. I didn't even know what to think.

  A nurse rushed by, holding her cap flat against her head. I waited until she was out of earshot before I tried to talk.

  "Did the sergeant tell you?" I asked Fox.

  "No, the captain," he said. "You know how he's always blurting stuff out like he's alone. Think he needs his head checked..."

  "Do you know who they brokered the treaty with?"

  "Orca, don't. If this gets out we're dead."

  I thought of Rabbit back home, the medicine wheel in his hair. Rabbit clinging to my arm like I'd left him on purpose.

  I let go of Fox's arm. When I looked at my hand I saw faint traces of blood.

  "You need to stop scratching yourself," I said.

  He pulled his sleeve down and laughed a death rattle.

  * * * * *

  Now that Hiroshima was destroyed we were left with the bizarre task of rebuilding it.

  What bothered me was that the guys in charge seemed to think it was a good idea to build on top of the debris instead of clearing it out of the way first. The captain sent bulldozers out to tear down whatever was left of the buildings; and when the rubble collapsed to the ground the dozers drove over it until it was flat. The rest of us mixed cement by hand, churned it with sand and cut it with water, and we carried the buckets out to the stinking, steaming city and spread the thick wet glops all over the ground. Milk developed a cough that worried me. I gave him my milk at mess every day but it didn't seem to help much.

  Shanty huts started popping up all over the city. Crude mortuary tablets followed them. It angered me when the captain made the dozers tear the mortuaries down. I didn't understand how anyone could disrespect the dead that way. We'd ruined their lives already; we didn't need to rub it in.

  "I thought we were soldiers," I
rish grumbled, "not construction workers."

  We gave out wafers and candy to the people living in the huts. Most of them stared blankly in retaliation. I didn't blame them. Killing them, then feeding them--that didn't make much sense. America didn't make much sense. I was waiting for someone else to realize that. I think I'd been waiting since before I was born, since the time when my blood lived in my ancestors' veins instead of my own.

  At night the sergeant let us visit Kamo District. It was like stepping into another world. Paper lanterns hung outside the teahouses. Girls flounced around in kimonos with their hair piled on their heads and their sashes tied in front of their bellies. Two-Ply was especially interested in the women. He drifted after them like a moth to a flame.

  "I bet they don't even have beer here," Irish complained.

  "Would you stop?" Fox said.

  They didn't. One of the sergeant's friends showed us into a teahouse where the walls were made of cherrywood, the floors bamboo. Military boots were stuffed into a cubby off to the side. The proprietress eyes us sternly and made sure we put ours away the same. In a way I understood; but on the other hand I'd grown up in houses with dirt floors, so maybe I didn't. After taking our shoes off we went through a sliding paper door and knelt on the reed mats with a few guys from Easy Company. A woman in white makeup poured us a kind of rice wine. No one understood why I wouldn't let Milk drink any.

  "How long do you think we're going to be here?" Milk asked, his chin on the low table. Two-Ply wasn't back yet.

  "Half a year, probably," Irish said. "Don't see why we couldn't stay in Germany."

  Half a year. My heart sank. My little boy. Irish wasn't always right about these things; he'd been wrong about Austria. I surveyed the clientele to distract myself. The soldiers were rowdy and boisterous. The server girls interested me more. They looked something other than human in their showy gowns, their immaculate hair. They smiled impeccably, but I wondered what they were really thinking. I wondered if they resented us. I wondered if they were scared of us. I wondered if they knew I was scared of us, too.

  I thought of the burn victims back at camp and felt so heavy, so helpless, I couldn't really enjoy myself. I excused myself and left early. I went back to Kure Pier No. 6.

  The field hospital to the east was even busier by night than it had been by day. If not for the lanterns I would have tripped over the vacant, bloody stretchers, the medical kits lying out in the open. The sound of the ocean was a lullaby. I forced my eyes open and looked for a nurse I could help--an orderly--anyone.

  Everywhere I looked someone was in pain. I saw a little boy whose hair had fallen out, whose eyes had gone white. I saw a young woman with a bloody ulcer covering half of her mouth. I walked a little farther and saw an old man with a matted chest wound so deep, I could see the outline of his lungs when he struggled to breathe. His arm was hooked up to a bag full of blood, the bag rapidly draining.

  "What's your blood type?" a nurse said suddenly, rushing over to me.

  "O Positive," I said unthinkingly.

  She grabbed me and tugged me over to a shadowy crate. A woman with long hair was sitting on top of it. The nurse got out a Tzanck apparatus and rolled up my sleeve and started swabbing my arm. Maybe there was a transfusion shortage; or maybe it was one of those things that went unsaid, that a soldier's supposed to shed blood for his army.

  The nurse threaded one end of the stinging wire through my arm, the other end through the woman's. I knelt on the ground. Blood pulsed between the woman and me and I got a good look at her face. It was very wan on one side. On the other it was half melted, red and waxy and surreal. Her eye drooped in a bloodshot pool of yellow moisture and palsy. Her bottom lip was partway melted, and the way her teeth showed through the gap, it gave her the look of a perpetual scowl. She caught my eye and stared at me, and I thought: The scowl was for real. And that was something I understood, too. She didn't do anything to me. She didn't do anything to anyone. She didn't deserve to have her face blown away, her life turned upside down.

  By the time the nurse put the needles away and bandaged our arms I was feeling kind of woozy. The disfigured woman went on staring at me. The nurse raced off without a second look back.

  "I'm sorry," I told the woman.

  The blank look on her face told me she didn't understand. The back of her robe was torn open. Her spine was stained red and sticky brown and burned in poison black hatchwork patterns. I couldn't imagine how much it hurt. I thanked God I couldn't imagine.

  * * * * *

  I went back to the barracks. The only other person in the Quonset hut was Fox. He must have slipped away while Irish was accosting the geisha girls in Kamo.

  I sat on my bunk, the one below Two-Ply's, and pulled my medicine wheel out from under the leathery pillow. I started stringing wampum in a circle around the centerpiece. I stopped and looked across at Fox. He was sitting up in bed, frantically reading out of a Japanese dictionary. He must have forgotten to gel his hair because it stuck up at funny angles. Without all that grease bogging it down it looked a lighter color than it usually did, a sandy kind of brown.

  "What are you looking for?" I asked him.

  Fox said, "I'm trying to figure out what arimasen means. It's not in here, I think I'm going to shoot myself..."

  I got up and took his hammerless so he couldn't. He frowned at me.

  A while later I went back to beading wampum. I wound up threading the line too tight and had to thread it over again. I slid the beads off the sinew and counted them. I felt Fox's eyes on me. I put the beads back in the leather case, put the case aside and looked up and Fox started. He drew his knees onto his bunk.

  "How old are you?" Fox asked.

  "Twenty-four," I said.

  "Oh," he said. "I'm twenty-three."

  I gave him a disbelieving look. "I know."

  "What? How do you know?"

  "Two-Ply asked you, back in AIT."

  "He did? I don't remember."

  Two-Ply came bounding into the barracks just then, singing one of those Japanese radio songs, only he seemed to think the words were "She ain't got no yo-yo." The rest of the squad followed him in. Pogue was plastered. He tripped over his own feet and couldn't get up the ladder to his bed.

  "Jap girls make for a pretty good lay," Irish let us know.

  Milk turned red. Fox told Irish to knock it off.

  Pogue fell asleep on the floor. No one felt like waking him. Two-Ply climbed the ladder up to bed and turned his lamp off. I turned mine off, too. Gradually the entire Quonset hut went dark except for Fox's side. He jammed his pillow behind his head and sat up against it and propped the dictionary open in front of his eyes. He had small eyes, Fox, but they were so pale they stood out anyway, his eyes pale and brown and his face an earthy gold.

  I don't know how long it was before he finally turned his lamp off. I heard him stuff the dictionary under his mattress and stifle a yawn. I turned on my side and slid my eyes shut and tried to go to sleep.

  * * * * *

  It was morning, a tepid morning, and the whole company gathered on the drill pitch. My fingers felt numb. MacArthur was in attendance today and we all stood at full attention. After the guard mounting, the saluting, he gave out medals to most of the majors. I wanted to throw up. These people were getting medals for bombing a civilian area in a country that had already surrendered. I thought about the Wounded Knee Massacre not even a century ago. When we still lived on the Great Plains the US 7th Cavalry killed four hundred Indians, four hundred unarmed elders and women and children and the president handed out twenty Medals of Honor congratulating the murderers. A leopard doesn't change its spots. A rat doesn't change its whiskers.

  The first thing I did after breakfast was go out to the field hospital. The woman with the raw face was standing in a paper gown, staring out to sea. She turned her head my way when I approached her, almost as if she'd expected me. She stared at me, unafraid, braver than anyone I'd ever known. Braver than I'd ever been
.

  I took my medicine wheel out of my pocket and I held it out for her to take. I couldn't explain myself. We didn't speak the same language. I didn't have a fancy medal to give her. She was the one who deserved the medals. She was the one who deserved her life back. Instead she was a rung on someone else's ladder. I didn't know what an atom bomb looked like, I didn't know if it would kill her down the line, but if it did I felt certain no one was going to mourn her.

  She took the medicine wheel between her fingers. She looked slowly at me. I would have given anything to be able to tell her how sorry I was. I would have given anything to wipe the wounds from her face with my bare hands.

  * * * * *

  At mail call I sat with Milk on the busy pier and he read through a wad of letters from his mom. The weather was starting to cool. The sky and the ocean were the same shade of blue-gray; I couldn't tell were one ended and the other began.

  "You should visit me sometime, Chief," Milk said.

  "You mean when you're done with high school?" I said evenly.

  He colored. "I dropped out two years ago. I mean, you should visit me in Salt Lake City. It's pretty nice. I work in packing."

  Fox raced around like a chicken without its head. I didn't want to know what he was up to. Instead I watched the low gilded sun hanging over the ocean waves. I pretended it was the polar sun, the same sun watching over my boy.

  "I've even got a girl..." Milk began.

  "You dog, you," somebody said in passing.

  The mail clerk called a name I couldn't make out. It must have been Fox's because he whipped around.

  "You come to Wapu Island sometime," I told Milk. "Bring your mom."

  Milk started coughing. It wasn't his usual embarrassed cough. I patted him on the back and it evened out. Fox sat down on the other side of me, distractedly opening his mail package.

  "I heard we're planting victory gardens tomorrow," Milk piped up.

  "What? Yes," Fox said.

  "Good," I said.

  "Here," Fox said. "Do you want this?"