Ken's War Read Online Free Page B

temporary.”
    “Everything’s temporary.” It was said
somberly, yet with assurance. “The body is a physical demonstration
of one’s state of mind. Oriental healers know of the mind-body
connection. An unnamed angst floats through the body like a ship
searching for a port, although we fool ourselves that we are
healthy and everything’s copasetic. Then a form of additional
stress is introduced such as a death in the family that renders the
vessels of our spirits vulnerable. Seizing the opportunity, the
floating angst settles in an organ or system of the body to become
an illness—cancer, kidney stones, ulcers—thereby giving us a
describable condition about which to feel justifiably
depressed.”
    Ken crunched ice chips between his molars.
This baloney had nothing to do with him.
    “You’re suffering from failure to adapt. Quit
resisting. Accept. Everything’s temporary.”
    “This stinking place would make anybody
puke.” His piss pot attitude failed to provoke Wizard into agreeing
that this place certainly was a stinking Jap hellhole. Ken tried
out another word. “What’s furro?’”
    “I’ve never heard of that.”
    “Fur ro. Fur ro . Furro.” He laid the stress on differently each time.
    Wizard enunciated slowly, “ Ofuro . A
public bath.” He checked his watch and, smiling at what he saw,
removed it and his fatigues. “What’s wrong?”
    “You’re a Nazi!”
    “Not in this life.” Confounded, Wizard
blinked rapidly and then with sudden comprehension clutched his
carved jade pendant hanging from a rawhide cord around his neck.
“This is the symbol for the wheel of life in Buddhism.” He flipped
it around and said, “Turned this way, it’s the sign Hitler
appropriated to represent the Aryan race.” He flipped the green
jade numerous times, saying,
“Nazi-Buddah-Nazi-Buddah-Nazi-Buddah.”
    “No wonder I’m sick. This place is
upside-down and backwards.” Ken also understood why this man
was still a private. He was goofy in the head.
    Wizard put on a stiff blue and white robe.
Ken watched him walk in that unsoldierly gait of his out of the hut
and down a gravel path toward the village until he disappeared
around a bend. Two crows landed on a pine bough, shaking dry
needles onto Ken’s hair. He raked the needles out of his hair with
his fingers and scrambled to catch up with Wizard who, evidently
expecting his arrival, instructed Ken to “Forget your training. Do
what I do.”
    A family of monkeys in the treetops bounded
ahead of them, waited until the two humans got close, and bounded
ahead again. Around them fissures in the earth wheezed, emitting
steam and slightly noxious odors. Imitating the commander on a TV
show he used to watch, he hooked his thumbs in his belt loop. The
cocky bearing helped him feel less flustered in this otherworldly
terrain.
    Wizard led Ken through the men’s entrance of
a wood-paneled changing room. Women and girls entered the door in
the other side of the small stone building. The smooth slate floors
had been polished by thousands of bare soles. Water gurgled down
bamboo spouts. Somewhere water slapped against the sides of a
pool.
    Wizard hung his robe, “ yukata” he
called it, on an iron hook. Ken stuffed his socks in his sneakers
and hung his clothes on an iron hook too. He hopped out of his
underpants and held an insignificant square cloth in front of him.
The other men didn’t look at him. They didn’t not look at him. He
sat on a low stool between Wizard and an old man. Like them, he
scrubbed and scrubbed.
    “Use this soap on your body,” Wizard
instructed quietly. “That’s the hair soap. Rinse completely and
thoroughly.”
    Ken rinsed and wrestled with trying to jam
his wet legs back into his pants. Wizard shook his head minutely
and walked naked through another door leading to the outside.
Unclothed, Ken followed. The upper torsos of children, young women,
grannies, young men and wrinkled, ancient men standing in a gray
slurry