The Cape by Kenji Nakagami

Author:Kenji Nakagami
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stone Bridge Press, P.O. Box 8208, Berkeley, CA 94707

House on Fire

He was a big man. No one had a clue where he’d come from. But it was a small town. They could make a rough guess, mostly from his accent. It sounded like Atawa or Kinomoto, or at the furthest Owase. The man wore khaki pants, a khaki vest, and a hunting cap. The son remembered his mother telling him about the man at some point, but he couldn’t remember exactly when. A train had been rumbling past the house.

“Come in,” ordered the son’s older brother.

The man just stood his ground, spitting into the gully that ran along the barley fields.

“Please, come in,” pleaded the brother, now on the verge of tears.

“Naw.” The man spit again, then wiped his face with his hand, “Later. I gotta job to do today.”

The brother stepped outside. “I’m going with you.”

“No, this ain’t somethin’ I can do with a kid like you.”

The man walked toward the station. The brother followed. Cutting through the barley field, the man jumped over a stick fence and the brother followed. They were on the railroad tracks.

“You mean I’d get in your way?” asked the brother as he hopped from one railroad tie to the next.

There was no reply. The sound of the gravel crackling under the man’s footsteps grated on the brother’s ears. The man was planning to ditch him. A train appeared from the direction of the station. The man jumped aside nimbly, gathering enough momentum to land on the grassy bank opposite. The brother followed.

“I told you not to come, you little shit, get the fuck outta here.”

“C’mon, let me join you.”

“I’m not that desperate.”

“So let me do stuff for you.”

“Yeah, that’ll get ’em talkin’ for sure—me chasing a young widow with her kid in tow.”

The man stopped abruptly. He spat, making a whistling sound through the gap in his teeth. It was a habit of his. He had just come back from the war. Or maybe he hadn’t gone off to war at all.

“Who cares?” asked the brother, staring at the man. “Let people talk if they want to.”

The train whistle sounded.

How old would his older brother have been then? At least eleven or twelve.

A sharp smell of grass filled the air. Not a breath of wind. Pampas grass and wormwood leaves gleamed as if they had shed their outer layers under the hot sun. The mother’s first husband had died, and now the brother lived in the house with his three young sisters. Copying the man, the brother whistled through his teeth and spat. He tore off a wormwood leaf and bit down on it. The man moved off again and the brother followed.

Together they cut through the train station to get to Ueda no Hide’s house. When Ueda no Hide saw the brother standing behind the man, he laughed. “So you’ve given up becoming a horse trader?”

Ueda no Hide was carefully wiping the lids of surplus canned Occupation goods he had picked up somewhere. Kinoe, who until recently had been living in the red-light district, sat sideways on a futon smoking a cigarette.

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