The Caprices Read online

  Francino stopped. He looked at Burns’s worried face. “Why are you whispering?” he said.

  “You know why,” said Burns. He tilted his head, swinging his eyebrows in the direction of the prisoner.

  Francino shrugged and began walking.

  Burns was offended. “Francino, listen to me. Francino.”

  Francino stopped. He looked at Burns over his shoulder.

  “We’re on the same side, you dumb Wop. You’re no better than me.” Burns lifted his shoulders and set his jaw. “Fuck, I even saved your life.”

  “What is your problem?” said Francino. “You’ve been gunning for me ever since I got here.” He regarded Burns carefully. “Is it just me, or is it all Italians?”

  “It might just be you,” said Burns. “Or it might just be Italians.”

  “I’m not going to get drawn into an argument with you,” said Francino.

  “Cut your losses.”

  The Japanese prisoner coughed again, and Burns and Francino fell silent. Francino nodded at him and raised his eyebrows to Burns. Burns shrugged his shoulders.

  They marched the next hour in tense, silent agreement.

  Burns seemed to be struggling with something. Francino had seen it in his frowning, his frequent looks back at him, even though Francino had ignored all of his stares. He didn’t want to invite him over, but Burns was determined. He came in close to Francino and shook his head heavily, to make it unmistakable that something was really bothering him.

  “You ain’t done nothing,” he said.

  “What?”

  “We can’t be falling apart like this.”

  Burns’s voice was barely past a whisper and Francino had to listen carefully. He wanted Burns to stop talking. He’d enjoyed the hour of estrangement, which in his opinion was preferable to a reconciliation.

  “Italians have good food,” Burns said. “Nice-looking women.”

  “Why don’t you just shut up?” said Francino. He marched quickly ahead with the pretense of checking on the state of the prisoner. “Let’s stop.”

  The prisoner fixed his sad, waning eyes on Francino and to Francino’s surprise, shook his head. “Do the Japs shake their heads?”

  “What?”

  “Do they shake their heads?” Francino demanded.

  “What do you think I am? The Jap ambassador?” Burns looked almost wounded. The past four days of marching had made him sensitive and moody.

  Francino took a sip from his canteen. “So why do you hate Italians?” he asked, resigned.

  “Well, a lot of Italians I just don’t like,” said Burns. He seemed to be relieved of a great weight. “There’s only one I hate.”

  Burns waited expectantly.

  Francino took a deep breath. “Mussolini?”

  “No,” said Burns. From the look on his face, he didn’t seem to know who Mussolini was. “DiMaggio.”

  “Joe DiMaggio?”

  Burns nodded solemnly.

  “No one hates Joe DiMaggio. Joltin’ Joe. The Yankee Clipper. Fifty-six-consecutive-game batting streak. MVP in ’41.”

  “MVP, with a batting average of .357. When Ted Williams—”

  “Ted Williams?”

  “Ted Williams batted .406.”

  Francino was silenced.

  “If it wasn’t for all the songs and the radio coverage—what does that have to do with the game? If the guy’s so fucking graceful, give him a tutu.”

  Francino was too shocked to laugh. Burns was nodding again, maybe to his patron saint or whoever it was who seemed to agree with him wherever he went, whatever generous spirit kept Burns feeling justified. It was because of this—the incomprehension on his part—that Francino didn’t realize that the prisoner had stood up and was walking toward them. The prisoner stopped just short of the end of Burns’s rifle, which was now readied, and said, “You an idiot.” The prisoner was shaking with emotion and his hatred of Burns showed clearly in the spite and accuracy of his words. “Joe DiMaggio is the greatest player, even Ted Williams say that.”

  Francino took strong steps backward. The shock of hearing the prisoner’s fluent English had scared him more than if a knife or gun barrel had been pointed at his face. Burns shoved his rifle at the man’s head. The prisoner pushed the gun away with the back of his hand. He had stared death solidly in the eyes and knew he had lost, that dying was just a matter of time. He would have his words first. He would have them, if it was his final act.

  “You moron,” he said to Burns. “You worried about Japanese eating you? Whole jungle full of fucking cannibal. Not one Japanese. All native from New Guinea eat people. They everywhere.”

  Burns looked around, frightened.

  “You not see them,” the man continued. “They like tree, belong here, not stand out like you, like me. You not see them,” he repeated.

  “He’s lying,” said Burns.

  “Why would he be lying?” asked Francino. “Are you lying?”

  “You fucking stupid American! Where you think all the native go? You think they go on vacation—hey, crazy Jap and stinking American shoot each other, why not we go to Palm Spring?”

  Francino and Burns hazarded a look at each other.

  “Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you,” said the Japanese soldier. “Fuck all America and all American mother.” Then he sat down on the ground as if speaking had been too much, too exhausting.

  “Where’d you learn to speak English?” asked Francino.

  “University of Michigan,” said the soldier, not raising his head. “I have Ph.D. in chemistry.”

  The prisoner looked upward, where a beam of light projected solidly into the thick air, substantive and menacing. Dead leaves circled through it and slowly wound back to the jungle floor. The light, from where Francino stood, seemed to dissolve into a misty cloud around the prisoner’s head. Francino felt a profound, general sadness.

  Francino patted himself down and found the cigarette he had been saving for later. He’d liked the idea that he believed in a later. He had a lighter, which had been useful the last few days. Francino walked over to the Japanese soldier and squatted down.

  “What the fuck you doing?” asked Burns.

  Francino raised his head to Burns. He was surprised. He couldn’t speak. His voice stuck in his throat and his eyes felt the unfamiliar sting of tears. He took a deep breath to compose himself. “This man is dying,” said Francino, “and I am giving him a cigarette. Do you have a problem with that?”

  Burns squinted, then looked away up at the canopy of sky.

  “Thank you,” said the Japanese soldier. “I shit blood, die soon. I alone.”

  Francino smiled and lit the cigarette.

  “They both born in California,” said the Japanese.

  “Who’s born in California?”

  “Williams,” said the soldier, “and DiMaggio.”

  The prisoner fell asleep. Burns was affable, which was all right with Francino, even though he was unsure how to proceed. Francino took his glasses and folded them. He put them in his pocket. They’d been sliding down his nose for days and now seemed pointless.

  “Can you see?” asked Burns.

  “Yeah,” said Francino. “The far stuff is still pretty clear, but I have a hard time making out what’s right in front of me.”

  Burns nodded sympathetically. “You like Australia?”

  “Yeah, I like it.”

  “I’m thinking of relocating after the war. I’d like to maybe get a house in Brisbane.”

  “Brisbane.” Francino smiled. “I won a dance contest in Brisbane,” he said. “I was jitterbugging”—here he laughed, because the idea of doing something like that seemed incomprehensible — “with an Australian lady. We were great. After we won, she liked me even more.” Francino smiled. “So we kept dancing.”

  “Dancing?” said Burns.

  “Yeah. Dancing. She was nice. She had a nice smell, some kind of perfume. We were getting along and then right in the middle of this dance, my Sa
int Christopher medal goes flying off my neck.”

  “Your medal just flew off?”

  “Flew right off.”

  “Must have been some dance.”

  “Yeah, it was. But get this. She sees the medal and she says, ‘You’re a Mick and I don’t dance with Micks.’”

  “You?”

  “That’s what I say. ‘I ain’t no Mick.’” Francino and Burns chuckled together. “And she says, ‘You’re a Catholic. That makes you a Mick. And I don’t dance with Micks.’”

  When Burns had nodded off and Francino was left to swatting mosquitoes and watching their immobile prisoner, his mind wandered back to Brisbane. There had been a trainload full of Italian POWs, Axis soldiers. They were all shoved in together in a boxcar like livestock. The boxcar was uncovered and the sun beat down on them. Francino was entranced. He listened to the heavy, sonorous conversations. He understood every word. He looked street-end to street-end and saw two Aussies, one with a broad-brimmed khaki hat, the other darker skinned and hatless, squinting out at nothing—as Aussies were inclined to do—with his hand resting on a street sign and the arch of his left foot set solidly against his right knee. In the boxcar, the Italians were talking about food and drink. Francino fought a desire to join them, climb into their small, familiar prison, to embrace them all and tell them about his family. He patted down his jacket. He had three packs of cigarettes with him. He opened each pack and jumped on a nearby bench. Joyfully, he threw the cigarettes into the boxcar. They snowed down on the prisoners and soon cheers rose out of the car. Francino threw in a box of matches and the Italians roared in approval. Francino almost couldn’t hear the Aussies yelling at him, running from all sides to see the why of the commotion. He heard them yelling “Wop,” “Neapolitan nigger,” and other things, but he didn’t care. He was happy for the first time in months.

  Francino fell asleep while thinking of this, the boxcar, the Italians he’d met in Australia of all places. His head fell to his chest and his rifle slid to the jungle floor.

  He woke to Burns’s yelling.

  “Fuck, fuck, fuck!”

  “What?”

  “That fucking Yankee-loving Nip’s escaped.”

  Francino raised his hand in a silencing gesture; Burns’s aspect shifted from anger to panic. Francino knew Burns by now and his mind followed the same route. The prisoner had taken off, met up with some Japs. They were in danger. Only Burns had added fear of cannibalism to the equation.

  “I ain’t gonna let no Nip do that to me,” he whispered.

  They were in a small clearing at the foot of a large tree. Burns inspected the edge of the greening and discerned some trampled leaves that weren’t the work of the previous day’s march. He gestured over to Francino, who followed him at a short distance. The sun was pushing through the tall foliate ceiling in blades and Francino, with his eyes partially closed and his breathing quiet, felt the great beast shift beneath him. Burns sighed loudly, sidestepped, and Francino saw the prone, still body of the Japanese prisoner lying unmolested on the jungle floor. The soles of his sandals were bared and one arm reached out ahead, as though he had never given up reaching his destination.

  “Japs are like dogs that way,” whispered Burns. He turned and looked up at the sky with his rifle butt resting on the jungle floor and his left thumb slung through a belt loop.

  Francino dropped to one knee. He rolled the man over. Grubs were making quick work of the corpse and had already invaded the soft membranes of the mouth.

  The rain started in the early afternoon. It thundered out of the sky in sheets rather than drops. Keeping upright in the mud and uneven terrain was difficult. Francino was menaced with thoughts of his flesh sloughing off his bones while he was still alive. In the late morning, he’d slipped in some mud and shot down twenty feet into a ravine. It had taken him an hour and a half and all his energy to make it back up the ridge. Then the rain had tapered off. The extreme heat had turned the jungle into a sauna.

  “Where are we going?” Francino asked Burns.

  “West.”

  “I thought we were heading south.”

  “South? It’s too steep. And with the rain.”

  Because it was raining again, a steady patter that occasionally swelled to a deafening drum. His boots sank down to the ankles in mud. More than once he stopped, unwilling to move, until Burns halted and got him back in motion.

  The earth shifted once more. Francino looked to Burns. He had not noticed it, nor would Francino tell him, that the great alligator that was Guinea was slowly waking. Her head swung low from right to left and a great claw made the first step forward. Her body moved slowly in a heavy S-shaped tread. Soon, Francino thought, soon he would be dead.

  “I thought I could survive this,” Francino said. He whispered to himself, half expecting a response, despite the fact he was praying.

  “I thought I would live to guide men,” he said.

  “I am not even half a man,” he said.

  “I have lost God. I will never find my way home,” he said.

  He saw a familiar purple cloud hovering above.

  Francino knew that he was at the edge of life. Burns pushed through vines and undergrowth, trampling everything, occasionally raising his thick head to smell the air. Francino trailed him desperately, tracked him up the muddy slopes, followed his retreating figure through the walls of mist and vine partitions. While scrambling under the branches of a tree that was growing almost horizontally, Francino caught his neck. He realized that his medallion was hooked and the chain was choking him. Francino yelled for Burns to stop, but Burns did not hear because the rain was falling in torrents. Rivulets in an impromptu waterway coursed past Francino’s knees, forking around saplings, knitting back together into a broad, fist-width river. A measured snap of twigs and the crush of greenery advanced slowly as if a snake were approaching him along a low branch. Francino pulled gently at the chain, but it did not come loose. He then gave one solid tug. The chain snapped and for one brief instant he saw the glint of metal—a spark—then all was lost in the deluge.

  Francino scuttled up and blindly forged his way in the direction he’d last seen Burns. He called and listened, but all he could hear was the endless rush of water. At the edge of his vision there seemed to be a brightening, a translucence to the vegetation. Francino slipped again, his knee hitting a rock. A sharper pain beside the dull thud of bruising let him know he’d cut himself clear to the bone. He raised his body up from the mud, holding on to a low branch, and limped the last twenty feet.

  The vegetation abruptly stopped. Here, there was nothing but air.

  Again the rain broke and a blinding sun struck Francino, instantly warming his skin through his heavy, wet clothing. There was a strong wind and Burns, standing a mere ten feet away, was beckoning to him. Francino walked to him only vaguely aware of the pain in his leg. Burns scuttled onto a large boulder that was set into the side of the mountain. Francino climbed after him, helped by Burns’s sturdy hands. They had reached the edge of the world.

  The earth fell at a steep incline, leaving Francino reeling in the thin mountain air. They had walked out of the jungle not by escaping on the south or west perimeter, but rather had somehow climbed through its ceiling and now stood above it. The air was clean and cool. On all sides, brilliant green slopes fell sharply downward and wisps of clouds caught on the peaks across the valley; farther down, Francino sighted a flat, metallic shimmer that had to be the ocean.

  “Well, look at that,” said Burns. “Where the fuck are we?”

  Francino dropped to a squat. “What does it look like?”

  But Francino’s words caught in his throat. A sound was floating up from the sea. At first he thought he was hallucinating, but the music wasn’t pretty enough to be imagined. He put his hands to his temples and listened. “What is that?”

  “That,” said Burns, “if I am not mistaken, is ‘Scotland the Brave.’”

  Francino smiled and listened. It was pipes,
bagpipes, and their profound belching and bellyaching echoed and bounced along the valley from the depths of the mud to the steep peaks. Here at the edge of creation the earth sang. Francino sat down. The rock pushed beneath him and he smiled, listening to the gentle groan of the great alligator as she settled back to sleep.

  Walkabout

  BOB SPENT most of his life working in Thailand. He was a quiet man who didn’t bother with conversation, which didn’t bother his coworkers, since Bob didn’t seem the type that would make good company. For one thing, he was at least twenty years older than most of the guys who went to the East to work on government-funded projects. For another, he had lost all ties to Australia—including football, cricket, and politics—and didn’t return for the expected visits, instead choosing to sign up for one long-term project after another. At first, his colleagues made up stories about him: he had killed his wife; Bob Cairns was not his real name; he was part aborigine, which explained his voluntary solitude. Eventually, the stories died because Bob refused even the smallest donations of corroboration or denial, and the interest in him died with them. Bob kept to himself, and that was all there was to it.

  The only thing that Ned knew for sure about Bob was that he was dead. He wasn’t even sure what day it happened, as the event had announced itself through a foul odor—the odor of an active and living decomposition—that was winding its way through the laundry chutes and fire escapes of the hotel. Ned was standing in the hallway wrapped in a towel. He had just given his date—the best that Thailand had to offer—a big tip, and was feeling altruistic, a false feeling that often gripped him in a hangover, when he saw the hotel manager, Gary (which the manager pronounced Gahlee), disappearing around a corner.

  “Gary,” Ned called. The man stopped in his tracks. He turned around, bobbing his head up and down in greeting, and slowly scuttled back up the hallway. “What’s that awful smell?” Ned asked.

  “I do not know,” said Gary. “You must help me.” The manager extended his fine, small hands in front of him. “It is coming from the room of your friend.”

  “Whose room is it?”