"Bruce Holland Rogers - These Shoes Strangers Have Died Of" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rogers Bruce Holland)

These Shoes Strangers Have Died Of
by Bruce Holland Rogers
This story copyright 1995 by Bruce Holland Rogers. This copy was created for Jean Hardy's personal
use. All other rights are reserved. Thank you for honoring the copyright.

Published by Seattle Book Company, www.seattlebook.com.

* * *


Nineteen forty-two was the first summer of the war bond campaign. After the newsreels and before
the feature, a government clip showed a Japanese soldier bayoneting a Chinese baby. The voice-over
said again and again, "Buy a bond. Kill a Jap. Buy a bond. Kill a Jap."
The rifle with its bayonet rose and fell. People coming out of the theater later would look at me, a
young man old enough to shave. Some of them asked me outright why I hadn't enlisted.
"I'll be old enough in September," I'd say.
After the theater was empty, I'd sweep the aisles and then sit in one of the middle seats, the popular
ones even on slow nights and matinees. I'd close my eyes grip the wooden armrests. Beneath my palms
the joy and fear and anger and relief that others had felt in this theater moved in the wood grain like a nest
of animals, stirring.
Buy a bond. Kill a Jap.
Feelings like a knot you can't begin to untie.
***


"Kill a Jap. Be a Jap," I said to the curtained screen.
The house I live in now was built to my own design on the north-facing slope of a canyon where the
trees grow dense and dark. The first floor is half buried so that the second floor won't rise above the
trees, won't too easily reveal the house. To drive here, you must follow a pair of wheel ruts that turn off
from the gravel road five miles distant. Unless you know where to look, underbrush hides the way. I stay
put in winter. For five months of the year, the snow between house and road lies undisturbed.
On the second floor is a corner room without windows. There's a deadbolt on the door to that room,
and a padlock. Inside, a Nazi battle flag hangs on one wall alongside photos of the camps. Black and
white photos of the living and the dead. The far side of that wall is devoted to wartime posters of
buck-toothed Japanese. There's a photo of me as I was in 1943, a new-minted soldier, posing with fixed
bayonet and glaring at the camera as if the lens were Tojo himself.
Buy a bond. Kill a Jap.
The war, my war, is limited to that wall. The other walls are papered with photographs of skulls
stacked in Cambodia, bodies swelling in the sun of Burundi or Rwanda, mass graves opened like ripe
fruit split wide to spill their seeds. Some of the newspaper images have yellowed. Some are fresh.
Nina, my agent, has seen the locked door, but has never asked what's on the other side. She has other
things on her mind. "Build a studio in Boulder or Denver," she says to me twice a year. "You'd be close
to the galleries. All of this would be so much easier."
She wants me out of the mountains. If I had a heart attack, a stroke, no one would know unless I
radioed for help myself. Park County Rescue would have to travel the same pair of wheel ruts that Nina's
hired truck negotiates, spring and fall, when it comes to take my work to the galleries.
"I can hunt deer from my front porch," I tell her. "Could I do that in Denver or Boulder?"
In the closet of the locked room, I keep the shoes, the boots, the uniforms.
The shoes are flattened, sun-cracked-- a right shoe hidden among high weeds in El Salvador, a left
shoe I stole from Bergen-Belsen, a right that I dug from the rotting mud of Cambodia. Shoes strangers