King Rat

A mosquito buzzed the King’s ear with sudden crescendo. He jerked up, found his flashlight and searched the inside of the net. At length the mosquito settled on the curtain. Deftly, the King crushed it. Then he double-checked to make certain that there were no holes in the net, and lay back once again.

In a moment he dismissed all things from his mind. Sleep came quickly and peacefully to the King.

Peter Marlowe still lay awake on his bunk, scratching bedbug bites. Too many memories had been triggered by what the King had said …

He remembered the ship that had brought him and Mac and Larkin from Java a year ago.

The Japanese had ordered the Commandant of Bandung, one of the camps in Java, to provide a thousand men for a work party. The men were to be sent to another camp nearby for two weeks with good food—double rations—and cigarettes. Then they would be transferred to another place. Fine working conditions.

Many of the men had offered to go because of the two weeks. Some were ordered. Mac had volunteered himself, Larkin, and Peter Marlowe. “Never can tell, laddies,” he had reasoned when they had cursed him. “If we can get to a wee island, well, Peter and I know the language. Ay, an’ the place cannot be worse than here.”

So they had decided to change the evil they knew for the evil that was to come.

The ship was a tiny tramp steamer. At the foot of the gangway there were many guards and two Japanese dressed in white with white face masks. On their backs were large containers, and in their hands were spray guns which connected with the containers. All prisoners and their possessions were spray-sterilized against carrying Javanese microbes onto the clean ship.

In the small hold aft there were rats and lice and feces, and there was a space twenty feet by twenty feet in the center of the hold. Around the hold, joined to the hull of the ship from the deck to the ceiling, were five tiers of deep shelves. The height between the shelves was three feet, and their depth ten feet.

A Japanese sergeant showed the men how to sit in the shelves, cross-legged. Five men in column, then five men in column beside them, then five men in column beside them. Until all the shelves were packed.

When panic protests began, the sergeant said that this was the way Japanese soldiers were transshipped, and if this was good enough for the glorious Japanese Army, it was good enough for white scum. A revolver fled the first five men, gasping, into the claustrophobic darkness, and the press of the men clambering down into the hold forced the others to get out of the shoving mass into the shelves. They, in turn, were forced by others. Knee to knee, back to back, side to side. The spill-over of men—almost a hundred—stood numbly in the small twenty-foot by twenty-foot area, blessing their luck that they were not in the shelves. The hatches were still off, and the sun poured down into the hold.

The sergeant led a second column which included Mac, Larkin, and Peter Marlowe to the fore hold, and that too began to fill up.

When Mac got to the steamy bottom he gasped and fainted. Peter Marlowe and Larkin caught him, and above the din they fought and cursed their way back up the gangway to the deck. A guard tried to shove them back. Peter Marlowe shouted and begged and showed him Mac’s quivering face. The guard shrugged and let them pass, nodding towards the bow.

Larkin and Peter Marlowe shoved and swore a space for Mac to lie down.

“What’ll we do?” Peter Marlowe asked Larkin.

“I’ll try and get a doctor.”

Mac’s hand caught Larkin. “Colonel.” His eyes opened a fraction and he whispered quickly, “I’m all right. Had to get us out of there somehow. For Christ’s sake look busy and don’t be afraid if I pretend a fit.”

So they had held on to Mac as he whimpered deliriously and fought and vomited the water they pressed to his lips. He kept it up until the ship cast off. Now even the decks of the ship were packed with men.

There was not enough space for all the men aboard to sit at the same time. But as there were lines to join—lines for water, lines for rice, lines for the latrines—each man could sit part of the time.

That night a squall lashed the ship for six hours. Those in the hold tried to escape the vomit and those on deck tried to escape the torrent.

The next day was calm under a sun-bleached sky. A man fell overboard. Those on deck—men and guards—watched a long time as he drowned in the wake of the ship. After that no one else fell overboard.

On the second day three men were given to the sea. Some Japanese guards fired their rifles to make the funeral more military. The service was brief—there were lines to be joined.

The voyage lasted four days and five nights. For Mac and Larkin and Peter Marlowe it was uneventful …

Peter Marlowe lay on his sodden mattress aching for sleep. But his mind raced uncontrolled, dredging up terrors of the past and fears of the future. And memories better not remembered. Not now, not alone. Memories of her.