Empire of the Sun - J. G. Ballard [130]
Jim nursed his bruised nose, as the armed men squatted on the bridge with their jars of rice wine. Despite the years of malnutrition in the camps, few of the former prisoners bothered to eat the canned food heaped on the back of the trucks. They drank alone in the hot sun, rarely speaking to each other. Jim knew almost none of their names. At dusk, when they returned to the seaplane base at Nantao, most of them dispersed with their share of the day’s booty to their hide-outs in the tenements of the Old City, reassembling the next morning like factory workers. Jim slept in the Buick parked on the concrete slipway, surrounded by the hulks of the burnt seaplanes, while Basie and the bearded Frenchman drank through the night in the pilots’ mess.
The Frenchman wandered back from the village and leaned against Basie’s window. ‘Nothing – not even one piece of shit.’
‘They could have left us that,’ Basie said in disgust. ‘Why don’t the Chinese come back to their villages?’
‘Do they know the war’s over?’ Jim asked. ‘You ought to tell them, Basie.’
‘Maybe…We can’t wait forever, Jim. There are big guns moving up to Shanghai, about six different Kuomintang armies.’
‘So it might be difficult to collect your equipment?’
‘That’s it. We’ll go now to this communist village. Then I’ll take you back to your Dad. You can tell him how I looked after you through the war, taught you all your words.’
‘You did look after me, Basie’
‘Right…’ Basie gazed thoughtfully at Jim. ‘You stay with us. It would be too bad if you got yourself kidnapped.’
‘Are there a lot of kidnappers here, Basie?’
‘Kidnappers and communists. People who don’t want to know the war is over. Remember that, Jim.’
‘Right…’ Trying to distract the cabin steward with some more cheerful topic, Jim asked: ‘Basie, did you see the atom bomb go off? I saw the flash over Nagasaki from Nantao stadium.’
‘Say, kid…’ Basie peered at Jim, puzzled by the calm voice of this bloody-nosed boy. He took a gun-rag from the rear window-sill and wiped Jim’s nose. ‘You saw the atom bomb…?’
‘For a whole minute, Basie. A white light covered Shanghai, stronger than the sun. I suppose God wanted to see everything.’
‘I guess be did. That white light, Jim. Maybe I can get your picture in Life magazine.’
‘Say, could you, Basie?’
The thought of appearing in Life exhilarated Jim. He wiped the blood from his mouth and tried to straighten his ragged shirt, in case a photographer were to appear suddenly on the scene. At a signal from Captain Soong, the bandits returned to their vehicles. As they left the village and set out towards the river Jim imagined his photograph among the pictures of Tiger tanks and US Marines. He had now spent four days with Basie’s bandit group, and it occurred to him that his parents might think that he had died in the death-march from Lunghua. Perhaps they would be sitting by the swimming-pool at Amherst Avenue, leafing through the latest issue of Life, when they would recognize their son’s face among the admirals and generals…
They were passing the eastern perimeter of Lunghua Airfield. Jim leaned across Basie and hung from the window. He scanned the creeks and paddy fields for the bodies of Japanese aircrew. The Kuomintang units which had seized part of the airfield were still killing the Japanese in batches.
‘You like those airplanes, Jim?’
‘I’m going to be a pilot, Basie, one day. I’ll take my mother and father down to Java. I’ve thought a lot about that.’
‘A good dream to have…’ Basie pushed Jim aside and pointed to the