Bullet Catchers

Chapter 8

Bullet Catchers

Eight

Pluto's eyes refocused themselves and found himself peering at a crumbled and stained issue of The Economist. He was half way through a sentence in an article he didn't even remember starting. Harshly he blinked his eyes and then shook his head, but of course it didn't help. Ever since last night his memory and consciousness had been spotty. He faintly recalled being punched a few times, hit with a tranquilizer, and being held captive. If he tried to probe any further into his memory banks he'd panic, as though someone was pointing a gun at his face. For a moment he'd forget how to breathe and he'd suffer a mental blackout.

Irritated, he tore his eyes away from the newspaper. Where was he? Laying on a couch and facing the ceiling, he opted to listen to audio clues. A very light clicking sound and someone humming was all his ears picked up. His head moved toward the clicking sound and found Arai sitting at a desk, his back hunched over as he worked on something tedious.

Sharp pain hit Pluto's head and arm. A glance down revealed his arm in a splint. With his good hand he reached up to touch his head, and found it was heavily bandaged. His entire face felt swollen and stiff. Breathing in made his entire body cry out in pain. It had been a long time since he had been that banged up. Laying there on that stiff couch didn't seem to be doing him any favors, either. He decided it was best to get up and stretch.

Slowly he was able to rise to his feet. Another visual sweep on the room showed that no one else appeared to be home. Why was Arai there? His eyes found the crutches leaning on the wall next to the desk and suddenly remembered that Arai had been shot in Guatemala. Considering how energetic the guy was, Pluto was certain he was bored out of his mind. He decided to make small talk with Arai, even if they didn't particularly know each other very well or necessarily care for each other.

Silently he had arrived at the desk and peered over Arai's shoulder. Spread out over the desk were seemingly endless amounts of plastic pieces, a set of clippers, small sand paper, and glue. Pluto didn't bother to ask what was going on; Arai would eventually notice his appearance and gush out way too much information.

Sure enough, the moment Pluto leaned on the back of Arai's chair he looked over his shoulder to see Pluto looking with eyes glazed at the mess. "Hey, you're awake! You feeling okay? Was kind of worried since you've been just lazing around all day. I don't blame you, though."

"I feel like s**t," Pluto muttered. Without thought he reached down to pick up a piece of the model Arai was working on. It was barely the size of a quarter, to hell if Pluto had any idea what it was used for. Carefully, he set it back down where he found it.

"Pretty neat, huh? It's the Musashi, the lesser known of the Yamato-class battleships from the IJN's fleet. Nearly seventy-thousand tons, over eight-hundred fifty meters long with a speed of over twenty-seven knots. She could travel a distance of over seven-thousand nautical miles. Nine forty-five caliber forty-six centimeter guns that could fire an over one-thousand kilogram armor-piercing shell up to forty-two thousand meters. Thirty-six twenty-five…"

Pluto's mind was whirling at all the numbers Arai listed off effortlessly. How anyone could remember the exact armament of any ship built within the last hundred years and rattle them off Pluto could never get. Weren't there more important things to learn? Like, how to make really great dumplings or how to train a dog to hunt? What about picking up women or drinking good liquor?

"… it took twenty torpedoes and almost twenty bomb hits to sink it. Crazy, huh?"

"But it still sank. So what was so great about it?" Pluto asked. He wasn't sure if he was actually curious or if he was forcing himself to care.

Arai didn't care either way. "Come on! Sometimes, even the greatest fall as times change. The Musashi was one war too late, I'm afraid."

"Even the greatest? Does that mean nations, too?"

"Sure. I mean, even existence isn't guaranteed to last forever."

There was a moment of silence as the two men just stared at each other. Arai sensed the conversation was over and turned back to his hobby. Pluto, too, turned his eyes back to the desk. Even though it was located in the main living room, it was still considering "Arai's Desk." It was littered with broken plastic pieces, history magazines, and stained with paint. On the wall above hung three framed pieces. The largest piece was a painting of an Arleigh Burke-class destroyer. The second was a picture of the Bullet Catchers from several years ago, before Pluto had joined.

It was the third that Pluto truly examined. He'd seen it a hundred times or more; after all, he walked by that desk several times a day. Yet it was a personal photo that belonged to Arai's past and Arai was… weird. His hair was always buzzed short, as though he fancied himself as one of those IJN guys he talked about so much. New guns were like toys to him; he could spend hours taking them apart and putting them back together. Aside from an occasional light beer, he never drank. Arai never tried to pick up women and he never did drugs. He spent an entire year forging a sword just to see what it was like. Arai was nothing like Pluto, and that scared the crap out of the Czech.

So of course, the photo of young Arai with his now-deceased wife was something that Pluto never stopped to admire. What would Arai say or do if he saw someone looking at it? Launch into another weird spasm of rambled words? Get angry? While everyone held secrets, they had all at least once shared a few anecdotes from their previous lives. Only Arai had remained strangely quiet about his past. To make it worse, looking at the photo reminded him of the distance in years, as well. Arai was nearly twice the age of the young Pluto.

Finally, Pluto settled on grabbing the photo. After all, he had purposefully walked over there with the intent of conversing with Arai. Hadji had been berating him to get to know the team better, so why not start with the one he was most distant from?

Arai noticed the movement out of the corner of his eye but made no moves to stop what he was working on. He didn't even say a word.

Pluto could sense him tense up a bit, but he focused purely on the picture. Arai looked like he was fifteen; considering at the age of thirty-eight he looked like he was twenty-five, that wasn't a shock. The young woman next to him was petite and fair skinned, her hair tied in a ponytail that the wind played with. The summer dress she wore swayed as well, but the smile on her face seemed unwavering. He couldn't stop himself from saying, "Wow. She's… actually really cute."

"Beautiful," Arai quietly corrected.

Pluto glanced down at him for but a second before he looked back at the photograph. He noticed something behind the picture, barely peeking out from the frame. Without requesting permission, Pluto popped the frame open. Another photo fell out, as well as a yellowed piece of paper. Since one arm was in a sling, Pluto wasn't able to catch all the goods as they glided to the ground. If it upset Arai, he never said anything.

The second photograph was facing up so Pluto could see it clearly as he bent down to carefully pick it up. This one also featured Arai's wife, but with her were two children. The girl couldn't have been more than five and the boy was just old enough for Little League, if the uniform he wore was any indication. Just as his fingers curled around the picture, Arai's voice said, "Cute kids, huh?"

Pluto was surprised to hear him and looked up to see that Arai had turned to face him fully, the model discarded. There was a smile on Arai's lips, as though his eyes shone a sense of sadness. After having picked up the fallen paper and pictures, Pluto stood up straight and asked, "How old?"

"Oh, let's see. Four and nine when that picture was taken. Man, that was a decade ago," Arai said, his voice distant. He propped his elbow on the desk and rested his face in his hand. His eyes stared off into a history that purely his own. Somehow he snapped himself back to reality. "You got any kids?"

Pluto shook his head and laughed. "I hope not."

"Someday?"

To this, he wasn't sure how to respond. Instead, he found himself on the ground, crossing his legs like a child sitting for story time. "Maybe. Why did you have kids?"

The question confused Arai, so he struggled to answer. "Because I loved my wife," he said.

"That's it?" Pluto questioned. Damn, why was conversing so hard and awkward with Arai? He could say anything to Tank, ask any question to Hadji, and seek any advice from Dingo or Jibaro. Even with a subject as simply as family, he asked stupid questions. He tried to quickly bring up a different one. "How did you meet your wife."

"It's a boring story. We cheered for the same baseball team in high school. No big deal. She put up with me, though. Couldn't let her go, you know? I mean, what are the odds a guy like me gets a beautiful girl like that more than once in a lifetime? Married when we were nineteen. We'd be nearing twenty years together soon, crazy!"

There was a laugh after that but it hurt Pluto to hear it. The sound of forced laughter, no matter how well acted, was always a painfully easy thing for him to notice. In order to distract himself from having to look at Arai's pathetic expression, he turned to the paper that had fallen out alongside the photo. It was a hand written note that was scribbled in a language that Pluto didn't understand. He held it up and asked, "What does this say?"

Arai gingerly took it out of Pluto's hands and said, "Maybe someday I'll read it to you."

Something about that action made it clear to Pluto that Arai was done sharing for the day. He decided to hand over the two photos as well. He watched as Arai stared at the pictures, his eyes again going to distant times and places. Pluto risked it when he asked, "What happened to them?"

Arai didn't look up. Instead, he said, "This photo of us was our first anniversary. Pearl Harbor. You know what's so amazing about that place? In 1941, that was the birth place of this era. If Pearl Harbor doesn't get attacked, then this age doesn't exist. The foundation for victory is overcoming catastrophic defeat."

Pluto watched as Arai carefully placed the three items back into the frame and hung it on the nail in the wall. A couple of nudges made it even. Then Arai sat back down and went back to work on the plastic kit, ignoring Pluto's presence. Yet there was no way Arai could shake the feeling of being watched. Pluto always had just stared at people without fail, a strange way of attempting to read them when he wasn't sure how to proceed.

Arai asked without turning from his model, "Do you have any pictures?"

"No," was the immediate answer. "I never really grew up normally. I don't know if I ever even grew up."

It was then that Arai realized that Pluto was born but a year before his own son. It should've made conversation easier, but in truth it just made it more difficult. Arai had planned to talk to his son about sports, girls, and college at that age. Not about death and difficult memories. He wanted his son to travel the world and see the monuments built to peace, not to construct graveyards in battle. While Arai's son was dead at age nine, in many ways that was the same year that Pluto's life ended, too. After that, war was all he had ever known.

So, what would he say to his son after all this time? He couldn't know for sure. All he could say was a pathetic and simple, "I'm very sorry. Must've been tough, huh?"

"I guess. But it must be harder for you, right? I'm sure family is like heroin. Sure it sucks if you don't have it, but it matters less if you've never tasted it. Once you've had that first hit, to never get another probably sucks c**k. I'll never know what I missed out on. But you'll feel that loneliness every day for the rest of your life."

"Hmph. Yeah. I guess that's true, huh?"

It was weirdly comfortable after that. Words were sparse. Pluto would ask random questions about guns or battleships, and Arai would dump information like a small child in his excitement. For hours they sat and in that very spot, for once neither one of them concerned about their past or the future.