The Heat of the Sun

Benjamin Franklin Pinkerton II. ‘Trouble’, as he was known, was a figure shocking enough, considering
only his crimes; when, added to these, came the truth about his birth, the mixture was explosive. Condemnation, like buckshot, spluttered in all directions. Some directed their greatest outrage at
B. F. Pinkerton; others, at B. F. Pinkerton II. Conservatives declared that a traitor was a traitor – what more was there to be said? Liberals asked: What was the son but the victim of the
father? What chance had the boy? With his blond American looks, Trouble could hardly have known he was half Japanese, the son of a geisha girl who had killed herself for love of his faithless
father. The truth might have devastated him at any time; in the event, it was kept from him for so long that, when he learned it, he could hardly help going a little mad.
    To others, the victim was neither Pinkerton II nor the hapless Japanese girl; the one to be pitied was the young Lieutenant Pinkerton, drawn into the seductive lure of the Orient. The Pinkerton
affair, in this view, was a sort of moral Pearl Harbor: Yellow Peril striking again, with Pinkerton II a fitting symbol that East is East, West is West, and never the twain should meet.
    Next year, to my astonishment, marks an anniversary: forty years since my story’s end. It is time to begin. I am an old man, and tired; sometimes I wish I could surge
free of the past, like a Saturn V rocket, shedding stages on its way out of the atmosphere. Perhaps, in setting down my story, I will achieve some freedom from it. For years I refused to talk about
the Pinkertons. But history cannot be left to Mr Burl Blakey. This book will appear only after my death. I shall paint no monsters. I shall level no blame. My purpose is simply to tell the story:
not the definitive story (for where is that to be found?), but the story as it appeared to me, from my first meeting with Trouble to the end of my association with his family, many years later.
Perhaps the story is not mine to tell. In the lives of the Pinkertons, I was, I suppose, a bystander, but one well placed on more than one occasion to witness the unfolding of their story.
    It is the saddest story I know. The ending is so out of proportion with the beginning. Yet for me that ending is implicit in every step that precedes it: that eternal moment when the atomic
cloud, one summer’s morning, bloomed above the port of Nagasaki, where, many years before, a young man had dallied with a girl known as Butterfly.

 
    ACT ONE
A Boy Called Trouble

 
    ‘You’re sure this is worth it?’
    He twisted around. ‘Trust me.’
    The hill was low, a gentle incline, but I sweated and my heart beat hard. Grimly, I leaned on my ashplant and said it wasn’t easy; Le Vol replied that nothing worthwhile ever was.
    Winter in Vermont, I thought, was going to be cold. The days were drawing in. All the way up from the playing fields, the trees beside the lane had cast down their leaves: topaz and bronze,
ochre and vermilion, saffron and scarlet and burnt orange. They filled me with a strange, exultant despair. They stuck to my shoes, to the end of my ashplant.
    I had been surprised when Le Vol asked me to the place he called Nirvana. In my first days at Blaze he had hardly spoken to me, even though he slept in the cubicle next to mine. On the day I
arrived I stepped towards him nervously, holding out my hand; but when I told him my name he only grunted, flopped down on his cot with a squeak of springs, and buried his face in a book that he
produced from a pocket of his jacket like a magician’s cards.
    Why he had warmed towards me I was never quite certain. Perhaps he saw that I was unsuited, like him, to the boisterous world of Blaze. On Wednesday afternoons, when there were no classes and
the fields were clamorous with football, hockey, and baseball, Le Vol and I had exemptions: I, for my ashplant; Le Vol, for the sickness that had laid him up the year before and still left him
weak. We were expected to remain in the library, stiff-backed before the elderly lady librarian, but the lady, ever-reliably, always fell asleep.
    The cries from the playing fields had faded and the ground had grown level. Le Vol beckoned me around a clump of trees. Quivering in the tawny light lay a graveyard. I was puzzled. Nirvana, I
had imagined, would be a hut or, perhaps, a forest bower.
    The graveyard looked abandoned, a remnant of early settlers. Weeds grew