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dirt and some grease he found by a ruined car, hoping it made him look less Caucasian. Then he'd joined the torrent of humanity, most of it frighteningly silent, as it flowed out of the ruined city of Nagasaki and into the bleak hills that rose out of the northern part of the island of Kyushu. On his way he saw the shattered hulk of the Catholic cathedral of Nagasaki. However small the numbers of worshipers might have been, the only center of Christianity in Japan had been destroyed by an allegedly Christian United States.
    As he walked, it further struck him that no one was doing anything for the people of Nagasaki. There was no plan; there was no government left in the area to start helping its people. All had been destroyed and no one knew where to begin. He looked behind him and saw that the pillar of the cloud had finally begun to stream away, and that it had lost much of its peculiar mushroom shape. It had begun to rain large, warm drops, and he wondered if the explosion had caused rain as well. Could the bomb have been so powerful that it changed the weather?
    At a point, he broke away from the main throng and struck out into the more rugged area around Mount Tara, which was to the north of Nagasaki .
    Hours later and high on a grass-covered ridge, he found the remains of a farmer's hut that must have been abandoned a few years before. He propped up stones and pieces of wood to keep the rain off him. The weather was warm so he didn't fear exposure, but the efforts of the day had exhausted him. He had to rest and he had to find food and water.
    Near his shelter, he located a puddle and lapped it like a dog when his cupped hands wouldn't retain enough to quench his suddenly enormous thirst. Then he took a stick and began to dig in the soft ground. It was as he had hoped. The damp earth was full of insects.
    As he ate, he decided that, whatever happened from here on in, he was not going back to a prison camp. Even if he died in the hills of Kyushu, he would do so as a free man.
    Later, as the days stretched on, he began to wonder. How long could he endure and survive on his meager diet in the mountains of Kyushu? The weather was mild, but winter was inevitable. He had no idea how cold it would get, but it would certainly be much cooler than the present. What if he had to spend a long time in the hills? What if it took years for the war to end? Then he thought of something even more awful, and it made him shudder, nearly cry. What if it never ended? If that was the case, then he was condemned to spend whatever remained of his life running, hiding, and slowly starving to death.
    Despite his circumstances, he saw black humor in the alternative possibility that the war would end and he would never find out. That would be just his luck.
     
Chapter 4
     
    "I'm not too sure which appalls me the most, the rioting by our servicemen in San Francisco, or the civilian riots in other cities," said Marshall .
    "They all sicken me," Truman said. "Look at the numbers for San Francisco. An estimated twenty thousand soldiers and sailors ran amok for two days before other military and state police could take control. They rampaged through Chinatown and killed anyone who looked even remotely Asian, hoping, I presume, that they were somehow killing Japs. God, more than a hundred dead and a thousand injured."
    "Are you counting the rapes?" Marshall asked.
    The riots in San Francisco had begun as a drunken celebration of victory over the Japanese by tens of thousands of servicemen overjoyed that they were not going to be fighting the Japs. When they found out the truth, the celebrations turned ugly. Most of the rapes had occurred during the celebration phase, the murders later on.
    "No," Truman said sadly. The document on his desk indicated three thousand reported rapes in San Francisco alone, and God only knew how many unreported. "And will somebody tell me why the people of Detroit felt it necessary to kill another score of Negroes? Hadn't