Fireflies Read Online Free PDF

Roy down there one afternoon. We tapped on the tarpaulin, and after a moment the man emerged from his shelter. He stared at us, his old face lined like a boxer’s, his beard as coarse as a brush.
    He squinted as Roy explained that we’d like him to tell us his tale. After stroking his beard and looking up the river for a while, he gestured at his scatter of belongings on the ground. We sat down cross-legged as he filled a bent jerry can with river water and put it on a little hibachi grill to boil for tea.
    I’d expected him to be half crazy, but, in fact, he was the model of eloquence. He’d been a bargeman once, he said, waving at the water, but over the years he’d managed to save enough money to buy a boat of his own. After that, he and his two sons made a living ferrying coal and timber from the factories and yards out to the big ships in Tokyo Bay.
    I remembered the picture postcards I’d seen of old Tokyo: the waterways bristling with skiffs and wherries, ferrymen carrying drunken revellers up and down the lantern-lit canals as fireworks burst in the summer sky. The river was almost silent now, with long strands of weed floating around the mooring posts.
    After the fire raids had begun, the man said, he and his sons had taken to sleeping on the boat, thinking they’d be safer out on the water. One night, as he had been sleeping on deck, his sons in the cabin, the sirens had sounded and the planes had started to float in.
    I had a sudden premonition of what he was about to describe. I saw the flash of spinning propellers as our F-13 lurched into the sky. Eugene was scribbling away in his notebook, smiling encouragingly.
    Mis-tah B — this was what the man called the B-29s, waggling his flat palm toward the horizon in demonstration — drifted in very low that night. In wave after wave they came, clouds of bombs tumbling from their bellies. From the river, it soon seemed that the whole city was ablaze, red and orange flames dancing across the sky. From somewhere, what he called a “firework” landed on the boat. To his amazement, it squirted fire all over the deck, fire that stuck to the water and blazed away in the blackness. He shook his head at the memory. Napalm , I thought, picturing the dewy blue flame I’d once seen spurting from a cylinder that had gone crazy after falling loose from a bomb bay.
    The deck of his boat, piled high with coal, quickly caught on fire. The old man leaped into the water, shouting for his sons to come out of the cabin. But just then another white incendiary whistled down and squirted fire all over him, and he swam desperately to the bank, struggling to escape the flames.
    Like an accusing ghost, he opened his coat to show us his torso — a marbled mass of pink welts and sinewy grey tissue.
    From the bank, the man had stared out at the blazing hulk of his boat, its glowing heart of coal, pleading for his sons to emerge.
    He closed his eyes. He shook his head. The barge had swiftly disintegrated into a mass of ash and cinder. By the next day it had dissolved away entirely.
    The smoke from the brazier fluttered in the wind, the water in the can still tepid. A sheen of perspiration covered my forehead. A vein pulsed in my temple. The old man looked upstream, as if he expected to see his boat come floating down the river at any moment.
    I took off the lens cap of my camera and asked him if I could take some photographs. With a noble bow, he agreed.
    While I was taking the pictures, Eugene asked how he was now surviving. The man pointed at the river and made a hurling gesture as if casting a line, then an eating motion with his hands.
    â€œHe catches fish?” Eugene said. “Well, how about that.”
    I could see the story typing itself out in his head — “The Lonely Fisherman,” perhaps — accompanied by a photograph of the old man proudly holding up his day’s catch.
    But the old man was running his fingers