Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  And so why would anyone have paid the slightest attention to Helen Wilson and her mother traveling north to Seattle or even staying there for eight or ten months? In 1943 the county felt as if it had been drained down to its bare skeleton: the Japanese gone, the boys gone, and with them both of the Wilson children, Jimmy off to the army (I would learn this soon enough), and Helen to the great Pacific Northwest. And to think that Ray Takahashi did not know that he had, while interned at Tule Lake, become a father at the age of twenty, just days before he had been allowed at long last to sign up for the army himself, that he had a child who was, even in that moment, being looked after by the Sisters of Mercy in that rain-soaked forestland at the edge of the cold, churning Pacific.

  Of course I did not even know that much at the time. The rest would begin to come after Mrs. Wilson appeared at the filling station a second time, pulling up to the pump much as she had weeks earlier. By then I had finished reading Styron’s book about Nat Turner and had returned, in the interim, to Look Homeward, Angel, a book which I had already read twice before, once in Vietnam, its sentences consuming me. O lost, and by the wind grieved, ghost, come back again.

  I had heard the car but had not yet seen it as I left the hot shadows of the office and stepped into the bright heat of the direct sun. Then the Pontiac and there, framed in the window, the face of my aunt, her eyes already trained on mine.

  “Mrs. Wilson,” I said.

  “Good morning, John,” she replied, not smiling—she never really seemed to smile—but at least nodding in a way that I thought was intended to be amiable, her stark angular features once again framed by a gauzy scarf that fanned out over the rounded mass of her hair.

  She waited until I had filled the car and washed the windows and retrieved her change from the office before asking me what she had plainly come there to ask, the Pontiac requiring little more than a top-off. Of course I said yes. Even without the pay I was strangely intrigued by the shades of narrative I had been witness to during the previous visit. And there was another reason as well. On my days off I had taken to sitting in front of my typewriter and drinking—beer at first and eventually sipping from a bottle of vodka I kept hidden under my bed. In my writerly naïveté, I thought, at the time, that the drinking was but a shadow of my inability to get my writing done, my attempt to lubricate my imagination quickened by each hour in which the page was yet empty. It did not occur me, and would not for many years, that much of that impediment was held within the greasy confines of the bottle itself. Simply put, I needed something with which to occupy my thoughts and my imagination. Something besides Vietnam. And so it was that midweek, on my day off from the station, my aunt once again met me at my grandmother’s home and we set off once more for San Jose.

  MRS. TAKAHASHI ALMOST SEEMED to be expecting us this time. Again she stood on the little porch of her bungalow when we pulled to a stop, watching as we exited the car and, also like the first time, Mrs. Wilson was pulled up short by that unwavering gaze. Both of them remained silent until we had reached the base of the little run of steps that led up to the porch and entrance, at which point Mrs. Takahashi said a single word: “Tea?” And when Mrs. Wilson did not answer, I did: “Please,” and Mrs. Takahashi turned and entered the house, leaving the door open behind her.

  She was in the kitchen for some time, during which Mrs. ­Wilson and I sat in utter and total silence. When Mrs. ­Takahashi appeared at last it was with the same tray she had brought during our previous visit: the three cups—two ornate and delicate and one heavy and thick—the creamer, the little bowl of sugar cubes. “How are you, John?” she said quietly.

  “Me?” I said. “I’m all right. I’m fine.”

  “It’s kind of you to do the driving,” she said.

  “It’s not a problem,” I mumbled.

  My aunt was silent all this time and had been mostly so from the moment we had driven away from Newcastle, but now, at the sound of Mrs. Takahashi’s voice, she began to stir, opening her purse and removing a single small sheet of paper. She glanced up now but when Mrs. Takahashi did not step forward to retrieve the sheet she lay it faceup on the table and then returned to her rigid posture, seated at the front end of the sofa’s pad so that she seemed ready, at any moment, to flee.

  She looked down briefly at the sheet. “That’s all I know,” she said quietly.

  I could not see what the paper contained from where I sat and Mrs. Takahashi did not so much as glance at it on the table, keeping her eyes focused on the woman who sat stiff and upright upon her sagging sofa. Mrs. Takahashi continued to stand near the arched doorway that led into the kitchen.

  I wondered at first if the two women would return to the strange idleness and prolonged silences that had marked my first visit to this living room, but then Mrs. Takahashi’s voice came, forceful despite its calm, thin sound: “You kept this from us for twenty-seven years,” she said.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Wilson said simply. “You have every right to be angry with me.”

  “Why did you come now? Why didn’t you just leave it quiet? We would never have known.”

  “Because I wanted Raymond’s help.”

  “Raymond’s help?”

  “To find the child. I thought maybe the courts would open the record if Raymond asked them to. As the father, I mean.”

  “Raymond?” Mrs. Takahashi’s voice, Kimiko’s, sounded distant and alone, as if in a different room.

  “Yes,” Mrs. Wilson said. “That’s what I thought. And if he doesn’t want to help me, I can understand that. After what I did. Keeping it from him.”

  “Raymond’s gone,” Kimiko said.

  “Gone where?”

  “He never came back from the war.” For a long moment Kimiko stood unmoving. No one spoke. I looked from her to my aunt and back again. Finally Kimiko mumbled, “Maybe something to eat,” and turned and stepped out of the room.

  “Kim? Kim?” Evelyn said behind her, her voice rising in volume, on her feet now, following Mrs. Takahashi into the kitchen and me following dumbly behind them both as if I might offer some assistance. Mrs. Takahashi bustled around the small room, opening a cabinet and removing a tin of cookies and then retrieving a plate. “What do you mean, he never came back from the war?” Mrs. Wilson said.

  Mrs. Takahashi looked at her now but said nothing, and after a moment she returned to the tin and opened it and began laying cookies upon the plate in the shape of a circle.

  “My God,” my aunt said then. “I don’t understand it.”

  “You don’t understand what?”

  “I don’t understand where he might have gone.”

  “He didn’t go anywhere,” Mrs. Takahashi said, turning to face her now.

  “No, no,” my aunt said. She had stepped forward and now stood in the center of the room, her breath coming fast. “You mean you never saw him?”

  Mrs. Takahashi said nothing, only stared in silence.

  “He came back,” my aunt said. “He did come back, Kim. He was in town. In Newcastle. In his uniform.” And, after a moment: “Maybe you should sit down. We don’t need anything to eat. Kim? Kim? Are you all right?”

  For a moment the woman looked as if she had turned completely to stone, even her flesh seeming to tilt gray, and when she sat at last, in a curved vinyl-padded chair that she jerked from beneath a small table, she did so as an act of crumbling decay. My aunt’s presence must have felt a kind of tidal wave set to wipe clean everything she had built for herself in San Jose, only a few hours from Newcastle and yet a world away, a world better and more secure and more like home than any she had experienced before the war.

  At long last Mrs. Takahashi’s voice came from her seat at the little table: a dry sound, like paper rubbing against sand, a sound as unfriendly and pained as any I have ever heard in my life. “Tell me what you know of my boy,” she said.

  Like her narrative of the birth of her daughter’s child, Mrs. Wilson’s account of Raymond Takahashi’s return to Placer County was fa
ltering and confused. Only later, just before the summer faded into the chill of fall, would I learn just how ­incomplete her account was, the narrative she spun disjointed because she was, at every step, erasing herself and her family from its shape. In Mrs. Takahashi’s kitchen we were (Mrs. ­Takahashi and I) offered a tale told out of order, so that it seemed at first that Raymond returned and immediately departed again. Mrs. Takahashi finally had to stop her and ask, “How long?” and even then Mrs. Wilson seemed to dissemble, her bearing rigid even as her head jerked and twitched like that of a distressed bird. “Well, I don’t know exactly. He was there and then one day he was just gone. I don’t know when he left.”

  “But how long do you think he was there?”

  “I don’t really know—”

  “Mrs. Wilson—”

  “It might have been a month. Six weeks maybe.”

  “Six weeks?” Mrs. Takahashi said now, her amazement plain in her voice. “He was in Newcastle for six weeks?”

  “Well, like I said, it’s difficult to say.”

  So her son had returned home from the war, had survived it, but somehow in all that time had failed to contact his parents at all, had not sent a telegram, had not written a postcard, had instead lived in and around Newcastle for as long as forty-two days, forty-two days in which he had been alive and she had not even known it, a time during which he had been no farther than my aunt and I had driven that very day, a matter of hours, a span of time so slight that even to consider that her son had been that close and alive and she had not even known it felt to her like a direct repudiation of everything she had already reconciled herself to believe: that her beloved son had been killed fighting for the same country that had put not only himself but also his mother and father and his two sisters behind barbed wire. But that had not been the case.

  “It’s not possible,” Mrs. Takahashi said now. “We searched everywhere. My husband even went back to Newcastle to look. He wasn’t there.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Mrs. Wilson said.

  “You’re mistaken. It was someone else you saw.”

  “I’m not mistaken, Kim. I don’t know why you didn’t find him. Maybe your husband came before your son got to ­California, or after he left. Raymond was there. I swear he was.”

  “Tell me what happened,” she said, her voice a dry rasp. They were both sitting now, Mrs. Takahashi on one side of the little table, Mrs. Wilson on the other, the two woman flanking the window through which bright yellow light glowed without direction or angle.

  “I am,” Mrs. Wilson said. “I have.”

  “From the beginning.”

  Mrs. Wilson’s body seemed, for the briefest moment, to slump, to drain, before righting itself again, the spine once more in a long ruler-straight line from waist to head. “It was a long time ago,” she said now, and when Mrs. Takahashi began to speak again she lifted a hand and the other woman fell immediately to silence. “But I’ll try,” Mrs. Wilson said.

  When she began again, Mrs. Wilson indeed started at the beginning, although it was not quite the opening scene I have supplied here. In her retelling, she was told that Ray had returned by her orchard foreman and had only seen him from a distance—perhaps in town or in Auburn a few times—so that there was, in effect, very little to tell.

  “You have to remember everything,” Mrs. Takahashi said.

  “But I’m sorry I just don’t.”

  “Who else did he talk to?”

  “I don’t know, Kim.”

  “Where did he stay?”

  “I’m not sure.” She paused then. “Maybe at the church? I know some of the Japs—I’m sorry—the Japanese stayed there. At least that’s what I heard.”

  “The Methodists?”

  “No, I meant the Buddhist church. But yes maybe the ­Methodists too.”

  Mrs. Takahashi looked at her for a long moment, the expression on her face one of absolute wonder. “So they knew?” she said after a time.

  “Who did?” This came from me, my question exploding out without warning so that both women turned immediately to look as if they had forgotten I still remained in the room.

  “The Japanese,” she said.

  “We just thought he went back to live with you,” Mrs. Wilson said then. “You know. He was there for a while and then we just didn’t see him anymore.”

  She shook her head. “He never came to us. I don’t understand why he would go there at all.”

  Mrs. Wilson did not respond. It was all too much. She had come to Mrs. Takahashi to enlist her help only to be faced with something else entirely, the realization that Raymond Takahashi’s mother had believed, all these years, that her son had perished in the war even though the army had informed her (her husband really, for it had been he who had written the Secretary of the Army) that he had been discharged. They had entered a period of panic then—this I would learn later—calling the Buddhist church, calling those few orchardists who had returned to Placer County, only to be told again and again that Raymond had not been seen, Hiro even driving there to speak to the priest in person and to be told this same information yet again. I believe now that Hiro missed finding news of his son by mere days, for his visit to Placer County must have been only a week or two before Raymond’s arrival, so that when Raymond himself had visited the church and the priest there had told him that his father had come looking for him, Raymond’s response must have been to thank the priest and to tell him a lie: that he had already returned to visit his parents and sisters and that there was no need to worry. He was a dutiful son. The priest would have nodded and smiled and that would have been the end of it. There would have been no reason for the priest or anyone else to contact the Takahashis in Oakland. Meanwhile, his parents continued to write the army, once, twice, a dozen times, asking for explanation and finally coming to accept the only truth that seemed possible: that Raymond was dead, that he had perished in Italy or Germany or France and that the army, through what her husband had called a “clerical error,” had neglected to report it correctly. But now this, this new knowledge, which Mrs. Wilson was beginning to understand, and I with her, was yet more important than any secret pregnancy or even of the existence of the child.

  Still Mrs. Wilson did not tell her of Raymond’s appearance on her porch that hot summer day, or of what she learned later about his altercation with her foreman, Bob Campo, nor did she offer any real specificity of what she knew of his movements in the county, despite the fact that she had followed those movements with some care. Her only goal at that time had been to keep him away from Helen at all costs, but her daughter was almost twenty then and had been dating a local boy, a white boy, and it was therefore nearly impossible to keep her indoors.

  “I’m sorry, Kim,” Mrs. Wilson said. “I just assumed he’d gone to find you.”

  For a long while the room rang with silence.

  “I don’t understand it,” Mrs. Takahashi said at last. “I just don’t understand it at all.”

  7

  “SO WAIT—WHERE WAS HE, THEN?”

  “Who?”

  “Jesus, Flip, who do you think? The Jap kid.”

  This was but a few days after I had returned from San Jose. The man I sat with I knew wholly by the nickname he had borne in Vietnam. I have no real notion of how it was in other units, but in ours most of us had nicknames of some kind, some colorful, some mere abbreviations of the names our parents might have called us, so that amidst Phil and Skip and Mike there was also Apache Dan and Mark-One and Tenn (short for ­Tennessee) and the great gruff African-American philosopher we all called Mama and the thin reedy stoner poet known to us as Professor Ted. And there was the man who sat across from me in the booth: my friend Chiggers, a man with whom I had lived and died in the mangrove swamps and whom I loved in the way that men who have been in combat together loved each other, many of our number bleeding out into the muck or exploded into pieces unrecognizable as human flesh. Those of us who survived had promised each other that we would st
ay in touch and that we would visit one another and be there for weddings and christenings and the like, and perhaps in the moment of our parting some of us actually believed such things were possible. But the truth was that I did not really think I would ever see any of them again after leaving the delta, not even Chiggers, who had been my best friend there. Indeed it had come to feel, in the year or so I had been stateside, that the war had been some strange dream from which I had never entirely awakened. It had all happened over there, in that other place, in another world than this. That the war was still ongoing did not seem possible, and yet it was present on a daily basis in the papers and on television and it would not be stilled.

  And so it was strange to see Chiggers now. He had called my parents’ home in Alhambra and they in turn had given him my grandmother’s number. His voice through those miles of electric cable had sounded not unlike the crackling sound of my radio, and for a moment, so fleeting it was hardly present at all, I felt myself back in the muck and mud and blood, back in the fear, but then that sensation was gone and I was on the phone in my grandmother’s living room, listening to Chiggers tell me that he would be on the way to Oregon to attend his cousin’s wedding and could he stop by. I said yes and gave him my grandmother’s address. When he finally arrived we drove around some and got more than half stoned on the fine Southern California pot he had brought with him from San Diego. Now we occupied a booth at a mostly deserted Denny’s restaurant attached to a long rambling motel pressed hard against the interstate at the very edge of Auburn, the seat of Placer County and a town of six thousand or so souls.

  I had never seen Chiggers outside of the military, and the man before me did not much resemble the man I had known in Vietnam. He had exchanged his fatigues and buzz cut for a denim shirt, pointed beard, and shaggy hair, not quite what we would have called long in 1969 but certainly on its way. It is a strange thing to say but in Vietnam I had never thought of him as Hispanic. Though he sometimes joked about being Mexican and peppered his curses with Spanish, what we did in Vietnam and who we were in that country seemed to diminish those differences, or rather made them irrelevant, although for me to say such a thing as a white man is problematic in ways I have tried to untangle for all the years since. Sitting across from me in that booth at Denny’s in that small town, Chiggers looked like the scruffy Latino mechanic he had been before the war, a life he had returned to afterwards, and I, for all my friendship and love, wondered what the other patrons in the restaurant thought of us, both of us bunny-eyed and giggling like crazy people.