Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  “You take care, man,” Chiggers said to me as I stood next to his Fairlane, the vehicle so covered in road grime that it was impossible to discern what color might lie beneath, the windshield fogged with grease and dirt and smeared insects.

  “You too,” I told him.

  We shook hands briefly and then went into a one-armed embrace, our hands still clasped, Chiggers clapping me on the back once, then twice, and then holding me there, not quite embracing now but close enough that his mouth was at my ear. “You still think about it sometimes, right?” he said.

  “Sure,” I said. “Sure I do.”

  “I still hear them sometimes.” His voice was barely a whisper. “Comin’ out of the dark. And I can’t tell if they’re gooks or our guys. You know? I sometimes wake up screaming like I’m still there. Scares the shit out of my mom.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “I still feel like they’re trying to kill me,” he said.

  “Me too.”

  He seemed to relax at that admission, and after a moment he released me from his embrace, his body sagging toward the car, be it in relief or exhaustion I did not know.

  There was a different texture to talking about such things in the bright warm light of the morning, different than it had been even brushing up against those subjects in the darkness of my grandmother’s back porch as the night rode on and on and our pot-stoked mellow flooded toward simple fatigue and finally to sleep. In a way, I was relieved that Chiggers was leaving, for I had sensed he wanted, more than anything, to talk about what had happened over there. But I was afraid that talking about it would bring the sluggish constant flow of the Nine Dragon River into a torrent, one which we would not be able to control or navigate and which would pull us both under its powerful current. How I wish now that I had held him there, had asked him to tell me more about how he felt, about how he was, but I did not. Sometimes I imagine myself telling him that he should picture me beside him when those black ghosts faded out of the shadows of that dream jungle, my radio warm and the handset of the Prick 10 already at my ear, already calling down a hellfire of salvation from the bright wet sky. But of course I said none of those things and Chiggers slipped behind the seat of the grime-encrusted Fairlane in silence, not speaking again until I had moved to walk back up the steps to my grandmother’s. He called out my name then and I turned. Chiggers sat framed in the open window, his hair in dark greased furrows and his eyes black but his mouth upturned in a grin. “Got a present for you,” he said. And when I reached the door he handed me, through the window, a paper sack. I could smell the pot within, its sticky aroma emanating everywhere. “Shit,” I said, “let me get my wallet.”

  “It’s a present,” he said. “You can’t pay for no present.” Then the Fairlane roared to life, its engine rumbling low and heavy in my chest. And a few moments later he was gone.

  “YOU LOOK TERRIBLE.”

  This a few days after Chiggers’s departure as I stood in my grandmother’s kitchen, wanting a cigarette or a cup of coffee or both, wanting something to do with my hands to keep them from shaking, having been drunk for much of the two days before, including, to a somewhat lesser extent, those hours I spent behind the counter at the filling station. I knew I was slipping toward some further darkness, and I knew that the drinking was only a half measure against it. Chiggers’s visit had something to do with this spiral, although it was difficult to pinpoint exactly what his presence had done to me. Perhaps his departing admission that he still felt like someone was trying to kill him was enough to send me over the edge, if this was indeed what going over the edge felt like. All I really knew was that the measure the alcohol provided was insubstantial given the enormity of the great glass well into which all my fears seemed to swirl without end.

  My grandmother, that morning, looked at me gravely, waiting for a response of some kind. She was not so directly critical of my behavior as my parents often were, especially her daughter, my mother, but there was perhaps a knot of criticism stuffed hard against her sense of concern, her eyes bright and watchful in the soft dry thin-lined whiteness of her face.

  “I’m okay, Gran,” I told her.

  “You most certainly are not,” she said. “I can smell the liquor on you from here.”

  “I’ve gotta get to work.”

  “You can’t do that,” she said now. “Not yet.”

  She rose and pulled me into the small confines of the washroom, one hand tight on my wrist, the other stoppering the claw-foot tub and turning the spigot on full.

  “Hot bath,” she said. “Cure all.” Then she paused and said, “Well, not cure all but it’ll help.”

  “I don’t want to take a bath, Gran.”

  “And yet that’s what you’re gonna do.”

  “I’m not a child.”

  “Aren’t you? I’ll bring you a clean set of clothes and I’ll set a cup of coffee right here on the counter. You can drink it in the tub if you want.”

  Then she left the room, the door swinging closed behind her. And because she was my grandmother and because I think I needed, more than anything else, for someone to simply tell me what it was I should do, I climbed into the blazing heat of the tub, sinking down to my chin and then submerging myself altogether, the ceiling above me wobbling in the rippling heat.

  KIMIKO TAKAHASHI ARRIVED at the filling station a few days later. The feeling of terror that possessed me had dissipated but was not gone altogether. It would take a lifetime for that feeling to fade, if it ever did, if it ever has. At the very least I had managed to stop drinking in the daytime and was willing to count that as some small success.

  I had heard the sedan stop at the pumps, the vehicle unfamiliar, its hood facing away from me so that I could only see the halo of dark hair around the driver’s head. But once at the window I found myself staring down into Mrs. Takahashi’s upturned face.

  For a moment neither of us spoke, our simultaneous surprise rendering us both utterly speechless. Then I said quietly, “Oh,” and then, “Mrs. Takahashi.”

  “John,” she said. She looked through me for a moment, toward the office, and then looked back at me once more. “You work here?”

  “That’s right,” I told her. “You’re . . . are you . . . you’re traveling through or . . .”

  “I’m coming to see Mrs. Wilson,” she said grimly, looking forward through the dirty windshield now.

  “Right, of course,” I said, and, as she made no further comment, I began to go about my general duties, cleaning the bug-spattered glass and filling the engine, and when I returned to the driver’s side Mrs. Takahashi looked up at me, her eyes tinged, I thought, with emotion. “John, I wondered if you would do me a great favor,” she said, her voice steady despite her bright, wet eyes.

  I handed her the change and told her I would be happy to do whatever it was she needed. Mrs. Takahashi asked if I knew a place where she and Mrs. Wilson could meet, and when I asked her if she needed help getting to the Wilsons’ her expression seemed to crumble in on itself like a pile of slightly damp sand. “I can’t go up there,” she said, her sentences ever tinged with the faint curl of her accent. “I thought I could but I can’t.” She looked up at me then. “You must think me very silly,” she said, “driving all the way here from San Jose. An old lady. And now I can’t even go up to a house and knock on a door.”

  I supposed I might have suggested the very Denny’s restaurant where I had sat with Chiggers a few days before, or, for that matter, any of the other little cafés in town, but when I opened my mouth again what came was not the suggestion of a restaurant but of my grandmother’s home. “It’ll be private,” I told her. “My grandmother won’t bother us at all. You, I mean. And Mrs. Wilson.”

  First my old war buddy and now Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. ­Takahashi. I knew I was taking some advantage of my grandmother’s hospitality, but I wanted to be there for their talk, wanted it so badly that I thought for the briefest moment I might not survive being excluded.

&nb
sp; Mrs. Takahashi did not even question my invitation. “Your grandmother’s?” she said simply. “That would be very nice.”

  9

  WHEN HE WAS YOUNGER IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN HE AND JIMMY together—two boys, thin, tan, shirtless, wandering the hills until their minds were great topographical maps upon which were inscribed that esoteric hierarchy of meaning important to boys alone: the prime locales for fishing and swimming, the decayed oak husks that provided homes to rattlesnakes, the trees that could be most easily scaled, and the sources of the coldest, clearest water. There had been chores, too, of course, but in his memory there were long periods of adventure where they hiked the ridges and hills seemingly without end. But Ray was no longer a boy, and his thoughts, his very memories, had turned to ash and shadow. Now his waking dreams brought to mind not the innocence of boyhood, however lost, but what had come after: her face, her body, so often in his thoughts that he sometimes imagined he could actually feel the warmth of her flesh in his hands. Even his sleep was broken by the myth of a past that was already lost to him, although he did not yet know it.

  On the way north they had watched Mount Shasta rotate across the windows of the train, its great hulking shape a silver ghost floating in the distant pines. Ray’s father had begun speaking in Japanese at the sight of that mountain, almost as if he had locked into a kind of prayer, his voice wistful and lonely. When Ray asked him what he was saying his mother whispered to quiet him. What he could understand—and his understanding of Japanese was poor at best—was something about the mountain his father called Fujisan, a peak that Ray knew had risen above his father’s home in Japan. He had known his father to be ever-practical, but now the man seemed enraptured to a fugue state, staring out toward that mountain, his view broken from time to time by a forest that seemed to rush in on the windows and then to flee into the distance.

  Ray thought of Helen. He would have liked to tell her about this mountain, this mountain that had apparently reminded his father of another mountain, a Japanese mountain, and wondered if he could write her in such a way that she would understand that what he really wanted to tell her could never be written down. What he wanted—what he must have wanted—was a simple return to the way things had been before, and to that end he would have rolled the whole clock all the way back to his own childhood, before his heart had gone crazy, before his family had been sent off the only land he had ever known.

  He sometimes thought of that great white peak in the long days after they arrived at Tule Lake: the barracks arranged in orderly rows, the fencing that enclosed them straight and clean, sagebrush rolling off in all directions, and the jagged line of Castle Rock rising against the southern sky. Beyond it, somewhere, was the white tower of Mount Shasta which he had come to think of as the ghost of his father’s memory of Fujisan but which held no meaning to the son except that it lay in the general direction of home, a beacon he could not see for the desolate outcropping that stood in its path. He told himself that he would scale that desolation one day, perhaps soon, simply so that he could once more see what lay beyond it in the long stretch of the country to the southwest, the sugar pine and foxtail, cedars and firs and, once or twice along the road, oak trees like those that dotted the hills behind them. Here in the camp there were no trees at all.

  The five of them shared one room, military-style cots crowding the tiny space. Sometimes his mother would have him stack those cots in a corner so that she could sweep the dust from the floor, although when the wind blew, and it blew nearly every day of the year, the dust swam through every crack and crevice despite the tar-paper siding, even blowing up through the gaps in the floor until each worn board was lined with a row of colorless soil. At first there had been no furniture at all except those cots—no shelves, no chests of drawers, no furniture upon and into which they might have unpacked their meager suitcases. But the War Relocation Authority would come by on occasion with scrap wood and he and the others would set to building what they needed. There were carpenters among them and someone set up a rudimentary shop, the tools mostly handmade, and from this and the labor of their own hands—Ray’s and his father’s—they built or acquired chairs and a kitchen table and shelves and a few cabinets from which his mother might produce a semblance of housekeeping. Later his father would procure a roll of used linoleum from a local farmer and they would move everything outside and his father kneel and push the roll across the boards until it was flat, a look of triumph in his eyes for which Ray was embarrassed, for what station had they reached that a roll of linoleum could serve as a triumph of the will?

  Dear Helen & Jimmy, he wrote later that night. It is lonely in this place but I am doing my best to keep my chin up. The room we are in is leaky as an old boat so dust blows in all the time. My dad put down some linoleum and I hope that helps some. Jimmy—are you in the Army now? I guess I won’t be able to join. We could be storming Tokyo together. Maybe that sounds like a strange thing to say but that’s how I feel about it. I know you do too. Helen—I hope you’re well. We think of you guys here a lot. Nothing to do but think about things. Give my best to your mom and pop. —Ray

  EACH OF THE LETTERS they received from the Wilsons was almost identical to the one that had come before, as if the first had supplied a kind of blueprint. When Kimiko considered them later they seemed not unlike the rooms they were assigned at Tule Lake and later at Jerome: each a copy of the last. But the families had worked hard to build within the confines of their rooms a sense of the people within. The differences were small but they were significant enough to give those spaces at least the semblance of home, not for the Issei and perhaps not for the older of the Nisei either but for the children, at least for them. She had just come to understand this not long before I first met her when the older of her two granddaughters, age thirteen, had chosen to write a report on her family history. That child’s mother, Doris, told her daughter what she recalled of those years—she had been eight at the start and eleven when the war had ended. It had not occurred to Doris that the girl would ask her grandmother and it would not have occurred to Doris that the girl’s grandmother would speak of such things because never in Doris’s life had her own mother so much as mentioned their time in the camps. “She answered your questions?” Doris stuttered. “Really?” and her daughter answered, “Sure she did. Why wouldn’t she?” as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Doris read her daughter’s notes later, notes which spoke to a variety of uncomplaining suffering that Doris herself found all too familiar, as if what had happened to her family were natural and could not be helped: the shared toilets, the barbed wire, the dust through the boards, the loss of their family home, all of it.

  And yet it had not felt so badly to Doris herself at the time. One Sunday after church, when she and her mother sat in her living room in San Jose, she told her mother that it had not been so much like prison to her, nor, she surmised, to her sister Mary, but had been more like going on a kind of vacation, like camping. The children she knew were all assembled there together so that instead of only seeing her friends at the grammar school or at church on Sundays, she got to see them every day, and as there were few chores for children apart from homework, they were allowed to play together for hours and hours.

  “But we had no choice,” her mother had said in response, her hands, like soft paper now, held crossed upon her lap. “They put us there because they were afraid of us.”

  “I know,” Doris said. She paused a long moment then. Her husband, a white man who sold electronic components and was often on the road, stood in the doorway listening, and Doris glanced up at him briefly before continuing. “I guess what I mean is that you did a good job,” she said.

  “Of what?”

  “Of making us feel like everything was going to be all right. Block fifty-seven felt like home.”

  Kimiko exhaled sharply at this, her tone dismissive, her hands rising as if to wipe away the absurdity of such a statement. “It was a prison,” she said. “Not home.” />
  “I know, Mom,” Doris said then. “I can’t imagine what it was like for you. As a mother, I mean. I just wanted you to know that you did a good job of keeping things normal.”

  “Okasama, she’s trying to give you a compliment.” This from Doris’s husband. He used the formal Japanese word for mother, something he did when he was trying to clamber past Kimiko’s defenses, and while Kimiko herself recognized this ploy she could not help but smile inwardly at the man’s care.

  “I know,” Kimiko said. “I know she is.”

  “It’s not such a bad thing to be told you’ve done a good job,” Doris’s husband said now.

  But she could say nothing to this. She had survived. Her husband had survived. Her daughters had survived. That was all.

  IN MY GRANDMOTHER’S living room, Mrs. Takahashi talked of the camps only sporadically, telling me—and sometimes Mrs. Wilson as well—what their lives had been like in that dismal shadscale desert in the far north of the state. Her grand­daughter’s school paper uncapped what had been, for decades, a period of Mrs. Takahashi’s life which was simply not discussed, so that it might have felt to the generations to come after as if their parents and grandparents had simply decided to move from one place to another in a manner identical to the way in which those same parents or grandparents or great-grandparents had once decided to emigrate from Japan. She had not treated it quite as a secret or as something to be ashamed of but instead considered it under the wide umbrella of what she called, in passing, gaman.

  “What did you call it?” I asked her when she sat upon my grandmother’s settee on that warm summer afternoon, a fan buzzing from the corner. She had said the word twice or three times before, not offering enough pause afterwards for me to interrupt.