Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  You get away from me. You get off my porch. Go on! Get off my porch! I don’t want you coming near this family. Do you hear me? Do you? Just get away. Get away.

  He must have seen immediately that it had not been a misunderstanding, although of course he still did not know why. Perhaps his relationship with Helen might have been discovered or, an even more fleeting thought, perhaps she had been with child. The thought of such a pregnancy, the very idea of it, would turn his gut over with such fury and terror that his mouth would water in anticipation of vomiting. It could not have been that. Helen would tell him the truth. Or Jimmy would. Perhaps he would simply wait on the steps until one of them appeared. And this was essentially what he would try to do for the next three days, until the Wilsons hired a group of men to guard the road and to drive him away before he could even step onto the property, a fact I would learn at the same time I would learn the rest of what the Wilsons had done to Ray.

  I CAME UP TO THE RIDGE many times afterwards, well after summer was gone and the whole of the ridgetop pressed closer to the sky, its countenance graying over with cloud cover and then, later still, watching it awake from that winter slumber. All through that period there was evidence of youth amidst the grasses: the black ring of a campfire, a loose sock and discarded condom, empty beer bottles: secrets of youth which are, of course, secrets to no one, ownership extending on into perpetuity to whatever generation might come after just as they had presumably been inherited from whatever generation had come before.

  So that was where he and Helen had—what? fallen in love? made love?—perhaps all of it. It might have happened in an instant, him realizing (or had it been her?) that she was no longer a child, no longer simply the little sister of his best friend. And with that understanding would have come another, sharper understanding, which was that he was, in fact, different from them in ways which he had ignored or had tried to ignore for all the days of his life. Perhaps he should have seen this from the beginning, but it did not really reach his conscious mind until the days of Helen, days in which the very color of the world seemed to shift and change. The bright aurora of his childhood was honeyed by the sense of her, by the smell of her skin, deepened and darkened until everything in his life seemed lined with contrast, each bright shining moment ringed in aphotic and shadowed silhouette. He could not have traced how it had happened and even when he knew it had, knew that he had fallen in love with her—with Helen of all people!—he still could not trace its shape.

  There must have been this or something very like it: a night at the ridge when he and Jimmy and a few others had built a small campfire on a damp evening, the sun dropping early and the whole world hushing around them. One of the other boys had brought a six-pack of beer and they each had one. Helen had come with them at her own insistence; Jimmy was nineteen now and had graduated from high school—Ray too—and Helen was but sixteen and Jimmy had grown tired of dragging his kid sister around, and yet she had managed to talk him into it and had arrived to find a few other boys and girls already there, all of whom were older than she was by three years or more.

  He did not know if it was the desire of the other boys that drew him to her; the thought that his desire was so easily swayed was embarrassing and yet it had been clear that night that Helen had crossed some invisible line into womanhood. The other boys at the campfire watched her and talked with her and laughed when she laughed. Jimmy seemed oblivious to the change but Ray was not. Nor was Helen. She was like a diamond that night, funny and captivating and very much older than her sixteen years. Several times across the heat and orange glow of the campfire, her eyes locked with Ray’s. The first time he looked away just at the moment of that invisible impossible touch, and when he glanced back again she had already moved on, leaning in now to listen to something Hank Pinkerton was whispering in her ear. The next time she looked in Ray’s direction he held her gaze, their eyes meeting somewhere in that tumult of flame heat. It was she who broke the contact that time and afterwards he was left with a feeling so unfamiliar, so strange and awful and wonderful all at once, that he had trouble regaining his breath; it was, indeed, as if the whole of his being had been interrupted.

  He could not understand what had happened at the campfire even though it was all he thought about during the drive back to the Wilsons’, Helen’s leg and hip pressed against his own, she and Jimmy chattering about something he was not listening to until Jimmy called to him across the cab of the truck in the singsong faux-Asian voice he sometimes adopted when wanting to seem less serious than he actually was: “Hey why you so quiet, Charlie Chan?”

  “Just tired out, I guess,” Ray said, exhaling.

  “You so lazy,” Jimmy said. “You go night-night. Get some sleepy-sleeps.”

  “Right,” Ray said.

  “Something on your mind, Ray?” This was Helen now, her voice sounding different than it ever had, than it ever would again, not bright or loud or anything but mellow and quiet and soft.

  “Nothing I can think of,” Ray said in response.

  Later they parked the truck at the Wilsons’ and Jimmy and Helen stepped out and Jimmy said, “See ya,” and Helen waved and then they were gone and Ray stood in the darkness alone, staring first at the house and then at the silvery shape of the trail that led through the orchard rows from this home to that of his own family, still wondering at what point Helen had grown up and why he had not noticed it before. The night around him alive with insect sounds and the fluttering singing of tiny frogs. There under the bright purple dome of the stars.

  At some other time, in some other world than this, they might have merely looked at each other across one campfire or another and understood, simply and plainly, that they were not meant for each other, clearly seeing each other that one time and then moving on to other people, other friends, other lovers. But then the order had been announced and the world itself changed all at once into a kind of crucible.

  Jimmy appeared at their little whitewashed home that day, the day they all heard the news, their fathers already bowed head-to-head in conversation, expressions serious and words hushed. Ray and Jimmy left them to it, walking down the hill through trees damp with February rain, Jimmy chattering much as Mr. Wilson had been back at the house, expressing his outrage and his belief, a belief he would continue to hold, that it would all come to nothing.

  “I’m sure you’re right,” Ray told him in response.

  “I am. I know I am. Hell, Ray, we’re gonna join the army together, right?”

  “Sure we are, Jimmy,” he said. He wondered, not for the first time that day, where Helen was. “We’ll show those Japs.”

  “Ha!” Jimmy said. “Good one, Ray. Those Japs! Yeah, those Japs! We’ll show ’em for sure.”

  Helen did not come that day nor the next nor even the day after that, although he hoped and feared that she would. The night of the campfire was months in the past now, and he sometimes thought that the whole thing had been a kind of hallucination. But there had been moments since that night, unspoken moments between them when he saw her staring back at him through the trees or across the dinner table when he supped with the Wilsons, glances so quick and furtive that he wondered if they had occurred at all.

  SHE CAME TO HIM at last during the fierce spring gloaming one late afternoon in early March. He had not seen her at all in over a month and had just begun to wonder why she would choose to avoid him, and why now, of all times. But maybe he was imagining the whole thing, his desire to see her, to simply see her, making her absence acute and meaningful, where before he might not have noticed her absence at all.

  He had been working on the truck with Jimmy that day and they had cleaned up at the outdoor spigot and Ray had come down the hill path toward his own home. He could see his sisters through the trees: Mary on the tire swing he and Jimmy had hung from the branches of the persimmon in the dooryard; Doris just beside her. The sun was dropping and the orchard was mostly in shadow. He knew that, from either house, the path was b
ut a darkness now. And it was into this darkness that she came, first saying his name so that he stopped and turned and peered at her there on the shadowed path, the sky still bright above them and the whole world below a silhouette.

  “Ray?”

  The voice was so quiet, so breathless, that it took him a moment to realize that it had not simply been a facet of his pining imagination. But no no yes there she was, standing in the shadows with stripes of blue moonlight crossing the thin shape of her body.

  “What are you doing out here?” he said.

  “I just wanted to tell you . . . ,” she said, stopping now.

  “What is it?”

  She stepped toward him. He could not move, his hands at his sides even as she came to him, a few feet apart, then less. He had not realized that she was, at sixteen, an inch taller than him, so that he had to look slightly upwards to meet her eyes.

  “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I don’t want to go either,” he said simply.

  But then she was crying and because he did not know what else to do he reached across those last few inches and pulled her to him and their arms encircled each other. His hand on the back of her head. His fingers in her yellow hair. Even in the moonlight it was like gold. His voice softly shushing her. “Everything’ll be fine, Helen,” he said. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

  He thought he could feel her heart beating against him, its shape somewhere amidst the pressure of her breasts, the heat of her.

  “God, Ray,” she said. “Why is this happening?”

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  She stood pressed against him for another moment, a moment in which the night orchard all around them hissed and hummed and scraped and rattled in its quiet way. When she pulled her head away from his chest he thought she meant to break the embrace but then her lips were on his own, a quick, soft kiss. And then she turned and fled back along the trail toward the great dark silhouette of the Wilsons’ house. He stood for a long while in the night under the shadows of the first rows of trees, watching until the light of the room he knew to be Helen’s lit up from inside, a yellow rectangle cut there into the firmament of a million wheeling stars.

  Months would pass before he would lie with her on a scratchy woolen blanket unfolded upon the broken yellow grasses below a similar sky and she would love him. They would love each other. In secrecy and in silence. And then all of it would blow away, not only because of history but because of their very lives, adrift as they were in the swirling spinning sea between one continent and another.

  THE BUSES CAME two months later, a scene you have already watched unfold but which I give you again because it was the last time they were all three together. Look at them there—Ray and Jimmy and Helen—in their tight knot upon the gravel, leaning together, Jimmy having just announced his own big secret, that he had signed up for the army three days before, this news very nearly buckling Ray to his knees. He wished, indeed, that Jimmy had not told him at all. His friend would go off to fight in the war and Ray would—what?—be stuck with his family in some place he had never heard of. But of course he did not say any of this. Instead he looked to the dust at his feet and said something about how angry Jimmy’s father would be when he heard the news.

  Helen’s voice then: “I’ll say.”

  And Ray did not look toward the sound, kept his eyes on the neutral ground at their feet.

  “There’s nothing he can do about it now,” Jimmy said. “I’m property of Uncle Sam.”

  “Won’t he need you?”

  “Shoot, Ray,” Jimmy said. “You’re supposed to be on my dang side.”

  “I am.”

  “Are you?”

  Ray looked up now. Jimmy was, like his father, a head taller than Ray, gangly and slightly bucktoothed, freckled and bearing too his father’s great pink ears.

  “Jeez, Jimmy,” Helen said.

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “You did not.”

  “Well, I am.”

  “That’s helpful.”

  “Can it, Helen,” Jimmy said.

  “Oh don’t look so blue, Ray,” Helen said then. Her foot in the gravel, the thin shape of it, came forward now and poked at his own shoe, its pale, dirty toe.

  “I’m all right,” he said.

  “You’ll come back,” she said.

  Still he could not raise his head to look at her.

  “It won’t be so bad. Just think of it as an adventure.”

  “That’s right,” Jimmy said. “We’ll keep all your stuff together. Mom and Dad said so. So don’t worry.”

  “Ray?” she said now.

  “What?”

  “Are you even listening?”

  “Sure I am,” he said.

  “Well, why don’t you look at me?”

  Mr. Wilson’s voice came then, a short sound across the stacked parcels and the gravel. Jimmy turned and went toward his father and then they were alone, just the two of them, still in the square with everyone else and yet alone as he hoped and feared they would be, if only for the briefest moment.

  “Look at me, Ray,” Helen said.

  And now he did so at long last, although it took all of his effort to keep from breaking to pieces in the process, her ankles and the bare flesh of her calves and then her legs obscured by the plaid skirt she wore and then the shape of her waist at its top, the faint swell of her breasts, her arms loose at her sides in their sleeves of white fabric. When his eyes had finished the lap of her body her gaze felt a lance or bayonet that seemed to cleave directly into his heart.

  “Ray,” she said, her voice a whisper. “You won’t forget me, will you?”

  “My God,” he said. “Of course I won’t. I wouldn’t. I can’t.”

  “Shake my hand,” she said.

  “What?”

  She held her hand out to him now, suspended in the air before him. “Just do it,” she said.

  He raised his hand and she clasped it as if she were concluding some business of which he was unaware. But then he felt it: a small, round object that fit into his palm, something cold and hard and smooth.

  “Don’t look at it now,” she said. “Just put it in your pocket.”

  The sound that came up the old highway was of the hard, high squeal of air brakes and then the rattle of a diesel engine. He realized he had been listening to the great beast roll toward them for a long while.

  “They’re coming,” he said, and now his eyes went to hers.

  “You’ll be all right.”

  “I don’t want to go.”

  “I know,” she said. Her voice was breathless, a kind of wind, a hiss.

  “Raymond? Raymond?”

  He looked toward where his mother stood, his father beside her, the two of them flanked by the Wilsons. Jimmy stood just a few feet away, staring in the direction of Ray and Helen.

  His father called to him to find his sisters and then waved a hand.

  “I’ll help,” Helen said quietly.

  He could feel a pull then at her words, a tingling in his lower gut that seemed to shake through him all at once.

  “I’m gonna help,” she called.

  He thought that Jimmy might come then but Jimmy only stood there watching as they walked toward the sheds, their bodies dipping into the shadows, Ray feeling Jimmy’s eyes on him even when he knew neither he nor Helen could be seen after they had rounded the corner of the sheds, the railroad tracks stretching off into the sunlight and not a soul in sight.

  He pulled her to him then and their lips met, blooming darkly with blood and youth and fear. He could feel her tongue, could taste it on his own, slippery in the warm darkness of her mouth.

  And then the voice of a child very close so that the two leapt apart as if from electric shock: “Ooh! Kissy kissy!”

  The older of the Takahashi sisters stood just outside the shade, pointing and laughing. “Kissy kissy!” she said again.

  “Mary!” Ray shouted. “You shut your mouth.”


  “Kissy kissy!”

  He reached her before she could escape, his hand dragging her forward, his flat palm striking her face with a loud slap that elicited, from Helen, just behind him now, an audible gasp. “You shut your mouth, Mary!” he hissed.

  “You hurt me!” the child squealed.

  “I’ll hurt you more if you tell anyone. You hear me?” She did not respond and he pulled hard on her arm again. “Do you?”

  She nodded now, her tears flying fast down her cheeks.

  “Where’s your sister?”

  “Let go of me!”

  “Where’s Doris?”

  “At the bus,” the little girl mumbled sullenly, still crying faintly so that her voice was high and twisted by her grief. “They sent me to find you, dumb head.”

  He stood for a moment, holding her there, frozen, the girl’s face drooping toward the dirt and weeds. Then he said simply, “Go on then,” and let her go.

  “Ray,” Helen said, her voice breathless. “You shouldn’t have done that.”

  “What if she tells someone what she saw?”

  “She won’t. She wouldn’t.”

  “She would. Those two are the biggest bunch of tattletales ever made.”

  They stood looking at each other then. “We should go back,” he said.