Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  That was all. Not, as it would turn out, their final meeting but the last time she would look at him as an object of her love, the end point of a long shining rope that, for a time, tied them together heart to heart. This image of them was hers, to hold her during whatever weeks and months were to come.

  She did not know where the Takahashis were going, her father’s answer to her question vague, without a place name or locator of any kind, nothing with which she might consult the Rand McNally. Their departure, not just of the Takahashis but of other of her classmates at the high school in Auburn, felt as if directed into a mystifying fog. If only she knew where they were going she might study it and think on it and investigate it in the library and so then she would know something and could tie one end of that shining rope around that place so that it would be held there in her heart like a stone.

  But of course that moment behind the fruit sheds had really been the beginning of its end. That her heart would turn in the weeks and months and years to follow, that it would turn away from Raymond Takahashi and toward closer, more immediate possibilities would be surprising only in a novel, for how long could we expect a teenage heart to stay true across the waters of some unknown sea? Helen would pine for her first love for a few months and then she would be gone for much of the rest of the year. That part of the story I have already told. By the time Ray Takahashi appeared in Placer County in 1945 she had long since returned and had been seeing a local boy, the son of a machinist, for eleven months. She would not marry that boy and I do not think she had yet come to the conclusion that she had to leave the county altogether, had to find someone to marry who would take her away. That conclusion, I think, came later, when Ray happened upon her at a diner in Auburn and she understood at last that the carefully constructed artifice that had become her life was not her own work at all but was and had always been the work of her mother, and were she to live she would need to flee everything she had ever known for some brighter future elsewhere upon the globe.

  THE SCENE AT THE DINER was one I learned of only because Mrs. Wilson inadvertently referred to it during what might have otherwise been a brief exchange upon parting. “It was like he came back just to finish ruining what he had started those years before,” she told me that night in her Pontiac after Mrs. ­Takahashi had left for San Jose. This was five weeks after Mrs. Takahashi’s first appearance at the filling station, and we had met and driven around to various locations a half dozen times in the days between. We had discovered, frankly, very little that might lead us to understand the situation which had resulted in Ray Takahashi’s disappearance, although we did know something of his movements during those weeks, twenty-seven years before, when he had walked the hills of Placer County looking for answers he would never find.

  As it would turn out, the night of that conversation was effectively the end of those days, when the two women and I would drive along those snaking roads through the oaks and the last of the orchards. The great teeming industry of Placer County fruit production had been decimated, I was to learn, by a statewide blight that killed off the trees even as the industry itself was faltering, that whole era coming to an abrupt close within a span of a few agonizing months, the orchards dead, the sheds closed, the towns along the old highway never really recovering, so that what remained when I arrived were quaint collections of old-fashioned houses and touristy businesses huddled beside the constant roar of the new interstate. I did not know that that day in late summer was to be the last with Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Takahashi, although thinking back on it now I might have surmised that the end was coming, for we had driven up and down the county looking for clues that were simply not there. July had broken into August and then August too was coming to a close.

  That last day was not unlike all the days that had come before, a kind of pointless and meandering drive, unguided and unmapped, to find any scrap of information that yet remained. We had visited a corner drugstore in Loomis owned and operated by a Japanese-American family, one of the few that had returned to the area after internment. They greeted Ms. Takahashi in English, the proprietor gathering his wife and grandmother and children from the back room, all of them smiling and nodding. They recalled generally that Ray had been in the area in 1945, if only briefly, remembering him mostly because of his uniform, a uniform he was apparently never seen without.

  When we left that drugstore, Mrs. Takahashi was very quiet, her face utterly drained of color, haggard and exhausted and lined with a sense of profound disappointment. It seemed clear in that moment that she understood, finally and irrefutably, that she would never discover what had happened to her son, that he had appeared briefly amidst that small chain of little towns that ran up and down the railroad, he had walked the orchard rows one last time for five weeks or six weeks or more, and then had winked out of her life and likely out of existence for reasons she would never know.

  “Is there anywhere else you’d like to go?” I asked her as the Pontiac’s hood flashed in the hot late afternoon sunlight.

  “I’d like to go home now,” she said simply.

  “All right,” I told her, and piloted the car back to my grandmother’s, where Mrs. Takahashi slipped out immediately, muttering a quick, plain, “Thank you,” and then closed the rear door.

  Mrs. Wilson’s voice beside me, its tone absent, lilting: “She still thinks her boy’s some kind of hero.”

  “He fought in the 442nd,” I said. “Doesn’t that qualify?”

  “No,” she said firmly. “Don’t you know that he came back here to ruin me? Can’t you see that?”

  “To ruin you? To ruin you? My God, he didn’t even know what was happening.”

  “So why didn’t he just leave? It’s like he just couldn’t let it go. He just had to keep hounding us all.”

  It was too much and I was angry now but before I could speak again, Mrs. Wilson said: “She had a boyfriend, you know. Not the man she married but they were serious. A local boy named Fisher.”

  “Helen? You mean Helen had a boyfriend?”

  “Of course I mean Helen. That thing with Ray wasn’t special. It was just a—just a—stupid—well, he seduced her is what it was. A sixteen-year-old girl. A child, really. God—he just wouldn’t leave. I mean he did eventually, obviously, but—it was like having a big spider hiding in the house somewhere and you never knew which cup it’d be under.”

  “He just wanted a clear answer why you’d kicked his family out of their home. That’s all.”

  “They were tenants, John,” she said sternly. “I’m not required to give them any answer at all.”

  “They were more than tenants.”

  If she heard this she did not acknowledge it, instead talking over me, saying things now that she should have said a month or more before, even twenty-seven years before. “It was that thing at the diner that brought it to a head. After that she would hardly speak to me at all. So you see I had to do something, didn’t I? As a mother, didn’t I have to do something?”

  “What do you mean? What are you saying?”

  “Well,” she said, and for a long time that was all. Then her voice started up again, resigned: “This is not to be repeated. Not to that woman or anyone else. Are we clear?”

  I nodded and she looked out the window toward the street. I thought she would begin her story, whatever it was to be, but instead she nodded into the darkness and told me we would have to drive there.

  11

  ON THE DRIVE TO AUBURN, MRS. WILSON TOLD ME WHAT SHE had, up to that point, kept in secret: that Ray had come to her home—“My home!” she exclaimed, baffled and outraged even years later—and that she had run him off the property. She had thought that would be the end of it, but of course he returned the next day. This time her husband was present. He and the boy—a man now, a soldier who had been under fire and had killed, done things that Homer Wilson had never done and never would—had words there on the porch. Homer tried at first to be reasonable, but Ray kept asking why why why no matter
what her husband said to him until Homer lost his temper, a rare event, his fleshy freckled countenance reddening from the end of his nose to the tips of his outsized ears. “Get off my property or so help me God I’ll have you thrown in jail,” his voice raised in a howl, indignant, bereft of patience, and still harboring the secret knowledge that here stood the father of his own grandson. He was unable to look him directly in the face, a face which must have reminded him of his friend Tak and all that had been before and all that would never be again. He had never seen the baby, neither of the men had, and although Mrs. Wilson did not say it I could not help but wonder if there was a great swath of loss running through Homer Wilson on that porch, that it had come to this, that in another world he might have embraced this boy as a son to replace the one that was lost.

  The war was over now, of course, but those years in which the names of the dead appeared in the newspaper had hardly closed at all. The regular news conferred a kind of terrible celebrity, those families anointed by the war’s great scythe becoming, through tragedy itself, the sudden center point and fulcrum of countless whispered conversations, as if giving full voice to those names—the names of the war dead—would somehow draw the attention of that dark reaper. Delivery of that news was—and this directly from Mrs. Wilson’s lips—the purview of the postman, Eddie Farwell, a short, timid man of forty during the war years, whose unlucky lot was to deliver the Western Union telegrams announcing what amounted to a roll call of dead boys.

  MR HOMER E WILSON

  NEWCASTLE CALIFORNIA

  THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY HAS ASKED ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR SON PRIVATE FIRST CLASS JAMES WILSON DIED FEBRUARY 21 IN PACIFIC AREA WHILE IN PERFORMANCE OF HIS DUTIES AND SERVICE OF HIS COUNTRY LETTER FOLLOWS

  ULIO THE ADJUTANT GENERAL

  That quiet man in his rattling mail wagon seemed to shrink in the span of those years until he was nothing more than the gray ghost of his former self, one ghost carrying news from a whole world of ghosts.

  Despite the fact that many of the residents of Placer County could draw their family trees to England and France and Italy and even Germany, few had been to any of those places, the dusty, sepia-toned photographs of their ancestors—our ancestors, since I am speaking, of course, of that dreaded but hardly universal we—providing a tenuous link. The great war machine in Europe boiled in us as if our homelands were overrun by the unwashed barbarian hordes of our nightmares, homelands we assumed were little different from our lives in Newcastle or Auburn or Loomis or any of the other little towns up and down the old highway, the European languages mostly forgotten, but the culture sharing a common root so when our boys died on that soil it was not so foreign as it might have been otherwise. It was Europe, after all; the people there looked like us and spoke languages we could at least recognize as languages. That was enough to bind us to a common sense of shared humanity.

  But there was also, of course, the other war, the war in the Pacific, a landscape that felt different from us, separate from us, more savage, more other. The Midway Atoll, the long bloodbath of Guadalcanal, the Battles of Tenaru and the Eastern Solomons and ­Matanikau. And so Tarawa and Makin and Eniwetok. And so Saipan and Angaur and Iwo Jima and Okinawa. And so ­Hiroshima. And so Nagasaki. We did not feel the Japanese dead. We would have dropped a thousand atomic bombs on every one of their cities and we would have watched them become ash over and over because they had taken our children, our boys, and they would pay as long as there was yet breath in our lungs. Jimmy Wilson’s end came on the island of Iwo Jima in the shadow of the great rock hulk of Mount Suribachi, a bullet passing through his chest so that he just had time to look down to the torn front of his uniform shirt where the blood was already pumping from the pressure of the final beat of his heart. He died facedown in the sand, and if he cursed his killers or thought of his bosom friend or of a girl or of his country or of anything at all, I do not know. What I know is that he died like so many others on some island he had never heard of and did not care about, fighting an enemy he did not know and could not understand. Seven thousand in February of 1945. Millions more in the years since. And millions more to come.

  Mrs. Wilson and I reached what turned out to be a café, a quaint, box-like room on Auburn’s main street, a roadway lined with old-fashioned businesses from a different time, redolent of nostalgia for an era that likely never existed at all. Memory ­filtered out the horrors so that what remained was that gauzy yellow light and the feeling that there had been, once upon a time, a period in which life was better than it would ever be again, the children respectful of their elders, the fruit heavy on the boughs, the rules just and easy to follow.

  What the street stood for, at least for me, was something that had come up again and again whenever I spoke to anyone about 1945. They did not remember Ray Takahashi but what they did recall was an abiding sense of joy, for the war was over and the whole country was jubilant with success, with victory, especially in the small communities up and down what had been the old highway. There had been parades here in Auburn, likely on the very street where Mrs. Wilson had directed me drive her Pontiac, parades meant to celebrate the victors, spaced in ranks and led by open-topped cars filled with waving girls and square-jawed older men, their hair shorn to stubble as if in tribute to those discharged veterans.

  “Are you hungry?” Mrs. Wilson said from the passenger seat. “Let me buy us dinner.”

  “Why are we here?”

  “Let’s go inside,” she said. “I’m feeling peckish.”

  What I wanted more than anything was to shift the car into park, open its door, and simply walk away. I knew, I think, that what would come next would be the truth, and yet, perhaps strangely, I did not know that I wanted to hear it. I had already agreed not to tell Mrs. Takahashi, not even to tell my grandmother, and so were Mrs. Wilson to tell me the next piece of the story I would become complicit in her lie, in her secret. I already was.

  But in the end I followed her into the quiet interior of the diner with its muted sounds of cutlery and its warm savory smell of grease and meat and potatoes, and I sat and listened to Mrs. Wilson, to her admission which was also tinged with the steadfast belief that she was, that she had been, in the right to do what she had done.

  “She was eating with her beau,” Mrs. Wilson told me.

  “Helen was?”

  “Yes, Helen,” she said. “I don’t know where in the restaurant but let’s say it was right here at this table. I wasn’t here, you understand. I was at home, but Helen told me all about it. You bet she did.”

  “I thought you said she wouldn’t talk to you afterwards.”

  “No, that was a bit later, but I could tell it all came from that night. She was so upset, John. Just hysterical, really. It took me several hours to calm her down.”

  “What happened?” I asked her then. I had ordered a chicken-fried steak and the waitress set the thick white plate upon the table before me, asking us if there was anything else and then disappearing to other tables and other customers.

  “Well, like I said,” Mrs. Wilson told me then, “Helen was eating with her beau.”

  RAY TAKAHASHI HAD BEEN in Placer County for nearly six weeks when he stepped into that diner. He had been to the ­Wilsons’ property four or five times in that period, although during all but the first two instances he had been held back at the property line, for Mr. Wilson had hired a group of local pickers (Mrs. Wilson, actually, although it had been Mr. ­Wilson who paid them) to stand at the road and ensure that he came no farther than the ditch. Undoubtedly they had called him all variety of slurs, racial and otherwise, but he never rose to whatever challenge they offered, holding back along the gravel of the roadway in his increasingly dusty uniform, hot and sweating in the lengthening summer sun. Perhaps he also came under the darkness of moonlight, skating in under the trees and watching the house, looking up at the windows for any trace of Jimmy or Helen, Jimmy’s always dark but seeing light in Helen’s and perhaps even her shap
e there. Perhaps too he wandered in that same darkness to the house in which he had spent all his life until the buses and the war—that small whitewashed house, in need of repairs and fresh paint now as it never had been when his own family had lived there. That house was filled with light and the shapes of its new residents, from Oklahoma and whose names he did not even know. Perhaps one of the men who had taunted him from the road was husband to the woman he had seen when he had first arrived and had stood in front of that house, for the men who guarded the Wilsons’ driveway were not men whom Ray knew but were from elsewhere, in town only for the summer months, for the picking and processing, and then would scatter southward into fields of apples and grapefruit and oranges.

  He would not have entered the diner had he not seen her through the front window, and for a long while he could only stand on the sidewalk, peering into the darkness, at first unbelieving and then realizing that yes it was her, it was Helen, at long last. There she was, seated across the room with a young man Ray did not know and hardly noticed at all.

  “Helen,” he said. He had already pulled the door open and stood squinting into the muted light of the interior, the room quieting as diners turned to look, their forks suspended in the air, his shape in the doorway rigid, uniformed. Then the waitress was beside him, her voice hovering somewhere between whisper and wail: “I’m sorry but you can’t be in here. We just can’t serve you. I’m sorry but it’s just our policy,” and his response was baffled surprise, not even understanding until that moment what kind of room, what kind of business, he had stepped into. “What? What?” focused all the while on Helen, his eyes still adjusting to the muted light. He felt himself pulled toward her even as the waitress continued to speak, “You can’t be in here, it’s not for you, didn’t you see the sign?” and him continuing to mumble, “What? What?” even as he pushed past her.