Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

  When he reached Helen’s table, the waitress was still there like some insect fluttering around his face, repeating something so that Helen had to look from Ray to the waitress and then to her dining companion who had stood now and was also talking, “Can I help you, bud? What’s the trouble here?” his voice amicable, his hand on Ray’s arm as if to reassure him that everything would be fine.

  “Helen,” he said.

  And her voice, when it came, was like an exhale: “Oh Ray.”

  “I’ve been trying—”

  But the waitress now, again: “You’re gonna have to leave. We don’t serve you people here. We just don’t. It’s policy.”

  “I just need to speak to—”

  “You’ve gotta go right out that door or I’m calling the police.”

  “Ma’am, if you’ll just—”

  “Right out that door. I’m calling the police. They’ll—”

  “Go ahead! Go ahead and call them. Call whoever you want.” And when the waitress did not move he shouted at her again: “Well, go on then. Make your phone call.”

  “Whoa bud,” the man at his elbow said. Ray looked at him now. A plain-faced young man barely out of his teens, white of course, skin tanned from a summer of sunlight, his shirt clean denim, dressed, Ray thought, not unlike how he might have dressed in those days before. He turned to see the look on Helen’s face, her sense of confusion, guilt, fear, horror at seeing him there.

  “Will you talk to me?” And when she did not respond he said her name.

  “Look, bud,” the man said, “maybe you and I should head outside.”

  “Helen,” Ray said again.

  “You’ve got to go, Ray,” she said then, quietly, not looking at him now, her eyes averted. “Just leave. Just leave us alone.”

  “Please,” he said.

  Mrs. Wilson told me that the young man at the table was Helen’s beau, Ed Fisher, and that he and Helen had been dating for three months, although the night Ray happened upon her at the diner would be their last date, their connection dissipating all at once like water into sand. But now he was there at Ray’s side, wiry and muscular, not slack but not a soldier either, or at least not a veteran of combat, and a head taller than Ray. When he spoke again his voice was firm and resolute and direct: “I’m gonna ask you to step away from our table, bud.”

  The waitress had disappeared now, perhaps to call the police, the diner around them utterly frozen as if in tableau.

  “I’ve been to the house,” Ray said.

  “I know.”

  “They told you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’ve been trying to see you. To talk to you.”

  “Ray, this is my boyfriend. Ed Fisher. Ed—this is Ray. My . . . well, he used to be my neighbor.”

  “Your neighbor?” Ray said.

  “Now you should go,” she said. “You don’t live here anymore, Ray.”

  And then another question, one which had been eating at him for all those weeks and which he might have asked anyone he had come across, even the priest at the Buddhist church, but had not because, in his heart, he already knew the answer: “Where’s Jimmy, Helen?”

  “Jimmy?”

  “Where is he? Is he still in the army?”

  “Ray,” Helen said quietly. Just that.

  She did not have to say more. The force of it was unexpected: a hard blow that seemed to strike him everywhere at once as if the air itself had solidified around him and then pressed in so that the whole of him—not just his body but everything he was—seemed all at once to crush in on itself.

  “Ah no,” he said. “Goddammit. Goddammit.”

  “Come on, bud,” Fisher said at his arm, and while a moment before Ray might well have swung on him, on his bland tan face, might have swung on him and might have kept on swinging in rage and terror and despair, now he let that thin hard grip turn him away from the table, glancing back at Helen one final time, her face a mask of confusion and concern and even sadness. But not love. And Ray hoped he would never see that face again.

  WE WERE SILENT THEN. Looking down at my empty plate with its smears of grease, I thought inexplicably of Chiggers and our talk at that Denny’s across town and how we managed, all into that smoky night, to skip over the real topic of our conversation, the one neither of us would bring up except in the thinnest and most fleeting of terms. He had not called me on the way back home to San Diego and I was thankful for that even as a deep pang of regret thumped my ribs.

  “You think I was wrong?”

  I looked up at her. “I’m sure you did what you thought best.”

  “Thank you, John,” she said.

  She looked away now, her eyes out past me toward the window that faced the street, eyes so startlingly blue that they appeared as if chips of ice.

  “What happened next?” I said.

  “Next?”

  “In the car you said that you had to do something after Helen saw him here. So what was it? What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do anything any mother wouldn’t have done.”

  “What did you do?”

  In the muted light of the diner I could almost see the woman she had been at thirty or twenty or even the girl she had been before that, the years stripped away and the ghost of her former self just beyond the light of those years, when the future had been yet open and the stakes controlled by choices never as dire as those to come after.

  “Well, I’ll tell you what I did,” she said at last, her spine seeming to straighten at the words, her neck and head elevating. “I did what my daughter asked me to do. And she was right to ask me. I had my husband pay some of the men to chase him off. He left me no choice.”

  “Who did it?”

  “Just some men who worked for us on the property. Migrants. They left at the end of the picking. What does it matter who they were?”

  “What happened?”

  “Well, he left, didn’t he?”

  “Jesus Christ.”

  “You’ll have children of your own one day. Then you’ll understand. You’d do anything for your children. Anything.”

  For all the years that followed that evening I have wished that I would have said something of value in that moment, something which might have served to lay bare all the truths and lies we had been snaking through during the blazing heat of that summer, something that would make sense of it, or even something more banal, a curse of anger or of despair, a damnation leveled at this woman whose deceit had blown apart not only her own family but Ray Takahashi’s family as well. But no words came, and in the end I only sat there, staring down at my empty dinner plate, my sweating water glass.

  “She was so young. And I didn’t know what she’d do if she saw him again. I was afraid she’d fall right back into his arms. I don’t expect you to understand but I thought Helen would, maybe not at first but certainly after she had her own children. I thought she’d understand then at least.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “Had you asked me that a few months ago I might have said no. Now I’m just not sure. It’s a strange feeling to have no family. I don’t even know where my daughter lives anymore. Last time I wrote her the letter was returned. Not at this address. Phone disconnected or changed. No forwarding number. Not in the phone book. It’s like she just disappeared.”

  “Like Ray,” I said.

  And now she looked at me and the expression that passed over her face was like a thousand clouds at once. The youth I had seen before was gone now and in its place stood every moment of her sixty-nine years, a woman who was, I realized, broken by all the decisions she had ever made.

  “Come on,” I told her. “It’s getting late.”

  “John.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  FOR THE REST OF THAT SUMMER I returned to the relative mundanity of my days before Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Takahashi had entered my life. I thought often of calling Ray’s mother to tell her what I had learned, but each time something held
me back, not a sense of loyalty to family or to race but perhaps simply the knowledge that what I had learned did not amount to much at all. He had been run off the property and did not return. Still, I wondered why Mrs. Wilson had chosen to tell me, to tell anyone at all, since she had very nearly gotten through Mrs. Takahashi’s visits without any of it being known. And really what did it matter now that she had told me? Was it such a great secret in the end? After all of it, no one really knew what happened to Raymond Takahashi and yet Mrs. Wilson had even kept what little she had known a secret, allowing the boy’s mother to make the drive not once or twice but six times in all, allowing her to trace the ghosts of a history that was obfuscated by Mrs. Wilson herself. Help me, Evelyn, Mrs. Takahashi had said. Perhaps it was simply loneliness, that she might have clung to Mrs. Takahashi in the emptiness of her final decades, their lives inexplicably re-entwined amidst the ghosts of a past the repercussions of which continued to reverberate well into whatever future was yet to come.

  And so I returned to my work at the gas station, and when classes started at the nearby community college I spoke to a counselor and signed up for a general education course in math and another in creative writing. I sat uncomfortably at the back of the room, listening to the professors drone on and watching the door.

  In the evenings I would sit out on the back porch, smoking and staring at the still-unkempt patch of lawn and the twisted black shape of the wild plum, a survivor, I imagined, from some orchard that might well have been tended and cared for in the days before the war. It was there, in the shortening days of late September, when I began to wonder about my friend Chiggers again. Perhaps I thought to call him because I now knew more of the story I had begun to tell him on the same porch when the summer was young and the days moved toward their own vigor. It was not my story, it never had been, and even so, my part in it was over. Ray Takahashi would forever be lost amidst the golden grasses and blue oaks and cold clear streams.

  Chiggers had written his phone number on a scrap of paper and I had come across it a few days earlier next to my typewriter, an artifact which was finally getting some use once more now that I was in school. One cool cloudy night in early fall, after my grandmother had stuck her head outside to tell me that she was going to bed, I determined it was time for me to contact my old friend. I waited outside until I thought my grandmother likely asleep, then I stubbed out my cigarette and reentered the darkening interior of the house, dialing those scrawled digits and then leaning against the wall as that distant telephone in San Diego began to ring.

  The woman who answered sounded, even in her one-word greeting, exhausted and I worried for a moment that I had called too late at night. I did not even know what time it was. Surely not far past eight. “Uh, hello,” I mumbled in response to her voice. “This is . . . uh . . . this is John Frazier. I’m a friend of Chiggers’.”

  “Who?” the woman said.

  “Chig—” I began, stopped, said, “Shoot,” and then realized with a start that I could not remember his real name. “I’m his friend from Vietnam. I’m sorry, we called him Chiggers. My name’s John. He called me Flip.”

  “Oh Flip, sí,” she said. And then the name: “Hector.”

  “Hector, right right,” I said. “This is his mother?”

  “Claro que sí.”

  “I’m sorry to call so late.”

  “Not so late.”

  I thought she would tell me to wait then, that she would go find Chiggers or that he was out, but she lapsed into silence again and so I said, finally, “Is he around? Can I speak with him?”

  “Oh no, not around.”

  “Will he be back soon?”

  “No. Se murió.”

  I could feel, in that moment, a fierce wild descent, as if I had slipped from some high precipice and was now flailing toward the distant earth, the helicopter blades chopping the air above me, the sawgrass racing up in its vast endless plain. “He’s dead?”

  “Walked into the sea.” There was an edge of emotion in her voice but she did not break down, did not fall into weeping.

  “He drowned?”

  “He was a good boy,” she said. And then, without saying goodbye, there was the faintest click and the phone was silent.

  The sound I made was something like a bark or a cry, a sort of explosion that welled up out of my heart like black bile. That morning, I had sat at this very table and had eaten a piece of toast with strawberry jam and drained a cup of Maxwell House with milk from my grandmother’s refrigerator, and all that time Chiggers was dead. When I thought of him then and when I was to think of him in all the years to come and when I think of him now it is of a forest of black pines and a cold, hard surf rolling in upon a gray beach. And Chiggers, tiny against that great sweep of mist, stepping forward into the sea, fully clothed, his body as black as those trees, as gray as the surf, as dark as the sky.

  It could happen, I knew, to anyone. The sniper’s sight still tracked my shape through the palms, the bamboo, through the wild plum in the backyard, and here, at the kitchen table.

  My grandmother stood in the doorway to her bedroom, her nightgown held tight around her shapeless body. “John?” she called to me, her voice coming as if from across some great and terrible distance. “Are you all right? John?”

  “No,” I said, my body seeming to come all apart as the first of the waves tumbled in from the wine-dark sea. “I’m not all right. I’m not all right. I’m not.”

  12

  I CANNOT FIND ALL OF THE DAYS IMMEDIATELY AFTER speaking to Chiggers’s mother, but one of the great horrors of heroin is that there is no merciful blackout attached to its sharp vinegar scent, which is to say that I remember more than I care to admit. Picture what you would like and I will tell you that it was probably worse: a lost weekend cliché of strippers and dope and alcohol and all the rest. When I found myself at last it was upon a stinking, seaweed-covered beach in a twilight that I realized eventually was not dusk but dawn, my body reeking of alcohol and seawater. What day it was I did not yet know, nor the location of the beach upon which I lay chattering with cold. Out beyond the edge of the shushing breakers ran a wall of endless fog that wrapped the whole of that landscape in a blurred and gauzy half-light. My pockets were empty, not only of cash but of my wallet and of any and all forms of identification. For a long while I simply lay there in the sand, feeling the sickness of life itself as it washed over me, staring out across the Pacific in the direction of Asia, of Vietnam, and, it occurred to me somewhat later, of Japan, and in the direction in which my friend Chiggers had walked into the sea, as if in doing so he might cross that gray ocean to return to the place where everything had gone so terribly wrong.

  When at last I tried to rise, the movement came with a paroxysm of vomiting that staggered me back to the sand for several agonizing minutes until what ran from my chapped lips was only bile and thin spittle and finally nothing at all. What I knew, what I thought of, was that if I could take just two hits, two quick puffs from the foil, inhale no more than a lungful, a half lungful, all this sickness would go away in an instant and I would be well again. God help me but sometimes I still think this even all these years later. That I was able to clamber achingly to my feet was a kind of miracle and then to stumble away from the water was yet another, weaving up the high winded crests of the dunes and mercifully away from the bracingly cold wind that ran in a wet gusty stream off the gray face of that sea of fog. Were it not for the chill of the fog I might well have wondered if I had fallen into my own memory of Vietnam and, even though I knew it impossible, had I come upon a thick band of jungle palms atop the shelter of the dunes I would have been terrified but not surprised.

  And yet when I came away from that oceanic dunescape it was into a sleepy San Francisco neighborhood, a fact I confirmed by inquiring of a passing bicyclist, a woolen-clad long-haired and beaded hippie of a type I had seen in Life magazine but rarely outside those pages, certainly not in my parents’ Alhambra. “San Fran, my man,” h
e said when I asked where I was, and then he was gone, flitting out in a slow undulating loop spun broadside to the sea’s wind.

  I found my grandmother’s car soon after stumbling out of the dunes, either by luck or providence or from some dim remembrance of where I had parked it, neatly and inconspicuously at the curb just a few dozen meters away. The vehicle was unmolested and apparently undamaged, the keys yet there on the floor just under the driver’s seat, where my grandmother was in the habit of keeping them and where I, even in my alcohol- and drug-induced haze, had apparently left them in turn. I must have passed out again there in the car, for I awoke a few hours later, hungry and thirsty beyond all reason, the sky the color of dead flesh and a faint perspiration of greasy rain hovering in the air. A search confirmed what I already suspected would be true, that my wallet was nowhere to be found in the vehicle, and so, without money or identification of any kind, I concluded that I had little choice but to drive back to Newcastle, a decision almost immediately rendered impossible when I turned on the ignition and realized that the vehicle’s fuel gauge was nearly touching the E. I could hardly get to Berkeley, let alone all the way across the Sacramento Valley and up into the foothills of Placer County.

  I sat there weighing my options and feeling the heavy tide of guilt and shame wash over me, but at last I walked to a pay phone and called my grandmother collect, hoping that she would pick up but also that she would not.

  “Gran?” I said, my voice croaking. “It’s John.”

  “Oh honey,” she said, “you scared the hell out of me. Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.”

  “You’re in big trouble, boy-o,” she said. “You scared an old lady half to death.”

  “I know I did. I’m sorry, Gran. I don’t even know . . .” I trailed off then. What more could I say? There was nothing I could tell her.

  “Where are you?”

  “San Francisco,” I said.

  “Not so far,” she said. “You can be home in a few hours.”