Phantoms

by Christian Kiefer

“I don’t have any money,” I said. “My wallet’s gone. I guess it got stolen.”

  “Well, we can deal with that when you get here.”

  “There’s not enough gas to get that far,” I said. “I can maybe get halfway. Maybe as far as Vallejo.” Then I shook my head. “I don’t know what to do.” I lay my forehead against the cool metal panel of the pay phone’s booth.

  She was silent for a moment. “I’ve got half a mind to make you walk home,” she said then. She waited, as if I might offer to do just that, and when I said nothing in response she told me to read her the number of the pay phone, which I did, and then told me to hang up and wait there for her call.

  In the hours of my exhausted slumber in the front seat of the car, the city had come fully awake, traffic on the wide span of the street slipping by in waves. I wondered if I could find the bar at which I had, two or three nights before, bought a small sticky lump of black tar heroin and if I could somehow talk that same dealer into giving me just a tiny bit more on credit. Perhaps the dealer would buy the car, or perhaps we might make a trade. I wanted to die.

  When the phone rang I jumped up from the curb, surprised and shocked at the loudness of that sound. “Hello, hello?” I croaked into the handset.

  “John?”

  “Yes, it’s me.”

  “Do you have enough gasoline to get to my house?”

  It took a moment for me to understand that although the voice was a woman’s, it was not the voice of my grandmother. “Who is this?” I asked.

  “Kimiko Takahashi,” she said.

  “Mrs. Takahashi?”

  “Do you remember how to get here?”

  “Yes.”

  “You come here, John.”

  My eyes were overbrimming with tears now. “I’m sick,” I said.

  “Then I’ll come get you. Tell me where you are.”

  “No, no,” I said. “Jesus.” I sniffled, trying in vain to master myself, feeling instead just how tired I was, just how utterly and completely exhausted. “I can get there. I can make it that far, I think.”

  “I’ll be waiting here for you. Come straight here. You hear me, John? Come straight to my house.”

  “All right,” I said.

  And that was exactly what I did.

  I HAD HOPED, on the drive to San Jose, that Mrs. Takahashi would simply hand me a few dollars by which I could gas up my grandmother’s sedan and make the drive back to Newcastle, but when I arrived it was to find her waiting for me on her porch, hands on hips, appraising my condition as I stepped achingly out of the car. “Come inside,” she said.

  “I’m filthy,” I told her.

  “You come inside now,” she said, her voice so stern that I almost expected her to stamp her foot like a mother scolding a recalcitrant child.

  I did as she bade me, removing my shoes before entering the house and then marching into the bathroom. “Soap.” She pointed. “Shampoo. Leave your clothes here. I’ll wash.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” I mumbled, but she only shook her head.

  “I’ll get you a robe to wear.”

  I can hardly explain how grateful I was but also how ashamed. When I emerged at last it was wearing the thick terry-cloth bathrobe I had found hanging from the inside of the door. The smell that came from the kitchen was savory and thick. Mrs. ­Takahashi entered the room in the same moment, pointing to the little kitchen table at which I had, months before, in the first blush of that now-gone summer, listened to Mrs. ­Wilson stammer out her questions about the whereabouts of Mrs. ­Takahashi’s son and at which I now sat as Mrs. Takahashi went to the stove and opened it and brought out a baking dish and a moment later delivered a steaming hot plate of chicken enchiladas, their curves bubbling with cheese, rice and refried beans on the side.

  “You eat,” she said simply. “You’ll feel better then.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said through my tears. “Thank you so much.”

  “John,” she said.

  I paused mid-bite to look at her, her dark eyes staring back at my own, fixing me in their gaze.

  “You’ll be okay,” she said. “You will.”

  I mumbled something in the affirmative.

  After a time she nodded. “I’m going to check the laundry,” she said. “There’s more in the pan on the stove.”

  “It’s so good,” I said, smiling now, smiling and crying, a kind of delirium possessing me so that I did not know if I was ecstatic or on the verge of death itself.

  “My husband,” she said. “He’s obsessed with Mexican food. It’s all we ever eat anymore.”

  I CLEANED THAT PLATE and refilled it and cleaned it again until the enchilada pan was empty. When I was done I sat back in the kitchen chair, my hands in my lap, the only sounds those of the road outside somewhere beyond the shaded window and the ticking of a clock.

  I do not know how many people I am responsible for killing in Vietnam, which is a clever way of saying I do not know how many people I killed. I had been in the country for a year as part of an invading army and the only Vietnamese person I could recall with any detail was a Saigon prostitute I—and Chiggers—called by her working name: Daisy. And yet I had killed and killed and killed and each of them had mothers and fathers and grandparents and some had been children and all had been loved and named and loved again. And I radioed and the Phantoms came and they brought napalm and white phosphorus and Sidewinders and Zunis and all the rest and those people, loved and named, became pillars of ash washed away by the monsoon rain.

  When Mrs. Takahashi finally appeared she held a folded sheet of paper in one hand and she set it upon the sideboard before crossing her arms and nodding briefly. “I have more,” she said. “My husband likes tamales too. There are some in the freezer.”

  “I’m stuffed,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “Good tamales,” she said. “At least he thinks so.”

  “He’s really gone nuts for Mexican?”

  “Every day,” she said. “It’s all he’ll eat now. If I make anything else he complains.”

  “You make them from scratch?”

  “Not the tamales. They come from a market across town. He’s picky.”

  “Is he?”

  “About the tamales. Not so much about anything else.”

  There was, between us, a moment of silence then, the afternoon’s gray rain spattering the house, but within there were no sounds but those of the room itself, our breath on the air, the ticking of the clock. “I’m sorry,” I said to her.

  “You don’t need to be sorry,” she said. “You needed help. And we’re friends.”

  “I’m a bad person.”

  “Why?”

  I shook my head. “I don’t even know where to start. You know I was in Vietnam.”

  “That was war, John.”

  “No,” I said roughly. “I mean yes, but no.”

  “You have to forgive yourself.”

  “How?”

  “It’s past,” she said simply.

  “But what am I supposed to do?”

  She looked at me. “You’re supposed to live,” she said. “That’s all. Just live.”

  Mrs. Takahashi lifted the sheet of paper from the sideboard and slid it before me on the kitchen table. I asked her what it was before I even looked at it but she did not answer, not at first, allowing me a moment to take in what was, I realized, a copy of a telegram.

  “Would you take this to Mrs. Wilson for me?” Mrs. ­Takahashi said after a time. “I had them make an extra copy. I was going to mail it to her.”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s him. Franklin R. Yamada,” she said.

  “Who?” But even in saying this single syllable I understood who she meant.

  “My grandson,” she said, and in response my voice emitted a sound that was part exhale and part moan.

  MR AND MRS ROBERT F YAMADA, DONT PHONE DONT DELIVER BETWEEN 10PM AND 6AM REPORT DELIVERY

  8722 WILLIAMS DR SEATTLE WA

&n
bsp; THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY HAS ASKED ME TO EXPRESS HIS DEEP REGRET THAT YOUR SON, RIFLEMAN FRANKLIN R. YAMADA DIED IN VIETNAM ON 28 MARCH 1968, FROM WOUND RECEIVED WHILE ON COMBAT OPERATION.

  PLEASE ACCEPT MY DEEPEST SYMPATHY. THIS CONFIRMS PERSONAL NOTICIATION MADE BY A REPRESENTATIVE OF THE SECRETARY OF THE ARMY

  KENNETH G WICKHAM MAJOR GENERAL USA F59 THE ADJUTANT GENERAL (17).

  “He died in Vietnam?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “God not even . . . a year?—year and a half?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you sure this is him? Couldn’t it be a mistake?”

  “This is him, John,” she said. “My grandson’s name was Franklin. Sounds funny to me. Franklin. I don’t think Ray would have named him that. Do you?” Her tone was plain but there was, I thought, an edge somewhere beneath.

  “How did you find him?”

  “My husband called his lawyer friend and his lawyer friend called a private investigator. He tracked it down from what Evelyn left.”

  “She left something?” But then I remembered that day when she had placed that single sheet of paper upon the coffee table in the living room, when she had said that this was all she knew.

  “The birth certificate,” Mrs. Takahashi said. “So we knew the date and location and they figured out the rest. I don’t know how. It doesn’t really matter anymore.”

  “Yamada,” I said. “That’s a Japanese name?”

  She did not say anything now, only staring down at the little sheet of paper on the tabletop.

  “God, Mrs. Takahashi,” I said then. “There’s something I need to tell you,” for the thought of it, that I harbored this last piece of information, the piece that my aunt had told me and for which she had sworn me to secrecy, that piece I could hold in secret no longer and so I told her, in one long gasping monologue, about that moment in the diner in Auburn and about how Evelyn Wilson—at Helen’s behest—had hired some fruit pickers to chase Ray out of the county, how Mrs. Wilson had been, all those weeks, not an ally at all but a kind of enemy.

  Mrs. Takahashi raised her palm. “I already know,” she said.

  I sat staring at her, goggle-eyed. “But how? She told me no one else knew.”

  “I knew she wasn’t telling me the truth,” Mrs. Takahashi said. “Or not all of it. So I came back three or four times and asked around myself. I found someone who worked for her back then, when he was a boy. Bishop was his name. He remembered my Raymond in his uniform. He—he liked him. He told me my son was a hero.”

  “My God, Mrs. Takahashi. He was. He was a hero. Jesus.” The tears were coming again but I had been washed dry of them now and the sobs were empty.

  In the end it had been so simple: a lawyer and a private detective and here was the telegram after just a few months. I had not been needed at all and my aunt had only obfuscated and slowed down the process. The Takahashis only needed us to get out of the way. It was their own story, not mine and not even my aunt’s, but of course that had always been true. And what I thought in that moment was that had the clock just rolled back two years or three or four or ten or God all the way back to the start, had Mrs. Takahashi just known or had Evelyn Wilson had the courage, they might have found him in time, before the army had taken him and Vietnam had blown the ghost from his skin. Our tours had overlapped, so it was even possible that I had seen him in the endless mud field of that base on the Nine Dragon River. In my shivering horror of that possibility, I stand below the Huey that will deliver him to his death, the insectoid shape hovering in the flat white light, its blades chopping the air. That moment seems to last forever but finally the machine drifts away, turning in a lazy arc out across the wire and into the jungle. It is almost beautiful, like a leaf upon the wind.

  “I wish I could have known him,” I said.

  “He would have liked you,” Mrs. Takahashi told me, and I nearly asked her how she could know such a thing but then I understood that she was not talking about her grandson Franklin Yamada but about Ray, Raymond, her son.

  “I hope you’re right,” I said simply.

  “I’m his mother,” she said. “Of course I’m right.”

  13

  IF THIS STORY HAD ENDED THERE I DO NOT KNOW IF I EVER would have written it down. The heat of that summer and the chill of winter passed until spring came again and another summer. I had moved back to Southern California by that time, having failed out of community college in Placer County, so that when I registered at Pasadena City College it was to start completely over. In most ways I did not mind. There are few moments in our lives when we are allowed to begin anew.

  It was from Pasadena that I mailed my aunt the sheet of paper that Mrs. Takahashi had given me the autumn before. I had held on to it out of cowardice, for I did not want to see her and so would not drive to her home to deliver the document in person and hesitated in mailing it when I was yet in Placer County for fear she would come visit me to discuss its particulars. I am quite sure she wondered why I had mailed it to her from Southern California, for it might have implied that Mrs. Takahashi and I were still in touch, which we were not, our lives untethered from each other’s in the same way my life had become untethered from Mrs. Wilson’s. We had told a story together, in a way, and that story was over now and there was nothing left between us but guilt and disappointment and sadness. We did not find out what had really happened to Ray Takahashi and at that point I assumed that we never would. But in truth, it was only Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Takahashi who would never find out that last piece of information; it would, in the end, be mine to bear alone.

  Hiroshi Takahashi passed away just a year after I left Placer County, in 1971. He was seventy years old and died in the grocery in San Jose where he had worked all those years after returning from the camps. I never met him, not a single time, and yet I felt I knew him somehow and drove up from Pasadena for the funeral, picking up my grandmother on the way. She and Mrs. Takahashi had kept in touch some, exchanging holiday cards, and so it was my grandmother who had informed me of Mr. Takahashi’s passing. It had not been particularly long since I had last seen Mrs. Takahashi, of course, only two years, and yet under these circumstances it felt as if I had not seen her in a good long while. I realized soon after pulling into the parking lot that I was actually anxious at the idea of seeing her again. The last time I had been quite literally a wreck, and while I had managed to keep sober in the gap between our meetings, I remained ashamed and mortified that she might think of me in terms of that day when I wept and wept at her kitchen table as she fed me reheated enchiladas, a meal intended for her husband’s pleasure. That I did not meet him, I realized, was yet another disappointment in a life that already seemed, at age twenty-three, filled to the brim with them. That she greeted me like an old friend, like a nephew she loved and had not seen in too many days, gave my heart a mighty lurch. She ran her fingers through my hair, told me I needed a haircut, and gently prodded my stomach. “Are you eating enough?” she asked me. “Do I need to bring you some enchiladas?”

  My grandmother passed away three years later, quietly, in her bed in that house in Newcastle. My mother and her sisters fought over her will and the house was quickly sold and what profit there might have been disappeared between them. My first novel was out by then and Gran had at least seen a copy of it before her death. Only after she was gone did I understand that she had been the most important person in my life; she had been there by my side during the worst of the implosion of my soul, had summoned me back from San Francisco and had ministered to me and taken care of me and continued to call me every few weeks all through the years to follow. That those calls would no longer come felt a blow to my heart but one which, at least, felt natural and reasonable. She had been eighty-five years old and that seemed enough. I could not imagine myself living half that long, although now, not quite at the midpoint, I have a better imagination for the future.

  Mrs. Takahashi’s death in 1981 brought me to San Jose once more. My wife had pu
t her on our Christmas card list—my wife was attuned to such things—and this had put us in some regular contact, enough so that one of her daughters had sent us the notice of her passing. After the funeral, I visited Mary and Doris, the two grown Takahashi daughters, although neither of their last names were Takahashi then and had not been for many years. I told them some about the summer of 1969 when their mother and my aunt had traversed the county looking for clues as to their elder brother’s disappearance. He would have been—should have been—fifty-eight years old on the year of his mother’s death and part of me still wondered if he was out there somewhere, walking the hills of some other land, resting under the shadows of some other trees. Mary told me of seeing Ray and Helen kissing on the day the buses came, their young bodies clasped to each other under the shade of the fruit sheds. “He had a little something from her,” Doris remembered.

  “What do you mean?”

  “A little locket or something. He used to fidget with it all the time when he thought we weren’t looking.”

  “He thought we were two blind little kids,” Mary said.

  “But we knew everything, didn’t we?” Doris said, smiling.

  “We sure did,” Mary said.

  But not everything, I thought.

  AS FOR EVELYN WILSON, I did not hear much from her in the years that followed the end of this narrative. She never met my wife nor my children, although I did discover after her death that she had every one of my novels and clippings of some of my stories and essays too. I thought that she might well have been keeping track of my writing just to make sure she did not appear in those public pages. Until the appearance of this book, she would have been quite satisfied.

  News of Mrs. Wilson’s passing came during a phone call from my mother not so very long after Mrs. Takahashi’s funeral. Just after her greeting, my mother asked if I remembered Evelyn Wilson “up there near Auburn,” and I already knew what was coming. My grandmother’s death had felt like a physical blow, and Mrs. Takahashi’s had not been particularly different, but Mrs. Wilson’s, much to my surprise, was the worst of all, and a hard heaviness flooded over me at the news. My daughter, six years old then, found me sitting on the kitchen floor near the phone, my head in my hands. “Daddy,” she said, “are you hurt? Do you need a Band-Aid?”