BY THE TIME THEY CAME he had decided to leave Newcastle entirely, to travel back west toward the Pacific and to find his family in Oakland. Had he left a day earlier, an hour earlier, he might yet have made it, might yet be alive, and then all that could have been might have been, for all of them: his parents, Mrs. Wilson, even Helen. And Franklin, of course; him most of all. Perhaps Ray would have found the boy, would have loved him from afar, watching his son’s innocent play from across some Seattle street on a day when the sun shone bright and clear through the clouds. Perhaps the boy would never have known him—for he would have had his own parents, the Yamadas, and assumedly they would have loved him fiercely, having plucked him from that orphanage—but even if they never met, even if Ray never made himself plain and clear to the boy, would not his love have been a kind of shield to him?
The rain was coming on and that grim cold weather had reminded him of that endless night in the Vosges Mountains, sleet descending from a sky so dark that it appeared a depthless slate hovering low above their heads, a darkness punctured by the flat white bursts of the antiaircraft rounds that continued to blast the mountain all around them so that mixed with the sleet were stones and clods of muddy earth. Sometimes blood too would spatter down like some nightmare rain as they huddled together in the cratered foxholes, shivering and chattering and, despite the rain, thirsty beyond measure. For hour after hour he could do little more than lay facedown in the mud, the noise and terror utterly without cease. On either side of him were two men with whom he had crossed much of southern Europe: The others were Victor Fujimori and Jim Ban. Both would die the following day or the day after, although he would not be with them then, and in the dozing half dream of the foxhole they appeared as skeletons in uniform, their death’s-head masks grinning out from their helmeted skulls, all around him craters of darkness and of light, the bodies within blooming white and terrible before thudding to earth again, dead, silent, while the big guns continued to fire unabated for all the hours to come. All he could do, despite his training and even despite his will to live, was clutch his helmet, occasionally yelping in fear but otherwise silent, breathless. And the dead. He would remember the dead, especially after the whole of the battle was over and they had accomplished the goal they had set out to accomplish, a goal levied upon them by a general somewhere far afield of where they huddled on that forested mountainside. It was only when the death count came that they would truly understand just how many of them would never leave that French forest. Sometimes Ray wondered if the dead stalked those forests even now, searching out their names in English, in scattered Japanese, their spectral shapes a kind of lambent mist through wet pines.
That he had survived had been a kind of miracle. Now, upon a different ridge, he watched the landscape drift into the quiet of the coming rain, all the beasts of the fields and the birds of the air hunkering down for the weather to come. The fire he built he had already determined would be his last, and so he had used more wood than he ordinarily might, the process of collecting it having brought him to ever-widening circles on that boulder-strewn ridge, the flames now crackling and hissing at the first drops of rain.
When he caught sight of their flashlights dancing up from the road he knew in an instant that the fire had been a mistake. And yet he did not flee but waited there, for in some lit part of his mind he still wondered if it would be Helen come to see him as she had those years before during the course of nights cool and dry and beautiful, her hair in his hands like gold thread in the moonlight and her body warm under his own. It was not until those distant lights flickered off, first one, then the other three, that he felt real fear. He removed the little locket from where he kept it in the front pocket of his uniform trousers and felt its hard, scalloped shape in his hand. He had held it in his palm at Anzio and Cassino and in the Vosges Mountains, held it when the blood and entrails of his companions rained down upon him in the shrapnel hell of those days.
They did not creep in the outer darkness beyond the firelight as he thought they would but came upon him without delay or preamble, their faces drifting before their bodies in the pale, reflected light. He waited, hands at his sides.
Later they would wonder why he had not hunted for a weapon in those moments.
“You know why we come?” one of them said, the sound of his voice dry and lilting with an accent Ray could not identify.
He could see them more clearly now. Three men. They held rifles and he assumed, of course, that the one of their number he could not see, the one who yet crept in the darkness, was similarly armed, and yet he stood with his empty hands by his sides, dirty uniform untucked, frame lit by the fire, watching them impassively as if he had expected them all the while.
“I don’t know you,” he said simply.
“Damn right you don’t,” one of the men said. This one was taller than the others, his neck long and the head above it small and compact, the first of the rain pattering against his hat brim.
“You don’t know us fer shit,” another said, shorter, barrel-shaped, hatless, thin hair already plastered down from the weight of the water. The third was a nondescript figure, plain and frightened-looking in the shadowy night.
“We’re just here on account of we got a job to do,” the taller said.
“What job?” Ray said.
“I think you know,” the taller said.
For a moment Ray did not speak. Then he said, “Who?”
“I think you know that too,” the taller said. “If you don’t, you’re even dumber than I thought.”
“Mrs. Wilson,” Ray said.
The man did not respond to this, aside from shifting slightly in his stance. “You shoulda shoved off when you was told,” he said.
“Yer too stupid though. Ain’t he? He’s too stupid.” This from the shorter again. The man was practically hopping on his toes with excitement.
Ray was preparing to tell them that he was leaving anyway, that he would pack up and leave that moment if only to avoid a fight of such numbers and such odds, but this last had set his teeth hard together in his mouth. He squared his shoulders against the whole of it. “Shut your goddamn mouth,” he said.
“We heard you had a temper on you,” he said.
“Just leave me alone,” Ray said. “Just leave me the hell alone.”
“Too late for that,” the shorter said. “What you gonna do, Jap?” The short one swung the rifle around so that it pointed at him.
He almost laughed then at the absurdity of his situation, that he would come through all of it—the unsettlement of the camps, the fire and terror of the war—and was now here, in the orange light of a campfire upon a ridge which he had come to think of as his and Helen’s, their place together upon which he had ranged over the secret geography of her body.
“I don’t like you pointing that at me,” Ray said quietly, his voice steady, although there was a trembling inside of him. That it would come to this. That it ever could have.
“I don’t give a rat shit,” the short one said, then added, as if a nursery rhyme: “Jap shit, rat shit.”
“Christ, Tuck,” the tall man said, his head shaking quickly in disgust. “Let’s just get this done.”
There was no more talking. The two men held their rifles on him as the tall man tied his hands behind his back with a length of coarse rope. When the knot was finished the tall man gave a whistle and the fourth man appeared from the darkness. It was he who gave the first blow, leaning in and calling him a dirty Jap and then striking again. For a time Ray tried to remain standing but it was too much and when he fell to the grass it was as if he were a pillar of ash come crumbling into the rain. That it was cool against his face was a blessing, for the blows continued and they were too many to count: his face exploding in agony, his thighs, his back, his neck, his chest, even his bound wrists. Their fists; then their boots.
“Point is, Jap,” someone whispered in his ear, “you’d best clear out or we’ll finish the job.”
“W
e ought just finish,” another said.
“I ain’t a murderer,” the first voice said. “Anyway, that’s not what we got paid for.”
“She’s just a girl,” the other said. “She don’t know what she wants.”
He felt himself rise through the delirium of his pain at this, like a thick jelly pushing up toward the airborne light just above the surface of the sea. “A girl?” he said. His face felt numb, and there was a warm wetness in his mouth. A hard jagged stone there which he knew must be a broken shard of tooth.
“What’d he say?” someone mumbled. And then, louder: “What’d you say, Jap?”
His voice was a struggle. “A girl? What girl?”
“Shit, Tuck,” a voice said. “He don’t even know. How’s that for it? He don’t even know who he’s got to thank. Boy, you really are up shit creek without a paddle.”
“God,” Ray said now, his heart lurching so hard and heavy that it felt for a moment as if it might break clear from his ribs, not like an arrow but like an egg, its viscous ooze soaking through him and into the grass.
“The old lady paid us,” a voice said calmly, “but it’s the daughter who wants it done.”
“You sons of bitches,” Ray said then. “You goddamn sons of bitches.” He tried to rise then, struggling against them as they came, the rope somehow loose so that his hands were before him and he was swinging in a wide arc and somehow connecting, first one fell and then another and he had to get away, from the men, from the ridge, from the Wilsons, from the whole of the map of his life, and so he spun from the campfire and ran, a staggering, loping figure, maniacal for motion itself and possessed only of that singular thought: to get away, to get away, to get away.
When the shot rang out he did not know what it was, although he had heard so much gunfire in his life, more than anyone had any right to, but not here. His body jerked forward as if it had been shoved from behind, as if some benevolent hand were helping propel him. From somewhere a shouted voice: “No, goddammit!” and already he was falling, for his legs were empty of whatever had moved them, whatever had pushed them on.
In the palm of his hand he could feel it, for he had held it all the while, even during the worst of it, even when the men had tied his hands and beaten him. He had gone down to his knees in the grass and now the grass seemed to pull him into its embrace and he let himself into it, his thumb on the locket, tracing its scalloped shape. When he looked back it was to see four faces outlined against a sky awash with black clouds. He wondered who they might be and thought they might offer some sense of where he was headed but when they spoke he could make no sense of it at all.
—Goddammit, Tuck, you done kilt him.
—He was runnin’.
—Of course he was runnin’, you idiot. We was beatin’ on him. You’da run too.
—Shoot. Only a Jap anyway.
—Now we gotta dig. And it’s rainin’ cats and dogs.
—I’ll get the shovels.
—He was runnin’. What else I s’posed to do? He was runnin’ away.
—That was the whole goddamn point. He was s’posed to run away. That’s what she paid us for.
And so the last words he ever heard. Above him, the slate of clouded sky continued to recede and the men leaned over what had become a kind of black tunnel cut into the air, their faces and the clouds all at the far end of it, the whole of that sky fleeing from him so that the thought that came at the very end was that he was lost, but when he turned his head he saw that he was, all the while, winging out toward some other sky, a vast plane of deepest blue which was yet familiar to him, more familiar than the world he had just departed, and he knew it was a kind of homecoming and that homecoming was bright and golden and its hills rolled on forever and his heart burst at the sight of that pure blessed land.
THE BONES OF THIS ARE what Jim Tuttle told me that afternoon, although of course I have imagined aspects of his story that no one will ever know. Tuttle’s father had been the one stalking the darkness, just outside the range of faint orange light from the campfire. “That man Tucker was a bad man,” Tuttle told me. “Ended up in Folsom Prison for murder later on.”
“No one turned him in?” I asked him.
“Wasn’t their way,” he said sadly. “Look, Mr. Frazier, I’m a Christian. Born again, you might say, and I just don’t want that blemish on my conscience.”
“Your dad told you all this?”
“When he was dying,” Tuttle said, nodding. “Told me he was afraid he’d go to hell.”
“Did he pull the trigger?”
“That man Tucker did.”
“And they buried him out there?”
“That’s what he said. I don’t know where exactly. Would help complete things to have him moved into a Christian cemetery but there’s no way to find him now. I tried. It’s just grass and boulders and trees and not much else. All looks the same.”
“He was Buddhist,” I said, as if this somehow addressed his concern.
“Still, seems wrong for him to be out there alone,” Tuttle said in response.
When he was leaving, Jim Tuttle stopped in my doorway and reached into his shirt pocket, the movement of his thick fingers awkward and raking, but he came out with what he intended to find there, a length of silver chain upon which something dangled, a kind of pendant. “I don’t know if this’d mean anything to you,” he said.
“What is it?”
“My dad said the soldier had it in his hand.”
I thanked Jim Tuttle for coming. He handed me a card with an address and his phone number and then I stood there on the porch, watching him drive away. From somewhere upstairs came the knocking of a hammer on a nail, a scatter of voices from outside. All that which had disappeared during the telling of Tuttle’s story now drifted back into the living world once more.
I did not uncurl my fist until I had reached the dining room table again, taking my seat at the typewriter and only then gazing with attention at what Jim Tuttle had given me. The chain was delicate but not particularly so and the locket a small shell-shaped piece of metal, silver in color but likely tin, with small dents and scratches here and there from the years. It was difficult to open but I managed, at last, to pry the lid free and sat staring down at the tiny image that might well have been Evelyn Wilson once upon a time but which was, of course, Helen. The woman encased in the shell-shaped tin was faint, the image granular, but where her mother contained within her a fierce beauty this girl was plain, ordinary, and yet she had filled Ray Takahashi’s heart so fully that he held her image with him for all the days of his imprisonment at the camps and all the days of war and held it still upon his return to what he thought, up to the last, was his home. That it had been Helen, and not her mother, who had at last hired the men to chase Ray out of her life was as terrible as it was believable, for was she not, in the end, her mother’s daughter?
THE HOUSE IS FINISHED NOW, or as finished as it will ever be, since I have more or less run out of the necessary funds for continuing its renovation. Perhaps this is a blessing, since I have come to understand that there is no end to such tasks, the process of replacing and rebuilding such that one wonders if the object that remains is still itself; if you replace every board of a house is it still the same house or something else? The work I had done here is not quite so drastic as that but it has been enough to make me feel, in some way, as if the house is now mine, even though the furniture remains more or less where it was when I first entered the parlor. Now my daughter charges through its rooms and up and down its stairs and lets its screen door clack shut with a terrific bang. The three of us have occupied the house in the way a family occupies a house, making a series of rooms and stairs and hallways into a home by the act of simply being in them, of stirring whatever ghosts remain, most of them fleeing out through the new shingles and into the blue summer night.
I informed a sheriff’s deputy of what I knew of Raymond Takahashi’s murder, although I well know it will likely come to nothin
g—a thirty-eight-year-old case without a body and without a living perpetrator is of little interest to the law—and yet I felt duty-bound to do that much. I also wrote Doris Harris, née Takahashi, whose address I still have, to tell her the story. Into that envelope I slipped the pendant. It was never mine, although in some ways I know it is not Doris’s either. The actions of sealing that envelope and dropping it at the post office have been two of the most difficult of my life, although I lack the words to explain why, even to myself.
Sometimes I can still feel the Wilsons in the rooms and halls and the stairwell of this old house, not only Evelyn and Homer but the children too, Jimmy and Helen in the upstairs bedrooms, bright phantoms whose yellow days extend into our own. How they shimmer like tinsel in the air. And Ray of course, in the days in which he was yet a child and could not even imagine all the madness that would descend in the years to come. Their laughter like bells. Their breath sweet with fruit.
And of course there are other shadows here as well and a good many of them are my own. This place has been handed to me utterly without warrant: the house, the old orchard trees, even the remains of the home in which the Takahashi family once lived. It is difficult not to feel that the whole of it represents the spoils of some war in which I was, wittingly and unwittingly, a participant. Ray Takahashi’s bones are lost in the earth somewhere on Boulder Ridge even now, even as you read these words, his family inexorably changed in the aftermath of that incontrovertible fact. That the family was not destroyed by what the Wilsons—by what my family—did to them, a series of actions built upon a legacy of sanctioned violence both subtle and overt, is but a testament to their strength. And perhaps it is, too, a comment on my own weakness that, despite everything, I choose to live here with my own family, to occupy this place, a place which I have, in no conceivable way, earned.
Phantoms Page 19
