The Far Shore

by Paul T. Scheuring

  He assumed she was sober enough to know what she was doing, but just wanted to double-check.

  It was still a stupid idea in the morning, to run off with this strange man with the Mike Ditka mustache.

  But still she said yes.

  (She could always take his eyes out with her fingernails if he went rapist on her.

  He is too fat to be fast.)

  And so here they were, side by side in a rental car like newlyweds, the furrowed fields with their red soil zooming by outside the window.

  And the air, that million-dollar air, with a shimmer of humidity, a tickle of tropical heat.

  She thinks she might butch out and buy a Hawaiian shirt.

  Women can wear Hawaiian shirts, can’t they?

  Or is that only waitresses in tropical-themed burger joints?

  She will buy one nevertheless.

  She will wear it open at the neck.

  She will get a farmer’s tan, or more likely a farmer’s sunburn.

  But sunburn turns to tan, doesn’t it?

  That was the old thinking anyhow.

  She hasn’t tried to tan in so long she hasn’t a clue what the prevailing tanning wisdom is.

  Bruce is pleased as punch beside her.

  He’s got the Don Ho channel on.

  Everything is a hammock.

  Check-in—two rooms at the Radisson, two showers, two hula burgers and fries—then they’re off to see Bradley Westover.

  He’s Gandalfian.

  Ought to be wearing a wizard’s cap.

  She had heard that the two things that continue to grow on a body until death are the nose and the ears, and Bradley is living proof.

  He has Halloween-quality versions of both.

  Nine decades of gravity have beckoned them millimeter by millimeter closer to the earth over the years.

  He is also a scratch golfer.

  Or was one, he tells them more than once in the first half hour.

  They have agreed to meet on the Olomana Golf Links.

  To get on, Bruce has rented clubs and Lily has declared herself a caddie.

  They follow Bradley as he slowly, incrementally chops the ball up the fairway.

  He is so pleased that they’ve come.

  He did not realize Gray Allen had descendants.

  Gray had always maintained, in the short time they served together in the Pacific, that he was the end of the Allen line.

  It is interesting, though, Lily thinks.

  Bradley asks more questions than he answers.

  He is probing them.

  She senses that he is playing gatekeeper to Gray.

  That he knows things.

  And is trying to protect them.

  Trying to ascertain whether or not the pair in front of him is worthy of the knowledge.

  You came from South Carolina?

  Sounds like you didn’t even know the man existed.

  Why the interest now, after all these years?

  She’s known this question would come.

  Has even practiced how to respond this time.

  She doesn’t want to lie about the money.

  She wants to tell the truth, because to lie is to tell herself that her agenda is a furtive one, a less-than-noble one.

  That she is just in it for the money.

  Which she is not.

  She will, of course, shower herself with Coors Lights and Klondikes, and pay off her bills, and set herself up so she never has to work at a place like the shipping company again, but more importantly, she will spread that money far and wide: she’ll devote days to driving around slapping twenties into the hands of every drive-thru bum she can find on those center meridians; she will go to the dry places of the world and dig wells; she will buy cornfields and start her Own shipping company, sending it by the ton and for free to the hungry folk worldwide; she will secretly cram packets of $100s into every mailbox of the foreclosed; she will buy two of every endangered species on earth and build a zoo.

  (Can you buy endangered species?)

  She is not in it for the money.

  She is not.

  So she doesn’t tell him.

  (And, if it proves he’s somehow in need—medical bills maybe—he too might receive an anonymous package of $100s under the Aloha mat on his front porch one morning.)

  No, she just wants to understand and preserve the family history for future generations.

  But you have no emotional attachment, Bradley half-states, half-asks.

  She gives him a noncommittal look.

  (That would be a hard one to lie about.

  You can’t love someone you’ve never known, can you?

  Love can’t be retroactive like that—can’t reach back into the irretrievable past—can it?)

  So she holds the noncommittal look.

  Surprisingly, he looks relieved by her dispassion.

  Good, he says.

  He digs into his pocket.

  I have seen people go to pieces, he says, when they’ve been presented with what would appear to be incontrovertible evidence of their loved one’s death.

  In his palm: dog tags.

  Upon which are stamped, atop a whole bunch of military arcana, GRAY MICHAEL ALLEN.

  XV

  LILY: (muffled sound of microphone, of device being set on a hard surface) There.

  BRADLEY: We ready?

  LILY: If you are; you’re okay with it, us recording…

  BRADLEY: Please. Don’t cost nothing. Back in the day, how much we had to pay for actual cassette tapes! Now…all the electronic magic inside these phones—could fit a goddamn library in there.

  LILY: Whenever you’re ready.

  BRADLEY: Okay. Gray Allen. I have to say in advance, I love this man. I really do.

  LILY: You use present tense.

  BRADLEY: It’s what us MIA/POW recovery guys do by default. You’ve got to believe they’re alive.

  LILY: (a long and very telling pause) You think…there’s a chance of that?

  BRADLEY: My heart no matter what will always say yes. But if you want me to speak rationally, no. No way in hell, seeing him as I did in his last moments.

  LILY: Can you talk about that?

  BRADLEY: I want to go back, if I can. Give the larger picture, because if you really want to know this man as you say you do—if you really want to understand—then you have to know his character. As far as I know, no one else—certainly not anyone else stupid enough to still be alive—can speak to his character.

  He was something special. You would not know it upon first meeting him. He was a basic doughboy on the surface. But beneath that uniform, beneath that skin, was a Soul. And not like the souls the rest of us have. But one truer, more naked and available to existence. Which is the worst thing one can be in the face of War. That sort of crucible breaks harder men. The open-hearted ones don’t stand a chance. They take in too much. They snap.

  And maybe that’s what made him the special thing he was. He had snapped. He’d gone into madness. And yet he’d come back.

  Not many of them do.

  Anyhow, we were replacements with the 96th, going into Okinawa. I’d befriended your great-uncle, Bill, some time before that. We were basically drinking buddies. I know, Mormons, drinking. Well, it was either your great-uncle or the War that turned me Jack. Hell of a lot easier to knock yourself silly at night than reflect on the day’s events when you’re in a place like the Pacific in 1945. Instead of twenty-four hours of hell each day—and sleep was no reprieve, trust me—if we drank our way through the night, it carved away a good quarter of that. Shortened our stint. At least that was the thinking at the time. He was a fun guy, your uncle.

  Anyhow, Gray showed up in late May. The guys that he was with, the guys that had been re-deployed from Europe, they looked horrible. Can you imagine, first being shipped off over the Atlantic on those troopships, then shipped back in turn across the US, and then shipped across the Pacific? All you do on those ships is eat ’til you’re
sleepy, sleep ’til you’re hungry. But really what you’re doing is thinking. Thinking about what’s to come.

  My first impression of Gray was misleading. I had never seen a soul so joyous. But in reflection I know this was because I was with Bill at the time, and Gray had not seen his brother in over a year. How he hugged him when he saw him! The whole of the world was in that hug. It was one soul dissolving into another. Giving the entirety of his self to the other, arms spread, at once seeking and offering all the solace he could. It made me want to have a brother!

  Bill had sort of primed me on Gray. Told me he was a troubled soul, even before the War, and that I should look out for him. I learned pretty quick as we drilled together that Gray’s great enemy was probably loneliness. No family to speak of, no girl. You have to understand, the Mormon environment, we’re up to our ears in family, it’s all about family. You can’t fall, because there are too many people in the house for you to hit the ground! I say that in jest, but it’s true. Someone always catches you. And that component of life, that notion that you don’t have to carry the burden all by yourself, I think allows a man or woman to persevere. The hardness of this world is a shared thing that way. We needn’t stare down the storm alone.

  But Gray…not only did he have the usual storms twenty-year-olds had in their heads, but at the same time, he had the storm of World War Two raging outside his head. There was nowhere to turn! God, what a horrible time to grow up! I determined that he was afraid of sharing his storms with anyone; that he was incapable of seeking solace from anyone. I got the sense he’d put faith in people before—had given over his heart and fears to them—and that trust had been betrayed, either by that person or by the universe. Parents had left him, foster parents had neglected him, the war had killed off anyone he’d communed with. Loneliness had become a kind of castle for him. A fortress of one, I guess you could say. Other than his brother, he laid his soul bare for no one. He’d been hurt too many times. Maybe he thought if he did so, he’d somehow curse that person, because everything in his history suggested a Malevolence out there that singularly picked off anyone he tried to get close to.

  It was as if he hated the loneliness, but the loneliness was the only place he could live. What lay outside its walls was too harrowing.

  You wonder probably how I’d call a guy like that a great soul. As I say, this was my first impression of him. What he did with the pain—and the greater pains to come—were what separated him from the rest of us.

  Anyhow, Bill shipped out soon thereafter. He was in the wave going into Okinawa ahead of us. So in his absence, I did my best to engage Gray, as Bill had requested I do. I told him about Utah, that my family had a long-standing dairy there, and that maybe after the war he could come and work with us. I got him to laugh a few times, got him to trust me enough to share the occasional bottle of hooch the quartermaster had drummed up and I’d been able to trade for with my allotment of cigarettes. I may be Jack, but I draw the line at booze. Cigarettes—only thing they were good for, at least back then—are for shoving up your nose and filtering out the smell of the dead. Booze, anyhow, you know where I stand on booze. There’s a reason I live in Hawaii. Try finding a bar in Utah.

  Whatever the case, a couple of nights before it was our turn to deploy for Okinawa—and no one was happy about this—the wounded were coming back and telling us of hell on earth—I sat with Gray after his shift at the BAS.

  We were doing a bit of drinking out at the beach. All this war, and sometimes you forgot you were in paradise. White sand as far as the eye could see and water as limpid as Jesus’ heart.

  Gray was contemplative. At first I thought it was a religious sort of contemplation. You’d see him, even when he was drinking, every now and again rubbing, very subtly, something in his hand. At first, I thought it was rosary beads. It fit the whole picture with the way he was in those moments. Like he was connecting, centering. But it turned out it was dog tags. They’d quietly click-click as the raised ridges of the letters and numbers would catch each other, release. Catch each other, release.

  I asked him if he’d lost someone. Fellow trencher.

  “Opposite,” he said. He offered me the dog tags. They were these well-worn things; you got the impression he’d rubbed them together, a lot. I’m no linguist, but it was pretty clear to me the tags were German army.

  “Souvenir?”

  “Guy I killed.”

  The way he said it suggested that was as much as he wanted to say about it. So I handed him the tags back.

  “Gray,” I said, “you really ought to think about Utah. Lot of good Mormon girls there. Guy with that dark brooding thing you got going, you’d clean up.”

  He reflected on that. Managed a small smile.

  “Thought you had to be blond to be Mormon.” I think he was warming to me. The booze helped.

  “No, we take all comers. Want in on a little secret? This war here, what we’re doing in the Pacific…this isn’t about fighting the Japanese. Nope. What this really is is an outreach program by the Mormon Church. We’re trying to convert as many of these huge Polynesians as we can. Convert ’em to linemen for the BYU football squad. Half dozen of those poi-fed monstrosities and we’d be unstoppable.”

  He liked that.

  I also think he saw through me, knew what I was doing. But appreciated it all the same.

  I told him I was serious about the Mormon girls. “They’re the right kind of horny,” I said. “You think they’re all getting married at an early age because of fidelity to the Church? They’re nineteen! They’re marrying to get laid!”

  He liked that too. He told me I was all right.

  “Don’t know if I could do that,” he said after a bit. “Birth a bunch of kids into this world. Maybe.”

  “War goes away,” I told him. “Sooner or later, there’s peace.”

  He mulled on that for a long time, like he wanted to believe it. Finally he looked at me with a pained smile. “Or is it peace goes away, and sooner or later there’s war?”

  I told him to get over himself and he appreciated that. Like I said, hooch was indispensable to us over there. It sure as hell knocked the sharp edges off of things.

  We laughed a lot that night. I remember it well. We were there in that tropical paradise, sitting out on the beach. The moon was this giant thing, raining down silver on the ocean, pooling between wave caps. There could be no such thing as war on a night like this. No way. To me that night was God talking. And in his great, silent echoing voice saying, See? I Am Here. Patience.

  Patience.

  The next night Bill came back from Okinawa.

  Gray was the one who saw him in his pinewood box first.

  The dead, those that had been recoverable, had been sent back to BAS for Graves Registration.

  Whatever hope there was in Gray died then.

  He stopped speaking, for the most part.

  I didn’t see him cry. Maybe he was cried out; maybe Bill’s death was corroboration of what he’d already arrived at emotionally: that the universe is ultimately a subtractive thing and will sooner or later take all that is dear to you. Maybe he would cry when he was by himself. I don’t know. But what the rest of us saw was a hollowness in his gaze, like most of the machinery that had for so long whirred behind his eyes had now ground to a halt. The body moved, dutifully, mechanically, but what was within seemed no longer to participate.

  When we boarded the troopships bound for our stint on Okinawa, I half wondered if he was going there to die. I could see no fight in him. And a man, in war, without fight in him is always the first casualty.

  The Japanese were on the run. We’d pushed them back through Shuri, and now they were digging in for a final stand on the Kiyan Peninsula. Once Kiyan went, Okinawa would fall, and we’d have the final and most important stepping stone to Tokyo.

  We came in on Beach Red 1, which 4th Marines had secured a day earlier. The wind and the rain were something only the Pacific could cook up. It was mons
oon season, and a couple of massive storms were forming around the island. The rain was hot, if you can imagine that, coming in at just the right windblown trajectory to blind us. It came in near horizontal, so that the bills of our caps and helmets did nothing for us—that hot rain just whipped right in beneath. Everybody’s eyes were red—wind-stung, rain-stung—and the high chop of the ocean on the way in did nothing to help the matter: I’d say about 90 percent of us threw up. Needless to say, the boats were filled a few inches deep with sloshing puke by the time we got ashore.

  It was a great blur to me, that beach. In my memory, I can smell it better than I can see it. No doubt because my nose had been so sickened by the earlier smell of puke, I greedily breathed in the fullness of the island’s smells in a desperate attempt to “reset” my senses, or at least purge them. I remember cordite, obviously, and the ever-present war smells of grease fouled by sand, of oil, of men mobilizing and taking over the land. But I remember too the faint vain smell, like it was still hopelessly trying to assert itself, despite man’s intrusion—of sugarcane. It was woodsy and sweet, a smell that promised delightful things under different circumstances.

  As one of the COs, I’d been instructed to get the men inland as quickly as possible. Ushijima had his forces holed up across the peninsula, well dug in, but the feeling from up high was that we could drive a couple of quick wedges into the Japanese lines—two great, aggressive spearhead moves by us—and Ushijima’s forces, separated from one another, flanked, supply lines cut, would quickly collapse. So we were to push ahead with all speed. There’d be no sleeping. The men, the brass said, could sleep when the war was over. Which it potentially could be, if we definitively took Okinawa; the emperor at that point would have to realize he had no more ground to cede—we’d be on Tokyo’s doorstep. This, of course, was based on the erroneous assumption that leaders in war are capable of rational thought.

  Gray, at any rate, was with me. Company-wise, we went straight into that rain. A bunch of men, tromping forward, heads down, stomachs still churning with post-vomit acid. That storm, I swear to God, was telling us to go home. Telling all of us to go home, Japanese and American alike. The war was over. All of us knew it. Everyone in the world knew it. Except a single old guy up in some ancient feudal castle somewhere back in Japan. Can you imagine? All of this effort. All of these massive ships churning off shore, battling the worst kind of seas; all these landing craft coming ashore, tearing up the reefs, poisoning the fish with their effluvial gas; all these boys, come from forty-eight different states, and all those Japanese, from every different prefecture, all going through the huge, labyrinthine ten-thousand-mile process to get here, to this place, to have this very dance, in the worst possible storm, a storm that even the animals—those unenlightened lizards and rodents that hid beneath rocks and flora underfoot—knew better than to go out in. It’s the great, cosmic joke, isn’t it? Here everybody is showing up for a dance that not a single one of them actually wants to go to, and yet the only guy that Wants it, the guy that Threw it, doesn’t bother to show up. What kind of dance is that?