But no, I’m not allowed to blame personal woes on work. I chose my profession. No one forced it on me. I spoke too soon because I was eager. I wanted my husband healed. So I ignored the impatience I had seen in him just seconds before, and forged ahead. “I saw that you had two fewer faces.”
“What’s that?” Michael was settling on the bench again.
“Your papers this morning. There were twenty-nine.”
He shook his head. “Will you ever leave me alone?”
I should have listened and let it go. But I couldn’t help myself. “Who were they, Michael? How did you get rid of them?”
“Look, I go to the shrink every goddam Wednesday. Isn’t that enough?”
“Do you talk to her about the faces?”
Michael closed his hands into fists, then stretched his fingers wide. “Not individual ones, no.”
“But the group of them? The thirty-one?”
“Look, what is this? First I can’t leave work. Now do I have to report to you what happens with my goddamn shrink?”
With that I realized that Michael was not the only one suppressing some rage. “You don’t, do you?” I raised my voice. “Dr. Doremus doesn’t even know about them. You’re up all hours drawing, night after night, and she doesn’t even know.”
“You think it’s so important, you go to the appointment this week.” He threw up his hands. “You take over, Deb. I could give a shit.”
“This isn’t about her, Michael.” I advanced on him. “It’s about you. It’s about getting rid of all the things that are haunting you.”
“Those two stopped haunting me because I realized yesterday that I was glad I’d killed them, all right?” He twisted his neck side to side. “They would have wasted as many of my buddies as they could, not to mention their neighbors and families and anyone else. So I blew them away, they never even saw me coming. Now I have to live with the fact that I liked killing them, that I’m proud of it, that part of me digs being a murderer.”
I held the railing for balance. “Michael, all I want is to help you get out of all this pain.”
He lay back, speaking to the ceiling. “You know nothing about my pain.”
“Maybe not. But I know a lot about pain in general. You have twenty-nine horrors inside you. Tell me about one of them.”
Michael spoke through clenched teeth. “Not a chance.”
“Just one. You pick. Which would be the easiest to talk about? The squiggle guy? The one with mouse ears?”
“You think any of them are easy?”
“Some must be easier than others. After all, you just made two go away.”
He fell back on the bench, grabbing the bar with both hands. “Right this second I would like to make you go away.”
Ouch. I fell back against the stairs. Michael gripped the bar, popped it off the safety frame, and began banging it up and down. His motions were so abrupt, so jerky, I worried that he might injure himself. So, as they say in my line of work, I removed the impediment to calm. I went upstairs, closing the door behind me.
WHY HAD I HANDLED THAT SO BADLY? Why did I press on about who those two absent faces were, when what really mattered was that they were gone? Most of all, how had I become one of Michael’s problems?
I picked up my cell phone and hit the speed dial for my sister Robin. But when the call went straight to voice mail, I hung up.
The last time Michael barked at me, it was that afternoon in the park after Dr. Doremus. He’d been furious with my impatience for him to make progress. And here I’d done it again. Too eager to crow about the two gone ones, too excited that we could somehow magically tick down the rest of the faces and they would vanish one by one.
It would not be that easy. I had to quit being so hopeful. Some of those faces were never going away. All of them were going to put up a fight.
The weights clanked from below, every sound reminding me of past strengths and past intimacy. If we could have made love once, just one damn time, it would have healed so much between us. I knew that with certainty, but I was powerless to make it happen.
I went outside and sat on the stoop by the kitchen door, staying there for hours.
There was plenty to distract me. Late commuters hurrying home, a pickup with a loud muffler, swallows darting after mosquitos. Some teens cranked pop music as they passed in a minivan, every window open.
As the light dwindled, I saw two kids on bikes with noisy training wheels pedaling up the road, their parents ambling behind. The Franklins: both pediatricians, their home five houses up the street, probably moving out of our neighborhood the moment their med-school loans were paid off. Michael had let them borrow his truck a few times, a load of garden mulch, that sort of thing. We waved at one another but did not strike up a conversation, which at the moment was a relief.
The air was humid despite the afternoon’s shower. Maybe it had rained only at Lake Oswego. Lights came on in houses here and there. Heat lightning flickered over the city. Hard day with patient, hard day with husband.
Before the war, the remedy for a tough work day was to unburden myself to Michael. He would not know Barclay Reed’s name, but he’d hear plenty about his personality, and prognosis, and any moments of grace along the way. Not anymore. Since the third deployment, Michael had not asked one question about a patient. It was almost like I didn’t have a job.
Sometimes life was difficult, that’s all. A down day. Nothing sleep and a fresh start couldn’t fix. But I wanted to cry.
Instead, I remembered my first patient at the agency. I’d lost people during training, but this was my introduction to the death of someone who was totally my responsibility. And it was a rough one: a plucky fourteen-year-old named Sally who had leukemia. When she lost all her hair, Sally looked like an adorable baby chick.
Sally died on a Thursday morning, a beloved stuffed hippo tucked under her arm. Back at Central Office that afternoon to finish the case’s paperwork, I sat at my desk and lost it. Just lowered my face into my hands and bawled.
In a place like that, you can’t cry long without feeling a reassuring hand on your shoulder. I raised my head. It was Timmy Clamber.
He leaned against my desk and folded his arms. “OK, darling. Spill.”
I told him about Sally, choking up again as I did so.
Timmy wagged a finger at me. “No more sobbing, Deb. Not ever.”
“There’s nothing wrong with crying,” I sniffed.
“In your personal life, no. But for this job? First of all, you’ll run out of tears. It’s a sorrow a day around here.” He bobbed his head, which jiggled his dangling crucifix earring. “Yes, it’s hard to see patients hurt, but remember, darling: You’re not the one doing the suffering. They are.”
He moved behind my chair and began massaging my neck and shoulders. Timmy had powerful hands and I leaned into them.
“You have to be strong for them,” he continued. “You have to be steady. That way they can fall apart and you will still be there, solid like a tree. My goodness. The reason you’re holding back tears is not because you don’t have a heart, but because you do.”
There on the little concrete step outside my screen door, I knew that Barclay Reed was about a month from dying of cancer. And Michael had just passed the six-month mark at home. In different ways, they were both suffering. Meanwhile I was healthy, and I wasn’t carrying memories of shooting anyone. I had to be solid like a tree for both of them.
Eventually the mosquitos drove me in. The basement door was closed. Either Michael was still down there, sweating out his rage, or he’d gone out the front door to walk it off. I wandered through the dark house, undressed by letting the clothes puddle on the floor, and crawled into my solitary bed.
AS THE TIME OF SOGA’S VISIT APPROACHED, American officialdom began to lay the contentious issues to rest. The Kennedy admi
nistration responded favorably to the Jaycees’ inquiry. Temple Wanamaker from the State Department wrote, “On behalf of the president I congratulate the Brookings-Harbor Jaycees for their efforts to promote international friendship and goodwill.” Mark Hatfield, Oregon governor and a World War II veteran, also wrote in support of Soga’s visit.
Then Claude Waldrop granted an interview to the Portland Oregonian. Recall that Waldrop was commander of the 174th Infantry at the time of the bombing. The incident had occurred on his watch. Waldrop’s junior officer, Second Lieutenant Joseph Kane—who memorably had ordered soldiers to keep quiet about seeing Soga’s first flight and failing to report it—was court martialed for deceiving investigators. Yet for Waldrop, time had healed this wound.
“I have no animosity,” he told the newspaper. “He was doing a job and we were doing a job.”
Although the momentum of these sentiments quelled some of the dissent, it did little to bolster the fund-raising.
Eugene Reiling, a World War I veteran and commander of VFW Post 966, wrote in the Pilot that he “can’t see why we should pay for someone’s way here who was trying to bring disaster to us.”
By mid-April, the Jaycees had collected less than half the money. Several made personal loans to cover the difference. Later donations rewarded their risk.
On May 3, 1962, the Jaycees formally invited Soga and his family. That step prompted another round of letters to the Pilot.
World War I veteran R. C. Baugh wrote, “To us, an invitation to Fidel Castro, or erecting a monument to John Wilkes Booth, would be just as sensible a project.”
Marion McElroy added, “The point in question should not be whether Soga is still an enemy or a person worthy of tribute. The main issue is how the $3,000 should be spent.” She suggested library books.
Jean Willard proposed that Brookings invite the astronaut John Glenn and his wife instead.
A few voices joined the debate with another point of view. “We are forgetting the most important factor,” wrote Helen Lucas, “the art of forgiving.”
Bill Krieger declared that opponents to Soga’s visit “thrive on hatred. We have looked with considerable distaste on (prejudice in Little Rock) and anti-Semitism in Germany and elsewhere. The war is long over, and Japan and the United States are joined in a firm effort to fight the threat of Communism.”
The ministers of seven area churches issued a joint statement of support for the visit. Once the pulpits had spoken, dissent quieted—though it did not cease.
In the days counting down to Soga’s arrival, security plans became increasingly thorough. Deputies drove to more than a dozen area homes, inviting certain people to skip the Azalea Festival that year. There is no record of which houses police visited, nor whether the list of dis-invitees included Donny Baker III.
By then he had appeared in the public record six times: on a marriage license, on the birth certificate of his daughter Heather, on a pilot’s license that certified him as equipped to fly a single-engine aircraft, and on a filing to create a corporation for a nursery business he and his wife had opened south of Brookings. The sixth occasion was a brief notice that he had won a regional shooting competition in the pistol division. Aside from his name on the newspaper ad, the first of his appearances, Donny was not evidently a leading spokesman among the opponents to Soga’s visit. Primarily those voices belonged to battle veterans, whose animus to all things Japanese was explicable.
By then, events had too great a momentum to change direction. On May 24, the Soga family disembarked in Portland. They walked down the airplane’s steps onto American soil. Ichiro was a small man in a gray suit, fifty-one years old, his hair combed neatly back, wearing square black glasses. His wife, Ayako, wore a yellow blazer, her head in every photo tilted to one side, an expression of listening with great interest. Son Yoshi stood stiff-backed at his father’s elbow. Daughter Yoriko hovered demurely two steps behind, her eyes on the ground.
Dignitaries greeted them warmly, even effusively. The Japanese pilot bowed to each person who addressed him but spoke only to his son, who translated the reply. When volunteers met them inside the airport to help with the baggage, Ichiro Soga insisted on carrying his own suitcase. There was a brief awkward moment when a zealous volunteer insisted on helping, until Yoshi stepped forward.
“Please pardon,” he said. “My father wishes to manage for himself.”
At that the volunteer stepped aside, and the delegation proceeded to the cars. In a photograph from that moment Soga held the suitcase not by its handle, but under his arm, against his ribs. He alone knew that within, wrapped in fine fabric, a 400-year-old relic of pride and honor lay tucked among the clothes, a stealthy weapon secreted like a pilot in a submarine.
CHAPTER 12
THE THUNDERSTORM HIT AT AROUND TWO. Or that was when the noise woke me. I lay diagonally on the bed, so I knew without moving that Michael was not there.
It was a good summer ripsnorter: flashes of lightning every few seconds, thunder distant at first, but approaching steadily till it struck right above our neighborhood. It was like standing beside the tracks as a freight train came barreling through, a big noise but complete safety. I remembered the August storms of my childhood in upstate New York, how scary they were, yet reassuring as the front moved over our town and on to the next.
Finally one crash hit directly overhead, rumbling away across the sky like a chair thrown down the stairs, and I gave up on sleep. The bedside clock read 3:18. I pulled on a shirt and shuffled to the kitchen for a glass of milk.
The room was pitch black. I only noticed because I was usually annoyed at how every appliance came with a little clock that had to be changed forward at daylight savings and set back in the fall each year, not to mention putting out a steady and unnecessary nocturnal glow.
I stood in the doorway, letting my eyes adjust. Had we lost power in the minute it took me to walk from the bedroom? Or perhaps the kitchen circuit breaker had blown? If so, the reset switch was in the basement, but the flashlight lived in the kitchen junk drawer.
I took a step toward it and banged into a chair. Now I was confused. The breakfast table normally sat against the wall, but in the dark my eyes could make out that it was against the back door for some reason. I slid a hand along the oven and there was tape over the clock.
I slid the chair aside; it made a trumpeting sound against the floor.
“Jesus, Deb, would you shush?”
Lightning flashed, and I saw Michael. The image was brief, but it told me so much.
He was crouched under the table in full combat gear: a military helmet, flak vest, and desert camouflage fatigues. A bandoleer of ammunition hung over his shoulder. He was clutching his rifle.
“Michael honey, what is going—”
“Shhhh, I said.”
The storm thundered above us, the rain poured down. I knelt and crawled toward him. The gun smelled of oil. “Sweetheart, what is it?”
“Mortars,” he whispered. “Two hundred yards.”
I knelt beside him. “Michael, you are home now. There are no mortars.”
“The Franklins. They’re using them.”
“Lover, you are in Oregon now.”
He clutched his rifle closer. “You think I don’t know that? This is the last thing I expected.”
I could have said the same. My strong man, hiding under the kitchen table with a weapon in his hands. I had no doubt that it was loaded. Every instinct told me to run, get safety, find shelter—everything but my heart. “Michael, I want to be near you right now. I am going to touch you, so don’t freak out.”
I placed my hand on his upper arm. The muscle trembled. “OK?” I said. “Can I get closer?”
His nod was like a little boy’s, wordless and tentative. Michael’s bent legs had pinned him against the door, so I could not exactly snuggle up. But I
wrapped my arms around his shoulders as far as I could reach, and whispered, “Michael, what do the Franklins do for a living?”
“They’re doctors. For kids.”
“Do you think they are the kind of people who would have mortars?”
He ran his hand up and down the stock of his gun.
“Besides,” I continued, “who would they be firing at?”
He faced me, blinking several times, pondering. His chin trembled.
After his second tour, Michael wept all the time. At movies, TV commercials, the closing minutes of professional sports games. When he said good-bye to that slobbery dog Elvis after one barbecue, Brian laughed.
“Pretty sure you guys will see each other again,” he joked, but Michael’s face was creased at the brow.
After the third deployment, not one tear. No more room for sadness. Now, after six months at home, he buried his head in my shoulder and took several huffy breaths. I squeezed him closer, ready for the downpour. Release it, lover.
Instead, he calmed. Michael shifted his legs, and the gun was awkward between us. Closing my hand on the barrel, I aimed it at the living room and slid it away on the floor. He did not resist, only burrowed closer against me. Something about removing the gun shifted his energy, his mood.
Another peal of thunder smashed the air above us, and Michael flinched. Every muscle went rigid. The nightmare of a man wide awake.
Oddly enough, I remembered a time we drove to Idaho on vacation and went to a zip-line playground in the forest. I was nervous, insisting Michael go first. After he went whirring down ahead of me, I reached out and touched the wire. It was alive with tension, the strength of the cable versus gravity’s pull on my husband, the metallic intensity.
That is what Michael’s body felt like, under the table on our kitchen floor. He was not going to cry, no, because he was not sad. It was something else.
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