Steel Breeze

by Douglas Wynne

  The Arizona authorities were confused and unfocused in the wake of that first kill. When he took the second head, time, distance, and auspicious coincidences had shielded him from any connection to Arizona; and a blind drunk had been convicted of the murder of Sandy Carmichael. But for the third target on his kill list, Sensei succumbed to an artistic impulse and revisited Manzanar, placing the severed head in the proper context to tie a life’s work together like the knot on a hakama.

  Only the span of the continent had kept the authorities from connecting the crimes thus far, but now, with his apprentice’s initiation by the execution of Phil Parsons, he could feel that uncertainty slipping into a new channel. The names he had tracked down already would have to be enough. Time was running out. When he drew steel today he would slay all of them, down to the very last soul in the Tibbets bloodline before he resheathed. After this he would no longer be able to travel as James Hashimoto. The country would be swarming with agents who carried his picture. Which was precisely why he had always known he would need an acolyte. If things went awry he could rest in the knowledge that he had trained the boy the best he could. While the master was killing the last Tibbets, the apprentice would be preparing the last Parsons. The Lamprey line had dwindled down to only one, and that one had been left gazing with crow-eaten eyes across the wastes of Manzanar.

  Manzanar. He had seen pictures of the surface of Mars that were the closest thing to that barren wasteland. Returning after all these years, climbing the guard tower at dawn with Lamprey’s head in a sack, and surveying the landscape from that high vantage had brought the memories flooding back. The terrain hadn’t changed. Only the buildings were gone. He remembered the red squall that smeared the sun across the sky when the wind picked up, and the sound of sand pattering against the walls of the tarpapered pine shacks while the dust whistled through the knotholes in the floorboards like a roomful of boiling teakettles.

  As a boy he had seen the neighbors using discarded tin can lids to cover those holes and to keep the dust out. Collecting the lids and nailing them to the floor, cutting his fingers on the ragged edges and bruising his nails with the hammer…it was one of his earliest memories—the first time he had filled his father’s shoes and cared for his pregnant mother.

  He didn’t remember his father at all or the night when the FBI had taken him. Mama told him that he tried to kick one of the agents and she had to carry him off to bed screaming. Mama had been three months pregnant when Papa went to be interrogated at Fort Lincoln. They never saw him again.

  He still wondered if the baby would have been a boy or a girl. No one told him which it was that died with his mother in the camp hospital that sweltering summer day. August 6, 1942. The day he became an orphan. He could still see Sister Mary Bernadette when he closed his eyes and thought of that time, could picture her face more clearly than his mother’s. His most vivid memory of the Sister was of her sitting beside a grimy window mending a rip in his coat after a fistfight he’d had with another boy, her nimble brown fingers working the precious needle through the wool deftly and lovingly, devoid of the haste or frustration he imagined she should have felt at having to do it for the third time for this boy who couldn’t hold his temper.

  It seemed to him that there was a scarlet thread running through the fabric of life, one that joined events across the years, piercing human hearts and plunging underground, only to reemerge without warning, a thread connecting lives and sometimes dates. When three years later his life in the camp came abruptly to an end, he would be shocked by the date: August 6th again. The day he lost whatever distant family remained to him. The day he was cast alone into the world like a stone into a pond, and no one could have imagined the ripples he would make. On August 6th the dream he harbored in secret of one day finding his grandparents, aunts, and uncles when the war was over, the dream of crossing the ocean as a stowaway on a steamer, was blown to dust in a flash, washed away by black rain, when Hiroshima burned.

  The echoes of that explosion were still rebounding.

  Now, after all these years, he was going to meet the last remaining descendants of the pilot who delivered the bomb. Paul Tibbets died in 2007, and the obituary had led Sensei to Ohio. There was a camp here. Not a concentration camp, like the one he had been raised in, but a cabin on a lake where the Tibbets family was now gathering with their hamburgers and hot dogs, their soda and beer, their swimsuits and cameras, for a family reunion.

  Sensei, the uninvited guest, was bringing the cutlery.

  He followed the map he had purchased at a gas station. The road carried him through small towns with white clapboard churches and farm-equipment dealers. He passed corn and potato fields, and was reminded again of his time in the camp. At night the searchlights roved the grid of pine barracks from the towers where the guards kept watch with their machine guns, but in the daytime they had been allowed outside the wire to work the fields. There was nowhere to run to. Cruel mountain ranges stood sentinel on both sides of the valley.

  Toiling in the cornfield, he had befriended Mr. Kanemori, an Issei, who regaled him with tales of old Japan. In time, young Hashimoto learned that Kanemori-san had a family somewhere, a daughter and grandchildren in some other camp. He didn’t know which; he only knew that they were not at Manzanar. The government had sent him to the wrong camp after interrogating him for months in North Dakota. A fisherman, they had accused him of running barrels of oil to Japanese submarines off the coast of San Francisco.

  Young Hashimoto asked the old man if he had been at Fort Lincoln, and when Kanemori answered yes, the boy almost couldn’t speak. He wanted to ask if the old man had seen his father there, but he couldn’t even describe his father. All he had was a name. Kanemori didn’t recognize it, but the simple fact that he had been in the same place where Papa disappeared was enough, and after that, the orphan boy went to work beside the old man every day the sisters gave him leave.

  Mr. Kanemori pointed out Mt. Whitney and told him that it looked like Fujiyama. Close enough to do the job. “The sight of such an immovable mountain provides spiritual sustenance for Japanese blood. These sandstorms cannot touch it. You should meditate on this and try to be the same. Find the rock in your own heart that cannot be moved, whatever storms may come.”

  Kanemori told him stories of the samurai, and carved wooden bokkens to teach him his first katas. Kanemori taught him to have yamato damashi, to be a Spirit Warrior. And in whispered tones, told him to disregard the lessons of the Sisters and Father Steinback. Kanemori told him about the night in December of the first year when the mess hall bells rang all night and the internees rioted until a guard named Lamprey fired his Tommy gun into the crowd. Kanemori renewed his allegiance to the Emperor in his heart when those shots were fired. If he lived to see the day when they were set free, he was going back to Japan.

  Kanemori didn’t make it, but when years later in the 1960s, Hashimoto finally traveled to their ancestral home, he visited the village the old man was from, on his way to Hiroshima. There was a time in his thirties and forties when he had considered remaining there for the rest of his life. By then he was an accomplished martial artist, had reclaimed the culture that his Nissei parents had abandoned, and could have opened his own school.

  But that had never been the summit of the mountain in his heart. And he knew that to fulfill his destiny, to thread the needle through the fabric of his life in a way that made an enduring knot, he would have to return to America and assume the costumes and customs of the land of his birth.

  When he returned to California he brought his only true companion with him. He had not found a wife in Japan as he had hoped he might, but he had found a soul mate: the sword that now rested in the cardboard shipping box beside him. A flawless beauty, her iron furnishings were engraved with reed stalks that reminded him of the fields of Manzanar, and the blade was forged from twenty-seven inches of steel harvested from the melted girders of the Aioi Bridge at ground zero in Hiroshima, melted first by the bo
mb, and again by a master smith, hammered into an object of unsurpassed lethal artistry. She whispered to him when at rest, and sang to him when drawn. That song of blood and wind was a tune sweeter than any wife could ever utter. Handing the box over to the idiot clerk had been heart wrenching, almost impossible. But now, with his weapon by his side again, he could breathe deeper. Soon he would hear the song.

  In the early days Sensei had gathered information at libraries, combing through newspapers and microfiche for obituaries and articles, combing through history books, and military journals, academy yearbooks and phonebooks. He was not computer savvy—Bell was better at that—but Facebook had been a revelation. It was astonishing how little some people cared for their privacy, thrilling how easy it had been to follow the thread of the family reunion, to find the dates and the place. He didn't have a GPS in the car, had even pulled into a rest stop and searched the engine compartment, trunk, and wheel wells for those tracking devices that some car rental companies now used. Nor did he carry a cell phone that could be triangulated once the authorities found the carnage. But before leaving home he had researched the lake at the library. He knew the lay of the land.

  The last road was a long, winding stretch of rutted dirt, wet with mud from recent rain, little more than a trail. The car jounced and swayed, its shallow chassis scraping against the ground, making sharp screeches like birdcalls. Low-hanging branches tapped a tattoo on the windows. The family seldom came here anymore, and no one had been up in advance of the reunion to trim the trees. Clouds of midges swarmed in front of the windshield. As the road descended to the lake, it resembled a tunnel of tree limbs, then swatches of color appeared—the bright metallic paint of SUVs, the sparkling Morse code of sunlight reflecting off dark water.

  Where the road widened again, Sensei slowed the vehicle and pulled into what looked like a turnaround for snowmobiles in winter. He slid the box across his lap in the little sedan, already dressed in his black hakama and kimono. He took a Swiss Army knife from the glove compartment and slit the packing tape along the seam of the box, removed the embroidered bag from within, and, reaching into the bag, closed his hand gently around the silk-wrapped hilt of the katana.

  Sitting in the driver’s seat and looking up the road for any sign of approach, any indication that he had been noticed (there was none, but he could hear delighted cries and splashes from the lake), he reached into the glove box again and flicked open a slim metal case. He pinched a clove cigarette between two fingers and put it to his lips. He lit it and, closing his eyes, took one long meditative drag. Exhaling through the cracked window, he watched the wind snatch the sweet vapor and shred it through the dripping black branches overhead.

  He climbed from the little white car and, standing in the empty road, bowed to the ghost of Mr. Kanemori in the east where a haze-shrouded sun burned unseen. Holding the sword in his left hand, he slid it through his sash and straps, and then pushed his left thumb against the tsuba, unlocking the blade from the scabbard. The hilt ejected into his eager right hand as smoothly as ever, and another sweet draught of clove scent wafted up into his sinuses. Soon he would smell the iron of freshly spilled blood. The joyful shrieks echoing through the lake air would change color through a spectrum of anguish like the foliage of this place in autumn.

  He tossed the glowing cigarette into a wheel rut. Then, with all ceremony attended to, he commenced to walk toward the enemy.

  It was not a walk like any in the western lexicon of foot travel. It was a crouching, sliding step, executed with slow, gliding grace. The walk was a meditation unto itself. With his legs and feet concealed in the black pleated folds of the hakama, any observers would have thought they were watching a man float over the ground on a carpet of winds.

  The first thing he saw as he cleared the trees flanking the dirt lot was a cold fire pit. The blackened concrete brought to mind the buildings of Hiroshima, forever blackened with the photographic shadows of human bodies vaporized in the blast and blown on a breeze of carbon dust at the cusp of the rolling shock wave. Trimmed branches leaned against the concrete, their tips sticky with marshmallow residue. This fire pit was cool, but the smell of charred flesh tinged the air, and a film of smoke from a nearby coal fire smudged the sky above the grassy yard where it sloped down toward the lake around the corner of the cottage.

  A gunshot punctured the air, close and loud, then rolled across the water.

  Sensei did not flinch or alter his stride.

  He crept close to the pale turquoise wall of the cottage where the propane and water tanks covered him from view of anyone in the yard. From this vantage point he could see a portly, middle-aged man with gray hair, dressed in cargo shorts and a polo shirt, scraping a spatula across a portable grill. In his left hand he held a .22‐caliber rifle by the barrel. A girl in a bathing-suit top and cut-off jeans reached impatiently for the gun while the man flipped the hamburgers.

  “My turn,” she said.

  But the man didn’t give up the gun when the girl, who appeared to be about twelve years old, tugged gently at his wrist. “Hang on a minute, Annie Oakley,” he said. “I’m gonna show you something.”

  The pair stood in a clearing, on the edge of evening, the indigo sky fading to deeper purple between the trees. Soon the children in the lake would notice the air getting colder and would quit their water games, climb back up the rocky lawn toward the smell of dinner. A dollop of hamburger grease dripped onto the coals with a sizzle, and orange light flared up, illuminating the man’s face for a second.

  Sensei recognized him as Bill Tibbets. Bill was slightly more scrupulous than some of his relatives about what information he shared online, but even a single profile picture was enough for a positive identification. Bill was a Tibbets, and that put him on the kill list.

  Bill Tibbets waved a hand at his face, swatting away a mosquito, then slapped at another on his forearm, leaving a smear of his own blood. He brushed his hand on his shorts and told the girl, “Light those citronella candles, would you, honey?” He put the spatula down and took a swig from a beer bottle, seeming to relish making the girl wait for permission to take the rifle.

  There was a paper target stapled to an oak tree some fifteen yards away where the lawn met the woods, its inner rings untouched, the perimeter pockmarked to reveal the golden flesh of punctured wood through the holes in the paper.

  Sensei looked at the rifle and followed the line of it up the man’s arm to the little blossom of blood. Soon the Spirit Warrior would taste what the mosquito had. While studying martial arts in Japan, he’d heard accounts of the Rape of China. Thousands of Chinese heads had lined the roads on bamboo poles to demonstrate the ferocity of the Rising Sun, thousands of bodies stripped of flesh and fed to dogs at first…later to men. Then the war against the Australians in New Guinea when food shortages in the bomb-scorched Pacific islands almost starved the Emperor’s army. But for the true Spirit Warrior, there was never a food shortage as long as there was an enemy. Soldiers were ordered not to eat fallen comrades, but the flesh of foreign foes was known to increase one’s spiritual vitality.

  Sensei wondered if he would have time to consume the spirit of Bill Tibbets. It would depend upon how quickly he could work. And where was Bill’s brother, Tim? Approaching the house, Sensei had seen a woman through a window, setting paper plates and plastic ware around a picnic table. They would eat indoors to avoid the mosquitoes. It was a small gathering for a reunion, but there were still spouses and children present who were not on the kill list. He had come here to sever a thread, to end a bloodline, to slice a name from a scroll. But events were moving quickly now, and it was possible that the cutting would not be as clean and precise as he had intended. The flyboys who dropped bombs on cities didn’t care for such things, but a samurai was different. Anyone could kill indiscriminately, but the sword was a symbol of pristine discrimination. In the hands of the Bodhisattva Fudo Myoto, the flaming sword was an emblem of the wisdom to separate this from that.


  Sensei watched the girl as she leveled the rifle with her eye and placed the wooden stock in the hollow of her shoulder. Whoever she was…she was not on his scroll. He took a deep breath and felt it flowing into his sinews and the subtle channels that carried the Qi throughout his body. Speed would be of the essence.

  There was a rustle in the branches overhead, and the cawing of an angry crow. A flutter of black wings. Looking up, he saw that a hawk had alighted on the tallest branch of a dead, lightning-split oak, scattering a black cloud of scavengers. Sensei smiled. This was an auspicious omen.

  The girl had been startled, but she had not fired. Tibbets was instructing her, adjusting the set of her shoulders. Then she squeezed the trigger, and the sound set the hawk to flight as a new hole exploded from the gray skin of the target tree across the field. The paper was unharmed. Tibbets reclaimed the gun from the disappointed child and told her to run along and tell the others that dinner was ready. She trotted toward the water, sandals flapping, ponytail swishing.

  Time to strike. Sensei called out, “Bill! Check this out.”

  Bill Tibbets cocked his head, scrunched the worry lines on his balding pate, and squinted at the corner of the cottage where the evening shadows had grown long and deep. He stepped out of the circle of light cast by the bug candles, holding the rifle loosely, as if only half aware which was in his hand at the moment—gun or spatula. It was like leading an animal to slaughter. You spoke its name, gave it a command, and it came to the blade.

  When Tibbets was in range and out of sight of the lower lawn, Sensei stepped forward, drawing steel, and lopped the man’s head off in a single fluid motion, sending it flying onto the grass near the tree line, trailing a ribbon of blood. There was no sound from the victim but a gurgling of air escaping the severed windpipe, a bubbling in the arterial flow for a moment, and then the dull impact of the heavy body hitting the dirt. Sensei swung the katana around in a spinning arc, ending with a short stop that sent a curtain of blood and tissue flying from the edge of the blade to patter on the leaves of a nearby fern.