A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set

by Stephen Hunter

  John had wanted to fight. He could have sat it out, but the records showed that late in January, he transferred, at sea, from the Iowa, to the troopship LCI-552, where elements of the 28th Regiment droned toward a date with death in the center of the largest Marine Corps invasion force ever assembled. It certainly was unusual. Possibly there’d been an injury aboard the LCI and a 28th officer injured himself and couldn’t continue duty, so John was shunted in fast. Or possibly John fucked up in some big, hideous way on the Iowa and was sent to the line company punitively. But more than anything, the move had the marks of pull all over it. Happened all the time. In ’Nam, boys would suddenly disappear a month into their thirteen-month tour, called stateside to work in the Pentagon. Somebody had complained to Mommy who complained to Daddy who’d done a congressman a million-dollar favor and so Junior caught the freedom bird home.

  But not John Culpepper. He used his pull to get into battle, not out of it.

  It couldn’t have been easy. A year on a battlewagon isn’t the best training for something like Iwo and when he got to the 28th the CO wouldn’t know him, the other officers wouldn’t know him, and the men wouldn’t know him. He’d go into the fight without much psychological support, not easy and made harder by far by the peculiar savagery of Iwo.

  So John fought on Iwo for a week. On the third day, Earl Swagger came down from headquarters and got his men through the successful assault against the blockhouse on the northwestern flank of Suribachi as the 28th circled and cut off the five hundred-foot tall volcano. Then, a few days later, a shell landed close at hand; the young officer’s legs were shattered. He spent three nights in an aid station and was evacuated by hospital ship. He recuperated in Hawaii, where he married his fiancée, Tommy’s mother, Mildred, a plain girl also from the Boston area. By the time he was duty-ready, the A-bombs had been dropped, the war was over. He got to go home a hero, even if he’d probably never fired his carbine once.

  It didn’t matter. He did what he was supposed to, even if he was scared shitless the whole time. That’s what won wars, the thousands of reluctant John Culpeppers, not the two or three Earl Swaggers.

  But there was no sword.

  Where could it be?

  Maybe it got thrown out and off it went to the Kenilworth dump, to rust away to oblivion or be crushed to junk by a bulldozer.

  Bob tried to think hard on the issue.

  What is the quality of a sword?

  Well, its sharpness, but that’s the sword as weapon. Think of the sword as object: the answer is, its awkwardness.

  It’s long and thin and curved. You might display it, but it wouldn’t fit neatly into one of those standard cardboard boxes; no, you’d have to wedge it in.

  Who’s packing these boxes? Probably some workingmen hired by the surviving son who has suddenly acquired a house he doesn’t particularly want and never remembers fondly, but he’s got to get it into shape, sell it before his wife files for divorce. So someone packs all this stuff, thinking not a bit about it, not engaged in the family’s life, having no special sense of the meaning of a sword taken in battle and—

  Bob went to the first closet. No. But in the second one, he found three golf bags, and there, in the third one, amid the sixes and sevens and the drivers and the wedges and the putter was Captain Hideki Yano’s shin-gunto.

  “Tom?”

  “Oh, yeah, you found it,” said Tom Culpepper, rising from a desk in what had been his father’s study. He had his ever-present glass of Maker’s with him, apparently just recently freshened.

  “I did, yes. It was in a golf bag. I thought you might want to have a look.”

  “Yeah, I suppose I do. Yeah, that’s it,” he said, taking it, holding it to the light. “Here, let me point out something. See this peg or whatever it is?”

  He pointed to a stub a few inches above the circular hilt of the old thing. It seemed clotted with some kind of black tar or something, smeary and gummy. But it also, in the right angle of light, threw up tiny puncture wounds.

  “I remember the day I got cut. I’d snuck it out of Dad’s study and we were waving it around, playing pirate or something. ’Fifty-seven, ’fifty-eight, sometime around there. Then we got the bright idea to take it apart. Don’t ask me why. We examined it and it seemed to be held together by this little wooden pin through this hole. See, it runs from one side to the other. That secures the handle to the blade, I’m guessing.”

  “I see,” said Bob, who already knew the correct terms from the Internet: the bamboo peg was mekugi, the hole into which it fitmekugiana.

  “But it was stuck. We tried to drive it out with a hammer and nail and all we did was dent it. God, when I think of it now, I’m a little ashamed. We had no idea. It was just a big sword thing for killing pirates.”

  “You were just kids. How could you know?”

  “We never got it out. I hate to remember this thing on the floor and I’m whacking on it, the blade is getting all crudded up on the floor. It’s got some kind of gunk on it. Real thick black stuff. I don’t know if the Japanese officer put it there, or your father, or mine, or someone at the factory, or what. But it’s not coming out easily.”

  “No, it’s not. Someone wanted to hold it together. Go on, pull it.”

  John Culpepper’s son Tom drew the sword out. It buzzed against the tightness of the metal scabbard, then described an arc across the room as he brandished it.

  “Wow,” he said. “This baby still wants to cut something. Here, it scares me a little.”

  He handed it over to Bob, who in taking it felt some kind of charge—what? a thrill, a buzz, a vibration—as indeed the baby still wanted to cut something.

  You could tell in a flash it was superbly designed for its purpose, a thin ridge running each side of the gently curving blade, reaching the tip—kissaki, he knew it to be called. He felt the blasphemous power of the thing. It had exquisite balance, but the blade seemed something even more, somehow weirdly alive. He waved it just a little and could have sworn that it contained some soft core that pitched forward in the momentum, speeding toward its destination.

  He held it up to the light. Indeed, the blade had seen hard use. The steel was dull upon close inspection, a haze of crosshatched nicks and cuts. Small black flecks attacked it randomly. On the edge—yakiba, he knew—almost microscopic chips were missing, whether from small boys whacking it against a tree or a Japanese officer drawing it against a marine’s neck. The handguard—tsuba—was a heavy circle of iron, like an ornate coaster almost. The grip was tacky: the sword was covered in gritty fish skin, then wrapped elaborately in a kind of flat cotton cording that was darkened with sweat or grime, worn in places and frayed.

  If you waved it, the sword rattled ever so gently, because, he now saw, the guard wasn’t secured tightly by spacers.

  “I remember as a kid you could slice paper with it, that’s how sharp it was,” said Tom Culpepper. “Here, let’s try it.”

  He grabbed a heavy piece of stationery and Bob touched edge to paper and felt the sword pause, then slide through neatly. Tom dropped two pieces of paper to the ground.

  “I can’t believe it’s that sharp,” he said. “Nothing should be that sharp!”

  7

  NARITA

  You can’t get mad.

  You can’t get mad.

  Yet it was all he could do to sit there.

  It’s a test, he told himself. They’re testing the gaijin. They want to see if I have the maturity, the patience, the commitment to politeness and ceremony to be worth talking to in Japan.

  Or maybe, he thought, they’re like cops everywhere: they just don’t give a fuck.

  Whichever, the result was the same. He sat in the Narita International Airport police station, forty miles outside Tokyo. It was a stark, functional space with nothing like the swanky, shopping-mall flash of the public hallways on higher levels.

  The process had all been set up. Having discovered the sword, he had called the retired Colonel Bridges of
the Marine Historical Section, explained all, and Bridges had volunteered to run the paperwork, which was considerable. He had the D.C. contacts and knew someone who knew someone at the Japan External Trade Organization, or JETRO, on the West Coast, which had some mysterious, influential connection with the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry, known as METI, one of those large governmental entities with fingers in many pies. Arrangements were made with customs to let the sword into the country. It would be removed from quarantine immediately to the Narita Airport police department, where a license would be duly issued. Thus with the customs certificate and the license, it was all supposed to be legal.

  But something was wrong. Now he waited in the central room, near the desk, with beaten Korean workers, with angry salarymen who’d gotten drunk and acted out and had to be put down with a thump on the head, with grifters and cheats, maybe with the odd minor gangster or two, as gangsters were said to be spread widely throughout Japanese society. They were called yakuza, he knew, “yaks” for short.

  But, Wait, wait, wait.

  Finally, Ah, yes, you have sword.

  His interrogator wore a pale blue uniform with a small handgun—a Smith & Wesson possibly?—in a flapped black holster. He was an unprepossessing man, not one of your beefier cop types.

  Yes, sir. The documents are there. I just need the license, and that was supposed to be arranged.

  Arranged?

  Yes, sir, here’s the letter.

  He handed it over.

  It’s a relic. It’s from the war. Mr. Yano’s father died in battle and lost his sword. I believe this was it, that it was taken in battle by my father. Mr. Yano came to America looking for the sword. I didn’t have it then and it took me a couple of months, but I think I have it now.

  The uniformed officer took the document.

  The sword is supposed to be delivered here from the customs office upstairs. It’s all arranged.

  Swords are very dangerous. You must wait. I will go check and call your name. Please return to your seat.

  And so Bob sat. He thought it would take a few minutes, but the minutes dragged on until sixty of them mounted up, then sixty more. Maybe he could go out, get a book, a newspaper, a cup of coffee, something.

  Everyone else in the waiting room had more patience. They could sit without making a sound, without fuss; the passage of time meant nothing to them.

  A name would be called out, off they’d go, to be interviewed, deposed, to give a statement, make an identification.

  Finally in the third hour a name was called and after a second he realized that it was some sort of approximation of Swagger. It came out “Su waggaa.”

  “Yes, here.”

  “Ah. Yes. You come, please.”

  He went with the officer—a different one, slighter, younger, though in uniform with a little gun in a holster as well—and back through squad and staff rooms, more insurance agency really than cop shop, because there wasn’t the sense of bully-macho, of men who used their weight to require obedience, that you felt in an American variation.

  Finally, he was led into a room; a uniformed senior police officer gestured for him to sit down.

  “Sorry, we had to do some checking. It’s fine for METI to have plans, but no one here knew a thing. Bureaucracy.”

  “I understand. Sorry for the trouble.”

  “Called your embassy, had to check with METI, the man there was out to lunch. This is unusual.”

  “People don’t usually bring them into Japan. Sure, the swords are so beautiful it’s usually the other way around. Sorry for the problem.”

  “Tell me please again.”

  Bob went through it, trying to keep his sentences short and clear. His father, Captain Yano, Iwo. The surprise visit, the request. His discovery, his decision to honor his father, Mr. Yano’s father, Mr. Yano and his family. JETRO and METI, his talks with the METI rep in L.A., the letter, the sense that arrangements had been made. He concluded with, “Is there a problem?”

  “A small one. You see, this is shin-gunto. You know shin-gunto?”

  “Sure. Army sword. I know it ain’t nothing fancy, not like the beautiful swords that are so much a part of the Japanese heritage.”

  “Yes. You see it’s not much. Not a beautiful piece by any means, like some. Old, rather hard used. What you don’t see is that we have a regulation forbidding this kind of sword, the army sword, from coming in.”

  “That kind of sword?”

  “Yes. You see it’s gendaito—”

  “Modern.”

  “Yes, and so officially it’s not an antique that tells us of our heritage and reflects the skill of our artisans. It’s merely a weapon. We would regard it as we would regard a gun. You know there are no guns in Japan.”

  “That’s why I left my bazooka at home.”

  “Excellent decision. Anyhow, the gendaito sword, the gun, in Japanese eyes, legally, they would be the same thing.”

  “Okay.”

  “But I understand and I appreciate. The man who visited you probably wasn’t thinking precisely about this issue. METI wasn’t thinking about this issue, only about necessary import forms, difficulties with customs, that sort of thing.”

  “Sorry for the trouble. See, I wanted it to be a surprise. The man I mean to present it to, he doesn’t know I’m here. I only wired him, told him I thought I’d have some good news for him. The reason I did it that way was that when he visited me, he preferred to do it without making an appointment. He didn’t want me going out of my way to arrange hospitality. He was trying to be as helpful as possible. I felt I owed him the same. I knew if I told him I was coming, he’d make a big to-do, he’d meet me, he’d have the house cleaned, all his kids would be dressed up, it would be a major event. I didn’t care to do that. I was trying to act appropriately.”

  “I see. I believe you. What I’m going to do is bend the rules a little. I have prepared a sword license for you.”

  He produced the document, which looked a little like the Treaty of Ghent, with all its formal kanji characters in perfect vertical columns, utterly meaningless to Bob. It had been stamped dramatically with some kind of red image, and it also had an impressive official serial number.

  “See here, where it says ‘year of fabrication.’ By our standards anything that is showa is gendaito, showa meaning from the age of the Emperor Hirohito onward, that is, from nineteen twenty-six onward. So in ‘year of fabrication’ I have written eighteen twenty-five, which puts it in the legally acceptable antique category of shin-shinto, meaning anything from eighteen hundred up to the first year of Emperor Hirohito’s reign, nineteen twenty-six. Given the deep curve of the blade, I am told by our sword expert, that is at least arguable. Therefore neither you nor the man who receives the gift should be in any legal jeopardy. That is what has taken so long.”

  “I’m very appreciative.”

  “No, it is we who should be appreciative. As I say, I have an officer here who knows a good deal about these things. He understood what a warm gesture of friendship and reconciliation it was for you to return the blade to the family of the original officer. It was his idea how to proceed. He examined the sword very closely. That gesture should not be hindered by stupid regulations.”

  “Again, I say thank you very much, sir.”

  “All right now. You must keep this license with the blade at all times and I would keep the sword bagged until you make the presentation.”

  “I will of course do so.”

  “Mr. Swagger, I hope you enjoy your visit to Japan.”

  “It is my pleasure, sir. I know I will.”

  8

  THE YANOS

  After a night in a hotel in a part of town called Shinjuku, which he picked at random for economy, after a shower, a western dinner, a walk, a western breakfast, he walked to the train station, through mobs that astonished him.

  The city was like being inside a television set. It seemed to be comprised mostly of vertical circuitry, very complex, ver
y miniaturized. He was suddenly transported to somebody else’s future. The reigning design principle seemed to be no wastage. Things were crammed in, built within bigger things, wedged this way and that. Even the alleyways were jammed with restaurants, stalls, and retail shops, each with a worm of neon above it and, of course, a sign. It was a literate society: writing was everywhere, in big signs that counseled certain consumer choices, in the endless series of official designations, of regulations and rulings and serial numbers, or directional indicators.

  The Japanese hurtled by him; all were on schedules, no one lagged, all had destinations. The intensity of the crowds was somewhat shocking. At least in this Shinjuku place it was like New Year’s Eve in Times Square 24/7. The crowds seemed organisms of their own. A red light stilled them all, but no other force on earth could, and when the green came on, baby, it was D-day, everybody hitting the beach at once. It was all go, go, go, now, now, now. Most of the men wore suits, most of the women wore suits. He knew they were called salarymen; they worked like slaves, they made the country go, they conformed, they never let loose, they always stayed on track.

  You know where that leads you. All that repression, all that discipline, all that pressure to conform, all that rigidity. It builds, it builds, it builds, and so when they blow, they blow. Examples of the blow are rife in history: thus a Nanking, a Pearl Harbor, a kamikaze. No prisoners. Australian pilots beheaded for the cameras. Killing ten enemy soldiers before you go, thus choosing death over life every damn time.

  And when the wiring blew sexually, it really blew.

  On the JR train to the suburbs, which arrived on the minute, probably the second, he sat next to a fellow who could have been an accountant, a salesman, a teacher, a computer designer—neat suit, horn-rimmed glasses, hair slicked down, unself-conscious, focused, driven. But Bob saw what had the fellow’s interest; it wasn’t the Wall Street Journal but some comic book about bound teen girls being violated by other teen girls with tools that were exactly what they seemed, only bigger, the drawings voluptuous and specific and amplified. It could get you arrested in some places in America; here, a fellow who looked like he understood mortgages read it casually, apparently following the story with some kind of rapture. Bob looked up and down the crowded car and saw at least two other men reading books with brightly colored, almost gaily cartoonized rape scenes on the covers. No one noticed, no one cared.