The Emperor of Any Place (11 page)

Evan wakes to someone walking by his bedroom door. It is a comforting sound, his father going to the bathroom and returning for a little sleep-in.
A good idea,
thinks Evan.

Where was he?

Running. Running with Isamu, waiting for the gunshot that will bring him down. A desert island — hunter or hunted?

Then he wakes again to reality.

Kokoro-Jima
lies beside him on the bedclothes, open, wings spread out like some grounded yellow bird. The story is bleeding into his life. Hurriedly, he closes it and shoves it under his bed. He rubs his eyes, checks his bedroom door. Closed. Would Griff have opened it? He looks at his phone: 10:33, two hours and thirty-three minutes late for debriefing. So, he is now officially the Devil’s spawn.

He should get up, but he lies there thinking about this stranger in his house. This man who must be a hundred, or at least — he figures it out on his fingers — at least in his late eighties. And yet he walks tall as if on parade, as if every muscle in his body knows its job, a well-oiled squadron of muscles waiting for deployment.

He thinks of Griff ’s voice, how disarming it is. How he seems hardly to acknowledge the
g
’s and
r
’s and
t
’s at the ends of words, so that everything
sounds
softened out, like a box of pastel-colored M&M’s. Except there’s no sweetness, really. It’s as if someone melted chocolate onto ball bearings.

He was the one who walked by Evan’s room.

Which could only mean he went into the master bedroom. Dad’s room. “Daddy,” as he referred to Clifford in that chocolate-covered-ball-bearings accent of his. What did he want, looking in Clifford’s bedroom? Who gave him the right to walk around this house?

“You did,” Evan mutters to himself.

Then he kicks off his bedclothes, gets dressed, and goes to face the music. To save the old man any need to reassess his grandson, he wears the same clothes he was wearing last night.
He’d be used to that,
thinks Evan.
Soldiers wear the same thing every day, don’t they?

Griff is in the Dockyard, staring at the shelves of ships in bottles. Evan glances nervously at the worktable, as if the yellow book might have left some memory of itself there. But his father’s worktable has been transformed back into the desk it was, a desk now stacked with file folders, papers.

On the right side is his father’s old Packard Bell, voted one of the ten worst PCs ever. The screen saver is on. Psychedelia. Griff must have followed Evan’s eyes.

“I was searching for something like a spreadsheet,” he says.

“Steam-driven,” says Evan.

“What’s that?”

“Dad used to say he had the last of the steam-driven computers.” Then he looks at Griff. “You know about spreadsheets?”

Griff acknowledges his surprise. “I may be old, but I’m not intimidated by technology.” Evan nods. “And good morning,” Griff adds, then turns to look at the wall of bottled ships. “I was just admiring the fleet here.”

“Yeah. It was his hobby.”

“Not surprised. He was one for making model airplanes when he was a boy. Had ’em all arrayed on shelves, just like this.”

Drawn into the room, Evan looks at the boats. Thinks of telling Griff that it’s not a fleet — it’s a flotilla. He wants to say hands off. He is suddenly possessive of the flotilla. But it isn’t that. He’s just uncertain of this man who has appeared out of nowhere.

“He’s good with his hands,” Evan says.

Griff nods. “He sent me one of these here things,” he says.

“He did?” The incredulity in Evan’s voice makes the old man smile.

“Yes, indeed. Surprised the hell outta me. But it fell a little short of being what you might call a gift.” Evan sticks his hands in his pockets, waiting for the story — wanting to hear any news of his departed father — just not wanting to beg for it. “It was the USS
Chesapeake,
” says Griff. “Pretty little three-master.” He picks up one of the boats, tilts the glass to see it better. “Only thing is the
Chesapeake
had, shall we say, a spotty career.” He puts the bottle back on the shelf, sniffs at the memory, and shakes his head. “You see her first commander, he surrendered that ship to the Brits in an action that started the War of 1812.”

Evan’s not quite sure he gets it.

Griff ’s expression is wry. “It was a little piece of history your daddy knew would not be lost on an old soldier.”

Oh. Now he gets it. “Nice one, Dad,” he mutters.

Griff reaches to an upper shelf. “Here it is,” he says.

For a moment, Evan is confused. Then he gets it. “You sent it back?”

“I did,” Griff says sternly. “I don’t like games.” He turns to look at Evan, to make his point perfectly clear.

Evan nods.
No jokes.
Check.
No games.
Check.
And not easily intimidated.
Check.

Griff finds his way back to the chair behind the desk. Evan grits his teeth, not wanting to see this man sitting there — not wanting to see
anyone
sitting there. No, that wasn’t it at all. Wanting so much to see one person sitting there.

“You no doubt are cognizant of . . . of your father’s and my . . . problem with each other.”

Problem,
thinks Evan,
as in “scornful intolerance.” Got it.

He nods his head, even as Griff shakes his. “It seems foolish now,” he says. “The two of us going on like that.” He pushes the chair back from the desk, knots his hands together in his lap. The liver spots on his broad hands look like lichen on granite. “Acting like . . . well, like a hippie son and his grunt of a father. The dove and the hawk — that’s what he called us back when he was your age.” He casts his assessing eye over Evan again, as he did last night. His eyes say shabbiness.

“So you don’t have a summer job, son?” he says. “A boy your age?”

“I
had
a job. But no, I don’t
have
a job.”

The old man nods as if he’d have guessed as much. “Getting up early too much for you?”

Evan is stunned. “Excuse me?”

Griff taps the face of his watch. “I thought we had a date,” he says.

“Are you kidding me?”

Griff shakes his head. “I’m not a man who kids. What are you?”

“Excuse me?”

“Your age, boy.”

“Seventeen in November.”

“That’s what I thought. When I was seventeen, I had already signed up. It was 1941. There was a war happening in Europe, and although we weren’t in it yet, we were going to be and I wanted a part of it. Had to lie about my age, mind you, but I was big for my age and the marines were hungry.”

Evan crosses his arms and leans against the door. He’s fuming. He wants to say,
Stop with the lecture, already, school was out five weeks ago.

“I spent my seventeenth birthday on a firing range in California. They had bundled us into cattle cars that morning and took us one hundred and seventy miles up the coast to this range near San Luis Obispo. Bundled into those cars like so much cattle. But that was the marines for you; that was boot camp.”

Now Evan has this terrible urge to clap. He resists.

“I had this M1 Garand, clip-fed, semiautomatic. It still reeked of Cosmoline, the gunk they greased ’em up with for shipping. I tell you, I’d sat for hours on my bunk scrubbing that damn rifle to make her fighting ready.”

Evan’s pulse is beating like mad. His breathing is getting ragged, but the old soldier hardly seems to know he’s there.

“Some wag pinned a lizard to my target. Dead center. I reduced it to lizard dust.” He smiles to himself, then pins Evan with his gaze, just as if he were a lizard on a bull’s-eye. “There were five possible results on the rifle range, Evan,” he says. “You could, one, not qualify; two, qualify; three, prove yourself a marksman; four, a sharpshooter; or five, an expert. That last result was what I was aiming for: expert. It meant a lot. It meant five dollars more pay, for one thing. A lot of money, back then. And it meant respect.” His eyes tell Evan that, in case he hadn’t noticed, there is a point about to be made. “You see it was what my daddy expected of me — nothing less. And in my day, you didn’t disregard what your daddy expected. His respect was your aim and your honor to achieve.”

Here endeth the lesson. Evan wonders if he’s supposed to say amen. Instead, he’s tempted to yawn. He shifts, stands straight, drops his arms to his sides, squeezes his hands into fists. “Why are you here?” he says, his voice hanging on by rubber bands.

“Because you asked me, I believe.”

“And why did I do that? Ask some guy I never met, who never so much as sent me a birthday card? Why would I want to see him?”

Griff lowers his head but not his gaze. “I seem to recall you were needing some help settling things around here.” His hands open like a magician’s over the folders before him on the desk, the screen of the computer now a swirling galaxy far, far away.

“Why?”

“What’s this about, son?”

“Just answer me. Why?”

Griff looks well and truly pissed. Good! “Because your daddy passed on.”

“Exactly!” says Evan, jabbing the air with his finger. “And
that’s
why I don’t have a job. That’s why I
quit
my job! Not because I can’t get up in the morning. Which is none of your fucking business, anyway!”

“Mind your tongue, Evan.”

“No, you mind yours. You’ve got way too much to say!”

The sergeant major sits up straight and leans forward, his huge hands resting on the top of the desk, his fingers splayed, ready to leap. “Is this how you talked to your daddy?”

“No, sir. It is
not
how I talked to my daddy. Not ever. And you know why? Because I loved him like fucking crazy.” His voice has pretty well given up the ghost, but it doesn’t stop him. He blunders on, his finger jabbing the air and tears springing to his eyes. “I loved him, okay? And respected him. He was the best damned father in the world. Unlike you!”

Then Evan storms out the door, heaving it shut behind him, and races down the stairs and out of the house. The Dockyard sign falls to the carpet, making no sound at all.

He half expects to find the doors locked — to find himself barred from his own home. It’s after eight in the evening. It doesn’t matter where he’s been; eventually he knew he would have to come back and face the music. What’s the man going to do, court-martial him? He stands just inside the kitchen door, listening. He hears the sound of the television funneling up from the den. Judging from the volume, the old soldier must be hard of hearing. All those bombs bursting in air. Ninety. Evan has done the math. Griff is ninety years old; Clifford died at sixty-two. Evan shakes his head at the unfairness of it all. He looks at the muddied orange clogs of his father, his decomposing Birkenstocks. He looks at his own torn-up Emerica Heretics with the yellow laces, piled with his soccer cleats, one flip-flop embalmed in spiderweb. And there beside them sit Griff ’s shiny black outdoor shoes. Even his shoes stand at attention.

Evan heads down the stairs. He knocks on the cracked-open rec room door. There is no answer. Evan pushes it open.
Shhhh.
The old man is sitting in the green wingback chair watching a baseball game on television. The infamous Griff does not look amused. Evan checks out the TV, the Dodgers and the Cardinals. He returns his gaze to Griff. He wonders if it’s only the game that is making him frown. Evan pictures the old aluminum baseball bat sitting in the corner of the carport and wonders why he didn’t grab it on his way in. Just in case.

There is a newspaper on the old man’s lap, folded so meticulously it appears to have been ironed, like the olive-green golf shirt and ivory chinos the man is wearing.

Evan clears his throat, his left hand still on the door, in case there’s some kind of weapon hiding under that immaculately folded newspaper and he needs to beat a hasty retreat.

Griff looks up at him. Nods. He picks up the channel changer from off the side table and mutes the game. There is a tray on the hassock in front of him with the remains of a meal on it. The marines have landed and apparently made themselves at home.

“I found a copy of your father’s will in his files. Apparently, it has been updated some.”

Evan sees this for what it is: a chance to move on. He steps farther into the room.

“I couldn’t contact his lawyer, on account of it being Sunday. I’ll try phoning tomorrow. I highly doubt he’ll be able to give me any specifics since he’s unlikely to have my name on record acknowledging me as legal guardian.”

Evan nods. “So, we’ll have to go together,” he says. Griff nods. “Okay, thanks.”

“That will depend, of course, on your schedule,” says Griff.

He can’t resist it,
thinks Evan. Has to get the dig in — let Evan know he hasn’t forgotten the scene in the Dockyard that morning. It makes Evan glad, in a way, or at least relieved. There will be no need to apologize for what went down this morning. For sassing an elder. He doesn’t need to care about this man, to feel sorry, to get close to him in any way. In less than twenty-four hours, Griff has lived up to everything his father ever said about him. It gives Evan the courage to say what he wants to say.