The Emperor of Any Place (14 page)

He sits on the side of his bed and, using his index fingernail like a tiny crowbar, opens the locket’s silver clasp. There are two tiny pictures inside: on the right, a soldier; on the left, a girl. The girl is a brunette with a big twisty hairdo and a flirtatious smile; the soldier’s face is certified grade-A macho, hair mown short into a high and tight. You can’t see the regulation blue of his eyes because the photographs are black-and-white. But this is him all right: the infamous Griff. Except
before
he got the scar above his right eye. The woman must be Evan’s grandmother, Mary. Evan never met her, as far as he can recall. Never heard from her, either. Evan isn’t even sure how
his
mother ended up with this necklace; there must have been some communication between her and Mary.

Anyway . . .

He stares at the young face of his grandfather. This is the man who disowned his only son when “the traitorous lout” bypassed the Vietnam War by dodging to Canada. That was what Clifford used to say to him with a certain amount of pride, as if he’d fought in a different kind of war and won.

Evan closes the locket. He remembers when he was a little kid getting his eye right up close to the locket as he snapped it shut. He remembers talking to the tiny people inside, as if he were just about to lock them in a darkened room and he hoped they wouldn’t be frightened. He remembers thinking when you closed the two halves of the heart together like that, the two faces inside couldn’t help but kiss.

Evan’s gaze drifts up until he can see himself in the mirror on the back of his bedroom door. He stands and approaches it, flattens his hair down with his hand, and tries to look tough, eyes on high beam, a nudge of a smile urged out of him by the photographer. He grimaces and makes the muscles in his neck stand out.

A blue-eyed leatherneck. A grunt.

He remembers a conversation with his father. “Your granddaddy was a grunt. So was his father before him and so on back to the Stone Age. Which is where they probably got the name, come to think of it. ‘Grunt.’”

The face in the mirror is angry. That’s what was missing. Now he looks a whole lot like Griff. Angry and suspicious. And frightened.

He replaces the locket in its dusty maroon box and puts it in the drawer of his bedside table. He’s about to climb into bed, when he stops and listens. No Griff. Not yet. So he turns to the closet, gets down the black box, and takes out the yellow book. Then he climbs into bed, shivering a bit from the cool breeze coming from the window. He pulls his duvet up around him and starts in again.

I have decided to insert myself into this narrative, interspersing my own recollections of the events that took place on the island Kokoro-Jima in the last year of the war, from the time when I arrived there, the time I first laid eyes on the only other inhabitant of the island. Which is to say, more accurately, the only other fully human inhabitant. The ghosts Ōshiro talks of I witnessed myself, both the flesh-eaters and the companion spirits. I understood these phantasms — if understanding isn’t too lofty a term — as the manifestations of an unhinged mind, a mind high on painkillers. That was my condition, at first. Reading him, I find myself taken back to that extraordinary time, recalling it all too well.

I watched the man climb the hill, scrabbling on all fours, out of the ravine. I kept watching even when I’d lost sight of him and could only hear him crashing through the underbrush. I was only lucky he had made as much noise coming down the slope as he now did leaving. It was all a matter of who saw whom first. I had been lucky this time. I would have to make sure I was more than lucky in the future.

Was he a soldier? It was hard to tell at the time. His uniform looked remarkably like American olive-drab army fatigues, severely bleached by the sun. Had he killed a GI? The rifle was an American issue M1. He had not arrived there with it, and I knew well enough where it came from. Still and all, the man carried the rifle like a soldier. On the other hand, he had taken off from the wreckage like a scalded cat, as I’d have thought he might once he saw the remains of my crewmates. Laski and Ramirez. I hated to leave them to the elements, but there was nothing I could do for them. Not in my condition.

That there were ghosts on this island had been a frightening revelation. Hideous things, they were, too. The old-fashioned word for such visions was “ectoplasm”: the gunk that supposedly oozed from a spirit, making it visible to the living. I was not a man who indulged in such fantasies. Even as a boy, I had a logical mind, was not taken up with fantasy, preferring to read the true stories of explorers and medical pioneers, science and such. But I could not deny the existence on this island of ghosts, the walking dead men, as I supposed them to be — zombies. And the other ghosts, who huddled near me and had, for days, been my only friends. Friends though they were, they were hardly more than vapor. I thought of them as hallucinations. And although I did eventually accept them as companions, I didn’t expect that they would prove reliable; certainly, I doubted that they could protect me from the creatures that Ōshiro called
jikininki.
One of these revolting zombies had been mere inches from my face when I first awoke from my coma. It looked flensed, the colorful word depicting the stripping back of the flesh that New England whalers did of old. The ghouls seemed stripped of their skin, covered with weeping sores and yet possessing teeth like a hyena and eyes like warning lights on a cockpit console. There was another, only slightly more rational explanation for these phantoms, of course, and that was that I had
not
really awoken from my coma; I had only
seemed
to wake up into a series of nightmarish levels of Hell. But no matter my condition, I knew that the man scampering from the plane was not one of those mutilated creatures, whatever else he was. He was as much a man as I was. But he was a man who knew how to keep the ghosts at bay using smoke. Which told me what? That he had presumably been there awhile.

When I was quite certain Ōshiro — though of course I did not yet know his name — was gone, I lumbered down from my hiding place to where he had dropped the transmitter. I had watched him trip over it. I’d seen him shake his fist at the crows, sharing my own disdain for their rapacious appetites. But they were only surviving as nature had equipped them to, just as the ragtag soldier was doing. Just as I, Flight Officer Derwood Kraft, was attempting to do.

It had been a near thing.

I picked up the yellow box. It was a BC-778, known to the troops as the “Gibson Girl” for its shapely figure. It was a simple-enough machine to operate. A round door in the front of it opened to reveal a ninety-two-meter antenna wrapped on a spool mounted on the back of the door. This was to be raised by a box kite or alternately a helium balloon; only the kite had survived the crash landing. There was a crank embedded on the back side of the transmitter, which you attached to the top and turned with enough vigor to get the voltage up and to maintain it, as indicated by a light on the top. The transmitter then sent out an SOS for up to a two-hundred-mile radius. It was a lot of work to operate the crank. You had to sit with that gal between your knees, strapped to your thighs, to hold her in place. I’d tried one out, stateside. I’d never been much in the muscle department, but I managed well enough. That was when I was healthy, when I hadn’t been lying half dead in the jungle for who knows how long.

Back when I still had two hands.

I had lost my left hand from just above the wrist. Not lost it, cut it off. It had been crushed on landing, broken so badly that I hadn’t had much cutting to do. Thank God for small mercies.

My survival was a miracle, a multifaceted miracle. I had been the only one to parachute from the plane when it was hit by enemy fire. Getting out was miracle number one. I landed on the same island as the plane, which was miracle number two. Except that was only because I had jumped too late to really benefit much from the parachute’s drag. So I landed in a tree and fell through many slashing branches until my downward fall finally stopped. That’s when my arm got wedged in the crotch of a branch, wedged and snapped.

Miracle three: I didn’t croak up in that tree. I was able to climb down — mostly falling — and, fainting numerous times on the way, find the Gooney Bird, thanks to the flames that briefly engulfed the forward end of it but mercifully never reached the fuel tanks. Was the rain the fourth or fifth miracle? Anyway, it was yet another miracle that there were enough bandages, gauze, iodine swabs, and other antibiotics, not to mention morphine tartrate, to get me through the ordeal. Endorphins from my traumatized body got me to the morphine, and then the drug took over the job of holding the pain at bay.

The fall had done most of the amputation for me. Digging a shiny new bayonet from one of the boxes of rifles, I slashed the muscle and tendon still holding my poor dead hand in place and then folded the skin and tags of flesh over the opening as tightly as I could. It wasn’t easy to stitch it up. Like most American lads of my day, I had never learned how to sew, although I did remember watching my mother sew the stuffing into a turkey at Thanksgiving. I remember leaning on the counter at her elbow, licking my lips, little realizing the use that homey lesson would later serve me!

When my arm was as closed up as I was going to get it, I poured a whole bottle of disinfectant on it, screaming the whole time. Then I wrapped it up as tight as I could manage with one hand and my teeth.

Then oblivion.

Who knows how long I was out? I had come to, once or twice, enough to douse the wound with iodine, take some more morphine, and keel over again. In the euphoria and dysphoria brought on by the drug, I remembered observing my lower arm for signs of rot. If infection set in, I knew I would be done for, because there were neither enough medical supplies nor willpower left in me to attempt a further cut.

And I survived.

I had never been one for praising the Lord. Mother was a good Christian soul, a Congregationalist; Dad not so much, as they say these days. He was a farmer back in Plainfield, Vermont, and the only bit of religion I heard coming out of his mouth was some variant of “the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.” I myself hadn’t seen much to indicate anyone was in charge up there — certainly not at Saipan or Tinian or Guam. And from what one heard of the war in Europe . . . God, if there was one, clearly had too much on his plate. But maybe this tiny island had its own smaller deity who had seen fit to bless a young flight officer and give him a second chance.

Until an hour before Ōshiro’s arrival, I had thought I was the
only
living human there. This was going to be a problem. I had all the rifles and ammunition you could want, but only one usable arm. I couldn’t even bury my dead comrades. I was emaciated from the ordeal, wasting away. Ōshiro had looked fit, quick, and strong. I’d be no match for him in any kind of hand-to-hand combat. So I would have to match wits with him.

I did have my handgun, but not much of the right-caliber ammo.

The first thing I needed to do was find a new home. And then I needed to get the Gibson Girl working for me. There was no point trying to raise the aerial down in the depths of the gully. There was little in the way of a breeze, for one thing. So I’d never get the box kite up. Besides, I would need all of those ninety-two meters of aerial to get a crack at transmitting a signal, and I was below sea level, as far as I could tell. So I would have to cart the contraption to some higher or more open place. Get it out to the beach, at least, get the kite up and the crank working, send my distress signal, and keep it going. All with an enemy soldier sharing the same few acres of land. The odds weren’t promising.

I was a Green Mountain farmer’s son. Farming wasn’t what I intended to do with my life, assuming I got out of that pickle, but I had a pretty good eye for acreage. I would guess the place wasn’t much more than four miles long and a mile and a half wide, narrowing to a point at its southern end. I would later learn Ōshiro’s name for it, the heart-shaped island. That it was. There were cliffs at the bottom pointy end of the heart, which was a lot closer to where I was. Now that he knew he wasn’t alone, the south end also offered the benefit of cover. I was living in a cave on the southern slope of the jungle and could see the hills rise up behind me, but had never had the energy to scale the heights. Now it seemed I was going to have to, and I hoped there would be more caves at the rocky south end, assuming the geomorphology was anything like it was on Saipan: volcanic rock, limestone. I had done little exploring at that point, being too busy just staying alive. Now I was going to have to work a little harder at that!

I sank to the ground and leaned my back against the grounded Gooney Bird. That’s what we affectionately called the Douglas C-47 Skytrain. The Brits called it the Dakota. It was essentially a DC-3 airliner stripped down for military transport. This one had carried its last load.

I was exhausted, worse than ever, at the thought of all I had ahead of me to do. It was going to be the Devil’s own work just to hoist the transmitter to higher ground, let alone get the damn thing working. I remember closing my eyes and listening to the sound of the night gathering around me. I’m not sure if it was my mother’s faith or my father’s practicality that gave me the strength to go on. Both, I guess. But tired as I was, I remember opening my eyes and smiling. I was alive. No, I felt
newly
alive. Spurred on. Somehow, in some strange way, I owed my enemy for that. I was going to have to outsmart the other man, or think of a way to render him inoperable.