The Emperor of Any Place (35 page)

“How much did you see?” Griff asks.

“You came back,” says Evan. “Back up to the fort. And you were angry about something.” Evan shakes his head, picturing the anger again. “That’s what started it.” He looks at Griff for corroboration. Griff looks down at his hands, the one still, the other subdued.

“I came back,” he says. He stares at the empty television screen as if he is seeing it there.

“It was getting gusty out on the water. I was worried about getting caught in a storm. I wanted to leave him as much time as he needed. Ōshiro. I didn’t know his name. I just knew he was there. I’d always known. Kraft was anything but crafty.” He smiles a wan smile. “I decided to keep the operative’s existence and position to myself. There was a war to fight. And then, finally, it was over. He — Ōshiro — deserved to know that.” He glances at Evan. “You see, there is this horrible paradox a soldier lives with: the only other person who really gets him is his enemy. Do you see that?”

Evan nods.

“By the time I made it up to the fort that second time, the trees were filled with wind. I remember stopping at the top of the hill and looking out across the lagoon. It was getting bad.”

He looks at Evan with consternation.

“That is relevant information,” says Griff.

“Yeah,” says Evan. “I felt it. In my dream. The wind.”

Griff ’s frown deepens.

“Anyway, I got to the fort, the broken palisade, the face of it all overgrown and coming undone. Teeth missing, where the doors had once hung. He wasn’t there.”

“You got there first,” says Evan, to help him along.

Griff nods, seems to gain something from Evan’s enthusiasm. Sits upright in his chair.

“I looked around the place, noticed all the stuff Kraft mentions in the book — how well organized it all was, and yet now overgrown, untended. I found my way to this one corner where there was a little altar of rocks. I’d noticed it when I first went up. Wondered about it. I just stared for a bit. Something told me it was a cache of some kind. Weapons, maybe. Something worth checking, just in case.” He pauses. He looks at Evan as if he’s expecting a rebuttal. Evan just nods.
Go on,
say his eyes.

“I moved the top stone, peered inside, and saw these books, several of them. I squatted, flipped through one and then another. I remember suddenly looking up toward the broken gateway, feeling as if I had wandered into a trap. It’s a second sight you develop as a soldier. There was no one there. And so I turned back to the cache. My attention was drawn to a flat tin box with black letters in a red bull’s-eye on the cover. The image was dented, scratched, the words almost obliterated. The letters read: L _C_ _ S_R_K_. I remember that tin, all right. Between the letters, fragments of black were left, a bit of ragged curve, a cross bar. ‘Lucky Strike,’ a cigarette case. I opened it.”

He stops and shakes his head.

“There was this snake’s nest of thin chains and flat metal rectangles. Oh, my Lord, I was perturbed to see that. I reached in and selected one of them, pulled it out, separating it from the others. It was a soldier’s ID necklace. This box held a load of dog tags.” He shakes his head. “I read through a number of them. No one I knew, not by name or rank or number. But one or two from my division, all right.”

He looks at Evan. “Can you imagine what I was thinking?”

“I think so.”

“I could feel my blood beginning to boil. Those ghost children you read about. They were there with me. Infernal critters. Well, they pulled away from me, right then, I’ll tell you. I think they were frightened of me — my own kin, if what Ōshiro says is true about what those things are.” Griff shakes his head. He has spent a lifetime not believing any of this. Evan waits.

“I guess they could just feel the heat rising off me. I snapped the lid closed on the Lucky Strike tin, undid the button on my breast pocket, slid the tin into it, closed the button.” Evan watches him mime the operation, patting the breast pocket of his pajamas. “And, as if on cue, he was there.”

“Ōshiro,” says Evan.

“Right. He was staring right at me. Had no idea he was there. Could have picked me off easy. Instead he just cried out.

“‘No!’ he shouted. In English.

“I didn’t wait for him to make the first move. He’d had the drop on me, but the fact that he had not taken advantage of the situation in no way inhibited me. I had my rifle off my shoulder lightning quick, aimed right at his chest.

“He threw up his hands. He had no gun on him, as far as I could tell, but you never know. Christ, one of them, up in Okinawa, wounded — emaciated — wearing nothing but a G-string, pulled a grenade out of it, if you can believe it . . . almost killed —” He stops. Shakes his head. “Wrong set of memories. Let’s just say I wasn’t taking any chances.

“I indicated the framed newspaper leaning against the pole at the corner of his sleeping place. He knew what I was getting at.

“‘Yes,’ he said in English. Then he bowed slightly, not taking his eye off me or my rifle. He seemed to struggle for a moment to find a word. He’d gotten both his hands in the air, but one of them was pointing upward as if he were trying to grab at some thought. Finally, he figured out what it was he wanted to say. ‘Over,’ he said.

“‘The end,’ I said.

“‘Yes. Over. The end,’ he said back to me. I guess Derwood had taught him some English.

“I wasn’t relieved. I still had that metal box in my breast pocket. I hadn’t come here looking for trouble, but those dog tags . . .”

Evan watches Griff nod to himself. His eyes fixed on nothing in this room — focused entirely on something that happened to him three-quarters of his life ago, and yet was still here, as clear as anything. Burned into his memory.

“A strange thing happened,” he says. “The ghost children — his ghosts — all took up a protective position in front of him. They were acting out of some instinct to preserve him, I guess.” Griff ’s face looks as if he is in pain. As if there were other things he could understand, but this — this was beyond knowing.

“When I read Ōshiro’s idea about them. How they were the children yet to be born. Well, that’s just plain insane, that is. And yet, it made sense, I guess. Not at the time. But when I thought about it later.” He looks at Evan, and Evan nods. “Especially now.” Evan doesn’t nod again, but he knows some kind of a pact just got signed between them. Two people both accepting something on faith.

“They didn’t even exist yet and yet their DNA
did,
if you want to call it that. Their future was in this man. And protecting him was as crucial to them as it would be for a mother protecting her baby child. Extraordinary.”

Griff closes his eyes. Rubs them with his knuckles, opens them again.
The unbelief in his eyes, the terrible impossibility of it is something he’s lived with all his life,
thinks Evan.
Do not hurry the man,
he tells himself.

Griff sighs. “I walked toward Isamu with my gun lowered, but with a pretty damn unsympathetic look on my face. By now, he was inside the gate a couple feet. Not making any attempt to run. I stopped. I guess I’d have been about fifteen yards away. With my free hand, I undid the button of my pocket and fished out the Lucky Strike tin. I held it up for Isamu to see. ‘What the hell is this?’ I asked him, or something like that. I rattled the tin at him, accusingly, so you could hear those dog tags rattle. So there’d be no doubt what I was talking about.

“And he nodded, looked kind of agitated. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Bury.’ And as he said it, he made this sudden movement.” Griff pauses. “It was the suddenness I noticed, his one hand reaching down as if maybe he had something concealed in his pant leg. I dropped that tin so fast. I had the rifle to my shoulder, aimed at him, my finger on the trigger, before it registered on me what he was doing. He was shoveling — pretending to shovel. Not reaching for a concealed weapon. ‘Bury,’ he had said, and he was miming it for me. He had buried those soldiers.” Griff rubs his steady right hand through the bristle of his hair.

And Evan says, “And is that when it happened?”

Griff nods, his eyes wide. “Out of nowhere.”

“Out of the ground,” says Evan. “He was standing right over the trap.
Tengu
’s grave.” Griff nods again.

Evan waits. Then he says, “Go on, Griff.”

Griff stares at him, rubs his face. Rests his hands on the arms of the chair.

“I started right in, firing on that thing. I fired again and again, my aim good — perfect — hitting it with every shot, peppering the shoulders and head of the thing. It was mauling Ōshiro, and I just strode right up to it, firing. By now, the upper half of its body was fully emerged. I emptied my rifle into its hide, and when I was out of ammo, threw it aside and drew my service revolver. I fired straight into the damn creature’s screaming face, one eye, then the next, standing at close quarters until finally those talons let go of him. Let go of his bleeding body.”

Griff pauses to breathe. He sounds dead weary when he speaks again. “Kept on firing, round after round, until with this awful gurgling, the creature slid back down onto the sand. Dead. Again.”

Evan waits. Then he says, “And it was too late?”

Griff nods. “As careful as I could, I dragged the fallen soldier away from the churned-up sand — out of the reach of the thing, in case it somehow came back to life.”

“Ōshiro was dead?”

“Not quite. Chewed up something awful, but not quite dead. The worst of it was this cruel slash across his throat, leaking blood at an alarming rate.”

He looks suddenly at Evan, frightened, distrustful. Even now he can’t believe it. Evan nods for him to go on. “I wrapped my hands around his neck,” he says, “and the blood, it just bubbled up through my fingers. I could just barely feel his pulse.” He shakes his head, angrily. “Damn heart,” he says. “Pumping blood
out
of the body, and I had nothing to stop the wound. Nothing I could do. Then I saw my rifle with the white truce flag tied to it. Letting go for a moment, I tore the flag off and wrapped it around Ōshiro’s neck. But there is this terrible truth about a neck wound: you cannot make a tourniquet. To stop the blood is to close the windpipe. The white flag was drenched red in no time. Even as I tried to stanch the wound, I could see the life slipping away from him. I had seen it enough times to know. I stopped and just sat there on my backside to cradle his head in my arms.”

Evan waits, watches. Listens.

“I’ll never forget his dying gaze. There was no anger there. He tried to speak but had no voice. I nodded and nodded. The shock of what had happened finally made way for what had gone before, the moment when he had made the gesture of someone digging. ‘Bury,’ he had said.

“‘You buried the soldiers,’ I said to him. He couldn’t nod, but I know now that’s what he had been up to. It was all in the book. All those dog tags had been saved, but they were not a murderer’s trinkets. I truly believe that.”

Griff goes silent. Evan watches him. Waits. Knows there is more. Can feel it, the story, throbbing inside his own blood. It is nothing he can explain. He can only attend this old man.

Griff makes a strangled kind of sound of anger and anguish, as if he’s seeing the next part.

“What happened?” Evan asks.

Griff looks up. “Maybe the strangest thing of all. I was plumb exhausted. Still sitting there, holding him, I closed my eyes. Just closed my eyes. Then I must have heard something, because I snapped ’em open and there were the others. Not the children, those confounded . . .”

“Jikininki?”

“Yeah, the flesh-eaters. I’d never laid eyes on them — sure as hell never seen them at work! They’d made themselves scarce when I’d been there with the troops. But now they were converging on him — on the two of us — and I knew well enough what was up. They were approaching from the clearing in front of the broken gate, sniffing the air, drawn to the smell of blood, I guess. I could hear them moan. I lay down the dead man and grabbed up my automatic. I loaded up quick. I fired at them and watched holes appear in their flesh, holes that did not stop them moving in. I kept on firing, again and again, to no avail.

“Which is when the ghost children closed in. They were there all along, but now they closed in on Ōshiro. One of them stared at me with this knowing smile. It was as if he was relieving me of my duty. As if they were going to take over now. There was nothing I could do, anyway. I backed off. And I watched the ghost children wrap themselves around the dead man, guarding him.”

Griff blinked tears away, sucked it in. Went on.

“Those zombies . . . My, but they squealed with rage. God, what a sound! There was nothing of the man exposed to them — not a square inch. They circled the body, gnashing their yellow teeth. Their red eyes filled with this wretched look of sorrow and helplessness and indignation, while these insubstantial children, so much less sturdy than the ghouls in every conceivable way, made a shield of their bodies over him. They had this one power, you see. The zombies would get none of their man.” Griff shakes his head in awe. “Ōshiro and his memories belonged to his own people.”

Tuesday, July twenty-second. Griff arrived late on Saturday night; he hasn’t even been here three whole days. Evan tries to remember how many days it took the Americans to take Tinian. There was a footnote in the book somewhere: something like a week, he thinks. Anyway, not long. It feels as if there has been a war here. He’s not sure who won. He would like the book back, and he has no idea where Griff ’s head is about Yamada’s graphic novel. So there is unfinished business — it’s just a question of whether it’s any of
his
business.