I hit the ground and could feel people piling on top of me. I lay there and could see the familiar face now, the stillness of the hand stretching to the arm, and finally Mai Kim’s eyes, which did not move.
* * *
“It’s your move, and it’s been your damn move for about three minutes now.” Lucian had decided to bring the game to the jail.
I looked at the chessboard again and couldn’t remember a single tactic. “Sorry.”
I was black and, from all appearances, black was in deep trouble. I reached across and hooked a knight in to take one of his pawns, a move he immediately countered by taking my knight with a rook that had been loitering with intent.
“Damn. . . .”
He shook his head, tipped back his hat, and clutched his chin like a fastball he was preparing to deliver high and inside. “What the hell’s the matter with you? You havin’ flashbacks or what?”
I half smiled. “I guess I am—daydreams at least....”
“This all about that Viet-nam-ese girl from out on the highway?”
“Yep.” I started to bring out my queen but thought better of it. “Her grandfather, the fellow I told you about?”
Lucian peered into the holding cell where Virgil sat slumped on the bunk with his back against the wall. He was staring at the space between us. Lucian nodded. “That Van Heflin character.”
Jesus.
Lucian’s malapropisms were usually reserved for the Indians, but the Vietnamese had given him a whole new venue.
“Tran Van Tuyen.” I explained the situation, along with the ambivalence of my feelings toward the man.
Lucian didn’t say anything but studied the board. “They ought’a burn down that ol’ ghost town, that or ship it off to Laramie, put in a slicky-slide and a carousel up and charge admission.”
I opted for a pawn, and he immediately stymied the move with the same rook. I thought about the old Doolittle Raider and his experience in that Japanese prison camp. “You ever think about the war?”
"Mine?” I nodded, and he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Not so much as I used to.”
We sat there for a while, sitting on the folding chairs and looking at the chessboard balanced on the wastepaper basket between us. Every once in a while a question hangs in your throat waiting to be asked of the exact wrong person, but I asked it anyway. He laughed hard, fighting to catch his breath. “You?”
I nodded.
He shook his head. “You could do with a dose of prejudice.”
It was, after all, the response I expected. I brought my queen out.
He sat there looking at the board as I watched him, the smile slowly fading from his face as his ears plugged with the racket of two radial-cylinder Pratt and Whitney engines roaring him into his past. I listened to the ticking of the clock on the wall and waited.
“We ditched just off the Chinese coast, and the impact pushed my copilot, Frank, through the windshield. We had two men that were wounded so bad that they drowned before we could get to shore. A civil patrol pulled Frank and me out and pretty well beat the shit out of us right there on the boat. I guess that was one of the scary parts; there were so many of ’em that I figured they’d just tear us apart. Near as I could make out, an officer in the Kempeitai pulled ’em off us and claimed us as prisoners of Tojo, and they shipped us off to Shanghai in occupied China.”
“They got ten of you, right?”
He worked his jaw, moved his other bishop, and then leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. It was like he’d been compacted there by the memories of his war. His sleeves were rolled up on his thin snap-front shirt, and I watched his Adam’s apple as it bobbed the top button a few times before he said anything. “They beat the shit out of us on a regular basis with them little bamboo, kendo swords,
shinai
. . . . Then they finally got around to shipping us off to Tokyo where they interrogated us for a couple more weeks.”
He reached down and picked up his bottle of Rainier, turning it so that the label faced him. It was quiet again, and I wasn’t sure if he wanted to go any further. “We don’t have to talk about this, if you don’t want to.”
“I’m trying to tell you something, so shut up and listen.”
I smiled at him and watched as the jaw worked some more. He sipped his beer and rested it on his prosthetic knee. “They wanted us to sign these statements sayin’ we’d committed crimes against Japo citizens—you know, bombed hospitals, strafed schoolchildren, and shit like that.” His mahogany eyes came up and met mine. “... Which we didn’t.”
I moved my queen again. “I’d imagine they asked with all due courtesy?”
“Oh, hell yeah.” He leaned back in and examined the board. “They started out pretty easy, you know, not lettin’ ya sleep for a couple days, no food, hardly any water. . . .” He took another sip of his beer and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Get you good and loopy and then they’d start in with the hard stuff.” He took a deep breath and held it, finally letting it out with the words. “They had this one trick where they’d tie a wire around your head and twist it with one of them little kendo swords and they finally did it to Frank for so long that his jaw broke.”
I studied the hardness in the old man’s eyes as they reflected the light like tiny drops of crude oil.
“Any man that ever tells you that he won’t break no matter what they do to him?” We both remained silent until his black eyes blinked. “They shipped us back to Shanghai and decided they were gonna have a trial, not a trial in any sense of justice, since they’d already found us guilty, but they needed to determine what kind of punishment was called for. Frank’s jaw was infected, and he was pretty weak by that time, so they’d take the two of us in together. We were in this solitary confinement compound at Kiangwan Prison, and they’d come get me and I’d lead Frank up these concrete steps into this shitty little wooden-slat building and they’d scream and yell about us and at us for a couple of hours, us not understandin’ a single word; then they’d take us back out and throw us in our cells until they’d come and get us the next day and do it all over again.” A tight little curve appeared at the corner of his mouth. “With the obvious limitations of not bein’ able to speak or write Japanese, we threw up a brilliant defense, and do you know them sons-of-bitches still found us guilty?”
“Hard to believe.”
He moved a rook, and his hand stayed on the little wooden piece. “October 15, 1942. They gave us pencil and paper to write good-bye notes to our family, and I wrote mine to my mother and asked her to please ask Franklin Delano Roosevelt to bomb these little yellow bastards back into the Stone Age with all due speed.” He drank some more. “She never got it, so I guess it got lost in the mail. . . .” The short-lived smile faded again.
“What happened?”
He stared at the chessboard and withdrew his hand from the rook. “They put us all in this concrete bunker with these narrow slit openings and come and got the first three. They took ’em outside and made ’em kneel and tied ’em off to these stubby little crosses, and then they just shot ’em in the back of the head, one by one.”
I moved my queen in a disinterested fashion. “They let you live.”
He watched me move and then nodded. “I guess they felt like they’d made their point, so the rest of us got life imprisonment. ”
“What happened to Frank?”
“Died in a camp in occupied China.” He reached over to straighten the angle of the wooden board on the trashcan. “So, you asked me if I thought about the war much—an’ I guess the honest answer would be, yes, I still think about it a lot. At least I think about Frank....”
“
Check
.”
I’d been watching Lucian’s face but hadn’t seen his lips move. I looked down at the board, and it was true that I’d accidentally positioned my queen for an impending and final victory over Lucian’s king. I looked up at the same time he did, a questioning expression on his face as he asked, “Did you just say
check
?”
I shook my head. “No, I thought you did.”
We both turned and looked at the big Indian, seated on the bunk and pointing a finger as big as a bratwurst toward the chessboard. The resonance of Virgil’s voice rattled through the damage in his throat like a very large and singular exhaust.
“
Check.
”
10
“What the fuck.” She sipped her coffee and then added another sugar to the four she’d already dumped in her mug. “He didn’t say anything else?”
I kept my volume low, even though she was still talking in full voice. There were a gaggle of tourists at the other end of the Busy Bee counter, and I saw no reason why they should be privy to the finer points of Virgil White Buffalo’s life. “No, but he and Lucian played until about three this morning. Prison chess, fast-moving; twenty-seven games, and Lucian only won five.”
“That’s why the old pervert’s asleep on the floor; he’s gathering his strength for another assault.” I nodded and took a sip of my own coffee; Dorothy refilled my mug as it touched the counter.
The proprietor of the café put the pot back on the warmer and parked herself within easy ear reach. “Michael make it in okay?”
I nodded. “Yep. Cady picked him up last night, and I haven’t heard from them since.”
She studied me, then Vic, and then changed the subject. “Any word from up on the Rez?”
Dorothy generally knew more of what was going on in the county than I did, so I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have her in on this part of the conversation. “Henry left a message that he and Brandon White Buffalo would be back from South Dakota this morning with a special guest.”
They both looked at me, but Vic was the first to respond. “A what?”
“A special guest.” I shrugged. “It’s Henry.”
Vic slipped her hair behind an ear and palmed her chin; evidently, it was a good hair day. "And...?”
“And what?”
My deputy spoke through her muffling hand, the only filter she had. “You said you read the report at the VA over in Sheridan. So, what’s the story on the jolly red giant?”
I glanced up at the chief cook and bottle washer. “How’s the usual coming?”
She glanced at the manila envelope resting on the counter between Vic and me and then studied my face. “Does this mean you’re dismissing me?”
I sighed. “I’m just not so sure that you’re going to want to hear all of this.”
She nodded and smiled. “Well, it’s good enough for me that you’d rather I didn’t.” She picked up both coffee pots, decaf and regular, from the warmers and retreated toward the tourists. “How are you folks doing?”
I took a deep breath and turned to my undersheriff. “You want the whole dog-and-pony show?” I pushed my elbows on the counter and looked out the doorway toward Clear Creek. Dorothy had the glass door propped open, and I was enjoying the cool from the screen door at my back before the heat of the day. “Virgil was misdiagnosed as mentally deficient by Big Horn County Health because of a speech impediment, but he graduated from Lodge Grass High School in ’68 anyway and got culled into Project 100,000.”
“What was that?”
“It was supposedly a program for social uplift. Every year, a percentage that scored at the bottom of the military aptitude test were inducted and then shipped off to Vietnam. Some uplift.”
I held my mug there, a little away from my mouth. I thought about the file and tried to remember the details. “He showed an aptitude for the art of war and got transferred to the 101st Airborne Division’s reconnaissance patrol. They were up in the central highlands north of Dak To looking for VC alongside this river, and they found them. . . .” I sipped my coffee. “About two regiments of ’em.”
I placed my mug down and looked at her. “Small-arms fire pinned them down for about eight hours, thirteen dead and twenty-three wounded. Air support finally arrived, and they started driving the North Vietnamese back enough for them to medevac the wounded out with a T-bar.” She started to raise her hand like she was in school. “It’s a harness and winch system dropped about a hundred feet from a helicopter.”
I leaned in, studying the collection of porcelain, plastic, glass, and wooden bees along the shelf above the range hood. “The VC saw that everybody’s concentrating on getting the wounded out, so they mounted a counteroffensive. The rest of the platoon hugged dirt and prayed for more support and suddenly this giant came up out of the ditch beside the road and started moving up and down the line firing his 16 in single shots, moving from the high spots to the low, each shot taking out a hostile as he went, firing with absolute purpose and never saying a word.”
“Fuck me.”
“The report says he went through three clips.” I took a breath and continued. “There were less than twenty men left in the platoon, but the battalion commander, safe in one of the helicopters, radioed back for them to attack again and believe it or not, they did. This Lieutenant Shields raised his rifle arm up like he’s in some bad Audie Murphy movie and screamed, ‘Follow me.’ The whole platoon, including Virgil, broke rank and followed this lieutenant straight into an ambush, where six seconds later, twelve more were dead, three were critically wounded, and they’re left with only three effectives. . . .”
“One of them being Virgil White Buffalo.”
I nodded at the marbled surface of the Formica counter. “The wounded were stuck in this gully, where Virgil made all three trips and dragged each one of them back to the original landing zone, including the lieutenant, who got on the horn and called for extraction but was told by this colonel in the helicopter that they needed to charge this machine gun nest to their right instead.”
She ran her fingers through her hair and looked at me in disbelief. “Get the fuck out of here.”
“This lieutenant started to get up.”
“No way.”
“And Virgil smacked him alongside the head with the butt of his M16, knocking him out cold.” I watched as she bit her lip to keep from laughing. “Then, just for good measure, Virgil rolled over and threw a few rounds at the battalion commander’s helicopter.”