Phantoms Read online

  So he did not take that route but turned on his heel and walked back through the green leaves and the heat to the road. He could see the whole of the country to the north from that point, the hills that flowed up the side of Auburn Ravine, their shapes covered, acre after acre, with the ordered rows of orchard trees and through which he could make out the snug pale homes of the farmers themselves. He knew they would still be picking the late peaches and plums and the first of the pears but he could make out none of that activity from the road. The whole spread of the landscape to the north seemed something he might have dreamed—and there it was again, the idea that he was somehow asleep and dreaming all this even though it was right here, present and alive. The breeze blew up the ridge from the south, up Red Ravine and across the orchards that lined the county road to the sheds at Penryn and Loomis and the quarries of Rocklin and on to the great railyards at Roseville, a place he had seen only once, that very day when his train from San ­Francisco had slowed and paused there as the tracks were switched. Even now the train rattled on up the mountain: Dutch Flat and Donner Summit and the great mythic blue of Tahoe before plunging into the high desert beyond. He had been at Bruyères near a year ago and now he was here, home again, although of course already it seemed less home than it ever had been. How alone he must have looked there.

  The Wilsons’ drive appeared just as everything else did, so exactly matching his memory that it seemed utterly false, the dark leaves that lined the road perfectly still. The back of his shirt had soaked through an hour ago and remained wet and hot against his flesh, the duffel burden enough that he slung it to the side of the road against the low trunk of a peach tree long since harvested clean.

  The first of the pickers appeared when the bare peach trees changed to pears heavy with late summer fruit, and he glanced down the rows to see ladders disappearing into the upper branches. He did not stand to watch, instead quickening his pace so that he was nearly at march step. He could sense them watching him now and although he could not identify any clear reason for his own sense of disquiet, he did not return their gaze, only continuing to walk as their chatter diminished, their eyes upon him, this uniformed soldier.

  And then his name, called from behind in a voice cheerful and bright, and he turned to that sound even though it felt as if doing so might augur into place a future he did not want to accept.

  The boy who stood before him was a teen, his head topped with a tousle of yellow hair. “It’s me,” he said when Ray did not respond, his mouth curling into a full broad smile. “Bish ­Kenner. Bishop, I mean. You forget me, Ray?”

  “Bish,” Ray said quietly. “Sure. You’re just a lot bigger than the last I saw you.”

  “Well, I am,” he said. “’Most fifteen.”

  “Well, good,” Ray said.

  “You were in the fightin’?”

  “Some.”

  “In Japan?” The words came quickly but then the boy seemed embarrassed, for he looked away quickly, his sharp shoulders seeming to jump up and down for a moment, a kind of oblique apology.

  “No, not in Japan,” Ray said. “Italy and France, mostly.”

  “No kidding,” the boy said, his embarrassment gone now. “My brother went to the Pacific. Okinawa.”

  “That so? How’s he?”

  “Got back about a month ago. Japs took his leg.” He paused. “Ah jeez. I didn’t mean it like that.”

  “You don’t gotta apologize,” Ray said. “Goddamn Japs took Chet’s leg. To hell with them, I say.”

  The boy laughed at this response, relieved. In the group behind the boy Ray could see a few others smiling at his words. “Yeah, to hell with the goddamn Japs,” Bish said with apparent glee. “To hell with them.”

  “Listen,” Ray said, “you tell Chet I said hello, would you?”

  “I will,” the boy said, still smiling.

  “What the hell’s going on?”

  “Ray’s back,” Bish called into the trees.

  “I don’t care if Jesus himself has returned,” the voice came, closer now, heading down through the hot rows of pear trees, “you all’d better get moving.”

  The pickers—young men and women, most of whom Ray recognized in one way or another from the high school—had already begun scrambling back into the trees or to the truck to gently spill their loads into the pears already waiting there. Bish was the last to flee, finally waving silently and disappearing just as the foreman—for of course it was the foreman—appeared from between the rows.

  Ray did not recognize him at first, a thin, gruff-voiced man of perhaps thirty-five, clean-shaven and wearing a tan cap upon what appeared to be a stubbled scalp. But then the features came into focus and he said the man’s name: “Bob Campo.”

  “That’s right,” Campo said. “What’s your business?”

  “Heading up to the house,” Ray told him.

  “I’m gonna give you one more chance to tell me what you’re doing here and then . . .”

  “And then what, Bob?”

  Ray did not wait for a response but turned and continued on his way.

  So quiet were the orchard rows. So fired with summer heat. It came up from the earth. It flooded through them all.

  “I won’t be talked to like that,” Bob Campo said from behind him. “Not from a . . .” He seemed to look to the uniform then, as if in consideration of what it might mean. Then he finished what he had started: “Not from a goddamned Jap.”

  What happened next was talked about for the rest of that evening and on into the following week and we all knew, each of us in our own way, that with each telling and retelling we were making things worse, that we were, each time, pressing him farther down the path that he only seemed to have chosen but which we had chosen for him: that Ray Takahashi did not even pause in his step but turned as if he had been given a marching command, about face, and drove his fist into Bob Campo’s jaw.

  The foreman fell without a word. When Ray spoke again, it was to call down the rows to the boy, Bish Kenner. When there was no answer he said, just loud enough to be heard, “You’ll want to get this man some water.”

  Now came the reply, a quiet voice from somewhere amidst the trees: “All right, Ray. I will.”

  Then he turned to the ground again where Bob Campo writhed in the dirt, clutching his stomach and breathing sharply against the dust. “It’s Sergeant Takahashi,” he said. Or maybe he said nothing. After all, this story was told to us by the teens on their ladders and would they not want a kind of closing statement? If we needed any proof of what he had done overseas it was there upon his uniform, the story somehow held in the shape of those three chevrons stacked one upon the other and pointing upwards on each sleeve. Sergeant Takahashi was home.

  WHEN HE REACHED THE WILSONS’ at last it was, like everything, just as his memory had preserved it and so he peopled it with the Wilsons of his memory, expecting them to appear, to greet him, smiling on his return from the war, Mr. and Mrs. Wilson and Jimmy and Helen. But when he approached that Victorian upon its hill—white and clean and glowing amidst the green blades of the orchard trees—it was quiet and still. The curtains were open but the direction of the sun had rendered them opaque, so that when he stepped onto the porch the windows were but incandent plates of blinding light.

  He might have circled to the side yard to peer up at Helen’s window or, on the opposite side, to Jimmy’s, but instead he went to the front door and knocked. Then waited. Then he knocked again.

  He had thought, imagined, that it would be Jimmy or Mr. Wilson or even Helen who came to the door. He had not anticipated Mrs. Wilson—Evelyn was her name but Ray had only ever called her Mrs. Wilson—and so he was brought up short. Seeing her there—her thin frame, light brown hair, aquiline features, skin gone olive from the long days of summer—was still less surprising than the expression on her face, at once hard and confused and filled with some mixture of grief and rage, emotions that passed over her face as if patterns of weather, clouds of different altitud
e and color and consistency and threat, fog and rain and hail and high winds, so that Ray took a moment even saying her name, at last managing the four syllables, “Mrs. Wilson,” and then paused as she stared at him, goggle-eyed, before adding, at last: “Is Mr. Wilson at home?”

  “You,” she said simply.

  “It’s me, Mrs. Wilson,” he said, nodding. “It’s Ray. Ray Takahashi.”

  “Ray Takahashi,” she said quietly, still staring at him, her eyes flashing with an emotion he still did not recognize.

  And so what he determined was that somehow, just as he could not identify the expression on her face, he too must have remained unrecognized or unrecognizable to her, his short hair and uniform making him into a foreigner. “I was in the army,” he said. He pulled his hat down from his shorn head now, holding the olive cloth in both hands before him as if something fragile. “I fought the Nazis in Europe.”

  “The Nazis?” she said. This a clear question.

  “Yes, ma’am,” Ray told her. “I just wanted to speak with Mr. Wilson. Oh, and you too of course. Are Jimmy and Helen at home?”

  When she spoke at last her voice was one that Ray had never heard before, not from her or anyone: a low breathy sound as if she were just on the edge of running out of air. “You get away from me,” she hissed.

  He stood silent in the face of it, mouth open, hat still clenched in one hand, thumbs at the seams of his trousers.

  “You get off my porch,” she said now, the volume rising even as her voice trembled. “Go on! Get off my porch!”

  “Mrs. Wilson?” He stepped backward as she advanced.

  “I don’t want you coming near this family. Do you hear me? Do you?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Just get away. Get away.” And she was coming for him now, her hands out, open-palmed but swinging so that he had to raise his own hands to keep her from battering his face, all the while retreating down the final step and into the grass again. She did not pursue him onto the lawn but remained above him, breathing hard and fast, the image of her in the hot slanting sunlight amidst the dappled shade like some creature of myth, the avenging mother, the avenging wife, Onryō or Ame-onna or something equally terrible, and yet what did she have to avenge? Did she not recognize him? Could she not see that it was Ray, Ray who had spent nearly every day of his life in her presence, whom she had fed at her own table as many times as his own mother had fed Jimmy and Helen? And yet now there was this moment, this moment of confusion and, yes, of terror.

  “Mrs. Wilson?” he cried. And then her first name, a name he had not dared call her in all the years he had known her, years which had spanned the entirety of his life, a name which he said now in a kind of desperation, for recognition, for understanding: “Evelyn.”

  But already she was gone, her small, thin frame rotating back to the house and swallowed by its cool darkness, the door banging shut behind her and then all the world, the grass, the sun, the orchard suspended between, fell back into silence. The soldier stood for a long while there in the yard, hoping and perhaps even expecting the door to open again, for Helen to appear or for Jimmy, his friend of all the years before, or even for Homer Wilson himself, friendly patriarch, expecting it all to be some kind of misunderstanding. But the door remained closed, the house silent, and at last he turned upon the grass and headed south again, across the lawn and into the orchard so that he could see the lit stripe of the road through the shadows of trees so heavy with plums that he might have simply reached up and plucked one down to his waiting mouth. Maybe he did just that. Or maybe he only walked on, hungry and alone and already pining for a life that he knew he could never again claim as his own.

  2

  I WROTE THE PRECEDING IN MAY OF 1969 WHEN I WAS twenty-one years old, thinking that it might be the start of a book, since the book I was trying to write, a book fictionalizing the year I had spent in Vietnam and which I already imagined would be something akin to Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead, that book, my book, seemed to be washing out from under my feet with each passing day. I had managed to complete but a single, unconnected chapter since returning from Southeast Asia and had the luck—bad luck as it turned out to be—to place it in Esquire magazine. The editor there, Harold Hayes, somehow fished my pages from the slush pile that presumably swam across his desk with each afternoon’s tide of mail and included my writing in a magazine that had published the likes of ­Norman Mailer, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, William Burroughs, Susan Sontag, Gay Talese, and so on. I felt, with all the naïveté that youth can muster, that I had already made it, that I was a full-fledged member of that exclusive, chrome-plated fraternity of writers.

  But in fact the publication of that piece effectively stoppered my inkwell altogether and the big book, “The Vietnam Book,” simply and resolutely refused to answer my feeble summons. Now I wonder if I was just too close to it, but at the time that very proximity felt like the stuff of great fiction, and so, upon my return, I spent many months shuffling through my various note cards, ideas, fragments, and nightmares, with an obsessiveness that sometimes terrified me. The fierce entanglement of my imagination and my memory had become a knot impossible to unravel.

  I have written many novels since those days, some of which may well be good enough to be remembered, although to this day I have yet to revisit the war, my war, in any sustained piece of fiction. I have waited so long now that it sometimes feels as if my experiences in Vietnam have already been told and retold dozens of times: the mud and canals and paddies and helicopters and the unseen enemy—faceless, nameless, perhaps not even wholly human—and the booby traps and the air strikes. The basic narrative has repeated itself in films and, most importantly to me, in works of fiction and nonfiction, some penned by friends and colleagues and much of which has helped me understand what happened over there and how the heavy stone of that experience continues to ripple out over a life that has been, at times, troubled by its own hidden currents. Much of the war was simply boredom on a level that is difficult to articulate—but one does not have nightmares about six weeks of boredom but, instead, of those brief flashes of murderous combat when our tracer rounds ripped into the blue-shadowed moonlight and I used my Prick 10 to call down fire from the sky.

  If the kind of experiences I had in Vietnam have already become a tired American myth, overtold, overanalyzed, then perhaps this is a good enough reason to justify what I am trying to do in these pages, returning to the 1969 of my memory not to write about Vietnam at long last but instead to narrate the story of someone I did not know but whose time in Placer County has come to feel inextricably tied to my own. That Ray Takahashi was a real person, not a product of my imagination, has complicated matters some, for much of his story is impossible to know for certain and I have indeed relied on my imagination when facts have proven inadequate to the telling of the tale. Nonetheless, I have researched with enough thoroughness to know when he exited the train and to whom he spoke and what the woman I have here called Evelyn Wilson said to him on the porch of her house when he first stood there after returning from the terror of the war in Europe.

  That I did not finish the story of Ray Takahashi in 1969 or in the subsequent fourteen years to follow, that I am finishing it only now, in 1983, can be explained by several recent occurrences, not the least of which have been the deaths of the principal players in this story, especially the passing of the woman I sometimes called my aunt, although she was, in reality, a second cousin twice removed. What you will find in these pages is an attempt to re-create events that occurred primarily in the late summer and fall of 1945, the details of which I mostly understood in 1969 and which I am finally putting down on paper today.

  I have seldom written so close a narrative as the one here assembled, a narrative which overlaps my own family’s history. My great-grandfather, John Frazier, after whom I am named, was an early resident of Placer County, a man who was, family legend holds, the first to plant peaches here. Since then my family has scat
tered across the state, putting down roots in Southern California and the Bay Area and some, like my parents, remaining in Placer County although not in agriculture, my mother teaching at the old grammar school in Auburn until she had her three children, and my father, a dreamer with a head filled with plans and schemes that never came to fruition, sporadically producing amounts of cash at unpredictable intervals, mostly via the repair of household appliances.

  My parents moved us all to Southern California in the early 1960s, my mother for a new teaching position and my father for a job in an assembly plant, and so by the time I was a teenager it felt like home. Nonetheless, the old memories of my early childhood in Placer County, amidst the scattered dry oak forests of Auburn and Newcastle, sometimes called to me with a strange and persistent song positively luminous with nostalgia: golden hills and ghost pines and cold clear creek water on hot summer days. The place felt, to my memory, too perfect somehow, too vigorous in its beauty and innocence, and so, when I returned to Alhambra after the war to discover that I simply could not reenter the old routines nor offer myself up to the judgment of my parents, both hawks who could not, despite their care for me, separate their politics from the grim reality that sat before them at the kitchen table, I began once again to ponder my quiet childhood memories of Placer County. It was but a day’s bus ride up the interstate from my then–Southern California locale.

  The larger and perhaps more immediate problem was the dope habit I had developed overseas, a habit I was desperate to hide from my parents and from myself and which may have placed as much stress on them as it did on me, as they likely had no idea why I swung between being utterly out of my mind with nervous fear and nodding off to a furtive, exhausted sleep. What I wanted more than anything was to be somewhere that felt safe and from which I might isolate myself and my demons and try to scramble up out of the cloud of white vinegar-tinged smoke that seemed to wrap itself around me like a snake, this while the dull reverberations of The Huntley-Brinkley Report murmured through the bedroom wall from Channel 4. Good night, David; good night, Chet.