A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set Page 3

  Earl pressed himself against the wall, took out one of the Jap grenades. With his teeth, he got the pin out. Then he slammed the end of the thing against the wall, felt it fizzle, and watched the dry thin smoke of burning powder pour out of it.

  Oh, shit, these things scared him.

  He dumped it in the bag, tossed the bag flush against the steel door, and headed back across the sand to the gun pit.

  He needed a weapon.

  The captain made it back inside. In the dankness, in the darkness, there was a moment’s respite from the storm of the battle. The noise went way down, the glare ceased, the stench of sulfur was supplanted by other stenches.

  Someone clapped him on the shoulder, someone hugged him, someone cried with joy.

  “I stopped their flame team. Now we’ve got them. They won’t be getting up here this morning. Samurai!”

  He handed the Type 100 to his sergeant and went back to his little corner. He picked up his sword, a prosaic blade probably ground out by a machine in the Naval Sword Company, polished on a machine, assembled by a worker. Yet it was strangely sharp and twice men had tried to buy it from him. There was something about it that he couldn’t quite define.

  Now he fastened it to his belt by its clip, drew the blade out, and set it before him.

  He felt he had done his duty. No one would perish in flames. They would achieve death with dignity.

  He picked up a calligraphy brush and dipped it in ink. He thought of Lord Asano in 1702, seconds from his own death by his own hand, bowing to pressures so great as to be incomprehensible.

  Asano had written

  I wish I had seen

  the end of spring

  but I do not miss

  the falling of the cherry blossoms.

  Asano knew what was important: the end of spring, his duty; the falling of the cherry blossoms, the emptiness of ceremony. Then Asano had plunged his blade into his stomach and drawn it cleanly across the midline of his body, cutting entrails and organs, spraying blood everywhere until the mercy of the sword had sundered his neck, ending all.

  Now it was clear before Yano. He had to record what happened here, what this place was, how hard these men had fought, how hard they had died. Inspiration suddenly arrived, along with enlightenment, and in a few deft strokes, he sent kanji characters spilling vertically across the rice paper. They seemed to tumble from his brush, feathery, almost delicate, a testament to the artist’s genius amid the slaughter. It was so human.

  It was his death poem.

  He removed his sword and laid it before him on the small writing table. With the nub of his brush, he pushed out the bamboo peg that secured the grip to the tang. Smoothly the grip slid upward, but instead of taking it off, he wrapped his death poem around the tang and remounted the grip. Then he thrust the peg back through the hole. But he thought, Too loose. With the still-wet calligraphy brush, he quickly applied a dollop of ink to the peg. It would slide into the hole, thicken like lacquer, then eventually harden into a cement bond that would keep the sword tightly assembled forever.

  For some reason this small task—in the face of death—gave him immense satisfaction. It meant that his last conscious act had been the act of poetry.

  Then the world exploded.

  2

  THE SCYTHE

  CRAZY HORSE, IDAHO, TODAY

  There was no why to it, not really.

  You couldn’t put it into words. His daughter had said, You have too much time on your hands. His wife had said, You cannot tell that man a thing. Who knew what the people in town said or what the Mexicans or the Peruvians who herded the sheep and mended the fences said, but of the last category, the words muy loco were certainly uttered.

  Bob Lee Swagger, nearing sixty, stood alone on a slope in the American West. The property was his own. He had bought it upon discovering, in this new stage of life, an unexpected prosperity. Two layout barns he owned in Arizona, in Pima County, were doing well, managed astutely by a high school friend of his daughter’s, a young woman who loved horses and had a practical streak. So a check arrived from Arizona every month. There were two more layout barns here in Idaho, east and west of Boise, which Bob more or less managed, except that they managed themselves and Julie did all the bookkeeping. So there was money from that too. Then the United States Marine Corps sent him a check every month as well, for all the bleeding he’d done in far-off places nobody remembered. There was a VA disability check for the bad business about the hip, that steel joint that was always ten degrees colder inside his body than the weather outside it.

  So he’d bought this nice piece of land on the Piebald River, still a ways out from Crazy Horse, itself still a longer way out from Boise. You could see the Sawtooths, a blue scar across the sea of green that was a valley. The land was serene: no human structure could be discerned. If you looked at the land, under the big Idaho sky piled with cumulus, hawks rotating in the thermals, and you saw the smeary white of the antelope herds, you might feel a little peace. A man who’d done some hard things and had finally come to a land where he could live untroubled with a wife and a daughter would love such a place, even if the daughter was off in graduate school in New York City and he and the wife didn’t speak as much to each other as they once had. But the idea was splendid: he would build a fine house, looking across to the Sawtooths, with a porch on it. All summer long it would be green, in the fall red and gold, and in the winter white.

  You earned it the hard way, Bob, Julie had said.

  Well, maybe I did. Anyhow, I’m just going to enjoy sitting under a blanket in the mornings and watching.

  I wouldn’t bet on that, but if that’s what you say.

  But there was one thing. Before a house could be built, the land had to be cleared and irrigated and Bob just didn’t want another man to do that job with a machine and a crew. He wanted to do it himself.

  It was called a scythe, an ancient, curved blade, rusted and nicked but still sharp as hell, affixed to the end of a grip with enough bend in it and enough knobs on it so a fellow could get behind it with his weight and strength and swing. What he swung at, he cut. You found the rhythm, the blade did the work, your muscles stretched, your stamina built. There was something nineteenth century about it that he liked, or maybe even eighteenth or seventeenth or sixteenth century.

  It takes some time to work a good-size piece of land, and the more he got into it, the more it got into him. It was an hour from his home in Boise, mostly on dirt roads; to save a little time, he’d bought and taught himself to run a Kawasaki 450 off-road bike, and tore across the desert in a more direct route than via the crazy-quilt switchbacks his truck would have required. Then, in jeans and boots and an old undershirt, he’d begin. He’d been at it a month, 197 paces one way, then 197 paces the other, six, seven, sometimes eight or even ten hours a day. He no longer ached, his back no longer throbbed. His body had finally gotten used to, even come to need, the labor. Back and forth, his calluses protecting him, the blade biting the scrawny vegetation, and with each swing, a spray of stalks and leaves flew away, cutting a swath maybe two feet wide. He was halfway done now. Half the field was cut to nubbiness and had died; it could be plowed under and planted. The steeper half still beckoned, a stretch of prairie grass and tumbleweed and cacti and other tough, scrawny, high-desert growers. Yet somehow it pleased him. It meant nothing to nobody, but it meant a little this day to him.

  This particular day was no different than any other. Why should it be: sun, sky, brambles to cut, scythe to swing, progress to be made. Up one track, back another, the steady swish of the blade, that swath two feet wide, the feel of the sweat building, the sense of giving himself up against and—

  Then he saw the car.

  Who the hell could this be?

  He didn’t think anyone knew he was here alone in the wild, or knew the strange linkage of dirt roads that got you here. Only Julie did: he figured then that she’d told whoever this was, and so it was all right.

  It
was a Mercedes-Benz S-Class in black, a very nice car, pulling up a rooster tail of dust.

  He watched as it slewed ever so gently to a stop. One by one two men got out.

  He recognized one right away: it was Thomas M. Jenks, a retired marine colonel and sometime friend of Bob’s, a biggish wheel in Boise who owned a Buick dealership, a radio station, and a mall or two, very nice fellow, active in the Marine Corps League, a man Bob trusted. The second was Asian. There was something about him that radiated Japanese, Bob thought, but he didn’t know quite what. He recalled a letter that had come a week or so ago, full of puzzling possibilities.

  Gny. Sgt. (Ret.) Bob Lee Swagger

  RR 504

  Crazy Horse, ID

  Dear Sergeant Swagger:

  I hope this letter finds you happy in a well-earned retirement and I hope you pardon the intrusion, as I know you to be a man who treasures his privacy.

  I am a retired full colonel USMC and currently head of the Marine Historical Section at Henderson Hall, Arlington, VA—Marine Headquarters.

  For some months I have been working with Philip Yano, of Tokyo, Japan. I have found Mr. Yano to be an excellent man. He is retired from the Japanese Ground Self-Defense Forces, where he was a colonel and a battalion commander, with special duty attachments to a variety of American and British Military Training Schools, including Ranger, Airborne, SpecOps, British SAS, and the Command and Staff College at Ft. Leavenworth, Kansas. As well, he has a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University.

  Mr. Yano has spent the summer researching Marine records as part of a research project regarding the campaign on Iwo Jima February–March 1945. As your father figured significantly in that battle and was one of twenty-three Marines to win the Medal of Honor for actions there, he hopes to discuss this with you. I gather he’s doing a book on Iwo from a Japanese point of view. He is a polite, respectful, and even an endearing man and a military professional of the highest order. I hope you can be of assistance to Mr. Yano.

  I am requesting your full cooperation with him. Possibly you would not be averse to sharing your father’s memories with him. He is, as I say, an admirable man deserving of respect and cooperation.

  I will put him in contact with you and sometime in the next few weeks he will be in touch. Again, my thanks and best,

  Sincerely,

  Robert Bridges

  Historical Section Superintendent

  Marine Headquarters

  Henderson Hall, VA

  Bob hadn’t felt up to this. When he’d read the letter, he’d thought, Well, now, what the hell? What do I know about it? The old man never talked, just as he himself, years later with tales of this and that when the lead was buzzing through the air, never talked either. That was somehow part of it: you didn’t talk about it.

  But he also knew that in a strange way, his father, who fought, hated, killed, blew up, and burned the Japanese for three years in the most horrific way possible, also respected them in the way that only enemies unto death can respect each other. To call it love was to say too much; to call it forgiveness and redemption, maybe too much as well. But call it healing and you’d have it just about right. He had an image of the old man at a drugstore, must have been ’52 or ’53, couple of years before he died, someone said to him, “Say, Earl, them Japs, they’se little monkey devils, huh? You fry them Japs by the bucketful, right?” and his father turned instantly grave as if insulted and said, “You can say anything you want about ’em, Charlie, but I’ll tell you this: they were damn fine soldiers and they stood their ground till the last drop of blood. They stood and fought even when they’s burning alive. No one ever accused a Japanese infantryman of not doing his duty.” Then he felt his father, so voluble and commanding, turn the conversation skillfully to other subjects. There were certain things he wouldn’t share, particularly with folks who hadn’t been out there, on the beaches and the tiny little islands.

  He turned to face the gentleman.

  He saw a man his own age, square-headed with a neat crop of short gray hair, steady-eyed, stocky where Bob was lanky. Even in the heat and the rugged terrain, the man wore a dark suit and tie and radiated military dignity from every pore.

  “Bob,” said Tom Jenks, “this is—”

  “Oh, I know. Mr. Yano, retired recently from…,” and then he paused involuntarily, noticing that Mr. Yano’s left eye, though almost the same color as the right, wasn’t focusing even as it moved in coordination with its brother, signifying that it was glass, and Bob then noticed a line running above and beneath it that, though neatly mended with the best skill that modern surgery could manage, was evidence of an ugly, violent trauma. “From his country’s service. Sir, pleasure to meet you. I am Bob Lee Swagger.”

  Mr. Yano smiled, showing white, even teeth, and bowed in a way that Bob had never seen except in movies: the bow was deep and deeply felt at once, as if the man were taking pleasure in it.

  “I did not wish to intrude, Sergeant Swagger.”

  Bob recalled something somewhere he’d heard about the Japanese and their humility and fear of acquiring obligation and causing difficulty and saw how from that point of view it made more sense to drive an hour through back roads than to come up to the house.

  “So what can I do for you, sir?” asked Bob. “Some research project about Iwo, is that it?”

  “First, Sergeant Swagger, if I may.”

  With that he pulled from his pocket a small gift box, bowed, and presented it to Swagger.

  “As an expression of thanks for your time and knowledge.”

  Bob was a little stunned. He wasn’t much on gifts or bows or the kind of formality that seemed pointless in ninety-degree sunlight in the high desert of a western state, on his own land, when he was damp in sweat.

  “Well, I can’t say how nice this is, sir. I certainly appreciate it.”

  “The Japanese always give gifts,” said Tom Jenks. “It’s their way of saying howdy and thanks.”

  “Please,” said the Japanese fellow.

  Bob saw that the box was so precisely wrapped that opening it seemed slightly sacrilegious. But he felt also an obligation and tore into it, marveling at the intricate folded structure of the paper, until finally he got it open, discovered a tiny jewel box, and opened that.

  “Well, that is really swell,” he said.

  It was a miniature sword assembled with high artistry. The tiny blade gleamed and the miniaturist had even wrapped the grip in individual thread strands.

  “The sword is the soul of the samurai, Sergeant Swagger. You are a great samurai, as I know, so I bring this in salute.”

  In a funny way, the gift touched Bob. It was so unexpected and, he guessed, quite expensive, for the craftsmanship was exquisite.

  “You shouldn’t have. It’s so impressive. Believe me, all that samurai-ing is way behind me. I just run some barns. But you put me in a helpful mood, so whatever it is you’re interested in, fire away and I’ll see if I can’t pitch in. My old man never talked much about the war.”

  “I understand. Few do. In any event, as possibly Colonel Bridges’s letter noted, I’ve spent the last few months at Henderson Hall, examining the original documents pertaining to Iwo Jima. Before that I spent almost a year in Japanese defense archives, examining the same thing, though as you might imagine, Japanese records are rather incoherent.”

  “Yes sir.”

  “I have ended up concentrating on an action that took place February twenty-first, at a place on Japanese maps called Point I-five. It was a blockhouse on the northwest slope of Mount Suribachi.”

  “I am familiar with Mount Suribachi and what happened on its northwest slope February twenty-first. Sir, may I say something. Sometimes you don’t want to look too carefully or learn too much about what happens in battle. People do things in battle they wouldn’t dream of doing no other way, time, or place. I speak from experience, sir.”

  “I know you do.”

  “You might learn som
ething about us or about your own people that would prove upsetting.”

  “I understand that too. This isn’t about atrocity, however, or national policies or even about the movement of troops across the landscape, say the Twenty-eighth Marines circling the southern tip of the island to cut off, then assault Suribachi. It’s about something far more intimate. Your father destroyed the blockhouse at Point I-five and killed most of the soldiers. That was a remarkable, courageous act of heroism. I have nothing but respect for it. The battle is interesting to me because my father, Captain Hideki Yano, was an infantry officer in the Japanese Imperial Army, Second Battalion, One Hundred Forty-fifth Infantry Regiment. He was in command of Point I-five, or the blockhouse on Suribachi’s northwest slope. In other words, I believe as the battle progressed, your father killed mine.”

  3

  THE BLOCKHOUSE

  Earl was trying to dig out and master a Nambu Type 96 light machine gun in the nearest gun pit when the grenades detonated. Though he was forty feet from them and they’d been wedged deep in a trench against the steel door of the blockhouse, the concussion still swept across him, punching him to the earth. He fell on a dead soldier, the man’s face beaten in by the butt of Earl’s Thompson. Earl saw the hideous rearrangement of features, the swelling, the shattered delicacies of the face and teeth, the bloated lips—then looked away. You train yourself not to see that stuff. He knew he had to focus. The gun, the gun!

  The 96 was no BAR, but enough of them had shot enough lead at him for him to respect it. He looked at it, understanding its principles immediately; machine guns were pretty much alike in most respects. He rummaged around for a pouch of mags, found one, shifted to a new, fresh tin of ammo, locked it in, looked for, found, and locked back a bolt. Now he lifted it, feeling the ungainly slippy rotation of the loose bipod on the end of the finned barrel, and raced back to the rear of the house. If men shot at him, he wasn’t aware of it.