A Bob Lee Swagger Boxed Set Read online

  He slipped down. The door was blown asunder and black smoke boiled out of the entrance. It was like the doorway to hell. This is where you needed a flamethrower, for one cleansing stream from outside would search out nooks and crannies, crevices and corners, and take care of business and you didn’t have to crawl in and go from room to room, killing.

  He took a breath and entered a subterranean world, fighting the acrid drift of smoke, the stench of latrine and blood and food, the sudden clammy coolness of the underground chamber. It was like entering an insect nest.

  He heard the heavy rhythm of a woodpecker from the left and turned, stepping over a body. Bap bap bap bap bap, the pound of the slow-firing heavy machine gun. An entrance yielded a chamber, and indeed three men serviced one of the big Nambu 7.7 92s, concentrating on downhill targets, one locating them, one firing, one feeding ammo strips into the big gun, fighting hard to the end. They hadn’t even noticed the blown doorway.

  It was pure murder. Usually you didn’t see it; shapes moved and stopped moving or disappeared. Now he pressed the trigger, felt the hot sputter of the gun, the tracers just swept them away in less than a second, so goddamned easy. It shouldn’t be as easy as with a hose against flowers. The gun in his hand emptied in a spasm and the soldiers never had any idea what happened, they just went down, flipping this way and that, this one fighting it, that one going down hard and fast, this one just slumping, caught and lit in a neon net, the Jap tracers white-blue and hot. It was over in a second.

  Earl rotated to his left, stumbled a bit, burned some skin off his forehead on a low ceiling, and moved to the next chamber.

  The captain shook spiderwebs, broken glass, fly wings, and dust from his brain. He was in pain everywhere, and when he breathed, only hot stench poured into his lungs and rasped at his throat. He thought he was drowning in an underwater of smoke and fumes. He gripped his skull to squeeze the pain out, but it didn’t help. Where was he, what was this, what was happening?

  It was his chamber that had caught most of the blast when the steel door was blown. The big Nambu wasn’t firing; it was tilted askew to the right and the loader was either dead or dying; at any rate he lay on his back, his face and chest bloody, his eyes unseeing. He was gone, some piece of shrapnel to brain or spine, turning off his light in a microsecond of mercy.

  It was Sudo of Kyushu.

  Your sacrifice wasn’t by fire, he thought. I kept my word.

  One of the privates, though, had gone to the gun and was fighting to get it righted and the third man joined him, albeit feebly as he too was seriously hit.

  Then the captain heard the sound of fire from close at hand and knew one of the hairy ones had penetrated. He reached swiftly for his pistol but found the blast had torn his belt off. He was defenseless. He looked about. The sword lay to his right.

  He bent, picked it up. It was, of course, ridiculous. In this modern age, Japanese NCOs and officers went into battle with these frog-stickers, helpful in executing Chinese partisans and waving in staff photographs and patriotic rallies and little else. Yet throughout the army they were beloved, because they connected to a thousand years of the bushido way of the warrior and conjured up men in elaborate armor or brilliant robes meeting and destroying each other in battles or back alleys for the sake—this was the lie, at any rate—of the hundred million. In the sword was freedom from the gaijin, dignity, spirituality, samurai. The captain drew the sword from its metal scabbard, feeling the friction of metal on metal, and then it sprang free and described a fine, glorious arc across the smoky space as the American approached.

  In truth, it seemed to be not much of a sword. It was but shin-gunto,short, almost stumpy, its brightness suspect upon inspection, because the skin was a mass of scratches and hazing, and a bit of edge here and there had chipped off, in some forgotten adventure. The captain had drawn it from resupply as part of his kit when he’d left Tokyo for the Volcanics, and it was one of thousands in a room of reconditioned swords recovered from returning soldiers back from the Sphere’s expansions all over the southern half of the globe in the last decade. Possibly it had been carried by a now-dead man in China or Burma or Malaysia, who knew, who could possibly know?

  But it was always weirdly sharp. This one, despite its mundane, even shabby appearance, had a will or destiny toward cutting. You could shave with it, or cut paper with it, and it had a lively quality unlike the heavier, duller sword that had been his first issue in China. It seemed to want flesh; it sought battle, destiny, fate. In some odd respect, he felt unworthy of it, though it was but military issue, presumably manufactured in a plant with thousands like it.

  Yet it reassured him, and he drew it back in both hands, above his head, slightly separated for leverage, assuming position jodan no kamai,or “high-level stance,” or even “fire stance,” because his spirit was so strong it meant to burn the opponent, oppressing his resolve. He saw the next second perfectly: the downward diagonal between neck and shoulder (perfect kiroshi, cutting technique), the sword traveling straight without wobble, cutting cloth, skin, muscle, bone, the newly approved seventh kata of 1944, kesagiri, the preferred killing stroke of the diagonal cut, the clavicle stroke. Then the quick withdrawal, followed by chiburi, or that flick of blood removal before resheathing. The ritual was pleasing; it gave him comfort and brought calm to his tumultuous mind. He became one with the sword; he waited.

  Earl killed the six men in the central chamber in a single second. It was just like the last: the tracers ate them up, tossed them up and down, and they fell, some mute, some twitchy. This was war: all the bullshit about doing your bit, about the team, about gung ho, semper fi, was forgotten: in the end, it was killing and nothing but.

  He withdrew, aware that the gun was either empty or near to it. He diddled, unlocked the empty magazine, and it fell away. He inserted a new one, locked it in, drew the bolt back, slid down the weird hallway, low, burning yet more skin off his bare head, and came to the last chamber.

  He knew they were waiting for him.

  God help me, he thought, this one last time.

  Then he plunged in.

  4

  A REQUEST

  “I don’t know about that exact thing, Mr. Yano,” said Bob. “I do know that in fights things get all mixed up. You can never tell who’s done what. Official reports don’t usually come no place near the truth.”

  “I understand that. It could have easily been a shell, a ricochet, a sniper, any of a dozen things, and it doesn’t even matter. I also understand that if he did, it was because it was his duty, because he had no choice, because it was war. But I do know for certain that he was there, that he actually penetrated the bunker. The medal attests to that, as do the witness reports.”

  “That much is known, sir,” Bob said. “Battle is a terrible thing, as is killing.” Something drove him to rare confession. “I have been cursed to have seen and done a lot of it. For the Marine Corps, I hunted and killed other men in Vietnam. I’ve thought a lot about it. I can only say, It was war.”

  “I understand. I’ve seen some battle too. That’s the way we chose, the path we followed.”

  The sun was bright.

  “But I am hoping so much that you will understand where my destination lies. I must ask one more question,” said Mr. Yano. “It’s only out of a love for my father as intense as the one you still feel for yours.”

  “Go ahead,” said Bob. “I see that’s why you came.”

  “There was a sword,” the Japanese said.

  Bob blinked, not sure what he meant. Did he mean the miniature sword that he, Yano, had given Swagger just a few minutes ago? That sword? Then he saw: no, no, his father’s sword. His father had a sword that day, of course. The Japs called them “banzai swords” or something like that: he remembered them not from anything his father ever said but from the war comic books he had read religiously in the ’50s. He saw in his mind a wicked, curved thing, with a long, tape-wrapped grip with a snakehead at the end of it. “Banzai! B
anzai!” some bearded, cavemanlike Jap sergeant in gogglelike glasses shouted in the comic books, waving it around, stirring his men to a human wave attack. Bob realized his idea of such a thing was probably crap.

  “I know young soldiers in battle,” said Mr. Yano. “In the aftermath of survival, they want something to commemorate their triumph, something tangible, that speaks of victory. Who can blame them?”

  “I’ve seen it myself,” said Bob. More memories stirred, forty years old, memories he had no interest in sifting through. But the man was right. It happened.

  “I know,” said Mr. Yano, “that hundreds, thousands, possibly tens of thousands of swords were taken in the Pacific. Along with Nambu pistols, flags, especially flags, Arisaka rifles, helmets, souvenirs of a fight so hard.”

  “Mostly it was guys in the rear who ate that shit up,” said Bob.

  “My father had a sword. His death was part of your father’s greatest triumph. I’ve read the medal citation and the after-action reports in the Marine Historical Section and I know how brave he was.”

  “My father was an extraordinary man,” said Bob. “I’ve tried my whole life and I ain’t yet come up to his waist. I imagine yours was as well.”

  “It is true. But I must ask, Is there a possibility that this sword was part of your inheritance? That you now have it? It was the sort of thing a father passes on to a son. There are far finer swords. But that sword: it would have enormous meaning to me and to my family. I really came to America in search of that sword.”

  Bob wished he had good news for the man. He understood that it was more than right that such an event might transpire all these years later, the sword returned to its place of honor with the family of the man who had carried it and died with it. The symmetry of the idea pleased him; it seemed to signify a final closing up of old, raw wounds.

  But he had no good news.

  “Mr. Yano, I would in a second, believe me. It would please me. For some damned reason, I have this feeling that it would please my father, and that would do me proud.”

  “I feel the same.”

  “But my father wasn’t a man for trophies. He had no trophies except a forty-five he brought back from the Pacific, and that was a tool, not a trophy. But no flags, no trumpets, no swords, no helmets, not even much chatter. He just put the war behind him and got on to the next thing. He never talked about it. He never wore the uniform again, until the day he died, not even on parade days when some of the other boys did. He wasn’t the sort of man who talked himself up, or tried to remind others of what he’d done. You don’t see that much no more.”

  If the Japanese felt disappointment, he didn’t show it, and Bob realized it was not their way to show such things.

  “I didn’t think I’d ever heard you say anything about a sword,” said Jenks, who’d been standing idly by while the two conducted business. “Bob’s not a showy kind, and I don’t believe his father would have been either.”

  “No, I understand,” said Mr. Yano. “Well, so be it. That is what the gods have decreed. The sword is where it is and that is where it will remain.”

  “You sure tried,” said Bob. Then he added, “Possibly there are still some men left in that platoon? They’d be in their eighties now. But couldn’t Marine Historical put you in contact?”

  “There are two and I’ve actually talked to both. One in Florida, one in Kansas. But I came up empty.”

  “That’s too bad. I’d really like to help. And—hmmm,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. All this talk about so long ago. I am hearing something,” said Bob.

  “Hearing something?”

  “I’m getting a buzz on something. ‘Sword.’ You say that word, meaning World War Two Japanese sword, I get a little kind of image.”

  “A memory, like?” said Jenks.

  “Not even that. I don’t know why it would be or what it would be. Somewhere deep down, I have this little bug. Maybe it’s a mistake.”

  “Still, it’s something.”

  “Mr. Yano, because we’re connected in such a hard way, let me make you a promise. It ain’t much. It’s all I got.”

  “I’m moved.”

  “There’s stuff in my attic. It was in the house in Arizona; I moved it when I sold that place. I looked through it a couple or so years ago when some business about my father came up and I had to go on a little trip back home. But I didn’t look thoroughly. Obviously, I wasn’t looking for anything having to do with a sword. So, I’ll go back through that stuff over the next few weeks. Maybe get a sense of what’s there. Who knows, maybe there’s a lead of some sort. You came all the way out here to No Place, Idaho, I feel I owe you, soldier to soldier. Also, son of hero to son of hero.”

  “You’re very kind. I know you’ll examine until there’s nothing left to examine. Here’s my card. Please accept it, and if there’s any news, you’ll be able to reach me.”

  5

  THE OLD BREED

  The young faces stared out at him. They were so thin, so unmarked, in many cases so unformed, with eager eyes and knobby cheekbones, tan in the tropic sun. Each man clutched a vicious KA-BAR knife, or a Garand or a carbine or a BAR. They were revving themselves up for war, this young marine platoon somewhere in the Pacific, somewhere in World War II. Finally one face in the back row materialized and Bob knew it to be his father’s. It was thin too, but if you looked hard, you saw the pure animal confidence. His father wore the NCO’s weird combination of foreman’s savvy, father’s sternness, mother’s forgiveness, teacher’s wisdom, and coach’s toughness beautifully, and the picture somehow captured a professional at the apex of his game, with a crushed boonie cap pushed back on his head, his teeth white and strong as he smiled, his utility sleeves rolled up, showing strong forearms that seemed to be curled on what Bob thought was maybe (most of it was hidden behind a man in the row in front of him) a tommy gun.

  He had no idea when the picture was taken. Maybe before Guadalcanal—no, not with M-1s and carbines—maybe before Tarawa, maybe before Saipan, maybe before Iwo. There was one other too, Bob couldn’t remember, but he knew his dad was one of the few marines who had hit five separate islands and lived to tell about it, though the wound on Tarawa from the Jap sniper would have killed a lesser man.

  The photo, old and curled, was one of a few that remained testifying to the war adventures of Earl L. Swagger of Blue Eye, Arkansas, who entered the war a corporal and got out a first sergeant even if wounded seven times. It was a real hell-and-back story. Audie Ryan didn’t have anything on Earl. He fought hard, he almost died; somehow, like little Audie, he came back. He never became a movie star, but instead became a police officer and he got ten more years of life out of the deal.

  But that was all. Bob was alone in the attic and it hadn’t been easy digging through this stuff, which had been hastily moved from a house in Ajo, Arizona, never categorized, never examined, just lumped together as junk from the past and shoved up here. The cardboard box—“Buster Brown. Size C7, Dark Brown Oxfords,” inscribed in his mother’s script “Daddy’s Things”—contained little else. The medals, even the big one, were nested together, the ribbons faded, the metal tarnished. Bob thought maybe he should have them polished and mounted, a display to the man’s courage. But his father would have been embarrassed at such show. There were police marksmanship medals, and yellowing newspaper clippings from the month of his death in 1955.

  Well, I tried, Bob thought.

  He thought of Mr. Yano’s card in his wallet.

  Dear Mr. Yano, he imagined the note he’d write, I went through what remained of my father’s effects and found nothing that would help you in your quest. Maybe if—

  And then yet another possibility occurred to him.

  This here was the stuff his mother had gathered, after the funeral, before she launched into the land of drunkenness. But there was another three years when her sister, Agnes Bowman, a schoolteacher and spinster who had not yet found a man good
enough, had come and stayed with them, and Aunt Agnes had raised him, sternly, not with love or tenderness, but out of a grim sense of family duty while Erla June drank herself to death and died before reaching the age of forty. Aunt Agnes was not a giving woman, which was all right. Aunt Agnes did the things that had to be done and didn’t have a lot of time for nursing boys like Bob, who in any case retreated into someplace dark for a few years after his father’s death, and so never made contact with her. Perhaps she was in her own dark place. That was okay; Aunt Agnes provided and guided and paid the bills and fed him; compared to that a squeeze or a hug wasn’t much of anything.

  But then Bob gravitated toward Sam Vincent and his big, rambling, loud, smart, funny, competitive, welcoming family and eventually, through high school, lived with Sam, almost as a Vincent. Aunt Agnes saw no purpose therefore and moved away, sending a Christmas card every year.

  Bob had visited her after his first tour in Vietnam in 1966 and as an adult discovered a decent, quiet woman, finally married to a widowed schoolteacher, living in Oranda, Virginia, in the Shenandoah Valley. It had been a nice visit, though not much had been said and damned if he could remember—

  Goodwin!

  Agnes Goodwin, her married name.

  He didn’t know why, he hadn’t thought of it in years, but somehow it flew at him out of some lost file in his brain.

  On Anywho.com he couldn’t even find an Oranda, nor on any map; he found an old map with the town located next to Strasburg, and identifying the town as Strasburg finally turned up a Goodwin. He made the blind call and located a cousin who knew other branches of the Goodwin family and guided him toward a Betty Frawley, of Roanoke, whose maiden name had been Goodwin and was that person’s uncle Mike Goodwin’s daughter.

  “Ms. Frawley?”