No Surrender Soldier (7 page)

Thank goodness no one mentioned the holes for the rest of the night.

Until after the neighbors all went home. My parents must have thought Tatan and I were asleep.

Only I couldn’t sleep. For the first time in my life my parents yelled at each other. I lay in the dark and listened to them through the bedroom walls.

“I don’t think we can handle Tatan no more.” Tata sounded worried.

“I don’t want to talk about it. Tatan’s going to be okay. Kiko will help. We can do it.”

“Tatan is not okay. He’s not going to be okay. He’s only going to get worse.”

“Don’t say that! That’s my tata you’re talking about! He’s got to get better. He’s got to, you hear?” It wasn’t like Nana to yell. She must have been really mad.

“We can’t pretend anymore. Tatan does have
lytico-bodig
. It’s getting worse. How can we take care of him and run the store, too? And Kiko…” I pressed my head to the wall when Tata said my name. “Kiko has to go to school. Roselina, listen to me, I t’ink maybe… maybe we should send Tatan to live with your brother on Oahu, or the other one in California. They got more money and better, you know, doctors and hospitals and places to help them with this… this dementia t’ing Tatan has.”

“How can you say that? Send Tatan to California with Tony? His wife’s
haole
! She’ll make my brother put Tatan in a nursing home. I won’t stand for it! We’re family. Family doesn’t lock away family.” It sounded like drum beats. I bet Nana was pounding her fist against something.

“Nursing homes are better equipped. It’s not prison. It’s a hospital, with nurses and—”

“As for Joaquin on Oahu, his Hawaiian wife is kind enough, but… but, Honolulu is too crowded! He’ll get lost and not be found.”

“You’re being unreasonable. Joaquin doesn’t live in Honolulu. He lives leeward side. Joaquin and Leala were good to Sammy the two years he lived with them during graduate school.”

“And look where that got our Sammy—in the military! He goes to graduate school to study engineering and he comes back enlisted in the air force,” Nana said.

“That wasn’t Joaquin and Leala’s fault. Sammy made up his mind on his own.”

“No matter,” Nana insisted. “Oahu’s not Guam. Tatan will be lost forever if he can’t live, and die, on Guam.”

“But what are we going to do? When Kiko goes to school?”

The yelling stopped. I strained to hear Nana’s reply. I got out of bed and pressed my ear near the crack where my door doesn’t meet the floor.

Nana was crying. I wanted to go hug her like I did when I was a little boy. Tell her Tatan would get better. Sammy would come home. That everything would be all right. Nothing bad would happen. Not now. Not ever.

It’d be a lie, though. A big fat lie. Just like how I’d been lied to my entire life, thinking nothing bad ever happened to Nana before.

Seto lay sealed in his cave, listening.

Leaves raining on bamboo slats sounded like bones clacking.

Woo. Woo.
Wind whistled through bamboo like flutes.

Gong. Gong.
One large bamboo shoot drummed against smaller, weaker ones.

Seto could not sleep.

Planes droned overhead, muffled by dirt packed on top of him. Buried alive. Burrowed in his sepulcher. Still, Seto did not need to be above ground, nor at the apex of the mountain behind his
Omiya Jima
cave, to know bombers overhead wore no Rising Sun.

Darkness shrouded Seto’s hiding place. This burial mound he called home. No matter which way he turned, side to side, front to back, he could not rest upon his mat. It itched. He scratched.

Seto tried to sleep, but to no avail. It felt as if thousands upon thousands of lice and beetles, cockroaches and centipedes and all the insects earth bore scurried millions of legs across his corpse.

Cold drafts drifted down his vault’s shaft.

“No! No! I invoke the spirits, leave me alone tonight!”
Seto cried.
“Sleep, Sleep, I beg of you, bring me peace.”

He shut his eyes tight. He tried to conjure up images of his mother, who smelled of spring cherry blossoms. He tried to see her steadfast fingers working threads upon her loom. He tried to feel her silky hair, faint silver wisps fallen around her face. He comforted himself by remembering her faded plum kimono, missing its
obi
she had embroidered and given to him to cherish her by.

Yet, he could not summon his mother’s spirit, try as he did.

For they were marching. Marching.

Seto clasped hands over his ears.

Not raining leaves, nor whistling wind, not gonging bamboo, nor droning airplanes—especially not the bombers—could drown out the sound of a thousand soldiers marching. Marching. Marching.

It was the Japanese Imperial Army. His platoon marched through his chasm as if it were their purgatory. Tormented spirits caught between heaven and hell.

Ghosts. Spirits. Specters.

It mattered not what name they be called, Seto feared the ghastly ghouls who haunted him by night. Soldiers dressed in battle gear with missing limbs and open wounds reached for him in anguish.

“Why do you come? Have I betrayed you?”
Seto had screamed this out to them before.

Still, no answer. Except for the sound of leaves raining overhead.

The soldiers marched, marched, marched through Seto as if he were the shadow, and they, the host.

Except for headless
hara-kiri
soldiers who placed grenades under their helmets, all other soldiers wore expressions of suffering.

“
Look, see what I offer.”
Seto sat up on his
tatami
and showed them a paper under a sack that he filled with coconut fibers for a pillow. “
See! See the letters! I have written your names. I shall return to the temple and ask Kannon for mercy!”

Yet they took not his gift, nor slowed their pace. Except one. He turned to Seto, and gaped his mouth open. A voice squeezed out,
“You are the only one left.”
Then, he turned and marched away with the rest.

Seto smoothed the memorial sheet and placed it back under his pillow.

“
Enough. Kannon, goddess of mercy, let this appease the dead. And may you send me no more uninvited guests tonight.”

But, alas, his greatest fear was that mercy was lost to the dead.

For man is destined once to die, and after that, face judgment. There seemed no rest, nor rebirth, for these tormented spirits.

Exhausted, Seto settled in bed.

He breathed deep. Tossed and turned. And tried once more to shut out the horrors of war.

He napped. But did he? Sleep and wake hazed into one. What mattered if a dream be day or night? His greatest nightmares haunted him awake. Seto prayed for deepest of sleep. So deep that neither phantom nor wraith appear. Deepest of sleep where no memory walks, but all is dark and empty of voice. Seto welcomed that sleep. Yet feared the sleep of souls so deep that there be no waking evermore.

It was to that sleep of death that Seto and two comrade stragglers hidden in the heart of darkness sent two unsuspecting Chamorros. These young men appeared again to judge Seto’s hand in their deaths.

Woo. Woo.…. Woo. Woo.

It is but Wind playing her flute,
Seto thought. He stirred, then settled on his back.

Woo. Woo.

Seto gazed up at his bamboo earth ceiling. Coconut oil coated it black. Iridescent pearl traces of the natives appeared. Seto wiped his eyes, then focused again to see if the outlines were but bamboo joints.

Woo. Woo.
Wind blew her bamboo flutes.
Woooo. Woooo
.

“Remember us?”
the traces said.
“We checked our traps in Talofofo boonies.”
Seto recognized familiar voices, though in life he gave them no chance to speak.
“And looked for betel nut,”
one disembodied spirit said.

Seto knew who they were, though he had seen them alive only once. The night he and his two companions murdered the young men because the stragglers feared they would be found.

Seto closed his eyes against tears and sweat that dimmed his focus. He pleaded with the wisps,
“I didn’t know. I didn’t know. Fear made me shoot.”

“What didn’t you know?”
asked the one who wanted betel nut.

“How young you were. Or that your knife was to cut shrimp trap line. Or… or…”

The younger one, in his teen alto voice, helped Seto remember,
“Or that your friends would cut our hands and feet, slice our guts, and leave us to rot?”

Seto cried,
“Please, have mercy! Let me be! Have mercy on me!”

Seto knew not what to offer them. He had no shrimp or betel nut. His gods had no power to restore life. Broken, Seto filled a coconut shell with milk and tossed it to the ceiling.

“Mercy is not ours to give.”
They departed up through bamboo and earth. All that remained was the smell of burnt oil and dripping milk.

Milk fell like gentle raindrops, but could not quench the fire Seto felt inside and out. Seto, drenched in sweat, lay down again.

He trembled with night terrors.

“Oh,”
he cried in anguish,
“what must I do to cleanse myself of this blood that I have shed by my hands? Hands made to be a tailor, not a butcher.

“Oh, by the gods, if you grant me one wish, to return to Japan, I will offer sacrifice and prayers in pilgrimage to the mountain.”

Yet he feared he would never leave this crypt alive.

When fitful turns died down, Seto slumped upon his belly like a brown tree snake stalking prey, then snuggled his head on a coarse sack and lay still upon his mat.

Gong. Gong.

“It is but bamboo banging against its brother.”

Gong, gong.

Two spooks rose up through the
tatami
and seized Seto’s feet and hands. He wrestled with his comrade stragglers who died of poison. Or was it suicide? Not twenty yards away, their bones were sealed in a necropolis they dug with their own hands.

“You’ve desecrated our graveyard and stolen from us all we had!”
the ghost of Michi Hayato said.

Seto’s body contorted with fear, as if shaken by seizures.

“Over there,”
he shouted and pointed to a neatly folded flag. White with a blood-red sun.

“And my talisman of a thousand stitches,”
the specter of Yoshi Nakamura accused.

“It did you no good! You were dead! I took it, hoping each stitch would keep me from harm.”
Seto’s fear stoked his fever hotter.

“Please,”
Seto begged,
“leave me alone. What have I done to deserve your visits? Have I even once done something cowardly that turns you against me?”

Demons laughed heartily. But Hayato and Nakamura gave no answer.

“I am your superior,”
Seto shouted louder, trying to summon a voice of authority
. “I order you to leave!”

Louder and louder laughter grew. Not like laughter of children frolicking by a river. Not laughter of newlyweds under their first moon. But rather shrill, shrieking, high-pitched siren laughter of eerie wind howling through grottos.

“Here, take flag,”
Seto bargained.
“I wanted it to remind me of home. And thousand stitches, those stitches were sewn for good luck by your kinsman and friends. Take it! Take it!”

The spooks trampled the flag and talisman, yet left no telltale rumples to show their presence.
“How about your gun?”
Hayato asked.
“Would you sacrifice your gun?”
Seto fetched the wooden butt and rusted barrel of his dormant soldier’s gun. It too had seen a thousand deaths in China and on Guam. Seto traced the Chrysanthemum.
“It is for my emperor. When I return.”

Hayato and Nakamura laughed a haunting laugh. The demons laughed.
Gong. Gong.
Wind sounded the gong.

They departed.

Seto stretched up on all fours like a cat and arched his sore back.

“It must be the rat I ate,”
he mused
.

Stretch. Reach. He doused his face in a little water he had boiled and saved for morning. Seto went to the toilet, then returned to his
tatami
.

“Let me start afresh. Never have I been visited by more than these. My fever’s broke. The ghosts are gone. Now I shall slumber.”

He smoothed the memorial paper under his pillow. Milk no longer dripped from his ceiling. He placed his comrade’s talisman on top of Japan’s flag, and cuddled his mother’s
obi
against his heart.

He then lay down to sleep in peace.

Drifting in and out. Out and in. Sleep fell in dreams and fits.

He smelled cherry blossoms.

“Tsuru,”
he whispered his mother’s name.

Cherry blossoms bloomed in Mount Mitake-san, where his mother prayed to conceive. The mountain granted her wish and gave her an only son.

Three airplanes from the east droned overhead. Bombers.

His mother’s plum kimono transformed into a billowing purple mushroom filling the heavens, with fire at her feet.

Seto searched for his mother in the fog. He looked for her loom. Instead, barren cherry tree branches like gnarled bones fingered silkworm threads upon her web. He felt for her hair. Silver wisps fell beyond his grasp. He longed to taste ripened cherries. Pits lay strewn upon wasted ground as birds pecked rotted poisonous fruit.

Seto curled in a fetal ball and embraced his mother’s
obi
. He had nothing to offer. She stained her
obi
with blood-pricked fingers. He soaked it with his tears.

When Nana woke me Monday morning, Tatan slept so soundly his snoring could be heard throughout our six-room house.

For once I was anxious to go to school. Since I couldn’t go to Tumon, and at home I’d be stuck babysitting Tatan, at least at school I’d get to see my friends.