The Emperor of Any Place (36 page)

And then Evan is suddenly crying, weeping. It comes over him like a cyclone, a tsunami of grief. “I hate him,” he sobs. “I fucking hate him!” But his anger only morphs into another wave of grief, as though he will drown Any Place with an ocean’s worth of tears.

And it subsides. Not gone but in remission. The grief.

A little war and now a little peace: a lifting of something — some weight. He looks at his cell phone. Just after eight. The earliest he’s woken in a month. He’s not sure what time it was when they called it a day, but he feels rested, despite everything. He climbs out of bed. He needs a shower. A long, scalding-hot shower. There is shampoo. Griff must have bought it. He stands there feeling the streaming water massage his neck and shoulders. He showers until the water starts to cool. Back in his room, he puts on shorts and a plain white T-shirt. A peace offering.

Griff isn’t in the kitchen. The door to the rec room is closed. Evan goes back into the kitchen. Griff ’s outdoor shoes are there, shining. Evan stands in the middle of the room, listening to the almost-quiet. The windows are open, and the distant hum of the Don Valley Expressway seems to have modulated to D major. A good sign.

He allows the idea of Griff being dead to take him over. It’s not something he wants; it’s something he fears. The old man had looked pretty gone last night. He might have stormed a lot of beaches in his day, but he wasn’t heavily equipped with weapons to confront big emotion. If he is dead, lying down there in the rec room, Evan doesn’t want to find him just yet or phone the authorities. He’ll try bacon therapy first.

It works.

Not fifteen minutes later, the man appears at the kitchen door.

“Ah,” says Evan. “So you decided to get up at last.”

Griff shakes his head. “You might try using the splatter guard,” he says. He points at a mesh utensil hanging beside the stove.

“Hey,” says Evan. “I always wondered what that was.”

He makes a big bowl of cheesy scrambled eggs and a log pile of bacon. There’s toast and raspberry jam, courtesy of Rachel Cope, a gallon of orange juice and a gallon of coffee. Saturday-morning breakfast on a Tuesday.

When Evan thinks it’s time, he says, “Can I tell Leo the news?”

Griff looks bemused. “What news would that be?”

“What went down out there on Kokoro-Jima.”

Griff shakes his head. “I’m not giving them permission, Evan, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“Why not? You didn’t do it.”

Griff sits up straight. He quietly lays his knife down on his plate, then pats his lips with his napkin.

Oops.

“Let’s just say that I’m not keen on the idea of reducing war to a comic book.”

“Have you seen Yamada’s work?” says Evan. “He’s, like, really amazing.”

“Words in bubbles? It’s a desecration, as far as I’m concerned, however talented he may be. Cheap and tawdry.”

Tawdry,
thinks Evan, and wishes he could draw out a word that well, so that it fills up with meaning. He makes himself nod, not in agreement but so as to show acceptance of the idea put forward, however insanely stupid and narrow-minded it is. He pats his own lips dry of grease. He made a deal with himself before launching into this conversation. He would not

1. swear;

2. be cheeky; or

3. leave the room.

Griff is watching him closely. When Evan doesn’t speak, he picks up his knife and recommences buttering his toast.

He’s under the impression that I’m done,
thinks Evan. He clears his throat. “Okay, but even if you’re not going to allow the project to go forward, it’d be cool to let Leo know, wouldn’t it? I mean that you’re innocent. I can even corroborate it. I’m an eyewitness. Sort of.” Griff is frowning, which is not like glaring. “You didn’t tell me what happened. I saw it myself and then you filled in the details. That’s got to count for something.” He manages to keep his voice light, as if it’s no big deal. He peers at Griff. He’s helping himself to another cup of coffee, doesn’t look too close to blowing up. There’s a little container of pills he has to take. Evan has never seen it before because they’ve never had breakfast together — never had any meal together. He waits, but he has never been big on knowing when enough was enough. “You’ll end up coming off like a hero, Griff.”

“I don’t need a cartoonist to glorify the incident.”

“But he can tell your story. Get it right.”

“What if I don’t want my story told?”

Evan considers that, shrugs, and takes the last of the eggs. “Okay,” he says. “Your call.”

Griff nods. “Damn straight it is, son.”

Then he sits with a piece of toast dangling from his hand, looking out the window. It’s that kind of thousand-yard stare you see on a person when they have pretty well left the room, so Evan feels free to observe the old man. And that’s when he sees the mask for the first time. It’s so thin and perfectly made that it’s almost lifelike, except that there is a tiny part of it that has flaked off, just under Griff ’s right eye. Maybe the tears Evan saw there last night, ever so briefly, dissolved some of the mask.

Griff doesn’t raise his voice or look up when he speaks. “You have no idea,” he says. “No idea whatsoever.” Evan watches as another flake falls away from the man’s face. “You think a few pictures say anything about what we went through out there?” His hand with the toast gestures toward the window as if Any Place were a war zone. “You think?”

“No, sir.”

Griff snaps his head around to look at Evan, expecting insolence even now, but seeing none. He’s spent a lifetime with boys not much older than Evan saying “Yes, sir” and “No, sir,” with respect and an edge of fear.
He doesn’t think I respect or fear him,
Evan thinks,
because he hasn’t spent a lifetime knowing this boy. Too bad.
There is no sneer on Evan’s face, no snide remark lurking at the corner of his lips.

“No, sir,” Evan says again.

Another tiny flake of the mask falls away. Griff scratches his cheek, and now Evan catches a glimpse of what the mask has been hiding. He waits. The mask — the armor — is crumbling as if it were a thin slip of clay, falling away, but Evan isn’t going to draw attention to it. Let the old man gather up the crumbs of it, sweep them from the table into his fist to dispense with later when he is alone. He isn’t a man who reveals himself too often.
This must be hard for him,
thinks Evan.

He goes back to his cold eggs. He looks up to see Griff looking out the window again at the nothing of consequence that happens on a daily basis out there in Any Place.

“What?” he says.

“Excuse me?” says Evan.

“You’re itching to tell me something. Fill me in.”

Evan smiles.

“Don’t patronize me, boy.”

“I’m not, sir. And I know you’re right. I don’t think anything can capture what you went through out there.” He nods toward the outside, the everywhere that stretches from this small place where Evan has spent his entire life. “But maybe there is something that can come of it. Telling the story.”

“It’s not a story, Evan. That’s my point. A story has some shape to it, a point. War doesn’t have a point. And it doesn’t have a convenient end to it, either.”

“It doesn’t end?”

“It ends and then it starts again, and the end of one war inevitably grows out of the war that came before it. There’s no . . . what do you call it . . .”

“Resolution?”

“I don’t know. Yeah. That.”

Evan nods. “So, how about if Yamada could get across this one single truth — just one.”

“What would that look like?”

“I don’t know. Just the idea that something looks like it happened one way, but it didn’t really happen that way.” He waits for Griff to counter but sees that he’s not going to. “That it was something bigger than you that killed Ōshiro. Something that can’t die, no matter how many times you kill it.”

Griff favors Evan with a wry grin. “And y’all think there’s a living soul out there who’ll believe it?”

Evan nods. “I do. That’s a start.”

Griff shakes his head, but there is no look of disparagement on his face, just a lifetime of people who didn’t get him — didn’t understand.

“Listen,” says Evan, leaning forward, his fists on the table, but his voice even and filled with clean clear possibility. “You were talking just the other night about how the truth isn’t what people tell you happened — how it’s something else. Isn’t that what you were saying?”

Griff nods, but his right eyebrow arches. “You mean you were listening to me?”

“Oh, yeah. I heard you loud and clear. It’s just that I’m not in the habit of saying ‘yes, sir’ every time I’m told something.”

Griff laughs. “What I said was, the truth is bigger than the stories people tell themselves and bigger than the lies they live with.”

“Right, so . . .”

Griff holds up his hand, a stop sign, a shaky one. “Hold your horses, Evan,” he says.

Evan nods, and now he knows to stop. For the time being.

Evan knocks at the Reidingers’ blue door. He hears the muffled shout of Lexie Jane announcing that she’ll get it. The door flies open.

“Oh, hey.”

“Hey,” he says.

She looks past him. “Is it time to do the lawn again?”

“No,” he says. “Well, yeah, actually it is. But I’m going to do it. That’s not why I’m here.”

Which is when she notices that his hands are behind his back. Which is his cue to show her what he brought.

“Oh, wow! The
Constitution,
” she says.

“Yeah. Sorry it took so long to get it.”

She makes a quizzical expression, and he realizes that she might not have even known what happened the other day when he balked and left her standing in the garden waiting. “Anyway,” he says. “It’s yours.”

“Are you kidding?”

“Do I look like I’m kidding?”

She smiles and, with his prompting, takes the bottle from him, carefully, in two hands. That’s when he sees just the tiniest glimmer of something like disappointment in her eyes. Really? “Don’t you want it?” he asks.

She looks surprised — caught out. “Oh, yeah, it’s great,” she says.

“Whoa, that wasn’t very convincing.” Now she looks embarrassed. “Come on, level with me,” he says.

“There was this other ship,” she says. “The
Bounty
?” He nods. “Well, it was my favorite because it’s a way better story, and your dad let me paint it — the hull, anyway.”

“You’re kidding me.” She shakes her head. “Then, give me back the USS
Constitution
and let’s go get the
Bounty.
”

“Honest?”

“Honest.”

Then Lexie Jane hands him the boat and yells back into the house. “I’m going over to Clifford’s,” she shouts. Then she looks at Evan and her face darkens.

“It’s okay,” he says. “Go on. You know where it is.”

Evan and Griff build a fishpond for Clifford on Saturday.

Rollo comes over to help with the heavy lifting. Griff actually just sits in a deck chair on the newly mown lawn, in charge of the lemonade and dispensing advice. Helpful stuff like: “That rock won’t move itself.” Or: “Do not — either one of you — even think about a career in garden maintenance. I mean it.”

Rollo loves it.

“You two’ve got to be the most hapless pair of shit-for-brains ever!”

“That’s what we’ll call the band,” says Evan.

“Shit-for-Brains,” says Rollo. “Got a good ring to it.”

“What is this? Break time again?”

Evan’s father kept a book about his garden, what he’d planted where, when things came up, what to do with different pests. He’d drawn a good plan of how the fishpond was supposed to look, and all the supplies were there. They spread his ashes in the hole before they lay down the rubber liner.

The three of them stand there, and Evan wonders if he should say something. Then he looks sideways at Griff, expectantly. But no, it’s too late for him. Any words he might have said died long ago.

The pause is a long, respectful one, and into it floods another wave of anger. Evan isn’t done with it yet, he realizes. The anger. But now is not the time for it. Now is the time to do what his father never got the chance to do.

“Rest easy, Dad,” Evan says.

Then something hits him. An idea. Rollo is already reaching for the shovel. “Wait a sec,” says Evan, and takes off toward the house. In the Dockyard he scours the shelves until he finds it. The USS
Chesapeake.
He carries it out to where Rollo and Griff are waiting at graveside. He shows it to Griff. “Was this the one?” he says. Griff takes it, looks it over. Nods. The ship his father sent Griff: the one with the sketchy history. The boat Griff sent back. On his knees, Evan places the boat in the grave. Then he stands up and rubs the dirt off his knees. He can’t look at his grandfather, but he feels him looking at him. Then they fill in the hole.

Rollo can’t stay for supper. “I’d love to get some more abuse,” he says to Griff, “but I’ve got a date.” He turns to Evan. “Oh, yeah. It’s with Bree. Is that her name?”

Evan punches him in the arm.

“I’m out of here,” says Rollo.

“Shiftless bastard,” says Griff, and Rollo howls with laughter. He walks to his car with his fist in the air.