Fields of Fire (35 page)

They loved again. He sought to draw out every moment, to find infinity in the passions of her womb, to cling to her and thus avoid the rawness of what awaited him. She seemed to him the rightest thing in a world gone totally wrong.

THEY met again the next night and he sensed that he had confused her life as nothing else had or ever could. He had made what appeared to be an absolute promise, but he did not understand the Okinawan ways. She was still uncertain of his sincerity. She did not know what to do about the Okinawan, who had been pestering her. She was afraid that her parents would condemn her.

As they talked, Hodges sensed that her parents were the key. If they gave their blessing, there would be no screams from the Okinawan suitor. If he approached the parents, she would no longer doubt his sincerity. If the parents approved, all doubts about such things as family tombs would disappear. He convinced her to trade days off with another girl. “Tomorrow,” he assured her, “your parents will fall in love with me, too. How can I miss? A fine American like me.”

HE walked out to her apartment in the wind-blown morning air, dancing along cluttered streets that seemed so quaint and harmless in the daylight, night's gutting shadows now bright and sunstruck. They caught a taxi ride to Gushikawa City, where she had been born, and where, she explained, her parents kept a business. He held her as they rode. Watching the traffic and signs and the little cluttered shops, he remembered their first taxi ride months before and renewed his vow that, someday, he would understand it.

In Gushikawa City, the cab wound randomly along packed streets until she stopped it abruptly in the middle of a block. He looked around and saw only shops and dozens of busy people. He paid the driver and she took his hand and led him through the crowd, much as a loom weaves fabric. They walked a waving path, careful not to touch other figures on the crowded sidewalk, and he felt the faintly hostile stares from passing Okinawans. They were not happy with gold holding white. He noticed that Mitsuko was wearing the same emotionless mask that she wore while serving Marines. She ignored the stares.

She turned off the main thoroughfare into what appeared to be an alleyway. It was one lane wide, and cluttered shops overflowed onto it, narrowing it further. As they walked he was surrounded by the clutter and the closeness and he sensed that he was entering a sort of inner sanctum. It was a close, bustling world of Okinawans, untouched and unvisited by Americans, devoid of cars and bars. He was amazed, not only that it existed, but that it thrived so near to the larger arteries that he had come to know as Okinawa. Cars and jeeps ground fifty feet behind them, but this was a walking world.

She turned again, into an even narrower walkway. The shops were as small as horse stalls now. The walkway was so narrow that the roofs of the stalls almost touched across it. They walked together, she bravely squeezing his hand in the face of rejecting stares, he lowering his head to avoid occasional low rooftops, absorbing strange smells and sounds of a patch of earth unchanged by the conqueror. He perceived that, for the first time, he was seeing her people. He smelled and listened and watched and he saw the certainty in her eyes and he knew her better, comprehended all the resistance. And as he was swallowed by the odors and the darkness of the shops, he felt drawn into a netherworld.

Finally she stopped. He stood in the middle of a mass of shops and cluttered goods and people, wondering at the darkness of the open-air stalls, the only light being small shafts that crept past the angled roofs. She nodded at one of the shops then, giving him a secret smile that was a wish.

He turned and faced the shop and peered through stacks of clothes, dozens of dull colored shirts and trousers, at two narrow aisles that were perhaps ten feet deep. The aisles met in a U in the back of the shop and there was a man sitting barefoot on a low wooden platform where they met. He was smoking a cigarette and sipping green tea that steamed lazily from a porcelain teapot on the platform. And, incongruously, watching a small color television. Hodges grinned. Culture clash, even in the netherworld. Except for the man, the stall was empty.

The shopkeeper sensed Hodges’ presence and hopped quickly from the platform. His narrow, wrinkled face wore an emasculated smile. He was small, gnarled, and beaten. All old Oriental men seemed like that to Hodges: the forever vanquished. He walked toward Hodges, his smile as much a mask as Mitsuko's emotionless, empty face of a few minutes before.

Then the old man saw her. He stopped and stared at their joined hands and the mask disappeared and he was no longer vanquished. He was a father more than he was a vanquished warrior. Blood, mused Hodges, is more real than flags. The man spoke low, urgent sentences to Mitsuko, his eyes alternating between the joined hands and her face. She met his gaze at first, then looked to the ground, her head lowered. But she did not let go of Hodges’ hand.

Her father had ignored Hodges from the moment he saw Mitsuko. He asked a series of staccato questions and she answered with hushed acknowledgments. Rapid-fire question. Soft, velvet “Hei.” New question. Another “Hei.” Finally, he turned to the rear of the stall and called commandingly. A tiny lady walked through the curtain, smiled widely when she noticed Mitsuko, and then assumed a querulous mask as she listened to the staccato of her husband. She did not look directly at Hodges, either.

Hodges watched their wailings and once again sensed the intrusion he was making into lives he did not understand. The shriveled parents spoke urgent words to their erring daughter, she surprisingly docile in the face of their lamentations. She did not meet their eyes. Her answers were a soft hush. But she continued to cling tightly to Hodges’ hand.

He was frozen by his lack of understanding. He did not want to increase their frustrations by forcing his presence on them, but he was not comfortable standing docilely by while Mitsuko caught the abuse that he had caused her. Finally, he compromised. He diplomatically made a low bow, his head only inches from the father's narrow chest, and held it until the man ceased talking. Then he smiled to both parents and spoke softly, cautiously, trying to avoid the casual, arrogant manner that had given his kind a bad name.

“I love your daughter very much. I will be good to her forever.” They looked curiously at him, not understanding his words and still not accepting his presence. He turned to Mitsuko. “Tell them what I said.” She hesitated a moment, then interpreted, still not looking at them.

They peered at Hodges, somber and unanswering. He continued, and Mitsuko slowly translated. “I've known your daughter for five months. I really love her. I want to marry her and I'd like to have your blessing.”

Mitsuko squinted her nose, staring uncertainly at Hodges. “No understand ‘blessing.’ ”

Hodges smiled, amused. The parents sensed their closeness and exchanged concerned frowns. Hodges rephrased. “I'd like you to say it's O.K.” Mitsuko nodded and looked at her parents as she translated, her face hoping.

Her father looked from Hodges to Mitsuko, pondering his answer. Then he spoke with what appeared to be frankness. Mitsuko translated. “How can I say O.K.? I do not even know you.”

Hodges felt a roll of slight elation deep in his chest. An equivocal answer seemed to him a major victory. Then her father continued, eyeing Hodges. Mitsuko translated again. “If you marry, where you live?”

The answer to the question was so obvious that Hodges had never even considered it to be open. He was slightly amazed that her father had even asked. “America.”

Her father spoke a staccato sentence and then bowed slightly, turning back to the rear of the stall. Mitsuko murmured, her eyes following her father's exit. “No can do. Daughter stay on Okinawa. Family on Okinawa.”

Hodges watched the wrinkled old man curiously, amused by what he perceived to be the parody in his actions. This old shopkeeper ain't getting my goat that easy. Does he think he has the right to bargain over his daughter like he's selling off a hog? Does he want money?

Hodges purged that thought. Nahh. Hell. I just don't understand these people.

Finally he grabbed Mitsuko by the elbow, startling her, and stood before her father at the rear of the stall. Her father ignored them now, pouring himself another cup of green tea. He sat down on the bench and adjusted the television set. There was a Japanese commercial on the television. I don't understand, Hodges fretted.

He bowed again, cutting the man off from his television. The father reluctantly acknowledged his renewed presence. “I'd like to get to know you. I'm gonna come back again, soon, to see you. I intend to marry Mitsuko.”

Mitsuko was tense and looked to Hodges again, her eyebrows raised. “No understand ‘intend.’ ”

Hodges put an arm possessively around her shoulder. “I'm gonna marry your little girl, Papasan.”

Her father grunted, shaking his head, and ignored them.

Mitsuko went to her mother. They had a long, though quiet, discussion, their voices hushed in deference to her father, who had dismissed both the issue and them. Mitsuko and her mother wore identical pained expressions, obviously understanding each other. Hodges walked over to them and placed an arm around Mitsuko's mother and kissed her on the forehead, wanting her to accept him and instinctively caring for her. She looked down, embarrassed, then took both of them briefly into her tiny arms, assuring them of her support with the gesture, and firmly pushed them toward the entrance of the stall.

The disapproving stares were all the more real to Hodges as they walked the narrow corridors of overflowing shops and bustling people back to the main street. He grunted ironically to himself, thinking of his earlier optimism. Uh huh. A fine American like me.

And the main street seemed a highway after his brief touch with the netherworld.

THEY spent the rest of the day on a taxi tour of Okinawa, which Mitsuko proudly conducted. She took him to the southern end of the island, where they drove past hundreds of family tombs, shrines, and monuments. She impressed him with her pride, and her grasp of Okinawan history, awakening him in her quiet way to the realization that Okinawa really was a separate entity, which had magically survived centuries of delusions by great, ephemeral warlords that owned it.

They drove to the site of the old Shuri Castle, which had been crumbled to the dust by the big guns of American battleships in World War Two. In its place was a university. The castle gate had been re-erected from the rubble, though. Above it was the sign that had been a part of Okinawa for four hundred years, a guidepost and a comment: Shurei No Kuni. The figures were translated by Mitsuko: “Nation of Courtesy.”

She carefully explained the warlord origins of the sign, how the Chinese dubbed them that while exacting tribute hundreds of years before. She told Hodges of the old double-winged castle that helped stave off destruction when the Japanese decided they wanted to rule Okinawa, too. Hodges marveled at the ingenuity of the old islanders who had decided to pay two warloads tribute rather than subject their people to a double onslaught by the two great powers. They had even constructed two separate-but-equal wings of the castle to receive their two masters simultaneously. Here You Are, Sir. Your Very Own Receiving Area. Don't Worry About That Other Warlord. Nothing To Get Upset About. Certainly Nothing To Fight About. Especially Here On Top Of Us.

Then she took him to the Shinto shrine at Nami-no-ue, on the bluffs overlooking Naha. She carefully explained, painfully searching for right words and gestures, how mothers and wives had come to pray each day during the earlier wars, beginning with the Sino-Japanese War. It had been the first Japanese adventure Okinawans were called to fight in. They're new at this, mused Hodges. Less than a hundred years.

She glanced to him shyly, her eyes on his war-scarred neck. They prayed, she noted with hesitation, that sons and husbands would be found unfit for military service.

No samurai on Okinawa.

Hodges watched her through all those hours and sensed that, in her delicate, indirect way, she was telling him something. But the power of his ghosts, all the pride that made him Hodges, would not let him listen.

HE spent the next day in a large, dim warehouse, putting his initials on dead seabags.

The seabags came from all the reaches of Vietnam's I Corps, to be collected in the warehouse and shipped home in groups. Each one represented a casualty who could not carry his own seabag away from the war, and who had preceded the seabag either in a coffin or on a medevac flight filled with the gravely wounded.

Seabag duty was reserved for officers awaiting flights into Vietnam. Sort of a—reacclimatization process, noted Hodges drily as he strode across the camp toward the warehouse where he would stand duty.

IT was a boring day. Hodges sat at a field desk in the front of the warehouse, talking away the hours with supply clerks and fantasizing about that evening, when Mitsuko would get off work. Occasionally a clerk would drive up in a motorized forklift and unload one or two seabags, presenting a casualty ticket and the seabag's tag for Hodges to verify. After Hodges signed the verification, the bags were placed on shelves in the rear of the warehouse.

The huge racks of seabags behind him began to bother him as the day progressed. The forklift worked unhurriedly, yet brought him a steady stream of dead bags to join the high, long rows that loomed in the darkness to his rear.

He found himself checking the names carefully as he certified the bags, at the same time hoping that he would not have to go through the agony of certifying the bag of one of his men, or an Officer classmate from Basic School. The dead bags became dead people. The forklift was bringing him coffins. Each bag was the same on the outside, like a coffin. And each held its own collection of belongings, sizes that fit only the man who had packed the bag, individualized—like the tragic innards of a coffin. The bags pulsed with personality, and he became overwhelmed by the long, dark rows of dead men.

Dead men. Yes, that was it. He walked the rows as if he were strolling through a cemetery. The bags reached the ceiling, shelved on racks, blocking the overhead lights and making mournful shadows on the floor. Occasionally he stopped, reading the tags, noting the man's rank and unit, as if reading the inscription on a gravestone.