Steel Breeze (18 page)

Chapter 18

He was James
Hashimoto on the flight to Ohio, but thankfully no one called him by that name.
James was the name on the driver’s license he carried, the name his mother had
given him, but he kept it in his wallet with his currency, where it belonged. He
despised his legal name almost as much as he despised the custom the younger
generation had of calling their elders by first names. He had endured this at
banks and stores from time to time when presenting a card. Apparently when
formal dress had vanished from the workplace, so too had proper manners. But
the workplace was far behind him now. What a long and humiliating game that had
been—pretending to share the same ambitions as his fellows, all the while
saving every dollar he could for the mission. Now he was a retiree who liked to
travel. He was Mr. Hashimoto at the car rental counter and at the Pakmail
location where he picked up the long, narrow box he had shipped to himself a
week ago. But by the time he was driving south on U.S. 23, he was Sensei again,
rolling down the windows and breathing in dusty, baked air that reminded him,
almost, of Manzanar.

He
had never again truly known dust like the dust of Manzanar. The closest thing
was to open a bag of flour and breathe it in. The film that would cover your
nose and mouth would resemble the texture of the air in that forsaken place,
but the smell would be too pleasant. Manzanar dust smelled of desolation and
despair, of vegetation ground to the finest granules, of human will caught like
a piece of gristle in the teeth of the jagged Sierras, gnashed and spat out
onto the cracked desert floor, then burned by the Mohave sun to an ash so fine
it would slip through any sieve.

Sensei
wanted this Ohio dust to remind him of that, but it failed.

He
glanced at the package on the passenger seat beside him. The trail he was
leaving would soon be picked up. After all the years of waiting and training,
of reclaiming what his father had abandoned when the man boarded the boat that
would carry his seed to Hawaii and then on to California in search of a new identity,
a new opportunity, after a childhood spent struggling to survive in the
spectacular ruins of that promise and an adulthood spent pretending to have
embraced it, he had finally opened his samurai eyes and fixed them on his targets.
In the course of only five years, he had found them all.

Had
it already been five years since he had taken his first head? Action had flowed
so quickly from research. Research had followed so easily from predatory
instinct. The first had been a farmer in Arizona, heir to an estate seized by
white vultures when the Japanese farmers were rounded up and bussed to the
internment camps. Strawberry farmers like his father. That first kill had
initiated him into the company of Spirit Warriors long dead, and for a brief
moment it had quenched the thirst of the sword he had been sharpening and
polishing in his secret heart since his boyhood in the dust of the Owens
Valley.

The
Arizona authorities were confused and unfocused in the wake of that first kill.
When he took the second head, time, distance, and auspicious coincidences had
shielded him from any connection to Arizona; and a blind drunk had been
convicted of the murder of Sandy Carmichael. But for the third target on his
kill list, Sensei succumbed to an artistic impulse and revisited Manzanar,
placing the severed head in the proper context to tie a life’s work together
like the knot on a
hakama.

Only
the span of the continent had kept the authorities from connecting the crimes
thus far, but now, with his apprentice’s initiation by the execution of Phil
Parsons, he could feel that uncertainty slipping into a new channel. The names
he had tracked down already would have to be enough. Time was running out. When
he drew steel today he would slay all of them, down to the very last soul in
the Tibbets bloodline before he resheathed. After this he would no longer be
able to travel as James Hashimoto. The country would be swarming with agents
who carried his picture. Which was precisely why he had always known he would
need an acolyte. If things went awry he could rest in the knowledge that he had
trained the boy the best he could. While the master was killing the last
Tibbets, the apprentice would be preparing the last Parsons. The Lamprey line
had dwindled down to only one, and that one had been left gazing with crow-eaten
eyes across the wastes of Manzanar.

Manzanar.
He had seen pictures of the surface of Mars that were the closest thing to that
barren wasteland. Returning after all these years, climbing the guard tower at
dawn with Lamprey’s head in a sack, and surveying the landscape from that high
vantage had brought the memories flooding back. The terrain hadn’t changed. Only
the buildings were gone. He remembered the red squall that smeared the sun
across the sky when the wind picked up, and the sound of sand pattering against
the walls of the tarpapered pine shacks while the dust whistled through the
knotholes in the floorboards like a roomful of boiling teakettles.

As
a boy he had seen the neighbors using discarded tin can lids to cover those
holes and to keep the dust out. Collecting the lids and nailing them to the
floor, cutting his fingers on the ragged edges and bruising his nails with the
hammer…it was one of his earliest memories—the first time he had filled his father’s
shoes and cared for his pregnant mother.

He
didn’t remember his father at all or the night when the FBI had taken him. Mama
told him that he tried to kick one of the agents and she had to carry him off
to bed screaming. Mama had been three months pregnant when Papa went to be
interrogated at Fort Lincoln. They never saw him again.

He
still wondered if the baby would have been a boy or a girl. No one told him
which it was that died with his mother in the camp hospital that sweltering
summer day. August 6, 1942. The day he became an orphan. He could still see
Sister Mary Bernadette when he closed his eyes and thought of that time, could
picture her face more clearly than his mother’s. His most vivid memory of the
Sister was of her sitting beside a grimy window mending a rip in his coat after
a fistfight he’d had with another boy, her nimble brown fingers working the
precious needle through the wool deftly and lovingly, devoid of the haste or
frustration he imagined she should have felt at having to do it for the third
time for this boy who couldn’t hold his temper.

It
seemed to him that there was a scarlet thread running through the fabric of
life, one that joined events across the years, piercing human hearts and
plunging underground, only to reemerge without warning, a thread connecting
lives and sometimes dates. When three years later his life in the camp came
abruptly to an end, he would be shocked by the date: August 6
^th
again. The day he lost whatever distant family remained to him. The day he was cast
alone into the world like a stone into a pond, and no one could have imagined
the ripples he would make. On August 6
^th
the dream he harbored in
secret of one day finding his grandparents, aunts, and uncles when the war was
over, the dream of crossing the ocean as a stowaway on a steamer, was blown to
dust in a flash, washed away by black rain, when Hiroshima burned.

The
echoes of that explosion were still rebounding.

Now,
after all these years, he was going to meet the last remaining descendants of
the pilot who delivered the bomb. Paul Tibbets died in 2007, and the obituary
had led Sensei to Ohio. There was a camp here. Not a concentration camp, like
the one he had been raised in, but a cabin on a lake where the Tibbets family
was now gathering with their hamburgers and hot dogs, their soda and beer,
their swimsuits and cameras, for a family reunion.

Sensei,
the uninvited guest, was bringing the cutlery.

He
followed the map he had purchased at a gas station. The road carried him
through small towns with white clapboard churches and farm-equipment dealers. He
passed corn and potato fields, and was reminded again of his time in the camp. At
night the searchlights roved the grid of pine barracks from the towers where
the guards kept watch with their machine guns, but in the daytime they had been
allowed outside the wire to work the fields. There was nowhere to run to. Cruel
mountain ranges stood sentinel on both sides of the valley.

Toiling
in the cornfield, he had befriended Mr. Kanemori, an
Issei
, who regaled
him with tales of old Japan. In time, young Hashimoto learned that Kanemori-san
had a family somewhere, a daughter and grandchildren in some other camp. He
didn’t know which; he only knew that they were not at Manzanar. The government
had sent him to the wrong camp after interrogating him for months in North
Dakota. A fisherman, they had accused him of running barrels of oil to Japanese
submarines off the coast of San Francisco.

Young
Hashimoto asked the old man if he had been at Fort Lincoln, and when Kanemori
answered yes, the boy almost couldn’t speak. He wanted to ask if the old man
had seen his father there, but he couldn’t even describe his father. All he had
was a name. Kanemori didn’t recognize it, but the simple fact that he had been
in the same place where Papa disappeared was enough, and after that, the orphan
boy went to work beside the old man every day the sisters gave him leave.

Mr.
Kanemori pointed out Mt. Whitney and told him that it looked like Fujiyama. Close
enough to do the job. “The sight of such an immovable mountain provides
spiritual sustenance for Japanese blood. These sandstorms cannot touch it. You
should meditate on this and try to be the same. Find the rock in your own heart
that cannot be moved, whatever storms may come.”

Kanemori
told him stories of the samurai, and carved wooden
bokkens
to teach him
his first
katas
. Kanemori taught him to have
yamato damashi
, to
be a Spirit Warrior. And in whispered tones, told him to disregard the lessons
of the Sisters and Father Steinback. Kanemori told him about the night in
December of the first year when the mess hall bells rang all night and the
internees rioted until a guard named Lamprey fired his Tommy gun into the
crowd. Kanemori renewed his allegiance to the Emperor in his heart when those
shots were fired. If he lived to see the day when they were set free, he was
going back to Japan.

Kanemori
didn’t make it, but when years later in the 1960s, Hashimoto finally traveled
to their ancestral home, he visited the village the old man was from, on his
way to Hiroshima. There was a time in his thirties and forties when he had
considered remaining there for the rest of his life. By then he was an
accomplished martial artist, had reclaimed the culture that his
Nissei
parents had abandoned, and could have opened his own school.

But
that had never been the summit of the mountain in his heart. And he knew that
to fulfill his destiny, to thread the needle through the fabric of his life in
a way that made an enduring knot, he would have to return to America and assume
the costumes and customs of the land of his birth.

When
he returned to California he brought his only true companion with him. He had
not found a wife in Japan as he had hoped he might, but he had found a soul
mate: the sword that now rested in the cardboard shipping box beside him. A
flawless beauty, her iron furnishings were engraved with reed stalks that
reminded him of the fields of Manzanar, and the blade was forged from
twenty-seven inches of steel harvested from the melted girders of the Aioi
Bridge at ground zero in Hiroshima, melted first by the bomb, and again by a
master smith, hammered into an object of unsurpassed lethal artistry. She
whispered to him when at rest, and sang to him when drawn. That song of blood
and wind was a tune sweeter than any wife could ever utter. Handing the box
over to the idiot clerk had been heart wrenching, almost impossible. But now,
with his weapon by his side again, he could breathe deeper. Soon he would hear
the song.

In
the early days Sensei had gathered information at libraries, combing through
newspapers and microfiche for obituaries and articles, combing through history
books, and military journals, academy yearbooks and phonebooks. He was not
computer savvy—Bell was better at that—but Facebook had been a revelation. It
was astonishing how little some people cared for their privacy, thrilling how
easy it had been to follow the thread of the family reunion, to find the dates
and the place. He didn't have a GPS in the car, had even pulled into a rest
stop and searched the engine compartment, trunk, and wheel wells for those
tracking devices that some car rental companies now used. Nor did he carry a
cell phone that could be triangulated once the authorities found the carnage. But
before leaving home he had researched the lake at the library. He knew the lay
of the land.

The
last road was a long, winding stretch of rutted dirt, wet with mud from recent
rain, little more than a trail. The car jounced and swayed, its shallow chassis
scraping against the ground, making sharp screeches like birdcalls. Low-hanging
branches tapped a tattoo on the windows. The family seldom came here anymore,
and no one had been up in advance of the reunion to trim the trees. Clouds of
midges swarmed in front of the windshield. As the road descended to the lake,
it resembled a tunnel of tree limbs, then swatches of color appeared—the bright
metallic paint of SUVs, the sparkling Morse code of sunlight reflecting off
dark water.