The Congress of Rough Riders

by John Boyne

  ‘She said she wouldn’t be back for a couple of hours,’ said Seth Reid in a clear voice, looking up and addressing the bartender for the first time. His face broke into a smile, revealing dirty brown teeth that looked as if they would not continue to be part of the man’s mouth for much longer. ‘And we have to leave within one hour,’ he added.

  Bill exhaled and nodded, biting his lip as he began to understand.

  Adam and I stayed in Tokyo for about two weeks before deciding to travel south-westwards towards Osaka, Kyoto and ultimately Hiroshima. We learned at an early stage that we were never going to master the language and took instead to committing to memory a series of simple phrases which could help us travel, eat and sleep with the minimum amount of fuss. After a time, some of the more common symbols and lettering became familiar to us and the initial feeling we had when we had landed at Narita Airport – as if we had suddenly been deprived of several of our senses – melted away. The people were friendly and helpful to foreigners, which was a relief, and we stretched our money so that we would be able to survive for as long a period as possible.

  Before leaving Tokyo, we visited the gardens of the Imperial Palace, where it became something of a relief to meet some fellow Westerners with whom we could converse. Adam and I got along pretty well but inevitably, the constraints of being solely in each other’s company and conversation twenty-four hours a day were beginning to show. There were a few tense moments but for the most part we tried to stay civil to each other. Still, we knew we could do with some new people to talk to. The gardens seemed to be filled with more Westerners than Japanese and we mingled with them as we began to explore. The palace itself was off-limits to visitors but we spent a couple of hours wandering around the plaza at Uchibori-Dori where the lawns and trees were cut with almost surgeon-like precision. It was forbidden to walk on the bridges which connected the plaza to the outer limits of the palace walls and so we stepped casually on to them, expecting at any moment a sho-gun to come running towards us, samurai sword swinging through the air, ready to decapitate us, but as nothing happened, and there was no further access granted from there, we drifted back in the direction we had come.

  Not far from the plaza was an open-air bar and as it was a warm day, we sat outside and ordered a couple of draught beers which were brought out to us at our table, foaming over the sides of the jokki dai in which they were served. Our plan was to begin the journey towards Osaka the following morning and we were discussing it when a couple of around our age asked us whether they could join our table.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, taking my bag from the seat beside me; we were seated at a wicker table of four seats and as Adam and I were facing each other, they were able to take the seats beside us. In the garden itself there were several other empty tables so I assumed that they wanted to talk. ‘How’s it going?’ I asked them casually, for I could tell by the girl’s accent when she had spoken a moment before that they were Americans. ‘Hot enough for you?’

  ‘Too hot,’ she replied, dazzling me with her smile while her boyfriend combed his blond hair away from his face with his fingers, using the other hand to signal to the waiter that they would both have what we were having, a quick snap of the fingers, pointing back and forth from Adam’s drink to mine, and then two fingers raised to indicate that he wanted one for both him and the girl. Rude but effective.

  ‘You’re obviously as good on the Japanese language as we are,’ I said, grinning at him and he laughed.

  ‘We’ve been here two and a half months,’ he replied, ‘and I still can’t figure out a single word. Jenny’s better, aren’t you?’

  She shrugged but didn’t disagree. ‘I took a course before I left,’ she said quietly. ‘I tried to get him to come too but he wouldn’t.’

  ‘Where are you from?’ asked Adam, sitting back slightly in his seat as the waiter brought their drinks and took the money.

  ‘Michigan,’ said the boy. ‘I’m Mike Naylor by the way. This is Jenny.’ We introduced ourselves and shook hands and an awkward silence hit us for a moment as we decided which way the conversation should turn from here. ‘So where you guys from?’ he asked eventually.

  ‘London,’ said Adam. ‘We haven’t been here long ourselves. A couple of weeks, that’s all.’

  ‘Just tourists?’

  ‘Sort of. We’re tourists now but we’re going to travel on and we may need to stop somewhere and find some work if we start to run out of money. How about you? Two and a half months is a long time to spend here.’

  ‘Oh we haven’t been in Tokyo that long,’ said Mike, taking a long drink from his beer and savouring it for a moment. His chin was covered in stubble, and he scratched at it irritably; he looked like all he really wanted was a shave and a shower. ‘We only got here last week but we took a bit of a break and just relaxed for a while. We’re doing the whole tourist thing this week. Hence the Imperial Palace.’ He gestured towards the imposing structure hidden behind the walls in the distance. ‘We want to get to the Tokyo Museum in Ueno yet and … where else?’

  ‘Shinjuku,’ said Jenny.

  ‘Oh yeah, that’s right, Shinjuku. The red-light district. Got to see that. They say it gives Amsterdam a run for its money, you know? It was a bit of a last-minute decision coming here at all to be honest so we have to see what we can. My parents gave us some money as a wedding present and we decided to blow it all on a three-month honeymoon.’

  ‘I think they wanted us to spend it on furniture or something,’ said Jenny with a sneer. ‘Like that was going to happen.’

  ‘You’re on your honeymoon?’ I asked, smiling at them in surprise. They nodded. ‘How old are you?’

  ‘Twenty,’ they said in unison.

  ‘Twenty,’ repeated Mike on his own. ‘It’s young, I know, but …’ He waved a hand in the air as if the whole thing was neither here nor there.

  ‘I don’t know anyone that age who’s married,’ said Adam, staring at them as if they were a pair of freaks. ‘It’s a good way to spend your honeymoon though.’

  ‘We figured it would be memorable,’ said Mike. ‘We came up with a good plan.’ They proceeded to tell us how they had spent the first two months of their married life in the southern province of Shikoku, where they had taken part in Japan’s most famous pilgrimage, dedicated to the Buddhist monk Kobo Daishi. It was a thousand-kilometre trail and took in eighty-eight temples along the way.

  ‘You walked a thousand kilometres?’ I asked, amazed by the idea, and resisting the temptation to look down at their feet to see whether they were swathed in bandages.

  ‘We walked it all right,’ said Jenny, reaching over to grasp her young husband’s hand in solidarity. ‘From the first to the last. Some of the other pilgrims cheated, they—’

  ‘They didn’t cheat, Jenny, they just did it a different way,’ said Mike in a conciliatory tone, as if the Zen aura hadn’t quite left him yet. He was wearing a pendant around his neck and I wondered whether it was a symbol of the pilgrimage or something he had brought with him from home.

  ‘OK, it’s not cheating as such, but they didn’t do what we did.’

  ‘They were old, so many of them!’ he protested.

  ‘They still didn’t do it.’

  ‘They did it when they were younger. A lot of Buddhist Japanese undertake the Shikoki Pilgrimage,’ he explained, looking at Adam and me in turn. ‘But they wait until they’re retired to do it. You know, two months is a long time to be away from your home and your … your job or whatever,’ he said, in a tone that suggested he wasn’t quite sure what the word job actually meant and was in no hurry to find out. ‘Also, I guess a lot of young people here just aren’t as interested in these kinds of things. It was a strange time.’

  I shook my head and felt a great urge to take a long walk with him right at that moment and hear his stories. ‘What were they like?’ I asked. ‘The people, I mean. We haven’t really got to know anyone here. It’s hard when you can’t speak the language.’


  ‘That was the great thing about it,’ said Jenny. ‘We couldn’t speak Japanese, most of the other pilgrims couldn’t speak English, we were definitely the youngest by, like, about thirty-five years, but it was the best two months of my life. We really got to know these people. They became like family to us, every one. There’s hardly a province in Japan where we couldn’t go now and have a bed for as long as we wanted one. If one of the pilgrims themselves doesn’t live there, then they’ve got family who do.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ I said. ‘I thought I was doing something extreme packing up and coming to Japan in the first place, but that … what made you want to do it? Are you …?’ I wasn’t quite sure whether it would be rude to phrase it as such but figured it was a simple question and I may as well just ask. ‘Are you Buddhist, the two of you? Is that why you wanted to do it?’

  ‘No,’ said Mike laughing. ‘We’d barely even heard of Buddhists except in some dumb Keanu Reeves movie a couple of years back. We just wanted to come to Japan, somewhere different, and when we got here we got travelling immediately because we didn’t want to stay in the Lonely Planet Tokyo and ended up in Shikoku. We heard about the pilgrimage, it was just about to start, so we said what the hell. You should try it.’

  I laughed. I knew I probably would never try it but admired them for doing so at the same time. We ordered more drinks and as the sun went down crouched closer and closer to each other at the table, eager for more stories of each other’s lives.

  ‘Each one of the eighty-eight temples,’ Jenny told us, ‘represents one of the eighty-eight evils which the Shingon Buddhists believe beset everyone’s life. Visiting each one makes the pilgrim confront a devil and exorcise it. It’s the ultimate action of the Shingon Buddhist, like a Jew returning to Palestine and visiting the Wailing Wall. A Catholic receiving the Pope’s blessing in St Peter’s Square in Rome. To the believer these actions signify a marked point in the penitent man’s life, a point which is superior to all their other actions. Completing the pilgrimage brings one a step closer to Buddha himself. They say that many people die within a year of returning from the pilgrimage as they have nothing left to achieve in life.’

  ‘That could also have something to do with the fact that they’re all so damn old,’ pointed out Mike with a smile and we laughed. They were holding hands between their seats as they spoke and seemed almost unaware of their doing so. I looked at them and felt a tinge of envy; I was alone. I had Adam, of course, but effectively I was alone. There seemed slim chance of finding any romance in Japan due to my total lack of ability in the language department, and yet despite that, I already knew that I would stay in this country for some time, regardless of my travelling companion’s plans. I was starting to feel at ease here and I think a part of that was due to my sense of disorientation. Nobody knew me, I knew nobody, I could collect and discard friends – acquaintances just – on a nightly basis, just like we were doing here. We were having a wonderful evening but part of that was because we knew – Adam and I, Mike and Jenny – that we would not see each other again after that night. It was a relief, in a way, to be so casual about things; we could be anything we wanted to be. And still I envied them.

  ‘So where’s the next pilgrimage to then?’ asked Adam and they shrugged.

  ‘Nowhere for now,’ said Mike. ‘That was the big one for us. That’s what we’ll remember as our honeymoon. We’ll hang around Tokyo for a little bit more maybe, then we have to go home.’

  ‘Back to Michigan?’

  ‘Back to Michigan. College is calling us. Still, we’ll have a good story for the grandchildren.’ I smiled and nodded. ‘You’ve gone quiet, William,’ said Jenny after a moment. ‘Are you tired?’

  ‘No,’ I said, sighing and leaning back, smiling around the table as if I could just reach over and hug them all. ‘I was just thinking about London. I was thinking about my father,’ I added, nodding slowly. For some reason I felt a sting of tears behind my eyes. I was surprised and embarrassed and blinked quickly to prevent an onslaught.

  ‘What does he do?’ asked Mike and I told them that he was retired.

  ‘It’s just what you said about your pilgrimage being a good story for your grandchildren. I mean I think that’s a good thing, passing stories down from generation to generation. That’s what Isaac, that’s what my father, did for me.’

  ‘William’s father believes he’s a cowboy,’ said Adam facetiously and I shot him a look of disapproval.

  ‘He doesn’t believe he’s a cowboy,’ I said, a little irritated. I looked at the other two who were looking at me and waiting to see what I had to say; they had told me their stories, it was time to tell them mine and unlike Isaac, I couldn’t quite find the words. ‘My great-grandfather,’ I began, unsure whether I could even say it without making them laugh. I really didn’t want them to laugh; this far from home, having run away from everything I was tired of, I wanted them to take me seriously if I had the desire to tell them at all. ‘Isaac, that’s my father, well he claims that his grandfather was American. He fought in the civil war, was a scout and so on. The thing is he claims that his grandfather, my great-grandfather, was Bill Cody.’

  They stared at me blankly and nodded. ‘Bill Cody,’ said Jenny. ‘That’s—’

  ‘My name, yeah. Except I go by William.’

  ‘Who’s Bill Cody?’ asked Mike. I looked at him in surprise and forced a smile. I wasn’t sure if he was having me on. I looked back at Jenny who seemed equally unaware.

  ‘Bill Cody?’ I repeated. ‘Buffalo Bill Cody? You’ve heard of him, right?’

  They both frowned. ‘I think so,’ said Jenny. ‘Wasn’t he in that movie with Doris Day?’ I stared at her now as if she was mad.

  ‘No, no, he wasn’t an actor. Well actually he was an actor eventually, but no, he wasn’t in any movie with—’

  ‘I don’t mean in it,’ she said, clicking her fingers as she tried to bring back a memory. She looked at her husband for support. ‘What was it, Mike?’ she asked. ‘That movie with Doris Day in it?’

  ‘Was Rock Hudson in it?’ he asked.

  ‘No, it was that guy from Dallas. What’s his name. Howard Keel. What was that movie? It was a musical. Annie Get Your Gun!’ she cried then enthusiastically, pleased that she’d got it at last. ‘He was in that, wasn’t he? That guy Howard Keel played him!’

  Both Adam and Mike looked as if they didn’t have a clue what she was talking about, but I did and shook my head. ‘No,’ I said quietly. ‘That was Wild Bill Hickok. Howard Keel played Wild Bill Hickok.’

  ‘Not the same guy?’

  ‘Not the same guy,’ I agreed. I sat back and shook my head. ‘I can’t believe you don’t know who he is!’ I said, amazed. There was complete silence for a moment, until I asked in a quieter voice: ‘You really don’t know who he is?’

  ‘Kind of,’ admitted Mike, perhaps taking pity on me. ‘I mean I think it rings a bell. Somewhere. I’ll take your word for it though. You’re really related to that guy?’

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said, a little deflated; this was the first time I’d ever come across someone who had failed to be either impressed or scornful of the fact that I was Buffalo Bill’s great-grandson. ‘So they tell me.’

  ‘So you’re an American then?’

  ‘Well, like a sixteenth,’ I said. ‘Like my left hand or something.’ I surprised myself by actually feeling annoyed. In recent years I had been trying to dissociate myself from everything to do with Buffalo Bill Cody and had caused a serious rift to develop in my relationship with Isaac in order to do that. And now here were two people who seemed unimpressed by it. Maybe it didn’t matter so much. But then, wasn’t that what I’d been saying to Isaac for years?

  ‘The first night we were in Tokyo,’ said Jenny eventually, sensing my discomfort, ‘the night we got back from the pilgrimage, we had a drink in a bar and there were twenty guys there all dressed like Elvis Presley. The whole package. Big white collars. Sequins. Sideburns. The lot. Of course th
ey were Japanese, but other than that they were just a bunch of regular Elvises.’ I stared at her and raised an eyebrow as if to say So? ‘They all thought they were related to Elvis, you see,’ she said. ‘They claimed to be his sons, all conceived when he visited Japan. I mean they were nuts, you know?’

  I nodded slowly. ‘Right,’ I said, disliking the association she was making. ‘So tell me,’ I said after a pause. ‘Who was this Kobo Daishi guy then?’

  I don’t know how Mike’s and Jenny’s marriage turned out, but my great-grandfather and Louisa Frederici were married at the same youthful age and within a year he had hot-footed it out of the Golden Rule Hotel. He rode off with David Yountam and Seth Reid to Fort Fletcher where he came into contact for the first time with General George Custer, who was stationed there at the time, leading sorties into Indian territories as the settlements continued and the reservations began to be brokered. Custer took little regard of my great-grandfather at first but they began to travel more in each other’s company after some initial scouting expeditions together proved to the general that Bill was just as brave and adventurous as he.

  Bill wrote to Louisa from the fort and explained to her that he was not cut out for life as a hotelier. He missed the excitement of life on the prairies, he said, and the company of other men who were opening out the western frontiers and settling states, just as his own father had done. Deciding on cutlery for tableware, choosing between different lace patterns and organising servants to change the bed linen just wasn’t what he was meant to do with his life. He was intended, he claimed, for a higher purpose.

  Louisa, needless to say, was devastated. Now just twenty-one years old, she was left with a hotel to run on her own and a child on the way. Travelling alone, she came to see him at the fort and they had an emotional reunion but he was not for turning. He asked her to stay with him, offering her the life of an army wife, always on the move and in potential danger, but promising that one day soon they would build their own home on the prairies but she declined for now, perhaps distrusting his promises, and probably having every reason to do so. Instead she returned to Salt Creek Valley while he remained in Fort Fletcher. They had married in haste and would pay the price for a long time to come.