by Tad Crawford
25
The light on my miner’s hat shone like a third eye that let me see in the darkness of the caves and fissures within the volcano. I walked downward, sometimes hunching over and other times crawling on my hands and knees. At last the rocks tightened around me and I had to shed my backpack and clothes to slither forward on my gut. Now I wore only my miner’s hat, underwear, socks, and boots.
“Have you come to visit me?” A woman’s voice reverberated off the stony walls.
I moved my head back and forth, but the beam of light only penetrated twenty or thirty feet, and I couldn’t see her.
“Where are you?” I called out.
“Here!” Her voice echoed from every direction.
“Let me see you.”
She laughed, a tinkling vibration that grew until I feared the walls around me might shatter.
“What have you lost?”
“Why?” I asked. “Why do you say that?”
“What have you come for?” she asked again. “The diamonds in the blue veins? Or perhaps to see someone? To take someone with you, back the long way you have come?” Again the laughter rose uncontrollably.
“Who are you?” I asked.
A woman—I’ll call her that—stepped forward into the beam of my light. She wore nothing, and her flesh was not flesh. She might have been shaped from an enormous ruby, and she shone with a red glow unlike any I had seen. She started to move her hips, and her arms undulated as her bright eyes fixed on me. Slowly, deliberately, she danced in the illumination of her own fantastic light. She could not be a woman and yet she had a woman’s shape. Her breasts were ample, her waist tapered above the fullness of her thighs and buttocks. Her little feet pressed ever so precisely to the stony floor. I had seen belly dancers move their bodies with such art and vigor that a divine vibration seemed to enter them. But this woman was that vibration. She moved because the vibration moved. She danced the dance of the vibration. And I imagined I heard—it could not have been real—an indescribable music, beautiful and penetrating. Somehow I knew that she did not dance to the music; her movements created the music. For all its beauty, it lived only for the moments of her moving.
She stopped, her bright eyes glowing and piercing into every recess within me. She knew what I knew, even what I had forgotten. I couldn’t think, much less speak.
“My name is Numun,” she said in a quiet voice.
“Why?” I barely croaked the syllable, and had no idea what question I wanted to ask her. Why did she have a body at once like a woman and a radiant gem? Why did she confront me? Why was she here, at this great depth?
“Why are you here?” Her inflection made it clear that she asked this for me and not for herself. “Weren’t you warned not to come?”
I shook my head. I had no recollection of a warning.
She raised her right hand with her palm cupped and her fingers spread. I could tell this had a meaning, but I had no idea what it was.
“Go back.”
I wanted to do as she told me. The light cycled upward in her body and emerged from the top of her skull like a radiant crown. I had no reason not to do what she ordered. Yet I stood there, unable to go back.
“I can’t,” I finally answered.
She smiled, but I didn’t find her expression pleasant.
“Whom have you come for?” she asked.
“I don’t know.”
“Think.”
I tried, but her shimmering closeness unnerved me.
“You have a memory of someone.”
I struggled to focus, but no image came to mind.
I could feel the certainty that had brought me this far, the certainty that I had still farther to go. I tried to remember the reason, but the effort dizzied me.
“Go back,” she said again.
She waited for my response.
“What is green in your world,” she went on when I didn’t speak, “is golden here. Nothing will be as you imagine it or as you want it to be. Go back.”
I gave a small shake of my head.
Her face tilted to the side as if to see me from a different perspective.
“Then take this.”
She flipped a small coin that tumbled end over end until I caught it …
26
“Hey, kid, did you get a good night’s sleep?”
I opened my eyes to see the prisoner squatting next to me. Hearing his accent, I knew where his captor had learned English. What he actually and very slowly said sounded much more like, “Hey, kee-uhd, did yew git a good naht’s sleep?”
I sat up, looking around me. I ached but at least I could move.
“I hear you’re from America,” he said, pronouncing it “Amur-cah.”
“Yes.”
“Bet you’re hungry. We got you some food here and water.” He pointed to another plastic bottle and a few morsels of food on a flat stone.
I drank first, then bent forward to eat.
“What is this?” I finally asked.
“Clams, slugs, a couple of big insects, a little bit of fish, and a little bit of snake. We preserve everything in brine.”
That explained the salty taste, but I ate without caring.
“Where are you from?” he asked. “What state?”
The prisoner was a large man with wide hips and white hair that cascaded from his head and face and curled from his chest to his genitals. His ears looked like saucers as they poked out from the white hair that fell to his shoulders. His brown eyes shone warmly over the long bridge of his nose. Gentleness showed in his speech and even the way he came near without crowding me.
“New York.”
He smiled with pleasure.
“I never met anyone from New York before. That’s what I’m going to call you, New York. And you call me Tex.”
He offered me his large hand. My smaller one clasped it for a shake.
“This is your camp?” I asked.
Large boulders formed a basin around the patch of sand where I had slept.
“Yep, the cave is dry. That’s good. From here there’s nothing but fields of stone going all the way to the top. Some days I’ve seen enough smoke to wonder if it’s going to blow again right then and there.”
I looked and saw a spiral of smoke rising from the volcano’s crater.
“You have fire?”
He shook his head. “Tsukino-san is afraid of fire. He doesn’t want to give our position away.”
“Tsukino-san?”
“Yes, that’s his name.”
“He claims the war has moved away from here. So why is he afraid?”
Tex shrugged.
“Damned if I know.”
“Where is he?” I asked.
“He’s goes out and pokes around.”
“You know the war is over,” I said.
“No, I didn’t know that,” he said with a frown. “Who won?”
“We did,” I answered. “And it ended a long time ago, in 1945.”
“You don’t say.” He shook his head in amazement.
“So you’re not a prisoner anymore.”
“He told you that, did he?”
“Yes.”
Tex considered this.
“Really we’re both prisoners of this island. That’s the truth. It looks like you are too.”
I nodded.
“You know, New York, happy as I am to see you, I feel sorry for you too. The boys and I used to talk about islands that were like paradise. Beautiful women, fruit hanging ready to eat from the branches, no mess halls or rations from a can. What if I had ended up on one of those islands? But you, me, and Tsukino-san pulled the short straws. That’s how it goes.”
“How’d you get here?”
“Plane crash.”
“What kind of plane?”
“I was tail gunner in a B-24. They called them flying coffins. Those planes only had one exit—out the rear. The catwalk to get there was so narrow you could hardly move with your parachute on. The fuel tank
s like as not would go up in flames if the plane got hit. One day it happened. We were out in formation. Zeros came overhead. Machine gun rounds ripped through our right wing. Sure enough, the fuel tanks caught fire. We tried to fight it, but finally the captain said jump. I was the first one out. As I came down, I could see black smoke pouring off the wing. The plane kept going closer and closer to the ocean. I didn’t see anyone else parachute, but I didn’t see it crash either. To this day, I keep hoping those boys are okay.”
“How did you and Tsukino-san meet up?”
“The winds blew me into the rocks. Split my head open and knocked me out. When I woke up, I couldn’t move. The parachute was tangled. The waves were like a thousand hands trying to pull me out to sea. I didn’t know it, but the tide was rising. By all rights I was a dead man. Then Tsukino-san shows up. He opened my harness and dragged me out of the water. In those days he was one strong fellow. Once he got me far enough up the beach, he went back for my parachute.”
“He rescued me too,” I said.
“Then he started spouting off in Japanese. I didn’t know what he was talking about. Took a long time for him to learn English and for me to learn some Japanese. We practiced at it, like we were at some school for languages. Didn’t have a lot else to do. He taught me to play go. We spent a lot of time doing that. Anyway, eventually we could communicate well enough for me to understand that I was his prisoner. He waved his knife around and scared the hell out of me to prove the point. I’d heard a lot about what the Japanese did to Americans. Cutting limbs off prisoners to eat, while keeping them alive so they’d still have fresh meat.”
What I knew came from history books. I had read of atrocities but nothing like this.
“I don’t believe that,” I said. “It’s too inhuman. You’re just repeating rumors.”
“You can call them rumors if you want to. But when Tsukino-san raised his knife, I believed everything I ever heard.”
“You’re still here, so he didn’t use the knife.”
“Actually, he took great care of me. Cleaned and dressed my head wound, fed me as best he could.”
At that moment Tsukino-san appeared on the rim of the rock basin. He slipped down through the crevices between the boulders with the ease of a younger man.
“Are you ready to go?” he asked me.
“Go where?”
“I have something to show you.”
I looked at Tex, who nodded.
“Sure,” I said.
“Come this way.”
Tsukino-san started back up.
I slowly stood and brushed the sand off my skin.
Tex rose too. He hunched a bit but still towered over me by a head.
I followed Tsukino-san but stopped when I saw that Tex wasn’t coming after us. He hunched forward even more, his right hand on the left side of his rib cage.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“Sometimes I get this sharp pain here, like a rope drawing tight around my chest.” He patted where his hand rested on his ribs. “It comes and goes. You go with him.”
I didn’t see what I could do to help, so I turned and hurried as best I could to catch up with Tsukino-san. The sun floated free of the ocean. We walked on a long barrier where the lava tumbled into the ocean and formed a wall of rock. Below us, giant waves leapt against this wall, fell back, formed again, and rushed with violent velocity against the barrier. My soles burned on the rock and occasional patches of sand. At last we came to a peculiar formation, an indentation like a slide going down the rock wall and into the water.
Tsukino-san gestured for me to turn inland. I picked my way up the rock-strewn slope, following him to where he disappeared behind a large rock. There I found him looking down at a crudely built raft. It had no rudder, no sail, no place to escape the sun, no storage bin for supplies to survive an ocean journey. It looked like Tsukino-san and Tex had spent years collecting scrap from the beaches to make this craft of broken spars, planks, and logs. Lengths of rope and vine lashed the pieces into a whole about ten feet square.
“We are almost ready to go.”
I didn’t know what to say. To ride this raft into the waves promised a slow, certain death. It would bob like a cork, directionless, lost in the vastness of the ocean. No shipping lanes came near this island. If the raft managed to stay intact in the shark-infested waters, the currents might carry it almost anywhere.
“You want my help?”
“Yes. We’ve worked on this for many years. If we are to have any hope of success, we must launch the raft and begin our journey home.”
I had an impulse to smile at the impossibility of what he proposed.
“How can I help?”
“Do you see what might improve it? You’re young. You have the strength and energy to complete what we began. You can escape with us.”
I compared the prospect of remaining on the island, living a life that was no life at all, with that of certain death on the ocean. It only took me a moment to decide.
“Fine,” I answered, “let me think about what I can do.”
That evening, as the sun began to set, Tsukino-san made a foray into the jungle on the other side of the island. Tex waved for me to come with him into the cave. He was still holding his ribs and moaning a bit with pain.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“My heart,” he answered. “It hurts.”
“Take it easy,” I said. “Maybe you should sit.”
The cave was nothing more than a shaft of a dozen feet that widened to an oval at its end. In the fading light, I could see sand and leaves spread on the floor. On a wide ledge, like an altar, was a knife with a white handle and a straight blade, and two piles of small round stones. One pile was white and the other dark.
Panting, Tex squatted until his haunches touched the leaves and sand. He patted around him.
“Is this everything you have?” I asked.
“No, we have more. There are other caves. Tsukino-san likes to keep things neat. This is where we sleep.”
“What are the stones for?”
“To play go. We make lines in the sand for a board.”
“And the knife?”
“It’s Tsukino-san’s. Handed down in his family for generations. It has a name.”
“Really?”
“Mayonaka.”
I reached for the knife, the white handle cool in my palm. The blade looked sharp, and I let my thumb rest lightly on it.
“If you have the knife, why don’t you escape?” I asked.
“I’m not healthy. And where would I go?”
“You could take the knife,” I said, lifting it from the altar, “and make him your prisoner.”
Tex looked up at me before replying.
“Would that be any better?” he asked.
“Of course,” I answered. “Don’t you think so?”
Tex slowly shook his head. “I don’t see why it would be better. If he was crooked like a snake with cramps, well then I could understand. But he’s as good an old boy as I am. If one of us has to be the prisoner, it may as well be me.”
I knelt to level my eyes with his, but I saw no sign of doubt or wavering.
“How long have you worked on the raft?” I asked.
“We started almost as soon as I came here.”
“It couldn’t have taken that long to build. Why didn’t you put it in the water a long time ago?”
“It was hard to finish.”
“Why? Were you waiting for better materials?”
“No, not really.” He rested his back against the wall of the cave.
“What, then?”
Tex reached toward me with his large hand. Touching his finger to the blade of the knife, he said, “Mayonaka means ‘doom at midnight.’”
“It’s a beautiful name, but not a pleasant meaning.”
Tex took the knife from me and rested the handle in his palm.
“No, the meaning is beautiful too.”
“Why?”
“Tsukino-san’s ancestors were samurai who lived by a code of honor. If a samurai’s lord ordered him to commit ritual suicide, seppuku, the samurai had to obey without a backward glance or regret. Only by doing so could he keep his honor. A blade like Mayonaka would be used to cut across the stomach. Then another person would use a larger sword to cut off the head.”
“I don’t see any beauty in that.”
Tex raised a hand to quiet me.
“Mayonaka is a special knife. The samurai who carried it believed in the midnight light. In that sacred light, the samurai would have a vision of how precious life is. Whenever there was a reason to commit seppuku, the samurai, instead of blindly following the code of honor, would climb to a mountaintop at midnight to see the sacred light with its power to cure. From that high place, he would have a vision of what his life might be. It gave him the courage to value life. He would find hope. Doom would be the surrender of that hope.”
“Surely,” I said, “many of them must have committed seppuku anyway, even after waiting until midnight on a mountaintop.”
“If a samurai found hope in life and its possibilities, at least he made a choice.”
I didn’t know what to say about such a choice and returned to where I’d been before this digression.
“So you don’t care about being his prisoner?”
“I wouldn’t say that,” Tex answered patiently, “but taking him as my prisoner wouldn’t make our lives any better.”
“If we’re lucky,” I said, wanting to believe my words, “we’ll be rescued once we launch that raft. Then it won’t matter whether Tsukino-san thinks you’re his prisoner. We can get you to a hospital. There are amazing operations now for the heart, tubes that open inside your blood vessels to keep the blood flowing and even bypass operations to give the heart new strength.”
“You think the raft has a chance?” he asked.
“Why not? I’ll make some improvements so it’s more seaworthy. Then we’ll be ready to go.”
He nodded, a deliberate up and down, as if confirming some inner conclusion.
“That will be fine. You should make the improvements as soon as you can.”