Fields of Fire

by James Webb

  He sat in her area at dinner. He said almost nothing, looking dumbly at her with an empty face. Tomorrow. Bullshit. As he rose to leave he touched her arm and stopped her in one of her journeys to another table.

  “I'll wait for you outside tonight.” She said no again and walked away.

  HE sat in the dark on the fence railing, whipped by the dry, insistent breeze, thinking of the other times he had waited for her, and of the intervening months. He no longer understood himself completely and the very fence on which he sat was where he had begun to lose his comprehension.

  As he dragged on his tenth cigarette she became a gliding shadow in the dark. He hopped down from the railing and stood in front of her. “Mitsuko.”

  She stopped abruptly, staring into him. He was unable to tell whether she was angry or merely upset. He stepped toward her and she lowered her head. “No-o-o! Boyfriend come now. Pick me up in front. You go!”

  Tomorrow. No time. “Tell him to go.” He sensed the wrong in his demand as soon as he issued it. It asked too much in the name of uncertain memories.

  Remarkably, she compromised. “Come my house later. Ten-thirty. O.K.?”

  He took her shoulders and kissed her full on the mouth. She kissed him back, charging him, then walked quickly away. He returned to the bar and had another bourbon and then swore it off for the night, feeling he had abandoned his only friend for her. After that he took a long, sobering walk through the camp and into the village. It was dangerous to walk alone. The camp and Kin village had spawned their own myriad of battlegrounds, shadows and bushes where violent men would gut you for the dollars in your wallet. Americans behind the gutting knives. But still he walked, quickly, impervious.

  IT was time. He bounded down the lighted street to her apartment, knowing the way by heart, retracing less-burdened footsteps of his former self. He knocked quietly on the door and she answered it, filling the door with a fresh innocent radiance. He stepped inside and closed the door and she looked achingly at him and asked him what he wanted but she knew what he wanted because she craved it, too. He crushed her to him and felt her breathe more quickly and then there was no need to crush her because she was holding him so tightly that he could feel her urgent pressing from knee to shoulders.

  The futon was unfolded but it was too far away, a whole room away, and he had no time to walk it. No time. He pulled her to the kitchen floor and somehow her happy-coat was gone and he reveled in the silky tightness of her skin again, having dreamed of it so many thousand times that he had to remind himself that this was real. She talked to him in low moans and he said his only Japanese words over and over, Ichi Ban, Ichi Ban, and he was inside her, she was hot mercury for him. He grasped for every part of her, wanting to absorb it all, and then exploded, sobbing from spent emotion.

  And then was still. They held each other tightly on the kitchen floor, the light still on, the wonderful misery of memory now a melancholy joy of rediscovery. But Hodges was already thinking of when he would leave her again, and he embraced her more tightly, a murmur deep inside him saying that he would not lose her if he somehow held her close enough.

  She smiled shyly and left him for a moment and when she returned he grabbed her and wrestled her to the futon. They laughed, still wrestling, then abruptly she held him very tight, her face into his chest. Billows of raven hair were a blanket on his middle parts.

  Then they began talking, using gestures and half-words to convey experiences and thoughts. He watched her give so much of herself merely to be understood, and was overcome by the innocent beauty of her effort. She talked to him with small words, and with her hands, and with her eyes, telling him how much she had missed him, her voice almost in awe that he was now in front of her. He grabbed her to him, grinning. Words, he decided, are so empty. This is what you call communication.

  He tried to tell her about Vietnam. She was too used to Marines to fully appreciate it. She saw the combat-innocent going in, and the survivors going out. She thought it was terrible that he had been hurt, and stroked his ropelike knots of scars as he spoke, gently massaging each one, trying to rub the hurt away. But she could not appreciate all of it. He stopped talking about it. There was no way she would ever even comprehend.

  She mentioned something about her Okinawan boyfriend that he did not understand, and he waved her off. “Hey. Forget the man, Mitsuko.”

  She laughed. “O.K.”

  “No, I mean really. You wanna get married? All right. Marry me.”

  She started to laugh and then stopped, trying to read his face. Finally she pursed her lips, her eyebrows furled, and scolded him.

  “You crazy. American, Okinawan get in trouble all the time. I know. Forget it.”

  He lay back on the futon, his hands behind his head, smiling comfortably. He felt better than he had since—well, since the last time he had been with her. “Everything I've ever asked you to do, you've said no first. Then you've always done it. Do you realize that? Well, I'm gonna marry you. I just made up my mind. And I'm not gonna let a little thing like you not wanting to get in my way!”

  She studied him back. She had not understood everything he said, but she comprehended that he was serious about it. Or at least believed he was. She spoke with absolute finality. “No. Can. Do. No way. You no got family tomb.”

  He grinned quizzically. “What the hell has a family tomb got to do with you and me?”

  Slowly she explained. The family tomb was the center of worship. When one dies he is remembered at the tomb. To marry a person who had no family tomb would be to condemn yourself to an afterlife of loneliness, without memory. Parents would never allow it. And her parents’ blessing was important.

  She shrugged with finality, eyeing him hopefully. “Understand?”

  He nodded, then lay still, pondering her explanation, trying to figure out a way around it. There's got to be a way. Finally he hit it. He remembered all the Sundays talked away with Grandma, learning of the ghosts, the trials and the sacrifices of the ones Grandma simply called “us.” Right here on Okinawa, he thought. Pick a war memorial.

  “Hey.” He caressed a silky arm. “Tell 'em I have a family tomb. Tell 'em Camp Hansen is my family tomb. It's the biggest one on the whole damn island!” She laughed, low and velvety, thinking he was teasing her. Then he attempted to explain it. The way he was brought up. Bullets in the creek beds. Daddy in the back shed. She mulled it for a few moments, not really understanding, running her fingers gently over his recent wounds, and pulled him to her. Neither mentioned it again.

  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 ironicall
y 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.