Terminal Island

by John Shannon

  “I watched some of these boys from the North like Bob Moses, full of piss and vinegar, but quiet about it, and I learned from them how there just wasn’t any otherwise when the time came. I couldn’t Jet them see me back down. I reckon I was lucky just to be there. And I did find how to go still inside so I could sit there quiet at that lunch counter with all those ignorant white boys spitting and shouting hate at us. Not many kids today get the luck to be somewhere important, no matter what they got inside, and I feel sorry for them.”

  Maeve was in so much awe of him she didn’t know what to say.

  “Maeve, give me your hand for a sec.”

  “You’re not done with Ornetta yet.”

  “Not that.”

  She held out her hand, and he took it in his as if shaking it. His hand was twice the size of hers. The skin was roughened and tough, and his palm felt dry, and he held her hand hard—hard enough that it hurt a little, as if he didn’t realize the strength he had.

  “Look there.” He pointed toward their hands with the nail brush in his free hand. “There’s nothing stronger on this whole earth than a white hand in a black hand.”

  Maeve wanted to say “or vice versa,” but she couldn’t. She felt herself needing to cry for some reason, her cheeks burning, the feeling pricking the corners of her eyes and then one tear just let loose and rolled down her cheek.

  “I’m so happy you two gals are friends.”

  “Blood sisters,” Ornetta corrected.

  He went back to painting Ornetta’s nails, and Maeve surreptitiously wiped her eyes. It was a long while before she could join their conversation about how hard it must be to work a typewriter or cash register with acrylic nails.

  Then all of a sudden the door came open. They hadn’t heard the sound of Genesee Thigpen’s wheelchair coming down the hall, but it was there now, her hands tight on the wheels. Her eyes took in the scene and then lasered in on Ornetta’s long purple spangled nails with a look of wrath.

  “You get those things off you right this minute!”

  “But my momma wore them,” Ornetta complained.

  Maeve watched them all carefully, and somehow she got the feeling that that may have been exactly the point. Maeve had never heard the full story, but she knew that many years ago, when Bancroft Davis had been a lot younger and stronger, he had flown to New York to rescue his adopted daughter, Ornetta’s mother, from either a crack house or a brothel—Maeve could hardly believe such things existed outside of movies. He had failed. The best he’d been able to do was sweep up Ornetta, still a small child, and bring her west. Ornetta only spoke of that time in allegory and folk tale, through a screen of make-believe, as a time of living in a big brick palace with her beautiful mother’s many men attendants and a tall knight guarding her.

  The old woman’s expression softened. “When you two get those evil things off, come help me shuck peas for supper. I’ll teach you how to make hush puppies.”

  “I’m sorry, the dress-up was all my idea,” Maeve put in. “The remover’ll take them right off.”

  Ornetta bristled a little but seemed to go along.

  “Can I call my grandpa later?” Maeve asked, surprising herself. She said it as much to divert their attention from this fierce focus on one another as out of any desire to talk to him. She hadn’t even realized she wanted to call.

  “Of course you can, hon’,” Genesee said.

  “You’re a rude old fuck,” Steelyard said.

  Declan Liffey seemed to stretch his neck, and then roll his head a little, as if working out a kink. “You mean, impolite?”

  “And more. Let’s come at this another way. I’m not leaving this room until you tell me what happened here during the war that’s pissed somebody off so bad and scared all you old farts into conniptions.”

  The room had been tidied obsessively since his ordeal. All the books were gone, the magazines, and what little had remained of any loose paper. The desk had a brand-new computer on it now, one of those Macs with the swiveling flat screen like a giant shaving mirror.

  “Some would say being impolite to authority is necessary. Saying your mind. Truth-telling—a deep human duty.”

  “Deep doo-doo. Like I give a shit what you assholes think about things. You and your pals did something to some Jap in this town that you know you shouldn’t ought to ’ve done and you’ve been letting it mulch since Truman beat Dewey.”

  “You like Japs?”

  Steelyard wasn’t going to get drawn into this. Once you let your subject set the agenda, the interrogation could only go seriously adrift. “The point is what you fuckin’ perpetrated, Declan, you and your legion pals.”

  Declan Liffey went off on a tear anyway, about the Japanese being sneaky and underhanded, coldhearted and unfriendly, vengeful and buck-toothed, copiers and mimickers of everybody else’s creative impulses. The old fart would have fit right in at one of the detective lunches, Steelyard thought, though he’d have to shift to a more popular target—say, spades or Mexes. Basically, they trashed everybody but nonhomosexual Protestants, even when one of the detectives present happened to be a spade or a Mexican, he was more or less expected to sit there and keep his mouth shut.

  “I don’t want to talk about the Japanese, Dec. I want to talk about you and your ballooning guilt.”

  “You’ve got to let me demythologize your thinking. You been stuffed with so many half lies. You’ll sink in all that shit and never be seen again. You got to get rid of that sentimental claptrap and bleeding-heart stuff about people all being the same.”

  “Legion hall, 1941. You can fuckin’ bottle the rest of your crap and send it out with the tide.”

  Declan Liffey frowned. “Maybe I got nothing to say.”

  “Maybe I got no help to give you the next time this ninja shows up.”

  “What more can he do to me? He’s trashed my life’s work.”

  “There’s your son and your granddaughter. He’s threatened both of them.” That gave the old man pause.

  “The girl, too?”

  “Looks that way. There’s a photo of her with a knife through her neck. He seems to go after families.”

  “They oughta clear out of town and stay out.”

  “They have, for now. Give me a hint here, Dec. Did you push some Jap around? Lynch him? Beat him up? After Pearl, it was understandable.”

  For a moment it appeared he might actually be ready to talk, but then the phone rang. Ken Steelyard swore in his head.

  The old man eyed the machine for a moment but then answered it. “Yes. Uh-huh.”

  Ken Steelyard could hear a tiny girl’s voice at the other end, though he couldn’t take in the words, like a bee in a bottle.

  “I’m okay, but I don’t think your father wants you to.”

  The bee buzzed some more, insistently. Slowly old Declan’s face took on a defiant air. “Sure, come on down tomorrow.”

  There was another little sizzle and trill from the bottle.

  “Bring your friend, too, the more the merrier.” He set the receiver down.

  It was not hard to work out. “I doubt if Jack is going to be happy about that.”

  “Then park your SWAT team in the alley to protect us. I want to see my granddaughter. I’ve never properly met her. My son cut me off years ago like a pariah dog you kick in the gutter.”

  Now, why would Jack do that, Ken Steelyard thought sarcastically, to such a pleasant old man? “Wartime, Declan. Pearl Harbor, sneak attack. People are cussing Japs on the street. They’re closing down Japtown over on Terminal Island. I imagine you and your legion pals got busy. You know, evening the score for Pearl by beating up little Jap schoolgirls.”

  The old man sighed. “Most of us then are gone. I was just a kid hanging with the men. Are you going to turn down the lottery if Ed McMahon walks in and tells you you just won? Especially when taking your winnings involves punishing somebody you hate?”

  “C’mon, tell me straight.”

  “I’m not g
onna answer. You know and I know that’s no fuckin’ innocent question.”

  “I ain’t leaving, Dec.”

  He shrugged. “Shit, it’s way past the legal limits anyway. Mike Zorotovich ran the San Pedro Moving and Storage just off Beacon. What an opportunity, man. All these Japs stored their stuff and then got hustled off to camps. We figured they were going to send them back to Japan. Why not help ourselves to all the good stuff before somebody else did?”

  “Break a few padlocks?”

  “It didn’t work that way. It was one big place back then. Had been an icehouse. They just had ropes around their stuff, with their name on it. Trusting little buggers. It didn’t even feel like stealing.”

  “And after the war?”

  He chuckled. “Not even after, man. The whole thing gets real funny here. We pretty much cleaned out the place the week after they dropped off their stuff, but I think the Ozakis went on making storage payments all through the war. Tough titty.”

  “Go on.”

  “This guy, Frank Ozaki, straight out of some heavy-duty internment camp for the badasses, he came home and threw a shit fit. Zorotovich wasn’t there no more and the guy in charge said he didn’t know shit. You know, this Ozaki didn’t even go and fight in the war, like most of them. He said he’d rather stay in jail than be a loyal American. Fuck him, you know.”

  “You did, Dec.”

  The old man shrugged. “He got a permanent bee in his bonnet about getting his stuff back, but how was he going to prove anything? He even peered in our family’s window once up the hill where we lived then and saw the chest and shouted at us from out there on the grass. My old man told him we got the thing at Sears and sent him off with an old forty-five he had.”

  “You don’t happen to have that forty-five anymore?”

  “Yeah, I got a bundle of dope, too, and some M-eighties and whatever else the granny state has decided I shouldn’t have.”

  “Granny frowns on anthrax quite a lot.”

  “I don’t have that, neither. But I’ve got a lot of ideas that granny hates, and that’s tough titty, too.”

  “You and your dad steal anything besides this chest?”

  “We got in late and there wasn’t much to go around by then. It was like a bunch of sharks in a food frenzy, and we didn’t have a truck. We had to tie the chest to the top of Dad’s old Dodge. Was a lot of folks to satisfy, you know?”

  “Where’s the chest now?”

  “I guess Mr. Ninja took it away with him. I was a bit preoccupied with other things he was doing to my stuff. Why don’t you ask the cop was eating doughnuts out front?”

  “You know, Dec, I’m starting to like this Jap. You’re lucky he didn’t chop off your balls for souvenirs. If you and your pals got any left.”

  “Jap-loving crud, you are.”

  “If you only knew.”

  He had a feeling that being precisely on time would be important for some reason. He waited at the end of the block until exactly three minutes to eight. It had been dark for a long time now because the calendar had hit the dead center of winter, if you measured winter by the shortest days. A few houses on the block had Christmas lights, those dangly white icicle lights that seemed to have appeared all of a sudden a few years ago and instantaneously driven all other Christmas lights out of existence. One roof had a homemade Santa-and-sleigh cutout, but this wasn’t the sort of neighborhood that had a lot of money left over for decoration, and it was possible such ornamentation didn’t really fit into the Latino conception of Christmas.

  He locked the VW, walked up the chilly street to the two-track driveway, and then walked along it to the little house in back that had once been a garage. He could see right away that his knife and message were gone and the front door was ajar, just a few inches, but enough to be unmistakable, intentional.

  He stopped at the door, making enough noise on the concrete stoop so he wouldn’t startle anyone inside, then checked his watch. Superstitiously, he waited as the second hand staggered drunkenly uphill until it hit the 12, and then he knocked. “Mr. Ozaki. Hello.”

  There was no answer, but he had a feeling that he wasn’t alone. He pushed the door inward slowly, feeling no resistance. The first thing he noticed was his playing card with his message on it lying on a small table by the door, the cheap knife on top of it. It gave him a momentary chill that the man hadn’t hidden it away somewhere or thrown it out, just left it there, as if it were basically of no consequence.

  “Mr. Ozaki. I’m coming in. It’s Jack Liffey.”

  There was some sort of indirect light in the room, enough so he wasn’t too spooked to step inside, and then he stopped in the doorway, easily silhouetted against the outside. Shoot me now, he thought, or forget it. He had the same feeling he had had a few times before, a tickle right in the center of his breastbone, as if sighted down by some new sort of laserscope that made you feel the red spot pressing gently against its aiming point. There was no red spot, though, and the sensation was complicated by his labored breathing, with the one lung still shut down.

  His eyes adjusted, and he almost jumped out of his skin: there the man was. Jack Liffey’s spine prickled all the way down. He hadn’t seen him at first because he was in such an odd place. For some reason, he stood on the cushions of the sofa, like a woman in a cartoon who had leaped up there to avoid a mouse. His back was to the wall, which was covered with an ugly vinous flowered wallpaper. He did not seem to be armed, though his head was turned slightly and his eyes were fixed on Jack Liffey like a predator. It was hard to tell, the way he was standing on the sofa, but he looked tall for an Asian, maybe five-ten, and he wore unexceptional chinos and a dark crew-neck sweater with shoulder patches, some sort of commando thing from L. L. Bean. The sleeves were pushed up, and his hands were cocked loosely on his hips, the forearms looking strong.

  “Good evening, Mr. Ozaki. I’m sorry to intrude, but I think you know why I left you a message. We need to have a talk.”

  There was still no answer, and Jack Liffey summoned all the self-possession he could muster. He had to keep the tremulousness out of his voice. He had sensed it building up in a tickle at the back of his throat. Silence was a weapon he used himself in interviews from time to time, and he couldn’t let himself be unnerved by it. It was a trick he knew well, and it didn’t usually get to him. He shut the door behind himself and felt marginally less vulnerable to silhouetting.

  He still couldn’t work out where the indirect light in the room was coming from, but as his eyes adjusted further, he could see the man clearly, standing there bizarrely in the very center of the sofa, surrounded by all the wallpaper vines, like a large bird of prey perched in some jungle. Everything in the room seemed imperceptibly drawn toward him by his own gravity. It might simply have been that he was positioned in the gloomiest spot in the room, but he seemed to be absorbing light from the air around him, using it up in some way. In fact, Jack Liffey had the feeling the man was slowly drawing energy out of the room, letting everything else go cold and dead with entropy.

  “I’m going to sit.” Jack Liffey lowered himself onto a stiff chair facing the sofa. It put him at a worse height disadvantage, but he couldn’t help that; he had to keep his legs from trembling. “I’m Jack, if you like. I won’t call you Joe unless you invite me to. You’ve done a pretty thorough job of blasting my dad’s life’s work, as you know.” He offered a rueful smile. “I don’t really mind that. The world can do without another benighted manuscript about the supremacy of the white race. I can’t consider it much of a loss. Good riddance, except maybe for entertainment value.”

  He knew he was talking too much, but he didn’t seem to have any choice. “You did quite a job on Steelyard’s trains and the fishing boat and on my woman friend’s home, too. You seem to go after what you think people value the most. She did love that place and put a lot of hard work and money into restoring it. Though it really had to be me you were targeting, didn’t it? Perhaps you thought the damage would des
troy our relationship, she’d blame it on me. Well, I’ll be honest with you, maybe it did. Though I had a feeling we weren’t going to last forever, in any case. I can move on. You haven’t really damaged me at my core, if that was your wish. You did seem to threaten my daughter, too, with that photograph. I hope that was only a metaphor. I really wouldn’t take kindly to anyone hurting her. In fact, one of us would have to die if you did. But you haven’t actually hurt anybody physically yet, have you? I have a feeling that would violate some code you’ve set yourself.”

  He waited to give the man a chance to speak. His only movement so far had been a microscopic adjustment of his head to follow when Jack Liffey sat. His face was expressionless, not even suggesting thought, and his eyes remained fixed, almost unblinking. There was some intimation of mortal fate in his motionless presence, in the immense inertia, the black hole that was drawing in and extinguishing all human emotion around itself.

  “I think I’ve worked out that you have some kind of grievance against a small circle of elderly men, and the grievance seems to extend to their families. I have a little more trouble with that part of it. I imagine long ago there was a slight to your family, some form of cruelty to your parents, maybe. You’re too young for it to have been you—I doubt you were even born before the end of the war. It must have been something done to your father, Frank, or your mother, Mary. I’m sure there was plenty of anti-Japanese feeling to go around those days. Does your morality insist that you carry a grudge into the second or third generation? I really can’t understand that kind of thinking.”

  Again, he waited to give the man a chance to explain himself, but there was no reply. His sense of his antagonist was shifting subtly. It was becoming increasingly difficult to think of him as a man at all. He was more a malign voodoo god, with something too fierce in his silent waiting to be purely human. His eyes followed every slight shift Jack Liffey made, and his muscles seemed ready for fast movement.

  “Mr. Ozaki. I know you were in Vietnam. I think you were in one of the commando forces, I think the Green Berets, but maybe Navy SEALs, Marine Recon. You probably had to kill your share of people, maybe more than your share. I killed someone once, not in the war, and I think I know some of the strange, sleepy hold it exerts on you. There are people who say you never really recover from that, you slowly become obsessed with guilt. But I think that’s just the sentimentality of people who never faced killing. We both know plenty of warriors who have shrugged it off. Some are psychopaths, of course. They don’t feel a thing. I don’t think that’s you, because you’ve gone to great lengths not to hurt anyone recently.