BooksBarbecue
Back Phantoms
Chapters (16)
  1. Title
  2. Chapter 1
  3. Chapter 2
  4. Chapter 3
  5. Chapter 4
  6. Chapter 5
  7. Chapter 6
  8. Chapter 7
  9. Chapter 8
  10. Chapter 9
  11. Chapter 10
  12. Chapter 11
  13. Chapter 12
  14. Chapter 13
  15. Acknowledgments
  16. Also by Christian Kiefer

“My God, Mrs. Takahashi. He was. He was a hero. Jesus.” The tears were coming again but I had been washed dry of them now and the sobs were empty.

In the end it had been so simple: a lawyer and a private detective and here was the telegram after just a few months. I had not been needed at all and my aunt had only obfuscated and slowed down the process. The Takahashis only needed us to get out of the way. It was their own story, not mine and not even my aunt’s, but of course that had always been true. And what I thought in that moment was that had the clock just rolled back two years or three or four or ten or God all the way back to the start, had Mrs. Takahashi just known or had Evelyn Wilson had the courage, they might have found him in time, before the army had taken him and Vietnam had blown the ghost from his skin. Our tours had overlapped, so it was even possible that I had seen him in the endless mud field of that base on the Nine Dragon River. In my shivering horror of that possibility, I stand below the Huey that will deliver him to his death, the insectoid shape hovering in the flat white light, its blades chopping the air. That moment seems to last forever but finally the machine drifts away, turning in a lazy arc out across the wire and into the jungle. It is almost beautiful, like a leaf upon the wind.

“I wish I could have known him,” I said.

“He would have liked you,” Mrs. Takahashi told me, and I nearly asked her how she could know such a thing but then I understood that she was not talking about her grandson Franklin Yamada but about Ray, Raymond, her son.

“I hope you’re right,” I said simply.

“I’m his mother,” she said. “Of course I’m right.”

Chapter 13

13

IF THIS STORY HAD ENDED THERE I DO NOT KNOW IF I EVER would have written it down. The heat of that summer and the chill of winter passed until spring came again and another summer. I had moved back to Southern California by that time, having failed out of community college in Placer County, so that when I registered at Pasadena City College it was to start completely over. In most ways I did not mind. There are few moments in our lives when we are allowed to begin anew.