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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

First my old war buddy and now Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. ­Takahashi. I knew I was taking some advantage of my grandmother’s hospitality, but I wanted to be there for their talk, wanted it so badly that I thought for the briefest moment I might not survive being excluded.

Mrs. Takahashi did not even question my invitation. “Your grandmother’s?” she said simply. “That would be very nice.”

Chapter 9

9

WHEN HE WAS YOUNGER IT HAD ALWAYS BEEN HE AND JIMMY together—two boys, thin, tan, shirtless, wandering the hills until their minds were great topographical maps upon which were inscribed that esoteric hierarchy of meaning important to boys alone: the prime locales for fishing and swimming, the decayed oak husks that provided homes to rattlesnakes, the trees that could be most easily scaled, and the sources of the coldest, clearest water. There had been chores, too, of course, but in his memory there were long periods of adventure where they hiked the ridges and hills seemingly without end. But Ray was no longer a boy, and his thoughts, his very memories, had turned to ash and shadow. Now his waking dreams brought to mind not the innocence of boyhood, however lost, but what had come after: her face, her body, so often in his thoughts that he sometimes imagined he could actually feel the warmth of her flesh in his hands. Even his sleep was broken by the myth of a past that was already lost to him, although he did not yet know it.

On the way north they had watched Mount Shasta rotate across the windows of the train, its great hulking shape a silver ghost floating in the distant pines. Ray’s father had begun speaking in Japanese at the sight of that mountain, almost as if he had locked into a kind of prayer, his voice wistful and lonely. When Ray asked him what he was saying his mother whispered to quiet him. What he could understand—and his understanding of Japanese was poor at best—was something about the mountain his father called Fujisan, a peak that Ray knew had risen above his father’s home in Japan. He had known his father to be ever-practical, but now the man seemed enraptured to a fugue state, staring out toward that mountain, his view broken from time to time by a forest that seemed to rush in on the windows and then to flee into the distance.