“Yep.” I started to bring out my queen but thought better of it. “Her grandfather, the fellow I told you about?”
Lucian peered into the holding cell where Virgil sat slumped on the bunk with his back against the wall. He was staring at the space between us. Lucian nodded. “That Van Heflin character.”
Jesus.
Lucian’s malapropisms were usually reserved for the Indians, but the Vietnamese had given him a whole new venue.
“Tran Van Tuyen.” I explained the situation, along with the ambivalence of my feelings toward the man.
Lucian didn’t say anything but studied the board. “They ought’a burn down that ol’ ghost town, that or ship it off to Laramie, put in a slicky-slide and a carousel up and charge admission.”
I opted for a pawn, and he immediately stymied the move with the same rook. I thought about the old Doolittle Raider and his experience in that Japanese prison camp. “You ever think about the war? ”
"Mine?” I nodded, and he took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Not so much as I used to.”
We sat there for a while, sitting on the folding chairs and looking at the chessboard balanced on the wastepaper basket between us. Every once in a while a question hangs in your throat waiting to be asked of the exact wrong person, but I asked it anyway. He laughed hard, fighting to catch his breath. “You?”
I nodded.
He shook his head. “You could do with a dose of prejudice.”
It was, after all, the response I expected. I brought my queen out.
He sat there looking at the board as I watched him, the smile slowly fading from his face as his ears plugged with the racket of two radial-cylinder Pratt and Whitney engines roaring him into his past. I listened to the ticking of the clock on the wall and waited.
“We ditched just off the Chinese coast, and the impact pushed my copilot, Frank, through the windshield. We had two men that were wounded so bad that they drowned before we could get to shore. A civil patrol pulled Frank and me out and pretty well beat the shit out of us right there on the boat. I guess that was one of the scary parts; there were so many of ’em that I figured they’d just tear us apart. Near as I could make out, an officer in the Kempeitai pulled ’em off us and claimed us as prisoners of Tojo, and they shipped us off to Shanghai in occupied China.”
“They got ten of you, right?”
He worked his jaw, moved his other bishop, and then leaned back in his chair and folded his arms. It was like he’d been compacted there by the memories of his war. His sleeves were rolled up on his thin snap-front shirt, and I watched his Adam’s apple as it bobbed the top button a few times before he said anything. “They beat the shit out of us on a regular basis with them little bamboo, kendo swords, shinai. . . . Then they finally got around to shipping us off to Tokyo where they interrogated us for a couple more weeks.”
He reached down and picked up his bottle of Rainier, turning it so that the label faced him. It was quiet again, and I wasn’t sure if he wanted to go any further. “We don’t have to talk about this, if you don’t want to.”
“I’m trying to tell you something, so shut up and listen.”
I smiled at him and watched as the jaw worked some more. He sipped his beer and rested it on his prosthetic knee. “They wanted us to sign these statements sayin’ we’d committed crimes against Japo citizens—you know, bombed hospitals, strafed schoolchildren, and shit like that.” His mahogany eyes came up and met mine. “... Which we didn’t.”
I moved my queen again. “I’d imagine they asked with all due courtesy?”
“Oh, hell yeah.” He leaned back in and examined the board. “They started out pretty easy, you know, not lettin’ ya sleep for a couple days, no food, hardly any water. . . .” He took another sip of his beer and wiped his mouth on his sleeve. “Get you good and loopy and then they’d start in with the hard stuff.” He took a deep breath and held it, finally letting it out with the words. “They had this one trick where they’d tie a wire around your head and twist it with one of them little kendo swords and they finally did it to Frank for so long that his jaw broke.”
I studied the hardness in the old man’s eyes as they reflected the light like tiny drops of crude oil.
“Any man that ever tells you that he won’t break no matter what they do to him? ” We both remained silent until his black eyes blinked. “They shipped us back to Shanghai and decided they were gonna have a trial, not a trial in any sense of justice, since they’d already found us guilty, but they needed to determine what kind of punishment was called for. Frank’s jaw was infected, and he was pretty weak by that time, so they’d take the two of us in together. We were in this solitary confinement compound at Kiangwan Prison, and they’d come get me and I’d lead Frank up these concrete steps into this shitty little wooden-slat building and they’d scream and yell about us and at us for a couple of hours, us not understandin’ a single word; then they’d take us back out and throw us in our cells until they’d come and get us the next day and do it all over again.” A tight little curve appeared at the corner of his mouth. “With the obvious limitations of not bein’ able to speak or write Japanese, we threw up a brilliant defense, and do you know them sons-of-bitches still found us guilty? ”
“Hard to believe.”
He moved a rook, and his hand stayed on the little wooden piece. “October 15, 1942. They gave us pencil and paper to write good-bye notes to our family, and I wrote mine to my mother and asked her to please ask Franklin Delano Roosevelt to bomb these little yellow bastards back into the Stone Age with all due speed.” He drank some more. “She never got it, so I guess it got lost in the mail. . . .” The short-lived smile faded again.
“What happened?”
He stared at the chessboard and withdrew his hand from the rook. “They put us all in this concrete bunker with these narrow slit openings and come and got the first three. They took ’em outside and made ’em kneel and tied ’em off to these stubby little crosses, and then they just shot ’em in the back of the head, one by one.”
I moved my queen in a disinterested fashion. “They let you live.”
He watched me move and then nodded. “I guess they felt like they’d made their point, so the rest of us got life imprisonment. ”
“What happened to Frank? ”
“Died in a camp in occupied China.” He reached over to straighten the angle of the wooden board on the trashcan. “So, you asked me if I thought about the war much—an’ I guess the honest answer would be, yes, I still think about it a lot. At least I think about Frank....”
“Check.”
I’d been watching Lucian’s face but hadn’t seen his lips move. I looked down at the board, and it was true that I’d accidentally positioned my queen for an impending and final victory over Lucian’s king. I looked up at the same time he did, a questioning expression on his face as he asked, “Did you just say check?”
I shook my head. “No, I thought you did.”
We both turned and looked at the big Indian, seated on the bunk and pointing a finger as big as a bratwurst toward the chessboard. The resonance of Virgil’s voice rattled through the damage in his throat like a very large and singular exhaust.
“Check.”
10
“What the fuck.” She sipped her coffee and then added another sugar to the four she’d already dumped in her mug. “He didn’t say anything else?”
I kept my volume low, even though she was still talking in full voice. There were a gaggle of tourists at the other end of the Busy Bee counter, and I saw no reason why they should be privy to the finer points of Virgil White Buffalo’s life. “No, but he and Lucian played until about three this morning. Prison chess, fast-moving; twenty-seven games, and Lucian only won five.”