The Emperor of Any Place (20 page)

I do not show him my watchtower. I do not want him to know of it, and, thankfully, the coral tree is so thick with leaves that one cannot see the little platform sixty feet up. I have a good reason for keeping this secret. I do not want the American to know that Tinian is so close — that American forces are so close. I doubt Derwood could climb, anyway, with only one hand.

I found Isamu’s “watchtower” within the first three days. I called it the crow’s nest. I had grown up in Vermont and had been lord of many tree forts. And I had been drawn to the tree for the very same reason Isamu had been; it was the tallest thing on the highest point of the island. When I circled it to see where best to get a grip, I found that the thorns had been cleared away in one particular place and smiled to myself.

The Mikado keeps his secrets,
I thought. That is what I called him to myself. In his presence I called him by his name unless he was acting in a high-and-mighty way, and then I would bow deeply and call him
Ten’nō
Ōshiro, which I guessed was the proper word for emperor. Anyway, I could keep a secret just as well as the next guy. And so, laboriously, I made my way up the tree, a Green Mountain boy again. After all, I was only reduced by the loss of one hand, and the lad in me could still get a grip on a good solid branch. My body — and there wasn’t much weight to it — knew how to fling its weight around to find the right balance for scaling things. I got a fair number of scratches, but it was worth it.

The headland was relatively clear of tall trees, and you could see for quite a way, so there was no fear of being surprised by the beast. That was the first thing I looked for when I got up there. The next time I came, I brought Isamu’s binoculars with me. It did not require much in the way of deception. Isamu would go off to fish from his raft on the coral reef. That’s what he said he was doing, at least, but more than once when I was up the tree with the binoculars, I saw him swimming out in the lagoon. The first time he was lying on the water, his arms spread like some naked Jesus on a transparent blue cross, casting a shadow on the sand below him. Moving the binoculars closer to shore, I saw his ghosts huddled at the edge of the water waiting for him to return. Such a strange phenomenon. My own attendant ghosts waited for me at the bottom of the tree. Though they were childlike, they obviously did not have a child’s gift for either swimming or climbing.

Other times I would see Isamu sitting in the center of his raft, cross-legged, writing in a book. I never saw the book at the compound. It was something else the Mikado kept under his hat — or under his shirt.

The binoculars were good, M 36 × 30 field glasses. And what a surprise, when I held them to my eyes and looked eastward, focusing in on the green blur in the distance: Tinian. I had landed there more than once since the invasion and recognized it right away. But that is not entirely the truth. The runway construction that had been under way when I last touched down there was far advanced by now. Tinian had always been a strategic target because it was within bomber range of Japan. That was what the Army Air Force was all about in the Pacific, strategic bombardment of the Japanese home islands.

Those were my people over there!

I wanted to yell and wave my hands. Not a particularly rational thought. In any case, the island did seem close enough that I could take the fishing raft and be there in a few hours. If I’d had two good hands to row with. The elation of seeing the island withered away as I remembered my predicament. You might ask how could I have forgotten it even for a moment! I suppose there was a store of optimism in me somewhere just waiting for a chance to jump up and shout hooray. They don’t hand out optimism as part of your kit when you’re a flyboy in a war. You’ve either got it or you don’t. I looked at my incomplete limb lying in my lap. It still ached a fair bit, though not all the time. But my native optimism refused to take a hike, just yet. The island was close enough to sail to, I thought. I’d have to rig something up on my own, obviously, and in secret. It was then, as I tried to wrap my head around all of that, that I came to my senses.

Getting there was a hopeless proposition, for now. But I did have the Gibson Girl. The island was well within the radius that she was capable of, if I could get her operable. That, I supposed, was not going to happen under Isamu’s nose, and I had to admit there was no way I could imagine returning to the southern beach to reclaim the beacon just yet. To be perfectly frank, the idea scared me to death, what with that monstrous angry thing out there. Nor did I want to fluster or otherwise agitate my host. Every now and then, the Mikado would strut around exerting his command, insisting that I was his prisoner, but he was incredibly industrious and good company, quick to laugh at some amusement and with a beguiling smile.

Skidimarink a-dink a-dink.

Isamu loved the song and sang it with me. He also enjoyed watching me trying to do anything one-handed. It made him laugh and slap his thighs. Derwood Kraft, vaudeville clown. I have to admit, I hammed it up a bit sometimes, just to watch him laugh at me. He might be the enemy, but he had saved my life and not just that terrible day of the attack. I shuddered to think how I would have survived here without his knowledge of the local flora and fauna. We had shelter. We ate well. And we had ourselves a little castle. Fort Ōshiro! We had a lagoon to swim in at the end of the day, although always with the raft nearby and a rifle aboard it. Who knew if
Tengu
could swim! I knew it was Flight Lieutenant Derwood Kraft’s duty as American Army Air Force personnel to get myself back into action. I suffered some misgivings about shirking this responsibility — let alone fraternizing with the enemy. But I will admit freely here, so many years later, it was Derwood Kraft, the man, who knew that I would make no attempt to return to action if by doing so it would risk Isamu’s security here. He was, after all, my unlikely savior, this emperor of the heart-shaped island.

I was in the crow’s nest when the storm came. I picked out the greeny-gold light across the sound, watched as darkness subsumed the southern reaches of Tinian, watched the sea surge, whipped by winds I could not feel — not yet — but that were coming our way. A cyclone. A typhoon: a warm-core storm system, nothing like the nor’easters I was used to back home, blowing in off the Atlantic seaboard. A typhoon in these seas could be two or three times that size. The cyclones in the Mariana Islands were among the biggest in the world. It was something I’d learned about flying these waters. And one was coming our way.

We had to take shelter. Fort Ōshiro might be perfect as a position of strength, but it was completely exposed to the weather. With a typhoon there might be winds of ninety knots or more. I’d seen it over the Philippines from the cockpit of a plane. Even a modest cyclone might have a radius of two hundred miles.

I hurried back down the tree, fell the last ten feet, tearing my arm on the tiger’s claw thorns. One of my waiting entourage of ghost children reached out to the cut as if to stop it, his young hand poised over my arm. He smiled but, seeing my expression, grew wide-eyed, frightened.

“I don’t know how the wind affects you folks,” I said, “but we’re going to skedaddle.” I didn’t stop to see his response. They seemed to show emotions, but it was difficult to tell if they understood anything. I raced back to the fort, calling Isamu’s name as I ran, praying he was not down on the lagoon or, even worse, out beyond the coral reef. From the calm stillness of the north end, he would have no idea of what was coming our way, sneaking up from behind.

“Storm!” I yelled. Isamu didn’t know the word, but I was swinging my arms around over my head like a crazy helicopter and my eyes must have told the rest. I held up the binoculars, pointing southeast; that was all Isamu needed to know. He snatched the field glasses from me and raced away from the compound, his anxious ghosts in swift pursuit.

“Where the hell are you going?” I shouted after him, but Isamu didn’t stop. I guessed he was going to look for himself. Well, I wasn’t hanging around to wait for him. I shoved some food and water into a backpack, tried to think if there was anything we could do to storm-proof the camp, but gave up in despair. Luckily, Isamu was back quickly, and he joined me, grabbing some supplies and of course a rifle and ammo.

“My cave,” I said, pointing toward the south end of the island. The typhoon was coming from the southeast, so it seemed insane to be running toward it, but with any luck the cave in which I had holed up would be in the lee of the storm, with the spine of the island, a towering limestone wall, at our back. I didn’t need to explain it to Isamu, and we took off. The rains came before we were halfway there. Driving rains and winds bending the palm trees on the high hills so that they looked like the flowing mane of a racehorse. We descended into the jungle and had some protection from the worst of it. But when we climbed up the cliff to cross the ridge, we were buffeted something fierce — almost knocked off our feet.

I remember looking southeast as we climbed, shielding my eyes from the needles of rain. The real storm had not made landfall yet; this was just the warm-up act. We scrabbled up the path, slipping on the wet rocks, one arm up protecting our faces, while grabbing at handholds on the limestone wall. It was a time to wish dearly for two hands. But whenever I faltered, Isamu was at my back, pushing me forward, grabbing the back of my shirt with his fist to hold me up. Then finally we reached the top of the southern rise — completely exposed to the storm. Isamu lost his balance, punched by a sudden draft, and I grabbed him with my one good arm just before he fell. Then we dropped six feet — threw ourselves down onto the western side, where the wall of stone protected us from the wind. By then the rain was torrential.

The cave was spacious enough and dry. I had not returned to it since my capture, but something had been in there, foraging for food; the floor was a mess of crumbs and cans flung about, not to mention animal scat. I had built a great pile of leaves and grasses in a corner and thrown a tarp over it as a bed — a nest, more like — not a very comfortable one. I fell onto it when we arrived, soaking wet and exhausted. Isamu sat cross-legged by the cave’s mouth, staring out at the ocean pounding the rocks forty feet below. He sat, backlit by the shimmering, almost supernatural light. The sky to the northwest was clear, and yet behind us the island was being pummeled. Then I drifted off to sleep to the sound of the sky turning itself inside out.

It was light when I awoke. Isamu was leaning against the wall by the opening. Behind him the foliage dripped, but the sky was blue beyond that. He was looking at something. It took a moment for me to realize what it was. My sketch pads.

“You?” said Isamu, pointing at the pad when I joined him.

“Me,” I said, nodding. I sat down on the wet lip of the cave, my legs dangling. The sea had settled, sloshing in the pockets of seaweed-covered rocks below. Seagulls circled, full of babble about the storm, I guess, and scanning the roiling sea for anything tasty it might have churned up.

Isamu held up a page to show me, pencil drawings of planes: a Gooney Bird on the tarmac. He turned the page to a B-29 Superfortress from a low angle, so that the mighty bomber loomed above its charcoal shadow. I flipped the page to reveal a Sikorsky R-4B “hoverfly” helicopter, as well as various attempts at drawing a pilot friend. I never got very good at people.

“Good,” said Isamu, using the English word. Despite his reticence to learn the language of his prisoner, he showed great aptitude at language acquisition.

“Good,” I said, laughing at my own expense. “Yeah, sure.”

“Yeah, sure,” echoed Isamu, and laughed too. He flipped another page. I pulled the sketchbook around so I could see it: a pencil sketch of the Gibson Girl in detail. Isamu cast me a look of unease, suspicion. He closed the book and handed it to me. I flipped through the densely covered first few pages, glad to have it back.

“Time to go,” said Isamu, hopping to his feet with an agility that made me feel old by comparison. I gathered together some things I’d been wanting: the pack with my few art supplies, various drawing implements, a small watercolor kit, another sketch pad, filled, and a brand-new one. There wasn’t much else.

Time to go.

When we got back, the fort was gone.