Stephen Hunter - The 47th samurai

“It’s beautiful,” he said.

“The calligraphy belongs to the man called Miyamoto Musashi. He is regarded as Japan’s greatest swordsman. He fought over sixty duels and won them all. He is revered though for his wisdom; he retreated from the world and wrote The Book of Five Rings, his guide to the sword and to life. To him, the sword was life.”

“I see,” said Bob. “A professional.”

“Yes. Samurai. Warrior. My father, your father, the same. So I give this to you. No, it’s not original, for that would be priceless, but the calligraphy was done by hand by a superb local after Musashi.”

“Please tell me what it says.”

“He wrote this in sixteen forty-five. The old one knew. He says, ‘Steel cuts flesh / steel cuts bone / steel does not cut steel.’ Do you see?”

Bob saw.

“The rest of them: they are flesh and bone. They will be cut. The regular people. The sleepers, the dreamers. The soft. We are the hard. We are the warriors. We cannot be cut. That’s our job. And that’s why they need us in ways they can’t even imagine,” said Philip Yano.

Nii of Shinsengumi stayed with the American all the way out. The man took a taxi from the Yanos’ after a bright morning’s formal good-bye in the front yard, but not to the station, as you might expect, but to Yasukuni, the shrine dedicated to the fallen of Japan’s wars.

It wasn’t a place most westerners went to. While the taxicab with his luggage sat racking up the yen in the parking lot, the American went into the shrine and stood humbly before the altar for some time. Nii wondered, What the fuck is this all about? It made no sense to him whatsoever.

Then the man walked the grounds. He was a gaijin and others avoided him, but he didn’t seem to notice or care. He walked about slowly, with that odd trace of a limp, again as if trying to make communion with something immaterial. He stayed longer than the young yakuza could imagine anybody staying. He stood under the soaring steel torii gate that seemed to reflect the spirit of the samurai who died in battle. That it was steel, and not wood like the many conventional Japanese gates, seemed to mean something to him; he touched it several times and looked at it as though it communicated a certain meaning. Then he walked the broad concrete promenade all the way to the white and timbered shrine 250 yards from the gate. He examined the screen of serene trees that cut this place off from the craziness of Tokyo. He went to the shrine, looked in, possibly meditated-who could tell with gaijin?

But finally he returned to his cab and the driver fought through traffic to a JR station. Nii simply abandoned his car on a wayside street-it would be towed, of course, but was easily retrievable-bought a ticket from the machine on the JR Narita express, took up a position down the aisle, and watched the American go all the way to Terminal 2, forty miles outside Tokyo.

The gaijin was in the JAL line, with his two light bags, casually dressed in jeans and a tan jacket over a polo shirt. His body betrayed no impatience; he waited his turn in line, presented his documents, turned over his luggage. Nii watched from afar, as the American went through security, and watched a little drama transpire as the American was pulled out of line, examined closely by inspectors, had a sensing wand waved over his body time after time, had his papers examined by three different levels of bureaucrat, and finally was waved clear. That was the last he saw of him, a tall stranger with a bland, blank face, not one of those mobile, yappy monster faces the hairy beasts were so known for. The man’s eyes were strangely powerful-that meant bad luck for enemies, the suspicion went-as if the man held a fund of secret knowledge.

But for now Nii of Shinsengumi was done. The perfect samurai, he took out his cell and called headquarters to report in. They told him to get back fast. Tonight was the night.

Now it was over. He had his boarding pass, his bags were checked, he’d board the plane in an hour, happy he had an aisle seat. He was headed to the departure gate. The flight would last fifteen hours, but he’d be fine through dinner, then he’d take a pill, and when he awoke they’d be landing in LAX. Then it was an hour or so and off to Boise.

He felt good. He’d gotten some satisfaction at last. He felt the old man would be pleased. He’d repaid the debt, the obligation, as best he could.

Hey, old man, I’m still trying to do what you’d want me to do. Sorry you ain’t here to see it.

Too bad he wasn’t a drinking man anymore. He had an ache in his gut for it. He felt so good he wanted to commemorate duty and closure and pay homage.

The more he thought about it, the better an idea the drink seemed. Just this once.

No sirree. So sorry, Charlie. Nada.

You take one of those and you float away on the tide and god only knows where you come down. It had happened before.

He had spent most of the seventies drunk, going through jobs, pain, a wife, a couple of houses, the patience of his friends, the respect of his peers, almost pulling the trigger on his sorry self a dozen times. Then, somehow, he beat it, by giving everything up. He couldn’t take the world. He couldn’t take the memories. He had to leave both. So he lived like a monk, among rifles, a dog, hills, and trees, an exile, speaking to no one, reading, shooting, walking, caring for the dog, making do on a tiny retirement, trying somehow to recover what he had lost.

He could have lived that way forever. But things began to happen. It was a busy time for a while as he was forced to recover skills he thought long gone. They weren’t gone. He still had a little something that could get him through, and the terrible thing was, that was really his best self. The Swaggers were men of war. They were warriors. Nothing else. Could add and read and make polite for a time, but that wasn’t them. That sure wasn’t Earl with his duty-craziness, whether he was walking in through the high tide and blue-white Jap tracers off Tarawa or stalking the cornfields of Arkansas for armed robbers. And that wasn’t Bob, three tours in ’Nam, America’s second-or third-or fourth-leading sniper depending on who was telling the truth.

So why would you want to drink?

You do not want to drink.

It is unnecessary.

I have a beautiful wife, I have a beautiful kid, I’m building a house where I can look across the meadows of the valley to a purple range of mountains, and whoever thought I’d have that? What old snipers get that? You hunt men and watch them flop and go quiet through the scope close on a hundred times, maybe you get so far out you don’t ever come back.

I am back, he thought. I don’t need no help.

But then he thought, Goddammit, I did something for my father today. That pleased him immensely. He remembered the old man from so long ago: the father who didn’t hit him. All the other kids, damn, they’d say, Lord almighty, my father tanned my hide yesterday but good. Wooiee, hurt so bad, I ain’t never missing on sloppin’ them hogs again. But Earl Swagger never hit him, not once. Years later he asked his mother on a rare sober day why.

“’Cause his daddy whipped both his boys so hard he left scars. Your daddy thought that was the coward’s way, man beating on boys, and he stuck to that rule. That’s the kind of man your daddy was, and Lord I miss him so.”

Bob missed him too: he remembered the old man in the black-and-white state police cruiser in June of 1955 pulling out of the farm. He didn’t look back, but he caught his son in the rearview mirror and raised a hand, and Bob waved back. “Bye, Daddy, bye.” The old man was dead two hours later. Bob was nine.

So he thought, I have done something my father would have liked. If he’s up there, he’s smiling. I paid off an Earl Swagger obligation, the last one in the world, and I have served the old man. If anything calls for a drink, that does.