The 47th Samurai

6

He missed it on the first run through Kenilworth, which seemed to be but a mile or so long on the edge of Lake Michigan about fifteen miles north of Chicago. The houses were big, mansions really, and clearly this Kenilworth was a spot where the rich lived, and if they lived overlooking the lake, they must be even richer.

But then he found it: the reason he had missed it was that there was no house at all, only a gateway, sheathed in vines and buried in the shadows of elms. You had to look hard for the numbers 1 5 6 on the pillar. He turned in, guided the rented Prizm a few hundred feet down what seemed a tunnel in the trees, and then at last burst into light at a circular driveway and a big, fine white house, one of those legendary places with about a hundred rooms and tile floors and a six-car garage. It was the sort of place where great families lived, back in the time when there were great families.

Bob parked and knocked, and after a time was greeted by a heavy, bearded man his own age in black, mainly. He was also a drinking man. He had a glass of something brown in his hand.

“Mr. Culpepper?”

“Mr. Bob Lee Swagger, I’m guessing.”

“Yes, sir, that’s me.”

“Cool name. So southern. ‘Bob Lee.’ Come on in. You’re right on time. You said two and two it is.”

“Thank you, sir.”

He stepped into a house that was magnificent, though in a museum kind of way. It seemed to be not lived in but preserved.

“Nice place,” Bob said.

“It sure is, but try unloading it in a market like this. You don’t have six million bucks in your pocket, do you?”

“No, sir.”

“Just a thought. Anyhow, care for a drink? I’m betting you’re a drinking man.”

“I was, but good. Thanks, no, sir. One drink and I wake up three days down the pike in Shanghai with a new wife.”

“That actually happened to me! Well, almost. Anyway, I sympathize. Been divorced?”

“Once. The drinking was part of it.”

“No fun, huh? I try to stay pleasantly lubed all day, at least until all this bullshit is over. I’ll refill if you don’t mind.”

He stopped at a bar, added a slug of Maker’s Mark to his glass and another cube, then turned.

“As I said in my letter, I remember the sword. I cut myself on it pretty badly in the fifties. It was sharp. You looked at it and something started to bleed.”

“As I understand it, the war swords were just meant to kill. Otherwise they were junk. They weren’t like the fancy ones the older Japanese in the flashy bathrobes carried.”

“My arm remembers how sharp it was.”

He pushed up his left sleeve. The scar was long and cruel.

“That there’s a forty-stitch scar, pard,” he said. “My one claim to macho. People look at that and think I’ve been in a knife fight. Have you ever been in a knife fight?”

“I had to kill a man with a knife once, sorry to say.”

“I thought so. I’m not impressing you any, I see. Anyhow, as I said, Dad died some years ago. As the only kid, I inherited the house. He went into advertising after the war, and he did very well. But we were from different planets. He went his way, I went mine. Advertising wasn’t for me. I never wanted to say the word client in my life, so I went into TV. I never had to say client. Instead, I had to say sponsor. Anyhow, I’ve got to sell this place to pay for my third divorce and this one’s a mess. Why are the beautiful young ones so hard to get rid of?”

“I couldn’t tell you that, sir,” Bob said with a smile.

“It’s because they’ve never heard the word good-bye. So when you say it to them, they take it personally.” He laughed. “This one wants my spleen for lunch as well as my dad’s fortune. Amazing.”

“Sounds rough, Mr. Culpepper.”

“Listen, even a genuine tough guy like you would get a cold sweat on this mission. Anyway, if you don’t mind, I’m going to take you to the storeroom in the attic and let you be. Maybe it’s there, maybe it’s not. I honestly don’t know what happened to it. I just don’t have it in me to go through all that stuff. You understand?”

“Sure. My attic’s a mess too.”

“Now-how can I say this? If you find something, you know, private. Uh, intimate. Maybe my dad had a stash of porn or letters from some girlfriend or even a boyfriend or something like that. Something indiscreet? Just leave it where you find it, all right? I’m not too interested in what is called the truth. I’d like to remember him as the distant, frozen, grim cadaver he was in life, all right? I’d hate to find out he was actually human.”

“I got you.”

They reached the third floor, the end of a hall, and entered a room. “Anyhow, I’ll leave you two old marines alone. If he didn’t get rid of it, it’s probably still here. Really, help yourself, take your time. The bathroom’s down the hall. If you want a drink, want to break for dinner, anything. I’m here alone with my legal problems and trying to get in contact with a daughter who seems to have run off with somebody calling himself a documentary filmmaker. Have you noticed? They’re all documentary filmmakers these days. If you need me, just holler. It’s your sword, really, more than it’s mine and it would make the old bastard happy to know it finally went to you and then back to Japan.”

“Thank you, sir.”

“Please don’t call me sir. I’m just Tom. John’s boy, Tom, son of the Mr. Culpepper of Culpepper, Townsend & Mathers.”

“Loud and clear, Tom.”

“Can I call you Sarge? I always wanted to call someone ‘Sarge,’ just like in the movies.”

“Sure, but the name I answer to mostly is ‘Gunny.’ It’s from gunnery sergeant, a rank only the Marine Corps has.”

“‘Gunny.’ Oh, that is cool. Gunny, go to town!”

So Bob turned and faced what remained of the life of a man who once had commanded, however briefly, Able Company, 2/28, on a far-off place called Iwo Jima, a hell that neither his only son nor even Gunny Swagger, three-tour survivor of Vietnam, could imagine.

Back and back, the boxes took Bob through Culpepper’s life, and a biography somehow formed. Two wives, one much prettier than the other, and younger too, picked up sometime in the mid-’60s, by which time the only child, Tommy-he was evident too, a towheaded fatty, somewhat overwhelmed by his glamorous and successful dad-was in his sullen, shaggy teens.

Finally, an hour in and thirty-five boxes deep, having passed through adventures in advertising, he came to World War II. Presumably there was a box for Yale or Harvard too, wherever the guy went, but the war box held the usual junk, good conduct ribbons, battle stars, the Purple Heart, a few other trinkets, but the treasure was a marine seabook, chronicling assignments and a surpassing adequacy of performance. Bob went through it quickly and saw that yes, originally John Culpepper had been assigned to command a thirty-man marine detachment on the battleship Iowa in 1944. That was really a ticket to survival. That was saying, Rich boy, we’re looking out for you. You get to go home when it’s all over with a couple of Pacific battle stars, a captaincy, some nice stories to tell, and a leg up on all the O’Tooles and Zukowskis who were bobbing facedown in the red surf.

John had wanted to fight. He could have sat it out, but the records showed that late in January, he transferred, at sea, from the Iowa, to the troopship LCI-552, where elements of the 28th Regiment droned toward a date with death in the center of the largest Marine Corps invasion force ever assembled. It certainly was unusual. Possibly there’d been an injury aboard the LCI and a 28th officer injured himself and couldn’t continue duty, so John was shunted in fast. Or possibly John fucked up in some big, hideous way on the Iowa and was sent to the line company punitively. But more than anything, the move had the marks of pull all over it. Happened all the time. In ’Nam, boys would suddenly disappear a month into their thirteen-month tour, called stateside to work in the Pentagon. Somebody had complained to Mommy who complained to Daddy who’d done a congressman a million-dollar favor and so Junior caught the freedom bird home.

But not John Culpepper. He used his pull to get into battle, not out of it.

It couldn’t have been easy. A year on a battlewagon isn’t the best training for something like Iwo and when he got to the 28th the CO wouldn’t know him, the other officers wouldn’t know him, and the men wouldn’t know him. He’d go into the fight without much psychological support, not easy and made harder by far by the peculiar savagery of Iwo.

So John fought on Iwo for a week. On the third day, Earl Swagger came down from headquarters and got his men through the successful assault against the blockhouse on the northwestern flank of Suribachi as the 28th circled and cut off the five hundred-foot tall volcano. Then, a few days later, a shell landed close at hand; the young officer’s legs were shattered. He spent three nights in an aid station and was evacuated by hospital ship. He recuperated in Hawaii, where he married his fiancée, Tommy’s mother, Mildred, a plain girl also from the Boston area. By the time he was duty-ready, the A-bombs had been dropped, the war was over. He got to go home a hero, even if he’d probably never fired his carbine once.

It didn’t matter. He did what he was supposed to, even if he was scared shitless the whole time. That’s what won wars, the thousands of reluctant John Culpeppers, not the two or three Earl Swaggers.

But there was no sword.

Where could it be?

Maybe it got thrown out and off it went to the Kenilworth dump, to rust away to oblivion or be crushed to junk by a bulldozer.

Bob tried to think hard on the issue.

What is the quality of a sword?

Well, its sharpness, but that’s the sword as weapon. Think of the sword as object: the answer is, its awkwardness.

It’s long and thin and curved. You might display it, but it wouldn’t fit neatly into one of those standard cardboard boxes; no, you’d have to wedge it in.

Who’s packing these boxes? Probably some workingmen hired by the surviving son who has suddenly acquired a house he doesn’t particularly want and never remembers fondly, but he’s got to get it into shape, sell it before his wife files for divorce. So someone packs all this stuff, thinking not a bit about it, not engaged in the family’s life, having no special sense of the meaning of a sword taken in battle and-

Bob went to the first closet. No. But in the second one, he found three golf bags, and there, in the third one, amid the sixes and sevens and the drivers and the wedges and the putter was Captain Hideki Yano’s shin-gunto.

“Tom?”

“Oh, yeah, you found it,” said Tom Culpepper, rising from a desk in what had been his father’s study. He had his ever-present glass of Maker’s with him, apparently just recently freshened.

“I did, yes. It was in a golf bag. I thought you might want to have a look.”

“Yeah, I suppose I do. Yeah, that’s it,” he said, taking it, holding it to the light. “Here, let me point out something. See this peg or whatever it is?”

He pointed to a stub a few inches above the circular hilt of the old thing. It seemed clotted with some kind of black tar or something, smeary and gummy. But it also, in the right angle of light, threw up tiny puncture wounds.

“I remember the day I got cut. I’d snuck it out of Dad’s study and we were waving it around, playing pirate or something. ’Fifty-seven, ’fifty-eight, sometime around there. Then we got the bright idea to take it apart. Don’t ask me why. We examined it and it seemed to be held together by this little wooden pin through this hole. See, it runs from one side to the other. That secures the handle to the blade, I’m guessing.”

“I see,” said Bob, who already knew the correct terms from the Internet: the bamboo peg was mekugi, the hole into which it fit mekugiana.

“But it was stuck. We tried to drive it out with a hammer and nail and all we did was dent it. God, when I think of it now, I’m a little ashamed. We had no idea. It was just a big sword thing for killing pirates.”

“You were just kids. How could you know?”

“We never got it out. I hate to remember this thing on the floor and I’m whacking on it, the blade is getting all crudded up on the floor. It’s got some kind of gunk on it. Real thick black stuff. I don’t know if the Japanese officer put it there, or your father, or mine, or someone at the factory, or what. But it’s not coming out easily.”

“No, it’s not. Someone wanted to hold it together. Go on, pull it.”

John Culpepper’s son Tom drew the sword out. It buzzed against the tightness of the metal scabbard, then described an arc across the room as he brandished it.

“Wow,” he said. “This baby still wants to cut something. Here, it scares me a little.”

He handed it over to Bob, who in taking it felt some kind of charge-what? a thrill, a buzz, a vibration-as indeed the baby still wanted to cut something.

You could tell in a flash it was superbly designed for its purpose, a thin ridge running each side of the gently curving blade, reaching the tip-kissaki, he knew it to be called. He felt the blasphemous power of the thing. It had exquisite balance, but the blade seemed something even more, somehow weirdly alive. He waved it just a little and could have sworn that it contained some soft core that pitched forward in the momentum, speeding toward its destination.

He held it up to the light. Indeed, the blade had seen hard use. The steel was dull upon close inspection, a haze of crosshatched nicks and cuts. Small black flecks attacked it randomly. On the edge-yakiba, he knew-almost microscopic chips were missing, whether from small boys whacking it against a tree or a Japanese officer drawing it against a marine’s neck. The handguard-tsuba-was a heavy circle of iron, like an ornate coaster almost. The grip was tacky: the sword was covered in gritty fish skin, then wrapped elaborately in a kind of flat cotton cording that was darkened with sweat or grime, worn in places and frayed.

If you waved it, the sword rattled ever so gently, because, he now saw, the guard wasn’t secured tightly by spacers.

“I remember as a kid you could slice paper with it, that’s how sharp it was,” said Tom Culpepper. “Here, let’s try it.”

He grabbed a heavy piece of stationery and Bob touched edge to paper and felt the sword pause, then slide through neatly. Tom dropped two pieces of paper to the ground.

“I can’t believe it’s that sharp,” he said. “Nothing should be that sharp!”