The Hummingbird (3 page)

He stared at the TV. But damn if that codger didn’t give himself away with the barest hint of a smile.

Well. Not a bad beginning. As I headed to the car, I hoped that the Professor would have a good night. I imagined he had fifty or sixty nights left. It was unlikely that he would live to see Labor Day.

If he inconvenienced me, therefore, or annoyed me, or grew too demanding, the calendar was all I needed to regain perspective. When Labor Day arrived, I would be free to go for a long walk. I might have a few friends over. I might get out of town for the weekend with my husband.

My husband. That reminded me to switch my phone back on. My practice is to have it handy always, in case there’s a medical emergency, but turned off so there’s no interruption in my work. Powering up that day, it gave a long series of notification beeps: nine calls from Michael, all clustered in midafternoon, but he had left no messages or texts.

I called him immediately. Six rings and no answer. My mind began writing all kinds of stories about what might have happened.

I listened closely to his recording though I was hearing it for the thousandth time. Silly, I know, but I had come to cherish that ten seconds of him speaking because he had recorded it two years ago, before the war changed his voice as it changed everything else. At the beep, I discovered I had nothing to say.

I hung up, tossed the phone onto the passenger seat, and pressed the accelerator hard. Meanwhile, I breathed a quiet prayer that my husband had not killed anyone. Or himself.

THE JAPANESE ADMIRALTY’S INVENTIVENESS—
to mount an assault on North America while naval conflict was concentrated across the Pacific Ocean—showed more than military wit. It reflected a cultural context with ancient origins.

In the twelfth century, four feudal clans vied for dynastic control of an island chain in the South Pacific. The dominant group was the Taira, a family of samurai warriors and their descendants with a lineage three hundred years old. In 1179, a Taira patriarch declared an infant of that clan to be the new emperor of the islands. This usurpation sparked years of war.

On February 7, 1184, Yoshitsune Minamoto attacked the Tairas’ fortress from an unexpected direction and at an unexpected time. This castle was supposedly impregnable, yet the Minamoto clan emerged victorious. The Taira leaders were driven to the sea.
Shouri.
Victory.

On April 24 of the following year, the Minamoto clan attacked the Taira in the Straits of Shimonoseki. Again the assault was a surprise. Though the Minamoto did not know the waters well, their naval forces outnumbered the Taira three to one. Meanwhile, through espionage, the invaders had learned which vessel carried the emperor, now six years old. After a clash of archers, the battle became hand-to-hand combat, ship beside ship for nearly a full day. Eventually Yoshitsune brought his Minamoto warriors toward the emperor’s craft.

Rather than become prisoners or slaves and allow the symbols of their royal might to be captured, Taira leaders killed themselves. After throwing his royal sword and mirror into the water, the young emperor also committed suicide.

Shouri
again. The regional struggle for supremacy was ended, the Minamotos’ dominion established in perpetuity. Yoshitsune’s brother became the joined clans’ first shogun. The feudal chain of islands became Japan.

In the Land of the Rising Sun, this story is as familiar as Paul Revere is to Americans. Even now seafood from the Strait of Shimonoseki is considered sacred because it may contain the spirits of slain Taira.

The battle’s outcome was more than political. It furthermore established a cultural ethos, a sensibility that sees surprise attacks not as underhanded or deceptive, but as clever and courageous. The idea permeates Japanese society to this day.

Two sumo wrestlers, wearing only the
mawashi
loincloth, circle one another: grim, rotund, almost comical. Suddenly one of them sees an opportunity, grabs his opponent, and throws him out of the competitive ring.
Shouri.

Many martial arts embrace this philosophy. Judo depends on sudden throws and shifts in balance. In the fencing art of kendo, there is a technical term—
mamono
—for the surprise thrust followed by rapid withdrawal.

The concept appears in spiritual practice as well. Zen monastic instruction often includes the teacher delivering a surprise whack across the novitiate’s shoulders, using a length of wood to awaken the meditation.

Even in the gentle realm of poetry, one of Japan’s oldest forms is haiku—which contains imagery of nature, plus a metaphor for the human condition or the speaker’s deepest emotions, all in seventeen syllables. (By contrast, the sonnet of Western literature contains one hundred and forty.)

These twelfth-century morals survived to modern times. In 1904, Heihachiro Togo attacked the Russian Pacific Squadron without having first declared war. While the Russian commanding officer was at a party, Japanese torpedoes destroyed two battleships and many cruisers. By the 1940s, Togo was admiral of the Japanese fleet.
Shouri.

Pearl Harbor multiplied this cultural notion by a million millions. As the culmination of eight hundred years of Japanese thought, it would be the sudden blow to surpass all others.

But just as sumo wrestlers train for years, the seeds for the attack on Oahu may have been planted decades earlier. In 1925, a British naval reporter named Hector Bywater wrote a novel,
The Great Pacific War.
His thriller imagined a Japanese attack on the American forces in Pearl Harbor, Luzon, Guam, and the Philippines. The book was a sensation. The Japanese navy translated it for top officers and added it to the curriculum at the Naval War College.

In September of 1925 the novel appeared prominently in the
New York Times Book Review.
Isoroku Yamamoto, a Japanese naval attaché stationed in Washington, was known as intellectually insatiable. Did he see that review or read that book?

One is tempted to speculate. Sixteen years later, Yamamoto was an admiral, vice minister of the navy, colleague of Admiral Togo, and an architect of the Pearl Harbor attack.

Spies early that year confirmed that U.S. naval power in the region was concentrated in one place. The day of the week with the most ships in port was invariably Sunday. The harbor’s narrow mouth allowed only one large vessel through at a time, making the sanctuary also a trap.

Above all, U.S. attention at Pearl Harbor concentrated to the south, toward a Japanese base on the Marshall Islands. Thus any surprise assault must come from the opposite direction. The Americans would play the role of the Taira.

At 7:48
A.M.
on Sunday, December 7, 1941, Japanese Zeroes reached the tip of Oahu. The story has been told before in gruesome detail, but even a brief summary contains multitudes of tragedy.

On that day, 353 Japanese bombers, fighters, and torpedo planes took off from six aircraft carriers, aided by five submarines and five miniature subs. The assault sank four U.S. battleships, three destroyers, three cruisers and five other ships, and destroyed 188 aircraft. Bombing, fires, and drowning killed 2,402 Americans and wounded 1,282 more. It was a slaughter.

Shouri
once again. The Minamoto methods lived. There had been no declaration of war. The attackers came from the north.

CHAPTER 3

I WAS A GRADUATE STUDENT AT PORTLAND STATE,
one semester away from attaining my final credential, when the transmission in my ancient Subaru gave out. The local dealer said over the phone that the repair would run nearly two thousand dollars. He might as well have said a million, the sum was so far out of reach. Buying a car was out of the question too, new or used. I was living on a teaching assistantship, about eight hundred dollars a month, which was nearly as little back then as it is now. I couldn’t borrow my way to a new transmission, either, because I hadn’t found a post-graduation job yet. I couldn’t stick the repair on a credit card, because my student loan payments would kick in about two minutes after the university handed me my diploma, job or not. I mean, in those days I couldn’t even afford a cell phone; I used an empty university office to avoid the cost of the call.

After hanging up I went to the grad students’ mailroom, where I found friends and colleagues eager to grouse with me about the inconvenience of being carless, and the general impoverishment of academic life, when Connie West poked her head out of the adjacent office.

“I know what you can do, Deborah,” Connie called. Although she was an infamous busybody, with a black belt in gossip, Connie was also den mother to the grad students, manager of our schedules and practicums and sometimes personal lives. “I know just the place.”

“Is it cheap?”

“It is trustworthy.”

I laughed. “Sorry, can’t afford that.”

She stepped out into the hallway. “You know my Silas has that ancient BMW, right? Older than Methuselah. He went to this guy Michael Birch, paid huge for a transmission repair, and broke down the next day anyway.”

Connie snapped and popped her gum, her usual method of pausing in a story. She held a nail file, inspecting her fingers without using it. “Silas had the car fixed someplace else, then wrote the Birch guy a total nastygram. What a rip-off, you don’t know jack, that sort of thing. A week later he gets an envelope, only there’s no note inside. Just a check, for the exact amount of the repair at the second place, signed Michael Birch.” She pointed at me with the nail file. “This guy must have called the second place and found out what the tab was, and then he covered it.”

She finessed one of her thumbnails with the file. “Now Silas won’t take his car anywhere else. He didn’t cash the check either, despite my input.”

“And the moral of the story is?”

She snapped her gum. “This Birch guy has a conscience. He won’t take advantage of you knowing nothing about cars.”

“But he messed up the transmission.”

“He might cut you a deal, too. But you will have to be charming.” Connie sashayed back to her office, calling over her shoulder on the way. “Wear a skirt.”

With the car stuck permanently in third gear, I strained the clutch and clanked all the way to Birch’s Automotive Arts. What a classic Portland name for a business. And yes, I admit it: With the begrudging attitude familiar to those who are habitually broke, I wore a skirt. But not a short one. I still had my dignity. When I arrived, the guy barely noticed me, or my legs. His head was poked too far in under the hood of an ancient Mercedes, its diesel engine rattling and producing a stinky plume.

“Who did you say sent you?”

“Connie West. Over at Portland State.”

Pulling his head out from under the hood, he sized up my twelve-year-old car before turning to take a look at me. “I have no idea who that is.”

I stuck around while he finished tuning the Benz. He took two phone calls and spent what seemed to me an hour in discussion when the Mercedes owner came to fetch his car. Twice I heard Michael say his conscience would not let him make an expensive repair without the guy realizing that it might not last. Finally he put my rusty rig on the lift and poked around from beneath.

“When did you last change your transmission fluid?” he asked.

I hated that my answer exposed me as a female automobile know-nothing, but my excuse was that I know health care instead. I coughed into my fist. “How often are we supposed to do that, exactly?”

He said nothing, just kept working with his arms raised.

How could I help but notice him? Forget the oil-stained jeans. He was wide chested, big armed, focused. I ventured a conversation. He owned the car business, which had been open nearly two years and already employed six people. He also served one weekend a month and two weeks a year as a National Guardsman—which was paying off his college loans because he invested every spare nickel in equipping the repair shop. And he was a lousy mini-golf player, which I learned the following Saturday on our first date. And a respectable kisser, I discovered later that night. And a few weeks later, a powerful, generous, patient, breathtaking lover. Michael.

WITH BOTH OF MYPARENTS BURIED YEARS BEFORE
—a long yarn in itself—my sister Robin flew out for the wedding. We held a small celebration by the water in Hood River, a gorgeous outdoorsy jock town sixty miles up the Columbia River gorge. Mountains rose steeply on both sides of the water, the near bank Oregon and the far one Washington.

People zoomed by on the bike path, some of them cheering when they saw my white dress. It fluffed in the wind like a flamenco dancer’s fan. Michael wore a top hat, which looked sharp, but he had to hold it down with one hand because of the constant upriver breeze. My grad-school pals and Michael’s friends from the Guard and his shop flirted madly, and I suspect they may have accomplished a tryst or two.

We stood in a little park and declared ourselves, forever and ever and ever, while behind us the gorge’s crazy kite surfers sped and soared, zooming across the river or floating above it like all of our dreams of the future, high and fearless and free. All I could conceive of was possibility.

That proved literally true too. When I did not get pregnant after four years of ardent efforts, we went to an endocrinologist. Given my lifelong irregular periods, I felt sure the problem was me. But it turned out that Michael’s swimmers could not go the distance. How strange that a man so strong and healthy should have that secret incapacity.

Because of how my mother had died—in an ICU, surrounded by machinery, the whole experience a big reason I had gone into hospice—I was unwilling to bring medical technology to our reproductive aid.

As I told Michael my decision, fully prepared for him to insist we try new measures and never give up, I wept as if I were teaching the sky to rain.

“Then it’s just us,” Michael said instead, his big arms circling me. “I’m going to have to make enough noise and laundry and joy for a whole family.”

He laid me down on the bed, by golly, and he showed it.

THAT WAS BEFORE THE WAR, OF COURSE.
Before the longest conflict in U.S. history. Almost everyone has an opinion about whether or not it was a good idea to go there, to spend billions of dollars and thousands of lives with the goal of driving out tyrants and killing the trainers of terrorists. No matter what people believe, they are certain of it.

Not me. I mean: There were no weapons of mass destruction, yes, OK. But at this point, so what? I say leave the debate to politicos and their parrots. All I care about is the plain fact of Michael’s condition once he returned.

First deployment: I expected working in the motor pool would be calm. But Michael saw too many Humvees dragged back for demolition, outsides scorched, insides splattered red. He brought home sorrow. A new vocabulary too, expertly obscene. Also a need for lovemaking so ardent and urgent—in the car, on the kitchen counter, one summer night even in the backyard, with the neighbors’ TV plainly audible—that was when we began calling each other lover.

The meaning was not entirely benign. Sometimes sex substituted for dealing with things. If we disagreed, or miscommunicated, or were bored, we went to bed for answers. We used the physical to blot out the mental. Evasive maneuvers, I later called it.

Second deployment: anxiety in crowds, jumping at loud noises. Also moments of startling generosity, as if his conscience were trying to atone. The wife of an employee named Russell was arrested for embezzling from the city parks department, and even though she said the money was for her dying mother, the media pilloried her. Michael called Russell in, the man clearly expecting to be fired. Instead, Michael told him that everyone needs help in hard times and gave him a thousand dollars.

Guard duties changed during that home period too: One soldier, selected from each unit, would attend sniper school. Because of his keen vision Michael had always been a good shot, and I wasn’t surprised when the orders came. The shock was the manner of his training, more indoctrination than education. Yes he learned techniques, and mastered new weapons. But one night they made him eat meal upon meal, then sent him out early the next morning on an assignment they said would test his commitment to duty. They left him there, prone on a hillside with his scope trained on a grove of trees, until he shit himself. It was supposed to build solidarity, but Michael soured on the military from then on.

Third deployment: The man who’d stood sharply in uniform the past two times would not let me accompany him to the departure muster. I pined by the back door while he took a taxi to report for duty. In Iraq two days later, the expert mechanic found himself under the command of a younger man with less training, from another branch of the armed forces, who used him exclusively as a sniper. Michael followed orders, winning recognition for kills and kudos for accuracy. But he returned home in a permanent mood of nitroglycerine, always just one bump away from exploding.

That’s why the politics are irrelevant. No one will repay what Michael lost, no one will be punished. Even so, I count my husband among the lucky ones. He did not give his life for his country. He did not sacrifice a limb. But he completely lost his innocence. His libido. His ability to control his temper.

I WAS HALFWAY HOME
when my phone rang, and the caller’s number was blocked. I snatched the phone up anyway. It was a detective. Michael was not hurt, but he was in trouble. The cop said he would inform me fully at the station. I changed routes, carrying the sodden weight of dread.

The feeling deepened when I pulled into the station’s parking lot and saw Michael’s red truck hoisted behind a towing rig. Opened airbags hung from the dashboard like half-rotten grapes. Inching forward, I saw that the truck’s front left corner was caved in. I’d ridden in that beast enough times, over enough hard Oregon back country, to know that damage like that did not occur easily. It required something massive.

“Oh, Michael,” I said. “Please, God, let him be OK.”

The police station smelled like hot metal. Once I’d identified myself, the desk sergeant pointed his pen at a side door. Another uniformed officer held it open, and a moment later I found myself in a windowless room with three mustached men. One wall had a mirror, but I knew what that meant.

Two of the men sat at the table with me and said their names, which I did not catch. The third one, who wore a black business suit, did not introduce himself. He leaned against the wall with his hands in his pockets.

The table was gray, the floor was an ugly speckled linoleum, and the walls and ceiling were painted a kind of institutional white that is actually less than white. I searched for a wastebasket, in case I needed to throw up. A metal can stood in the corner, brimming with discarded coffee cups.

The man in uniform cleared his throat and stroked his bushy mustache downward. “Your husband committed vehicular assault today, Mrs. Birch. Everyone is unharmed physically, thank goodness. But, um, we still have a situation to deal with.”

“Is Michael all right? Where is he?”

“We’ll take you to him in just a moment.” The policeman tapped his pen on the table. “Apparently what happened—”

“It was road rage,” the other man at the table interrupted. He was older, his mustache as white as ice. He was wearing a turquoise Seahawks t-shirt. “He got pissed at me for some reason, I have no idea why, and he rammed me.”

“He what?”

“With his truck. Then he backed up and rammed me again.”

“Under normal circumstances, your husband would face numerous charges.” With the pen tip, the policeman counted them off on his fingers. “Vehicular assault, destruction of property, disturbing the peace, moving violations, um, disorderly conduct, resisting arrest—”

“But I saw the parking stickers on his bumper,” the older man broke in again. “Camp White, Camp Withycombe. So I knew he was a veteran.”

Everyone paused at that point. They were staring at me.

I nodded. “He served three deployments.”

“As a sniper,” the older man said. Perhaps he was testing whether Michael had told him the truth.

“He’s a mechanic,” I replied. “Normally he runs a motor pool. But his last deployment was primarily a sharpshooting assignment.”

“How many kills did he have?”

I sat back in my chair. Did they really want to know? Did they want to hear about the nightmares? Should I describe for them how he had not touched me intimately, not once, in the five months since he’d returned?