THEO
SUZY’S REAL GRAVE was now filled with a pool of water and delicate sea anemones. Silver-blue waves whipped into a foamy white fury just inches away. I’d never pass it again without seeing her face. Life, so fragile. How did her tiny body end up there?
Heat from the sun blazed against my black pants. The .38, which I hadn’t carried in years, was heavy, yet comfortable in my waistband against my back. Winds rustled through the soft grasslands that protected the beach, the sweet smell of blackberries permeated the air, butterflies whispered—hushed angels on a cloudless late October day.
I settled on an immense rock, squinted my eyes against the sun’s glare, and searched for answers in the glass-like waters. Answers to how to erase the images of those sweet children in Korea that looked so much like Suzy Wu, or how to extract the sounds of them playing and singing their songs in my waking memory. How could I silence it all? I searched for answers, a way to bury the image of those hushed angels deeper inside, or somehow toss them into a gentle sea of forgetting. I searched. No answers. No forgetting. Not today.
***
As I returned to town, Bud was leaving. He rolled down the window and said, “May finally have a lead in the Wu case. I’m off to Tillamook. You armed?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’ll stay in town all day.”
“See ya tonight.” He drove off.
Solomon was on his bench, sharpening his hunting knife on a palm-sized grindstone. He looked up at me and said, “Your fists, sore?”
“Yeah,” I said, looking down at the fading bruises on my knuckles. “But stronger.”
“You’re a southpaw,” he said. “‘Bobber and weaver,’ newspaper writers said. Your coach said your head was ‘elusive target’ and that was your strength, no matter what weight you fight.”
“That was a long time ago,” I said. “Most of them tried to convert me from my southpaw ways—turn me around and have me take a right-handed stance. But I’m a southy all the way.”
“Yes,” Solomon said. “Leopards do not shed spots.”
“I guess not.”
“You are leopard with deep, dark spots . . . since you were a boy,” he said, and then looked me in the eye. “He was your blood. You defend your blood.”
“It cost my family everything.”
“What was your warrior pledge?”
“To be vigilant,” I said. “Protect the garden of life.”
“Sometimes this means life for life.”
“Right. Life for life.”
“You are southpaw, leopard, warrior. Time of grieving is over. Time to honor your wounds, let them be wisdom, guides for next journey. I see shadows on the mountain. Trouble comes. Time to get ready.”
“Ready?”
“You are holy man with knife in his boot and a gun secure at his back. I think you remember ready,” he said, then dropped the sharpening stone into his medicine bundle and wrapped the suede strap around it. “The Ancient Ones tell me the battle that comes unfolds slowly. Begins in hunting season. At sunrise.”
“What begins at sunrise?”
“You read letters?”
“I wrote them, I remember what’s—”
“Every day you must battle dark sand in your warrior bag until fists are strong and no longer bruise. Read letters, heal old wound. Then burn them. Bring back spirit of ten-year-old warrior. There will be fire again. Fire is cleansing tool.”
“Fire,” I said. “Alright, then what do I do?”
“You will know what to do . . . because you will be ready.”