Coin Locker Babies (3 page)

Suddenly, Hashi looked up and his heart stopped. Somebody was watching them from the second floor of the theater… a young man dressed only in a pair of leather pants. Kiku had seen him too. The man looked first at one boy, then the other, then twitched his jaw as if to say “get lost.” Petrified, the boys stood their ground, until a low voice made it plainer:

“Get lost!”

At this point, Hashi would have taken to his heels, but Kiku still made no move to go.

“Kiku!” Hashi shouted, but Kiku’s eyes were fixed on the thin young man with the long beard.

“So I finally found you,” he was muttering to himself. “This is where you’ve been. The man who’s supposed to take me up to heaven lives in the town destroyed by the spinning rocket.” But as he spoke, the man pulled his head back inside the window, and they could hear a door close somewhere.

Kiku shook himself and shouted: “But where’s the motorbike?” There was no answer.

“Come on, let’s go home,” said Hashi, near tears as he tugged at Kiku’s sleeve. Kiku eventually gave up, but as they rounded the corner of the theater they heard a scraping sound, and a sheet of thin corrugated metal from the second story broke away and fell to earth. Then, all of a sudden, a motorbike exploded from the hole in the wall and disappeared in a cloud of dust. The noise of the engine faded in the distance, but Kiku was sure he’d seen the rider smile as he raced by.

When questioned by Kazuyo about the mud on their shirts, Hashi confessed that they’d gone to investigate the area around the mines. For this she scolded them at length. Didn’t they know how dangerous it was? Hadn’t she told them about the two bums who’d been bitten by snakes while picking through one of those buildings? And then there was the little boy who’d fallen down a shaft… The planks that covered the entrances were all rotted out, Kazuyo told them, and the tunnels themselves were full of gas. If you fell in, you dropped three thousand meters straight to the bottom, where you became food for all sorts of creepy bugs and snakes. And there were chemicals in the old storerooms that could eat your flesh down to the bone in a second if you happened to spill them on you, not to mention the crazy old drifters who lived in the abandoned buildings and did nasty things to little girls and most likely to little boys, too. And if something were to happen, there was nobody to help you; you could never yell loud enough to be heard back in the village. When the lecture was over, she had managed to extract a promise from Kiku and Hashi never to go near the mines again.

Kuwayama and Kazuyo decided that the beauty shop should be closed until the boys were used to life on the island, so Kazuyo had time to take them around and introduce them at each house
in the neighborhood. Then she bought them bathing suits to take them swimming.

The boys caught a whiff of salt air through the high grass and ran yelling in the direction of the beach. Just as their bare feet sank into the hot sand, a wave broke, showering them with spray. Tiny crabs scuttled into holes, and small fish stranded by the receding tide lurked in the shadows of the tidal pools. Kiku and Hashi groped around trying to catch the minnows, smaller than one’s thumb, but had no luck. Still, they learned to poke their fingers into the tips of the brightly colored sea anemones to feel the pleasant sucking sensation when the mouths closed. After that, they watched the hermit crabs swarm over the remains of their lunch, then held races from the dunes to the waterline.

Hashi waved at the cicada kids who came down to the beach wearing goggles and carrying spears. They quickly disappeared into the sea, and before long a spear broke the surface, its end decorated with what seemed to be a lump of plastic.

“Octopus!” yelled the boy brandishing the spear, and Kiku and Hashi ran to look as he clambered back on shore. This octopus was different from the one they’d seen at the aquarium on an orphanage outing. That one had been reddish, with a head, eight legs, even little eyes; this one was a mass of splotchy darkness oozing black liquid as it writhed atop the prongs, more like a tattered rag than a living thing. As it was being pulled from the spear, the rag managed to wriggle free and set off slithering toward the water, which happened to take it right to where Kiku and Hashi were standing.

“Grab it!” a boy yelled, so Hashi stuck out a hand, only to have the octopus latch on tight. Speechless with fear, he watched the slimy, shapeless, glistening thing squirm up his arm toward his face. When he finally realized what was happening and began
clawing at the creature with his free hand, he only succeeded in transferring its grip to the other arm and boosting it up until a tentacle reached his shoulder. From a distance, Hashi’s gyrations might have been mistaken for a dance, but Kazuyo came running when she heard the screams, to find Hashi on the ground with the octopus about to cover his face. Kiku and the other children were doing their best to peel the monster off, but it was stuck so fast it was like part of his skin. Kazuyo ripped off her blouse, wrapped the dry cloth around her hand, and began to peel away the tentacles one by one. Once she had transferred the octopus to the blouse, she banged it again and again on the rocks.

Hashi’s shoulder and neck were swollen and red, and the suckers had left round marks, but he managed to get to his feet to stare at the dead octopus before he burst into tears. Kazuyo gathered him in her arms. Her breast digging into his side tickled a little, and when he buried his face on her shoulder, he could taste the salt on her skin.

The flowers on the canna lilies on the hillside were falling. Cracked brown petals turned to dust underfoot. When a typhoon blew through scattering faded summer blooms and overripe nuts, Kazuyo showed Kiku and Hashi how to gather chestnuts in the hills, now beginning to turn dry and sere. First you stamped on the thorny balls, then picked the kernels, three to a nut and all different sizes, from the cracked shell. The bit sandwiched in the middle was always the biggest, having sucked most of the nourishment away from the other two, which were often shriveled and dead.

“Look how lonely it is when you’re selfish and crowd the others out,” Kazuyo would say.

Kiku found a chestnut with two kernels exactly the same size joined back to back in the shell.

“Now that’s odd,” said Kazuyo. “Usually ones like this get a little bubble inside the shell and end up rotting.”

Kiku and Hashi put half each in their pockets.

Twice a month Kuwayama rented a small boat to go fishing. These outings started well before dawn when it was icy cold, but he insisted on taking the boys along however much they hated it. Sipping hot green tea flavored with salt, they would huddle in the tiny cabin watching the first rays of sunlight on the surface of the sea. Eventually, the air began to warm a little, and the fish began to accumulate in the bottom of the boat, blue fins sharp as knives in pools of clear, dark blood. There was the smell of drying scales, the yellowish waves lapping the hull, the faint hiss of snowflakes expiring in the sea.

About the time that thousands of small white butterflies began hatching in the cabbage fields, Kazuyo presented Kiku and Hashi with boxes tied up with ribbon; inside they found school satchels.

The old woman cut across the playground. A drifter, she survived by sleeping in abandoned miners’ sheds, pilfering from the
fish-drying
racks, begging rice door to door, or, occasionally, stealing potatoes from the fields. She had lived on the island a long time, left a widow and childless when her husband was killed in an accident in the days before the mines were closed. For a time she had been in a mental hospital, but she escaped, made her way back to the island, and refused to leave. Everyone agreed she was harmless and left her alone. Hashi, however, couldn’t get her out of his head.

“Every time I see her,” he told Kiku, “I wonder if she could be my mom. I hate seeing women like her going around begging and scraping. It makes me think my mom’s probably having the same kind of bad luck for throwing me away. She couldn’t be happy, not after doing something like that. So when I see some poor old lady, I feel like running up and hugging her and calling her Mommy. But then I think, if it really were my mom, I’d probably kill her instead.” Not long after they had started elementary school, another child had seen the old woman passing through the schoolyard and shouted at Hashi, “Hey! Kuwayama, that old hag’s your mother.” The old rage had come back in an instant and Hashi had taken off after him. “Sorry, Grannie! I mistook you for Kuwayama’s mother!” the boy yelled again, exultant for
a moment at least before Kiku joined in the fight and began to hit him. The encounter was Kiku’s introduction to violence, in a way, since neither the Kuwayamas nor the nuns had ever laid a hand on either of them. For the first time in his life he clenched his fist and planted it on someone’s chin, flattening the little boy with a single punch and knocking out two teeth. The whole thing was over in a second, and Kiku, as though a little disappointed, stood kicking him in the side until he lost consciousness. Then, for good measure, he went on to beat up the other kids who had laughed at the boy’s taunts. When he was done, the whole class was afraid of him. Perhaps because he was usually so mild-mannered, he seemed all the more frightening, but, whatever the reason, no one was willing to cross the two boys after that. Hashi’s sadness at the sight of the old woman, however, remained. Once he watched her from a distance as she was picking rags out of a dustbin—purple ones seemed to be her favorites—and draping them around her shoulders and hips. When the wind blew, she was like a figure in a dream, all fluttering lavender.

Breaking their promise to Kazuyo, they often went to explore the ruins. By the time they were in fourth grade, it was almost a daily routine; they would drop off their satchels at the house and head straight for the abandoned town. They had drawn a rough map dividing the area into quadrants—the miners’ quarters, the mines themselves, the school, and the deserted streets—and each was given a comic-book name: Zoule, Megad, Puton, and Gazelle. Zoule was the leader of a fierce band of space pirates, Megad a spaceship base on Venus, Puton was a robot serving in the defense of the Third Star in the constellation Cygnus, and Gazelle a noble emissary, son of Superman and a Chinese woman. The miners’ buildings, in Zoule zone, were surrounded on three sides by hills covered with vines under which vipers lived, so the boys had all
but given up on the idea of exploring that section. All they knew for sure was that the wind could sometimes be heard whistling through tall buildings beyond the hill.

One day, however, while carefully hacking at the vines on the hillside, Kiku had discovered a concrete staircase which, if it went to the top, promised a view of the unexplored buildings and the sea beyond, and thus the possibility of completing their map. The stairs were steep and overgrown, so the boys worked cautiously, checking under the vines for snakes before cutting them. Finally, however, they reached a place where they could see the whole ruined complex: twelve eight-story apartment blocks overlooking the ocean.

The buildings, labeled with the letters A through L, were reached by a wide track that ran along the crest of the hill before sloping down to the apartments. In places the vines covered second-story balconies, but the glass in many of the windows seemed to be intact. Unlike buildings they had explored before, the entrances here were open. A plant cascading from a balcony on the seventh floor of building B looked, from a distance, like a pale green mattress set out to air; but from directly below, the gray vines and fuzzy green leaves were more like a monster that had devoured the inhabitants of the apartment. The boys knew from experience there could be all sorts of good stuff inside: broken dishes, graffiti, salvageable tatami mats. What a find—a dozen buildings, apparently untouched.

Kiku and Hashi had already made quite a collection from the other abandoned buildings: a dagger, old records, photographs, a fishing rod, scuba tanks, a gas mask, a miner’s headlamp, a helmet with leather straps, goggles, eighteen cans of ammonium sulfate, a globe, an anatomical model of the human body, and a flag—all hidden safely away in the basement of the coal refinery. This time, Kiku was hoping for a bicycle.

As they approached the buildings, Hashi suddenly stopped short.

“Something’s wrong,” he said. He was quick to sense things and would always warn Kiku of the clump of grass where a snake was hiding, the exact location of the bat in the tunnel, or the patch of seaweed with a jellyfish in it. “I can hear somebody breathing,” he said.

Kiku peered cautiously through the wall of weeds ahead and then broke into a smile.

“Hashi, come and look,” he called. But Hashi refused to budge, remembering other times when Kiku had said the same thing and he had gone cheerfully forward only to find a ceiling covered with bats, or worse. “It’s a puppy!” said Kiku at last.

It took a promise of his diving mask if he was lying, but Hashi finally came forward to find a white puppy playing in the entrance to building B. They watched as the puppy dug at a hole for a while, then ran off after a bug. Before Hashi could even suggest that they take the dog for a pet, Kiku had run out of the bushes. The puppy was still a little unsteady on its feet and should have been easy to catch, but it saw Kiku coming and set off in the other direction. Chasing it, they got as far as the entrance to building C when a growling sound froze them in their tracks. It seemed to come from the entire building, a low moan filling the great concrete cavity. A moment later they noticed several shining eyes in the dark entrance, and then as their own eyes adjusted to the light, they could make out bared teeth and crouching forms. Eyeing them malevolently, one dog crept out into the open and began howling, which set off all the others.

That was enough for Kiku; he was about to turn and run when Hashi grabbed him.

“If you turn your back on them they attack. I read in a book
on big game hunting you’re supposed to look them in the eye and back up slowly.” As they watched more dogs appear from the building, they remembered that the body of some man—a vagrant, everyone had said—had washed ashore a while back with the haunches, belly, and sides eaten away. The police said it couldn’t have been fish since fish always eat the eyeballs first. And when a chicken or a pig disappeared from somebody’s farm, people talked about wild dogs, but no one had ever tried to hunt them, mostly because they lived right where the vipers were most abundant.

“What do you mean ‘look them in the eye’?
Which
eye? There’re hundreds of them,” moaned Kiku. “We’re dead if they get behind us. Can’t you think of something?” Hashi suggested they try yelling as loud as they could, but the yell rose to a shriek and the baying grew louder. By now they were surrounded.

“All they do is sit there and howl. Maybe they only eat stuff that’s already dead,” Kiku started to say, but just then a small reddish dog darted forward and snapped at Hashi’s leg. Kiku swung the sickle he’d been using on the weeds, catching it on the side of the head and drawing a spurt of blood. The animal rolled away, but another came jumping over it, biting Hashi’s collar and dragging him to the ground. This time Kiku couldn’t aim for the thing’s head for fear of hitting Hashi, so he drove the blade into its flank, but when it turned to run, the sickle was pulled from Kiku’s hands.

Now the ring of dogs was getting tighter. One leapt at Kiku’s throat, but he managed to grab Hashi’s sickle and jab it in its face. Almost without flinching, it turned and sank its teeth into Hashi’s wrist.

“Hashi! Get up!” Kiku screamed, cutting the dog along one side, but this only made it bite down harder. As he raised the
blade to strike again, a mass of black fur fastened itself to Kiku’s thigh. He collapsed on top of Hashi, who had gone as white as a sheet, but by shielding himself with both arms he was able to keep the dog away from his throat. Then, suddenly, a deep roar shook the ground, a cloud of dust swept up, and from its midst a motorbike appeared outside the pack of dogs. It was Gazelle, the man from the theater in the old town. He pulled off his helmet, wiping his brow with the back of his hand, then tossed some white stuff in the dogs’ direction. A space opened in their circle and, yelling like a cowboy driving a herd of cattle, Gazelle advanced, scattering bread as a decoy as he came. Even the black creature that had hold of Kiku loosened its grip to pounce on a lump that fell nearby.

The motorbike drew slowly forward and the rider signaled for them to get on. Kiku managed to hoist Hashi, who was beginning to go faint, onto the seat, then climbed on behind to hold him in place by grabbing Gazelle’s belt. Gazelle donned his helmet, checked his cargo, and took off in another swirl of dust.

The bike headed toward the sea, wheels engulfed in vines, with Gazelle kicking the dogs that followed with his heavy boots. Cutting through the apartment buildings, they plunged into a thicket, finally coming out onto the bus road where they picked up speed. By now the boys could feel the air cooling and drying their wounds, and Kiku opened his eyes for a moment to catch a glimpse of the sea, glistening, smooth, and wide, before his vision blurred. As he rubbed his thigh, which was slippery with blood, he felt it was all part of a long, vivid dream; and in his mind’s eye he could see the bearded man standing on a cliff overlooking the sea, holding aloft a newborn Kiku as an offering to heaven. At last he had found his way into the picture on the wall of the orphanage chapel; at last he knew the blessing of a real birth.

“D’you live in the theater?” he shouted.

Gazelle nodded.

“Can we come visit you sometime?”

“I once saw a guy with rabies,” said Gazelle. “He tried to stick his hand down his throat to scratch out his own lungs. If they tell you that you guys have rabies, come to the theater. I’ll scratch them out for you.”

Gazelle only allowed them in the theater once, for a tour of his digs. Since water to the abandoned town had been shut off, he had dug a well in the courtyard of the school, which he covered with stray lumber and grass to avoid detection by the local authorities. Inside the theater, he had put up steel struts to reinforce the mezzanine so it would support the weight of his bike. Apart from a large number of broken seats and a sheet hung in front of the screen, the place was much as it had always been. Gazelle had also managed to tap into a transformer to siphon off electricity, but except when he ran the projector, he rarely needed it.

There were only two films in the projection room, both shorts, and these Gazelle ran for them without any introduction. The first one, titled “Nature in the Occupied Ogasawara Islands,” was mostly underwater shots in tropical waters. The entire frame was filled with tropical fish except for the lower edge where the shot included an underwater cave and some words superimposed. Gazelle stopped the projector and stared at the frame. The only sound was the hum of the fan.

“DATURA,” he said almost inaudibly. He started the film again only after he realized that Kiku and Hashi were staring at him, and even then he went on gazing at the makeshift screen with a pained expression, muttering “DATURA.”

The other short was a documentary on the daily life and work
of the security guards for the National Stadium during the Tokyo Olympics. In between scenes featuring the guards, there were long sequences showing the finals of the men’s hundred-meter dash and the pole vault. It was the first time Kiku had seen pole vaulting, and as he watched Hansen being catapulted by the fiberglass pole in slow motion, he had the strange sensation that he too was being drawn along up into the sky. At the age of twelve, the muscles he would one day develop still slept under Kiku’s skin, but on the way home from Gazelle’s theater he found a long stick and pretended to be a pole vaulter.

It was the hottest day of summer vacation. Kiku and Hashi had been spending nearly every afternoon at the beach working on the seashell collection that was their summer homework project. Hashi, who had learned to snorkel, was hunting for abalone in the shallows, while Kiku, not feeling very well, sat watching on the sand. He had tried to take a nap, but woke up from a dream in which his legs were being roasted over a gas burner.

“The way you were curled up, your legs are going to be sunburned,” said Hashi, setting his catch down on the sand. Kiku rubbed his numb calves with hot sand and seawater to relieve the tingling.

A young couple spread a blue towel on the rocks just above where Hashi was diving and sat down in the sun. Every day this couple, or another like it—they all seemed interchangeable—spread out the same blue towel printed with the name of the local inn. The woman’s predictably pale skin, slathered with sunscreen, was marked here and there with red blotches left by insect bites. Hashi, cradling his bucketful of shells and sea urchins, reported to Kiku that there were no abalone below, then turned his attention to the newcomers.

“That lady has a cat, you can bet on it,” he concluded after a quick look.

Kiku had begun to practice vaulting, using a bamboo pole and the sea as a landing pit. He hadn’t quite got the hang of it yet, but one thing he had figured out was the need for speed in the approach. The faster he could run, the further and higher he would fly; so the first problem was to work out how to run faster. He decided his stance at the start was wrong, recalling the way Bob Hayes had crouched before the finals of the hundred meters at the Tokyo Olympics: legs set, back extended, every muscle tensed, as if his body were itself a pole. That way, the body would just shoot forward on its own when the strength gave out in the lead leg. He remembered that Hayes had adjusted his stance again and again, checking it against some mental ideal of the perfect sprinter. That must be it, Kiku thought: running was just leaning so far forward you were about to fall on your face and then sticking out the other leg before you actually fell. The first ape to struggle up from all fours must have done it like that, and if it was good enough for him, it was good enough for Kiku. So, whenever he raced along the beach, sweat dripping, limbs growing heavy, he pictured his precarious ideal to himself, running on until he was exhausted and the idea of another step had become unbearable.