Coin Locker Babies (23 page)

As he was listening to Yoshikawa’s story, Handy was doing some calculating that proved rather discouraging: seventeen years ago, Miki and her husband had been living in city housing; in such close quarters, surrounded by his co-workers, it wasn’t likely that a pregnancy or birth could have gone unnoticed. What’s more, after the later incidents, there would have been a thorough investigation that would have turned up any previous suspicious activities. No, he had to accept the fact that Miki Yoshikawa couldn’t possibly have left Hashi in locker 309, and that meant that his original hunch, which he’d known all along was pretty shaky, was in fact just wrong. He smiled bitterly as he thought of the huge reward D had offered. When Yoshikawa finished speaking, Handy tapped on the fish tank and asked absently:

“Don’t suppose you’ve ever heard of a woman who left a baby in a coin locker?”

“Yep. I heard of one,” Yoshikawa said.

“You have?” said Handy, coming to life.

“Yep, from when I drove a recycling truck. There was this guy they called Goat who worked for the same company; funny sort of fella—used to be a roof tiler, they said, but as far as I could see he spent most of his time playing checkers for money. As I remember, he was missing the little finger on his left hand. He
used to like to talk about the women he’d made it with; usually, they were middle-aged waitresses or hookers, but there was this one time he came in bragging how he’d scored with a girl from a massage parlor. Said she really knew how to rub him the right way. Anyway, seems she got a bit drunk and started talking about her past; Goat said she told him she came from… Kochi, I think it was, and how this one time she’d run into a guy she’d known back there… I guess I still remember all this ’cause of what happened with Miki… Well, the guy she met was married, but they did it once anyway, and she ended up having a kid. She told Goat it was dead when she had it, and that’s why she left it in a coin locker.”

Handy slipped a five thousand yen bill into Yoshikawa’s pocket and headed back to his car. His next stop was the recycling company, where he was told that Goat had quit long ago but was now working as a driver for a pet grooming school.

The Aoyagi Pet Care Academy was located on the banks of the Tama River in Kawasaki City. In order to give its students training in grooming live cats and dogs, the school arranged to borrow pets from neighborhood residents in return for a free shampoo or clip. Goat was in charge of transporting the pets. Handy dropped in on the school and found out where Goat was supposed to be making stops. When he caught up with him, the truck was parked by the side of the road and Goat was standing in the street spinning a cage containing a poodle around and around. Ignoring the howls, which were getting more and more frantic, he calmly spun the cage until the dog stopped barking and began to be sick. Satisfied, he then tossed the cage into the back of the truck and went over to piss by a telephone pole. It was at this point that Handy and his helper approached to make inquiries about a certain girl in a certain massage parlor; as an ice-breaker they brought with them some money and a knife, and
a minute later, with a small slice in his cheek and a five thousand yen bill in his pocket, Goat got talkative.

“It was a place called Tenman round back of Kawasaki Station. But that was more than ten years ago; who knows if she’s still there.” He didn’t know her name, but she was a big girl, especially her hands. Her eyes were narrower than usual, and if he remembered right, she had a scar, like from an appendectomy. And a whole lot of dyed blond hair. That was about it. At Tenman, of course, there was no such person, but the manager said they’d always used licensed girls and they could check with the union to find out who it might have been. He even made the call himself.

A week later, Handy received his fee: five times what he normally charged. Kimie Numata, forty-four, was currently employed in a massage parlor in Tachikawa City, but Handy had heard that back in May 1972 she had unmistakably been pregnant, and after taking a month off from work in June and July, she had told at least four people that she’d left the baby in a coin locker. Two of these were girls from the massage parlor, one was Goat, and the other was a young bartender with whom she’d been living at one point for six months. The bartender was sure of the following: Kimie had abandoned the baby when she was twenty-seven years old, that is, in 1972; it was summer; and the baby had been a boy. Furthermore, Kimie didn’t go on vacation that summer; this last Handy learned from the lady who delivered milk door-to-door in the neighborhood—it seems Kimie had put out empties every day. In short, in the summer of 1972, Kimie Numata had left a male infant in a coin locker in the city of Yokohama. Facts were facts. And there were only were only two baby boys discovered in Yokohama that summer…

The crocodile was submerged in the artificial pond that occupied much of Anemone’s living room, the single eyeball protruding above the surface following the lumps of meat swinging overhead. Kiku had secured two dripping red chunks the size of babies’ heads on a pole and was gingerly proffering them in Gulliver’s direction. According to Anemone’s instructions, he had to keep dinner moving until Gulliver came after it; the point was to lure him out of the water and get him to walk around a little before feeding him. Gulliver was prone to a crocodile disease that left its victims too fat to walk, with teeth and bones brittle and atrophied. Unchecked, Anemone was afraid it would kill him.

Normally she fed Gulliver herself, but today she’d got up early and worked all day on a Christmas dinner for Kiku. The menu was to include a potato salad with shrimp, candied yams with chestnuts, sea bream soup, turkey teriyaki, and a chocolate cake. Kiku said he thought yams were New Year’s food, but Anemone explained that when she’d taken Home Economics in junior high school, it was the one dish her teacher said she made well—and anyway, a holiday was a holiday. She’d bought a whole bucket of chestnuts.

No matter how much Kiku shook the meat, Gulliver made no move to go after it. The two five-kilo lumps of flesh suspended from a drying pole cut in half had long since worn out Kiku’s
arms; but just as he was going to tell Anemone that it was no good, Gulliver gave a huge twitch of his tail, leapt a meter out of the water, and downed one of the meatballs in a single gulp. Kiku had no chance to yank the pole away, and now he was wet from head to foot.

“Something the matter?” said Anemone, poking her head around the kitchen door to find Kiku holding the pole with only one piece of meat on it.

“Seems he got it,” said Kiku.

“I guess I’ll have to show you how it’s done,” said Anemone, handing him the bowl of yams and taking the pole. Having polished off the first lump of horsemeat, Gulliver had sunk back to the bottom of the pond, but when she dangled the remaining lump over his nose, he began to stir. “You can tell when he’s about to make his move by the way he tenses up his tail.”

As tiny ripples broke the surface of the pond, Anemone started shaking the pole, and almost simultaneously Gulliver gave a powerful rake of his tail and lunged out of the water. Anemone, however, was quicker, pulling the meat just out of reach and going on with her lesson:

“You see, a crocodile doesn’t move along at an even pace; it kind of jerks forward five or six quick steps, using its tail for balance, and then stops still as a stone. But it’s not like he’s thinking or anything when he just stands there; he’s actually storing up energy for the next rush. He seems to get energy from just about anything: you, me, the wall, the ceiling, even the air; and then when he’s got it, he can run a few more steps. But sometimes, in Gulliver’s case, I think he’s just disgusted at being penned in and he’s trying to turn disgust into the killer instinct.”

Just as she was finishing, Gulliver lashed out as though trying to flip himself around, and in the process caught the lump of meat
with his tail. The cord from which the meat was hung eventually snapped, but not before Anemone was pulled up over the railing and almost into the pond. Kiku was just quick enough to catch her, and as they tottered on the edge, Gulliver and the meat disappeared beneath the surface. In a moment, a film of blood and grease began to spread across Uranus.

The Christmas tree on the dinner table was made of interlocking plastic panels bristling with hair-thin tubes filled with a glowing liquid, looking like luminous pine needles. To add to the effect, the liquid turned all the colors of the rainbow when it changed direction in the tube. Blowing on the tree set off a regular light show, and a puff of air from below created an effect not unlike a triangular cloud at sunset, with the bottom white, the middle various shades of blazing orange, and the top fading to deep red with just a hint of blue. Anemone had five bottles of Pommery champagne chilling in a tub of ice, and from the sideboard she selected two crystal glasses etched with a floral pattern. She had been to the beauty parlor, returning with her hair swept up to the right and held back with a pin embossed with an image of a naked nymph perched on a dragonfly. It was Christmas Eve.

Kiku was thinking about Christmas Eves at the orphanage. In the afternoon they used to put on red and white costumes with tassels on the cuffs and hems, and then file into the chapel to sing hymns. The curtains were always drawn, and in the darkness each child carried a single candle, tiny fingers numbed by the cold. To warm up their hands and avoid dropping the candles, they sang the hymns as loudly as they could. When the service was over, a trombone-playing Santa Claus appeared and presented each child with a paper stocking. Among the contents, Kiku could remember caramels, cocoa powder, a plastic rugby ball, a panda bear balloon, and an eraser shaped like an army tank.

Earlier in the day, Anemone had handed Kiku a package, telling him he couldn’t open it until she gave the word. Kiku had one for her as well: a book called
All about Omelettes
, with a recipe for rice omelettes in it. Having finished the rest of the cooking, she was busy with the chocolate cake. Kiku was changing into the black suit she’d bought for him when the phone rang. Anemone answered it, then handed the receiver to him with a strange look on her face. “It’s for you,” she said.

“You remember me, kid? Sorry if I was a little rough on you.” The voice, all sugar and gravel, was unforgettable: it was Mr. D.

“How’d you get this number?” asked Kiku.

“Does it matter? I hear you’re living with a real doll. I guess Hashi isn’t the only one of you boys with ‘talent,’ shall we say.”

“Good-bye,” said Kiku.

“Wait a second. I just wanted to find out if Hashi’s there.” Instantly, Kiku had a sinking feeling.

“Why should he be here? Has something happened to him?”

“Not seen him? OK, sorry to bother you,” said D, as if ready to hang up.

“Wait!” said Kiku. “What’s happened to Hashi?”

“Don’t you read the papers?” D said, and the line went dead.

When he had replaced the receiver, Kiku picked up the newspaper and started from the front page, looking for Hashi’s name. As he turned the pages, his sense of foreboding grew into a great, suffocating cloud. He reached the columns listing upcoming radio and television programs, then jumped up from his seat: beneath a picture of Hashi was a caption describing him as a singer left in a coin locker who was about to meet his mother for the first time in seventeen years.

As he hurried around the apartment getting ready to go out,
Anemone stopped him, but before she could speak, he put his hand over her mouth.

“I’ll be back, I promise. Just don’t open my present while I’m gone,” he said, ripping a steaming drumstick from the turkey on the table and stuffing it in his mouth as he headed for the door.

“Kiku!” Anemone called, but he was already gone.

The elevator door opened and he crossed the lobby at a jog, then broke into a run when he reached the street. He gnawed at the turkey as he went. Just wait for me, Hashi, he repeated to himself; I’ll help you. He ran into Yoyogi Park, straight to one particular bench in the stadium, and began to dig. In a few minutes he had extracted a package tied with heavy wax paper; inside were four shotguns and a supply of cartridges. A moment later, the guns were loaded and Kiku ran off into the night.

A faint rush of wings over the water, ducks probably, and a cry carried off by the wind. Hashi’s breath was white as he crossed the park for a second time. The bodies of two lovers kissing on a bench made a rustling sound. A cigarette dangled from the man’s hand; her hair had a scorched, dry look. Another rustling sound, their lips still stuck together, and the cigarette went out. It had begun to snow, a light, big-flaked snow so fluffy it hardly seemed to reach the ground, sticking instead to the trees, the lovers, the streetlights, the birds’ wings. A young girl came running up with a dog that started barking at him. The girl jerked the dog’s chain and apologized, then ran on. As she passed, he thought he saw a faint smile on her lips, and he suddenly wanted to call to her, to stop her, to make contact. He wanted to ask her the question that was preying on his mind: if you met the mother who abandoned you, what would you say to her?

It was Neva who had told him, three days earlier.

“It’s a done deal, Hashi, and there’s nothing we can do about it. You’ve got to go through with it. Neither of us is strong enough to stop it. I tried to think of a way out; I knew how much it would hurt you—I swear I want it to hurt me just as much. But the way I see it, we only have two choices: one is for you to act your way through the whole thing; go through with it, meet this woman—who may or may not be your mother—but tell yourself that she means nothing to you, that you just happened to have borrowed her womb for a while. No matter what she does, you don’t get angry, you don’t cry, you just stare at her with a sad look on your face, and that’s that. It’s all over in thirty minutes, and everybody goes home and forgets about it. The audience forgets, you forget, and it’s history. The other choice is for you to go with your feelings, which could be more dangerous, but in a way it could be easier, too. You just do what comes naturally if it’s too hard to control your emotions. But I doubt you’ll feel anything anyway. I bet you when you meet this woman she’ll seem just like a stranger, like anybody else you were meeting for the first time, and it won’t be such a big deal.”

But Neva, thought Hashi, understood nothing, nothing at all. She just didn’t see how it was; she couldn’t understand what hell it had been imagining the sort of woman who might be his mother. The images were never pleasant, the face never smiled, marked for life with the horror of having thrown away a child. The women who lingered at the edges of Hashi’s mind were racked by remorse, doomed to blame themselves continually, eternally. They were crazy old beggars, ugly as sin and draped in stinking rags, their bodies too riddled with disease even for dogs to feed on. In Hashi’s imagination, these broken women were forever being knocked down, bloodied, tortured until they pissed their pants—over and over again, until he felt appeased.

Afterward, he was left with gooseflesh all over his body and a nasty taste in his mouth; and somehow, in the process, he always came to pity them, to feel like weeping for them. He wanted to make their minds whole again, make them ten years younger and not so wrinkled. He wanted to pick them up from the trash heap, comb their hair, bathe them, dress them, put their shoes back on, and set them toddling on their way. He wanted to take them to a hospital and have them cured of their boils, then erase the ugly scars they left. He wanted to dry their tears and send them off for a night on the town, with a nice man to keep them company. He wanted them to find a nice place to get undressed, to show off their freshly healed skin, a little flabby perhaps but clear and pink. He even wanted the man to stick his head between their thighs, to make them groan with pleasure. And then at last he would hear it: the women laughing. Unmistakably, laughing. And that was enough to set him off again—too much, as always, for him to stand. The next moment the women were on the road back to poverty, disease, insanity. No, one thing was quite clear: Neva just didn’t know what it was like.

Still, until yesterday Hashi had thought he would go through with the broadcast anyway, confident that he could keep control of himself, confident of his acting abilities. He had even been in training, convincing himself that the woman he was going to meet, no matter what she might turn out to be like, meant nothing to him, a total stranger. Running away before the broadcast had been the last thing on his mind. Then, this morning, he’d had his first look at Kimie Numata from a distance. D had taken him in his car, and they’d watched her out shopping for her dinner. She was a big woman, tall with a thick neck. Despite the cold, she wasn’t wearing any stockings, and the plastic shopping bag she carried was cheap-looking and dirty. She’d stopped at a grocer’s
for a daikon radish and some pickles. While they were wrapping them, she picked up an orange, but reluctantly put it back on the shelf when she heard the price. She’s not exactly rich, Hashi noted.

Her hair, he could tell from the car, was dyed, and her hands were rough. She was wearing a little makeup, but not much. They followed her to a fish store where she bought one dried cod. One—so she must live alone. No husband and no kids. She chatted a while with the fishmonger who must have told a joke because he laughed at it himself. The woman didn’t laugh. Hashi looked closely to make sure: she didn’t laugh. He was trembling, on the verge of tears. He had to grab the seat to keep from shouting, he was so happy.
She hadn’t laughed
. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any longer and tried to jump out of the car, but D caught him and clapped his hand over his mouth just in time to muffle the scream: “Mother!”

Inside, he was bursting: his mother, the woman who’d given birth to him, WASN’T CRAZY! She wasn’t a beggar, or sick, or ugly. She was just a normal woman! A little down on her luck, maybe, and living alone. She was probably lonely, and she didn’t feel much like laughing. But SHE WAS JUST A WOMAN!… When he finally got himself back under control, Hashi began to feel a little scared: what if this perfect-looking mother just rejected him again? He pictured himself running to embrace her, hoping his feelings for her would be returned, only to find that she was angry, that she wanted to push him away—the thought left him dazed.

That afternoon, he’d slipped out of a bathroom window to escape D’s guard and hurried to the woman’s apartment. She wasn’t home, and he had ended up in this park, crossing it in search of another house in the quiet neighborhood beyond it.
By the time he found the gate and rang the bell, the snow made things hard to see. A young woman came out to ask what he wanted, and Hashi answered in a mechanical tone, as if a tiny robot were speaking from the back of his throat:

“My name is Hashio Kuwayama. I’m a singer. I’m seventeen years old. I was found seventeen years ago in a coin locker in Yokohama along with a bunch of bougainvillea. A year ago I saw the lady who lives here on TV and she said she once met a woman who left a baby and some bougainvillea in a locker. She was in prison at the time. I want to ask her about that woman; I think she’s my mother. I know it’s late, but I’m afraid it has to be now.”