The Electrical Field (14 page)

“Chisako!” Yano’s voice was not loud but it stopped my heart for a second, the ominous warning in it. But Chisako ignored him, still giggling, trying to catch her breath. The sound of his voice I could not forget; like thunder gathering
its charge. A second later he slammed his fist down on the table with such force that books fell, the floor even shifted, and the withered blossoms shook; a few petals drifted down in the aftermath. He was crazed then, his long, greasy hair fallen over his eyes. I feared for Chisako, but she remained calm as ever. The laughter had vanished, and she now appeared almost solemn.

“Gomen, Masa-chan,” she whispered, as if to a favourite child. “Forgive me.” She went to him, smoothing his hair back from his face with surprising tenderness. I saw what was between them. It was the only time I ever heard her call him by his given name, and in that intimate moment I longed to disappear.

Despite my protests, Yano insisted on walking me back across the field. We went in silence for several moments, with him lost in his thoughts. He erupted loudly into conversation, as he often did.

“You learn quick, Saito-san.”

“You were right. Your wife is an excellent teacher.”

“Thanks for coming,” he said. He seemed to be looking at me, but it was difficult to tell as we fell into a shadowy stretch.

“Not at all.”

“My wife is lonely,” he said, in a quiet tone. “She hasn’t made friends. Her English isn’t so good.”

I was about to remark that her English was, in fact, excellent, but stopped myself. Instead I said: “It was kind of you to think of us, both Chisako and myself.” It later struck me as an odd thing for me to say. “I had a nice time,” I added.

“She’s … difficult,” Yano said, pursuing his own thoughts. I could see his broad hands flexing in front of him, that frustration I’d seen in him when words failed. “Mon ku, mon ku. Complains and complains.” We’d stopped in the middle of the field.

“This is fine,” I said. “I’m fine now,” indicating that he could turn back. “Thank you again.” There was his large, ever-gleaming face illuminated by a fragment of moonlight. I recognized the anger lurking in his furrowed brow.

“You know, Saito-san. I do what I can,” he said, one fist working into the palm of the other hand. “I work hard. Try to change things for us nihonjin. It’s important to try, don’t you think?”

“Yes, yes,” I murmured, in as soothing a voice as I could, anxious as I was to get home, away from him. Try, he’d said to try. I envisioned the one word on the page in his typewriter, gathering dust, spelled and misspelled. I felt apprehensive standing there with him, I don’t know why.

“There were others who tried, but they gave up, years ago, Saito-san. I won’t give up.”

He turned towards Mackenzie Hill, the darker shadow of it in the sky, far off and yet so large. The moon hung flimsily over it, a white light dully glowing. “If things had been different, if it weren’t for the war, I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing. Pressing collars and cuffs all day, cleaning other people’s dirty clothes. Would I, Saito-san? Would I?” He wanted an answer; demanded it.

“No, no,” I replied, again as calmly as I could. But I did not believe it. Not for an instant. What would you be doing, I wanted to demand back of him. What?

He started walking again, striding as he spoke. “Same with your papa, sweeping up on that chicken farm. Your brother, all those years. We’d be doing something else. Something important, ne? You too, Saito-san. All of us. We were too good. We were doing too well, so they had to set us back, didn’t they?”

Thankfully, we just then reached my front porch and I scurried up the steps. He was waiting for some response, anxious that his words not be lost to the darkness between us. I heard his shoe tapping in the snow at the foot of my steps. The sound of his fist working into his palm, dry and rough as sandpaper.

I gave a forced sigh. “Well,” I said, groping for words to placate him. “What’s past is past.” A meaningless phrase, but it seemed to frustrate Yano even more.

“No, Saito-san. Never say that. Never.” He sounded ominous again. But then he stopped himself; seemed to pull himself up. He half smiled, tiredly, no longer daunting. Just another man, a shambling figure in the night. “Well, Saito-san, good-night.” He gave a wave and we both turned from each other. Then, as I was about to close my door, he called back, as he always did.

“Tomorrow at seven, Saito-san! The meeting at school!”

When I shut the door and switched off the porch light, I found Stum alone in the dark, sitting by the window in Papa’s wheelchair. In those days he shared my habit of staring out into the field, watching the goings-on. “What meeting, ne-san?” he asked. He must have heard Yano’s shouts. I could not see Stum’s face, but often it seemed he could be so transparent in his boyish wonderings. I could see the
mechanisms in his head and heart clicking and chugging along, those intricate engineering drawings he sketched in his notebooks come to life. He played with the chair’s wheels, turning them, wheeling back and forth.

I placed a firm hand on his shoulder, stilling him, wincing at the welts being ground into my carpet. “Oh, nothing,” I muttered. “Some little meeting at the school. Nothing you’d be interested in.”

“Papa said it’s about money from the government for us. For being in the camp.” Stum had such a curiosity then; his voice conveyed a light trusting quality. “Papa says it’s stupid. Is it, ne-san?”

“I suppose it is,” I said. I felt suddenly tired. I wanted nothing more than to fold myself into my fresh sheets and sleep. I yawned and indicated that I was retiring.

“Are you going, ne-san? To the meeting?” he persisted in that youthful way.

“Oh, no,” I laughed. “A waste of time. Nothing will come of it.”

As I lay in bed that night, in my crisp clean sheets, I was suddenly wide awake and wondering about what Yano had said, his rantings, his stacks of papers and books, his meetings. That one word on his typewriter, again and again. Abrogation. I knew what Yano took it to mean. Of rights, abrogation of rights. Blaming everything on the war, the camps. It was too easy to see things in such simple terms: cowardly, even, not to face your own personal troubles. Instead, to air them to the world and expect it to pay attention. In a way, pitiful.

The time I spent day in and day out, remembering this,
remembering that, or not remembering at all—this was how my time went by. It brought me comfort. I felt sorry for Yano as I lay in my warm bed; he had no peace of mind, none at all. In the end, I suppose, I accepted my lot as he never could. I felt sorry for Chisako too, to be with Yano in our little neighbourhood, shy and alone; no doubt missing Japan, though she’d said otherwise.

I didn’t think of Yano’s meeting the next day as I went through the routine of my chores. If it hadn’t been for Stum’s mentioning it again at dinner, it would not have crossed my mind at all.

“Will anybody go to that meeting, ne-san?” he asked, food dropping from his chopsticks. In those days, much as he kept to himself, staying in his room with his drawings and studies, Stum could ask many questions, always expecting me to know the answer. I’d summon up the best response I could, and pronounce it with all the authority of an elder sister.

“One or two at the most,” I said, with a little toss of my head. Knowing Yano, he would have sent out countless flyers all over. I remembered that open phone book in his living-room—he’d picked out the nihonjin names to make his list, that was what it was. Since the end of the war, nihonjin were scattered all over. No longer any reason to settle together in certain blocks of the city, as if in a camp of our own making.

It was shortly after dinner when I felt a fullness in my stomach that only a brisk walk would dissipate. I found myself near the middle-school grounds and happened to spot a single classroom lit up. As I neared the window, I caught sight of Yano standing at the front of the class, and
in the first row were two men I took to be nisei, uncomfortably seated in those child-sized desks, still wearing their coats. Yano was gesturing emphatically as if to a room full of people, as unkempt as ever, with a stack of papers on the desk before him. I was surprised, and yet not, to find Chisako absent.

“Anne! Anne!” I looked up from where I was squatting in the garden to find Stum standing by the back door rather stiffly. His calling me by my Christian name was a warning. He cleared his throat noisily and gave me a strained glance. “Anne, could you come inside, please? Someone is here.” Through the grey-shadowed screen, I discerned a tall silhouette. Quickly I got up, slipped into my shoes stocking-less, and entered the house behind my brother.

We sat in a circle, Stum, the police detective, and I. I was a little nervous; a lick of excitement, perhaps fear, ran the length of me as I watched the man lean his large frame into my armchair, the one whose cushions I’d plumped up just that morning. He cradled a small black notebook and held a tiny pen in his oversized hands. We so rarely had guests, let alone hakujin.

The man, Detective Rossi, raised his pen to us in a salute, sat tall in my armchair as if it were a saddle a little small for him. He was not that young, I saw, though his hair was thick and full and without grey, running like a sprouting hedge across his forehead. Perhaps ten years older than Stum, at the most. A little younger than me. I looked for signs of unnatural colour, where he might have used something like that Grecian Formula, for his face betrayed his age.

“Ma’am, tell me. How well—”

“Please,” I interrupted. “It’s Miss Saito.” I could not endure being called
ma’am
this and
ma’am
that in my own home. Stum flashed me a look, a look that said
how dare you
?

“Please,” I said, leaning forward in my seat as graciously as I could in my nervousness, “continue.”

“How well did you know the deceased, Mrs. Yano?”

“She was my friend, of course.”

“When was the last time you saw her?”

“Well, let me see.” I tapped my fingers across my lips and ran through a flurry of dates in my head. I must have been muttering, for when I looked up the detective had stopped writing and was staring at me. Stum looked dark and small beside this man, his colourless eyes radiating kindly concern. Stum had his eye on me, waiting for me to mortify myself before our guest. Pretending a dread of it, but deep down looking forward to it. I had an urge to run to the bathroom mirror to see myself, what could be read on my face.

“Which is it, Miss Saito? Monday, the fifteenth of May, or Tuesday, the sixteenth?” He was tapping his pen on the arm of the chair.

I felt a draft on my knees and glanced down to see my pale, veined legs exposed without stockings. How hideous they looked, how mottled and old. I pulled my skirt over my knees. “It was the Tuesday then,” I answered.

“That was the day before Mrs. Yano was murdered,” he said, in his indifferent way.

“Murdered?” No sooner had I let that escape than I felt like an idiot.

The detective looked up, his forehead crinkling with four straight creases parallel to the hedge of his hairline. They disappeared in an instant. “Well, it doesn’t look like it was an accident. It wasn’t suicide.”

“Of course not. It’s just the word … it’s upsetting, isn’t it?” My face flushed hot and cold. The word stung me. Up until this point I’d heard, read in the newspapers:
dead, deceased, shot
, but never
murdered.
The violence of it. The severed yellow police ribbon dangling from trees in the parking lot, the trampled blood dust came back to me; the streak of it on Sachi’s finger. Stum was watching me.

“Did Mrs. Yano express to you any fears or anxieties about anything? Anyone?”

“No, not really.”

“Miss Sa-to, am I pronouncing that right?”

“Sa-i-to,” I corrected.

“Miss Saito, did she confide in you about her relationship with this man who was found with her, Mr. Spears?”

It was at that exact moment that I noticed an inch-long section on my leg where the vein was actually protruding, a bluish worm halfway down my calf. It seemed to vibrate grotesquely. Incredibly, it was a part of me, my own body. How long had it been there? It seemed undeniably a sign. I closed my eyes for a few seconds to regain my composure, then opened them to find both Stum and the detective once again watching me closely. I had to pause to place myself, to register the room I was in, one that could hold these two faces side by side.

“Miss Saito?”

“Anne?” Stum kicked the side of my shoe with his.

“Yes, yes, don’t rush me,” I muttered. They both drew back from me.

I took a deep breath and tried for calm, but I could feel that my lips had got ahead of me, as usual. I slowed them down.

“Ma’am?”

“Yes,” I said simply.

“Yes?”

“Mrs. Yano and her friend were having … an affair.” As I said the word, I stroked the raised worm encased in my leg and shivered. The detective would have caught that, the telltale tremor.

Yet he seemed unaffected by my revelation. Had he heard this before? From other neighbours? From Keiko and Tom? Sachi? How many knew? He began to tap his loafer with his pen.

“And what about Mr. Yano? Did you know him?”

“Yes,” I said. “I did.”

“He was involved in some political activities, wasn’t he?”

“I suppose so,” I said. “I wouldn’t know about those things.”

“When did you last see Mr. Yano?”

The dates seemed to blur in my mind. For what did dates mean to me when my days were all the same, all routine, I told myself; every day is a Saturday; I couldn’t be held responsible. I shook my head regretfully. “I can’t say for certain,” I answered. “Several days earlier, I suppose. At least.”

“Tell me, Miss Saito, have you known the Yanos for very long?”

“Since they moved in. About four years ago.”

“Miss Saito, have you ever seen Mr. Yano become angry or violent?”

Strangely, that evening years earlier was all that came to mind. When we three, Chisako, Yano, and I, stood admiringly before that pathetic arrangement of half-dead flowers. As long ago as it was, it was fresher in my mind than any recent encounter with Yano. I wondered what this was, this trick of memory. But there was Chisako, her hair oddly cropped as it was then, clutching her side, still giggling at whatever Yano had said. And there I was, unsmiling, tentative. Wondering what I was doing there, out of my home, away from my armchair, away from my window. Yet somehow enthralled. “Chisako!” Yano had boomed. Then the fist, that crashing fist.