The Electrical Field (15 page)

“Miss Saito?”

I felt the kick of Stum’s foot against mine, jolting me into the present. “Anne?” Stum was staring at me.

“Should I repeat the question, Miss Saito?”

“No,” I finally said. “No.”

“You remember the question?”

“Of course I do,” I said. “I’ve never seen Mr. Yano violent.” The detective scribbled something into his little notebook.

“Shouldn’t you talk to their neighbours?” I pointed vaguely out the window, across the field to the house beside the Yanos’.

The detective turned his earnest eyes to me. “Is there someone in particular you think I should talk to, Miss Saito?”

“No, no,” I answered quickly. “I just wondered, that’s all.”

“And you,” he said, turning to Stum. “Were you acquainted with any members of the Yano family?”

Stum shrugged and sank farther down in the couch, playing the sullen teenager once more, ridiculous at his age. “Not much. Not like her,” he said, wanting to slough things off on me.

“Is there anything you can tell me that might shed light on the deaths or the disappearance of Mr. Yano and his children?”

Stum blinked his eyes slowly, as if each time he might not open them again. “Nope,” he said. Then smiled a lazy smile at the detective, who got up, brushed off his pants with one hand.

“Anything at all? You’re sure?”

Stum nodded, keeping his lazy smirk.

“Fine.” The detective seemed satisfied. “Now, just a few routine questions.” He gave a little smile. “Anyone else live here with the two of you?”

“No,” I said, pleasantly. I felt Stum’s foot bumping mine.

“Ne-san!”

The detective looked from me to Stum and back again.

“I mean, yes, there is,” I stammered. “Our father, upstairs. I forgot to say … because he’s very old, you see, and he barely …”

“But he still lives here, does he?”

“Yes. I only meant that—”

“And how old is he?”

“Eighty-six.”

“How long have you each lived here?”

“All my life,” said Stum, raising his hands and letting them drop. He turned to look out the window.

“Don’t be silly,” I scolded. “Only since you were thirteen.”

“Twelve.”

“So, how long is that?” The detective remained patient.

“Twenty-one years this September,” I said softly. How long. It was painful to say aloud, a blur of time. Just numbers, telling nothing of the tick tick of it. What did it mean to this stranger, this detective who was passing through a single moment of it? And yet I knew I would be reviewing it over years to come, asking myself: What did he think of us? Did he believe what we told him?

“You’ve been here the longest of all your neighbours, then.”

I nodded. The detective wandered to the window. I felt the heat draining from my legs, the circulation waning.

“You must have seen the neighbourhood go up, house by house.” He pointed across the way. “You must have watched every one of those families move in.” He seemed to be scrutinizing my face, to see my response.

“I suppose.”

“School wasn’t even built until ’65.” He was squinting to the south, where the electrical field became the football field farther up. “This is the old vet’s farmhouse, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said, thinking of the Yanos’ neighbour; she’d called it a farmhouse too.

“I grew up not far from here,” he explained, pointing north. “On the other side,” he said, half to himself. He meant the Italian blocks, where large elderly women in black dresses sat on kitchen chairs on their porches or sidewalks.

“When we were kids, we’d go down to the creek.” The view out the window, though it was the opposite direction from the creek, must have called up memories for him.

“We’d skip off classes, go down there … do things we weren’t supposed to.” He winked at Stum. Without missing a beat, Stum nodded back. Man to man, as they say. I tried to imagine this detective as a boy, his body lanky, with his bushy head of hair and an eager instead of careful face, lying on the bank of the creek, all stretched out, a cigarette in his hand like Sachi. The kind of boy who’d have taken her down there after school, then ignored her the next day in the hall.

And here was my brother, now an experienced man who gave back an assured nod to the detective’s suggestive remark. Nowadays, he must understand everything.

“That’s a long time in one place,” the detective was saying.

“You don’t notice,” Stum mumbled.

As I held open the screen door for him, the detective paused, his face a foot up from mine. “Miss Sa-i-to,” he pronounced carefully, with another smile that didn’t stay. “I wonder. Did you see anything from your window that day? That Wednesday?” He meant the day Chisako and Mr. Spears were found, before the news broke.

“Not that I can recall,” I responded. I glanced at my chair by the window, its worn seat and armrests.

The detective stared at his car parked out front, dwarfed by the towers. “It’s possible we’ll never find them,” he said quietly. “In cases like this. People just disappear and—” The last of what he said was sheared off by a car speeding past
on the concession road. I made a useless gesture for him to repeat himself, but by then he’d bid us goodbye and the door was flapping shut.

Stum and I huddled silently at the corner of the window, the way we always did after a rare guest left. The detective sat in his car, busily writing more notes, his chin squashed to his chest. When he glanced up at the house he may have spotted us as we quickly stepped back from the window, a pair of clowns. Finally he drove away, leaving a cloud of dust from the gravel shoulder in his wake.

“The way you behave!” I exclaimed, walking away from Stum and the window.

“We didn’t give away anything, did we, ne-san?” He balanced on the ledge, legs folded girlishly. “We protected our own, didn’t we?”

“What do you mean, give away? Protected our own? You sound like—”

Stum clucked his tongue. “Like Yano?”

“You can’t believe he’d do this.”

Stum ignored me, swivelling to look out the window, then swivelling back to me. “You wanted him to ask more questions, didn’t you? You were disappointed not to have her stories to tell, all the details, weren’t you?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Don’t be disrespectful, not to Chisako-san.”

“Isn’t it true, ne-san?”

“Just because I don’t have anything to hide. Not like you!”

“Me?”

“You know something, don’t you?”

“What are you saying, ne-san?”

“Why didn’t you tell the detective?”

“Why didn’t you?”

“If you know something, you must tell the authorities, little brother.” I watched him shift uneasily. “You’ve been talking to Yano, haven’t you? That’s where you got that sticking together rubbish, isn’t it?” Stum seemed unperturbed. “He’s been saying that to me for years. And you take it all in, like a fool, don’t you?”

Stum turned back to the window, silent and thoughtful as he stared across the field at the empty Yano house. “Yes,” he said softly, after moments passed. “He was my friend.”

The way he said this, so convincingly. I was shocked. Why had I not seen signs of this friendship? Barely a smile exchanged, a pause between them on the street, in the field. How could Stum have hidden this from me? Why?

“How could you be friends with such a person? The other day you called him kamikaze!” I accused him childishly.

“What do you mean, ‘such a person’? You’re the one who says he’s done nothing.”

“He’s a weirdo. He smells, he’s dirty! He shames us all. Even his wife.”

“His wife has shamed him! She deserved it!” Stum rose angrily from the window-ledge, his fist pounded the back of my armchair. Before I knew what I was doing, I heard the smack of my hand against his cheek, clear and stark. He stood back, his face shuddering with the realization of what I’d done, in his eyes that child’s look of betrayal I’d seen when Papa once struck him. More a child than Sachi, who’d been callous to it, unsurprised by the violence in me when
I’d raised my hand to her. I retreated to the chesterfield and sank down.

The echo of our shouts hung in the air. Upstairs Papa was calling out feebly, Nani-yo? Nani-yo? It was so faint, as if he were singing.

“I want the boy and girl to be safe. That’s all,” I said quietly. I clung to that thought amid everything.

“Is it, ne-san? Is it really?”

“Of course.”

Suddenly he was calm. “I don’t think so. I think you wish them all dead, even that Nakamura woman,” he declared. My striking him down had made him rise up mean, almost menacing. “You want that poor girl to have only you to turn to.”

“Is that what you think of me? That I’m the monster?”

“Why not?” He reeled. “You’d do anything to stop me from having a life besides you and Papa. I can’t even have a friend to myself. Even Yano!”

“You sneak out like an animal at night and stay out till morning! I don’t stop you!”

“Now I see. Now I see! You’re jealous, ne-san. Admit it!”

“Just tell me, once and for all: What do you know?”

“What do you know?”

“I don’t know a thing. Not a thing.”

“Stop playing innocent!” He seemed to charge at me like a heated animal, and I reared back, warding him off with raised arms. That seemed to enrage him more, but he fell away. “Stop pretending! You’re formidable, ne-san! Formidable!”

Formidable. I didn’t know he knew the word. He looked stupidly victorious having used it.

“All right, all right,” I said, patting the air down around us. “I only meant … you keep saying it’s Yano who did it. How do you know? How could it be? Is he capable? You say the boy and girl are—”

“Dead.” He seemed to blow out all his rage through that one word, then went limp.

“They can’t be. Just because you say!” How irrational I sounded, like Sachi brimming with desperate puppy love. Like the girl in my romantic imaginings who dreads the boy leaving her, taking the part of her that has become his.

“They’re waiting until it’s safe to come out.” I said this with a conviction that surprised even myself; in the same unwavering tone as Sachi had used to convince me.

“You should know.” He gave a tinny, heartless laugh.

“You sound like an old record. Over and over. Never telling me what you mean.” But I didn’t want to know. I edged towards the kitchen. The white light of the cloud-filled sky was blinding and cold before the window. It cast an eerie light into our living-room, as if Stum and I were at the helm of a spaceship approaching a strange planet.

“Because, ne-san.” He softened as he came near, with that tentative, shy look that used to come over him when he wanted up onto my lap. His voice low. “Because you were the last one to see Chisako before she died, weren’t you? Didn’t she confide in you as usual, ne-san? Didn’t she?”

“I don’t think I was the last—”

“What did she tell you that day? She must have suspected something.”

I was shaking my head. “No, no, no,” I repeated, unclear about what I was refusing. “There must have been others.
There was the hakujin neighbour too. Chisako must have spoken to her that afternoon, long after I—”

“And what did you tell her, once she confided in you? How did you answer?”

I walked away from him, swung the back door, and stepped out to my garden. I had to clear my head but the air pressed closer outside than in. Stum was confusing me, spinning a web around me, making up ridiculous stories. It was merely his revenge for every single thing, for being the baby brother who was born in the camp, too early, too late. Who had nothing, no one to blame for his sufferings, for his shortcomings.

I lay down for hours, from afternoon through evening, with Eiji’s photo clutched to my chest, neglecting my chores. As I tried to sort out the things that had been said, dust was settling on ledges, in corners, everywhere, so dirty. It was that woman, I suddenly realized, his something-wonderful-has-happened woman, who was influencing Stum, making him accuse me in this way. Half of me would want to demand that he bring this new woman in his life to me, so I could see for myself that she was the instigator. For it seemed his cruelty had only surfaced recently, and perhaps it was more than Chisako’s death that was causing this tension between us. Bringing such thoughts into my sweet brother’s head. Not that I believed him to be an innocent, but he never would have said such things to me before.

As I looked at my photo of Eiji, into his calm, knowing eyes, his smile reassured me, and I could not help seeing how ridiculous Stum was; I too had to smile. I began to laugh then, uncontrollably, from the tension, I suppose. I laughed
all the harder hoping Stum might hear me in the next room. But when I stopped there was silence down the hall. Perhaps he had already prowled out once again, to see her.

When I got up, Stum’s door was ajar, the room dark. His pants lay crumpled in the middle of the floor, the pants I’d ironed earlier that week. I stooped to pick them up, lining up the seams from the crotch to the ankles and stroking the creases out; I draped them over his chair. Papa’s mumblings went in one ear and out the other as I fed him; even though, strangely enough, he’d begun babbling more and more about Yano in the last two days, it did not interest me. After I cleaned him up for the night, I returned to my room without going to the window downstairs. I slid into bed without washing, without brushing my teeth, and I felt the grime of the day coating my body. Yet I did nothing. It was just me alone, with Eiji clutched to my breast, as always. I closed my eyes, waiting for sleep to overtake me. Yano’s voice drifted back.
My wife is lonely
, he’d said. Lonely.

Stum brought his special friend in the next evening, without warning, though I was not surprised. It was as if I’d expected it. I was in the kitchen preparing dinner, and somehow I had known to slice ample portions of meat and to steam an extra half-cup of rice. The day had passed slowly, dripping into its large empty bucket that somehow magically grew full. I’d succumbed to waiting by the window, waiting for Stum, for Sachi, but no one came by. Keiko’s car passed early in the morning, on her way to work, I presumed. Even Papa was quiet. At noon children flooded the field momentarily, then vanished, their cries and laughter melting to echoes. Late
afternoon, I heard the door being opened and held two instants longer than it usually took Stum to step clumsily inside. I did not look up hearing the shuffling and general commotion in the hallway, then twinned footsteps approaching into the living-room. Stum’s stockinged feet appeared on the linoleum before me as I sliced chicken into bite-sized pieces.