The Electrical Field (2 page)

“You snagged them,” I said, examining the stockings. This kind, thick yet fine at the toes and heels, was not to be found in the stores any more. I’d bought two dozen of them when we lived in the city, before we’d moved here, and taken out a new pair every two years over the past twenty.

“Go check on Papa,” I ordered. “See if he wants dessert.” Stum could be an obedient little brother at times. He and his lopsided cheeks and his tiny eyes, and his legs that met from their tops to the knees, so you’d hear the
vim vim
of his
trousers as he walked. He’d be turning thirty-three this year but he was still my baby brother, my ototo-chan.

At my window I noticed that the Yanos’ car was still not there. At the Nakamura house, farther down, the drapes were now drawn and their car was parked in the driveway. I thought of Sachi inside, waiting under its grey roof. I took one last look before finally closing the drapes for the night.

I stepped out onto the porch in the morning and picked up the newspaper. I treasured this hour in the fresh early air, Stum gone and the routine not yet started up with Papa—feeding him, cleaning him. When, without a glance at the world’s dreary front-page news, I could, at my leisure, turn to my word jumble and my crossword at the back of the want ads, near the funnies. I was not far into it when I looked up to find Sachi racing through the field towards me. She was screaming something but I couldn’t make out the words. I folded up my newspaper and set it aside, trying to resist the chaos she was bringing. I could not help seeing then that the Yanos’ car was not back, and the light from last night still burned in the living-room. Sachi flew up my steps, two at a time. She grabbed my arms, screaming in my face: “Tam! Where’s Tam!” Her hair swarmed round her unwashed face; her breath was rotten.

I pushed her away. “Shush, shush, now,” I said, but she only screeched louder.

“Where is he? We have to find him!” She was hysterical. “He could be down there!” She pointed to the back of the house, her hand shaking, her whole body shaking; down at the creek, she meant. I drew back. I could hardly stand her
clawing me like this; where was Keiko, her own mother? She should have known better, she should have sensed what was rising in me, but she was coming closer, about to grab at me again, and I slapped her, not hard, but enough. As if I’d been waiting for an excuse for some time. In all her confusion, she sensed that too. The air carried the sound, the smack of it. The sleeve of her top slipped down her shoulder, exposing the brown nut of a newly sprouted breast, her hair hiding her eyes. She wasn’t the untouched child I’d sat with here yesterday; I had no wish to soothe her, to comfort her. Tam would be back in no time, with the others. No time at all. She just couldn’t stand the fact of them gone somewhere together, a family, without her. I almost said so, but didn’t; I bit my lip.

“You don’t care about him,” she said coolly. “Maybe he’s dead and won’t you be glad,” she seethed. She ran along the side of the house and down towards the creek, then turned back. “But he’s not! He’s not! You’ll see!” she cried.

“Sachi,” I called out. “Come back here, now!” I shouted, but the words seemed to drop to my lap, little fish leaping from a tank. She’d got me riled up in spite of myself. Hurriedly, I slipped into my shoes, calling up to Papa, though he couldn’t have heard. I headed down to the creek after her.

I ran, my feet tangling in the uncut grass, until I reached the trees that thickened by the creek and fanned the water, and the bushes hung in bunches over the edge. I thought I caught a snatch of black hair through leaves, a shadow sliding over the dirt path that followed the creek. I stopped; aside from my own heaving breath, there was only the held-in whisper of the woods I knew so well. My feet were hot and swelling inside my shoes, my stockings snagged. I
touched a hand to my face to find it curiously damp; I was grateful no one could see. Mosquitoes circled close even as I swatted them, drawn in by the sweetness of my body, my blood. I took a last look through the bushes at the the creek, the murky water quite still except for circles of current tracing the surface from its underside and pinpricks of insects that touched down here and there. I called out. At last I spied her lying by a weeping willow that leaned off the bank, her thin stomach wriggling to catch some breath. She looked pale and sickly: a strange little island there. Her eyes were black holes, shot out by the sun. But her face strained up, her back arched up too, up to the burning bright sky. Then she cupped one hand over that nut of a breast.

“He’s not here” came out of her small, cold lips. “Go back. You can’t stay,” she hissed. “Not this time,” and her eyes stayed with me, as if to ward me off, as if telling me she’d found me out. Then she curled up, wrapping her raggedy arms across her chest, pulling up her thin legs so they stuck out at her sides. She made me think of those straddling insects you often saw here this time of year, with their jutting wings, getting ready to mate in mid-air. Abruptly, she jumped up onto the bank and danced across the creek on stones; faced me from the other side with the sun blazing behind. Now her face wasn’t pale any more; it was tanned, too tanned in this light, her eyes gone gun-metal. She was that urchin again, belonging to no one.

“He’s not gone,” she called across, all the hiss let out. “But you don’t care. You don’t give a shit about any of them.”

For a moment I didn’t reply. She was hysterical, she made no sense at all. I could have said something, something to
calm, something to hurt back. She was a girl, after all, and I was a grown woman. “I’ll say a namu amida butsu for Tamio that he’s all right” was all the answer I gave, ignoring the strange and angry look she cast me. I dabbed my forehead with a crusty tissue I’d finally found tucked up my sleeve. “You’ll be late for class,” I said stupidly, as if she cared about school, and headed back to the house.

When I climbed my front steps, I saw I’d left the door wide open. Anyone could have walked right in, taken whatever there was to take. I made a mental note to go and dust off Buddha’s figure dark in the altar in the dining-room; to say a prayer, needless as it seemed. It would be the first time in a long, long while. I would do it for Sachi’s sake, in spite of how she’d spoken to me. Papa was calling for me; I could hear him even through the screen, that low intermittent groan that must have started long before my return. I left my mud-chunked shoes on the porch. Chotto matte—in a minute, in a minute, I thought, sliding my feet into cool slippers. The groaning went on. Everything had the dull sheen of the indoors you see after coming in from bright sunlight. I made my way to the kitchen and drank a cool glass of tap water before heading upstairs.

I hesitated the slightest bit at his door before stepping in; it happened every once in a while. His eyes shifted to me as I stood just inside the doorway.

“Nani?” I finally said, coming up to the bed. What, what? Knowing what he wanted, making him wait a moment more. He closed his eyes and I moved in, all shameful efficiency: I yanked back the sheet from his shrunken body; I
hitched down his pyjama bottoms without flinching at the sight or the smell, unpinned, wiped, and changed him. He gave a thread-fine shudder at my final movement: tucking the cooled sheet back over him. His mystery, power, gone.

Downstairs, at my window, a lawn of silvery fine dust had already appeared on the ledge I’d wiped just yesterday. There was still no sign of Yano’s Pontiac. I reminded myself to drain the soybeans I’d been soaking overnight for dinner, and to slice and salt the cucumber for sunomono.

The beans had bloated up to the surface, along with the moulting husks, tiny corpses. I poured them into a sieve, all clustered against one another like a hive. I shivered at the sight. It was turning into the kind of day, I felt, when nothing looked quite the same. I dropped the beans into the sink, and went back to the front window.

There she was, my Sachi, crossing the field as I’d seen her on a hundred other days when she’d been skipping school to run off with Tam. Already wise to life, wiser about its possibilities than I’d ever been. I could never fool her, never keep her with my silly folding cranes or my heaven-earth-and-man flower arrangements, my pretend readings of tea leaves. I could never be angry with her for long. No wonder her mother didn’t know what to do with her.

She was halfway across the field when she turned as if she knew I was looking out, though with the sun casting a glare over the window she couldn’t possibly see me. Her hair was a dark blot, nothing blacker on that field. I came out onto my porch. She raised her hand to her mouth and I saw there was a cigarette clipped between her fingers. She looked foolish and mean, her one shoulder bare where her top
slipped down—a summer top, too thin, too skimpy when it was only the middle of May. I fought the feeling welling in me as I saw her tiny hip jut through the cotton of her skirt; I detested that stance with everything in me. She puffed furiously in quick spurts, a little engine revving. All of a sudden she froze, spotting something where the glinting electrical towers marched like giants past the houses and into the distance. Then she ran. She stopped short at the base of a tower, the north one, closest to Mackenzie Hill. So small against the giant, yet I could read everything there in her posture, her turned hip, the way she held her head. Again she glanced back, daring me, knowing I wouldn’t step down from my porch to stop her. She swung herself up the first rung. She was climbing, a slow struggle because the rungs were diagonal and widely spaced even for her gangly legs. Her skirt hitched up to expose the gleaming white of her underpants, white as the clouds.

I put my hand to my mouth. I was about to utter something. An awkward sound? Her name? “Get down here this instant,” like the concerned mother I could never be? I held my hand there as she struggled higher and higher, higher than I’d seen her climb with Tam, up into the cut of the sun. Then she stopped and leaned her skinny neck and shoulders towards the creek where it curved down behind Mackenzie Hill, holding on with one arm wrapped around a steel beam. I knew she was looking for Tam, and hoping he’d be looking for her. I felt wet at one corner of my lip—my mouth was still open—and I knew the word just as my lips pushed against one another: “Baka!” I cried. Papa’s word. Stupid! Get down! I’d taken another step when shouts from the
far side of the field drowned me out. It was him, Tom, Nakamura-san, her father, on his day off, striding across the field, stopping himself from running. “Hey, hey!” he yelled, the way he always did, without using her name, as if she were anyone to him.

He arrived at the base of the tower, and once she saw him there she gave in instantly. As if all she’d wanted, all along, was for him to come for her. I knew it, for hadn’t I felt that impulse, used that child’s ruse, myself? She tugged at her skirt and began climbing down, almost daintily now. But just when she was about to reach him, she balked. She screamed and pointed past my house towards the creek. I heard Tam’s name cried out, and her legs bounced, poised to climb again. Then he grabbed her. I’d come down my lawn by then, crossed the road, and as I hurried onto the field I saw that man’s brute fist grabbing Sachi’s skirt, pulling her as she screamed and screamed, her eyes darting and blinking all at once, like the light inside a siren. Once he got her, he slung her over his shoulder as if she were one of his two-by-fours to be nailed down in his unfinished basement, only she wasn’t a piece of board, she flopped and kicked. He nodded at me as I ran up, some sort of polite gesture. His face was heated, red, his eyes only half rising from the ground as he kept his balance. “Sorry, Miss Saito,” he called, and as he swung towards their house, Sachi glared at me through the web of her hair. She raised a finger in a rude gesture I’d seen other schoolchildren use with one another. “He’s back there!” she screamed. “Go look! Go! For me!” And she strained over her father’s shoulder, tethered there, almost diving into the field, except for the strong carpenter’s hand that clamped her back.

In a few moments they’d disappeared into their house, and I was left standing alone as usual, the ridiculous one. The girl’s cries rang in my ears and I half turned to head for the creek, but I stopped and marched myself back to the house. I bristled at Tom calling me Miss Saito, like some old thing, some old schoolmarm, when he could hardly be much younger. Even Yano called me Saito-san. I shook my head thinking of what Tom would have to contend with once he got her home. Hands grabbing at door handles left and right, holding on with all her might; legs kicking and banging, fighting him in his arms with each step he took down the hall to her room.

It was half-past eleven. Already the sun was overhead. They were somewhere: Yano and Chisako, driving with Tam and Kimi in back, a family. Down a pretty country road, green, with tips of spring colour sprouting in the ditches, somewhere together, for once. A little holiday on a whim, a day or two taken off work, the light in the living-room forgotten, who knows what else. I might have even urged Yano to do just that, had I thought of it.

More chores, and at last I sat down to read my paper, folded as I’d left it. I opened the paper and there it was. I remained calm, numb to it, I suppose. I ran my hand over the picture of Chisako, smudging it with my fingertips, which were suddenly damp. Awful picture. It was her, but before. Beside her, a hakujin, a white man, behind big horn-rimmed glasses so you couldn’t really see him. Couldn’t see his deep-set eyes, or his wavy hair that was dark but not quite black, or how tall he was. Her Mr. Spears.
Woman, man shot in lovers’ lane
, it said.
In the chest, both of them, him once, her twice.
Husband, twin son and daughter missing.
It blurred as I tried to read on.
Found by boy and his dog Wednesday evening.
Inked in thick and black, their names for strangers to see:
Mrs. Chisako Yano, Mr. Donaldson Spears. Tamio and Kimiko, Mr. Masashi Yano.
Masashi. Who called him Masashi?

The field was silent. Children should have been out by now, on their way home for lunch, calling to one another, birds weeping to be fed. Something was wrong. Come out, come out, I wanted to call. Across the way, the rows of houses were straighter than ever, drapes drawn except for one. Closed eyes. Cold shoulders. Where were the children? No jeers, not even a
hey, chink lady.
Deserted. Nothing.