The Electrical Field (28 page)

“Sachi, I—”

“Don’t you trust me?” Her lips tickled my ear. She relaxed her body into mine, willing herself to be patient.

“I trust you,” I said.

“Then take me!” she cried.

“No, Sachi, no,” I murmured.

“Keiko will never. Only you, Miss Saito. Please!”

“I can’t.” We both heard it: for the first time I was saying no to her.

She tore herself from me then, grabbing that small black box from the windowsill. She ran down the hall. I heard the rumble of her feet on the stairs, and the slam of the door that vibrated upward; a distant cry I couldn’t make out. Outside the dog began yelping and did not stop. The coldness stole over my breast, the wetness of her tears abruptly chilled; the child gone from me.

I
SAW THE SPOT
in my mind, in Yano’s mind, the place he would have chosen. A place seemingly untouched. A temple in the forest. A place Sachi would know how to find. She would have done anything to get there—hitchhike, cycle, if it took all day and all night. The sight of Sachi’s hands, the snaking cuts along them, filled my head; her voice, ominous:
There are things you don’t know
.… And at the same moment, a lurid slash of yellow at the side of the road caught my eye. I backed up to find a police ribbon tagging a tree. I parked the car. The trees and bushes were too green and lush and sparkling from the rain. I sprang from the car. I could be too late: the air felt spent. Already the sun was dropping.

The dog tumbled out after me. It paused in front of a dirt path, glared at me with its quick, dark eyes, and darted down among the trees. I went after it, lurching clumsily, for
I hadn’t exercised in days, weeks, bedridden for what seemed like an eternity. Twigs and leaves scratched my cheeks, poked my eyes, I didn’t care; and orange sunlight needled in between the trees. Just ahead, only the white blur of the dog. With every step my feet in those stupid shoes sank into the muck from the rain, but the white ball kept rolling down. Abruptly it vanished, and I reached an empty clearing, gasping for breath. There it was, sitting obedient as could be on the grass, as if Yano had ordered it to sit. Only its tongue flopped wildly, not fitting back in its mouth.

I clapped my hands, cracking the air. It had to move, had to tell me where to go, where to find Sachi. “Yuki!” I shouted. “What is it, girl? What is it?” I tried to talk to it as she did, as if it were human, as if it were wise, but still it sat panting, staring; wanting to move, it seemed, but compelled to sit. I scanned for more police markers, for signs of disarray. But nothing.

I was deep down in the ravine, far from any source of light, far from the sky. There was the creek, the same creek that ran behind our house, now rushing wide and fast, brown and swollen from the rain. The place where Sachi had skipped across the creek on stones was miniature, remote in my memory, miles away. Everything was too big here, dwarfing me as in a dream, and I felt lost, shrunken. Where was Sachi? Was I too late? For what, I didn’t know, I couldn’t think. I shooed the visions of her welted hands from my head. I began walking, following the creek as fast as I could, urged on by the current, full of force and omens. I called to the dog but still it wouldn’t come. I looked back to where I had landed, now a distance off, but no one else came.

No one. Hours earlier I’d pulled myself from my bed, crossed the electrical field, climbed the steps of that house I’d never been welcomed into, knocked on their door, to say what? To do what? It was only for Sachi that I found myself there, obeying my conscience. To tell Keiko, to warn her of I didn’t know what. I had to say it, the danger of what she might do. To act unselfishly for once, urging a mother to her child. Not to come between them.

They’d stood there dumbly, Keiko and Tom, tired from work, I could see that. Nothing to say. They would wait, stupidly silent, never ask why I was there; why their daughter came to me and not to her mother to confide every single thing, everything that mattered. Too proud, too timid to ask me, to have asked her in the first place. I thought of Yano then, amid the salty smells of shoyu and fish, familiar smells that did not lessen my discomfort. I thought of what he’d said about our shame.

I told them about the ravine, the park named in the newspaper, frantic because every moment counted. I don’t know if I made any sense, if I conveyed what I meant to. What was at stake. I spied the ghost of a smile on Keiko’s lips, slow in showing itself—that amusement at my expense, at Sachi’s. Wasting precious time.

“You must believe me,” I said, breathless.

“Sachi has a mind of her own,” Keiko finally declared. Of course she would speak first, hard woman that she was. Indignant that I should be telling her about her own daughter, her own blood. “Don’t make a fuss, Miss Saito,” she snapped. It was a command, an order.

“It’s Asako,” I barked back. I don’t know why, in the
middle of all my worry over Sachi, I had to say it. Refused to be that old schoolmarm to them. Keiko’s mouth hung open. “My name is Asako,” I repeated, ready to walk out.

“She would never keep still, even when she was little,” Keiko said suddenly. Looking at me to say,
You must understand.
“She wouldn’t keep quiet.” As if that was the worst thing to be in the world, not quiet. For once I saw how desperate they were, how angry. “She’d scream and scream.” Keiko looked to Tom anxiously, pointed at him to share it. “Once he even had to throw water over her to calm her down.”

But she was only a child, a child! The thought pounded in my head. Why couldn’t Keiko see that? A child.

“What?” She was staring at me, the hoods lifting from her eyes, now bright, exposed. “What did you say? Asako?”

Slowly I repeated what must have slipped out. “She’s only a child,” I told her, careful to keep the accusation from my voice.

We stood in silence, we three, I unable to leave, unable to entrust her to them.

“It’s the boy,” Tom finally said, in his brusque, clumsy way, watching himself tap his smallish foot, in brown Hush Puppies. He reminded me of Stum then, unbearably awkward, unbearably timid. For all the bluster, it was difficult for him to speak up to a woman, to Keiko. But in an instant he could, like a man, surprise you with a glimmer of what was going on inside, what you’d never fathomed there before. Tom knew about Sachi and Tam, more than he might have known from carting her away from the electrical tower that day. More than I thought he’d ever try to find out. “She and the boy used to go to the hill together, and the creek.” He
lifted his smooth muscular arm in the air and let it drop. It was beyond him to say more.

“Ara?” My first time hearing Japanese from Keiko’s lips. The helplessness in that exclamation, what even she fell back on. She looked from Tom to me and back again, stunned, in panic: what she didn’t know, had never been told. Could not have guessed, when the rest of us had. “Why didn’t she tell me?” Keiko half shouted, and in those moments of fury, of humiliation, I knew Sachi would be forgotten.

“She’ll be back,” Keiko declared, calm and hard once more. “She always comes back to me,” she said. This to hurt me, I suppose.

I withdrew then. Leaving her to them. I resisted every impulse in me to stay.

“Miss Saito.” I heard Tom call after me, half-hearted, divided between us. Calling me “Miss” again. But nothing more.

I let myself out and faced my trek across the field. It was alive with echoes, a minefield. It was the kind of day—misty and changeable with rain and bursts of intense sunlight—that could have brought on one of Yano’s attacks. Such a day as when I, striding along, was called back by that stooped, wheezing man, his breath stopped. For a moment vulnerable, choking. What if I’d hurried home to my window, left him there? What if?

At my window once more, I waited, watching for them to get into their car, to go to her. But they did not. I blamed Keiko, blamed her with all my heart. Cold, cold woman, I must have muttered, over and over. As Chisako had called me.

I waited, trembling with anger. Stum and Angel tried to get me back to my bed, not understanding, but I refused. Stum knelt beside me. No longer the suitor, he shook my arm: overgrown, inarticulate boy, late in learning his own strength. I could not begin to explain to him. It upset him to see me like this, his strong, capable ne-san, but I could no longer look after him; he had his Angel. Then Angel laid her hand on his shoulder, to calm him. “She blames herself, Tsutomu,” she cooed, saying his name with as much care as I ever did. “Poor thing,” she sang. I could not be consoled by her, ignorant as she was of my part in all that had happened. What I was coming to understand.

“Please, ne-san,” Stum pleaded. “Stop this. Please.” He bent close, rasped: “The man was a kamikaze.” Believing it would heal me, vindicate me to hear this. He clung to the word without knowing what it truly meant. It could only be a picture in his head, as it was in mine: a newspaper cartoon of hideous flying insect-men plummeting in flames. Photographs of Japanese soldiers in magazines, squashed faces, hundreds and hundreds of them, all the same. Not one recognizable. Not one Yano. In spite of all I now knew him to be.

At last I left. Tiptoed past Angel and Stum huddled together on the chesterfield, finally surrendering to their own exhaustion. They stirred against one another as I carefully retrieved Stum’s car keys from his jacket and slipped out the back door. The dog followed me from the backyard to the car, the silent, knowing ally Sachi had always believed it to be.

The woods now crowded thick around me, dense, impenetrable. The creek roared low in my ears, out of sight. The
dog was long lost behind me. Above, in the narrow sky, birds swooped down and up, recklessly, it seemed, their wide wings buckled by the wind. The air was close, insects brushed my face.

Kamikaze. Stum’s fireflies—nightmarish creatures, really, seen up close, their bellies in flames. Yano came to me once again, unbidden. “Kamikaze were very clean, Saito-san,” he was saying. Smiling a strange, shy smile. We were sitting in my garden on a sunny afternoon three weeks earlier, under a wide-open, blazing blue sky. He was not so ugly to me that day. He wore fresh, clean clothes; even his fingernails, habitually long and dirty, had been clipped. He was a different person. Almost handsome. Yet clownish and sad, because he was being deceived at that very moment, and I, as a favour to Chisako, was helping.

She’d telephoned me that morning. Mr. Spears had dared to call her at home, she told me breathlessly. His wife had gone away for the day and he wanted to see Chisako. Demanded to, spilling with passion for her, which she was helpless to resist; herself burning in his eyes. I could barely stand to hear it, the excited twitter in my ear that would not stop. “I have to see him, Asako. Only you understand. You’re the only one.” She was relentless; she would not let me go. She’d scurry to a side-street deep in the neighbourhood, unrecognized; the eely shimmer of that beige Eldorado catching the light as it pulled up beside her. Her tiny feet in high heels lifting from the pavement, one, then the other.

“The kamikaze cleansed themselves and prayed before they flew off to die for the emperor,” Yano was explaining. How had we gotten on to that? The war? His years in Japan?
He was different that day; even the way he spoke, without the usual roughness. On his best behaviour because I’d let him into my house. He sat up straight in the lawn chair I’d set out for him, sipping his tea. “Ocha is good,” he said, holding up his cup a little too eagerly.

“You keep your house clean, Saito-san.” He twisted in his chair to look back through the kitchen window. “Better than Chisako,” he laughed. “It’s like a temple, ne?” he said gravely. Mocking me, perhaps, but I couldn’t be sure. “Today I cleaned myself up to enter your temple.” He laughed and patted his pressed white shirt.

It was not long before Yano slipped into his familiar rant, much as he’d tried to hold himself back, keep up his good behaviour. “They were hoping we’d all commit hara-kiri in the camps, don’t you think, Saito-san?” He laughed a dull, sour roar, but it pierced me just the same. “People say it wasn’t so bad. Easy to say now. But it was bad, wasn’t it, Saito-san?”

Abruptly he fell into a sheepish silence, realizing how he’d already misbehaved. It was bad, I suppose: the waiting, not knowing how long, Papa not knowing how he would start up again once we got out. Stupidly, I kept thinking of that boot stuck in the mud in front of our shack, stuck all through one winter until the snow melted. How I waited for someone to claim it. Wondered how a person could lose one boot and not come back.

He cleared his throat. “You know, Saito-san, there were a few who did kill themselves. Out of shame.”

“Don’t exaggerate,” I scolded, but he ignored me, staring out beyond our neatly fenced yard—drifted, almost dreamily.
“I thought about it myself,” he murmured. “Once or twice.” In an instant he came back, alert, watchful. “How about you, Saito-san?”

I must have stuttered then, utterly confused, for Yano, seeing me, was suddenly remorseful, and waved a hand in the air, shooing his words away like bad air. “Remember how I brought you and Chisako together? The ikebana? Chisako didn’t have any idea. And here I am. We stick together now, don’t we, Saito-san?” Already his face had begun to assume its old ugliness, the freshness worn away in spite of the gleam of his white shirt.

“At last Chisako’s making new friends,” he went on brightly. “I don’t have to worry about her any more, ne?”

I shook my head.

“She’s been working overtime for her hakujin boss. Some important executive, she says.” He guffawed. “No extra pay.” He tilted his chair back to survey the sky. “I tell her, make him pay. Who does he think he is?” He shook his fist, about to pound the table I’d set out beside him, but stopped himself, looking sheepish. Instead he downed his tea in one scalding gulp. “These hakujin think they can do anything they please, ne, Saito-san? We’re just mushi they can squash.” He swiped at the air as if to catch a fly. “Same old story, right?”

I rose with my teapot to refill his cup, stumbling on the uneven grass, and before I knew it the hot liquid flew out the spout onto his shirt. He stifled a cry.