DISPATCH

by Bentley Little

  I sat down on the opposite end of the couch from my brother. The microwave made static lines on the television, and the sound of the oven’s fan nearly drowned out the dialogue, but I dared not complain. Drawing any sort of attention to myself would result only in increased scrutiny for the rest of the evening, and that was one thing I couldn’t have. Despite the unexplained strangeness of my dad’s behavior, my mind was still focused on my new pen pal, and I was just putting in time until I could be alone and write Kyoko Yoshizumi a letter.

  My dad showed up and changed the channel without a word. He sat on the couch between me and Tom to watch the news, while the two of us went into the kitchen.

  After a dinner of microwaved frozen burritos and Jell-O, I went to my room. I closed the door, sat down at my desk and took out my pen pal folder from its hidden spot in my bottom drawer. I withdrew my new pen and a sheet of stationery. I was supposed to be doing my homework, but instead I tried to write a letter to Kyoko.

  Tried being the operative word.

  I stared at the blank page before me on the desk. What should I say? I had no idea. I never talked to girls at school, and I’d certainly never written to one before. I sat there for nearly an hour, stumped. The only decision I’d made was that I would be twelve years old instead of ten. American girls liked older guys, and no doubt the same thing was true in Japan. But other than that, I was at a loss. I was unable to decide even how to start the letter. “Dear Kyoko” seemed too intimate, too familiar, but I could think of no other way to lead off my missive.

  I hadn’t even begun my math homework, and when my mom walked in to check on me, she saw the unopened textbook. The sound of the door opening had given me enough time to hide the folder and stationery but not enough time to open the math book and take out my homework so I could pretend to be working on it.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. “You’re supposed to be doing your homework. What’s going on in here?”

  “I just finished it,” I lied, standing up.

  “Let me see.”

  I should have known I couldn’t fool her, and I hemmed and hawed until she nailed me and got me to admit that I’d been goofing off.

  “I’m getting your father,” she said, lips thin.

  I shoved my pen pal folder back in the bottom drawer the second she left the room, and by the time she returned with my dad, I had the real homework out. I’d answered the first question and was doing my best to appear studious, but that didn’t save me. They both started in, telling me I was stupid and lazy and would amount to nothing. I took it, nodding as though I agreed, but inside I was thinking about Miss Nakamoto and the girl in Japan who probably looked just like her.

  I did my homework, then took my punishment, going to bed early without any television. But I did not fall asleep. I lay awake in my bed, waiting hour after hour until first Tom and then my parents went to bed. When I was sure they were asleep, I got up, crept over to my desk and composed my letter by the light of my little desk lamp. I knew now what I wanted to say, and the words flowed fast and easily. I told Kyoko I was in seventh grade, that I was a champion surfer, that I was a star basketball player and on the student council, that I’d just broken up with my most recent girlfriend, that I played guitar and was starting a rock band.

  In other words, I lied about everything.

  Aside from my name and address, nothing I wrote on that page was true.

  But I felt exhilarated as I finished, licking the gummed flap of the envelope, and I immediately began planning a follow-up letter, one in which I expanded upon my made-up life. I was impressed with myself. How could Kyoko not be?

  I hid the envelope in my math book, then went back to bed. I fell asleep, imagining Kyoko reading my letters, falling in love, growing up to look like Miss Nakamoto, then coming to America to marry me.

  3

  I received her first letter on a Saturday.

  The air was filled with the smells of suburbia: newly cut grass, competing flower fragrances, gasoline exhaust from edgers and mowers, the faint scent of McDonald’s and Taco Bell from a few blocks over. I remember it clearly even today. I remember, as well, the way I felt when I pulled the mail out of the box and saw the small pink envelope made with unfamiliar paper and affixed with a foreign stamp.

  I knew what it was immediately, and I rushed into the house, into my room, closed the door and tore open the envelope.

  The letter didn’t say much. It was quite a bit shorter than mine, and I sort of resented Kyoko for that, but I had to remind myself that she was writing in English rather than Japanese. She was taking this opportunity to practice a second language, while I was using my native tongue. I read the letter once, twice, thrice. She wrote that she lived in an apartment instead of a house, that her favorite color was pink, that her favorite school subject was art and that she had a large stuffed-animal collection, which seemed kind of babyish and immature to me. But what I liked about her letter was the fact that she signed off with Love, Kyoko. It made it clear that this was a girl—I’d concluded my letter with Sincerely—and that was very exciting in a new way that I didn’t quite understand.

  I’d been half afraid she’d reject me, that she’d tell me she wanted to correspond with a girl rather than a boy, and I was happy that she seemed to want to be my pen pal just like I wanted to be hers. But I knew we needed to quickly establish some things we had in common or this was going to go nowhere.

  I wondered what she looked like. In my mind she was still a miniature Miss Nakamoto, but for all I knew she could be hideously ugly and grotesquely overweight.

  No, I couldn’t think that way.

  Eventually, I would ask for a photo, but for now I would just assume that she was as nice and pretty as I wanted her to be.

  I spent the rest of the afternoon playing with Hot Wheels in my room and then going over to Paul’s to help him wash windows; his mom promised us two dollars apiece if we did the whole house. I could have written a response to Kyoko, but I wanted to save that experience, wanted to savor it, and my plan was to once again wait until everyone had gone to bed.

  We were eating dinner, Mom, Tom and me, and my dad was late—which wasn’t such a strange occurrence. He often spent Saturday afternoons and evenings with his friends, hanging out, watching ball games, and sometimes he lost track of time. Then the phone rang, and my mom went to answer it in the kitchen. A second later, she was screaming furiously, and we could tell from her end of the conversation what had happened: my dad had gone to a bar with his buddies, had too much to drink and was picked up by the police on his way home. Tom and I looked at each other in a rare moment of camaraderie, both of us afraid of what might come next.

  My dad had taken the Torino, so my mom piled us into the Volkswagen, and we drove to the police station. Tom and I sat on a hard bench in the lobby while my mom ranted and railed at the hapless men behind the front desk. She was allowed to go in and see my dad, disappearing behind a metal door that was opened by a switch behind the counter. She stayed back there for what seemed like an interminable length of time. We saw a woman come in who complained that her minivan had been broken into and her purse stolen, an old man whose parked car had been smacked by a hit-and-run driver, a woman who wanted to get a restraining order against her husband—and all of them had finished their business and were gone before my mom emerged from behind that security door.

  “Come on,” she said, lips tight. “Let’s go.”

  I looked at Tom. One of us had to ask it. And he was the oldest. “What about Dad?” he said.

  “Your father got himself into this mess. He can get himself out. Come on!”

  We followed her out to the car, both of us afraid to speak. I had never seen her this mad before, and I wondered if my parents were going to get a divorce. Back at home, our food was cold and still sitting on the table, but I didn’t feel like eating. Not that I could have eaten anyway. My mom immediately started clearing off dishes and dumping food down the garbage dispos
al in a furious frenzy. Tom went to his room, closing the door, but I stayed in the living room, unsure of what to do with myself, expecting at any moment to hear the shatter of broken dishes from the kitchen. I did hear slamming cupboards, banging silverware, even the unusually loud clink of dishware, but she was not out of control enough to break anything.

  Despite all that was going on, my mind was calm, serene, like the eye of a storm, focused in perfect Zen-like fashion on Kyoko’s letter and what I would write in my response. After the events of the evening, her simple description of stuffed animals seemed even more immature, but in a way that was nice, a refreshing contrast to my family situation. Besides, I was planning to ask a few questions in my letter this time, force her to talk about less babyish things.

  My mom came out of the kitchen, saw me sitting on the couch. “What are you doing here?” she screamed. “Go to your room!”

  I didn’t have to be told twice. I hurried down the hall to my bedroom, where I shut the door. My bedtime was still two hours away and I was wide-awake—so I had a lot of time to kill. I considered writing my letter, but my mom could walk in on me at any time. I didn’t have a TV, so I couldn’t watch that. I had a small record player, but the sound might carry, and I didn’t want her storming down the hall screaming at me to turn it off.

  I wondered what Tom was doing in his room.

  Finally, I decided to read a book, a science fiction novel called Time of the Great Freeze that I’d checked out of the library twice and must have read four or five times already. I found comfort in the tale of a band of humans who survived the next ice age. It was reassuring to me to once again enter their world, and before I knew it, it was time for bed. My mom didn’t come over to tell me—she was still in the front of the house and I had no idea what she was doing—so I got into my pajamas voluntarily, put out the light and crawled under the covers.

  It was weird lying in bed knowing that my dad wasn’t in the house. But it was also nice in a way, and I realized for the first time that I wouldn’t really mind if he was gone for good.

  I wouldn’t mind if my mom were gone, either.

  Or Tom.

  Against my will, I fell asleep, my mind overburdened by the stress and excitement of the day. When I awoke, the world was dark and a sliver of moonlight shone through the crack in my drapes. I crept out of bed to look at my clock, holding it close to my face so I could see the numbers.

  Two fifteen.

  Even my mom had to be asleep by now, but just in case, I turned on my desk lamp and waited several minutes until I was sure it wouldn’t draw any attention. The house remained still and quiet, and I opened the bottom drawer, taking my pen pal folder from its hiding place. Once again, I withdrew pen, stationery and prestamped envelope.

  I started to write.

  TWO

  1

  Our correspondence began in earnest.

  I invented a new family for myself, the family I wanted to have, the family I thought I should have. I told Kyoko my dad was a scientist, that he had worked on the Apollo moon rockets and that he was now engaged in a job so top secret even his family wasn’t allowed to know anything about it. My mom was a writer for a famous American magazine, an expert cook and interior decorator. I was the most popular kid in school, liked by girls, admired by boys. I omitted the fact that I had a brother.

  Kyoko should feel honored just to be corresponding with someone like that, I thought. And she was. Her next letter was gushing, far longer and more detailed than the first, although a lot of it was in broken English. I didn’t mind. In fact, I liked the fact that she was forcing herself to the limits of her language abilities in order to communicate with me. It showed a level of interest that went far beyond what was expected from a pen pal.

  That letter arrived on a school day, and it was my mom who got the mail. There was no right of privacy in our house, and it was pure luck that my mom didn’t open the letter herself. She did ask me about it, and I explained in a put-upon manner that my teacher was making everyone in class write to a pen pal in a different country and that this was the girl I’d been assigned. My mom lost interest halfway through my explanation, and I could only hope that meant she wouldn’t open any letters in the future.

  Still, just to be on the safe side, I took out Kyoko’s first correspondence, noted the date and postmark and asked her in the future to send everything on the same day as that one in an effort to have all of her letters arrive on Saturday, when I could intercept the mail.

  The next envelope arrived two Saturdays later, and I took it into the bathroom, closing and locking the door so I wouldn’t be disturbed. This time, Kyoko sent me a picture of herself, and she asked for a photo of me, as well. She was cute, and though she didn’t look much like Miss Nakamoto, that didn’t seem to matter to me as much as it had at the beginning. The picture had been taken in some sort of park, with pink flowered trees in the background, and I was reminded of the Japanese Deer Park which I’d gone to on a field trip in first grade. It was gone now, but it had been by the freeway in Buena Park, and it was kind of a petting zoo where people could feed deer with pellets of food purchased from gum ball machines. The surrounding buildings were all Japanese, as were the gardens. What I remembered most from the place was a fish, a koi, that popped its head out of the water to smoke a cigarette held in a metal clip. I’d wondered then and wondered now whether that fish would get cancer. It seemed a cruel thing to do to an unsuspecting animal.

  I examined Kyoko’s photo more closely. Was this a class picture or a snapshot her parents had taken? It was hard to tell. The setting was informal, but the picture quality was good and the pose looked professional. She was wearing what looked like a sailor outfit—a school uniform, according to her letter—and had two pigtails and a little round face. Her smile was wide and happy and made her eyes turn into barely visible slits. She was cute, and if she wasn’t quite in Miss Nakamoto’s league, there was definitely the potential for her to grow into it.

  Where could I keep the picture, though? If Tom found the photo, I’d never hear the end of it. If my parents found it, there’d be countless questions. I slipped the picture into my pocket, flushed the toilet as though I’d been using it, and retreated to my bedroom. Looking around, I tried to think of a good hiding place, then realized that I already had the perfect spot for it: in the pen pal folder. If anyone found the picture there, I could claim it came with the program information I’d been assigned.

  Now the question was, could I find a photo of myself to send her? Or, more to the point, did I want to use a photo of myself? Would she believe this face belonged to the boy described in my letters?

  In the end, I didn’t send one. I invented what I thought was a pretty good excuse, explaining that I’d given all of my school photos away to girls from my class, and my parents wouldn’t let me send out any of the family’s personal snapshots. But I thanked her for her picture and made up for not giving her one of myself by inventing a story about how I stood up for a Japanese exchange student on the playground, chasing away two bigoted bullies who’d been harassing him. That ought to impress her, I thought.

  The next morning, I mailed the letter on my way to school, feeling confident, feeling good.

  Feeling even better about it by the time I got home, I sat down and wrote her another letter, once again late at night after everyone had gone to sleep, and in this one I said that because of my defense of the Japanese student, the principal of my school had given me a special award and had made me a crossing guard.

  Although she hadn’t posted a sign-up sheet, Miss Nakamoto soon had a bulletin board devoted to the Pen Pal Program in an effort to convince more students to get involved. There was a map of the world with strings leading from various continents to envelopes on which were written the names and addresses of children from different countries.

  And there was a list of participants.

  I was immediately subjected to ridicule.

  “Jason’s in the Pee-pee Pr
ogram!” Missy crowed.

  Even Robert and Edson laughed, and they were my friends.

  “It should be called the Pansy Program,” Ken Vernon said.

  Indeed, I was the only boy on the list, and my face burned with shame. I glanced over at Miss Nakamoto, wondering why she had betrayed me by not keeping everything in strictest confidence, but she smiled back reassuringly, and that gave me the strength to stand up to them. “I’m doing it for the extra credit,” I said in a voice that, through intention and not a little luck, was pitched perfectly, a disdainful lecturing tone that sounded bored and above it all, and at the same time disgusted with their stupid and unfounded innuendos.

  “Yeah,” Ken snorted. “Right.”

  “You think I want to do this?” I groused. Participants were required to turn in bimonthly reports in order to qualify for extra credit, and I seized on this. “I have to write a letter a week and then write a report about it? Would I do this if I didn’t have to?”

  They could see that I had a point. And while Missy, Ken, Charlotte and a few others continued to give me a hard time, everyone else bought my excuse. Not only that, but my participation broke the ice. Other boys started signing up for extra credit. They moaned and complained all the way, but they did it, and I found myself wondering if it was all an act with them, as well, if they secretly enjoyed having a pen pal as much as I did.

  Maybe Miss Nakamoto was right to have posted the names.

  Robert and Edson soon had pen pals, too, and while that should have brought us closer together, it didn’t. In a weird way, it pushed us apart. I mean, we were still friends—and would be all the way through grammar school, junior high and high school—but I could never be as open with them as I had been previously. I continued to pretend with them, as well as everyone else, that I was a pen pal unwillingly and out of necessity. I did not tell them that it had become one of the most important things in my life, that I thought about it constantly, that looking forward to getting Saturday’s mail helped get me through the long days at school. I kept them at arm’s length on this. For all I know, they were lying to me, as well, downplaying their own interest, and in my mind at least, that made us not as close as we had been before.