by Sarah Bird
I pat Bosco’s back. In the silence I listen to the planes taking off and realize that Moe is right. I can tell the difference between the C-141s and the B-52S.
My sister cries until the rain stops. Then we walk on to the stable and take turns brushing Hickory the Horse.
Weed
“What is their problem?” Kit asks, as we drive out Gate Three. Flanking each side of the gate are dozens of Okinawan demonstrators sitting cross-legged beside the barbed wire fence encircling Kadena. Even though the sun is brutal, the men wear dark suits and ties, the women dresses. They hold banners written in Japanese and have white cloth headbands splashed with red characters tied around their foreheads and sashes across their chests. Amidst the scramble of kanji, I make out “B52” without the hyphen, repeated again and again.
“Just guessing, but they don’t seem too happy about having hundreds of warplanes loaded with bombs crammed onto their island.”
“Why do they care what we park here?”
Buried behind a picket of signs is one that demands NO NUCLEAR!
I start to ask Kit if this could be true. Are there nuclear weapons on the island? But the last people on earth who would ever know would be the families of the men stationed here. Besides, I’m flattered that Kit, who has had her license suspended, has asked me to drive her to the preliminaries of this dance contest she plans to win. It feels great to be out of the concrete house. I am determined I won’t let Kit get to me.
HIGHWAY ONE, I read a sign beside the road as we head south.
“One and only,” Kit sneers, as she flips on the radio.
That was “A Beautiful Morning” by The Young Rascals. No argument here! It is a beautiful morning here on the Rock. This is Private First Class Keith Delano, your Jock on the Rock! Here’s The Fifth Dimension. They’re gonna get up, up and away in their beautiful—oh, yeah—that bee-yoo-tiful bah-looon!
We break free of the miles of runways and acres of concrete stacked with tarp-covered crates, and the East China Sea appears beside us. Towers of white clouds extend from the water high into a sky of dazzling blue. We spin along the coast on a day so beautiful even the corny music seems right. We’re all floating, all of us—me, my family, the entire Department of Defense—we’re floating on this beautiful balloon of an island where no one mentions nuclear weapons or Vietnam. Where troublesome teens and their families simply vanish overnight.
A convoy of camouflage Army trucks boxes us in. I floor the accelerator, and the sluggish station wagon surges ahead.
“All right! Pedal to the metal!” Kit whoops and, for one second of bad-girl glee, we could be buddies, girlfriends out cruising around. That is what the GIs in the trucks take us for. They honk and wave their caps as we pass. A boy on the passenger side of the lead truck opens his door and leans out, holding his arms open to us, pleading.
My beautiful, my beautiful bah-looon!
Heading toward Naha where the tryouts are to be held, we pass fields of sugarcane and pineapple. In one pineapple field, harvesters with baskets strapped on their backs hack fruit from the low bushes, then toss them into the baskets without a backward glance. I swerve to avoid a bandy-legged farmer in rubber zoris and baggy khaki shorts who leads a water buffalo beside the road.
“Hey, egghead, what time is it?”
I can’t recall anyone in our family ever asking this question and check to see if Kit is kidding. She’s not. She isn’t wearing her Seiko.
“Twelve-twenty-five. Twenty-six. Somewhere in there.”
“Tryouts start at two. We’ll be too early. I want to be last. Last is always best. I always make sure I go on last. That way you leave a lasting impression with the judges. We’ve got some time to burn. Turn off up there.” I take a left onto a road topped with crushed coral. It winds through sandy terrain, then heads steeply upward.
“So that’s your secret?” I ask. “Going last?”
Kit sniffs at the insinuation that she needs to rely on trickery. “It doesn’t matter when you go if no one’s going to vote for you.”
“Ah. And what is your secret then? In the event no one is going to vote for you?” I try to make it sound like I’m kidding.
At the top of the rise, a flatbed truck loaded with sugarcane hurtles directly toward us on our side of the road. Kit and I shriek like lunatics as I bump off onto the shoulder. Almost dying together seems to warm Kit up enough to really talk to me.
“You want to know the secret to making people like you?” She pauses for dramatic effect, then answers herself. “There’s no secret. God, Bern, you’re such a brain, I could never understand why you didn’t want friends. I mean, it’s the easiest thing in the world.”
On the other side of the hill, the Pacific Ocean stretches out beneath us all the way to California. Instead of the hard granite black it was when we landed in Yokohama Harbor twelve years ago, the water pools in a lagoon below, turquoise and then cream where the soft waves splash to shore.
“It was never easy for me.”
“You make it hard. All you have to do is give people what they want and they always let you know what that is in, like, the first three minutes after you meet them or something. I mean, like, you meet this girl and she’s all worried about being fat, so you tell her she’s not fat and she’s your slave. And guys! Guys are so easy it’s pathetic. You don’t even have to bother listening to them. They show you how they want you to control them. They’ve got on their letter jacket, or they show you their Honda six-fifty or their comic book collection and they have the original Spider-Man or something, and you just act like that’s amazingly cool and they love you.”
“They love you. Guys never much care what I think about their Spider-Man comics.”
“Because you never acted like you cared.”
“It got kind of hard after the first half dozen or so moves, though, didn’t it?”
Kit shrugs and I try again.
“I mean, growing up military sort of makes you a Buddhist from a very early age. Like, you have to detach. You know it’s all transitory. None of it’s permanent, you know?” I am so excited to have my sister talking to me that I throw in as many “likes” and “I means” as I can to keep her hooked.
Kit tilts her beautiful face toward me and I can understand every sappy guy who ever gave her his heart for just this much.
“Like, when we’d start at a new school, I could never believe how seriously everybody took everything. Like it really mattered who was in and who was out? Who was Homecoming Queen and who was going to the prom and who wasn’t? It was already too late to care. I mean, I already knew that this particular microcosm I just happened to be inhabiting was being duplicated millions of times over all around the world. The same in–out, popular–outcast stuff was going on in Hap Arnold Elementary and General Chenault Junior High and Kubasaki High School.…”
Even listing a fraction of all the schools we’ve attended exhausts me, but it’s thrilling to finally talk this way with Kit. To have her listen, her eyes now the exact same tender aqua as the water below, and believe that she is finally going to understand me.
“Anyway, I already knew going in that this arbitrary little system truly was not the center of the world. I guess I cared, but in the way a performer cares that the play they’re in is well done, believable, successful. What I could never understand was how anyone could ever truly believe in such a totally fake thing? I guess that was my problem. I was always baffled by the ones who did. The climbers, the school-spirit people, the boosters. Didn’t they know that other girls in sweaters with animals pasted on their breasts were yelling just as hard at millions of other schools? That they believed their quarterback was the hottest guy in the universe? Didn’t they know other children believed their country was the best on the earth? I mean, even being a Catholic. How are you supposed to believe that it is the one true religion?”
Kit blinks and shakes her head. “Wow. You sound exactly like Bosco. Or she sounds like you, more like it. You guys a
re so weird. Did you ever stop to consider that there might be such a thing as thinking too much?”
“Yeah, okay, it was really good to open up to you like this.”
Kit shrugs and points to a stand of pines where the coral shell road ends. “Park up there.”
A dozen other cars are already clustered at the end of the road. They all have Kubasaki Dragons bumper stickers pasted on them.
We get out and I follow Kit to the edge of the cliff. We’re on top of a coral outcropping hundreds of feet above the lagoon far below. The East China Sea surrounds us on three sides.
“It’s beautiful.”
“Yeah. Sometimes you can see Taiwan from here.”
I squint hard into the opalescent glare.
“See that right over there?” Kit points to the other end of the horseshoe, across the lagoon from us. It rises to a column of coral, twisted and ventilated by the waves, that arches out over the jagged peaks at its base. “Suicide Cliffs. That’s where all the enemy soldiers jumped instead of surrendering. Hundreds of ’em. Just … Banzai! and over the top.”
She stares in silence at the black lip of coral jutting out above the waves, and for a second I am certain that Kit and I are remembering the same thing, remembering Fumiko telling us about her father coming home and giving her rock candy. I’m certain we are both imagining hundreds of men like Fumiko’s father, trapped at the edge of the world, choosing to step off the black coral into the blue of the sky that will become the blue of the ocean. I’m certain we both see them falling through the air. Their caps with a cloth in the back to shade their necks floating off their heads as the soldiers plummet toward the spiked rocks. Their moss-green puttees unwrapping from around their ankles to flap loose about their bodies like wings that will not work.
Then Kit says, “Crazy Japs,” and I remember she had been asleep when Fumiko told me the story about her father; she doesn’t remember it at all.
“Come on!” Kit is already scaling the hill behind us, grabbing at the gnarled roots of pines to pull herself up.
“Kit! Watch out for snakes! Habu!” But she’s already out of sight. I scramble to catch up, following a trail of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer cans, Slim Jim wrappers, and empty Coppertone tubes. I catch a glimpse of Kit just before she disappears into a slit in the rocks.
Sweat is streaming off me by the time I reach the slit. It exhales cool, musty cave air. From inside, voices echo out. High-pitched female squeals peal out greetings to Kit. I don’t hear what she says, but it elicits the deep rumble of a male laugh. I squeeze past the wedge of rocks and follow the voices and a flicker of light down a cramped and twisting passageway. The damp limestone walls narrow and I have to crouch down and inch through sideways until, abruptly, the mountain opens into a cavern where shadows cast by Coleman lanterns dance crazily upward for ten, twenty, fifty feet, flickering in and out amid an upside-down forest of stalactites.
The answering forest of stalagmites projecting up from the ground is inhabited by a platoon of young Americans lounging among the broken nubs. As always, Kit is at the center of this group of twenty or more. Half are high school kids, Kubasaki Dragons, the other half, in olive drab and camou, bad haircuts slightly grown out, are obviously GIs. The quarterback-looking guy from the convertible grabs Kit and kisses her, blowing a lungful of smoke into her mouth. She exhales it immediately—pot is for losers and noncoms—and dances out of his grip. Three girls cluster around Kit, whispering and shrieking. Beside them, a GI in a floppy olive-green hat and tank T-shirt holds the flame of a Zippo lighter under the wire mesh of a hookah as a girl in a Madras plaid blouse and a pair of clam-digger shorts inhales until the water burbles.
Disconnected bits of conversation ricochet off the limestone walls.
“This is some righteous weed, man.”
“Like I give a shit. I’m short. I’m booking out in three weeks and counting. Stateside. Back to the world. So long, suckers, see you in the next cartoon.”
“Carlene gave Matt his ring back.”
“You lie like a dog!”
“If I’m lyin’, I’m dyin’. Steffie told me.”
“Travel light and carry a heavy bag.”
“Roger that, bro.”
“No, I told you. My dad is like royally PO’d. One ding and I’m, like, permanently grounded. Thank God he’s TDY.”
“Big sister.”
I turn. A hawk-nosed guy with frizzy red hair picked out into as much of an approximation of an Afro as he can manage stands beside me, holding out a joint.
“I understand you get high.” He tries to make his hookworm accent from one of the meaner southern states like Arkansas or Mississippi sound as black as he can. “Tha’s what they tell me. They tell me big sister, she’ll smoke herself a joint now and again.” He laughs a stoned cackle that stretches lips so smeared by freckles that it’s impossible to tell where they leave off and the rest of his pale, speckled face begins. Too much of his doughy skin shows beneath a GI undershirt. His dog tags hang atop a few sparse, carroty chest hairs. I wave the joint off and step away, searching for Kit in the hazy gloom.
The GI lopes after me, trying to imitate the loose-limbed grace and street savvy of a black pimp. “Big sister seems a mite freaked out.” He takes a hit, chants as he exhales, “Hey, hey, LBJ. How many babies you kill today?”
I tell myself this idiot couldn’t possibly know about anything that happened on the other side of the world, at the University of New Mexico. He couldn’t possibly know about the Damsels.
“Oh, you met Ron. He’s our friend in OSI.” Kit puts her finger over her lips to give me the hush-hush sign and giggles a laugh that sounds more drunk than stoned. “You know. OSI? Office of Special Investigations. The ones who spy on us. Ron, tell her what’s in big sister’s file.”
Ron quotes from my file. “Bernadette Marie Root. Height, five foot five. Weight, one-forty—you could stand to drop some L.B.s there, big sister. Eyes, hazel. Schools attended. Man, there’s a shitload of them. Forget schools. Member of antiwar group Damsels in Dissent that disseminates information on illegal means of dodging the draft and generally undermining the United States military. Associates with known narcotics users. Active in protest marches. Oo-wee, big sister, you in a world of hurt that shit gets around. What yo’ daddy gonna say?” He cackles because he doesn’t care what my father would say.
My heart is pounding and the cave and everyone in it scares me. “I’m leaving, Kit. If you want me to drive you, you come now. Otherwise, stay here. I don’t really give a shit.”
The sunlight blinds me as I squeeze back out of the narrow opening. I sit in the broiling car for twenty minutes and my hands, suddenly gone icy, never warm up.
Kit finally comes out and gets in, but neither of us says anything until we’re back on Highway One and the traffic has clotted up again as we head into Naha.
“Funny, isn’t it?” Kit asks. “That you should end up being the one who could get us RIF’d. And you could, you know. Major’s daughter telling guys how to get out of the draft. They’d nail him for that. At the very least, he’d never make light.” Kit’s habit of using military slang—light for lieutenant colonel—seems even more foreign and annoying than usual.
“What about you? Hanging out in caves, smoking dope with GIs. Like that’s going to get him sent to Air Command and Staff?”
“Ron does all the filing at OSI. Any reports I want him to, he just loses. He’d never narc me.”
“Was Sandra Muller a friend of Ron’s too? Was he never gonna narc her?”
“Sandra had it coming. Sandra was smoking opium. She was a loser. Don’t worry, I’m not Sandra.” Kit grins at me, as stoned on the invincibility of her beauty and charm as she is on anything she smoked or drank. I want to knock her perfect teeth down her throat.
“You stupid idiot.”
“Of course. How could I not be? You took all the brains before I even got here.”
Right Guard
Naha, the island’s lar
gest city, looks and smells, initially, like five Kozas crammed together. Swarms of Daihatsus and Nissans and three-wheeled trucks eddy around the station wagon. It takes all my concentration to keep the wheels out of the benjo ditches that line the road on the outskirts of town. We cross over the Kumoji River. Below us, on the river, log rafts float past on their way to the plywood factory.
By the time we reach Kokusai Street, the commercial heart of the city, the open sewers have been paved over and the buildings rise up ten and fifteen stories above us. This isn’t the strip-show pawnshop boomtown of Koza but an actual city where the main business is not the American military. A stream of diesel buses belches past, followed by a delivery boy on a bicycle balancing a tray of brass lunchboxes.
At a stoplight, a flock of schoolgirls in pigtails and black middy blouses wearing pastel-colored backpacks crosses the street.
“Hey, look.” Kit points to two little Okinawan boys. One has scrambled up into a tree and is wiring pink plastic cherry blossoms handed to him by the other boy onto the tree’s barren branches.
“Isn’t that cute?” Kit laughs her pinging crystal laugh, and I realize that while I have been brooding since we left the cave, despairing over the future of our family, she hasn’t given the incident a second thought. “Oh, turn right up here.”
Tryouts are being held in the Kokusai Hotel, one of the few structures on the street with a sign outside in English. A Ryukyuan man in a straw pith helmet waves us officiously into a parking garage, where Frenchie bulges over both sides of the designated space.
A sign just in front of the reception desk reads DANCE CONTEST: Fourth floor.
