by Sarah Bird
“Hey!” she calls out to the wives gawking at her unprecedented morning appearance. “The eggs any good today?”
Caught off guard, they stare at Moe as if they don’t understand English.
“Eggu ichi-ban!” The egg man steps forward to reassure Moe, and she turns all her attention away from her fellow wives to the wizened man smiling in front of her.
“Well, then, give me two—no, make it three dozen. San-ju-roku? Ne?”
“Hai! San-ju-roku!”
“Go-shobai-wa ikaga desu ka?”
“Arigato, kanari ii desu.”
The wives go from staring to gaping at Moe as she converses with the egg man, whose smile bursts into a larger and larger grin with each word of Japanese our mother speaks. He plucks eggs from the baskets in his cart and wraps them artfully in cones of newspaper, a dozen to a cone, which Moe clasps to her bosom as she holds out her wallet for her new friend to take what he needs. There is a flurry of hand waving as Moe gestures for him to take more for his fine eggs and the egg man wipes away the offer.
“What’s she saying?” Bosco asks me, when Moe’s last comment in Japanese causes the egg man to beam even more broadly.
“How should I know?”
The egg man looks up at the wives to make certain they’ve heard before he bows deeply.
“I guess it was a compliment.”
The egg man takes three eggs from his basket, balances a bonus egg on top of each cone, and pulls his cart away, waving at Moe until he is out of sight.
“Fresh eggs,” Moe says to the wives. “So much better than those old cold-storage things we get at the commissary, right?”
The wives nod, and Moe walks back to our house holding the eggs like Miss America cradling her red roses.
“When did you learn Japanese?” Buzz asks, as Moe fills the egg holders in the door of the refrigerator and mounds a bowl with the rest.
“We lived in the country for four years. Most of them on the economy.”
“Yeah, but you never spoke Japanese before.”
“Never needed to buy eggs before. Well, omelets tonight.”
With Moe coaching Bosco through the art of tucking sheets into hospital corners and the twins turning Bob loose with a can of Pledge and a mandate to “rain liquid death” while they attack the lawn, we quickly achieve a level of hygiene adequate to avoid being RIF’d.
“Let’s book on out of here,” Moe says, snapping off her rubber gloves. The twins bounce their eyebrows up at each other, and I, too, wonder where our mother absorbed hipster GI talk.
In short order, we are coasting north on Highway One toward the less-developed end of the island. Moe is at the wheel. She swings her right arm out at every stop to protect Bob, in just the same way she’s done with every child, always the youngest, who sat up front next to her. The convoys of military vehicles thin out as we leave the base behind until the view is nothing but green hills on our left and the Pacific Ocean on our right. Then the land narrows to a slender neck as we pass between the Philippine Sea and the East China Sea. The farther north we head toward the wild north end of the island the more jungly the hills become. The water beside us even shifts from a placid aqua to a white-frothed Prussian blue.
Bosco keeps looking out the window, then over at Moe; she cranes around to check on the twins relegated to the Way Back seats that face the rear window before she catches my eye and almost smiles. She exudes contentment. This is how the world is meant to be, riding in Frenchie beside water sparkling with sunlight, her mother at the wheel, laughing and singing. Even the twins seem to be holding their breath, not wanting to wreck the moment by giving each other monkey bumps or noogies or wedgies or X no-backs or he-who-smelt-it-dealt-its.
Moe starts to sing. At first I think it is my old friend “Mairzy Doats.” But Bosco and Bob join in. Of course, Bosco has learned what the real words are, and I learn for the first time that mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy.
“What’s so funny?” Moe asks, glancing at me in her rearview.
“Nothing. I just never knew the real words before.”
“Words aren’t important as long as you get the tune right.”
We pass a farmer riding a horse the size of a burro. His feet almost drag on the ground as he leads a water buffalo by the rope tied to a ring in its nose. Moe sticks her hand out the window and waves. Farther on, another farmer spreads sheaves of rice along a guardrail to dry. We all wave this time, and the farmer waves back.
In the courtyard of a red-tiled farmhouse set back from the road, half a dozen children in zoris play stickball. A Ryukyuan boy in a Cub Scout uniform complete with knee socks whacks a tennis ball with a two-by-four.
“Home-oo run-oo!” Bosco yells out the window.
“Home-oo run-oo!” the kids scream back at her.
Bosco leans back, very pleased with her communication.
The slender curving trunks of papaya trees heavy with green fruit clustered at their crowns run like the slats of a fence along the narrow road. We cross a bridge over a river gushing toward the ocean. Several Okinawan housewives have spread their washed clothes across a clump of sago palms. One of the women, so old she bears the faint blue traces of the old-style tribal tattoos, has her kimono top pulled down to her waist and is sloshing handfuls of water under her armpits and over her leathery breasts.
“I see she’s not wearing a bra.” I say it to test Moe. Her face lights up and she turns to Bob next to her on the front seat. “Take the wheel.”
“Oh, boy!” Bob grabs the steering wheel.
“You’re letting him drive?” Abner, alarmed, aggrieved, asks from the back. Moe squirms around, turtling both arms into her blouse.
Bob turns around to stick his tongue out at Abner and the car bumps off the road. I lunge forward to steer us back on. Moe pops her arms back out of her blouse. In her right hand is her Playtex long-line bra.
“Guh-ross!” the twins scream in unison.
“You said it, bebbies!” Moe laughs, tossing the big white bra out the window. It flutters behind us for a moment like a white bat before landing in some weeds beside the road. “The natives got it right.” She catches my eye in the rearview. “You got it right, Bernie. It’s too damned hot for all that cross-your-heart nonsense. Bosco, don’t look so worried. The old gray mare isn’t kicking over the traces, just adjusting her halter a little.”
Although Bosco does look worried and even admonishes Moe to “give a hoot, don’t pollute” and Buzz and Abner go on for miles about over-the-shoulder-boulder-holders and flopper-stoppers, it is as if the instant Moe took her bra off, we could all breathe again.
“Bob, you are doing a beautiful job,” Moe says to my little brother, who has kept his hand on the wheel even after Moe took over. “You can be my right-seat guy anytime.” It’s been a long time since I’ve heard the phrase “right-seat guy.” That was who my father was, back in Japan, when he was copilot, the right-seat guy, for Major Wingo. A memory of Major Wingo brings back a handsome Nordic face. Curly blond hair. Mouth wide open, laughing, his arm around my father, who looks up to him. His nickname tickles my brain. Corny? Connie? The memory floats past.
One by one, the houses with red-tiled roofs and the fields of pineapple, sugarcane, and sweet potatoes disappear, and the hills close in on either side of the Oldsmobile. Fan palms, bamboo, scrubby pine, and banyan crowd in, their roots twisting like vines over everything, an insistent wall of green that casts the road into shadow.
We drive in silence until the low rumble of an American engine approaches coming the other way. A troop truck crests the rise we are climbing and bears down, head on, toward us. There is not enough room on the narrow road for two giant American vehicles. Moe pulls over. The squat olive-drab truck slows down as it nears us. The truck’s windshield catches the sun and turns to a shield of polished silver. The canvas flaps are all up on the sides of the truck. Two rows of soldiers in camouflage, ten on each side, sit in the back. The truck cr
eeps past us at a glacial speed. The soldiers on the side closer to us turn as they pass. Their faces are covered in a camouflage pattern that matches the caps on their heads, their lips painted black as panthers’. Sweat and streaks of muddy makeup darken circles around their necks. None of the soldiers smile. They look blank, exhausted. One soldier catches my eye and raises his hand in a peace signal.
“Lurps,” Buzz whispers to Abner.
“No shit, Sherlock.”
“They’re Marines,” Bosco whispers to me. “Long Range Reconnaissance Patrols. They do training maneuvers up there on the north end of the island where it’s all jungle.”
I nod. Moe stares for a long time after the truck as it rumbles south before she starts the engine and we bump back onto the road.
“You’re in the boonies, now, cherry!” Buzz whispers to Abner in a creepy redneck twang. “Hell, yes, soldier. You’re in-country. You got your flak jacket on? Take your weapon off safety, maggot.”
“Yessir, sarge, sir.” Abner plays along, nodding, eyes wide with new-recruit terror as Buzz fishes one of Kit’s batons out of the clutter on the car floor and thrusts it into his twin’s hands.
“You got the M-sixty, grunthead. Remember, bursts of three.”
The twins go into their alternate reality. Abner braces the baton out in front of him and pretends to cover the countryside.
“Left! Eleven o’clock!” Buzz shrieks. “Gear in on him!” Spit flying, Abner jerks off an imaginary round of machine gun fire on the baton.
“Ammo up!” Abner cries.
Buzz digs a roll of paper towels out of the bag of picnic supplies and Abner feeds this “ammo belt” into the baton.
“Call in the Eighty-Mike-Mikes!”
“Send in Willie Pete!”
“White phosphorus launched!”
“Frag the Second Louie!”
“Wasted him!”
“Righteous, my man!”
“You smoked Charlie!”
Moe slams on the brakes so hard the drums lock and squeal and Bosco and I slide forward off the vinyl seats. Moe has her arm out, blocking Bob from hitting the dash. She stops dead, swivels around, and fixes the twins with a death glare.
“Was that”—she gestures toward the truck, disappearing over a hill—“was that a joke to you boys? Do you think that is all a joke? Did any of those boys in that truck look like they think it’s a joke?” Moe, breathing hard, continues to glare at them until Abner lowers the baton.
Both twins face out the back window. Abner mutters, “Jeez, you don’t need to freak out. We were just goofing around.”
“Look at me when you talk to me! Look at me!”
Hissing gasps of exasperation, they both turn back around.
“Never, ever joke about … about that again. Do you understand me? … Do you understand me!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
There is a long moment of silence that Bob breaks. “I like the jungle,” he observes idly.
“That’s because you don’t know a goddamned thing about the jungle, Bob.”
We dart glances back and forth at Moe’s solemn swearing.
Moe turns the station wagon around and we head back, our outing over. A few miles later the twins are happily pounding and poking one another again. Bosco and I remain silent, Bosco searching the horizon ahead for the calamities she is certain wait to overtake her family.
Mildew
Moe’s mood doesn’t brighten until we are spinning along the coast again. Buzz and Abner pull out Kit’s baton and, holding it out of Moe’s sight, lay down covering fire as we are swept into the traffic jam that is Highway One.
Back at Kadena, the knot of demonstrators at Gate Three has swollen by several hundred. The new protesters are not the polite suit-jacketed crowd that was there the other day. A Japanese man in Trotsky glasses, his hair in a spiky brush cut, marches back and forth in front of the demonstrators, yelling into a bullhorn and beating his fist in the air in time with his message. Like many of the other new demonstrators, he has a look of pasty-faced fanaticism that I recognize from the ringleaders of the protest movement at college. This time many of the signs are in English.
NUCLEAR NO! U.S. BASE GO! U.S. DISMISS B52S FROM OKINAWA.
“Do you think they mean ‘remove’?” Bosco asks.
Moe tries to edge Frenchie through the crowd that has surrounded our car, but the protesters abruptly link arms and slide in front of us in snaking, zigzagging rows. The man on the bullhorn continues ranting, his voice cracking now with hysteria.
“Moe?” I ask, as the crowd swarms around us, the windows becoming a shark tank with wet mouths and greasy foreheads smashing against the glass. Demonstrators pound on the back window.
“Mom!” Bob’s shoulders pull up to his ears with each breath he sucks in. “Mom, are they going to hurt us?”
“No one is going to hurt us, Bob. Now calm down, you’ll make your asthma flare up.” She rolls down the window. Dark heads press into the opening, and I lunge over the seat and grab her hand.
“What are you doing? You can’t!”
“Bernie, don’t be a ninny. Most of these people appear to be from Tokyo. Japanese are only dangerous to strangers. All we’ve got to do is to stop being strangers.” With an iron grip, she rolls down the window enough to speak out. “Mihnasan, konnichiwa.” Her voice takes on a ridiculously high, childlike, fluting quality and sounds exactly the way it did when she would make Fumiko and I laugh with her imitation of the way Fumiko spoke when we first met her. “Ii o-tenki desu, ne.”
The demonstrators back away from the car.
Moe bows her head and extends a cranelike arm out toward the gate with a grace that recalls Fumiko welcoming us into the little house in Fussa. “Ima itte mo ii desu ka?”
The ringleader with the bullhorn bows and clears protesters out of the way. Smiling and bowing her head, eyes downcast, Moe drives through the gate.
Abner and Buzz watch the demonstrators bowing good-byes.
“That was weird,” Abner observes.
“That was very weird,” Buzz agrees.
On-base, we move from a chaotic, congested world crowded with small vehicles and small people into a world where armored personnel carriers and broad-beamed six-footers roam an orderly, expansive landscape of boulevards, runways, and fields, most of them ringed with white-painted rocks.
Among the most expansive of the many rolling spaces on-base is the parade ground. This afternoon, however, it is packed with people and booths. A banner fluttering above it all reads KADENA KARNIVAL: 23 YEARS OF RYUKYUAN-AMERICAN FRIENDSHIP.
“That wasn’t here when we left, was it?” I ask.
Bosco, her sleeve pulled up over her hand, continues rubbing her window even though the smudges are on the outside. “Oh, they have one every time there’s a big demonstration.”
“Can we go, Mom? Can we? Can we?” Bob whines, his terror at the gate already forgotten.
“Bob, we went the last four times they had a carnival.”
“Yeah, but I was little then and my memory doesn’t go that far back.”
“Come on, Mom.”
A general pro-carnival movement sweeps the car.
“Aw, what the hell,” Moe announces, with typical TDY spontaneity.
An Okinawan woman wearing a yellow hard hat several sizes too small waves us into a portion of the parade ground that has been turned into a parking lot.
As we walk to the carnival a half-track tank rumbles past carrying a wagon lined with hay and loaded with kids. Three Ryukyuan children in sun hats that frame their round faces like wilted petals wave at their parents, taking photos at the side. The rest of the passengers are American kids, mostly occupied with stuffing hay down one another’s backs.
“Hey, I wanna ride!”
“We gotta get tickets.”
Moe transforms all the cash in her purse into loops of tickets. The twins snag several coils and, with Bob running after them, disappear in the direction of booths where
other gangs of boys are hurling hardballs at lead-bottomed Coke bottles and popping off balloons with BB guns.
“I’m good at this.” Moe and I follow Bosco as she runs toward a booth with a moatful of plastic carp sluicing around it. Moe trades tickets for a fishing pole and Bosco starts angling. Pole clasped in both hands, she swings the hook at the end of her pole in incremental twitches as the carp rush past, missing each time. Five tickets later, she hooks a fish and wins the Asian version of a Kewpie doll, a pink-cheeked, red-lipped nymph with a wave of molded-plastic hair cresting above her bulging forehead. Bosco is delighted. “I told you I was good at that.”
The window of the concession booth is covered with hand-lettered signs reading: FRY CHIKEN $1. FRY FRENCH 50 CENTS. YAKITORI $1. YAKISOBA $1. SPAGHETI $1. SQUID $1. My squid ends up being the best of the items we sample, although Bosco, with a decided predilection for the noncrispy, is quite happy with flabby fries drowned in watered-down ketchup.
I wonder what the Damsels would think of me, circling a parade ground in a hay wagon pulled by a tank while I slurp a Coke and snitch French fries as a Marine band plays Sousa marches in the distance. It is Americana in a concentration known to few who have not experienced the overseas military base.
We hop off at a remote corner of the grounds where military vehicles have been pressed into service as carnival rides. A decommissioned jet rests on the back of a trailer that a serviceman drives back and forth, creating, no doubt, the impression that the boy within is piloting a Winnebago with bad brakes. Grenade launchers have been modified for the event, and for two tickets a child can hurl a pineapple into the pulpy mass already fermenting at the end of the field.
