The Yokota Officers Club

by Sarah Bird

  “Oh, my God!” A stricken look comes over Moe’s face and she sprints toward another field where a Huey churns the parade-ground dust into a small tornado as it hovers overhead. A crew of Green Berets straps half a dozen kids into rescue harnesses dangling from the helicopter. On a signal from one of the Green Berets, it ascends and circles over the grounds. The kids waiting surge forward, jockeying for a better position in line for this most coveted of all rides. Elbowing their way most forcefully are the twins. Moe jerks them out of line just as a Green Beret points magic fingers in their direction.

  “But Mo-om, we’re next!”

  “Next to be dangled like feed sacks from a helicopter? Not while I’m alive, buddy!”

  Back at the “midway,” the twins and Bob win a couple dozen Kewpies and turn them all over to Bosco, which makes her ecstatic. With no current means of bringing home all A’s, Bosco needs other ways of keeping score. “I’m the girl at Kadena Elementary with the most Kewpies of anyone.” Moe buys us all Byerley sodas from a local bottler. The outsides of the glass bottles are powdery from overuse. My diet cola has the delicious hypersweetness of the cyclamates now under suspicion back in the States.

  For no apparent reason, Abner snatches Bob’s drink away. Abner and Buzz pass it back and forth, taking sips until the soda is almost gone and Bob is mad with impotent fury, at which point he launches himself at Abner, a tornado of skinny flailing arms. Abner holds him away with one arm and casually finishes his soda with the other. Spit flies from between Bob’s clenched teeth, his face red and sweating.

  “Abner!” Moe yells. “Let your brother hit you before he has a heart attack.”

  Abner releases Bob. “Give it your best shot, twerp.”

  Bob winds up like all his cartoon heroes. “This one’s coming out of Kentucky, sucker, and it’s got your name on it!” Bob lands his puny punch in the middle of Abner’s muscled chest and Abner drops like a sack of concrete. Bob cackles with glee.

  “Thank you,” Moe tells Abner, who is twitching very realistically on the ground.

  Around a corner from the booths are the sideshow attractions, all run by locals. Bob drags us into a crowd gathering in front of a low stage. Two speakers the size of shoe boxes broadcast a tape of tinny-sounding Okinawan music. A samisen-like instrument plunks in the background as a singer screeches. An Okinawan man in a tattered, iridescent, electric-blue jacket and an Elvis-style pompadour bounds onstage and picks up the microphone that has been resting near the tape player.

  “Wear comb! Wear comb!” It takes a second to process what I’ve taken to be a very curious personal grooming tip and adjust for the lack of the letter L in this part of the world.

  “Prease to wear comb my rovery assistant.” He swings an arm out to the back of the stage where an Okinawan girl in a sequined bikini, her long black hair pulled up into a ponytail on top of her head, teeters up the steps. She has the chunky, muscular build of a teenage gymnast and, in spite of her waist-free prepubescent figure, the unmistakable air of a working girl with one too many nights on the streets of Koza.

  We clap mechanically.

  “Take it off! Take it off!” A clump of GIs in slacks and plaid shirts hoots and whistles. Lovely Assistant drops into a crotch squat and squirms around a bit, perched on the tops of her heels. The GIs go wild. Abner and Buzz glance at each other, embarrassed, mesmerized. Moe’s eyebrows furrow as she ponders whether she needs to take maternal action and drag her young children away.

  The assistant springs back up and wobbles to a basket of Ping-Pong balls at the edge of the stage while Okinawa Elvis puts the microphone back down next to the tape player so we can all enjoy more samisen music played at Conelrad alarm volume. He claps, grunts out a loud “Hah!” and Lovely Assistant begins firing Ping-Pong balls, which he catches in his wide mouth and taps in until his cheeks bulge with half a dozen balls. With much eye-popping and bobbing of the Adam’s apple, he “swallows” the balls and his cheeks deflate. A few seconds later, in obvious alimentary distress, Okinawa Elvis dashes from one end of the stage to the other, frantically searching for a private corner. Throwing his hands up in hopeless resignation, he squats down and proceeds into an orgy of red-faced grunting and straining that leaves the twins hanging on to each other, crippled with laughter. Bob is even more amused. Moe has her hand pressed against her mouth, stifling a smile while shaking her head with maternal disapproval. Bosco watches, worried, as if she is going to be required to administer CPR or the Heimlich maneuver or, in some way, rescue someone.

  Finally, Elvis bops himself a good one in the pompadour and, like a chicken laying an egg, a white Ping-Pong ball pops out. Bob is now beyond delirious, beating on Moe, who laughs openly with him. With a rapid succession of knocks on the pompadour Elvis poops out the rest of the balls and holds them over his head.

  “Look, look.” Bosco tugs on my sleeve and points. “He spit the balls into his sleeve before he held his arm up.”

  “No kidding, Bosk. You mean the guy didn’t actually eat and shit out six Ping-Pong balls?”

  Ka-ching! Ka-ching!

  Onstage, Elvis swings a waist-high machete about, clanging it to great effect against the power pole next to the stage. Lovely Assistant rolls out a round chopping block the size of an ox-cart wheel, drops it in the center of the stage, and carefully positions a yellow Okinawan watermelon at its center. She steps aside and pivots on her high heels several times, as she gestures toward the melon and then toward her machete-swinging boss. With stylized movements and expressions that recall the thundering stomps of sumo wrestlers and the tooth-baring grimaces of Kabuki actors, Elvis raises his machete. The next instant seems to disappear because no one sees the machete descend, no one hears the slurpy thump of the melon being split open; the canary-colored fruit simply rocks open without being touched.

  “Wow.” The twins’ jaws drop in unison.

  “He didn’t even touch it,” Bob mutters.

  “He did too. He just did it really fast and the knife is really sharp. Big deal. He sliced open a watermelon.”

  “Bosco, you think you know everything. You don’t know everything. He could split your head with that machete.”

  “Oh, big accomplishment.”

  “Eat me, twerp. Oh, man, what is he doing now?”

  With the same lightning strokes, Elvis hacks the melon into pieces, which Lovely Assistant hands out to the crowd. Abner snags a piece and passes it to Moe. All the melon gone, Lovely Assistant lies down on the chopping block, holding another melon on her bare stomach. Elvis shreds a silk scarf, raining down filaments of pink and white on her upturned face to show how sharp the blade is.

  “Ewww,” Moe whispers to me. “I think I’d seek another line of work.”

  Screaming a strangled Kabuki shriek, Elvis rears back with the machete, swings forward, and stops. He does it several more times, like a man splitting kindling homing in on his target. With each aborted chop, the crowd grows tenser. Finally, a mighty banzai! and the melon splits into two perfect halves. Lovely Assistant bounces up, not a scratch on her firm belly.

  As Elvis and the assistant steeple their hands in a victory arch above their heads, another Ryukyuan woman comes onstage. Wild and tribal, she reminds me of the old woman we saw bathing in the stream today. The bikini bottom beneath her stretch-marked Buddha tummy seems like a loincloth, the top sagging beneath her deflated breasts an odd accoutrement as optional as the snake-fang necklace hanging above it. Her brown arms and ankles are cross-hatched with scars that make me think of the pineapple pickers and their curved knives. Draped around the woman’s shoulders is a small python.

  Elvis holds Lovely Assistant’s hand as she totters down the steps. The python rouses itself and undulates across the older woman’s collarbones, slithering under her armpit in a stream of ductile motion.

  “Prease to wear-comb Mama-san!”

  A smatter of puzzled applause.

  “Bring back the LBFM with the melons!” The GIs crowd around and slam s
houlders into their witty buddy. The twins, pleased to get the melons part, laugh. Bob laughs for his own reasons entirely.

  “What’s an LBFM?” Bosco asks. I shrug.

  The microphone squawks. “Mama-san know all ancient art Okinawa. Mama-san make snake magic!” He holds his arm out in an I-give-you motion. “Mama-san!”

  Mama-san walks to the center of the stage with a splay-footed gait, her thick bare toes prehensile as they grip the plywood boards, the python surging around her belly. The GIs whoop when it detours south, coiling around her crotch.

  “Is this really something you kids should be watching?” Moe asks.

  “Yes!” Bob yells back, unable to take his eyes off the snake. “This is science, Mom.”

  “There are no bikinis in science,” Bosco informs him sternly.

  Mama-san tries to take the microphone, but Elvis won’t relinquish it, so she pulls his hand to her mouth and chatters away in a Ryukyuan dialect no one seems to understand except for the announcer, who jerks the mike back. Mama-san, the python now hobbling her ankles, toddles after him, her stream of Ryukyuan punctuated by a series of pelvic thrusts. No one, least of all the guffawing GIs, needs a simultaneous translation. Eyes creased with delight, Mama-san grins broadly at their bawdy har-hars, opening a dark, toothless hole.

  Elvis, jealous of her cheap laughs, puts the mike back down next to the tape player. Mama-san sways along to the plinking, screeching music. Waggling her butt lasciviously, she reaches down between her legs, grabs the python behind its head, and drags it up to her face. The snake flicks its tongue over her face. Mama-san holds the python’s head to her lips and kisses it. The GIs groan. She starts licking the reticulated head, then, abruptly, astonishingly, she stuffs it into her mouth.

  The groans turn to enthusiastic cheers. “Whoo! Whoo! Mama-san numboo one! Numboo one!” They imitate the baby talk of the Koza bar girls.

  Mama-san’s face resembles a picture in a schoolbook of an astronaut being subjected to G-forces that turn lips and mouths into rubber. The snake’s thick body protrudes from her mouth and hangs slackly as if it has gone into hibernation. She holds its long body in her hands. I can hear the effort of her sucking breath through her nose with the snake pressed against it.

  “Take it all, baby!”

  “Up to the hilt, Mama-san!”

  Behind us, one of the local girls with the GIs announces, “You gotta take me back. I work now.”

  “Naw, you short time stay me.”

  “I stay you gotta pay bar fine.”

  “I ain’t payin’ no fuckin’ bar fine.”

  At the F word, Moe starts herding Bob and Bosco away. “Okay, kids, come on, let’s go. This show is over.” All of us except Bosco walk with our heads turned back to watch Mama-san as she slides the snake in and out of her mouth.

  “Okinawans have big mouths,” Bob concludes.

  Abner whacks him and dances away. “You got a big mouth, dipshit.”

  Bob charges after Abner, with Buzz darting in and out, smacking them both and yelling his zombie battle cry, “Hasten demise!”

  Bosco watches her brothers. “Boys are such savages. Their muscles won’t leave them alone.”

  I’m gonna wait till the midnight hour.

  “Oh, my God, what is that?” I ask. What it is is the first non-sanitized music I’ve heard since arriving. I drag Moe and Bosco toward it. Wilson Pickett’s first-line promise has magnetized every black serviceman in the area, and we join the stampede rushing past the ring toss and fishing pond, heading toward a stage set up at the end of the line of booths. A sign on the drum kit announces that the band is the Tomadachis.

  “It means ‘friends’ in Okinawan,” Bosco informs me.

  The singer is a handsome kid, half black, half Okinawan, who has plucked the best from both gene pools, including straight black hair and a growling vibrato. He has three high school buddies backing him up, and they are thrashing “Midnight Hour.” I break into a little backup-singer line-dance action, a few hand rolls garnished with a cuff-link adjustment at each end.

  “The wicked Pickett,” the singer announces as the guitarist hits the final chord. His accent is a seductive blend of singsong Okinawan and gutbucket soul. “He’s the king of them all, y’all.”

  Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.

  I squeal and punch Bosco. “All right! ‘Land of a Thousand Dances.’ Dance pop quiz.”

  When the singer tells us that we gotta know how to pony like phoney moroney, I make Bosco high-trot along with me like we’ve just stepped off the set of Hullabaloo or Shivaree, the essential dance primer shows of the mid-sixties. Then I show her how to snap her spine when the singer orders us to “do that Jerk.” A couple of black GIs step in front of us, and we all Watusi like his little Lucy, hey!

  By this time the singer is feeling pretty good, y’all; he’s spotted us and starts throwing out every dance he’s ever heard of: Twist. Frug. Pearl. Hully-Gully. Alligator. The Skate. Shingaling. Stroll. Slop. The Boogaloo. Dirty Dog. He orders us through everything except a minuet. What moves I don’t know from my devotional viewing of Shivaree and Hullabaloo and a lifetime of hovering at the edges of Teen Club dances, one of the black guys does. Whoever gets it first models for Bosco and me, and we mirror the motions. Dancers around us pick up on our minimarathon, and the GIs and their Koza dates Jerk and Boogaloo along with us as we survey a compendium of how America’s young move.

  Nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah-nah.

  Nah-nah-nah-NAH!

  The Tomadachis work with the crowd, going into an even longer extended version of Cannibal & the Headhunters’ ode to kinetic ecstasy. As always happens when the music is good and the beat insistent enough, I am set free from my usual prison of self-consciousness, and everyone within a 360-degree radius becomes a partner. I dance with a Koza bar girl, a Kubasaki high school kid with acne and a big Adam’s apple, a good-looking GI in baggy Hawaiian-print shorts, and several black servicemen.

  You gotta know how to Monkey like funky barunkee.

  I grin back at the singer, who laughs with us at his idiotic improvisation, and drop into a deep-bobbing Monkey, climbing the vine with ferocious arm swings that Moe clucks and smiles at. Just to make her laugh even more, I break into an impersonation of Lovely Assistant complete with an excessively low crotch drop.

  “You are wicked.” Moe can barely contain herself. I pivot away so she can fully appreciate my backfield in motion and come face-to-face with Kit. Her white shorts, white teeth, and sleeveless yellow ribbed T-shirt set off her tan to perfection. Her hair, pulled back with a broad white ribbon like Alice in Wonderland, flips up perfectly at the ends. The rest of her crowd of half a dozen or so in polo shirts and Weejun penny loafers exudes, though to a lesser degree, Kit’s aura of blond American perfection.

  I am at the bottom of the vine, my butt almost scraping the packed earth of the parade grounds, just starting my monkey climb back up the vine, when Kit spots me. Surprised, Kit doesn’t hide behind her usual disdain. In her look is crystallized so nakedly all her thwarted longing for a normal family, a normal big sister, that I too am caught off guard and can’t respond with my usual dismissal. She turns away before her friends can associate her with what I suddenly realize is a crude copulatory performance. I straighten up slowly, disconnected utterly from the music, and walk away until it sounds as tinny as the samisen plinkings coming from the other end of the midway.

  “Bernie! Bernie, wait up!”

  Bosco, Moe trailing her, runs toward me.

  “Why’d you leave?”

  I shrug.

  Kit and her crowd have taken our places, closed their magic circle, and are reprising the “Land of 1,000 Dances” catalog, except that Kit renders each one a bit too literally. For the Pony, Kit appears to be, once again, the leader of the wild horses, stomping and pawing at the ground, pausing to toss her hair from side to side and sniff the air. Her Monkey involves armpit-scratching and some bowlegged staggering. Her Skat
e brings Hans Brinker to mind. Her Mashed Potatoes is an enigmatic tribute to the tuber. But the Jerk. Kit’s Jerk is another dimension.

  Bosco’s eyebrows crease farther and farther down as she watches. “She looks like she’s being electrocuted.”

  “Don’t make remarks about your sister,” Moe orders sternly. But when Kit launches into a pantomime of the death of a killer robot, Moe is startled into a burp of laughter that she corks quickly with her hand. “You couldn’t say that rhythm is Kit’s big gift in life.”

  “Bernie is our family’s dancer.” Bosco parrots the party line loyally. We watch silently as Kit Boogaloos down Broadway as if a sea chantey were playing in her head. “You’re tons better than she is.”

  Still in some obscure pirate mode, Kit takes to hopping around as if she had a peg leg. The boys in the penny loafers and crew cuts gaze adoringly. The girls copy her moves even as she segues into an imitation of a hay baler.

  “You know what, Bosk? It really doesn’t make any difference. It never has. Never will.”

  Moe stares hard at me. “Bernadette Marie Root, don’t say that.”

  “It’s the truth, Moe. It doesn’t bother me. It’s just true that Kit is beautiful, and it’s true that beauty’ll get you a lot more places in this life than a sense of rhythm, and one of those places is going to be an all-expense-paid trip to Tokyo, and that’s just how it is. I really don’t care, but I have had about enough of Kadena Karnival.”

  We run into the boys, standing in a long line outside a large surplus tent old enough to have been used during the invasion of the island. A handmade sign over the entrance flaps reads OKINAWA AMINALS.

  “Come on,” I call out, “we’re going home.”

  Bob becomes the emblem of seven-year-old outrage. “No! We’ll lose our place in line. I want to see the aminals!”

  They all glower at me and look to Moe to intercede. She does. “Come on, Bern, let’s see the aminals.”

  Two airmen in khakis raise the flap. “Next ten.” To the grumbling of those behind us in line, we take cuts and meld with the group ducking their heads to enter the tent. The air inside is stifling and smells of mildew, canvas, hay, and manure. A string of bare bulbs lights the tent, which is actually a series of tents strung together.