The Yokota Officers Club

by Sarah Bird

  “The Apes?” Kit giggles for too long before she finally points to the guys on the ground. “They are the Apes.” The two GIs snort silly little laughs and go back to staring at the fire.

  I move back in with a no-nonsense “Come on, let’s go.”

  With a swiftness that surprises me, Kit grabs my arm and bites down.

  “Oops.” Kit presses her finger against the Cupid’s bow scar above her lip and tries to stifle a laugh, as if she might have just passed gas instead of sinking her teeth into me.

  “You bitch,” I say, more for the snicker than the teeth marks on my arm.

  “Me? I’m the bitch?” The opium takes the edge off Kit’s question so it sounds innocent and injured. “Oh, of course, I forgot, Kit is always the bitch. Let’s not mention anything about Saint Bernadette stealing the only thing I ever wanted in life away from me.” Kit’s tone is strangely airy. She whirls in slow circles.

  “I didn’t steal that contest, Kit, I won it. Big difference.”

  Kit stops. “Contest? Not the contest, bozo.”

  “Well, what the hell are you talking about?”

  Kit closes her eyes and twirls slowly away from me. As I watch her actually moving in time to the music, I realize how stoned she is. This might be the only chance I’ll ever have to make my little sister talk to me. My tone is gentle. “Kit? Tell me, okay? What are you talking about? I stole the only thing that matters from you?”

  Kit’s pupils are tiny black leaves floating in a pond of aqua blue. She seems to forget who I am and answers in a small voice, “Mommy.”

  “Kit, what do you mean?”

  “You know what I mean, silly.” She undulates forward and slaps her palms against my chest with the slow-motion lassitude of seaweed swept by an underwater current.

  “What, Kit? Tell me.”

  Her words spool out in a long, slow drift.

  “You know, you two are always glued to each other. You always were. You were always sick or crying about something, or hurt. You hogged her. You still do. The way you two sit out on the patio and laugh and smoke.”

  “You could always come out and sit with us too.”

  “Right, and have the conversation stop the way it always does when I walk in.” Kit seems less glazed now and more like a drunk on the verge of blubbering. “You know, there are people in this world who like having me around. Lots of them.”

  I should argue, tell her that I like having her around, but she would know it’s a lie.

  “You and Moe and Bosco, you’re just this bizarre little closed club, and you decided a long time ago that I don’t fit in.”

  “Kit, you always had your own little closed club.”

  “What?”

  “You know what.”

  “Me and Dad?” Kit’s head rolls sleepily forward on her chest and she snorts in exasperation. “You’re kidding, right? Tell me you’re kidding. Tell me that my egghead sister isn’t that blind and that stupid.”

  I don’t want to get into this, especially not in front of a bunch of cheerleaders on opium, but Kit seems suddenly, aggrievedly, coherent.

  “You really haven’t noticed that Dad hasn’t spoken to me since I got tits? No, really not since the twins could throw a decent fastball.”

  I try and come up with a time in recent memory when our father has spoken to Kit and am stunned to discover I can’t come up with one. Kit studies my face. “You are an idiot. You’re an idiot, and now you’re going to Tokyo. You stole that too.”

  “Kit, it wasn’t yours for me to steal. I beat you. Bobby picked me.”

  “Right. So now you’re going over there and you’re going to find her, aren’t you?”

  I can’t imagine what layers of resentment the opium has roiled for Kit to arrive at this deduction. Even though I know exactly who she means, I ask, “Find who?”

  “Fumiko.”

  “Why not? Why shouldn’t I?”

  “Does the fact that she ruined our family matter to you at all?”

  “How, Kit? How do you think Fumiko ruined our family?” I stand so close to Kit now that I can smell the sweet, smoky odor of opium on her breath.

  “Think? I know and you know. You just won’t ever admit that a big part of it’s your fault.”

  “My fault? How did you cook that up in your deluded brain?”

  “Fuck you. Fuck the three of you. You ganged up on me. On Daddy. Fumiko was more important to Mom than her own husband. You let her in and she ruined our family. We were happy before. Our parents talked. They laughed. We all laughed. We had a family. Then she ended it. Now we don’t have a family.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You know what I’m saying. She screwed our father and wrecked our family, and you and Moe let it happen.”

  For a second all I hear is the crackle of the fire and the accelerated thump of my heart. It is both unthinkable and the only explanation for what happened to my family.

  One of the girls giggles. I glance down and from her dreamy, unseeing stare realize that her amusement has as little to do with anything Kit and I have said as it does with the GI absentmindedly twiddling her nipple.

  “Kit, come on, let’s go home.”

  “No. I’m never going back there. Why should I? Why should I ever do one fucking thing you ever say?”

  “Because if you don’t, your picture is going to be on television and we’ll get shipped off this island so fast your head will spin. And then, Kit, you won’t be head cheerleader or prom queen your senior year of high school.”

  Kit is too ripped to drive, so we both get in the Corvette and make the trip back to Kadena in a stony silence that is only broken when we pull into the carport.

  Kit seems not just cold sober when she speaks, but lucid in a way she has never been in her entire life. “There’s no difference between you and me, you know. Not to them.”

  I turn off the ignition. “What are you talking about?”

  “It all comes down to the same thing in the end. If you’re a bad girl, they punish you by making you invisible. If you’re a good girl”—Kit opens the door, pauses—“they reward you by making you invisible. That’s your reward, ghost girl. You’re a pale, silent ghost who nobody notices when she’s here and nobody notices when she’s gone.”

  Kit stands, slams the door, and walks away.

  Brylcreem

  Of course, Kit doesn’t come to the airport, the commercial one in Naha, to see me off, but everyone else does. Moe wears a cotton shift bright with a red-and-yellow hibiscus print that we bought together at a stall in a Koza alley. The bright flowers and Moe’s rosy cheeks help me dismiss Kit’s accusations from the night before. The ghost-girl stuff is harder to forget. I try and remember a friendship I’ve ever kept up after we moved and can’t think of a single one. For that matter, it’s hard to recall the names of any friends I ever made to begin with. In the end there was always Moe, just Moe and the sibs.

  The twins have disappeared. Bob and Bosco cluster with a group of Okinawan children around a man demonstrating a toy that looks like a Ping-Pong paddle with a wooden ball hanging down from it. As he twirls the ball, the chickens on top of the paddle start to peck.

  A murmur of Japanese calls our attention to the main entrance. Okinawans crowd around the glass doors. On the other side, a driver opens the door of a black Lincoln Continental and offers his white-gloved hand to help Bobby Moses out.

  I glance at Moe watching Bobby get out. The tropical sun glitters on his Brylcreemed hair and sharkskin suit. For one second, I am certain she is going to tell me I can’t go and we were both insane to even consider the possibility that a major’s daughter would ever play Joey Heatherton to this fifth-rate Borscht Belt comedian’s Bob Hope. Instead, Moe digs an envelope out of her purse and hands it to me.

  “You probably won’t see her, but if you do—”

  I don’t have to read the envelope to know the name on it: Fumiko Tanaguchi.

  Lavender

  “You’
re back there in the cheap seats,” Bobby says, as we step onto the plane. “I’m up here. I need the room.” He heads up to first class and the Japan Airlines stewardess, impeccable in a blue suit, white gloves, and a pillbox hat atop her French twist, smiles, bows, and points to my seat in coach.

  As soon as we take off, I slide Moe’s letter out of my purse and stare at the envelope. Moe’s loopy, old-fashioned handwriting twines across the front, spelling out Fumiko Tanaguchi.

  “Yoroshiku onegai shimasu.”

  A stewardess in a dove-gray kimono stands beside me in the aisle offering a wet washcloth with a pair of tongs. The warm, damp cloth is lightly scented with lavender. Once I have wiped off my hands and face, it seems natural to simply set the damp cloth on Moe’s envelope until the flap unsticks. I carefully remove the letter. Just as she always made an effort to speak slowly and clearly to Fumiko, Moe has obviously tried to keep her scrolling handwriting as plain and simple as the words she uses.

  Dear Fumiko,

  I should have written this letter eight years ago. Probably I never would have if Bernie hadn’t been going over.

  What I want to say is, although you took most of the blame, it was not your fault. I never really felt like it was, but you know why I couldn’t write. We all just got caught up in a big mess that none of us could control. Maybe Mace was wrong for his part in it. I probably should have spoken up. About that and a lot of other things. I don’t know. We don’t discuss it. I have thought of you so often over the past years and so wish I had stayed in touch. You were a good friend to me and to my family. I hope it is not too late for us to be friends again.

  Sincerely yours,

  Moe

  I fold the letter and slip it back into the envelope.

  It was not your fault.

  Far below, the Pacific Ocean sits like an old friend who’s waited a long time, eight years, for me to come back. Who remembers, as I remember that first crossing, twelve years ago.

  October 1956

  By the time the S.S. President Wilson finally landed, I had been living on ice chips for ten days, and my father had to carry me to the upper deck for my first glimpse of Japan. A tug towed our ship into Yokohama Bay. As we slid past the black hulk of a sunken Japanese battleship staked upright in the black water of the bay, my father stared at the wreckage, absorbed to the point that his arms slipped a bit from under me and I had to cling like a starfish to hold on to him. Words I had heard before and not understood—“bombardier,” “B-29,” “saturation bombing”—connected then, both with the ruined ship and with my father.

  When we docked, I was shocked to discover that Japan was like the world on the small screen of the brand-new television set we’d watched Hopalong Cassidy and Howdy Doody on back in California. There was no color in Japan; everything was black and white. The dock far below was a canvas of gray cement swarming with interchangeable cartoon people all drawn in black: black hair, black eyes, black clothes. Boys in black school uniforms with high Prussian collars pushed black bicycles. Women in black kimonos held umbrellas of oiled paper turned a slick black by the drizzle. Girls, their hair in black braids, wore black skirts, black jackets, black shoes, black backpacks. Men in black caps dug black dirt from the black earth with black shovels pushed by black rubber-booted feet.

  “All right, troops.” My father addressed Moe, Kit, and me. “We are entering a foreign land. Don’t ever forget that you are ambassadors of the United States, of the United States Air Force, and of this family. I expect you to act accordingly.”

  Even as I was calculating how I would fit this ambassadorship in with my schoolwork, Kit pulled away from Moe.

  “Eileen! Wait!”

  My sister, already running down the gangplank, looked back at Moe only long enough to let it register that she had heard and had no intention of obeying. Moe, lumbering down the slick steps, glanced at my father for help with reining in my sister. He just grinned at Kit’s bravery as she plunged ahead into the throng milling about on the dock. We hurried after her. Kit’s blond hair had been bleached platinum by long days in the saltwater swimming pool, her cheeks and lips were a berry-stained pink, her eyes blue as a Siamese cat’s. She was a dazzle of healthy American Technicolor in the gaunt and colorless world we had landed in. The crowd on the dock melted away from my sister as if a glowing ember had fallen onto a sheet of black ice.

  A Japanese girl, her hair in pigtails, her cheeks chapped red, stepped forward, touched one of my sister’s long blond curls, sucked her breath in, and called out on the inhalation, “Utsukushii!” I didn’t need a translation. I’d heard the word constantly since Kit had been born. Beautiful.

  “Hey! Wild Root!” The tallest man on the dock waved at us. He wore a peaked cap with a major’s oak clusters.

  “Coney!”

  Coney. I’d heard that nickname for as long as I could remember. The major and my father went through aviation cadet training together at Kelly AFB. Then the war. Then Korea. I knew Coney Wingo was a Texan who’d gotten his nickname after a particularly wild ride. I’d always imagined the famous Major Wingo in a big hat and boots with pinto-hide chaps, but even in his uniform he looked like a cowboy, a head or two taller than all the Japanese who surged around him, his handsome face open as a prairie sky. He certainly sounded like a cowboy.

  “My right-seat guy is here! Now hear this, now hear this: The Mace is on-base. Hey, buddy, we gonna fly us an ay-ro-plane! Yee-haw!” My father let me slide to the ground and the men shook hands. Coney whacked my father with his free hand so hard that droplets of drizzle flew off my father’s belted blue raincoat. As the men pounded each other, my father stopped being my father and turned into the stranger he became with other fliers. His happiness made him a stranger. He was happier in that moment of meeting Major Wingo than I could ever remember seeing him.

  “And this little dazzler can’t be Eileen, can she?” the major asked, kneeling down right in a puddle so that his face was in front of Kit’s. Kit tilted her head to the side and said yes, she was Eileen. I backed away, terrified of receiving such attention from the big major.

  Coney put his big hands out and wrapped them both around one of Kit’s. “Well, I’m Major Wingo. That should be easy, right? A Wingo who flies, who’s a pilot. That sound ’bout right to you?”

  Kit smiled the special smile she reserved for strangers and officers.

  Major Wingo didn’t seem inclined to stand up from the puddle he’d knelt in until Moe waddled up. The major rushed forward then to relieve her of the heavy shoulder bag she carried.

  Moe glanced around behind the major. “Is LaRue here?”

  “No. Some Wives Club deal she couldn’t get out of. We’ll get together at the club later. She can’t wait to see you all. Just can’t wait.”

  His car was a big forest-green Pontiac with an Indian head on the hood and plenty of room inside. Major Wingo got behind the wheel and took his hat off. His hair was the golden clear color of beer and seemed to have sunlight falling on it even on that rainy day.

  “Now this is more like it,” Major Wingo said, when our father took the front passenger seat next to him. “Got my right-seat guy back. The old team, together again, eh? The world-beaters. The barn burners.”

  My father grinned a movie-star grin that dazzled me.

  We headed into traffic and Major Wingo pulled into the wrong lane. When a stream of cars hurtled toward us on the right side of the road I grabbed Moe and shrieked a mousy little shriek that made the men laugh.

  “Leave it to the Japs to get it backasswards and drive on the wrong side of the road,” Major Wingo explained.

  That and everything else about this country seemed wrong. There were still no colors. Even the cars were only either white or black. It was crowded and chaotic. I wanted to go home but could no longer think of where that might be.

  I snuggled up closer to Moe, who sat in the back between Kit and me. “What about the rest of the luggage?” she asked, looking back toward the harbor.
/>
  “The billeting officer’ll pick it up for you. I wanted to show you to your new quarters myself.”

  “VOQ?” my father asked.

  “Forget that Visiting Officer noise. No, I promoted a place on the economy for you. Had to cut a lot of red tape, but I swung it.”

  “Nothing on-base?” My father’s disappointment was evident. “Even Wherry housing? Capehart?”

  “Nada. Damned lucky to get this.”

  “So, we’re in the ville, huh?”

  “You’ll love it. Little village, Fussa. It’s right outside Yokota. What’d you come halfway around the world for, live in a cinder-block house and mow a lawn? Who needs that bull puckey?”

  The frightening thought that we were going to live off-base in this colorless world plunged me into despair, and I complained about the one corner of my life I might possibly have any influence over. “I’m cold.”

  In the front seat, neither man acted as if they had heard me. They talked about the men they had flown with, and everyone was either a meatball, a hambone, a feather merchant, a brownnoser, or—the worst of the insults—a frigging ground pounder, a desk jockey.

  “Hey, what about Blueblade?”

  Major Wingo didn’t answer.

  “You know? Shapiro?” my father asked again. “Remember that time he was in Alpha wing with us and he made that half-ass wingover outside of Pusan, took out his Norden, and he’s reefing back on the column control but can’t—”

  “Didn’t you hear?” Major Wingo stopped my father. “Shapiro augured in.”

  “Aw, Christ. No.”

  “Yeah, hotdogging in an RB-forty-seven. Came in low, doing three hundred knots at least. Maybe more. Horsed it back and couldn’t hold the G’s.”

  “I’m cold,” I repeated.

  “Aw, Christ. Once a fighter jock, always a fighter jock.” The men in the front seat watched the wipers clear drizzle off the windshield.

  “Mace, the girls’ jackets are with the luggage and they’re cold. We’re all cold.”