The Yokota Officers Club

by Sarah Bird

  I turn to the hipster bandleader. “Do you know ‘Brown Eyed Girl’?”

  Yoshi beams and gives me a thumbs-up. “Van-u Morru-san! Ichi-ban!” He fires off a burst of rapid Japanese, opens a case, pulls out an electric guitar. I try not to look at Bobby but catch a glimpse anyway. His face is the color of boiled tomatoes as he repeatedly slices his finger across his throat. Yoshi tunes his electric guitar and the women clap hands over their ears. The men exchange What-is-this-shit? glances.

  “Hello.” The microphone squawks and I jerk back. “Hello. My name is Bernadette Marie Root. My five brothers and sisters call me Bernie. I am not Okinawa’s answer to Joey Heatherton. I am an Air Force brat. My mother is Mary Clare Mohoric. My father is Mason Patrick Root. I went to five schools in fifth grade. The longest we ever lived any place was here. We were stationed at Yokota Air Base from 1956 to 1960. My father flew RB-fifties with the Thirty-eighty-first Reconnaissance Squadron. His crew was the Bong Bunnies.”

  Led by the redheaded major, all the guys at the back table bound to their feet. “All right! Thirty-eighty-first!” The major hoists a mug high above his head and delivers his panegyric, “Thirty-eighty-first! First in war! First in love!” The rest of the crew raise mugs high and stare at the surrounding tables until those officers hoist their drinks up, as well, in a salute to the 3081st. The young redheaded major clinks his mug against his tablemates’. The toast rings through the ballroom, and all the men slam down their drinks.

  “Barkeep!” the young major bellows. “Drinks for the house! The best goddamn squadron in the best goddamn Air Force in the world is buying!” Waitresses scurry around, distributing free drinks. Then the crew turns toward me and each holds his drink aloft while the major bellows out, “To a brother!” Everyone in the club hoists their drinks up for my father and yells back, “To a brother!,” clinks, and drinks.

  Hey Roderigo! Dates when no raking!

  Yoshi holds a flimsy lyric sheet and sings out the words written by my old friend, the tea-loving Taiwanese transcriber. He bends down to plug his guitar into the amp and picks out the lead. The drummer follows Yoshi, picking up the rhythm. The keyboard player slips in where he can. The baffled horn players try to throw in a fill or two. Still, suddenly, it’s music. I take my glasses off and the Yokota Officers’ Club becomes an Impressionistic painting.

  I grin uncontrollably as Yoshi turns Van’s new game into a nude game and, before I realize it, I’m dancing.

  “Whoo! Whoo!” The young major leads his table in a conga line toward the stage. Tables are bumped, plates knocked to the floor, wives pulled out of their seats and dragged away. “Nothing can stop the Thirty-eighty-first!” they sing to the tune of the Air Force song, almost, but not quite, drowning out Yoshi.

  By the time the conga line reaches the stage, nearly all the officers have appropriated partners. The redheaded major, the last of his beer sloshing from his mug, dances with me.

  He takes my hand and makes me spin like a ballerina in a music box while Yoshi sings about sew hearts fighting a highway and mammary backstairs roaring.

  The stage crowds as all the single officers shanghai waitresses and drag them onstage to dance. A chubby lieutenant bumps into me and I dance with him, laughing even harder as Yoshi bawls out the transcriber’s thoughts about making love in the negroes beehive!

  The chubby lieutenant, the redheaded major, the petite brunette wife, we’re all laughing as we scream out “Stay tea! Yum!” along with Yoshi. Yoshi catches my eye and mimes sucking on a joint as he sings “brown high girl!” and I laugh with him, too. All of us, me, the band, the girdled wives, the once-young officers, all the members of my father’s old squadron, we’re all in on the joke and we’re all laughing together.

  Sha ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra ra! Ra tea tah!

  Yoshi, thrilled by this response, cues the band and they go into extra innings. The officers dance around me, happy and graceless as drunken bears.

  The first shriek of the alarm doesn’t register. By the second, however, I have already translated the blast from a code I didn’t realize I remembered: Typhoon. 1E. First Stage. Destructive winds of fifty knots or greater are anticipated within twelve hours. Active duty personnel contact Officer of the Day. Dependent personnel return to quarters.

  Band members all stop playing on the same note. The club manager flips on the overhead lights. The dancing officers seem dazed, like sleepwalkers who wake to find themselves in the middle of a street.

  Chairs scrape back all around the room. Some officers help their wives on with their coats; most already have their keys in their hands and are striding toward the exits.

  “Crap.” The young major puts his empty beer mug down. “I thought it was gonna miss us.” He walks off the stage, followed by the rest of his crew. The lights go on. Within minutes, the dining room is empty. As Yoshi waves goodbye and follows the last band member out, I realize what I must do.

  “I have to go home.”

  “Home? You mean Okinawa home?” Bobby rolls his eyes, the preliminary to his what-did-I-do-to-deserve-this-fahcacting-shiksa routine.

  Before he can start, I repeat, “I have to go home.”

  “No can do, kid. We’re already in Condition One-E. All commercial flights will be suspended by the time you get to the airport.”

  I slam out the swinging doors and run down the hall. Near the front entrance I catch up with the crew from the 3081st. They’ve been slowed down by the fact that the navigator is passed out on the floor. The young major has the wife he picked up at the coffee shop slung over his shoulder, and he’s directing his crew in how best to help their fallen comrade reclaim verticality.

  “Not like that! You’re just spinning him around. You got to pick him up.” As the men try to coordinate their efforts, I run up to the commander.

  “Hey, look! It’s Joey Heatherton!” He tries to dance with me and the wife slides off his shoulder, landing unsteadily on her feet.

  I explain to the major that I need to get home to Okinawa and that my father, who flew with the 3081st, would consider it a personal favor if he could help me.

  The major studies me blearily for a moment, then bellows out, “Get me a phone!”

  A few minutes later, the young major comes back. “Boy, are you a lucky dog. There’s one flight out. It’s going to Okinawa and the AC knew your old man. Get out to the Flight Line. ASAP.”

  Outside, that afternoon’s misty rain has turned into a downpour. I’m waiting under the porte cochere with the gang of drunk fliers when Bobby ambles up. I make him promise to bring the rest of my stuff with him back to Okinawa.

  “So, kid, it’s been real.”

  “Bobby, I’m sorry I’m leaving—”

  “Forget about it. So they sue me for breach of contract. So I’m ruined and end up eating outta trash cans.”

  “Bobby, could you give Fumiko my address? Tell her to write.”

  “So you decided to stay in touch, huh? The man without a country is going to write a letter, that it?”

  “Yeah. Bobby, I … The whole”—I don’t know what to say—“it was fun.”

  “We had a few laughs there, Zelda, didn’t we?”

  “Yeah. We did.”

  “Jesus, let’s not start blubbering. What? You think this is the last time you’re ever gonna see Bobby Moses? No such luck. I’ll be looking you up. We’ll keep in touch.”

  “Thanks, Bobby, thanks for everything.”

  “What thanks? You give a little, you get a little, life goes on. Just one thing, okay? Listen, kid, when you’re my age you realize that we all pass through this life too soon and, in the end, what have you got? Your friends, right? Fuck it, just don’t—don’t be a prune, kid, huh?” He looks away, embarrassed by this brief dip into sincerity.

  Bobby flags down a cab. As I run out to it, skipping barefooted through the puddles, he yells at me, “Get some shoes before the freaking hookworms eat you alive!”

  I pause in the pouring rain long eno
ugh to holler back, “You get it, Bobby, you just really do get it.”

  “Hey! What’d I tell you about stealing my tag line! Get out of here, get your own tag!”

  Strawberries

  I pile into the taxi and we drive through a rain that turns the windows of the car into sheets of wobbly liquid.

  At the Flight Line, the security guard already has my name on a list and waves us on. We drive to a hangar at the end of the runway. I pay the driver then run through the downpour into the hangar, where rain thunders on the metal roof. The hangar, open at both ends, tunnels fresh, cool air past me. Outside, the rain makes the runway lights hazy and distant. The rotating red beacon in the control tower barely penetrates the downpour.

  A Kota Kab pulls up. The back door opens. Fumiko, holding a box, gets out and runs into the hangar.

  “Bobby told me you were here.” There isn’t even an instant when I don’t hear what Fumiko means instead of the bar-girl English.

  “Fumiko, I was the one who ruined everything.” The words pop out. “I was the one who told.”

  “You were a child. It would all have happened anyway. Does Moe still love strawberries?”

  “More than ever.” Raindrops glisten on Fumiko’s hair, as dark and shiny as it was the day we met. “She misses them. A lot.” She holds out the box, a small crate made of slats of pale, sanded balsa wood and tied with a thick apple-green grosgrain ribbon. Through the slats, I see perfect, hydroponically immense strawberries nestled in excelsior as securely as babies in incubators.

  “Tell her—” Fumiko stops.

  There are words to say, but I don’t know them any more than Moe knows the words to say to my father. Hearts beating as one is less a matter of will than of time and place and circumstance.

  “You Mace Root’s girl?” an officer yells at me, and I see the crew hustling out onto the runway.

  Fumiko shoves the tiny crate of strawberries into my hands and like a magic spell lifting, I stop hearing what she means and only the bar-girl words are left behind. “You give Moe.”

  I say what was there from the first. “I love you.”

  Fumiko nods, and I can’t tell whether the drops running down her face are rain or tears.

  “Wheels up, babe!” the officer yells at me. “You’re on crew time now! Move it! Move it! Move it!” The last of the crew hustles out to the plane rumbling on the runway.

  Fumiko reaches out and touches my widow’s peak, then steps away and—blink—a time that started when she first slid back the paper-screened door of the little house in Fussa is over. She turns and hurries through the rain to the waiting cab.

  Rain

  I fly back to Okinawa in a WC-130 Hercules with a crew from the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron out of Andersen Air Base in Guam. Turbulence is ferocious. I am grateful I haven’t eaten.

  The aircraft commander, a jaunty, long-faced colonel with a deep tan and no discernible lips, bald on top with a fluff of blond on the side poking out around his earphones, swivels around in his captain’s chair to face me. He shouts to make himself heard over the drone of the propellers.

  I crane forward from my perch on a drop seat bolted to the wall but can’t hear him.

  He nods, switches on the intercom, and speaks into the microphone that curls in front of his mouth. His words now boom down from the speaker above my head.

  “We’re the Guama Bombahs.”

  I grin and nod like a lunatic, eager to express my appreciation for the immense favor they are all doing me. Especially the colonel. Taking an unauthorized dependent along on a weather scouting mission would not look good on his OER.

  The colonel sits, ankle resting on his knee, sprawled back in the chair as if he were watching a football game in his living room. The cockpit is dark except for an array of lights on the control panel and the phosphorescent face of the radar screen in front of the navigator. They are charting the edge of the storm wall. “Milk run” was how the colonel had described it. The weather officer passes me and consults with the copilot, who stands beside the navigator, staring at the screen where a yellow fireball spirals against the black background. The only word I can hear as the copilot circles his finger around the open center of the spiral is “eyewall.” The weather officer nods and goes back to the rear of the plane to radio information back to ground control.

  The copilot, whose dark curly hair is pushed up into a pompadour above a high forehead by his headset, has the look of a young seminarian reading his breviary as he gazes into the screen and quietly answers all the questions only very occasionally interrupting the pilot to ask a question of his own or to forward a request from another crew member.

  It is dark, loud, and cold, very cold, even with the two blankets and the pair of wool socks the flight engineer hands me. In the darkness, the search screen with its flame of whirling typhoon is like a hearth on a wet, miserable day where everyone draws warmth, comfort. Copilot; that was my father’s job. I imagine him as he was then, his hair dark, long, combed like a movie star’s; smoking a Camel cigarette; surrounded by men whose lives depended on his doing his job just as his life depended on them doing theirs. Everyone went through him. Like the Virgin Mary, he interceded for the others with the commander.

  I think that my father and his crew must have been as oddly at peace as these men as they fly through the far edges of a typhoon. Maybe even as much as Moe and her group of sixteen nurses packed into a stateroom designed for a honeymoon couple, never knowing when an enemy torpedo would hit, singing in a jungle of damp underwear.

  The Hercules shudders along. At dawn, a dim spectral illumination shines in through the fifteen windows that wrap around the front of the cockpit. Empires of cloud—gray, slate blue—rise up outside the windows. The ocean is a block of granite far below.

  “Everyone buckled up back there?” The colonel’s voice comes over the intercom. “It might get a little bumpy now.” I don’t see how it could get any bumpier, but I hook my thumb under the seat-belt straps coming over my shoulders as if I were snapping my suspenders at the county fair. “Time to go to work.” The colonel directs his last comment to me.

  The plane banks with a lurching yawn into the shroud of clouds and the ocean disappears from view.

  The yellow bar on the navigator’s screen that indicates our heading, which had been skirting the edge of the bright flower of the typhoon, now pierces its center.

  The copilot sees my sudden panic. “Don’t worry. We’re not flying into the eyewall. Not this time. I wouldn’t have allowed a civilian on board if we were. Just have to scooch in enough for the Dropsonde operator to deliver his packages.”

  The operator muscles a couple of two-foot silver cylinders packed with weather-sensing instruments toward the cargo bay. The copilot is close enough to yell to me over the roar of the engines that they have to penetrate into the wall of the typhoon to drop the cylinders, which will transmit information as they parachute down. He tells me not to worry.

  “This is nothing compared to our last mission!”

  “What was that?”

  “You don’t want to know!”

  “Sure I do!”

  “Trying to make enough rain to turn the Ho Chi Minh trail into a mudslide!”

  The intercom crackles to life. “Okay, ladies, let’s bite ’em in the ass!”

  All the men turn to their duty stations. For the next several minutes, the intercom spills out a complex garble of numbers, coordinates, words spelled out with bravo and delta instead of letters, with each utterance receiving a roger that, Captain. Even I stop noticing how the plane is pitching. The tight harmony is sustained until the cylinders are dropped. The garble is like a musical score conducted by the aircraft commander. I wonder what kind of commander my father would have been.

  A bubble of euphoria swells as the colonel banks back around and heads south.

  “Next stop, Kadena O Club. I’m buying. Wake me up when we get there.”

  The pilot makes a show of stretchin
g out, tipping his headset so it covers his eyes, folding his arms into nap position. He is grinning broadly. The rest of the crew yell jokes, tease one another about supposed incompetencies, laziness, cowardice, all of which highlight how perfectly brave and skillful they all were together. How entirely extraordinary.

  “Is your father—”

  The pilot is not using the intercom to speak to me and I can barely make out his shouted words. He puts his hand up and pantomimes a plane soaring through the air, its wings tilting up one way then the other.

  I shake my head no. He presses his mouth together tightly and nods with sad understanding.

  In half an hour, we’ve outrun the typhoon. Tattered streamers of dingy clouds slide past windows misty with a rain that has slowed down to a constant drizzle. We have to circle the island several times before landing, the runways are so busy with planes being evacuated.

  The landing is effortlessly smooth. My biggest worry is what Moe will say about my bleached hair. It turns out that this is an unscheduled stop. No one else is getting off. They made this detour on their way back to Guam simply to deliver me. The colonel brushes off my thanks. “I’m sure Wild Root would do the same for my kid.” His voice sounds soft and faraway after the hours of engine noise.

  Outside, the wind socks balloon out at a stiff ninety-degree angle and the heavy drizzle threatens to graduate to a downpour. The sky overhead is filled with aircraft moving out of the path of the typhoon.

  It only surprises me for a moment when I see Moe, Kit, Buzz, Abner, Bob, and Bosco standing on the observation deck outside the Kadena terminal. Someone in the Air Force net must have alerted Moe that I was coming home. For one second, before they spot me, I watch my family. They are all alert, searching, even—maybe especially—Kit.