by Jack Hodgins
In case they should admire her linguistic talents too much, she added, for Weins — and for Conrad, who’d come back from his walk to nuzzle his face in her throat — “I wonder what I said. If my Japanese is as bad as some of the English I’ve heard spoken here it could be anything. This morning I asked a lady behind the counter of a jewellery shop what was meant by all the posters you see hanging everywhere. Was there going to be a vote? ‘Yes, ’ she said, ‘we are having a general erection!’”
What? What was she saying? Conrad seemed to find it so funny that Weins was sure it had something to do with him.
“They can’t say their ells, Weins. They’re having a general election!”
Could Hiroshi have taken offence at the joke? He’d arrived soon enough to have heard it. Well mannered as always, however, he showed no reaction. Rather he gave Eleanor a shallow bow. She found it an occasion for another cigarette, though Conrad fumbled at her hand, and went back to her sheet-covered bench.
With his T-shirt hanging from his belt loop, Hiroshi was naked from the waist up but Eleanor turned her eyes away from the tattooed woman whose elaborate kimono swept like a peacock’s tail down his arm. Conrad edged closer to stare. He’d probably want one for himself before he went home.
When the youth grinned, his large black eyes were reduced to slits. Had the old lady been flirting with Weins or offering him a job? he asked.
“Jesus,” Conrad said. “Can you imagine being stuck with a job like that?” He forced the tips of his fingers down into his pockets and bounced a few times on the balls of his feet, like an athlete limbering up for a race. “Why doesn’t she sign herself into an old folks’ home? After a day of work she probably can’t even stand up straight; I bet her family uses her for an ironing-board.”
If he expected a laugh he was disappointed. Eleanor was preoccupied with arranging herself for the unseen photographers. And Weins was watching the little clutch of retreating street-cleaners. How did he know that she was really a woman? He didn’t. In this place you couldn’t be sure it wasn’t a little old man. There had been no clues in the face. Everything else was covered. That skirt was all he had to go on. When you got to a certain age, maybe it didn’t matter.
Hiroshi hadn’t yet learned that you paid no attention to Conrad. “You will not find many old folks’ homes in this country, although young people are beginning to say we should build them. Old people are not so welcome in families as they used to be.” Delivering this news required a long and serious expression on his face. He raised his hand to slip off the twisted rag he’d worn around his head. His thick black hair — a little longer than most you saw in this city — was damp. He used the rag to wipe the sweat off his face, then shoved it into the back pocket of his jeans. “Besides, perhaps she likes to work. Surely it is better to be out here in the world than shut up in some special home?”
Enough of this talk, Weins was ready to go. “Should we take a taxi or what?”
“No hurry, no hurry, it goes on until six. The best sumotori don’t fight until the end. If we get there too early you’ll be tired of watching before we get past the beginners.” He ducked his head into his red T-shirt and drew it down over his chest. “University College” was printed on it, and a faded gargoyle. The sleeves had been cut away.
“You’ve got the tickets?” Conrad said.
Hiroshi looked at Weins. “Yes? I have the tickets. For two.”
“But hey, hey, what about me?” A kid about to be left out of a game. Would he start to cry? It wasn’t impossible, if you judged by the look on his face. If he didn’t cry, he’d throw a tantrum at least, right here on the street. Or drive his fist into a tree. “I’ll get my ticket at the door, okay? I’ll just go along and get what I can, I don’t even need to sit with you guys, I’ll look after myself.”
From her bench under the tree Eleanor sighed. “Conrad shut up. I want you to come shopping with me this afternoon — while I look for your birthday present.” The look she gave Weins meant that she expected to be rewarded for this. “Then Jill promised to take us both to a concert.”
“And there’s little chance of getting in,” Hiroshi said, “without a ticket.”
Stabbed from every angle, Conrad confronted his assassins, his eyes accusing them one at a time. One hand was a fist, striking his other palm. Instead of crying or throwing a tantrum he chose to stomp off in a huff. “Screw the bloody concert!” And started towards the hotel. “Screw the bloody concert! Screw the bloody shopping! Screw the whole damn city!” On the edge of the street he turned and confronted them again, his arms thrown wide, his face the mottled-red colour of strawberries. “Screw the whole damn bunch of you, I’ll find my own amusement!”
III
Sitting on the bottom of that lake in Oregon, Weins had decided to leave certain things to fate. If he drowned, he drowned, too bad, but if somebody rescued him in time he’d take it for a sign he was meant to live, at least for a while. When a pair of muscular youths had pried him loose from the bottom and dragged him up to the surface, he elected to see the experience in a different light. What he had done, he decided, was earn the right to indulge. From now on he could afford to follow his natural instincts just wherever they chose to lead him. That they’d chosen to lead him here to this cramped arena stall was surely a cause for rejoicing. Down on his knees he was sure — so what if his legs were in pain? — that this sumo business was all he had hoped for and more.
The two fellows up on the raised clay platform might not be Grand Champions yet but to Weins they were good enough. Especially the closer one, an obvious winner. In his purple silk sash with its long stiff tassels, he turned so the crowd on all sides could admire his incredible stomach, his enormous thighs. That bare glistening backside alone was enough to make you think of a hippo. With its heavy nose and puffy eyelids, his face was the face of a killer — there wasn’t a dainty thing about him, except for those seashell ears. A sure bet to win, especially against the flat-faced sourpuss in green with the bandaged wrists. With all his tiny features pulled to the middle of a pudgy face, he looked like an ugly baby, ready to cry or pout. You could tell by the way he refused to look at his opponent that he was already doomed.
Crammed into the fifth row from the front, Weins thought he could hear their breathing, the rasps of excited beasts. He could be wrong. In the general noise of this packed arena it was hard to tell one sound from another. Row after row of squeezed-in kneeling people sloped up on all four sides, and no one seemed to feel the need to be quiet. At least not yet. Weins thought of Mabel in her red-plush seat in that theatre. What a contrast. Here all that separated him and Hiroshi from the rest of the crowd was this narrow rail about six inches off the floor. And a rather tubby neighbour — perhaps a sumo wrestler himself in an earlier life? — spilled over into some of Weins’s space.
The referee’s clothes would be more appropriate for the kind of thing Mabel was watching, not this affair. In a white kimono and a black hat, did he think he had come to take part in a play? The way he postured, pointing his white-socked foot like a dancer, his hand on his hip, you’d think he was planning to give you ballet. Whisk whisk, you could hear the rustling kimono as he changed his pose, and swept his fan up into air. The names he’d whined out meant nothing to Weins, just collections of meaningless sounds. The Purple Hippo was the name he gave to his favourite; the other was Sourpuss, it didn’t matter — the man was too obviously a loser to deserve a name of his own. You could already see the shining smear of sweat across his shoulders — a sign of fear.
Out by the nearest edge of the platform the Purple Hippo squatted and tipped up a mouthful of water, which he spat into a hole in the sandy floor. With a piece of paper he wiped each armpit. Was he afraid of B. O.? “Purifying himself,” Hiroshi said. “Before the battle begins, all evil must be killed.” Weins had no idea how a piece of paper could wipe out evil, nor how this handful of salt tossed out into the ring was supposed to do any good. But the contemptuous look on the
Purple Hippo’s face as he flung the salt was justification enough. His opponent, clearly intimidated, dribbled only a few grains and turned his back. People screamed. A man with a camera down in front of Weins stood up, crouched for a picture, and knelt again. The two warriors suddenly squatted, facing each other from opposite edges of the platform, and clapped their hands.
“To summon the attention of the gods,” Hiroshi said.
Having summoned the gods, both men held up their opened hands, palms outwards, and turned them in every direction. To show that they hid no knives. Again they threw salt — the Purple Hippo tossing such a huge fistful that Weins could hear it land, while the other sprinkled even less than before. They waddled towards each other — the Hippo with a lip-lifted snarl on his face, the other with his glance turned away — and then bent over, nose to nose, with their fists on the ground. Like two runners waiting for the starting gun they twisted their feet, tested their grip. Weins could imagine the impact when they moved — two sides of beef hurled at one another. The green one was bound to give way, or fall. Once he was out of the ring he was done for, or if he let anything but the soles of his feet touch the floor. It would be good to see — in some strange way it would serve him right, for having that big stupid mug of an ugly face.
But nothing happened. Bent over and breathing heavily they refused to move. Waiting for perfect silence from this crowd? If they were, they got what they wanted but still didn’t charge. Both pulled back suddenly, stood up, and retreated to the sides. New cries broke out. The man at Weins’s shoulder slapped his hands on his own thighs and roared. The Purple Hippo turned his back on the other, faced in Weins’s direction, and lifted his left leg — grabbed it by the ankle and raised it out and up higher than his own head as he tilted his body away, turning the dirty sole of his foot towards his opponent — then brought it down slam on the floor. Enough to shatter bones, or crack open a weaker mound of clay. Weins felt a needle of pain shoot up his own leg and lodge in his hip. If he ever got himself straightened out from this cramped position, which was doubtful, he could be partly crippled for life. A good thing there was a four-minute limit on all this warm-up business, these two looked as if they could hold out until midnight at least.
Poised again like runners, face to face, this time they seemed to mean business. Hiroshi elbowed Weins to look at the referee, who’d dropped his fan to his forearm. Both wrestlers leapt forward, as if a race was exactly what they were starting (in opposite directions), and immediately slammed into each other. For a moment nobody gave. The crowd howled. The photographer leapt to his feet again, ran around the ring and took a picture from a crouched position, then stood up and bashed into another photographer doing the same thing. Unlike the wrestlers, they both gave ground immediately, and scurried back to their kneeling places on the rough hard mat.
What would Conrad think if he were here? That these two giants were acting out some important ritual. Only the winner, perhaps, would be allowed to call himself a man. The loser? Who could guess what Conrad did with losers, being one himself?
The Purple Hippo was a thick bare straining back, a greasy topknot, a slash of purple silk between his buttocks. The Green Sourpuss was a twisted face, tilted up and grunting. All those little features had clamped down into a tiny knot like a single twisted muscle, a tightened spring. Perhaps it would fly apart. Why were his hands groping all over the heroic belly of the Purple Hippo?
Things got worse. The tightened muscle of the face’s features flew apart, the head disappeared, the whole body ducked, and those hands were into the sash. One hand slipped under the purple silk at the side, and the other hand hooked into the front, the face and head became a battering ram that pushed into the Purple Hippo’s chest and drove him backwards several steps. Hippo or not, after the backwards steps his feet left the floor. The Green Sourpuss thudded forward, the giant’s weight on the back of his neck and his shoulders, then lifted the helpless body up in a swinging arc and heaved him out of the ring. On the edge of the platform he teetered for a moment, then fell, like a collapsing house, and rolled into the lap of the photographer. Around him the crowd went crazy — you couldn’t tell if you were hearing cheers of triumph or jeers of scorn. Probably both. The woman beside the photographer leapt to her feet, and offered her hand to the wrestler. He ignored it, of course — hadn’t he been humiliated enough already? — and got to his feet without help. Not a trace of emotion in his face. These people were trained to hide what they really felt. He bowed to the strutting winner up on the platform, then turned to walk away. Before he left the arena, however, he turned and bowed again. Was this the usual? Weins didn’t know, but he was sure there was a trace of mockery in that second bow. Self-mockery or hero-mockery, either was possible here.
The winner paid no attention to the loser’s bows. He squatted to receive his prize from the referee and turned to leave the ring in the opposite direction. How had any of this happened? The obvious winner had been thrown right out of the ring by a baby-faced slob with only half the stomach, half the strength in his thighs. Astounded, Weins looked at Hiroshi for an explanation.
“Speed,” he said, and grinned. “Weight and muscle are not everything. Back in the earliest days of sumo our friend in the purple might even have been killed by such an agile opponent. This was not such polite entertainment then. The victor might easily have kicked him once he was down, and stomped him to death. If you had bet on the loser you would know by now that your next crop was destined to fail.”
Weins found himself looking at an assortment of food someone had placed by his knees. Was he supposed to be eating this stuff? People around had been feeding their faces ever since he’d arrived but he didn’t know whether he felt up to it himself. The pickles he could swallow if he had to, and the oranges, maybe even the little cakes of rice. But his stomach still wasn’t ready to tackle those bits of raw fish. As for the blushing squid — you didn’t know whether to eat it or apologize and shake hands. It lay there in his cardboard carton, all its tentacles stiff, and waited. If Jill hadn’t served him a meal or two of meat and potatoes, Weins would have starved to death by now. Bowls of rice he could stomach, and after some practice he could almost enjoy a bowl of seaweed soup if he didn’t think about what he was doing. But he drew the line at chomping on creatures that looked more intelligent than certain people he knew.
Hiroshi, of course, was digging in, and slurping the sake out of his little cup. “A good thing you are not in training for s’mo,” he said. “With your small appetite you would never make a Grand Champion.” He gestured to the giant portraits that stared down from the rafters, above the people in the balconies. “Those guys are expected to eat as many as ten bowls of rice every meal, and to stuff themselves with stew.”
Weins made a face. “Does the stew have rosy squids looking out at you?” One of those portraits was bound to be of Taiko the Great, but how could he tell the difference? Careless Kashiwado the Cast Iron. Kirinji the Disjointed. Where was Wajima?
Weins pushed his food away. Maybe later. “How heavy you figure that fellow was? Three hundred, four hundred pounds?”
“Somewhere between. Do not think their training is only eating to get fat! That’s not just lard you are looking at, it is muscle too. They walk up and down stairs carrying a man on their back, or haul a tire uphill with a man sitting in it. Exercise. And the stable boss thinks nothing of beating them with bamboo rods, or a broom handle. It toughens them up. I played the part of a jo-no-kuchi, a beginner, once in a movie. Not very realistic for a man of my size, but never mind. I stayed for a few days in one of the stables here in Tokyo, to see what goes on. And met the champion whose younger days I was playing. It is a difficult life.”
If it was a difficult life, the afternoon’s contenders seemed eager enough to get on with it. Maybe it was all they knew. One pair had hardly left the spotlight when the next were already climbing onto the platform for their encounter. Meanwhile their own successors were coming down the aisles
to sit cross-legged on cushions in the front rows and glare at one another. How many tons of human flesh performed before Weins’s eyes? One pair of moon-faced blimps battered each other so long the referee made them rest. One got more out of the rest than the other and immediately picked up his opponent by the sash and deposited him outside the ring. Another pair were only medium weight but concentrated all their efforts in their legwork. Each tried to trip his opponent by wrapping a leg around the other’s but the tangled mess sent both of them toppling. The one who landed last was declared the winner. The biggest man that Weins had ever seen, with a belly like a cast-iron stove, ended his bout in less than a second by whacking his opponent in the back of the neck. Face-first in the sand, his victim would undoubtedly agree with Hiroshi. It was a difficult life.
An old man in a tight grey cap came pushing his way between the rows of spectators until he could whisper something into Hiroshi’s ear. His own ears were even bigger than Weins’s. His nose was considerably smaller, two nostrils and a tiny bump. Under his arm he carried something that looked like one of Mabel’s sketching-pads. Was he someone Hiroshi knew? The jabbering that went on between them appeared to have something to do with Weins. They looked him up and down like an object for sale. Not only for sale, but comical as well; the old man opened his mouth and chuckled loudly, shaking his head. It was the doubting laugh of a farmer who refuses to believe that the price someone wants for a cow is to be taken seriously.
“He says he is an artist,” Hiroshi explained. “He says he has been watching you and he would like to draw your face.”
