Above the East China Sea

by Sarah Bird

  “I didn’t think it would be … You know.” I’m embarrassed. Just as I feared, the instant I let anything about my family out, humiliation follows.

  “SoapLand, that’s the name of this establishment and the translation of sopū,” Jake explains, as he backs the car into a side street and parks in a spot that allows us to see without being seen. “SoapLand is the only place around here that’s so low-class they take foreigners, even the most despised of the gaijin, soldiers. U.S. GIs were what originally built the businesses, but all that’s changed. Most sōpus now won’t even let a GI stand outside and ogle the photos of the girls, because they’ll scare away the customers with real money, Japanese businessmen.”

  The rain has stopped, and in the bright sunlight SoapLand looks even dingier. The aqua tile framing the frosted glass next to the front door has a filigree of mildew along the grout lines. The large photos of girls sporting ratted-up hairstyles, pale lipstick, and heavy eyeliner from the sixties and seventies, posted in glass cases outside, are so old they have faded to a lifeless blue. They remind me of the photo of my grandmother. Too much.

  “Actually,” I say, “I’ve changed my mind. I don’t even know why I thought that I’m related to”—I wave at the scene on the other side of the windshield—“any of this. My grandfather was a farmboy from Missouri. My grandmother met him when he was stationed at Kadena.”

  As I speak, the marines rejected from the higher-class sōpu down the street appear. As soon as they move into view, there is motion on the other side of the frosted glass of SoapLand. The shadow of a man wobbles across the glass as he nears the open door. My heart gives a violent stroke.

  “So, you want to leave?” Jake asks.

  The shadow is inches away from being exposed at the open door. “Yes, we should leave. Now.”

  Jake starts the engine and pulls forward. He is about to turn onto the street and put the grimy realities of SoapLand behind us when the shadow man appears in the open door.

  Jake stops. “Isn’t that the guy in the picture you showed me?”

  He is even more gaunt than he’d looked in the photo taken three months ago. The high knobs of his shoulders tent up his baggy suit on either side of his head. A rim of white hair outlines his face where the roots of his frizzy dyed curls are growing out. Though he could pass for Latino, even white, in person, his loose-jointed ease with a hint of swagger is all African American.

  I want to say no so much it hurts. I don’t want to be related to some skeevy guy working at a sudsy whorehouse. Or a skanky mom so messed up she needs the military to keep her on the rails. And I really don’t want any of that to touch the only two good people who were ever in my life: Codie and my grandmother. I am cutting this loser out, excising him like a malignant growth. I’m saying the word, I’m denying that he has any relation to me when the old guy throws his shoulders back, stands up straight, and greets the marines with a smile that is Codie’s dazzling smile. The years fall off of him and Codie is there in how he radiates the same quick but scattered intelligence.

  The marines try to wave him away, but he gets out in front, cutting them off. They step around him, but he stays on their heels, a whippet herding buffalo. When they continue rebuffing him, moving farther down the block away from SoapLand, he grabs the sleeve of one of the marines. Instantly, two massive clubs of arms shoot skyward, throwing off the unwelcome touch. Both soldiers whirl on the pest and go ghetto on him, with aggressive head bobs and eye pops.

  The skinny man with Codie’s smile backs away, both hands up, declaring total surrender. The marines leave, fist-bumping each other, bonded again in semper fi brotherhood.

  “What do you want to do?” Jake asks.

  What I want to do is to tell Jake that I was mistaken, that my life has nothing to do with a broken-down old pimp dogging customers. I really want that. The only thing I want more is the tiniest scrap of my sister back. A flash of her smile. The name of the man who might be our grandfather. The list of ancestors that there’s the remotest chance might let me contact her. I still could have denied it all, though, except for one indisputable fact: I am looking at the man, forty years older now, from the album cover. The one in the white vest that my grandmother used to moon over.

  I pull the handle back; the car door cracks open. “I have to talk to him.”

  “Okay, I’m coming with you.”

  “No, I need to do this alone.”

  “Sorry, there is no way I’m letting you go by yourself.”

  He gets out, and we both head toward SoapLand.

  THIRTY-SIX

  “Say what?” The man puts a hand behind his ear and wings it out. A tendril of wire connected to a hearing aid loops into the ear.

  I glance over at Jake, standing down the street, grateful that he agreed to remain out of hearing. I give him a quick smile before repeating my introduction a bit more loudly: “I’m Luz James!”

  “Don’t have to yell. Just have to stop mumbling like you were before.”

  “Okay. Sorry. And my mother is Gena James. She was Gena Overholt. My grandmother was—”

  “Setsuko?”

  I hate hearing her name come from his mouth.

  He points a bony finger at me, the joints swollen like the nodes on a stalk of bamboo. “You her kid? What? Change-of-life baby?”

  “Grandkid.”

  He exhales a sharp bark of triumphant laughter, as if I’ve come to pay tribute to him with the fact of my existence. A fit of wheezing stops him mid-jubilation. When his ruined lungs stop laboring, he peers at me, asks, “They sent you, didn’t they? Her crazy so-called relatives? Okay, okay, I get it now. You’re the reason those lunatics came out here three months ago taking pictures of me, aren’t you?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  He folds his arms across his spindly chest as if to barricade himself against the fast one he’s convinced I’m pulling. “Okay, let the shakedown begin. What’s Sukie want?”

  Sukie? He called my grandmother Sukie.

  “College money? Back payments on child support? What’s it gonna be?”

  “I’m not here to—”

  “All them crazy-ass relatives care so much about her, where were they when she needed them, huh? Think I didn’t recognize them out there taking pictures of me? What’d she send them to take pictures of me for? Whatever it is, she knows it’s some lame bullshit. She had a legitimate claim, she’d come herself.”

  “My grandmother …” I speak as loudly as I can, and Jake moves forward. I hold up my hand to signal that I’m fine.

  He winces, adjusts his hearing aid. “Jesus, kid, quit saying that. Grandmother. You freakin’ me out.”

  “She’s dead.”

  “Sukie? Setsuko? She …? When?”

  “It’s been a while. I was young. We were stationed in Germany when we got the news, so at least ten years ago.”

  “How’d she go?”

  “Heart attack,” I lie. I don’t owe this stranger the truth. I don’t have to say the word out loud: “suicide.” Don’t have to think about my grandmother all alone in a country where she barely spoke the language, her one child doing everything in her power to always be as far from her as possible.

  He studies me, nods. “Oh, yeah, I can see it now. Can definitely see it. You got the good Vaughn hair.”

  Vaughn. His last name is Vaughn. My grandfather’s last name is Vaughn.

  “What about Gene?”

  “Her husband? You knew him?”

  “Stationed here together.”

  “He died before her.”

  “Gene? Gene’s dead too? How? Throat cancer?”

  “How did you know?”

  He shrugs, drops his arms. “Informed guess.” The high-tension force field of kinetic energy whirling around him sags and I can almost feel a vacuum being broken with a whoosh, like a rogue gust of wind blowing down the alley as time rushes in and catches up with him. He leans against the wall, looks up and down the street,
searching for who or what just mugged him, stole his youth, his health. “So you’re not here for money. Who sent you?”

  “No one.”

  “Then how’d you find me?”

  “A photo. I saw a photo.”

  “One of the ones they took? I don’t get it; all they ever wanted was to get Sukie and me out of their lives. Why they bother takin’ pictures of me?”

  “They sent one to my mother. To keep her away, I think.”

  “So why are you here? You need an organ donated or something?”

  Suddenly there is nothing I want from this man. All I want is my grandmother with her silly dance moves back. “Actually, forget it.”

  “I got it. You’re doing a Roots thing. Tracing the ancestors, right?” I almost start to walk away, but in that instant, he tilts his head, and the light catches in his eyes. They are the same olive green as Codie’s, and for the briefest instant, my sister stares back at me, and I would do anything to keep looking into her eyes. In them I see the truth of what the Okinawans believe: For better or worse, our ancestors are with us forever, and they won’t be denied.

  “So, you’re my granddaughter.” He studies me, nods like he guesses I’ll do. “Well, come on up. We’ll have some tea and go over the whole family tree.”

  I call Jake over, tell him the plan. He insists on coming with me. I can’t expose him to any more sordid secrets. I just can’t. “It’s kind of personal,” I insist. “I’ll be fine.”

  “She’ll be fine,” Vaughn echoes. “Just gonna go over the family tree. I’ll make sure nothing happens. She’s my blood, you know.”

  Jake bristles. “You do know who her mother is, don’t you?”

  “I’m just getting caught up on all that.”

  “She’s the head of Kadena base police.”

  Vaughn glances at me, impressed. “That so?”

  “Yeah, and she’s very protective.”

  “Good, that’s good. Glad to hear it. Listen, chief,” he tells Jake, “you can stand down. Nothing’s gonna happen she can’t tell her mama about. I promise you, man, you are looking at the last person on earth who’d want anything at all to do with the U.S. military. You feel me?”

  “Jake, really, I’ll be fine.”

  “You don’t have your phone, do you?”

  I shake my head no.

  Vaughn hands me his. “Here, call him all you want.” Jake gets Vaughn’s number, calls it. The phone rings. Jake hangs up. “Okay, you’ve got my number now. Hit it the instant you need me, and I’ll be there.”

  “ ‘Whenever you call me, I’ll be there.’ ” Vaughn walks away singing a song I recognize from one of my grandma’s old soul albums. His voice erases any doubts I might have had about him being the one my grandmother loved; his voice is astonishing.

  At the front door, Vaughn turns, sings out with special emphasis, “ ‘I’ll be lyin’ in a coffin, baby! You know I’ll be there!’ ” before disappearing inside.

  Jake squeezes my shoulder and, after a moment’s hesitation, I follow Vaughn into SoapLand.

  Vaughn stands at the front desk where a broad-shouldered Okinawan woman with a bad perm, wearing a turquoise polo shirt and poppy-red lipstick is seated, drilling him with rapid-fire questions in loud, bossy Japanese. Surrounded by stacks of cheap white towels and busy folding more, the woman looks like a combination madam/team manager. Whatever Vaughn tells her—in a Japanese so American-sounding I can almost understand it—makes her mad, and she hectors him in a high-velocity, staccato tone, waving toward the front door, ordering him to get back to work.

  “Catch you later, Mama-san,” he says in English, flapping his hand at her dismissively. I follow him upstairs.

  “Sorry,” he tells me, unlocking the hollow-core door of his room on the second floor and standing aside to let me enter first. I don’t know if he’s apologizing for the studio apartment’s small size, its threadbare furnishings, the trash can stuffed with Styrofoam take-out containers, or the interaction downstairs. The issue turns out to be a construction crew jackhammering down the block. He slams his one window shut. “Kinda noisy. I usually just turn my hearing aids off. I should move out, find a better place to live. But this dump comes free with the job.”

  I wait for the feeble air-conditioning to cool off the hot, airless room. Vaughn doesn’t seem to notice the heat, though, as he studies a ceiling-high stack of boxes until he finds the one he’s looking for, and unearths it. He gestures for me to have a seat, then extracts a photo album from the box.

  “First ancestor you need to know about is me.” He carefully places the book of photos on my lap and opens it to a color glossy. It’s the original photo that was on the cover of the album my grandmother used to secretly dance to. Vaughn, minus forty years of hard living, stands in front of the four Okinawan guys in the band, dressed in a skintight white suit with nothing under the jacket except a deep V of glistening brown muscle. The guy staring calmly into the camera is not the fidgety old gent in the room with me but a star, charismatic and handsome, someone worth mooning over. Above his head are the words “The Soul Tronics. Appearing Every Friday at Club Girls A Go Go. Saturdays at the Peek-A-Boo, B.C. Street, Koza, Okinawa. Starring Motown Sensation Delmar Vaughn.”

  My grandfather’s name is Delmar Vaughn.

  “You were with Motown?”

  “Woulda been. Had a contract and everything. Got drafted right out of the studio. They had me all positioned to be the next Smokey Robinson.”

  The easy smile, light skin, and olive-green eyes, startling in their pale brightness, as if an extra light were being shone only on him and none of the other band members, they all call the famous singer to mind.

  The rest of Delmar Vaughn’s photo album is filled with pages of good-times shots: Vaughn at the microphone, his flashed-out Afro a halo around his head; Vaughn hoisting drinks to the camera; Vaughn grinning, Super Fly pimp hat atop his head, a bar girl coiled under each arm.

  “Green or turmeric?” he asks from the kitchen area, holding up two boxes of tea. “The turmeric tastes like shit, but it’s supposed to make you live forever.”

  “You know, if you could just give me the names of everyone in my grandmother’s family that you knew, plus your family tree, then I’ll get out of your hair, stop bothering you.”

  “No bother. Not every day your past comes to life in front of you. Seems like you’d want to know about me.”

  “Maybe I could come back another time.”

  “Naw, I don’t think it’s gonna work like that.”

  The tiniest edge of a threat in Vaughn’s tone makes me realize that he’s a man who’s been waiting for decades to tell his story to someone who cared. And he’s decided that I’m that someone. Before he gives me what I want, he’s going to make sure that I hear his story. He hands me his phone. “Call your boyfriend. Tell him you’re fine and that you decided to stay awhile.”

  Jake tells me to take all the time I need, he’ll sleep. “But call me the instant anything gets weird. Actually, call me the instant before anything gets weird.”

  I promise I will, hang up, tell Vaughn, “I’ll try the shit tea.”

  He cackles a pleased laugh. As he busies himself heating water in a dorm-size microwave, I notice a large black-and-white security monitor split into nine different screens that takes up most of a shelf on a wall facing the bed. The upper left of the patchwork of screens is focused on Mama-san downstairs at the reception desk, folding towels. Other screens show the street outside. Most stare into small, empty rooms covered in tile. The only furnishings are a handheld shower snaking from the wall, its chrome head resting next to a large plastic stool with a split down the middle; a white plastic bucket; an inflated air mattress; and a stack of towels. Another camera is zeroed in on an overly bright room where three no-longer-young women in string bikinis slump on white vinyl chairs. Two look Filipina. The third, a tall, sturdy girl with narrow, single-fold eyelids and high cheekbones, sits away from the others and concentrates
on picking at a scab on her right elbow.

  All three are bored. The Filipinas flip through limp magazines, exchange listless comments, check their makeup in hand mirrors, and rearrange individual strands of their bangs. The third girl just sits and picks. A flurry of motion in the upper screen resolves into the backs of the shaved heads of the two marines I saw earlier. They step in front of Mama-san and cash is exchanged for towels. Mama-san takes the money but keeps her hand out. The marines wave her off. She starts to give the money back. The soldiers look at each other, shake their heads, pull out their wallets again, and both of them surrender their ID cards. Only then does Mama-san step out from behind the counter and lead them off camera.

  In the same instant, both the Filipina girls come to life and assume rehearsed poses. One arches her back, sucks her middle finger; the second tips her head down and gazes up through a tangle of lashes at the marines. The third girl’s smile is a wince, as if she’s staring into the sun. The two petite Filipinas are chosen. They look like tiny Hindu elephant trainers as they lead the soldiers away.

  Vaughn comes over with two mugs of hot liquid that looks like chicken broth. He notices me glancing quickly away from the monitor. “Sorry, wish I could turn that off, but Mama-san’s got it rigged so it’s on twenty-four-seven. Ignore it. It’s just business. You’ve probably seen a lot worse on the Internet anyways.”

  Vaughn takes a seat on the edge of his bed across from me. “Want to see what killed your grand … what killed Gene?” He leans over, flips the pages of the album back almost to the beginning, stops at a faded color snapshot of two slender young airmen riding a motorcycle across the open swath of a runway. Vaughn is the passenger, sitting in back, arms held out wide. In front, leaning over the handlebars into the wind, is a thin, fit Gene, my grandmother’s husband. The reddish-blond hair he’d lost by the time I met him is a fringe flattened against his high forehead. His eyes are nearly lost behind the swell of his cheeks as he grins. He is so young.