Coin Locker Babies (35 page)

The styrofoam press Kuwayama should have been running at this hour was silent. The garden was overgrown and littered with trash. And the doghouse he and Kiku had built was rotting, with ants nesting in the ruins, and Milk’s water dish was tipped on its side and covered with mud. Seeing this, and the fact that the house itself was tightly shuttered, it occurred to Hashi for the first time that Kuwayama had probably moved elsewhere. Still, the name-plate was hanging by the door, and he could see the little metal clips on the gas and electric meters that indicated a recent inspection. In the mailbox he found a notice saying the water supply was about to be cut off. So Kuwayama was still here; he would have to ask him what had happened to Milk. The door wasn’t locked, but when he opened it, the stench made him reel: five parts booze and five parts shit. Rows of empty bottles almost filled the hallway. Whiskey and grain alcohol. Inside, somebody was coughing.

“Who’s that?” It was Kuwayama’s voice.

“Me,” said Hashi. For a moment there was silence, and then Kuwayama appeared, headphones lifted from one ear only.

“Hashi? That really you?” Hashi nodded, and the little radio dropped from Kuwayama’s hand. “They just this minute mentioned your name on the radio. It was that Yumemaru who was talking about you. You two friends?”

“Who’s Yumemaru?” asked Hashi.

“He’s that young comedian. You know him?”

“Know him?—I’ve never heard of him.”

“Well, doesn’t matter. Come on in! Aren’t you coming in?” Retrieving the radio and turning it off, he took Hashi by the arm and led him into the house.

“Where’s Milk?” Hashi asked, but Kuwayama didn’t answer.

“My eyes have gone bad,” he said instead. “Hurts to go out in daylight.” The light in each room was limited to one tiny bulb that did little to dispel the gloom. “Is it dark in here? We can turn on some lights. I’m OK if I wear these,” he said, putting on a pair of welder’s goggles as he switched on the light. For the first time Hashi could make out the contents of the rooms; Kuwayama’s bed was laid out in the inner room, and the family altar for Kazuyo had been set up in the parlor.

“Business got pretty bad there toward the end, but I had my pension coming to me, so I closed up the workshop a while back. Knew I wouldn’t get much for the press anyway, so I left it out there in the shed… Just the day before yesterday I went over to have a look at your mother’s grave. Bet that’s why you’re showing up here all of a sudden; bet she brought you here.”

“Where’s Milk gone?” Hashi interrupted.

“I gave him away.”

“Who to?”

“To a guy who works as a guard down at the salt factory. Said he’d make a perfect watchdog, so I gave him away.” Shedding the padded jacket and light kimono he was wearing, Kuwayama pulled a shirt and some pants from a chest and began dressing. “Now you just have a seat and wait for me a minute. I’m going to do some shopping and then I’ll be right back.” So saying he bustled out through the door, leaving Hashi staring at the old clothing spilling from the dresser drawer. He pulled out some
things; familiar outfits of tiny shirts and tiny pants, two sets each. To avoid any hurt feelings, Kazuyo had always bought them both exactly the same clothes: two little summer shirts with sailboats on them, two checked cardigans, and two pairs of shorts, one with a large stain on the bottom—the shorts they had worn the day they’d been attacked by the dogs.

Hearing voices outside, he went to the hallway still holding the shorts. There he found a goggled Kuwayama pointing a finger in his direction.

“See, didn’t I tell you? There he is. The same Hashi you see on TV.” A dozen neighbors were crowded into the area behind him.

“Hashi? You sure have done yourself proud!” bellowed the old lady who ran the grocery store. Everyone laughed. Slowly they drew in closer: the young man who had opened a shoe shop next to Kazuyo’s beauty parlor, the fellow who ran the candy store on the main street, the stationer, the cab driver, and all their wives. After the shoe man had shaken Hashi’s hand, everyone else wanted a turn.

“Welcome home, Hashi.”

“The whole island’s proud of you!”

Kuwayama had soon distributed tea cups and was on his way back from the kitchen carrying a bottle of sake.

“Ain’t
that
the truth,” he was saying. “How do you figure it? Two brothers, and they couldn’t be more different. And
you
end up being the pride of the island. When we read all those
write-ups
in the magazines, it makes us feel like they were saying it about us.” With the exception of the taxi driver, they all began drinking. Even though it was broad daylight outside, with the shutters closed and the lights on, it seemed like nighttime.

“Have you seen Kiku?” the old lady from the grocery store asked quietly. Hashi shook his head. “They say he’s in prison,” she
continued. “Should have stuck with those sports, if you ask me.” Though it was impossible to tell where Kuwayama was looking behind the dark glass of the goggles, he seemed to be listening to her. Suddenly he turned to her.

“Please—let’s not mention Kiku. He’s brought us nothing but shame. Nothing but shame!” he blubbered, emptying his cup in one gulp. Silence fell over the room except for the sound of Kuwayama’s coughing. The guests exchanged glances. Finally the shoe man spoke up as if trying to put a bit of life back into the party.

“Hashi… if it’s not rude to ask a pro like you in a place like this… d’you think you could sing something for us?” The guests studied Hashi’s face, gauging his reaction, then turned to Kuwayama to guess at the expression on his downcast, goggled face.

“I bet Kazuyo would have been tickled to hear Hashi sing,” said the stationer. Hashi too was looking at Kuwayama. He was thinner than he had been, with hollow cheeks and a bony chest, and he seemed somehow to have shrunk. He hadn’t much hair left either, and his scrawny limbs and neck were covered with blotches and protruding veins. Looks just like a bug, thought Hashi to himself. He was already wearing bulging goggles; if you stuck on some antennae and wings and covered him with scales, he’d probably fly straight off toward the nearest light bulb.

“How ’bout it, Hashi? Won’t you give us a song?” he said eventually, pushing aside the goggles for a moment to wipe something, tears or sweat or whatever, from his eyes. “How ’bout a song for Kazuyo? Imagine how happy it’d make her.” The others chimed in, and started to applaud.

“Sorry, I’m tired,” Hashi said, looking around at them. “And besides I just don’t feel like it.” As he spoke, Kuwayama had begun to nod deeply at each word.

“That’s just fine, boy. I’m sure your mother’s happy enough just to have you home, like the rest of us. You don’t have to sing a note if you don’t want to.” The guests nodded vaguely in agreement, and Kuwayama, looking down again, fell silent.

Hashi left them for a moment to go into the sitting room. Opening a drawer in the desk, he started rooting around for something. While he was gone, the old woman who ran the grocery stood up to go, and the others followed suit. A minute or two later, only the young man who owned the shoe store remained, half sitting and half standing, with an embarrassed look on his face.

“Uhhh,” he started when Hashi returned carrying a handful of cassette tapes. “Sorry about asking you to sing. Hope you’re not upset.”

“That’s OK. Like I said, I’m just tired and I don’t feel like it.” Looking somewhat reassured, the man bowed to Kuwayama and made his way to the door and back into the bright world outside. “This place is incredible,” Hashi told Kuwayama, who was watching him shove the tapes into his bag. “Not one thing’s changed since I left. Even the same stuff in the drawers.” Kuwayama poured some more sake into his teacup and gulped it down.

“I’m not one for messing in other people’s drawers,” he said. “So, you staying the night?”

“No, have to get back.”

“That so? ’Sa shame. So how’s Tokyo? You like it there?”

“Not particularly. To tell the truth, I came to see Milk. Once I’ve done that, I don’t want to miss the last ferry.” Kuwayama said nothing but staggered after him when Hashi rose and headed for the door. He caught up with him as he was slipping into his shoes.

“I guess I haven’t been much of a father,” he said.

“Why do you say that?” laughed Hashi, looking back over his shoulder. Kuwayama was rubbing at his eyes.

“Well, what I mean is… you with so much on your mind and all…” He waved as Hashi walked away. Hashi wondered what the eyes were doing behind the goggles. The hand, at any rate, waved feebly, like the leg of a bug stripped of its wings and antennae, wriggling in a dark hole. “Take care of yourself now!” Kuwayama called. “Take care!”

As he walked down the hill, Hashi decided he really ought to send him a pair of sunglasses; those goggles must hurt after a while, he thought. He reached the main road and wandered along it looking for the lane leading to the salt works. The landmark was a building with a red tiled roof, the ruins of the warehouse used for storing explosives for the mines; next to it was the narrow road of reddish earth that led down to the sea. Halfway down the slope was a large pig shed and the dump for the lime left over from
salt-making
, which had seeped into a boggy area lined with shacks that had been built for the miners. Someone had surrounded part of the bog with barbed wire when it turned white from the dissolving lime, and Kiku and Hashi had once tried to crawl under it. They had wanted to see what had happened to the frogs that lived there. Hashi had maintained that everything must have died when the water turned a murky white. Kiku’s theory had been that the frogs themselves might have been dyed white and could then be sold as rarities. In the end, they had retreated without penetrating the barbed wire, not, of course, because of the “No Trespassing” sign but because of the terrible stink around there. No way a frog or a killifish or anything else could live in water that smelled like that, they’d reasoned. And if anything
is
living in there, Hashi had told himself at the time, I don’t want to see it. Even with the sun directly overhead, the chalky water gave back no reflection, catching every ray and sinking it in its depths.

The salt works were further down, at the edge of the water.
They had been built during the summer of Hashi’s third year in junior high school, and he could still remember the day of the dedication ceremony. There had been fireworks and red-
and-white
rice cakes, and in the evening of that same day, Gazelle had died. Rode his motorbike off a cliff. He and Kiku had gone to see the bike while it was still burning. Some gasoline had dripped down on to the rocks where the waves were pounding, and a pale flame shivered in the surf. Kiku had been too sad even to eat any of the rice cakes.

Hashi stopped at the gate to ask where the watchman and his dog were, but was told they didn’t show up till six. Cutting through the grounds of the factory, he came out onto the beach; the tide was out. He walked along the damp rocks until he came across an old woman gathering seaweed. As he looked at her a shudder ran through him: the woman was very much like the old beggar who he used to imagine was the woman who’d left him in the locker. She wore a pair of man’s pants rolled to the knees and was holding a bamboo pole, frayed at one end, with which she was tugging at the seaweed. Her kimono, a thin, gray thing, had been discarded higher up on the rocks. Hashi assumed she was one of the people who lived on the small boats that had always been anchored in a cove on the far side of the island. He had often seen them when he was younger, these people from the boats, and they had always worn this type of kimono.

When he approached and greeted her the old woman gave a cackle, dropped her pole, and clutched at the kimono to cover herself. The pole began to slide off the rock into the water, but Hashi managed to catch it and hand it back. The wet seaweed still wrapped around the end glistened in a rainbow of colors that probably came from oil leaking down from the factory.

“You from Tokyo?” she asked him.

“How’d you know?”

“Oh, just seemed like it,” she laughed, turning to thrust the pole back into the water.

“You know, I’m…” he yelled at her back, “I’m
crazy
! Raving mad!” The old woman turned and fixed him with a serious stare.

“People who are really crazy don’t run around saying so,” she told him.

Hashi found a dry place on the rocks and sprawled out on it. A brackish smell had sunk into the stone. Stretched out on his back, he yelled again, this time at the sky.

“I’m mad! My head’s come off my body!” The old lady came closer and peered down at his face.

“You haven’t swallowed a fly, have you, by any chance?”

“Huh?” said Hashi.

“My son-in-law started acting just like you are now.”

“Crazy, you mean?”

“Yep. And that was what he always used to say: ‘I swallowed a fly.’” In every ten thousand flies, she said, it seemed there was one that had a human-looking face, and these human-faced flies were attracted by the smell of people’s vocal chords, so it happened occasionally that when someone was asleep they’d wander into his open mouth. The vocal chords, apparently, were the sweetest meat on the whole human body. The trouble was, once these human-looking flies started chewing on them, the person would begin to go crazy from all that buzzing going on in there. And in the end he’d lose not just his voice but his mind as well, and the fly was running the whole show.

Hashi listened carefully to her story before asking: “Is there any cure?”

“Nope, none,” said the woman.

“Then what do you do about these flies?”

“Be nice to them.”

“The flies?”

“Sure. Get to know them, make friends. That’s the only way to go,” she laughed. In the distance, a dog began to bark. With a yell, Hashi jumped to his feet.

“Milk! Milk!” he called as a white speck appeared on a breakwater across the way. “Milk! Over here!” He started to run, slipping and staggering on the wet rocks. Held in place by a length of chain, the dog could only rise up on his back legs and bark, until finally the little man holding him let go. Long white fur billowing, Milk took off like a shot. Jumping from the breakwater to the rocks, he charged toward Hashi, barely skirting the spray. The white fur was ablaze in the setting sun. Hashi ran to meet him, arms outspread.