The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (16 page)

BOOK: The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
12.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
“Now! The time is now! In another month they’ll have finished clearing the land around our dry dock and then the place will fill up with people. Besides, we’re almost fourteen.”
The chief glanced through a black frame of evergreen branches at the watery gray sky and observed: “Looks like tomorrow will be a nice day.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
O
N
the morning of the twenty-second, Fusako went with Ryuji to City Hall to ask the Mayor of Yokohama if he would be toastmaster at their wedding dinner. He said he would be honored. On the way back, they stopped at a department store and ordered engraved wedding announcements. Reservations for the reception had already been made at the New Grand Hotel. After an early lunch downtown, they returned to Rex.
Just after one, Ryuji left the shop to keep an appointment he had mentioned earlier in the day. A high-school classmate who was now a First Officer had docked that morning at Takashima Pier and was free to meet him only in the early afternoon. And Ryuji didn’t want to appear in an expensive English suit. He didn’t like the idea of flaunting his new circumstances in front of an old friend; at least not until after the wedding. He would stop at the house on his way to the dock and change into his old seaman’s clothes.
“Are you sure I don’t have to worry that you’ll get on that ship and disappear?” Fusako teased as she accompanied him to the door.
Noboru, pretending to need help with homework, had summoned Ryuji conspiratorially to his room the night before and entrusted him with a mission which he was discharging faithfully:
“Dad, all the guys are looking forward to hearing some of your sea stories tomorrow afternoon. We’re going to meet on that hill above the pool when school gets out at two. Everybody’s been wanting to meet you and I promised you’d come. You will, won’t you? And tell them some of your adventures? And would you wear your sailor clothes like you used to, and your sailor cap? Only it’s got to be a secret from Mom. You could tell her you’re going to meet an old friend or something and get off work early.”
This was the first son-to-father favor Noboru had ever asked and Ryuji was determined not to betray the boy’s trust. It was a father’s duty. Even if the truth got out later it would only mean having a good laugh together, so he had fabricated a plausible story and left the shop early.
Ryuji was sitting on the roots of a giant oak near the top of the hill when the boys appeared just after two. One of them, a boy with crescent eyebrows and red lips who seemed particularly bright, thanked him politely for having come, and then suggested that a more suitable spot for his talk would be what he called their dry dock. Supposing they were headed somewhere near the harbor, Ryuji agreed to go.
It was a mild midwinter afternoon. The shade was chilly but in the sun, which reached them through a wispy layer of cloud, they didn’t need their overcoats. Ryuji was wearing his gray turtleneck sweater and carried his pea coat over his arm; the six boys, each with a briefcase, anticked around him as he walked along, now surging ahead, now falling behind. For this generation, they were smallish boys: the scene reminded Ryuji of six tugboats laboring futilely to tow a freighter out to sea. He didn’t notice that their frolicking had a kind of frenzied uneasiness.
The boy with the crescent eyebrows informed him they were going to take a streetcar. Ryuji was surprised, but he made no objection: he understood that the setting for a story was important to boys this age. No one made a move to get off until the last stop at Sugita, which was far south of the city.
“Say, where are you guys taking me?” he asked repeatedly, as though amused. He had determined to spend a day with the boys and it wouldn’t do to appear annoyed, no matter what happened.
Though careful not to draw attention to the fact, he was observing Noboru constantly. As the boy mingled happily with his friends, Ryuji saw the piercing look of cross-examination go out of his eyes for the first time. It was like watching motes of dust dance into color in the winter light streaming through the streetcar window: borders between Noboru and the others became blurred, and he confused them. That had hardly seemed possible, not with a boy so different from everyone else, a lonely boy with a peculiar habit of eying adults furtively. And it proved that Ryuji had been right to take off half a day in order to amuse Noboru and his friends. Right, he knew, in terms of a father’s moral obligation. Most books and magazines would agree. Noboru had approached voluntarily and offered in this excursion a providential opportunity to cement their relationship. It was a chance for a father and son originally strangers to forge a bond of deep and tender trust stronger than mere blood ties could ever be. And since Ryuji could very well have become a father when he was twenty, there was nothing out of the ordinary about Noboru’s age.
As soon as they were off the streetcar, the boys began tugging Ryuji toward a road which wound into the hills. “Hey, wait a minute,” he protested. “I never heard of a dry dock in the mountains!”
“No? But in Tokyo the subway runs up above your head!”
“I can see I’m no match for you guys.” Ryuji winced, and the boys howled, thoroughly pleased with themselves.
The road skirted the ridge of Aoto Hill and entered Kanazawa Ward. They passed an electric power plant with its webs of power lines and gnarled porcelain insulators thrown up against the winter sky, then entered Tomioka Tunnel. Emerging on the other side, they saw glinting along the ridge to the right the tracks of the Tokyo-Yokohama express; bright new housing lots covered the slope to the left.
“Almost there now. We go up between those lots. All this used to be an American Army installation.” The boy who seemed to be their leader tossed the explanation over one shoulder and stepped ahead; his manner and language, in a matter of minutes, had become brusque.
Work on the lots had been completed; there were even stone boundary fences and the skeletons of more than a few houses. Surrounding Ryuji, the six boys marched straight up the road that ran between the lots. Near the top of the hill, the road abruptly disappeared and there began a terrace of uncultivated fields. It was like clever sleight of hand: a man standing at the bottom of the hill would never guess that the straight, well-graded road gave way at this point on the slope to a grassy wilderness.
There wasn’t a person in sight. The heavy droning of bulldozers echoed from the other side of the hill. Sounds of automobile traffic ascended from the tunnel road far below. Except for the echoes of engine noise, the vast landscape was empty and the sounds themselves only heightened the bright desolation.
Here and there wooden stakes thrust up from the meadow: they were beginning to rot. A footpath buried under fallen leaves skirted the ridge of the hill. They crossed the withered field. Just off to the right, a rusted water tank surrounded by a tangle of barbed wire lay half buried in the ground: bolted lopsidedly to the tank was a sheet of rusting tin lettered in English. Ryuji stopped and read the notice:
U. S. Forces Installation
Unauthorized Entry Prohibited and Punishable
under Japanese Law
“What’s ‘punishable’ mean?” the leader asked There was something about the boy Ryuji didn’t like. The flicker of light in his eye when he asked the question suggested that he knew the answer perfectly well. Ryuji forced himself to explain politely.
“Oh—but this isn’t army property any more, so I guess we can do whatever we want. Look!” Even as he spoke the boy appeared to have forgotten the subject, as though it were a balloon he had abandoned to the sky.
“Here’s the top.”
Ryuji stepped to the summit and gazed at the panorama stretching below. “You’ve got yourselves quite a place here.”
The hill overlooked the northeastern sea. Away to the left, bulldozers were cutting a red-loam slope into the side of a cliff and dump trucks were hauling the earth away. Distance dwarfed the trucks but the roar of their engines battered endless waves into the choppy air. Further down in the valley were the gray roofs of an industrial laboratory and an airplane factory: in the concrete garden in front of the central offices, one small pine was bathed in sun.
Around the factory curled an isolated country village. The thin winter sunlight accented the highs and lows in the rows of rooftops and corrected the files of shadow cast by countless ridgepoles. The objects glinting like seashells through the thin smoke covering the valley were automobile windows.
As it neared the sea, the landscape appeared to fold in on itself and assumed a special quality of rust, and sadness, and clutter. Beyond a tangle of rusted machinery discarded on the beach, a vermilion crane swung in wobbly arcs, and beyond the crane, there was the sea, the piled white of stone breakwaters and, at the edge of the reclaimed foreshore, a green dredger smoking blackly.
The sea made Ryuji feel that he had been away from it a long, long time. Fusako’s bedroom overlooked the harbor but he never went near the window any more. The water, with spring still far away, was Prussian blue except where the shadow of one pearly cloud turned it pale, chilly white. The rest of the midafternoon sky was cloudless, a bleached, monotone blue fading where it neared the horizon.
The sea spread from the dirtied shore toward the offing like a huge ocher net. There were no ships close in to shore; several freighters were moving across the offing, small vessels and obviously, even at this distance, antique.
“The ship I was on was no little tug like that.”
“I’ll say—the
Rakuyo
had a displacement of ten thousand tons,” Noboru affirmed. He had spoken hardly a word all afternoon.
“C’mon, let’s go,” the leader urged, tugging at Ryuji’s sleeve. Descending the footpath a short distance, they came to a segment of land miraculously untouched by the surrounding devastation, a vestige of the mountaintop as it must once have been. The clearing, on one of a twisting series of slopes sheltered from the east wind by a stand of oak and protected to the west by the heavily wooded hilltop, merged into a neglected field of winter rye. Withered vines snaked through the underbrush around the path; sitting at the tip of one was a shriveled, blood-red gourd. Sunlight out of the western sky was thwarted the moment it descended here: a few pale beams flickered over the tips of dead leaves.
Ryuji, though he remembered having done similar things in his own youth, marveled at a young boy’s unique ability to discover this sort of hiding place and make it his own.
“Which one of you guys found this place?”
“I did. But I live right over in Sugita. I pass by here lots of times on the way to school. I found it and showed the other guys.”
“And where’s this dry dock of yours?”
“Over here.” The leader was standing in front of a small cave shadowed by the hilltop, smiling as he pointed at the entrance.
To Ryuji the smile seemed as brittle as fine glass crystal and very dangerous. He couldn’t say why he thought so. With the adroitness of a minnow slipping through a net, the boy shifted his gaze away from Ryuji’s face and continued the explanation.
“This is our dry dock. A dry dock on top of a mountain. We repair run-down ships here, dismantle them first and then rebuild them from the ground up.”
“Is that right? . . . Must be quite a job hauling a ship way up here.”
“It’s easy—nothing to it,” the boy said, and the too pretty smile lit his face again.
They sat down on the faintly green, as though grass-stained, ground in front of the cave. It was very cold in the shade and the sea breeze spanked their faces. Ryuji bundled into his pea coat and crossed his legs. He had just settled himself when the bulldozers began their din again.
“Well, have any of you guys ever been aboard a really big ship?” he ventured, with forced cheeriness.
They glanced around at each other, but no one answered.
“You talk about life at sea,” he began again, facing his stolid audience, “you have to begin with getting seasick. Any sailor’s been through it one time or another. And I’ve known men to throw in the towel after one cruise, they’ve had such a hell of a time with it. The larger the ship is, the more mixing of rolling and pitching you get; and there are some special smells too, like paint and oil and food cooking in the galley. . . .”
When he saw they weren’t interested in seasickness, he tried a song for lack of anything else. “did you fellas ever hear this song?
“The whistle wails and streamers tear,
Our ship slips away from the pier.
Now the sea’s my home, I decided that.
But even I must shed a tear
As I wave, boys, as I wave so sad.
At the harbor town where my heart was glad.”
The boys nudged each other and giggled, and finally burst out laughing. Noboru was embarrassed to death. He stood up abruptly and, plucking Ryuji’s cap from his head, turned his back on the others and began to toy with it.
The anchor at the center of the large, tear-shaped emblem was girded with chains of gold thread and wreathed in laurel branches embroidered in gold and hung with silver berries. Above and below the emblem, hawsers of gold braid were looped in slack coils. The peak was bleak: reflecting the afternoon sun, it shone with a mournful luster.
Once, at sunset on a summer day, this marvelous cap had receded over a dazzling sea, becoming a glittering emblem of farewell and the unknown. This very cap, receding until it was free of the high injunctions of existence, had become an exalted firebrand lighting the way to eternity!
“My first voyage was on a freighter bound for Hong Kong. . . .” As he began to talk about his career, Ryuji felt the boys growing more attentive. He told them of his experiences on that first voyage, the failures, the confusion, the longing, and the melancholy. Then he started on anecdotes collected on voyages around the world: waiting in Suez harbor for clearance through the canal when someone discovered that one of the hawsers had been stolen; the watchman in Alexandria who spoke Japanese and conspired with merchants on the pier to foist various vulgar items on the crew (details of these Ryuji withheld as being unsuitable material for the classroom); the unimaginable difficulty of taking on coal at Newcastle in Australia and then readying the ship for the next load before they reached Sydney, a journey logged in a single watch; encountering off the coast of South America a United Fruit transport vessel and the sea air suddenly redolent of the tropical fruit brimming in the hatches. . . .

Other books

Indian Horse by Richard Wagamese
God of Vengeance by Giles Kristian
Gabriel's Ghost by Megan Sybil Baker
La colonia perdida by John Scalzi
The Throwback by Tom Sharpe
The Boys Next Door by Jennifer Echols
Scheisshaus Luck by Pierre Berg; Brian Brock