The Sun Gods (2 page)

1

EVEN WITH HIKING BOOTS ON,
Clare's legs were gorgeous in shorts, and, watching them move, Bill kept tripping over the underbrush that lined the Issaquah Creek trail.

“Lord, give me strength,” he muttered.

“What's that?” she called out.

“Let me go ahead, Clare,” he said. “You're blocking the view.”

“What view? Just trees?” She stood aside.

“You'll see,” he said, pecking her on the lips as he passed by. “We'll get to the shallows soon.”

He jumped over a large rock and took the lead with long strides.

“Slow down! And why do
I
have to carry the pack?”

“You wanted the full experience,” he said with a laugh.

Clare trudged along behind him, her heavy boots crunching on the gravel by the stream.

“Bill?”

She sounded serious. Maybe she didn't think it was as funny as he did. Maybe he should have offered to take the pack.

“Yes, Clare?”

“You've got great legs.”

He whirled around, mouth agape.

“I mean it,” she said. “You're beautiful.”

He fluttered his eyelids and touched his hair, but she was not amused.

“Go on, keep walking,” she commanded.

He forged ahead.

“Think of it,” she said. “There's not a
girl
in the whole college half as nice-looking as you, let alone a boy.”

“Come on, Clare, this is embarrassing.”

“No, really. I know girls who'd kill to get that shade of reddish blond. You probably never had a pimple in your life; your eyebrows don't need tweezing; your big, luscious eyes would look good on Rita Hayworth; and you're built like Tarzan.”

“Well, that's a relief,” he said, fanning his face and grinning. “At least I'm not built like Jane.”

“Don't you see what I'm getting at? I don't deserve you. How can a man like you marry a girl like me?”

“That's enough, Clare. You almost had me fooled …” He turned and pointed to the water. “Look at the stream now. You can see them swimming. Hundreds of them.”

“Where? I don't see—Oh my God!”

Down in the surging darkness of the stream, long shadows moved. In threes and fives and twos, they glided past, their flared tails waving gently as they propelled themselves against the silent flow.

“So many!” she whispered, as if they had stumbled upon a secret ceremony.

“Wait. This is just the beginning.”

He pushed a drooping branch aside and motioned her ahead.

The stream level was dropping quickly now, and the large, dark patches were no longer deep pools of water but swarms of fish—huge Chinook salmon, two and three feet long—massing together, poised in equilibrium against the flow.

“They swim in from the Pacific to the Sound,” Bill said. “Through the ship canal. And they just keep coming.”

“But the canal only leads to Lake Washington. How do they get way up here? We're practically in the mountains!”

“I'm not sure,” he said. “Lake Washington is connected to Lake Sammamish, and this stream feeds into Lake Sammamish. It's incredible how they know the exact route.”

Ahead, jutting rocks broke the smooth surface of the creek, and a sudden flutter sent up a spray of water. A salmon surged across the gravelly shallow stretches of the stream, its gleaming, dark body exposed to the air, tail churning the water like a small motorboat. Nervous seagulls stood in the shallows, hopping away whenever a thrashing salmon came too close.

Lone salmon, some with dead white scars where rocks and predators had gouged out their reddish-black flesh, lay on sandy pockets of the creek bottom. They latched their fiercely hooked jaws upon any other fish that happened to stray into their territory. Pink spheres of salmon eggs littered the stream bed, and the gray, rotting bodies of huge fish lay upon the banks, crows pecking at their bleached guts.

“This is it?” she asked. “They just lay eggs and die?”

Bill had come year after year to witness the fall salmon spawning, drawn by the fatal sureness that brought the fish back to the waters of their birth. He decided not to show her the hatchery, where workmen slashed open the bellies of the females, disgorging thousands of orange-red eggs into big buckets, then fertilized them with the thick, white milt they squeezed from the bodies of the males.

They continued up the creek to a small, sunny clearing. Moving in behind her, he lifted the pack from her back.

“That feels good!” she said with a sigh.

Bill sat cross-legged on the warm ground and opened the pack. She followed his lead, sitting opposite him, her knees touching his, and took the water bottle he handed her. She drank her fill, then closed her eyes as she leaned toward him, and their lips met, softly.

“Which reminds me,” she said, pulling away. “How
can
a man like you marry a girl like me?”

“Don't be ridiculous,” he said. “You're absolutely beautiful. But what matters most is our love of God and our love for each other. If we're going to spend our life together, spreading the Gospel, we need to have complete faith in each other, right?” His father would be proud to hear him say that, he thought.

They joined hands, resting them on his bare knees, and looked into each other's eyes. The only sounds were the gurgling of the stream and the sighing of the wind in the trees. To these were added on occasion the squawk of a bird among the branches, followed by the beating of wings. The breeze was a little cooler than Bill had expected for mid-September, but warm sunlight flooded down on the grassy clearing.

“Let's go farther upstream,” he said at last.

“Oh, Bill, not today. I'm not that crazy about dead fish.”

“I'm glad your campers can't hear you. Even I could hardly keep up with you this summer! Anyhow, it's too early to go back to campus.”

“We can stay here and talk, can't we?”

“Give me my jacket, then,” he said, pointing toward the pack behind her.

They lay on their backs, side by side, looking up into the circle of sky fringed by swaying tree tops.

A strong gust of cool air swept over them, and Bill drew his knees up.

“It is a scar, isn't it?” Clare said, pointing at his right thigh above the knee.

He glanced at the scar and looked away. “Uh-huh. It's an old one.”

“Well? Aren't you going to tell me about it? It was obviously pretty bad.”

“Yes, I suppose it was.”

“It looks as if an arrow went right through.”

A huge, empty feeling of night came to him, and he was running.

“I'm not sure what happened,” he said. “I was only four or five.”

“I remember lots of things that happened to me when I was four or five.”

“I don't know, my father told me it was some kind of hunting accident. I was staying with my aunt's family in Kansas.”

But even as he spoke, images of gigantic, black houses loomed up inside him: a huge dining hall crowded with Asian people shouting at each other; sand in his mouth and eyes; and the wind screaming like a train outside the room. Another monstrous chamber full of steam and water sprays and laughter and naked women.

“Bill? Can you answer me?”

“I'm sorry. Did you ask me a question?”

“You haven't heard a word I've said! You do that a lot, you know.”

He sat up and touched her shoulder. She ignored him.

Large patches of cloud were blowing out of the west, and the clear blue of the sky was filling up with gray.

“We'd better go,” Clare said.

They barely spoke during the return hike and the ride back to the city. He thought of that strange rainy morning when he was still in high school. A one-armed Asian man had glared at him and spoken his name. Somewhere out there were people who knew him, who knew more about him than he himself did. And they were not his color.

“Where do you go when you get all quiet?” she asked when they were waiting for the light to change at Rainier Avenue.

“I don't know,” he mumbled. His hand crept down to his bare knee, and the fingers began to trace the scar.

All these years, he'd been living inside the mind of a child, accepting anything he was told about who he was and where he'd come from. Here he was, a twenty-one-year-old man, standing on the verge of independence, thinking of marriage, and he hadn't had sense enough to bring his grade school geography lessons together with the living truth in his heart.

Whole cities filled with Asian people in Kansas? And which of those people could have been the “aunt” he was staying with? Was it the one called Mitsu? Was she really his mother? But wasn't his mother dead?

Somewhere nearby, car horns were honking.

“Bill! The light's green!”

He gunned the engine and peeled away from the intersection.

“Why can't you tell me what's bothering you?” Clare said when they pulled up to her dormitory. “You make these pretty speeches to me how we have to trust each other, but you have a problem and you shut me out. It's the same when I ask you about your family. When are you going to introduce me to them? You say you've got a father, a mother, and two brothers, but for all I know, you might as well be making them up.”

Clare was right. There was a part of him he didn't know how to share with her yet: a dark void that he had scarcely glimpsed himself. He knew he needed to explore those depths alone at first. “I'm sorry, Clare,” he said. “I can't explain it.”

She sighed and shook her head, then got out of the car and walked away.

2

AFTER HE HANDED
in the assignment for his 9:30 class Monday morning, Bill found the thought of sitting indoors, taking notes, intolerable. His first impulse was to throw his hiking boots in the car and drive out to Issaquah to see the salmon again, but that would solve nothing. Should he visit his father at the church? Maybe now was the time to ask about those murky years between the death of his real mother and the arrival of his stepmother. The topic had never been part of life in the Morton household.

He got into the Chevy and started to drive before he knew where he was going. Soon he realized he was headed toward Chinatown. He pulled into an Esso station, and while the attendant pumped a dollar's worth of regular, he went inside and found a street map in a wire rack. As well as he knew Seattle, the oriental neighborhood was an area into which he had only strayed once or twice with some of the other students. Certainly his father had never taken him there.

Working his way along the ship canal, he turned south onto Aurora past the rows of billboards to downtown, then struggled through the traffic toward the white prominence of Smith Tower. It seemed like a gateway to a world beyond.

He turned onto Jackson Street and found himself in foreign territory, where all the shop signs were half in exotic characters, half in nearly-as-exotic transliterations: Ming Hing Grocery, Asahi Printing, Chong Wah Gift Shop, Chung Kiu Company, Nakazono Produce, Higo 10¢ Store. Wads of newsprint drifted along the street in the wakes of the passing cars. Green and white shards of glass littered the asphalt. They called this blighted area “Chinatown,” but some of the names here must certainly be Japanese. Chinese people had names like “Chang” and “Wong,” while Japanese names were more like “Yamamoto” or “Tanaka.” “Mitsu” had to be Japanese. He turned down 8th Avenue and drifted up King Street, looking at the restaurants and at the markets with ducks and sausages in the windows.

A pang of hunger reminded him of the time. Clare would soon be looking for him at their usual table in the cafeteria. He hated to disappoint her, but he would not be going back.

He pulled up to the curb and started down King Street on foot, scanning the stores for a Japanese-sounding name. He passed the Wah Young Grocery, one window of which contained garish red porcelain cups, the other metal strainers with bamboo handles. In the next window hung headless chickens, their darkly roasted skins glistening.

At the corner of Sixth, he looked to the right, beyond Jackson and part way up the hill, where there was a sign that had to be Japanese: “Maneki,” it said in red letters above a smudged, gray area. That rhymed with the notorious General Tojo's name: “Hideki.”

Not until he was standing beneath it could he make out the foggy lower portion of the sign. It was the badly weathered figure of a seated cat holding its left paw up as though taking the Boy Scout oath with the wrong hand. The picture seemed both bizarre and oddly familiar to him.

The restaurant itself did not look promising. Behind dust-smeared panes of glass were some sort of bare wooden lattices that prevented any view of the interior, and the gold letters on the door had flaked away almost completely, but the small sign on the door frame said the place was open. He gave the door a push.

The first thing inside was a black wooden display shelf with various knickknacks, the center piece of which was a foot-high porcelain version of the cat with the upraised paw. Now there was no doubt in his mind that he had seen something like this before.

“One?” asked a slim, graceful Japanese woman who had come up beside him.

“Yes, I'm alone.”

She turned silently, and he followed her to the left. The restaurant was shaped like an L running along two sides of a long rectangular structure, a kind of house-within-a-house that had its own shingled roof beneath the shop's high, brown ceiling. The crashing of pots and clash of glass came from a small window in the side of the “house.”

The left wall of the restaurant was lined with eight or ten booths, all having bright red imitation leather backs. The waitress gestured for him to take a seat in the one unoccupied booth, and then she glided away. One other waitress—a plump woman in her thirties—scurried between the window and the booths.

His waitress returned with a dented aluminum kettle, from which she poured some greenish water into a squat cup that had no handle. The green leaves in the fluid sank languidly to the bottom. The woman pointed to the other end of the gray Formica table and said, “Menu.” He took one of the plastic-covered folders from behind the napkin holder and opened it while she stood over him.

“This might take a while,” he said to her, but she merely smiled and waited. He let his eyes wander down the menu, the four corners of which were decorated with drawings of the cat. The terse English explanations of the Japanese items were not much help when it came to choosing one dish over another. The woman's presence made it difficult to concentrate, and so did the noises from the kitchen. There seemed to be two cooks at work in there, one of whom yammered endlessly in Japanese, the other responding sometimes with grunts, sometimes in a form of English.

Near the bottom of the second page, one word struck him as familiar:
O-nigiri
. The menu described o-nigiri as rice balls wrapped in seaweed, which sounded anything but appetizing.

“I'll have this one: o-nigiri,” he said to the waitress, who giggled and bit her pencil.

“Is something wrong?” he asked.

“I surprise. You say word so nice. Not many
hakujin
s—I mean, white people—know o-nigiri.”

“I really don't know what it is. I'll try it, though.”

For a moment, she looked puzzled. “Oh, I know,” she perked up. “You study Japanese at U.W.
Konnichi wa
.
O-genki desu ka
?”

She cocked her head, obviously waiting for some response from him.

“No, I don't know any Japanese,” he said, smiling weakly.

“You sure you want o-nigiri? I don't think you like. Sukiyaki has beef.”

“That's all right. I'm just experimenting.”

She smiled and started to move away.

“Wait, just a second,” he called. “I want to ask you something. What is this cat? I mean, why is he holding his paw up?” He pointed to the drawing in the corner of the menu.

“Oh, that
maneki-neko
, like Maneki Restaurant,” she said, smiling, as if no further explanation were called for.

“Yes?”

“It mean welcome. Cat go, ‘Come here.'” She made a pawing motion with her left hand.

“It looks as if you're waving goodbye.”

“Oh, no. Japanese people wave like this mean come here.”

She left him to place the order, and he tried sipping the contents of his cup. It was bitter but not unpleasant. He drained the cup, being careful to avoid swallowing the leaves at the bottom, and poured himself another. The stained, yellowish aluminum kettle had the words “Made in Occupied Japan” stamped at the base of the handle.

Accompanied by a small, covered bowl, from which steam was escaping, his plate arrived with three thick, triangular wads of rice, each sandwiched between paper-thin sheets of blackish-green stuff.

“How do I eat this?” he asked the waitress.

“Just pick up and—” she chomped at the air in her hand.

She went off to another table, and he took the wad on the right. The black stuff crinkled as his teeth tore through it, and suddenly his mouth was filled with secret delights long denied. He had eaten this! He had enjoyed this penetrating, salty, sea-like flavor, but along with the pleasure, it brought back an ancient fear: a monster would find what he had inside his stomach and rip it out of him.