The Third Son (11 page)

Toru looked down at his watch again for a moment and then dropped my wrist, putting his hands on his hips. He fixed his eyes on mine. “Why did he burn it?”

“Because of a girl,” I said.

“You want the same girl?”

“Yes,” I said. “The same girl I was trying to find when I was bitten by that snake.”

“The snake? You were just a boy.”

“I was.”

He watched me for a moment, then walked over to the counter and absentmindedly stamped my military-service form with his signature. “Well, and now you’re a young man. Your service starts next week?”

“Yes.”

“And what will you do after that?”

“My uncle’s lining me up a job at Taikong, doing the wiring for some new buildings they’re planning. It can’t take me more than a few months, and then I have no idea what I’ll do. I guess that’s why girls just want to marry a doctor,” I said bitterly, and then I stopped, suddenly wondering why Toru was not married.

He handed me the form and walked to the counter by the sink. He replaced the lid on a canister of cotton balls, then threw a used muslin wrapper into a hamper under the sink. He opened the window shade and closed it again, and I was surprised that he would do something so purposeless. Then he turned to face me, his hands on his hips again. “Saburo,” he said, “you only have one life. Fight for it.”

I blinked at him in surprise. “You’re the one who told me my life would be limited.”

“It is,” he said. “But limits can be surpassed.”

“You mean . . . the girl?”

“I mean”—he waved his hand—“everything.”

“Why would a girl want an electrician when she can have a doctor?”

He sighed, looking at me. “Believe in yourself. Let her be the one to decide.”

T
HE NEXT MORNING,
I bicycled downtown, my hands gripping the handlebars.

Of course, Toru was right. Had I grown up so soft? As a child I had stood up after all my bamboo whippings and gone out to play again. I had, knowing that it might expel and harm me, told Teacher Lee and my father that they were wrong. Why would I let Kazuo’s threats keep me from Yoshiko? He had already burned my book. What else could he possibly do if Yoshiko chose me of her own free will? And if she chose Kazuo over me, then so be it.

I pushed through the glass door of the pharmacy. I watched Yoshiko close a cabinet and then return to the counter, neatly entering figures into a large ledger book. I admired the soft angle of her cheek and the smoothness of her neck. As I drew near, I could even see a thin gold necklace glimmering at her throat as she breathed and frowned a little, murmuring arithmetic calculations in Japanese. What had happened to that happy little girl, so full of love and trust?

“What do you need?” Her eyes were down as she snapped the book closed and put it under the counter.

I plopped a little paper bag on the counter. There were darkened spots of moisture on the sides.

Her eyes shot to the bag and then up to me. I felt a shock as her eyes met mine.

She straightened up in surprise. I drank her in, intoxicated by her proximity, by the transparent mixture of pleasure and uncertainty on her face, until she peeked down at the warm peanut
moachi
nestled in the bag.

“You said it was your favorite,” I managed to say. Just as I was going to tell her there was a movie ticket inside the bag, too, her brother stood up from a low stool behind her where he had been opening cartons and glowered at me. I had not even thought of a pretext for coming to the pharmacy. Hurriedly, I turned away.

“Wait!” I heard Yoshiko say. As the door fell closed behind me, I saw her watching me, eyes wide and searching, one hand on the counter, the other clutching the
moachi
bag, her brother at her back.

I
SPENT THE
next two days in torment. School had ended and I walked the grounds of the family company, Taikong, with my fourth uncle so he could show me the layout of the buildings they planned.

He waved importantly through the air. He looked very much like my father, except that his face, instead of being rounded like an egg, was longer and concave in the middle, indicating, according to tradition, less good fortune. He was a powerful man, equal to my father in his position in Taikong. “Though we’ve expanded into other pharmaceuticals, injectable glucose still constitutes a large part of our sales . . .”

As he talked and our feet crunched across the gravel grounds of the factory, I berated myself for not being more cunning, more bold. I didn’t even know whether Yoshiko had seen the ticket. Perhaps she’d eaten the
moachi
and thrown the bag away without looking. Perhaps her brother had taken the entire bag, and I would find him next to me at the movies instead. If I could just have told Yoshiko or indicated with a look or pointed, then I could be sure she had seen it. If she didn’t show up at the movies, I wouldn’t know whether she was rejecting me or simply hadn’t known I had invited her.

O
N
S
ATURDAY
I paced in front of the cinema and was the first person to enter.

I sat in my seat, one away from the aisle, and waited. Every time I heard the door open, I turned to look.

The theater began to fill, and the air grew thick with a thousand conversations. Many times I stood to let gangly young men in short-sleeved button-down shirts shuffle past me, their dates’ flouncy skirts brushing against my knees.

At two minutes to the hour, I realized she wouldn’t show. She hadn’t checked the bag. Her brother had taken the
moachi
. Or she had seen the ticket and thrown it away in disgust. Worse, she had thrown it away with regret.

I looked at my watch and again at the door. A single girl walked through in red high heels and a ponytail. Not her.

The lights dimmed, and the national anthem began. We stood at attention, watching the Nationalist army marching across the screen under the benevolent eye of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. How many lives had he snuffed out with that paternal smile? Like the repeated sticks of a needle, the sight of that patriotic sequence made me sick to my stomach every time.

I felt a rustle at my elbow and looked to see a girl put her purse down in the seat beside me—the aisle seat. Her face was shadowed from the screen by the man in front of her. Was it her? I had heard of girls playing tricks, of taking tickets from adoring young men and giving them to their friends.

The anthem ended, and we sat. The countdown began and I turned toward the girl beside me. The light from the screen flickered across her face; her eyes, flashing golden brown, looked straight into mine. I flushed in the dark. She turned to the screen, and so did I, for the moment, only to turn back again and watch the images slide over the soft contours of her face.

The first reel was a travelogue—
Midwest Holiday.
It had a story, in which a jaded journalist followed a beautiful painter and her father through endless plains, across the Missouri River, and through the Rocky Mountains. I had seen images like this before, and mostly I watched Yoshiko. Occasionally she met my gaze, then turned back to watch the screen. Only toward the end of the reel, as the camera panned across the carved granite foreheads and noses of George Washington, Teddy Roosevelt, and Abraham Lincoln, did I sit up in wonder. Later in my life I would realize that these scenes were fleeting and distant, far less grand than the true place. But perhaps it was because of my elation at having Yoshiko here beside me at last, so close that I could hear her gasp and feel the movement of her elbow as she brought her hand to her mouth in surprise, or perhaps it was because we were finally watching an American movie in the cinema that she had spoken of as a child and that I had so often frequented hoping to see her, that I thought there could be no grander place on earth than Rapid City, South Dakota.

I turned to Yoshiko. “I should like to go there,” I whispered.

She turned to me and smiled so her dimples showed.

I barely registered the film that followed. I had chosen it merely because of the time and location and waited impatiently for it to end.

Finally the lights came up, and the theater filled with the rustling of people rising and gathering their things.

I stood, leaning aside to let people by, and as I did, I noticed across the aisle the broad back of a leather jacket. The jacket twisted, and my eyes met those of Li-wen—Kazuo’s friend who belonged to the Anti-Communist Youth Corps.

I quickly looked away. Yoshiko had stood, too, the top of her neatly coiffed hair reaching only as high as my shoulder, her elbows brushing into me as she buttoned an embroidered cardigan over her yellow silk dress.

“Let’s go,” I said.

She looked up at the urgency in my voice and saw me glance at Li-wen. He was talking to someone next to him.

Yoshiko looked back to me, her expression anxious. “Where shall we go?”

“The elementary school?”

We hurried out of the cinema, Yoshiko delicately clutching the strap of her imitation-leather purse with the first three fingers of her hand as we passed the cafés and the brightly lit night markets hawking smelly tofu and cheaply made clothing, shaved ice with red bean, and ginger ice cream.

We turned off Mingchu Road toward the school, our footsteps crunching on the gravel as we stepped between a pair of blossoming peach trees. A breeze blew, laden with the delicate fragrance of the trees, whose petals fluttered above us in the cool air. Past the trees, the sky was clear and high, and the stars showered down light from past millennia upon our heads, upon the modest little building and its schoolyard of dirt and grass.

Yoshiko stopped walking and stood in the starlight, a peach petal in her hair, looking at the school.

“This was your school, wasn’t it?” I pulled up beside her, my throat constricted with emotion as I indicated the dark silhouettes of trees behind the school. “We met in those woods.”

“We did,” she said quietly.

I turned to her, and she looked up at me with glittering eyes. “I’m sorry,” she said, “but it’s a bittersweet memory for me, as my cousin and my brother are both dead.”

A motorcycle roared by in the distance, its tail-end growl fading into the screeching of the cicadas, the calling of frogs at the foot of the fence, the rushing rhythm of the blood pulsing through my heart.

The shadow of her eyelashes played along her cheek as she blinked and looked away. “My cousin, Ah-hiang,” she said. “You remember she fell and cut her knee?”

“I remember,” I said. “She was holding the writing board over her head.”

She nodded. “It was a stupid thing to do, as you said. So she fell, and she got tetanus, and I never saw her again.”

“Tetanus!” I looked away at the silhouettes of the trees swaying in the darkness. I lost my bearings for a moment and had to step back.

“Your brother, too? But I saw him later, at the welcoming parade for the Nationalists . . .”

“Did you? Well, he died soon after that.” She frowned. “It’s a long story.” She looked up at me. “What about you?”

“Me?” I had so longed to hear what happened to her that I had never even thought of talking of myself. “Well,” I said, “I was bitten by a water krait and expelled from my middle school.” I said the words without thinking, then quickly regretted it. It was not what a young man was supposed to say to win a girl.

“Expelled? Why?”

“Well . . .” I hesitated, but she looked curious. “I drew a picture of my teacher with a pig’s nose, and unfortunately it happened to be February twenty-eighth.”

To my surprise, she laughed, and her laugh rang out in a womanly way that reassured me.

“So that’s why I went to junior college. I was lucky, actually. They reversed the expulsion.”

“Junior college? That’s pretty good. College is college.”

“Well, it’s not Taipei University, or”—I looked at her slyly—“medical school.”

She shrugged, looking away. “It doesn’t matter what school you went to. Your father didn’t go to college at all and he’s mayor.”

“Well, that’s true.” Why hadn’t I thought of that when he said I’d ruined my life?

She waved toward the fence. “Let’s sit. My shoes are killing me.”

We sat. She smoothed a lacy handkerchief onto the fence railing first to protect her skirt. She patted the railing. “This wood is from our lumberyard. I remember when they built this.”

“Your family owns the lumberyard past the temple?”

“Well, now it’s just my uncle’s. He kicked us all out after the war. My father had no say. He’s number three, like you.” She glanced at me.

“How did you know I’m number three?”

“I asked around.”

She looked down, and I thought she looked a little embarrassed.

“Are you seeing my brother again?”

“I agreed to have dinner with him tomorrow night.”

My stomach lurched, but I saw the faintest trace of a frown on her face, which reminded me of her wary look when Kazuo invited her to the meet. “I saw you at the pharmacy,” I said. “Before we met at the stadium.”