Coin Locker Babies (11 page)

“Is there a way I could have some of that milk without anybody seeing?” asked the girl, pointing at the half-finished carton Kiku had been drinking from. He wasn’t surprised she was thirsty, wearing that dress in this heat. “They won’t let me drink while we’re shooting ’cause they say my stomach sticks out,” the Lonely Bride explained.

She squatted down in front of him, pretending to be deep in conversation as she palmed the milk and emptied it in one suck. A drop escaped from the corner of her small mouth and ran down her chin. Watching the way the line of her neck undulated as she swallowed, Kiku was amazed how beautiful she was.

“You like to pole vault?” she said, looking straight into his eyes and delicately wiping her lips.

“Why do you ask?” said Kiku, looking down in confusion.

“Because I love it, that’s why,” she answered.

“I guess I’ve always liked flying,” he said.

“Since you were a kid?”

“Yeah, I suppose so.”

“I thought people who liked to fly usually turned out to be pilots,” said the bride. “But they say you have to be smart to be a pilot, and me, personally, I can’t stand anything you have to be smart for.” One of the camera crew yelled at her not to get sunburned, and, without bothering to answer, she opened the parasol she was carrying as a prop.

“Picky, aren’t they?” said Kiku.

“You think so too?”

“Lights in the middle of the day—seems pretty weird to me.”

“I’m glad you agree.”

“When I see guys like that, I always think they’d be better off dead,” said Kiku, at which the Lonely Bride’s eyes got very wide.

“I once read this novel,” said the girl, apparently changing the subject, “where the sun expands and the whole earth gets real hot. Places like Tokyo and Paris are like Tahiti, and everybody moves to places that used to be too cold to live in.”

“Like Hokkaido?”

“No, much colder, like the North and South Pole. Hokkaido would be like the tropics.”

“And what happened to Tokyo?” asked Kiku.

“Tokyo? It turned into a swamp.”

“Why a swamp?”

“’Cause the South Pole melted and the sea level went way up, and I think it rained all the time too.”

“Neat,” said Kiku.

“And you know what else? There was just this one man and woman in the Tokyo swamp, and they were in love.”

“But I thought it was supposed to be too hot, hotter than the tropics. How did they survive?”

“They drank a lot of beer,” said the girl. From time to time she dabbed the sweat from her upper lip, careful not to disturb her elaborate makeup. Kiku noticed how thin her skin seemed; the pale blue veins in her eyelids blended with her eye shadow to form mysterious patterns that made his head swim. If you pricked her with a needle, he thought, her skin would burst like a balloon and she’d disappear into those patterns.

“If you tell me when you have a meet, I’ll come watch,” she was saying.

“I don’t go to meets,” Kiku told her.

“You mean you just practice?”

“Not exactly, but I don’t go to meets.”

“I just thought it would be fun to cheer for you a little,” she said, sounding a bit disappointed.

“Well, if you just want to watch me jump…” The girl nodded. “Then come tonight and wait between the Sumitomo Building and the Overseas Union Bank. I’m jumping barbed wire tonight.”

“You jump at night?” she asked in a slightly dubious voice.

“You don’t have to come if you’re not interested.”

“I’ll be there,” she said. She was being called again; apparently they wanted to fix her hair before they started shooting. As she stood up to leave, Kiku thought to ask her name. Lifting the hem of her long dress, she looked back over her shoulder as she walked away.

“Anemone,” she said.

That evening, Kiku arrived early and spent a long time calculating the exact distance between the uppermost line of barbed wire and the tip of the pole as he held it vertical. Then, when he was satisfied that his measurements were correct, he marked a spot and dug a hole twenty centimeters deep. This he filled with sand to form a makeshift box for planting the pole in; the sand would help absorb some of the shock. Next he strung a piece of rope along the ground perpendicular to the fence and, standing on the rope, made a
right-angled
triangle, with his body—arms stretched over his head—as the hypotenuse and the pole and the ground as the legs. Where his feet were placed would be the take-off mark. From there he paced off an even number of steps, counting two steps walking for each he would run. Then he lined the path from the take-off mark to the starting point with small white pebbles and removed the rope.

His preparations completed, Kiku went over to Anemone, who was waiting in the bushes with a Polaroid camera around her neck—“to take a picture of the jump,” she’d told him.

“When I make a new friend, I always take their picture. Kind of a souvenir, see?” It occurred to Kiku that Anemone was the first person he had met since coming to Tokyo who kept her word, seeing that she’d actually turned up. When he told her that he planned to jump the barbed wire to get into Toxitown, she tried to make him change his mind. She talked fast and what she said was a little muddled, but as far as Kiku could make out, it seemed he would end up with holes in his face, that the entire area was contaminated with some kind of poison, and—worse—if he were discovered trying to break in, he’d be fried alive by a flamethrower. Something like that. If he simply
had
to get in, she conceded eventually, she could show him a way; but when she led him to the hole in the fence that the boy with the rotting face had once shown her, they found it had been repaired. As they walked, Kiku studied his guide; she had removed all the makeup from that afternoon and was wearing jeans with a red enameled belt and a silver lamé blouse with ducks printed on it.

The guards had passed by on their rounds three times during the preliminaries, and each time Kiku and Anemone had huddled together in the bushes. During their second circuit, Anemone had started to whisper something and Kiku had pressed his hand over her mouth to shut her up. There were still red marks from his fingers on her pale cheek.

“Kiku, guess what, I have a pet crocodile,” she whispered at last, as the lights of a car passing in the distance showed for a moment that the red weals were gradually fading. The shadows of the bushes fluttered across her face, hiding her eyes. Kiku thought again how pretty she was, but he had the feeling that he could forget her in no time simply by shutting his eyes.

“His name is Gulliver. What do you think?”

“What do I think about what?” he asked, confused.

“About raising a crocodile,” she said.

“Pets are all the same; they’re cute but they’re a lot of work.”

“He’s a big crocodile—very,” she added, her lips pursed as she whispered this new bit of information. Her breath was warm on his ear, and from the nape of her neck came the smell of soap.

“A crocodile, huh? I only saw one once, in an aquarium. Looked a bit stupid to me,” said Kiku.

“You want to come see mine sometime? It’ll make you feel like you’re in the jungle.” Kiku wanted to tell her that he felt as though he were already in a jungle: hot and a little bothered. “So when you’ve taken care of whatever it is you have to do, come by sometime and see him.”

“Tonight’s out,” Kiku said.

“You know there’s a brand of whisky called Crocodile Tears?” She had changed the subject again.

“Tonight’s impossible,” Kiku repeated.

“Doesn’t matter when. Come whenever you like.”

Kiku wondered why he was having trouble breathing; it had started about the time he left the red marks on the girl’s cheek, an act that had seemed quite brutal to Kiku even as he was doing it. The cheek had been cool and soft, and Kiku had wondered what it would be like on the inside; still cool but probably a little gooey. The graceful curve of her jaw and neck, and that slightly pursed lower lip, were visible from time to time in the light that filtered down from the office towers, as if lit by the lighthouse back at home. The silhouette shifted subtly when Anemone whispered or smiled or caught her breath. He reached out to touch her cheek again, tracing the faint marks with his finger.

“So you’ll come see my crocodile?” she was saying. “Come any day, just phone first.”

“OK. I guess it’s about time,” said Kiku, straightening his legs. He went to get the pole he had hidden in the grass. As he shouldered it, Anemone gasped.

“It’s beautiful, like a laser beam,” she whispered as the opalescent shaft caught the light. “Make it a nice jump,” she added, “… for the camera.”

After warming up, stretching his calves, and running in place for a moment, Kiku stood at the starting line staring at the top of the fence. Anemone crouched nearby, camera at the ready. Then, going fast, he set off down the makeshift runway, conjuring the essential image: his body being sucked up into the air and over the barrier—except in this case the image featured the jagged spikes of the wire rather than the harmless bar. At the halfway point, his stride evened out and his speed picked up; and then, one step before the take-off mark, he planted the pole in the sand hole. His body dug in, the pole bent… and somewhere, just at that instant, a whistle blew.

“Halt!” a voice yelled, as two guards in white protective suits charged from the shadows. One fired a warning shot, but Kiku was already airborne and the shot merely broke his concentration as he was clearing the fence. His left hand came off the pole, his body twisted, and the prongs of the barbed wire flashed before him. One barb caught his cheek at the corner of his mouth and sank in like a knife, so, to avoid being ripped to pieces, he instinctively caught hold of the wire and came to rest suspended on the strands. Directly below stood the helmeted guards, their guns pointing at his head. Feeling his mouth fill with blood, Kiku tried to plug the hole with his tongue, but numbness was setting in and there was little he could do about it.

“Don’t move or we’ll shoot,” one guard ordered, waving a flashlight in Kiku’s face. “Now climb back down on this side.”
Kiku caught a glimpse of Anemone hiding in the bushes at the edge of the circle cast by the spotlight overhead. She was busily snapping pictures. Strange girl, thought Kiku, smiling to himself.

“Listen, asshole, don’t mess with us,” the guards yelled at him, apparently angered by the smile. “We have orders to fire at will. You want to die right there?” Bored with endless circuits around the barbed-wire perimeter, they seemed to fancy the idea of actually killing somebody. One of them raised his gun to aim right between Kiku’s eyes, his helmet bobbing with excitement; but before anything could happen another guy appeared under the spotlight—a strange, huddled figure on the inside of the fence, who lurched forward clutching a gun of his own and, just as the guards swung toward him, opened fire. Buckshot spat from the wide barrel, tearing through the fence and ripping fine black holes in the white uniforms as the guards were hurled backward. Kiku turned to see a small, dark-skinned, toothless man beckoning to him. Smoke was still pouring from the barrel of his gun.

“What do you think you’re staring at? If you hang around up there, they’ll fry your butt. Get
down
here, pole boy!” Kiku did as he was told, but as he struggled down from the fence, more guards, apparently drawn by the shots, came racing toward them in an armored car. He looked back just long enough to see Anemone waving at him and making her escape, and then he followed the little man into the darkness. When they were safely hidden, his guide stopped and pointed toward a low, shadowy building from which a shaggy figure was approaching. It was Hashi.

“So this is the great Kiku? You know, you’ve got to stop pulling stunts like this. If we hadn’t shown up when we did, you’d be a cinder by now… Hashi tells me you’re a big-time pole vaulter. No shit? A real live jock? Boy, that’s bad; in fact there’s nothing as bad as jocks with sweat glands where their brains ought to be, getting all razzed up, yelling ‘Go, team, go!’ How can you stand yourself?”

The guy with no teeth, Kiku learned, was Tatsuo—Tatsuo de la Cruz, from the Philippines. He and Hashi, who had been hiding nearby during the rescue, lived together on the second floor of a small tin-roofed factory building, where Hashi now silently led them. Beneath the bare light bulb at the bottom of the stairs, a pregnant woman was stooping with difficulty to put polish on her toenails. She straightened up just long enough to swat a moth fluttering around the light, sending a few flecks of powdered gold drifting down onto her wet nails.

The room on the second floor was dim and smelled of piss. A plastic hose wound in through one window to a garbage pail full of cloudy brown water where Hashi washed his hands. The tatami matting had been stripped away, and the floor was spread instead with a square of canvas that might once have been a painter’s back-cloth. In the center of the room was a small table with two cups crusted with dried tea bags. The other furnishings
included a black and white TV, a cassette recorder, and a vanity table. Vanity table… Now that Kiku thought about it, there was something odd about Hashi: he seemed to be wearing makeup. His eyebrows had been plucked and his face had a light coat of powder on it. Without a word or a glance at Kiku, Hashi went to the mirror. It was Tatsuo instead who spoke.

“So, did you get a load of my handiwork, Jock? The way I blew away those grunts? Made the gun myself, a sawed-off shotgun. Not fuckin’ bad, huh? Nobody else in Japan can make a gun like that. Modeled it after one they called the Liberator that the partisans used in Europe in WWII. Hey, Jock, you know what ‘Liberator’ means? Huh?… Nah, I guess you physical types don’t spend much time studying… I’d been wanting to make a beauty like this since way back, and I would’ve called mine a Liberator if it’d turned out just like the partisans’; but it was tricky figuring out how to keep the recoil down and still pack a big bang. Maybe I’ll work it out someday. Anyway I call this baby a Getaway, after a movie I saw as a kid. There was this American guy in the movie, had his hair cut real short, and he was always blasting people with a shotgun…”

As he jabbered on, Tatsuo moved around the room poking into old paper bags and a disintegrating box filled with shuttlecocks and shoehorns. “That’s weird,” he said as he finished his search, “I was sure we had some mercurochrome somewhere.”

He went to the bucket and wet a handkerchief, mumbling continually, half to himself and half to Kiku: “So just keep that in mind, pole boy: I’ve got a shotgun.” When he handed him the handkerchief to wipe his bloody cheek, Kiku noticed Tatsuo’s hand was trembling.

“OK then, Jock, I’m going out to buy you something to put on that cut,” he said finally, turning to leave. When he reached
the door, though, he looked back to deliver a last word of warning. “But don’t you forget it: me and my Getaway here, we don’t like being made a fool of. I’d take you outside right now and show you a little of what this Getaway can do, but there’s an old guy lives down there called the Quaker, and when he hears loud noises he gets all upset and screams ‘Earthquake!’ loud enough to make you deaf. It’s like a fit, I guess, but he sure makes one helluva noise, and then he kind of collapses in a heap, poor guy.”

“Must have been scared by an earthquake once,” said Kiku softly, his eyes on the floor.

“He said something!” laughed Tatsuo, slapping Hashi on the shoulder. “The pole boy can speak! And for a jock it wasn’t half bad. We didn’t even have to knock him around to get him to talk. You know, kid, Hashi here really likes you. When we saw you trying to vault your way in, he said to me right away, ‘You go help him.’ Yeah, he sure does like you… What was I talking about? Oh, the Quaker. No, you’re wrong about him. He doesn’t hate earthquakes. You see, he was a security guard since he was thirteen years old. Sixty years he worked as a guard, saving up his salary the whole time and buying emergency rations and canned goods and bottled water. Then a few years back he got sick, some kind of lump on his spine so he can hardly walk, can’t even take a piss by himself, and what do you think? His family leaves him here in Toxitown with nothing but a barrow full of his old emergency rations. So now he says earthquakes are the only thing you can count on, that he worked those sixty years for an earthquake. And whenever anything happens, he starts yelling ‘Earthquake!’ louder than the real thing. Pretty interesting neighbors we got here, don’t you think? This is a pretty good place… And I’m a pretty good guy,” said Tatsuo, bringing the rapid-fire monologue
to a sudden end. “I’m off for the medicine,” he added, and with a wave to Kiku he disappeared through the door.

Hashi, still seated in front of the mirror, opened a jar of cream and began rubbing it on his face.

“Where can you buy medicine at this time of night?” Kiku wanted to know. It was one in the morning.

“You’re in the city, Kiku. There’s an all-night market,” said Hashi, speaking for the first time. He continued staring at the mirror. His voice, at least, was much the same, Kiku thought. “I work at The Market myself, and I’ve got to get going pretty soon. When Tatsuo gets back with the medicine, you should try to get some sleep. We can talk tomorrow.”

Hashi seemed to have lost some weight, but he knew what he was doing with the makeup, brushing on pale blue eye shadow with a practiced hand. Kiku caught a whiff of perfume on the warm night air: it was a woman’s smell, like the smell that came from between the legs of the foreign whore at the Hotel Springtime.

“Hashi,” he said, “do they make you dress like that where you work?”

“Kiku, please—could we drop it for now? I feel like my head’s going to burst, you showing up all of a sudden like this. Like I said, we’ll talk about it tomorrow… we’ll talk about everything tomorrow.”

Hashi pulled off his T-shirt and put on a cream-colored bra, stuffing it with mounds of sponge. Then he put on a pink shirt, tying the shirttails across his stomach. From behind he could have been a small-assed girl.

“There’re some blankets in that closet, and if you get hungry Tatsuo can fix you something to eat,” he said, getting into a pair of high-heeled sandals. Kiku noticed the green nail polish on
his delicate toenails and the silver chain around his ankle. Hashi opened the door and stood for a moment with his back to him.

“How’s Milk?” he asked.

“Milk’s fine, but Kazuyo’s dead. I brought you one of her bones.” As he bent down to unravel the thread that held the bone in his trouser cuff, Kiku was suddenly, inexplicably furious. Kazuyo’s face, with its scarlet death shroud, floated up before him, bringing with it the fear and anger of that night. He remembered the feeling of being sealed inside something tight and pulpy. He felt he had to tell Hashi, to ask him if he too had felt trapped, to tell him about the fear. He wanted Hashi to know about the voice the night she had died, the one that said that nobody needed him, that he was completely useless. He wanted to tell Hashi that the voice was meant for him too, and he wanted him to know about DATURA, and how he would be able to kill them all if he could only get his hands on some. But most of all he wanted to ask Hashi why he was dressed up like a girl. Instead, he took the bone, which he’d finally managed to extract from his cuff, and threw it on the floor. Hashi turned to look, his face screwed up with pain and his shoulders heaving softly.

“Some asshole knocked into her while we were searching for you in Shinjuku and she fell and hit her head. It killed her. Do you remember how she used to sit up in bed sometimes at night? It was kind of spooky, remember? She always said the same thing: that she got to thinking about how she would end up dying and she couldn’t sleep. She’d just sit there blubbering away like a little kid, holding us until she fell asleep. Remember? Well, she probably never imagined she’d die spitting blood in a creaky bed in some stinking hotel. But you’re lucky, Hashi—you didn’t have to be there to see it… you’re really lucky…” Kiku was almost in tears as everything that had been bottled up since
Kazuyo’s death came spilling out. When he was done, he felt drained.

“I’ve got to get going,” said Hashi, averting his eyes from the bone lying on the floor.

“It’s part of her. Just take one look, just spend one second thinking about her.”

“I haven’t got time—I’m late as it is.”

“Just say a little prayer and go. It won’t take a minute.”

Hashi turned. Tears were streaming down his face. “Stop it!” he screamed. “Think for once how
I
feel, what kind of situation
I’m
in!”

“Situation my ass,” Kiku muttered, grabbing a plate of leftover spaghetti from the table and hurling it against the wall. Hashi sat down at the top of the stairs and began to whimper. Just then, Tatsuo returned.

Seeing his friend in tears, Tatsuo lunged at Kiku, but Kiku stepped inside and landed an open hand hard on his jaw, sending him rolling into a corner of the kitchen. He then took Hashi by the shoulders and shook him. “What the hell are you doing here?” he yelled. “Did you find that woman who left you in the locker? Is that it? Say something!”

Through his tears, Hashi could only mumble “I’m sorry,” over and over again. “It’s all my fault. I’m sorry, Kiku, I really am. I just wanted to be a singer. I’m sorry for everything.” His odd, nasal voice slowly filled the room like a fog, settling on Kiku’s skin, sinking in through his pores, and calming the anger and anxiety that had been streaming through him a moment before. He wanted to tell Hashi how lonely he’d been since he left the island, but he couldn’t.

Suddenly Hashi screamed “No! Don’t!” Tatsuo had recovered and was now aiming his gun at Kiku. Hashi flung himself at Kiku
and they both went flying just as he pulled the trigger. The light bulb and a piece of the wall shattered, and the room went dark.

“I’ll kill any fucker who messes with Hashi or thinks he can make a fool out of me,” they could hear him muttering. Hashi lit his lighter to find Kiku, in one piece, brushing bits of glass from his hair as he got to his feet.

“Eaaarthquaaake!” a hoarse voice bellowed from below. “Banzai! Banzai! Turn off the gas! EARTHQUAKE!!!”

“Can’t call this place boring, anyway,” said Kiku. Nodding, Hashi began to laugh.

Tatsuo had been born in Japan, the son of Laguno de la Cruz and Lurie de Leon, both from Cebu City in the Philippines. The couple had come to Japan in 1969, he to work as a musician, she as a dancer, but lacking any real talent, they had found it difficult to make a living in the city. After knocking around in increasingly mediocre shows, they ended up in a touring company working small towns in the provinces. Six months later, Lurie got pregnant and couldn’t take the constant traveling any longer, so they signed a contract with a hot-spring hotel northwest of Tokyo. The terms of the contract were terrible; the four band members and three dancers got up at 5:00
A
.
M
. to help make breakfast and were kept busy until the floorshow in the nightclub ended at midnight. Still, they preferred it to life in Cebu, and in time their hard work and reliability made them friends in the place.

Tatsuo was born in the winter of 1971. As soon as he was old enough to toddle around on his own, they started training him to be an acrobat, and by the time he was five he was performing in the dinner show at the hotel with Emiko, the daughter of one of the other dancers. They were something of a hit. Emiko, a “half”—Filipina and Japanese—was three years older than
Tatsuo, and had a crush on him. In fact, he was the pet of the whole hotel, the front desk clerk even nominally adopting him so he could have Japanese citizenship and attend elementary school. Twice a year, Tatsuo and Emiko would give a benefit at a hospital nearby for people with leprosy, which earned them a certificate of merit from the local government.

The summer of the year he was to enter junior high school, Tatsuo made a crucial discovery. He was poking around in a closet looking for mosquito coils when he found a strange bundle wrapped in several layers of paper. Inside was a gun. It was a working model of a Browning revolver that his father had smuggled in piece by piece and assembled himself, and with it were more than a hundred .22 bullets. His hands were shaking uncontrollably, but he took both the gun and the ammunition and hid them under the floor mats.

After that, whenever he could find the time, Tatsuo would stuff the gun under his shirt and escape into the mountains for a bit of target practice. Sometimes, when something was bothering him, or to celebrate his birthday or whatever, he’d stand on the side of a hill, the earth reeking of sulfur from the hot springs, and shoot straight up into the air. He began buying books and magazines about firearms to learn more about how they were made. One day in the mountains, he shot his first living thing: a cock pheasant. He got it at such close range the head came right off. The recoil and the satisfying shudder that went through him afterward drove home the fact that killing things was pretty easy. And it wasn’t long before it occurred to him that it might be that much more interesting, and no more difficult, to shoot a human being. Unfortunately, however, he remembered a line from a gun book he particularly trusted: “Never fire unless the situation has become absolutely hopeless, and even then fire only
to intimidate your adversary.” Tatsuo couldn’t read the characters for “intimidate” and so interpreted the passage to mean that one could only shoot people when the situation was “absolutely hopeless.”

From that time on, he began to pray for one of these desperate situations to turn up. The chances of being attacked by savages or stormtroopers in a small hot-spring resort were, admittedly, slim, but this didn’t prevent him becoming more and more impatient to try his hand at shooting someone. It’s because I’m really a Filipino, he told himself—I’m not cut out for this soggy old Japanese mountain town. He would look at pictures of Cebu and long for the warmth of the sun to thaw him out, melt those icebound shapes outside which often looked to him like guns.