Coin Locker Babies (39 page)

It hadn’t yet started to rain, and the heavy dome of clouds made it all the hotter. Hanging low over the ship, the sky looked like a huge metal lid, dull with rust and decaying plankton, from which no reflection could escape. The first sign of the storm was the wind that seemed to duck through the narrow gap between sea and cloud and blow over them, churning the waves white. Heated by the swollen clouds, the wind felt warm on their faces. After the first few gusts, it grew in strength until it whipped the flags about, threatening to shred them, and plucked up the trainees’ uniforms drying on the deck and tossed them over the stern. But when it died down for a moment, the men could feel the first signs of seasickness, a sense that the warm, clammy tingling on their skin was sinking into their bodies.

With the wind came swells, and for the first time on the voyage the captain took the wheel himself. As he steered the ship into the waves, he pointed behind him: a leaden wall was moving fast toward them. Then the squall overtook them, and the ship lurched violently. The wind lashed the waves into a frenzy, leaving a trail of foam behind.

At last it started to rain, and in no time at all the deck was awash. The rain seemed to fall sideways, blowing up under the crew’s rain gear, soaking the clothes underneath, and flailing at what felt like bare skin. Each time the ship bobbed up on a big wave, Kiku felt a numbing at the base of his neck. The captain ordered the deck anchor readied, and the first mate told the trainees to get below. In the hold, they found Nakakura rolling around moaning on the floor, clutching his hands to his chest. The smell of vomit hit them as soon as they set foot inside. The order was to get in their bunks and secure themselves, but the pitching of the ship made it impossible even to climb up. As they lurched about, someone slipped in Nakakura’s puke and fell, while hot, heavy air cascaded down the hatch. Kiku held tight to the bed frame and concentrated on working out the numbness in his neck.

The breath of fifteen trainees crammed into the hold soon mixed with the stink already there to form a gas that seemed to cling to their skin, sapping all feeling from their bodies. Before long, the numbness at the base of Kiku’s neck had crawled up over his face and from there invaded his whole head, leaving him without any sensation from the neck up or anywhere on the surface of his body. Only his muscles and his insides seemed to be working. One after another, the trainees were being thrown to the floor, clutching at the sheets they’d peeled from the bunks and stuffing them in their mouths. Kiku managed to hold on, but he had the feeling that his head had become a magnet, drawing the other parts of him toward it. Something seemed to be stuck in his throat, and if he opened his lips the least bit, sour spittle dribbled down his chin. He found himself staring as hard as he could at the ceiling, afraid his stomach would pop into his mouth if he so much as glanced down. A bare light bulb was swinging in violent arcs directly overhead, leaving a deep orange afterimage
in its wake. One strange orange curve piled up on the next until they had traced a star, and the star then twirled above Kiku until it gradually faded, to be replaced by another. He was aware that someone was retching at his feet; the floor sucked at the soles of his shoes. And when the man grabbed his ankle and let fly, the colored patterns on his retina ran together like bright vomit, making him wish that he could sever all connection with his head—cut it off and leave the rest of him in peace.

Just then, he realized someone was calling him. A voice from the hatch was yelling names.

“Kuwayama! Yamane! Hayashi! Get up to the wheelhouse!”

Keeping a firm grip on the bunks, Kiku climbed over the backs of his fallen comrades and made his way to the hatch. Other than Kiku, only Hayashi, Yamane, and two of the engineering trainees were still on their feet. When they had crawled across the deck to reach the wheelhouse, they found the first mate unconscious, with a gash on his head.

“Ah, you made it,” said the captain, ordering one of them to watch the radar while the others used the loran to check their position. Wave after wave rose up in front of the ship, and as each reached its highest point, the wind would shred the crest into strands of glass and blow them off to leeward. The fine spray from this made it impossible to tell whether the drops hitting the windows of the wheelhouse were rain or seawater. Still, the trainees who’d made it outside were sure they were better off here, wind, waves, and all, than down in the filthy hold. The feel of the storm on their faces had even relieved their seasickness a little.

“What a bitch,” the captain muttered. The ship seemed to be making almost no headway, it being all he could do to avoid being broadsided by incoming waves. The radio reported that a
small-craft warning had been issued urging ships to seek shelter at the nearest port. The captain ordered Hayashi to find the closest harbor.

“Ishinomaki!” Hayashi answered after a moment. The radio officer tried to raise the coast guard station, but their frequencies were apparently overloaded since there was no response. Next he tried the fishing co-op in Ishinomaki, asking for permission to make an emergency call and for a guarantee of anchorage. The co-op reported that fishing boats were fast filling up all their space, and they should get a move on if they wanted one of the remaining berths.

The sea was churned snow-white, and the foam from the waves skittered across the surface ahead of the wind. Yamane shouted that there was a blip on the radar that seemed to be dead in the water, just as an S.O.S. began coming in on the radio. An
eight-ton
fishing boat was sinking; present location, 142°18’ east by 38°58’ north.

“They need help,” said the radio officer, “and they’re just 0.8 nautical miles to the northeast.” The captain, however, ignored the report, paying no attention to the shocked looks they all gave him.

“We’ll maintain this course,” he announced. “The storm’s picking up and we’ve got no time to lose on a rescue. They want us in Ishinomaki by 1905 hours. Anyway, the coast guard will be out after them; get on the radio and let them know about this, and if they’re still not answering, ask the fishing co-op to contact them.”

“Let’s go help them,” Yamane blurted out, but even this failed to get a rise out of him. A minute later word came back from Ishinomaki that all available coast guard boats were already out on rescue missions.

“Captain, sir,” Yamane spoke up again. “It seems to me we’ve got to go save that ship,” he said, adding a crisp bow, only to be told to shut the fuck up.

“Three minutes more on this course and we’ll be at our nearest approach to the vessel,” said Hayashi, looking up from the charts.

“They’ve stopped transmitting the S.O.S.,” the radio officer shouted. At this point, three more trainees joined them in the wheelhouse. It turned out they were all fishermen, and when they heard the situation they also begged the captain to do something.

“Now listen up, you bastards,” Captain Eda howled. “You’re
prisoners
, or have you forgotten? And you’ve got no business chasing around saving people.”

“But we’re fishermen first, sir. And there’s no way a little boat like that is going to make it in this storm.”

“And just how the hell do you think we’d go about it? The mate’s out cold, and I’ve got to steer. Who’s going to do the rescuing?”

“We will,” said Yamane, feeling that the captain was beginning to relent.

“There they are!” Hayashi cried, as a plume of orange smoke became visible off the bow. The captain called Yamane over and began shouting in his ear. Yamane nodded several times, then turned to ask Hayashi to fetch some metal cable they had stored below.

“And while you’re at it, round up five or six guys who look like they can still stand up,” he added as Hayashi went off in search of the cable. When he came back, the first thing they did was tie one end of the safety line around their waists and the other to the bridge, then Kiku and Hayashi split up, one going to the bow and the other to the stern. Hayashi was able to hold on to the rail and keep his feet, but Kiku was almost instantly tossed up by the wind and dropped onto the deck, only managing to
cover the distance by crawling along hand over hand. As he went, he ran out the cable, securing it first to the windlass and then the mooring winch. When the lines were in place, the rest of the rescuers followed them out, forward and aft, in four pairs, each man being belayed to the fixed line. Kiku, armed with a boat hook, was lashed together with Nakakura who seemed to have recovered somewhat from his seasickness. When the fishing boat was at last in sight, they could see that it had capsized and the crew were clinging to a red buoy, bobbing up on one wave and then plunging out of sight before the next. As the
Yuyo Maru
approached, hands started waving all over the buoy. Once the ship was in position, Kiku tried to use the boat hook to catch onto their life preservers and drag the men to the ladder hung over the stern. He reached the end out toward a young man who was shouting something, teeth bared, but just as he was about to grab it, a huge wave engulfed the ship. Kiku and Nakakura managed to ride it out clinging to the rail, though for a moment they thought they were done for, but the man in the water was lifted bodily on the crest of the wave and slammed down head first on the deck. Kiku was able to snag his collar with the hook and haul him over, bleeding and unconscious. The man was a foreigner.

“Pirate fishermen,” Nakakura mumbled as he got a good look at the sailor’s face. He was, it appeared, from somewhere in Southeast Asia. When he was close enough, Nakakura wrapped his arms around the man; the hard lump in the hip pocket of his camouflage pants turned out to be a gun.

The only lights to be seen were the signal buoys marking the entrance to the harbor at Ishinomaki and the revolving beacon of an unmanned lighthouse further out on the cape. There had been two searchlights on the seawall inside, but the typhoon had
already toppled them, shattering the lenses; the shards of glass had clung to the concrete for a time before being washed up by the enormous breakers and swept into the black sky by the wind. The rest of the town appeared to be blacked out.

As the
Yuyo Maru
was being made fast to the seawall, four policemen in heavy blue raincoats came out to meet them, followed by the men from the fishing co-op who formed a circle some distance behind them. The prison supervisor went ashore to discuss accommodation for the trainees and spent a long time huddled with the cops. Apparently, the phone lines were down in town and they were keeping in touch by walkie-talkie. To make things worse, the co-op’s meeting hall was already full of men from fishing boats sheltering from the storm, and the other likely place—an elementary school—had been ruled out by the principal, who didn’t want a bunch of criminals staying there. In the end, the only possibility the police could suggest was a warehouse in the fish market, and the supervisor’s argument that the state had responsibility for the men and they deserved better treatment seemed to fall on deaf ears. While these negotiations were going on, the men in question were kept locked up in the hold until at last a compromise was struck: the supervisor agreed to having them sleep on the floor of the warehouse provided they were each given a change of clothes and a blanket. When the deal was done, he explained that they were all exhausted and urged moving them as soon as possible, but with only four officers in town, the police were in favor of waiting until reinforcements arrived from the prefectural station.

“Don’t forget,” said the officer in charge, “your lads aren’t the only problem we’ve got to deal with, there’s also the matter of those illegals you rescued; they’ve got to be kept in custody as well.”

They had managed to pull seven crew members from the pirate fishing boat, all of whom were now huddled shivering in one corner of the hold, making the limited space more cramped than ever. Nearly all of them had an injury of one sort or another. The bunk frame in the center of the hold had collapsed at some point from the pitching of the ship and the weight of the men, leaving them nowhere to sit. Thus, the entire group had been standing knee-deep in a fragrant stew of oil, salt water, and puke while the powers-that-be argued about their fate. Nor did being anchored to the seawall stop the rocking in the hold. At first, the excitement of the rescue had kept spirits high, but as time went by, fewer and fewer voices answered when the captain or the guards came to yell encouragement down the hatch. The rocking went on, milder but still inescapable, punctuated now and then by a tremendous lurch. For what it was worth, they held on to what remained of the bunk frame, but several men had slumped to the floor from exhaustion, settling into the soup. Their faces, peering up from a pool of bilge, might at one time have been funny, but nobody felt much like laughing. Sealed off from the outside, the hold was like a hermetic globe with its own tepid, nauseating ebb and flow.

“Fuck this! Give me solitary any day,” Yamane groaned. He was suffering from another headache, this one apparently the result of a blow from the winch during the rescue operation. Kiku, however, was busy coping with his own nausea, trying to distract himself by building bit by bit a picture in his mind: the picture that had hung on the wall of the chapel at the orphanage. The man with the beard was still hoisting the newborn lamb, lifting it up to heaven. Kiku could see him, this person he’d been told was his father, standing on the cliff overlooking the sea, a sea he suddenly realized had been stormy. And for the first time
he had the feeling there might have been, somewhere off in the corner of the picture, a tiny, foundering ship. He
had
been in the picture after all, he realized: he was aboard that ship. Yeah!—he told himself—I’m going to make it! And when I get out of here, the guy with the beard will probably be waiting for me up on that cliff, all shining and glorious!

“OK! Everybody out! We’ve got you a place to stay,” he heard the supervisor shout just then, as if in answer to his thoughts.

As they climbed on deck, cheering and hugging one another, they came face to face with their welcoming party: a jeep equipped with a spotlight, two rows of policemen, and a small crowd of fishermen who were staring, pointing, and whispering among themselves. They were then herded onto a truck where each of them was given a blanket, while the foreign fishermen climbed into the jeep and were driven off elsewhere. But the truck stayed put, delayed apparently by the man in charge of them complaining that they hadn’t received the change of clothing they’d been promised.