Commodore Perry's Minstrel Show (32 page)

He would have been happy to know that such luminary gentlemen as Kyuzo and Ichiro had been having those same liberal (and drunken) thoughts only a few hours earlier.

He swung his stick again, perilously close to his brother's head.

“Father won't like it if you wake up these geisha,” Manzo told him. “And you won't like it if some hung-over samurai comes out and slaps you around. I remember how you whimpered and mewed the last time that happened, Momo. And if you hit me with your stick I'll make you whimper myself.”

“Ah Manzo, you have no imagination, and no ambition, either, that's your problem. If I were a warrior I could wake up any geisha I chose, simply by sliding in beside her, warming her futon!”

“Be quiet, Momo,” said Manzo, “I mean it now. Look what your nonsense has brought us! Look there, at the bottom of the road!”

Momo followed his brother's hand when it held a pine bough up, and sure enough, two actual samurai had come into the street at its lower end, as if summoned by his bravado. They were badly dressed men and rode on the backs of two awful-looking horses, a large pickle jar tied to the first horse's flank with strands of thick hemp rope.

“Here comes real trouble, Momo,” Manzo said. “Just act busy. What are they doing here so early? Oh, what bad luck!”

Momo hid his stick in their wagon and bent as if inspecting the wagon's wheel, trying to control his fear. Manzo, on the other hand, continued with the weaving of his boughs, looked up at the approaching riders, and smiled.

“Hey dung men, what's your secret? How do you keep the flies away?” called one of the filthy samurai. He had ridden up close to the two brothers, pointed at their wagon, and then at his pickle jar, where swarms of iridescent flies carved geometric figures in the wet morning air. The men had the stench of evil upon them. Manzo recognized it by the ease with which it cut through the shit smell.

“We do it with these,” he politely said, holding up one of his nicely woven pine boughs.

The samurai who'd spoken was younger and a good deal more frightening than the other one. He stared at the brothers hard, as if trying to discern some insult, a small bit of drool at the corners of his mouth. But his next words were directed at his companion.

“You should have kept things clean,” he hissed. “You should have washed it like I told you! Washed it and sealed its lid every night!”

A small bit of urine wet Momo's thigh, but the older man merely waved his companion's words away, like he'd no doubt waved away the flies, and climbed down off his horse. “I should have stayed away from the likes of you, from the outset,” he said.

He looked at Manzo, his voice full of resignation. “Bring me a few of those good-smelling boughs, then. Come on lad, be quick about it.”

Manzo hurried to oblige but when Momo saw their father emerging from the pathway between the two geisha houses he swallowed his fear, stood up and spoke deliberately, as if he were just then finishing a long explanation.

“Sappy pine will keep flies away,” he brightly said, “but only after you scrub your jar with citrus oil. Flies don't like citrus, even fruit flies don't.”

As he spoke he looked to gauge his father's reaction to his fine instructive tone, but when he saw a thin white hand opening the upstairs window of the nearest geisha house his heart turned a somersault, never mind that danger stalked them all. A geisha was looking out at them—looking out at him!—and though she no doubt wished they would be quiet, Momo loved her instantly, and doubled his hatred for the fact that these stinking men could go and drink with her, while he, in this lifetime at least, could not. All he could ever really do, he understood bitterly, was piss his pants and swat the fetid air with his stick!

“I can do it for you if you like,” said his brother, bowing down before the men. “I have just now woven these new boughs.”

The older samurai held up a hand and the younger one began to tell him to stay where he was, but Manzo, dulled to the danger as usual, had already stepped beside the pickle jar. Flies lined the jar's lip and the tails and rumps of both the horses and were in the hair of the two men. Momo thought the flies looked like humble and begging petitioners outside a castle, while Manzo saw them as elegant, like an emergency meeting of metallic-blue lords.

Their father had stopped when he saw the two samurai, but came forward quickly now, worried that Momo's unruly mouth had once more got him in trouble.

“I'm sure he didn't mean it like it sounded,” he told the two men. Last week's pine boughs were stretched over his shoulders, where they worked to soften the strain of the overflowing buckets.

“What will you do with all the shit you've collected?” the younger samurai asked him. “Sell it to a farmer, or spread it on a field of your own?”

It was an ignorant question—what honey-bucket man had a field of his own?—but the father only said, “We sell it to a merchant who sells it again to farmers, passing it on.”

He emptied the buckets into his wagon, careful to ensure that no bits of waste splashed the horrid samurai's already wasted clothes. Then he bowed as low as he could, peeking to assure himself that Momo's head was also down.

“Merchants again!” croaked the younger man. “Isn't that always the problem? Usurping merchants everywhere, even in the shit business! We ought to kill every one of them!”

He raised his voice for a second but then stepped closer to the father, becoming conspiratorial. “You men provide a service and so does the farmer who buys this crap, don't get me wrong,” he said. “But tell me old man, what does the merchant do save build obstacles between the two of you, and while he's at it build himself a fine new house?”

As he spoke the older samurai, though he'd finally let Manzo spread fresh pine boughs across the backs of both horses, was having no luck at all getting the flies to leave their pickle jar alone. The boughs, of course, were meant for after cleaning, as a kind of garnish, not for when shit caked everything in sight like hard tofu. That was what Momo had been trying to tell him.

Momo expected the younger samurai to go on about the evils of the merchant class a while longer, but instead he returned to the horses to swat at the flies again and otherwise rummage around. In the window above them the geisha was now singing the refrain of a popular love song—“
I waited for him till my well ran dry, until the nearby fields grew fallow”
—while across the street someone else splashed water from a bucket and mopped another bar's floor. Momo, of course, was convinced that the geisha was singing for him alone. He loved this street with all his heart and, though he would never have admitted it to anyone, had formed the habit of reciting the names of its bars:
“Bizen-ya, Kado, Yamago-ya, Kanzan, Jittoku, Miki, Edo-ya
, “as he scooped the shit from their outhouses.

He recited them now, inside his head, to the rhythm of the song of the geisha, until the younger samurai came back with a fist full of coins.

“We want to buy all this shit,” he said. “We'll take it off your hands right now.”

“What?” said the older samurai, but the younger one turned on him, in a hissing rejoinder that soon turned into a shout. “You've seen for yourself that nothing else will cover the smell! What rots, rots! That is why we have flies and worms!”

He glanced back at Momo's father and said in a quieter voice, “We'll need the loan of your wagon, also.”

The father knew by their weight that the coins he'd been given were sufficient, so he told Momo to go with the men, and bring the wagon back when they'd found their field and the fertilizing was done. Manzo was disappointed that he had not been chosen to go, since everyone knew he was the more responsible son, but he hid it by saying, “That's good shit you're buying, sirs. Everyone loves the shit from a geisha house.”

It wasn't only Momo who could say something clever. He could, too!

Despite its awkward look and sloppy, heavy contents, the wagon could be pulled by one man if he were skilled. Manzo was the best puller in the family, followed closely by their father, while Momo was one of the worst pullers in all of Shimoda. So when Momo stepped into the wagon's thick hemp halter, Manzo forgot his jealousy, stopped trying to think of clever things to say, and helped his brother center himself. It wouldn't do for Momo to bring embarrassment to the family, no matter how decrepit the men who had purchased the load.

When Momo was ready Manzo and his father pushed from the sides until the wagon gave a beginning lurch, while Momo remembered to keep his head bent, watching his feet to make sure they were set wide apart. Up the road he went, away from his father and brother and out of the sight of the geisha, who, in any case, had stopped singing and closed her window again some moments earlier.

Momo could hear the samurai behind him, the younger one walking, the older one tense on his horse, when it quite suddenly came to him, as if in a final lyric from that geisha, that there was more to be careful of here than just spilling shit or the pace and gait he chose. His father had told him to come back
as soon as the fertilizing of their field was done
, but these men were no more likely to have a field that needed fertilizing than he was! No sir, they were outlaws of some kind, that's what they were, and their contraband was hidden inside that pickle jar! And if that were true then this, at long last, was the opportunity he'd been waiting for, the chance to break loose from the pitiful peasant shackles that were ruining his days and enslaving his entire life. He had to be brave, that was all there was to it. He couldn't piss his pants again. He had to find the courage he was always bragging about right now.

Momo headed out the way they always did, not stopping until he reached a spot at the edge of town where some two dozen other honey-bucket wagons waited, full and unattended, for the merchant who would later pick them up. “Kambei, the catcher of criminals!” he thought, and imagined himself depicted on a poster.

To cover his growing nervousness Momo sang the second line of the geisha's song, in a loud and quivering voice:
“Until the petals fell from all my pretty flowers and the freezing mountain streams grew murky…”

“Shhh,” said the younger samurai, bringing the pickle jar forward. “Be quiet! Stop that horrible noise and take this from me now, my strong young lad. Submerge it in your wagon. I don't want to dirty my clothes.”

Momo had slipped out of his halter and turned to face the man, flexing his jaw and trying as hard as he could to cast his fear aside. The pickle jar was heavier than he thought it would be but he pulled it against his chest and smiled, allowing the flies to track their dirty feet across his lips and nose.

The older samurai was slow at getting off his horse and took a piece of material from his pack to cover his mouth before coming forward. He also carried one of Manzo's newly woven pine boughs, and waved it in the air. This told Momo as plainly as words ever could that the smell he'd lived with all his life had become his best advantage. So he stuck his tongue out for extra effect, allowing a couple of flies to land upon it, dancing in the wetness that they found.

The older man coughed and gagged a little bit, but the younger one confided in Momo. “It's only a trick we are playing on a friend. Just lower the jar down into the shit now, that's a good boy, hide it well until we're ready for it.”

“There are a lot of wagons here,” the older man told him. “If we're ever to find it again we'll have to leave a mark.”

Though it was an easy order to carry out, Momo bought himself time by pretending that it wasn't. He strained under the weight of the jar and bumped the wagon, staining his forearms with the little waves of waste that came lapping over its side.

“Just place it in the wagon,” said the older man. “Slip it under the surface till we don't see it anymore.”

Momo grinned, then lifted the jar up much higher than was necessary and fairly threw it into the center of the wagon, as if it were a heavy stone. Shit splashed everywhere, over the ground around them and onto the heads and shoulders of all three men. Strains of it flew even into the mouths of both the samurai, and while they were spitting and wiping themselves and shouting, leaning over and vomiting onto the ground, Momo stood up straight and ran, not singing this time, but chanting his memorized litany of bar names:
“Bizen-ya, Kado, Yamagoya, Kanzan, Jittoku, Miki, Edo-ya…
” until he heard them pull their swords from the scabbards, remount their horses and give chase.

Who knew what he thought he might achieve by such a tactic when, not ten seconds earlier, running seemed to be the thing he most wanted to avoid?

WITHOUT THEIR WAGON
and with time to spare before they were due at home, Manzo and his father had walked toward the port to take a look at the American ships while it was still early enough for their presence not to bother anyone. It had been Manzo's idea to do such a thing, convincing his reluctant father, because he wanted to have a story of his own to tell when Momo got back and they all sat down to breakfast later on. They had had to slip past that sleeping contingent of Ueno's drunk soldiers to stand at the town's bulkhead, and were now looking out at the ships and the swelling high tide. The weather had held but the offshore clouds were worrisome, frowning at them in a good imitation of Manzo's father.

“Don't fret so much, Papa,” Manzo said, but he couldn't help adding, “You know if me and Momo could gather the shit from those ships we could go into business for ourselves and you could retire.”

He counted eight ships and had heard that within them were more than a thousand men, filling their bellies daily, and flushing all that potential profit into the bay. No ambition? Who did Momo think he was?

His father nodded, but was so accustomed to Manzo's ramblings that he hadn't really listened very well. Rather, he had been musing on what had happened earlier and said, “You know, the more I think about it the more I worry that I should not have let your brother go with those men. We all knew perfectly well they were masterless, I must be getting old.”