Fiction River: Unnatural Worlds (5 page)

Bug Boy hoped he would be back by the time
the Sisters called them down to breakfast. He hoped he would have
parked Bike Number Two and sneaked back up the side of the building
and through the little window and into his place at the end of the
line as the boys filed down (minus the Newspaper Boy who would eat
later) for breakfast.

You might think Bug Boy was wearing a leather
jacket as he leaned over the handlebars and stood up on the pedals
and pumped hard down the nearly dark street.

Look at him go.

What’s your hurry Bug Boy?

Oh, never mind. We don’t want to know.

You’d be mistaken about that leather
jacket.

When Bug Boy got around all the corners and
into the little park, he stopped and looked left and right, back
and forth, up and down, and then he let the crack in his back
widen, and he spread his wings, and a foul odor lumbered out so
heavy you might imagine you could actually see it. Bug Boy knew
better than to open his wings anywhere near other people. This
reluctance to open them was the cause of his odor problem. Because
he could not open them often enough, stuff just built up in there
next to his skin which looked and felt like uncooked chicken, and
it was like you yourself would be if you never got to take your
socks off, say. That would be no bed of roses we’d be smelling when
you finally did get to take them off and wiggle your toes in the
cool air.

Bug Boy let the bike fall over on its side.
Then he ran around in circles, jumping and flapping his arms, and
slowly opening and closing his wings to fan out the awful odors.
The morning air felt so cool and moist on his back that he couldn’t
help bursting out with a little happy chirruping.

2

Kameko

Her students all sat there looking up at her
and waiting for her to say something interesting. Or anything at
all, really. All she had to do was talk to them in English. The job
was not terribly difficult.

She loved her students. She loved this
amazing city. But life was so hard here, and she was so lonely.
Everything was very expensive. It might have been better if she
spoke the language. It might even have been better if she looked
like she shouldn’t really be able to speak the language. Everyone
was so nice to regular foreigners, she thought, but she looked just
like everyone else until she opened her mouth. Then people seemed
shocked, although they were masterful in hiding it, as if she had
just lifted her skirt to show them the ugly scar on her upper left
thigh from falling out of a tree when she was twelve. Gramps had
been so angry at the backyard for letting her fall, and the
backyard had been so contrite and crushed with guilt that they had
had super strawberries, some as big as baseballs, long after the
season was over.

Japanese might be the language of her dead
mother, but she didn’t think she would ever learn it. She tried to
memorize a new word every day, but then when she tried to use such
a word, she found that it changed when you put it in a sentence in
ways she just couldn’t seem to get. Oh, and the “wa” and the “ga”
were driving her nuts.

Her grandfather had been right, even if he
hadn’t insisted on it—coming to Japan when all she knew about the
country and the language was what she had learned from anime might
be a big mistake. There weren’t many ninjas about, for example. And
no one seemed to really care about your blood type. Japanese men
were either a million polite miles away, or they were pinching and
groping her on the trains.

She might have listened to her grandfather’s
gentle suggestions, but she had gone out to the backyard while he
cooked dinner, and his crows had come to her and told her yes, she
should go to Japan, told her they could take her right now if she
wanted. All she had to do was become in tune with the crow culture
of the place she wanted to go, and presto change-o whoosh! Away
she’d go. But what did she know about Japanese crows? Nothing
really. Didn’t they all have three legs? The Yatagarasu? Did they
play soccer? Ha ha! You silly girl! The crows made such a racket of
cawing and flapping and laughing at her that Gramps ran out still
holding his tongs to see what the matter was.

In the end she flew to Tokyo by jet instead
of crows and made her way to the Ueno neighborhood where she would
be teaching English at an orphanage run by Catholic nuns. Actually,
someone else, a trained teacher would be providing the instruction.
All Kameko had to do was talk to the students in English. The
simplicity of her duties made her feel even more isolated and set
apart from the other teachers, the real teachers. She had a very
small apartment with tatami mats and cushions and a low table and a
futon. It was perfect. She would never have been able to afford
such a place in Tokyo without help from her grandfather. The
neighborhood had plenty of crows, and they were very different from
the crows at home. These were big and aggressive. Don’t even think
about messing with us or we’ll rough you up! They were all the time
dive-bombing people they didn’t like. The city put blue netting
over the garbage cans on collection days to keep them out of it.
That didn’t really work. The crows were smart and worked together
to get under the netting.

“Okay,” Kameko said. “Today we will be
talking about pizza.”

Peas Sue!

Peas Saw!

Just as she turned to write the topic on the
board, the floor moved. Kameko knew it was an earthquake
immediately. She had mistaken the only other earthquake she had
ever experienced in Oregon as a big truck passing by on the street
outside. This one was unmistakable. This one was the real
thing.

Time slowed.

A voice came on the intercom, and the
students all got up, so slowly, and crouched down under their
desks. Kameko was not sure what she should do. The room was
shaking. The windows were rattling. Stuff was dancing off the big
teacher’s desk and falling onto the floor. There was a roar in the
air but she couldn’t be sure it wasn’t just in her head. It would
be stupid to just stand there and be the only casualty, but then
she noticed the strange student whose name translated to “Bug Boy”
had not gotten under his desk. Instead he was moving quickly toward
her, very quickly—scuttling forward on too many legs, she thought.
He was at her side almost at once.

He took her hand and said something in a
language that was not Japanese. She shrugged and tried to smile at
him but felt her smile flash on and off as the room continued to
shake. He pulled at her hand, and she let him lead her to the
classroom door. The earthquake seemed to be over by the time they
got into the hallway, but he was still pulling her forward
urgently.

The aftershock hit just as Kameko and Bug Boy
got outside.

So many things happened at once. The dark sky
was alive with the flapping and screaming of the big gangster
crows. The earth was shaking, and the tall buildings were swaying
from side to side. She pulled away from Bug Boy and put out her
arms for balance, but that did no good. She fell to the pavement.
She saw Bug Boy looking up at the sky and waving his arms. He’s got
his jacket on backwards she thought as it seemed to open out at
either side of his body just as the crows descended and covered him
completely. Kameko yelled for help, but no one came. She grabbed
her phone and called her grandfather, thinking it was a crazy thing
to do even as she was doing it.

“Earthquake!” she shouted when she saw his
face on the little screen. “The crows!”

3

The Backyard

When Cassie was alive she liked to tell the
story about how my backyard was in love with me and had tried to
sabotage our romance. She would tell about the night she came home
with me and first met the backyard.

Yes, I had owned this house all those years
ago, and after I’d married Cassie, she and the backyard came to a
kind of détente. It remained my territory. It liked our boy Johnny,
but he never really felt comfortable back there. He knew the
backyard would be whispering in my ear about anything he got up
to.

But that first night Cassie and the backyard
did not like one another. Okay, okay, I was flattered in a
perverted way over two women fighting over me, even if one of them
wasn’t strictly speaking a woman. In fact, I never ever referred to
the backyard as “her” while Cassie was alive. In those days, I had
a patio table out there on the deck with a couple of wonderful huge
white wicker chairs with comfortable cushions I was always careful
to bring in when I wasn’t using them so the Oregon rain would not
ruin them.

I’d left Cassie sitting in one of those
chairs while I went inside for wine.

I heard her squeak like she’d seen a bat or
something, and I’d yelled, “What?”

“Nothing,” she’d called. I decided we could
use some snacks, too, so I put some cheese and crackers on a
platter.

From Cassie’s viewpoint, things had not been
so serene. She used to describe the sudden drop in temperature as I
left her in the wicker chair. Branches snapped. Bushes shook as
creatures crept through them. Something scampered over her foot.
The patio light above the sliding glass doors dimmed. A sharp wind
shook everything and then just stopped suddenly leaving a wet, dead
smell floating in the air. A hummingbird flew down in front of
Cassie. She carefully raised a hand toward it. It dropped onto the
tabletop, obviously dead.

“What?” I’d shouted.

“Nothing!” she’d said.

She didn’t know quite why she did it, but she
opened her bag and nudged the body of the dead hummingbird into it.
She snapped the bag closed and put it in her lap. I came out all
goofy smiles with the wine and the cheese and crackers. The air was
cool and sweet with the smell of spring flowers.

Johnny married a wonderful woman named
Natsuki from Japan and they gave us a granddaughter, a beautiful
baby, my Kameko. But then a drunk driver killed both Johnny and
Natsuki. Natsuki had been an orphan and had no family at all, so
there were not so many hurdles for Cassie and I to jump when
adopting Kameko.

Those were wonderful years really, and I
treasure them. Cassie’s heart failed suddenly, when Kameko was ten,
and I finished the job of raising her alone.

Well, me and the backyard.

The hummingbird wasn’t really dead, Cassie
would say, zeroing in on the climax of her story.

The backyard loved Kameko almost as much as I
did, maybe even more than it loved me. Cassie and Johnny would have
been amazed to see it. I never worried about Kameko when she played
back there. Picture this. She’s three-and-a-half and wearing the
white, red, green, and orange tie-dyed dress we’d bought her at the
Saturday market, and she’s barefoot, and she’s in the backyard
talking up to a tree. Her jet-black hair is long down her back. She
raises one small fist and shakes it in the air. Or maybe she’s
talking to a squirrel up in the tree. Whatever it is, it’s getting
a piece of her mind.

So there he was, Cassie would say, with his
crackers and cheese and wine, grinning like a bear. The backyard
had gone completely silent. It was a deep listening quiet that you
couldn’t help but notice. Any little sound you made yourself
bounced around like a scream. And in that deep quiet came a muffled
desperate cry from Cassie’s lap. She pulled her purse onto the
table and opened it, and the hummingbird shot out like a bunch of
angry bees! The backyard blew out a huge sigh of relief that
brought all the rustling and whispering night sounds back all at
once.

She’d say I said, “Was that a bird?” And I
suppose I might have said that. I don’t remember the details she
remembered. I remember that I was already in love with her and that
I ached for her and that I was wondering if she would spend the
night with me. So she had a bird in her purse? I could live with
that.

Cassie would say the backyard was trying to
make me think she was a thief. The backyard was trying to say look
look she snatches helpless hummingbirds out of the air and puts
them in her purse. Tell her to go away! Tell her to go away!

Well, that didn’t happen, I would always
say—my only contribution to the telling of Cassie’s story.

My phone made the special sound that meant it
was Kameko calling. An odd time for her to call. Shouldn’t she be
in school? It would be tomorrow morning in Japan. Maybe she was on
a break. We were totally video these days so I put on a smile and
took the call ready to see her face swim up on my small screen.

I could see something was terribly wrong.

“Earthquake!” she shouted. “The crows!”

I thought she meant my crows here who were
suddenly everywhere. How could she see that? My crows. The ones
that always came back to the backyard. The ones who were cautious
but not afraid of me. The crows who had told Kameko they could take
her to Japan. Did they promise she would find her mother? They
poured into the backyard in a huge heap. I had never seen them do
such a thing. It was as if they had all pounced on something.

“He’s gone!” Kameko said on the phone.

“What?” My eyes were jumping back and forth
from the phone to my crows in the backyard. What had they
caught?

Then the crows all suddenly leaped away from
what they had been covering and took to the air. A boy, I
thought.

The figure unfolded itself and beat at the
air with its own dark wings. I made some kind of startled sound,
and it turned black eyes on me, and then it jumped up and scurried
toward the rhododendrons. The backyard closed around it like a hug.
Not a boy, I thought.

“Gramps?” I looked down at the phone again.
Kameko swept the camera in a wide panorama, but I couldn’t make
much of the blurry images and couldn’t tell if things were still
shaking.