Above the East China Sea: A Novel (38 page)

“What a trip. Our girls crying, hanging on to us. Wind whipping that rain sideways straight into our faces. Like a movie. And all us young, good-looking, renegade bloods were the stars. And our courage and pride and righteousness were going to beat back the damn United States air force, army, navy,
and
marines. Then someone with a radio starts yelling about how Elsie been declared a supertyphoon. Winds predicted to hit a hundred and seventy-five miles an hour. That is some serious shit. Blow a fuckin’ anchor down the street’s what I’m talkin’ about.”

I feel it, the winds howling through me, the winds that have always howled through me. Finally, I know where they come from.

“About then, lights flicker off. Shops close. Streets get dark and empty. We’re standing in the middle a fuckin’ ghost town. Then that siren goes off. You ever hear an Okinawan typhoon siren?”

I can barely force a word out, and whisper, “No.”

“Make the hair on a dead man’s neck stand up. Scary movie shit. Like they opened up the graveyards and ten thousand ghosts come pouring out, all wailing and flying through the streets. Man, eyes
popped
open when those sirens went off. No one be talkin’ about blockading the streets, garroting the MPs one by one when they come for us. Everyone
looking around for some shelter and all we see is doors closed, locked, and sandbagged. Brothers be thinkin’ about those nice safe reinforced concrete barracks back on base. Next time that siren goes off, they gone. All the girls gone.
Poof.
Vanished. All except one.”

“My grandmother.” My
anmā.
I can see my grandmother so vividly, the way she always was. Always moving ahead, pushing forward no matter what, even if she was walking into a gale.

“Yeah, little Sukie. Not a dog out there loyal as that one. The wind about strong enough to blow her to China, and she just stand there, put her hand in mine, and led me away. Had a nice little studio. Had her a hot plate, four-blade ceiling fan, cassette player, nice double bed. Actual mattress on a frame. And the building was sound. Lot of buildings, shit whole department stores!, blew away when Elsie hit. Eight people killed. But we rode it out, me and Sukie, drinking
awamori,
smoking those funky Violet cigarettes, laughing. Made me happy to make someone as happy as she was just from being with me. I was like Elvis, Jesus, and Smokey all rolled into one for Sukie.”

She pined for you for the rest of her life.
I wonder whether I should hate him for breaking my
anmā
’s heart or if it really was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. I wonder whether I’m like my grandmother or my mother.

“Even after Elsie moved on, Sukie stayed home from her bar hostess job. Bought me whatever I wanted. Beer, cigarettes,
sōki
soba. What can I say? Woman flat-out worshiped my ass. Loved to just pat me like I was some big, giant Christmas doll. My eyes, though. Man, she’d stare into them and whisper in her crazy Oki language. Not Japanese. Whole other language. And my hair? She’d bend over and kiss it like every curl was a baby that needed her to coo over it.”

I think of her, transported, as she kissed my curls, Codie’s. Of the adoration that oozed from her.

“At first, being a deserter was like staying home sick from school. I stopped shaving, grew me a fine Eldridge Cleaver,
Soul on Ice,
Black Power beard. But it wasn’t the same. The Bush never recovered from Elsie. Typhoon blew the heart out the place. None of the cats who made the scene so cool ever came back after that night. Every last one of them was shipped out on the first plane that took off after Elsie passed. No more brothers strutting around in leather jackets, black berets, and purple granny glasses giving the Black Power salute.

“I got jumpy. Was sure they were coming after me. That they’d find me holed up in Suki’s little apartment. Every time someone knock on the door, I’d slip out the window, hide in the alley until they left. But the MPs never came. No one came. Local police didn’t even care. Once I realized no one was coming, I started wandering around outside. Sukie’d freak every time I opened the door. But I had to get out. I’d go up and down Gate Street. B.C. Street. If Sukie’d made enough the night before, I’d get me a hot dog, a few beers. Those five or six blocks were my prison yard. Went on like that for months.

“Eventually, I started going all the way up Gate Street, right to the edge of the base. Circled around all the way to the runway where Gene was unloading them rainbow barrels. Thought I was a ghost when he first saw me, then he had to know all about how I beat the air force almighty. Played it off for him. Acted like I was livin’ the life, boy. Gene.” He shakes his head at the memory. “Eugene Overholt.”

“I was so lonely, I gave that hillbilly peckerwood my address and he started coming around. Got to be the highlight of my week when Gene’d show up with a loaf of Wonder Bread and a jar of Skippy peanut butter from the commissary. By then, he had this crusty rash all over his hands, arms. Told him it was from those damn drums. He just said, ‘Not possible. PACAF has certified that it’s safe.’ Fool.

“Wasn’t like I wasn’t an even bigger fool, though. Bit by bit, it come to me why the air force wasn’t coming after me: They already had me locked up. I was in a sixty-mile-long, three-mile-wide prison. I mean, where the fuck I gonna go? All they got to do is wait until I go stir-crazy like every other grunt ever gone AWOL on this Alcatraz of an island and they knew I’d turn myself in. Or they could just pick me up if I try to leave. Instant I flash my passport at the airport, I be in handcuffs and on my way to Leavenworth. And not just for desertion either. Hell, no. Okis had started protesting by then about all the rapes, murders, robberies committed by GIs and how U.S. military courts never done jack shit to a one of them. How Tokyo never stood up for them either, just hung ’em out to dry as usual. So military was looking for a scapegoat. They ever got me, they wouldn’t just ship me out to ’Nam; they’d pin every murder, every rape, every cab fare ever got walked, and every pack of gum ever got stole on me and I’d be doin’ some hard,
hard
time.

“Minute I realize I was never getting out, that’s when I started losing it. The walls closed in on me. Koza, I had to get out of that shithole. I
figure if I was going to be serving a life sentence on the Rock, at least I could do it in a decent city like Naha, where there’s something beside strip clubs, tattoo parlors, and T-shirt shops.

“I didn’t say nothing. Sukie, though, she was about half psychic, always getting messages from her ancestors. She knew we were played out. That I was leaving and wouldn’t be taking her with me. She went crazy in her own quiet, moody way. Is it possible to rape a man? I woulda said no until then. That woman would not leave me alone. She was always pawin’ at me, grabbing at my dick.”

I stand. “Yeah, okay, that’s enough. My grandmother was the best grown-up I ever knew and you were lucky that she gave you the time of day.” As I start to leave, he stops me.”

“I’m sorry. I haven’t been around decent people in forty years. I can’t even talk right anymore. You’re right; I didn’t deserve your grandmother. Stay.”

I keep walking to the door.

“Hey!”

I stop.

“I’m not gonna be around a whole lot longer, and I need someone to know this story before I’m gone.”

I don’t move.

“I won’t talk smack about your grandma anymore, but I am gonna tell the story true. You want that, don’t you?”

I nod, sit back down.

“No surprise she turned up pregnant. I ask her what she want
me
to do about it. Sukie’s a professional. She knew how to get it taken care of. I’m not saying that’s the way I
shoulda
been, just that that’s the way I was. But from then on,
she
was the one wouldn’t let
me
anywhere near her. Sulled up like a possum. Prayed and lit incense. Only time she smiled was when Gene came by. She found some funky ointment for his rash. Rubbed it on him with her pretty little hands. Asked in this whispery baby voice if that made him feel better. Gene’d just nod his head like he was hypnotized. Being pregnant changed Sukie. What she wanted didn’t matter anymore to her. Only my baby mattered. She needed someone to protect her, protect the baby, and I guess Gene seemed like the answer to all those prayers she was saying and all that incense she was burning.

“Pretty soon, Gene stopped even pretending he was coming to see
me. Then he stopped coming to the apartment at all. Sukie’d leave, go meet him somewhere, come back smelling like that funky Jade East shit he wore. Few times I did see him, Gene looked at me like a dog got caught eating the Thanksgiving turkey. All ashamed, feeling bad for cheating with my woman. Only thing I felt was relieved. Didn’t even tell her good-bye when I left. I’m sorry I did your grandma that way after she saved me, but once I had me a job lined up in Naha, place to stay, I was gone. Solid gone.”

I guess a billion dominoes have to fall in exactly the right order for any one person to appear on earth, but the epic randomness of my being here because a typhoon veered off course and gave an Okinawan bar girl the opening to make her move on a guy she was crushed out on momentarily overwhelms me.

Vaughn’s gaze flickers over to the monitor. What he sees there causes him to sit up straight, bristling with attention. The girl he’s watching slithers over her customer like an eel with good rhythm, twining and rubbing until the marine arches his back, his glistening chest rising off the air mattress. He reaches out for the girl on top of him, and Vaughn zooms in. He watches with a steely gaze as the soldier grasps the girl’s hips, tries to force her onto himself. Vaughn is on the verge of jumping up when the girl shakes off the marine’s grasp and wriggles about on his crotch until the soldier shudders, his eyes fluttering and mouth gaping open as he sinks back down.

Vaughn, too, sags back down, the scene on the monitor forgotten. “So I assume she got Gene to marry her, take her with him when he left?”

I nod that this is the case. As Vaughn goes to a shelf and searches through it, I think about how I’d always been told that my grandfather’s family had rejected us because they were racist and hated my “Oriental” grandmother. But I recall a family photo when my grandmother was pregnant, standing in front of Gene’s husky Missouri farming family. They were all smiling. A big woman in a housedress stood between Gene and my grandmother, her freckled arms draped protectively over both of them. No such happy family pictures exist after my dark-skinned mother was born.

Vaughn pulls out an old leather-bound Bible, opens the tissuey pages to one showing a family tree. “There it is. Goes all the way back to slave times. Got a German in there. Seminole. Cuban. Irish. Little bit of everything. All ended up getting called black.”

I ask him for some paper and a pen and begin copying. Vaughn goes from monitoring the girls with the marines to watching me and nodding with approval. “It’s good to know who your people are. Important.”

I copy the names. The oldest ones, from the early eighteen hundreds, sound either English or Old Testament. Nancy. Abraham. Bessie. Isaac. I write them down, but those aren’t the names I’m really interested in. I doubt they’ll help the
yuta;
I need Okinawan names. When I’ve gotten down enough of this stranger’s family tree to be polite I ask, “What about my grandmother’s family?”

“Sukie’s people?” He blows out from between clenched teeth. “Okinawans and family, that’s a whole other deal. Hard for an American to understand. We go around saying, ‘Family’s the most important thing.’ Not even close. Minute family gets between an American and what’s really important to him—money, power, pussy, being left alone—he’ll cut ’em loose so fast. Not Okinawans. Ain’t no cuttin’ loose for an Oki. Family’s yours in this life and all the ones to come. Worse than the damn Mormons.

“Sukie thought she was lucky that way. Bragged all the time about what an important family she come from.”

“The Ueharas.”

“Right. She even took me once to see the tomb. Bigger than her apartment, swear to God.”

“Do you remember her father’s name?”

“What was that sonabitch’s first name? Haru? Hideo? Hiroshi, that’s it. Hiroshi Uehara.”

I write the name down, the first on my list for the
yuta.
“And her mother?” I ask, but Delmar Vaughn isn’t finished yet with my grandmother’s father.

“Old Hiroshi. Owned most of the land where the big marine air station is now. Of course, all the property titles were burned and bombed to dust during the war. U.S. military only too happy not to have any property titles to deal with when Japan gave them pretty much anything they wanted long as it was way off here on Okinawa and not on the mainland. Without the land, though, Uehara had nothing. That’s why he adopted Sukie.”

I stop writing. “Adopted?”

“Yeah, thought you knew that. Sukie was an orphan. Ueharas adopted her.”

I put the pen down. I need the names of blood relations. “No, I didn’t know that.”

“Happened a lot back then. There were so many orphans after the war, they were handing them out at those detention camps like puppies at the pound. Sukie was too young to remember her real family, her mother. All she knew was that she was what they called a ‘surplus person.’ Thought she was lucky that the Ueharas took her in, even if it meant she worked like a dog all day and slept on a mat in the kitchen at night. The whole deal was tied to them allowing her to be buried in their tomb. That was supposed to be the big payoff for her, that she wouldn’t spend eternity all alone. Always knew that her place was to serve that family however she could, ’cause if she ever let them down, all the Uehara ancestors would make her life hell not only in this world but in the next one too.

“The reason girls were adopted was to be maids or field hands. Then, if they were pretty enough and the family needed money because Dad gambled or whored around, they’d be sold to a house. All the shame would be loaded onto the girls, so the family would be cleansed when she was sold off as a prostitute.