Coin Locker Babies (42 page)

“We were wondering if you could spare some fuel,” he said. “We’ll pay for it, or we’ve got some rice and vitamins we could trade.” The old man told them there was another jetty on the opposite side of the island, and they could take as much as they liked from a fuel tank there.

“And it’s free of charge,” he added. “Don’t even need to thank me. Where you kids headed, anyway?”

“Garagi,” said Nakakura. The man nodded, stealing a glance at the pistol butt sticking out of Nakakura’s pants, then went over to a glass-topped rattan table and selected a volume from a stack of photo albums. He brought the album to Anemone, pointing out a picture of himself in the pilot seat of a small jet.

“I used to fly all the charters for candidates campaigning for the Malaysian National Assembly,” he said proudly.

“That’s great,” said Anemone, getting up. “Listen, I’m sorry, but we’re in a bit of a hurry. The coffee was fantastic. I love it rich and dark like that. Thanks a lot.” The old man looked a little disappointed, but he shut his album and offered to see them back to the boat.

With the goat trotting along beside them as they walked between rows of trees loaded with ripe and rotting mangoes, the man pointed at Nakakura’s gun.

“Who you planning to shoot with that?” he asked.

“Bad guys,” said Nakakura, aiming his index finger and firing at the sun. The old man laughed.

“You all are the first visitors I’ve had since I started living here alone,” he said. “You’re welcome to stop in on your way back from Garagi,” he added, patting the goat.

“You know what I’ve been wondering,” said Hayashi, speaking up at last, “is how you manage when you get sick.”

“Well, there was one time when I got bit by a moray eel and the wound got infected. My leg swoll up like a balloon and I was fresh out of penicillin, so I figured there was nothing to do but amputate—it was that bad. Trouble was, I couldn’t think how to go about it, but finally I came up with the idea of a guillotine. I had the blade: a big steel thing I use for cutting peat; it just had to be given a good sharp edge. I got a frame assembled, and I rigged it so I could pull the blade up and drop it. I even had enough wood left over to make a pair of crutches and a little coffin for the leg. The toughest part was carving out the track to keep the blade on line; if it was too narrow, I was afraid it wouldn’t drop smooth enough, and if it was too wide, it’d just wobble around and not cut clean. But I got it fixed, and decided to do it on a Sunday. Then it rained, so I put it off a day and checked all my preparations again: bandages, drugs to stop the bleeding, disinfectants, everything. When the day finally came, I tied my thigh right under the blade; it was so black and puffy by then—like a tree trunk almost—and I had so little feeling left in it that I guess I wouldn’t have been too sorry to see it go. It was my right leg, and about the most painful thing was bending the left one out of the way…”

“But you’ve still got your right leg,” Nakakura interrupted.

“Sure do,” said the old man. “The thing was a washout; the blade stopped at the bone. I thought I’d sharpened it good, but
it didn’t cut through. You’d be surprised how tough bones are—hard as anything.”

“It must of hurt terribly,” Anemone put in.

“Naw, not so bad. And the good part was that all the pus came spurting out all over the place; except I nearly got it in my eyes and I was scared it’d blind me… I guess for me it wouldn’t have been so bad being lame, but I’d be in pretty deep trouble if I wound up blind.”

“Why’s that?” Anemone asked.

“Well, you see, young lady, I’m a pilot, and while you can probably manage to fly a plane with one leg, there’s no way in creation you can fly when you’re blind.”

A snake with yellow and black stripes cut across the road in front of them. The old pilot rolled up his shorts and showed them the scar. He then asked Nakakura if he could have a go with his gun and, aiming at nothing in particular, fired off into the trees. A flock of birds rose as one body into the air.

“You come back and see me now,” he said again when they were back on board and preparing to leave. Kiku looked up at him as he stood there on the wharf.

“Do those helicopters still fly?” he asked. The old man nodded.

“Might take an hour or so to get them into shape, but with a little work they’ll take you anywhere you want to go.” The shadow of the birds still circling overhead passed across the weed-choked channel. The goat flicked its tail at a horsefly and bleated as they pulled away.

Garagi Island, which they were finally approaching, was shaped rather like a woman’s shoe.

A squall blew up as they were busy sorting out the diving gear, and soon afterward the engine began making an odd sort of
noise. Hayashi, who was at the helm at the time, shut it down, while Kiku and Nakakura went below to see what was wrong. The engine room smelled of burning oil, and they checked the fuel injection pump, the exhaust system, oil pressure, and so on; but in the end they discovered that the problem was some seaweed clogging the intake for the cooling system. The filter screen was torn, and some of the green muck from Miruri must have found its way inside. They would have to clean the whole tube by running seawater through it under pressure.

The engine room was muggy and cramped, and both of them, already badly sunburned, had begun to drip with sweat. As they were removing the broken filter, Nakakura asked Kiku a question that had been on his mind for some time.

“So, supposing we do come up with this stuff you’re looking for, what then? You really planning to dose Tokyo with it?” Kiku was poking a wire brush about inside the intake valve. “You should think about saving some for Chiba,” Nakakura added, slipping a small bolt into his shirt pocket before starting to install the new filter. “I’d love to do Chiba.”

“That because your mom’s there?” Kiku asked with a chuckle. Nakakura nodded. Kiku’s bare chest was covered with oil and bits of seaweed that slipped down his skin on streams of sweat. The brush came out dripping with a mass of bright green sludge. “Why did Hayashi come along with us?” he went on as he sluiced it away through the bilge hole. “Doesn’t he have any family or anything?” The thin, oily fronds seemed to have tiny hairs all over them.

“He just didn’t have anywhere else to go,” said Nakakura. “And anyway, they’re bound to catch us sooner or later, so the bottom of the sea’s about as good as anywhere else.” Kiku reached out to remove a strand clinging to Nakakura’s forehead.

“They’re not going to catch me,” he said, replacing the cover on the intake tube.

“But what happens if there’s no DATURA?” Nakakura asked as Kiku wiped some grime off the wings of the supercharger.

“Then it’s on to the Marianas or the Marshalls to look some more.” He gave the big engine of the Hatteras a pat. Just then they heard the sound of a plane overhead and went back up on deck. It was the Self-Defense Force patrol again telling them not to land at Garagi. Kiku radioed back that they were doing some repairs, but just as soon as they were through they would head back for Ogasawara. The plane circled a while longer, then veered off, but Kiku waited until it was completely out of sight before starting the engine. Anemone napped in the cabin while Nakakura
double-checked
the pressure in the scuba tanks. Hayashi read charts. As the sun dipped toward the horizon, Garagi Island loomed directly ahead.

If Garagi were a high-heeled shoe, Uwane reef would be tucked in somewhere between the heel and the arch. Just after dark, the boat pulled into the cove at Uwane, engine running quietly, lights out. The gentle waves in the cove scattered the moonlight lingering on the surface as the boat dropped anchor a few meters short of the reef.

Kiku and Nakakura went down first, circling the reef to look for the fissures opened by the underwater earthquake. Several fish wandered through the narrow beam of a flashlight as it played over the rocks. Nakakura, who had told Kiku to stick close behind him, crawled along the crags hand over hand, feeling out the currents, which were swift in certain places and at certain depths; once a diver was caught in one, there was no telling where he might end up. The reef stuck straight up from the seabed, as if a tall building had been sunk leaving only the penthouse exposed. At the deepest spot—the base of the reef on the seaward side—the depth gauge read thirty-eight meters. Kiku and Nakamura were swimming at a depth of about twenty meters, stopping every now and then to shine their lights on the rocks nearest them. In the dark, any deep shadow seemed to be a crack.

Just when their air was beginning to get low, Nakakura pointed in front of them where a tiger shark three meters
long was drifting up into the light. Kiku raised his spear gun, but Nakakura stopped him, turning off his flashlight as the shark slowly circled them. Now only a smooth gray shadow, the fish abruptly stopped circling and moved toward them. Kiku leveled the spear gun again, firing straight at its jaws but missing badly. Nakakura grabbed Kiku’s light and, pairing it with his own, flashed both into the shark’s eyes, turning it aside less than two meters away. While it studied them, he went on flickering the lights in its eyes until at last it gave up and moved off.

Not long after this, a glint on the face of the rock alerted Kiku to the location of the cave’s entrance. The beam of the flashlight had glanced off some aluminum bars and thick wire mesh that sealed the opening. The tank gauges by now read zero, so they decided to leave a marker buoy tied to one of the bars before returning to the boat.

Anemone had made some spaghetti on the hotplate in the cabin, and they ate while Nakakura ran through the diving procedures one more time. Anemone was going to stay in the boat; she’d wanted to go with them, but gave up on the idea after hearing about sharks. Nakakura went down first to unhook the gear they lowered on the anchor line: three underwater scooters, a battery to run two electric drills, twelve reserve tanks, six spear guns, and quantities of rope. By the time Hayashi and Kiku joined him, he was busy cutting through the wire mesh. The mesh, which formed a double seal with the grating of aluminum bars, was bound tightly to the rock and heavily rusted. The wire had resisted the claws of the cutter when he tackled it head-on, but he had managed to pry some of it loose with a knife in order to cut it from the side. Despite this, the work was going slowly, and they still had the metal piping
to deal with, which had been set in concrete. So Nakakura decided to go ahead and use the drill. He signaled Kiku to plug it in, and with a series of muffled blasts he set to work. The drill stirred up a cloud of fish, darting from every shadow in the rock, but it had much less effect on the concrete. Soon Nakakura had Hayashi take over, checking his air supply and letting Kiku know that even twelve tanks wouldn’t be enough if they wasted too much time on this.

Above them, Anemone’s eyes drifted back and forth from sea to sky. She could hear the faint sound of rock being hammered down below her feet, like the jackhammers she’d heard sometimes on construction sites but cushioned by the dark water. The only motion on board was a gentle rocking from the breeze. Suddenly, she saw something flashing on the surface. Whatever it was, it seemed to be dodging between the waves, and its numbers were increasing rapidly. Anemone instinctively closed one hand around the pistol Kiku had given her and the other around a spear gun. The bright streaks moved through the water at a good pace, flickering on and off as they were hidden by waves, until finally they were near enough for Anemone to see that they were dolphins, glowing from the phosporescent plankton that covered their backs.

“Dolphins!” she nearly shouted with relief. One after another, they skimmed the surface, turning the sea a pale blue as they headed for open water. Like a show at an amusement park, she thought to herself, half expecting to see a laughing Santa Claus on water skis bringing up the rear. She wished Kiku were there to see it too, these sleek things slipping out to sea, leaving behind faint, shimmering lines on the surface of her eyes. There had been something she’d wanted to show him while he was in prison; what was it? She searched her memory. Oh yes: the
curtains she’d made all by herself. Well, from now on they would be able to see everything together.

Below, the three divers had managed to break through, and Nakakura, holding the drill in one hand, was guiding his scooter inside with the other. Hayashi was trailing six of the spare tanks bundled together with an elastic tether, while Kiku towed the battery and the spear guns behind him. With only the dim headlights on the scooters to show them the way, they moved further in, noting that the passage widened as they went. Finding some large groupers and parrot fish lurking in the shadows, they realized there must be another entrance somewhere besides the one they had just come through. The floor was covered with a fine, soft silt, and they had to move carefully to avoid stirring it up and clouding the water. Besides the fish, they shared the passage with countless moray eels which bared their fangs and looked menacing when caught in the light. Weighed down as they were with equipment, it would have been difficult even to turn and run had one of the morays actually attacked. Hayashi seemed particularly afraid of them.

At one point, an eel as thick as a man’s arm reared its head from the shadows and lashed out at Nakakura’s leg, catching and shredding his fin instead. Hayashi gestured that he wasn’t going any further, and the other two had to spend a while demonstrating that the morays didn’t attack from the safety of their nests before he would agree to go on. The tunnel meandered on, bending to the right and left or up and down, with Nakakura leaving a small marker light at each corner; and Kiku was reminded of the abandoned mine shafts he and Hashi had once explored, remembering how scared Hashi had been of the bats that hung from the ceiling, particularly their red eyes and that uncanny squeak.

Without any warning, Nakakura turned and signaled for them to drop to the bottom of the tunnel, and almost instantly he switched off the motor of his scooter, threw the drill aside, and floated down to lie flat on his belly. As Kiku and Hayashi followed suit, they noticed that the gray surface of the rock ahead had begun to move toward them and realized that it was actually a huge school of parrot fish bearing down on their lights. Kiku sensed danger. It wasn’t them the fish were scared of; on the far side of that living wall was something far more frightening. Nakakura was signaling him to hand out the spear guns, and a moment later the three of them were aiming into the cloud of fish that had engulfed them. Here and there were fish with their guts ripped out, swimming as best they could through a shower of gray scales.

Up ahead a mottled shark appeared in the circle of a flashlight beam. It was on the small side, but the teeth lining its open mouth were sharp enough. Nakakura fired his spear gun, hitting the thing at the base of the neck, but as it began to writhe and thrash, three more appeared behind it. One of them immediately fastened onto the pale belly of the wounded shark, while the other two headed in their direction. Kiku fired next but missed, and the sharks kept coming, teeth bared. As he bent to draw the knife strapped to his ankle, the lower jaw of one shark brushed his back, snagging his hose; and with a flick of its tail it arched away, taking the hose with it and stirring up the muck on the floor of the tunnel. Momentarily blinded, Kiku could only guess that the swishing sound he heard was a spear from someone’s gun, but soon he could see a plume of green blood and a shark squirming on the bottom, its snout half buried in the silt. It wasn’t until he noticed bubbles gushing out above him, though, that he realized that his hose had been
cut, that no air was coming through his mouthpiece. He looked around for the spare tanks, but vision was badly restricted in the narrow passage. About the only thing he could see in the wildly spinning beams of the three flashlights was a mist of fine sand, with bits of fish guts and patches of green shark’s blood floating in it, and the bubbles belching from his tank. It was getting hard to breathe, but Kiku told himself to stay calm. He was sure that Hayashi had been carrying the extra tanks, so he would go and look for him. He should swim toward the other lights, he decided, his head beginning to pound.

At that instant a shark appeared right before his eyes. Apparently oblivious to the harpoon planted in its back, it made straight for him. At the last moment, though, he had the presence of mind to aim the jet of bubbles from his severed hose into the shark’s eyes, making it twist its neck up just far enough to allow him to stick his knife in deep. The effort, however, made him swallow a good deal of water; in fact, water seemed to pour into his nose as well, choking him and bringing him close to panic. Knowing he was done for if he couldn’t stop the flood, he steadied himself and tried to block his nose and mouth. By now the pain was so bad it felt as though his chest would burst. Got to find the tanks, he thought, but as the word “tanks” trailed off in his mind, he realized he no longer knew where he was or what he was doing. Why all this pain? The foul air in his lungs seemed to be expanding, threatening to rip his whole body open right down the middle. His vision darkened and his jaw went slack. Abandoning himself to the darkness and pain, he took his first full breath of water, a breath that brought relief. He could hear the water rushing in to fill his insides. So this is what it’s like to die, he thought to himself. Not bad at all; not so painful anyway… just numb. But a corner of him still held out, that
part where he could feel his heart still beating, beating wildly, furious that he should make his peace with death. He struggled for a moment, but it wasn’t any use. His chest was moving on its own now, sucking at the sea. He tried unsuccessfully to raise his hand, realizing at last that it was over. And then, just as he was settling back again, someone shoved a new regulator in his mouth and a rush of air poured into him. The instant he stopped swallowing water, though, the pain returned with a vengeance, as if every cell in his body were being stuck with its own needle. He couldn’t help it: he wanted to rip the regulator out, wanted to tear apart whoever was forcing this air down his throat. Suddenly, someone began pressing hard on his chest, clearing his lungs to allow the new, dry air to flow in. The new air too was like stinging needles, but Kiku could feel each tiny air sac gasping for it. He breathed out again, and slowly things began to take shape around him. Nakakura and Hayashi were peering into his mask. You OK? they signaled. Kiku nodded weakly.

There in that pool stained green with blood, he had learned two things: one was that all the pain stopped when you stopped fighting death; and the other was that as long as you could still hear your heart beating, you had to keep fighting back.

They waited for Kiku to recover, and then continued down the tunnel, moving cautiously around two remaining sharks that were feeding on the three they’d killed. Nakakura and Hayashi had finished one tank apiece and gone on to a second. They made steady progress for a while, with only the motors of the scooters humming in the water; then Nakakura stopped and pointed ahead. Half buried in the silt were two human bodies, with patches of flesh still clinging to the bones. Nearby was a rusty diver’s knife. A school of butterfly fish was using one of the
skulls as a nest. Beyond a waving field of lavender seaweed, they could see a broad, dark area, a black cavern too deep for any light to penetrate. Nakakura revved the throttle on his scooter and moved off toward the darkness.

Passing through the fringe of seaweed, they found themselves on a rocky shelf rising out of the water, and Nakakura immediately gave the signal they had agreed on: do not remove your regulator. The shelf was, in fact, already occupied—by hundreds of large lobsters whose shells were flame-red in the artificial light, their antennae waving wildly above them like massed conductors at a silent concert. In one corner was a cluster of blind morays, and a lion-fish that fluttered off like a swallowtail when startled by the light. A sea snake striped like a tiger slithered past, and a spiny fish with what appeared to be yellow threads dangling from its mouth puffed up so large when caught in the light that it seemed ready to explode.

The cavern was like the nave of a cathedral, with the ledge lined with lobsters as an altar, and ribbed columns rising above it. The curtain of pale purple seaweed was a canopy hanging over the blind eel priests who sat listening to confessions from a congregation of multicolored fish. And beyond, where a tall cross would have been, were three black fissures in the rock. Cautiously Nakakura approached and flashed a light deep into each of them, and after peering into the middle one, he turned to wave to Kiku and Hayashi. The middle crack was an entrance to another branch of the cave that sloped sharply down from the opening. Nakakura was pointing at the base of the slope where the light revealed an outcrop that was clearly different in color from its surroundings, with what looked like a flat surface, as if someone had sliced off the rock with an enormous blade. Nakakura checked the depth gauge; they were
currently at twenty-nine meters, so the suspicious gray block of stone would be at about forty meters, he estimated. He then did a quick calculation with the decompression computer to see if their air would last. How long would the work take them at a depth of forty meters? Six minutes, he guessed, holding up six fingers. Quickly they agreed that Nakakura and Kiku would go down the slope secured with a safety line which Hayashi would hold from above in case of an emergency. Clutching one of the drills and a battery, they lowered themselves over the edge.