The Journey Prize Stories 21 (4 page)

The boy wipes his nose with his wrist and says Dad I can't. His father breathes out. Softly prods around the hook. Give us, he says, the pliers.

Are you sure?

He nods. Takes the pliers. Holds his breath and snaps off – grunting – the other two barbs. Takes out his flask. Closes his eye. Pours liquor over his cheek and the nose of the pliers and his fingertips. Then he drinks the last of it. Tosses the flask toward the front of the boat. Applies his thumb to the curve of the hook. Breathes in. Then leans to the right and tries to sick over the side but it's half in the boat and the smell of it.

The boy clamps his teeth.

His father says Son, you'll have to do it.

My hands, says the boy. And he looks at their shaking. His father holds the left one then places it against the top of his head and leans hard against it and says Just pop it through.

Okay.

The boy pinches the base of the hook and – his father growls – pushes like he's threading a lace through an eyelet. The hook pops through. His father breathes out. Grabs the pliers and leans his head toward his shoulder. Feels with his fingers and lays the pliers along his face and crimps off the barb. It shoots away like a tiny silver wasp and then his father slides out the lure. Looks at it in his hand for a moment. Then tosses it in the water. Leans on his knees and breathes like a boxer who can't answer the bell.

The boy pushes the back of his wrist against each eye and blinks and looks at his father and then – it jitters – at his father's fishing rod.
Dad
, says the boy, and he points just as the rod starts rattling along the side of the boat.

Then the boy lunges. Grabs the rod's handle and gets to his knees and the rod bends nearly double. But the boy holds on as the reel spins like a tire on ice. His father reaches round him and holds the rod as well and says I've got it, son, I've got it! The boy lets go. Leans back with his father as he reels and pulls. Pulls and reels. Duck under, says his father. But the boy only watches as the big fish – like the lake spat it out – writhes in the air then splashes and thrashes then dives again as the boy's father says Blood and fucking sand!

Then the line goes slack and curly.

And everything is very quiet.

And the boy sits between the arms of his father staring at the spot where the monster fish was. And then his father's right hand lets go of the rod and when the boy turns around his father is looking at the blood on his fingertips. And then he touches his cheek again and looks at his fingers as though they had lied. Then he wipes the blood on the leg of his pants and says to the boy Go have a seat, now.

The boy moves up the boat and sits and watches his father reel in the slack line and look at the end of it. Wonder, he says, if it swallowed the lot.

The boy looks at the water and imagines the mangle of frog-and-hook in the muskie's mouth. Then he shrugs and says We should go, Dad.

His father's eyes – wide and glassy. But he puts down the rod and turns to the motor.

And on the way into shore he reaches for the pail and tosses the last frog over. An old green pickup passes the launch and the boy's father waves it down. It turns into the laneway of the yellow cottage and stops and the man with the beard gets
out. Meets them at the launch. The boy's father cuts the motor and the man says How did it go? Then he notices. The boy looks down and his father says Bit of a mishap. The man leans forward and grabs the bow's handle and pulls and the boy steps out and helps him. Then his father steps out too. A little wobbly. The man looks at his face. Fish jump up and bite you?

The boy's father laughs but not really and the boy says It was my fault.

The man says You wanna come in? We got ointment.

The boy's father says If there's a hospital nearby –

And the man says You know Glanisberg?

Heard of it, yes.

Go down number 7. Turn left on 30. Half hour tops.

That's what we'll do, then.

I'll watch your boat. You go on.

Very kind of you.

No bother.

The boy's father drives with one hand and holds Kleenex to his face with the other. The boy's mother keeps a box in the glove compartment. They use most of it and in Glanisberg see a church letting out. His father pulls over. The boy runs across the street and asks a lady in an old-fashioned hat for directions. Follows his father into Admissions then down to Emerg but they won't let him through so he sits in the waiting room beside the ambulance drivers' office. Hears the static and garble of the radio. Football on the television. He glances at the tired- and sick- and sad-looking people and shuffles through old magazines about hot rods and hunting and jet airplanes. Looks up and sees his father in the doorway. Gauze
and tape on his face. The boy follows him to the car and the drive back to the boat feels like ages.

He put it back on the trailer, Dad.

Bloody good of him.

The boy's father gets out and walks toward the laneway but here come the dogs. He stops. Waves. Gives a thumbs-up. The boy looks at the cottage and sees the man in the living room window waving back.

They quickly pack up and while his father hitches the trailer the boy gets in the car. In the rearview he watches his father turn for a moment and look toward the islands. Then – as they pull away – his father says Some fish that.

And the boy says Massive.

Then they don't talk until Highway 28.

Dad.

Yes.

Will it mend? Son.

Yes.

Shush now.

The boy looks out the window and presses his trembly lips together.

In his room he can hear their voices but not their words. Outside the light is fading and the moon is already there like a blind eyeball. He sits on his hands at the edge of the bed. Can smell the mince and 'nips. After a while his mother knocks and comes in and sits on the bed beside him.

Sure you're not hungry?

The boy looks at the floor.

We're not cross with you.

The boy looks at her. Then down again.

It was, says his mother, an accident.

What if it was his eye.

It would still be an accident.

He'd be blind. Well. Half.

It's not funny.

Suit yourself. Supper's there if you want it.

The boy lies down. Curls toward the wall. His stomach growls and he gives it a whack. Footfalls again – his father's this time. But they go past the boy's room. Down to the basement. The boy lies there a little longer and then gets up and walks softly to the kitchen. The dishes not done. His place still set and a glass of milk. He peeks into the living room. His mother on the chesterfield. One finger tap-tap-tapping the arm as she looks at the turned-off television like an old movie – the kind that makes her sad – with singing and dancing and natty dresses to die for.

A
fter Sayuri disappeared, her picture was everywhere. She stared at us from the windows of Murakami Bakery and Mrs. Nakamura's noodle shop, from the sliding glass door of Yoshimoto Drugs, and of course from the giant poster in front of the police station. It was impossible to go anywhere without seeing her. Iwata Supermarket and Mori Grocers pinned her picture next to their checkout counters, and smaller versions of the poster were wrapped around all the bus stop poles in town.
Do you know this girl?
the poster asked.
Have you seen Sayuri?
It was always the same photograph, the one taken at the beginning of that term. Sayuri was wearing our high-school uniform, a dark navy tunic over a white blouse. As the years passed, the whiteness of the blouse turned grey and blotchy and the tunic faded to a metallic green. But despite the graininess of the photograph and the weathering of the elements, Sayuri's eyes stayed the same: shiny as new marbles, full of hope and mischief.

Have you seen me
, I heard Sayuri say every time I looked into her eyes.
Do you know me?

Sayuri disappeared thirty years ago from the small town in Shimane where I grew up and where she and I went to high school together. The town is in decline now but it used to be a big fishing port, and boats went far out into the Sea of Japan almost halfway to Korea and China in search of their catch. Over time, though, many young people moved away seeking white-collar jobs in big cities, and I was no exception. I came to Tokyo and started a new life, eventually marrying the man who was my supervisor at Tanaka Electric and becoming a full-time housewife and mother. I rarely went back home, and after my parents passed away, the severing of my ties to the town was complete. There was nothing at all to draw me back to that place or to that period of my life. And then I saw her. Sayuri's picture appeared on the evening news along with a dozen other young Japanese who had been missing since the late 1970s. Apparently they had been kidnapped and taken to North Korea.

Lost and then found. I could scarcely believe my eyes.

We were eating dinner in front of the television when I felt my throat stiffen. “I knew her,” I whispered hoarsely ten minutes into what promised to be lengthy coverage of the startling discoveries.

“Who?” my husband, Masayuki, asked.

“One of the abductees they're talking about. One of the girls who was taken to North Korea. Sayuri Yamazaki. We went to high school together.”

“You're kidding.” Sayuri's photograph appeared on the screen again. “You never told me anything so dramatic happened at your school.”

“At the time we didn't know things like that went on. It was like she vanished into the air.”

“Well, the whole thing is unbelievable.” Masayuki stabbed his chopsticks in the air. “If she was kidnapped while walking on the beach, like they say, you'd think someone would have noticed something. A young girl being dragged away like that.”

“We didn't know. Everyone thought she ran away.”

“I wonder why they picked her?”

“I don't know.” I shivered.

“Poor girl was in the wrong place at the wrong time, I guess.” Masayuki answered his own question. “Good thing you weren't walking on the beach then. That could have been you.”

My husband turned toward our son and suddenly made a silly swooping movement with his arms like a large crow flapping its wings. “Snatched by the North Koreans. What do you think of that, Tatsuo? That could have been your mother.”

My teenage son's head was bent over his food and his long bangs covered half his face. “So when
was
all that?” he mumbled without looking up.

“Many years before you were born,” I said. “All that time we never knew what had happened to her.”

For a long time after Sayuri vanished, I would go after school to my secret spot, a hidden cove almost a kilometre up the coast from the main harbour. Sometimes I would stay for over an hour just staring out at the sea. At the thick waves slicing up and down, at the thin grey line where water met sky at a distant horizon. What drew me to do this was an utter mystery. Back then, none of us in our wildest dreams could have imagined that Sayuri had been taken across the Sea of Japan, spirited away like in a spy novel. To think about it now gave me a queasy feeling: what if I had been looking in the precise direction where she stood on a distant shore? What if she too had been staring back across the same expanse of sea? Would she, I wanted to know, have been looking for me?