The Sun Gods (12 page)

13

AS SOON AS BILL
pushed open the glass door of Maneki, the two waitresses—the thinner, younger Reiko on the left and the buxom Kumiko on the right—dropped what they were doing and rushed toward him, reaching him at exactly the same moment.

“You look so handsome tonight,” Reiko said, “in a suit and tie.”

“Prince Charming!” Kumiko said. “
Ohji-sama
!”

Kumiko was the boss's wife. She muttered something in Japanese to Reiko, who sullenly returned to her section of the restaurant, glancing at Bill once or twice.

“Why are you so dressed up tonight, Ohji-sama?” Kumiko asked.

“I was on a date,” Bill said. “It didn't end very well. I probably won't be seeing her again for a while—if ever.”

There were few diners in the restaurant this late, so when she brought Bill his food she joined him in the booth, settling her plump, little body in the seat opposite his. “Are you sad?” she asked.

“Yes,” said Bill, “we were engaged.”

“No more?”

“Probably not.”

“I'm sorry for you,” she said. Her round, little eyes were damp with tears. In the next moment, he was surprised to hear himself telling this waitress he hardly knew, “I'm having problems at home, too.”

“Yes?”

“I had a big blowup with my father. He's so upset with me, I doubt he'll keep supporting me. I think I'm going to need a job.”

“Wait a minute,” she said, and hurried off to the kitchen.

The noise level in Maneki's kitchen was always high, but the male voice was louder now and growing clearly agitated.

When Kumiko came back, her small face wore an unaccustomed flush, but also a triumphant smile.

“You work here,” she announced, white teeth flashing.

“What do you mean?”

“Wash dishes.”

The idea appealed to him, but it seemed unlikely that such a small restaurant could afford additional hands. “Are you sure it's okay with your husband? He didn't sound very happy.”

“That's all right. You work hard. We only pay minimum wage. Dollar an hour.”

He liked the idea of spending more time here—and getting paid for it. Having his own independent income would enable him to minimize his contacts with his father. “Thank you,” he said. “I'd love to work here.”

Maneki was deserted when he walked in at four o'clock the next day. Kumiko came running out of the kitchen. She pulled him to the back of the restaurant and through the hanging bead curtain into the roofed enclosure. Two men in white chef outfits were busy cutting some brown, spongy stuff. Kumiko introduced him to the one with thinning hair, whom she referred to as “my husband, Kamekichi Nagaoka.” She immediately cautioned him to call her husband “Boss-san,” which she pronounced “Bosu-san.” The “Bosu” looked at Bill's extended hand for a moment before giving it a feeble shake, but the grim nod and deep grunt he offered left no doubt that he was firmly in charge. He was not much taller than Kumiko, but he was built like a wrestler. When he turned back to his cutting board, his white shirt strained across his powerful shoulders.

The other fellow, who was probably two or three years older than Bill, grabbed his hand and shook it firmly. In lightly accented English, he said, “Hi, Bill, I'm Teruo, but everybody calls me Terry. I'm glad you're coming to work here. I hate washing dishes.” The boss grunted something in Japanese. Terry stopped smiling and went back to cutting the spongy stuff.

Kumiko gave Bill a white jacket, pants and apron. She said they had ordered large sizes for him from the linen service. Then she showed him the big, gray stone sink in the back corner of the kitchen where he was to wash dishes. There were various stiff, brown-bristled brushes, rags, towels, bottles of detergents, and a large rack where the dishes would drain before he dried them. He was also expected to keep the floors clean with the mop and brooms kept in a galvanized cabinet nearby and he would be in charge of cleaning the small restroom. One thing he would never do, she said, was wash the pots and pans. The boss took care of those himself. No one was allowed to touch them. They had built up a slick, black carbon coating over the years which cooked the food to perfection, and only the boss knew how to clean them.

Kumiko was showing him how to handle the covered soup bowls, the long, narrow dishes for seaweed, and the little, round ones for soy sauce dips, when Reiko walked in, squealing with delight at Bill in his white kitchen togs. Kumiko glanced up at her and went on talking to him as though Reiko did not exist. The younger woman stomped off to the back of the restaurant.

Bill could hardly keep his eyes open when he drove back to his Cascade-Pacific dormitory at one o'clock in the morning. His legs and hips were aching, his hands were sore, and he could smell the fumes of soy sauce and boiled fish flakes clinging to his body. He slept until almost eleven the next morning. Lying in bed, he wondered how he could possibly drag himself to classes at 8:30 on weekdays. But he smiled to think that he had learned a few Japanese words.
Hayaku
meant “hurry,” and
dame
meant “stop it” or “bad.” He had the impression that something the boss kept grumbling to Terry,
kusottare
, meant “stupid,” but Kumiko said only, “I think you don't want to know what it means, I think,” and Reiko was laughing too hard to explain it.

As the job went on, Bill found himself able to understand—and even to speak—a surprising amount of Japanese. The more he learned, the more the others encouraged their Ohji-sama, and they even worked with him on learning to read the simple phonetic scripts.

One Saturday night, the big dinner rush was over and the late-night crowd had not yet begun to come in when Reiko invited him to sit in one of the empty booths for a Japanese lesson. She sat next to him rather than on the other side of the table, and she edged closer to him as they traded phrases. He had seen enough now of Japanese feminine behavior to ignore the silly slapping and patting that constituted the greater part of their coquetry, but he was not prepared for the placement of a hand high up on his thigh.

Almost the moment it happened, Kumiko burst out of the kitchen, aiming a machine-gun spray of syllables at Reiko. He recognized the word
guzu-guzu
—“wasting time,” but the rest went by too quickly for him to make any sense of it. The intensity of Kumiko's fury was obvious enough without a knowledge of Japanese, though. Reiko jumped to her feet, bringing her broad, flat mask to within inches of Kumiko's little face and matching Kumiko's husky snarling with her own high-pitched squeals. Heads popped up from the two booths where customers were sitting, but the show ended quickly. Reiko tore off her apron and flung it at Kumiko's feet. Then she stalked to the back of the restaurant and returned with her purse. Casting one last, pleading glance at Bill, she rushed to the door and flung it open with a bang, disappearing into the night.

By this time, the boss had come out from the kitchen holding a large, black ladle. “
Dohshitanda
!” he demanded of Kumiko: “What the hell's going on here?” She was too agitated to speak, but stood there, holding onto the edge of the table, eyes moist with angry tears.

Bill tried to explain in Japanese what had happened.

“
Kenka desu
,” he said, at which the normally poker-faced boss bared his enormous teeth and threw his head back in reverberating laughter. Even Kumiko was unable to maintain her high level of excitement and began to titter, covering her white teeth with a tiny hand.

Bill looked at them in bewilderment, which prompted another round of laughter. “Too polite,” Kumiko said finally when she stopped laughing. From what he could understand of the mixed English and Japanese explanation he received from the couple, he had stepped forward at the culmination of the wild battle to announce in formal Japanese, “It is a quarrel.”

Kumiko and the Bosu-san then launched into a serious discussion of whether or not they should bring Reiko back, to which Kumiko was adamantly opposed. When the after-theater-after-gambling crowd began to pour in looking for sushi and
ochazuke
, though, they would be in trouble, he cautioned her. She would find a way to handle it, she assured him.

Even before all the booths had become filled with hungry customers, Bill peeked out from the order window to see that Kumiko's confidence had begun to crumble. Her forehead was beaded with sweat.

“
Oi!”
called the boss, motioning toward Bill. “You go.”

“What?!” he exclaimed, incredulous that he, too, should suddenly be fired in the midst of the chaos.

“You go,” repeated the boss, this time gesturing with his hands as if holding a pad and pencil.

Incredible—the boss wanted him to wait on tables. He pictured Kumiko and Reiko zipping back and forth in their little ballet between the booths and the order window, and he saw himself as a big blond ox stumbling across the stage, smashing dishes and trampling people's feet.

The boss grunted at him again, and Bill wiped his hands and grabbed an order pad from the pile in the corner. Since Kumiko had been trying to cope with the entire L-shaped restaurant, the clear division between her section and Reiko's had been lost. He simply searched for the booth with the most impatient-looking people, approaching four Japanese men who were craning their necks toward the kitchen and grumbling loudly.

“
Onna wa doko da
!” demanded the fat one in the left-hand corner. Bill hadn't been expecting this. Why hadn't he looked for a booth containing white faces? He turned in search of Kumiko, hoping to trade tables, when he realized with a thrill that he understood the man's question: “Where's the woman?”

All four men had open collars and their hair was slicked back. They slouched in the booth, looking at him with sullen expressions that dissolved into smiles when he replied, “
Ima wa imasen
”—“She is not here now.”

It was one thing to parrot phrases from Kumiko or the boss, but the experience of having successfully communicated with a hostile stranger made his heart dance. He wished he could follow it up with something equally impressive, but the best he could do was wave the order pad in their faces and say, “
Dohzo
,” which meant “Please.”

“
Ore wa katsudon
,” said the fat one. He wanted katsudon—a bowl of rice topped with a pork cutlet and eggs. Bill knew the menu inside out by now, and even if he couldn't catch all the words used to order the dishes, he could tell what people wanted. Numbers were a problem, though, which he realized when the other men were specifying how many items they wanted. To double-check, he read back the order to them, holding up the appropriate number of fingers. Sent off with smiles and nods, he had started back to the order window when one of the men called to him, “
Oi! O-cha!
” Of course—he had forgotten the tea!

He managed to serve the meal without a hitch after that, and when the four men left an hour later, he experienced the warm glow of a successful debut. In addition, they had left him a dollar tip. He walked into the kitchen with the four quarters spread out on his palm. “
Doh shimashoh
?” he asked. “What should I do with this?”

Terry, who had been forced to wash dishes again, looked up from the sink and grunted, but the boss said, “You keep!” flashing his big teeth and gesturing as if putting something in his pocket.

Bill's other customers that night were not as generous as the four men, but he came back to the dorm satisfied with an extra $2.80 in his pocket.