The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (6 page)

Noboru munched his food in nervous haste, a habit his mother often scolded him for, squinting upward into the glare as he ate as if to catch the sun in his open mouth. He was recalling the design of the perfect painting he had seen the night before. It had been almost a manifestation of the absolutely blue sky of night. The chief maintained that there was nothing new to be found anywhere in the world, but Noboru still believed in the adventure lurking in some tropical backland. And he believed in the many-colored market at the hub of clamor and confusion in some distant seaport, in the bananas and parrots sold from the glistening arms of black natives.

“You’re daydreaming while you eat, aren’t you? That’s a child’s habit.” Noboru didn’t answer; he wasn’t equal to the scorn in the chief’s voice. Besides, he reasoned, getting mad would only look silly because they were practicing “absolute dispassion.”

Noboru had been trained in such a way that practically nothing sexual, not even that scene the night before, could surprise him. The chief had taken great pains to insure that none of the gang would be abashed by such a sight. Somehow he had managed to obtain photographs picturing intercourse in every conceivable position and a remarkable selection of pre-coital techniques, and explained them all in detail, warmly instructing the boys about the insignificance, the unworthiness of such activity.

Ordinarily a boy with merely a physical edge on his classmates presides at lessons such as these, but the chief’s case was altogether different: he appealed directly to the intellect. To begin with, he maintained that their genitals were for copulating with stars in the Milky Way. Their pubic hair, indigo roots buried deep beneath white skin and a few strands already strong and thickening, would grow out in order to tickle coy stardust when the rape occurred. . . . This kind of hallowed raving enchanted them and they disdained their classmates, foolish, dirty, pitiful boys brimming with curiosity about sex.

“When we finish eating we’ll go over to my place,” the chief said. “Everything’s all ready for you know what.”

“Got a cat?”

“Not yet, but it won’t take long to find one. Nothing will take long.”

Since the chief’s house was near Noboru’s, they had to take a train again to get there: the boys liked this sort of unnecessary, troublesome excursion.

The chief’s parents were never home; his house was always hushed. A solitary boy, he had read at thirteen every book in the house and was always bored. He claimed he could tell what any book was about just by looking at the cover.

There were indications that this hollow house had nourished the chief’s ideas about the overwhelming emptiness of the world. Noboru had never seen so many entrances and exits, so many prim chilly rooms. The house even made him afraid to go to the bathroom alone: foghorns in the harbor echoed emptily from room to empty room.

Sometimes, ushering the boys into his father’s study and sitting down in front of a handsome morocco-leather desk set, the chief would write out topics for discussion, moving his pen importantly between ink-well and copper-engraved stationery. Whenever he made a mistake, he would crumple the thick imported paper and toss it carelessly away. Once Noboru had asked: “Won’t your old man get mad if you do that?” The chief had rewarded him with silence and a derisive smile.

But they all loved a large shed in the garden in back where they could go without passing under the butler’s eye. Except for a few logs and some shelves full of tools and empty wine bottles and back issues of foreign magazines, the floor of the shed was bare, and when they sat down on the damp dark earth its coolness passed directly to their buttocks.

After hunting for an hour, they found a stray cat small enough to ride in the palm of Noboru’s hand, a mottled, mewing kitten with lackluster eyes.

By then they were sweating heavily, so they undressed and took turns splashing in a sink in one corner of the shed. While they bathed, the kitten was passed around. Noboru felt the kitten’s hot heart pumping against his wet naked chest. It was like having stolen into the shed with some of the dark, joy-flushed essence of bright summer sunlight.

“How are we going to do it?”

“There’s a log over there. We can smack it against that—it’ll be easy. Go ahead, number three.”

At last the test of Noboru’s hard, cold heart! Just a minute before, he had taken a cold bath, but he was sweating heavily again. He felt it blow up through his breast like the morning sea breeze: intent to kill. His chest felt like a clothes rack made of hollow metal poles and hung with white shirts drying in the sun. Soon the shirts would be flapping in the wind and then he would be killing, breaking the endless chain of society’s loathsome taboos.

Noboru seized the kitten by the neck and stood up. It dangled dumbly from his fingers. He checked himself for pity; like a lighted window seen from an express train, it flickered for an instant in the distance and disappeared. He was relieved.

The chief always insisted it would take acts such as this to fill the world’s great hollows. Though nothing else could do it, he said, murder would fill those gaping caves in much the same way that a crack along its face will fill a mirror. Then they would achieve real power over existence.

Resolved, Noboru swung the kitten high above his head and slammed it at the log. The warm soft thing hurtled through the air in marvelous flight. But the sensation of down between his fingers lingered.

“It’s not dead yet. Do it again,” the chief ordered.

Scattered through the gloom in the shed, the five naked boys stood rooted, their eyes glittering.

What Noboru lifted between two fingers now was no longer a kitten. A resplendent power was surging through him to the tips of his fingers and he had only to lift the dazzling arc seared into the air by this power and hurl it again and again at the log. He felt like a giant of a man. Just once, at the second impact, the kitten raised a short, gurgling cry. . . .

The kitten had bounced off the log for the final time. Its hind legs twitched, traced large lax circles in the dirt floor, and then subsided. The boys were overjoyed at the spattered blood on the log.

As if staring into a deep well, Noboru peered after the kitten as it plummeted down the small hole of death. He sensed in the way he lowered his face to the corpse his own gallant tenderness, tenderness so clinical it was almost kind. Dull red blood oozed from the kitten’s nose and mouth, the twisted tongue was clamped against the palate.

“C’mon up close where you can see. I’ll take it from here.” Unnoticed, the chief had put on a pair of rubber gloves that reached up to his elbows; now he bent over the corpse with a pair of gleaming scissors. Shining coolly through the gloom of the shed, the scissors were magnificent in their cold, intellectual dignity: Noboru couldn’t imagine a more appropriate weapon for the chief.

Seizing the kitten by the neck, the chief pierced the skin at the chest with the point of the blade and scissored a long smooth cut to the throat. Then he pushed the skin to the sides with both hands: the glossy layer of fat beneath was like a peeled spring onion. The skinned neck, draped gracefully on the floor, seemed to be wearing a cat mask. The cat was only an exterior, life had posed as a cat.

But beneath the surface was a smooth expressionless interior, a placid, glossy-white inner life in perfect consonance with Noboru and the others; and they could feel their own intricate, soot-black insides bearing down upon and shadowing it like ships moving upon the water. Now, at last, the boys and the cat, or, more accurately, what had been a cat, became perfectly at one.

Gradually the endoderm was bared; its transparent mother-of-pearl loveliness was not at all repellent. They could see through to the ribs now, and watch, beneath the great omentum, the warm, homey pulsing of the colon.

“What do you think? Doesn’t it look too naked? I’m not sure that’s such a good thing: like it was bad manners or something.” The chief peeled aside the skin on the trunk with his gloved hands.

“It sure is naked,” said number two.

Noboru tried comparing the corpse confronting the world so nakedly with the unsurpassably naked figures of his mother and the sailor. But compared to this, they weren’t naked enough. They were still swaddled in skin. Even that marvelous horn and the great wide world whose expanse it had limned couldn’t possibly have penetrated so deeply as this . . . the pumping of the bared heart placed the peeled kitten in direct and tingling contact with the kernel of the world.

Noboru wondered, pressing a crumpled handkerchief to his nose against the mounting stench and breathing hotly through his mouth: “What is beginning here now?”

The kitten bled very little. The chief tore through the surrounding membrane and exposed the large, red-black liver. Then he unwound the immaculate bowels and reeled them onto the floor. Steam rose and nestled against the rubber gloves. He cut the colon into slices and squeezed out for all the boys to see a broth the color of lemons. “This stuff cuts just like flannel.”

Noboru managed, while following his own dreamy thoughts, to pay scrupulous attention to the details. The kitten’s dead pupils were purple flecked with white; the gaping mouth was stuffed with congealed blood, the twisted tongue visible between the fangs. As the fat-yellowed scissors cut them, he heard the ribs creak. And he watched intently while the chief groped in the abdominal cavity, withdrew the small pericardium, and plucked from it the tiny oval heart. When he squeezed the heart between two fingers, the remaining blood gushed onto his rubber gloves, reddening them to the tips of the fingers.

Noboru had withstood the ordeal from beginning to end. Now his half-dazed brain envisioned the warmth of the scattered viscera and the pools of blood in the gutted belly finding wholeness and perfection in the rapture of the dead kitten’s large languid soul. The liver, limp beside the corpse, became a soft peninsula, the squashed heart a little sun, the reeled-out bowels a white atoll, and the blood in the belly the tepid waters of a tropical sea. Death had transfigured the kitten into a perfect, autonomous world.

I killed it all by myself
—a distant hand reached into Noboru’s dream and awarded him a snow-white certificate of merit—
I can do anything, no matter how awful
.

The chief peeled off the squeaky rubber gloves and laid one beautiful white hand on Noboru’s shoulder. “You did a good job. I think we can say this has finally made a real man of you—and isn’t all this blood a sight for sore eyes!”

M
EETING
Ryuji on the way back from the chief’s house just after they had buried the cat was pure bad luck. Noboru had scrubbed his hands, but what if there was blood somewhere else on his body or on his clothes? What if he reeked of dead kitten? What if his eyes betrayed him—like those of a criminal encountering an acquaintance just after the crime?

For one thing, there would be trouble if his mother learned that he had been near the park at this time of day: he was supposed to be in Kamakura with a different group of friends. Noboru had been caught off guard, he was even a little frightened, and he decided arbitrarily that Ryuji was entirely to blame.

The others scattered after hurried goodbyes and they were left alone on the hot road with their long afternoon shadows.

Noboru was mortified. He had been waiting for an opening to introduce Ryuji casually. If, under perfect circumstances, the introduction had succeeded, the chief might have admitted reluctantly that Ryuji was a hero and Noboru’s honor would have been redeemed.

But at this unhappy, unexpected meeting, the sailor had presented himself as a pitiful figure in a water-logged shirt and, as if that wasn’t enough, smiled like a fawning idiot. That smile was a disparagement, for it was meant to mollify a child; besides, it transformed Ryuji himself into a disgraceful caricature of the adult lover of youngsters. Overbright and artificial, an unnecessary, outrageous blunder of a smile!

On top of that, Ryuji had said things he should never have said: “Small world, isn’t it? Have a good swim?” And when Noboru challenged the soaking shirt, he should have answered: “Oh, this? I rescued a woman who had thrown herself off the pier. This makes the third time I’ve had to go swimming with all my clothes on. . . .”

But he hadn’t said anything of the kind. Instead he had offered this ridiculous explanation: “I took a little shower at the fountain up there in the park.” And with that unwarranted smile all over his face!

They found themselves walking in the direction of the house. Ryuji, who still had two hours on his hands, fell into step with the boy, feeling pleased to have found someone to pass the time with. “There’s something funny about both of us today,” he volunteered as they walked along.

Noboru didn’t like the show of eager sympathy, but it made asking an important favor easy: “Mr. Tsukazaki, would you mind not telling Mom about seeing me at the park?”

“You bet.”

The sailor’s pleasure at being entrusted with a secret, his reassuring smile and quick assent, disappointed Noboru. At least he could have threatened a little.

“I’m supposed to have been at the beach all day—just a minute.” Noboru sprinted to a sand pile at the side of the road and, kicking off his tennis shoes, began to rub his feet and legs with handfuls of sand. The smug, affected boy moved with an animal quickness Ryuji hadn’t seen before. Conscious of being watched, Noboru was putting on a show, smearing the sand on the backs of his legs and all the way up his thighs. When he was satisfied, he stepped into his shoes gingerly so as not to dislodge the sand and minced back to Ryuji. “Look,” he said, indicating the sand on his sweating thigh, “it stuck in the shape of a draftsman’s curve.”