The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (8 page)

Seeing Fusako here in her white suit, Ryuji felt that their first meeting must have been in some tropical jungle. Deliberately, cautious of pointed leaves at eye level, they moved together and embraced. The fragrance of her perfume rose above the low droning of mosquitoes: Ryuji was anguished, unaware of time and place.

Outside, only a slender wire fence away, small neon lights were twinkling like goldfish; every few minutes the headlights of a passing car mowed down the shadows of their forest. The glow of a red neon sign flashing across the street carried to Fusako’s palm-shadowed face, brought a delicate blush to her white cheeks and blackened her red lips. Ryuji kissed her.

The long kiss plunged them into private pools of sensation. Fusako was aware only of the next day’s parting. Stroking Ryuji’s cheek, touching the hot, lacquered surfaces where he had shaved, smelling the odor of flesh rising from his agitated chest, she sensed every nerve in his body screaming goodbye. His tight, furious embrace told her how desperately he wanted to affirm that she was real and really with him.

For Ryuji the kiss was death, the very death in love he always dreamed of. The softness of her lips, her mouth so crimson in the darkness he could see it with closed eyes, so infinitely moist, a tepid coral sea, her restless tongue quivering like sea grass . . . in the dark rapture of all this was something directly linked to death. He was perfectly aware that he would leave her in a day, yet he was ready to die happily for her sake. Death roused inside him, stirred.

Then the pale tremor of a ship’s horn floated in from the direction of Center Pier and settled over the garden. A nebulous mist of sound, it would never have registered on Ryuji’s ear if he hadn’t been a sailor.
Funny time of night for a freighter to be pulling out—I wonder how they got her loaded so fast
. The thought broke the spell of the kiss; he opened his eyes. And he could feel the horn probing deep inside him, rousing his passion for the Grand Cause. But what was it? Maybe another name for the tropical sun.

Ryuji drew away from Fusako’s lips and began fumbling in his vest pocket. She waited. There was a harsh rustling of paper and he produced a crooked cigarette and placed it between his lips; but Fusako angrily snatched the lighter out of his hand. He leaned toward her. “Don’t expect me to give you a light, because I won’t.” The lighter flared with a metallic click, the flame danced in her unmoving eyes as she held it to a hemp leaf. The withered tassels should have fired quickly but the flame wouldn’t catch. Her engrossment, the steadiness of her hand made Ryuji afraid.

Then the little flame lit up her cheek and he saw the string of tears. Fusako put out the lighter when she realized he had noticed. Ryuji embraced her again and, relieved by the assurance of her tears, he began to cry too.

Noboru waited irritably for his mother to come home. At ten o’clock he heard the telephone ring. A minute later the housekeeper came to his room with a message.

“Your mother just called to say she’s going to stay the night at a friend’s. She’ll be back in the morning to change before she goes to the shop; and you’re to spend the evening catching up on all that summer homework.”

Never before, not as far back as he could remember, had his mother ever stayed out all night. The development itself was no surprise, but he flushed with rage and apprehension. He had been looking forward all day to the peephole: there was no telling what revelations, what miracles it might have disclosed again tonight. He wasn’t at all sleepy, on account of the nap he had taken in the afternoon.

The desk was covered with assignments he had to finish before the new semester began; there were only a few days left. But Ryuji was leaving the next day and then his mother would help him again. Or would she just wander around in a daze, too preoccupied to worry about her own son’s homework? Not that it made much difference: Japanese and English and art were the only subjects she could handle. She was never much help with social studies, and he knew more about math and science than she did. How could anyone that bad at math run a business? She was probably always at Mr. Shibuya’s mercy.

Noboru opened a textbook and skimmed a few pages but he couldn’t concentrate. He was too disturbed by the indisputable fact the Ryuji and his mother were not in the house.

He stood up, sat down, and at last began to pace the small room. What could he do to get to sleep? Go into his mother’s room and watch the mast lamps in the harbor? The red lamps on some of the ships blinked on and off all night; there might even be a freighter sailing again, and another screaming horn.

Then he heard the door to the next room open. Maybe his mother had been trying to fool him and had come home with Ryuji after all. He slipped the drawer quietly out of the dresser and lowered it to the floor. He was already dripping wet.

This time there was a knock at his own door! He couldn’t let anyone see the drawer sitting in the middle of the floor at this time of night: he scrambled to the door and pushed against it with all his might. The doorknob rattled harshly.

“What’s going on in there? Can’t I come in?” But it was the housekeeper’s voice. “Are you all right? Go ahead and be stubborn then; but you’d better turn those lights out and get to bed—it’s almost eleven.”

Noboru was still leaning against the door, maintaining obstinate silence, when a key was rammed into the lock and roughly turned! He was aghast. It had never occurred to him that the housekeeper might have a key: he had assumed that his mother had taken all the keys with her when she went out.

Furious, his brow dripping sweat, he wrenched the doorknob with all his strength; the door didn’t open. The housekeeper’s footsteps faded as she descended the groaning stairs.

Noboru had hoped to take advantage of this one-in-a-thousand chance by sneaking over to the chief’s house and waking him with a password whispered outside his window. Now this last, fervent hope was dashed to bits. He despised all mankind. And he wrote a long entry in his diary, not forgetting to set down Ryuji’s crimes.

But after thinking it over, Noboru erased the third count. It was obviously a contradiction of the first two, which were aesthetic, idealistic, and therefore objective value judgments. The subjective problem in the third charge was only proof of his own immaturity, not to be construed as a crime on Ryuji’s part.

Noboru squeezed a mountain of toothpaste onto his toothbrush and belabored his mouth until the gums bled. Staring into the mirror, he watched a pistachio foam swaddle his irregular teeth until only the shiny pointed edges of the boyish cuspids showed: he was despondent. The smell of peppermint made a purity of his rage.

Tearing off his shirt, Noboru put on his pajama tops and looked around the room. As if it were material evidence, the dresser drawer was still on exhibit in the middle of the floor. He lifted it, surprised by a heaviness he hadn’t noticed before, and was about to return it to the chest when he changed his mind and put it down again. He slipped into the space in the wall with practiced ease.

The hole had been closed, he thought for one terrifying instant; then, groping with his fingers, he discovered that it was open as before. There simply wasn’t enough light on the other side to reveal it at a glance.

Noboru pressed his eye to the peephole. When the door had opened before, he realized, it had been the housekeeper going in to draw all the curtains. Gradually the pupil strained open and he discerned around the brass bedsteads a glimmer of light, a wisp of brightness hardly more than a trace of mold.

The room as a whole, feverish with a vestige of the noon heat, was as black as the inside of a large coffin, everywhere a shade of darkness, and alive with jostling particles of something Noboru had never seen, the blackest thing in all the world.

T
HEY
spent the night in a small old hotel not far from the docks: Fusako was afraid she might be recognized at one of the large downtown hotels. She had often passed this drab, two-story building but had never imagined as she glanced through the glass doors at the entrance and saw the dim, outsized lobby, and the scarred front desk, and the large steamship calendar bedizening one calcimined wall, that she would be staying here one day.

They slept for a few hours in the early morning, then separated until sailing time. Fusako went home to change clothes before going to work, Ryuji returned to the pier. He had to substitute for the First Mate, who was going ashore to do some shopping. He would have been busy in any case because the maintenance of ropes and other tackle so important in the loading operation was one of his regular duties.

The
Rakuyo
was due to sail at six; and thanks to four days and nights of perfect weather, loading had proceeded on schedule. The freighter was bound for Santos, her meandering course to be determined by consignors in ports along the way.

Fusako came home at three, changed into a cotton
yukata
so that Ryuji might have a last look at a woman in kimono, and left for the pier with Noboru. Traffic was light: it was just minutes after four when they arrived. A few trucks and a crane were still clustered around one of the concrete sheds, the boom on the
Rakuyo
’s foredeck still wobbled between her hatches and the pier. Fusako decided to wait in the air-conditioned car until Ryuji came down to meet them.

But Noboru couldn’t sit still. He bolted out of the car and raced up and down the bustling pier, inspecting the barges moored below and exploring unlocked sheds.

Inside the largest, reaching almost to the crisscross of green steel beams at the ceiling, were stacks of new white wooden crates with black metal clasps at the corners and stamping in English on the side slats. Noboru, watching a siding fade to nothing amid the towering freight, felt a thrill of joy at having come to the end of the dream that railroads wake in children, and mild disappointment: it was like tracing the course of a familiar river and discovering its tiny source.

“Mom! Hey, Mom!” Racing back to the car, Noboru drummed on the window: he had spotted Ryuji standing near the windlass in the ship’s prow.

Fusako got out of the car and they waved at the high distant figure in a dirty khaki shirt. Ryuji raised one hand in reply, then moved busily out of sight. Noboru thought of the sailor toiling now, and soon to sail away; and he was flushed with pride.

Fusako could only wait for Ryuji to appear again. Unfurling a parasol with a silver handle, she watched the
Rakuyo’s
swaying hawsers cut thick gashes across the harbor’s face. The dock was broiling under the western sun, light-washed and overbright; and eating into all the steel and concrete, like the salt in a sea wind, was a strong, smarting grief. The same grief was diffused through the bright air, its force imparting to the occasional clatter of deck plates and the crash of hurled cables a long, hollow reverberation.

The concrete pier trapped the heat and hurled it back as a scorching glare; the light breeze blowing off the water brought no relief.

They squatted at the edge of the sea wall with their backs to the ferocious sun, and stared at the wavelets mincing in to break and foam against the white-flecked stone. Rocking slightly like a rough-hewn cradle, one of the barges moored below edged toward the wall, then slipped back while another sidled in. A sea gull skimmed over the wash that flapped on the open decks; a shiny log floating amid other garbage on the dirty water rode around and around on the eddying swell. The waves advanced in tiers, flank blending subtly with azure flank until it seemed that this endlessly repeated pattern was all they could see as they gazed at the water.

Noboru read off the draft numbers painted on the
Rakuyo’s
side; 60 was just above the water, 84 and 86 bracketed the water line, 90 was almost as high as the haweshole.

“Do you think the water ever gets that high? Boy, it must be really something if it does.”

Noboru had guessed his mother’s mood and she was reminding him as she stared out to sea of that lonely, naked figure in front of the mirror: the question was as boyish as he could make it, but Fusako didn’t answer.

Across the harbor basin, pale gray smoke hovered above the streets of Naka Ward; the red-and-white-striped beacon tower aspired to clearer sky. The offing was a dense forest of white masts and, still farther out, a bank of clouds luminous in the late afternoon sunlight heaped and twisted above the water.

A steam launch towing an unloaded barge pulled away from the far side of the
Rakuyo
and chugged out of sight.

It was just after five when Ryuji came off the ship. The silver chains which would raise the gangplank had already been attached. A gang of longshoremen wearing yellow helmets had filed down the gangplank, piled into a Longshoremen’s Union bus, and left the pier. The eight-ton Port Authority derrick had gone, the hatches had been bolted down. Then, finally, Ryuji appeared.

Noboru and Fusako chased long shadows toward the sailor. Ryuji squashed Noboru’s straw hat with the palm of his hand and laughed as the boy struggled to pull the brim up over his eyes. The work had exhilarated him.

“We’ll be leaving any minute now. I’ll be aft when we cast off.” Ryuji gestured toward the distant stern.