The Yokota Officers Club

by Sarah Bird

  “Oh, my God! There’s—” I pivot, following my pointing finger as we drive on. I can’t say her name. It hasn’t been mentioned since we left Japan.

  “There’s who?” Moe cuts me off. In her tone is a warning to me to leave well enough alone.

  Then I see the woman’s face. She doesn’t look anything at all like Fumiko. “No one.” I sag back into my seat, as disappointed as I am relieved.

  We drive on in silence, broken only when Bob asks, “What’s a three-holer?”

  Grass

  We come to a halt in front of the Gate Three guard hut, one of the few breaks in the miles of barbed-wire fence that encircle the base. Ahead of us, an Air Policeman wearing a white helmet with AP stenciled on it examines a load of pineapples being ferried on-base by an Okinawan native driving a three-wheeled truck. A white webbed strap crosses the AP’s chest; his khaki pants are neatly bloused into laced-up combat boots.

  When he steps around to the back of the miniature truck and comes close to the station wagon, Bob squeals, “Oh, no, the Apes!” and ducks down. Apes are the agents of potential destruction, destroyer of worlds, for all military brats. They stand sentry at the entrance to our neighborhoods, and they patrol them, seeking out bad kids whose infractions—graffiti, broken windows, drinking, vandalism of government property—could get their fathers RIF’d, fired.

  “Pass, pass?” the guard asks the pineapple man.

  The Okinawan answers with a gush of Japanese.

  “Okay, pull over there. Over there. To the side.” The guard tries to wave the man aside, but, smiling all the while, the Okinawan insists upon his right to deliver the pineapples.

  “Oh, my sweet Aunt Fannie!” My father pounds his palm on the steering wheel, irritated out of all proportion to the inconvenience. He slams the glove compartment with his fist several times, but it doesn’t open.

  “Okay, Mace, okay.” Moe speaks like the leader of a squad sent to defuse a bomb. She pushes the button on the glove compartment and it falls open. Without looking at her, my father snaps his fingers and holds his palm up, jiggling it impatiently until Moe pulls out one of his many rolls of Tums and flicks two into his palm. He keeps jiggling his hand and Moe flicks in two more.

  While we wait for the pineapple man, I have plenty of time to study the sign in front of the guard hut that declares Kadena Air Base to be the HOME OF THE 313TH AIR FORCE. The base seal sits on a background that depicts a pagoda floating above an outline of the island, both floating on a field of red and white stripes and blue stars. The seal itself features a black rooster on a gold shield with a jet streaking across its wattles. Next to the rooster is inscribed in Gothic script:

  Our Mission:

  To defend U.S. and Japanese mutual interests

  by providing a responsive staging and

  operational Air Base with integrated,

  deployable, forward-based

  Air Power.

  Beneath the shield a scroll unfurls reading Unguibus et Rostro.

  “Ugly Butts and Roosters, nowhere else but Oki,” my father jokes grimly. “Well, here you are, Bernadette, Kadena Air Base, the elephant graveyard of the Pacific. Where military careers come to die. Where the deadwood is farmed out to rot away.” My father worries about being RIF’d because he’s been in almost twenty years and is still only a major.

  Moe catches my eye in a glance that says she’s heard this way too many times.

  I turn to Kit, hoping for a sign from her about how things are between our parents. She turns away from me. Bosco huddles closer against my side and, from the anxious look pinching her face, I gather they are pretty bad. Our father believes the assignment to Okinawa to be the death knell of his career, a dirge that started playing at a point so long ago I can no longer pin it down. No details are ever offered, but, as in most marriages, 90 percent of all communication is carried by tone, and his, when he does speak to Moe, is accusatory. For reasons I can’t fathom, it seems my father holds Moe responsible for the downward trajectory of his career. But now, listening to a symphony of exasperated gasps and curses at the holdup, it seems my father also believes that the pineapple man has it in for him.

  The three-wheeled truck is finally waved on and we creep forward. The guard snaps off a crisp salute, we drive through the gate, and I am back on every base we’ve ever lived on, breathing in the watermelon smell of new-mown Bermuda grass mixed with the tang of jet fuel fumes wafting in from the runway. On either side of the broad main avenue is a prairie of a parade ground that rolls on into a tundra of runways. Though vast expanses of open space—runways, golf courses, parade grounds, parking lots, immense yards—characterize every base I’ve ever set foot on, coming now from the claustrophobia of Koza, I notice this profligacy for the first time. An American flag snaps in the breeze above it all, its tether clanging against the metal pole. Signs everywhere urge personnel to contribute to the Red Cross blood drive, take salt tablets, observe the speed limit, know the typhoon warning system, update inoculations.

  We pass the base theater and I recall the start of every movie I’ve ever seen on every base we’ve ever lived on. That’s when it finally, fully, hits me that I am back in a world where the National Anthem is played before previews of coming attractions and if you aren’t standing you’d better have at least one leg in a cast.

  Wedged between my parents in the front seat, Bob laughs and repeats, “Ugly butts and roosters.”

  My father raps Bob’s forehead with his middle finger like he’s testing a melon. “Cut the comedy.”

  We drive home in silence.

  Herbal Essence

  My first night on Okinawa, I dream about Eileen, before she became Kit. I dream about the moment after we landed in Yokohama Bay and she ran down the gangplank of the S.S. President Wilson into a calligraphic world of people all drawn in black: black hair, black eyes, black clothes.

  The sea of black closes in around Kit until the flame of her white hair is extinguished. My father holds me. My mother stands by his side. But when I turn to look at them, I am back in the backyard of the house in Fussa. Fumiko stares at me. She wears a kimono printed with bamboo brush drawings of Mount Fuji. Two of the perfect cones float above her breasts.

  Then Moe screams, “Come on, girls! Let’s go! Get dressed! They’re coming! Move! Move! Move!” and the OSI officer appears to take Fumiko and me to prison. Even after I wake up in a dark bedroom in a house on Kadena Air Base, it takes me a moment to realize that the OSI officer was in my dream but the yelling is not. My mother is standing in the middle of our room, her eyes wide open, glittering, Bob by her side, ordering us to get up.

  “Mom, wake up.” Kit’s voice, sleepy, irritated, pulls me away from Fumiko. “You’re having that dream again.”

  “Don’t argue with me, Kit! Not now. We’ve got to go! Now! They’re coming! Get Bosco!”

  In the dim glow cast by Bosco’s Huckleberry Hound night-light I can see the terror on my mother’s face.

  “Moe, what is it?”

  She stares blankly at me. She’s wearing the pink nylon nightie I gave her for Christmas the year we lived in Harlingen, Texas, and it never got cold enough to wear the heavy wool jackets and thick sweaters we’d brought from Japan to grapefruit country.

  I get out of bed and put my arm around her shoulders. “Moe, it’s okay. Wake up.”

  My mother blinks, recognizing my voice but not my face.

  “It’s me, Moe: Bernie. I’m here.”

  My mother wakes up and bursts into tears, hugging me. I bury my face in her neck. She smells like my mother, but I have to make sure. I run my hand down her back.

  “I see we’re not wearing a bra,” I tell her.

  For a second Moe stiffens back into the girdled stranger who’d met me when I’d landed. Then she laughs and she’s finally Moe, finally my mother, again. “You sassy brat, you’re gonna end up with boobs like a hound dog’s ears.”

  “Is it a school day?” Bob wakes up. “Is Miss Delgado still m
y teacher? What room am I in?”

  “No, baby, school’s out for the summer. Back to bed.” Moe turns him around toward his room and marches him out.

  I crawl back into bed and survey the room. It is pure military. A bunker of poured concrete with a slit of a window set too high to see anything but a slice of the tropical night sky. A bunk bed stands against the other wall. I’m back in the girls’ room. Six children. The inevitable three bedrooms in a base house. We always had a girls’ room, a boys’ room, and a parents’ room. Bosco snuffles softly in the top berth. From somewhere in the darkness comes an odd sound, like a cross between a chirp and a delicate burp. Before I can identify it, Kit, in the bottom bunk, heaves a sigh.

  “Shit, I thought she’d be okay once you got here.” In her tone is the familiar accusation that Moe likes me best.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Wait till you see the house in the morning.”

  “What about the house?” I’d been too exhausted to notice much last night, walking straight back to the girls’ room where I’d fallen into bed in my clothes, too tired to even open my suitcases.

  I’d assumed that the house was arranged the way every house we’d ever moved into had been arranged, in accordance with Moe’s philosophy that “Even if you’re only going to be somewhere for three weeks, you should set the place up like you’re going to be there for three years. We’re not Bedouins,” she’d protest, hammering nails into the walls of whatever base house we’d landed in in order to hang up her giant wooden fork and spoon from the Philippines or the framed set of fans she’d brought back from Japan. Those and all the other spoils from a military life—the camel saddle, Hummel figurines, Toledo sword, coconut pirate heads, geisha dolls in glass cases—they were Moe’s first line of defense against the charge that her family were nomads. Once she had erected that line in a house where floors were mopped and waxed weekly, where dust never settled, and all the beds had hospital corners, then she could relax.

  That, I assumed, was how this latest in the long line of houses Moe had settled her family into would be arranged. I asked Kit again, “What about the house?”

  “You’ll see.”

  “Come on, just tell me.”

  “No, I don’t want to spoil the surprise.”

  “Kit, it’s not absolutely required that you be a total bitch to me all the time. You can, like, take a night off or something.”

  “Fuck you, Bernie. Listen, you haven’t been around here for this last year in paradise.”

  “What’s going on? Why didn’t you write me? Or call?”

  “Oh, right, call. Roger that,” she says sarcastically.

  Phone calls with my family for the last year had been placed through MARS, some military operation, because normal phone lines don’t reach Okinawa. My father had to requisition time on the service in advance. Then our few calls, placed on lines that hissed and roared with static, were relayed through a radio operator and you had to say “over” when you finished talking and “roger” when the other person finished. Having an outsider listen in, then relay our words, had frozen our few conversations to abrupt stilted telegrams.

  Kit rolls over and pulls the sheet up to her ears. She still has a genius for willing herself into deep and instantaneous sleep.

  I can tell from the lump-and-divot pattern beneath me that I’m lying on the single mattress that has been mine for most of my life. I snuggle into its familiar hammocky contours, close my eyes, and try to sleep in spite of the odd chirping that creeps closer to my bed.

  Not enough hours later, I open my eyes to find Bosco and Bob crouched above me like a pair of Lilliputians gloating over their gigantic Gulliver find. Bob wears Mighty Mouse underpants that highlight his spider-monkey body, while Bosco resembles a loaf of French bread in her two-piece swimsuit. The radio is playing.

  You’re listening to Armed Forces Radio, the voice of the Keystone of the Pacific. Temperatures will be climbing into the high nineties with winds out of the northeast at thirteen knots per hour. Sunset at eighteen twenty-three hours. Sunrise at oh six hundred hours. The Thomas Crown Affair, with Hollywood stars Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway, is playing at the General Curtis LeMay theater at nineteen hundred hours.

  “Why is there a mirror under my nose?” I inquire.

  “To see if you’re dead.”

  “I’m not.”

  Bob takes the mirror away from my nose. “There wasn’t any smoke coming out of your nose.”

  “Condensation.” Bosco corrects her little brother. “Just carbon dioxide and breath stuff.”

  “Oh.” Bob notes the correction without further comment. It’s understood that if Bosco says it, it’s right. Everyone in my family has one thing that no one else has. Bosco’s is that she is never wrong about a fact. It’s a big thing—bigger than Abner’s ability to do his age in sit-ups times one hundred, or Buzz’s rubber-limbed talent for putting both his feet behind his head and swinging on his arms like a gorilla, or Bob’s capacity to recite, line for line, kablooey for ka-blooey, every cartoon he’s ever seen. Kit’s one thing is big too. We all recognize that Kit can walk into any new school on any base in the world and become the most popular girl inside a week. My one thing is dancing.

  There is a common belief about military brats that all the moving around makes us very adaptable and we end up becoming sort of social geniuses. The only person in our family that this is true for is Kit. The rest of us are class-A social retards. The best we can hope for is not to be noticed, to survive the purgatory that is any place outside our front door.

  Kit is just the opposite. She would rather be anywhere except home, which is the only place the rest of us can take a full breath. Kit’s ability to relate to humans outside of our family awes us. Still, Bosco’s thing of never being wrong is pretty good too. We suspect a photographic memory, but Moe forbade us to utter those words.

  “I don’t want your sister feeling she is unusual in any way,” she warned me. This is mostly because Bosco is already “unusual” in far too many ways.

  “So, does this mean I’m dead?” I ask.

  Bob raises his skinny shoulders to his ears until the blades stick out like the buds of angel wings and shrugs as if to tell me to face the evidence and deal with it. It is out of his hands. He glances at the big watch on his wrist—“Oh, no! Road Runner already started!”—and darts out.

  Overly bright tropical light slices into the room through the high window. The major decorating motif in Bosco’s sector is equine. Shelves of resin horses line the walls above her top bunk. Color drawings of particularly lustrous horses are taped everywhere. From her extensive letters I knew that my little sister has achieved satori here on Okinawa through actual horse ownership. The beast in question, a gelding named Hickory, is well represented. Taped to the wall above Bosco’s pillow are snapshots of a swaybacked, dwarfed creature with a fuzzy coat like the lining in a cheap jacket.

  “He’s descended from Genghis Khan’s horses.”

  Indeed, the stumpy Hickory would not look out of place with one of the Mongol horde on his back. Bosco sticks another stack of photos in my hands.

  “These are newer. Sit here. The light is better.”

  I sit on the stool in front of Kit’s vanity. As I sort through the photos, the urge to curry overtakes Bosco and she brushes my hair.

  “He’s really happy there.” Bosco touches the photo. “He’s sad in that one.” I flip through a dozen more photos with accompanying commentary on the many moods of Hickory the Horse, though the only emotional state I can discern seems to be digestion.

  I feel stuporous, lulled by jet lag and the uniquely narcotizing sensation of having soft little-girl hands brush and pat my hair into a side ponytail with swizzle sticks poked into it for a saucier effect.

  “Don’t move,” Bosco orders me.

  Kit’s vanity is covered with enough cosmetics to stock a Las Vegas revue. Tubes of iridescent Mary Quant lipstick. Pots of strawberry-flavored Bonne Bell
lip gloss. Cakes of sparkly lavender Yardley eyeshadow. Tubs of Dippity-Do. Spider’s legs of false eyelashes with clumps of glue covered by strips of vinyl eyeliner. Spray bottles of emerald-green Emeraude and amber Tabu cologne.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see a flash of motion skitter up the wall next to me. I shriek and jerk, causing Bosco to ram a swizzle stick into my temple.

  “I told you not to move.”

  “What is that?”

  “Oh, that. That’s Lucky, our gecko. Geckos are lucky. Plus she eats cockroaches.”

  Lucky the lady lizard seems to have been startled by my shriek. She does delicate little push-ups, her tiny gumdrop feet suctioned to the ceiling above my head, the pink bubble at her throat inflating and deflating with each breath.

  “You scared her.”

  “I scared her?”

  “Wait here and don’t move. I’ve got to get something.” As Bosco leaves, Bob bursts in and takes her place at my side. He can barely breathe, he is laughing so hard. “Bernie, you should see. Wile E. Coyote runned after Road Runner and then Road Runner runned over the clift and Wile E. Coyote runned after him, then—” Bob loses control, overcome by the indescribable hilarity of it all, and tries to pantomime the rest for me. Wile E. Coyote’s futile backpedaling in midair. Road Runner’s triumphant beep-beep as he zips back to the safety of the cliff ledge. Coyote’s weary resignation before his inevitable plummet to the earth below.

  Bob’s rendition is funnier than any cartoon ever made. I crack up as he does Wile E. bonking his head and stumbling around in drunken loops. He gets so worked up that his asthma kicks in and he begins wheezing slightly. The sound of a maniacal cartoon laugh echoing from the living room—“Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh Heh-heh-heh-heh-heh”—effects an immediate cure, however.

  Bob holds his wrist up to check the time, but the jumbo watch slides down to his elbow. “Woody Woodpecker!” A puff of air whooshes behind him as he runs out of the room, trampling over Bosco coming back in.