The Yokota Officers Club

by Sarah Bird

  My father acted like he hadn’t heard Moe either; then he asked Major Wingo, “Hey, skipper, what are the chances for some cabin heat in this bucket?”

  “Check with the crew chief.”

  My father twisted a knob, and a blast of nauseatingly overheated air dank with the odor of the wet wool of the men’s uniforms shot into our faces. Kit put her head down on Moe’s lap and in a spasm of territoriality I did the same, squeezing my sister onto one thigh and one thigh only. The men’s voices clotted together with the roar of the heater, then faded into a blanketing drone.

  I woke up with the inside of my nose and throat seared from the hot air and listened to the men’s voices while Moe and Kit snuffled and whimpered in their sleep.

  “Root, I appreciate this. I know you’re high-enough time to be sitting in the left seat, commanding your own bird, but I promise you, put your fifty in with me and you are on your way to Command and Staff. I’ll get Cartwright to cut the orders himself.”

  “You don’t have to ask LaRue’s old man to do any favors for—”

  “Never done a damned thing in my life I ‘had’ to, Wild Root; this one I want to do. I want to do this for my right-seat guy. You just help me fly those fifty missions and your ticket is punched for anywhere you want to ride it to. We go back, Root. We’ve covered a few pages in the logbook together, right? I owe you, and Coney Wingo always pays up. Hey, did you hear? Dugan’ll be here next week.”

  “Patsy Dugan! I thought that rumpot was stooging around in goonybirds out of Wright-Patterson.”

  “He was. I got him.”

  “Wingo! You got the Mick.”

  “Yeah, now that you’re here the old team’s back together. The Bong Bunnies fly again.”

  “The whole team? You got all the Bunnies? Don’t tell me. You couldn’t have—”

  Before my father even finished his eager question, Major Wingo was grinning and nodding.

  “Naviguesser! You got our naviguesser back!”

  “Better believe it. Pulled Coulter right out of Offutt.”

  “No! You snaked Dub Coulter away from LeMay?”

  “Correction, Wild Root, the general gave Coulter to me. He personally reassigned him to my crew.”

  Suddenly, the laughing jocularity left my father’s voice. “Wait a minute, Wingo. You’re saying the head of Strategic Air Command personally assigned Coulter to you.”

  “That’s the name on his orders.”

  My father’s tone suddenly turned serious. “Jeez, Coney, what kinda pop stand you running here?”

  I saw Major Wingo’s big handsome head swivel and shut my eyes quickly, so that all he saw behind him were three sleeping faces. Even so, when he spoke his voice was a low whisper I had to strain to hear.

  “We’re only going to talk about this once, Root, and that’s one time too many. You got it? I report directly to LeMay himself. Green Door briefing at SAC. LeMay reports to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That’s it. That’s the entire chain. I’ve got ten crews in the squadron. We’re lead crew. We never appear on any budget, any operational chart, zip. Oath on a Bible. OSI gets your firstborn. The whole nine yards.”

  “Black?”

  “As the ace of spades. We’re weather reconnaissance. We’re navigational training flights. You will never know the exact nature of any mission until we hit the cloud deck. Something goes wrong, you auger in, you survive, bite the capsule, buddy, ‘cause no one’s comin’ for you ’cause the mission never happened and you never existed.

  “For every swinging dick in the squadron, every Jap national dragging a hose on the Flight Line, every airman cranking a wrench, everyone—I mean everyone, including Moe and the kids—they got two hard-asses in OSI checking you out. You will never talk about the mission to anyone, not to me, not to Dub, Pats, any of the other crews, not to Moe, nobody. One question, Root, one wrong comment, and OSI will crawl so far up your ass you’ll never get them back out. You’ll be gone, your family will be gone, and there won’t be one thing me or anyone else can do to help you because we’re off the books now, Root. It’s radio silence from here on in. You with me?”

  My father nodded but didn’t answer.

  “You got any questions?”

  After a long moment, my father spoke. “Yeah, Coney, I do have a question. A real big question.” His voice was so quiet and serious that the breath caught in my throat.

  Major Wingo was impatient, irritated. He clearly had not expected my father to have any questions. “What?”

  “Where the hell does a guy go around here to restore his fluid levels?”

  “Root, you ring-knocking son of a bitch!”

  We drove onto Yokota Air Base and my lungs expanded with the first full breath I’d taken since we left Travis. Everything that was wrong about Japan was right here. The streets were broad and calm. Trees stood in tall, straight columns. The cars were blue, red, green, yellow. An American flag snapped overhead. A barbed-wire fence with a guard at the gate embraced it all. This was home. This was where I wanted to stay.

  Kit woke up when Major Wingo stopped in front of the package store. Even though it was still drizzling outside, she insisted on going in with the two men. They ran through the parking lot, knees pumping high, splashing in every puddle on the way like boys playing hooky, with Kit held as high between them as the banner of the winning team.

  The instant they left, I turned to Moe. “I don’t want to live in Japan. I want to stay here.”

  “You’re kidding. Living off-base is the luckiest break we’ve gotten yet. They can’t get us off-base, the wives. No visits from the base commander’s wife, and the president of the Officers’ Wives Club, and most especially no visits from”—she leaned in closer and whispered—“the squadron commander’s wife.”

  “But I thought Major Wingo was the squadron commander.”

  “You got that right, kiddo.”

  “So, you mean his wife is—”

  Moe nodded. We had a special secret name for the wives Moe didn’t like. The ones who thought they carried their husband’s rank. The ones who spent all day playing bridge at the club and let their kids eat Ritz crackers for lunch. The ones who gossiped and said mean things. We whispered the name together: “A big fat pain in the keister!”

  “Yep, LaRue Wingo of Paducah, Kentucky”—Moe put on a funny southern-belle voice—“is Mrs. Squadron Commander and never lets you forget it for one cotton-pickin’ minute. Or that Daddy just happens to be General Chalmers Cartwright who just happens to run the whole show up there in PACAF.”

  I didn’t care about LaRue Wingo’s father, General Charmers Can’t Write, or about the whole show up there in Pack Ass. All I cared about was that, whoever and whatever they were, Moe and I didn’t like them. Like all outsiders, they were the glue that sealed the cracks in the little world we two had created. My homesickness disappeared. Moe was right. It was just her and me, we were in it together like the Army nurses sailing to Casablanca in their jungle of underwear, and we didn’t want any wives around ruining it. We didn’t want any outsiders at all.

  The men swung Kit back into the car, then jumped in themselves.

  “Wheels up!” my father yelled.

  “Wheels up!” Major Wingo yelled back, pulling out fast enough to spin his car into a slide that cascaded a spray of gravel onto a fifty-five-gallon drum painted navy blue with the word TRASH stenciled on it in white.

  “Taxi accident averted, skipper.”

  “Pilot to copilot. Pilot to copilot, you gonna just sit on that beer till it hatches or are you gonna pop one for your aircraft commander?”

  My father cracked the opener into a Falstaff, handed it to Major Wingo, and opened one for himself.

  Kit kicked on the back of Major Wingo’s seat, begging him to make the car slide again.

  As Major Wingo reached behind his seat to tickle Kit, who was giggling wildly, a jeep sped toward the parking lot exit on our right side. An instant before I screamed, my father calmly announced, “We go
t us a little departure hold there, Captain.” At the last possible moment, Major Wingo saw the jeep and slammed on the brakes.

  The wet brakes shrieked but didn’t hold, and we careened crazily toward a collision with the jeep. At the last second, the jeep bumped into a culvert to avoid the Pontiac, but Major Wingo’s big bearish body seemed frozen in an arc that pulled us back toward a concrete embarkment. My father grabbed the steering wheel, turning it for Major Wingo, and only then did the major pull out of the slide and, finally, stop. Moe and I were thrown back against our seats.

  “We would have died if Daddy hadn’t stopped him,” I panted into my mother’s ear.

  “Par for the course for good buddy Wingo,” Moe whispered. Her eyes were drawn tight in a hard stare at my father’s boss and she panted hard, angry breaths. “Par for the g.d. course.”

  While the men pretended nothing had happened, Kit hung on the back of their seat, her arms around both their shoulders, begging Major Wingo to do it all again.

  At the stop sign leaving the parking lot, Major Wingo revved the engine and Moe pulled Kit down and made her sit.

  “Throttles forward.” Major Wingo pretended to push some imaginary plane lever.

  “Throttles forward.” My father did the same thing.

  “Boot ’em in the ass!”

  “Boot ’em in the ass!”

  With Kit kicking the back of his seat with wild delight, Major Wingo jerked his foot off the brake, slamming Moe and me back into our seats as he peeled out of the parking lot, shimmying onto the wet road.

  “Mace, you’ve got two kids back here,” Moe said, struggling to keep the anger out of her voice.

  Major Wingo and my father exchanged looks like two boys reprimanded by an overly strict teacher. Then they laughed and my father opened more beers.

  It was twilight by the time we reached Fussa and color was seeping back into this alien world. The main street was a mosaic of glass signs in jewel colors—sapphire, lapis lazuli, ruby, turquoise, emerald—all set off by red lanterns painted with black slashes of calligraphy. At a corner where a hot pink crab opened and closed his neon claws and a yellow-and-red fan spread wide, then shut, we turned down an alley. Our house was pressed in the middle of a row of small shops and houses, each one glowing like a lantern with soft light shining through paper screens.

  Major Wingo stood at the door and yelled for a long time before a young Japanese woman in a kimono printed with poppies and pussy willows slid it open, then bowed. The woman seemed dazed as if we’d awakened her. Her hand wobbled as she pushed the door open further for us to enter.

  Moe was at the head of our group and she didn’t move, so we remained standing in front of the house. At the edge of my vision, I could see the doors of neighboring houses slide back. As heads peeked out up and down the alley to stare at us, I shriveled with embarrassment. The one who stared the hardest, though, was this strange woman bowing in the doorway of what was supposed to be our house who kept looking at me as if I were an old friend. Although she seemed to fight to keep her head down, every time I glanced in her direction the stranger’s obsidian eyes were fixed on me.

  “This is your maid, Fumiko,” Major Wingo said. Moe glanced at my father, who shrugged to say he didn’t know any more than she did. “She comes with the place,” Major Wingo explained. “It’s standard.”

  The idea of an outsider, a Japanese outsider to boot, breaching my one outsider-free sanctuary in life appalled me. I was certain that Moe would put a stop to this horrifying prospect. Moe had been an Indiana farm girl who stirred bluing into tubs of boiling sheets with a stick on wash day; she had been a student nurse who mopped the floor of her ward with carbolic acid under the stern gaze of Sister Aloysius; she was a mother who taught me how to make hospital corners on beds, who used vinegar and water and old newspapers to clean windows. Moe was simply not the sort who would ever have a maid. I was certain of that. Moe whispered something to our father.

  “Don’t worry,” Major Wingo said. “She only speaks a few words of English and understands even fewer.”

  This outsider, this Fumiko, glanced at Moe, then bowed, ducking her head.

  “We can’t afford a maid.”

  Fumiko peered up at Moe, then again at me. Again, she looked at me as if we were old friends, as if we were in this together, sharing a joke, and she could barely keep a smile off her face. I glanced around to make certain that Kit wasn’t standing behind me. This was exactly the kind of instant acceptance my beautiful little sister always inspired.

  “She’s ten thousand yen a month,” Major Wingo said. “That’s—what? Thirty a month. LaRue has a maid, a houseboy, a sew girl, and a nanny.” Major Wingo’s laugh echoed hollowly in the quiet alley.

  “Thirty dollars a month? No one can live on that.”

  “War reparations. Japanese government kicks in some,” Major Wingo explained to Moe. “Housing’s still real tight. Better than it was right after the war when eight million of them were living in parks and sleeping under pieces of tarpaper, but, shit, if there ain’t houses for American Air Force officers, you can bet there’s not enough for them. So long as Fumiko works for an American officer, though, they’ll put her up at the maids’ dorm. Doubt she has anywhere else to go. But it’s your decision, Moe. It’s all the same to me.”

  Fumiko straightened up and watched my mother’s face warily, searching for a clue to her future, then looked at me and lifted her eyebrows as if she and I were hoping for the same decision.

  “Mason?” That Major Wingo used my father’s real full name showed how serious and awkward this situation was.

  “This really is Moe’s call.”

  I prayed that Moe would tell them it was impossible. We Roots just didn’t allow strangers into our houses, our lives. But then Moe gasped, put both hands on her stomach, and poked it, fingers prodding several different spots as she counted. “One, two, three, four, five! Oh, my God, there are at least five separate appendages poking me, which means …”

  “Twins?” My father’s question hoped there could be another answer.

  “Twins,” Moe confirmed, and in that moment of seeing herself washing two sets of dirty diapers in a house she wasn’t certain even had running water, my mother became exactly the sort who would have a maid.

  “I would love to have Fumiko’s help.”

  At the sound of her name, Fumiko shriveled back into a bow and whispered “Madam,” which came out as “My dam.” Instinctively, I resonated with Fumiko’s fear, with the immense effort of not only speaking but speaking in a stranger’s language.

  Kit looked up at our father and laughed. “She said damn. You said damn was a bad word. She said a bad word.”

  I liked to think it was because of Kit’s tone of amused mockery, but probably it was because I was the one being carried by an American officer wearing a blue hat with a silver eagle affixed to it that Fumiko stared, transfixed, into my face instead of my sister’s, then touched, of all things, my widow’s peak, sucked in her breath, and exhaled the word utsukushii. Beautiful.

  “Domo arigato.” Fumiko’s hand was a white crane slicing through the air, the sleeve of her kimono a wing trailing behind, as she bid us enter. Major Wingo didn’t come in. He said Fumiko would get us all squared away, he had to make like a cow patty and hit the trail.

  Then Moe, my father, Kit, and I followed Fumiko’s hand into our new home.

  Sweat

  We are stuck in the line to go through Customs at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport. Bobby bounces impatiently from foot to foot as we wait for the inspector to poke through a mountain of cardboard boxes being imported by a squat Okinawan man in a porkpie hat who buzzes around the inspector, chattering and pointing animatedly to his goods. The inspector has the white peaked hat and imperious demeanor of a Banana Republic dictator. Bobby slaps his passport against his fleshy palm and groans as the inspector opens yet another box of shell figurines. Standing next to him, I notice that his Brut cologne is losing the olfactory w
ar with body odor.

  “Aw, Jesus, what’s he think this schmoe’s smuggling into the country, sand? It’s the same thing every time. They strip-search you when you come in, but when you leave you sail right out. That’s the Japs for you. Believe evil only travels one way: into their country. Far as they’re concerned nothing bad has ever come out of this country, and that includes World War Two.”

  Bobby catches me glancing at his passport, reading the name Moishe Rosenblatt printed on it. “What? You think Jackie Mason is Swedish?”

  At last the customs inspector gestures for us to move forward. The boxes of shells clatter as the Okinawan pushes them away with his foot while bowing to the inspector.

  “Great!” Bobby asks the inspector, who doesn’t understand a word, “You sure you’re done with the Shell King here and his criminal empire?”

  While Bobby tries to kibbitz with the inspector, I glance around the airport. The first time I catch sight of Fumiko, my heart lurches. By the fourth time I’m certain I’ve spotted her, I relax, reassured that the only place I will meet her again is in memories. Memories that always start with that little house on the alley in Fussa.

  Honeysuckle

  Having this Fumiko stranger in our tiny paper house all the time was bad enough. What was even worse was the horror of school at Yokota’s Bob Hope Elementary. On my first day, I was herded into a Quonset hut, a giant can cut in half lengthwise, where catatonia seized me upon being strafed by the merciless gazes of twenty-eight children and my new teacher, Miss Ransom. Miss Ransom wore ballet slippers and shirtwaist dresses. At thirty-five, she had signed on with the Department of Defense school system to add adventure and a husband to her life. Moe quickly learned and just as quickly told me that my teacher was a regular fixture at happy hour at the officers’ club—mixed drinks a quarter, beer a dime—where she made new friends with the flight crews that rotated in and out of Yokota on TDY.

  I learned for myself that Miss Ransom usually smelled of incompletely metabolized vodka and cigar smoke, and her nerves were not all they should have been. Trying to teach twenty-eight students, too many of them the children of old boyfriends, pushed Miss Ransom to her limit. The addition of a twenty-ninth, myself, who refused to speak and cried if you looked at her crosswise, pushed Miss Ransom beyond that limit.