Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  The other girls nodded, excited by the grand adventure they were all on.

  “Girls! Girls!” Head Nurse shouted. “Stop gabbling like a bunch of silly geese! Your turn to have your photographs made will be next. You may take ten minutes, no longer, to return to your room and prepare.”

  We rushed to the girls’ room, where Mitsue gave me a uniform she’d outgrown. As the girls smoothed their hair into sleek braids, I bemoaned the sorry state of the short, wavy mop atop my own head.

  “I’ll fix it,” Mitsue volunteered. In an instant, she had produced two rubber bands and swept my hair into pigtails that everyone agreed were chura. Without a mirror, I trusted that my new hairstyle was truly as cute as they had proclaimed it to be. More than my hair, though, I yearned to view myself in the uniform of a Princess Lily girl. But there wasn’t time to find a mirror large enough before we rushed off to the empty classroom that had been set aside for the photographer’s use. There we stood in line and waited while he opened the heavy metal case containing his equipment. He tacked up a large piece of canvas over one wall for a backdrop, set up a wooden tripod, then mounted a camera with a bellows on it.

  The photographer wore a soiled white shirt with a battered tie knotted at his scrawny neck. His most notable feature was large ears with points at the top like a bat’s wings. In spite of his scary ears, he was a jolly soul who made silly jokes as he asked each girl her name and the name of her village. He carefully recorded the information in a notebook, positioned the girl in front of the canvas, stared down into the viewfinder of his camera, held a bulb out, then said, “Oh, you, I know your type. You have too many boyfriends to count, don’t you?” When the girl laughed, he squeezed the bulb and the shutter clicked. No matter how many times they’d heard his silly joke, each girl in turn smiled when the photographer accused her of being a heartbreaker.

  The only girl he didn’t tease was Mitsue. In fact, when he looked into the viewfinder and beheld her he was struck dumb. As if not believing what his camera was recording, he glanced back up at his subject. Instead of flapping his hand one way or the other and saying to her what he’d told the rest of us—“A bit more to the right. Now back to the left. Chin down. Hold it. I bet you have too many boyfriends to count, don’t you?”—he stepped over to my cousin and touched her, gently positioning her first one way, then another. He arranged her hands, her arms, pivoted her shoulders. He smoothed imaginary wrinkles from her uniform as if she were a work of art and he the curator. We all stopped laughing and something uneasy passed through us as we witnessed the power of female beauty to enslave the male beholder, a power that the rest of us knew instinctively we would never possess.

  After he took so many pictures of Mitsue that the bat-eared photographer had to change the film, it was Hatsuko’s turn, then mine. He snapped off our individual photos in a glum, automatic manner without any boyfriend teasing, as if Mitsue had made him feel like a heartbroken suitor. When he was finished with our photos, my sister begged him to take one of the two of us together. “Please,” she explained, “she’s my little sister.”

  “There are lots of sisters here,” the photographer grumbled, speaking in our native dialect. “I’m supposed to take individual photos for your official records just the way they do them in Japan.”

  I put on my best backcountry accent and said, “But this one will be for our sweet little anmā. Please, sir, please.” I made my silliest Little Guppy face, popping my eyes out and puffing up my cheeks before I took a chance and added, “I thought big ears were supposed to be the sign of a generous nature.”

  The photographer laughed then, seeming relieved that I’d turned his job back into a silly game, and said, “Oh, what the hell, get in there with your sister.” He waved me back into the frame. “In times like these a little silliness is worth a lot.”

  I stood in front of my sister and she rested her hand on my shoulder. I knew I looked even more like a guppy than I usually did as I grinned into the photographer’s camera, but I couldn’t help myself from smiling so wide that my cheeks ached, because I had done it: I was with Hatsuko and the Princess Lily girls in Shuri.

  TWENTY-ONE

  “Oh, we are in-country now, motherfuckers,” Kirby says.

  Me, Jacey, Wynn, and DaQuane are following Kernshaw through a wooded ravine on the edge of base housing. The Apes are out in force, patrolling the streets, looking for curfew breakers to bust, so we’re sticking to the overgrown ravine that runs behind the neighborhoods. The jungly undergrowth is slick and has a squishy, tropical smell. It is alive with trip wires of vine and sticky nets of spiderweb. I’m hanging back with Jacey, who’s wearing strappy sandals and having trouble picking her way over the roots that run through the ravine like veins on the back of a man’s hand. Up ahead the guys are talking about Jake.

  “Why’s he gotta be that way?” DaQuane asks. “It’s not like anything would ever happen to him even if we did get caught.”

  “Shit, no,” Kirby agrees. “As long as generals like to play golf and his family keeps the course looking like fucking Pimlico, he is untouchable.”

  “Pimlico is a horse racing track, turd munch,” Wynn points out.

  “Okay, but that other one? Where they wear the green jackets and shit. That’s why the Furusatos are royalty on Kadena. Jeez, they live in base housing, right? Go to base schools? Get to shop at the commissary? You cannot tell me that they are not majorly connected.”

  “They have to be,” Wynn agrees. “They’re probably the reason that angry mobs aren’t protesting about so much prime real estate being used so American generals can knock white balls around with a stick.”

  “Don’t get me wrong; I love the guy—”

  “Except when he goes off on his Oki shit.”

  “Except when he goes off on the Oki shit. Precisely.”

  Jacey and I hang back, letting the guys drift out of earshot. “Look,” she whispers, and I follow her finger to a dense grove of low-lying vegetation. It sparkles with fireflies. “Wow, I can’t remember the last time I saw fireflies.”

  “Me neither. When Codie and I used to go stay with our grandma in Missouri, they were everywhere. Codie loved fireflies. We’d catch them in jars outside Grandma’s house and light up entire rooms with them bright enough to read by.”

  As we watch the enchanted circuitry blinking on and off, it takes me a minute to realize that I’ve just spoken Codie’s name out loud. And talked about her in the past tense.

  “Luz?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m really sorry about your sister.”

  I nod, tamping down the little flare of anger that blazes up anytime anyone says something terminally lame like that, something about being sorry.

  Jacey heads up the path, but I remain rooted to the spot. She pauses. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, sure.”

  She holds a branch out of the way and waits for me. I stoop under; she’s nice. She’s just a nice person who said the wrong thing because there is no right thing to say. There never will be. We rush to catch up to the guys.

  The ravine trail ends at the USO parking lot on the edge of junior officer housing. Kirby points to the house nearest to us. The number 2283 is stenciled in black letters on the front. “That’s it.”

  The boxy white cinder-block house is indistinguishable from all the other boxy white cinder-block houses around it. Except that the other houses each have a nameplate with the last name and rank of the soldier assigned to the house, and there is no name attached to number 2283.

  “Really?” Jacey asks. “That’s it? That’s Murder House? It just looks like your average dumpy base house.”

  “What were you expecting?” Kirby snaps. “All kind of haunted-house shit? Bats flying out the windows and a hunchback with a limp answering the door? It’s a freakin’ base house, dude. Jeez.”

  “Sorry,” Jacey apologizes.

  In the thin drizzle of violet illumination cast by the streetlight half a block away, number
2283 does feel haunted in its own way. It appears smaller, more compact than the other houses. As if those other houses have expanded to hold the lives within them, but this one, isolated at the edge, though exactly the same size, seems smaller, shrunken. Like it was standing off by itself, holding a grudge.

  “Is anyone living here?” Jacey asks.

  “Not for years,” Kirby answers with a new authority in his voice. “The air force stopped assigning families to it a long time ago.”

  DQ bobs his head from side to side, only glancing at the house out of the corner of his eye, the way you don’t look directly at a growling dog. “So it’s all locked up? What? We gonna break a window? Destruction of government property. That is a federal offense. Leavenworth, man.”

  Kirby grins and dangles a key on a string hanging from a metal-ringed tag with the number 2283 written on it in black Sharpie.

  “How the hell you got a key?”

  “When you clear base, just take a second and check out the name on your inspection sheet.”

  “Your dad runs Inspection?” Wynn asks with appropriate deference.

  Like his superpower has been revealed, Kirby nods in modest acknowledgment. We have all felt the lash of Inspection, the corps of anal-retentives who swarm over your quarters when you move out, making certain that your family isn’t trying to pull a fast one on them with old tricks like not cleaning the dusty air vents or spackling over your nail holes with toothpaste. Everything has to meet the housing inspector’s standards or your transfer will get held up.

  “Why is it called Murder House?” I ask.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Usually the reason someone asks ‘why,’ isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, Luz. Maybe you’re working undercover for your mom. Undercovers ask a lot of random questions.”

  “That’s it, Kirby. You got me. I’m wired up the yin-yang. Here.” I stretch out the neck of my T-shirt toward him. “Speak into this.”

  “Way I heard it,” DQ starts in, “some captain choked out his wife when he caught his best friend nailing her. Who was also, like, the navigator in the crew he was on.”

  “That sucks a bag of dicks,” Wynn sympathizes.

  “Not the story I heard,” Kirby argues. “I heard that the wife wasted the captain because she caught him. With the navigator!”

  “Dude!”

  “You’re both wrong,” Jacey says, her voice a low rumble that slices through the monkey chatter. “It was a fourteen-year-old girl. Back in the early sixties. Her stepfather was …” We all wait for her to continue. Something in her tone, her intensity, makes me stop breathing. “… interfering with her.”

  DQ’s brow crinkles, the old-fashioned word has confused him.

  “She threatened to tell, and he choked her to death.”

  Wynn and DQ start asking all kinds of stupid CSI questions about whether they had the “forensic capabilities” back then to conduct a proper investigation. Through the whole boneheaded discussion Kirby, for a change, doesn’t say a single word; he just watches Jacey. When Wynn and DQ start going off about JonBenét Ramsey, Kirby steps over next to Jacey and says, “Jerkwads, shut the fuck up. Jesus.”

  They are silent for a moment; then Wynn asks, “So why is this place supposed to be haunted?”

  Kirby answers, “Whole bunch of weird shit. Water faucets and lights turning off and on by themselves. Bloodstains on the curtains and floors that wouldn’t wash out. Candles blowing themselves out in closed-up rooms. Children crying in rooms no one was in. Just weird, freaky shit. The next family they moved in told base housing they couldn’t live there. Obviously, BH don’t give a shit. Refused to move them. Whole family bugged so bad that they made their dad take the first transfer available. They ended up PCSing to Armpit.”

  “Harsh.”

  Armpit is slang for Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska. Not a dream assignment.

  “After them, it got really interesting. The next family saw an Okinawan woman dressed like an old-timey princess washing her hair in the laundry room sink. And a samurai warrior dude with the winged helmet and everything, riding a horse through the living room.”

  “What does that have to do with the girl?” DQ asks.

  “Everything. Her getting murdered was such a major release of negative spirit energy that it opened up a sort of wormhole there for all the forces of evil to enter and—”

  “God, Kernshaw,” Wynn interrupts, “would you please stop talking out of your ass. Jake already told us the whole story. The house was built on an Okinawan family tomb. After the war, they came in and bulldozed this site where ten generations were resting.”

  “Oh, wow, like in Polter Guys, where the house was built on an ancient Indian burial ground.”

  “That was a hella scary movie.”

  “Yeah, that part when Jack Nickels hacks through the door with an ax and goes, ‘Here’s Jack!’ ”

  “No, dumb ass, that was that other one. The one that had the lady from Popeye in it.”

  The chatter rises to such howler-monkey levels that I have to say, “Okay, you morons are going to have to shut up now. Your stupidity is physically hurting me. Kirby, you going in?”

  “Me? Why me?”

  “Uh, because you’re the one with the key.”

  “Second wave. I’ll go in with the second wave.”

  “What if the first wave never comes out?” DQ asks.

  “Wynn?” Kirby holds the key up, jiggles it at Wynn. “YOLO, bro.”

  Wynn shakes his head. “Hey, I’m with Jake on the whole desecration deal.”

  DQ swats Wynn. “You’re a pussy. Big tough cowboy. You’re a scared little pussy boy.”

  Wynn swats back, which starts a whole slapping, fake punching war. While they’re occupied determining who the bigger pussy is, I pull Jacey aside and whisper, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Sure. Of course.”

  “Did Kirby put anything in the Cuervo?”

  She doesn’t hesitate before shaking her head. “No, if he’d actually had anything he would have pulled it out when I said I was leaving. I mean, he’s seriously into me.”

  She’s right. Kirby wouldn’t have been cooking an egg with a flashlight if he’d had exotic designer drugs to impress Jacey with. “So there wasn’t anything in the Cuervo?”

  “No. But don’t stress. About the way you were? You know, after the cave and all?”

  I look away, praying that Jace gets the message that I don’t want to talk about this anymore. She doesn’t.

  “Don’t feel bad, okay? This one time? Back at my friend’s when we were stationed at Lackland? We were like eleven or something. Her brother gave her a joint and we both got so high, we were laughing our asses off. Had the monster munchies. Everything. Then her brother tells us it was oregano and grass clippings. But, I swear, I was super, super high. So, you know, it happens. You think you’re doing some shit and your mind plays tricks on you. It’s no biggie.”

  Even though Jacey can’t see me, I nod, not knowing what to say as I consider the possibility that it all really happened. The instant that I allow the image of the girl in the cave into my thoughts, the fireflies either reappear or I just notice them again. Either way, it’s like someone has turned the intensity all the way up. The dots of light brighten to diamond pinpoints.

  I grab the key out of Kirby’s hand. “I’ll go.”

  “Luz,” Jacey says, “are you sure?”

  I shrug. “YOLO, right?”

  Jacey turns so that only I can hear her. “I don’t think you should be the one to go. Not after—”

  “That’s why I have to go.” I take the flashlight from Kirby.

  “Wow, you see that?” DQ asks, holding his palms up. “It started raining right when she said she was going in.”

  “Rain?” Wynn asks, holding his palms up to the drizzle. “This is like extra high humidity. Mist at the most.”

  “Whatever.”

  I take the key and walk alone
across the parking lot to the place where the dead communicate with the living, and the question I’ve tried so hard to tamp down, the one only Codie can answer, bullies its way into my head. I shove it down and glance back. The group is now mostly hidden in the woods around the lot, right on the edge of the area illuminated by the security light. The mist makes them look fuzzy and washed-out, like a fading photo of people I used to know a long time ago from another assignment, another base.

  I turn back to the house and am nearly to the door when Jacey scampers up beside me. “I’m going in with you.”

  “Jace, really, you don’t have to.”

  “I know, but you’d do it for me.”

  As I try to open the back door, first Kirby, who squeezes in next to Jace, then DQ and Wynn arguing about who’s the pussy now, join us. A patrol car passes. Its spotlight rakes the yard, and everyone presses into the shadows as the car passes.

  “Hurry up, Luz,” DQ hisses as I fumble in the dark. “He’s turning around. He’s turning around! He’ll see us when he comes back this way.”

  “Oh, fuck,” Wynn whispers. “My dad is gonna have my ass.”

  “Your dad,” Kirby says. “Mine’ll lose his job.”

  We all shove in the door the instant I get it open. A second later, stripes of high-intensity illumination from the patrol car’s headlights slash across the empty back porch and slice in under the blinds.

  Everyone freezes. The closed-up house is pitch dark and hot as an oven. It smells like an empty base house, like dust and Pine-Sol, but it feels different from any other empty base house I’ve ever set foot in. It feels inhabited.

  “Kirby,” DQ hisses, “turn the fucking flashlight on.”

  “No! We have to be sure they’re gone.”

  Codie?

  I wish I was alone. In the darkness, while the others make nervous jokes, I try to conjure my big sister by bringing to mind the way she looked on the day of her graduation from Basic. She was a recruitment poster in her pale blue blouse with brand-new chevrons on either shoulder. Her hair was braided tight against her head and tucked under her dark blue cap. A LEGO block of colored medals and awards was pinned ruler-straight across her chest, right above her heart. She was so proud. I wish I had been proud too, instead of angry and bewildered and jealous of my mom and the air force for taking her away from me. I wish I’d known that my anger was a luxury that I squandered too much of the time we had left on.