Above the East China Sea: A novel

by Sarah Bird

  Always embarrassed by the gap between her front teeth, my grandmother hides most of her smile with a hand in front of her mouth. Still, the corners of her lips show on either side of her hand. They’re painted with a lipstick so pale they seem white. She could have been Elvis Presley’s girlfriend instead of Eugene Overholt’s. That’s the grandmother I see in my dream, who lifts up a curly, unstraightened section of Codie’s hair, lowers her head into the unruly curls, and kisses my sister’s wavy hair as if each strand were a beautiful flower with a heavenly scent.

  “When are you coming back?” I ask my sister, eager to work out the details so that she can return.

  Before Codie can answer, brown water splashes against my ankles and the taste of caramelized sugar fills my mouth. In that instant information way that dreams have, I know that the droplets come from bullets being shot into the puddle of mud at my feet. I know that my sister and I are being hunted and we have to find safety before the planes come again. I grab her hand and pull her along. But no matter how fast we run, the bullets stitching a deadly seam in the earth follow right behind us. The seam fills with blood, but I know that if I can only hang on to my sister until the bullets make ten thousand red stitches, we will be saved. We run harder, but the dirt turns to mud that sucks away our frantic strides until we’re not moving at all.

  I drag my sister forward and then I shelter her body under mine when a thousand dragonflies attack us like angry wasps. When I rise up, however, all I find beneath myself is an amputated leg. I remember that my sister is dead, until she calls to me from another room in an empty house stacked with boxes. I can’t tell whether we’re moving in or out. I search for Codie, but one room leads to another in an endless warren. Finally, I look up and see her. She is outside on the vast lawn, exposed; the planes will come and she will be killed, and it will be my fault. I was supposed to take care of her; I promised our mother. Frozen in place, I call to her, but no sound comes from my screaming mouth. My sister twirls slowly beneath a rain of crimson blossoms, trampling the flowers at her feet into a red stain, her hair a rippling curtain swirling around her.

  Maybe I stopped sleeping because I hated to wake up crying. I thought that the worst mornings were the ones when I was certain that I’d been able to convince Codie not to go and she never enlisted and we were together again. On those mornings, for three seconds after I opened my eyes, Codie would be there, absolutely there. The fourth or fifth second, though, was worse than when the chaplains came, because I’d be crashing straight down from the dream happiness. This, though—waking up in Jake’s sun-blasted guest room being stared at by dolls with bugged-out alien eyes, certain that my sister is about to be killed and I have to save her and I don’t know how—this is worse.

  THIRTY

  I’m in the kitchen when Jake comes in from guiding another group of pilgrims to the shrine. An older gentleman in a white guayabera shirt is with him.

  “Luz, meet Shingo-san.”

  We exchange bows as Jake explains, “He’s agreed to stay here to help any other villagers who come so that I can take you to the appointment with the yuta.”

  “You already made an appointment for me?”

  My surprise surprises Jake. “I said I would.”

  “But won’t your family be upset? Didn’t they leave you in charge?”

  “They did, and this is what I’m deciding to do. We gotta book, or we’ll be late.”

  Outside, as we walk to the car, I see that what I’d thought was your average tribal tattoo encircling his right biceps turns out to be a linked series of what look like Chinese throwing stars. The black ink looks so good against his tan skin that I touch one of the circular symbols. Trying to hide how much I just wanted to touch his skin, I ask what the symbol means.

  We stop next to the car, the metal warm against my back as Jake studies the tattoo, his finger rubbing against mine where we’re both touching it. “It’s the hidari-gomon. It used to be the royal crest of the Ryukyu Kingdom.” He’s so close, I can feel his breath against my cheek. My heart thuds. His other hand rises. I think he’s going to kiss me. Instead he holds the keys between us and asks, “Can you drive? I’m trashed from no sleep.”

  “Jake, you can just tell me where the appointment is. You don’t have to come with me. I’ll figure something out. You don’t have to go to all this trouble, leaving the course and everything.”

  “Actually, yeah, I do. The kami put it in my heart that I have to help you.”

  “They did?”

  “Yeah, when we were at the shrine. Also, I have to go because the yuta doesn’t speak English.” As he heads for the passenger door, Jake adds, “Mostly, though, I’ll be punished if I don’t do what the kami want.” He says it in such a matter-of-fact way, like he’s just told me that gravity will make a person fall down and bump his ass, that it ends the conversation, and we get in the Surfmobile.

  Even without the surfboards that he usually keeps hidden under the blue tarp in the back, the car smells like seawater and board wax. I start up the engine. “Which way?”

  “The A&W south on 58.”

  “Like the root-beer stand? This yuta person is meeting me at an A&W?”

  “That’s what she said.”

  Jake is asleep before I can ask whether that’s weird.

  I drive at fifteen miles per hour through the wide streets lined with sprawling green lawns. The housing area slips past in slow motion, like I’m on a train gradually leaving a station that I will never return to. Sprinklers click through their orderly arcs, throwing water onto the ruler-straight yards. A pack of boys riding BMX bikes stand on the pedals and lean forward into their adventures. An elderly Okinawan lady, most of her face covered by the scarf tying a broad-brimmed hat to her head, pushes an ancient lawn mower up a steep hill. In a playground, little boys in baggy shorts, their noses peeling from sunburns, ignore the swings and jungle gym to jump out of the cockpit of the husk of an old fighter jet that is the centerpiece of the area.

  The hot, humid wind blowing in the station wagon’s open windows lifts the hair off my neck. I zone out, and images from last night’s dreams fill my head. I don’t understand why Codie and I were running from planes strafing the earth behind us. Or what the amputated leg was about. Or why those dreams felt so real, as if they’d happened to us, when the only memory I’m certain is an actual memory is the one where my grandmother buries her nose in Codie’s curls, because she really did used to do that. With both of us. She’d smell our clouds of curly hair as if each strand were a beautiful flower. As if we, her granddaughters, were the loveliest beings ever born. That feeling, of being adored, was what Codie and I got from Anmā and no one else.

  We leave through Gate Two. When we pass through that opening in the miles of chain-link fence encircling Kadena Air Base, we go from a world where the rules are black-and-white into claustrophobic chaos, and all I have time to think about is driving. I’ve had so little opportunity to get behind the wheel on Okinawa that when I pull out into Okinawan traffic and an armada of tiny clown cars hurtles directly at me, the stomach-dropping wrongness of driving on the left side hits me with full force.

  On the off-base side of the fence, a line of Okinawan protesters wearing white headbands and carrying signs marches back and forth. Most of the signs are in red characters. A few are in English. “NO U.S. BASE!!” “WW2 OVER IN 1945!!” “WHAT IF OKINAWA OCCUPY ONE-FIFTH OF US?!?!” A bullhorn crackles and one of the protesters yells at us in Japanese.

  I hear a crinkling coming from the back of the car. In the rearview mirror I catch a glimpse of Kirby emerging from beneath the blue tarp. Hair spiked up on one side where he slept on it, Kirby gapes at the protesters and comments, “Dudes, you lost the war. Deal with it.”

  Jake sits up, going directly from sleep to fully awake. Apparently used to Kirby appearing without warning in the back of his car, he says, “You did not seriously just say that.”

  “What? That you all lost the war? Truth hurts, brah.”<
br />
  “Kirby, we’ve been over this before, remember? Okinawa was essentially a colony of Japan.”

  “So you keep saying, but colonists can kill them some motherfuckers too. Ask Benjamin Franklin. He fried some redcoat ass with electricity.”

  Jake catches my eye and we exchange indulgent smiles, like we’re taking our developmentally delayed cousin out for the day.

  “Look at that, boy-san.” Kirby points to the businesses lining the streets outside the base: tattoo parlors, bars, strip clubs, restaurants with giant cheeseburgers and tacos painted on them, clothing stores selling oversize gangsta clothes, and clubs blasting aggressive hip-hop with bitches-hoes-suck-coochie-cock lyrics. “Bet them dudes is happy we’re here. All those places’d be belly-up tomorrow if the bases closed. Okinawa’s economy would totally tank.”

  “Yeah, Kernshaw, what a blow it would be to lose all those high-paying stripper and tattoo artist jobs. To say nothing of the great BX cashier, gate guard, and lawn boy positions.”

  “Hey, Furusato, glass houses, dude. You and your family haven’t done too bad sucking off the teat of the USAF.”

  Jake just shakes his head, but I say, “Lucky Charms, you don’t know what you’re talking about. You really don’t.”

  Kirby, distractible as a lemur, rolls his head from side to side, wings his right arm out, stretches his shoulder. “When are you going to get some foam back up in here?”

  “Sorry if the accommodations aren’t up to your standards, m’lord.”

  “Inflatable mattress, that’s what you need.”

  “Not getting too shit-faced to make it home to your own bed’s what you need.”

  “Naw, I like it back here. Like camping, but you don’t got to wipe your ass with leaves.”

  “Kirbs.” Jake laughs, his irritation gone. “You are so worth the price of admission.”

  “So, where are we going this fine day at hungry thirty?”

  “ ‘We’?”

  “Why? What? This a date? That it? You two on a date?”

  “No,” Jake and I answer together.

  “Did you officially break up with Christy?”

  “Kernshaw. Shut up.”

  “What? You’ve only been talking about it since, like, sophomore year or something.”

  “Seriously. Shut. Up.”

  “Well, if it’s not a date, then I can come, right?”

  “No, you can’t come,” Jake answers.

  I spot the orange-and-brown oval A&W sign and flip on the turn signal.

  “A and Dubs! Oh, hells, yes! I’m so hungry I could eat a gas station hot dog. I’ma get me one of them Melty Riches. Drive this piece of shit like you stole it, girl.”

  “You’re not sitting with us,” Jake warns.

  “Wouldn’t if you begged me, bro-bro.”

  I pull into the parking lot of one of the many A&Ws on the island. Almost vanished from its American homeland, the classic fifties franchise is inexplicably popular on Okinawa. In the drive-in section, an Okinawan carhop in an orange polo and orange-and-brown-striped skirt, the ponytail of her black hair squirting from the back of an orange ball cap, hurries out with a silver tray. I park in the lot near a mechanical, potbellied bear wearing an orange tam, licking his chops with an orange tongue, and waving a happy welcome.

  “You got a shirt back here, brah?” Kirby asks, plucking his tank top away from his spindly chest. “I’m all gym locker up in here.”

  “You left one back there somewhere after your last sleepover.”

  “Coo. Meet you inside.”

  The restaurant is loud with Japanese pop music, the clatter and beep of food prep machines, the happy chatter of customers. Covies of schoolgirls in sailor blouses and tiny white ankle socks lean over tables, gossiping and slurping frothy drinks. Mothers sit on benches outside and watch their children crawl through the giant hamster tubes of the orange play structure. A cluster of old men in guayaberas occupies a booth in the back, sipping coffee, passing judgment on the scene, nodding and laughing at one another’s comments.

  “How are we supposed to find her?”

  “She said she’d find us.”

  Just as we slide into a booth by the big windows facing onto the parking lot, Jake’s phone rings. He checks the number, jumps to his feet. I assume it’s Christy. “I’d better …” He points outside as he answers while walking out the door. Kirby, buttoning his shirt, passes Jake on his way in. Guessing who Jake’s talking to, Kirby pokes him with an accusing finger until Jake karate-chops him with his free hand. Kirby comes in, his shirt buttoned wrong, one side hanging down half a foot more than the other, and slides in across from me. “So, are you and Jake together?”

  “ ‘Together’? What’s that even mean?”

  “It means his girlfriend is ripping him a new one right now because someone probably saw you two together and called her.”

  “No reason for that.”

  “Really? So Jake wouldn’t kick my ass if I hit on you?”

  “I’d kick your ass if you hit on me.”

  “Harsh, Caboose, very, very harsh.”

  “What did you just call me?”

  “Caboose? Cabooskie? That was your nickname, right?”

  “Yeah, but no one ever called me that except—”

  “Your sister. I know.” He stares at me, realizes something, and explodes, “Fuck, no! You really don’t remember. All this time I thought you were just being cool.”

  “Cool? What was I being cool about?”

  “If you don’t remember, forget it.”

  “No, tell me. You knew Codie?”

  “God, you really don’t remember.” He shrugs. “You were pretty young.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Jeez, this is embarrassing.”

  “Isn’t embarrassing your specialty?”

  “Okay, remember the Sheppard NCO pool?”

  “Yeah, but I was like nine or ten when we lived on Sheppard. Oh, no. Now I remember. That was you? You were such a shrimp. How did you get so tall?” And then all the details of the incident he doesn’t want me to recall come back and I explode. “Yes! That was you! That was totally you!”

  “God, Luz, I was a kid. I didn’t know what I was doing.”

  “What didn’t you know you were doing?” Jake asks as he slides into the booth next to me.

  “He showed my sister his wiener at the pool on Sheppard.”

  “Get. Out.”

  “I didn’t make her touch it or anything.”

  “Yeah,” Jake says. “Probably because she couldn’t find it. Thought you dropped a Hot Tamale in your swimsuit.”

  Maybe it’s because Kirby is such a complete goober that talking to him is like talking to a big, slobbering, but ultimately lovable dog. Or maybe it’s just such a thrill to meet someone who knew Codie that, like with Jacey, talking about her, thinking about her doesn’t hurt. “Codie sort of actually liked you.”

  “She did? Now you tell me.” Kirby shakes his head. “Codie James. Jesus, she was like my sexual awakening. She was like this perfect anime warrior princess. Badass but so cute.”

  I grin; it’s the perfect description.

  “I used to come out of the pool all pruned up and shivering, and I’d lie on my stomach on the hot cement and put a towel over my head and watch her just being so cute that I kind of wanted to squeeze her to death. Just aaarrrr. She kicked my ass after I … You know.”

  “Say it, perv,” Jake interjects. “Exposed yourself to her.”

  Kirby slugs Jake on the biceps. Hard.

  “Yeah, she told me.” I smile at the memory of Codie going krav maga on the skinny white boy. “Also told me that the carpet matched the drapes.”

  “There wasn’t any carpet! I was a kid.”

  “I was messing with you. She never said that.”

  “She scared the shit out of me. Said what I did was a federal offense, since it happened on federal property, and I’d go to Leavenworth if she told your mom.”

  “N
o! She never told me that. That’s good.”

  “She was such a badass. She was killer with all those Oriental martial arts. I could totally see her enlisting.”

  The happy-memory vibe screeches to a halt. He hadn’t known Codie at all. “Really? Because I couldn’t. I never could.” My tone is so weird and intense that no one says anything after that. We pull menus out of the holder and study them until a waitress approaches and asks, “You look yuta?”

  “Yuta, yes. Hai!” I answer eagerly.

  She holds a tray with a mug of root beer and burger off-greasing onto wrapping printed in Japanese with the words “Melty,” “Chubby,” and “Lite” sprinkled around, points me to the private meeting room down a short hall, and says something in Japanese to Jake.

  “She’s waiting for you back there,” Jake translates, giving the girl some bills and taking the tray. “We’re supposed to bring this to her.”

  “I’ll pay you back.”

  “Don’t worry,” Jake says as we leave Kirby at the booth ordering half the menu. “It’s good karma.”

  “Okinawans have karma, too?”

  “Everyone has karma.”

  The back room is deserted except for a grandmotherly lady, sitting with her hands folded in front of her, at a booth covered in orange Formica. The yuta has short, frizzy hair and is wearing glasses so enormous they cover half her face and magnify her round cheeks and the pouches beneath her hooded eyes. When she spots us, she waves for us to come over, then turns her entire attention to the order that Jake slides in front of her, peeling the top bun aside to check the toppings on her burger. The pineapple, onions, cheese, and bacon meet with her approval. She takes a bite as she motions for us to sit. As we do, she leans forward, grabs the straw poking from her root beer, presses her lips together in a prim seam, and pipelines half the mug down while staring intently at me. Not that I necessarily would have liked a séance atmosphere with incense burning, but the overhead fluorescent lights, poppy music, and the yuta’s obvious fondness for all-you-can-drink root beer in a frosted mug don’t build my confidence that she will be any help at all.