Ransom

by Jay McInerney

  The first person Ransom picked out of the crowd was the narc sitting near the door. Shades, Berkeley sweatshirt and beads. The obvious wig. He smiled when he saw Ransom and snapped his fingers. “Be crazy,” he said.

  “Rock out, baby,” Ransom said.

  “Right on.” The narc held out his palm and Ransom slapped him five, wondering if there were a special school where these cops were trained, and if so who were the teachers. Buffalo Rome had yet to host a single bust, not that it lacked for drugs; only the mentally impaired could mistake a Kyoto narc for a real person. All this was amusing until you considered the fate of someone busted by sheer luck. The Japanese took dope very seriously, reportedly to the point of beating prisoners on the feet, withholding food for days, interrogating round the clock. Ransom had avoided drugs for some time, so it didn’t much concern him now, although thinking about it always made him nervous, reminded him of casualties.

  Ransom generally felt slightly tainted after a night at Buffalo Rome. He stayed away for weeks at a time, then went in three or four nights running. That his friend Miles Ryder was co-owner was among the reasons he found for squandering his time and money there. He saw Miles’s Stetson above the heads at the bar. As always, returning after a fair absence, Ransom had the impression of great space; the bar was huge by Japanese standards—nearly the size of an indoor tennis court, with a high cathedral ceiling. Before Ryder and his silent partner had turned it into an absurdly profitable watering hole, this had been a sake warehouse. They had set up a bar at one end, a stage at the other and wire spool tables in between.

  Miles was talking to a blonde in a white dhoti, and made an elaborate show of greeting Ransom.

  “Sensei. We are honored to have you with us. What news from the front?”

  “Are you a teacher?” the girl asked. A gold ring decorated one side of her nose. “Sensei is teacher, right? I did a little studying on the boat from Pusan.”

  “Right you are,” Miles said, “but that’s just the beginning. It’s a high honorific for which we English speakers have no true equivalent. It means master, doctor, honcho. I bestow it on our friend Ransom, because he is an inspiration to us all, gaijin and Japanese alike.”

  The girl studied Ransom with interest. “What are you doing here?” she asked.

  “I hope to slake a mild thirst and an inexplicable urge for company.”

  “I mean in Japan.”

  “Ransom is in training for the afterlife,” Ryder said. “He is a nonviolent samurai warrior who hopes to qualify as a bodhisattva.”

  “My boyfriend’s back from the bathroom,” she said. “I guess I better go see if he’s okay. He’s had amoebic dysentery ever since Lahore. See you guys later.”

  “What are you drinking?” Miles asked, bowing extravagantly to Ransom.

  “Tea.”

  “On the wagon?”

  “Neither on nor off a wagon,” Ransom said, irritated. “I just don’t drink anymore.”

  “The people who saw you last Saturday night will be relieved to hear it.”

  Ransom had quit tobacco and alcohol when he took up karate, with only occasional backsliding in both departments, Saturday night, for instance, involving two Aussie merchant marines and one bottle of absinthe. Some of his most precipitous backsliding involved absinthe. He had thought this beverage the casualty of changing tastes and law, the downfall of French Symbolist poets as well as the source of their twisted visions; but in Japan it was still legal. Naturally, he investigated.

  As Miles ducked behind the bar, strains of amplified guitar began to rise through the crowd noise. On the stage, Kano was hunched over the neck of his Gibson, fingering the tuning posts. Ransom smiled. Mitsuhashi thumped the pedal of the bass drum, which bore the roman letters MOJO DOMO. Up front, people were making encouraging noises in English, broken English and rehearsed black dialect. Play those blues. Get funky. Get down. The band had a hard-core following, both gaijin and Japanese, and regarded the blues as a spiritual orientation—for them the spirit born in red delta clay out of the souls of black ex-slaves was universal and redemptive. Their Mecca was Chicago. Mojo Domo hoped someday to make a pilgrimage in veneration of the masters—Muddy Waters, Howlin’ Wolf, Willie Dixon, Elmore James. Meanwhile, they were fiendish collectors of old Chess and Vee Jay recordings and devoted servants of Muddy Waters, for whom the band had once opened a set in Osaka during his last Japanese tour. Kano breathed his name with a mixture of reverence and chumminess, although Ransom felt that Kano disapproved of Muddy’s longevity; Sonny Boy Williamson and Robert Johnson were, in dying young, perfectly immortal. Mojo Domo had been offered recording contracts backing up Japanese pop stars but they refused. They only played blues. Ransom thought them admirable, if faintly comic.

  He took a seat at the bar and ordered a cup of tea. A tall, ethereal-looking American he knew only as Eric appeared beside him.

  “How’s the karate?”

  Ransom shrugged.

  “You really ought to try aikido,” he said. “No offense, but I mean, karate is so violent. In aikido you learn how to overcome through yielding. It’s like that game kids do, what do they call it, Paper, Scissors, Rock. Rock dulls the scissors, but paper covers rock.”

  “You left out the part about the scissors cutting the paper,” Ransom said.

  Eric assumed an expression at once indulgent and triumphant. “Even in conversation you’re aggressive, combative, unyielding.”

  “You should hear me talk to myself. It’s brutal.”

  Eric ordered a beer and attempted to explain how Ransom could get in touch with his ki, the life force, the whole ball of wax. Listening to Eric, Ransom decided that one of the things he liked about the Japanese was their distrust of loquaciousness, their suspicion of language itself, although he wasn’t sure what was left if you dispensed with it.

  Eric buzzed on and Ransom considered the hollowness of expatriate communities. The individuals might be interesting enough, but they had in common only what they had already left behind. Having exhausted the subject of ki, Eric said goodbye and shuffled off when Miles drifted back.

  “DeVito’s acting up tonight,” Miles said. Ransom followed his gaze to a table where two gaijin were arm wrestling, one of them sporting a samurai haircut. This was DeVito. “I may need you to help me beat him senseless.”

  “DeVito’s already senseless.”

  “You think you could take him?”

  Ransom shrugged. “It’s not something I’ve given any thought to. I don’t fight outside the dojo.”

  “What good are fighting skills if you can’t thrash scum like DeVito? What are you supposed to do if someone picks a fight with you?”

  “The sensei says the best defense is two feet.”

  “Kicking ass, right and left. I rest my case.”

  “Not quite. You run away.”

  “This took you two years to learn?” Ryder’s eyes registered a new point of interest. Ransom turned to look. Marilyn was just inside the door, looking around.

  “What’s she waiting for?” Ransom said. “A drum roll?”

  Ryder waved her over. She didn’t move in the tentative and pigeon-toed manner of Japanese women. It seemed to Ransom that she didn’t walk like any Asian women he had ever seen. He supposed that she had adopted this bold Western stride in her native Saigon, back when it was an American outpost. Ransom had met her here last Saturday. Ryder, who had met her at the same time, was already infatuated. She was a refugee from Vietnam, she explained, and her real name was Mey-Van. She was a singer in a Kyoto nightclub, where her manager billed her as Marilyn, which, although virtually unpronounceable for the Japanese, had a shamanistic power because of its former attachment to Monroe-san. Marilyn herself much preferred it to Mey-Van.

  She and Miles kissed. Ransom stood up.

  “Hello, Ransom-san.” She looked him over and turned to Ryder. “His breeding is wonderful. It wouldn’t occur to you to stand up when a woman enters the room, but Ransom does it in a bar
for a woman he doesn’t even like.”

  Ransom was surprised all over again by the quality of her English. Certainly none of his Japanese students could rival Marilyn, even if he worked with them for years. To him her slight accent seemed vaguely French.

  “Ransom likes you just fine,” Miles said. “Don’t you?”

  “Who could resist Marilyn’s charm?”

  The bartender called Miles to the phone. “Keep an eye on my baby,” he said to Ransom. Marilyn pulled a cigarette from her purse and hunted for a light. “The only defect in your manners, Ransom, is that you never light a girl’s cigarette. But you don’t approve of smoking, do you?”

  “I gave it up myself.”

  “And you don’t drink?”

  “Not much anymore.”

  “Bit of a bore, aren’t you?” She took his hand and fingered the callused knuckles. “Karate.” She flipped the hand over and spread the palm open on her knee, as if to read his fortune. “Kara—empty. Te—hand. Empty-handed Ransom. Is that it? You give up everything for your quest.” She leaned close and whispered, “How about girls? Have you given up girls, too?”

  “Some girls I have given up in advance,” Ransom said.

  Marilyn finally produced a lighter and lit her cigarette.

  “You know, I asked Miles if you were running from some terrible secret. He says there is no warrant for your arrest he knows about, no pregnant girlfriend. What is this mysterious problem? You can tell Marilyn.” She smiled coquettishly.

  “Original sin. I’m Catholic—born and raised guilty.”

  “I was raised Catholic, too.”

  “In Vietnam?”

  “Yes. Where else?”

  “That would make you French Catholic, basically. French Catholicism is different. The French are only in it for the art. Cathedrals, paintings, gold chalices. Pomp plus bread and wine. It’s a wonder they haven’t added cheese to the service. Nothing like the Irish or the Spaniards, who are in it strictly for the self-abuse.”

  “Which are you?”

  “My mother was Irish Catholic.”

  “Is she religious?”

  “She’s dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Happened quite a while ago,” Ransom said.

  “And you? Still a Catholic?”

  “Not practicing. But it’s not necessarily something you can shake.”

  Miles reappeared. “What can’t you shake?”

  “Those old lonesome blues,” Ransom said. “Who was on the phone—your wife?”

  “What are you, my mother?”

  “That’s what you have against me, isn’t it?” Marilyn said.

  Frank DeVito strutted up to the bar, pointedly leering at Marilyn, bringing eyebrows and tongue into play. She stared back belligerently and Miles glowered. Something ugly verged on happening until DeVito turned slowly away and moved to an opening several stools down.

  Frank DeVito, ex-Marine and current Bruce Lee clone. Enlisting with the fervent desire to see combat, he got out of basic after they stopped sending Marines to Vietnam. Posted to Okinawa, he acquired a taste for the martial arts and, eventually, a dishonorable discharge, the cause of which was variously attributed to drug trafficking, assault on an officer, assault on an Okinawan schoolgirl. From what he knew of DeVito, Ransom thought assault more likely than drugs, and the schoolgirl more likely than the officer. The rumor was that, despite the discharge, DeVito had wangled a disability pension for an alleged back injury and was thus able to devote his time solely to training. Shortly before Ransom landed, DeVito had come to Kyoto to study at the dojo of a maverick sensei of dubious standing in the karate world who made movies starring himself and who demonstrated his skills by killing oxen barehanded. His disciples, among whom DeVito was prominent, were required to take a blood oath of allegiance and secrecy. DeVito, who modelled his appearance on the old samurai, was embarrassingly eager to please Ransom whenever he didn’t choose instead to insult him, his dojo, his sensei and his mother. Ransom was consistent in his dislike of DeVito, who reminded him of grade school misfits who gave you all their toys one day and beat you up the next. His only achievement, in Ransom’s view, was his exceptionally fluent Japanese.

  “I’m going to boot him out of here,” Ryder said, after he had walked away.

  “Don’t,” Ransom said. “It will be a mess if you do. He just wants the attention.”

  “I hate that fucking Okie.”

  “He’s not worth getting upset about,” Marilyn said.

  Ransom turned toward the stage. Kano was still tuning his guitar with the intense concentration of a man wiring a bomb. Sato, on rhythm, watched and tuned with him. Bubba, the bass man, née Satoichi Yasuhiro, was rocking back and forth on his heels, ready and waiting. Finally Kano stepped up to the mike and said, “Let’s get down and dirty.” The gaijin up front hooted and clapped, while the Japanese looked on politely. Kano counted out the beat—“Ichi, ni, san, shi”—and they started into “Got My Mojo Workin’.”

  Kano had once asked Ransom how he would define Mojo, leaving Ransom very much at a loss. When Kano had tried to enlist the guidance of the only black patron of Buffalo Rome, an aikido student from Oakland, he had been told that the blues were strictly Uncle Tom and very uncool. He was shaken, but he kept the faith.

  Ransom observed the crowd and half listened to the set. Miles and Marilyn fondled each other’s limbs. Ransom couldn’t help but feel sorry for Miles’s wife, Akiko. On the only occasion when Miles had felt obliged to explain his womanizing, he invoked the when-in-Rome theory, claiming that Japanese women expected no more fidelity than Japanese men delivered. Ransom thought this extremely swinish. He was also suspicious of this Marilyn. He had no reason to doubt she was a Vietnamese refugee, nor that she was a singer in a downtown bar. But he wondered if she didn’t do a little after-hours work as well.

  When the set was over, Ryder seemed wistful. “If only I could find a Japanese band that played Hank Williams.”

  “You’ve got everything he ever recorded on the jukebox,” Ransom said.

  “I know. But I’d love to hear that high, lonesome twang in Japanese.”

  Miles was taking another call in the office, and Marilyn was in the Ladies’, when Frank DeVito returned with an empty glass.

  “Ransom, you scumbag. I thought it was you. Old handsome Ransom.”

  Ransom glanced briefly at his fellow American, tonsured in the fashion of a sixteenth-century samurai, the front and sides of his scalp shaved, a long lock of hair doubled over and tied along the ridge of his skull. “Hello, Frank.”

  DeVito pulled a long face. “Hello, Frank. What kind of greeting is that?”

  “Sufficient, I’d call it.”

  “I’d call it unfriendly. What’s with the chill here? Fellow karate-ka ought to get along. Are you still hanging out at that wimpy dojo?”

  Ransom looked into DeVito’s dark eyes but he didn’t say anything.

  “What do you call that brand of dancing they teach you there? Go-go?”

  “Goju.”

  “Tofu?”

  “It’s called Goju,” Ransom said. “Hard-soft.”

  “Hard-soft? What’s that? Soft guys with hard-ons, or what?”

  “The principle works many ways. Like, you apply a hard weapon—say, fist—to a soft area—say, belly.”

  “Think you’re pretty good, don’t you?”

  “I’m just a student,” Ransom said.

  “Don’t hand me that humility shit. Show me your stuff.”

  “I’ve got nothing to show,” Ransom said.

  DeVito called for a beer. Miles came up behind the bar, watching DeVito intently, and set a bottle on the counter. DeVito lifted his beer and drank off half of it.

  Marilyn returned, nodded at the seat beside Ransom and looked at DeVito. “Do you mind?”

  “Yeah,” DeVito said, still facing Ransom. “You can just wait a minute. There aren’t five men in Japan fast enough to knock the neck off of a standing
beer bottle.”

  “There aren’t two,” Ransom said, “who could care less.”

  “You think you can do it?” DeVito asked.

  Ransom raised his hands and flopped them down on the bar. DeVito was the sort who made a personal contest out of a coin toss, invested a game of checkers with the aspect of an epic struggle for survival. A few weeks back he had taken bets and broken one of the spool tables in half. Miles threatened to call the cops, but DeVito had contemptuously turned over his winnings to pay for the table. Because he would stake everything on nothing, DeVito would have been dangerous even if he was weak.

  “Let’s just see,” DeVito said, stepping away from the bar and drawing a deep breath. He closed his eyes and drew his hands up to his chin. Opening his eyes, he swung his right hand, palm open and rigid, in a slow arc that ended at the neck of the beer bottle. Behind him, the onlookers were divided—one could judge from the expressions—between those who admired DeVito’s strength and audacity and those who hoped he would slice his arteries and die. People cleared away from the bar. DeVito practiced the move several times, closed his eyes again, and gathered himself up from the shoulders, inhaling violently.

  The bottle skidded along the bar, spouting foam, and disappeared over the edge. Miles retrieved it and held it up, intact.

  “Great trick,” Marilyn said.

  DeVito examined his right hand, sorting out his failure, and looked up at Ransom. “Your turn, handsome.” He called for another beer. “I want it tonight, not tomorrow afternoon”—drumming his hands on the bar as the bartender reached into the cooler.

  DeVito lifted his head back and held the bottle high as he swallowed, then slammed it down in front of Ransom. By this time he was surrounded by spectators, some explaining to others the nature of the challenge.

  “Go ahead,” he demanded.

  “I need a reason,” Ransom said. “Even if I could do it, why should I?”

  “The thrill of victory. Because it’s there. But mostly, because I say you can’t do it.”

  “You’re probably right.”

  DeVito seemed at a loss. “You think you could land a hit on me?”