Ransom

by Jay McInerney

  What do we have tonight, the host asked. He was wearing a pink tuxedo, a blue boutonnière and several pounds of hair spray.

  One gang rape, the woman responded brightly, one double suicide, and a love-triangle murder. We’ll be right back.

  An ad for instant noodles came on, followed by back to back detergents. Yamada told Ransom to drink up. The sensei, who had ducked out to the bathroom, returned and asked what the lineup was. Ransom wondered what the Monk was doing. He imagined Ito in a bare, monastic cell, two tatami mats and a small table at which he performed occasional calligraphy, sitting cross-legged, mentally reviewing the evening’s practice, every motion, every contraction of muscular tissue, every neuron explosion. Yamada enthusiastically described last week’s ax murder, voted best episode of the week by the studio audience, which was asked, at the end of the show, to select their favorite of the three dramatic re-enactments of true life sex crimes, taken from the files of police precincts all over Japan.

  The noodle shop audience was not especially impressed with the first episode, a standard love-triangle deal. A young salary man conceives a passionate attachment for a bar hostess; his parents arrange a marriage for him with an unappealing stranger. He marries, which event scarcely interrupts the serious business of his life, including his affair. However, one day a Korean businessman proposes to the hostess, who accepts. She informs her lover of this one night when they are lying in bed, post-coitus, in a love hotel. They remain in the hotel for days. The scene switches to the front desk of the hotel, to which the salary man, increasingly haggard, keeps returning to pay for another few hours on the room. The staff jokes about the honeymoon couple, takes bets on how long they can keep it up. Until, finally, after a week, they begin to notice the smell.

  No one is impressed; this was standard material. Yamada said that they always saved the best for last. Ransom said he hated to miss out on the good stuff, but he had to be going.

  11

  His karate sensei gave him a letter of recommendation to a kendo dojo. DeVito couldn’t read all of it, but the sensei said it commended him for his true spirit of Budo, the Martial Way. He brought the letter to the budokan and watched a practice session. Looking like enraged baseball umpires, some thirty men in padded blue smocks and helmets whacked each other with bamboo staves. All in all, this seemed a little tame. When the session ended DeVito appoached the sensei, bowed deeply and presented the letter. The sensei had a face like a drill sergeant, lips like knife blades. He glanced at the letter, balled it up and tossed it over his shoulder.

  Why do you want to pursue kendo? he said.

  DeVito had been prepared for this. He bowed again and said that the way of the sword was the highest expression of the spirit of Budo. He made his grammar deliberately awkward, hoping this would add to the impression of humility.

  There’s some garbage on the floor over there, the sensei said, indicating DeVito’s recommendation. Pick it up.

  DeVito bowed and scuttled over to the letter, picking it up, wondering why he kept submitting himself to the same kind of tyrannical authority—his old man, Marine officers, senseis. But in the Corps he had begun to understand that you had to eat some short-term humble pie to get to be one of the guys who dished it out. Living in Japan, he had learned that you could say Fuck you on the inside and Yes, sir on the outside. Maybe this was knowledge that came to the silver-spoon set mixed in with their Gerber baby mush, but DeVito learned his lesson the hard way, and he was going to make up for lost time. It was easier to do it in a foreign country, especially Japan, because you could play ignorant whenever you needed to, and people tended to cut you plenty of slack.

  He did his faithful-dog number, retrieving the ball of paper for the sensei. He knew that this guy was the best, and he was willing to do what it took to enroll as a student.

  Garbage can, the sensei said, indicating the location with a nod of his head.

  Some of the students stood by watching the spectacle, helmets under their arms. Laugh now, DeVito thought, returning from his garbage run.

  How often can you practice?

  Every day.

  It was the right answer.

  The sensei called out to a young boy who had just finished sweeping the wooden floor and was putting the broom away in a closet. Broom, he said, and the boy raced over.

  The sensei told DeVito to sweep the floor.

  DeVito thought, Surprise me, why don’t you? Taking the broom from the boy, he bowed and thanked the sensei before undertaking his humble sweeping routine, polishing the floor with a vengeance. When you were ambitious, you did what you had to do. Ambition had brought him this far, half a world away from his dirtball hometown in Oklahoma. He wondered where he’d gotten it; not from his old man, who thought he’d made the big time when he opened his own barber shop, and whose idea of travel was twenty-seven holes in a golf cart. Get yourself a trade, was his great advice. That and Be your own boss, as if the old man didn’t kiss ass on every banker and lawyer and oilman that walked into the shop.

  DeVito swept every inch of the floor while the sensei looked on, and when he was done he scurried back and bowed. The sensei scrutinized the floor before turning to DeVito. Come back in two months.

  This guy was hard-ass deluxe. How would you like an instant nose job, he wondered. He said, Yes, sensei. Thank you very much.

  12

  The kid reached up and tugged at the brim of the Stetson, edging it lower in short increments toward a precise but elusive position over his brow. When he had it right, he dropped his hands to his sides and then lifted them away from his body until they were a foot from either hip. Then he was ready.

  You could see it in his eyes: the sun was high, the shadows short on the dusty street. Below the false-fronted second stories, doors and windows were bolted and shuttered. It was just the two of them now, the kid and the tall stranger in the dark clothes staring him down from thirty paces. A dry wind stirred eddies of grit around their legs. A lonesome tumbleweed rolled past. In the hills at the edge of town, rattlers and scorpions bellied over warm rocks in search of prey. The kid wouldn’t be the first to draw. He would wait all day if he had to.

  For Miles Ryder, watching from his stool behind the glass counter at Hormone Derange, the drama being played out in front of his full-length mirror was not entirely without suspense. Maybe this time the kid, a Japanese schoolboy, would buy the Stetson. This was his third shootout in four days. So far the kid has been lucky. But the odds got shorter every day.

  Ryder turned to Ransom, who was leaning with his elbows on the counter thumbing through a Japanese cycle magazine. He said, “These Jap bikes all look like sewing machines to me.”

  Ransom said, “The seven fifties are quicker than a big Harley, and they’ve got a faster top end.”

  “Statistics don’t impress me.”

  “They’re a hell of a lot more reliable, too.”

  “They’ve taken the balls out of biking. It’s like sex. Give me a little stink and smoke and noise between point A and point B. Give me a woman who howls and shouts. Give me that deep bass of a Harley.”

  “Suit yourself,” Ransom said.

  “Speaking of getting from point A to point B, I always wonder why it is we say ‘I’m coming’ and they say ‘I’m going’? How come orgasm is an arrival for English speakers and a departure for Japanese? The first time I got laid here, this girl starts shrieking iku! iku! I knew from my Japanese Made Easy book that this meant ‘I’m going,’ and I couldn’t figure out where she was going, and why. That’s one problem with these mixed Japanese-gaijin marriages, not knowing whether you’re coming or going.”

  “How is Akiko?” Ransom said, wondering if Miles was still seeing or, for that matter, screwing Marilyn.

  “All right. She’s past the morning pukes. It’s hard to know how she’s feeling—she never complains.”

  Miles Ryder tilted back on his stool. Above him, on the wall, was a mounted boar’s head, its flared tusks suggesting a s
neer; beside the boar a poster showing a cowboy sitting on a split-rail fence, a woman draped like saddlebags over his shoulders. “Are You Ready for Boots?” read the caption.

  “Problem is, it’ll take months to find a new Harley and the insurance won’t come close to covering it.”

  “I saw DeVito the other day,” Ransom said. “He dropped in at my dojo.”

  “And you let him walk away?”

  “Why are you so sure it was him?”

  “It’s your basic fox-and-chicken situation. You don’t need testimony from the cows to figure out the blood and feathers. What do you suppose he was doing at your dojo?”

  Ransom shrugged. “He doesn’t have any reason to bother me.”

  “He has plenty of reasons. You just don’t think they’re good ones.”

  Ransom turned the page. A woman in a bikini was tied provocatively across the frame of a Ducati, wrists bound to the handlebars, ankles to the spokes of the back wheels.

  “I’m going to get him,” Ryder said.

  “Let it go,” Ransom said, handing him the magazine.

  Hat in hand, the quick-draw kid approached the counter. He asked, for the fifth or sixth time, how much it was. Then he turned it over and peered inside the crown, as if looking for an oracle. Finally he said he would take it. Ryder told him it was a good choice, put it in a box and explained the care and feeding of the hat. He said he hated to sell a hat this good to someone who wasn’t going to take care of it. The kid said he would. Ryder told him to come back for boots, when he was ready.

  13

  The yen was rising, auto exports were up, the Giants had beaten the Carp in extra innings after a home run by Sadaharu Oh, who was only eleven short of Hank Aaron’s 755. The Japanese debated the significance of the imminent new world record, given the difference in field size, playing season, pitching styles between the two countries. Ransom thought Babe Ruth would always be King.

  Otani, the coffee shop owner, poured Ransom another glass of water, complaining bitterly about an umpire’s call earlier in the week. When the phone rang, Otani removed his apron and went around the bar to pick it up. He said hai five or six times, bowing repeatedly as he did so, and finally held out the phone for Ransom.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t meet you at the hotel,” Marilyn said. “I had some trouble.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “I’ll tell you later. Can you meet me tonight?”

  “After practice,” he said, and arranged to meet at the Drive-in downtown at ten.

  Stuck in an alley off Kawaramachi Street, the Drive-in was actually a walk-in. The cars were inside—fiberglass mockups of ’57 Chevies and other classic models, parked in rows on a precipitous, stepped floor. Ransom’s father had once owned a ’57 Chevy Bel Air; Ransom still had a picture of himself, a crewcut seven-year-old, and his mother, her blond hair tamed under a scarf, both smiling from the passenger seat of that car. This was in Bel Air, shortly after they’d moved west; the fact that their car and their new town had the same name seemed to Chris Ransom a remarkable coincidence which could only be fraught with great meaning. He remembered his father washing the car every weekend with the garden hose and a pail of soapy water. Sometimes Chris would be allowed to wash the fierce chrome eagle on the hood. The last time he had seen a real ’57 Chevy had been two years ago, on the Pakistani side of the Khyber Pass.

  Ransom was late. Marilyn was waiting in the lobby, wearing sunglasses. He asked if they were going to see the movie and she nodded.

  They walked down about halfway. Overhead, the ceiling was painted to resemble a nighttime sky, with lightbulb stars and a fluorescent half moon. Marilyn pointed to an aqua ’56 T-bird. Ransom held the driver’s door open for her while she crawled across to the passenger seat. A stylish young couple took the module beside theirs: cuffed black jeans, leather jacket, and pompadour for him; ponytail, pleated skirt and bobby socks for her. Ransom got behind the wheel and closed the door, thereby activating the lighted dash. The side and back windows were tinted for privacy.

  Meanwhile, Ransom thought, armadas of Datsuns and Toyotas were cutting the Pacific, bound for American highways.

  The credits rolled down the screen to the accompaniment of a brooding symphonic overture. Then Marlon Brando was yelling up at a tenement window, “Hey, Joey!”

  “I’m sorry about Sunday,” Marilyn said. “When I got back to my apartment Saturday night he was waiting for me.”

  “Who?”

  “My fiancé. I’ve never seen him so angry. He called me all kinds of names and said he was going to take care of the cowboy. So I said what you told me. I told him it wasn’t really Miles. I pretended to hold out but finally said it was you and told him what you looked like. And when he left on Sunday morning he put a man at my door. That’s why I couldn’t make it to the hotel.”

  Listening to her, Ransom noticed something about the way she was holding her head. He reached over and lifted her sunglasses. Even in the dim light he could see the bruises around her eye.

  “He hit you?”

  She looked down at her hands.

  “This has gone way too far. You’ve got to move out. Obviously you can’t stay with me, but there’s a hostel near my place.”

  She shook her head. “I can’t leave.”

  “Why the hell not? If you’re going to tell me you love this guy then I wash my hands of the whole thing. And you’re crazy.”

  “It’s not that. It’s my job.”

  “Then get another job. We’ll find you one somehow.”

  “I can’t—I don’t have a visa. I don’t even have a passport. I’m in the country illegally, Ransom.”

  “You must have a gaijin card.”

  “It’s a fake. He had it made for me. If I leave him he will tell his friends in Immigration. I can’t get a job, an apartment or a plane ticket without the card. They’ll throw me out of the country.”

  Ransom was stumped. It was easier to think about dealing with yakuza if one held the card of possible legal recourse. He tugged at the steering wheel, which spun freely in its socket.

  “You’re really between a rock and a hard place.”

  “Pardon?”

  “And now your gangster is looking for me.” He was suddenly angry as he realized the hopelessness of her dilemma.

  “You told me to tell him it was you instead of Miles.”

  “I know. But you didn’t tell me how bad things were. It would take the CIA to get you out of this.”

  She put her glasses back on and turned to the screen. “I’m sorry,” she said, more angry than sorry, Ransom felt. He watched the movie, which seemed written, directed and acted to provide ironic commentary on his conversation with Marilyn: honest people, including the reluctant Brando, standing up to the mob. Why On the Waterfront tonight, he wondered. It was a weird coincidence, unless it wasn’t a coincidence at all. She had chosen the meeting place, which afforded privacy, not easy to find in Japan—but he wondered if the feature had been an additional incentive. But it seemed unlikely that she had even heard of the movie; this atmosphere of conspiracy, amplified by the plot, was making him paranoid. These days it was difficult, he thought, to live as if you weren’t in a movie.

  He turned to her, and hesitated for a moment. “Does he really love you, or what?”

  “He wants me,” she said.

  “Maybe he’ll get sick of you after a while.”

  “Maybe. But he wants to marry me now.”

  “What do you mean now?”

  “Soon. As soon as possible.”

  “At least that would solve your legal problems, wouldn’t it?”

  “In a way. It would make me his property. Japanese law.”

  Ransom was looking for openings, weak spots. “How about money?” Ransom had some, his father’s checks. Maybe he could buy the guy off.

  “That’s what he expects to get from me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “After we’re married, he gets all t
he money I earn.”

  “Are you going to earn that much?”

  She had been studying the dashboard. Now she turned toward him, her eyes hidden behind the glasses. “Do you think I’m attractive?”

  He thought this rather shameless, until he put it together with the part about earning money. “You think he’s going to pimp you?” Ransom felt a thread of panic rising along his neck.

  “They all do, all his friends, the yakuza.”

  “I thought you said he was jealous.”

  “He is. He’s jealous of my pleasure. But business is different.”

  “You seem to take all this for granted.”

  “Please don’t judge,” she said. “It’s not as if I have a choice.” She turned back to the screen. “I shouldn’t have involved you.”

  “It’s about time I got involved in something.”

  “Wait,” she said, “watch this. I love this scene. When Brando says he could have been a contender.”

  “You’ve seen this before?”

  “Shhh. Of course.”

  “Where?”

  “Who knows?” All her attention was focused on the screen.

  “They show these old flicks in Vietnam?”

  She looked over at him blankly, as if she had forgotten who he was. “What did you say?”

  “You saw this in Vietnam?”

  “Sure. Saigon.” She turned back to the screen. “The Bijou.”

  When the movie ended and the lights came up, they waited in the car. “Tell your fiancé that my father is a very important man in the government.”

  “He is?”

  “No, but he won’t know that. Tell him my old man’s a congressman. That should take a while to check out.”

  “What does he do, your father?” Marilyn asked, as they got out of the Thunderbird and began walking up the aisle.