by Alex Austin
“Wow, that’s one hellacious tale,” said Demi, as Yuudai drummed his fingers on the pizza box that had cooled during the length of his family chronicle. Demi stilled his hand with hers, pressed against him and whispered in his ear, “You smoke?”
The old Mustang smelled of marijuana, and its red leather upholstery was soon absorbing another sweet cloud. She unbuttoned easily.
He didn’t think of the camp at Manzanar. He didn’t think of the boys getting hungry. He didn’t think of Sumiko’s illness. He didn’t think of Sumiko. He thought of this pretty body that he’d never seen or touched.
By the time Yuudai got back to camp, it was eight P.M., an hour later than when he’d told the boys he’d return with dinner. He wasn’t surprised when they weren’t at the campsite. They’d gotten bored and were no doubt riding their bicycles on one of the nearby paths. He waited for ten minutes, as the forest squeezed out the remaining sunlight and an owl hooted. By flashlight he walked the paths, calling out their names. He went to each of the nearby campsites—marshmallows and s’mores—a staticky baseball game on a boom box. No one had seen them. He returned to the paths. Each breath growing shorter, he drove back to the bar, thinking that his restless sons might have taken their bikes to find him. Another woman had replaced Demi, nudging up to another man, downing another Jack and Coke, her flannel shirt opened another button. Yuudai leaned across the bar, calling to the bartender. “My sons . . . I can’t—”
“It happens all the time. They wandered away. They’ll be fine. Probably found their own way back by now.”
But the bartender said he would call a ranger just to be safe.
Like the bartender, the ranger who showed up an hour later assured him that they would find his children. A mile deep in the woods, hungry and crying, but okay.
The ranger took a description of the two boys and told Yuudai to remain at the bar. He would look for them on horseback. Have a beer, relax.
Yuudai had a beer, ignored the woman speaking with him, stared at the collection of abandoned children’s playthings on a shelf below the beer bottles. A toy soldier, a ballerina, a Rubik’s Cube, a fire engine, a tiny watch, a set of dinosaurs—a fierce charging triceratops. Yuudai heard his father’s voice.
“The mother’s hiding these little plastic dinosaurs on the café’s patio . . .”
When the ranger hadn’t returned in an hour, Yuudai told the bartender he was going back to his campsite. The bartender urged him to stay, but Yuudai couldn’t breathe. With each attempted inhalation he drew in Demi’s checkered shirt, as if someone had stuck the fabric in his mouth and he was sucking it in, choking himself, drowning in flannel.
He forgot to turn on his headlights, and one hundred yards beyond the bar, he couldn’t understand the black stretch of road, so he accelerated to get beyond the dark. Get back to camp, get out on those paths. He would hear their cries in the night.
He had the momentary sensation of flying, as if he had hit a little hill and had pulled back on the steering wheel, and then a boom and cartoon lights and then blackness.
The instant later was three days later when he awoke.
“Where—”
“I’m sorry, Mr. O’Keefe. We’ve searched . . .”
Brent and James had vanished into the forest.
His children were gone.
Chapter 21
Twenty years had not altered the fissured and weedy parking lot at Mother’s Beach in Marina del Rey, where Setsuko and Hugh had regularly taken the twins as toddlers. So unchanged was the flat gray slab that Hugh turned to reassure himself that his sons were there, but they were not there, just the bare backseat awaiting the infant car seats.
As Hugh got out, he turned at the throaty growl of a car engine and saw the primed Camaro. He turned, walked a few steps toward the beach, stopped and looked back. The car was gone.
A couple of teenage girls scampered by him.
Hugh stopped, opened his wallet and took out the scrap of paper on which Anna had written her name and phone number. He tore the paper into a dozen little pieces. He let the scraps sink into the garbage like hot pistols into the sea.
Under the covered patio bordering the beach, smoke rose from barbecues tended by seniors in sunhats, Venice, California, silk-screened on their baggy T-shirts, from whose sleeves hung frail arms bright with sunspots. As breakfast patties sizzled and cranberry juice flowed, a wilted flower child bopped to “Whole Lot of Love” while her man smoked his doobie, thrusting his hips. Leaning against the wall of an outdoor shower, a homeless man with a face like dying embers clawed at his despairing yellow dog.
“You need coolin’, baby, I’m not foolin’ . . .”
Across the dull brown sand, mothers spread their blankets, distributed juice packs, mini-donuts and bagged cereal. A sailfish tacked the inlet, and one hundred yards away, a cabin cruiser pulled out of its marina, gray exhaust bubbling up from the water. Hugh took off his sandals, cuffed his jeans and walked down the beach.
Half a life ago, Setsuko and Hugh had eaten dinner and danced at Sol Luna, a restaurant that overlooked the marina and the little public beach.
Later they left the restaurant to sit on the dark sand, watching the night-lights of the docked boats and passing crafts sparkle on the water. Hugh challenged Setsuko to strip down to her panties and bra and go for a swim with him. For most of the two weeks they had spent together in the states, Setsuko had been on edge. She hadn’t called her father to tell him that Hugh had gone to Los Angeles with her, and it troubled her to think that she would not be able to tell Kazuki, for then she would have to tell him all of it. Under Hugh’s tutelage, Setsuko had agreed to lie to her father—each lie, even if only one of omission, would widen her orbit, so that one day she might be pulled from his gravity—but that didn’t free her from the guilt. Tonight, though, a day before they were to return to Japan, she seemed utterly relaxed and didn’t hesitate to unclothe and dash into the water.
They swam out to the rope that signaled the limits of the bathing area. Clinging to the rope, they made love.
It was perfect, but—
Hugh never mentioned the odd pulse of the water as they joined, and he could not have then guessed that its source was a hundred circling sharks. Nor did he mention the vague, solitary creature hunched down on the shadowy sand, perhaps watching them, perhaps admiring the lights on the water, perhaps eyeing their heaped garments; for when Hugh and Setsuko returned to the beach, Hugh found nothing missing, and he didn’t want to frighten her.
Hugh looked back toward the road where a moment ago he saw the Camaro. That night on the beach with Setsuko, Hugh assumed that the person hunting through their clothes was a denizen of the beach. A vagrant looking for a few dollars or something to sell. But nothing had been taken . . .
Likely Hugh’s glance had frightened him off. He had never considered another explanation . . . Hugh turned his gaze back to the placid bay.
The calculations that Setsuko would later make put the conception of the twins at Mother’s Beach, and it was to Mother’s Beach that they would bring the boys as toddlers one hundred times.
One hundred times . . .
It was low tide. Rippled sand and mud—smelling of oil—stretched in a broad crescent like a black quarter moon. As he walked along the tide line toward the docks, he stopped to watch two boys dig a moat for their castle. A woman, hugely pregnant, rushed to their side, eyeing Hugh. He smiled at her and moved on. The cool wet sand sunk beneath his feet, exuding another memory, a memory of mud.
Takumi and Hitoshi, a year old, sat at the bay’s edge, water lapping their toes. They dug into the mud, ripping out handfuls to toss aside or to taste, provoking their mother’s quick catch and release.
“It won’t hurt them,” said Hugh, lazing on the blanket, digging a beer from the ice chest, and wondering if the mud would truly not hurt them.
Their chubby white backs glistened with sunscreen. Setsuko coated them before they left the apartment, leaving not a
sliver of skin unprotected. Their diapers protruded over their bathing suits like the petals of flowers. Their hair was not so dark as their mother’s, but still black and dense. Hugh drank his beer, walked to the water’s edge and dropped to his knees before them. He held out his hands palms up. Both boys got it right away, dropping the mud into his hands until it overflowed.
“We should go,” said Setsuko.
“We just got here an hour ago,” said Hugh, dipping his hands and shaking them clean. He hoisted both boys under his arms like sacks of flour and strode out knee deep. He dropped to his haunches, balancing each boy on a knee. They slapped at the water.
“Too much sun is not good,” said Setsuko.
“Ten minutes,” he lied.
She turned and walked back to the blanket, where she would refuse the beach chair to sit cross-legged beneath the umbrella and sketch seascapes, later to turn some of the sketches into delicate, iridescent watercolors. He followed her prideful walk up the beach. As with everything she wore, her bathing suit was modest, hiding her shape. Though he detected little change, she insisted that the pregnancy had deformed—Henkei shi ta—her body. She didn’t dwell on it, and if it weren’t for the loose clothes that she preferred to wear, in contrast to the revealing dress of their dating days, Hugh would have thought that she wasn’t aware of it at all, though he suspected, considering the sharpness of her occasional self-criticism, that she wanted him to be aware. She wanted him conscious of her flaw. But it was only at the beach, where her pronounced concealment betrayed her self-consciousness, that Hugh took notice. Hugh scuttled backward like a crab, carrying his sons deeper into the water, so that the yellowish suds came up to their chests. He shook and bounced them until they were near hysterical.
Jesus, he loved their warm little bodies.
“This is where it all began, guys,” he whispered, gazing at the safety rope that Setsuko had held as she floated upward to catch him in her legs. “Conceived among sharks, my little boys. Well, your mama says it began so.”
The Tempter was docked in Holiday Marina, a small anchorage less than two hundred yards from the beach. A concrete walkway and chain-link fence ran perpendicular to the quays. Hugh reached the gate to the first dock and paused to watch an elegant sailboat pull out of its slip, the water rushing across its hull. He placed his hands on the gate and let the metal’s heat burn his skin. Failure rose in his gut like bile. An ultimately fruitless quest, like those that drove on the steadfast but hapless detectives who trudged through the noir screenplays he once wrote. His sons were gone and beyond recall. It was irrational to believe that he’d find even a trace of Takumi and Hitoshi after all this time. He stopped, a gloom settling on his intentions. He had no chance. He was like—it came to him, the boys’ favorite cartoon. He was like Road Runner’s Wile E. Coyote. Having vaulted off a cliff in pursuit of the bird, he was trying to find purchase in the thin air but succeeded only in climbing to the top of his vaulting stick, which upon pivoting left him at pole’s bottom again, plummeting ever downward to the dusty canyon floor where Coyote’s previous falls had etched the sand.
There must have been dozens of Tempters not for sale. The odds were low that the boat he was about to view was the Oceanside vessel. Better that he go home and turn spotlights on his house.
To forget time, to forgive life, to be at peace.
For an instant he took solace in that promised death, that green current passing over him, or the earth packed around him, the bugs tunneling through his moldering corpse, a city’s cold dark thoroughfares. But at the periphery of his vision, Hitoshi and Takumi swam toward him, Setsuko’s letter fixed to his fingers, crayfish roamed beyond their domain, the honeysuckle, Nakamura Reality, the boys on the boat, Jason.
Hints, surely, but hints of what?
No, he knew. Be honest, Hugh.
He had no choice. He had to believe in the absurd quest. Click my heels three times and believe.
Two minutes later, he was at the gate of Dock Three Thousand. He dialed Albert’s number.
The phone rang a half-dozen times.
“Hello?”
“This is Mullen. I’ve come to see the boat.”
“You make an appointment?” asked a rough, sleepdrenched voice.
“Last night.”
“What’s the name?”
“Mullen. Pirie Mullen.”
“Oh, yeah, yeah. Where are you?”
“Outside the gate to your dock.”
“Um. Give me a minute and I’ll buzz you through. Last slip on the right.”
It was several minutes before the gate buzzed and unlocked, the click like an errant heartbeat. Until now, his thoughts had been tangled, snagged on their own implications. He could not avoid the idea that his sons had been taken. An opportunist. A barren couple or lonely man who wanted a child to nourish. The news frequently reported childless women snatching infants from hospital incubators. One could almost sympathize. But there were others whose carnal and sadistic desires recognized no boundaries. That was the black sickening thought he couldn’t accept. If you believed the radio talk shows, the predators were behind every tree, at the wheel of every dark van, at the helms of yachts trolling the beaches. Drugged and bound. Hidden in a shed in the high-hedged backyard. Forced to—his thought shriveled up. He couldn’t bring his imagination to that foul place. But why hadn’t he considered it then, in the days after? No, it was no mystery. He had accepted their deaths because he was responsible for their deaths.
He had accepted and he had lost his mind. Not with baby steps like Alzheimer’s, but all at once as the abortionist’s machine sucks out a fetus. Behind his back they whispered zombie.
Hugh walked down the quay, taking in the vessels. On half of the boats there was activity, middle-aged men in polo shirts and shorts inspecting winches and inboard motors. Pretty young women applying sunscreen and brushing their hair. Day laborers lugging supplies aboard for voyages to faraway, exotic places. An old man with rheumy eyes and gray beard looped a line around his hand and elbow, smiling at Hugh as if he knew a secret.
The boat sat between the fingers of the outermost slip, bow abutting the dock. Hugh glanced from the pilothouse to the forward hull, reading the boat’s name: Pearl, in arced black letters against the ivory hull. Showing through the white paint at each end of the arc were faint traces of additional letters. Or was he imagining the pale letters? He walked to the end of the dock where the transom was visible. Pearl again with the faint trace of other letters. He looked up at the eye-catching pilothouse. Even among the larger and no doubt more expensive crafts, the boat stood out. It evoked speed, breaking limits. The Pearl rose and fell in the backwash of a monstrous motor yacht.
“Impressive, huh?”
A shirtless man stood at the Pearl’s transom, pointing to the yacht motoring by. Hugh’s lips felt dried and cracked.
“How—big was that?” Hugh managed to ask.
“Ninety feet. That’s as big as this marina can handle. That what you’re looking for?” asked the man.
Hugh turned his gaze from the oversized yacht and pointed to the Tempter.
“I like this,” said Hugh,
“You ever been on one?”
Hugh hesitated. “No.”
“I’m Albert Abe.”
“Pirie Mullen.”
Hugh took Abe’s hand, big and soft as an oven mitt.
“Come onboard,” said Albert. “I’ll give you the twenty-dollar tour.”
Albert could have been Hugh’s age or ten years younger, his age deferred by a deep tan and gravity-defying pompadour. Amerasian for sure, but finer than that Hugh couldn’t guess. Albert smelled of alcohol and a swampy cologne.
“You own a boat now?” asked Albert.
“No.”
“You have, though?”
“No. Never.”
“Like making your first car a Shelby Cobra,” said Albert, picking at his pomp. He examined something between his fingertips and then flicked it over the sid
e.
“I’ve read about the Tempter Pilothouse,” offered Hugh.
“Reading’s not racing—or motoring. Excuse me.” He retrieved a Bloody Mary from a cup holder. He stirred the drink with his celery, sucking the red from the stalk before taking a gulp.
“Make you one?”
“Thanks. I’ll pass.”
“Coffee?”
“I’m okay.”
“Good. I ain’t got any. Let’s make you salivate,” said Albert, gesturing for Hugh to follow him.
“Now here,” said Albert, as they entered the pilothouse, “is what makes this baby special.” Albert spun. “Three-hundred-and-sixty-degree visibility. Air-conditioned, two Cat Vision monitors . . .” Albert recited a dozen features. “Beauty, huh?”
Hugh nodded and asked polite questions as Albert touted his merchandise.
“How long have you owned the boat?” asked Hugh.
“Eight years for me, twenty years in the family.”
“Long time.”
“My father bought it new.”
“It looks new now.”
“Takes a shitload of work. My old man drummed that into me. Last thing he said was to make me promise to take care of the boat. Loved it, he did. She was his mistress. He couldn’t part with it. I can. How serious are you?”
“Pretty damn serious,” said Hugh.
“You want to go for a ride?”
“Sure.”
“Give me five minutes,” said Albert, exiting the pilothouse.
When he returned, Albert took a helm seat and ordered Hugh to sit in its companion. Albert started the engines. As the owner maneuvered his boat from the dock, Hugh studied Albert’s hair, which looked like nothing so much as a gathering wave, blacked with crude oil. Hugh wondered if it was fake.
“Elvis,” said Albert, catching Hugh’s gaze.
“Oh?”
“Vegas.”
“You’re an impersonator?”
“It’s just a goof. Bunch of us go out there a couple of times a year.” Albert’s head swayed and he bellowed, “Well, since my baby left me. Well, I found a new place to dwell. Well, it’s down at the end of Lonely Street at Heartbreak Hotel . . .”