[Conduct Unbecoming 01.0] Conduct Unbecoming

by LA Witt

“Not my fault you weren’t paying attention.”

  “Says the man who used a sign the size of a walnut as a landmark.”

  I laughed. “Whatever. We’ll find this place. If not, I’ll call him.”

  “Okay, I’ll take your word for it.”

  The highway followed the west coast of Okinawa from Naha up to Nago, the other major city, and then, if we were inclined to keep following it, on to Cape Hedo, the northernmost point of the island.

  To our left, the East China Sea was bright blue and sparkling. The swells were a little high today for snorkeling, and there were a few whitecaps, but Shane had said the place we were going was completely sheltered.

  “Only way you’ll find big waves there,” he’d said over the phone last night, “is if you go during a typhoon.”

  There was sure as hell no reason to worry about a typhoon right now. A gentle wind ruffled the palm, banana and banyan trees, and colorful kanji-inscribed banners fluttered above shops and restaurants. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky, and the Okinawan sun was intense. Marie and I both had on sunglasses, and it wasn’t to look cool.

  Once we’d passed through Nago, Marie picked up the printed e-mail in which Shane had given us directions.

  “After Nago, you’ll pass an inlet on your left,” she read. “Look for a stoplight with a Family Mart on the left and a blue sign overhead that says Kouri Island. Turn left.” She lowered the paper. “Okay, I’ve seen about four billion Family Marts in the last half mile. How the hell is that a landmark? That’s like telling someone to turn at the palm tree.” She gestured outside at the twin rows of palm trees on either side of the highway.

  “Yeah, but there’s a sign for Kouri Island,” I said. “You don’t see those every ten feet.”

  “Mm-hmm.” She sounded dubious, and I couldn’t help chuckling.

  I drove through a small town just after Nago. As the town faded behind us, a broad expanse of calm, sheltered water glittered in the sun to our left. Unlike the open ocean we’d seen for miles, the water was glass smooth.

  “This must be the inlet he was talking about,” I said. “Look for a…stoplight and Family Mart?”

  “So he says.”

  Up ahead, a stoplight came into view, and there was a blue sign overhead. We’d seen several of those along the way, usually announcing in both English and Japanese that a particular town or road was coming up. Among the points noted on the sign was Kouri Island.

  “See?” I gestured at the sign. “He didn’t lead us astray.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “There’s still plenty of directions on—oh, hey, there’s the Family Mart.”

  “So it is.” I put on my turn signal and went left at the light and the Family Mart. “Now what?”

  “Now it says to drive for eight clicks—what the hell is a click?”

  I laughed. “Kilometer. Don’t judge him. He’s military. Anyway, go on.”

  “Okay, so eight ‘clicks’ until you reach a stop sign. Turn left.”

  “Any mention of a Family Mart?”

  “No, Dad. No mention of a Family Mart.”

  This was truly the countryside of Okinawa. Sugarcane fields sprawled over hills and valleys. Farmers—from young to very, very old—hunched over wheelbarrows and shovels, their faces shielded from the sun by pointed straw hats. An elderly man on a bicycle that was probably as old as he was peddled up a hill like he was unaware of the huge bundles of sugarcane stacked on the back of the bike.

  After roughly eight kilometers, we came to the stop sign in question. I turned left, and the road curved between a cluster of banana trees and palms.

  “He says to turn right at the sign for Kouri Island,” she said. “Then take the long bridge across to Kouri, make the first right, and pull into the first parking lot on the right.”

  “Simple enough.”

  We crested the hill, and both the bridge and the island came into view.

  Marie leaned forward, staring at the gorgeous view. “Wow. I can see why we’re swimming here.”

  “No kidding,” I said, glancing at the water as much as I could without running off the road.

  The bridge was almost perfectly straight, held up on pylons above the turquoise water and leading to a strip of white sand and a couple of concrete breakwaters at the edge of a heavily forested island. The entire island was maybe a kilometer end to end and looked virtually uninhabited aside from a small resort, a couple of tiny buildings and some tombs tucked between a field or two and the thick forest.

  Following Shane’s directions, I turned at the end of the bridge, then pulled into a parking lot that was part grass, part crumbling concrete, and part sand. Shane’s car was nosed up to a cement barrier dividing the lot from the beach, so I took the space beside it.

  As we unloaded the car, footsteps turned my head, and my heart skipped as Shane came around the corner. He already had on his wet suit, which never failed to throw my pulse out of whack, and though I couldn’t see his eyes through his sunglasses, his grin threw my balance off just like it always did.

  “So I didn’t get you too lost?” he asked.

  “No, you didn’t get us lost.” I gestured at Marie. “Shane, this is my daughter, Marie. Marie, Shane.”

  “Nice to meet you,” he said as they shook hands.

  “You too.” She smiled. “I was starting to wonder if you were just Dad’s imaginary friend.”

  Shane laughed. “No, I’m plenty real.” He nodded toward our gear. “You guys need a hand with all of this?”

  “I think we’ve got most of it.” I hoisted a backpack onto my shoulder. “Though if you can grab the two chairs, that would help.”

  “No problem.”

  He picked up the folded beach chairs and also took the umbrellas. Marie and I picked up as much as we could carry and followed him to the beach.

  “Nice going, Dad,” she said under her breath.

  “What?”

  “He’s hot.”

  “Marie.”

  “I’m just saying…”

  From the corner of my mouth, I said, “Stop ogling my boyfriend.”

  “Not my fault you like hot guys.”

  I glared at her.

  “What?” She shrugged. “It’s not like he’s my stepdad.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  She snickered and adjusted her snorkel bag on her shoulder. We followed Shane to the beach and set up our chairs, cooler and umbrellas beside his.

  Marie looked around. “Is it safe to just leave all this stuff here while we’re swimming?”

  “Oh, hell yeah,” Shane said. “You could leave your wallet out in plain sight around here, and no one would touch it.”

  “Guess this isn’t exactly New York City,” she said quietly. “But I’ll pass on leaving my wallet out.”

  “Smart girl,” I said.

  Shane smirked. “She gets that from her mother, then?”

  “Oh, very funny,” I said.

  Marie laughed. “God, you two are so cut out for each other.”

  Chuckling, I rolled my eyes. “Great. Glad you approve.”

  Once we’d set everything up, put on wet suits and had our gear ready to go, we hit the water.

  Shane was right about Kouri Island. The visibility was unreal. Unlike Komaka Island, Kouri was fully sheltered from the open ocean, with virtually no waves to speak of, and all three of us navigated the gentle current with ease.

  Aside from the massive concrete pylons beneath the bridge, the area was mostly sand and underwater vegetation rather than rocks and reefs. Still, there was plenty of interesting sea life. Out in the open water, colorful tropical fish eyed us warily while crabs—hermit and otherwise—skittered along miniature dunes and darted down into holes between sea cucumbers and sea stars.

  In the slightly deeper water near the first pylon, we found a large sea anemone occupied by black-and-orange clownfish. They were aggressive little fuckers too. When Marie and I swam in to get a closer look, a few of them lunged at us, bonking
into our masks and nipping at our gloves. Naturally, Shane couldn’t resist playing with them. Funny, none of us knew clownfish could bite, but apparently they could. Of course, the bite was toothless and painless, but it made Shane laugh, which is never a good idea with a snorkel. Personally, I thought the mouthful of salt water served him right for pissing off the clownfish in the first place.

  Once Shane had finished coughing and clearing his snorkel, we moved on to the bridge pylon. Out here, the water was a good fifteen feet deep, and the pylon was about ten-by-twenty feet of solid concrete that was covered with those huge black sea urchins, colorful branches of coral and some shellfish I couldn’t identify. A pair of lionfish, one of which was almost as big as a medium-sized cat, swam amongst the urchins’ spines.

  And at the bottom of the pylon, huddled between a few chunks of broken concrete, was an octopus, which was cool as hell. That was something we didn’t encounter often, and had it not been quite so far down, and had one of the rather poisonous lionfish not been swimming just above it, even I might have gone down for a closer look.

  As it was, the current was stronger out here than it was elsewhere. With that many urchins and the pair of lionfish hanging around, we decided not to stay by the pylon too much longer.

  We swam on, riding the current until we reached a shallower, calmer area.

  As we explored, I threw occasional glances in Marie’s direction. She was a strong swimmer and had a good head on her shoulders, so I wasn’t worried about her doing something stupid or not being able to handle the current. Anything could happen, though. I preferred to err on the side of keeping an eye on her just in case.

  As we swam past a broad expanse of lazily waving sea grass, I looked at her as I’d done a hundred times already. She cruised along, checking out the scenery and searching for sea life, and—

  My heart skipped.

  Rippling between her fins was a three-foot-long ribbon of alternating black-and-white bands, and there was no mistaking that distinctive pattern.

  A sea snake.

  Intellectually, I knew they weren’t aggressive creatures like the habu on land, but they were highly venomous, which meant, aggressive or not, that one was way too close to my kid.

  Movement caught my eye, and when I turned, I realized Shane was swimming toward Marie.

  And he was taking off his glove.

  My throat tightened. Shane, my God, if you tease that thing when it’s that close to her…

  While I watched, Shane fell in behind her and approached slowly. She was completely oblivious to him. Diving masks meant limited peripheral vision, so she wouldn’t have seen him coming.

  He swam up beside her, staying a few feet to her right. Then, he held out his glove, keeping it a foot or so below the surface, and slowly waved it back and forth.

  The snake went from a long ribbon to something like a messy figure eight or an ampersand. When it straightened again, it dipped downward and cut through the water toward Shane.

  The snake approached Shane warily, but kept its distance. Then, apparently realizing the man was crazy, it swam off in a different direction and slipped into the tall sea grass.

  Away from Shane. Even farther away from Marie.

  I exhaled.

  Maybe there was an advantage to the man’s fearlessness around dangerous animals.

  We continued swimming. Eventually, we all got out of the water and went back to where we’d set up our stuff on the beach. We dropped our gear unceremoniously in the sand and sank into our chairs.

  “That was some amazing snorkeling.” Marie poured some sunscreen into her hand. “I think this place is going to ruin me for swimming anywhere else.”

  “You ain’t kiddin’,” Shane said.

  I chuckled. “Yeah, assuming something doesn’t kill any of us.”

  “I know, right?” Marie slathered sunscreen on her arm. “Is everything on this island poisonous?”

  “Everything except the spiders and the bats,” Shane said.

  “The spiders aren’t?” She glanced at him.

  He shook his head. “You’d think they would be. They’re huge, though. Motherfuckers are—” He stopped abruptly and looked at me with a sheepish expression. “Sorry.”

  “Oh, I don’t fucking care,” Marie said with a dismissive gesture.

  “Marie.” I gave her a disapproving look over my sunglasses.

  “Whatever, Dad. I learned most of it from you.”

  “And the rest from your mother, I’m sure.”

  “That and rap music.” She put the back of her hand to her forehead and sighed dramatically. “All those curse words. Rap music has stolen my innocence, Daddy.”

  I tried to keep a somewhat stern face, but when Shane muffled a laugh, I couldn’t help it.

  “Anyway,” he said, still chuckling, “the spiders here are huge, but they won’t hurt you. Unlike the fish, snails, snakes…” He waved a hand. “Pretty much everything.”

  “Sort of like that sea snake that was following you around,” I said.

  Marie glanced up, and when she looked at me, she jumped like she hadn’t realized I’d been talking to her. “What sea snake?”

  “The one that was between your fins,” Shane said.

  She pursed her lips and shook her head. “Yeah, whatever.”

  “He’s not kidding,” I said. “I was ready to choke him because I thought he was coming over to play with the damned thing.”

  Shane sniffed. “Oh, come on. I’m crazy, but you didn’t really think I’d get something to bite her, did you?”

  “Well, no,” I said. “But I have to admit, it would have been nice to be able to read your mind when you started chasing after it and taking your glove off like you always do when you’re going to harass something.”

  “Wait, wait, wait.” Marie capped the sunscreen and tossed it on top of a snorkel bag. “You guys aren’t kidding?”

  We both shook our heads.

  “It wouldn’t have bothered you,” Shane said. “I was just concerned you’d turn around and see it, then panic, scare it and wind up bitten.”

  “Panic?” She raised an eyebrow. “Do I really strike you as a girl who’s afraid of snakes?”

  He laughed. “Not in the least. But they’re a little disconcerting when they’re between your fins. Even I’ve about jumped out of my skin when I’ve seen one following me like that.”

  “Wimp,” she muttered. “So you scared it off. Damn it, Shane. What if I’d wanted to play with it?”

  I gave an exasperated sigh and rolled my eyes. “Jesus Christ. I knew it would be dangerous to introduce you two.”

  Shane shrugged. “Well, at least I didn’t tease the octopus. Those things are poisonous too.”

  “Octopus?” Marie sat up. “What octopus?”

  He pointed at the bridge. “Up against the second pylon. We pointed it out to you.”

  She furrowed her brow. “You pointed out the lionfish.”

  “No, I was pointing out the octopus,” I said. “If you needed me to point out a lionfish, then it’s no wonder you didn’t see the octopus.”

  “Ha-ha, very funny.”

  “It’s probably still out there.” Shane took a drink and set his water bottle in the sand. “They don’t move around much.”

  “Show me, then.” Marie picked up her mask and snorkel.

  “All right.” He grabbed his own gear and looked at me. “You coming?”

  I eyed him. “Are you planning on pestering the poor creature?”

  “Define pestering,” Marie said.

  I groaned. “Oh God. No way am I letting you two go out there by yourselves.”

  I picked up my gear.

  ~*~

  Laughter dragged me out of a sound sleep.

  Apparently oblivious to me, Shane and Marie continued with their conversation.

  “No, Cronenberg completely owns Lynch,” Marie said.

  “Pfft.” Shane laughed. “Not a chance.”

  “So if I go look
online,” she said, throwing him a challenging look, “After I go verify that Cronenberg had the balls to film eXistenZ and Crash, I won’t go look under Lynch’s filmography and see crap heaps like Mulholland Drive and Dune?”

  “Hey. Hey. We don’t speak of Mulholland Drive.”

  “We do when you’re trying to call Lynch a better director than Cronenberg.”

  I blinked a few times, lifting my head off Shane’s shoulder to stretch a kink out of my neck. “What are you two going on about?”

  “Hey, you decided to join us.” Shane ran his fingers through my hair.

  “What can I say?” I rubbed my eyes. “I was tired from keeping up with the two of you all damned day.”

  “You’re just old.” Marie playfully nudged me with her elbow. “Come on, Dad, I’m the one who’s jet-lagged, and you were out cold before the opening credits finished.” She gestured at the TV, where end-credits scrolled up the screen.

  I chuckled. “Well, it sounds like you two did just fine on your own.”

  “We did,” Shane said. “But I’m disappointed you haven’t properly indoctrinated your child into the world of David Lynch. She seems to have this delusion that he’s inferior to Cronenberg.”

  I blinked. Looked at her. Back to him. “Who is inferior to who?”

  Shane rolled his eyes.

  Marie groaned and let her face fall into her hand. “Dad. God.”

  “Sorry, baby,” I said with a tired shrug. “You know I’m not the film snob you are.”

  “Yeah, that’s obvious.”

  Shane laughed.

  Shaking my head, I said, “I don’t know how the two of you even pick movies based on their directors. I couldn’t begin to tell you who directed this one.” I gestured at the TV.

  “That’s because you fell asleep before it started,” he said. “Do you even know what movie we were watching?”

  I furrowed my brow but drew a blank. “Now that you mention it, no.”

  Marie released an exasperated sigh. “Dad, we need to get Crash and eXistenZ so you can watch them and explain to your boyfriend how awesome they are.”

  “Um. Okay…”

  Shane nudged me. “Just make sure you pick up some Lynch for a palate cleanser.”

  I laughed. Patting his leg, I said, “You know, if I’d known you were into films like this, I’d have warned you my kid is working on getting into film school.”