Ransom Page 4

  He picked up the hundred-yard cinder track along the river’s edge and ran downstream. Standing on the bank, two fishermen were trying to conjure something out of the water with long bamboo wands. Ransom always wondered if these anglers ate their catch, a thought that made him queasy. From its source the river drained fields and paddies heavily fertilized with petrochemicals and manure. Closer in, the Kyoto silk dyers dumped their rinse tanks. The white herons that fished the shallows had purple plumage one day, green the next—weeks in advance of the women who bought the kimono silk in the shops downtown.

  The cinders from the track pricked his insteps. He came up on a volleyball game—schoolgirls in uniform gym suits. The team facing him dissolved in giggles as he passed, trading the word gaijin among themselves like a dirty joke. One of them, a girl in yellow sweats with a thin, aristocratic face, definitely sparked his interest. He thought of the seduction line one of his students had taught him recently: Asita asa, kohi nomimasu-ka? Will you have coffee with me in the morning? This one, though, was about thirteen years old, and would be until she suddenly turned thirty.

  He crossed the river at the Imadegawa Bridge and started up the other side, running in the shade of the trees along the levee. The cherry trees were budded and ready to blossom; in Tokyo they had already come and gone. Ransom passed two men in kendo helmets and breast plates, dueling with bamboo staves. Fellow budo-ka, followers of the Martial Way. He had thought about studying kendo, but he didn’t like the idea of all that equipment. Further on, a young man in a beret was blowing an alto sax out over the river, eyes closed, head thrown back. Certainly he was very far away, Ransom imagined, from the three-room apartment he shared with his parents and sister, dreaming of Greenwich Village.

  As the notes of “Take the A Train” faded behind him, Ransom heard a high whine that sounded like cicadas. A radio-operated model airplane appeared above the trees upriver, banked and then dove at him, pulling up sharply just as he was about to bat it away. The plane swept out over the river and came back around, buzzing him and again pulling away just short of his reach, then cruised north before disappearing over the treetops.

  He scanned the riverbanks and then ran to the spot where the plane had gone over the trees, but there was no sign of the operator. He went through the trees and, at the top of the levee, startled a young couple in matching running suits holding hands on a bench. When he asked them if they had seen an airplane, they looked at him fearfully, as if he himself had just fallen out of the sky.

  * * *

  “How is your head?” the girl asked DeVito when he opened his eyes.

  “Shut your face,” he said softly.

  She didn’t understand. Lying on the futon beside him, she had been watching him sleep, wondering if he was asleep. The tight set of his eyes and mouth made him appear to be lying in wait, ready at the slightest sound to leap up and strike out.

  Last night, after he was carried out of the bar, she and her friend had walked him through the streets. He wanted to go back in and fight, but she lied and said that the police were on their way. DeVito took her back here to his rooms on the motorcycle, went out again, and returned near dawn, slipping into the futon beside her. She pretended she was asleep.

  “What time is it?” he said now.

  She told him it was almost noon.

  “Make some breakfast,” he said. With one motion he was on his feet, standing nude beside the futon, looking around the room as though he expected to encounter an intruder.

  While she cooked the rice, he put on karate gi and went outside. Taped on the mirror over the sink was a quotation typed on a sheet of rice paper: “It is necessary to maintain the combat stance in everyday life and to make your everyday stance your combat stance.”

  When he came back half an hour later, breakfast was ready. After she cleared away the breakfast things, he drew a pitcher of water at the sink and told her to come outside.

  The temple grounds were deserted. Beyond the wall, over toward the main temple, she heard the sound of someone raking gravel. She did not understand why he lived in the temple compound. He was very strange, this gaijin.

  In the courtyard next to a sawhorse was a case of empty beer bottles. Placing one of the bottles on top of the sawhorse, he half-filled it from the pitcher. “Hold this,” he said, handing her the pitcher. As he stood in front of the sawhorse, drawing deep breaths, the distant sound of traffic from Nishi-oji Dori gradually seemed to underline the silence of the temple grounds. The raking had stopped. She felt sleepy. Several minutes later, a limping pigeon on the roof of the Hon-do caught her attention, and she didn’t see him strike, though she heard the unbroken bottle hit the sand.

  After his third attempt, he stormed behind the house and came back with an armful of bricks. “Get a towel from the house,” he said. When she returned he had arranged the bricks in two stacks. He laid the towel on top of the first, knelt down in the sand and placed his right hand on the bricks, raising and lowering it slowly.

  DeVito shouted as he smashed the bricks. He held up the broken pieces for her inspection. The second stack he broke with his head. When he turned to look at her, his forehead was cut and bleeding. He smiled.

  “You’re hurt,” she said.

  He said, “But we’re having fun, aren’t we?”

  He allowed her to wipe the cut with the towel and then told her to set a bottle on the sawhorse. This time, he knocked the neck off without spilling a drop.

  * * *

  When Ransom finished his run, Kaji, the landlord, was waiting for him in front of the house. Kaji lived downstairs, and at first he had been reluctant to rent to a gaijin, having no experience of them and speaking no English. Now he was almost too enthusiastic a neighbor. He frequently came up to apologize for obscure nuisances or oversights he imagined Ransom to have taken to heart, and his wife was always sending up food. They had two preschool children, boy and girl, who rolled around in the dirt of the street and ate sweets all day.

  Konichiwa, Kaji-san.

  Konichiwa, Ransom-san. After two years of practice Kaji had mastered a fair imitation of his tenant’s name.

  Ransom said it was a fine day and Kaji agreed. He looked pleased with himself and clearly had more to say. Ransom asked after the kids—they were fine—and then Kaji said he had a little surprise. Not really a surprise; in fact, it was nothing at all, barely worth mentioning.

  What is it? Ransom could see that he was excited.

  Slowly and with much gesticulation, Kaji explained that a friend of his could get him a very good deal on a hot water heater for Ransom’s apartment. It was just a kitchen model, of course; Ransom would still have to use the public bath.

  Ransom didn’t want to hurt Kaji’s feelings; neither did he want Kaji to spend money unnecessarily. He thanked Kaji for thinking of him, but the apartment was just fine the way it was.

  Was Ransom-san worried about the rent? Kaji asked. Not to worry. There would be no additional rent.

  Ransom-san said that Kaji surely had more important things to spend his money on. He himself wanted for nothing, and his teaching salary was if anything generous.

  Think of the winter, Kaji said. Think of the cold.

  It keeps me moving, Ransom said.

  Kaji withdrew inside like a man defeated. Among the many reasons he had worried about renting to a gaijin was the primitive state of the family property. His old, prewar house was made of mud and lime, had tatami floors and minimal plumbing, and Americans, he knew, were used to all the latest of the modern conveniences. The newer homes and apartments in the city had these things. He tried to discourage his prospective gaijin tenant. Later, when Kaji had come to know him, he offered Ransom the black-and-white television when they had purchased a new color set. Kaji had feared the offer of the old set was a terrible insult to Ransom, and Ransom, knowing that his refusal of the gift would be taken as a rejection of an unworthy object, had thanked Kaji profusely. Later, under cover of night, he carried the set down to
Buffalo Rome and gave it to an English friend, who would enjoy watching sumo wrestling on television.

  Ransom had not come to Japan to watch television. He knew when he arrived that American shows were among the staples of the local airwaves, but was surprised to discover that the local product was even trashier. Ransom had strong opinions on the American medium, his father being a director and producer. He started out as a playwright, and although Ransom was only three years old when his father’s last play was produced, he never quite forgave him for abandoning that vocation. A year ago, on Ransom’s twenty-fifth birthday, his father sent him the manuscript of that play, still revived from time to time, a tragedy about a New England family with skeletons in their closets; the play’s excellence had long been a matter of faith with Ransom, who used it as a point of reference against which to judge the situation comedies which had occupied his father since. Though a critical success, the play was commercially as modest as its predecessors, and Ransom’s father turned increasingly to script writing and doctoring. He began to direct commercials. When Ransom was five the family had moved from New York to Los Angeles, and for reasons having nothing to do with art or geography that relocation had come to symbolize for young Ransom a fall from grace. He started school, and hated it. His mother opposed the move. She liked New York, her family was in New England. And she wanted her husband to write plays, not television scripts. Ransom’s parents seldom fought, but he began seeing less and less of his father, who worked progressively later into the evening. His father stopped going to church—he had converted to Catholicism to marry Ransom’s mother. Materially, things got better and better, yet the widening gap between the family’s prosperity and its happiness made Ransom loathe his father’s success, even as he rode the minibikes and watched the newest features in the screening room and swam in the pool and smoked cigarettes with the sons of movie stars.

  Then, when he was fourteen, his mother died of cancer. Ransom knew the marriage would have ended even if his mother hadn’t gotten sick. His father quit the series he was working on, becoming a model husband at the end; his son irrationally blamed him, his girlfriends and his career for his mother’s death. She was sick for eighteen months, during which time she tried to prepare her son for her passing.

  When it was over Ransom went back to Beverly Hills High. After his sophomore year his father sent him East to prep school, a move they both wanted, although both acted reluctant to the very moment when they stood outside the white clapboard dorm, Ransom, Sr., standing beside the rental car with his hands on his son’s shoulders, telling him to call if he wanted anything and, after an awkward embrace, handing him ten twenties. Ransom was furious with impatience, just wanting the old man to be gone. He stayed East for college, despite his father’s half-hearted lobbying for Stanford.

  In the meantime, Ransom, Sr., had given up writing almost entirely for directing and producing. Ransom came home summers, and spent one as an assistant grip at one of the studios. His father made sure that Christopher knew the times and the networks of the shows he had a hand in, and Ransom watched more than he would care to admit, though without much pleasure. His father’s greatest success, a family sit-com which started running when Ransom was seven and had its last season when he was thirteen, featured a successful Hollywood-scriptwriter father, wholesome mother-who-knew-best and mischievous son. Over the years Ransom heard his own words come back at him from the screen, things he’d said and done as a child, the kind of things that other children heard repeated about themselves at family reunions. At home, a cold war set in; the television family remained wacky; not rich, but happy.

  * * *

  Upstairs in his room, Ransom picked up some student essays for grading, then headed off to Kitaoji Street. En route he passed the cardboard man, ancient and hunched, who collected discarded boxes from the sidewalk, crushed them under his feet, and piled them on the tall stack on the back of his fantastic homemade tricycle, while his dog, an obese pit bull chained to the vehicle, waited patiently in the gutter.

  Ransom bought an English language Japan Times at the newsstand and took it to the coffee shop on the corner, where he spent part of every morning. The telephone in the coffee shop was Ransom’s major electronic interface with the rest of the world. Following the practice of Japanese college students, he gave the phone number of the shop to his friends. In exchange for regular patronage, the coffee-shop owner, Otani-san, took messages for him. Anyone who called for Ransom was told he was usually in between nine and ten.

  Otani welcomed him with a hot towel when he sat down at the counter. Ransom wiped down his face, still sweaty from jogging, and browsed through the newspaper while Otani prepared his coffee. Vietnamese refugees were floating into Malaysia and Hong Kong in leaky boats; leftists in Tokyo had beaten an ideologically suspect comrade to death; Sadaharu Oh was on the verge of breaking Hank Aaron’s home-run record.

  At a table in the back sat two young women, and propped beside them on the floor was a tumescent shopping bag with copy printed to resemble an English dictionary definition.

  FUNKY BABE: Let’s call a funky girl “Funky Babe.”

  Girls, open-minded, know how to swing.

  Love to feel everything rather than think.

  They must all be nice girls.

  The women did not look very funky themselves.

  Otani placed Ransom’s coffee in front of him. Ransom asked when he thought Oh would break the record. Otani, a Hanshin Tigers fan who hated the Tokyo Giants, didn’t want to hear about it. Ransom pursued the conversation eagerly, dreading the stack of student papers in the envelope at his feet. According to the lesson plan of the A-OK English Language Program, the topic was “Business Etiquette.” But since Ransom knew nothing about business and his students knew little about English, that subject was likely to be a standoff, and he had substituted the topic “My Personal Goals,” goal being one of the vocabulary words of the week. He nevertheless doubted that the essays would be much different from those written on business etiquette.

  The alternative to this drab semi-employment was to accept the money his father continued to offer, and this was what kept Ransom going in the teaching business. He didn’t want the old man’s baksheesh. From time to time he still sent checks, which Ransom kept in an unread book in the bottom of a drawer.

  Among the disadvantages of small quarters was not having room to work out. Saturday was officially a day of rest for the dojo, but in order to be merely competent Ransom had to be fanatic. After an hour of essays, he changed into sweats and rode the Honda down to the gym, an ugly prewar box with a peeling concrete skin. The smell inside was forty years of sweat and ammonia. Ransom greeted acquaintances as he walked among the scattered barbells and dumbbells. The gym had one Universal; otherwise it was just a matter of finding a bar and slapping on the weight.

  He took a jump rope out back to the parking lot. After half an hour of cals and stretching he went over to the punching post—a four-by-four wrapped in hemp at fist level. He did fifty and fifty. After two years of this, the skin splitting and scarring over again and again, the right hand was tough enough that he barely felt the impact. The more sensitive left still bled every time.

  He went back inside to bench press, beginning at sixty kilos and working up to a hundred. He had started toward the Universal when someone threw an arm around his neck and pulled him back hard.

  You’re dead.

  Ransom planted a foot behind him, struggling for leverage, but the arm tightened and drew him farther back, off-balance. He was fighting in earnest for air, couldn’t move, then was released.

  You never know, the sensei said, when I’ll be behind you. Coming out of your house in the morning, rounding a corner downtown. I might be waiting underwater in the bath.

  Ransom bowed and nodded, trying to catch his breath.

  What are you doing lifting weights? the sensei asked. Too much weight-lifting will stiffen you up and slow you down. I told you this. You’re stiff and slow
already.

  Excuse me, sensei.

  Do you have your gi? the sensei asked.

  When Ransom said he did, the sensei told him to put it on, he would show him some moves. But he couldn’t, he said, show Ransom how to see.

  5

  When Ransom showed up at Buffalo Rome on Saturday night, Miles Ryder was waiting for him. They retreated into the office.

  “I want to rearrange his face,” Ryder said. “I am going to make a study of methods of inflicting pain and suffering.”

  “How do you know DeVito did it?”

  “Get serious. Who the fuck else is going to trash my bike? Okies love to beat on things.”

  “Did you file a report?”

  “I told ’em. Not that it’ll make a difference.”

  “What do you propose to do if he shows up?”

  “Eventually call an ambulance.”

  Ransom hoped DeVito wouldn’t show, since nothing good came of Texas–Oklahoma blood feuds. From his seat at the bar he kept an eye on the door. Possibly he could head DeVito off before Ryder spotted him. But Miles was also watching the door as he talked to a few friends at a table, and Ransom suspected that DeVito had devolved some blame for last night’s disgrace onto him as well.

  Dana the Potter joined Ransom briefly. He had been snowbound for most of the winter at a kiln town in the mountains, making the same tea bowl over and over. Laboring over the wheel, referring to a model shaped by his sensei, Dana regularly presented a new bowl to the sensei, who examined each one briefly before ordering him to squash it down to clay and start afresh. Ever since the roads opened Dana had been bingeing in Kyoto. In a few weeks Dana would go back to the kiln and beg his sensei’s pardon and then they would not see him again for several months; meanwhile he would talk to anyone who listened. What Ransom thought remarkable was that, after two years in a small village where no one spoke English, Dana did not speak Japanese. Talking to Ransom, he made large, pot-shaping gestures with his hands, as if unaccustomed to having his words understood. Ransom wondered what he was doing up in those hills besides learning how to make a tea bowl, suspecting that Dana’s program was not so different from his own.