Bicycle Days (17 page)

Alec bowed, too, trying to exactly match the angle of the man’s torso. Just when he thought he had gotten it, the man bowed lower.

“I am called Kawashima,” he said in Japanese.

Still bent over, Alec stretched his neck upward to look at the man, but all he could see was the back of his head. “I am called Alec.”

They both stood up. The man was shorter than Alec had originally thought. Even with the geta, the top of his head barely reached Alec’s chin. He had the rough, tanned face of someone who spent much of his time outdoors, with deep lines around his eyes and forehead. In Kawashima’s strong cheekbones and chin, Alec was sure he detected a resemblance to Kiyoko. Though their color was dark, Kawashima’s eyes were alive with light—actually gleaming, Alec thought.

Picking up the duffel bag, Kawashima led the way to a sparkling white Honda sedan. His geta click-clacked against the pavement. Alec stared at the car, then back at the old man, trying to put the two images together. Kawashima started up the car like an old pro, opening the moon roof with the flick of a switch.

They drove through the main part of town in silence, Kawashima hardly seeming aware that there was another person in the car. They moved slowly through the narrow streets, past modest shops and markets. In their midst, rising above the low
roofline of the houses, wooden torii marked the entrance to Shinto shrines.

And then, suddenly, the town was left behind, the Honda winding its way through one cluster of trees and then another. They were pines, most of them, but thinner and sharper than the ones Alec knew from home. They grew wherever they could, huddling in small groups along either side of the road, raising their pointed heads to the vertical landscape with an air of fierce pride. Beneath them in the valley, a house would occasionally show itself, the overhanging eaves of its roof appearing as purely horizontal as the rice paddies that belonged to it.

They turned off onto a dirt road that meandered upward through the pine trees. The car hit a bump and Kawashima let out a grunt; Alec realized they had been riding in silence since leaving the station. Now they were on another dirt road, heading down into the valley. Gradually the land leveled out, turning into a series of rice paddies that led almost to the edge of a narrow river. Like others he had seen along the way, the house popped into sudden view, a gift. It sat nestled among a grove of cherry trees at one end of the valley. The plain wood of the frame and worn, green roof tiles seemed themselves to be a part of the earth, and Alec had to look closely to make out the exact boundaries of the house.

They headed down another road, this one more rocks than dirt, until the car was under a cherry tree that marked the edge of a small orchard. In silence, Kawashima stopped the car, got out, and started walking. Alec followed him through the trees.

Kawashima’s wife was waiting for them at the entrance to the house, her yukata fluttering in the wind. Her hand pressed the hem against her legs to keep it from rising. She was shorter than her husband, but broader. There was a natural steadfastness to her bearing that made Alec think she had no fear of hardship. Her tiny feet were covered in white ankle socks, which had a separate toe so they could be worn with thonged sandals.

She bowed low, but Alec was prepared this time and moved along with her; he thought he heard the old man chuckle. She
welcomed him, told him that he could call them Grandmother and Grandfather, since they were the grandparents of his friend. Alec bowed even lower. As he straightened up, there was a clarity to the scene—to the old couple, their house and land—that made him suddenly aware of the day’s end. The light had changed, grown at once less strong and more crystalline, imparting everything with a greater sense of depth. The three of them stood still and watched the sun, already a fiery orange, as it gradually drew its colors in ever-deepening hues across the horizon.

The house was two stories, but small. The top floor was a bare, open space that could be divided into separate rooms by pulling closed a sliding screen of wood and rice paper. One side of the room was where the old couple slept on their white cotton futon. The other side was to be Alec’s. With his elbow, Grandfather indicated that, when the time came to go to sleep, Alec could fetch his own futon from the cupboard in the wall.

A navy blue yukata lay folded on the tatami. Grandfather said, “Yukata,” and watched with amusement while Alec put it on. When the belt had been tied, the old man grabbed the knot and pulled; it held. With a grunt, he turned around.

Together, in silence, they walked down the rickety stairs.

It was strange at first, sleeping in an open space with Kiyoko’s grandparents. Alec lay awake for a long time, the sounds of the old couple’s snoring and coughing making him feel as though he were listening to passengers on a night train; their noises had the steady sense of routine about them. Openmouthed, head cocked to one side, Alec strained and listened, and gradually, reluctantly, the old man and woman began to identify themselves to him until he knew for certain which noises belonged to whom. And once he could read the rhythms of their sleep, it was only a matter of time before he started to remember things he thought he had forgotten long ago. They came to him as they had from his first day in Japan, as images and scenes, each one
belonging to something larger and unidentifiable. It was as if he had lost control somehow, as if his memory did as it pleased, mocking him by playing his childhood back to him in bits and pieces. He watched them as he would someone else’s home movies, and felt the foreignness of his own life. Like thick rope, it coiled around him and held him where he was.

A month had passed since Alec’s visit to the men’s club with his father. He had just begun eighth grade the week before. People were already starting to talk about high school. It was Saturday, the tenth anniversary, Alec’s father told him, of their renting the house in upstate New York. They made the three-hour drive so that they would be there to celebrate.

The house was Colonial style, painted white. It was old and at one time had been a schoolhouse. A cracked school bell still sat in one corner of the attic, its surface long since covered with dust and cobwebs. A back porch had been added on to the second story of the house. Maple trees bordered the property on two sides, sheltering it from neighbors. A rope swing hung from the tallest tree. A long field began at the edge of the house and sloped down to the steep bank of the river.

That same Saturday the head of the town’s historical association arrived to hang a wooden plaque on the front of the house. He was portly, all tweed and wide-wale corduroy, and he peered at the house and its occupants through round, gold-rimmed spectacles. He took his coffee with milk, he said, and sat down heavily in the Victorian chair by the Ben Franklin stove. He spoke of the history that had occurred on the site, of the famous people who had learned their childhood lessons within the walls of the old building. There were pages and pages of records, he said—dusty old books filled with important facts and schoolboy stories. Alec didn’t recognize any of the famous names the man mentioned and spent the rest of the day looking them up in his father’s 1952 edition of the
Encyclopedia Britannica.

It was late that night when he awoke, perhaps two or three in the morning. The sound of Mark’s uneasy, openmouthed sleep
reached him from the other side of the room. Alec’s bladder ached, and he thought that he should probably go to the bathroom. He climbed carefully out of bed and walked into the playroom, where he paused for a moment to get his bearings in the darkness. The corner of the Ping-Pong table felt splintery against his outstretched hand. To his right, his fingers brushed over the wall of shelves that held his and Mark’s natural history museum. Alec could picture in his mind the placement of each bird’s nest, of each animal skeleton and jagged piece of quartz. A hollow robin’s egg, he knew, rested in a tightly woven nest on the second shelf from the top. He moved slowly through the room, feeling his way. He closed the door behind him and shuffled down the long hallway to the bathroom, which was just to one side of the staircase leading up to the second floor. But he never went inside. He heard his parents fighting upstairs in their bedroom. They were shouting at each other, over each other, and Alec could tell from the wildness in their voices that they were both drunk. He turned from the bathroom and sat down on the bottom step.

Alec couldn’t remember his mother ever having been drunk before or shouting the way she was doing now. Shouting, then sobbing, then shouting again. He wasn’t even listening to what she was saying. It seemed to him that it was all about sounds now, not words. Terrible, animal sounds that raced down the wooden stairs and pounded into him like a fist as he sat in the darkness. A door slammed. Something made of glass shattered against a wall. The noise was brutal, too clear to believe, and Alec cringed as if the object had been thrown at him. He felt again the ache in his bladder, and then the sudden loss of it, like an exhale, as the warm urine flowed out of him and into his flannel pajamas.

Things were quiet after that. Alec didn’t move. Already he could smell his own sour-sweet odor. He held his breath and waited for Mark to appear. But no one came. For some reason Alec thought of the plaque hanging on the front of the house, of how the head of the historical association was so sure that he
knew everything there was to know about the house and who had lived in it. And he realized that no one understood the history of the house the way he did now. He had sat on the stairs and pissed in his pants and no one would ever know a thing about it. He had listened to his parents rage and battle against each other, while Mark had slept through it all. The historical record would show that nothing had changed.

It must have been then that Alec understood for the first time that he had to get away from that history, from the house, from the sounds he had heard that night. He had seen and heard too much. He would go away to school the next year and leave it all behind him, leave Mark sleeping soundly in his bed. He would find something of his own and never once remember any of what had happened here. He would never look back.

The next morning, it was dark when Alec woke, shivering. The air through the open window still tasted of night, cool and moist. He kicked the crumpled sheet back on top of him but knew he wouldn’t be able to go back to sleep.

Reaching for his yukata, he stood up and put it on. The cotton felt harsh against his skin. He groped his way to the stairs; they groaned loudly under his weight. Then he was down and out the door to the porch. The dew-laden air clung to his skin, raising goose bumps on his chest and arms. Out in the open, it was a different kind of darkness from that of the interior of the house—it seemed to Alec somehow more complicated, filled with things beyond his imagination—and it took him a minute to recover his vision. Slowly, as though emerging from a tunnel, things became clear: the cherry trees standing like soldiers around the house; the bare outlines of a rectangle of garden off to one side; Grandfather sitting motionless on the porch, staring across the darkness of the valley.

Alec felt his heart jump upward, bounce against something, then fall back into place. Before he could stop himself, his mouth made a loud sucking noise.

“Sit,” Grandfather said without moving.

Alec stared at him openmouthed. The sky seemed suddenly to have grown lighter, exposing him like a spotlight.

“Sit,” Grandfather repeated.

Alec sat down next to him, his knees cracking. “I am sorry for disturbing you.”

The old man didn’t respond. Alec tried to figure out what he could be looking at for so long. The sky was fully waking up now, the light spreading through it with a surprising gentleness.

“Do you like to fish?” Grandfather still hadn’t moved.

“What?” Alec said, not understanding the word for fishing.

“Fish. In the river.”

“In the river? Yes, I like to fish.”

Grandfather stood up, started walking briskly down the slope in the direction of the river. Without looking at Alec, he pointed to where the fishing equipment lay, the bamboo rods resting against the side of the house.

“Good,” he said. “I like to fish, too.”

Barely able to carry everything, Alec rushed after him.

They walked for a while. When they reached the river, Grandfather turned downstream along the bank. Finally, he stopped. Alec stood beside him at the edge of the river, studying the strength of the current. A twinge of fear rocked his stomach; he had once tipped his canoe and almost drowned in the river that ran behind his family’s country house.

“It is a very pretty river,” he said.

Grandfather grunted, began threading the fishing line through the eye of a small lure. When he was finished, he reached into one of the bags Alec had been carrying and brought out a pair of rubber fisherman’s waders. Alec extended his hand, thinking they were for him. But the old man put them on himself, tucking the edges of his yukata into the chest-high waders. Picking up his rod, he walked carefully into the water, planted his feet, and began fishing.

Alec stared after him, too shocked to even laugh. He wondered
if he had been brought along simply to carry the equipment. He picked up a lure.

Five minutes later, he was still trying to thread the line through it. Grandfather hadn’t even turned around to check on him. Sweaty and humiliated, Alec cleared his throat loudly.

Grandfather didn’t turn his head.

“I can’t do this,” Alec mumbled.

“You said you like to fish.”

“I do.”

With a loud sigh, Grandfather reeled in and, dripping wet, came up beside him. Feeling like a little boy, Alec handed him the line and lure.

“Watch,” Grandfather said.

Slowly, so that Alec could see exactly what he was doing, he threaded the line through the eyehole and tied it off with a tiny, secure knot. He looked at Alec for a moment, then cut away the knot with a sharp pocketknife. Holding the lure and line, Alec stared after him as he walked back into the river. On the third attempt, he threaded the lure, then secured it with the same knot he had seen Grandfather tie. There was a second pair of waders in the bag. They were too small, just barely reaching his waist.