The Changeling (39 page)

Daio had turned the back of his darkly sunburned neck toward Kogito and was plainly avoiding his gaze. But when he said that, Kogito blurted out, “From the beginning, you’ve been using Goro as bait to lure Peter here, and just a while ago you
were saying that Peter would be happy that Goro had come back. So you’re no different from the gang that’s lying in wait to try to kill Peter! And what you’re doing right now is creating an alibi for yourself, so that after Peter’s been murdered, you can say, ‘Oh, no,
I
was against it, but the young warriors just pushed me aside and ignored my warnings.’ And you’re trying to use us as witnesses for your self-serving alibi!”

Daio turned his head and looked at Kogito straight on, with a troubled expression. “No,” he said, “I was truly glad that Goro decided to come back, and ... just like the plan we made in the beginning, I hope that Peter won’t have to take out his pistol and that he’ll be able to enjoy his reunion with Goro. All I want is for him to leave ten broken rifles for us when he goes home.

“Just like yesterday, I’ve heated up the bath, and I’m having another feast prepared—today some of the young warriors butchered a cow, just for the occasion—and that’s as far as it’s gone. Beyond that, if Peter and Goro find themselves on the same wavelength and decide that they want to get together, we’ve already gotten a bedroom ready for the two of them, just in case.

“My plan is essentially a peaceful one. If everything goes well, we’ll send Peter home with his desires satisfied. And if he leaves behind ten broken rifles for us, that’s when we’ll begin to set our plan in motion so we can go out in a blaze of glory, like true sons of Japan.”

As Kogito was standing up he saw Daio glancing in his direction, and he suddenly kicked out wildly and hit the older man under the right eye. Daio tumbled from the sofa onto the floor with a loud crash, so easily that Kogito wondered whether
he had fallen on purpose for dramatic effect. This impression was confirmed when Daio continued lying flat on the ground, fumbling around halfheartedly with his one remaining arm as he tried (though not very hard) to raise his torso to a sitting position.

Goro jumped to his feet. “Kogito,” he scolded, “why do you always have to lose your temper? What’s the point of doing something stupid like that?”

Evidently thinking that Kogito might aim another kick at the back of Daio’s head or his side while the one-armed man was lying defenseless on the floor, Goro stood in “ready” position, clearly determined to stop his headstrong friend from doing any more damage. The truth was, seeing Daio in that pitiful state, feebly groping around—almost as if he was deliberately trying to exaggerate his own weakness and vulnerability—caused a new wave of anger to blaze up in Kogito. But Goro had put one arm around Kogito’s shoulder and was propelling him toward the exit, and Kogito had no intention of defying his friend’s wishes.

Kogito and Goro, who were both feeling as dispirited as if they had lost the confrontation with Daio (or, at least, as if they hadn’t won), squatted down at the top of the tall steps at the entrance to the main building and put on their shoes. Then they set off walking toward the wide, sloping meadow, where the bright green grass was waving in the wind.

6

The sky was clear, and both the lush, grassy meadow and the deciduous forest on the other side of the valley (with a heavy cliff looming precariously above) were bathed in a diluted yellowish light, even though it wasn’t yet dusk. The wind that was blowing up from the river was unseasonably chilly.

About halfway down the incline, some freshly cut timber from the periodic thinning of the forest (each log was about the diameter of a clenched fist) had been assembled into a sort of rack that resembled an oversized sawhorse. Goro and Kogito walked up to the odd-looking apparatus. Gingerly, the two of them clambered onto it—buttocks resting on the topmost crosspiece, feet supported by the lowest one—and gazed down the slope.

“Come on, Goro, let’s just go home,” Kogito pleaded.

“Why? Isn’t this an exciting adventure?”

“I just think it’s stupid to be curious about that sort of thing.”

“Hmm,” Goro said facetiously, pretending to address his remarks to an invisible third person. “Exactly what does Kogito mean by ‘that sort of thing,’ I wonder?”

“Well, then,” Kogito shot back, “what
I
wonder is, why do you want to stay?”

“Because Peter’s a friend, and he’s risking his life by coming back here. He has absolutely nothing to gain from that, you know.”

“It’s only because he heard that you were going to come back today.”

“In that case, it’ll be even worse if I’m not here when he returns.”

“Worse for whom?”

“For Peter, of course. But also for my self-respect. I don’t like to play bait and switch.”

“So you’re going to offer yourself up as a sacrifice?”

“Don’t worry, I won’t do anything I don’t want to do.”

“What if you end up being forced at gunpoint?” As he said that, Kogito felt that he was being terribly childish and melodramatic.

“Even if there’s a gun pointing at me, I still won’t do it. Like I said, if I don’t want to do something ...,” Goro repeated.

“But there’s no need to get yourself backed into a corner where you have to make that kind of choice, is there? ’Cause there’s someone waiting to give us a ride back to Matsuyama in the three-wheeled truck, right now.”

“Yeah, and they’ll probably let you pass through to the place where the three-wheeled truck is parked—after all, this secret hideout was built by your father’s followers. But do you really think they would let me cross the bridge so easily?”

Kogito’s attention was suddenly drawn toward the lower right-hand corner of the slope, at the foot of the suspension bridge. There, a crowd of Daio’s disciples—the young warriors,
as he liked to call them—was milling about. While Kogito and Goro had been batting these short sentences back and forth, a fair amount of time had elapsed. From a distance, it was impossible to read the expressions on the faces of the young men, but it was clear that they were very busy doing something at the bottom of the hill.

What bothered Kogito right away was the way the group was moving. He could see a certain aggressive, overstated swagger in their physical movements and gestures, which was typical of people from around here when they’d had too much to drink. During the party the night before, as far as Kogito could see, none of the young disciples had been partaking of the free-flowing home-brewed sake. But according to Daio’s account, the party had gotten quite wild toward the end, after Kogito and Goro had snuck off.

Whether the young warriors were making up for their previous abstemiousness or going the hair-of-the-dog route, they must have started drinking well before dusk today (probably right after their unpleasant confrontation with Daio), passing around high-octane
doburoku
that had been decanted into giant-sized beer bottles or something like that. And then there was Daio, too, guzzling moonshine nonstop, all by himself. It seemed likely that both sides were drinking as a distraction from everything that was weighing on their minds. What if everyone at the training camp had decided to get rip-roaring drunk? That prospect made Kogito feel distinctly uneasy.

At the bottom of the lower part of the slope, on the left side, there was a thicket of leafy, luxuriant shrubbery covered with reddish-brown buds. While Kogito watched, five or six young disciples, who had apparently been engaged in some sort
of clandestine activity in the thicket, suddenly burst out of the bushes and began working in plain sight. First they would fill large, deep buckets with something, and then, as if setting out to walk down to the river, they would dump the contents of the buckets into the water, which wasn’t visible from the top of the slope. There were also some large, bulky items, too big to fit into the buckets, which they carried to the edge of the cliff and flung into the river far below.

From the other side of the thicket, two black dogs sprang out in a frenzy of excitement. The dogs started eagerly jumping up on the young men, who were cleaning out the emptied buckets with wads of fresh-picked grass, but they were soon driven off. The hounds ran away at top speed along a road that couldn’t be seen from the top of the slope, then dashed down the hill into the deep valley.

By and by Kogito noticed that several young disciples—the number seemed to have increased—were climbing up the slope, each lugging a bucket that had obviously been refilled with something. Behind them marched two strapping young men, carrying what looked like a messy, rolled-up carpet with jagged edges on their broad shoulders. As they drew closer, it gradually became evident that the men were extremely dirty—not only their upper torsos but their heads and faces, as well. It was also obvious from the way they lurched along that they were more than a little intoxicated.

The men were walking with exaggerated slowness, but soon enough they sidled up next to the sawhorse where Goro and Kogito were sitting, in the manner of innocent pedestrians who just happened to be passing by. Kogito realized then that the stuff in the buckets they were carrying was the flesh
and internal organs of the slaughtered calf Daio had mentioned earlier in connection with the feast, and that the unwieldy ruglike object was that animal’s pelt, although it was so massive that it looked more like the skin of a full-grown cow. The young men who were toting these gruesome burdens, whether by hand or on their shoulders, were grinning wordlessly and clearly feeling no pain. They looked like the grown-up versions of country children who have come to town for a festival parade, but Kogito had no idea what they were planning to do.

After a while one of the young acolytes, who seemed to be the most popular member of the group, put down the largest bucket as if it didn’t weigh a thing and called out to Kogito and Goro, not addressing either one in particular: “Oh, that’s the life! I guess it pays to be a pretty boy.” After a moment’s silence, Goro responded in a tranquil voice. “What are you talking about?” he asked mildly, but his response had an element of condescension, as if he wasn’t taking the young men very seriously.

“This is what I’m talking about,” the young warrior sneered. “Here we are, slaving away, doing menial labor and getting covered with all this disgusting blood and grease, and we aren’t allowed to go to the bathhouse to get cleaned up. So after we deliver these heavy buckets to the old guy in the kitchen, we have to trudge back down to the valley, and then we have to wash ourselves off in the cold river, with the dogs right next to us, gobbling up the filthy offal. But it’s a very different story for you two, isn’t it? You have nothing to do but take refreshing hot-spring baths, and eat and drink till you’re full. And after you’ve carefully washed everything, right down to your assholes, it’s
‘
Wondafuu, sankyuu beriberi maachi
,’ am I right?” The next-to-last phrase was rendered, with maximum contempt, in phonetic English.

The young warriors, including the one who had just delivered this diatribe, burst out laughing, but there was something childish about their merriment. It seemed to have an edge of hostility, yet beneath the alcohol-fueled bravado there was a vestigial element of bashfulness, as well. The truculent remarks and derisive laughter gave Kogito a disheartening sense of the mean-spiritedness of his countrymen. He was shaking with anger and nervous tension, but Goro showed no signs of losing his cool. Finally, unable to control his temper, Kogito lashed out.

“Hey, if that’s your lot in life, then just go ahead and wash off your dirt with the dogs! Why are you hanging around here, looking like you want something? You’re just adding to your hardships by putting down those heavy loads and then picking them up again and loitering around where you aren’t welcome.”

At this, the young men erupted in uproarious laughter. Kogito had a feeling that they were laughing because in his excitement he had spoken to them in their own dialect, and that made him even angrier. What a bunch of mean-spirited jerks! He felt somehow ashamed of the young men—and, by extension, of himself, too, since they were all from the same place—and he felt embarrassed about subjecting Goro to such an unpleasant experience. The two men who were carrying the roughly rolled-up, raw calf pelt were laughing along with the others, but they appeared to be up to something else as well. They passed right by Kogito and Goro, then stopped, ominously.

“Yeah, it’s a rough life, all right,” one of them retorted. “But the main problem now is that the drying rack we need for our dirty work is being occupied by your pristine little asses!” And then in one quick movement the young warriors unfurled the large blood-soaked pelt they were carrying and dumped it right onto Kogito’s and Goro’s heads.

Teetering atop the high, rickety platform, the two boys were enveloped in a lukewarm, bloody-smelling, disorienting darkness as they struggled to keep their balance so they wouldn’t go crashing to the ground. Their arms were pinned at their sides, and their attempts to kick the fetid calfskin off with their legs were woefully ineffectual. And as if from the other side of a thick wall, a great wave of laughter kept washing over them—now close, now far away.
A hard night! Dried blood smokes on my face, and nothing lies behind me but that repulsive little tree!

Kogito had only a vague memory of what transpired immediately after he and Goro finally managed to extricate themselves from underneath the bloody calfskin, but that scene was set down with perfect clarity in the screenplay.

KOGITO: Come on, let’s cross the bridge and get out of here.

GORO: But we’re totally filthy. Even if we do decide to leave, I’m going to get cleaned up first.

In the gathering dusk, the two of them are surrounded by the young warriors, who are still laughing loudly about their prank
.

GORO (
ignoring the young men
): Seriously, I need to go wash up. My shirt and trousers are dirty, too, so I need to rinse them out, as well. If I leave them like this, I won’t be able to put them on again.