The Ark Sakura, Page 4

  Someone helped me up from behind, so near I could smell the sweat in his armpits. It was the insect dealer.

  “Where in hell have you been?”

  “Sorry. I didn’t think it would take so long, but it turned out I had to take a crap too. I’ve had loose bowels off and on for a while. Maybe it’s the weather; who knows?”

  “Go after them. Hurry!”

  “After who?”

  “The shills, of course.” I stood and started to run off ahead of him, but my left leg was rubbery and lacking totally in sensation. I clung to his shoulder, barely managing to keep upright.

  “That woman is a looker, isn’t she?” he enthused. “That face makes me want to take her in my arms. That ass makes me want—”

  “Never mind that. They ran off with my stuff.”

  “What stuff?”

  “The tickets. They swiped them and ran off.”

  “Now why would they want to do a thing like that?” He pulled me back under the canvas, out of the rain. I would have resisted, but my leg wasn’t obeying orders.

  “You wouldn’t take it so lightly if you knew how much those tickets are worth.”

  “How should I know? I’m sure they don’t, either.”

  “Their instincts were better than yours, though.”

  The scanty hair on his big round head looked as if someone had scribbled it on with a ballpoint pen. Water dripped from his earlobes and the point of his chin, as if someone had left the faucet running.

  “Relax,” he said. “I think I know where they went. If you can walk, I’ll let you lean on my shoulder.”

  There was pain like a scattering of broken needles, but normal sensation was beginning to return. I gripped the shoulder of the insect dealer, who carried the suitcase, and we headed toward the exit, getting wet to the skin. The store loudspeakers were announcing closing time to the accompaniment of “Auld Lang Syne.” The man evidently in charge of dismantling stalls came dashing up the emergency stairway, pulled out a crowbar from the toolbag slung around his hips, and set to work, starting in a corner.

  In front of the elevators there was a roofed area some fifteen feet square, filled with a jostling crowd seeking escape from the rain. The overload bell was ringing, and the elevator doors were wide open. No one moved to get out. No one could have—the elevator was packed too tight. Angry shouts … crying children … women’s screams … and the bell, ringing and ringing …

  “Hopeless. Damn!”

  “We’ve got to hurry and find them! The man had a crew cut, and the woman had curly hair. She was wearing a T-shirt printed with some kind of scenery on the front—”

  “Forget it. Take a look at that. No way.”

  “Why not take the stairs?”

  “We’re on the ninth floor, you know.”

  “So? I don’t care.”

  We circled around in back of the elevators till we came to a white steel door. On it was a wooden sign marked EMERGENCY EXIT. AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

  4

  MY BIOLOGICAL FATHER

  IS CALLED INOTOTSU

  The door swung open to a noise like the buzzing of ten thousand horseflies—the hum of motors reverberating down the pit of the stairwell. It was a steep, strictly-business stairway, a world away from the gaudy bustle of the store interior. The walls were of plain concrete, adorned only with large numbers on each landing to mark off the successive floors. The air smelled of raw pelts hanging up to dry.

  The railing was on the left, which made it easier for me to favor my injured left knee. On the sixth-floor landing we stopped for breath; I tried straightening my leg and putting weight on it. There was a watery sensation, but the pain remained local. The insect dealer’s glasses were starting to steam over.

  “Are you sure you know where they went?” I asked.

  “They have an office. A rented one, with just a phone, but an office.”

  “ ‘Shills for hire,’ is that it?”

  “It’s a referral agency for sidewalk vendors. They keep a percentage of the space rental fee.”

  “Then they are racketeers. I knew it. He tried to gloss it over—called himself a ‘sales promoter’ or some damn thing.”

  “They don’t seem to have any direct connections to organized crime, though. If they did, they could never deal with the department store here so openly. Who knows, maybe they pay their dues on the sly.”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me. There was something slimy about them.”

  “Her too?”

  The question was impossible for me to answer in an offhand way. I stopped, pretending my knee hurt. The insect dealer shifted the suitcase to his other hand and looked back at me, a faint smile on his face.

  “Doesn’t she get to you?” he said. “She does to me. She’s too good for him.”

  “He called her his fishing lure.”

  “Did he, now.” He licked his upper lip, then his lower. The suitcase bumped down the stairs in time to his footsteps. “The man’s no fool. You have to give him credit for that.”

  “Do you really think they headed straight for the office at this hour? Maybe we should phone first, to make sure.”

  We passed the fifth floor, then the fourth-floor landing, brushing past a pair of uniformed security guards in an evident hurry—probably on their way up to straighten out the crowd and get the elevators going again. Rain washed against the skylight.

  “If I were you, I wouldn’t even bother doing that,” said the insect dealer. “I’d make straight for the harbor.”

  “Harbor?”

  “Sure. That ticket gets you on board a ship, right? A ship means a harbor.”

  “But my ship isn’t in the water. It’s sort of …” I groped for a way to express it. “It’s in dry dock, you could say.”

  “Well, it’s only a question of time till they find it and get on board.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “There’s a map on the back of that ticket, isn’t there?”

  “You mean you’ve already looked at it? That was quick.”

  “It’s a habit of mine,” he said. “While I’m in the john, I have to have something to read.”

  “Do you think they could find it with just that map to go on?”

  “A fisherman could. I like deep-sea fishing myself, so I knew where it was the minute I saw it.”

  “Oh … What about him? Does he fish? He did make that crack about fishing by lure… .”

  “That area is full of great fishing spots,” said the insect dealer, giving his hip pocket a slap where the ticket apparently was. “I know my way around there pretty well. Wasn’t there an old fishermen’s inn somewhere near there?”

  I felt a sick embarrassment, as if he’d told me my fly was open. I didn’t want to hear any more. To have the past dragged aboard my ship was the last thing I wanted. When we set sail, I wanted my slate as clean as a newborn baby’s.

  “Oh, sorry, I forgot to give you back your watch.”

  On the second-floor landing, we took a final rest. My knee was almost entirely free of pain now and felt merely a bit stiff—though to keep my companion off his guard it seemed wiser to pretend otherwise. The insect dealer strapped his watch on his wrist, sat down on the eupcaccia suitcase, and stuck a cigarette in his mouth.

  “No smoking.”

  “I’m not going to light it. I only smoke five a day.”

  “See there? You do want to survive.”

  “No, just to enjoy my last moments. Lung cancer isn’t my idea of fun.”

  We looked at each other, and shared a laugh for no reason.

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “I guess it would be smarter to go straight to the ship than to waste time stopping by their office on a hunch. Are you coming with me?”

  “Sure—as far as the first-aid room. It’s right on this floor, somewhere in back. You’ve got to attend to a sprain or it’ll get worse.”

  “Hold on just a minute. That’s not what you said before. You promised
you’d help me find them.”

  “I did?”

  “Besides, first aid isn’t going to help me drive my jeep. It’s parked down in the underground parking lot. The clutch weighs a ton.”

  “You want me to drive it?”

  “What’s the matter, can’t you drive?”

  “Are you kidding? You’re looking at a former truckdriver. I’m just wondering why I should go that far out of my way for you.”

  “Well, I gave you back your watch, but I notice you haven’t given me back my ticket.”

  “If you want it back, just say so. I thought you’d traded me this for the rest of the eupcaccias.” He started to get up, fumbling in his hip pocket. Alarm took possession of me, as if I were watching an egg roll toward a table edge.

  “Nobody’s asking for it back!”

  “Lower your voice, will you?” he said. “I can’t stand loud voices. Dogs barking, hogs squealing, people yelling—it all drives me nuts.”

  Hogs. Did someone say hogs? My ears buzzed as if filled with crawling insects. I wasn’t always a porker. When I was a boy, I was as skinny as a shish kebab skewer. Not all hogs are fat, either, as far as that goes. “Hog” became synonymous with “Fatso” back when ninety percent of all hogs raised were Yorkshires. The Yorkshire is a lard breed, and before synthetic oils and fats came into wide use, it was an important source of fat. Not just cooking fat: lard from Yorkshire hogs was used for a variety of things, from all-purpose salve and tallow to ointment for rectal suppositories—even a mustache pomade said to have been popular with the French aristocracy. Then, as demand for pork grew, the Yorkshire breed gave way increasingly to the bacon-type Landrace breed and the loin-and-ham-type Berkshire breed, both of which have a thin fat layer and a high proportion of excellent lean meat. With four extra ribs, the newer breeds were considerably longer and sturdier than their ancestors.

  My biological father (a pariah in his own hometown) goes by the nickname Inototsu—literally “charging boar,” which is certainly an accurate description of his personality. Not only is he as reckless and dangerous as a wild boar, but he used to run a fishermen’s inn out on a rocky cove called Inokuchi, or Boar’s Mouth (who would have thought the insect dealer would know anything about it!). The cove, where Mount Boar trails into the sea, is so called because it looks like the snout of a boar.

  That there should be some physical resemblance between my biological father and myself probably couldn’t be helped. Both of us weigh nearly two hundred twenty pounds, but Inototsu is well over six feet tall and has a neck so short that he can’t wear ready-made shirts. He really seems less a hog than a giant boar, with all the domineering brute force of one. As a matter of fact, he is clumsy and timorous, but people always defer to him and are awed by his appearance. To hide a peculiarly wavy hairline, he used to wear a loud green hunting cap, which only increased people’s apprehension.

  He always liked to stand out. He used to hang around the city hall when he had nothing better to do, and even had namecards printed up with some official-sounding bureaucratic title or other. Eventually he got more ambitious, and started hankering after a real councilman’s badge. His wife (my stepmother) was a practical woman; instead of protesting, she had him turn the deed to the fishing inn over to her for safekeeping. The inn was large, with a great many rooms, each provided with its own kitchen; it had a sizable clientele, including a number of cooks who liked to catch their own fish. Inototsu’s only other assets consisted of two twenty-five-ton fishing vessels. As his wife had feared, when he ran for office he sold these off to raise funds. But not even changing his hunting cap for a felt hat did any good; he always lost miserably. When his money was gone, he became a terrible alcoholic and never bathed. Eventually he smelled so bad that dogs would run away from him. In the end they even threw him out of the city hall.

  One day he tripped over his wife and fell on her as she lay sleeping. He escaped with a nose out of joint, but she died from internal rupture. The rumor was that he had deliberately trampled her to death, but they let him go, for lack of evidence. Even so, his entire staff quit in fear. It was after that that Inototsu took in me and my mother.

  My mother had run a little cigarette stand on Mount Boar, just across the town road. She had me after Inototsu raped her. Then the year after we went to the inn to live, the summer I was twelve, it was my turn to be accused of rape. The victim was a waitress thirty years older than me. The one who raped her wasn’t me—I just happened to be spying on the scene of the crime. But with Inototsu’s blood in my veins, I found it impossible to clear myself. Inototsu suddenly became a self-appointed emissary of justice; he caught me and shut me up in an abandoned underground quarry in the mountain (the present ship), where he kept me chained for an entire week, until Mother finally sneaked in and set me free.

  It was then that I started putting on weight. I wish to make it absolutely clear that I was not born this way. My excess weight is compensation for this unreasonable violence inflicted on me in childhood. My left ankle still bears scars from the chain. At fourteen, I ran away from home, but I continued to gain weight, my hatred of Inototsu proliferating along with the scar tissue on my leg. Rumor has it that he still hasn’t abandoned his old dream of becoming a councilman. But who can take seriously a thug with a record of four (possibly seven) convictions, who is also an alcoholic and gives off a foul odor for thirty feet in all directions? Even I, his biological son, while living in the same city, have seen him face to face only once in the last few years.

  So please, please don’t talk to me about pigs. Just the sound of that word makes me feel as if my entire personality had been stuffed in a meat grinder. Local people look on me as an overgrown hog, so I eliminated them from consideration as crew members from the start. I eliminated almost everyone I ever knew, however casually. Each person who seemed likely to call me a pig I changed mentally into a louse. And then crushed between my nails.

  “Don’t hit the ceiling. No harm intended. As long as they don’t howl and make a lot of noise, I’ve got nothing against dogs. I have one myself—a mutt, nothing fancy.”

  “So do I. What does that prove?”

  “A spitz, I bet.”

  “Flake off.”

  “Well, if you don’t want to go have your knee looked at, I can’t make you.” He shifted the unlit cigarette in his mouth, and looked up at a nonexistent window. What did he see through it? “At this time of day, the first-aid room will be jammed anyway, with victims of department store fever. They say it’s endemic among housewives who go home to an empty house.”

  “Then you’ll come with me to the ship?”

  “I didn’t say that. I’ll hang on to the ticket, though. There’s always next time. When the sun starts to go down, I have to have a drink. That’s mainly what keeps me going, day in and day out. I’ll carry the eupcaccias out to your jeep for you.”

  “You underestimate the gravity of the situation.”

  “You overestimate it.” Briskly he clapped his hands—fleshy hands that made me think of heavy-duty gloves—and sprang to his feet. “I don’t brood over things the way you do. It’s not my style.”

  “Oh, crap—say you’ll come with me. I’ve got booze on the ship, if that’s what you want. If we take the bypass, we can get there in less than an hour, and I know a shortcut that only a jeep can manage.”

  “I can’t figure it out—why you’re counting so much on me.”

  “Blame it on the eupcaccia. That’s what brought us together.”

  “Look, as far as I’m concerned, the eupcaccia was a dud. I only sold one, so that proves it. I misread the people’s mind. What’s-his-name, the German psychologist, has a theory that this is the age of simulation games. Eventually reality gets confused with symbol. There’s a desire for enclosed spaces, like pillboxes—or with a little more aggression thrown in, tanks. If you can’t follow it, don’t worry. It was all in the paper. Anyway, the end result is a boom in electronic monsters, model guns, and computer war
games. He could be on to something, don’t you think?”

  “The shill said the reason the eupcaccias don’t sell is because they don’t have horns.”

  “That could very well be. You sure you wouldn’t be better off teaming up with him instead of me?”

  “Personally, I don’t give a shit about horns. One of these days I’m going to design a ship’s flag, and I have in mind a logo based on the eupcaccia.”

  “In the end, what do you think you’ll do with your ship—subdivide or lease?”

  “How could I put a price tag on life?”

  The stairs came to an end in front of the basement door. The insect dealer put his hand on the knob and paused.

  “They station a guard here to keep employees from carrying off merchandise,” he explained. “We don’t have anything to hide, but still you don’t want to undergo a body search, do you?”

  He opened the door. Out poured that uniform concentration of noise that characterizes basement grocery sections of a large department store. A standing screen was placed before the door, but there was no sign of anyone around.

  “Here we go.” Holding up the suitcase like the figurehead on a ship’s prow, he plunged into the crowd, shouting, “One side, please, sick man coming through, one side, please. Everybody out of the way, there’s a sick man coming through… .”