Barely had the last tectonic plate sighed with exhaustion and settled down into its new alignment than Kitsune lit out for the cave. He knew what was coming next. The deities would dispatch demons, armed with an assortment of demon stuff: fevers, retchings, deliriums, tumors, accidents, comas, ruptures, poisonous bites, etc. And all of this sorcery aimed specifically at Kazu. Kitsune gathered speed.
He was still a kilometer or so away when he spied the head of Tanuki protruding from a hollow log. Initially, the fox thought his colleague had been felled by the quake, but he quickly realized that the badger was, instead, sleeping off a bender. Tanuki reeked, not merely of sake but of a medley of vaginal perfumery, not every note of which, according to the fox’s keen nostrils, was human. (There were female tanukis in the hills.) Moreover, he was bleeding from various wounds, administered, doubtlessly, not by the earthquake but by men whose wives or daughters he had been caught romancing. His short legs were swollen from excessive dancing, his round belly had been drummed to the point of baldness.
“Forgive me if I don’t pay immediate homage to your suave grooming and elegant mien,” said Kitsune. “Compliments, however well deserved, must of necessity be postponed. You’ve got to run to your den at once and send your family away.” When Tanuki groaned in protest and made to turn away, the fox seized him by the ears. “Listen up, you worthless rascal!” Then he briefed an increasingly sober Tanuki on how the Cloud Fortress was intent upon eradicating tiny Kazu.
Tanuki’s immediate impulse was to fight back—but though he had a lot of tricks in his bag, they would have been no match for the combined forces of the Cloud Fortress, and he was somehow astute enough to realize it. As for Kitsune, he had outwitted the gods on any number of occasions, but this was not a cause for which he was prepared to risk anything more than he had already. “You have no choice,” he said. “You’ve got to send them out of the country immediately.”
The badger grew solemn. “That Miho,” he mused, and his voice was less gravelly than usual. “That Miho made a fine wife woman. As wife women go. Of course, she hasn’t been overly friendly to me lately. . . .”
“I can’t imagine why not,” said the fox, his flame of a tongue curling with sarcasm.
“And Kazu. How could such a thing as this be happening to my precious little Kazu? What will become of her?”
“You should have thought of that before,” chided Kitsune. “To bring a child into the world without preparing in advance for its security and happiness is a criminal act, and the parents responsible should have their genitals removed.” He might have said more in this vein had he not noticed that there were tears—actual teardrops—in the badger’s beady orbs. Kitsune rested a paw on Tanuki’s shoulder. He’d never seen him look so despondent. “Everything will turn out all right. Let’s take you over to the creek and get you washed up. Afterward, I’ll accompany you home if you’d like.”
“Okay,” muttered Tanuki. “Thanks.” Then he hesitated. After a thoughtful moment, he said, “I need to find something first.”
The fox’s green eyes grew slitty with suspicion. “Oh? You need to find what?” He was imagining a jar of sake stashed in the bushes somewhere.
“A chrysanthemum seed,” Tanuki said quietly.
“Ah so,” said Kitsune. He nodded understandingly. “I see. Yes. A chrysanthemum seed. I’ll help you look for one. Let’s go.”
Pausing about thirty yards from the den, the two animals, who’d been scampering through the woods on all fours, caught their breath and surveyed the situation. It was nearly dusk and very still. Under a pine tree not far from the cave’s entrance, Kazu was playing with a crudely fashioned stick doll. At the entrance, yams were roasting over supper coals. Their aroma set Tanuki’s mouth to visibly watering, and Kitsune practically had to hold him back. “Miho’s inside,” said the fox. “Good. I’ll go in alone and talk to her, save you getting brained with a rice pot.”
“Thanks. My head’s sore enough already.”
As Kitsune disappeared into the cave, Tanuki approached Kazu. She squealed with pleasure when she saw him. “Papa!” He reared and they embraced. “Papa go for eat?” she asked, always amused by the gymnastic vigor with which her father addressed his food.
At the mention of eating, Tanuki’s head swung involuntarily in the direction of the roasting yams, and his oral cavity again flooded with anxious saliva. However, exhibiting more restraint than experienced tanuki observers would have thought possible, he turned back to his daughter. “No eat,” he said through the drool. “But I want you to open your mouth. Open it wide for Himself.”
The little girl did as she was asked, expecting to be fed a tidbit of honeycomb or some sweet berry. “No, this is not for chewing,” said her father. “Now open wide. This is going to pinch a little, but it won’t hurt for long. Be brave. Like a tanuki.”
With that, he pressed the chrysanthemum seed against the roof of Kazu’s mouth. She flinched, and tears formed, but she did not pull away, and he pressed harder and harder until the seed was embedded fairly deeply in the soft tissue of her palate. When it was as fixed as he could make it, he sealed it with a smear of beeswax to help hold it in place until the impacted tissue would grow over it.
“You must make Himself a promise. Okay? This is very, very important. Are you listening?”
“Yes,” she assured him with a bit of a choke. And she was.
“You must never ever, even when you’re a big girl, even when you’re a grown lady like your mother, you must never ever take out of your mouth what I just put in it. Understand? You promise?”
Kazu was no more than two and a half, but she was quick. She got the picture. She made the promise. And she was rewarded and consoled with a morsel of sugary rice cake that Tanuki had fetched for her from the stash of stolen goods he kept midway down the mountain. He hugged her again.
“Now, why don’t you run inside and see what your mother and that old fox are up to?”
For several moments after his daughter disappeared into the cave, Tanuki stood watching after her. Then, with a swish and a clunk of his giant scrotum, he turned and vanished into the forest.
Not many hours later, after the moon had set, when the night was so black not even Michael Jackson’s cosmetic surgeon could have lightened its hue, Miho and Kazu began to steal their way down the mountain.
Acting on Kitsune’s advice, Miho’s plan was to trek directly to the sea. “Maybe you can convince a boatman to sail you down the coast,” the fox had said. “Barter him your body if necessary. From Kyushu, you’ll need to find another sailor to take you across the strait. Maybe in one of those noisy, newfangled boats, the fast ones they call ‘motorized.’ You may have to fuck him, too, but try first to rely on your disguise.”
Miho was dressed in a masculine kimono left over from Tanuki’s clandestine days in Kyoto. From dried moss, Kitsune had helped her fashion a wig and false beard. Secured in a covered basket with twigs protruding from it, Kazu was strapped to her back. The appearance, if one didn’t look too closely, was that of an old man packing a load of firewood.
Meet me in Cognito, darling,
Sure, some may think that it’s rash,
But you’ll look chic incognito
With your fake nose and Groucho mustache.
Admittedly, the prospect of this new adventure excited Miho. For most of her existence, she had been tweaked by curiosity. It was her abiding curiosity, in fact, that had prompted her to do the unthinkable, to make the romantic decisions that had resulted in her current predicament.
The pain of her departure was tempered somewhat by its inevitability. Even before learning that she had angered the gods—what a bunch of hypocrites!—she had been preparing herself for an exit. Tanuki was staying away for increasingly long periods of time, and when he did come home, he was drunk or hung over, dirty, bedraggled, stinking of fornication. It wasn’t really a surprising development. Neither was he totally to blame. After all, she had willingly married a tanuki.
And a tanuki was . . . a tanuki. Still, it was not a healthy environment in which to raise an impressionable child. Especially, perhaps, when that child, herself, had tanuki blood in her veins.
Upon Miho’s previous exodus, as she’d been packing to leave the temple, the abbot had come to her room to bid her farewell. His gaze was pellucid, his nod curt. “Remember this,” he said. “It is what it is, you are what you it, and there are no mistakes.”
She wasn’t sure what his words meant. She wasn’t sure they meant anything at all. Maybe they were just another of those cryptic Zen ploys designed to slip a silver bridle onto the wild horse of the mind. In any case, the words gave her a sort of solace, a strange sense of elasticity and liveliness as she picked her way around rock piles and descended slippery slopes, and she whispered them to herself for the sheer tingle of hearing them spoken.
“It is what it is.”
“You are what you it.”
“There are no mistakes.”
A kind of boil was forming around the seed in the roof of Kazu’s mouth. Honoring her promise, she didn’t touch it, not even with tongue tip. But from time to time, the soreness caused her to whimper. Believing the child’s discomfort the result of sleepiness and confinement in the basket, Miho cooed soothing words to her. She jostled her as little as possible. She sang her a low lullaby.
Thus, mother and daughter went on through the night. No rest. No regrets. They just pushed onward, onward toward whatever lay in store. At one point, however, Miho came to a complete and sudden stop. From somewhere above them, far up the mountainside, she and Kazu—who had just as abruptly ceased fretting—heard a familiar sound, a faint rhythmic echo of some terrible unnamed and untamed joy.
Pla-bonga. Pla-bonga. Pla-bonga.
PART II
She was the kind of woman who thought that the changing of the seasons was cute.
Her sister, if anything, was even worse. She thought that clowns were sexy.
“Isn’t it cunning, isn’t it adorable,” marveled Bootsey, “how gradually, on their own, the days are getting a teeny bit shorter? And how there’s an itty-bitty kiss of fall in the air?”
Pru sniffed. Pru shrugged. To ascribe osculatory attributes to a season characterized by rot and decay struck her as a textbook example of metaphoric excess. Now that she no longer looked good in a swimsuit, Pru frankly didn’t give a damn about the length of summers. The single thing about the end of a typically anemic Seattle summer—and, hey, kiss of autumn or no kiss of autumn, it was still only August—that meant anything to Pru was the high probability that a circus or two would soon be rolling into town.
Sure enough, scarcely a fortnight passed before just such an event was announced. The sisters were watching the six o’clock news together, as was their custom, when on came a commercial for the so-called Mother of All Shows, scheduled, an offscreen voice intoned, to open at Seattle’s Key Arena in about ten days.
A staccato montage of animals, props, and spangled performers assaulted them, accompanied by exuberant brass band music. Then the camera stilled, focusing on an alluring Asian woman in riding breeches and high, black patent-leather boots. The woman, glaring theatrically, was cracking a whip in a playfully menacing manner, while behind her a semicircle of funny, almost cartoonish animals, seven in all, were perched on their hind legs atop seven separate red and yellow stools. The animals—snouted and barely more than three feet tall—seemed poised to perform some feat or other, their beady eyes and pointed ears alert for their mistress’s command. A couple of them were dancing in place.
“For the first time ever on the North American continent,” proclaimed the disembodied ringmaster, “a titillating troupe, a curious congregation, an exotic ensemble of one of the rarest animals on earth—the tremendous tumbling tanukis from the jungles of Southeast Asia, genuine mystery beasts: captured, tamed, and trained to execute amazing and amusing antics by the glamorous adventuress, Madame Ko.”
“Oh, my goodness,” said Bootsey. “Aren’t they just precious?!”
“Kind of goofy-looking, if you ask me,” said Pru. In truth, Pru did find the tanukos (she hadn’t caught the name) oddly appealing, but so disappointed was she by the lone fleeting image of red nose, greasepaint, ruffled collar, and pantaloon during the entire thirty-second circus commercial that she wasn’t about to speak favorably of it. The instant the ad ended, in fact, she arose in a mild distemper and went to the kitchen for a glass of tomato juice. There’d be no shortage of clowns at the actual circus, naturally, but still. . . .
“But what was that hanging between their legs?” Bootsey asked as Pru left the room. “Was it their . . . ?”
“No way. Couldn’t have been.”
Pru decided the canned juice might be improved by a squeeze of lemon. She was rummaging in the refrigerator’s fruit-and-vegetable drawer when Bootsey called from the den. “Pru! Come here! Quick!”
There was just enough urgency in Bootsey’s voice to prompt her younger sister to slam the refrigerator door and walk rather briskly back into the TV room. What now? Pru thought. She’d neglected to bring the tomato juice.
“Look at that man, that priest,” said Bootsey, pointing at the screen, where an ostensible man of the cloth, his hands cuffed behind his back, was being led through what appeared to be one of those palmy, breezewayed, stucco terminals that one finds at tropical Third World airports.
Before Pru could focus clearly, the scene shifted to a close-up of a cardboard box into which were being placed a number of plastic baggies filled with beige powder. Then, just as abruptly, the camera returned to a view of the handcuffed man, now being ushered into a Jeep operated by what appeared to be U.S. military police.
Piecing it together, Pru gathered that a French Catholic priest on a flight from Bangkok to Los Angeles with a stopover in Manila had been apprehended at the airport in Agaña, Guam, with bags of narcotics taped to his torso and legs beneath his ecclesiastical garb.
“Doesn’t he look like Dern?” Bootsey said. “Look! I mean, doesn’t he?”
“Hmm. Well, yeah, I guess so. I can see that. There’s a resemblance. Although he’s quite a bit older.”
Bootsey regarded Pru with the compassionate dismay she usually reserved for the more spectacularly incompetent clerks at the post office where she worked. (By this time, the newscast had moved on to coverage of student protests against the proposed U.S. missile defense system.) “Older? Older than Dern? Not any more. Honey, Dern’s been missing for—”
“I know. I know.” Pru sighed. “Dern’s been gone for twenty-seven years.”
“Twenty-eight.”
In front of the shill and flicker, the sisters slowly sank into a state somewhere between reverie and paralysis.
At about that same time, give or take a few hours, a pretty, twenty-year-old woman was waking up in a strange bed in Bangkok. The woman’s street name, her professional name—her nom de guerre, as she would prefer it—was Miss Ginger Sweetie. Her real name is not important.
In Miss Ginger Sweetie’s cerebral railyard, germ-sized boxcars were starting to couple. With an electrochemical creak, the train lurched forward. First, Miss Ginger Sweetie remembered that she was at the Green Spider, a cozy backstreet boutique hotel that catered to a clientele, mainly foreigners, who possessed a certain aversion to paying by credit card, showing identification papers, or entertaining unannounced guests: not a low-life element, exactly, just careful.
Next, as the brain train picked up speed, Miss Ginger Sweetie recalled the man who lay beside her and to whom her smooth, bronze back was turned. My, wasn’t he the odd one? Nice. Likable, actually. But decidedly unusual.
He claimed that he was French, but he spoke Americanized English. He spoke, in fact, the way she imagined William Faulkner would have spoken. And his name was Dickie. Dickie? Now, Miss Ginger Sweetie was no world traveler (until a few years ago, she’d never been out of the slums of Chiangmai), but neither was she some ignorant paddy girl. She was, she’d have you know
, a full-time student of comparative literature at an accredited university—and, yes, it’s true, she whored in Patpong, but only to pay for her education. Miss Ginger Sweetie knew that Dickie was a name no French mother would have christened her son.
And this Dickie hadn’t touched her. (She felt between her legs now to make sure.) He was a handsome man, tall, slender, too old for his face; which was to say, while his hair was rather liberally salted, he looked as boyish as she thought Tom Sawyer might have looked. And while Miss Ginger Sweetie appreciated the holiday, the respite, she wouldn’t have minded terribly much if he had taken what he paid for.
But he hadn’t touched her. At least, not in any regular sense. What he had done was to smell her—although, she was quick to remind herself, not in the crude manner of a pervert or a dog. He’d looked her over thoroughly in an admittedly flattering way, and then he’d carefully sniffed her as if he were a wine connoisseur or something; sniffing her perfumed neck, her nipples, her armpits, finally lowering the tip of his nose gently into her belly button. But that’s as far south as he would go.
Now, the man had not been unaffected by this scrutiny, this olfactory examination, Miss Ginger Sweetie had noted with some professional pride. In fact, when he had lain upon his back, the protuberance that jutted from the depths to lift a section of the white cotton bedsheet was of such substance that, rising like it did, Miss Ginger Sweetie couldn’t help thinking for one weird second of . . . Moby Dick. Two-plus years of Patpong service had left her jaded about, even bored by, masculine display, yet for some reason the indication of this lurking phantom, all shrouded in savage shyness and allegorical white, had aroused the exploratory instinct in her. When she attempted to lay claim to the object of interest, however, he’d pushed her hand aside.