The crowd, the traffic, the gaiety, even the anger reminded Buddwing suddenly of Japan, where the slightest unexpected incident would draw a throng of Japanese, all laughing behind their white face masks, but laughing with the anger of a defeated people who were now suffering foreigners on their soil. He looked again at the Oriental girl who sat on the far side of the car, and he was surprised to see that she was still studying him curiously, as if she were not really a part of this shameful spectacle, and as if she suspected Buddwing was not a part of it, either. Jesse climbed back into the car, and Sally slid over on the seat again, her leg and thigh winking, and once again he tried the ignition, and the car started.
“There you are,” he said, and at the same moment a cheer went up from the crowd in the street and on the sidewalk, and as though stilled by a sudden and mysterious command, all the horns behind the Volkswagen went silent.
“Where are you girls all going?” Jesse said, sitting behind the wheel and showing no indication of moving.
“Downtown,” Sally said. “Home.”
“To Chinatown?” Buddwing asked, bending down to look into the car.
“Yes,” Sally answered.
“Why, that’s just where we were going,” Jesse said. “Ain’t it, Sam?”
“Yes, sir,” Buddwing answered, and he smiled at the other girl to let her know this was not where they had really been going, but that if it was all right with her, they would make it their destination now. The girl understood the smile completely, it seemed, because she turned to her friend — Buddwing assumed Sally was her friend; she could just as easily have been her sister or her cousin or her aunt — and said, “Why don’t we give them a lift, Sally? They did start the car for us.”
“All right,” Sally said quickly. “But please get in before they start blowing their horns again.”
The trigger-happy motorists behind the car, as if submitting to Sally’s prophecy, began leaning on their horns in renewed fury. Jesse, ignoring them, got out of the car and said, “Whyn’t you two get in the back, and Sally and me’ll sit up front? That okay with you, Sally?”
“All right, all right,” Sally said, sliding over onto the driver’s seat again, and Jesse said, “I’ll drive if you want me to,” and she said, “All right, all right,” and slid back onto the seat the younger girl had vacated. The younger girl was now climbing into the back seat from her side of the car, and Buddwing was trying to get into the back seat from his side, with both front seats bent forward at the same time, and with neither being able to squeeze past the bottleneck. In the meantime, the truck drivers were beginning to lose their patience, and the door of one of the truck cabs opened and a very burly man wearing a cap with a pencil stuck in it and a plaid shirt began lumbering toward the Volkswagen. As he approached the car, Buddwing allowed the young Chinese girl to get into the back seat first, and then collapsed on the seat beside her with an awkward backward-falling motion. Jesse got into the car and, smiling, said, “Well, now we all settled, huh?”
“What the hell are you doing up here?” the truck driver bawled. “Celebrating Chinese New Year’s?”
“Go blow it out,” Sally said in English, and added something probably appropriate in Chinese. Jesse stepped on the gas, crashed the red light on the corner, waved at the startled cop, and turned left on Sixth Avenue.
“You’re going the wrong way,” Sally said.
“I know. This’s a one-way street.”
“Well, do you know where Chinatown is?” she asked.
“Sure,” Jesse replied. “Right near the Golden Gate Bridge.”
“You got the wrong city, mate,” Sally said, and then she turned toward the back seat and giggled, and Buddwing saw the flash of a gold tooth at the side of her mouth and knew with certainty he was in Yokohama. They had stolen a trolley car there... well, not stolen it, simply commandeered it, shoving the conductor to one side, and taking his place at the electric throttle while the passengers around them laughed behind their face masks, hating. There was something about this ride in the Volkswagen that reminded him of that wild trolley-car ride, Jesse turning left again on the next corner, and then hitting Seventh Avenue, and then weaving in and out of the traffic plunging downtown to the heart of the garment district, delivery boys shoving their wheeled dress carts, even on a Saturday, Puerto Rican seamstresses hurrying back from their lunch hour, even on a Saturday, models walking in tight short skirts, crowds pushing their way through Macy’s doors, the imposing monolithic hulk of Pennsylvania Station, and then the relative silence of the dead streets between 31st and 14th, windows reflecting the afternoon sunlight, the long Japanese afternoons, the smell of fish and of flowers, the silent shuffle of sandals on cobblestone streets.
They had come up out of Sasebo by train, he and Jesse, and they had been drunk even before they boarded, loading up on Japanese beer in the USO and then reeling to the train station. They had sung all the way to Yokohama, Pardon me, boy, is this the Yokohama choo-choo? Track ee-chee-nee, we’ve got to be back by three, making up the lyrics as they went along, offering seats to surprised Japanese ladies, staggering and giggling, and searching for words in a language as alien as the landscape, We can afford, to board, the Yokohama choo choo. Got yen to spare, we’ll have an oh-hai-oh there! The roadbed was lined with budding cherry trees, the blossoms opening pink and white and red against the rolling green terraced hills beyond as the train, a Toonerville tinker-town train, chugged and rattled along the track, throwing coal cinders back through the open windows of the car, dirtying their summer whites. The Buddha sat in immense splendor miles from the track, but it seemed close enough to touch, dominating the hillside and the entire landscape, a huge stone idol, unseeing, seeing all, as the train clattered past and they sang the song that linked them with a world they knew.
In Yokohama they drank more Japanese beer in a Japanese dance hall and danced with thirty-year-old hostesses who were wearing Western clothes, the kind of simple cotton frocks twelve-year-olds were wearing in the States. And they commandeered the trolley car, and ran like hell from the shore patrol, two marine bastards in a jeep who sat with their white helmets and white leggings and white clubs, one of them yelling, “Hey, you sailors! Come back here, you hear?” while he and Jesse ducked into a bombed-out alley, eluding them. And then they met the girls, one o’clock in the afternoon, Yokohama in skeletal ruins, rubble piled in the streets, met them on the roof of the servicemen’s club where Jesse posed for his picture with one of them, the older one with the gold tooth. They walked downstairs again later, there were cherry blossoms even in the rubble, and stopped to watch the Japanese street artist who was drawing a picture of an Army sergeant while little girls with straight hair and sniffly noses stood around and watched and grinned, and the girl he had met on the roof of the servicemen’s club covertly slipped her hand through his arm.
“Whereabouts you going, exactly?” Jesse asked.
“We’re going home,” Sally said. “I told you.”
“And where’s that, exactly?”
“Exactly?” Sally said, and giggled. “He wants to know exactly, Tina.”
“Well, now, sure I do,” Jesse said.