“Did you paint this?”
“Nah, the last owner did.”
“Why’d he paint a cow of all things?”
“Who knows?” I said.
She walked back and stared at the cow again, looking as if she regretted saying too much to me, then kept her mouth shut as she got into the car. It was incredibly hot inside the car, and all the way to the harbor she didn’t say a word, wiping off her dripping sweat with a towel while she chain-smoked. After lighting a cigarette, she’d take three puffs and stare at the lipstick on the filter as if inspecting it, then snuff it out in the car’s ashtray and light another.
“Hey, about last night, all the other stuff aside, what the hell did I say?”
“This and that.”
“Well, just tell me one thing I said. C’mon.”
“You were talking about Kennedy.”
“Kennedy?”
“John F. Kennedy.”
She shook her head and sighed.
“I don’t remember a thing.”
When I dropped her off, without a word she tucked a thousand-yen note in behind my rearview mirror.
10
It was an extremely hot night. Hot enough to softboil an egg. I pushed open the heavy door to J’s Bar with the back side of my body, as I always did, and the air conditioner had filled the place with pleasantly cool air.
The inside of the place smelled like cigarettes and whiskey and French fries and armpits and sewage, the smells stagnating on top of each other just like a layer cake.
As always, I sat at the seat on the end of the bar, scanning the place with my back to the wall. Wearing unfamiliar uniforms, there were three French sailors with two girls they’d brought, and a couple who must’ve just turned twenty, and that was it. And no Rat.
After ordering a beer and a corned beef sandwich, I pulled out a book and decided to take my time waiting for the Rat.
Just ten minutes later, a thirty year-old woman with breasts like grapefruits and a flashy dress entered the bar and sat a seat away from me, scanning the surroundings just like I’d done and ordering a gimlet. After taking just one sip of her drink, she got up and made a painfully long phone call, then came back and grabbed her purse before going to the bathroom. In forty minutes, she ended up doing this three times. Sip of gimlet, long phone call, purse, toilet.
J came over to me, looking bored, and asked if my ass wasn’t getting tired. He was Chinese, but his Japanese was better than mine.
Returning from her third trip to the toilet, she looked around for someone and then slid into the seat next to me, talking to me in a low whisper.
“Hey, you wouldn’t be able to lend me some change would you?”
I nodded and dug the change out of my pocket, then set it all on the counter. There were thirteen ten-yen coins in all.
“Thanks a lot. If I ask the bartender to make change for me again he’ll be sore at me.”
“No problem. Thanks to you my pockets are lighter.”
She smiled and nodded, nimbly scraping up the change and disappearing in the direction of the pay phone.
Getting tired of reading my book, I had J bring the portable television over to my place at the bar and began watching a baseball game while drinking my beer. It was a big game. In just the top of the forth, the pitcher gave up two homeruns and six hits, an outfielder collapsed from anemia, and while they switched pitchers there were six commercials. Commercials for beer and life insurance and vitamins and airline companies and potato chips and sanitary napkins.
After seeming to have struck out with the girls, with his beer glass in hand, one of the French sailors came up behind me and asked me, in French, what I was watching.
“Baseball,” I answered in English.
“Base-ball?”
I gave him a simple overview of the rules. This guy throws the ball, this other guy hits it with a stick, running one lap around is one point. The sailor stared fixedly at the screen for five entire minutes, but when the commercials started he asked me why the jukebox didn’t have any Johnny Hallyday.
“’Cause he’s not popular,” I said.
“What French singers are popular here?”
“Adamo.”
“He’s Belgian.”
“Michel Polnareff.”
“Merde!”
Saying this, the French sailor went back to his table.
At the top of the fifth, the woman finally came back.
“Thanks again. Let me buy you a drink.”
“Don’t worry about it.”
“I feel like I have to return favors—it’s a character trait of mine, for better or worse.”
I tried to smile, but it came out all wrong, so I just nodded and said nothing. She called J over with her finger and said a beer for this guy, a gimlet for me. J
nodded exactly three times and disappeared from the other side of the bar.
“The person I was waiting for never came. You?”
“Same story.”
“Waiting for a girl?”
“A guy.”
“Same as me. We’ve got something in common, then.”
There was nothing I could do but nod.
“Hey, how old do you think I am?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“Liar!”
“Twenty-six.”
She laughed.
“But I don’t mind. Do I look single? Do I look like a girl with a husband?”
“Do I get a prize if I guess right?”
“We might be able to work something out.”
“You’re married.”
“Yeah…you’re half-right. I got divorced last month. Have you ever talked to divorced woman like this?”
“Never. Though I did once meet a cow with neuralgia.”
“Where?”
“In college, in a laboratory. We could only fit five people in there at one time.”
She laughed like she was having a good time.
“You’re a college student?”
“Yeah.”
“I was a college student too, once, back in the day. Maybe around ’60. Those were the good old days.”
“How so?”
She didn’t say anything, she just giggled and took a sip of her gimlet, checking her watch as if suddenly remembering something.
“Gotta make another phone call,” she said, grabbing her purse and standing.
With her gone and my question still unanswered, the dust whirled around in the air for a moment. I drank half my beer and then called J over and paid my check.
“Running away?” J asked.
“Yeah.”
“You’re not into older women?”
“It’s got nothing to do with her age. Anyway, if the Rat shows up, tell him I said hey.”
I left the bar just as she finished her phone call and stepped into the bathroom for the fourth time. On my way home, I whistled the whole way. It was a song I’d heard somewhere before, but the name of it somehow managed to escape me. A really old song. I stopped my car along the beach, staring at the dark, nighttime ocean while trying my best to remember the name of it.
It was the Mickey Mouse Club theme song. I think these were the lyrics:
“Come along and sing a song and join the jamboree, M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E!”
They probably really were the ‘good old days’.
11
ON
Good evening everybody, how’re you doing out there? I’m feelin’ really excited tonight! Almost good enough to give everybody half of what I’m feeling!
It’s time for NEB’s world-famous Pop Music Requests! From now until 9pm we’ve got a
wonderful two hours lined up for you on this Saturday night, blasting the coolest hot tunes your way! Old favorites, songs that bring back memories, fun songs, songs that make you wanna get up and dance, boring songs, songs that make you wanna puke, anything goes, so hit those phone lines! You know the number. Yeah, make sure you get that number right! You run up your phone bill and upset your neighbors if you misdial, you know. By the way, since we opened up our phone lines at six, all ten lines to our station have been ringing off the hook. Hey, can we get a mic on those ringing phones for a second? Isn’t it amazing? It’s great, just great! Dial