Really, we could see no difference between them. It all looked Japanese. We liked the colors next to the red brick of the building.
Finally one of them abandoned the project site altogether, drove the backhoe to another part of the newly sodded lawn, and started digging. The other one paid no attention, poured goldfish into the shallow pond.
The delegation had come from Takaoka to escort the gardeners home. At the airport the Japanese were dressed to the hilt. We all bowed to say good-bye. We muttered a few words we knew. We had arranged ourselves around the brown waiting area and kept the two of them far apart. They sat silently, heads bowed. All of us pretended none of this had happened.
The runway stretched on and on.
A woman from our city broke the silence, suggested that we sing the state song, that everyone should sing. The out-of-town businessmen stood up, charmed by the silk and smiles.
We pretended to sing. The woman had a clear, high voice. She sang the state song — a song about the rivers, the trees, the meadows, the hills, the unimproved beauty of our state.
Guam
The time in Indiana never changes. I grew up minutes from the Ohio line, and in the spring, the clocks leapt forward there. But in Indiana we’d lose an hour without trying.
A pack of us in my father’s Olds crossed over to Van Wert and a bar there called Mr. Entertainer and got smashed on 3.2 beer, legal for minors. In the summers the nights were long, longer than the bars were open, and we waited for the dawn, parked on some township road, the car wading in the corn. It was the funniest thing to us, buzzed as we were, to race the sun back to Indiana. There were five guys in the backseat. We took off, the tail of my father’s car dragging in the gravel. Even floored, it took a quarter section before the overdrive cut in, and then, maybe, we hit a grade at an intersection or the road tossed us up when it switched to tar or oil. The shocks heaved, and we were flying, the eight knocking and the tires revving off the ground. This was dawn. Maybe there was a farmer on a Case, scything the ditch weed with a sickle bar. All of us stuck our arms out the windows, flapping our wings. I blew the horn, and we watched our selves pass the sound. We saw it roll off the fenders and tumble into the dust, bounce a few times behind us like something we’d killed. We were moving so fast, we weren’t moving, like the times all of us had sat in our fathers’ parked cars and pretended to drive, that fast. And then we jumped over another road and into Indiana, and there, it was an hour before we left the bar, and we felt like we had cheated on several things and gotten away with it all.
I could tell this hadn’t impressed her. A frat house friend from college had set us up. This was the year after graduation, when I was sharing an apartment the company owned with some other guys. It was on the west side of New York City, and for the first couple of weeks I lived there I watched the sun set in a smudge on the other side of the river at the end of our street. Her name was Doreen, and this was the only time I ever took her out.
“So, where you from, Doreen?” I asked. We were walking around Times Square looking for something to do.
“We moved around a lot,” she said.
This was kind of a lie, I found out. Later, at the comedy club where we ended up, all the comics taking turns at the open mic started their routines by telling us we were a good-looking crowd and asking us where we were from.
“Guam!” Doreen shouted louder than the rest of us could shout where we were from. And all the comics picked her out of the noise of states and cities.
“You’re kidding. You’re from Guam!” they’d say, adjusting the microphone stand to their height. Guam is a funny enough word, and they all had jokes they’d fire off as they settled into their timing and material.
Doreen rolled her drink between her hands. Her neck snapped back when she laughed. Things dangled from her ears. She’d say, “Guam!” when the next guy came on and asked, nervous and squinting in the lights, where we were from. And Guam again for the guy after that. It was funny because none of the comics had heard the one before him, passing the time in the greenroom backstage. So the last several were getting laughs just for throwing off the question. The house sat still to let Doreen answer the question he had forgotten, in the silence, he had asked. “Guam! I’m from Guam!” and the comic would recover with a joke about food or sex, thanking her with his eyes and the cock of his head for such a straight line. But by this time I couldn’t laugh anymore because I had laughed so much already at all the other comics who’d come before. They had been funny. I felt bad that the only way to let the last ones know they were funny was to laugh, and I just couldn’t anymore.
It was early in the morning when we left. A new comic was asking what remained of the audience where they were from. We started walking home.
“So, what was Guam like?” I asked Doreen. I imagined island beaches of ground volcanoes, cinder-block houses painted after-dinner mint colors, reefs made from rusted hulks of sunken ships. Everyone is related and looks the same.
“I was only born there,” Doreen said. “I’m from no place really. But I remember it like every place else I’ve lived. Quonset huts, lots of Quonset huts.”
It was early in the morning, and I was trying to think how to get us to an after-hours club downtown my roommate had told me about. There, no one would expect me to laugh, just dance and drink, and I could get close to Doreen and shout in her ear, ask her more questions she wouldn’t answer. I still didn’t know then how the night would turn out.
Tomorrow’s market in Tokyo had already closed. Hong Kong had fixed the price of gold. Their yesterdays already heading this way. In my office, I kept a laundered shirt in my desk drawer. No need to go home. There were no cabs. There never are. We were standing on a traffic island in the middle of Broadway, back to back and circling each other, concentrating on the cars as they rushed by. Above us, the lights of the big signs sputtered all around. I began my story about where I was from and what I did when I was there. I thought about Guam again while I was talking. I thought of the surge of water the moon pushes ahead of itself every day, bearing down on that pile of sand. And I thought about the people there, just getting up or just going to bed, laughing at each other, never thinking that I was thinking about them, here and at this very moment on the other side of the world.
The War That Never Ends
That summer I followed the trucks as they cut down the trees. I sold ice cream to the kids who watched, drawn by the pitch of the chain saws and the wood chipper. Our convoy snaked through the terraced neighborhoods. The green city two-and-a-half, the cherry picker folded on top, hauled the chipper, a yellow cannon. And trailing behind, the dump truck, its bed mounded with chips, pulled the leggy circular saw skirted with canvas that ground down the stumps. The trucks’ lights flashed. They bucked in low gear. Their drivers rode the brakes, looking for the trees marked with the white X’s. I pedaled hard behind them, thumbing the bells when I thought about it, jacking the freezer box back and forth as I cranked up a hill. I breathed in their trail of sickly sweet fresh-cut green wood and burned sap. The trees arched over us, leafless and dying.
More kids banged out of the screen doors, clutching change in their fists. They jumped on their chipped bikes and swerved in behind me. Their axle cleaners, strips of leather riveted together with a cheap reflector, plunked the spokes of their wheels when we coasted, sounding like a flat Oriental instrument.