"Domo," Henry said. It was the only Japanese word he knew, aside from what Sheldon had taught him earlier.
"You're welcome. Come back, I'll take your picture!" the photographer yelled.
Henry was already down the street.
Henry and Keiko walked through Kobe Park on their way home from school each day, and he knew the hillside park by the numerous rows of cherry trees that lined the streets. Across from the park sat the Nippon Kan Hall, more of a Kabuki theater really, complete with posters for plays he'd never seen, or even heard of--like O Some Hisamatsu and Yuku No Ichiya-- written in kanji and English. Like Chinatown, the whole area around the park apparently woke up on Saturdays. Henry followed the crowds, then the music. In front of the Nippon Kan were street performers, dressed in full traditional costumes, fighting with shimmering swords that flexed and bent as they cut the air.
Behind them, musicians played what looked like strange, three-string guitars. Nothing at all like the yuehu or gao wu, the two-string violins that he was used to hearing when the Peking Opera performed a fighting routine.
With the music and the dancing, Henry forgot all about looking for Keiko, though he occasionally murmured the words Sheldon had taught him-- Oh I decky tay ooh ree she day sue-- mainly out of nervous habit.
"Henry!"
Even through the music he knew the voice was hers. He looked around the crowd, lost for a moment before spotting her sitting on the hillside, the high point of Kobe Park, looking down on the street performers, waving. Henry walked up the hill, his palms sweating. Oh I decky tay ooh ree she day sue. Oh I decky tay ooh ree she day sue.
She put down a small notebook and looked up, smiling. "Henry? What are you doing here?"
"Oh-I-decky-tay ..." The words rolled off his tongue like a Mack truck. He felt a wisp of perspiration on his forehead. The words? What was the rest? "Ooh ree she day ...
sue."
Keiko's face froze in a smile of surprise, interrupted only by her occasional wide-eyed blinking. "What did you just say?"
Breathe, Henry. Deep breath. One more time.
"Oai deki te ureshii desu!" The words came out perfectly. I did it!
Silence.
"Henry, I don't speak Japanese."
"What ... ?"
"I. Don't. Speak. Japanese." Keiko burst out laughing. "They don't even teach it anymore at the Japanese school. They stopped last fall. My mom and dad speak it, but they wanted me to learn only English. About the only Japanese I know is wakarimasen. "
Henry sat down beside her, staring at the street performers. "Which means?"
Keiko patted his arm. "It means 'I don't understand'--understand?"
He lay back on the hillside, feeling the cool grass. He could smell the tiny Japanese roses everywhere, dotting the hill with patches of yellow stars.
"Whatever it was, Henry, you said it beautifully. What's it mean?"
"Nothing. It means 'What time is it?' "
Henry glanced at Keiko sheepishly and saw the look of suspicion in her eye. "Did you come all the way over here to ask me what time it was?"
Henry shrugged. "A friend just taught it to me, I thought you'd be impressed, I was wrong--what kind of notebook is that?"
"It's a sketchbook. And I am impressed, just that you'd come all the way over here. Your father would be mad if he knew. Or does he?"
Henry shook his head. This was the last place his father would expect to find him.
Henry normally hung out at the waterfront on Saturdays, with other boys from the Chinese school, haunting places like Ye Olde Curiosity Shop out on Coleman Dock--looking at the real mummies and genuine shrunken heads, daring one another to touch them. But since he'd begun attending Rainier, they all treated him differently. He hadn't changed, but somehow, in their eyes he was different. He wasn't one of them anymore.
Like Keiko, he was special.
"It's no big deal. I was just in the neighborhood."
"Really? And which neighbor taught you to speak Japanese?"
"Sheldon, the sax player on South King." Henry's eyes fell to the sketchbook.
"Can I see your drawings?"
She handed him her small black sketchbook. Inside were pencil drawings of flowers and plants, and the occasional drawing of a dancer. The last one was a loose sketch of the crowd, the dancers--and a profile of Henry from the host of people below.
"It's me! How long did you know I was down there? You just watched me the whole time. Why didn't you say anything?"
Keiko pretended that she didn't understand. "Wakarimasen. So sorry, I don't speak English." Joking, she took her sketchbook back. "See you Monday, Henry."
Bud's Jazz Records
(1986)
Henry closed the yearbook in his lap, setting it on the carved cherrywood coffee table, next to the framed photograph of him and Ethel on their thirtieth wedding anniversary. To Henry, her smiling face looked thin, gracefully hiding a certain sadness.
In the photo she was in early remission, but still was missing most of her hair from the radiation treatments. It didn't fall out all at once like you see in the movies. It came apart in uneven clumps, thick in some places, smooth in others. She'd asked Henry to use a set of clippers and shave it all off, which he did, reluctantly. It was the first of many personal moments they would share together. A long sabbatical into her day-today care, part of the mechanics of dying. He'd done all he could. But choosing to lovingly care for her was like steering a plane into a mountain as gently as possible. The crash is imminent; it's how you spend your time on the way down that counts.
He thought about moving on but didn't even know where to begin. So he went where he'd always gone to stimulate his senses, even as a little boy--a place where he always found a little comfort. He grabbed his hat and jacket and found himself stalking the dusty aisles of Bud's Jazz Records.
Bud's had been a fixture on South Jackson, near the old Pioneer Square, for as long as Henry could remember. Of course the original Bud Long didn't actually own the place anymore. But the new guy, a grizzled fellow with sagging hangdog cheeks like those of a partially deflated Dizzy Gillespie, filled the part amiably. He tended the record counter, where he readily answered to the name Bud.
"Haven't
seen
you in a while, Henry."
"I've been around," Henry said, flipping through a rack of old 78s, hoping to find something by Oscar Holden--the Holy Grail of Seattle's jazz recordings. The apocryphal story was that Oscar recorded a master-session 78 way back in the thirties, on vinyl, not wax. But of the rumored three hundred printed, none survived. None that anyone knew about anyway. But then again, almost no one knew who Oscar Holden was. Seattle greats like Ray Charles and Quincy Jones had moved on to the fame and fortune of Celebrityville. Still, Henry daydreamed that he might find a vinyl copy someday. And now that CDs were starting to outsell records, the used LP bins at Bud's were overflowing with new used records every day.