The ABCs
Part 2
By Tony Monbetsu
Copyright 2013 Tony Monbetsu
2
Wednesday came like a murder of crows, dark and ominous and ready to cover your life in greasy white unpleasantness at the slightest provocation. The simile was perhaps a little too apt, as Wednesday's dawning actually was accompanied by a literal flock of crows, a flapping mess of the dirty things cawing and chortling outside my window. The crows were always there on Wednesday because Wednesday was garbage day.
I rolled out of bed and kicked away a few chuuhai cans that somebody had mischievously strewn underfoot. Then I thought better of it- you never knew when Miss Takahashi might come over to discuss important educational matters. Or another teacher, for that matter. I picked up the cans and deposited them into one of the many garbage bins that lined my kitchen wall like royal attendants. They're very strict in Japan about garbage sorting, so I had a separate bin for each kind of trash- burnables, plastics, paper, chuuhai cans, the works. There was an entire bin devoted to milk cartons, which I had never actually emptied. An enterprising archaeologist digging through the bin would find steadily older dates as he worked his way to the bottom, like layers of sedimentary rock.
I got on with my morning. My apartment had the bruised look of a homeless dog today thanks to the overcast sky; Mr. Sun was on vacation, apparently. Maybe I should say Sun-San instead of Mr. Sun, but that sounds ridiculous so I won't. I had my two bowls of yogurt and put on a T-shirt that said "DELIGHTFULNESS: I AM FEELING OF A BOTTOM MIND" in pastel pinks and blues. I was feeling of a bottom mind indeed as I contemplated the day's work ahead. Crows pranced and shuffled their feet audibly outside.
I went out with the day's garbage. Wednesday was the day for cans and for nama-gomi, which means fresh garbage if you don't know. Not an apt name, or at least it wasn't in my case. I put my garbage in the big steel cage, much to the chagrin of the crows. Mr. Goro came out and did the same and we exchanged Ohayo Gozaimasus. Steve came out in time to get in on the greetings, too, a bit less breathlessly than the previous day. Way to go, Steve, I thought. He had two giant bags of completely unsorted garbage, which he pitched into the cage with a proud smile. I made a mental note to remind him to pick it up again that evening after the garbage collectors had refused to take it. In his month in Kuroyama, Steve had only managed to get his garbage taken once, the time Mr. Goro had helped him. I knew that he had a good-sized stockpile growing steadily in his spare room, and I hoped he'd work out sorting before it spilled out through the window and made us all look cheap.
I got my mama-chari out of the shed but didn't mount it. I was going to Kuroyama Junior High that day, Kurochuu for short, and it lay in the same direction as Steve's school, Kuroyama High School.
"You walking?"
"Yeah!"
Steve was always walking. Mr. Goro made some noises of appreciation at our English as he rolled away. We hit the road.
Both of our schools were in the town center, such as it was, and they lie in the opposite direction of the mountain pass to Kami-Kuroyama. As we walked along, the rice fields lining the road on either side of us soon gave way to broken-down shacks, fields of tires, and extraneous garages. Not Kuroyama's best face, and brooding overcast light wasn't doing anybody any favors. I hoped it wouldn't rain; I could hold an umbrella while riding my bike at the same time, but the thing tended to make some pretty awful squeaking sounds in the wet. And anyway, Steve almost certainly didn't have one. An umbrella, that is, although he didn't have a bike either.
"That's a nice shirt," said Steve.
"Thanks. It was a gift from my grandmother. It means a lot to me."
"Huh," he said. My wit is, as usual, wasted in Kuroyama. "Hey, how do you say 'special' in Japanese?"
"Tokubetsu."
"Cool, thanks. Tokubetsu."
"No problem." We passed a man on the side of the road who was enthusiastically moving ancient tires from one pile into another. He waved gaily.
"Hey, what do Japanese girls like? I mean, in a guy?"
Oh boy. "Well, you know. They like the same sorts of things as anyone else. They like to be made to feel special. They like to be protected. They like… well, they like being treated right."
"Hmmm," said Steve. I could tell I might as well have been speaking in Japanese for all the comprehension going on.
"They like guys that show they care," I said. "Who will do things for them, not little acts of courtesy but really meaningful kindness. Save a girl when she thinks she's really in trouble, and, well…"
"Well, what?"
"Well, it'd be just fantastic. Ah, heck, I don't know. Why do you ask?"
"No reason," he said, then contradicted himself by saying "There's this teacher at the high school I might be interested in."
"Ganbatte. Just tell her she's a tokubetsu hito."
"Would that mean, uh, 'special person'?"
"Yeah." Way to pursue those Japanese studies, Steve. All it takes is motivation.
We had entered the town proper, which was marked by an increase in the density of the buildings if not in the quality. A gaggle of high school girls in pristine seifuku came out of a side street about as wide and well-lit as a can of coffee. Seifuku means school uniform if you don't know, and boy are they a sight to see. The girls giggled at me and Steve beamed. He turned after the students in the direction of his school.
"Thanks a lot, Moriarty!" he said, and set off towards his fate. I gave him a starched salute and mounted my mama-chari for the rest of the way.
Kuroyama Junior High school was a cinderblock meat locker surrounded by a tall fence that served the double duty of keeping the students in and the perverts out. Both jobs were equally important and the fence did neither of them very well. Across from the school was a pachinko parlor that had gone out of business sometime in the eighties, with an eyeless grinning monkey for a mascot. I assumed that the monkey had possessed eyes at one point but with pachinko mascots you never knew.
I entered the gate. This school, being the only junior high school in Kuroyama, claimed about two hundred students. Most of these students were now swarming around the grounds and the front entry of the school, loitering on vacant planters and bike racks, standing around in aggressively sullen groups. All of them were some combination of grumpy, smelly, pouty, loud, and sneering. Puberty, I assure you, is no prettier in Japan than it is anywhere else in the world.
"Jackson-Sensei! Good morning!" This was Motokare, a ropy second-year with a face like a tire tread. He was sitting on top of the school's entryway, a good three meters off the ground.
"Good morning, Mr. Motokare."
"Jackson-Sensei, do you like big unko?" He made a face of concentration and clenched his fists to illustrate the act of defecation, which is what unko means if you don't know. His cronies cackled from below. I just smiled pleasantly. Motokare had transferred into Kuroyama the previous spring. I happened to know from his previous ALT that Motokare had had a rather catastrophic bathroom incident in his sixth year of elementary school, but I was holding that little tidbit in reserve for a real crisis. Motokare, as it happened, was on my shortlist of suspects. I went into the school, passing directly under the kid's bony legs.
The entryway was a riot, of course. Taking off one pair of shoes and putting another pair is a pretty simple operation, but nothing is really simple when it comes to teenagers, and try to get twenty of them to do it in a space the size of a public bathroom stall and you're just asking for trouble. Luckily the teachers' entrance had its own shoe rack, and I was able to bypass the habitual traffic jam.
Schools like Kurochuu are much more impersonal in nature than tiny places like Kamisho, almost mechanical, and I found it easy to slip bet
ween the gears most of the time. I got in, did my job, and got out with as little fuss as possible, and everyone involved seemed to be happy with this arrangement most of the time. Today was going to be different, though. Today I knew I'd have to rock the boat a little bit and see if any beautifully-painted alphabet cards fell out.
My desk at Kurochuu was next to that of the English teacher, Takai-Sensei. I mentioned earlier that Takai-Sensei was a man with a lot of hair and a lot of teeth. Realistically I'm sure he had just the standard human amount in his jaw but he somehow gave the impression of many more. Maybe the length of the teeth was longer than the standard norm, or maybe it was just the fact that he was always baring them like a late-stage marathoner experiencing bowel problems. In any case, Takai-sensei had a lot of teeth, and his hair was an upswept peak like a dollop of whipped cream atop a singularly unappetizing cupcake. Japanese people always say that the noses of foreigners are takai, which means tall and narrow. Takai-Sensei's entire head was takai. No, unfortunately, that wasn't actually what his name meant; the character for it was different.
"Good morning, Takai-Sensei," I said as I sat down, and he looked up. I think I was the only person he had ever encountered that was taller than himself, hair not counted, and he always seemed to need a moment to adjust to the idea.
"Good morning, Mr. Jackson." He grinned at me, by which I mean he looked at me without relaxing his perpetual grin.
"Say, Takai-sensei, did Miss Takahashi from Kami-Kuroyama come here earlier this week?"
"Yes, she did!" His grin widened. "Very pretty lady, Takahashi-Sensei!"
"Indeed, Takai-Sensei. Did Miss Takahashi happen to forget anything when she left?"
His grin faltered a little bit. Not enough to be suspicious, just enough to indicate confusion. "No, she didn't. Why?"
"Don't worry about it," I said. Takai-Sensei's answer hadn't told me anything I didn't already know. I hadn't an ounce of real respect for the guy, and I would have had no trouble believing him capable of the crime, but there was no motivation. What would he have done with the cards? He couldn't have used them in class; everybody would know he hadn't made them, and anyway junior high students were supposed to have the alphabet down pat. Supposed to. No, Takai had no logical reason to take the cards. Nobody did. That's why I had to look towards those to whom logic was only a subject on a test.
I scanned my schedule for the day, and there it was: third period, Class 2B. It was the only time I could ever remember having been excited to see that class on my schedule.
Kurochuu had two classes for each year, Class A and Class B. If you asked me to name the best class in the school, I'd struggle; 3A, maybe, or 1B. But if you asked me to name the worst class, I'd answer with no hesitation: 2B. 2B was the home of Motokare and a clutch of other boys who made him look like a scholar of classical art. Their female counterparts in the classroom seemed to communicate entirely through cackles and shrieks. The few decent kids who had had the poor luck to end up in that class sat in the back with their heads down on their desks like seasick passengers on the Titanic. 2B was where I'd find the cards, alright. Figuring that those kids would do the crime was no problem at all. Getting the cards back was another matter.
I passed the morning like a boxer waiting for his bell, supplementing my coffee with the Pepsi Nex I'd stashed in the teachers' fridge for just such an occasion. The day was hot and sultry despite the cloud cover but I didn't sweat. Ice cold, I?told myself, or maybe it just had something to do with my dry mouth. I bided my time and waited out the first two periods, staring at the clock in a kind of fugue. When third period rolled around I was primed and ready.