Little Yokozuna (2 page)

He was embarrassed. "Nothing, mama," he said, burying his face in her old familiar house kimono. "You startled me, that's all."

As he followed her inside, she laughed for only themselves to hear, to make him feel better. "When I first saw you there," she said, "I thought your father had added a new stone to the garden. A second crane-stone to keep the Old One company."

At the door, Kiyoshi-chan looked back one last time at his father's garden, and stopped with one foot already over the threshold and one still outside. He peered out into the dark. Did something move there behind the lantern, under the little pines? Did he see a quick glimmer of eyes? He thought of foxes, and bears, and demons, and was filled with fear. Stepping in quickly, he slid the door shut behind him.

 

 

 

Late that night, Kiyoshi-chan lay on his futon, wide-awake. Izumi-chan was asleep beside him, her face looking very white in the night, almost as if it were shining like a small moon. The rain was still running back and forth over the roof tiles, like ghostly children playing kickball, but it was not the rain that was keeping Kiyoshi-chan awake.

Kiyoshi-chan was remembering part of what had made him feel so happy earlier, when he had first returned home. He had been even gladder than usual ever since yesterday after school, when he had finally beaten the big twelve-year-old Taro-chan in the after-school sumo wrestling at the playground. Taro-chan was so big and strong that he usually beat Kiyoshi-chan with a ridiculous move, lifting the smaller boy up by the seat of his pants and setting him outside the ring like a baby. Then he would dust off his hands like a real sumo wrestler.

"For your information," Taro-chan would always say, "that was a lovely tsuridashi" He was proud to know the names of all the sumo techniques, from uwatenage to yorikiri. But a tsuridashi was to lift up an opponent by his belt, or mawashi, and to set him outside the ring. Everyone would laugh at Taro-chan's treatment of Kiyoshi-chan, knowing that they would soon have their turns to lose. Taro-chan was always the champion of the playground.

But yesterday Kiyoshi-chan had gone after Taro-chan like a fury, hooked his leg and pushed him over backward with all his might before the large boy had a chance to grab him. "Oof!" Taro-chan had grunted as he landed on his bottom, like a fat sack of rice. He sat there with a look of pure amazement on his face, his eyes as round as rice bowls.

Then Kiyoshi-chan had turned to the circle of astonished boys and carefully dusted his hands. "For your information," he said. "
That was a lovely kawazugake.
"

Then everyone crowed at Kiyoshi-chan's great victory. Even Taro-chan got to his feet with a crooked smile and bowed with great dignity to Kiyoshi-chan, and Kiyoshi-chan grinned till his cheeks hurt.

Now tonight Kiyoshi-chan could not sleep for thinking about his victory over Taro-chan, and he laughed out loud again.

"Why are you laughing, Kiyoshi-chan?" asked his father from the other side of the paper doors. "Are you dreaming or awake?"

"I'm awake, papa," said Kiyoshi-chan. "I'm remembering Taro-chan yesterday."

He heard both his mother and father laugh in the other room.

"Go to sleep, Taiho," said his father.

"Skinny little yokozuna" said his mother.

So Kiyoshi-chan tried to go to sleep, but his mind was too wide awake to let his body drift away. He remembered how when the boys had finished praising him for his victory, the talk had turned to American baseball and the new season. They had talked about Bob Gibson, the great pitcher of the world champion St. Louis Cardinals, and about the amazing left fielder of the Boston Red Sox, whose name was too long and hard to pronounce. They just called him Yazu. Kiyoshi-chan loved baseball, but not as much as he loved sumo, and he wished they would talk of Taiho and Kashiwado and Sadanoyama instead, or even the wrestler Wakachichibu, who was as big as a mountain and who wobbled as he walked.

The night hours passed, the rain fell, and Kiyoshi-chan thought of many things while the whole house slept around him. Finally, in all the circling of his memories, he remembered the strange experience in his father's garden last evening. He tried to puzzle out what had been different about the garden, or if it were just the extra reflections of the rain that had made it seem depthless, as if his father's garden really was full of the Universe.

Then he heard the child crying.

At first he thought it was Izumi-chan making sounds in her sleep, so he turned to see what was wrong. But her face was still as round and white and silent as the moon, and she had a look as if she were dreaming pleasant dreams.

Then he thought it was a cat, and tried to close his eyes again to go to sleep. Their neighbors had a cat who sometimes came into their yard under the bamboo fence. It must be a very wet cat tonight, thought Kiyoshi-chan.

But then his eyes sprang open again. It didn't really sound at all like a cat when he listened closely. As he lay there and heard the strange sound go on, something brought back to him the thought of last night's garden and of its shadows, strangely fathomless and frightening. It was no child crying, he thought suddenly. It was a ghost or a demon, trying to lure him outside. He burrowed under his quilt, his heart thumping in his ears.

But still it went on and on, like the saddest whimpering of a hurt beast, just loud enough now and then for him to hear it between the waves of rain. Kiyoshi-chan felt the sadness of it deep down in his stomach, and wanted to cry with it as if it were the voice of some universal sorrow. Silly person, he had to remind himself. He had no sorrow at all to speak of, and he had beaten Taro-chan with a lovely kawazugake yesterday. Why should he feel like crying?

Feeling brave, Kiyoshi-chan pushed back his quilt and stood up. He would go and see what the sound was, and he wouldn't wake his parents. He slid back the door of their room and padded in his bare feet around their futon. In the entryway he slipped on his father's great wooden geta, so his feet would stay out of the wet. Then he slid back the screen door and the wooden outer door, and stepped onto the outside platform. The rain poured off the roof like a curtain in front of his eyes. It was dark in the yard, but not as dark as he would have expected deep night to be.

He stepped forward to the edge of the platform and looked to the right, toward the gate and away from his father's garden. Somehow it seemed to him that if there was anything to see it would be in the garden, but he almost stepped back into the house without looking in that direction, as if he had done all he could do. He stopped himself with an exasperated exclamation, but still found himself reluctant to look where he knew he needed to.

"Remember Taro-chan!" he said aloud. He grinned at himself for doing it, but knew that in a world where such things happened, he could not step back now. With determination, he went right to the edge of the platform and peered through the dreary darkness into the shadows where his father's garden was. For a moment he could see nothing.

Then he screamed at the top of his lungs. Something moved in the deep shadows, and then out from under the tiny trees of the garden came a small white figure, a ghost surely. He screamed again.

The ghost seemed paralyzed by his scream, and they stared frozen at each other, the boy and his ghost. Part of Kiyoshi-chan's mind noticed that it wasn't really a ghost, it was a very, very wet little girl of about four years old, with yellow hair and white, white skin, with even greater terror than his on her face. Kiyoshi-chan barely had a chance to begin to stop screaming when the little girl did the strangest thing he could ever have expected. She suddenly held her nose and sprang into the air, cannonballing to the ground. But instead of thumping with a splat onto her bottom in the mud, she disappeared into the earth as if it were water. A couple of thick ripples spread out and dissipated along the surface of the ground.

Kiyoshi-chan was too shocked to scream any more. He stared at the place where the little girl had been, but now the yard was dark and empty, streaming with rain and ghostless. He stood like a statue on the edge of the platform, with the rain pouring down onto the front of his head.

"Kiyoshi-chan!" said his father behind him. "What in the world are you doing out here?"

 

 

 

 

By the time Kiyoshi-chan finished telling his parents about the little girl-ghost in the garden, he could hardly keep his eyes open. His mother led him back to his futon, covered him with his warm quilt, and smiled to see him already sound asleep. But even as the little home grew quiet under the hypnotic rain, something else was already happening, and not far away. Two strange children were walking in the nighttime downpour along Kiyoshi-chan's own Kashiwa street, with no idea in the world where they were.

"I don't know how we're ever gonna find her, Granny," said a boy named Knuckleball, who was the same age as Kiyoshi-chan, but didn't know it, of course. He also had the name of Edward, but was called Knuckleball because of always trying to throw one when he played catch with anybody. He was wearing crooked wire-rimmed glasses, and a shapeless, battered baseball cap that made his hair stick out over his ears in wild ways. It had been a long time since he'd had a haircut. "I mean, let's face it," he went on, trudging through a big puddle just for fun, "we have no clue where we've landed this time. Just look at this rain, Gran. Where does it rain a lot? How about Seattle? Do you think this is Seattle? But Seattle's in America, isn't it? And this doesn't look like any part of America I've ever seen, no way. Just when we think we know where we are we get blown a million miles off course. Doesn't that just figure, Gran?"

His companion said nothing. She was a tall, slender teenager who walked with a dancer's graceful stride, and she looked like she had been out in the rain for days. Her face, normally puckish and pleasant, was now set and somber. She had tied her blond hair back with an old shoelace, and her jeans were torn at the knees. Her name was Annie, and she was Knuckleball's sister.

"Scratch Seattle," said Knuckleball. "Let's see, what other cities do I know about? It's obviously not Boston, or Philadelphia, or London. We've been to those places, and they're nothing like this. A little more traffic, I think, even this time of night. What about Chicago? Does it rain in Chicago? I mean, I was barely born when we lived in Chicago, and was hardly checking the weather, Gran, but you must have noticed, huh?"

"Whatever," said Annie.

They stopped at a junction of narrow ways. There were no streetlights and all the houses were dark. The rain poured from the black sky and gushed along the street gutters.

"Knuckles," said Annie. "We already know where we are."

"You mean we had a theory where we were," said Knuckleball. "I think this last little trip of ours cooked that theory pretty good, not that it was ever that definite to begin with. Now we've been blown into the

Twilight Zone. You watch, any minute we'll find ourselves walking sideways into our own ears or something. Wouldn't that be cool?"

Annie said nothing but kept walking, peering into the gloom. Her shoes squelched.

"So," said Knuckleball, "until we find out for sure that we've fallen into a parallel universe, we'll assume that this is Earth and just start trying to figure out what continent we're on. You go ahead and enjoy the rain, Granny. I'll handle the brainwork."

"Mm," said Annie.

"Thank you for your support," said Knuckleball, straightening his crooked glasses for the hundredth time.

"And my name is not Granny," said Annie.

"Okeydoke," said Knuckleball, shoving his hands into his pockets and stomping in another puddle. "Annie Granny, quite uncanny," he chanted in time to his marching.

"Knucklehead," said Annie, "do you ever, ever, ever stop talking?"

"Of course not," said the boy, appalled. "How could I do that to everyone else? They depend on me, Gran."

"Well," said Annie.

"Besides, we can just stop this silly game anyway," said Knuckleball, kicking a pebble into the gutter, where it splashed with a hollow thop. "I know exactly where we are."