Little Yokozuna (3 page)

Annie pushed back her soaked bangs and blew at the runnel of rain pouring off the tip of her nose.

"I can't wait to hear this," she said. "Where..."

Then, to Knuckleball's intense astonishment, she suddenly stopped in the middle of her sentence, threw her hands in the air, and sat down in the middle of the road, as if it weren't raining in sheets all around her. Her brother gaped.

"Well, that doesn't look very comfortable," he said. "Can't we find a dry place to rest?"

Annie buried her face in her arms. It took a moment for Knuckleball to realize that she was crying. He knelt down beside her and hugged her awkwardly.

"Annie!" he said. "I'm really sorry! I'll stop talking so much."

"Knuckles," sobbed Annie. "Why would I care what you say?" Then she put her head down and cried some more, silently. Knuckleball flopped down in the road and leaned his back up against hers.

"We've been looking for her for so /ong," said Annie finally. "It's been so long since we saw her. I want to find her, and go home."

"I know," said Knuckleball. "I know."

The two children sat, back to back, on the street. The sound of the drumming rain seemed to fill their heads with an ever-louder roar until it numbed them and seemed more like a great hollow silence than a noise, the hushing of the vast Universe, a long syllable of emptiness, like the voice of the Ocean. Annie cried no more, but they sat on in the rain longer than either of them could tell.

It was out of the depths of this deep-voiced stillness that they heard it.

"I hear thunder," said Knuckleball.

"Maybe," said Annie.

The thunder, if it was thunder, went on and on without interruption, growing in volume. There was no lightning to punctuate it. It seemed to be coming from the way they had come, far away over the horizon.

"It doesn't sound like thunder," said Knuckleball. "Not really."

"Thunder doesn't just keep on" said Annie.

"I don't like it," said the boy.

The sound grew and grew, until Knuckleball had to put his hands over his ears.

"Annie!" he cried. "Where can we go?"

"If I don't know what it is," said Annie, "how can I know where to hide from it?"

Incredibly, the town around them seemed still to be sleeping. No lights were lit, no gates open for sleepyeyed people to peek through in curiosity. The rumble grew until the pavement seemed to shake with it.

"Annie!" cried Knuckleball. "We have to run! We can't just stay here!"

He leaped to his feet and ran to the nearest gate, throwing it open. There, with his hand just reached out to unlatch the gate from the inside, was a boy of his own age, with black hair and cream-colored skin.

Knuckleball stared at the boy for three heartbeats. "Annie!" he yelled.

"What, Knuckler?" shouted Annie over the rain and the thunder, still rooted in the middle of the road and staring into the far distance.

"I know where we are!" cried Knuckleball.

"So do I!" said Annie.

From just inside the gate, Kiyoshi-chan stared out at the scene in the road. For a second time that night he had run out of his sleeping home, this time for the strange thunder. He was not sure why he again had

not awakened his parents, but had run straight out to the street to see what was happening. He knew earthquakes and thunder and could tell that this was neither. With the strange experience of the garden and the ghost fresh in his mind, he was irresistibly drawn to this new mystery.

But as strange as the uncanny thunder were the two creatures he saw in the road, shaggy and soaked and yellow-haired, a boy and a girl shouting at each other in gibberish. Kiyoshi-chan gawked at them. What else could happen in this night of bizarre things?

"Knuckleball!" cried Annie, with a new note in her voice, of terror or triumph or something else. "It's him!"

The something extra in her voice made Kiyoshi-chan look toward the north also, though he understood none of the sounds she made. What he saw made him almost faint away with fear.

Far, far up the walled street, at the point where the walls met in the distance, there was a leaping lighted thing approaching, bounding toward them at an incredible speed. The roar of thunder seemed to come from the crashing of its feet on the pavement, though it sounded more like a thousand elephants in full stampede. Nearer and nearer it came, till they could see its great head, hideous with gaping mouth, rampant hair, and an eerie light flickering all around. It ran on two legs like a human, and waved a long, curved, cruel sword in its fist.

"Oni," whispered Kiyoshi-chan, in fascinated dread. "Oni!

On came the warrior goblin, on, near and nearer. The roar of its coming rose all around like a tsunami.

"Annie! Run!" wailed Knuckleball. "Hide!"

But Annie stood in the middle of the way, like a slim young tree. She raised a fist in the face of the leaping monster.

"Where is she?" she cried. "What have you done with our sister?"

Then Knuckleball also overcame his fear and stepped out of the shadow of the gateway. "Yeah, where is Little Harriet?" he yelled at the top of his lungs. "Who do you think you are?"

The goblin rumbled with anger and waved its sword, so that a blast of flame blew Annie back against the concrete block wall. She flopped into the rushing gutter, where she struggled back up to her hands and knees. The demon whirled aside toward her and bent its horrible head as if to devour her.

Then Knuckleball was filled with the greatest wrath of his life. As if there was no other hope left in the world, he snatched up a fence post lying on the ground and ran into the road. Even as he swung back the club, the thought flickered through his mind that it was about the same weight and feel of his favorite baseball bat. Kiyoshi-chan gaped in horror at this little boy that would challenge an oni with a fence post.

"Have you lost our Little Harriet?" Knuckleball screamed at the goblin. "Who do you think you are, you big pimple!"

The strange flaming creature lifted its head to stare at Knuckleball, and bent down again toward the stunned Annie. Then with a furious cry, Knuckleball swung his club as if everything in the world depended on it. There was a great crack as he connected on that hideous forehead. The goblin's ghastly head leaped off its body and rolled away.

Stupefied, they all watched it roll down the pavement, trundling back and forth like a lopsided ball.

The towering demon stood up and grabbed at the space over its shoulders with both hands. Not finding its head, it gave a gobbling howl, then turned and fled back where it had come, leaping down the street until it vanished in the distance. Annie looked up at Knuckleball. Knuckleball looked back at Annie. The head of the goblin wobbled down the curve of the pavement and plopped into the gutter.

"Oh, my," said Knuckleball, looking at the post in his hands as if it were a piece of dynamite. "How did I do that?"

"Nice hit, little brother," said Annie, quietly. "But I'd also like to know how it could roar like that even without its head."

"And what I want to know," said Knuckleball, "is what he's done with our Little Harriet."

Annie looked where the demon had fled, toward the far horizon of tiled Kashiwa roofs. "Are we sure he's the same one?" she asked, half to herself. "Could there be more than one?"

"Look, Annie," said her brother. "We have company." They looked down the street.

Kiyoshi-chan had hauled the goblin's head out of the gutter and was looking inside it. Suddenly he started to laugh, and put the revolting thing over his own head. Knuckleball and Annie looked at him, disgusted and amazed. But then Kiyoshi-chan said something, his voice echoing and muffled.

"Annie!" said Knuckleball, pulling her to her feet. "He's speaking Japanese! We are in Japan! That explains everything!" He ran toward Kiyoshi-chan, trying to say everything at once. "Watashi wa Knuckleball desu. Namae wa nan desu ka? Hajimemashite!"

"It explains nothing, Knucklehead," said Annie, shaking her head and walking up the street toward the two boys. They were already talking excitedly with each other, and taking turns trying on the goblin's head.

 

 

 

"So," said Kiyoshi-chan's father, "you see that it isn't a head at all. It's a helmet."

"But it's more like a mask in front," said Knuckleball, straightening his glasses to see better. His baseball cap was off, and his hair was a sight. "And an ugly one at that. Looks like a wild man."

"You should see yourself, Knuckler," said Annie. "This guy looks elegant in comparison."

"It is very like the helmets of our ancient samurai" said Kiyoshi-chan's father. "Each warrior had his helmet made uniquely for himself, to terrify the enemy. The thing that you saw, whatever it was, was dressed and armed like an ancient Japanese warrior."

Annie and Knuckleball turned the object over in every direction, examining it inside and out. They were seated on the tatami of Kiyoshi-chan's home, around a low table, huddled in blankets. Kiyoshi-chan and his little sister Izumi-chan were also in the room, listening with puzzled smiles to the odd Japanese of these strange children. Kiyoshi-chan's mother came bustling in regularly, setting the table for breakfast.

"I like the dragon on top," said Knuckleball. "I especially like all those little tendrils round its mouth, like whiskers or earthworms. It's not so scary when you look at it up close."

"It's all such a mystery," said Annie. "I wonder if the rest of the armor was as empty as the helmet?"

"Of course not," said the father. "It was a tall costume, with a short person inside. What else could it have been?"

"I'm not sure," said Annie.

"Anyway," said Kiyoshi-chan's father, with a keen look at his guests, "we have some bigger mysteries than that."

The two children looked back at him, and smiled uncomfortably. The blue-gray light of a rain-filled morning was just becoming visible through a crack in the door.

"For one," said the man, "how do you speak Japanese, though you are American? Few Americans speak Japanese at all."

"Our father taught us," said Knuckleball.

"He's a professor of East Asian studies," said Annie. "At St. Gildas College. Near Boston. Do you know Boston?"

"Of course," said Kiyoshi-chan's father. "I must say that you speak our language very well."

Kiyoshi-chan could scarcely contain himself. "They talk as if they have cotton in their mouths," he said, grinning.

"Like cartoons," said Izumi-chan, giggling. "It makes my ears hurt to listen to them."

"You are rude," said their father.

"It's OK," said Annie. "I'm sure they're right."

"I have more questions," said the father. "Please tell me how you came here."

Annie and Knuckleball looked at each other.

"Here?" said Knuckleball. "Well, we walked."

"From where?" asked the father.

"From the train station," said Annie, too quickly.

Kiyoshi-chan's father sat up very straight and looked at them with a crooked smile.

"It's not far," said Annie. "It's just a few blocks away. It's a very nice train station, with a little garden on the platform."

"I know," said Kiyoshi-chan's father. "I use it every day. But you are hiding things from me. Where is your father? Where is your mother?"

"In America," said Annie and Knuckleball in unison.

"In Massachusetts," said Annie.

"And the two of you are here alone?"

There was a long pause.

"Well, not really alone," said Annie. "Not alone in a completely alone sort of way." This was even more confusing in Japanese than in English, and Kiyoshi-chan's father looked bothered. He waited, but the American children offered nothing else.

Kiyoshi-chan's mother brought in steaming bowls of rice and miso soup. The small room was full of the aroma.

"It is now eating," she said in English. "We have maximum hotness."

Kiyoshi-chan's father smiled at the children, continuing to speak in Japanese. "I am sorry I cannot speak English as well as my wife," he said. "She was always a much better student than I."

"Her English is wonderful," said Annie.

The mother laughed, holding her hand over her mouth. "Oh, no," she said. "Is not wonderful. Is very peculiar English."

The father was not concentrating on the conversation. His eyes seemed to be trying to dig deeply into the minds of the two American children, to uncover the

mystery of their coming to his home.

"It is very strange," he said finally. "Very, very strange." "I know," said Annie. "I'm sorry."

"Sumimasen" he said, "excuse me, but may I ask you one more question?"

"Of course," said Annie.

"Do you know anything," he asked, "about another American child near here? A little girl, about the size of Izumi-chan?"

Annie and Knuckleball scrambled to their feet, almost upsetting the table. "Yes!" said Annie. "Little Harriet! Have you seen her? Where? When?"

"I don't know if it was this Little Harriet," said the father. "But last night Kiyoshi-chan thinks he saw a little ghost in the form of a girl. Here."