Kamikaze and Other Stories

Kamikaze and Other Stories

Juan LePuen

Published at Smashwords by Fario and Juan LePuen

Copyright 2014 by Fario and Juan LePuen

Contents

Kamikaze

Separate but Equal

Cashiers and Courtesy Clerks

Landlocked

Houseboy

Ruphina

Teacher of the Year

Failure Notice

The Adobe House

Road Hazards

Happy Valley

Diary of a Would-be Translator

More from Fario

Kamikaze

We sat there looking at Vice Principal Macon.

Mr. Suzuki-san, he said, pausing briefly so that we could take in his command of the Japanese language, has come all the way from Tokyo to be the first Japanese language teacher in Louisiana public schools. We at Magnet High are proud we can offer our students more than any other school in the state. We are number one! Vice Principal Macon paused again, as if he were expecting applause. It wasn’t forthcoming, so he went on:

I hope you’ll give your new teacher a warm welcome and show him what the best school in the state is like. Sayonara!

As he left, our gaze went from the vice principal to the man he was introducing us to: a white-shirted figure with shaking hands, wide circles of perspiration spreading out from under his arms, and a shock of jet black hair, surprising on such an old man, hanging low and only slightly greasy over his forehead. His name, as the vice principal had told us, was Suzuki.

So that’s how every day for an hour, right before lunch, we sat straining to understand Mr. Suzuki’s English. I made the effort for about a week. Jeff, who on one glorious occasion invited me to smoke a joint with him out behind the gym, making me feel for once incredibly cool and rebellious, so unlike the tall, skinny kid who threaded the crowds in the hall clutching books to his chest like a girl and every day suffered the torture of coming out of the lunch line and finding no welcoming table to sit down at with his tray of cafeteria food, Jeff, to whom, by the way, I remain grateful to this day for that joint that in my own mind at least worked such a miraculous transformation, well, as I was saying, he must have given up trying to decipher those sounds coming out of Mr. Suzuki’s mouth after about half an hour. Brian was there, too. Don’t ask me why. He couldn’t get through Spanish. What was he doing in Japanese? Then there were Mark and Greg. They sat in the front row. Mark was probably the first black kid from Caddo Parish, Louisiana, ever to take Japanese. As for Greg, well, every day between first and second period, I walked by him standing at his open locker. On the inside of the door he had a poster that went like this: The meek shall inherit the earth. The rest of us will escape to the stars. Fat chance, Greg. There must have been five or six more of us in class, but I can’t remember them. Except for one girl who was kind of cute and had nice breasts. I looked at her a lot.

Meanwhile, Mr. Suzuki would be mumbling something in his broken English. Probably had to do with Japanese. Beats me. Go ask Mark and Greg. They were always sitting up front. So was Alicia—I remember her name now—the cute girl. A couple rows back, as far back as we could reasonably go without awakening immediate suspicion, Jeff, Brian, and I would spend the period doing anything but class-work. We talked to each other now and then, but mostly it was just each of us making it through the hour as best he could. Jeff sat with his hands in the pocket of a trench coat he never took off, not even in warm weather. Brian spent the whole hour acting like he was paying attention. I was well placed—behind her and sort of at an angle—to spend a good part of the hour looking at Alicia without fear that her eyes would catch mine and force me to lower my gaze in shame.

Other times, I wondered about Mr. Suzuki. He looked like an accountant retired after thirty years’ exemplary service at a motorcycle factory. How had he ended up in a C-wing classroom at Magnet High in Shreveport, Louisiana? And without really thinking about anything but how the mysterious destiny of human beings kept them shuffling all over the planet in vain attempts to escape boredom, satisfy a former ambition, or become strangers to themselves, I could also, in less than half a class period, chew my ballpoint pen—borrowed from Mark or Greg, as likely as not—down to a twisted and mangled stub. Working at these pens with my teeth, I created true works of art, abstract pieces as legitimately expressive of their creator as any flower arrangement or rock garden.

One day—it always came as a surprise—a pen exploded in my mouth. Thick blue ink covered my hands and face. It had a metallic taste. Next period was lunch. I had to get the ink off my face. No way could I stand in the lunch line with blue smears all over my hands and face and ask for a plateful of meatloaf and green beans. I was on the edge of panic.

John? John?

I started. Mr. Suzuki was saying something. To me, apparently.

I’m not sure about that one, I said, implying I knew all the others. Nobody snickered. When in doubt, plead selective ignorance. I looked over at Brian. The expression on his face suggested that if he had been called on he would have known the answer. Right. I went back to rubbing a finger moistened with saliva all around my mouth and lips, in a desperate but discreet attempt to remove the ink before it dried. Nobody, it seemed, had noticed anything. I could relax. By then Mr. Suzuki was saying something else. I dared to look up. Something about a test. Might have to study for that one, I thought to myself.

By the end of the first grading period, my efforts in Japanese had earned me a B plus. I knew, at most, three characters of the simplest alphabet.

*

Only once did I ever really talk to Mr. Suzuki. It happened in the cafeteria. I came out of the lunch line and headed over to an empty table. Head down, I worked at my lunch. Strips of fried catfish. Not bad at all. A tray was set gently down in front of me. Looking up, I saw Mr. Suzuki.

I sit with you?

Imagine that! A man in his sixties asking permission to sit with me.

Sure, I said.

In between bites of catfish and cornbread, we talked. But it was hard. After more than three months in Louisiana, Mr. Suzuki’s English hadn’t gotten any more intelligible. And my Japanese was none too reliable. The buzz of voices rose all around us, knives and forks flashed in the sunlight, trays were brought down with bangs, shouted conversations took place from one table to another, girls and guys flirted. I looked at Mr. Suzuki and took in his bewilderment and loneliness. Did he have a wife? Where was she?

Making small talk with an old Japanese man at the end of a long table, surrounded by the noise from dozens of more vigorous exchanges, was more than I could do. I resisted the urge to tell him that some prankster must have spiked the state-subsidized half-pints of milk with Spanish fly, thinking that I would only add to his confusion and maybe even alarm him. We lapsed into silence.

That was when I realized Mr. Suzuki wouldn’t last out the year.

*

Sometime over Christmas break he left. My back-row classmates and I may have felt a pang of guilt, but Mrs. Espy, the new teacher, didn’t give us much time to examine our consciences.

We got back our first test and went into shock: Fs. What was this? Something was clearly wrong with the woman who had replaced Mr. Suzuki. Brian suggested—a suggestion that to my astonishment would later form the basis of a formal accusation against Mrs. Espy—that she was taking out on us her hatred for the citizens of the country that had fire-bombed her native land into submission.

Right, I told Brian, who had evidently spent far too long at the knees of his psychologist father, that’s why she married an American. Besides, she must’ve been about three when Hiroshima and Nagasaki got creamed. If she was even born.

Jeff thought she was just prejudiced against Americans. Another kid, who had also seen his grade tumble, said Mrs. Espy was forcing us to learn by rote, a fine technique for the yellow masses, he added, but not for us independent-minded citizens of the United States of America. The dangers of rote learning in Japan had just then been the subject of many solemn reports on the nightly news. I just sat there and listened.

*

Would you please send John to the office? The voice came over the intercom in the middle of German class. I was being sent to the office! I couldn’t believe it. All my classmates heard the summons and witnessed my departure. Problem was, cool people just didn’t take German II. Why wasn’t I called in the middle of P. E. or geometry? Besides, adjective endings weren’t so bad, but deep knee bends were another story, and Mrs. Dinty, the geometry teacher, was an awful harpy whose class I would’ve done about anything to miss.

It was Vice Principal Macon who wanted me. He was waiting for me in his office.

John, he began, how is your Japanese class going?

I hesitated half a second.

Not too well.

Why not? asked Vice Principal Macon. But before I had to admit I was an idiot and hadn’t studied since about the fourth day of class, he forestalled me.