Slightly Far East

Hudson Review, The, Winter 2005 by Moyer, Kermit

"Gway-go-weef Tammi screams, comically mangling his name. "Be good! What you fren will think?"

"You be good-and do what you're told, like a good little housemaid," Gregory says, still advancing.

"It doesn't hurt," I say to Tammi, reassuringly, reasonably. 'You don't have to be afraid-there's nothing even to be afraid of-"

When she looks over at me, Gregory takes the opportunity to reach out and grab her wrist. She squeals, "No-o-o," but he's already pressing the mouth of the rubber cup against the soft flesh of her upper arm, branding her.

Everything hangs suspended for a moment, but then Tammi gives a kind of barking laugh and it's okay. She pulls the rubber cup off her arm and throws it toward the table, but it falls short and bounces across the floor. She and Gregory are both panting, as if they've been wrestling. As for me, I've unaccountably developed an erection, and I'm afraid that if I go after the rubber cup, I'll embarrass myself, so I sit there silently running through the multiplication tables in my mind and waiting until I can safely stand up.

'You bad boy," Tammi says, rubbing her arm, and for a second I think she means me.

Behind our house, at the top of the terraced garden that Papasan so painstakingly tends, is an empty tomb, a small cave like a dark mouth in the side of the hill. The subdivision where we live was evidently once a kind of burial ground, because there are a lot of open tombs visible in the recently cleared hills around us. They once held burial urns filled with the ancestral bones of whole families, but now they harbor nothing-unless you count the deadly Habu, a snake related to the King Cobra that is native to the island and that is said to like the tombs' cool, moist darkness.

Gregory and I have the idea to explore as many tombs as we can, starting with the tomb in my backyard, looking for anything of interest that may have been left behind. Maybe an old coin or a broken urn or even an identifiable human bone. There are stories about kids finding live grenades left over from the war and accidentally blowing themselves to smithereens, a rumor that lends another kind of danger to our plan. For equipment, besides our snakebite kits, we each carry a flashlight and a knife (I have a Boy Scout sheath knife, Gregory has a Swiss Army knife), one Army canteen on a web belt (my father's), and a long pole (actually the handle from one of my mother's-or rather Yoshiko's-mops). The pole is to wave and rattle around in the tomb's entrance to rouse any Habus before we actually enter. Wearing jeans rather than shorts, and sneakers rather than zoris, we're bent over the tomb's open entrance, a rectangular hole in the side of the hill about two feet high and four feet wide and framed with gray ceramic tiles. While I poke the pole into the entrance hole and wave it around, Gregory shines his flashlight around to see if anything moves.

"Nothing but stones and dirt," Gregory says. "It looks totally empty."

'Yeah, well, we knew that, but it might be cool actually to go inside. It would make a neat clubhouse-"