Red Ice

“Thanks, sir, now don’t forget I gotcha covered.” God, he looked vulnerable. It was hard to believe he was the same man I’d seen that night in the U Minh Forest. He’d been badly wounded and, when put on a dustoff chopper, had swatted aside aircrewmen in a raving frenzy. In delirium, he’d hunkered down apelike, and the Army medics didn’t go near him until he’d passed out from loss of blood.

“No sweat. Things have been looking up,” I said, and winked.

He grinned.

“Get it back to me when you can.”

There was no thought of recruiting him. He’d given all he had.

With much bonhomie, he trudged unevenly down the stairs.

Where and when had I become angel to him and so many others? Strange bonds. Trust them… but only with your life.

For a beached frogman who took little notice of money, I seemed ever sensitive to the manner in which it fell between my fingers.

Not too much later, I ambled down to Keiko’s restaurant. Seconds after I had entered, I felt her squeeze my hand as she glided by into the teppanyaki room. Tall by Japanese standards, she bore herself like a princess of the Ama among the restaurant’s well-heeled clientele. Her vibrancy and striking, athletically trim good looks stole your attention. Everyone else in the room seemed bland, part of the background. A Chinese-style yellow sheath dress, a cheongsam—one of my favorites—made her particularly desirable in the soft lights.

A faint piston-like fidget of her hips indicated she had more than one thing on her mind. Ever restive, she could still move through a room with a presence that made rough seas placid.

Keiko Shirahama was the hamlet girl who had grown to want more.

Japan, more than most countries, looks to the sea for sustenance. The Ama, as divers for shellfish and edible seaweed, shared breadwinner status with their fisherman husbands. Their fathers and brothers served as boatmen and tenders while these women divers, equipped with the natural feminine superiority provided by an insulating layer of subcutaneous fat, plunged to the sea bottom day after day.

The term Ama in Japanese was a homonym for the Japanese word for “nun.” There were other similarities; their white scarflike headgear, for instance, bore an eerie resemblance to a nun’s headdress. Ama, however, unlike nuns, had a reputation for being, as one Japanese friend put it, “women with sharp tongue.” Even spicier in personality than most of her fellow divers and quick to translate her moods physically, young Keiko had publicly boxed the ears and berated the fishing cooperative’s headman after a family dispute with the cooperative.

She was prudently hustled off to board with land-bound cousins in Yokohama who treated their novel Ama like a black sheep. Her unmerited status was an affront to her pride, but it offered certain unexpected benefits.

Forced to take a job as a restaurant bookkeeper and hostess in an establishment that catered to—horror of horrors—foreign devils, gaijin, she found it surprisingly to her liking. By Japanese standards, foreigners had rough edges, and so did Ama. She bought the restaurant a year or two later. Only after realizing the world she had been born to and loved had grown too small.

The attraction to life in a larger arena was in constant tension with the values and traits inculcated by time and heredity. Undeniably, she had been forged by hard work and tempered in cold water. The Yokohama waterfront presented as pluralistic a community as Japan could offer. Physical courage and hardship endured were the watchwords of the Izu Peninsula fisher folk, and in her adopted world she gravitated to those who traded in those qualities.

She returned quickly to tow me into one of the more private dining compartments. The compartment had a leg well around the table, a concession to Westerners, which she knew I preferred because of a bad knee. She slid the wood-and-paper door shut. Moments later a waiter appeared with ocha, green tea, and the, ingredients for shabu-shabu, a sort of do-it-yourself beef stew. Another favorite; she wasn’t overlooking a thing.

The meal went by uneventfully as I described some of the less sensitive portions of my trip. We alternated tending the small burner on the table. I finally sat back, sated and mellowed by the onslaught of earthly delights. The uneven graph of my stubborn existence, which had too often plunged me into gritty, bloody, hang-by-your-fingernails valleys, demanded I savor these fleeting soft-rich moments. Sometimes they could be eternities apart.

“Quillon, did you enjoy your trip to Korea?” Keiko said gently, breaking a reverie.

I nodded, swirling the tea in the bottom of my teacup. The Japanese found meaning even in teacups. A good teacup in Japan must be faintly cracked. A minor defect gives character and warmth. Weren’t the best frogmen always slightly flawed?

“More than on those other trips you take?”

“No, about the same.”

“Why didn’t you take me with you?”