Light and dark

[24]

“YOU PLAY at Okamoto’s place these days?”

“Nope.”

“You had another fight?”

“We didn’t fight.”

“Then why don’t you play?”

“Just don’t.”

It appeared that Makoto had more to say, and Tsuda wanted to know what it was.

“Don’t they give you all sorts of stuff when you go there?”

“Nope — not that much.”

“But they treat you—”

“We had rice curry last time, and it was too spicy.”

Spicy curry seemed an inadequate reason not to visit the Okamotos.

“That can’t be why you don’t like going there.”

“It’s not me — Father says I shouldn’t. I’d like to go and use the swing.”

Tsuda inclined his head in thought. What reason could his uncle have for preferring his son not to visit the Okamotos? A difference in sensibility, in family traditions, in lifestyle — all these occurred immediately. His uncle spent his days at his desk promulgating his vehement views with words in silence and wasn’t nearly as powerful in the actual world as with his pen. Secretly he was sensible of this discrepancy, and his perception had made him obstinate and somewhat reclusive. In that part of himself that feared venturing into a society where wealth and authority were paramount and being made a fool of by others, he appeared to be ceaselessly vigilant against the awful possibility that even the smallest corner of his personal domain should be contaminated by their values.

“Why don’t you ask your father what’s wrong with going to the Okamotos’?”

“I did—”

“What did he say? He didn’t say anything, right?”

“He did!”

“What?”

Makoto appeared a little embarrassed. Presently he stammered a reply in a somber tone of voice.

“He said if I go to Okamotos’ I’ll see, you know, all of Hajime’s things and come home and want, you know, the same stuff for myself. He says I’ll start pestering him to buy me things so I shouldn’t go over there—”

Now Tsuda saw the point. One family lived somewhat better than the other, and the difference in their wealth had to be reflected even in their children’s toys.

“So you only bother your old man about expensive stuff, cars and kid-leather shoes and lord knows what, things you saw first at Hajime’s house — whatever he has goes to the top of your shopping list, is that it?”

Half teasingly, Tsuda lifted a hand and tried clapping Makoto on the back. Makoto screwed his face into an expression that suggested an adult who has had an unattractive truth about himself exposed. Unlike an adult, he offered nothing in the way of self-justification.

“That’s a dirty lie.”

Pressing against his side the one-yen, fifty-sen air gun he had wheedled out of Tsuda, he took off in the direction of home. The marbles in his pocket clinked like prayer beads being vigorously fingered. From his backpack issued a bumping as of textbooks, perhaps, against a lunch box.

Pausing at a black board fence at the corner, he darted a glance back at Tsuda like a weasel and disappeared down the alley. Tsuda had traversed the alley and was stepping through Fujii’s gate at the far end when the bang of a gun sounded just yards ahead of him. With an uncomfortable smile he observed Makoto’s shadowed figure taking careful aim at him through the hedge fence on the right.