THE EASTERN sky began to lighten over Sanya, above shops and small factories tossed up in the early 50s and left to decay.
Manny Ramos stepped over a bag lady sleeping in the mouth of an alley and crossed the street. He sat on the steps of a dormitory for transient workers and waited for the yakuza crew bosses to arrive.
A few miles south of Manny, the first trains of the day were leaving Ueno and Asakusa stations. Clattering along elevated tracks, their headlamps winked down at newspaper boys on bicycles and road repair crews finishing graveyard shifts.
Manny watched as a mongrel dog pissed on a dumpster a foot from the bag lady’s face, yawned as the wind drove scraps of paper—racing forms and fast-food wrappers—into a chain-link fence.
Beside the ramshackle dormitory, men in tattered work clothes wandered near a fire burning in a weedy lot. They argued and jingled coins in their hands, keeping watch on vending machines in front of a tobacco shop. With timers set to the sun, the machines wouldn’t spit out Kirin beer, Chu-Hi and cups of sake for another ten minutes.
The wood smoke from the fire reminded Manny of home and how much he missed his daughters. He hadn’t seen the girls in nearly a year. Such a long time. He looked back ever further—to the day the big tugs had towed the last floating dry dock out of Subic Bay and changed his life forever.
Manny was forty-nine-years old and had worked as a carpenter at the giant U.S. Navy base since the beginning of the Vietnam War. A concrete house on Olongapo’s Baloy Beach and an aging Datsun had marked him as a man of stature, a member of the community’s tenuous middle class.
And then the politicians had ruined it all, destroying his life and the lives of thirty-thousand other base workers. First, the Soviets had thrown in the towel, rendering Subic and Clark airfield expensive white elephants in a battle against a Red menace that no longer existed.
Next, Mt. Pinatubo, in what Manny was certain was a warning from God, had erupted and buried Clark and surrounding Angeles City in mountains of ash.
But the Philippine Senate hadn’t got the message. Addicted to shaking down the Americans for base rental fees, they’d postured, threatened and whined. And missed the geopolitical boat.
When it had finally became clear that the U.S. wasn’t going to bother digging out Clark and intended to abandon Subic, the politicians had made fiery speeches and retreated to their family plantations on Negros and Mindanao. While watching half-starved children work the cane fields, they’d proclaimed themselves anticolonial saviors in a war of national sovereignty.
But sovereignty was thin gruel for Manny Ramos—it wouldn’t pay his daughters’ school fees or replace the water pump on the Datsun. After a couple of years trying to scrape by doing odd jobs, he’d flown in desperation to Japan, a cheap tourist camera around his neck, the name of a building contractor neatly folded in his pocket.
The first few months in Tokyo had been good. His tourist visa had kept the ever-present cops at bay and he’d quickly found work. The construction trade had been as hot as the rest of the nation’s overheated economy. Even after his visa had expired, life had been tolerable. He’d kept working, ducking the police and sending money home every month.
But then the economy had taken a dive. Illegal workers had been the first hurt and now every day dozens of men were turning themselves in for deportation and a free plane ride home courtesy of the Japanese government.
Manny had decided to stick it out, hoping things would get better. He was holding his own but just barely. The few jobs available almost always went to younger men.
He stood up as a line began to form outside a storefront office. White-faced Iranians in leather jackets and baggy jeans stood beside dark-skinned Pakistanis. Chinese spoke to Bangladeshis in Japanese and listened closely to replies in precise British English.
The line edged forward. A bricklayer from Bangkok looked back at Manny. They’d met at a job site in Funabashi months before. “I hear there’s no work again today,” he said. “It’s always the same now. This place is no good for us.”
He lit a cigarette and held out the pack. “We’re old men, we should be sitting in the sun, not digging holes for the Japanese.”
Manny nodded. The sun sounded wonderful. It would be hot in Subic and if he was home he could take the girls to the beach. He looked up at the dark sky and decided to give himself another week.
Sam leaned on the bar. It was nearly two o’clock and he was exhausted. Without May to help, the lunchtime crowd had been a killer. Even his sign on the door suspending food service had done little to deter rabid packs of housewives, both tourist and local.
The rush seemed to be over. The only customer was a skinny, owl-eyed college student at the counter. The kid had sat slumped on his stool for the last hour, flicking through the pages of a comic book three inches thick.
Shortly after the student’s arrival, Sam had dropped a soapy glass and it had shattered in the sink. The kid had looked up, his eyes wide and jittery. Sam had topped off his coffee and apologized for the noise. The kid had mumbled and gone back to his reading.
Later, long after the coffee had grown cold, the kid’s head had sunk on his breast and his eyes had glazed over. His hand had moved faster and faster, until the rasp of turning pages had been the loudest sound in the room. He’d blindly slurped his coffee, his eyes locked on the comic heroine, a doe-eyed schoolgirl with perky breasts.
At last, he’d sighed and lit a cigarette, setting the comic on the counter open to the final page. The girl, her breasts still perky, lay raped in a school yard. Despite glistening comic tears in her big round eyes, she looked both resigned to her fate and ready for next week’s adventure.
“Excuse me, are you open?”
Sam lifted his head from the counter. “Uhh, yeah, sorry. I must have dozed off. Our kitchen’s, uhh, closed but I can get you a cup of coffee or a beer.”
“Coffee’s fine,” Manny Ramos said. He couldn’t afford to eat in a restaurant anyway. He’d been wandering all day and just wanted to get off his feet. He took a closer look, wondering what a white guy was doing working in a coffee shop. He’d seen plenty of Southeast Asians—that wasn’t so unusual—but the whites always had better jobs.
The guy handed over the coffee and asked, “You speak English?”
“I was speaking English,” Manny smiled. “Or at least I thought I was. Is my accent that bad?”
Sam rubbed his eyes. “Uhh, no. I’m sorry, I guess I’m still half asleep. Sometimes I get confused.”
“Tough day, huh?”
“Murder.” Sam poured himself a cup of coffee. “Where are you from? The P.I.?”
“That’s right, near Subic Bay. Ever heard of it?”
“Sure. I filed some stories from Manila when Marcos was kicked out of the country.”
Manny nodded. Hopes had been high then. Everybody had thought things were finally going to change. He smiled. They’d been right, things had changed. They’d gotten worse.
“What are you doing in Japan?” Sam asked.
“Trying to make a living.” He explained his situation in as few words as possible. Reality was depressing.
Sam listened and an idea began to form. He could help this guy and help himself, too. The more he thought about it the more he liked it. The only question was whether May would go for it. There was only one way to find out and he knew he couldn’t stand another day like today.
He refilled Manny’s cup and peered at the older man. “Can you cook?”
“Cook what?”
Sam handed a menu across the bar. “This stuff.”
The menu was written in katakana, the simplest of the Japanese alphabets. Like many foreigners, Manny had learned it his first month in Tokyo. He scanned it quickly—all Japanese coffee shops served the same food.
“Anybody can cook this,” he said. “How hard is it to make fried rice and tuna sandwiches?”
Too hard for Sam. “Yeah, but what about the spaghetti?” he demanded, feeling a little defensive. “Spaghetti’s not easy. Not everybody can make that.”
“Hmmm, I guess you’re right,” Manny agreed. “Spaghetti’s pretty tough. First, you have to boil the noodles and then dump sauce on top.” He laughed. “I bet it takes a lot of training.”
Sam held out his hands. “OK, OK. Maybe spaghetti’s not that difficult.” He grabbed the menu back, determined to find something that took real culinary skill.
Manny waited, surprised and amused at the turn his day had taken. He wasn’t at all sure where this conversation was leading but it was very easy to like the guy behind the counter. After the crew bosses and the cops, the loneliness and the crowding, it was fun to joke around. He’d been taking life far too seriously recently.
Sam slapped the menu down on the counter and grinned. “All right, all right. Here we go.” He pointed at an item halfway down the list. “OK, buddy. Just try and tell me this one’s easy.”
Manny sounded out the katakana. “Mini-Pizza?”
“Right.”
“I think those usually come frozen. You just put 'em in a toaster oven, don’t you?”
“Really?”
“I’m almost sure of it.”
Sam put away the menu, popped the tops on a couple of Budweisers and handed one across the bar. “So you want a job?”
Manny’s smile was as wide as Sam’s. “Of course. That’s what being an illegal alien is all about. We always want jobs.”
“Yeah, that’s what I figured.” Sam hesitated. “There’s just one thing, though...”
“What’s that?”
“The final decision is up to my sister.”
“Is she the owner?”
Sam looked toward the door. “Uhh, not exactly.”
May grabbed Kiyomi by the shoulder to stop her from moving deeper into the coffee shop. Too late, the strange man behind the bar had already seen them.
Her heart bounced—he was standing right by the cash register—and stopped beating. A body was lying in one of the booths. Its feet were sticking out. She recognized the purple and kiwi-colored Nike sneakers. Sam’s sneakers!
The door closed behind May, gently bumping her inside. Kiyomi, flustered and getting scared, tried to back up. They banged together, their books flew from their hands and slid across the floor. Eyes wide with fright, they prepared to scream.
Manny beat them to it. “Welcome!” he shouted at the top of his lungs. He smiled broadly and gestured for them to come closer.
May would have none of it. She took two steps forward and three to the side, circling the intruder as if he were a dangerous animal.
“You can sit anywhere you like,” he invited.
May began to breathe again. The stranger looked almost shy and his Japanese was funny; he put musical accents on every syllable. She heard a low noise from the other side of the room. Sam was lying on his back, his face covered with a copy of the Asahi Shimbun. One of his feet moved; he snored and snored. Lazy man!
Kiyomi laughed and picked up her books; May advanced to the counter and plopped herself down on a stool. She leaned forward and looked the stranger right in the eye.
Manny flinched under the intense scrutiny. This must be the sister. It was a surreal moment. He was nearly fifty years old and his life and the lives of his children might depend on her opinion.
“You’re old,” she said.
“I’ve got a daughter about your age. Her name’s Miriam.”
“Your Japanese is terrible.”
“It’s difficult.”
“Yeah, it’s pretty hard,” she agreed, switching to English.
May looked over at Sam. She was still a little afraid he might run away again. It wasn’t fair to leave him here all alone in the daytime. Maybe if he had somebody to talk to.
“OK,” she decided. “You can stay.”
Manny concealed his relief. It wouldn’t do to grovel. “Good. Is there anything you’d like? A Coke or something?”
“Absolutely,” May said. “Two Cokes, please.”
“Anything else? You must be hungry.”
“Do you know how to make Mini-Pizzas?”
Manny turned, flicked on the toaster oven and began to laugh.
