A Wild Sheep Chase (34 page)

“It’saniceplacehere,” the Sheep Man changed the subject. “Beautifulscenerygoodcleanair.You’regonnalikeithere.”

“Yeah, it’s a nice place,” I said.

“It’sevennicerinthewinter.Nothingbutsnowallaround,
everything frozenup.Alltheanimalssleepingnohumanfolk.”

“You stay here all winter?”

“Uhhuh.”

I didn’t ask anything else. The Sheep Man was just like an animal. Approach him and he’d retreat, move away and he’d come closer. As long as I wasn’t going anywhere, there was no hurry. I could take my time.

With his left hand the Sheep Man pulled at the fingers of his black right glove, one after the other. After a number of tugs, the glove slipped off, revealing a flaking blackened hand. Small but fleshy, an old burn scar from the base of his thumb to midway around the back of his hand.

The Sheep Man stared at the back of his hand, then turned it over to look at the palm. Exactly the way the Rat used to do, that
gesture. But no way was this Sheep Man the Rat. There was a difference in height of eight inches between them.

“Yougonnastayhere?” asked the Sheep Man.

“No, as soon as I find either my friend or the sheep, I’m leaving. That’s all I came for.”

“Winter’snicehere,” repeated the Sheep Man. “Sparkling white.Everythingallfrozen.”

The Sheep Man snickered to himself, flaring those enormous nostrils. Dingy teeth peered out from his mouth, the two front teeth missing. There was something uneven to the rhythm of the Sheep Man’s thoughts, which seemed to have the whole room expanding and contracting.

“Gottabegoing,” the Sheep Man said suddenly. “Thanksfor thesmokes.”

I nodded.

“Hopeyoufindyourfriendandthatsheepbeforetoolong.”

“Hmm,” I said. “Let me know if you hear of anything.”

The Sheep Man hemmed and hawed, ill at ease. “Umwellyes surething.”

I fought back the urge to laugh. The Sheep Man was one lame liar.

He put his glove back on and stood up to go. “I’llbeback.Can’t sayhowmanydaysfromnowbutI’llbeback.” Then his eyes clouded. “Noimpositionisit?”

“You kidding?” I threw in a quick shake of the head. “By all means, I’d love to see you again.”

“WellI’llbeback,” said the Sheep Man, then slammed the door behind him. He almost caught his tail, but it slipped through safe and sound.

Through a space in the shutters, I watched the Sheep Man stand staring at that peeling whitewashed mailbox, exactly as he
had when he first appeared. Then wriggling a bit to adjust the costume better to his body, he took off fleetfoot across the pasture toward the woods in the east. His level ears were like a diving board of a swimming pool. In the growing distance, the Sheep Man became a fuzzy white dot, finally merging into the white of the birches.

Even after the Sheep Man disappeared from view, I kept staring at the pasture and birch woods. Had the Sheep Man been an illusion?

Yet here were a bottle of whiskey and Seven Stars butts left on the table, and there on the sofa were a few strands of wool. I compared them with the wool from the backseat of the Land Cruiser. Identical.

As a way to focus my thoughts, I went into the kitchen to fix some Salisbury steak. I minced up an onion and browned it in the frying pan. Meanwhile, I defrosted a chunk of beef from the freezer, then ground it with a medium blade. The kitchen was what you might call compact, but even so it had more than your typical run of utensils and seasonings.

If they’d only pave the road here, you could open a mountain-chalet–style restaurant. Wouldn’t be bad, windows wide open, a view of the flocks, blue sky. Families could let their kids play with the sheep, lovers could stroll in the birch woods. A success for sure.

The Rat could run it, I could cook. The Sheep Man could be good for something too. His costume would be perfect up here in the mountains. Then for a practical, down-to-earth touch, the caretaker could join us; you need one practical person. The dog too. Even the Sheep Professor could drop in.

While browning the onions with a wooden spatula, I tossed these ideas around in my head.

But my beautiful-eared girlfriend—was she lost to me forever? The thought depressed me, though what the Sheep Man said was probably right. I should have come here on my own. I should not have … I shook my head. Then I took up where I’d left off with the restaurant.

Now, if we could get J to come up here, I’m sure things would work out fine. Everything should revolve around him, with forgiveness, compassion, and acceptance at the center.

While waiting for the onions to cool, I sat down by the window and gazed back out at the pasture.

Three uneventful days passed. Not one thing happened. The Sheep Man didn’t show. I fixed meals, ate them, read my book, and when the sun went down, I drank whiskey and went to sleep.

The morning air of the pasture turned steadily cooler. Day by day, the bright golden leaves of the birches turned more spotted as the first winds of winter slipped between the withered branches and across the highlands toward the southeast. Stopping in the center of the pasture, I could hear the winds clearly. No turning back, they pronounced. The brief autumn was gone.

Without exercise and without smoking, I had quickly gained six pounds. So I started to get up at six and jog a crescent halfway around the pasture. That took off a couple of pounds. It was tough not smoking, but with no store around for twenty miles, what was one to do? Each time I felt like smoking, I thought about her and her ears. Compared to everything I’d lost this far, losing smoking was trivial. And indeed it was.

With all this free time, I cooked up a storm. I made a roast beef. I defrosted a salmon and marinated it. I searched the pasture for
edible vegetables and simmered my findings with bonito flakes and soy sauce. I made simple cabbage pickles. I prepared a number of snacks in case the Sheep Man showed up for a drink. The Sheep Man, however, never came.

Most of the afternoons I would pass looking out at the pasture. I soon began seeing things. A figure emerging from the birch woods and running straight in my direction. Usually it was the Sheep Man, but sometimes it was the Rat, sometimes my girlfriend. Other times it was the sheep with the star on its back.

In the end, though, nobody ever materialized. Only the winds blowing across the pasture. It was as if the pasture were the winds’ own private thoroughfare. The winds raced across the pasture, never looking back, on missions of utmost urgency.

On the seventh day after my arrival on the mountain, the first snow fell. The winds had been unusually calm from morning, the skies overcast with dense lead-gray clouds. After my morning run and shower, as I settled down to coffee and records, the snow started. A hard snow. It struck the windowpanes with a battery of dull thuds. The wind had picked up, driving the snow down at a thirty-degree angle. Rather like the slanting lines of some department-store wrapping-paper pattern. Soon the storm intensified and everything outside was awash in white. The entire mountain range and woods were obscured. This was no pitiful snow as sometimes falls in Tokyo. This was the real thing, an honest-to-goodness north-country snow. A snow to blanket everything and freeze deep into the heart of the earth.

The snow was blinding. I drew the curtain and curled up to read by the heater. The record ended, the needle lifted, and all was silence. The sort of silence that follows in the wake of the death of all living things. I set down my book and for no particular reason felt the urge to walk through the house. From the living room into
the kitchen, checking the storeroom, bath and cellar, upstairs to open the doors of each room. There was no one, of course. Only silence which rolled like oil into every corner. Only silence which changed ever so slightly from room to room.

I was all alone. Probably more alone than I’d been in all my life.

I’d been dying for a smoke the past two days, but as there were no cigarettes, I’d been drinking whiskey straight. One winter like this and I’d end up an alcoholic. Not that there was enough liquor around to do the trick, though. Three bottles of whiskey, one bottle of brandy, twelve cases of canned beer, and no more. Obviously, the same thought had occurred to the Rat.

Was my partner, my former partner, that is, still hitting the bottle? Had he managed to put the company in order, turn it back into a small translation firm, as I suggested? Maybe he’d done exactly that. But could he really make a go of it without me, as he worried? Our time together was up. Six years together, and now back to square one.

The snow let up by early afternoon. Abruptly, just as it had begun. The thick clouds tore off in places as grand columns of sunlight thrust down to play in the pasture. It was magnificent.

The hard snow lay sprinkled on the ground like candy. Solidified into pellets as if to defy melting away. Yet by the time the clock struck three, the snow had all but melted. The ground was thoroughly wet, the twilight sun enfolding the pasture in a soft light. The birds sang as if set free.

After dinner, I borrowed two books from the Rat’s room,
Bread Baking
and the Conrad novel, then made myself comfortable on the living-room sofa. One-third of the way into the novel, I came across a four-inch-square newspaper clipping the Rat had been using for a bookmark. No date, but from the color of the paper it
must have been recent. It was local news, a symposium on aging and society to be held at a Sapporo hotel, a rally at a train station near Asahikawa, a lecture on the Middle East crisis. Nothing to grab the Rat’s interest, or mine. On the reverse, classified ads. I yawned, shut the book, went to heat up the leftover coffee.

I suddenly realized that this was the first time, in what now seemed like years, that I had seen a newspaper, and that I’d been left behind an entire week from the goings-on of the world. No radio or television, no newspapers, no magazines. A nuclear missile could have destroyed Tokyo, an epidemic could have swept the world, Martians could have occupied Australia, I wouldn’t have known. Of course, the Land Cruiser in the garage had a radio, but I discovered that I had no pressing desire to go listen after all. If something could take place without my knowing, it was just as well. I had no real need to know. I, in any case, had plenty on my mind already.

Something gnawed at me. Something that had passed before my eyes but which I’d been too dense to notice. All the same, on an unconscious level, it had registered. I deposited my coffee cup in the sink and returned to the living room. I took another look at the newspaper clipping. There it was on the reverse:

I put the clipping back in the book and sank into the sofa.

So the Rat knew I was looking for him. Question: how had he found the item? By accident, when he’d come down off the mountain? Or maybe he’d been searching for something through several weeks’ worth of papers?

And why didn’t he contact me? Had I already checked out of the Dolphin Hotel by the time he came across it? Had his telephone line already gone dead?

No. The Rat could have gotten in touch if he wanted to, he just didn’t want to. Because I was at the Dolphin Hotel, he figured I’d find my way up here, so that if he wanted to see me, he had only to wait, or at least leave me a note.

What it boiled down to was this: for some reason the Rat didn’t want to face me. Even so, he wasn’t rejecting me. If he didn’t want me here, he could have shut me out any number of ways. It was his house, after all.

Grappling with these two propositions, I watched the second hand sweep slowly around the face of the clock. After one full circumgyration, my reasoning had made no progress. I couldn’t figure out what lay at the center of all this.

The Sheep Man knew something. That much was certain. Someone who had monitored my arrival on the scene was sure to know about the Rat’s living here for six months.

The more I thought about it, the more difficult I found it to escape the feeling that the Sheep Man’s actions reflected the Rat’s will. The Sheep Man had driven my girlfriend from the mountain and left me here alone. His showing up here was undoubtedly a harbinger of something. Something was progressing all around me. The area was being swept clean and purified. Something was about to happen.

I turned out the lights and went upstairs, climbed into bed, and looked out at the moon and pasture. Stars peeked through a tear in the clouds. I opened the window and smelled the night air. Among the rustling leaves I could hear a call in the distance. A strange cry, neither bird nor beast.