Men Are Killers
• Glen Kenner... just for a second Jay senses that the Pop Tarts, or perhaps all the food, is at stake here.

It's on a Saturday that the deliveryman comes. He is an older man with thick glasses and thinning hair but he is trim and his uniform and company jacket are spotless. He rings the doorbell once, knocks once and then tries to open the door. It's locked because Jay and Sheila, unlike their Japanese neighbors, are uncomfortable with the Japanese custom of allowing strangers to walk into their apartment. Sheila yells, "Chotto matte, kudasai," from the kitchen and finishes drying a plate. From the bedroom Jay yells, "Who is it, babe?" "Why don't you come open the door," she answers. "Then we'll both know." But Jay doesn't answer her. She hears the music from the bedroom grow louder and so she puts the plate into the dish dryer and walks over to the door. When she opens it the deliveryman jumps back from the peephole and nearly falls down the stairs. "Sumimasen," he says. "Yeah, yeah," Sheila says. "You're sorry. Of course you are, you rude little jerkoff." "Excuse me," the deliveryman says in halted English. "What is 'jerkoff?'"

---

"Oh! Its a... Well, what I meant to say was... that is..." She turns towards the bedroom. "Jay! Get out here. The delivery man needs your help!"
Jay comes running from the bedroom. He's dressed in a T-shirt and underwear and he makes it to within a few feet of the door when he realizes this. The deliveryman sees him and calls out "Sumimasen," to which Jay replies with an even louder, "Sumimasen," as he spins around and runs back into the bedroom.

Sheila, her face now red, quickly bows her head and says, "Sumimasen." The deliveryman smiles, bows again and says, "Many sumimasen today." Jay comes running back out, now with jeans on, and quickly exchanges his slippers for his tennis shoes. "Hey, hey!" he calls out to the deliveryman. "Our foreign food is here," he sings, "everything except the beer."
He runs down the stairs and the deliveryman follows.
"Beer?" he calls out to Jay, who is a floor below him and still singing.

Most of the food is in cardboard packing boxes and is stacked inside the delivery truck. Jay begins to climb up into the truck but the deliveryman places a hand on the tailgate and vaults himself inside. He says to Jay, "You wait, please." Jay gets down from the tailgate but leans inside the darkness of the truck. The deliveryman turns to him, then looks down at his clipboard, looks at the boxes around him and then again at Jay. "You have beer?"
"Beer?" Jay repeats.
"You want a beer? Okay."
"Oh, no, I am sorry," he deliveryman says. "I ask, you have beer delivery."
"Oh, beer for delivery. No. I wish, but no. No beer for delivery." The deliveryman smiles and hangs his clipboard on a hook near the tailgate. "Good. Because no beer for you."
"That's okay. I'll live." Jay grabs a box and turns. "But you want beer. Okay. We have beer. Okay?" The deliveryman smiles and jumps down as Jay turns back towards him. "We have beer. You, wife, Yamamoto," he points to his nose to indicate himself, "and Yamamoto son. Okay? Beer, okay?"
He nods his head up and down until his hair loses its neat part. Jay looks at him and replays in his mind all of the meals he's had in Japan where the main method of conversation was pantomime and drawing on napkins. He says, "I'm very sorry, but, just now I'm afraid that... uh, just now my wife and I..."
"We have beer. Many, many beer. Many, many beer okay?" The deliveryman is holding a case of Cherry Frosted Pop Tarts and just for a second Jay senses that the Pop Tarts, or perhaps all the food, is at stake here. Could he do that, he wonders. Damn, not the Pop Tarts. "Okay, what the hell. Many, many beer okay."

They've got all of the boxes open and most of the food put away. Some of it, like the canned ravioli, they hide out on the deck. If any of their foreign friends, especially any Americans, saw their stash of canned ravioli, Jay and Sheila would be forced to share. At four dollars a can, friend or no friend, sharing is not an option. Jay comes in from out on the deck and announces, "That's all for Mr. Jay." He walks into the living room and turns on the TV. "Ah," he says loud enough for Sheila to hear from the kitchen, "porno anime is on." He's flipping through the channels at lightening speed, trying to find something in English. "Whoa!" he yells out. "These guys know how to draw fourteen-year-olds!"

From the kitchen Sheila yells back, "I know you're just flipping through the channels." She walks into the living room, sits down and takes the remote from his hand and turns the TV off. "Besides," she says, "I thought you were more interested in women." She looks him in the eyes and leans back on the couch.
"You know me so well, babe." Jay scoots over to sit next to her and hooks one arm around her neck and draws her face close to his. He stares her in the eyes but then grunts, crosses his eyes and says, "Me likes pretty womens. Me likes, me likes." He begins licking her face. She's laughing but suddenly stops and says, "Your breath smells like ravioli! Were you eating ravioli out on the deck? Out of the can?"

Jay sits up, cups his hand to his mouth and tries to smell his breath. "For Christ's sake, Jay. Sometimes you really are an animal. Are you going to act like this tomorrow night?" "No," he says, "I'd never grunt in public. But you got the animal part right. I'm the king of the jungle, the mighty lion. I run down my prey," he says, his voice sinking deep into his throat, "chasing it, pursuing it, until it's breathless and its heart is ready to explode and it wants the hunt to end. It begs for me to attack." He pauses and then lunges at her, laughing and tickling her and he tries to lick her face again but her hand comes up quick and grabs his tongue and pulls. "Outh," he yells.
"I'm serious," she says, holding onto his tongue. "Don't embarrass me tomorrow, okay? And don't drink so much. Okay?"
"Outh, juth leth-"
"I said, 'Okay?'" She lets go of his tongue and stands up. "Okay, for crying out loud. Okay."

At eight o'clock, the small and dark ramen shop is crowded and filled mostly with young men in suits, their laughter loud and friendly as they enjoy an hour between the stress of an office just left and the responsibilities of going home to new wives, small children and small, cramped apartments. A regular slides open the door and walks through the heavy curtain hanging above the door and the owner and his wife call out, "Irrashaimase!" Jay and Yamamoto, the deliveryman, are singing a Carpenters song but neither can remember the words. Jay stops singing long enough to tip his head back to drink the remaining soup from his bowl but falls back and smashes into the floor. One leg of the chair, Sheila realizes a second before the owner does, has broken off and is now missing. She begins to climb under the table to find the missing leg, but the deliveryman's son puts his hand on her arm, gently, and says, "It's okay. The owner will find it."

His name is Kento but he goes by Ken around foreigners. His English is nearly perfect and he speaks in a slow, drawn-out accent from the years he lived in Australia. "The chairs are very cheap and break all of the time. It'll come good."

Sheila sits back up and smiles at him, embarrassed for her husband who is drunk and lying on the floor passed out, but also embarrassed because this young Japanese man, five years younger than her, has touched her hand and arm several times and, once, under the table, her foot with his.

The older Yamamoto is under the table now but has stopped looking for the chair leg and instead curls up next to Jay. Within seconds he is snoring. Young men at the next table laugh and go back to their beers and ramen, occasionally taking long glances over their frosted mugs at Sheila. Ken smiles and says, "Many men come here after work and drink heavily. It is nothing." His hand is resting on her bare forearm and with just the slightest pressure he squeezes her arm and leans into her. "Men are different than women. We are who we are. No acts. No masks."
"You may be right, Ken," she says, leaving her arm where it is, but looking down at his hand and back up again, her face flushed from his touch and the beer and the warmth from the closeness of so many people in the small restaurant. "But Jay promised me he wouldn't drink so much tonight."
"I mentioned that I spent a year working in Nepal," he asks.
Sheila nods her head and resists the urge to turn her eyes towards Jay. He's lying on the floor, his shirt soaked from ramen soup, she knows, and if she looks at him her anger will swell and break and she doesn't know what she will do next.

"Every weekend I traveled as far throughout Nepal as I could, visiting cultural places and making new friends. I was in Kathmandu during the festival time of Dasain. During Dasain, I saw the men, who are very poor, tie goats to poles and slaughter them. The dead animals were left there for the goddess Durga. It was very bloody." Ken pauses and shakes his head while beginning to slowly stroke Sheila's forearm so lightly that at first she thinks she feels a breeze.
"I asked an old man in my poor Nepali, 'Why killing?' He saw my Japanese face and smiled at me and slowly said, 'Men are killers. For god, for money, for women. It is who we are.'"
"Well, Jay is-"
"Jay-san is who he is," he interrupts as he moves his face closer to hers. "He cannot change, just as the men in Nepal cannot change to stop from killing, just as the goat cannot change to save its own life." He pauses and his face shows no emotion. "Look at him," he says and though she turns her eyes towards her husband, Ken does not.
"That is who he is. He cannot change."
He takes both of her hands in his and gently pulls her towards him, but she doesn't turn back to face him. Sheila sees Jay lying face up on the floor, soup on his shirt and splattered on his forehead and cheeks, his hair in sticky, matted patches from the ramen, his face calm with the same peaceful look she saw after the first time they made love and she woke in the middle of the night and watched him, curiously aware that she was torn between a breathless, aching desire for him and a need to care for him, to comfort and protect him. Without a word to the man who has taken her hands into his, she pulls away, stands and steps over to Jay and bends down. "This is who you are," she says quietly and wipes soup from his face with a napkin, but carefully, tenderly, so as to let him sleep; his dreams of running down his prey undisturbed.

© Glen Kenner 2001 (His first piece for Hacks - let him know if you like it)
glenkenner@yahoo.com

From Glen: ... Hackwriters has been built into a great site with a lot of great content. As an American living and working in Japan (as an English teacher), I appreciate quality ezines like Hackwriters.

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