Chapter 11: Last Two
…
We marshal ourselves into the stadium to see how Hanamichi and Kaede are holding on. Ryota's still in his football training, leaving me and Mitsui again in this baby-sitting duty.
"Mitsui, tell those two that if they ever get sick of trying to get along with each other, let us know because I'm still on the look-out if something like that can really happen."
He chuckles at this. "You're just making it difficult for yourself if you're just gonna sit on it; let things flow."
In truth, it's not really that big a deal to me; not like I'd love to sing it out to them to be friendly and all. In its most ordinary sense, I just think it'd be nicer if they were on better terms.
We watch our two freshmen sweat themselves shitless as each works himself up to his limits. At length, the players dole out the gym until Kaede and Hanamichi are the only ones left communing with the balls.
"I suppose Kaede is heading for a double overtime." I tell Mitsui as Hanamichi retires to the locker room.
"As always."
"Should you wait for him? I can go with Hanamichi."
"Yeah, I'll stay behind. Ryota will probably drop by after his football drills."
I nod and I'm once again alone in the knowledge that Mitsui's spoiling his beloved protégé on his way to fucking brat land. He's quite lucky I know when to set my rants aside.
After brief farewells, I find my indistinct treads matching Hanamichi's over the pavement.
"You mentioned Youhei Mito's your friend."
Oddly enough, he consumes a criminal amount of time to reply. I'm thinking he's about to launch an array of teasing for my peculiar interests. Instead,
"You can say that. But he's been pretty distant lately. Well, I'm not especially one to talk, being an athlete and managing to keep time with you guy. Have you met him?"
"I saw him over a week ago in Karakura district's embankment. He was in a brawl, after which he took off unscathed. Nothing much."
"He's always in a goddamn fight. It's a very easy game for him, being the crack-head bastard that he is."
"That's his idea of fun, I would guess."
Hanamichi heaves a sigh, only for his over exertion to lead me to think I may have said something uncalled for.
"I don't wanna think of him that way. But I guess I—me and the Guntai boys—have made more excuses for him more than he deserves."
"And you're clinging to him because you think it's right, because he's your friend?" I solicit.
Hanamichi sinks on to this foliage case nearby, his conduct indicating the next thing he's gonna say will require singular attention. With his gaze fastened on the concrete pavement, he sighs again. At long last, he opens his mouth reluctantly, as if compelled to utter something he so shudders to think of,
"Youhei has changed. He's still perfectly in charge of his wits but I dunno about his emotions. Megane, are you asking me all these because you want him to run around with us?"
I discharge my gaze from his. It strikes me that I really don't know the answer to that, and I am being completely honest. And here is my doubt again, exacting its toll on me, me, who hasn't the slightest hint of what he truly wants in life.
"I don't know. Hell, I don't even know him, not in the shabbiest degree, even. But I guess I do want to know him." Maybe I should congratulate myself for managing to determine what I want for the moment.
He looks at me with a steadfastness I'm hardly comfortable with. He then reinstates himself to calmness, "I'll tell you. I'll tell you all you need to know for you to grasp the scale of which you need to overlook before you credit him with merits he barely deserves. So, he's this bona fide punk, a self-proclaimed one, and he can't be too sure of anything else in the world other than that. To some extents, he's probably just like the whole bunch of us; we fix troubles if they get on our tits even if it means incinerating an entire bastard breeding ground or ambushing some defenseless fucktard and leaving him for the ambulance to arrange. To a certain extent only. Beyond that, trouble really does look for him. And when he gets acquainted with something that has a loose end, he's liable to finish the dirty job at whatever expense. As it's cracked up to be, we, the Guntai boys, don't involve ourselves much in his enterprises which, I think, he finds convenient. He's come to that because, we suspect, it has to do with his older brother." He pauses, unceremoniously so. For all I know, the wind may have abducted the contents of his throat.
"Tell me." I entreat because my curiosity has had me with no options left but to be a prying son of a gun.
He tilts his head backwards, lets his eyes wander off the streak of the dark violet above us and speaks, "Well, his brother is in some rehab; got addicted to some substance and is now of hardly any resemblance to the genius he used to be. If you carried it to its broadest possible context, you'd make out that his brother has been an imbecile for succumbing to dirt. But Youhei never really saw it that way, never will, perhaps. That's the precursor to his ride downhill. After determining his bro was an innocent victim of these drug-dealing hooligans, he went about conducting his solo flights, orchestrating fraudulent deals with these fugitives and giving them a taste of the hell they deserved—using his goddamn fists. I mean, that can be understandable if you open your mind wide enough, but, you see, our minds can only be too fucking wide. So, yeah, some self-respecting someone may see he has a fucking point. At length, however, we kinda arrived with the idea that he was no longer doing it for revenge. It's like hatred has hardened inside him as he continued to contrive with evil. Our suspicions elevated to a fact when…" he falters. Something seems to have pierced his concentration; either that or his narration has reached a part which his articulation cannot accommodate.
"What the hell happened?" I pursue. I do understand he's said enough to satiate any veteran snoop's curiosity but, if his stall means there's something more, there's just no way I'll stop wanting to hear the rest of the revelation; not even if it comes in so many words.
"He got himself a girlfriend." He starts. I immediately wonder what assistance this info can serve the story. All the same, I allow him to continue, "She's this rich girl, kinda pretty, has a decent upbringing; in a word, she's the major catch. You'd wonder what a chick like that would gain from a punk who has a hazy background, an unstable present and predictably no future. Well, Youhei is kinda good-looking and, apart from that, he really knows how to talk, like he even got as far as negotiating with the big boys and screwing them shitless afterwards; know where I'm getting at? So he got around to get on with her and we were really happy for him in the hope that he'd be appeased and would stop it with his detestable propensities of putting himself in constant danger. Why the hell am I even telling you these? Okay—and then one day, he got really pissed because me and the guys, we were like teasing him outta his wits for his romantic side, like we were raising bloody racket all over Kanagawa about him having a girl and all and then—and then—, fed up as he was, he told us the reason why he chose the girl for her fucking girlfriend…he's after her father. Like, he's using her to get to her old man. Her pops is some rich business tycoon who's living a double life. I don't know a shit how Youhei got to know that much; like perhaps he really underwent some thorough investigation; the effort, man, I dunno. He told us the sonuvabitch was running some secret operations of an illegal substance circulation. So we realized he was fucking obsessed with his judgment-passing delusions. What we realized, he confirmed. Only that this isn't a delusion for him; he's absolutely serious about this goddamn self-appointed mission to fuck up the greatest fuckers of this place. He's fucking seventeen or sixteen years old, man! We've tried talking him into forgetting the whole plot because other than screwing an entire family, he's just about to chuck the best chick he'll ever be likely to fucking snatch. And we might as well talk back to the fucking sun. You know what he told us? He said, 'I don't effing care. I'll drag this bastard to hell even if I have to fucking go down with him.'"
My composure smothers under the weight of the information. Should I be awed, ashamed of myself or terrified? If all this is true, then maybe I'm too small for the world, too young for my age and too vulnerable for the lives around me. I swallow hard as I feel Hanamichi move briskly beside me. He stands up hastily as if someone's gonna stop him if he does. I copy his movements because my wits are currently incapable of originality. Now we're walking side by side again. I recall what Vault has traveled to all this time. There's nothing much that remains the same; Mitsui and I have grown out of pointless street brawls, we've finished a few justice-seeking exploits, Rukawa has learned how to practice attachment, to Mitsui particularly, Hanamichi has woken up to the fact that there's more to life than chicks and being a punk, Ryota has become so delineated from your conventional jock…Perhaps I too have changed after all. Well, all these—they're not much to get yapping about…
"Hanamichi, your friend needs help."
"Yeah. It's not like we haven't been trying to salvage him from the fucking mess that he is."
"No. Not that. He can't take on that bastard single-handedly."
Hanamichi pulls to a halt and stares at me as though some horror that's too much for him is bearing down on us, to sweep us away.
It's possible I've spent too much time with Mitsui and his goddamn mouth.
…
Hesitation is my department and that's something I've learned to accept with time's help. For now, I'm being rewarded with a piece of mind; yeah, I think I'll set my engines running now. It's about time.
So here is Mitsui, Ryota and Rukawa. They've just arrived from somewhere, a place perhaps where they could set their mischief loose. Rukawa's lower lip is bleeding mildly, Miyagi's nursing his bloddy fists and Mitsui hasn't got a hair out of line on his body. Go figure.
"What's up?" I ask. Sakuragi abandons the magazine he's reading upon the three's glorious entrance.
"You know Ryu?" Mitsui starts. From what I have hitherto conjectured, he's rapt up with joy from some crack-headed business. "The one who stole Tetsuo's Harley Davidson? We've just dropped him a personal reminder that if doesn't stop fucking around the entire neighborhood, the next place he'll find himself into is the fucking morgue."
Miyagi roars with laughter. Sakuragi, who's been sitting undisturbed with me all the while, now starts to howl like a hyena.
"You okay, Kaede?" I ask.
"He's okay. He has some slick moves; long limbs equal to far-reaching fists." Mitsui tells me of his protégé.
What we're slowly plunging into now is perhaps ethnical purging. Or maybe it's just me, same old me who's prone to wishful thinking. Chances are, we're just doing this for fun, if not to let time pass. But if things had been different, I'd probably be miserable beyond reasonable. So I laugh along to try to make the truth softer, the truth being we can't laugh all the time, at least not forever…
Here on the same night, I root myself beside Mitsui. I'm really glad he's put down his accursed videogame for a change. I mean, he may be having something coming down on him like some eye condition for sitting too long on the goddamn TV screen. Hence I stay quiet for as long as I can pretend, downplaying with effort my desire to tell him something. But I speak before silence dominates us,
"Found an interesting kid." That's as much as I can give by way of describing the enigma that is Youhei Mito.
Mitsui's casual reception of the news becomes apparent at once.
"Lemme guess, a freshman?"
"You guessed right." I answer, supposing Hanamichi has done the honor of saving me some spit.
"From Kainan High who goes by the name Kiyota Nobunaga." He says in a mockery of earnest confidence.
He's wrong anyway. But, more importantly, what on god's green earth is he talking about?
"What the hell are you talking about?"
He stares at me in a mild comprehension. Well, yeah, if you're Hisashi Mitsui, accepting your mistakes can be pretty hard since you believe something as human as that is not possible.
"I'm wrong? You're not talking about the Kainan kid?"
"I don't know any friggin' Kainan kid except those dudes in Gungrave."
"Oh."
"You trying to diversify our line-up?"
"No. At least not two minutes ago. Since now that you've mentioned it, the idea has developed some attraction."
Here he goes again, demonstrating his mindless daring tendencies.
"Who's this Kainan kid?"
"He's this dude whom Ryota knows—well, only by name—from the football field; a freshman Linebacker from the Kainan Football varsity team."
"And? What does Ryota see in him?"
"It's the other way around; What does he see in Ryota?"
"A little help here, please." I say as my patience ebbs away by high degrees.
"He says he wants to be a part of Vault for a certain quarterback he looks up to, whose name is Ryota Miyagi."
Now that's some news. Fame really does make things happen.
TBC
Note: I don't really know where this shit is going. Suggestions would be nice.
