Montana Voice

The people I worked with had brought me to the party, but I was weary from listening to techno talk and money stories. When I saw Yuko, I just wanted to stand next to her, next to someone I didn’t know. I went over to the window. She turned and looked at me for a moment and then returned her gaze to the darkness outside. It was February, late winter, and outside it was snowing. There was no wind and it seemed silent out there. I tried to watch the snow through the darkness, instead, though, all I could see – all I was able to pay attention to – was Yuko’s reflection. Her eyes were large and dark in the paleness of her face, and she too seemed to be looking at my reflection, looking at me. So I spoke to her. “You have paint on your hands,” I said, “what have you been making?” She didn’t answer. She didn’t move. My eyes relaxed, focusing past the window now and into the falling snow further out. I was about to turn and leave the window and go back to the kitchen or another crowded room, but then she looked directly at me, her face less than two feet from mine, and said, rapidly and with an awkward accent, “My boy friend, he love me. I come to Montana for him. For him I paint. For him I artist. For him I be famous.”

So I ask her, “Is your boyfriend here?”

She shakes her head, a silent ‘No,’ and then she turns back to the window and says quietly, “No, no. He go. He go.”

“Who do you know here?” I asked.

She answered, “I come here to find my boyfriend, but he go now. He love me, but he forget me.”

I didn’t say anything, and she continued, “I paint all week for him. I finish this morning.” She nodded her face towards her hands, “and I bring painting to house this afternoon, but he no take it.”

“Your painting,” I ask, “what was it of?”

She looked at me quietly, and then asked, “You understand art?”

I nodded, yes.

“How you know art?” She asked. “You study it?”

“No,” I said, “but I think I understand why we try to show ourselves. But why wouldn’t your boyfriend take your painting?”

“You ask what I paint. I made myself.” and she put a hand up, pulling her hair above her head, “I paint my hair in colors of how I feel for him. I paint rainbow. I paint sad thing like storm. And he not take it. He say he will not look at it. He close door on me. He have other girl friend now. He break my heart.” She was looking out the window again, and continued speaking, but without looking at me, “I come here because this is house of person he work for. I knew party. I think maybe he come here. But he does not come.” And then she looked at me again, and said to me, “You understand art? So you understand why I trash painting?”

“Trash it?”

“Yes. Take knife, cut face. Throw painting in can by street.”

It had been too long since I had heard talk like this. I had been in the world of The Lie for the past few years, a place where no one is honest, and where no one shows weakness. In just these few sentences exchanged with Yuko, I knew that I didn’t want to be at the party anymore, didn’t want to talk with anyone else except her. And what I suddenly wanted was to try to save her “trashed” painting.

“Hey,” I said, “I don’t know you. You don’t know me. But will you let me keep that painting for you? Can we find it?”

She didn’t answer right away, and when she did she didn’t say ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ instead she said, “You have car? He not come here. I go home.”

And without saying anything else we left. She lived in an apartment near the University, and when I parked, she turned to me and said, “Thank you for drive home,” and then she added, “My name is Yuko. Painting in can behind building,” she pointed, “I no see it again.”

She opened the car door and was about to close it, when I said, “Wait. Can I talk with you sometime?”

“No,” she answered, “He no love me anymore, but I have boyfriend.”

“OK,” I said, “but if you do want to talk sometime, call me.” I had taken scrap of paper and written down my name and phone number and now was handing it towards her. She took the paper, and without looking at it, shoved it in her coat pocket, closed the car door, and walked into the building.

I waited a few minutes, and then I got out of the car and went to the back of the building. In the alley there was a dumpster with a metal cover. There was an inch of snow on the cover, which I brushed off, and then I looked inside. In the light from the street lamps it was easy to see, and there, still on the top of the garbage, was an abstract portrait of Yuko. It was about three feet square, painted in blues and reds. Her hair was a sprawling rainbow, and her skin was white with highlights of silver. There were two diagonal cuts through the canvas. One went through an eye, and the other across her cheek and through her mouth. I pulled the painting from the dumpster and took it to my car, where I managed to get it into the back seat. It was an oil painting, and some of the paint was still wet. As I drove back to my house, I shook my head and laughed. There was now blue oil paint on my hands.

So I am awake two months later at seven in the morning listening to her message. I make coffee. I check email and read some news on the computer. I listen to the message again. She doesn’t know English well, but she has given me enough to understand what is happening. In the phone book I find the number for the jail, and I call. Yes, they have a Japanese girl named Yuko. They tell me that her bail is set at fifteen thousand dollars, she is being held for committing four felonies – breaking and entry and three assaults – and that her scheduled court date is two months away. They won’t tell me details of the assaults. When I ask for specifics about what bail means – having never bailed anyone out of jail before – they tell me to call a lawyer or a bondsman. In the background there is yelling. The person on the other end of the phone abruptly hangs up. I drink my coffee for a while, and then page through the phone book.

I call up a bondsman, the first one listed in the yellow pages. I tell him what I know and he explains that I can go to the jail myself and hand over $15,000 in cash which I might get back if she shows up for her hearing. Or I can give him $1,500 that I will not get back. I ask him why I might lose the $15,000 even if she makes her court hearing, and he explains the judges use the posted bail as the fine – in addition to prison time – for people found guilty. “What did she do?” the bondsman asks. I tell him I have no idea, and he says, “A fella’ could hire a lawyer. Find out.” I thank him for the info and tell him I have to think over the options, and we end the call.

I go into work. I spend a few hours on the phone. My business partner, O’neill, comes into my office and complains about the company that has recently bought us. He tells me that I need to get back there as soon as possible. In the last two weeks I have already been to Seattle four times. But I say, “OK”, and I go home to take a shower and get some clothes. I catch the afternoon flight, get into the rental car, spend the night in the motel, and at six the next morning – in the dark – go to SLAM and talk most of the day. There is no discussion of ideas or technology, instead the talking revolves around how we will describe “person-hours” spent on “designated-projects.” Eight hours of lies, and then I catch the evening flight back to Montana, getting into my house near midnight.

All the concrete, the fractured motel sleep of the night before, the day in the glass-palace rooms with white-boards and assistants, the diagrams and convincing, the talk about money, then the furious freeway traffic in the winter dusk – too many trucks – nothing soft. Ugly machines. Too fast. The airport, the shuttles, into and out of the crowds. Then the flight. Back. Unlocking my door, seeing the blinking lights of the phone messages. It always feels like weeks. I turn around and walk outside. In the dark, close by, are mountains. I breathe the cold air deep. To be stirring a dying fire someplace up high, counting stars… I go back into my house. There is no welcome home, which means it is no home.

The next morning. It is now three days since Yuko left her message. I go to work and spend hours with O’neill explaining what went on in Seattle, and then I spend more hours on the phone. Now it is four in the afternoon and already getting dark. A nothing day. A day in The Lie. All of a sudden I want to know what she has done. I pick up the phone and call the bondsman. He remembers me. “We can do it right now,” he says, “Meet me at the jail with fifteen hundred in cash,” and he gives me driving directions. I leave my office and go across the street to the bank and get the money, and then drive down Broadway to the jail. The bondsman is already there. He is dressed like a working cowboy, the boots, the long black coat, and the hat. When he shakes my hand I see a revolver under the coat. He asks me for the money. I give it to him, and he says, “Thanks, I like hundreds.” Then we go into a lobby where, behind glass and through a speaker, a cop asks, “Who is it today?” The bondsman explains, and then we sit and wait. He tells me again that I don’t get my $1,500 back, and also gets me to sign some paper that says if she doesn’t show up for the court hearing I will have to pay the bondsman more than thirteen thousand dollars.

“You trust this gal of yours?”

“I really don’t even know her,” I tell him.

He just stares at me. He seemed impressed when I handed him the $1,500. But now he warns me, actually threatens me, “You just make sure she shows up for the hearing. I don’t want to be coming after you.” He is silent for a while, and then says, “usually I check a bit more to make sure a fella is good for all the cash, but what the hey, right?” Then he laughs and slaps his knee. Like he does this sort of thing all the time. Like he hopes he will have to chase somebody for money.

There is buzzing and a steel door opens and a jailer comes out holding Yuko’s elbow. She is wearing jeans and the coat she had on that night we met. On her feet she is wearing paper slippers. Her pants and her coat are stained with dark and dried blood. She is looking at the floor, her head bowed, her face hidden by her hair. Both her hands have bandages on them. The right hand has a gauze bandage wrapped about her knuckles, and the left has a large bandage near the wrist. The bondsman has Yuko sign some paper too. Yuko does not say anything and does not look up at any of us. As we are going out, the jailer says to me, “She can keep those slippers. She wasn’t wearing shoes the night she came in.”

Outside, the bondsman shakes my hand again, this time letting his coat swing open so I get a good look at the holster around his waist and the long-barreled pistol. “She’s all yours now,” he says, “I’d keep an eye on her. She looks squirrely to me.”

It’s dusk outside. The fields surrounding the jail are spotted with scraps of newspaper and trash. Yuko and I are standing next to each other, I am looking at her, but she is still looking at the ground. “This is an ugly place,” I say, “I’ll drive you home.”

Neither of us talk as I make the fifteen-minute drive from the jail to the University district. When I get to her apartment I park and turn off the engine. She is still looking down, and I have not been able to see her face at all. I say, “You’re home now.” But she doesn’t answer, and she doesn’t look up. Then she says, quietly, “I wait three days for you. You no get my message? Why?”

I don’t say something like, hey, I have no idea who you are, and no idea of what you have done, so why should I risk anything to get you out of jail? Instead I say, “It was a lot of money.”

“How much?” She asks. And I tell her, and I also say – and I am not sure why – that I don’t care about the fifteen hundred that I have given to the bondsman, but I do care that she makes it to the court hearing in two months. She nods, says, “I got it.” Then she opens the car door, stands there for a moment, and says to me, “Come inside.”

I get out and follow her in to her ground floor apartment. She takes a small wallet from her pocket and gets her key out, opens the door, turns on the light, and says, “Please, come.” The apartment is one room. There is a kitchen nook in one corner, a bed in the other. The center of the room has a small table with one wooden chair. Next to the table is a painter’s easel. Leaning against the walls are dozens of paintings, most of the canvases the same size as the one I took from the dumpster. The place stinks, the smell of rotting food from the dishes in the sink, mixed with fumes from the paintings. She goes to the window and opens it, then says to me, “Please,” and gestures to the chair. I sit down and she takes out her wallet, asks me how to spell my name, and writes me a check for the money I have just given to the bondsman, and hands it to me. I take the check but then ask her, “Didn’t they tell you that you could have bailed yourself out? Didn’t they explain that if you had money – if this check is good – that you could have called a bondsman yourself?”

She is looking at me. There are dark circles under her eyes. Her lower lip is swollen and cut. Her straight hair is tangled, and wisps of it are curling into one side of her mouth. I look at her. I just look at her. She is crying. Slow tears in the corners of both her eyes, slow tears down her face. She says to me, “If no one want me out, then I do not want come out.”

“But you don’t know me,” I said, “We don’t know each other at all.”

She nods, and says, “You take my painting. In my culture we know without much word.”

I still had no idea of what she had done, or of who she was. But I said to her, “Listen, you need to wash up, change and get some sleep. Is there a shower here?” She nods ‘yes’, and points to a door that I hadn’t noticed. I ask, “Do you want me to leave?” She shakes her head fast, no. Stay, she tells me. She says, “Please, no leave me alone.”

She gets some clothing and goes into her bathroom. I can’t stand the stink anymore so I drain the water from the sink, which gets rid of most of the smell right away. She comes out of the shower about the same time I am finishing with the dishes, and starts to tell me that I shouldn’t have cleaned, but I shrug. She sits down on her bed and I go back and sit on the chair. “What did you do?” I ask, “What happened?”

“I so sad,” she says, and then she lays down, pulling her blankets over herself. “I tell you later.”

I get up to go, but she sits up and says, “No, no, please stay.” I go back to the chair and sit down, and she smiles at me, the first time I have seen her smile, and pulls the blankets up to her face. She has changed the bandages on her hands, replacing the large gauze wraps with band-aids. She doesn’t look like a felon; she just looks like a skinny girl from Japan, living alone with her paintings. I don’t mind just staying there, so I say, “Ok,” and she closes her eyes, sighs several times, shudders, and then seems to be sleeping.

There is a lamp in the apartment’s far corner, near the window, and I turn that on and turn off the overhead light. I pace about the room, looking at the paintings, quietly pulling them from where they lean against each other, one at a time putting them under the lamplight. They aren’t a student’s work. There’s a style, a consistency between all the paintings, the same mood. Faces with eyes closed, figures huddled against walls on the outside of row houses – house after house after house – with tall buildings behind and elevated railroad overhead. It’s Tokyo. The railroad edge of Tokyo, where school children commute four hours a day between their cramped homes and distant schools while their parents work. Same sort of stuff as the rusting oil barrel fringe of Montana towns, but in Tokyo it is a spotless and crowded loneliness.

I spend two hours with the paintings, and forget about Yuko who is sleeping a few feet away. It’s about 8pm now, and I decide to leave, but when I am opening the door Yuko says, “Don’t go.” I close the door and go and sit down on the bed.

“Did you sleep?” I ask.

“Yes. But I wake and watch you. You like my art?”

“Very much,” I say. She puts her hand on my shoulder.

“Sleep next to me,” she says, and then says again, “I so sad.”

Maybe because I have been desperate too… I lay down next to her, five hours earlier than I usually try to sleep, and we just hold each other, two strangers, our eyes close, and then I am asleep like I am drugged and drunk. Roaring trains turning to soft wind, her breathing on my neck, my mouth against the top of her head, dreamless and still.

I woke up in the dark. 5:00am from the clock on the table. Yuko was sitting up next to me, wrapped in the blankets. “I’m cold,” I said to her, and pulled her back down to me, pulled her against me. She laughed and said, “Hungry. I eat now,” and she got out of bed. She went to her small fridge, opened it, and said, “No food. What we do?”

I said. “We can go downtown.”

“OK,” she said, “We do that. But we not be friends. We sleep together. We eat together. But you only be person who gets me from jail.”

We dressed and went out to the car. She had brought with her a sketchbook and was wearing sunglasses, even though it was not yet daylight.

I was in no hurry to try to find out why she was in jail. Instead I was content to be with her, her dark glasses, her sketch book and her hands.

We pulled into the parking lot of a 24-hour restaurant and casino, the only place that was open so early. “Eat here?,” she asked, pointing to the blinking sign, “Place say ‘Bar.’” I explained that we could get food here, and she giggled and said, “Maybe get drunk in morning. Maybe I be nasty girl after I be in jail. Maybe I change mind about you.”

We went inside and sat in a booth, she on one side, I on the other. We ordered breakfast, and while we were waiting for the food, Yuko held her sketchpad in her lap and started drawing.

I asked her what she was drawing, and she said, “My story. I show you when done. You please no talk now.”

When the food arrived, Yuko stopped sketching, and we both ate in silence. When we were done eating, she looked at me and said, “You listen to me. You not talk when I say not talk. You good.”

Then I asked her what she had done, why she was in jail.

For a moment she seemed like she was going to become upset, but then she said, “I there because boyfriend and because he had new girl. And because police. I attack all. I bite him. I hit police.” She started drawing again, not looking at me, and continued, “It raining. I run out of apartment. I forget shoes. I go to corner store. I call. He hang up phone. I call and call. I run to his house. I run in rain.”

“Does he live close to you,” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, “His house close. It was house of ours. My apartment only for paint. In house there was my room. There was my bed. Window by my bed. I stood by window. I in back yard that was my backyard. I could see in window. My candle burning. My bed. My boyfriend. She not right in my bed. She wrong to be on my boyfriend.”

Yuko stopped talking, and concentrated on the drawing, her arm moving fast and smooth. I said, “You do not need to tell me anything. I don’t need to hear what you don’t want to say.” But she looked up at me, and said, “Here, you can just see,” and then she turned the sketch towards me.

It was a pencil and ink sketch, all dark except for accents in red and blue ink, the lines of three blurred figures in motion. A naked woman being pulled by the hair across the floor by another, barefoot woman, whom I recognized as Yuko by the red in her hair. And there is a naked man waving his arms next to the two, his face outlined in blue. Behind them is a large, sliding glass door with the window shattered. Streaks of gray look like rain. Red marks on Yuko’s hands are blood. There is a lit candle next to the bed. There is a bottle of wine next to the candle. She lets me look at the drawing for a few seconds, then yanks the sketch pad back, rips the drawing out, crumples it, and starts on another.

“He drunk,” she says, “He call police when I break window.”

“When the police came, what happened?”

“Boyfriend put hand on my face. I bite his finger. Police put hand on my shoulder. I hit police. Here,” she touches her nose, “Police put cuffs on me. Girl say I try kill her. She liar. Boyfriend drunk. He drink wine. Girl on him. That wrong. He call police on me. That wrong. It my window. I pay for big window. It my big bed. I pay for big bed. I pull girl to make her leave. Pull out of bed. But she no understand Japanese way. She think I try to kill her. It my blood on her hair. It my hand break window. It not her boyfriend. It not her blood. It my blood.”

She has told me all this between fast breaths, nearly in a whisper, but still I am left with a feeling that she has been yelling at me. Her English moves back and forth in tense and correctness, but I understand what she has said. I am suddenly afraid of her. Then she is quiet again, and draws in her sketchbook. The waiter comes to our table and asks if we need anything else. Outside it is still dark, but I ask him to bring me a glass of wine. It is a casino, he doesn’t care what time it is, and he turns to Yuko and asks if she would like some too. She looks up and asks the waiter, “You have Raspberry coolers?” The waiter says yes, they do have wine coolers. Yuko says again, “Raspberry,” a word that is difficult for her to pronounce, and she smiles and looks like a high-school girl, absolutely innocent. The waiter asks her what she is drawing, and she says, “Here, you see,” and turns the sketchbook towards him. I am watching his face, wanting to see the reaction to whatever chaos Yuko might be showing him, but he just says, “Nice,” and then goes back to the kitchen.

I ask, “What are you drawing now?” and she lets me see. It is a sketch of a huge, half-full wine glass in a clearing in a forest. The moon in the night sky is reflected on the surface of the wine. Sitting on the base of the glass is a naked woman, her knees up under her chin, her arms wrapped about her legs, long hair hanging in front of her face. I am amazed by this drawing, amazed that she has drawn it in less than ten minutes using nothing except a pencil and a sheet of paper. But it is not her technical ability that touches me, instead it is the emotion of the drawing which makes me actually shiver, making me want to hug my own legs, the way the ghost-like woman in the sketch is doing. Emotion that comes from a hand, to paper, to my eyes, in a way that no one yet has figured out how to do over wires or through computers.

She rips the drawing from the sketch book, and I think she is going to crumple this one too, but instead she hands it to me and says, “This for you.” I take the drawing from her as the waiter brings us our drinks. She sips from her cup, giggles, and says, “I like sweet purple drink. I like bars where they have pink drinks and cream that floats. I like straws and little hats. Have you been to Karaoke bar? In Tokyo, I sing American song.”

I hear all this, but I just look at the drawing she has given me. I am drinking rain that has fallen from Australian clouds and turned into fruit half a world away. I am drinking dark wine that has aged on a ship as it crossed oceans. And I am sitting with a girl who has punched a Montana cop in the nose and who is now sipping her sweet drink that is spiked with industrial ethanol fermented and distilled from corn, but who is also able to show her feelings simply by sketching onto paper. A girl who is able to make me frightened one moment, and foolish the next.

She has finished her wine cooler, and says, “I want another.” She waves for the waiter, and he brings us more to drink.

None of this makes sense. I am driving Yuko home at eight in the morning. She is leaning against my shoulder. She is saying, “I drunk, but I no call police.” She sighs, and says, “I no love you. But you stay with me today? Maybe you stay with me all time now? Maybe I be famous now for you? What you say?”

I think I will take some time off from work and not bother letting anyone know where I am. I will watch this girl paint. I will hire a lawyer for her. I will drink wine from a bottle, and let my own life come back. I say to Yuko, “Teach me your culture of few words,” and she murmurs and pulls tighter against me as I drive carefully the rest of the way back to her place. I am happy, even though I know that the coming sadness will last forever.