Hear the Wind Sing Read Online Free PDF Page A

no Rat.
    After ordering a beer and a corned beef sandwich, I pulled out a book and decided to take my time waiting for the Rat.
    Just ten minutes later, a thirty year-old woman with breasts like grapefruits and a flashy dress entered the bar and sat a seat away from me, scanning the surroundings just like I’d done and ordering a gimlet. After taking just one sip of her drink, she got up and made a painfully long phone call, then came back and grabbed her purse before going to the bathroom. In forty minutes, she ended up doing this three times. Sip of gimlet, long phone call, purse, toilet.
    J came over to me, looking bored, and asked if my ass wasn’t getting tired. He was Chinese, but his Japanese was better than mine.
    Returning from her third trip to the toilet, she looked around for someone and then slid into the seat next to me, talking to me in a low whisper.
    “Hey, you wouldn’t be able to lend me some change would you?”
    I nodded and dug the change out of my pocket, then set it all on the counter. There were thirteen ten-yen coins in all.
    “Thanks a lot. If I ask the bartender to make change for me again he’ll be sore at me.”
    “No problem. Thanks to you my pockets are lighter.”
    She smiled and nodded, nimbly scraping up the change and disappearing in the direction of the pay phone.
    Getting tired of reading my book, I had J bring the portable television over to my place at the bar and began watching a baseball game while drinking my beer. It was a big game. In just the top of the forth, the pitcher gave up two homeruns and six hits, an outfielder collapsed from anemia, and while they switched pitchers there were six commercials. Commercials for beer and life insurance and vitamins and airline companies and potato chips and sanitary napkins.
    After seeming to have struck out with the girls, with his beer glass in hand, one of the French sailors came up behind me and asked me, in French, what I was watching.
    “Baseball,” I answered in English.
    “Base-ball?”
    I gave him a simple overview of the rules. This guy throws the ball, this other guy hits it with a stick, running one lap around is one point. The sailor stared fixedly at the screen for five entire minutes, but when the commercials started he asked me why the jukebox didn’t have any Johnny Hallyday.
    “’Cause he’s not popular,” I said.
    “What French singers are popular here?”
    “Adamo.”
    “He’s Belgian.”
    “Michel Polnareff.”
    “Merde!”
    Saying this, the French sailor went back to his table.
    At the top of the fifth, the woman finally came back.
    “Thanks again. Let me buy you a drink.”
    “Don’t worry about it.”
    “I feel like I have to return favors—it’s a character trait of mine, for better or worse.”
    I tried to smile, but it came out all wrong, so I just nodded and said nothing. She called J over with her finger and said a beer for this guy, a gimlet for me. J
    nodded exactly three times and disappeared from the other side of the bar.
    “The person I was waiting for never came. You?”
    “Same story.”
    “Waiting for a girl?”
    “A guy.”
    “Same as me. We’ve got something in common, then.”
    There was nothing I could do but nod.
    “Hey, how old do you think I am?”
    “Twenty-eight.”
    “Liar!”
    “Twenty-six.”
    She laughed.
    “But I don’t mind. Do I look single? Do I look like a girl with a husband?”
    “Do I get a prize if I guess right?”
    “We might be able to work something out.”
    “You’re married.”
    “Yeah…you’re half-right. I got divorced last month. Have you ever talked to divorced woman like this?”
    “Never. Though I did once meet a cow with neuralgia.”
    “Where?”
    “In college, in a laboratory. We could only fit five people in there at one time.”
    She laughed like she was having a good time.
    “You’re a college student?”
    “Yeah.”
    “I was a college student too, once, back in the day. Maybe around ’60. Those were the good old