Hokkaido Highway Blues

coming up to a rural stop sign and the few survival skills I possessed were now kicking in like recessive genes. Run away, they whispered. Run away. I slid my hand onto the door handle and prepared to leap from the car (I was frantically going through the fundamentals of the shoulder roll, as gleaned from high-school gym class, and berating myself for not having paid more attention). I made my move.
    The door was locked.
    “Cow sex,” said Tomio, his eyes shining with glee.
    Well, you’ll be happy to hear that the story doesn’t end with me being forced to scamper about in the clover wearing a cow bell and going “moo” while the theme song from Deliverance plays in the background. I had just managed to discreetly unlock the door and had girded myself to leap from a moving vehicle, when—like a tumbler turning in a lock—it suddenly clicked. I looked over at him.
    “Are you a doctor?” I asked. ‘An animal doctor?”
    “Oh, no.” He brushed this aside with a show of modesty.
    “But you help animals have babies.”
    “Yes, yes! Cows. Sex. Babies.”
    He was an artificial inseminator. “My cows,” he said, pointing to one herd and then another. I almost wept for joy. “Do you have any children of your own?” I asked.
    “Oh, yes. I have three.”
    “And you, ah, had them— naturally ?”
    He laughed uproariously over this. “Of course, of course.”
    With the tension gone and my anus slowly unclenching, I became giddily, hysterically happy. Tomio and I got along famously, laughing at everything and slapping each other on the shoulder (in a strictly he-man way you understand). By the time we reached the golf course, he had invited me along.
    As I had never played the game before, it was decided we would stick to the driving range. He pulled into the parking lot and retrieved his clubs from the trunk.
    “Nice place,” I said.
    “It’s the northernmost golf course in Japan,” he said. But let’s face it, we were only about ten or twelve kilometers from Cape Sōya, so everything up here was the northernmost something or other.
    “Form is very important,” said Tomio as he teed up a ball. “Shift your left leg forward, rotate your hips, keep your chin up, your chest out, and your shoulders straight. Tilt your right knee at a forty-two-degree angle, while raising your left elbow two inches and shifting your lower pelvis over your center of gravity. Decrease the upward velocity, slowly raise your right pinky, put your left leg in, put your left leg out, and do the hokey-pokey as you turn yourself about. And that,” he said, “is what it’s all about.”
    What a stupid sport. I took a couple of swipes at the ball, but all I succeeded in doing w r as sending up a spray of dirt. Rugged Canadian that I am, my technique was more slap-shot than golf swing. I was digging up great clods of earth at this point, and every time I slammed down with the club, Tomio winced. His smile trembled in the way I imagine a patriot’s does when faced with a firing squad. Stiff upper lip and all that.
    I was sweating so hard I had to take off my jacket. I spit into my hands (a gesture Tomio had apparently never seen before) and went at it with renewed vigor. Having perfected a take-no-prisoners sort of slap-shot, I began working on my wrist shot, my hip shot, and my finely tuned, scythelike, Genghis Khan shot. I was lobbing balls in all directions, right, left, and into the next lane. The other golfers were standing back, well back, and watching with that same queasy fascination one usually gives an impending car crash.
    After about half an hour of this, Tomio congratulated me on my prowess and took back his club. It. was scuffed up quite a bit. On the back, in a metal sticker was the price tag. (High-status items in Japan often have price tags that are semipermanent and not meant to be removed.) It read: 70,000 yen. No wonder he was wincing. “Jeez,” I said. “A hockey stick would only put you back ten, twenty bucks tops.”
    He smiled at me, but his eyes were full of tears.
    “Shall we play a round?” I asked. “I think I’m starting to get the hang of it.”
    “That, ah, won’t be necessary,” he said.
     

18
     
    TOMIO DROVE ME far out of his way, beyond the golf course, to where the road met the sea at a T-intersection. From here it was a short, four-kilometer hop to Cape Sōya. I could see the cape, a low slow curve of land in the distance. “I came all the way from Cape Sata,” I said. “Just