ANTHONY SWOFFORD

At seventeen, Virginia Sachiko Kindwall wore pearls around her neck and diamonds in her ears, combat boots, and mostly black clothing. She was a hafu, a dark-haired Faye Dunaway from a punk rock remake of Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie and Clyde was her favorite movie, and it often played at the Yokota base theater. She’d covered her bedroom walls with still photos from the film: Bonnie and Clyde in bed; Bonnie, framed in bars, pointing a revolver at a bank teller; Bonnie, Clyde, and C.W. living in their car.
Virginia tried on clothes and scrutinized herself in the mirror, fulllength attached to the closet door. A crowd of rejected skirts and T-shirts gathered at her bare feet. She clenched a pink silk skirt between her toes. She chose black knee-highs, a Catholic-schoolgirl skirt, and a black concert T-shirt. She approached one of the posters of Warren Beatty and kissed him on the lips. Standing in front of her dresser, she applied makeup, looking at herself in the round vanity mirror. She’d bought it at a thrift store off base. Two of the lights were burned out, so her face was half in shadow.
She opened the top drawer of her dresser and pulled out a blond wig and tried it on. She smiled at her blond self and removed a .38-caliber pistol from the drawer. She put the wig and pistol in her purse and went downstairs to tell her father she was hanging out with friends in Shinjuku after attending the 8:00 p.m. movie at the base theater.
The base kids crowded the Base Square, an area near the center of Yokota Air Base meant to replicate the downtown in Anywhere, America. The kids called the area the mall, even though their parents called it the square. The kids were correct. American food and retail chains had bought the rights to sell their wares on the base, so indeed at Yokota Air Base, Tokyo, Japan, the children and mothers of American military men spent American dollars in a strip that looked as though it had been transplanted from Montclair, New Jersey, or Dickinson, North Dakota, or Sacramento, California. You could buy hot dogs on a stick after purchasing sneakers at the Athletic Shoe Factory, which was located next to a Baskin-Robbins counter, across the way from a Pizza Hut. Some of the kids had lived overseas for so long they didn’t know that what lay in front of them was a replica trading center that could be found in thousands of American towns. They lived the suburban American dream without knowing it. The difference was that this mall was always safe. There were no abductions, no girls lured into rape vans with promises of modeling careers or screen time, no burglaries in the parking lot.