Mega Sushi
“We hadn’t begun to scratch the surface of what was coming. Planet Earth had just got put on the galactic map.”
It was hard to believe it when the three-year anniversary for Mega Bug Battles came around. Three years had gone by in a flash, and man, those early years were some great times, not just for me and Jackie Earmuffs but for everyone. We were still living out of our old motor home on People’s Bluff, overlooking the battle ground everyone just called Bugtown. That was where all the action was, so it was pretty quiet up on People’s Bluff. And man, those gulmotids were so insatiable, and wealthy I guess by human standards, that after six months of Mega Bug Battles, the Mastersons were richer than they’d ever figured they could be. Domenico Domingo—my boss at the Top Sushi when we were still in Naples—he’d opened five-star restaurants at choice locations in New York, Vegas, Miami, and I heard he was even thinking of opening a place in Shanghai. And that was just what he did with the money left over from his investments.
Me and Jackie, we did fine letting the money pile up. We didn’t need anything extravagant, just our little bus; our camping spot; sandwiches, cup noodles, and snack bars; and work kept us so damn busy all night we didn’t hardly have time to think about what to spend our money on, much less to spend any of it. We didn’t blow our money on some kind of super bus like most people on the hill. That wasn’t our style. Every time we got tempted by anything like that, Jackie would just say “Boomtown, Groober. Easy come, easy go.” That was pretty sensible. You never know when something comes along that changes everything.
It was around that time me and Jackie got hit by about five different life-changers all rolled into a couple months.
First was some good news. One day Jackie leapt out of our bed in the back of the bus and just about fell into the toilet from the sound of the way she went crashing in there. All I could hear was Jackie Earmuffs booting into the bowl. And when I asked her from the edge of the bed if she was all right, she started grumbling at me.
“This is all your fault, Groober.”
“Does that mean what I think it means?” I asked her.
“It could be yours,” she said back. “Or it could be the first human-alien hybrid. That big gulmotid tongue of theirs, Groob. It really gets me going.”
And then she made a big slurping sound so loud I could hear it through the door. Even puking her face off, Jackie Earmuffs was something else.
“Only you could break the news like that, Jackie.”
“Or maybe it’s their proboscis,” she said without missing a beat. “I can’t decide what’s hotter.”
“Proboscis?” I muttered. Jackie and the Mastersons used bug words like that, I guess, being in the business.
Jackie told me she was about eight weeks along after she brushed her teeth and came back to bed.
“A little baby Groober,” she said. “That’ll be fun.”
“Or a little baby Earmuffs,” I replied. “Do they make earmuffs in baby sizes? She’ll need them if she stays in the family business.”
Jackie didn’t answer. “We’re going to need a bigger bus soon, Groober.”
“All in due time.”
So that was how it started. Big changes were on the horizon.
We both left the Bluff about mid-afternoon to get set up for the night. There was always a lot of prep-work to make sure everything went smooth when those bug-eaters came down from orbit. By then, Top Sushi had become the premier vendor along Championship Row. Me and Domenico and Mitra liked to think it was all because of our hard work.
Damien, though, thought it was a couple reasons, the first of which was that the Mastersons had the best quality bugs, which I couldn’t confirm first-hand myself, but the gulmotids sure couldn’t get enough of the Mastersons’ crickets and beetles and grubs.
The second reason he thought was that they could actually say our name—Top Sushi—which wasn’t a given with those aliens. We learned that lesson the first couple weeks—thinking we could name something, put it up on the menu, and run a special. Mitra tried to put a two-for-one special up on beetle buckets, and when they tried to say it, two-for-one came out sounding like “Blaferrouuu” and the gulmotids got so damn frustrated trying to say it that nobody ordered that special until one of them finally blurted out “Sushi furr sushi!” And the whole crowd out front practically exploded at the concept. That night they went running through the whole bug grounds shouting out “Top Sushi! Sushi furr sushi!” spreading the word. So we didn’t usually name anything ourselves until the gulmotids figured out what to call things.
But more than anything, Damien thought we were popular because of our grand champion rhinoceros beetle Kokontaaz, one of the few grand champions of the bug fights to ever get a name. Jackie’s mom had grown him special for the bug battles, and I don’t know what she fed him, but he looked so big on the first night we thought he had a chance to win the pot. Sure enough, he won that night and fifty-six nights after—the longest running grand champion in the brief history of the Mega Bug Battles. Mitra got the flash idea to put a likeness of him on our signs and paper buckets, and I swear, those gulmotids—after they named him—they said that name with the kind of reverence you had to think he’d been canonized, like Babe Ruth, Muhammad Ali, and Diego Maradona all rolled into one: Kokontaaz! And that was how they said our name half the time, too, “Top Sushi! Kokontaaz!”
For us, he was just a bug. But none of us would ever tell them that. Me and Damien would just nod along. “Yes, yes, Kokontaaz. That’s greatness right there, boys. Best there ever was. Come and get your crickets. Sushi for sushi. Step right up and tap your gold card here.”
That was how things would go most nights.
The night Jackie Earmuffs told me she was pregnant, though, things felt a little different down on the concourse when I got there. Mitra had already opened the screen to let the backside air out, and he and Damien were sitting at the front countertop under an umbrella, each of them sipping a bottled beverage of the adult human variety getting ready to get to work. It was heading toward sunset. And that was when we heard all kinds of weird chants and protest noises coming up the concourse like we’d never heard before in Bugtown. At that time of day, usually it was just us workers on the concourse, as well as the bug-boni zipping up and down the pavement keeping the walkways nice and tidy day-to-day. Mitra said that ruckus reminded him of the early days—the protests about the aliens down in Naples and Miami. Mitra put up an arm and shouted down toward the crowd, “Earth is for people!” and he was kinda joking. But as the group got closer, we started to see it wasn’t any regular protest like we’d seen in those early days. First of all, we didn’t hear what it was about initially, because half of it was in another language we couldn’t pick out over their speakers from far away, and then when the other language stopped, they started speaking English.
By the time they were close enough to the Top Sushi for us to make out what they were actually saying, we could see they were Japanese, and it was a whole big entourage with signs and chants and everything. There were Japanese ladies all dressed up in kimonos and in the middle of everything, we could see when they finally got close, there was a very serious looking Japanese chef and standing beside him wearing an elaborate gown was about the biggest man I’ve ever seen—a real-life Japanese sumo with his hair in a bun.
When they got in front of the Top Sushi the whole crowd started chanting at us angrily. One of them would go, “Sushi?” and then everyone else would answer, “Ja-nai! Ja-Nai!”
Me and Mitra and Damien had no idea what it was all about. And then that chef got on the megaphone and started barking into it loud and fast in Japanese.
昆虫は魚じゃない！
He was so mad he turned red.
お前らアメリカ人の厚顔無恥ぶりには、もはや限度というものがないな。
I thought he was gonna have a stroke.
なぜ我々の文化的遺産を盗み出し、それを愚弄するような真似をするんだ？お前らは最低のクズ野郎だ！
The only thing that calmed him down was every thirty seconds or so a translator had to take the megaphone to explain what he was saying, and then it was all clear to us.
The Japanese were furious. Sushi was a part of their cultural heritage. That chef had been training for decades to become one of the top sushi chefs in all of Japan, and they didn’t like it one bit that their craft had become synonymous with bugs and aliens and slop-wagon food buckets, Mega Bug Battles, and smelly gulmotids. To my mind, they had a point. That group right in front of us had a whole culture and style that seemed worthy of more respect than that.
Mitra and Damien were kinda shaking their heads dismissively, after all, it wasn’t as though we’d tried to steal some part of their cultural heritage. The gulmotids had landed on us. And we didn’t call it sushi first. That was them, because it was one of the only words for food they could say. I could see both sides myself, so I figured I’d go down there and have a word with those visiting Japanese dignitaries, mend fences. They looked fancy and decent, albeit a little proud. Hell, though, I figured we should be a little proud us people. We were all on the same team now.
So I walked down there, smiled, and told that crowd what I thought in a couple words. “Hi, friends. I’m Groober, and Earth is for people,” I declared. Then I said the magic words. “Welcome to the Top Sushi.”
That wasn’t the right thing to say, as it turned out.
“Sushi ja-nai!” that chef shouted back at me, and then the others started chanting it back to him.
They didn’t want to hear the word sushi from a bug-slinger like me. The whole crowd erupted in anger. They were proper fired up, and I was doing my best to explain, but they were a genuine cultural delegation, as it turned out, and there weren’t a lot of them understanding me, and I wasn’t understanding them at all, until finally someone with a familiar face came up and introduced herself.
“Hey, Groober. My name’s Sayaka,” she told me, pulling on my elbow to get my attention.
She looked Japanese herself, but I swore I’d seen her around in Bugtown before.
“You’re not with these guys, are you?” I asked her.
“No. I work the back room at Mega Sushi. I just came down while we were prepping because I heard the commotion and wanted to see what it was all about.”
“I just wanted to talk to these guys,” I said, “but I don’t think they want to hear from me any.”
Before I knew it the entourage started walking down toward Line Sushi and Mega Sushi and that whole corner of the Bugtown concourse. And then Sayaka started explaining for me what was going on.
“You speak Japanese?” I asked her, and she nodded. “But you’re not from Japan?”
“No, Toledo,” she replied. “But my parents are from Nagoya.”
She started trying to talk to a few people, but they were into their chant. “Sushi?” then “Jai-nai! Ja-Nai!”
“What’s that mean, ‘Ja-nai’?” I asked Sayaka.
“It means like no, only very emphatically. Basically they’re saying it’s not sushi, these bugs. They feel very strongly about it, Groober.”
“Right.”
Nobody in that protest really wanted to talk. They were all too fired up, especially that red-faced chef. I was about to give up, but then everyone was crowding around the front of Line Sushi getting ready to shout at Ollie and those guys when I got bumped into by something that felt like the backside of an elephant. I was about to fall over when one gigantic hand reached down and grabbed me by the collar, holding me up. It was that humongous sumo; and he’d caught me, kept me from falling over, let go, brushed my collar straight, patted me on the shoulder gently, and said something in Japanese that I didn’t understand.
Then he and Sayaka started talking. She explained to him that I was the manager of the Top Sushi and that I wanted to hear them out. She introduced him, and seemed a bit in awe of him at the same time, looking up at that big, stoic face of his as we struggled to have a three-way conversation in that hectic crowd. It didn’t really last that long, but Sayaka made sure I got my key points across—no offense intended; Earth is for people; welcome to America; and so forth. That giant sumo said it was a pleasure to meet us both.
Then as Sayaka stepped out of the crowd with me, she explained what the sumo had told her, that he was yokozuna, and at the time I didn’t understand yet, but that was his title, not his name, like grand champion of all sumos—the best of the best, a real honor to meet him. And Sayaka and I talked for a little while about whether there was something we could do for them to make the Japanese happy. But that cat was already well out of the bag, you know. Sushi had been sushi for years now to the gulmotids. We couldn’t get those clumsy, cantankerous, bug-eating bastards to do anything. To start calling bugs something else? Sorry, but good luck. Sayaka told me she had to get back to Mega Sushi before Fletcher got mad.
“Just don’t tell him you were talking to me,” I told her.
“Oh, I know better, Groober. I don’t know why he hates you guys so much. I’ve always thought you and the Top Sushi crew were all right.”
“Well, anyway. Thanks, Sayaka,” I said. “It was good to meet you. If things aren’t working out at the Mega Sushi, come and find me. We can always use good, friendly help.”
I admit, it wasn’t a great move to be open about poaching another place’s staff, but I knew full well Fletcher had been openly trying to steal our best second- and third-tier guys for years, so I guess turnabout is fair play. I didn’t fully understand where the beef had begun with Fletcher, but it went back to the earliest days out here in the desert. When old Doc Ryerson sent me those prototypes of the noseclips—the real technical stank-blocking nasal accessories—they were just prototypes, and he’d only sent a few. But they worked perfect. Completely shut off all sense of smell for the wearer, making those atrocious-smelling gulmotids completely undetectable from an olfactory standpoint. Obviously, I didn’t need one myself on account of my congenital anosmia, but I gave a set to Damien, Mitra, and Jackie, and we had a spare one for our other two floaters, whoever was on the front team with us on any given night. And I only had one left after that, which I gave to Ollie Mercator over at Line Sushi, owing to the fact he was closer friends with us, and it was his idea to start the bug battles in the first place. They worked so good they were the talk of every last busser, cleaner, cook, and server in Bugtown, and I guess Fletcher must have been pissed he wasn’t on the shortlist.
Well first, we didn’t even know they were coming until they arrived, and second, we didn’t have any idea whether they would work until they actually did. And sure, it made life a thousand times better for Damien, Mitra, Ollie, and the rest of our staff, but it wasn’t like it gave us any advantage on actually doing the work. And finally, once we told Doc Ryerson they worked great and started sending orders back to Florida, not only did I make sure Fletcher and his staff got taken care of first, we didn’t even charge him for his first order. And then, instead of saying “Thank you, Groober,” or “These are going to make our lives a whole lot better,” he was all like, “What took you so damn long, Groober? Thanks for holding out on us.” But for him to still be holding out a grudge on me two years later? That seemed a bit much to me. And sure, I figured there should’ve been some friendly competition between the main outfits like us, Line Sushi, Sushi Bug, Mega Sushi, and Bugz Bucketz, but we were all on the same team after all—Earth is for people, above everything else. Jackie said that some people are just like that, though. Complainers. Plus, she thought Fletcher was jealous.
By the time I parted ways with Sayaka after we met that sumo, it was getting dark. When I got back, the boys were putting on their nose clips and opening the shutters and the rear flaps. Jackie was just coming in the back with her first load of bugs for the night, and we were starting to see the streaks coming down from orbit, the spaceships descending to the desert floor. It might sound crazy to say, but that was my favorite time of the day. Mega Bug Battles were about to begin.
We headed into the back and started getting suited up. It was a warm night, so we waited till the sun was down to get dressed, head covering, waxing our eyebrows down, full pants, the whole getup. That was less fun, but soon, we could hear the gulmotids coming again, rumbling down the concourse. Top Sushi was open for business.
We had a real professional outfit—AI logistics, work flow engineering, efficiency metrics, and all that. And I don’t just mean Top Sushi itself. All of Bugtown was a smooth operation. Things came in waves so that we were maximizing sales and productivity throughout the night. The first wave would come into Bugtown, get their buckets and head to the arena for the first round of bug battles, and while the battles were going Jackie would arrive with the bug wagon, stock us back up; then we would clean up the counters, resupply, and get ready for the second wave. All the gulmotids would flood out into Bugtown, get more buckets, place their bets for round two, and head back to the stadium for more action. It went like that all night. The only time things were actually relatively quiet was the last ten minutes before the stadium let out after a round of battles. Other than that, we were hustling all night.
I didn’t think anything would be different about that night at all until about the fifth wave of battles was about to let out. It was quiet out on the concourse, and there weren’t that many gulmotid stragglers about, so when I saw that big frame approaching, I had to look down at my watch to see if I’d got my timing off, because the battles weren’t quite finished yet. But as he got closer, I could see the outline of something I never expected—a perfect traditional sumo top-knot. And I sorta panicked, because I’d seen those gulmotids freak out about a single human hair showing from a server’s cap, and here was this sumo strutting down the concourse like he didn’t have a thing to worry about. I decided I had to let him know. Those gulmotids would be coming out, and I didn’t know what would happen. I told the boys to watch the front and get ready for the rush, and I stepped out into the concourse.
When he saw me, the yokozuna suddenly broke from that serious look of his and looked very happy to see me once he realized who I was, which was good, but when I tried to invite him to step out back so we could sort out his hair, he declined. It took me a bit longer to figure out how to communicate with him, but the sumo was a step ahead of me. He pulled out his rectangle, and through the translation app, he told me something that surprised me. He was looking for me, but really, he was looking for Sayaka. He’d thought she worked for me when we met earlier that night, and when I told him she didn’t, he suddenly got disappointed and asked me if I knew how he could see her again.
I told that sumo that all this was great and that I was happy to help him out, but we needed to get out of that concourse before the rush, because those gulmotids were going to come rumbling down that concourse like a herd of hippos, and they’d quickly turn into an angry herd if they caught one glimpse of that top-knot the yokozuna was sporting. I tried to offer him a Top Sushi hair covering like we wore, and he just shook his head at me, put up a hand and said, “No, no, no,” and then something in Japanese.
It didn’t occur to me as I was looking up at this gigantic human being that he didn’t have an ounce of physical fear in all that mass he was carrying. He was a good six-six and must have been damn near five hundred pounds. The way the translation came out made it sound like it was a point of principle more than any fashion choice. He was a sumo, and no alien was going to tell a sumo how to wear his hair for anything. I told him it might be dangerous, but he kinda laughed and said “Arigato, Grooberu. I be ok.”
I told him that Sayaka was working over at the Mega Sushi and that I’d be happy to facilitate a connection at the end of the night, and he thanked me and told me he thought she was more beautiful and cute as any Japanese girl he ever met, and apparently, he joked that a famous sumo like him had as many opportunities as he wanted. And then speaking of girlfriends, Jackie Earmuffs came out, because she made the same mistake as me, thinking I was out in the concourse about to get trampled while I was holding some kind of conversation with a gulmotid. She took down her earmuffs and shouted out to us as she approached.
“Damn, Groober,” she said, all wide-eyed when she got close enough to see the yokozuna there. “That sumo’s almost as big as the gulmotids. You gotta get him off the road.”
I introduced her to him, saying, “Yokozuna, this is my girlfriend Jackie Earmuffs.”
That was when he explained that his name wasn’t yokozuna, it was his title. His real name was Akebono Mori. He was named for a famous sumo himself, and he thought Jackie’s name was really funny. It was pretty clear he liked her right away. And she took him by that big hand of his and asked very nicely as she tried to tug him along, getting him to step out of the concourse with us before the rush came. And once she got him out of the main causeway, she tried to explain the same thing about his hair, and while I was telling her what he’d said about it, that was when the walkway started to thunder.
“Here come those goblins,” Jackie said, again trying to urge Yokozuna Mori a little farther off the walkway.
He seemed genuinely amused by her concern for him, and as the first gulmotids started to trickle by, Jackie told him she was making a delivery over at the Mega Sushi during the next wave. She’d seen Sayaka around before too, and she told him that he had good taste in girls—she must have been a sweetheart if Jackie Earmuffs liked her. Jackie told the yokozuna she’d make sure Sayaka came over after the battles were over that night. And for someone so big and confident like Yokozuna Mori, it seemed like he was really grateful and even a little nervous to talk to Sayaka. We were standing there, and as the gulmotids started to file in fast now, Jackie began to retreat to the back of the hut, and I was excusing myself from the yokozuna because I had to work. Then one of those gulmotids rushing in toward the front of the stand slapped his tongue toward Jackie, just getting fresh as they sometimes did, because he didn’t like the sight of her. Well that big boy hadn’t taken notice of Yokozuna Mori, who did not like that one bit.
Now it may seem kinda funny that in three years plus with those cantankerous and sloppy gulmotids, we’d never had any problems with violence at all in Bugtown. Not a single incident I’d even heard of—not with the gulmotids anyway. They never fought with each other at all, and we assumed they had a way of policing each other that we didn’t involve ourselves in, and really, for an ordinary person to take on a gulmotid was more or less akin to squaring off with a bipedal rhinoceros. Nobody had ever heard of a person starting a fight with those smelly bastards, tempting as it may have been at times. Nobody had told that to Akebono Mori.
I saw it in his eyes right away and tried to get between him and that gulmotid that had gotten fresh with Jackie, just to warn him off on how bad an idea it was to take on a gulmotid, and Akebono brushed me aside effortlessly with a single gesture of the palm, respectfully. I’d even say it was gentle and courteous. And then he slapped his two giant hands together to get that gulmotid’s attention, walked over, and started ripping into him in Japanese, shaking an angry fist, pointing his finger at the big boy, and then gesturing toward Jackie so he understood what it was about.
Then that big ugly gulmotid blurted something back, almost laughing at the silly human challenging him before finishing whatever he was saying with the absolute worst word he ever could have put to Akebono Mori while pointing to the front of our stand. “Sushi.”
I could see those big Japanese eyes of his get wide and turn to fire, as he shouted back, “Sushi ja-nai!”
And then the big boy answered the yokozuna. “Sushi!”
Akebono Mori slapped his chest and challenged that gulmotid to step forward, and I’m not sure he knew what was happening. Then one of the quicker specimens in the crowd caught on and spelled it out for him.
“Barrooowww!”
“Oh, crap,” I heard Jackie shout as she rushed to hide around the corner of the Top Sushi. But she couldn’t run all the way back there. Jackie Earmuffs was such a fiend for drama, she had to stick her head from around the corner to watch.
“Barroww!” the other gulmotids rumbled.
That was exactly what Akebono Mori had in mind. The gulmotid who’d snapped at Jackie looked a bit shocked. They’d never seen a human stand up to them before, but I guess he didn’t see any way he was going to back down from the very first human challenge like that. When the others said “battle” and the sumo slapped his hands together again, he knew that it was on.
The second that big boy took one step forward toward Akebono, the yokozuna flashed into action like a grizzly bear, slapping that gulmotid upside his head four or five times before angling up underneath the big boy’s arms and dumping the bigger creature to the pavement in a bumbling heap that let out an echoing, involuntary BLUURRRP that sounded almost exactly like the spirit escaping from a gulmotid at the speed of sound. And that was clearly the end of the first human gulmotid battle, all in a span of about three seconds.
It was the next second, though. Something that’d never happened in Bugtown in its three-year history.
Dead. Silence.
And there was Akebono standing there in front of a crowd of about a hundred wide-eyed gulmotids, who looked back at this champion human fighter in utter disbelief. And I didn’t have the faintest idea what would happen the next moment when the shock wore off and those big ugly bastards started doing the simple math.
“Groober!” Jackie sorta shouted and whispered at me at the same time. “Do something!”
Oh, hell no, I thought. I didn’t want to get in the middle of that. And I had no clue what I could do when Jackie said it, but suddenly it just popped into my head.
“Battle!” I shouted, walking out from behind Akebono. “Nansha Battle!”
It was what they said in the bug fights when the match was finished, and then I followed the script from the program talking about how good a fight it was and did my best to lift up Akebono’s arm to declare him the winner.
“Winner!” I finished the script as the gulmotids were used to. “Yokozuna Akebono Mori!”
“OKO-BUMA!” one of the big boys in the front of the crowd shouted.
“Okobuma!” they began to shout and celebrate.
And then, Mori reached over and gave his opponent a hand up, which I think they appreciated as a sporting gesture. And he slapped that gulmotid on the back as though to tell him it was a good battle, but then he pointed toward Jackie and gestured, waving his hand in an unmistakable way, saying, “Nai. Nai.”
And it was the damnedest thing I’d ever seen with those obstinate creatures, he looked at Akebono and said, “Nai. Nai. Okobuma!”
And then they crowded around him like he was the greatest thing they’d ever seen. And that was that. Situation defused.
So I shouted to everyone. “Top Sushi!”
And the whole crowd shouted back, “Sushi!”
Akebono himself stepped around to the corner of the hut, watching as the gulmotids crowded in, pushing and shoving against the front of the counter trying to get their orders in. And something about it must have rubbed Akebono the wrong way, because he watched from that corner with a sour look on his face for about two minutes before he stepped over to the front of the counter and started waving his finger at them, shaking his head, and then he began to direct them where to stand, how to queue up, not to push and shove. And to everybody’s shock, those gulmotids didn’t hesitate one bit. They didn’t even talk back. They just said, “Okobuma!” And then they came forward and gave their order one at a time—sushi for sushi, big lime seltzer, beetle bowwwl!
“Next!” Damien shouted as me and Dina filled buckets.
Mitra could hardly fill up the hoppers fast enough everything was going so smooth.
“Holy crap!” Jackie Earmuffs said from the side door. “That sumo’s like a lion tamer for these aliens, Groober. You have to hire this guy.”
“I think he’s got a job already, Jackie. He’s like the best sumo in the world.”
“I know how to get him to work here,” she said, and then I saw her sneaking out the back.
To my shock, after the rush died out about an hour later and the call to the next wave of battles came from the stadium, the great yokozuna was still standing there at the corner of the Top Sushi front window, directing traffic and waving the gulmotids on as they shouted out his name to him—Okobuma!
He may have been famous in Japan, but in one hour he’d become just as famous in Bugtown. It seemed like every last gulmotid on Earth knew who he was now.
The second things died down at the window long enough for me to step out, I patted the big fella on the arm and thanked him for helping out. He thanked me for defusing that tenuous moment with all those hungry gulmotids. He had a damn sour look on his face, though, for the words being exchanged. I asked him if he could write what was bothering him on his phone as it was translating for us aloud. He nodded as he typed away deftly with a couple of his giant fingers, I couldn’t help but notice how tiny that phone seemed in his hands. Then he put that rectangle in my hands.
“God, these guys stink!” the screen read in English.
“Oh, shit!” I said, shaking my head at the oversight. “I’m sorry.”
I snuck around back again and grabbed a spare noseclip, hoping it would fit. And when I came around again, demonstrating how to put it on, I could see his eyes light up the second it kicked in.
“Better?” I asked him, and when the phone translated, he nodded.
“How come you don’t wear a noseclip like this?” he asked me—or the phone did after it translated.
Then I tried to explain. I was born without a sense of smell, I told him. Isolated congenital anosmia. He seemed mystified by that.
“Look who I found,” I heard Jackie’s voice from the side alley, she was coming around front with a friend. “I poached her mid-shift, Groober. Fletcher’s gonna shit when he finds out.”
And it was Sayaka. It took me a second, because I’d only seen her before or after hours in Bugtown, not kitted up like that with her eyebrows waxed down and her hair covered over. But it didn’t take Akebono even a second to recognize her, greeting Sayaka in Japanese. And man, I don’t know what it was about the Top Sushi and love at first sight, but that big fella was smitten, and both Jackie and I could see the same in Sayaka’s eyes as she looked up at him. Jackie took me by the wrist. “Let’s give these two a little space, Groober. We got work to do for the next wave.”
Come sunup, both Sayaka and Akebono were still there, she funneling refills in to Mitra in the back to keep the bugs flowing, he standing out front keeping the queue orderly, fast, and calm. When the final bell chimed out of the stadium and the gulmotids went thundering out toward the flats to their ships to beat the sunlight, I took a look at our countertops out front and then down at the pavement in our standing area, and there wasn’t a single stray bucket or cup to be seen. Not only had Akebono kept the lines neat, he’d singlehandedly, in one night, taught the entire gulmotid race the most important word they’d failed to learn for three years prior—“Nai!”
It hadn’t fully registered with me just how much of a difference it made having a genuine yokozuna running the front of the house. But it sure did. Half the time one of those gulmots tried to leave a stray bucket or throw a cup down on the pavement, Akebono would give a look and say it—Nai! The other half of the time another one of the gulmotids themselves would do it—Nai!—and then they’d finish off the directive with the exclamation “Okobuma!” And Akebono himself would nod in approval.
Top Sushi was the fastest and cleanest it had ever been. I couldn’t believe the look of the place when the sun came up. We cleaned the back in record time, packed everything up, cleaned ourselves up, dumped our clothes in the laundry, and he was still sitting there out front, waiting for Sayaka.
So we went out to sit with him, offered him a beer or a soda, like we usually finished a shift with. Then, while we were sitting there, as usual, I ran the numbers.
“Holy hell, you guys,” I said. “We do have to hire this guy.”
“Double, Groober?” Mitra asked. “I was cooking ‘em as fast as that girl Jackie poached from Fletcher could load them in.”
“Near as,” I replied, holding up the graph on my work tablet.
Damien’s eyes nearly bugged out. “I could put a hot tub in the bus if this guy hangs around.”
“Okobuma!” Mitra said, grinning at our new friend.
He and Sayaka laughed, but those two were a little bit too much into their own conversation to pay all that much attention to us.
We clinked our bottles to cap off the best night we’d ever had at the Top Sushi thinking it was too good to be anything but a one off.
That was what we all thought until Akebono came walking back down the causeway an hour before sunset the following evening, hand in hand with Sayaka. And he stayed all night again. Same result only bigger and better. Numbers booming, lines straight and long, and those gulmotids loving every minute of it. Akebono would make the simplest gestures and those gulmots understood it—get back in line, pick up that cup, don’t you even think of slurping that tongue at that server. Okobuma! Okobuma! Nai, nai!
The lines were getting longer each wave. Every time the battles let out, they would race down the causeway past Mega Sushi and Bugz Buckets just to queue up at our place.
He’d only been there for two nights and Mitra was already suggesting we put Akebono’s face on the buckets instead of Kokontaaz!
I woke up the following day to Jackie Earmuffs puking her face off again.
“I gotta warn her, Groober,” she said after coming back to bed.
“Warn who?” I asked her.
“Sayaka. She’ll end up like me soon if she’s not careful, knocked-up with a sumo-baby, working the bug wagon by night, puking her guts out by day. It’s not the life for a sweet kid like her.”
“You think they’re already ...?”
“Of course they are, Groober. She’s crazy if she isn’t. Once you go sumo ...”
Then she got that look in her eye Jackie got when she was about to get frisky.
“You’re going to make me jealous of the big fella, Jackie. You better knock it off.”
“That big bun of his. That’s some kind of haircut.”
“I could grow my hair out like that, big sumo man-bun,” I joked, kissing Jackie on the cheek.
“You better not,” she said grimacing at the thought. “Baby Groober, though. I could see it. He’ll be a little bug slinging sumo of our own soon enough.”
I figured it could only last a couple days with the yokozuna around. As Jackie said all the time, Bugtown was boomtown—easy come, easy go. But six days after that delegation of fancy Japanese dignitaries had arrived protesting our use of the word “sushi,” not only had we not given back their word for delicious raw fish, we at the Top Sushi had poached their greatest living sumo wrestler as an encore. He was still walking Sayaka to work each night, hand-in-hand, sticking around to keep order all night, and waiting patiently at the big seats on the concourse for Sayaka to finish up so he could walk her home at sunup. And for us, things had never been better. He hadn’t even asked for a cut of the major spike in profits we were pulling in with him around. I started feeling guilty about it.
So on that sixth night, just before sunrise, while Sayaka and Dina and Mitra were still finishing up scrubbing down the back, I went out front to have a word with the big fella. There were causeway seats out there that were designed to hold up to those gulmots, and for me it was like a kindergartner seated in a grown man’s bucket-seat. But for Akebono, it was the perfect place for him to get off his big feet after a long night of standing and keeping order. That chair was his only compensation so far. The gulmotids already knew—that one was Okobuma’s seat, and they didn’t sit there. Didn’t even dare touch it. I wiped down the one next to it before sitting beside him.
“Akebono San,” I greeted him the way Sayaka taught me. “Good night?”
“Hai, Grooberu. Hai.”
Then he pulled out his phone. We were getting good at talking through his rectangle.
“I think you have an excellent job, my friend,” he said. “You are a good ambassador for Earth, make business, much fun, and welcome these aliens to our world in a positive way.”
“That’s giving us bug slingers a lot of credit,” I told him. “We’re just making a living in the way we know how. You’ve been helping a lot this week. We all thought you’d be gone already.”
He looked over his shoulder toward the back. The others hadn’t come out yet.
“I have good reason to stay, Grooberu.”
“Yeah, but you don’t have to work the bug line.”
“I want to make sure. Sayaka says she almost got hurt some times at her other job.”
“Mega Sushi?”
“Hai. So, so. She says bossu—I can’t say his name.”
“Fletcher.”
“Hai. He made her go to clean the buckets from the front between waves too early, too many aliens around. Snapped her twice and knocked her down once too.”
“Oh, I’d never do that to Sayaka, Akebono. You know.”
“I like to be sure. Makes her feel safe if I’m here.”
“Having you around makes everyone feel safe, big fella. Listen, I haven’t known how to approach this because we never officially talked, because I always figured you’d be on a plane the next day anyway, but we’re making a lot more money here at the Top Sushi because of you. And you’re doing a lot of work to help us. We should be giving you something.”
He grinned at me and turned his head toward the back again.
“I have plenty of money, Grooberu. Sumos like me are well compensated.”
“Like what, a basketball player?”
He shrugged those big sumo shoulders of his. “Not as well from the league, but I do many many commercials. Yokozuna is a big honor in Japan. Ever since I became yokozuna, my face is in many places.”
“Well, we all like having you here, and if you want a piece of the action, you just say the word, Akebono San. And stay as long as you like, my friend.”
Just then I could hear the others coming out from the back, each of them carrying a folding chair with them. Mitra had a cooler with some beers in it. Funny tradition, beers at sunup.
Akebono smiled and nodded at me, putting out one of his big old fists for a fist-bump.
The others came and sat around us. That was the gravity of the big fella—where he was sitting, that’s where the gang would gather. And as funny as it was to see someone so big holding hands with a regular-sized girl like Sayaka, they looked good together. I thought it couldn’t get any better than that—times you wish you could freeze right there.
It lasted about three minutes, not even half a beer.
“Hey, Groober!” I heard someone shouting from across the concourse. “I bet you think you’re real smart, poaching my people in the middle of a shift like that. You and your girlfriend from the bug wagon.”
Damn. It was Fletcher.
“Nice to see you too, Fletcher. Pull up a chair and grab a beer if you like, so we can talk like civilized human beings.”
“Yeah. No thanks.”
“That was like six days ago, man?” I said to him as he got closer. “If you were that fired up about something, you could’ve come talk to me, hear my side of things?”
He glared over at Sayaka, who was translating to Akebono under her breath.
“What is this? You poach my back staff and hire a sumo wrestler to run your front? You think this shit is Disney World or something, Groober?”
“Damn, Fletcher. How the hell do you have the energy to be so goddamn angry at five in the morning?” I asked him. “Take a breath, will you?”
“My Gramm gets cranky like that too, mornings,” Mitra joked. “Usually means she’s got a UTI.”
We all started laughing. Couldn’t help it. Mitra had a million stories from Naples. That was how he’d started cooking at Top Sushi in the first place—to take care of his grandmother back in Florida.
Fletcher was fuming.
“I could get you a cranberry juice instead of a beer,” Mitra continued. “I bet Damien still has a extra course of antibiotics left over from ... what was her name, D? Sylvia?”
“Serena,” Jackie interjected, shaking her head and scowling.
“Or I could just give you her number, Fletch,” Damien suggested. “It wasn’t anything permanent, but you’re going to need those antibiotics if you do give her a call. Getting a little might help with that anger, buddy.”
We were all laughing pretty good by then.
“Real funny assholes,” Fletcher replied, looking over at Sayaka plenty sour as she continued to translate for Akebono, who still had that stern sumo look fixed to his face, not even a grin.
“Oh, stuff it, Fletcher,” Jackie told him. “You’re just pissed we thought of it first. Any time anybody else has a better week than Mega Sushi, you get sour.”
“Don’t think I don’t know it was you, Jackie, coming in snaking my employees for Groober. You think you can get away with anything because you’re a supplier?”
“Call somebody else the next time you’re weeded, Fletcher,” Jackie replied. “Or stop being an asshole for once. It’s not like you never poached anybody else’s staff ever.”
He got red faced and started pointing a finger at Jackie, shouting. “Not in the middle of a shift! The next time you come in my place and pull shit like that—”
Fletcher stopped shouting mid-sentence. Akebono had stood up. That yokozuna didn’t even have to take a step forward, just stood there looking at Fletcher and then wagged a finger at him, just like he did to those gulmots.
No, sir. You do not.
Fletcher was shaking his head, plenty embarrassed. He nearly pissed himself standing there with Akebono staring him down like that.
“Fine,” he grumbled. “We’ll see how smart you assholes think you are ...” and he kept grumbling as he turned to storm back down the concourse toward the Mega Sushi.
“Bye, Fletcher,” Jackie said to his backside, mocking the jerk.
I think maybe the others thought that would be the end of that, but they didn’t know Fletcher like I did. I figured something would be coming down the line soon enough, and I wasn’t wrong.
We didn’t hear from Fletcher for another ten days or so, but I had the sense he was up to something all the while. Just the look on him any time we crossed paths, a sly grin. I never could’ve imagined the extent he’d go to getting even, or at least it was even in his mind somehow. People like Fletcher can get a little dangerous if you give ‘em a bit of money.
We were getting toward the fifth wave, a little past midnight, and there was about fifteen minutes before the current battle was set to let out. It was slow enough that only a few gulmotid stragglers were out on the concourse. And suddenly, I hear a commotion out the front window. I saw Akebono’s eyebrows go up as though he recognized something. Turns out it was the Japanese language getting barked over a megaphone.
This angry crowd was a group a lot like the one Akebono came with in the first place, a whole Japanese entourage, only right in the middle beside the Japanese guy barking into the megaphone was Fletcher, and standing right beside him, a head above Fletch, was another tremendous, broad-shouldered sumo, his hair tied back in a sumo bun, the same stern look on his face as Akebono. He looked like a beast. Then, when the group got to our pen out front of the Top Sushi, Fletcher grabbed the megaphone and started mouthing off from the middle of the concourse.
“Lately, I’ve been hearing a lot about Top Sushi. I learned a new word this month, like everyone else around here—Okobuma! There he is. That’s him right there. You’ve all seen him. Oko-booma!”
And Fletcher started pointing over at Akebono, acting all tough from fifty feet away in a crowd with his own big sumo to guard him. All the gulmotids in the causeway started gathering around, wondering what the business was.
“I’ve learned something about their okobuma, though. You hear me, Groober? Akebono Mori isn’t even the champion! He’s the champion!” And Fletcher held his arm up behind their sumo. “This is Koji San—the real yokozuna! He’s the reigning champion of all sumo on Earth! Akebono is old. He’s washed up. He came to Bugtown to run and hide so he didn’t have to face Koji! That’s what everyone in Japan is saying, Groober. But Akebono can’t hide here in Bugtown anymore. Mega Sushi is calling you out, Groober. You’ve got your yokozuna. We’ve got ours. There’s only one thing left to do. Say it with me everyone ... BATTLE!”
I figure those gulmots understood about three words of that whole monologue Fletcher had probably been practicing in the mirror all week, but they sure knew the most important one. That whole concourse outside the Top Sushi erupted.
“BAAARRRROOOWWW!!!”
“Okobuma! Okobuma!”
“BAAARRROOOWWW!!!”
To his credit, Akebono Mori didn’t flinch. He stood there with his arms crossed, giving that other sumo and Fletcher and that whole crowd from Mega Sushi a big fat sumo stank eye. And then their sumo, Koji, started shouting to Akebono in Japanese, pointing, calling him out. And damn, I had no idea what Akebono must’ve been feeling on the inside, but he seemed like a cool enough customer. He raised both arms wide, as if to say to his rival, “Any time, big fella!” Then Akebono patted his chest with one hand, nodded, and then waved the entire crowd away with the back of his hand and shouted two words I never expected to hear out of his mouth:
“TOPO SUSHI!”
Just then Jackie came running out of the back.
“Groober! Groober! What’s going on? What did I miss?”
“Fletcher’s got his own yokozuna now and he’s calling Akebono out.”
“Damn. What’s he going to do?”
“He’s going to fight him.”
“Damn.”
“Mega Sushi!” Fletcher shouted back over the megaphone, and then he got that whole crowd on the concourse shouting their yokozuna’s name, “Koji, Koji, Koji, Koji!”
“We’ll see you in the ring, Groober! You and the rest of you Top Sushi losers.”
Right then the bell rang from the stadium to signal the end of the wave, so even if they’d wanted to stay out there taunting us any longer, they’d have got trampled. They all dispersed fast so they could get back to the Mega Sushi before the rush. But they’d sure blindsided all of us. We hardly had time to process what the hell had gone down before the gulmotids came thundering back for their bugs.
The rest of that night went as usual, but there was a different energy around the concourse. “Okobuma” didn’t get uttered with the same kind of reverence to Akebono when the gulmotids came through. And our lines weren’t quite as long as they had been the previous nights. I heard that morning from Ollie Mercator that the Mega Sushi was booming after midnight. He said they were slammed at Line Sushi too, benefiting from the spillover from the crowd around Fletcher’s. He’d come by to see what was happening over at ours, and he was surprised to see that Akebono and Sayaka were already gone by the time Jackie and me and Damien and Mitra were sitting out by the concourse decompressing after another busy shift. We hadn’t had a chance to take a breath really, much less figure out what was going on.
Ollie sat down, grabbed a beer and started scrolling, and we started learning about sumo. I hadn’t checked up on Akebono and his life. I’d never really met anyone that famous before as a friend, and I figured it was better to just take him as he was, let him tell me who he was by his behavior and let him share what he wanted to tell me about himself, not go snooping about his life. Jackie, though, she told Ollie to dig deep. She wanted all the dirty details.
Akebono, it turned out, was a late bloomer. He was thirty-four now and hadn’t won his first championship until he was twenty-eight. In hundreds of years, there had only been eighty-six men awarded the rank of yokozuna. Akebono Mori became number eighty-five after winning five consecutive championships when he was thirty and thirty-one, surprising everybody with his consistent dominance at his peak. Following that commanding campaign, he’d blown out his left knee on the tenth day of the spring Tokyo tournament the following year.
Koji San, whose full name was Nishiyama Koji, came out of nowhere the following year and dominated. Akebono hadn’t finished rehabbing in time for the grand championships, but Koji was so dominant everyone speculated about who would win once Akebono finally came back. Koji was only twenty-five when he was awarded the rank of yokozuna that following year.
When Akebono finally returned, according to what Ollie was reading, our pal had lost a step and didn’t look like the same guy from before his injury, but he was so great despite it, that only one sumo was a match for him—Koji. They met in the final match of the grand championship in Osaka, where Koji matched him for speed and power, barely managing to push Akebono from the ring. There was a lot of speculation afterward that Akebono had re-aggravated his knee injury in that final match. A few months later, they met again in the July tournament on the fifth day, with Koji ducking under and throwing Akebono to the clay to secure the victory. That match more or less decided the tournament. Akebono hadn’t won a tournament since, and according to what we were reading, he was nearing the time limit before his absence from the ring would disqualify him from retaining his title of yokozuna.
It didn’t look good for the big fella, I had to say. But we’d seen him earlier that night. He couldn’t back down, and we knew he wasn’t going to. We just hoped he could hold his own, not even for Top Sushi or anything, but for him, our new friend. That Koji was no joke, though. Ollie was showing us all videos. It looked like he had all the skills and knew all the tricks. He was a yokozuna, through and through.
I didn’t quite know what to think about it, and I figured I wouldn’t until I could talk to Akebono himself. He was the only one in Bugtown who truly understood what was going on. Even beyond the cultural stuff, there was also history there, him and Koji.
Part of me expected that Akebono and Sayaka wouldn’t show up the following night. That shows you how much I knew about Akebono’s culture. He came strutting down the concourse the following day like he owned it. And man, when I saw that other sumo, I saw it was a thing they both did—walked like that, that sumo strut, like nobody on Earth was gonna mess with them, not even the aliens that outweighed them by two hundred pounds, not even other sumos. You had to respect it.
As Sayaka and Dina and the guys were getting ready for the night, I stepped out front to chat with Akebono. I wanted to ask him about how the match was going to go.
“Don’t know, Grooberu San,” he told me through his phone. “I’ve never done sumo for any other reason than a tournament.”
“Did you talk to Koji?”
He shook his head. “Don’t have his number.”
“Oh. I figured there weren’t so many of you guys that you all might talk.”
“We talk,” he replied, shrugging, “mostly with the wrestlers in our stable, and also at the tournaments. Very professional and respectful. Good match. You too. Those things.”
“So there’s no bad blood?”
He looked back at me doubtfully. “Maybe not no bad blood. Those things are quiet. Not for other people to see.”
“But not between you and Koji?”
“I don’t know, Grooberu. I have no bad blood for Koji San. As a person, I don’t know him very well. As a sumo, he is a great champion. It will be a very big challenge.”
“Well, you’ve got our support, Akebono San, however it goes down.”
He asked me to check with Fletcher to see whether they had a plan for how everything would be arranged. It was going to be complicated. Akebono didn’t want to do anything the wrong way, and as we talked, it began to sound like it wasn’t going to be easy to pull off a proper sumo match in Bugtown. Both he and Koji were world-class athletes, so it wasn’t like they were okay with a bunch of Americans who knew nothing about the sport drawing a circle in the dirt and shouting “Go!” That’d be like expecting professional hockey players to have a serious hockey game on a pond without lines and officials and boards and all that. These were serious men with serious reputations. So we were going to need some help from Japan at the very least to build a proper ring on pretty short notice. And, as it turned out, the Japanese in general weren’t the biggest fans of ours. Not only that, we’d need referees, and none of them would have anything to do with a match like this without an official blessing from the Sumo Association if they ever wanted to work again. I had Ollie look into it, and we found out that there’d only been a handful of exhibition matches held outside Japan ever, and they sure weren’t held center stage at the Mega Bug Battles.
Leave it to Fletcher to stick his big stupid nose into something he didn’t understand. I don’t know how much he had to pay Koji San to stir up trouble with Akebono, but nobody had seen him at the Mega Sushi since. According to Sayaka, he was already down in Vegas, running around town like a movie star with big gold sunglasses and a crowd of pretty girls.
The following day, when I expressed doubt that we were going to be able to make it happen, Akebono made his feelings known clearly, as he did, basically telling us that he hadn’t asked anything of us for all the help he’d given the Top Sushi. He told me he was asking this one thing—to make it happen. And man, me and Damien and Mitra together, we could run the Top Sushi. I didn’t want to tell him that this was above my pay grade, but that’s what I was thinking. So I called up Domenico and asked him if he had some friends who could help facilitate it. He was scratching his head.
“A sumo match, Groober? Are you for real?”
“I sure am, boss.”
“I don’t know anything about sumo.”
“And you didn’t know the first thing about serving bugs to aliens before they landed in Naples neither. But you’ve done okay figuring that out.”
“I’ll make a few calls and see what I can do,” he told me.
Meanwhile, another week passed.
It was tough to tell how Akebono was doing. His expression almost never changed, except whenever Sayaka appeared. Then he would always crack a little smile. He told me about that. He’d never got married in Japan. Most sumos lived in their stables until they did get married. But for many years he was too poor to even think of it, just a junior guy, a big body the real wrestlers needed to push around in training. And then, suddenly, when they couldn’t push him around as easily, when he started winning a few matches, and then tournaments, and girls started paying attention to him, Akebono got the sense that those sorts of girls didn’t care that much about him. They cared about the money and fame that was starting to come his way. That was what he liked about Sayaka so much. She’d liked him right away, and she’d had no idea how much money he had or how famous he was in Japan. She just liked him. It was a lot like me and Jackie when we first met. A connection.
It sounded like a damn tough life, actually, being a sumo. There were only two active yokozunas. There were maybe twenty or thirty other successful wrestlers who did well. Everyone else was busting their ass to get to the top. Most never did.
When I finally heard back from Domenico, things weren’t looking good. He told me the Sumo Association was a tough nut to crack. And if Domenico Domingo knew anything about anything, it was about nuts, all kinds of nuts, like me and Mitra, Jackie and Damien, building restaurants for feeding bug-eating aliens, putting together Bugtown out of nothing. To hear he was pessimistic was a little surprising after everything we’d done.
“I dangled about as much money in front of them as I could, Groober, but they told me it wasn’t about all that. It was about pride and dignity—respect.”
I talked to Jackie the next morning as we were lying down together in the bus.
“Pride and dignity,” she kinda scoffed. “That’s all well and good, Groober, but at the end of the day, it’s a bunch of fat mostly-naked guys blasting bellies in the dirt when it comes down to it. Money buys a lot of dignity whether it’s banking money or bug money. Money’s money. They just need to see a figure that makes them forget about their pride.”
“I don’t’ think we got that much money, Jackie.”
“We might not, but those gulmots do. They’re laughing at us, Groober. Every one of them is like a billionaire to us. Even the money we make is a joke to them, never mind regular people.”
That was a thought. Maybe Domenico was calling the wrong people. I called him up again and had him talk to his friends in the government—the ones who talked to the aliens, regulated Bugtown, and controlled space traffic in orbit. Somewhere out there in the galaxy was an alien Provedor, who regulated Earth on the alien side as well. And sure enough, some one of those humans—the ones who treated banks like trading cards—well one of them must have looked at the proposition and thought about it for a second or two and come to the conclusion that if these gulmotids liked bug battles, they’d go nuts for sumo. It was about the only human sport they could understand. Before we knew it, the big screens on the causeway were showing sumo matches in between waves, and the gulmots were going crazy for it. We had to keep it to a minimum, because they were so entranced by the screens it was hurting our sales numbers. They were rushing to the booking screens to place bets and getting angry when they found out the matches weren’t live. Before long, we heard a few gulmotids had even shown up in Japan looking for the tournaments.
Very quickly after that, the Japanese Sumo Association was calling Domenico. If they didn’t like the gulmotids in Bugtown, they sure didn’t like them in Osaka any better. And when that Provedor started talking to the Sumo Association about galactic broadcast rights, the numbers were suddenly very prideful and dignified. Koji San wasn’t in Vegas anymore. He was over at the Mega Sushi again directing the queue, and we were hearing it in the causeway: “Okobuma Okobuma! Battle!”
“Are you ready, big fella?” I asked Akebono.
He nodded, and though he didn’t look like he had a hint of doubt, I could still see a hint of something, maybe sadness, maybe something like it. What Fletcher’d said wasn’t wrong. Akebono was old for a sumo. He hadn’t won a match for over a year. He hadn’t wrestled for nearly as long. And Koji? He was a yokozuna at the height of his powers.
I insisted to Domenico that whatever deal was struck to make this thing happen had to be a one-off, partly for Akebono’s sake, in case it went bad for him, and partly because I could smell something. Those bankers were looking at numbers that the sumos hadn’t seen yet—same as we bug slingers when Bugtown was being built. We’d done well, sure, but our eyes weren’t nearly as open back then as they were three years on. This would be one battle to test the waters. From there, we could see what came of it, and the sumos could have a look at things with their eyes open before galactic business got done on their behalf.
Two weeks, I got word a couple days later. And holy hell, not in my wildest imagination did I have any sense of what was about to descend on Bugtown.
The first wave Akebono prepared me for. That wave was Japanese. There were officials from the Sumo Association that had to construct the ring and the area around it. Akebono had managers and training partners and physiotherapists and masseurs and cooks. It was like he’d been on vacation here until that moment, and I could see it on his face. Suddenly, he had to go to work again. He even cut back at the Top Sushi, sending some of the younger wrestlers to work the line. The gulmots still listened to them after the okobuma put his hand on their back and made all the unmistakable gestures—this guy is my guy, okay? You listen to him too.
Sayaka was a nervous wreck. Jackie found her in tears out behind the Top Sushi as she was bringing in a delivery a couple nights before the fight.
“His knee has never healed,” she told Jackie. “If it wasn’t for Fletcher and his damn ego, Akebono could’ve just retired like he was going to. Now he can’t back down.”
Shit. That was a piece we didn’t know. Suddenly me and Damien and Mitra and Dina were all carrying the same vibes as Sayaka in the days leading up to the match, something between grief and dread. After all, Akebono wasn’t just some aging yokozuna to us anymore. He was our friend. And Koji San, gold sunglasses and all, was down at the Mega Sushi making gestures to the crowd like he was going to bust Akebono up, hyping the fight like it was going to be the biggest spectacle in the history of Bugtown. He was not wrong.
Before we knew it, there was nothing left but the fight. All these bug battles were fun and games for us people. This one meant something.
I’d been inside the stadium before, of course, but always when it was empty, and even then, the floor level was much smaller than you’d figure for a venue so big. It hosted bug fights after all, so it was a steep, bowl-shaped amphitheater with limited space at the bottom of that bowl. If it hadn’t been for the fact that we’d opted to build in premium gulmotid seating on that lower level, there probably wouldn’t have been enough room for a sumo match down there, and it wasn’t as if a sumo ring was that big at all. I was surprised by how small it seemed in person.
I came in representing the Top Sushi, as Domenico didn’t go down for stuff like that. And Fletcher, of course, wanted to stick it to me personally, not Domenico. And part of the agreement for the whole thing was that it would be a hybrid-type event, so there were introductions and announcements in English and Gulmotix that never would’ve been part of a genuine tournament in Japan.
The way it worked in Japan was that a sumo would wrestle once a day for two weeks in a grand tournament. Then, based on records, they’d decide the tournament on the final day, usually a match or two. But we couldn’t do that here. So Akebono’s people and Koji’s people decided on a best-of-three match exhibition format on the same night. And, of course, because everyone involved wanted to give the gulmots time to place their bets between matches, there would be a half hour between bouts. Most of the money was on Koji wiping the floor with Akebono in two matches, but I didn’t believe that, mostly because I didn’t want to.
Me and Jackie went in with Sayaka, and she was so anxious her hands were shaking. She said she’d never seen him like he’d been in the last few days, really quiet, serious, no laughter or smile. But, I kept trying to remind her, she hadn’t known him before when he was wrestling.
The place was so full up behind us there wasn’t room for another gulmotid or person. You could feel the arena just full up with living energy, and Jackie, out of curiosity, made the mistake of slipping off her noseclip just for a second and nearly started puking then and there in the middle of the arena.
“Oh man! Groober, I wish you could smell it,” she said between coughs, reacting to the smell of thousands of gulmotids all penned up in one place together.
And that was funny too. One of the unique rules. The sumos and the judges were allowed to wear Doc Ryerson’s noseclips so they could tolerate the atmosphere. They wouldn’t have done that in Japan.
Jackie was still trying to describe the stench to me. “It’s like death died, smelled itself rotting, and then threw up on its corpse.”
Damn. Only Jackie Earmuffs could put it like that, but I still couldn’t really understand.
Right as Jackie stopped coughing, they started announcing things in Japanese. I’d watched a few sumo videos by then, so I sorta knew how things would go. The wrestlers came in, got introduced, and there was a buzz among the human VIPs along the outer ring on the floor with us, and then above us there were rumblings from the gulmotids. Half of them roaring out “Okobuma!” when Nishiyama Koji was introduced. The other half when it was Akebono Mori.
Sayaka was clenching her fists and trying not to freak out. Jackie couldn’t help herself, though, when those sumos were walking around the ring getting ready.
“Damn, that’s a lot of ass,” she said when Koji circled past us, and it was loud enough for about a quarter of the people on the floor to hear.
That was just before Akebono and Koji began throwing salt into the ring, getting ready. I was feeling nervous almost like I was going to fight. Then things went into slow motion as those sumos crouched down, and almost before I knew what was happening, they touched their knuckles to the ground.
Both men exploded toward each other in an overwhelming burst of energy. The entire arena roared as they blasted into each other. Koji pushed Akebono back, but the big fella absorbed it, elbowing Koji’s shoulders away. And then they locked each other under the arms, grabbed each other’s belt, and took turns trying to get their legs inside each other to throw the other sumo out. I couldn’t believe it, because most of the videos I’d watched of matches lasted a few seconds, but those two yokozunas were tussling with each other for maybe twenty seconds before finally, as Akebono tried to throw Koji from under his shoulder, Koji somehow slipped it and pushed Akebono back, forcing him to step out of the circle—a loss.
And while the rest of the stadium was roaring and cheering, all wrapped up in who’d won their bets, we saw Akebono look over our way for the briefest of moments, and he flashed us an expression of surprise, the quickest hint of joy, and then he stomped on that bad leg of his, nodding as if to say, don’t look away just yet my friends, both these legs are working again. Koji San couldn’t have seen it. Almost no one did. But Sayaka knew, and I knew, and Jackie Earmuffs knew.
“Don’t say anything,” I told Jackie. “We’ll jinx it.”
Everybody else cleared out of there while the sumos retreated to their areas underneath the grandstands. The gulmotids were off making bets. A lot of the humans on the floor did too.
Not us. We sat there with Sayaka waiting quietly, only breaking our silence to talk when Ollie Mercator came over with Mitra and Damien. They agreed that Akebono looked good. And then, before we knew it, the gulmotids were filing in again above us. Okobuma. Okobuma. BATTLE!
I didn’t know what it was like in there when the bugs were fighting, but those big ugly bastards seemed to be having the time of their lives up there in the grandstands.
A few minutes later, in came the yokozunas again. And just like the first time, they circled, they made the same ritual movements, the same gestures, they tossed the salt, they approached the center of the ring, and, when they crouched and met eyes, they touched their knuckles to the floor.
Again, they charged toward each other and met with concussive force. This time when they hit, Akebono didn’t budge one inch backwards. They stood in the center slapping each other’s arms away, trying to find a way into the other’s body, to get an arm inside, to gain a foothold or a point of leverage to push. And you could see Koji getting turned back, trying again, and then, to the shock of almost everyone in the building, Akebono seemed prepared to absorb another fierce charge, only to sidestep ever so slightly, and in that flash of a second, position himself to get an arm under Koji’s shoulder, turning him sideways ever so slightly enough to get him off balance. Then he pounced on the advantage he’d created, running Koji San right out of the ring!
The place erupted in a kind of noise like I’d never heard before. The gulmots were roaring. The humans were shouting. Sayaka was jumping up and down. And Jackie, standing there wide-eyed with this sour look on her face like she’d swallowed a cricket on accident, grabbed me by the neck and shouted into my ear, “Damn it’s loud in here, Groober! I should’a brought my earmuffs.”
I started laughing. And this time, as Akebono strutted back to his spot, he looked over at Sayaka and winked.
Nobody had thought it would get that far. And as the place cleared out again for final bets. Ollie and Damien and Mitra came over, about as excited as I’d ever seen the three of them. We could hardly stand still waiting. But nobody was afraid anymore that Akebono was going to get hurt or humiliated or thrown out of the ring in shame. There was just the one doubt. As Akebono had said himself, Koji San was a great champion. He was as well. Anyone could win now that they were on level footing. I was looking around as Ollie and Damien went back to their seats on the other quarter of the ring, and as they did, I sorta looked across and met eyes with Fletcher, who was talking with some of his employees. They were all wearing those gold-rimmed sunglasses like Koji, and those guys were all hanging out with Fletcher because they had to because he was the boss. And he pointed across the floor at me and started shouting.
“Mega Sushi! Mega Sushi! MEGA SUSHI!!!”
“What an asshole,” Jackie Earmuffs said, holding up her hand toward him with her thumb and forefinger about an inch apart, and Fletcher knew exactly what she meant, scowling back at Jackie.
We all laughed at him. And then above, the gulmotids started yelling at each other. Mega Sushi! Top Sushi! Mega Sushi! Top Sushi! And they started stomping their big feet, creating a tremendous wave of noise as the bout was set to begin. And it only got louder as Akebono came walking in, a little extra swagger in that sumo strut. And then, in came Koji San. I don’t think I’d ever witnessed anything nearly that exciting.
They threw the salt, they bowed, they crouched, all the necessary movements, then, knuckles down, and BOOM! The two yokozunas crashed into each other in the center of the ring, and this time, they stalled out, pressed up against each other with either refusing to yield an inch. They both got hold of the other’s belt, and they rocked against each other, spinning, pushing, butting heads, trying to tip each other over, move the other backward, or gain any point of leverage. Five, ten seconds passed, each sumo taking turns seeming to gain some slight hint of the upper hand.
When it happened, it happened so fast I had no idea how he’d done it, but what it looked like to me was that Akebono stepped back at just the moment when Koji was trying to press forward, and he pulled down on Koji’s belt, forcing him to compensate with a big step back, and that was all our champion needed to get an arm under Koji’s, and then he tossed Koji San by the belt, launching his great big sumo ass—his legs tumbling over his head—clean out of the ring and into the first few rows of people crowded around the match in Fletcher’s section. As he landed, Koji sent beers and handbags and gold sunglasses up into the air in one big gigantic ball of chaos, while our side of the ring erupted in cheers.
I could honestly say at that point I’d never been so happy in all my life. I grabbed Jackie and Sayaka and we started jumping up and down as the gulmotids were shouting, “Okobuma! Okobuma! Okobuma!”
We had no idea what to do with ourselves. Akebono was nodding at us, kinda telling us to keep cool. I could see the guys, and they were thinking like me and Jackie to go running in there, mobbing the big fella, but that wasn’t how these sumos did business. He waited for Koji to get back to his feet, and they bowed and nodded to each other as a sign of respect, and then they just walked off the arena floor like it was another day at the office as the gulmotids went crazy above us.
So was that it? Oh no. That was just the start of all the crazy things that happened those last few months it was just me and Jackie in the bus together. Nobody on that floor needed to be a genius to know nothing would ever be the same in Bugtown. Galactic broadcast rights, sumo and bug battle doubleheaders, sushi for sushi like never before.
Jackie Earmuffs was right again. We hadn’t begun to scratch the surface of what was coming. Planet Earth had just got put on the galactic map, and our new friend Akebono Mori was the one to do it. And the last thing we saw as we were strutting out of the arena together with Ollie and the boys was Fletcher and his crew from Mega Sushi, and to top it all off, there was Fletch hiding behind his bent-rimmed gold sunglasses, and none of his boys had told him, but he had a big fat wad of clay smeared across his forehead from when Koji San went tumbling into the crowd.
We couldn’t enjoy the moment for too long, though. We had to get back to the Top Sushi and work the lines. Those gulmotids didn’t want to eat anywhere else that night. We at the Top Sushi were the kings of Bugtown.