House of the Red Fish (2 page)

And what did the pigeons do that was so terrible the FBI had to kill them?

And what had Grampa Joji done, an old man who raised chickens?

That was all my family had. Fishing and chickens. It was how we lived.

Now, me and Mama and my five-year-old sister, Kimi, survived off the pennies Mama made as a housekeeper for the Wilsons, the rich family whose land we lived on. We stretched that money as far as it would go.

“You the man of the house now,” Mama told me the day they took Grampa away. That night she’d cried, silent and alone in the war-darkened kitchen.

So many times after that day I’d said, “I can quit school and get a job.” But she was firm. “No, Tomi-kun. You go school. Work summertime. We fine. School more important.”

She wouldn’t budge. “Work summertime.”

Last summer I made a few dollars washing cars at the service station over by the grocery store. Maybe this year I’d work down at the pineapple cannery.

***

Me and Billy squatted on our heels at the edge of the canal, silent, barefoot, in long pants and loose shirts. What we wore to school. I was thinking I should have gone straight home, because this was Kimi’s day,
Hinamatsuri,
or Dolls’ Festival, the day my family celebrated a girl’s growth and happiness.

But here I was at the canal again, staring at Papa’s boat.

Underwater.

Sunk the day it was towed to this spot, we’d heard—a hole axed in the hull.

Even though it made me feel helpless, I kept coming back, because with Papa and Grampa Joji away in U.S. Army prison camps, looking down on the
Taiyo Maru
was my way of still being with them, the three of us together— grandfather, father, son. That sunken boat and two postcards we’d gotten from Papa was all I had of them.

I was thankful that Billy had come with me. He was the best friend I’d ever had. I was glad he’d convinced his parents he should stay at Roosevelt High for one more year, instead of changing schools and going to private school at Punahou like his brother, Jake. Billy liked Roosevelt. All his friends were there.

He stood a head taller than me now, blond, almost five-eleven. He could lift me up and set me on the hood of a jeep, if he wanted to. But I was strong, too, because every day I worked at lifting a thirty-pound boulder I found in a stream to build myself up for baseball. Also, I’d worked pulling up
fish on Papa’s boat. “Haw! Bonecrusher, you,” Billy once said when I gripped his hand. “You could crush a tin can with that grip.” Made me feel pretty good.

Across the water a blanket of trees smothered the jumble of low houses behind Waikiki. Just below us the canal sat rusty brown, with mullet nosing through the muck for food, waggling in and out of sight around Papa’s boat.

“Looks kind of sad, doesn’t it?” Billy said.

Moss fuzzed green on a coil of rope on the wood-planked deck.

I nodded.

The boat sat on the muddy bottom in about eight feet of water. Only a foot or two of its deckhouse stood above the surface. Its name,
Taiyo Maru,
was soberly lettered in black across its white stern transom, and bullet tracks trailed across the decking, a reminder of that dark day. That was the worst to look at—the bullet tracks. Sanji died right there on that deck, I thought. Papa must have crawled around with his bleeding leg trying to help him, to bring him back, looking up to see how far away the island was, searching for help … when Sanji was already gone.

“Tomi,” Billy said. “You okay?”

I nodded, turning my face away.

Billy tossed another pebble into the water.

I was grateful for his silence.

The
Taiyo Maru
wasn’t the only sunken boat here. There were ten of them, all Japanese fishing sampans.

I pinched the bridge of my nose.

“We got to stop coming here, Tomi,” Billy said. “There’s
nothing you can do. What’s done is done. Brooding over it won’t bring it back up.”

Billy scooped up a handful of dirt and added, “Actually, the boat looks okay, you know … I mean, it’s not all broken up or anything. It looks good.”

“Except that it’s on the bottom.”

“Well, yeah, there’s that.”

All these boats had been in the canal for over a year. Before he was arrested Grampa told me the army chopped holes in them and sank them so they couldn’t be used against us in the war. But I keep thinking … fishing boats? Small sampans? What harm could they do?

I peered into the water. How bad was the hole?

Maybe someday I’d dive down and take a look.

The other sampans wobbled under the surface nearby, the tops of their small deckhouses sitting on the water like gravestones, some straight up, some angled, sinking sideways.

I turned to look back over my shoulder, the world feeling eerily still, as if someone were sneaking up on us. But the wide field of dirt and weeds and the thick bushes that blocked the narrow streets and low buildings of Honolulu from view were as vacant as when we got there.

Billy skimmed a pebble across the water, where circles ballooned out and jiggled the clouds sleeping on the glassy surface. “Let’s go home.” He pushed himself up. “It’s getting dark. Curfew’s soon.”

“Yeah,” I said, but didn’t move.

Billy crossed his arms and checked the sun, now easing toward the sea.

I picked up a stone and slammed it into the canal. If a wall had been there I would have hit it with my fist. “I can’t help it, Billy. It’s Papa’s boat. It was all he had. How can I just leave it here to rot?”

“What can you do?”

A thought came flickering back, one that had popped up the day before while I was daydreaming in class. An impossible thought.

Wasn’t it?

“I could bring it up.”

Billy snorted. “And I can lift a car with my bare hands. Come on, we gotta get home.”

I shrugged and stood. Yeah, what could I do, even if Billy helped me? Two ninth-grade kids.

“Let’s
go,
“ Billy pleaded. “We gotta get home before curfew. You might not mind getting shot at, but I sure do.”

We started across the dirt field, because Billy had a point. The islands were under martial law and it was getting dark; we were running out of time. The dangerous time would double in an hour and triple in two.

Because at sundown, shadowy self-deputized block wardens came swaggering out into the night like roaches, guys with itchy fingers who roamed the streets with old rifles and rusty pistols looking for something to shoot.

For the first time in my life I had bad feelings for Japan, because after they destroyed Pearl Harbor, every Japanese person in Hawaii, U.S. citizen or not, became suspect. We got second looks everywhere we went, hooded eyes watching, wondering. Is this one a spy? That one? What are they planning next? It was crazy.

Mr. Wilson, whose land we lived on, was one of those guys. He was part of an organization called the BMTC, the Businessmen’s Military Training Corps. Only white people, haoles, could be in it. And they all had guns. At school, our teacher Mr. Ramos warned us to watch out for them even though we were kids, because sometimes those guys got trigger-happy. “We’re in the middle of a war now. It’s dangerous, and the future is unknown.”

I glanced back at the deckhouse on the
Taiyo Maru,
the only visible part. Too much time had passed. The engine was probably shot. But … maybe it could be cleaned up and fixed. The hull would dry out and be fine, but the moving parts were probably crusted with corrosion.

Billy nudged me and motioned with his chin.

Down the way, emerging from the bushes, seven guys broke out and bunched toward us. Haoles. Older than us, maybe by two or three years. I’d seen some of them around but didn’t know them by name.

Except for one.

Seeing him was like swallowing gasoline.

Me and Billy slipped into the weeds.

Back on the streets it was easy to hide.

For sure, the seven white guys didn’t know this part of Honolulu like we did, a jungle of alleys and old buildings. Loose-planked fences to escape into. Spooky streets they might worry about going down, streets with mean dogs and centipede boys who wouldn’t be happy to see haoles anytime, anywhere, especially rich guys who lived in green neighborhoods up near the mountains, sons of the BMTC who made it clear that they were keeping their eyes on anyone who wasn’t like them.

Which meant me.

Billy, too, for that matter. They called him a Jap-loving traitor.

Mr. Davis, Billy’s father, told us, “Guys like that are ignorant,” as if he were spitting the words. “Ignore them.
Don’t engage them. You fight with skunks, you always come away smelling bad.”

Which was just exactly what Papa would have said if he’d been here.
Don’t fight, Tomi-kun,
he would say.
Don’t shame the family. Be helpful, be generous, be accepting.
He always said stuff like that, even about people who were anything but those things.

Papa didn’t know how hard that was for me.

But my Grampa Joji would fight back. I knew he would— at the right time, and someplace where shame wouldn’t be a problem, because no one would see him. Grampa had no second thoughts about standing up for himself.

But Grampa was over seventy years old.

I frowned, thinking back to right after Pearl Harbor got bombed. Fear had made me and Grampa Joji hide everything we had that was Japanese—the
butsudan,
the altar to my grandmother; all Mama’s letters from Japan; the photograph of the emperor; Grampa’s flag of Japan; and whatever else we had. Most important was our family
katana,
or samurai sword, the symbol of our family’s long history. I’d wrapped it in a
furoshiki
scarf and a burlap sack, then buried it in a secret place in the jungle, feeling ashamed that I’d had to do it. I’d thought to ask Billy if he would hide it at his house, but didn’t, because if he got caught helping us do that it might get the Davises in trouble.

I mashed my lips together. Just thinking about doing that to Billy’s family made me feel ashamed.

After I’d buried the katana I went back into the jungle every few weeks to dig it up and clean it so it wouldn’t rust or corrode. Then I’d bury it in a new location in case of … I
don’t know what … but it made me feel better. Nothing was as important to our family as that katana, and I would fight to my last breath to guard it. I dreamed of the day when I would dig it up for the last time and shine it until I could see my face in its blade, then display it so it would be the first thing Papa and Grampa would see when they came home.

“Look,” Billy said, lifting his chin toward the side of a sorry-looking concrete building freckled with bullet holes. Boards covered its windows, and the front was pockmarked and gouged with shrapnel from the day of the attack. Most of the damage around Honolulu had been done by us, firing back at the Japanese planes. Those bullets had to land somewhere.

We hurried on, racing the sun.

Like seeing the shot-up boat, the pocked building made me think about Papa. Long ago I’d given up hope that the army would figure out that he wasn’t siding with Japan and would release him. Now, my only hope was the end of the war. When it was over he’d come home—I would never stop believing that. And when he did, he would need that boat. I couldn’t even imagine what his life would be like without it. How would he work? How would we survive? We’d never be able to save enough for another boat.

“Why’re you so quiet?” Billy said. “Still thinking about bringing it up?”

“I guess.”

“It’s too big of a job, Tomi. You’d need heavy equipment.”

“Maybe we could get it.”

He snorted.

“Okay, maybe we can’t get heavy equipment, but with enough guys … you, me, Mose and Rico. Some of the guys on the team, we could—”

“We’re ninth graders, not a salvage operation.”

“So?”

“So nothing. We’re just talking.”

We headed up toward Nu’uanu, where we lived. Billy’s house was on the estate next door to the one we lived on. From my house I could barely glimpse his place, a sprawling white house in the trees. Our house was a small shack on the Wilsons’ property. We only lived there because Mama was the Wilsons’ housekeeper. Mr. Wilson was a banker. They had a big house with a jungly green yard, a tennis court, a dog, Rufus, and one son—an eleventh grader named Keet.

Who was the one who’d sent the gasoline through my gut down at the canal.

We used to be friends, me and him. But around the beginning of sixth grade that easy world caved in and I quickly turned into his worst enemy. I don’t know why for sure, but Billy thought he knew. It took me a week to force it out of him. Keet Wilson had been told by his friends at school that white guys weren’t supposed to like Japanese guys, so what was he doing hanging around with me?

Fine, I thought. If that was the way it was. Fine.

I could live with that. I didn’t need him.

It was too bad, though, because I used to like Keet. I learned things from him. He was smart, very smart. All he had to do was hear something once and he remembered it. He craved anything to do with the military, too. Actually, he was obsessed by it. “You ever heard of Annapolis?” he once
said. “Well, that’s where I’m going.” He told me about the United States Naval Academy, and how you could learn to fly fighters there, and become an officer in the navy after you got out. He had his eye on flying off aircraft carriers. “Wow,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go to that academy too.” He laughed and said, “I don’t think so.”