House of the Red Fish (8 page)

“Why get everybody into this?” Billy said. “Let Keet and Rico go at it alone, like Rico said. Man-to-man, with no weapons. No need for all of us to fight.”

Still, nobody moved. You could almost hear minds grinding that up—man-to-man, settle it that way.

Slowly, bats and clubs came down.

Eyes shifted to Keet.

Inside, I grinned: Keet was scared. Looking at Rico, I would be too.

Rico tossed his bat away. “Now we talking. Come at me, you haole pig.” He circled out, motioning Keet closer with his fingers.

Keet’s face flushed and the veins on his neck popped out like worms. His eyes searched for a way out. Rico could look insane when he got mad. Like now.

“Come on,” Rico said. “I waiting, piggy. Let’s go.”

Keet swung. He had no choice. It was fight or be shamed.

Rico jerked his head back and Keet missed by a mile.

But Rico didn’t.

Bok!

Keet staggered back into the guy behind him.

The guy stood him up and pushed him back toward Rico.

Rico cracked him again.

Flesh slapping on flesh, an ugly sound.

I almost felt bad for Keet.

Keet stumbled up, blood drooling from his nose. He looked at me, not Rico, with hate. He swiped the back of his hand over his lips, coming away with blood.

Dwight grabbed Keet’s arm. “Finish this later.” He pulled Keet back. Keet made a feeble show of trying to shake Dwight off, but he let Dwight pull him away.

“He’s not worth it, Wilson,” Dwight said. “You could hurt the little spit, and you don’t want to get his mommy all upset, now, do you?”

Rico lunged at Dwight, but Keet tripped him and Rico went sprawling in the dirt. He scrambled back up.

Mose grabbed him from behind. “Let it go, cousin.”

Keet and his punks backed away, then turned and headed for the street. I wondered if some of them even knew why they’d come down to the canal.

Dwight stopped and called back. “Don’t think this is over. Don’t think you’re getting out of this, because you’re not. Understand, monkeys? Huh?”

He smiled, as if he were nice enough to be somebody’s friend. “Bye now.”

I knew for a fact that today would be the first time ever in his seventy-four years that Grampa Joji had gotten into a car like the Davises’, maybe even into
any
car. Trucks, maybe, but never a shiny car that Jake kept purring like a cat.

Kimi, Mama, Billy, me, Jake, and Charlie all stood around talking low in Billy’s yard when Mr. Davis drove up the long driveway, slow and importantly, giving Grampa Joji the royal treatment. Kimi jumped up and down with her hands flying in delight, ready to race up the second he got out. Mama held her back.

Mr. Davis parked and went around to help Grampa out.

Grampa creaked up, all five feet three inches of him, and stood straight and tall as he could, like some king. No smile, and no acknowledgment of us standing there holding our breath.

“Unnh,” he grunted, then bowed to Mr. Davis.

Mr. Davis bowed back and opened an arm toward us. “They’ve been waiting for you.”

Grampa lifted his chin higher, checking us over. He gave Charlie a thumbs-up, which made Charlie grin. And he nodded politely to Mama. When he saw Kimi, he actually gave her something you could think of as a smile. He held out a hand.

Mama let Kimi go and she ran over and wrapped herself around Ojii-chan’s legs. He took her hand. “We go look those eggs,” he said, slowly shuffling off with her, heading through the trees to his chicken coops as if he’d never been gone.

I punched Billy’s arm. “I told you so.”

We cracked up.

“Kimi,” I called. “Warn him about the goat.” She wouldn’t have thought of that, because Little Bruiser left her alone. It was only guys that beast attacked. All we needed was for Little Bruiser to chase Grampa Joji and scare him into another dizzy spell.

Kimi nodded.

“Thank you, Mr. Davis-sama, thank you,” Mama said, bowing again and again. Then she hugged him, something she’d never, ever done before to any haole. “Thank you,” she said again, backing away and lowering her eyes, her face flushed.

I stood stunned. But in these times anything could happen.

“You’re welcome,” Mr. Davis said. “And call me John.”

Mama hurried after Grampa and Kimi.

I shook my head. That’s my grampa. Just go off, like nobody else is here.

Billy glanced at me, grinning. I knew he was thinking the same thing.

Charlie put his hand on my shoulder. “You folks need anything, you come get me, okay?”

“Thanks, Charlie.”

“It’s great to have him home,” Mr. Davis said.

I grabbed Mr. Davis’s hand in both of mine and shook it again and again. “Thank you, Mr. Davis, thank you,
thank you
!”

I ran off after Mama, thinking about that goat.

Little Bruiser was right there by the chickens with his legs planted, head slightly down, staring at Grampa. “Watch out,” I called. “When he stares like that you know he’s going to charge.”

Grampa Joji stared back at Little Bruiser.

The goat kept his eyes fixed on Grampa, his head swaying slightly.

Any second now, I thought, trying to get between them.

Little Bruiser and Grampa stood there checking each other out. A moment passed, then the goat loped off to chew on a piece of wood.

What did I just see? Two old goats coming to a mutual understanding to leave each other alone?

Well, good grief.

That night we sat around the table in the blacked-out kitchen, me and Mama on one side and Kimi leaning up against Grampa across from us. Tea steamed from three cups. Mama had cooked him her best hot
udon,
which he slurped up like a thirsty dog.

“So, Ojii-chan,” I said, then waited for him to look up.

He just gazed at his steaming teacup. But he wasn’t dismissing me with one of his annoyed looks. That was good.

“So,” I went on. “What was it like at that camp? Where was it?”

He frowned, and his eyes flicked up and touched mine, for a second. “Kauai,” he said. “Wet … mosquitoes …
plenny
mosquitoes … mud all over.”

“How … how’d they treat you? Good or what?”

He thought, then shrugged. “No problem.”

“They treated you okay, then?”

“Jus’ those mosquitoes … bad, those buggahs, confon-nit. Bad food, too. No more squid.” He half grinned, then replaced it with his usual frown.

“Did you see anybody you know there? So many people from Honolulu got taken away. I thought—”

He shook his head. “Nuff … talk something else now.”

“Okay, Ojii-chan, fine. I understand.”

I glanced at Mama, who sat with both hands around her teacup. She was probably thinking what I was thinking: if they treated Grampa okay, then they were probably treating Papa okay too.

“Ojii-chan, wait!” I said, suddenly remembering the two postcards we’d gotten from Papa. I’d stuck them between the pages of one of our few books. The first one had come not long after he was arrested. All it said was that he was okay and that he wanted me to take care of things while he was away. Then there were months of silence. I figured the army probably wasn’t letting a lot of mail go out of the camps. Anyway, Papa couldn’t read or write English.

But a second card arrived a year later, and it made Mama
fall onto the couch and cry—not because of what it said, but because it proved Papa was all right. Like the first card, its postmark had been blackened by a censor.

“We got this one about three months ago, Ojii-chan,” I said. “Listen!”

Grampa said nothing. He took the card from me and studied the small, neat handwriting, then handed it back, nodding to himself. He pointed toward the first card we’d gotten, and I read that to him, too.

Ojii-chan scowled. “He doesn’t know about his pigeons,” he said in Japanese.

“No,” I said.

Ojii-chan grunted and finished his tea, then went to bed.

***

That night I slept in my room for the first time in weeks. And Grampa slept across from me, happy to be back on his tatami mat. The sound of his ragged snoring was so much like it was in the before time that I fell asleep smiling.

Our school, Roosevelt, went from grade seven to twelve, a public school. Keet Wilson and most of those fools he found to back him up went to Punahou, a private school. Billy’s brother, Jake, went there too. It was probably the best school in the territory, but not everyone could go there because you had to pay for it.

Our school was open to anyone—sort of.

There were restrictions. You had to pass a test to get in, an oral language test. That meant you had to be able to speak Standard English, as they called it. Anyone who wasn’t haole usually had a hard time, because that meant haole English. Most of us grew up with other languages spoken in our homes—Japanese, Chinese, Hawaiian, Filipino, Portuguese— and because of those different languages we all spoke what was called pidgin English so we could understand each
other. Pidgin was mangled and twisted with strange words and strange pronunciations from all those other languages. I loved it.

But Roosevelt didn’t.

Some of us could turn it off and on like a light switch. Standard English, pidgin English. No problem.

He’s such a troublemaker.
Or
Ho, da kolohe, him.

Let’s take the bus down to the canal.
Or
We go canal.

Those of us who made it into Roosevelt were lucky for one big reason—the teachers. They cared about us, worked us hard, treated us as if we were important to them. And the best teacher of all was Mr. Ramos, who we sometimes called Mr. Uncle Ramos, because he was Mose and Rico’s uncle.

Still, there were some junk teachers too.

One time a teacher whispered to me, “You don’t belong here, you know that, don’t you?” I wondered if she’d said that to the seven other Japanese kids in my class. But I shrugged it off, remembering something Papa and Grampa Joji taught me:
Gaman,
they’d both say.
Persevere. Face forward. Take that next step, no matter what. Keep going.
Yeah … forget the fools.

In Mr. Ramos’s class nobody was any better or any worse than anyone else.

“Who can tell me what’s going on in the war today?” he asked one day, strolling back and forth in front of the class with his arms crossed.

Nobody raised a hand.

“What?” he said, raising his eyebrows. “Nobody read the paper today? What have I told you about the newspaper, class?”

After a moment of silence, Rico said, “ To read it.”

“How often?”

“Every day.”

“Right. So who read this morning’s paper? Or at least glanced at it? What was the headline?”

Silence.

Mr. Ramos faced us. “You folks mean to tell me that my newspaper lecture went in one ear and out the other?”

We all looked anywhere but at Mr. Ramos. Including me. Sometimes I glanced at the paper, but the news was always old, because the only paper we got was the one that Mama saved and brought home from the Wilsons’ house after they threw it away.

“ ‘The Fighting Traditions of the United States,’ “ Billy said, finally. “That was one headline.”

Mr. Ramos took the paper off his desk and held it up. “ ‘The Fighting Traditions of the United States.’ Thank you, Mr. Davis, for taking something important from my class and using it in your life.”