Strawberry Yellow (13 page)

Robin had been good enough to include a computer printout of the map to Alyssa’s dormitory, a twelve-story building that looked like it could hold at least five hundred people. How could he find Alyssa amid all the other long-haired Asian coeds?

After he made a couple of missteps, a student who seemed to have pity for Mas pointed him toward a desk on the second floor of the building.

“Alyssa,” he said. “Lookin’ for Alyssa Arai.”

A young woman who could have been Alyssa’s twin, aside from wearing oversize red-framed glasses, furrowed her eyebrows.

“I’zu relative. Mas Arai. Family emergency.”

The girl bit the end of a pen and then dialed a number on the desk phone.

“Alyssa, there’s someone’s here for you. A relative. He says it’s an emergency.”

Within five minutes, Alyssa appeared from a long hallway. She didn’t even bother to say hello. She pulled Mas into a corner away from her bespectacled twin. “What are you doing here? Did something happen to my grandmother?”

Mas took Alyssa to the other side of the lobby. The student receptionist continued to keep an eye on them, but at least they were far enough that she couldn’t overhear their conversation.

“Robin tole me to come ova. Police comin’ to talksu to you. Don’t say nuttin’ to them. Robin gettin’ you a lawyer.”

“A lawyer? But why?”

“Police knowsu all about the te-le-phone calls you make to Laila.”

Alyssa began to blink furiously. “I had my boyfriend call. I wanted to scare Laila off. To tell her to move out of Watsonville. But we only did it a couple of times. Then my boyfriend said he didn’t want to be a part of it. We aren’t together anymore.”

Mas was ready to leave, but the girl apparently wanted to continue talking.

“I didn’t do anything to Laila. I didn’t bash her head in. I was sleeping over my aunt’s house when she was killed. The police can ask Robin and my brother.”

Why did Alyssa feel the need to spout out her alibi to me
? Mas wondered.

“You don’t think the police will want to talk to my ex-boyfriend?”

Naturally they will, Mas thought.

Alyssa quickly read his face. “No, that won’t be any good. He’s really pissed at me. I don’t know what he’ll say to the police.”

Apparently more frightened by the prospect of dealing with her ex-lover than with a murder charge, Alyssa started to tremble.

“Wait for lawyer,” he said, and she nodded.

“It’s all his fault, you know. My dad. If he had his midlife crisis or whatever by just buying a sports car, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

They then heard voices from the courtesy desk—a couple of men in bad suits were talking to the receptionist with the red glasses.

“Rememba, don’t say nuttin’,” Mas repeated to Alyssa before going out a side door.

Jimi got back in his truck. He placed his wrench back in the glove compartment. He was a stickler about returning
things to their proper place. The nut that he’d removed from a screw, he could have tossed it away, but he instead put it in his jeans pocket. Maybe he’d place it in a jar when he got home. A souvenir, at least before Jimi and Ats’s last days.

It had been easy with an old Ford truck from the 1950s. No electronics or computer circuit boards to deal with. Being a farmer, Jimi had serviced more tractors and pickup trucks than he cared to remember. But in this case, he wasn’t fixing a vehicle, but breaking it down.

He didn’t know whether he should follow the Ford on its way through Hecker Pass. Hecker Pass was winding like an angry snake on the side of a cliff. He wondered how the truck would crash. Over the ledge, falling, falling hundreds of feet below. Or perhaps it would be like that winter Olympics game, the bobsled. The truck would shoot down the winding road at record speeds and then crash into the side of a mountain, maybe even bursting into flames.

Jimi remembered traveling on Hecker Pass when he and his mother Itsuko returned from Poston. The loss of his father had been devastating enough in camp, but somehow it felt worse after they were released. At least inside, all the people seemed to prop them up, whether they liked it or not. But now free, they were unanchored, untethered. It was as if their small family was floating away from each other, never to meet again.

Itsuko never recovered from Poston. She spent her days outside beside her four stones. It was as if she felt every loss in her life, over and over again.

“It was harvest time, the fields full of red strawberries. We had to leave them all. I wonder if anyone picked the
strawberries,” she said, remembering when they were forced to leave their Watsonville land. Luckily they had an attorney who had taken care of the property taxes during their absence. But nobody was there for the strawberries.

The Taro, Jimi wondered. What had happened to the Taro strawberry?

One summer night, the night of Watsonville’s first Obon festival after camp, he could not sleep. Most of the Japanese, at least the Buddhist ones, were at the temple, dressed in cotton
yukata
, clutching and waving fans and cutting into the hot, humid night air with their sharp hand movements. Even though they lived miles away from the temple, Jimi swore he could hear the beat of the large drum, the
taiko
, with wooden sticks, pounding, pounding. He told his mother he was tired. Which he was, but there was also something else.

The Stem House was completely dark, the window shades down like closed square eyelids. The Arais, cornerstones of the temple, would be at the dance, which meant Jimi could finally pay the Stem House a visit. Armed with his flashlight and a leftover spare rib, he went through the unlocked front door.

The Arais’ black poodle, Kuro, started his insane barking, but as Jimi thought, the spare rib was a perfect bribe for the dog’s silence. Jimi himself was a dog lover, with two miniature collies at their farm house, but he had no affection for Kuro. Anything that the Arais cared for, he could not.

He swept the walls and furnishings with the beam of his flashlight. Their family portraits, their smiling faces seemed unending. In Jimi’s case, there were more family members in the ground than above it.

What had Jimi’s father said? The plants had been hidden in the basement. A couple of turns around the house and he spied a door cut into the side of the back stairs. He turned the glass doorknob and yes, found the steps leading to complete lower darkness. A perfect place for hibernating strawberry plants. He descended and circled the floor with the flashlight. He saw a dirt outline of squares and a lone crate, an old-fashioned one hammered together by hand. Jimi kicked it to the side and noticed the label. Jabami Farms, it read, with the painted image of a juicy strawberry adorning the label’s right side. He knelt down and picked up something on the ground that spilled out from the old crate. Strawberry roots, shriveled up like dead spiders, on the verge of disintegrating to dust. There must have been crates full of them at one time. And now they were gone.

Mas noticed something
okashii
, again funny peculiar, with the Ford right before he got on the highway. The truck lurched forward, and the front brake squeaked louder than usual.

Okashii
.

But then, there were a lot of
okashii
things with the truck. Although it was built in 1956, Mas had squeezed in a 1970 dashboard, compliments of a junkyard in Monrovia. It was a neon-yellow Chevrolet set, sawed off to fit the Ford and fastened together with black duct tape. Mas steadied the truck onto Hecker Pass. Driving over the pass on his way to San Jose had been a bit of an ordeal; the truck shook and
jerked like it was on drugs. Now, he figured that coming back to Watsonville would be a little easier. He’d be going downhill. Steep inclines, sharp, angled turns, fun for billiard players, but a challenge for old-man drivers. Mas knew he would have to pay attention.

The sun was starting to go down and the diffused light bothered his eyes. Beyond the two-lane highway, beyond the clumps of giant redwood trees, was a ledge to nothingness. The sky, a glowing gray, filled with the rolling fog.

Mas pulled at the steering wheel at an almost ninety-degree turn and pumped on the brakes. Another pump and another pump. Instead of slowing, the Ford seemed to be picking up speed. Mas fought with the old truck and leaned forward to put all his weight on the brake pedal. But the pedal was on the floor and there were no signs of deceleration.

In spite of the high speed, everything inside seemed to go in slow motion as the Ford went off the road. The crumpled coffee cup on the floor floated up as if it were in outer space. The pens and mini-flashlight jumped up from the cemented coffee cup, the makeshift ashtray danced in the air. The car visor flapped like the wings of a seagull. And then the truck rolled once or maybe twice. Mas felt the cinching of the seat belt around his belly and then he was flying, flying. An awful roar of the Ford’s exterior scraping against asphalt and rock. And then everything went black.

T
he first thing out of Mas’s mouth was, “Whathappentomytruck?” His voice sounded strange and muffled, as if someone was pressing on his neck.

“Mr. Arai, please relax.” The nurse gently pressed Mas’s shoulders back on his pillow. “Don’t try to speak.”

Mas’s head felt woozy and his throat was sore. There was some kind of beeping machine next to him. He focused on another figure in the room and practically jumped.

Mas frowned. “Hekillme?”

Oily’s mouth fell open.

“He’s heavily medicated. He doesn’t know what he’s saying.” Minnie was also in the room, which Mas now figured must be in a hospital. He couldn’t see her, but that definitely was her voice.

“
Chotto, chotto
,” he called out to her, and she obliged. He tugged at her sweater sleeve and warned, “Watchout, watchout.”

“Watch out for who?” Minnie looked puzzled.

“It may be better if you both leave now,” the nurse said to Minnie and Oily. “Let him get some sleep.”

It was so dark. But it wasn’t night. Black, black, black. Then orange flashes in a distance. Smoldering, suffocating fire. The
flames roared forward, licking the Hiroshima train station.

“Riki!” Mas yelled out. “Kenji!” And finally, his best childhood friend, “Joji!”

Where were they? Where were they? Mas grasped at his neck. Why couldn’t he breathe? The air was getting thin, and he kept scratching at his throat.

Suddenly a figure of shining white appeared through the ashes. Shug, but instead of the drooping shoulders, muscles the size of Superman’s.