Strawberry Yellow (14 page)

“Shug, what are you doing here?” Mas gasped.

“I’ve come to save you.” Shug’s voice sounded strange; it echoed through the hollow station. Where were his childhood friends, where were the passengers? And where was the fire?

The ground then shook, the walls giving way, more dust and debris falling, falling. Got to get out, got to get out.

“Mr. Arai! Mr. Arai!” The nurse called out.

Mas pried his eyes open.

In his hands was his tracheotomy tube, extracted from his throat. Mas tried to swallow, but his mouth felt destroyed. Raw.

“You weren’t supposed to pull out your tube,” the nurse said, annoyed. “Now we’ll have to put that back in.” She left to get the doctor.

Luckily, the doctor determined that Mas could probably breathe on his own, with the help of an oxygen tank. So the hole in his throat was cleaned and bandaged and a simple plastic tube laced underneath his nostrils and held in place
by his earlobes. Still not ideal, but more comfortable. At least he could speak better now, which he did when Minnie finally returned to the room.

“I see Shug,” Mas told him. “In my dreams, I see him.”

Minnie smiled, if you could call it a smile. Just a faint upturn of her upper lip. “He’s in my dreams, too.”

“Heezu all white, shiny like a star. Muscle all ova.”

Minnie chuckled, covering her mouth. “Are you sure that it was Shug? What you’re describing sounds like that man on my cleaning detergent, Mr. Clean. Maybe the TV was on while you were sleeping.”

Why did the Shug in his dreams say that he had come to save them? Save them from what?

Minnie sat in the padded chair next to Mas’s bed. “One time I dreamt that Shug was on a stage, like in a music concert. He was surrounded by cheering young people. It was quite a scene. But then he fell off the stage right onto his head. He was wimpering for me to help him. I couldn’t reach him.” Minnie then sniffed loudly and Mas regretted bringing up the dream. He tugged at his hospital wrist band.

“You gave us quite a scare, Mas.” Minnie rested her pocketbook on her lap. “And I think you hurt Oily’s feelings. He didn’t want to come back here.”

“Heezu the one, Minnie. Heezu the one who killed Shug.”

“Now, now, you’ve been through a lot. Don’t you worry; we’ve called Mari and the whole family is coming up tomorrow, after your son-in-law finishes work.”

Mari, Lloyd, and the grandson.
Oogoto
. Chaos. No, no, no. Also Mas knew how difficult it was to travel with the
toddler. And with the regular baseball season starting, Mas knew that Lloyd was overburdened with work. Not much his son-in-law did was impressive to Mas, but being connected to Dodger Stadium was actually something to brag about—even though he was a groundskeeper and not a player or executive. “No, no,
da-me
.” Mas tried to pull himself from the bed with the metal handrails. His lips were bone dry; when he touched them, flakes of skin fell off.

“Mas, relax, please relax.” Minnie attempted to push him back on the bed.

“You call Mari. Tell her don’t bother to come.”

Minnie sighed and got out her cell phone and, using her address book as a reference, dialed some numbers. She apparently got Mari on the other line, because she started to give a full medical report: “Uh, huh. Concussion. He’s got a few scrapes. And they had him on a breathing tube, but he’s off of it now. Yeah, yeah.”

“Lemme talk.”

“Here he is.” Minnie held the cell phone to Mas’s ear.

“Dad, how are you doing?”

“Don’t come ova.”

“What are you talking about? Of course we are coming. I’ve booked our flights. We will be there tomorrow night.”

Mas pulled the phone from Minnie and held it to his other ear. “No, no, I’m
orai
. You all gotsu
yoji
to do.”

“Don’t talk about work. You’ve gone through a serious accident. You can’t be there on your own.”

“Not alone. Minnie here.” Mas looked at Minnie and she nodded her head. She took the phone from Mas’s hand.

“Mari, don’t worry. He obviously doesn’t want to burden
you, but we’re here for him. I have time to watch him and after he’s discharged, he can stay with me.” Minnie then turned her back from Mas. “Yes, well, it’s been totaled,” she said. “Yes, completely.”

What was totaled? Was it what Mas feared it to be?

“Do you want to say anything more to her?” Minnie asked Mas.

Mas shook his head. He felt frozen. Coldness spread down to even his fingertips.

Minnie flipped her phone off and took a deep breath. “The Ford’s gone, Mas,” she said. “It’s no more.”

Mas remembered when he first laid eyes on the Ford. It was a dealership in South Pasadena, where a former gardener, Yak Fujii, had started to work part-time as a salesman in the 1950s.

There had been a recent run on Ford trucks, not to mention the Chevrolet—usually pronounced She-bu-re by Kibei, men who were born in the U.S. but raised in Japan. For the undiscerning, there was little difference between the Ford and Chevy—the same blue-green exterior, the shade of the bottom of a moldy swimming pool. Yet there was a difference.

There was only one 1956 Ford truck left in the dealership, the last model for the season. While the She-bu-re’s white grill evoked a skeleton wickedly smiling, the Ford’s look was more
shibui
, restrained. More Japanese in an American-made body.

What Mas also appreciated were the Ford’s running
boards, which were positioned right below the doors—easier to step in and out when you were only five feet two. Mas went back and fourth with Yak a couple of times, then it was a done deal. The Ford was his.

After all these years, the Ford was his only surviving companion. It was there, carrying Mari as she jumped onto the back bumper and held onto the tailgate as he eased into the driveway after a long day’s work. It was there, working, when Chizuko passed away from cancer. It was there when their dog died. His Ford had survived being stolen and stripped. But it had not survived Hecker Pass.

The loss of the Ford was more painful to Mas than the tube that was shoved down his throat. Who would he be without his fifty-year-old trusty sidekick? What car would he drive? The room seemed to move and shift. Mas felt sick to his stomach. He asked for a bedpan and vomited over and over again.

Jimi Jabami had never seen anything quite like it. The truck turning over not once, but two times. The neon-yellow seat shooting out with its passenger tied to it like a rag doll. The hunk of metal squashed like an aluminum can. And the sound. The sound was incredible. Worse than anything he had ever witnessed in a junkyard.

Jimi had parked his truck behind a grove of redwoods. Soon other cars and a semi stopped, blocked by the smashed Ford pickup. A couple of people had run over to Arai, who was attached to the ejected seat. They were trying their cell
phones, but there was no reception. The trucker then got on his CB radio; authorities were on their way.

Jimi waited until the paramedics arrived, unbuckled Mas from his yellow throne, and moved him to a gurney. He saw no sign of a coroner, which meant one thing: Mas Arai was still alive. He had nine lives, like that stray country kitten Ats had adopted. The kitten had been run over by a tractor—every single bone in its trembling body should have been crushed, yet it lived. It mewed its way through ten more years.

This stump of a man had survived the atomic bomb, Jimi then recalled. There was something in his genes that kept him going and going. Other than sporadic visits to the temple, Jimi was not a religious man. He did believe an eye for an eye, however. There was something—or someone—who wanted to keep Mas Arai alive. So maybe the thing to do was not necessarily seek to destroy him, but keep him distracted, at least until it was over.

When it was time to pick up Mas, Minnie didn’t come alone. Oily stood behind her, his lower lip extended like a sumo baby’s.

“I can’t have you two feuding if you’re staying with me, Mas,” Minnie said, her purse hanging from her arm.

“He’s the one who’s accused me of being a cold-blooded killer of my best friend. I don’t appreciate that.” Oily’s voice shook.

“Listen,” Minnie interrupted. “I don’t care how you do it—but you two work this out. Right now. Before we leave.
I’m going to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee.” She disappeared out the door.

Mas was dressed in Shug’s pants and shirt, because his had been cut open by the medics. He leaned against the hospital bed. He wasn’t going to be the first one to talk.

“Minnie told me that you think I stole Shug’s computer,” Oily finally said. “Well, you’re right. I did.”

Mas was surprised by Oily’s easy confession.

“We’ve been worried about the progress of Billy’s variety, whether it would stand up to Sugarberry’s strawberry. We figured if we just had a look at Shug’s patent before it was filed, we’d know what we’d be up against.”

“Who’s ‘we’?” Mas asked.

“My boss. The president of Everbears. Clay Gorman.”

As he spoke, Oily’s whole body seemed to grow a bit smaller. “We’re kind of in trouble, Mas. Overextended ourselves. Grew a little too fast in too many different kinds of berries. And then Clay’s vanity project, the Forever Resort. He wants to use that as a tool to attract venture capitalists. We’re in the red, and I’m not talking strawberry red. I should have retired a long time ago, but I need to keep working to support all my ex-wives.”

Mas breathed in and out, still feeling a soreness at the base of his throat.

“Anyway, Shug’s computer was wiped clean, as you probably heard. I should have known as much. But I told my boss that I would at least try.”