Strawberry Yellow (20 page)

“No
shinpai
,” Mas said, sitting down. He had forgotten all about Evelyn’s rude comment.

“Where were you?”

“Castro-bi-ru. Monterey.”

“You saw Linus.”

Mas nodded.

“And—” Minnie waited.

“Dunno. Shug was goin’ ova there eberyday.”

“To develop their strawberry.”

Mas nodded again.

“That figures. That’s no surprise, I guess. But why was Shug making it such a secret?” Minnie removed her reading
glasses from the bridge of her nose. “And Monterey. You and Billy went to Laila’s parents’ house.”

Mas drummed his fingers on the table.

“I heard they live in a mansion there. Own houses in San Jose, Kona, and even Hong Kong. To tell you the truth, I didn’t know what Laila was doing with Billy.”

Mas wasn’t sure himself. “Gettin’ a detective,” he told Minnie. A real one.

“To find Laila’s killer? That’s good. I’m glad they are.”

Mas carefully watched Minnie’s eyes. Was she really glad?

She quickly changed the subject, waving her hands over her paperwork.

“So much to do still, even after the funeral. Did you change over all your bank accounts right away?”

Mas was embarrassed that Mari had handled most of his financial matters after Chizuko passed away.
Yakunitatanai
, you don’t have much usefulness, Chizuko would have said to him at the time.

“I have to wait at least another two weeks for the death certificate, I guess.”

Mas realized that there was some organization in Minnie’s piles of paper. Next to the bank accounts, he saw a document with the letterhead of the Santa Cruz County Coroner’s Office.

“Whatsu dis?” Mas couldn’t help but ask.

“Oh, the coroner’s report. The one they issued a few days after the autopsy. Just basic things. Contents in stomach, that type of thing.”

Without even asking permission, Mas began reading the report.

“He had some kind of stomach flu before he died, so there wasn’t much in there.”

“Strawberry,” Mas murmured.

“Isn’t that something? So ironic. The last thing he ate was strawberries.”

But that wasn’t the only thing. The other thing, according to the report, was rhubarb.

The first and last time Mas tried rhubarb was in Watsonville.

Jabami Farms always had some rows of field rhubarb, the green, full leaves hiding the long, popsicle-pink stalks. Mas had never heard of rhubarb before, but Oily and Shug would often get into debates about whether it was a vegetable or fruit.

Ats decided that she would bake a strawberry rhubarb pie. It would be a surprise for the crew, and more importantly, a surprise for Jimi.

After taking a small bite, Mas couldn’t help but pucker his face.
Suppai
!

“Does it taste all right? A little too tart, huh?” Ats asked.

The boys just kept quiet, but leave it to Evelyn to deliver the truth without any diplomacy. “Golly, Ats, it’s as sour as sour can be!”

Ats blinked away her tears, and Mas made up his mind to eat every single bite. He lived to regret it, however, because everyone who ate the pie got sick.

They took turns running to the toilet at the Stem House.

“Oh my gosh, what have I done?” wailed Ats, her face flushed.

They found out soon enough when they next convened at Jabami Farms. Jimi Jabami, stone-faced, stood in the middle of the rhubarb plants. “You could have killed somebody,” he scolded Ats. “You never eat the leaves. They are poisonous. You just use the stalks.”

“Oh.” Ats’s lips actually formed the shape of an “O.” She was terribly embarrassed, but she didn’t make a mad dash through the fields to escape her shame. Instead she stood squarely in front of them in her pedal pushers and sneakers. “I’m so sorry, everyone.”

“Hey, we’re alive,” Oily joked.

“No
shinpai
,” said Mas, telling her not to worry.

“Thank God I didn’t eat much,” commented Evelyn.

From that point on, Mas vowed never to eat rhubarb again. Sure, there were people in Japan who didn’t mind spending thousands of yen on a poisonous blowfish, but he figured that was for those who never really stared death square in the face. Mas, on the hand, had seen death too many times, and he wasn’t about to willingly invite it into his life.

Over the years, Jimi Jabami must have experimented with rhubarb, just because he was that type of man. Mas had heard that his father, Goro, had been the same. Goro and Wataru Arai, actually, were cut from the same kind of cloth—Issei men who were pioneers, inquisitive. They were unafraid.

Mas could visualize Jimi in front of his stove, boiling down vats of rhubarb leaves. Perhaps he first tested his deadly concoction on rodents, mice. Maybe even snakes. Was Shug his first human victim? Or had there been more?

It had been so easy, thought Jimi. So easy. But he knew that from being a cook all his life. Once you appeared with any kind of baked good—apple pie, German chocolate cake, oatmeal-raisin cookies—most people stopped thinking. They only responded with their eyes and stomachs. And Shug Arai was no different.

He hadn’t been eating well, he told Jimi, since Minnie had left town a week earlier.

“It’s a bit early for the rhubarb,” Jimi responded. “Someone at the temple mentioned that you were on your own, so I thought I’d bring this by.”

Shug looked confused at first, and then strangely touched. Jimi hadn’t been friendly like this in years, maybe decades. What had Shug been thinking? Perhaps that Ats’s sickness had softened Jimi?

Jimi thought it was all hubris. Shug’s pride that people would be talking about him, worried about him.

Jimi handed off the mini-pie, a perfect single serving for a gluttonous man. The crust had turned out perfectly, a glossy golden.

“Would you like to come in?” Shug asked.

No, no. He had to get back to Ats. Jimi bowed his head slightly and took his time going down Shug’s porch steps. As soon as he heard the screen door and then the regular door close behind him, he smiled. The big shot would eat his poison, and there wouldn’t be anyone to save him.

Jimi spent the morning in his rhubarb fields. Harvesting rhubarb was easy, just twisting the stalk and tearing it off. He loved to hear the snap, just like fresh celery stalks make. Today he had a knife to remove the fan-shaped killer leaves on the other end.

It felt therapeutic, as if he was actually accomplishing something. The caregiver was back from her trip and inside with Ats, so he had a few hours to himself.

In the distance, he saw a car parked on the side of the road, near his mailbox. Wasn’t that Shug’s car? Jimi dropped his knife. And was that Shug coming toward him?

Jimi cupped his eyes and then relaxed. It was Mas Arai, the man with nine lives. He used one of them up in Hiroshima, then another when his truck crashed on Hecker Pass. How many other times had he survived danger? How many more lives did the old man still have left?

Mas didn’t bother with saying “hallo.” He’d come for business. Purely business. When Jimi saw the hard line of Mas’s mouth, he understood. He picked up his knife.

“
Hayai, ne
, for rhubarb,” Mas said.

“Yup. Early. Came out of nowhere.” Snap, snap.

“No rhubarb in Japan,” Mas said. At least not in Hiroshima.

“There is something that tastes a little like it. Knotweed. Part of it looks like bamboo.”

Mas nodded. He was familiar with that.
Itadori
. “
Itadori
leaves like rhubarb. Poison.” Back in Hiroshima, their garden had its share of
itadori
. A stray cat had wandered into their yard one day; the next day, it was found dead hiding underneath the shade of some maple trees.
Itadori
was the culprit,
insisted Mas’s mother, a cat lover. The
itadori
was pulled out immediately.

Rhubarb leaves fell off the stalk with one movement of Jimi’s knife. The fields were so quiet now. A breeze moved through the ranch, and Mas swore he could hear the leaves rubbing again each other.

Jimi stood up from his work. “What do you want?”

“Shug neva do nuttin’ against you. Not really.” Mas still didn’t understand why Jimi would want to take his second cousin’s life.

Jimi frowned. He wasn’t sure how to react. Was this a trap? It well could be.

“Those strawberries,
mukashi no hanashi
.”

Jimi felt anger rise to his head. He knew what this Arai was trying to do. Throw in some Japanese words in an attempt to disarm or maybe even charm him. But
just things of the past
? Really? Was he supposed to forgive and forget? Oh, no, it was not that simple.

“You’re not from here. You don’t know.”

“I born here.”

“Watsonville may be on your birth certificate, but you don’t know what it feels like to get a notice that you need to leave your life for a shitty fairground with thousands of other people. To get the runs and stand in line for the bathroom with no stalls. To leave a field of ripe strawberries, the best crop you’ve ever had, for birds to eat. To watch your daddy die in the desert from all that dust. You don’t know jack shit.”

Mas couldn’t debate Jimi. The old man was right. Mas didn’t know. But Shug, Minnie, and the rest did. Why so much hate toward them?

“And then I see Shug Arai, riding so high. UC Davis grad, some kind of genius. And our strawberries—our strawberry variety—being stolen from us. What the hell did he think he was doing? Going to save the day with his strawberry? Make his millions with his strawberry?

“Then I heard what they’re calling it. The Masao. Your name. Why? You had nothing to do with that strawberry. So why you?”

Mas, ironically, had to agree.

“So Shug gets rich. But what about the rest of us?” Jimi’s head began to shake.

“So you goes ova there with a pie. Rhubarb pie.”

“Can’t prove anything. So what if one of the last things Shug ate was the pie? Doesn’t mean a thing.”

Mas turned and starting walking toward Shug’s Lexus. We’ll see, he thought.

“I wouldn’t make any accusations if I were you,” Jimi said.

Mas winced but kept walking, a little slower now. Was that a threat?

“We wouldn’t want you to lose another truck.”