Strawberry Yellow (27 page)

The reporters sitting in the front row straightened their backs and leaned forward.

“The Masao, I believe, would prove injurious to the cooperative, and I won’t let it be released.”

The reporters began to pepper Minnie with questions.

“What do you mean, ‘injurious’?” one called out.

“Would it be a financial liability?”

‘What’s wrong with the Masao?”

Linus attempted to talk over the reporters. “You are technically not the co-owner, Minnie. Sugarberry is. And as the co-inventor of the Masao, I’m here to tell you that it is a revolutionary berry.”

Yes
, Jimi said silently,
because its lineage goes back to the Taro
.

“We are part of the cooperative,” Minnie shot back, “and we object to the introduction of the Masao.”

All attention was on Minnie.

“You all have known me and Shug for years, some even decades. Trust me when I say that the release of this berry will endanger the future of our cooperative, not to mention our industry.”

“What’s wrong with it?” the question arose again.

“I can’t say. I’m sorry, but I can’t. If I did, our reputation would be damaged immediately. I cannot let that happen and I won’t let that happen.”

Circles of strawberry growers grew closer together, intensifying with energy. Mini-tornadoes of reactions whipped through the Sugarberry group, dressed in white shirts, and the Everbears members, dressed in red. The room filled with noise.

Jimi tried to make eye contact with Linus, but the breeder himself seemed overwhelmed. His arms were outstretched, his palms facing the ground, as if he was attempting to steady himself in a moving boat.

A
hakujin
man rose. It was Sperber, a member of Sugarberry. “I object, too.”

A Filipino man got up. Pabalan. “I object.”

Another Japanese grower, Ichida. “I object.”

A
hakujin
woman. Eisert. “I object.”

The objections continued. Pretty soon at least a dozen growers were standing. All part of the Sugarberry cooperative.

A few of them cast glances toward Jimi, halfway expecting him to join them. But he remained silent. All he cared about was the announcement, “Jimi Jabami, Sugarberry’s new breeder.”

Mas could not believe what he was seeing. Minnie and Oily were trying to prevent the release of the Masao. And how did Genessee get up here? Genessee, wearing a colorful print dress, turned around and searched the crowd. Finally her eyes found Mas’s. She smiled, a slice of dazzling white.

“Dr. Verdorben, can you tell us why you think your new berry is revolutionary?” a reporter asked.

A ring tone from Minnie’s cell phone rang out.

“Of course.” Linus gathered himself together, smoothing down his shirt. He was approaching the podium when Minnie, getting off the phone, took control of the microphone again.

“There is no Masao. The Masaos have been destroyed,” Minnie reported. She shook her phone in the air to express her glee.

Linus glared and pulled the microphone from Minnie. “Yes, there was a mishap in my test fields in Castroville. But I still have the mothers in storage up in Northern California.”

Another tussle for the microphone.

“No, sir, you do not. I just got confirmation that the Masaos were destroyed as of 11:17 a.m. today.”

“What’s going on?” one of the cameramen said, removing his earphones.

Mas tried to let the news settle in his head.
The Masaos had been destroyed
. Mas knew that strawberry farmers needed to store the runners, or additional growth of the mothers, in a cold area. Back in the late 1940s, Sugarberry was using a storage facility near the Sierra Nevadas that was owned by a Nisei who’d been in the same Poston block as the Arais. Minnie must have ordered the execution of the Masaos, and
the word was in—the deed was done.

Linus’s face darkened. “You had no right,” he said to Minnie.

“According to our living trust, it’s legally my storage facility now.”

Dazed, Linus reached for the edge of the podium so he wouldn’t lose his balance.

The strawberry commission spokesman spoke into the microphone. “Well, this concludes our press conference for today.”

The reality of what just transpired was starting to sink into Mas’s chest.
Was it over? Was it really over?

Jimi bumped into other growers as he rushed the stage.
What just happened?
Here he’d spent so much time trying to squash the Masao, and now technically it was dead. But what about him? What about his new position?

“The announcement,” Jimi said to Linus, “what about the announcement about me becoming a Sugarberry breeder?”

Linus stumbled from the platform, almost falling to his knees. “The Masao is dead. Dead. How can that be?”

The cameramen began to disassemble their equipment.

“Why the hell did we come here?”

“I have to get over to Silicon Valley now.”

“I know a great taco place around the corner.”

“Great, I’ll follow you.”

Mas felt someone tugging on his suit jacket.

“What’s going on, Mas?” Now a completely different style and color, Evelyn’s hair looked like strips of fried bacon. “Someone at my hairdresser’s said something was happening here.”

Mas ignored Evelyn, going in the opposite direction of the crowd.

“Genessee,” he called out.

Finally, she was in front of him. Her cotton dress made out of an Indian print accentuated her tiny waist. “I spoke to Minnie this morning, and she thought I should get up here. I was on the next plane for San Jose. Oily was able to connect her with a patent attorney, and we figured it was worth a try. I’m so happy for you, Mas.”

A ring of white-shirted Sugarberry members had surrounded Minnie, while Oily attempted to insert himself in some last-minute photographs with Clay and Billy, who proudly held a bowlful of Shigeos.

Evelyn, meanwhile, had caught up to Mas. “Hi, you must be Genessee,” She extended her hand. “I’m an old friend of Mas’s. We are all part of the same gang.”

Genessee, returning Evelyn’s smile, accepted the handshake.

Mas felt his face grow hot. What was Evelyn going to do, say?

“Mas has spoken very highly about you,” Evelyn said. “You must be a special lady.”

The world had turned upside down in an instant. No more Masaos. No public humiliation. And now here was Evelyn, being buddy-buddy with Genessee.

Minnie had somehow extracted herself from her Sugarberry coop partners to join them. “Jimi Jabami was here,” she told Mas. “Where did he go?”

Mas’s eyes scanned the room. Jimi was nowhere to be found.

He dismissed the caretaker and went to check in Ats’s room. She had been apparently very quiet that morning.

“Ats,” he murmured, collapsing in the recliner opposite her bed.

Her eyes were closed. The shape of her face had changed, Jimi noticed. Her cheeks had lost all their fullness, and even the sagging skin underneath her jowls had disappeared. She resembled the queen of spades, just eyes, nose, and barely a mouth visible.

How he wished he could speak to her. And she to him. Perhaps she would have tried to stopped his scheme to poison Shug. She would have told him that bygones were bygones. That the Arais were forced into camps just like the Jabamis were. In terms of the loss of the house and farm, it was
shikataganai
. It could not be helped. She might have blamed herself, her illness. But not enough to give up. She didn’t know how to give up. That’s one reason he loved her so much.

Without her counsel, he tried not to give up, either. Getting away with Shug’s murder was a sign. A sign that he could do more in this world.

Ats stirred, and her eyes seemed to be fluttering open.

“Ats,” he said, “the Arais did it to us again. But I’m going to have a strawberry of my own. I’m going to be a breeder, thanks to Linus Verdorben.”

Ats’s eyes were pools of black, reminding Jimi of her cat’s when it went blind.

Both her hands were underneath her comforter. She
slowly pulled out her left hand and extended it toward her husband.

Yes, yes, my sweetheart. My wife.

Jimi got up and clasped the hand that was being offered. All delicate bones barely held together by almost transparent skin.

The comforter moved again.
What was that?
On the right side, something black and metallic.

A blast and Jimi felt a force go through his chest, his rib cage, his heart. The pain stunned him but soon, thankfully, he couldn’t feel a thing.

His body slipped to the ground. His hands padded the front of his shirt. It was slippery, like the first rain falling on a dirt road. His eyes were closing, and before they were completely shut, he heard another blast in the room.

O
f all the people who would hear the news of the Jabamis’ murder-suicide, Oily was the last person Mas would bet would take it so badly. But he did.

He jumped from his seat and stomped out of the room.

Brushing down his upper lip, the assistant district attorney remained in his chair in the middle of Minnie’s living room after delivering the news. Not only were Oily, Mas, and Minnie there, but also Evelyn and Genessee. It was the old gang minus Shug but plus one, a very important female one.

“You better talk to him,” Minnie told Mas.

Genessee, sitting next to Minnie, nodded her head.

Why does it have to be me?

Oily was a businessman and a playboy, which meant he was an eternal opportunist. When sales were down one day, he always trusted that sales would go up the next. When one marriage failed, he looked forward to the next one. The fact that Ats had given up on Jimi, not to mention on herself, distressed Oily to no end.

“Ats was the one who always pulled us together,” Oily said as they stood in the kitchen.

Mas had been away from their circle for so long that he didn’t quite understand what Oily was talking about.

“Every birthday she’d remember. Every time someone was sick, she’d be there with chicken soup. She took care of us. She’d never give up on life.”

Mas thought Oily was being a little
ogesa
, exaggerating Ats’s role, because if she were so important to them, where were they when she needed them most?

“Maybe dis way she tryin’ to keep Jimi from doing bad things,” Mas said. From what more he didn’t know.

When the two of them finally went to rejoin the group, the attorney was on his way out. “Let me know what you’re planning to do,” he told Minnie. “You’ll have to get your own lawyer to stop it.”

Hearing the word “lawyer” from a lawyer made Mas feel queasy. After the door closed behind him, Mas asked, “Whatsu goin’ on?”

Seated in her place on the couch, Minnie squeezed one of its cushions. “A judge has cleared the Smiths’ request to exhume Shug’s casket.”

Mas stood back and watched his friends wrestle with this new development.

“That’s sacrilegious. You can tell the judge that it’s against your religion,” Evelyn said.

“But most Buddhists cremate, and I buried Shug, just in case the toxicology report came up fishy. So there goes that argument.”