Strawberry Yellow (3 page)

Billy had stepped away from the test plot, so Mas couldn’t help but sneak in a taste of the Masao. He pulled off one of the larger berries. It was firm, a meaty chew with a sweetness that tasted familiar. He remembered the berries developed early by the University of California, the Shasta and Lassen. This one wasn’t that different from the Shasta, he thought. What was so special about the Masao?

Ban! Ban!
The clattering of wood hitting wood.

Shug’s son was on the porch of the Stem House, pulling off the slats over the door with his bare hands.

Mas frowned. Had the boy gone
kuru-kuru-pa
? He moved as quickly as possible in the darkness. The decaying stairs creaked under his weight, the top one almost collapsing.

“Whatchu doin’?” Mas hissed, even though there was no one around. “Not your house no more.”

Billy tugged at an especially stubborn three-by-five. “Don’t worry. Nobody cares.”

Mas picked up the flashlight from the porch so he could get a better look at what Billy was trying to do.

“Youzu bleedin’.”

Billy didn’t stop. “You gonna help me then?” he said, as the door frame seemed to moan in pain.

“
Chotto, chotto
.” Mas cursed, first at Billy and then at himself. Whatthehell was the boy thinking? Why did he agree to come in the first place?

Taking the flashlight with him, Mas stumbled back to the Ford and pushed the front seat, a junkyard find, forward. He grabbed hold of a hammer, saw, and crowbar and then felt the floor for another flashlight.

He presented his finds to Billy, who had collapsed on the porch, sweat running down his face. He was gulping down another beer. “My dad was right. He said you were always prepared for anything.”

Together, with the tools, they easily completed the extraction. Billy, of course, entered first. Mas, clutching his flashlight and the crowbar, followed.

The inside of the house smelled awful. A mixture of piss and mold and body odor. Billy immediately began to sneeze, and Mas attempted to breathe out of his mouth.

There was still some old furniture left in the house, some even old enough to be from Mas’s day. But it was all beaten down and soiled, no use to anyone.

“They found vagrants sleeping inside the house. Almost set the house on fire. Boarded it up. Some of them have since moved into the greenhouse. There was even talk of a
dead body found in here once.”

Mas didn’t doubt it.

The house was terribly rain damaged. Mold had grown and died in every crevice and corner.

“We needsu to get outta here,” Mas said, hearing some kind of noise upstairs.

“Don’t worry. It’s probably just a rat.”

Mas didn’t understand why Billy wanted to come inside the house. It almost seemed as though he was looking for something. But what? What good could come out of this mess of a house that wasn’t taken already?

Before Mas could stop him, Billy was climbing up the staircase, which obviously wasn’t in the most stable condition.

“I’zu leavin’,” he declared, but that didn’t stop Billy.
Maybe I can call someone for help. Oily?

But Mas had no cell phone and there was no working phone that he could see.

Shikataganai.
Mas could only follow Billy up the stairs like a good-for-nothing sheep.

He saw Billy disappear into the corner room, the round room where Mas had slept when he lived there. When he walked in the door, he saw that Shug’s son had collapsed on one of the beds, clutching a couple of his leftover beers.

Sonafugun. Mas shook Billy, but he obviously was out, at least for the night.

Mas shivered, hearing something moving in the corner of the room. What now? If he left the drunken man and Billy fell down the decrepit stairs by himself, Mas would be haunted for the rest of his life.

No, once he opened the motel door to Billy and had
driven them both to the Stem House, he had made a commitment to see this thing through. He chose the mattress (it couldn’t have been the same mattress from the 1940s, could it?) on the floor by the window. Zipping up his windbreaker so no stray bugs or rodents could gain entry, he lay down and willed himself to sleep. Everything will be all right in the morning, he told himself. He’d go to the funeral and then get into the Ford and be on his way back home. As he drifted off, he apologized to his daughter, grandson, and even son-in-law. In spite of the all the
monku
that he’d expressed silently and not so silently about them, life with them was a picnic compared to this.

Sirens, not his grandson’s cry, roused Mas from his sleep.

Sunlight came through the slats of wood hammered over the windows.

He looked at the mattress where Billy had been sleeping. It was empty.

The sirens, meanwhile, were getting louder and louder. Mas pressed his face to the slats, feeling splinters burn his cheeks. First he saw the police cars. A few minutes later, a white car with an emblem proclaiming the Santa Cruz County Sheriff-Coroner’s Office pulled into the dirt driveway.

I
t had been a dog that discovered the body. A purplish-colored pit bull that was now wagging his tail by his owner’s feet. He was chewing on an old discarded baseball mitt, apparently his reward for his find.

The only thing that Mas could make out from the dog’s owner was that it was the body of a woman. A dead homeless vagrant, Mas figured. One of the trespassers that Billy had been talking about. Mas wanted to get out of there as soon as possible, but his Ford was completely surrounded by the police cars. Even worse, an officer had opened the truck’s door and was doing a full-scale search. Mas saw him opening the glove compartment—it would only be a matter of minutes until they identified him as the owner. So he stepped forward.

“Sorry, this is a crime scene. You’ll have to stand behind the tape.” A policeman tried to shoo Mas away.

Mas saw a stretcher being carried toward the greenhouse.

“Dis my truck,” he said.

“This is your truck? Lieutenant—we have the owner of the vehicle here.”

Mas had dealt with his share of policemen and women, so he braced himself for probing questions, perhaps even skepticism.

The lieutenant was an Asian woman, her hair streaked with gray and secured back in a bun. One of her officers handed over the Ford’s registration papers.

“You are Masao Arai?”

Mas nodded.

“I’ve heard of you.”

Mas widened his eyes.

“I think we are distantly related. My name is Robin Arai.”

Mas and the lieutenant played family tree for at least ten minutes. He figured out that this Robin was Shug’s niece. She was Billy’s cousin, and she’d pretty much been raised by Shug and Minnie. The father had died in Chicago in some freak accident in the fifties, shortly after this girl Robin had been born.

“You’re here for Uncle Shug’s funeral.”

Mas nodded.

“I live in dis house,” he explained.

“In the forties, right? After World War Two?”

He nodded again.

“So you came here last night to take a trip down memory lane.”

“Nah, well, Billy—” Mas was in a quandary about how much he should share about Shug’s son being the one to come here in the first place.

“Was Billy here?”

Mas now regretted spilling the beans.

“Did I hear that right? Billy Arai was here last night?” A man as short as Mas interrupted their conversation. He wore the same uniform as hers, except that his narrow nametag read, “Sergeant Arturo Salgado.”

Mas felt his face grow hot. He could taste the unbrushed crud in the back of his dentures.

“It’s okay, Sergeant, I have this covered.”

Someone called Robin over to the greenhouse. She abruptly excused herself, leaving Mas alone with Salgado.

“I bet you have it covered,” Salgado muttered to himself. “Covering your family’s ass as always.”

Mas was shocked to hear the insult coming from the police officer’s mouth. Robin and Sergeant Salgado were supposedly on the same team, but obviously that team was divided.

“So you’re an Arai, too,” Salgado said. His ears looked normally shaped, but he seemed to have the gift of excellent hearing, or perhaps more like eavesdropping. “Why would you come to this place last night?”

Mas’s eyes inadvertently moved toward the test strawberry plot. The rows of Masaos were missing, quite evident to his gardener’s eyes. What was going on?

“Sergeant—” Robin called Salgado over to the crime scene.

“You don’t leave,” he ordered, gesturing at Mas with a stern index finger.

Mas shuffled his feet and then sneaked a look past the officers toward the open door of the greenhouse. He expected to see the wasted body of a homeless woman. Dirty, maybe even toothless.

But it was a young woman, maybe thirty years old at most, with a sheet of brilliant blonde hair, the roots soaked with blood.

Mas dutifully waited as the police officers traveled back and forth from their parked vehicles and the scene of the crime.

What the hell had happened to Billy, Mas wondered. His truck wasn’t in the motel parking lot, so somehow he’d made it back home.

But when? And why didn’t he bother to wake Mas up?

In the light of day, Mas got a clearer picture of his former home. The two greenhouses hadn’t changed much since he’d lived there. A few cracked windows and a haphazard arrangement of seedlings in long wooden boxes—today it looked like pansies, tomatoes, peppers, and maybe some early lettuce. Strawberries didn’t need the heat; they worked better in Watsonville’s mild temperatures. That’s why strawberries had become the main crop for the area.

Mas ran his hand through his thinning hair. What the hell was he going to tell the police? That he fell asleep and had no idea where Billy had gone in the middle of the night? But why in the world would Billy want to hurt a young
hakujin
woman? Even if Mas told the truth, Billy would be cleared immediately. Billy would tell them where he had gone and the police could then go on and find the real killer.

But while the officers went back and forth doing their investigation, Mas noticed Sergeant Salgado’s frequent glances toward him, as if he expected Mas to attempt to escape.
I’m not guilty
, he said to himself, although for some reason, he was starting to feel that he had done something wrong.