Strawberry Yellow (8 page)

He wanted to pack all his belongings in one bag and set out for the road, feeling free to take a
hirune
, a nap, underneath an oak tree, to feel the hush of twilight, to smell the end of a day. He didn’t feel the need to be responsible for anybody else in his life. He didn’t want to be confined in a box, led by a leash. Maybe someday, but not yet.

Now, some fifty-five years later, Mas was back in the same place as he was in his late teens. He could do as he chose, although now there were ties to Mari and Genessee. But with Genessee, it was just thin twine that could be untied at any time. There were no promises of a future.

“No,” he told Minnie. “Nuttin’ waitin’ for me.”

They heard a noise in the hallway. Billy appeared, wearing the same clothes as the day before. His afternoon shadow was nearing full-blown beard status. The short hair on top
of his head looked like a patch of weeds. “What is he doing here?” he asked no one in particular.

“Billy, don’t be so rude.”

“We’re trying to convince him to take a job at Sugarberry. To be our spy.”

Billy’s dark eyes rested on Mas’s face. “You should,” he said. “To find out who killed Laila.” He then turned and went back to the darkened hallway.

“You weren’t kidding, Minnie. He’s sure not doing well.” Evelyn shook her head.

“I tell him to go back to work. Work always helped Shug feel better.”

“Shug was a hard worker,” Evelyn agreed. “And you were, too, Mas. You two seemed like you were everywhere, hauling tomatoes, picking lettuce.”

“They used to call them the Two Kilroys, because they seemed to show up everywhere. You two were connected at the hip.”

Mas almost cracked a smile. Shug and he would often compete on how many crates they could fill. They were eighteen, nineteen years old, with energy to burn. Maybe seeing how Sugarberry did things wouldn’t be a bad idea. Mas suspected that the strawberry cooperative would pay him at least enough to buy a few meals. Nostalgia again reared its powerful head, and before Mas knew it, he had agreed to spend at least one working day at Sugarberry.

The late afternoon fog was starting to move in on the
Jabami farm. Jimi was up on a ladder inspecting the leaves on his apple trees. He knew that yellows was something that could be passed from one fruit to another, but somehow he felt that everything near him was getting poisoned. The orchard, as far as he could see, was fine. It would be a good autumn harvest. For a moment, Jimi felt an ache of sadness. He wished he would be there to see the branches weighed down with ripe red apples, to pull down a ready piece of fruit and hear the stem snap free, to bite into the skin and white meat, juice pooling on his chin.

One year all his grandchildren, from faraway places like Minnesota, Texas, and even Sweden, were here in the orchards for Ats’s and his fiftieth wedding anniversary celebration. It wasn’t that long ago. Ats was
genki
then, laughing with the children and even chasing them through the apple trees.

Jimi had first laid eyes on Ats in the Arizona camp, in the mess hall where he helped mix goopy freeze-dried eggs and mashed potatoes with water.

She wasn’t particularly pretty, but then she didn’t seem to care that she wasn’t. That was the first thing that drew Jimi to her. She wasn’t like the other girls in camp, who were constantly primping their hair in spite of the relentless desert winds that would loosen and blow wild the most perfect of curls.

She wasn’t afraid to be alone. In fact, one day, hours before dinner, he saw her sitting alone in the mess hall, a book in her hands. He never saw her with her parents, but then, most of the teens ate with their friends and not family members.

Under the guise of cleaning the tables, he got close enough to see the title of the book that she was reading.
The Stranger
.

“Any good?” he asked, a gray wet rag in his hand.

“Okay. Not really my cup of tea, but Miss Everett says people need to stretch themselves sometimes.”

Jimi didn’t quite understand. How do you stretch yourself by just sitting there and reading?

‘Where you from?”

“Block Twenty-one.”

“No,” he said. “Back home.”

“Salinas.”

“Salinas, we’re practically neighbors.” Jimi added that he was surprised they hadn’t met at a regional Junior YBA event.

“My parents aren’t religious,” she said.

“Farmers?” he asked.

“You like asking questions.”

His face colored. “No, actually,” he stumbled over his words.

She carefully placed a bookmark in her copy of
The Stranger
and got up from the bench.

Don’t go. I’m sorry. I will let you be
, Jimi wanted to call out. He didn’t care if the girl didn’t talk to him. As long as she stayed in that spot the whole afternoon. But apparently he had intruded on her solitude and she, like a migrating butterfly, escaped out the screen door.

Days later, he saw her walking with Shug Arai.
Why always the Arais?
he thought to himself.
Why did the Arais always seem to win the prize?

Jimi’s luck changed when they returned to the West Coast after the war. He didn’t know how it happened, but the butterfly flew to him and had stayed with him ever since.

Reentering the house, Jimi heard moaning and hurried into the bedroom. The caregiver, wearing nurse’s scrubs, was at Ats’s bedside.

“Active today, Mr. Jabami,” the caregiver said. “She keeps calling for you.”

“Ats, I’m here.” Jimi clutched at his wife’s hand. It felt so fragile. All her nails had turned black and were splitting like dried-out bamboo.

“More morphine?” he asked her, pressing down on the remote to administer the painkiller. Only so much, a few milligrams worth, was allowed to safely drip down into Ats’s bloodstream.
One day, this will all be over
, he silently promised his wife. In Jimi’s packing-shed refrigerator, carefully wrapped and hidden beside jars of strawberry preserves, was that special package. Waiting, waiting. For when the time was right.

Y
es, we can! Yes, we can!”

“
Sí, se puede! Sí, se puede
!”

Mas tried to pull up his collar to be less conspicuous as he walked through the protest line. Apparently he didn’t have to worry. No one seemed to notice him.

He had parked the truck along a dirt road about two blocks away. Seeing the line of protesters assembled in front of the Sugarberry driveway, he didn’t want to take any chances for his Ford to get vandalized. It may have looked like Mas was
doudemonai
, didn’t care one way or another, but he’d actually carefully chosen each newly fused spare part from the multiple junkyards he’d visited.

The crowd thrust hand-painted signs toward cars passing on the street.

SUGARBERRY, NOT SO SWEET FOR WORKERS KEEP OUR FAMILIES SAFE

There was a woman with dark, wavy hair who seemed to be leading the charge. She had a bullhorn and was not afraid to use it. “Shugaberry shuuugacoat no mo! Shugaberry shuuugacoat no mo!”

As Mas got closer, he could hear the chant more clearly. “Sugarberry, sugarcoat no more! Sugarberry, sugarcoat no more!”

Mas didn’t care for chants, whether it be at a political
protest or in a Buddhist temple. He also didn’t care much for
urusai
activists who polluted the open air with their noise. When he first moved down to Los Angeles, the gardeners were embroiled in a labor conflict of their own. Told to join a union, the gardeners said no, without the chants. They had grown their businesses through their own sweat and tears, sometimes booking one lawn job immediately after another. They asked their customers to hang their monthly checks from the clothesline; there was no time to knock on kitchen doors and wait to be paid.
We are independent businesses
, they claimed. Many of them had spent three years locked up in a dusty camp and were sick and tired of institutions telling them what to do.
We are our own bosses.

Mas entered what looked like a newer extension to a warehouse. Plain white, it was purely functional, with no decoration in sight. A secretary at one of the metal desks assisted Mas and gave him a nametag, directing him to the packing shed across the way.

Sugarberry was one of the oldest strawberry cooperatives in Watsonville. Farm cooperatives allowed growers to become members so they could share in patents, knowledge, and distribution. The cooperatives originally were started by Japanese immigrant farmers in the early 1900s. Back in Japan, they’d learned that not only two heads, but sometimes three, four, or maybe a dozen were better than one. As a result, farmers came together cooperatively to share capital to survive cash-flow troubles and even to stabilize prices, which could go up and down from week to week. In Watsonville, the Sugarberry cooperative was also able to take advantage of refrigerator cars, so even before the Great Depression, its
strawberries made it all the way to New York City.

Mas had done his share of strawberry packing in the past. Now his brand-new supervisor, Carlos, was directing him to a seat next to a conveyer belt. Each packer was assigned a large box of glossy strawberries, which they packed into smaller clear plastic clamshells, making sure that the less attractive ones went first in the bottom. Once packed, the clamshells were snapped shut and placed on the conveyor belt to be packed again into larger boxes.

Mas’s co-workers, mostly middle-aged women, looked at him curiously as he slid on the silicone gloves.

“
Nombre
?” one of the older women asked him.

Mas knew enough Spanish to answer. “Mas.”

“
Más
?”

“
Más
?”

“
Má
s?” It seemed that a number of the women found humor in his name.

“
Más, por favor
?” More, please.

“
Más agua
?” More water.

“
Más tequila
?” More tequila.

Finally he couldn’t take it anymore. “
No Más
!” he said.
No More
! The room erupted in high-pitched laughter.

He had survived the new-employee initiation. In fact, he did more than survive. He passed with flying colors.

At eleven-thirty, they stopped for a half-hour lunch break, and Mas’s coworkers made a beeline for the catering truck that had parked next to the protesters. Apparently the
protesters were also on a lunch break.

A man was in an intense debate with the woman with the bullhorn. “Listen, Rosa, I wasn’t going to protest at a man’s funeral, okay? I don’t care what he might have done. I’m not going to do that to a dead man’s family.”

“Even though he was using genetic engineering to create a new strawberry?”

“You don’t know if he was or not.”

“Well, it had to do with yellows, that’s for sure.”

“We’ll find out next week.”

“But by then it will be out. Laila wanted us to stop it before it was introduced.”

“What are we stopping? We look like fools, Rosa. Nobody understands our message, because we don’t really understand it.”

“I don’t know why you’re like this. You pour cold water on everything. The protest at the funeral and now. . . .”

“And you should be glad we stopped you. The little support you have would have been gone, like that.” The man snapped his fingers.