Strawberry Yellow (9 page)

“Just come tonight.” She handed the man a half-sheet flier, which he promptly dropped on the ground.

“Two
machacas
,” the catering truck worker called out from a small window.

As Rosa left to pick up her taco order, Mas picked up the flier. “Work for Food Safety for All,” it read, and it listed a downtown address. The day and time of the meeting: tonight at seven p.m.

Mas stuffed two carne asada tacos in his mouth, one after another. He could eat soft tacos one-handed, his favorite
method of eating. Wiping his hands on his jeans, he was back in the nondescript office in just a few minutes to fill out some employee paperwork.

As he carefully entered his Social Security number on a form, he felt someone staring at him.

It was Jimi Jabami, wearing a Sugarberry windbreaker. He looked a tiny bit better than he did yesterday when he’d heard the terrible fate of his strawberry crop.

“What are you doing here?” Jimi didn’t even bother to sound friendly.

“Workin.”

“Working? In the packing shed?”

Mas nodded.

“I thought you were going back home.”

Mas pushed up his reading glasses. He had said nothing of his schedule to Jimi. “Just spendin’ a few days here.
Inaka, inaka
feelsu good.”

Mas felt like a fool saying such nonsense, especially to Jimi, who had a strong nonsense detector.

Jimi balled up his fists, and his fish eyes seemed to bulge out even more.
Why did the old man care if I work here
, wondered Mas. He didn’t call the shots at Sugarberry. Or maybe that was the point.

Mas resumed filling out his form, but he knew Jimi wasn’t quite finished with him. Through a window he watched Jimi march up to Carlos in the parking lot, probably trying to get to the bottom of his employment.

When he returned to the packing shed, Mas wasn’t surprised when Carlos came up to him.

“I fire?” he asked, almost relieved.

“You kidding me? You know how to do hard work,” Carlos said. “You have good hands. Workingman hands.”

Feeling self-conscious, Mas stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Jimi Jabami talksu to you.”

“Jimi gives me a piece of his mind everyday. I can’t blame him this time. You heard about his crop?”

Mas nodded.

“And I think these protesters have him a little on edge. They tried to organize the workers at Jabami Farms last month. The union lost by two votes. That doesn’t have much to do with Sugarberry, that’s what I told Rosa, you know, the woman with the megaphone. We are just the distributors. The farms are all independent. She doesn’t listen to me. Has an axe to grind with Sugarberry, that’s for sure. She’s no fan of Shug—you’re related, right? She hates. . . well, hated him.”

Mas’s coworkers, all full of tacos, were trickling back to the conveyor belt.

“For me,” Carlos concluded, “Shug was hero, a genius. With their patents and new varietals, Everbears is becoming a contender. Sugarberry needs something to keep up with them and all the others. Without innovation, we are dead in the water.”

The seven o’clock meeting for Rosa’s group was being held in an historic building on Main Street. Mas recognized it from his teenage days of wandering around downtown Watsonville and was astonished to see that it was still standing. The city had been hit hard by an earthquake in the 1980s. Mas
remembered the photograph in
The Rafu Shimpo
newspaper that he got in the mail most every day. Piles of bricks in the place of the two-story buildings he remembered.

Rosa was already speaking in front of a small crowd of twenty-five people in folding chairs. Mas opted to stand at the back of the room next to a table that held a coffee maker and stack of paper cups. “We are dedicating tonight’s meeting to a dear, dear friend, Laila Smith.” Rosa’s voice cracked; it was obvious that the two women had been close.

“Laila cared about you, the worker and student. She devoted . . . no, she risked her life for us. During the methyl bromide battles, Laila, as a student at UC Santa Cruz, fought hard to ban that fumigant. She didn’t grow up here, but her heart was here. She cared about clean water and air, about preserving our best for the next generation.”

Mas was here because Carlos had mentioned that the protesters did not look at either Shug or Sugarberry that favorably. Did their animosity fuel the demise of Shug? Was his killer right here in their midst? He scanned the crowd. He thought he recognized a few of the pickers he’d seen working the fields at Jimi’s farm. There were also a couple of young
hakujin
people, looking deceptively shaggy and dirty on the outside. In the back row, sitting by herself, was a young brunette, her thin arms firmly crossed. Familiar, Mas thought. He squinted his eyes. It was Cecilia, the maid at his motel.

“So it’s our turn now. We need to step forward. All the corporate brass, co-op leaders, and big growers will be at the strawberry commission meeting next week. Two new strawberry varieties will be announced, varieties that were built on
the back of our labor. In addition, there are rumors that Sugarberry has been using genetic engineering in these new berry varieties. We’ve all heard stories of GMOs, of radiation in our food, of the crossing of fish cells and strawberries. We can’t let that happen.

“The local media will be there, and we need to be in full force to show them that we don’t want our food soiled by radiation and biogenetics. Our leaders in the past sacrificed their lives so we can work under healthy conditions. We can’t go back in time.”

The meeting dragged on and on, with various people talking about “logistics” and strategies. Determined to see if anyone would mention Shug’s name, Mas tried to stay alert, but his eyes kept drooping shut, even while standing. Seeking some kind of help, he went to get a cup of coffee. Cecilia must have been feeling the fatigue, too, because she was right behind him.

“Hello, Mr. Arai,” she said.

“Hallo.” Mas poured at least a tablespoon of sugar into his cup.

Cecilia wasn’t wearing her name-tagged apron. “I didn’t know they grew strawberries in Los Angeles,” she said.

Mas frowned. Again the girl seemed to know too much about him.

Before he could respond, someone tore the steaming Styrofoam cup from his hand, splashing coffee onto the concrete floor.

“Mom! What are you doing?” Cecilia was aghast.

Rosa, the attacker, placed her knuckles on her hips. “I heard you are one of them.” She was about two inches taller
than Mas and leaned so close to him that he could see the fine lines around her mouth.

Mas waited for clarification.

“Them. The Arais.”

“Stop it. He’s not from here. He’s from L.A. He’s a nobody.”

Mas, for once, felt very happy to be called a nobody.

“Doesn’t matter, he’s still an Arai,” she said to her daughter and turned back to Mas. “Your people killed Laila, you know that?

“She was getting close to the truth. Billy knew that. I kept telling her, blood is thicker than water. Watch out. She thought Billy was different. Not like the father. But look what happened to her.

“She found out something the night she died. What Shug Arai was hiding about the announcement they were going to make next week.”

“Shug already dead.” This woman was
kuru-kuru-pa
. How could Shug have revealed something from beyond the grave?

“These secrets could speak after death. A trail of deceit,” Rosa spat out. Mas could hardly follow what she was saying.

“She was going to talk to Billy about what she discovered. I begged her not to. It was so earth-shattering that she couldn’t even tell me over the phone. ‘This will change the world,’ she told me. ‘When we blow this out of the water, we’ll be on every website and on the cover of every magazine. It’ll be that big.’

“The morning after she tells me this, she’s found dead in an Arai greenhouse.”

“You’zu so sure, why don’t you go to police?”

“Oh, yeah, you people have that covered, too. Lieutenant Robin Arai. But I’ve gone above her head to the sheriff’s county headquarters. They know now. They know not to trust any of you Arais. All you care about is money. Status. Yourselves. Your precious family.”

Mas was too stunned to reply. All the air in the old building seemed to have seeped through the cracks in the walls and ceiling. He tried to breathe, but he could not.

“Nothing to say now?” Rosa continued. “Well, just wait until we get to the bottom of this. I’ve found out who was helping Laila with analyzing Sugarberry’s new variety, and it won’t be long before I know, too.”

Mas had heard enough. Leaving the coffee-stained floor and the angry Rosa, he turned and walked out to get into his truck and hightail it out of there.

“Mr. Arai, Mr. Arai,” he heard a high-pitched voice on the other side of the crosswalk.

Hugging a drawstring bag to her chest, Cecilia crossed the street to reach Mas. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “My mother is intense, but she doesn’t usually go this far. She’s just so messed up over Laila dying and all.”

“
Orai, orai
,” Mas said. He was now practically used to Watsonville folks taking out their sorrows on him.

“Hey, can you give me a ride to the motel? I don’t think my mom’s going to be ready to go anytime soon.”

At first Mas thought that Cecilia didn’t have much in
common with her mother. But he was wrong. They both like to talk. A lot.

“Laila was her best friend. They did everything together. Mom took it hard when Laila got together with Billy Arai. She said it was sleeping with the enemy. Plus Billy has a wife and kids, you know. I went to high school with Billy’s daughter, Alyssa. She was so tight with her dad, you know, before all of this.”

Mas tried the best he could to pay attention to the girl’s sing-song banter. He opened his eyes wide and glanced in his junkyard side mirror, a former fixture on a semi truck in a past life. Behind him was a pickup truck, its right headlight dim, as if it was close to burning out.

“I kind of got why Billy was with her. Laila could win guys over with her looks. She got pretty much everyone and everything she ever wanted. I mean, she was rich herself, although no one really knew. That’s why there’s no funeral in Watsonville—her parents in Monterey took away her body. They pretty much barred Billy and my mom from going to the service. My mom wanted a memorial service here, but she wouldn’t work with Billy on it.”

Cecilia finally took a breath when they were at an intersection about a block away from the motel. “I hate to say this, but, in a way, I think Laila deserved what she got.”

Mas’s foot almost slipped from the brake pedal. What a
hidoi
, severe, thing to say.

Noticing Mas’s reaction, she quickly clarified, “I’m not saying that I’m glad that she’s dead—just that it doesn’t surprise me. She never thought about anyone else’s feelings.”

She gestured to the corner. “Can you let me out here?”

It just occurred to Mas that it was late for a maid to be reporting to work.

“I study in empty rooms there sometimes. My neighborhood is way too noisy at night. The manager doesn’t know about it, so I have to sneak in.”

Mas stopped the truck and waited for Cecilia to get out. “Thanks for the ride,” she said, picking up her bag from the floor of the truck.

The girl jumped out and ran to the side of the motel. In his side mirror he saw the reflection of a a pair of headlights, one bright and one dim. Before he could open his door to get a better look, the truck made a sharp U-turn and disappeared down the street.