Under the Blood-Red Sun (5 page)

Billy nodded. I could imagine the Dodgers—Whit Wyatt nodding to Mickey Owen. I moved up into the catching position, eyes level, wrist loose. Billy wound up and let one fly.

Whomp!

I threw it back. “Low. Try again.”

Whomp!

“Not bad … for a
haole.”

Whomp! Whomp! Whomp!
For the next half hour he
pitched curveballs. We hardly said a word. My legs ached, but it felt good. We were getting better, tighter.

The Kaka’ako Boys usually beat us because they were more serious about baseball than the lazy bums we had. They were all from the Japanese part of Kaka’ako, an area crammed with old buildings down in the hot and dusty part of town.

The place was poor and pretty rickety. Japanese, Hawaiians, and Portuguese lived there, but separated into their own sections. I loved it down there. Lots of action. Lots of people in the streets, and stores, and things like that. Not like where me and Billy lived on the quiet streets of Nu’uanu Valley where rich people lived, mostly
haoles
. Kaka’ako was a different world. Or maybe
we
lived in the different world. More of Honolulu was like Kaka’ako than Nu’uanu. Down there you found the people who did the hard kind of work—cannery workers, fishermen, truck drivers, boat builders, tuna packer guys, and the men who worked on the roads.

Whomp!

Whomp!

Almost an hour of curveballs.

“Let’s take a break,” I finally said. My legs felt like two rusty door hinges.

“Not yet … Ten minutes, that’s all … ten minutes.”

We went for almost a half hour more before Billy decided to rest his arm.

A slight breeze combed through the treetops as the island cooled down. The sun, now lower in the sky, sent long, jagged shadows across the field. Billy tucked the
ball into his glove and flopped down to the grass. “So who’s going to take the Series?”

“Brooklyn,” I said.

Billy shook his head. “You’re dreaming,
compadre
. The Yanks will chew ’em up and spit ’em out.”

“Nope.”

“Hey. They’re hot,
way
hot.”

“But the Dodgers got Reiser … batting .343.”

“You want to back that up with something more than words?”

“Ten cents,” I said. “Kiss it good-bye.”

Billy stuck out his hand. “Make it fifteen and you’re on, sucker.” We sealed it with a shake.

A shadow startled me. I squinted up into Grampa’s face. He leaned over me and Billy with his shiny bald head, shaved clean in the old traditional Japanese way.

Billy bolted up when he saw him.

Grampa grinned. But his smile turned into his usual scowl when he looked back at me. “Papa home. Get up. He like you come clean fish.”

“He’s not supposed to be back until tomorrow.”

“Home now, confonnit.” Grampa turned and started walking back to the house.

Billy stood, keeping his eyes on Grampa, still wary.

“I gotta go,” I said.

Just then Papa came strolling through the trees. “The fish can wait,” he told Grampa, who just went right on past Papa as if he hadn’t even seen him there.

Papa had short black hair, army style. His face was sun-brown and his eyes crinkled at the edges. He walked up to us wearing a white undershirt, and wrinkled khaki
pants like Grampa’s. He flicked his eyebrows to Billy, then smiled and put his rough hand on my shoulder. “How you boys doing? How’s those girlfrens?”

Billy looked down. He was too shy for girls, and I guess I was too. But there was a girl I thought was pretty cute—Donna, in Mr. Ramos’s class. But I never told
her
that. Anyway, Billy and I were too busy playing baseball for girls.

Papa grinned and scruffed Billy’s hair. “Ne’mind, then. How’s the birds?”

“Okay,” I said.

Papa smelled like fish and sweat. His khaki pants were crusty where he’d wiped a couple of days of fish slime off his hands.

“You fly ’um yet?”

“No.”

“Let’s go, then.” With his hand still on my shoulder, we went over to one of the lofts, the split one—one side tumblers and racers, and the other side high-fliers and some captives for breeding. The high-fliers were Papa’s favorites, though he spent more time with the racers. He liked the tumblers, too, because they amazed him when they did their flips while flying around in circles.

Papa studied the birds awhile, then said, “Go lie in grass.… I going let out high ones.”

Me and Billy moved out to the center of the field. Papa opened the loft door and tapped the side lightly. Six high-fliers exploded out, almost too fast to see, wings flapping, beating against each other, bursting into brilliant whites and grays when they flew above the trees into the sunlight. A faint feathery dust followed them out.

Papa came over and lay in the grass next to us. No one spoke, we just watched the birds climb into the sky. Those birds flew so high I thought they would pop. Soon they became specks. Straight up, higher than even the bravest clouds would go, it seemed.

I tried to imagine being one of them, floating in the sky with the wind pushing up under the fan of my wings, rumbling in my ears. I’d look down and see me and Billy and Papa like ants in the field far below, and the shiny silver roof of our house, and Keet’s and Billy’s houses nearby. And then the cemetery past the trees, that whole city of gravestones in one view. You could see so much it would make you dizzy.

“Mama should see these birds,” Papa said, mostly to himself.

I peeked over at him. Mama once told me there was no one else in the whole world like Papa. “We all very lucky, Tomi-kun,” she said.

One day when Grampa was in a dreamy mood because his friend, Charlie, had given him a green bottle of
sake
, Japanese rice wine, he told me the story of how Mama and Papa met.

When she was only sixteen, Mama sailed over from Japan to marry a sugarcane worker. She was one of those picture brides—she’d never even met the guy except through a picture and a couple of letters. In those days that was the only way a Japanese man in Hawaii could meet a Japanese woman, and lots of people did it. I told Mama it seemed like a big gamble, but she said it was a way to get out of the poverty she’d grown up in, which was worse than any I would ever see in Honolulu.

So Mama sailed over with hundreds of other picture brides to meet her new husband and start a new life.

But before she got here, the guy was killed in a gambling fight. Mama got off the boat and no one was there to take her in. She ended up staying with a fisherman who had sent for a bride from the same ship. Mama’s story spread quickly around the fishing boats, Grampa said. The poor girl. What she going do? Sell herself in a bar for the navy guys? When Papa heard the story, he found the fisherman and asked if could meet the bride with no husband. Papa was kind of lonely, Grampa said.

“Just think about that, Tomi-kun,” Mama said. “If he never did that, how sad would my life be.… I would probably have sailed back home … alone. Unwanted bride. Then who would marry me?”

I looked back up at the high-fliers, now almost invisible. So high. So sure of themselves, like Papa. I wondered if I could ever be like him.

The P-40 Tomahawks

“Tomi,”
Papa said early one Saturday morning a couple of weeks later. He nudged me and I sat up. A kerosene lamp, turned low, hung from his fingers.

“Okay … I’m awake.”

Papa nodded and set the lamp on the floor near Grampa’s mat, which was empty. Then he left.

For a moment I stared at the wall, not awake, but not asleep. The lantern made the whole room glow an orangy-brown that made getting up that early worth it, just to get the feeling. Papa and Grampa probably felt like that, too, because they
never
got up after the sun.

I rubbed my eyes and squinted at the clock by my bed. Three forty-five.

A pair of shorts and an old shirt. That’s all I’d need,
because we’d only be gone two days. I got dressed and took the lantern out to the kitchen, where Mama was heating up the kerosene stove. The sweet smell of the flame filled the room. Mama smiled at me.

The screen door to the backyard squeaked in the blackness as I went out. The trees and jungle loomed gray and spooky in the light from the lantern. Lucky sat at the bottom of the stairs looking up, whining and wagging her tail.

“Go back to sleep,” I said, walking down the stairs. “You’re just wasting your time.” Papa would sooner carry bad-luck bananas on his boat than Lucky, who would leave little puddles around the deck. Besides, Papa was already taking a chance on bad luck by letting me bring Billy along this time. It would be the first time a
haole
had ever even set foot on the
Taiyo Maru
. Maybe it would even be the first time a
haole
set foot on
any
Japanese fishing boat. Papa’s helper, Sanji, said
haoles
were bad luck.

“Where the boy?” Papa asked as he came out of the darkness of the path that led to the outhouse.

“He’ll be here,” I said.

Papa nodded and went up the back steps to the kitchen.

I held the lantern high to spread the light around. The shadows in the trees moved as I crept into the jungle. The air smelled sweet, full of some kind of flower you could only smell at night. I took a deep breath and tried to remember it.

But when I got near the outhouse my memory went blank. That place was just a deep hole in the ground
surrounded by a wooden closet with bugs inside, the kind that live in the dark and run for it in the light.

I held my breath and went in. I almost made it without breathing. Hoo, that place smelled like a grave, or something. The air smelled twice as sweet when I ran back out.

It was going to be a great day.… I could feel it.

“Ssssst,” someone whispered from the blackness, and I jumped.

Billy came smiling into the small circle of light.

“Jeese! Don’t scare me like that, confonnit.”

“Look,” he said, handing me a pair of binoculars. “Dad said we could use them.”

They were black and heavy. I looked through them but couldn’t see anything, then handed them back.

Billy stuffed the binoculars into a small canvas bag that hung from his shoulder. He smelled like toothpaste.

“You had breakfast yet?” I asked.

“Nope.”

I picked up the lantern and started toward the house. “Come on, then.”

You could see Mama and Papa working in the kitchen through the screen window. Billy stopped and waited at the bottom of the steps while I went up. “Come inside,” I said, turning back. It was only the kitchen.

Papa came to the door carrying a metal bucket with a lid on it. He lifted the bucket to show Billy. “Bait … fresh opelu … Charlie went catch ’urn.” Papa squeezed past me and started down the stairs.

Billy stepped back so Papa could get by. “Mr. Nakaji …” Billy said. “Thank you for inviting—”

“Nah,” Papa said, butting in. “’S okay.”. Papa was a lot more friendly to Billy than Mama was. He was friendly to everyone. It drove Grampa crazy, because he wanted Papa to be more firm, like he was. And anyway, Grampa wasn’t too sure Papa should let me mix with
haoles
.

Billy nodded.

Papa smiled and said, “Go inside, you boys. Eat. I going get birds.” Papa always took a couple of racers out on the boat to let them fly home, to keep them in shape.

Billy came inside and sat on the edge of a chair at the kitchen table. He was barefoot, like I was, so he didn’t have to take his shoes off. I glanced at Mama’s face to see how she felt about Papa’s invitation to Billy to come inside and eat. But Mama looked just like always, kind of serious, but not worried about anything, as far as I could tell.

Mama brought us each a steaming bowl of rice, and in another, smaller bowl, a raw egg. Then she poured some shoyu into the bowl with the egg and whipped it around with her cooking chopsticks. Raw egg and soy sauce. My mouth was watering. Billy watched with big wide fish eyes. “It’s good,” I said, to reassure him. “Eggs don’t get much fresher than this.”

Mama poured the shoyu-egg over our sticky rice and gave us some chopsticks.

Billy waited, staring at the bowl in front of him. He picked up the chopsticks and tried to make them work.

“Itadakimasu,”
I said, and Billy looked up.

“It’s what you say before you eat,” I said.

“What’s it mean?”

“It means, let’s eat.”

I mashed the rice and shoyu-egg together and dug in. Billy poked around the eggs, trying to keep the rice and egg separate. He managed to balance a few bits of eggless rice on the ends of his chopsticks. I tried to keep from laughing. It was good to finally have him come into our house for more than just a couple of minutes. Maybe I’d think about letting him see my room someday.…
Maybe
.

Pretty soon Grampa came in the back door with more fresh eggs from his chickens. He seemed to be in a good mood. He tipped his head toward the bucket of eggs and glanced at Billy. “Good, nah?”

Billy nodded. He looked nervous, and I had to smile. Grampa always made Billy kind of shaky, and Grampa knew it. “You seasick today?” Grampa asked Billy.