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  LAUREL-LEAF BOOKS

  UNDER THE BLOOD-RED SUN

  Graham Salisbury

  EYES OF THE EMPEROR

  Graham Salisbury

  MILKWEED

  Jerry Spinelli

  GATHERING BLUE

  Lois Lowry

  CODE ORANGE

  Caroline B. Cooney

  HARMONY

  Rita Murphy

  TAYLOR FIVE

  Ann Halam

  BEFORE WE WERE FREE

  Julia Alvarez

  FOR

  YOUNG PEOPLE EVERYWHERE

  FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS

  NEVER GIVE UP

  MAHALO NUI LOA

  ROBYN SALISBURY,

  TAKAKO KYO,

  AND

  GLENNA RHODES

  One Saturday morning in September 1941, three months before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the islands lay on the ocean as warm and peaceful as cats sleeping in the sun. Life was still good then, and I’d just started eighth grade at Roosevelt High School.

  I woke with a jolt, threw on a pair of shorts and a shirt, and ran out of the house, letting the screen door slap behind me. “You need to eat something!” Mama called, coming up to peer through the screen.

  “Later,” I said, turning to jog backwards.

  She waved me off and sank back into the darkness of the house.

  Papa was coming in today. He and his deckhand, Sanji, had been gone for a week, fishing for tuna somewhere beyond the blue horizon.

  I jumped on a city bus and headed down to Kewalo Basin, the harbor where Papa kept his boat. When I got there the Taiyo Maru sat motionless alongside the pier, its fish unloaded and Papa and Sanji hosing down a week’s worth of fish slime. She was a beautiful boat, bright white to match her name—the Sun—a Japanese-style fishing sampan thirty-eight feet long.

  “Heyyy,” Sanji said as I jogged up. “Look who’s here, boss. Better put um to work, ah? Make um more fast for me to get home to see my girls.” He meant Reiko, his wife, and their three-year-old daughter, Mari, the two people he lived for. Sanji was only nineteen, by far the youngest father I knew.

  “Tomi,” Papa said, a big grin on his face. “We cleaning up. Come aboard.”

  That was exactly what I wanted to do. To work with Papa and Sanji on the Taiyo Maru was one of my dreams. That and playing baseball. In all of life, what else was there besides boats and baseball?

  Papa stood with his feet spread, coiling a rope. Dark brown from a lifetime on the sea, short haircut, baggy khaki pants. And that grin.

  “You catch much?” I asked.

  He wagged his eyebrows. “Best haul we ever had.”

  “Ho, really?”

  “Got lucky, this time. The guy counting us our money right now.”

  Sanji tossed me a scrub brush.

  An hour later, the boat was squeaky clean. All the equipment was stored in the hold, and the deck was free of fish slime and smelling good again. Sanji jumped off onto the pier and untied the lines. He tossed them over to me. “You know what to do with this ropes?”

  “Pfff,” I said. “As good as you, any day.”

  He laughed. “You dreaming, cockaroach.”

  He looked up at Papa, still on the boat. “Hey, boss, try go get the small glass ball. I forgot um in the drawer by the deckhouse.”

  Papa dug it out and held it up.

  “That’s for you,” Sanji said to me. “I foun’ um about ten miles pas’ Kauai. Keep um. I give you.”

  Papa handed me the glass ball.

  “Ho, thanks, Sanji.” I held the green net float from Japan up to the sun. Every time I touched one I thought of that faraway country my family came from—Japan, trapped inside the glass, its mystery magnified by the sun. Every now and then you could find them in the ocean, or washed up on the beach. If this one had been covered with barnacles like usual, Sanji had cleaned them off. “Like a good-luck charm,” he said.

  While Sanji went over to warm up his fish-stinky truck for the ride home, Papa and I walked the boat out into the harbor and tied it to its mooring, a white float chained to a giant block of concrete on the sand below.

  Papa untied the small skiff he kept secured upside down on the bow. It made a plopping sound when he dropped it down onto the water. I eased over the side into it and set the glass ball on the floorboards. Papa handed me the wooden pigeon crate. He’d taken six of his pigeons to sea. “They all come home?” he asked.

  “Right on time.”

  Papa smiled and lowered himself into the skiff, rocking it gently. Every time he went to sea he’d take some of his racing pigeons a few miles out and turn them loose to find their way home. They always did. And fast. Their homing instinct fascinated Papa and me. How they knew just where to go was a mystery, like how some animals get antsy minutes before an earthquake.

  I sat in the stern facing Papa as he rowed long, slow strokes back to the pier. He dipped his head. “Look at that boat.”

  I turned back to gaze at the Taiyo Maru. She had an open deck with a small forward wheelhouse sitting on it like a queen. And a long-armed tiller that Papa often guided with his knee.

  “It’s a good one,” I said.

  “From way back in my younger days that’s what I dreamed about … right there.”

  I studied it closer, this time noticing how it sat on the water, perfectly still and perfectly balanced, not tilting to one side like some boats in that harbor.

  “It’s a good boat,” I said, unable to think of anything smarter to say.

  Papa smiled and nodded.

  Rowed.

  Back at the pier Sanji helped us haul the skiff out and carry it over to the palm trees where the fishermen kept their skiffs. We turned it upside down and tucked the oars under it.

  A man from the fish shed came out and handed Papa a wad of bills the size of a big fat riceball. “Good catch, Nakaji,” the guy said. “Do that again and you’ll be a rich man.”

  “Already am,” Papa said, putting his hand on my shoulder.

  The guy winked at me and left.

  Papa counted the money, his lips moving soundlessly. Sanji turned away to give him privacy.

  “Unn,” Papa grunted, handing Sanji his pay.

  Sanji gaped. “This too much, boss.” He tried to give some of it back.

  Papa waved him off. “You worked hard. Buy gas for that rattrap truck. Take home something nice for Reiko and Mari.”

  Sanji ducked his head. “You too good to me, boss.”

  The three of us squeezed into the small cab of the truck for the ride home, the shiny green glass ball in my hands winking in the sunlight. It was the perfect day—except for the fish stink.

  A small price for all we had.

  In the before time.

  Now it was Wednesday, March 3, 1943, a year and a half later.

  My best friend Billy Davis and I had just finished another slow day of school, both of us now in ninth grade. Instead of heading home, I’d talked Billy into coming down to the Ala Wai Canal with me to stare at Papa’s boat.

  We hopped on a city bus to Kapiolani and Kamoku Street, then headed through a quiet neighborhood to the bushes and trees that hid the canal from view. From the trees we crossed a wide field of dirt, the afternoon sky blue and silky. Puffy white clouds sat like hats on the green mountaintops behind us.

  We eased down at the edge of the Ala Wai, a rainwater drainage canal that wandered from the swampy lowlands out to the ocean, mixing rusty mud-water with the clean blue sea just past a small-boat harbor. To the right of that harbor, a manmade channel cut into the reef that edged the shore and ran parallel to the beach over to Kewalo Basin, where the Taiyo Maru had harbored before the war.


  A silvery mullet jumped after some bug, then plopped back down, leaving rings that wobbled toward us, then vanished. Behind us, the muted sounds of Honolulu whispered through thick weeds sagging in the heat of the sun.

  Billy tossed a pebble into the water. “This probably wasn’t a great idea.”

  “Yeah, prob’ly.”

  Going down to the canal only brought back terrible memories of terrible days of just over a year ago. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese slammed down on Hawaii, bombed Pearl Harbor, and plunged us into war. Papa and Sanji were out fishing the day they came.

  The next day two U.S. P-40 Tomahawks dropped out of the sky and came down on Papa’s sampan with their machine guns blazing, wounding Papa in the leg and killing Sanji.

  Of all that had happened, that was the worst.

  Papa wounded and Sanji dead. Only nineteen, with a wife and little girl. I didn’t even know who to blame—Japan or the U.S. Navy.

  And then the navy raced a boat out and arrested Papa, threw him into a makeshift prison on Sand Island with blood still leaking into the T-shirt he’d wrapped around his torn-up leg.

  The same day the U.S. Army confiscated his boat and towed it up into the Ala Wai Canal to rot.

  A few days later, the FBI came up to our house and made me kill Papa’s pigeons. His beautiful, gentle birds. Then they arrested my Grampa Joji and took him away to who knew where. Just because he was a Japanese citizen.

  Those days.

  Out fishing, Papa and Sanji hadn’t even known that Pearl Harbor had been attacked, or that they were supposed to have been flying an American flag to identify the boat as friendly when they came in. They had no radio. Who could afford one?

  And what did the pigeons do that was so terrible the FBI had to kill them?

  And what had Grampa Joji done, an old man who raised chickens?

  That was all my family had. Fishing and chickens. It was how we lived.

  Now, me and Mama and my five-year-old sister, Kimi, survived off the pennies Mama made as a housekeeper for the Wilsons, the rich family whose land we lived on. We stretched that money as far as it would go.

  “You the man of the house now,” Mama told me the day they took Grampa away. That night she’d cried, silent and alone in the war-darkened kitchen.

  So many times after that day I’d said, “I can quit school and get a job.” But she was firm. “No, Tomi-kun. You go school. Work summertime. We fine. School more important.”

  She wouldn’t budge. “Work summertime.”

  Last summer I made a few dollars washing cars at the service station over by the grocery store. Maybe this year I’d work down at the pineapple cannery.

  ***

  Me and Billy squatted on our heels at the edge of the canal, silent, barefoot, in long pants and loose shirts. What we wore to school. I was thinking I should have gone straight home, because this was Kimi’s day, Hinamatsuri, or Dolls’ Festival, the day my family celebrated a girl’s growth and happiness.

  But here I was at the canal again, staring at Papa’s boat.

  Underwater.

  Sunk the day it was towed to this spot, we’d heard—a hole axed in the hull.

  Even though it made me feel helpless, I kept coming back, because with Papa and Grampa Joji away in U.S. Army prison camps, looking down on the Taiyo Maru was my way of still being with them, the three of us together— grandfather, father, son. That sunken boat and two postcards we’d gotten from Papa was all I had of them.

  I was thankful that Billy had come with me. He was the best friend I’d ever had. I was glad he’d convinced his parents he should stay at Roosevelt High for one more year, instead of changing schools and going to private school at Punahou like his brother, Jake. Billy liked Roosevelt. All his friends were there.

  He stood a head taller than me now, blond, almost five-eleven. He could lift me up and set me on the hood of a jeep, if he wanted to. But I was strong, too, because every day I worked at lifting a thirty-pound boulder I found in a stream to build myself up for baseball. Also, I’d worked pulling up fish on Papa’s boat. “Haw! Bonecrusher, you,” Billy once said when I gripped his hand. “You could crush a tin can with that grip.” Made me feel pretty good.

  Across the water a blanket of trees smothered the jumble of low houses behind Waikiki. Just below us the canal sat rusty brown, with mullet nosing through the muck for food, waggling in and out of sight around Papa’s boat.

  “Looks kind of sad, doesn’t it?” Billy said.

  Moss fuzzed green on a coil of rope on the wood-planked deck.

  I nodded.

  The boat sat on the muddy bottom in about eight feet of water. Only a foot or two of its deckhouse stood above the surface. Its name, Taiyo Maru, was soberly lettered in black across its white stern transom, and bullet tracks trailed across the decking, a reminder of that dark day. That was the worst to look at—the bullet tracks. Sanji died right there on that deck, I thought. Papa must have crawled around with his bleeding leg trying to help him, to bring him back, looking up to see how far away the island was, searching for help … when Sanji was already gone.

  “Tomi,” Billy said. “You okay?”

  I nodded, turning my face away.

  Billy tossed another pebble into the water.

  I was grateful for his silence.

  The Taiyo Maru wasn’t the only sunken boat here. There were ten of them, all Japanese fishing sampans.

  I pinched the bridge of my nose.

  “We got to stop coming here, Tomi,” Billy said. “There’s nothing you can do. What’s done is done. Brooding over it won’t bring it back up.”

  Billy scooped up a handful of dirt and added, “Actually, the boat looks okay, you know … I mean, it’s not all broken up or anything. It looks good.”

  “Except that it’s on the bottom.”

  “Well, yeah, there’s that.”

  All these boats had been in the canal for over a year. Before he was arrested Grampa told me the army chopped holes in them and sank them so they couldn’t be used against us in the war. But I keep thinking … fishing boats? Small sampans? What harm could they do?

  I peered into the water. How bad was the hole?

  Maybe someday I’d dive down and take a look.

  The other sampans wobbled under the surface nearby, the tops of their small deckhouses sitting on the water like gravestones, some straight up, some angled, sinking sideways.

  I turned to look back over my shoulder, the world feeling eerily still, as if someone were sneaking up on us. But the wide field of dirt and weeds and the thick bushes that blocked the narrow streets and low buildings of Honolulu from view were as vacant as when we got there.

  Billy skimmed a pebble across the water, where circles ballooned out and jiggled the clouds sleeping on the glassy surface. “Let’s go home.” He pushed himself up. “It’s getting dark. Curfew’s soon.”

  “Yeah,” I said, but didn’t move.

  Billy crossed his arms and checked the sun, now easing toward the sea.

  I picked up a stone and slammed it into the canal. If a wall had been there I would have hit it with my fist. “I can’t help it, Billy. It’s Papa’s boat. It was all he had. How can I just leave it here to rot?”

  “What can you do?”

  A thought came flickering back, one that had popped up the day before while I was daydreaming in class. An impossible thought.

  Wasn’t it?

  “I could bring it up.”

  Billy snorted. “And I can lift a car with my bare hands. Come on, we gotta get home.”

  I shrugged and stood. Yeah, what could I do, even if Billy helped me? Two ninth-grade kids.

  “Let’s go,“ Billy pleaded. “We gotta get home before curfew. You might not mind getting shot at, but I sure do.”

  We started across the dirt field, because Billy had a point. The islands were under martial law and it was getting dark; we were running out of time. The dangerous time would double in an hour and triple in two. />
  Because at sundown, shadowy self-deputized block wardens came swaggering out into the night like roaches, guys with itchy fingers who roamed the streets with old rifles and rusty pistols looking for something to shoot.

  For the first time in my life I had bad feelings for Japan, because after they destroyed Pearl Harbor, every Japanese person in Hawaii, U.S. citizen or not, became suspect. We got second looks everywhere we went, hooded eyes watching, wondering. Is this one a spy? That one? What are they planning next? It was crazy.

  Mr. Wilson, whose land we lived on, was one of those guys. He was part of an organization called the BMTC, the Businessmen’s Military Training Corps. Only white people, haoles, could be in it. And they all had guns. At school, our teacher Mr. Ramos warned us to watch out for them even though we were kids, because sometimes those guys got trigger-happy. “We’re in the middle of a war now. It’s dangerous, and the future is unknown.”

  I glanced back at the deckhouse on the Taiyo Maru, the only visible part. Too much time had passed. The engine was probably shot. But … maybe it could be cleaned up and fixed. The hull would dry out and be fine, but the moving parts were probably crusted with corrosion.

  Billy nudged me and motioned with his chin.

  Down the way, emerging from the bushes, seven guys broke out and bunched toward us. Haoles. Older than us, maybe by two or three years. I’d seen some of them around but didn’t know them by name.

  Except for one.

  Seeing him was like swallowing gasoline.

  Me and Billy slipped into the weeds.

  Back on the streets it was easy to hide.

  For sure, the seven white guys didn’t know this part of Honolulu like we did, a jungle of alleys and old buildings. Loose-planked fences to escape into. Spooky streets they might worry about going down, streets with mean dogs and centipede boys who wouldn’t be happy to see haoles anytime, anywhere, especially rich guys who lived in green neighborhoods up near the mountains, sons of the BMTC who made it clear that they were keeping their eyes on anyone who wasn’t like them.

  Which meant me.

  Billy, too, for that matter. They called him a Jap-loving traitor.