Under the Blood-Red Sun Page 7

  Washington, Friday, Oct. 31. (UP) The Navy Department announced today that the destroyer USS Reuben James was sunk last night by a torpedo west of Iceland.

  No further details are available at present.

  In a photograph just below the headline, the Reuben James sat peacefully in a glassy harbor. The sailors were dressed in white and lined up on the deck. Below the photo it said FIRST U.S. WARSHIP SUNK.

  Mama stood there with her arms crossed, looking out the window. Finally, she went over and opened the back door and called for Kimi to come inside.

  • • •

  Very early the next morning, before the sun came up, Lucky started barking under the house. I could hear her through the floorboards beneath my bed.

  Grampa sat up on his mat.

  “Something’s wrong with Lucky,” I said. I couldn’t find the lantern, so I just grabbed a box of matches and ran down the back steps.

  It was too dark to see, but I knew where Lucky slept. She heard me crawling toward her and whined between barks. When I got close, I took a match out and struck it. Three sets of small red eyes froze and stared back at me.

  Mongooses.

  “Ghaaaaa!” I said, and they scurried away.

  The match went out and I lit another one. Why were mongooses bothering Lucky? I crawled closer.

  “Lucky … you little rabbit.”

  Four squirmy pups nudged at her belly. Actually, they were more like four wet blobs. They must have just come out, or else Lucky had licked them. I’d never seen puppies so new.

  Grampa crawled up beside me.

  “The mongooses were trying to get at them,” I said.

  “Uhnnn.”

  The puppies looked like they were born too early, their ears nothing but furry tabs. They looked more like rats than dogs. “Is there something wrong with them?”

  “Nah,” Grampa said. “They born blind … and deaf … but pretty soon eye come right, and ear.”

  “Got to build a fence, or something,” I said. “To protect them.”

  Grampa studied Lucky’s puppies a moment, his face soft and hard at the same time. He wasn’t very interested in animals as pets, but he was soft on any kind of babies. He even felt like that for baby chicks, even when he knew they would soon grow to be as cranky as he was.

  Grampa and I watched the puppies fumble around Lucky’s belly, trying to drink. Then we crawled out from under the house. The sky had changed, just barely, going from black to purple. Grampa’s rooster started to crow.

  Mama must have heard Lucky’s barking too. The light from the kitchen window spilled out over the grass. The cool scent of ginger from the jungle filled the air as Grampa and I clomped up the wooden steps.

  “Lucky had puppies,” I told Mama. The screen door slapped behind me and Mama scowled. She hated loud noises like that. “Sorry,” I said.

  Kimi was sitting at the kitchen table. “I want to see,” she said.

  “Later,” Mama said. “Too dark now.”

  “You got any extra chicken wire?” I asked Grampa. “I need to make a fence.”

  “No need fence,” he said. “No need dogs, confonnit. Take ’um on the boat … drown ’um.”

  I turned to Mama, and she raised her eyebrows. “Who can pay to feed dogs?”

  “I can ask the Wilsons for scraps, or the Davises.… I can get it.…”

  Mama studied me, considering it. “If you can feed ’um, you can keep ’um. But when they get little bit more old, you can only keep one. Give away the rest.”

  “Okay, okay.”

  “Who going drown them, anyway?” Mama said. “Not you. Not me, for goodness sakes. And not that poor old man sitting there looking mean.”

  Grampa humphed, then got up to go light some incense at the butsudan. And probably to consult Grandma about what should be done about Lucky’s puppies.

  When I came home from school later that day, I hurried under the house and found a perfectly squared chicken-wire fence around Lucky and her pups. It even had a gate to let Lucky in and out.

  “Grampa,” I said, when I found him and Kimi out by the chickens. “Who built that fence? Did you do that?”

  “Was my dogs, I drown ’um, you can bet.”

  I smiled. He was such a bad liar. “Thanks, Grampa.”

  “Watch out the damn mongoose,” he said, pushing past me, bumping my arm.

  • • •

  Billy came over later and stayed under our house practically all afternoon looking at Lucky’s pups. He went home and came back after dark to look some more.

  “That one is Red,” he finally said, touching a pale tan one with a white saddle on it. Lucky got nervous and growled a little. Billy moved his hand away and Lucky looked up at him with forgiving eyes. The puppy twitched in its sleep, the light from the lantern warm and yellow.

  “How come that one?”

  “It’s the smallest.”

  “Red Ruffing isn’t small.”

  “Yeah, but Red Ruffing would pick the small one if he was picking.… How could he help it? The small one needs you the most.”

  I shrugged. “Okay, it’s yours.”

  “What is it, anyway?” Billy asked. “Boy or girl?”

  “I don’t know. Take a look under its tail and see.”

  “What do you look for?” Billy said.

  “How should I know? Just look and see what you can see.”

  Billy picked up the puppy and lifted the tail. Then he looked under the tails of the rest of the pups. “They all look the same.”

  “All girls? Or boys?”

  “I don’t know,” Billy said.

  “Can’t you tell a boy from a girl?”

  “You try, then.”

  So I studied them carefully. Billy was right. “Well, anyway,” I said, “it’s your dog. Boy or girl.”

  We finally got back out from under the house. Billy had to get home. I walked with him as far as diamond grass. We couldn’t stop talking about Lucky’s puppies. I was going to train one to shake hands, and Billy was going to teach Red to catch tennis balls.

  “Good luck,” I said. “If Red is anything like Lucky, all he’s going to do is sleep and chew those balls to rags.”

  Just then, the night sky exploded into rays of light. Searchlights. The mountains behind us looked flat and close in the beams that crawled along the ridges.

  Billy read my mind. We took off for the banyan tree, stumbling through the ghostly jungle half-lit by the glowing clouds. I followed Billy up the massive trunk into the branches. We clawed our way to the top, where there was an opening in the leaves. My legs felt rubbery, I’d climbed so fast.

  “Holy moly,” Billy said, gawking out toward the horizon. From where we were you could see the whole side of the island and miles and miles of ocean. There must have been fifty searchlights, some shining into the sky, some running along the mountains, and some blasting out to sea, scanning the water.

  “Maneuvers,” Billy said.

  “Yeah … incredible.”

  Long, straight beams of blue-white light crisscrossed each other, back and forth, slicing through the black night. And far out on the ocean, you could see dots of ships caught like roaches in the powerful beams.

  A breeze whisked up from the town below, bringing with it the night smell of seawater and honeysuckle mixed together. I leaned closer to the branch, gripping it tighter, its sandpapery bark pinching my palms.

  Then the lights went out.

  The island turned black. Only small yellow lights from the city sparkled below, like distant camphires. Far away in the hills on the west end of the island, red flashes flickered in the sky, followed seconds later by rumbling sounds, like thunder on the moon.

  “Those army guys never stop,” Billy said.

  Night maneuvers. I listened to the eerie, muffled explosions. Strange. Kind of scary … like it was all happening in outer space somewhere.

  I lay awake for more than an hour that night. You hardly ever thought about the army, and
then you were suddenly reminded it was still there, like somebody’s grumpy watchdog. I kept seeing the boats caught in the searchlights out on the horizon. Maybe one of them was Papa’s. I tried to put myself out there, out on the Taiyo Maru, looking back at those blasts of light. The boat was so small, just a leaf on the sea. A plane could bomb it out of the water in a second.

  • • •

  When Papa came home early the next morning, I showed him the story about the Reuben James. He sat down at the kitchen table and studied the picture. Grampa was next to the window, sitting as straight as a stop sign.

  Papa couldn’t read English either, so he handed the paper back and asked me to read it to him.

  “What does it mean, Papa?” I asked, when I’d finished.

  Lines of worry stood between his eyes. “Hard to say, Tomi …”

  But I knew what he worried about—the Japanese, who were making war with China and arguing with the U.S. about it, making war like the Germans were. And though the U.S. wasn’t at war with anyone, maybe it was only a matter of time until it would be.

  “Lot of people in Honolulu starting to point finger,” Papa said. “They wondering whose side us Hawaii-Japanee going take, and what we going do if Japan and U.S. got into a fight.”

  Maybe that was what Mr. Wilson was wondering too.

  For a few minutes no one spoke. I felt kind of queasy. Under the house Lucky barked, and made me jump. I watched Papa study the picture of the Reuben James. Had the men on it drowned, or gotten blown up? I wanted to ask Papa if he’d seen the searchlights, and I wanted to tell him about Mr. Wilson, and what he’d said. And I hadn’t even told him about Lucky’s puppies.

  But I didn’t say a word.

  The Butcher

  “Gentlemen … and I use that term loosely,” Mr. Ramos said. “Remember the science project? Well, this is it. The deadline for telling me what you will be working on.”

  I glanced over at Billy and Mose and Rico. For once, the three of them were sitting up straight and looking as innocent as Lucky’s puppies.

  Mr. Ramos sat on the edge of his desk. “Well?” he said.

  Billy raised his hand.

  “Ah, Billy. Good. What’s it going to be?”

  “I thought I would make a display on how to throw a curveball. I could do some drawings and write something. And then I could do a demonstration.”

  Mr. Ramos raised his eyebrows. “Hmmm … more like physics than earth science. But if that’s what you want to do, then that will be fine.”

  Mose and Rico stared at their desks.

  “Okay, the Corteles cousins … what about you?”

  “Mose and I want to do one together,” Rico said.

  Mose perked up.

  “Let’s hear it, then,” Mr. Ramos said.

  “We’re going to make a vollacano and show how it works.”

  Mose stared at Rico. I had to laugh, it was so obvious Mose hadn’t heard a thing about any volcano project.

  “All right,” Mr. Ramos said. “But first you’ve got to get the pronunciation right. It’s volcano. And it better be good, because there will be two of you working on one project.… Understand?”

  “Yessir, Mr. Ramos,” Rico said.

  Mose nodded okay.

  Billy put his hand up to cover his mouth and whispered to Rico, “Yessir, Mr. Ramos.” Rico reached across the aisle and slapped Billy’s arm with the back of his hand.

  “Was there something else, Rico?” Mr. Ramos asked.

  “No, no. That’s all.”

  “Okay. Now, this is for all of you. I want to see some real progress by December fifteenth—that’s one month from now.”

  Mr. Ramos winked at Mose and Rico, but Mose didn’t see it. He was too busy writing a note to Rico.

  • • •

  After school, we skipped the school bus and headed out to catch a city bus. Rico had heard a rumor that the Kaka’ako Boys had a new pitcher, who was also a slugger, some guy from the island of Hawaii who was over six feet tall … and only in the eighth grade. We had to check it out.

  Mose was still in a bad mood over the volcano. But for Rico, the more he thought about it, the more he slapped himself on the back. “Don’t worry,” he said to Mose. “Easy, this. All we gotta do is get a pile of mud and dig a hole in the middle. Then let it dry and paint some red coming out. Maybe put a stink bomb inside to make it smell like real.”

  “Jeese.” Mose rolled his eyes. “This is a science project. You gotta do a report, and you gotta be able to explain the thing. Who’s gonna do that?”

  “You. I make it, you fake it.”

  Mose shoved Rico. “Do me a favor—don’t think anymore today, okay?”

  “Here comes the bus,” I said. “Stop goofing off, or he won’t let us on.”

  Mose and Rico settled down. The driver gave us dirty looks when we put our five cents in the meter. We stumbled to the back while the bus lurched on down the hill toward the ocean.

  “Rico, how much money you got left?”

  “Nothing.”

  Mose looked at me. “That was all I had.”

  We all turned to Billy.

  “Rich haole,” Rico said. “It’s up to you, or else we going walk back.”

  “Ten cents,” Billy said.

  “I told you he was rich,” Rico said.

  “But not rich enough,” I added. “Two of us gotta walk.”

  “Nah,” Billy said. “We can all walk.”

  Mose shook his head and started another round of shoving. But we stopped when we noticed the bus driver’s eyes in the mirror.

  We got off and headed down to Atkinson Park, where they had a couple of baseball diamonds. We passed the soda works and the soy factory, the buildings squeezed so close together only a cock-a-roach could fit between them. Small kids were playing in the streets. They were a mixed-up bunch of all the races in Kaka’ako, mostly boys who roamed around like ants. A bunch of them followed us in a pack about a block behind.

  That part of Kaka’ako was crammed with falling-down two-story wooden buildings with laundry hanging from every window. I loved that place. I’d been down there on Japanese festival days with my family, and many times with Papa to see his fishermen friends. Once in a while I even went with Mama and Kimi to visit Mama’s old picture-bride acquaintances.

  As we walked Billy got quiet, like he was trying to hide. I couldn’t blame him. You didn’t see many haoles down there. Everyone noticed him, with his blond hair and baby-pink face.

  Ahead of us seven boys, all Japanese, hung around blocking the way to the park. We had to walk through them or else cross the street like cowards. But Rico and Mose weren’t about to cross any street for anybody.

  “Now we’ve had it,” I whispered.

  “What, from those punks?” Rico pulled a stick match out of his pocket and stuck it in his mouth like a toothpick.

  We kept walking, Rico strutting ahead. The gang slowly bunched up, but Rico kept on going straight at them. If a fight broke out I’d yell “Police, police,” and hope they’d run for it.

  Rico moved up, nose to nose with the biggest guy, except that Rico’s nose was only at the guy’s chin. But Rico just stood there with the stick match almost touching the big guy’s neck. Nobody said a word. Seven boys giving us deadly looks.

  Rico pushed on past, then turned and looked back with his hands on his hips, waiting for me and Mose and Billy.

  Mose turned sideways and bumped his way through. Then me, so close I could smell the oil on the guy’s hair and see the small pin-sized pimples on his chin.

  But when Billy tried to pass, the big guy stepped in front of him.

  Billy started over to the other side of the street. One of the smaller guys followed in front of him, blocking his way step for step.

  Billy stopped and looked over at us. The guy kept staring at him, about two inches from his face. But Billy ignored him. He wasn’t afraid. He just didn’t like trouble.

  The big guy came up to me. “How
come you bring these haoles down this place?”

  Rico pushed me out of the way. He spit the stick match out of his mouth. “Who you calling one haole?”

  The big guy nodded his head toward Billy. “The lily-white punk over there … and you, too, in fack … yeah, you.” He put his fingertips on Rico’s chest and pushed him back.

  Bok!

  Rico landed one good punch. The big guy fell to the ground.

  “Hey!” someone up the street yelled. “Hold it!”

  A guy ran up to us, a man with a ballahead army-kind haircut. He was short, but he had big muscles. “Beat it,” he said to the gang guys. “We don’t need no trouble around here.”

  The big guy scrambled up, covering his eye. He seemed to know the ballahead man. He glared at Rico, then backed away. The rest of his gang looked at us like they wanted to tear our heads off. Finally they turned and disappeared into an alley.

  “No worry about them,” the man said. “They won’t bother you if I’m around. They dumb, but they not stupit.” He glanced over at Billy and smiled. “Hey … I know you. You the pitcher, yeah? Hoo, man, you good. What’s your name?”

  “Billy.”

  The man glanced at the rest of us. “I seen you guys too. You the team play my kid brother. Herbie Okubo … you know him? The kid play second base?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Mose said. “He’s pretty good.”

  The man shook his head. “The bugga work hard. … I never seen a kid practice like that. So, what you boys doing down Kaka’ako?”

  “We heard they got a new pitcher,” Billy said.

  “Yeah,” Rico added. “We heard he was six feet, maybe seven.”

  “Maybe eight. That’s all Herbie been talking about for the last week,” the man said, shaking his head. “How’s about I come with you? I never seen him yet either.”

  “Sure,” Mose said.

  The man put his arm on Billy’s shoulder. “Come on, haole. You welcome in this neighborhood. No worry about those punks. They always like that. Hell, I used to be like that myself.… No mean nothing, they just like to ack tough.”

  Billy nodded, and we headed into Atkinson Park. Some of the Kaka’ako Boys saw us coming and stopped fielding grounders that Hamamoto, the catcher, was hitting out to them. Soon they were all standing there staring at us.