House of the Red Fish (3 page)

Only now did I understand that laugh.

Still, we both liked the idea of being up there in the clouds. For me it was all about Papa’s pigeons, and the freedom I felt watching them, white specks circling in the blue sky.

Keet even used to watch them with me.

But that world crumbled long ago. First he just ignored me. Then he told me to stay away from him. Then he got dangerous.

One day in the jungle, he crossed the line.

It was right after Pearl Harbor. Keet started spying on me. He’d been creeping around with his .22 rifle one afternoon and caught me cleaning the buried katana. He pointed the rifle at my chest. “Give me that Jap sword,” he said. He wanted it, like the military was confiscating things from Japanese people all over the island, things they thought could be dangerous to the USA. I said something like
Over my dead body,
not afraid of him or his rifle, not when it came to the katana. I was even ready to break my promise to Papa not to fight.

It was just us, alone, face to face.

Lucky for both of us, he backed down. That day I learned something about Keet Wilson that the navy might not like— he gave up easy. Maybe he was afraid to fight. It seemed to
me that if you were going to fly off an aircraft carrier into battle you needed all the guts you could find, and then some.

***

It was late, darkness now coming down like a hammer.

Billy walked faster, me right behind him, no money left for a bus.

Soon the crush of town faded away, replaced by wide streets and dark yards protected by thick hedges. Quiet, already asleep.

Or maybe ready to jump out of the bushes and start firing.

“You heard anything about your grampa yet?” Billy said.

“Not a peep. Like he fell in a hole somewhere.”

“It still doesn’t make sense why they arrested him.”

“He’s just a grumpy old man.”

“Maybe they’ll let him go, too much trouble.”

I laughed. “I’d leave the door unlocked and hope he’d escape in the middle of the night.”

“Confonnit,” Billy said.

That cracked me up. It was Grampa’s favorite word when he couldn’t think of anything else to say. It felt good to laugh.

“Look,” Billy said, pointing with his chin.

The park wasn’t much like it used to be with its wide grassy field to play in, because now it was scarred with trenches deep enough to jump into if the Japanese bombed us again. In the fading light, Billy and I watched three small blond-haired kids racing around in those trenches. You could only see their hair zipping around.

“They got no problems,” I said.

“Except, like us, they better get home quick.”

A police car pulled up and cruised slowly beside us. Two police looking over. “You boys headed home?”

“Yessir,” Billy said.

We kept walking. They kept driving.

The police looked past Billy at me. “Where’s your gas mask?”

“Uh … home,” I said.

They stopped so we did, too.

“Your IDs, both of you,” one guy said without getting out of the car.

We dug them out of our pockets. Everyone had one now, and you had to carry it everywhere you went. Your gas mask, too, but they were heavy and ugly and we never took them with us.

The guy checked our IDs, then handed them back. “You boys start carrying your gas masks. You never know when you might need them.”

“Yessir,” we said at the same time.

The car moved on.

We hurried home in silence, daylight down to a flicker. Soon the light would die … and the roaches and block wardens would come out.

A dirt path cut through the bushes from the street up to the small green house I lived in with Mama and Kimi. Billy’s house was beyond the trees to the left, the Wilsons’ above and to the right. Both were hidden from view by a jungle of bushes and tall trees that roared in the wind like the surf.

It was dark now, everything murky. Shadows and shapes. I held out my hand to stop Billy.

“What?” he said, crouching.

“That dumb goat. You see it?”

Billy squinted into the darkness. “No.”

We started ahead slowly, eyes on the black spots in the bushes.

A month back Mr. Wilson had bought a pygmy goat and brought it over to our house with a face that meant business.
“Tie this goat up on a long rope,” he said. “Let it eat down all these weeds. This place looks like a junkyard.”

That was because I couldn’t do everything that needed to be done to hold back the jungle. The weeds and vines grew too fast, closing in to swallow our house. The lawn that grew in sad patches in the dirt we called a yard was as tough to cut as old rope. Grampa Joji used to keep it all from swallowing us with a machete and a rusty push mower we had stored under the house. But he had all day to do that. I didn’t.

Billy crept behind me. “Maybe it’s out back,” he whispered.

“He’s a bag of tricks. Yo u can’t trust that thing.”

I’d named the goat Little Bruiser, because my legs were covered with bruises from his attacks. He must have been owned by someone with boys he didn’t like, because he never went after Mama or Kimi. Just me and my friends.

The place was still. A relief.

“Tomorrow,” Billy said, hurrying over to the trees and the trail to his house.

“Don’t forget your gas mask,” I whispered.

“ Too late. I already forgot it.”

“Pfff,” I scoffed. For the first few months after Pearl Harbor we carried those bug-face masks everywhere. But then we stopped, like most people did. The cops had to be tired of talking to people about them.

My lazy half-beagle mutt, Lucky, came stretching out from the cool space under the house. One of her pups peeked out from behind her, a smudge in the night—Kimi’s puppy, Azuki Bean. And behind Azuki Bean were the two pups I
still had to find homes for. It wasn’t getting any easier because they were over a year old now.

Lucky lowered her head, acting all shame at getting caught napping, or maybe she was just shaking off a dream. “My scraggly welcoming committee.” I squatted down. “Hey, you dogs seen that goat?”

Lucky yawned and nudged my hand with her wet nose.

“That’s what I thought,” I said, scratching her dusty head.

I glanced up.

The shape of Grampa’s beat-up, rusty bike sagged against the side of the house. Weeds had grown into its spokes. It hadn’t been ridden since the police and FBI took him away.

“Ho!” I screeched, startled out of my skin when Little Bruiser streaked around the side of the house, coming at me as if fired from a cannon. I leaped up. Lucky scurried back under the house. Little Bruiser’s rock-hard head nicked my shin, stinging like a Portuguese man-of-war. “Ow!” I hobbled up the steps and slammed through our screen door into the house.

I looked back out at him, staring at me from the top step. “One day I going sell you for dog food!” I rubbed my leg.

Little Bruiser stared me down as if he owned the place and I was the intruder.

“Git! Beat it!”

He didn’t budge.

“Confonnit.”

I thought, Did I just say confonnit? Jeese, I’m becoming Grampa Joji.

The house was quiet. “Anybody home?”

No answer. It was dark as a cave in our front room. The house was so empty now, with all our Japanese stuff hidden or buried, some of it under the house, some in the jungle.

Something was cooking, filling the house with good smells. I heard voices and the sound of Kimi clomping up the back steps laughing. I headed into the lightless kitchen.

“Tomi-kun,” Mama said, following Kimi into the house. Kimi was carrying a small lantern, turned low. You had to have it if you went to the outhouse in the jungle behind the house. That place was a gamble even in full-on daylight.

“Why you so late today?” Mama went on. “Black out the house so we can get some light.”

“Hi, Kimi,” I said, ruffling her smooth black hair with my hand. Her blue dress looked out of place above her dusty bare feet and weed-scratched legs. “How many eggs did Ojii-chan’s chickens make today?”

“Twenty-eight,” she said, jumping up and down as if she’d just located all the gold in China.

I knelt down and faced her. “Wow, that’s a good haul. You sell some?”

“The store wanted all of them, but we kept four.”

“Go, Tomi,” Mama said, waving toward the windows.

“Okay, okay.”

I stood and rubbed Kimi’s head one more time. Her smile made me happy, blue sky peeking through clouds.

Mama worried too much about blacking out the house. But who could blame her? She had a friend downtown whose kitchen light got shot out, right through the window from the street. Some BMTC guy. It was crazy out there.
Some people thought if they could see a light at night, enemy planes could see it too, and come bomb us again. But that didn’t make much sense to me, unless the Japanese had a new kind of plane that hung around in the sky like a cloud with nothing to do but wait for small lights to pop on.

But it was the law.

I quickly taped old pieces of cardboard boxes over every window in the kitchen and the front room, where we lit candles at night. Every other room would stay dark.

That night we ate rice, spinach, and eggs by candlelight, huddled quietly at our small kitchen table. I wondered if Kimi and Mama felt as lonely as I did with Papa and Grampa missing. I wanted to talk about them, and about the boat, too, but it would only make Mama worry.

Later, I lay down on a tatami mat with Mama and Kimi to sleep on the floor in the front room where we spent almost every night these days. I’d peeled away the cardboard so we could get some fresh air, the candles pinched out with licked fingers.

Around midnight I was jarred awake by the wail of sirens.

A fire truck, or an ambulance.

The wailing faded off and the island fell silent.

The sirens wailed again minutes later and kept going.

Overhead, something rumbled in the sky, a lot of something. The sound rolled through the hills, caught in the valley, tumbling down. Planes, flying low—a sound I would never in my life forget, because it chilled me to the bone.

The whole house rattled.

I sprang up, hopping as I dragged my pants on. I ran outside to stand in the inky black night, cocking my head toward the hills.

Planes, for sure.

Fear raced through me, copper swelling on my tongue. My breathing was shallow, like I couldn’t get enough air.

They were back.

The Japanese!

Searchlights burst into the sky, crisscrossing beams
searching for the enemy. Big antiaircraft guns down by the ocean boomed to life, shaking the night. The flickering of gunfire reflected off the low clouds that hung over the city and blanketed the mountains beyond.

Boom!

Crummp.

Mad searchlights. Terrifying drone. I held my head, wanting to scream. Big guns boomed. My brain howled:
Run back inside, tell Mama and Kimi to run for cover! Get out of the house and go into the trees!

But I couldn’t move.

I jumped when Mama put her hand on my shoulder. “Come inside, Tomi-kun,” she said, almost in a whisper. “Come.”

“But—”

“Only planes, Tomi,” she said. “They not bombing. Listen.”

Mama pulled me close. I listened.

She was right. There was only the distant antiaircraft fire. No bombs, a sound we all knew too well.

Back inside the house I sat next to Kimi, who was trembling under a blanket that completely covered her. I rested my hand on her back, warm to the touch. “It’s all right, Kimi. It’s going to stop soon.”

A few minutes later the navy gunfire fell silent. But sirens still wailed in the far distance, and my heart still raced.

Kimi finally fell asleep, but Mama lay awake. I could tell by the way there was no sound to her breathing.

When I tried to sleep, I saw Japanese soldiers slinking ashore in my crippled dreams.

I saw bombers.

I saw prisoners … us … wounded and beaten.

When you’ve been inside a war—standing under falling bombs, breathing the smoke, smelling rubber burning, hearing who has died and seeing the damage all over your once peaceful island—you can’t shake it off. They could still come back. It could happen again.