House of the Red Fish (21 page)

“That we are.”

This is all for you, Papa, I thought. All for you.

Jake drove through the quiet neighborhood and got as close as he could to the canal. He stopped to peer through the trees. On the other side of the street, houses slept.

“Now what?” Billy said.

“Let’s walk around, see if we can find a way to drive the truck through these trees.”

“I’ll wait here,” Jake said. “If you find something, shout.”

We found a dirt road in, but it was blocked off by a chain locked to two posts. Farther on we found a place where it might be possible to drive through the trees.

“Too bad there’s no road here,” Billy said.

“We could make one. Just plow on through.”

Billy turned and whistled to Jake.

Jake started up the truck and drove down to us, studying the bushes. “There’s no road.”

“We’re going to make one. We’ll walk ahead of you and check for rocks. Just drive over the weeds, right in here.”

Jake got out and studied the opening. He nodded, got back into the truck, and followed us through. Easy. The dirt was packed as hard as a paved road.

We drove on out to the canal.

Got out, thumping the doors behind us.

Jake studied the sunken boats with his hands on his hips, whistling low. “You guys are crazy. No way are you going to bring that boat up. I thought it would be smaller.” He shook his head and sighed. “This was a waste of time.”

“No,” I said. “We can do it.”

“Uh-huh.”

Gazing down on the
Taiyo Maru,
I could see his point. It
looked
impossible. Even to me, every time I saw it.

“I heard these boats were sunk by a storm,” Jake said.

“Some say that,” I said.

“Seems odd that they’d all go down, don’t you think?”

“There’s a hole in the hull of our boat. Somebody axed it.”

“Huh.”

Down the way two fishermen sat in the water on wooden stilt-legged chairs, fishing for mullet. No one wandered the shoreline on the other side of the canal where Keet and his fools had bombarded us with rocks.

I looked up at the sun, now heading toward the sea. “We need to hide these pontoons,” I said. “Nothing much we can do today, anyway. Not enough time.”

Jake scratched his cheek with his thumb. “Dad will be in deep you-know-what if somebody hauls these pontoons off.”

“Who’s going to take them?” Billy said. “They’re too heavy.”

“You got that right. I guess we can leave them here. Somewhere.”

That somewhere was a patch of tall weeds in the shade of a tangle of dry trees, far enough away from where we’d hidden the boat parts that if Keet Wilson came around he probably wouldn’t find it. It would have to do.

We guided Jake with hand motions as he backed the truck in. Billy lowered the gate and gazed in at the pontoons. “Can’t we just leave the truck here too, so we don’t have to carry these back to the water?”

“Dream on,” Jake said. “Come on, twits, muscle up.”

My hands had gone red and raw, and I was soaked with sweat by the time we’d dragged the two pontoons in their cases off the trailer and covered them with weeds, old brown leaves, and whatever else we could find. In the end it looked like a trash pile.

Getting them all back over to the canal without the truck was something I didn’t even want to think about. But I would manage.

I shook that thought out of my head, opening and closing my beat-up hands.

That night we had a rare meal—hamburgers!

Mrs. Wilson had given Mama some ground beef, something that was very hard to get. The closest I’d been to a hamburger since before the war was in the papers, when Wimpy ate them by the truckload in the
Popeye
comic strip.

“I didn’t want to take it,” Mama said about the meat. “But Mrs. Wilson insisted. She said not to tell her husband.”

“Why?” I asked.

Mama thought a moment. “Mrs. Wilson is two people. One with Mr. Wilson, and one without Mr. Wilson.”

“What does that mean?”

“Someday you will know.”

“Kind of like Fumi?” I said.

She frowned. “Fumi?”

“Well, Fumi is two people too. First she jokes and bosses
around army guys at her shop, and they all like it when she does that; then on the other side she is kind and generous to me and Ojii-chan and would never think to boss us around.”

Mama shook her head. “Don’t tell me what goes on down there. This new Ojii-chan is too much for me already.”

That made me laugh. “I know what you mean, Mama, believe me.”

Mama cooked the meat in a frying pan.

Grampa came in from the chicken coops and we sat at our kitchen table, Kimi and Mama on one side, me and Grampa on the other, the windows blacked out. One light-bulb lit the stuffy room.

“These are so good, Mama,” I said.

“We very fortunate, Tomi. Mrs. Wilson is good to me,” Mama said, truly thankful. “We lucky to be working for them.”

I looked at her a moment, then nodded. It was probably true. The Wilsons weren’t so bad some of the time. We could get along.

When we were this lucky we celebrated, even Grampa, who had his own special way of putting a hamburger together, a way that I copied because hamburger and eggs from our chickens went together like mustard on a hot dog at a baseball game. There was nothing better. What we did was take two pieces of bread, slap the cooked hamburger on one piece, then a fried egg with juicy yolk on the other, then put them together. Man, was that good. Me and Grampa ate in silence, in a little bit of heaven, you could say. For once, we agreed completely.

I felt Mama’s eyes on me and looked up. “What?”

She studied me a moment longer, then said, “Where you been going so many weekend, Tomi-kun? What you doing I don’t know about?”

I glanced at Grampa, who went on enjoying his meal as if he weren’t even in the room with three other people. But he was listening. He didn’t miss a beat.

“Nothing, Mama, I just doing things with my friends.”

She frowned.

Should I tell her? If I did she might get worried and make me stop, especially because of Mr. Wilson.

She eyed me, her hands folded on the table in front of her plate. “I know you’re up to something. You can’t fool me.”

I took a big bite so my mouth would be full and I’d be unable to say anything if she asked another question. At least it would buy me some time to think.

When I didn’t answer, she said, “I only want to know one thing, and then I let this go. What you are doing—would your father approve?”

I put the hamburger down and wiped my hands on my shirt, gulping down that huge bite.

“Yes, Mama. For real, he would approve.”

Early Friday morning we headed down to the canal.

Besides me and Billy, we had Mose, Rico, Jake, and Charlie’s nephews, Ben and Calvin, who could probably carry those pontoons in one hand like a waiter with a tray.

“How come you don’t just drive us, Jake?” I said. “We got Sanji’s truck.”

“Somebody might want to see it tonight. I need to keep it good and clean. I wouldn’t want to chance getting in a wreck or anything either.”

I shrugged. “Yeah.”

“You need to think about those things,” he added.

Billy snorted and nudged me. “Dad thought of it, not him.”

Jake winked.

At the canal, we headed in from the street. I scowled when I saw that the weeds leading into the hiding place were
flattened, and I couldn’t believe we’d left it like that. We should have been more careful.

But it was more than carelessness. The boards and weeds and trash we’d covered the pontoons with were torn away and scattered all over the place.

The pontoons were gone.

“I can’t believe this,” Jake said.

A piece of paper flapped in the breeze, one corner stuck under a rock.

A note.

Calvin picked it up and read it silently. When he was done he looked up and grinned. “Looks like this going be more fun than I thought.”

“Let me see that,” I said.

It wasn’t signed.

Billy snatched it out of my hand and read it out loud, his face turning pink with anger. “ That’s it,” he said. “ That moron’s gone too far.”

“Now we talking,” Rico said, slapping a fist into his hand.

Ben and Calvin nodded, grim.

“Bad, bad news,” Jake said. “Those pontoons didn’t belong to us. Dad’s going to—”

“I know where they are,” I said.

***

We took the bus back up to Billy’s house, a silent ride. Seven stone-faced guys in the backseats. Nobody sat near us. All I could think about was how creepy it felt to be robbed. Like an invasion, somebody coming in and messing with your private life. Made my stomach turn.

We stood around in Billy’s yard, eight of us now, because Ben and Calvin got Charlie all worked up about it. I ran home to get Grampa, too, but he was gone. Mama was at the Wilsons’, and Kimi was playing out behind our house with Azuki Bean.

“Kimi,” I said. “You want a real important job? Just for an hour or so?”

We needed a lookout. We didn’t need Mr. Wilson to be anywhere near his own home when we did what we were going to do. If anyone came into that jungle I wanted to know about it.

She nodded. “Something with the chickens?”

“Naah, you too smart for that. This job is bigger than chickens.”

She smiled, ready to work.

With Kimi again riding high on Charlie’s shoulders, we
took a muddy trail from Billy’s house into the damp jungle of trees, high grasses, vines, ferns, and bamboo thickets, slapping our necks and faces at the mosquitoes.

The grass where Keet and his fools had driven their truck in was freshly flattened. We followed its trail around a couple of trees.

The two pontoon cases were tossed in the weeds with the boat parts.

Charlie lowered Kimi to the ground and squatted. He lifted a corner of a hatch cover from the
Taiyo Maru
and peeked under it, where a handful of lead weights lay in the mud.

“Keet’s gone off the deep end,” Jake said. “This is personal, Tomi.”

“Yeah,” I said. “But why, is what I want to know.”

Calvin pursed his lips. “This punk needs to spend some time in jail. Look at this stash.”

“Maybe we going stash his face,” Rico said.

Mose frowned at Rico. “
Stash
his face?”

“Yeah, it means stab my fist in his face and smash it.”

Mose shook his head.

“We better get to work,” Ben said. “Where we going take it?”

“Bring it to the toolshed by my house,” Charlie said. “I keep my eye on it there. Don’t worry, Tomi. We watch out for you.”

“Thanks,” I said. “I mean that more than you know.”

“No problem. You go take Kimi where she can watch for trouble.”

“Yeah, yeah. Let’s go, Kimi.”

We crept over toward the Wilsons’ house. The jungle tumbled in on us as we picked our way through the thick tangle of vines.

A five-foot tree fern, dark and leafy, edged the Wilsons’ backyard.

We crouched behind it.

Mama stepped out the back door of the Wilsons’ house with a floor mat to shake out. Kimi started to call to her, but I clamped my hand over her mouth. “No, Kimi. Mama can’t know we’re here. Okay?”

She nodded, and I took my hand away.

“Good. All you have to do is watch the house. If you see Mr. Wilson drive up, or if you see Keet or his friends, or anyone who’s not Mama or Mrs. Wilson, then you come tell us quick, all right? Quick!”

Kimi’s eyes grew wide and alert. “What was that stuff back there where Charlie is?” she whispered.

I hesitated, looking down at the mud oozing between my toes and around the edges of my feet. How much should I tell her? Would it scare her to know about Papa’s sunken boat? As far as I knew, no one had told her about it. But she’d seen our island bombed. And worse, she’d been there when Grampa and I had to kill Papa’s pigeons.