Southland (29 page)
It only took Victor a few days to get another job—at Bethlehem Steel, which was right there in Watts. And he was assigned to a day shift, nine to five, so he saw a lot more of his wife. It had taken her six days to feel well enough to get out of bed, but her employers were more sympathetic than Victor’s, and welcomed her back when she was ready. At first, Victor’s extra time at home seemed like a good thing; Janie had nightmares almost every night and would start shaking uncontrollably during the day. But slowly, over the next several months, everything started to burden him. He didn’t like the dull weight of Janie beside him in the bed. He couldn’t stand to sit at the table with her and eat another meal in silence. He couldn’t endure the wails of the just-born baby girl. But most of all, he couldn’t bear to look at his wife, to see the face and lips and dull sad eyes of the woman he had failed to protect. Several men from the plant lived there in the neighborhood, and Victor began to go out with them after their shift, having a drink or two over at the Downbeat on Central, or playing cards at Penny’s Barbershop on 103rd. When he’d get home late, smelling of whiskey, Janie would fix her eyes on him and ask where he’d been. And because he couldn’t stand hurting her, he began to get angry and yell that he was just relaxing after a hard day’s work. They fought over his hours, over money, over the perfume she once detected on his collar. And then one night, exasperated after yet another fight, he threw his hands up and walked toward the door.
“Where you going?” Janie demanded, fist on her hip.
“Friend’s place. I can’t sleep in the same house as you.”
“You going to see a woman?”
“Naw, girl, don’t be foolish.” But he was already thinking of the perfume woman, how glad she’d be to see him, how
her
eyes didn’t measure him against some silent expectation and decide that he came up short.
“So you just gonna walk out of here and leave me with your babies?”
“Well, I know the
first
one’s mine, anyway.” He didn’t know why he said this; he didn’t believe the thought behind it; knew she was pregnant when he found her in the alley. But a canyon cracked open between them now and he could barely make her out on the other side. She just stared at him and nodded, as if understanding something, and then walked over to the crib and picked up the baby. The space she created that held herself and her children no longer had room for Victor. He knew it. Without saying another word, he turned and walked out the door.
Victor moved into a room above a liquor store in the only place besides Watts and the Mesa where Negroes were welcome—Little Tokyo, renamed Bronzeville, which had been emptied by the war. Where just two years earlier every face had been yellow, now every face was black. Negroes were running businesses with names like “Yamashita Clothing” and “Ushimoto Dry Goods.” They inherited, too, the cramped and crumbling apartments, the lack of plumbing, the roach-infested quarters carved out of any empty space—a storefront, a storage room, a dirt-floor garage—that are the fate of all unwanted people. Victor’s room had only a bed, a chair, and a shelf for all his clothes. Janie accepted money from him every month to help care for the children, but after a few failed attempts to bridge the deepening canyon, she refused to see him again. And the night life that had been so attractive when he was married held no appeal for him now; he stayed in, read the
Sentinel
and the
California Eagle
, and saved and saved his money. He felt both odd and comforted as he walked through the streets where his best friend’s family had first settled in this country. Occasionally, he made the acquaintance of a woman he liked, but all of them were painful reminders of the woman he had loved and let down. Finally, he decided to go back to the Mesa, in order to try and have some kind of life again. And so he used all the money he had set aside over the years and bought a house a mile away from the house he’d grown up in. It wasn’t intentional, but it did seem fitting, that the house was right across the street from his old friend Frank, whom he hadn’t seen since right after the war; who seemed, like himself, quiet and reduced; who’d also made an inglorious return.
J
ACKIE GOT home from the Holiday Bowl and called Lanier before she even put her bag down. “I think we got him,” she said when he picked up.
“Who?”
“Lawson. I think we got him. I went back down to the Holiday Bowl today and talked to Kenji Hirano, and it turns out he saw Lawson on the Saturday of the riots in front of my grandfather’s store.”
“Really? Doing what?”
“Just standing out there with the boys. And then while he was watching, he saw Lawson make them go inside.”
“That’s beautiful. A witness.”
“Not only that, but Hirano was there when my grandfather found them.”
“Shit. We’ve got him. Do you think he’d testify?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how much help he would be. I think he’s a little bit senile.”
“Always was. Why didn’t he say something before?”
“Who knows? I didn’t ask. Maybe he thought it was useless. But at least he’s saying something now, right? So what do we do from here?”
“I don’t know, girl. You’re the lawyer.”
Jackie laughed. “OK, I guess we call the District Attorney’s office. I have a professor who’s good friends with him, and that should make it easier to set up a meeting. We should try and get the funeral home records, to prove the boys died and were buried.”
“I can do that,” said Lanier. “It was Ferguson’s Funeral Home, on Adams. It’s still there.”
“Good. And I still want to contact Matsumoto in Japan, and there’s one other person we should talk to—Victor Conway. Hirano mentioned him, and my aunt’s brought his name up, too.”
“Of course. Mr. Conway. He lived across the street. Did you find out anything else?”
Jackie paused. “Well, I’m not sure. But when Hirano was telling me about the day they found the boys, he mentioned that my grandfather made a phone call. And he assumed it was to my grandmother, but I’m pretty sure it was to Alma.”
“Why?”
“Because from what Hirano quoted me, he talked specifically about Curtis.”
“Well, that would make sense, wouldn’t it? To call the parents first?”
“Yes,” Jackie said, “except he called her ‘my love.’”
“Shit. Do you think—”
“Yeah, I do. And my question is, could Lawson have known about it, and could it have had anything to do with why he murdered the boys?”
“You mean, like, did he have something against the two of them together? Or something against Alma?”
“That, or maybe something
for
her.”
“Right. But if there
was
something going on between the two of them, do you think anyone else would have known about it?”
“I don’t know. And the thing is, we can’t really ask.” She paused. “What I don’t understand is how they did it. I mean, she worked and he never left the store, and there were always other people around. How’d they ever see each other alone?”
“I don’t know. But people manage. People can be real secretive about love when they need to be. And even when they
don’t
need to be.”
Jackie didn’t answer. She knew this last comment was in reference to her, and although she appreciated his effort, she wasn’t prepared, just then, to talk about Laura. She was finding it hard, recently, to think about her at all, and so she let his ball lie where it had landed.
Two days later, Jackie was standing on a sidewalk in front of an elementary school, waiting for Lanier to show up. Here, she’d learned from Hirano—this neglected-looking school in the Westlake district—was where Victor Conway spent his days. Beige paint was chipping off of the sides of the building; half the letters on the sign had dropped away. And the schoolyard looked like a ghost town—the unraveling cloth swings swayed lightly in the breeze; the metal rings on the jungle gym clanked together forlornly; what little grass there was on the soccer field was brown and patchy. If a child was shy of stepping on cracks, she’d never be able to play here—the cement was full of them, large and small, intertwined and crossing; it looked like a net had been laid flat on the ground, waiting to entrap all the children. Jackie glanced at her watch again—it was a little after three. Lanier was late and she was getting nervous; she didn’t want to face Victor Conway alone.
In front of the entrance, women were starting to gather. Jackie didn’t pay much attention to them and moved further down the block to keep her privacy. Then the clanging, reverberating final bell—the sound so engraved in her that she felt the blood-deep urge to run away from school and home for the day. She turned to watch the children pour out of the entrance. Which they did— running, jumping, screaming children, dressed in bright sweaters and pants, some of them hugging the women who waited, some of them moving in clumps down the sidewalk. And she noticed, now, that while a few of the children were black and Latino, most of them were Asian. Largely East Asian, Korean and Chinese, a few others who looked Thai or Filipino. She heard them talking to their mothers and amongst themselves in lively, private languages she couldn’t understand. And looking closer, she saw the marks of poverty—the slight, unsturdy limbs on both the women and the children; the poorly made and threadbare clothes; the bags and shoes that seemed older than the children themselves. She thought of herself at their age, the only Asian child in a welloff school where everyone had new clothes. She thought of the Thai workers, locked inside for months on end, the trials they’d overcome and had yet to face. And she wondered for the first time what it had been like for the original Ishidas and Sakais, the desperate or brave ones who’d left their home country to try their luck in this new, wide land. She wondered about the battles they’d had, amongst themselves, against others; she wondered how they struggled and suffered. And she knew, unmistakably, that while they’d acquired and achieved; while they’d cut ties with their old land and dropped anchor in this new one, the cost had been high, the losses massive. She was where she was, her parents where they were, because of what Frank and the other elders had been through. But the original Issei had been like the mothers on the sidewalk, and Frank and the second generation like the children—poor, lost, enclosed in themselves, not yet ready for their struggles with the larger world. The swarms of children looked to Jackie like a deep, slow river, which she wanted, now, to enter and be a part of, but which she needed just as deeply to avoid.
As the last of the children finally trickled away, Lanier walked up in front of her.
“Hey,” he said. “Hello? Anyone home?”
She turned to face him, with great effort, dragging herself out of the current. “Yeah. Hi. How are you?”
“You OK?” he asked. “You’re looking a little lost.”
You have no idea how lost, she thought. But she just frowned at him. “You’re late.”
He apologized, citing traffic, and together they climbed the steps and entered the building. Inside, the school was more cheerful—pictures and drawings decorated the walls and the floors were clean and shiny. They wandered the hallways until they came upon an elderly man mopping outside of a classroom. Lanier cleared his throat to speak, but the sound made the man look up. His movements—his handling of the mop, the time it took to straighten— betrayed his age, but his face was still strikingly handsome. His skin was dark and smooth, barely wrinkled. He had a full head of gray hair and glasses which made his eyes look larger and warmer than they already were. They widened when they settled on Lanier.
“Jimmy?”
And Lanier, under Conway’s stare, was transformed into a boy again, struggling to be worthy of standing in front of a man. “Yes, sir.”
Conway’s eyes moved over to Jackie and widened more. “Good Lord,” he said. “You look like Frank. Are you Jackie?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I used to bounce you on my knee, girl. Remember?”
Jackie looked down at her feet. “No.”
Conway ran a hand over his head, then carefully placed the mop back into the bucket of dirty water. The boy who always followed after Curtis. This girl with his best friend’s face. They’d walked through several decades to see him, but he wasn’t surprised; the past never stayed in the past. Nodding, he indicated that they should step outside and into the schoolyard. He pulled out a pack of cigarettes, which he offered to Jackie and Lanier (they both declined), and Jackie saw that his hand was shaking as he lit the match. After one puff, two, he looked at them. “They’re bad for you, I know. Doctors keep telling me I’ve got to stop, but I’m too old to be breaking bad habits.”
“How you doing, Mr. Conway?” asked Lanier. He remembered the old man more clearly now—his ready, side-splitting laugh; he and Frank sitting together on the crates in front of the store; the way all the women, including his mother, always brightened in his presence.
Conway took a drag and raised his eyebrows. “Well as can be expected at my age, I suppose. Broke a hip a couple months ago, had to have an operation—slipped right there in the hallway. That’s why I missed Frank’s funeral,” he said, looking at Jackie. “I’m real sorry about that. I was still in the hospital then. Just started back to work this week.” He didn’t say the rest of it, which was that he’d felt relieved, spared the difficulty of bidding Frank goodbye. The closest thing to a brother, Frank Sakai. The ranks of Conway’s friends were thinning out anyway, and he didn’t like to think that Frank was gone.
“Why are you working?” asked Lanier. “Why not just take it easy at home?”
“I retired from Bethlehem Steel in ’86. But after a year of sitting up in the house, I was about to lose my mind.” He couldn’t explain about the heavy hours staring out the window, mind always chewing on the past. The only things he’d looked forward to were his monthly breakfasts with Frank and the visits from his children, who’d finally started speaking to him after thirty years of silence. “Mrs. Choi, she ran the store after Frank sold the place, she had a sister who was a teacher’s assistant here. The paycheck adds a bit to my social security, and it’s good to be out of the house.”
A little girl ran across the schoolyard. She found something in the grass, retrieved it, and dashed back to the sidewalk, where a man took her hand and led her away.
Conway held his half-smoked cigarette in the air. “Used to take smoke breaks with your grandpa,” he said to Jackie. “Every day in front of the store. Way before then, too, in high school. Back then, they had smoking areas for the students.”
Jackie turned. “You went to high school with my grandfather?”
“Yep, Dorsey High, class of 1942. Although Frank didn’t graduate with us, you know.”
Jackie looked at Conway differently now, and so did Lanier; neither of them had known the men went back so far. She wanted to get a better sense of this man—his shaking hands, his sad eyes—and through him, a better sense of her grandfather. “I can’t imagine him as a boy,” she said. “What was he like back then?”
Conway stubbed the cigarette out against a pole and lit another. He thought of Frank at seventeen, the rigor and responsibility bred into him by his parents, the joy he took when he could be with people and forget about himself. “Very serious, very focused. I always liked to try and loosen him up.”
“Did you always live across the street?”
Conway shook his head. In the distance, they heard a siren, coming closer and moving away. “No. I bought that house in 1955. I’d been living down in Watts a few years. Didn’t see Frank for a long time, you know. Just right after the war, and then not again until I moved back to Crenshaw. But it was me that took care of the house when your family was sent to the camps.” And the time of the war seemed to age them as much as the fifteen years that followed. All the marks of boyishness pressed out of them by violence and loss. He thought briefly of his family; of the childhoods he’d missed. He thought of old friends from the shipyard and their deteriorating lives, spent almost wholly, after the war, in the once-temporary projects which had fast become permanent, hulking, unsafe.
Jackie didn’t know if she was supposed to acknowledge Conway’s caretaking, but he cut off her train of thought.
“You’re here about the murders, aren’t you?”
“Yes,” Lanier said. “My cousin…”
“Curtis,” interrupted Conway. “I know. I know who did it, too—a cop who worked in the neighborhood, Nick Lawson. I don’t know if you remember him, Jimmy, but the day your cousin died, I saw him take the boys into the store.”
“Did you see him leave?”
“No.”
“Did you see anything else?”
“Not really. Just a bunch of kids running back and forth. Kenji Hirano out in front of his house, testifying. You’ve got to remember—there was a lot of craziness that day. I was trying to stay away from the windows. And I didn’t think Lawson…well, I just didn’t think. Some other cops passed by—the Irishman, the nice one. The two black ones, too, the partners.”
“I talked to one of them, Robert Thomas. He wasn’t very helpful. Basically told me to mind my own business.”
“Sounds like Thomas,” the old man commented. “He always was the white man’s pet, and he had no love for black boys. If he knew anything about the store, I’m sure he wouldn’t tell you.” Conway remembered Thomas, the loud bluster that was so easy to see through, but still intimidating to the kids. It was different now, but there was something about being a cop thirty years ago that made certain weak-willed black men act like white men.
“So that day outside the store was the last time you saw the boys?” Lanier asked.
Conway nodded. But he had seen them again. On the floor, in front of the counter, after Frank had dragged them out of the freezer. After Derek came in and left again, clutching his head. The two men standing there, Victor’s arms locked tight around Frank’s wiry chest, trying to keep his friend from falling over.
They were all silent for a moment. A gust of wind blew through the schoolyard, rattling the chains and the rings on the jungle gym.
“Did you know the boys at all?” Jackie asked.
Conway nodded again. “I knew the older ones, Curtis and David Scott. I tell you—what happened to them, it made me want to kill somebody. Might have been the worst single thing that happened in that mess, but no one knew about it, and no one did a Goddamned thing. It tore your grandpa up, girl. Tore him up. He was always real close to those boys.”
