Strawberry Yellow (15 page)

“Where’su computer now?”

“Dropped it into the bay,” Oily said. “I’ve already confessed to Minnie. I told her all about it. I wouldn’t do
anything to Shug. He was like a brother to me.”

They two men stayed silent for a while. Nurses walked back and forth, responding to beeping machines in other rooms.

“Friends?” Oily put out his hand.

Mas accepted the handshake. Inside, however, he resolved to always keep one eye open when Oily Takei was around.

A
s a rule, Mas didn’t like to stay in anyone else’s house but his own. There was a Japanese expression,
ki o tsukau
, literally “to use up your feelings.” It used up Mas’s feelings to have Minnie waiting on him hand and foot. It used up Mas’s feelings to wear Shug’s old clothes and have Minnie wash his dirty underwear. It used up Mas’s feelings to have her cancel her bridge classes to spend time with him. Pretty soon, Mas wanted to shout,
stop using up my feelings, it’s wearing me out!

He determined that he needed to get better as fast as possible before he was all used up.

After a meal of pork roast and sticky rice, Mas and Minnie looked through old photo albums over cups of instant coffee. She gave him a magnifying loop to take a closer look at the faces.

Mas stared at one of the photos. It was a black-and-white image of Shug as a teenager, with another Nisei boy around the same age. In Shug’s hand was a bat marked by unusual writing burned into the wood.

Minnie looked over his shoulder. “Oh, do you know who that is?” she said, pointing to the boy next to Shug.

Mas shook his head.

“Fibber,” she said. “Fibber Hira, Hira. . . .”

“Hirayama,” Mas completed Minnie’s sentence, surprising both her and him. How did he know this? Of course, he
was the baseball
senshu
.

“Yes, that was it. Fibber Hirayama.”

“Bigshot baseball in Japan. For Hiroshima Carps. My hometown.” My Japanese hometown, Mas silently corrected himself. Mas was already in California when Fibber made it big as a Carp, but the news had spread across the Pacfic Ocean onto the pages of the local Japanese newspapers in the 1950s. Fibber had only been an inch taller than Mas, but he was known for his hustle.

“Eventually came back to California. Fresno. Became a teacher, some kind of educator, I think.”

Moving the magnifying loop over the page, Mas stopped at the bat that teenage Shug was holding. There were the familiar markings—it said “Poston,” in both English lettering and Japanese
katakana
.

“Dis Shug’s daddy’s bat.”

“Yes, that’s the one my father-in-law carved in camp. After the war, he kept it in the greenhouse, used it as his cane. We told him he should get a proper cane—even bought some for him, but he never used them. Too vain. So instead he’d keep the baseball bat in the greenhouse, you know beside the door. He said he carried it around to scare the chickens away, but we all knew that he needed it. To lean on.”

“So datsu why you’zu put it in coffin.”

Frown lines appeared on Minnie’s forehead. “What?”

“Bat right next to Shug.”

“You know, I didn’t even notice it. I know we put in the grandchildren’s drawings and things. Their teddy bears. I haven’t seen that bat in years.”

“No, the bat in there.”

“Well, the last time I saw that bat was in the greenhouse. . . .” Minnie stopped herself and pulled at her necklace. “Well, anyway, if you say so, Mas.” The light from the living room lamp reflected off her bifocals. Mas knew she didn’t believe him. But he was sure of what he saw.

Later that evening, Mas sat outside on the stoop. It was times like this he wished he hadn’t quit smoking. To hold the cigarette between his index and middle fingers, to inhale that blast of nicotine and let out the smoke—it would cast the whole world in a new light. Instead of the clear, sharp lines that didn’t forgive, the smoke would make everything a bit blurry, somehow more digestible.

Mas didn’t have help from to-ba-co right now. But he did have a bump on the head that made certain details fuzzy, including the pain. The pain had changed from being sharp jabs to a dull ache.

A car roared up the street and parked in front of the neighbor’s curb. Mas saw a line of cars in the driveway—a torn-up camper, a red Toyota truck, and a silver Oldsmobile.

Victor was still wearing the same glasses and hoodie when he noticed Mas sitting on Minnie’s porch.

“Hey, you,” Victor said. “Mister Shug’s cousin. I don’t think I got your name last time.” The teenager jumped over the begonia bush dividing the two properties and walked over to Mas.

“Mas. Mas Arai.”

“Más? Didn’t know you had some Mexican blood in you.”

Mas didn’t respond. The joke was old the first time he heard it.

“So, anyway, Miss Minnie mentioned that you got into an accident. Totaled your truck, huh?”

Mas nodded. He’d forgotten about the Ford for a moment.

“Sorry, sorry.”

Mas gestured to the boy’s sedan. “Me own an Impala. Long, long time ago.”

“For reals?”

Mas nodded. “Same model. Getsu hot in summertime.”

“You bet. You can fry an egg on the hardtop. Actually I’ve tried it.”

Mas laughed. Just what a snot-nosed boy would try to do. “Eat it?”

“Yeah, I ate it. Kind of runny, but I ate it.” Victor looked back at the Impala. “That was my
bisabuelito
’s first car when he came to Watsonville.”

“Mine was second passenger,” Mas said. “Studebaker first.”

“Hey, you want to meet my great-grandpops?” Victor said abruptly, as if it just occurred to him.

Whatthehell, Mas thought. Did he have anything better to do?

The Duran house felt familiar. It was a house with no women,
just like Mas’s. The few pictures on the walls were edged with dust. A couple of posters, either featuring men with guitars or women in bikinis, were taped haphazardly, motivated by impulse more than aesthetics.

The elder Duran was sitting in a wheelchair at the kitchen table, filling out a sudoku grid. Mas had tried sudoku a couple of times and found it unsatisfactory. So what if you got all the numbers arranged in the right slot? Unlike poker, blackjack, or even solitaire, you could always change your answers. No self-respecting gambler would go for those rules.

“
Bisabuelito
, this is Shug’s cousin, Mas. He’s from L.A.” He then identified the old man Duran as Miguel.

Miguel pulled out the other chair in the kitchen and motioned Mas to sit. He faced was as pockmarked as the moon and he wore a neatly trimmed mustache. Victor remained standing but didn’t leave.

“Shug’s cousin, huh?” Miguel finally said.

“Second cousin.”

“Where you from??

“Born here. Watsonville.”

Miguel narrowed his eyes. “I never seen you before.”

“Papa and mama take me ova to Japan as soon as I could walk. Two older brotha, too. Came back afta World War Two.”

“He lived in the Stem House,
bisabuelito
,” Victor interjected.

Miguel seemed to almost jump in his chair. “When?”

“Coupla year. Til 1950.”

“No kidding. We probably passed each other in the streets. Do any farm work?”

“Work for Jimi Jabami.”

“My family took care of the Stem House at first during World War Two. My father don’t write, so I was writing the family all the time.”

Mas had always wondered who had taken care of the house during the war. He had figured a
hakujin
lawyer, not a farmworker whose roots were most likely in Mexico.

“
Osewaninatta
,” Mas couldn’t help but to say, bowing his head. “Thanks so much.” We Arais are in your debt.

“No, that’s not necessary. Heard it all years ago. We did the best we could. Paid the property tax, but it was late one year. That was the year that the bank took it away from the Arais and sold the property to the highest bidder. Browning Gorman.”

“Everbears,” Mas murmured.

Miguel shook his head. “Same family, different generation. Clay Gorman’s grandfather. He was the head of the bank, so he had an inside connection. We felt terrible but we did what we could. The Arais got themselves a lawyer. My father, even with his broken English, testified in court. The Arais were the early ones to come back to Watsonville, and in a matter of months, they got their house and greenhouses back.”

Mas remembered talk of a lawyer and courts but never knew the whole story.

“You Japanese keep your feelings and thoughts to yourself, I know. Strong people. I went with my father to Salinas Fairgrounds right in the beginning, before they were shipped out to Arizona. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. This was a place for horses, but my classmates were there, sleeping and
eating.” Mas detected some moisture in Miguel’s eyes. “All old man Arai wanted to talk about was those berries of his. The ones in his basement. He’d tell us to go down and plant them. So we did. Beautiful, beautiful sweet strawberries. I don’t know what they crossed it with.”

“What are you talkin’ about?” Victor interrupted.

“Kids.” Miguel threw up his arm as if he were ready to throw down some dice. “They know nothing about growing. Strawberries have a mother and father. Just like people. You take a berry with something special and pollinate with another berry with something special. That’s why you call it ‘birds and bees’—it’s all about combining and making love.”

Victor’s face colored slightly. “Okay, I get the ‘bee’ part, but why do they say ‘birds’?”

“I don’t need to explain everything, do I? Anyway, these breeders act like the bees, spreading the pollen on the other thing on the strawberry plant.”

Victor covered his ears. “I don’t think that I want to hear this.” He left for the front door.

“Going for his cigarette fix,” Miguel said. “Terrible habit. Smoked two packs a day and see what happened to me. Triple bypass and my legs aren’t worth a damn.”

Mas was actually thankful to be alone with Miguel Duran, old man to old man. He had things he wanted to discuss, namely Jimi Jabami. “Whatchu think about Jabami?”

“Something happen to Jabami. Not sure exactly what. I think what happened to the Japanese just crushed him. And the mother. Oh, was she depressed. Lost the husband in that Arizona camp. I think it was tuberculosis. Now that was sad. Just think if he were over here. Maybe he wouldn’t have died.

“Anyway, Jabami always had a chip on his shoulder about those strawberries that we planted for the Arais. Always claimed they were his.”

Mas’s ears perked up. This was the first for him to hear this.

“Oh, those strawberries, sweetest things you’d ever eat, I’m telling you. Sweet, sweet, sweet. But didn’t last. Fragile. Just like a mistress.”

Come to think of it, the Masao did taste pretty sweet, but as Billy confirmed, the meat didn’t retain its firmness.

“We kept growing the crop, because I promised I would. And then Shug came back, so I gave him back every single strawberry plant. His father was crazy about the plants, too. But they didn’t say anything to Jabami. I kept my mouth shut, too.”

“Shug and his family owe you one, for sure. Oh, everytin’ you did.”