Strawberry Yellow (17 page)

Mas’s eyes were on the ball when he heard, “Hey, Mas.”

Recognizing the voice, he felt a tinge of dread. Too late now.

Oily was at the sushi bar, and extended an arm to the empty seat beside him. “Come join me.”

Mas wasn’t sure if Oily was there to eat. He was certainly there to drink, judging from the empty glasses in front of him. One still had some liquid, along with something gray floating in it.

“Whatsu dat?”

“Oyster shooters. You know, umm,
kaki
.”

“Yah, I knowsu
kaki
. Gotsu plenty in Hiroshima.”

“I’ll get you one.”

“No, no condition. My
atama
.” Mas pointed to his banged-up head.

“Concussion, right? Had a dozen of those when I was playing football. Drinking is the best antidote to concussions, my friend.” Oily was never good at listening, and he obviously wasn’t going to start now. “Doi-
san
, an oyster shooter for my friend,” Oily ordered from the owner, who doubled as the bartender and cashier.

“
Hai
.”

The oyster shooter came, and Mas had to agree, it went down smoothly. A cool tang and snap. He thought he might be in love. Another oyster shooter and then warm sake, smooth again with a comforting burn at the roof of his mouth. Oily was right. Mas was starting to feel better. Next came sake on the rocks, cool and refreshing, a
suppai
taste in the middle of his tongue that made his insides contract.

Mas’s head started to swim with all the liquor. The disco ball seemed to be moving—in fact, the whole room had become a blur of faces and voices.

The alcohol hadn’t slowed Oily down. In fact, it seemed to have opened him up. He started talking about each of his ex-wives, each woman’s merits and weaknesses. Then he moved onto work. How he was depending on Billy to introduce a strong, one-of-a-kind varietal in a season of strawberry yellows.

“I told him that the strawberry had to be clean. Clean all
the way to the mothers,” Oily said. “Guess what he’s calling his berry?”

Mas had no idea.

“Shigeo. You know, in memory of Shug.”

Mas had been so used to calling Shug by his nickname that he’d forgotten that his friend had a proper Japanese first name.

“So, any leads on what Shug and Linus are introducing?”

Oily obviously thought he could take advantage of Mas’s inebriation. “Shug dead,” Mas slurred.

“But that doesn’t mean the varieties are dead. He’d been working with Linus this whole time.”

Linus, the name sounded familiar.

“You know, Linus Verdorben. The other hybridizer over at Everbears.”

The giant elf who had been at Minnie’s house. “Yah, yah,” Mas said. “I knowsu him.”

“They’d been working on it over at Linus’s house in Castroville.”

Castroville? No one had mentioned Castroville, the king of the artichoke.

Oily grinned proudly, his wide smile making him look like a jack o’lantern. “I followed Shug one day. Followed him over to Linus’s. He lives in some trailers next to his old man’s gas station. He’s got an artichoke painted on one side of a trailer.”

“Huh?” Mas thought he might have heard Oily wrong. Hell, with all this alcohol, he certainly could have.

“That Linus is a
sukebe,
and a real one, I’m telling you.”

Mas, his face bright red, chuckled. To hear Oily call
another man a
sukebe
meant the other guy was quite a pervert.

“He walks around his lab with no clothes on.”

Mas raised his eyebrows.

“I’m not kiddin’,
yo
. Shug even told me. Linus says his creative juices work better when he feels free.”

“Shug jokin’. Shug wouldn’t hang around nobody like dat.”

Oily’s chin jutted out. “Typical, Mas. You putting Shug on some pedestal. You were always by his side. Defending him. I know what you did for Shug.”

“
Nanda
?” Mas asked in Japanese.
What?

“You know, the time you took the hit for Shug. Back in Salinas. Why did you do it?”

On that early summer day, it was thirst that drove Mas and Shug to search for a liquor store. They were in Salinas and it was 1949. They had just delivered crates of late strawberries from Jabami Farms, and they wanted to be rewarded for their efforts.

Salinas wasn’t that far from Watsonville, only thirty miles south. But it was a different world. The coastal air somehow softened Watsonville, like opaque curtains waffling in a ocean-scented breeze. Salinas, on the other hand, was a harsh, real agricultural town. It was big, much bigger than Watsonville, with more history and more anger.

Mas and Shug were dusty and dirty. But they wanted a drink, and they couldn’t find a liquor store.

So they went into a bar. It was named after some kind
of reptile that Mas couldn’t pronounce. To clearly make its point, a bronze lizard, its long tongue protruding, perched on a pedestal near the door. Shug and Mas made their way to the wooden bar.

“Two beers, please,” Shug said.

“You got it,” the bartender, his back turned, said. He began filling two glasses with beer and then swung around. His face fell and grew hard. The beers remained in his hands.

Mas suddenly noticed all the military memorabilia surrounding them. An American flag hung on one side of the wall. There was a Veterans of Foreign Wars plaque, with a framed newspaper article on the return of Salinas-born soldiers who had survived the Bataan death march in the Philippines.

“What are you, Japs?” the bartender asked. A few other men at the bar turned, their faces bearing the same grim expressions.

“No, sir,” Shug said in his best college-boy voice. “We are Japanese Americans. Born here in the U.S. of A. We are not Japs.”

The bartender wiped his hands on his apron. “He looks like a Jap. Let me hear him speak.”

Mas felt sweat pour down his hairline. He pushed Shug. “Letsu go,” he mumbled.

“No, sir,” said Shug. “He’s not your paid monkey. He’s a person and he’s not going to say something just because you want him to.” What was Shug doing? This was not the time to fight.

“Well, then, the two of you can get the hell out of my bar.”

“Letsu go.” Mas jerked hard at Shug’s arm. He still wouldn’t move, so Mas thought he’d lead the way. Good riddance, he thought, crossing through the doorway back outside. Why be somewhere you are not wanted?

“Mas, Mas,” Shug jogged toward him.

Mas stopped and waited.

“Look what I have.” Shug opened up his jacket to reveal the bronze lizard, its mouth wide open.

“Shug!”

“Hey, you!” The bartender was in the doorway, his finger pointing right at Shug.

Shug dropped the lizard and ran. Mas followed, his workboots digging into the sand and spraying gravel all around him.

He felt something pull at his shirt. Run, run.
Hashire. Hashire
. Then a tackling of his legs, and Mas fell flat on his face, grains of sand stinging his cheeks and eyes.

“You goddamn Jap thief,” said the bartender, his chest heaving from running so hard. “We’ve already called the cops.”

“Wait!” Shug had stopped, but Mas waved him away.

“No, I take it,” Mas said. “I steal.”

“I’ll get help,” Shug said before running off to the truck.

The bartender held onto Mas’s arm, pulling it so hard that Mas feared it would be torn from its socket. He made Mas sit on the ground outside the bar, right next to a spot where someone had vomited recently.

Mas wasn’t scared, however. He’d gotten into trouble before in Hiroshima. So when the policeman came in his black-and-white Ford, he showed no emotion.

“He bloody admitted it to me,” the bartender claimed, but now, since Shug was gone, Mas saw no reason to make a false confession. He stayed quiet.

The officer put him in the back seat and drove him to the Monterey County Jail. There he was photographed, fingerprinted, and searched. He was finally led to a large holding cell filled with scrawny white boys. There were also a few dark, short men like Mas. Only they spoke Spanish, so they were most likely
braceros
, the temporary workers brought from Mexico.

A couple of men spat “Jap” toward Mas, but he didn’t care. It was strange: Inside the jail, slurs seemed a rite of passage, but on the outside, they had much more bite.

He spent only one night in jail. The next morning, they called out his name, and he figured that Shug had come to his rescue and posted bail. But in the waiting area was someone he didn’t expect. Ats, wearing a sweater over a cotton dress.

“Jimi gave me the money,” she said. Jimi also provided for an attorney, who was able to immediately dismiss the charges. Mas ended up paying Jimi back in free labor.

Shug apologized countless times for putting Mas in that position, but Mas waved him off. “No
shinpai
.” What was one night in a jail cell? He had experienced far, far worse.

But if he really admitted it to himself, he did feel somewhat branded now in Watsonville. The town knew he’d been taken into police custody, and of course no one bothered to get the facts.

“So why did you do it?” Oily repeated.

Shug, unlike Mas, was destined for better things. He was a college boy at UC Davis. Mas, on the other hand, was basically a migrant farm worker. If they could go back in time, Mas would have done the same thing all over again.

Mas didn’t answer Oily. Instead he said, “Mo’ sake.”

Oily let out a low whistle. “So that’s why.”

“Huh?”

“Now I get it. That’s why Shug named his new variety Masao.”

Was that the reason?
thought Mas. Was his insistence on taking the blame for Shug’s theft of the bronze lizard reason enough to be immortalized in a newfangled berry?

The restaurant owner refused to serve them any more drinks until they got food in their stomachs. So it was one
nigiri
after the other, and miso soup, and
chawan mushi
, a delectable egg custard cooked with shrimp and shiitake mushrooms. Plus cup of tea after cup of tea. Soon the doors were closing, and both Mas and Oily had forgotten about their oyster shooters.

“You okay driving, Mas?” Oily asked in the parking lot. Mas nodded. Oily apparently lived close enough to walk home.

I’ll just take a quick nap
, Mas told himself. Just a little pick-me-up before the drive back to Minnie’s.

A
knock, getting louder and faster.

The light, even diffused by the fog, blinded Mas. He squinted his eyes toward something moving through the frosted windows. Wiping the misted surface with the side of his arm, he could clearly see Minnie, the front of her hair in rollers.

When he opened the car door, the cold air poured into the Lexus and soaked into his bones.

“Mas, you scared the daylights out of me. When I woke up and you still weren’t back, I thought something had happened to you.”

“Just took a little
hirune
. What time?”

“That was some nap, Mas. It’s five o’clock in the morning.”

Mas’s head pounded, and he didn’t think that it was the concussion. It was that
bakatare
Oily’s oyster shooters, not to mention sake cup after sake cup.