The Tattoo (3 page)

“But you’re smart.”

My father came and stood in front of us. His face was turning red from the mixture of sunlight and Miller Lite. “How you feeling, Shar?”

“Better than yesterday, hopefully better tomorrow,” she answered.

He bent down and kissed her on the cheek.“Don’t baby da kid too much. He gotta be tough. You know dat. Right, Ken? You goin’ be tough.”

I nodded. My mother smiled. “He’s right,” she said, “you gotta be tough.”

I flexed my arm at them and they both laughed. “I goin’ pick up da net,” he said. “So what, you goin’ let me take da kid too?”

My mother’s arms wrapped tighter around me. “Hell no.”

My father shook his head and sighed. He and Uncle Sonny picked up a cooler filled with beer and walked toward the boat.

Through the hours they were gone, I spent half the time listening to my mother read me parts of
Treasure Island
, and when I got restless, I spent the other half looking for crabs with Junior Boy. We got flashlights from our mothers and scoured the beach. The crabs were harder to catch at night. Whenever they saw our lights, they charged into the small shore break. The white water washed over them and most of the time, when the water washed back out, the crabs were gone. Junior Boy and I were at it for hours, though. We weren’t satisfied until we had twenty crabs.

After we’d caught our twentieth crab, Junior Boy and I saw the lanterns on the bows of the boat get closer. We shined our flashlights toward the water and waited. As the hum of the outboard engines grew louder, Junior Boy said,“I hope dey caught sharks.” I shivered. I hated sharks.

My father and uncles brought the boat into shore. It was very late, early morning in fact, when we heard the boat buzzing in from the darkness. A couple of seconds after the engine was killed, the boat’s nose slid up the sand. My father and two uncles jumped out of the craft and pushed the boat further up the beach. I heard the grains of sand rub against the fiberglass hull. I waited farther back on shore than Junior Boy, afraid of the water, especially at night. Gone was the transparency of the ocean surface, it was now black where the lantern light didn’t touch it.

After the boat was secured, the men began to throw their catch out onto the sand, showing the children their trophies, showing their children what men they were. All sorts of fish were caught in the net. Mullet,
weke
,
awa‘awa
,
omaka
,
papio
and
lai
were thrown into a pile. A separate pile was made for the biggest rubbish fish in the ocean — sharks.

When my father began throwing the baby hammerheads out of the boat, I took a step back. They weren’t big, ranging maybe from one foot to two, but I hated their mutated heads and I associated them with their much larger parents. The last thing my father threw out of the fiberglass boat was a tiger shark, about three feet long and still alive, flapping as soon as it landed on the sand. Though it wasn’t as ugly as the hammerheads, it looked more dangerous, with its large mouth and its hydrodynamic body. There was a lot of kick to it and, with each jump, its entire body cleared the ground. My father stepped out of the boat with a small bat in his hand. I looked back toward the tents and was comforted when I saw my mother walking toward us.

The next thing I knew, my father scooped me in one of his arms and was walking toward the baby tiger, which, after its first several leaps, had stopped moving. My father put me down a couple of feet away from the shark. “Touch it,” he said.

I shook my head violently and took a step back.

“Touch it,” he repeated, beer fumes shooting toward my face.

Again I looked back for my mother. She was still far away, and I looked up at my father. I felt like one of those sand crabs Junior Boy and I had caught. I felt like I was scurrying in the palm of my father’s hand. “It’s still alive,” I said. “It might bite me.”

My father shook his head. He took a step toward the shark. He leaned over and hit the shark on the head twice with the bat. It lay still. He stepped toward me. “Now touch it.”

I refused again and again looked back. Mom was getting really close.

Then I felt my father’s thick fingers wrap around my forearm. He squeezed hard and it hurt. He stepped me up to the tiger and forced my hand on its back, right above the dorsal. It felt cold. It felt like a flexible layer of rubber, like a slightly flattened basketball. I began to cry. The shark jumped and my father pulled me back. I was hyperventilating. I heard the laughter of my uncles and cousins in the background. Junior Boy’s chubby face was scrunched up in laughter. My father began to howl loudly, too.

As my mother got close, I lifted both my arms and ran to her. She scooped me up and I felt a little better. She stepped toward my father, who faced her and giggled. She responded with a vicious slap, which landed on my father’s left cheek.

It was a loud slap, like the sound of the bottom of the bow striking a big wave. He stopped laughing, everybody stopped laughing. He gazed at her, first in shock, then in rage. When my father was mad, nobody I ever met looked meaner. Mom stood her ground. My father slowly worked up a laugh again. The others in the back began to put their best efforts into a phony chuckle. My mother turned around and carried me to the tent. Only the two of us slept in the Hideyoshi tent that night.

When my father made me touch the shark, it was the first double left hook, overhand right combination he had given me. His syringe arms were working, pumping furiously that night. I’ve had a difficult time not looking over my shoulder ever since. All of this happened before my mother started to get really sick, about two years before she died.

When your mother
dies and you’re six years old, there isn’t much you remember. I don’t care how good your memory is. Like most young memories, scenes flash but dialogue is forgotten. Sometimes when you’re up late at night, out of the blue, you suddenly realize that you’ve forgotten what your mother looked like. You jump out of bed and search frantically for old photo albums. When you find an old picture of her, it’s like, “Oh, yeah.” It’s like when you suddenly forget how to spell a simple word, and you look for it in the dictionary, find it, and tell yourself what an idiot you are for forgetting it. Unlike the spell search, however, when you forget what your mother looked like and you have to rediscover the image with a damn photograph, you take back to bed the guilt of an ungrateful child. I do not need the album now.

Mom was a tall Japanese woman. A school teacher. She was young when she died, twenty-seven, and as I think back on what she looked like, the image now seems more like that of a long-lost sister. I look like her. She had that long, angular face, thick black hair, unusually dark eyes. She was pretty. She and my father made an interesting-looking couple with their clashing features. My father, with his short but broad body, his Toshiro Mifune-like face. My mother, who was about an inch taller, with her thin features and her thoughtful disposition. She loved to read, books were his kryptonite. He always looked angry, even when he wasn’t, while she looked like she was constantly thinking about something. He was local, born and raised in Hawai‘i, she was a katonk mainlander, sansei, born in internment. He spoke pidgin, her English was impeccable, stone white.

I hate hospitals. Dignity dies in them. Cold rooms, plastic curtains, ugly gowns, prodding doctors. No comfort, no sympathy. The gowns are the worst. Easy access. Almost naked. I’m surprised there are patients who walk out of a hospital feeling healed and not violated. I’m shocked that families don’t more often spirit their loved ones away from this house of sickness, whose neighbor is the cemetery. As patient and visitor, I have always exited with a fresh wound. Purgatory. A soul waiting. Maybe I was indeed born here.

I missed school regularly my first-grade year. I spent these absent days in the hospital waiting. Waiting to go home. Waiting to see if Mom was going to live or die. Sometimes friends or relatives waited with us. These were the best times. I played with Junior Boy and the waiting passed more quickly. The friends and relatives were nice. But watching somebody die of cancer is to watch them starve to death. Slowly the flesh peels off the body, the spirit evaporates through the pores. After a couple of months you realize that you’re looking at half of what that person once was. Yellow, skinny, weak. Glassy-eyed.Vacant-eyed. Ugly. Waiting.

I was six, but I did not cry. Practically everyone else did. I was too young. One of the amazing things about children is that they’re like little beasts. They only howl when they aren’t getting something they want. Adults cry because of anger, guilt, joy, love, and especially sorrow. There is no sorrow for children. For me, the sorrow came later.

The day before she died, my Aunty Jana had picked me up from school. I was attending school depending on my mother’s condition. If she improved, I went to school, and if she worsened, I was at the hospital. For the last two months of her life, I only saw the worst of her.

It was still morning, before recess, when Aunty Jana entered the classroom. She whispered in the teacher’s ear and the teacher called me: “Kenji, could you come here?”

The rest of the class laughed as a couple of my male peers mimicked the teacher with a nasal voice.“Kennjii,” they sneered.

Humiliated, I stepped toward Aunty Jana and Mrs. Wright. “Kenji,” Mrs. Wright said, “your aunty is here to take you to the hospital. She says your mother is getting worse and that you should be there.”

Aunty Jana gave my teacher a quick glance. Then she turned her head down to me and said, “Let’s go.”

As we walked out the open door, I heard Mrs. Wright scold the class. “You kids better learn to be more respectful. His mother is very sick.” Her statement resonated in the hall. As I stepped out to the parking lot, the only thing on my mind was the hatred I felt for Mom. It was the day before she died.

I was standing at her bedside in the frigid room which I loathed so much. I didn’t want to look at her, I didn’t want to see that yellow face, to look into those weary dark eyes. Instead of looking at her, I stared at a white vase stationed by her bedside. The vase was vigilant, but lent no comfort. It was a tall and slender vessel, subtly curved outward at the top. I gazed and listened as a weak, rough sound started. As my eyes worked their way up, I saw the vase transformed to thorned stems, leaved here and there. I began counting the leaves. One... Two...Three... Some were caramelizing on their spined edges. More sound. My eyes reached the top of the stems and saw green crowns, the hands of the flowers holding up their bulbs of crimson bloom. The hands looked fuzzy, little hairs responding to the electricity of the room. The sound wouldn’t stop. I counted the bulbs. One... Two... Three... It was hard to see them all because some were hidden behind others. If I were taller I could’ve counted better. I noticed how a rose on the right had petals that spread outward, while others on the left still cocooned their pollen. The sound droned on. I looked at the flowers and thought about how I’d left school that morning. I grew angry, furious. I hated those kids. I hated that sound. Sound and fury not signifying nothing but working together in an orchestra. Woodwinds and reeds. Soft-spoken opera. Tragedy. The sound stopped, but the fury didn’t. I looked up at Mom. She was sleeping. The aria was over.

The guilt was overwhelming. I knew that sound was her voice, but I didn’t listen. I even knew those were her last words to me, but I just drowned out the sound of her voice with the flowers in the vase.

She left me little. A face, an asshole father, a shit-load of books. Fucking father went loony after she died. Flashbacks. Of Mom or Nam? The funeral. The lacquered coffin was set high in the front of the mortuary. I gripped the edge, felt the satin on my fingertips, stretched my body as high as it would go, and caught a glimpse. Her face was as white as the language she spoke except for the artificial, rosy cheeks. She wore a frilly white dress. She even had shoes on. She looked like a porcelain doll in her new lacquered doll house. I turned my head back and looked toward the pews. The dozens of faces wore humbled looks. Some I had seen before, some I hadn’t. My grandfather, my father’s father, picked me up and took me outside.