Dawn Patrol (11 page)

He’s heard the stories, though. He knows the history. Hell, the cop shop that he works out of is just blocks away from what used to be “Little Japan,” down on Fifth and Island, on the south edge of the Gaslamp District.

San Diego’s Nikkei community had been in the area since the turn of the century, first as immigrant farmworkers, or tuna fishermen down in Point Loma. They’d worked their asses off so that the next generation could buy land in Mission Valley and up in North County near Oceanside, where they became small, independent farmers. Hell, Johnny’s maternal grandfather still grows strawberries up east of O’side, stubbornly hanging in there against the dual enemies of age and urban development.

Johnny’s paternal grandfather moved into Little Japan and opened up a bath and barber shop, where the Japanese men came in to get their hair cut and then take long hot baths in the steaming
furo
down in the basement.

Johnny’s father has walked him through the old neighborhood, pointing out the buildings that still survived, showing him where Hagusi’s grocery store was, where the Tobishas had their restaurant, where old Mrs. Kanagawa kept her flower shop.

It was a thriving community, mixed in with the Filipinos and the few Chinese who stayed after the city tore down Chinatown, and the blacks and the whites, and it was a nice place to be and to grow up.

Then Pearl Harbor happened.

Johnny’s father heard it on the radio. He was seven years old then, and he ran to the barbershop to tell
his
father. By the next morning, the FBI had rounded up the president of the Japanese Association, the faculty of the
Japanese School, the Buddhist priests, and the judo and kendo instructors and thrown them in a cell with the common criminals.

Within a week, the fishermen, the vegetable growers, and the strawberry farmers had been arrested. Johnny’s father still remembers standing on a sidewalk downtown and watching as they were marched—in handcuffs—from one jail to another. He remembers his father telling him not to look, because these men—leaders of their community—were looking down at the ground in their humiliation and their shame.

Two months later, the entire Nikkei community was forced out of its homes and taken by train to the racetrack at Santa Anita, where they stayed for almost a year behind wire before being moved to the internment camp in Poston, Arizona. When they returned to San Diego after the war, they found that many of their homes, businesses, and farms had been taken over by whites. Some of the Nikkei left; others yielded to reality and started over; some—like Johnny’s maternal grandfather—began the long and tortuous legal process to recover their property.

But Little Japan was no more, and the once-tight Nikkei community scattered all over the county. Johnny’s father went to college, on to medical school, and then set up a successful practice in Pacific Beach.

He always thought his son would join the practice and take it over, but Johnny had other ideas. Young Johnny was always a little different from his siblings—while he dutifully fulfilled the stereotype of the diligent Asian student, Johnny preferred action to academics. He got through the school day to get to the baseball field, where he was an All-City second baseman. When he wasn’t on the diamond, he was in the water, a hard-charging grom ripping waves. Or he was in the dojo, learning judo from the older Japanese men, Johnny’s one real bow to his heritage.

When it came time for Johnny to choose a career path, he had the grades to go premed but went prelaw instead. When it came time to go to law school, Johnny checked out of that wave. He dreaded more hours at the library, more days behind a desk. What he craved was action, so he took the police exam and shredded it.

When Johnny told his father about his decision to become a cop, his father thought about the police who had led his own father in handcuffs through the streets of downtown San Diego, but he said nothing. Heritage, he thought, should be a foundation, not an anchor. Johnny didn’t become a
doctor, but he married one, and that helped to ease the sting. The important thing was that Johnny become a success in his chosen field, and Johnny rocketed through the uniformed ranks to became a very good detective indeed.

His connections to the Japanese community, though, are tenuous. He retains enough Japanese to be an annoyance in a sushi bar, he goes to the Buddhist temple with less and less frequency, and he’s even missed one or two of the monthly visits to his grandfather at the old farm. It’s just the way things are in this modern American, Southern California life. The Kodanis are just busy people—Beth puts in brutal hours at the hospital and Johnny works his files like a machine with no off switch. Then there’s all the stuff with the kids—soccer games, Little League, karate, ballet, tutoring sessions—it’s small wonder there’s little room in the schedule for the old traditions.

Now the good detective opens the cheap, lightweight sliding door, which reveals a narrow closet. No clothes on the wire hangers, no shoes on the floor. A woman’s suitcase—more of an overnight bag—is set on a freestanding rack, and now Johnny goes through it. A pair of jeans, a folded blouse, some underwear, the usual assortment of cosmetics.

Either Tammy Roddick wasn’t planning on being gone long or she didn’t have time to pack. But why would a woman contemplating suicide pack an overnight bag?

Johnny goes into the bathroom.

It hits him right away.

Two toothbrushes on the sink.

One of them is pink, and small.

A child’s.

The girl walks on the trodden dirt path on the side of the road.

Her skin is a rich brown, her hair black as freshly hewn coal. She trips over a brown beer bottle that was thrown out the window of a car the night
before, but she keeps walking, and as she does, she fingers a small silver cross held by a thin chain around her neck. It gives her courage; it’s her one tangible symbol of love in an unloving world.

In shock, not really sure where she’s going, she keeps the ocean to her left because it’s something she recognizes, and she knows that if she keeps the water to her left, she will eventually reach the strawberry fields. The fields are bad, but they are the only life she has known for the past two years, and her friends are there.

She needs her friends because she has nobody now. And if she can find the strawberry fields, she will find her friends, maybe even see the
guero
doctor, who was at least nice to her. So she keeps walking north, unnoticed by the drivers who rush past in their cars—just another Mexican girl on the side of the road.

A gust of wind blows dirt and garbage around her ankles.

Boone stops off at The Sundowner for a jolt of caffeine and a delay in trying to explain the inexplicable to Petra Hall, attorney-at-law and all-around pain in the ass.

High Tide’s there, his bulk perched with surprising grace on a stool at the bar, his huge hands clutching a sandwich that should have its own area code. He wears the brown uniform of the San Diego Public Works Department, in which he’s a foreman. Tide is basically in charge of the storm drains in this part of the city, and with the oncoming weather, he knows he could be in for a long day.

Boone sits down beside him as Sunny looks up from wiping some glasses, walks over to the coffeepot, pours him a cup, and slides it down the bar.

“Thanks,” Boone says.

“Don’t mention it.” She turns back to wiping the glasses.

What’s she torqued about? Boone wonders. He turns to Tide. “I just had a conversation with one of the more interesting members of the greater Oceania community.”

“How
is
Eddie?” Tide asks.

“Worked up,” Boone says. “I thought you island types were supposed to be all laid-back and chill and stuff.”

“We’ve picked up bad habits from you
haole
,” Tide says. “Protestant work ethic, Calvinist predetermination, all that crap. What’s got Eddie’s balls up his curly orange short hairs?”

“Dan Silver.”

Tide takes a bite of his sandwich. Mustard, mayonnaise, and what Boone hopes is tomato juice squirt out the sides of the bread. “Don’t make no sense. Eddie don’t go to strip clubs. When he wants all that, the strip club comes to Eddie.”

“Says Dan owes him a big head of lettuce.”

Tide shakes his head. “I ain’t ever heard that Eddie puts money on the street. Not to
haoles
anyway. Eddie will front to Pac Islanders, but that’s about it.”

“Maybe he’s expanding his customer base,” Boone says.

“Maybe,” Tide says, “but I doubt it. Way it works, you owe Eddie money and you don’t pay, he don’t take it up with you; he takes it up with your family back home. And it’s a disgrace, Boone, a big shame, so the family back on the island usually takes care of the debt, one way or the other.”

“That’s harsh.”

“Welcome to
my
world,” Tide says. It’s hard to explain to a guy, even a friend like Boone, what it’s like straddling the Pacific. Boone’s literally lived his whole life within a few blocks of where they’re sitting right now; there’s no way he, or Dave, or even Johnny can understand that Tide, who was born and bred just up the road in Oceanside, is still answerable to a village in Samoa that he’s never seen. And the same thing applies to most of the Oceania people living in California—they have living roots back in Samoa, Hawaii, Guam, Fiji, what have you.

So you start making some money, you send some of it “home” to help support relatives back in the
ville
. A cousin comes over, he stays on your couch until he makes enough scratch at the job you got him to maybe get his own place, where he’ll have another cousin crash. You do something good, a whole village five thousand miles away celebrates with pride; you do something bad, the same village feels the shame.

All that’s a burden, but … your kids have grandmas and grandpas,
aunties and uncles, who love them like their own kids. Even in O’side, the children go back and forth between houses like they were huts in the village. If your wife gets sick, aunties you never knew you had show up with pots of soup, cooked meat, fish, and rice.

It’s
aiga
—family.

And if you ever get in trouble, if someone outside the “community” takes you on, threatens your livelihood or your life, then the whole tribe shows up over your shoulder; you don’t even have to ask. Just like The Dawn Patrol—you call the wolf, you get the pack.

Back in the day, Tide was a serious gang banger, a
matai
—chief—in the Samoan Lords. S’way it was, you grew up in Oceanside back then, especially in the Mesa Margarita neighborhood: You played football and you g’d up with your boys. Thank God for football, High Tide thinks now, remembering, because he loved the game and it kept him off the drugs. Tide wasn’t your drive-by, gun-toting banger hooked on
ma’a
. No, Tide kept his body in good shape, and when he went to war with the other gangs, he went Polynesian-style—flesh-to-flesh.

High Tide was a legend in those O’side rumbles. He’d place his big body in front of his boys, stare down the other side, then yell
“Fa’aumu!”
—the ancient Samoan call to war. Then it was
on, hamo
, fists flying until it was the last man standing.

That was always High Tide.

Same thing on the football field. When High Tide came out of the womb, the doctor looked at him and said, “Defensive tackle.” Samoan men play football, period, and because O’side has more Samoans than anyplace but Samoa, its high school team is practically an NFL feeder squad.

High Tide was where running games went to die.

He’d just eat them up, throw off the pulling guard like a sandwich wrapper, then plow the ball carrier into the turf. Teams that played O’side would just give up on the ground game and start throwing the ball like the old Air Coryell Chargers.

Scouts noticed.

Tide would come home from practice to stacks of letters from colleges, but he was interested only in San Diego State. He wasn’t going to go far from home—to some cold state without an ocean to surf in. And he wasn’t going far from
aiga
, from family, because for a Samoan, family is everything.

So Tide started for four years at State. When he wasn’t slaughtering I-Backs, he was out surfing with his new friends: Boone Daniels, Johnny Banzai, Dave the Love God, and Sunny Day. He gave up the gang banging—it was just old, tired, dead-end shit. He’d still go have a beer with the boys sometimes, but that was about it. He was too busy playing ball and riding waves, and became sort of a
matai
emeritus in the gang—highly respected, listened to and obeyed, but above it all.

He went early third round in the NFL draft.

Played one promising season, second string for the Steelers, until he got locked up with a Bengals center and the pulling guard came around and low-jacked him.

Tide heard the knee pop.

Sounded like a gunshot.

He came home to O’side depressed as hell, his life over. Sat around his parents’ house on Arthur Avenue, indulging himself in beer, weed, and self-pity, until Boone swung by and basically told him to knock that shit off. Boone practically dragged him back down to the beach and pushed him out into the break.

First ride in, he decided he was going to live.

Used his SDSU glory days to get a gig with the city. Found himself a Samoan woman, got married, had three kids.

Life is good.

Now he explains to Boone some of the intricacies of Oceania business protocol.

“That’s why Eddie only deals with the
ohana
, bro,” Tide says. “He knows if he goes to a
haole
family with a debt, they say, ‘What’s it got to do with us?’ Family’s a different concept on this side of the pond, Boone.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Yes, it is.”

Boone eyes Sunny, who’s very deliberately not eyeing him back.

“What’s her problem?” he asks Tide.

Tide has heard all about the British betty from Dave. He slides off his stool, shoves the last bite of the sandwich into his mouth, and pats Boone on the shoulder. “I got work to do. For a smart man, Boone, you’re a fucking idiot. You need any more anthropological insights, give me a ring.”