Dawn Patrol (37 page)

“I speak English,” Marco says.

“Well you’d better
start
speaking it,” Harrington says. He pulls his pistol and jams it into Marco’s stomach.

“They just left,” Marco says.

“Left for
where
?”

“The fields.”

“
What
fields?”

“The strawberry fields.”

Johnny feels his skin go cold. “
What? What
did you say?”

“The strawberry fields,” Marco says. “The old Sakagawa strawberry fields.”

Johnny feels dizzy, like the room is spinning. Shame flows through his blood. He lurches to the door and shoves it open. Staggers down the hall, through the living room, and out the door. He leans on the car and bends over to catch his breath.

It’s coming on dawn.

The first faint rays of sunlight hit Pacific Beach, warming, if only psychologically, the crowd of photographers, magazine people, surf company execs, lookie-loos, and hard-core surfers who stand shivering on Pacific Beach Point in the cold morning, waiting for the light.

The bluff they’re standing on is historic ground. Surfers have been riding that reef break almost since George Freeth, and it was way back in the 1930s, when this was still a Japanese strawberry field, that Baker and Paskowitz and some of the other San Diego legends built a shack on this bluff and stored their boards here and proudly adopted the name that the farmers gave them—“the Vandals.”

Just off to the north, the big swell is pounding the reef. Sunny stands at the edge of the crowd, her board beside her like a crusader’s shield, and watches the sunlight turn the indistinct gray shapes into definitive waves.

Big waves.

The biggest she’s ever seen.

Mackers.

Thunder crushers.

Dreams.

She glances around her. Half the big-wave riders in the world are here, most of them professionals with fat sponsorships and double-digit mag covers behind them. Worse, most of them have Jet Skis with them. Jet Skis with trained partners who will pull them into the waves. Sunny doesn’t have the cash for that. She’s one of the few paddle-in surfers out here.

And the only woman.

“Thank you, Kuan Yin,” she says softly. She isn’t going to bitch about what she lacks; she’s going to be grateful about what makes her unique. The only woman, and a woman who’s going to paddle into the big waves.

She picks up her board and heads down toward the water.

Dave’s out there already.

He sits out behind the massive break on a Jet Ski, ready to pull people out if they need it. It’s his sacrifice, his penance, not riding the big waves. He hasn’t slept—he’s exhausted—but somehow he felt that he had to be here, but not surf.

There was just something that felt wrong about it, going out there and having the time of his life when he’s seriously questioning what his life has even become. He can’t shake the image of the girls huddled in the hold of the boat—who they were, where they were headed, whether or not Johnny managed to intercept them.

And then there’s all that. Johnny’s going to want some questions answered, and the answers are going to blow up life as they know it.

Which maybe isn’t such a bad thing, Dave thinks as he checks his equipment—mask, snorkel, fins—things he might need if he has to get off the ski and dive into the soup.

Maybe this life needs a little blowing up.

A change.

Even if Johnny doesn’t ask the questions, Boone will.

But where the fuck is Boone? He should be out here with me and Tide and Sunny, should at least be here for Sunny, backing her up, helping her deal with the big-name Jet Ski crews that will try to block her out.

Boone should be here for her.

The girls look like ghosts.

Boone spots them coming out of the trees. The last of the morning mist hugs their legs and mutes their footsteps. They don’t talk to one another, walk side by side, or chat and laugh like girls going to school. Instead, they walk single file, almost in lockstep, and they look straight ahead or down at the ground.

They look like prisoners.

They are. Now Boone sees two men walking behind them. They’re not carrying guns—at least Boone doesn’t see any—but they’re clearly herding the girls along. It doesn’t take much effort, as the girls seem to know where they’re going. And the men are behind the girls, not in front of them.

It’s a drill, a routine.

The men in the fields look up as the girls come out of the tree line. Some of the workers stop their work and stare; others lower their heads quickly and go back to work, as if they’ve seen something shameful.

Then Boone spots her.

Thinks he does anyway. It’s hard to tell, but it sure looks like Luce. She wears a thin blue vinyl jacket with a hood she hasn’t bothered to pull up. Her long black hair glistens in the mist. Her jeans are torn at the knees and she wears old rubber beach sandals. She moves like a zombie, shuffling steadily ahead.

Then she turns.

All the girls do—as if on a conveyor belt, they turn away from the strawberry fields and toward the bed of reeds.

Boone gets out of the car, stays as low as he can, and runs toward the trees.

I know I promised you, Tammy, he thinks. But there are some promises you can’t keep, some promises you shouldn’t.

He picks up his pace.

Old men don’t sleep much.

Sakagawa is already awake and now sits at the small wooden table in his kitchen and impatiently waits for first light. There is much work to be done, and the endless battle against the birds and insects to be fought. It is a daily battle, but if Sakagawa were to be honest with himself, he would admit that he actually enjoys it, that it is one thing that keeps him going.

So he sits, sips his tea, and watches the light flow onto his fields like a slow flood of water. From his vantage point, he can just make out some of the workers, the Mexicans who come just as the Nikkei had come so many years ago, to work the land that the white man didn’t think he wanted, coated as it was with salt spray and blasted by the sea winds. But the Nikkei were used to salt and wind from the home islands; they knew how to farm “worthless” land along the sea. And from the salted soil, the old man thinks now, we grew strawberries … and doctors and lawyers and businessmen. And judges and politicians.

Maybe
these
workers will do the same.

He bends over slowly to pull on his rubber boots, which keep his old feet dry in the damp early-morning fields. When he straightens up again, his grandson is standing there.

“Grandfather, it’s Johnny. John Kodani.”

“Of course. I know you.”

Johnny bows deeply. His grandfather returns the gesture with a short, stiff bow, as much as his ninety-year-old body can muster. Then Johnny pulls out one of the old wooden chairs that have been in this kitchen for as long as he can remember and sits down across from the old man.

“Would you like tea?” Sakagawa asks.

Johnny wouldn’t, but to refuse would be brutally rude, and with what he has to tell the old man, he wants to exercise every gentle kindness. “That would be nice.”

The old man nods. “It’s a cold morning.”

“It is.”

The old man takes a second cup and pours the strong green tea into it, then slides it to Johnny. “You’re a lawyer.”

“A policeman, Grandfather.”

“Yes, I remember.” Perhaps, he thinks, it is good that the Nikkei are now police.

“This is very good tea,” Johnny says.

“It’s garbage,” the old man says, even though he has it specially imported from Japan every month. “What brings you? I am always happy to see you, but …”

I haven’t been here for months, Johnny thinks. I’ve been “too busy” to stop by for a drink of tea, or to bring his great-grandchildren for him to see. Now I come by at five in the morning with news that will break his heart.

“Grandfather …” Johnny begins. Then he chokes on his own words.

“Has someone died?” the old man asks. “Your family, are they well?”

“They’re fine, Grandfather,” Johnny says. “Grandfather, down by the old creek, where we used to play when we were kids … Have you been down there lately?”

The old man shakes his head.

“It’s very far to walk,” he says. “A bunch of old reeds. I tell the men to clean up the garbage people toss from the road.” He shakes his head again. It is hard to understand the disrespect of some people. “Why do you ask?”

“I think people … your men … your foreman are doing something down there.”

“Doing what?”

Johnny tells him. The old man has a hard time even understanding what his grandson is saying, and then he says, “That’s impossible. Human beings do not do such things.”

“I’m afraid they do, Grandfather.”

“Here?” the old man says. “On my farm?”

Johnny nods. He looks down at the floor, unable to face his grandfather.
When he looks up again, the old man’s face is streaked with tears. They run down the creases in his face like small streams in narrow gullies.

“Did you come to stop them?” the old man asks.

“Yes, Grandfather.”

“I will go with you.” He starts to get up.

“No, Grandfather,” Johnny says. “It’s better you stay here.”

“Those are my fields!” the old man yells. “I am responsible!”

“You’re not, Grandfather,” Johnny says, fighting back tears himself. “You’re not responsible, and …”

“I’m too old?”

“It’s my job, Grandfather.”

The old man composes his face and looks Johnny in the eye. “Do your job.”

Johnny gets up and bows.

Then he walks out of the kitchen and down into the fields.

The air smells like strawberries.

The acrid smell rushes through Boone’s nose as he breathes heavily, sprinting toward the trees, hoping not to be seen. He makes it into the tree line, then turns west toward the reeds. He can run more upright now, in the cover of the trees, and he makes it quickly to where the tree line ends and the reeds begin.

The reeds are taller than he is. They loom over him, vaguely threatening, the tops blowing in the breeze as if waving him back. He pushes his way in and is soon lost in thick foliage. He can hear voices in front of him, though—men’s voices, speaking in Spanish.

The last time you did this, he thinks, you got beaten half to death. He takes the pistol from his waistband and keeps it ready in his right hand. Pushing back reeds with his left, he plows ahead until he makes it to the creek.

He jumps in and wades toward the caves.

Sunny can’t paddle into this surf.

The beach break is totally closed out. There isn’t space enough between waves or sets to paddle out there, and the waves are too big to paddle over.

She comes out of the water and moves about two hundred yards south, between breaks, and paddles out onto the shoulder, then starts back north on the far side of the break. She’s not alone in this maneuver—all the Jet Ski crews are out there making the same approach, buzzing around like giant, noisy water bugs. She paddles strong, smooth, and hard, her wide shoulders an advantage for a change.

The Jet Ski crews linger farther out, giving them room for the highspeed run-up into the wave.

The biggest wave Sunny’s ever seen looms up behind her, with another after that. She paddles herself into perfect position for the next wave. It rolls toward her, a blue wall of water, its whitecaps snapping like cavalry guidons in the stiff offshore wind.

A beautiful wave.

Her
wave.

She lies down on her board, takes a deep breath, and starts to paddle.

The shame is unbearable.

The Sakagawa family name is disgraced.

To think this was happening on my land, the old man thinks, in my fields, under my nose, and I am such a fool as not to have seen it.

It is intolerable.

There is only one way, the old man decides, to redeem the family’s honor. He looks around the kitchen to find a suitable knife, then doubts that he has the physical strength to do what is necessary with a knife.

So he takes up the old shotgun, the one he uses against the birds.

It is not ideal, but it will have to do.

Boone crawls up the edge of the creek bed and looks over at the little clearing where he had his confrontation with the
mojados
.

Now Pablo’s on guard, an ax handle in his fist, ushering about twenty field-workers into a ragged line in the clearing in front of the caves. One of the men who herded the girls walks up the line, collecting money. The workers pull dirty, wrinkled bills from their pockets, and don’t look at the man as they give him the money. There are a couple of white guys in line. They don’t look like farmworkers, just guys who like to do little girls.

The girls go into the little caves that have been chopped into the reeds. A couple of the girls sit down and just stare into nothingness; a couple
of the others arrange their “beds.” Boone crawls to the far edge of the clearing and sees Luce take off her thin blue jacket, carefully spread it out on the ground, then sit down, one leg crossed over the other—a young female Buddha—and wait.

For waves of men to fall on top of her and break inside her and then recede. And then the next wave comes in, and the next, every morning, inevitable as the tide. A perpetual cycle of rape, for as long as her short life lasts.

There’s a world out there you know nothing about
.

Tammy steps into the clearing.

She comes from the other side, from the road by the motel, the way Boone tried to come before Pablo laid him out.

Luce sees Tammy, springs up, and runs into her arms. Tammy holds her tightly. Then she slides down, squats in front of the girl, and looks her in the eye. “I’ve come to take you away,” Tammy says. “Forever, this time.”

Good, Boone thinks. Go, take the kid with you.

Give each other some kind of life.

Then Dan Silver comes into the clearing.

Dan says, “So we have a deal?”

“I just want Luce,” Tammy says. “You’ll never hear from me again.”