House of the Red Fish (15 page)

“Phew,” I said. “Had me worried there for a second.”

“They were just showing you how mean they can look,” Billy said. “Might come in handy sometime.”

Surprisingly, they shook like normal guys, no bone-crushing finger-breaking grips, which for sure they had. I don’t care how strong my own grip was, they could have crushed my hand like a matchbox.

“I thought you might need some help to muscle up your daddy’s boat,” Charlie said.

I glanced at Billy. Now even Charlie knows?

Billy shrugged.

“We can come Uncle’s place anytime,” Calvin said. “Just call us … anytime. We come help you.”

“Great! You got any inner tubes?”

Twenty-three.

That was all we could dig up. Twenty-three tubes, four with big red-rubber patches on them. Depressing, but like Billy said, it was wartime, and twenty-three was pretty good.

We took them all, and some rope, down to the canal on the city bus. Five of us—me, Billy, Mose, Rico, and Grampa Joji. One lady asked if we were going to the beach. “Yeah,” I said, “the beach.” I didn’t know what she thought Grampa was doing with the tubes he was carrying.

We stood along the edge of the canal looking down on the
Taiyo Maru.
We had twenty-three tubes, twenty-three short coils of rope, and one long one to go all the way around the boat. My idea was to spread the tubes out equally around the hull, just under the sampan’s splash shield, which was five or six feet underwater. Not an easy task.

“Whatchoo waiting for?” Grampa Joji said. “Go.”

I shook my head. “I don’t think we got enough tubes to lift a turtle, Ojii-chan.”

“Humpf.”

“Try um anyway, ah?” Rico said. “It’s hot. I like swim.”

“Unnh,” Grampa agreed, nudging me toward the water.

Mose took one end of the long rope and I took the other. We swam around the hull, leaving rope floating on the water, and met on the other side. Billy and Rico jumped in, so now we had two guys on each side of the boat and one long rope surrounding it. But of course we were on the surface and the splash shield five feet down.

“Okay,” I said. “When I count to three, we dive this rope down and secure it all the way around the hull, just under the splash shield … you with me?”

They nodded. I counted.

We went under.

It took longer than I thought it would, but we did it on the first try. My lungs were screaming by the time I came gasping back up for air.

“Hoo-ee!” Mose shouted. “I never thought I could hold my breath that long.”

“Stop smoking,” Rico said, “and you could hold it longer.”

“Smoking? I don’t smoke, you fool.”

“Yeah, but you might someday.”

Mose stared at Rico. “In your mind that makes sense?”

Rico grinned and tapped his head with a finger. “Brilliant, remember?”

Grampa Joji tossed out orders. “Come, come,” he said, waving us in. “No stop now.”

We climbed up over the rocks that edged the canal.

The hot morning sun dried us off quickly while we sat on the bare dirt, tying the short ropes to the inner tubes, so that now we had tubes with ropes like the kind you held on to when you threw them out to a drowning swimmer.

We tossed the tubes into the water and jumped in. Now the hard part—pushing them down under the boat’s splash shield. There was only one way I could think of to do it: raw muscle—since we sure couldn’t take them down flat and inflate them underwater. Anyway, we didn’t even have a pump.

We spread them out, eleven inner tubes on one side, twelve on the other.

“How we going push these down below the splash shield?” Rico said. He pulled himself up on a tube and leaned on his arms, floating. “Look. I can’t push it under. Too strong.”

“Not push, Rico. We going pull um with these ropes,” Mose said. “What? All this time you thought we was going push um down? Jeese.”

“Hey, what I did?” Rico said.

“Okay, listen up,” I said. “First we have to stick these short ropes under the long rope we just tied around the hull. Then we come up and stand on the deck and
pull
these things down. Then we tie them off.” I paused, picturing it. “Whether or not they lift the boat off the bottom is another question.”

One by one, we dove down and slipped the short ropes under the main rope and came back up with the loose end.

When we were done, we stood waist-deep on the submerged deck. “All right,” I said. “Start pulling those tubes under. Mose, you go down and tie them off.”

“You got it.”

It was backbreaking, muscle-popping work, worse than pulling up big fish from the deep sea. My hands grew raw and painful. Billy grunted and Rico complained, but we did it—all twenty-three tubes.

Which did exactly nothing to lift the
Taiyo Maru.

Zero.

We were standing silent and beaten on the slimy deck when Rico yelped and grabbed his head.

“Hey!” Billy shouted as more rocks rained down on us.

I looked up to see Grampa Joji scurrying away to the trees.

We jumped off the
Taiyo Maru
and raced for shore, scrambling up the rocks and sprinting out of range.

But Keet Wilson and his flathead friends on the other side of the canal tried to hit us anyway.

“Jake put an ad in the paper,” Billy said four days later.

We’d taken the bus down to the canal right after school. Mose and Rico had headed home, because Rico still had a headache from getting hit by that rock. I felt bad for him. First he got shot, now he got hit with a rock. He wasn’t having a very good year.

“What?” I said, only half listening to Billy.

“I said, Jake put an ad in the paper … for the truck.”

“When?”

“Yesterday.”

We were sitting in the weeds with our knees up and arms crossed over them, the
Taiyo Maru
in the water below us. A few minutes passed.

“Yeah,” Billy whispered, nodding his head. He snapped up. “Yeah, yeah!”

“What?” I said.

Billy snapped his fingers. “Pontoons, that’s what!”

“What’s pontoons?”

“Listen,” he said. “There’s this kid I know over in Ka-neohe. His dad is a marine, but they don’t live on the base. They live in a neighborhood like everyone else. Anyway, in that kid’s backyard he had this huge black rubber thing … like a giant rubber float, and I mean it was as big as a car. What we did was run water from a hose over it so we could slide off it for fun. He called it a pontoon, something his dad brought home from the marine base.”

“Huh,” I said. “Sounds fun, I guess.”

“You don’t see what I’m getting at?”

“No.”

“Pontoons … if we had two of them? Each one as big as a car?”

“Yeah?”

He grinned and tapped my arm with the back of his hand. “And, this is the key, we inflate them with something like a compressor—underwater?”

Bong!

“Man, I’m slow,” I said, the picture now developing in my brain. “Ho! So how can we get one? Can we borrow that kid’s? Is it heavy?”

“Whoa there, hold on, son, it’s just a thought. We got to think it out. And we’d need two of them.”

“Yeah, yeah. Two.”

“Pontoons …”

“Pontoons! I like it.”

“First thing is that we have to see if it’s even possible to
borrow something like that,” Billy said. “I’ll call him up tonight.”

“That’d be good,” I said. “Since we don’t have a phone.”

“Right.”

Billy was a good guy. It didn’t matter to him that we didn’t have a phone, or that Grampa slept on the floor, or that we washed our clothes in a tub behind the house. Billy didn’t even seem to notice that he was a haole, and that haoles weren’t supposed to hang around with Japanese.

We took the bus home, thinking about pontoons.

When we got to my house Billy raised his chin. “Later,” he said. “Got a phone call to make.”

“Good luck.”

Billy headed through the trees.

Azuki Bean and my two homeless dogs, Shrimpy and Joe, stood at my feet, yawning. All of them were over a year old now. I wanted to keep Shrimpy and Joe and wasn’t trying very hard to find homes for them. But I would have to, and soon. We couldn’t afford to keep feeding them.

I dropped down on my knees and sat back on my heels in the dirt, and the big puppies nosed over to me. “You little rascals, how’s life, huh?”

I rubbed their fat, warm bellies.

The screen door squeaked open and I glanced up.

Keet Wilson let the door slap shut behind him.

I felt my jaw drop, just slightly, not enough for Keet to see but enough for me to know I’d just been hit on the head with a hammer.

I stood, slowly, brushing the dirt off my knees.

Keet glanced off to my left, and I looked that way. Little Bruiser was tied up short in the shadow of a tree. I turned back. “What are you doing in our house?”

Keet swaggered down the steps. “Whose house?”

I said nothing.

Keet humphed. “I thought so.”

Mama must have gone somewhere with Kimi, I thought, the house dark through the screen door.

Keet came closer, now four, maybe even five inches taller than me. My eyes were level with the two fake army dog tags he wore around his neck.

“Where’s your white shadow?” he said.

I didn’t answer.

“How about your mommy? I need to talk to her. She’s not in your house … oops, I mean, she’s not in my house.”

I turned to the side and spat into the dirt. I could get one clean shot at his nose before he killed me. It would be worth it.

Nakaji must always be a good name, Tomi.
Only Papa’s words held me back. But it wasn’t easy, especially remembering the rock that slammed into Rico’s head, and Grampa hurrying away, scared and rattled. What kind of sick dogs would throw rocks at an old man, anyway?

Keet reached out and placed the tips of the thumb and fingers of his right hand on my chest. He shoved me, and I stepped back, but I never took my eyes off him.

“Your room is a sad place,” he said. “It’s as pathetic as your life.”

“You had no right to go in our house,” I said.

“Oh, I have a right, fish boy.” He grinned. “We own you.”

He shoved me again.

“Do that again and you’ll wish you hadn’t,” I said.

“Ooo,” Keet said. Then laughed. “You know what I found kind of touching in your room? I mean, besides the fact that you sleep in there with that insane grandpappy of yours?”

I waited.

Keet winked. “You saved all the pieces of those stupid fish. Cute.”

Papa, this is too hard.

I headed around him and started up the steps.

“When mama-san gets home you tell her she’s needed up
at the house. We got company coming, and our house—and this dump, too—got to get dressed up, know what I mean? We don’t want
any
Jap symbols of
any
kind around this place, including stupid fish kites, you hear me? You tell your mama to come on up to the big house just as soon as she shows up.”

I pushed past him, heading up the steps.

“Oh,” Keet added. “We need her for something else, too.”

I let the door slap behind me.

“I need her to make my bed!” he shouted, then laughed.