I look back over toward the ocean.
“They say they’re out there,” she whispers.
“Who? The Japanese?”
“Yes. They say maybe Germans, too. Who knows?”
“Who’s ‘they’?” I ask.
“‘They’ always means anyone airin’ their opinion, Jewels. You’d be amazed what ‘they’ say on our party line.” She looks back over the ocean. “They say they’re out there. Somewhere.”
“You mean, if our lights were on right now, some Japanese gunner would see us and bomb us to Kingdom Come?” I ask.
Mom turns and looks at me. “I guess,” she says. She runs her hand over her face, purses her lips, and sighs heavy like she does when she’s thinking things over.
“Do you think they’re out there and will come ashore and invade us?” I ask.
“I don’t know.”
Just then, the car chugs, rattles, and conks out. We look at each other, exhale as if to say “not again,” open our doors, and get out.
My mother puts her arm around me and says, “Jewels, honey, we’re goin’ to be fine. Everything will be just fine.” And we walk arm in arm along the shoreline, two perfect targets for the Krauts or the Japanese or the FBI or the McAloon Twins Beach Patrol or anyone, but it’s sort of nice. Most arm-in-arming Mom and me ever do is ol’ Jewels helping ol’ Malice Alice home after a long boozy night at Edna’s Inn and Out. But not tonight.
We stop in front of the Look-Sea Lounge and glance up. It’s pitch dark now but was once so bright and gay and full of life. Sometimes I used to sneak over and hide in the dunes when there were big things going on. Holiday dances, special events, parties, and such. Dancing people and music would spill out onto the patio and the spotlights from the roof would light up the whole beach. Hard to believe all that fun and life once came out of this big, dark building.
“Sort of sad, huh, Mom? Seeing this place so dark and dead.”
“It’s not dead. Maybe just snoozin’,” she says.
I can smell cigarette smoke and there, sitting on one of his teak deck chairs on the patio, is Tommy Kaye, bundled in a blanket and smoking. Hero comes to meet me as we walk up.
“You’re not supposed to be out here,” Mom says.
“Neither are you,” Mr. Kaye says back. He kicks out a chair to invite her to sit.
“Nice evening, for February,” Mom says, sitting and taking in a long breath. “Maybe a Chinook comin’.”
There’s one of those silences that all kids come to understand. You know, where adults want to talk or something but they won’t if you are standing right there. So either they’re going to say something like “don’t you have some homework to do?” or “be a good kid and make us a drink” or maybe even the old standard “put an egg in your shoe and beat it!”
“Mom, I got . . . I have some homework to do. What do I do if that FBI man comes ba—”
Mom shoots me a look but Mr. Kaye picks right up on it. “FBI?”
“Oh, you know those hotshot G-men, always snoopin’ around. Askin’ questions about you. So, maybe we best go inside,” she says.
“Why? You think I should just hide from the FBI? You think I have something to hide?” I pick up the anger in his voice, and you don’t hear that too often from Mr. Kaye.
“No, I meant, maybe . . . Come on, Tommy. Don’t get mad.”
“Well, I am! I am sitting on my deck chair, on my patio, on my property. I have nothing to hide! Why the heck should I go inside?”
“Well, because I’m gettin’ cold. And you could probably use a drink,” Mom says as she ticks her head up toward his apartment.
CHAPTER 20
“Shut up! I can’t hear!” Rex barks at me, holding a glass of milk in one hand, half a sandwich in the other, and peering through the swinging kitchen doors into the Look-Sea Lounge. We’re here doing homework and laying low from the FBI man while Edna, Mom, and Mr. Kaye sit talking.
“What’re they saying?”
He shushes me again, then says, “Edna was grilled by the FBI man. Wanted to know if Mr. Kaye has any family.”
“Well, he doesn’t,” I say. “And his parents are dead.”
Rex stops chewing, looks down at me, and asks, “How do you know?”
“He told me. Guess what else he told me?”
“Shhh! Things are heating up in there.”
We open the doors and sneak into the big, darkened room.
“This is the FBI!” Edna shouts. “God knows what information they have—on all of us!”
“All of us?” Mom snaps. “What are you hiding? Two clams over the limit? As I recall, you got off scot-free!”
“Well, I’m pretty sure you don’t want any government man snooping around your past,” Edna snaps back.
Rex and I look at each other.
“Ladies, please,” Mr. Kaye says. “Are you forgetting our pledge? It was right there behind that very bar when we all put our hands on the Bible and swore we’d never talk about it again!”
Mom and Edna are nose to nose, but settle back into their seats. Edna and Mom are what Mr. Kaye calls the “best of enemies.” They both love and hate each other so much, you’d think they were sisters.
Mr. Kaye says, “Now, Edna, what else did this agent ask?”
“He wanted to know how much money you have, but I said, ‘You’re the FBI. You tell me!”’
“What else?” Mr. Kaye asks.
“He asked about family and if you travel and well, it was the third degree. I tell you, it was the third degree.”
Mr. Kaye runs his hand through his hair and turns to Mom. “And did you get the third degree, too?”
“No, we got rid of him. But he wants to come back tomorrow!”
Edna gets up, saying, “I need another drink.”
Rex and me quickly slip back into the kitchen. We sit at the table and he mutters, “Crud. It’s going from bad to worse.”
“Because of the FBI man?”
“No, Jewels, because the toilet in cabin twelve doesn’t flush. Of course! They don’t send the FBI unless it’s something big. I wonder who Mr. Kaye’s lawyer is.”
“Ed Simcoe, who else?” I say. There’s only one lawyer in Sea Park and everyone uses him. Town joke is he spends most of his time in court suing himself. Then I remember. “But it doesn’t matter. Becky Simcoe said her dad already went to Portland to enlist.”
“Pretty soon it’ll be just us kids left in Sea Park,” he says. “Guess we have that to look forward to, since all the adults are acting like children.”
Then I ask what I got to ask, have been wanting to ask but have just been too scared to: “Do you ever think, well, wonder . . . what if Mr. Kaye really is . . .” I stumble until Rex stops me.
He throws his pencil acrost the room and shouts, “Stop it, Jewels! Just stop thinking that!” That starts him coughing a little and he grabs his side.
“Rex, you better do something about those ribs.”
“I read they take a long time to heal. Maybe months,” he says, polishing off a glass of milk. “It’s just hard to breathe being all bound up like this. A sneeze would kill me.” Then he looks at me and says, “Anyway, you just stop thinking like the rest of the town about Tommy Kaye!”
“What’d you think’s going to happen to him?” I indicate the Stay and Play around us. “I mean, if there’s no customers, won’t he go broke?”
“Yes, I guess so. Unless that strongbox from the safe is filled with thousand-dollar bills.”
I shrug my shoulders. I’m thinking about the family photo of Mr. Kaye and his parents. “Everyone wants to know where he got all his money.”
“Maybe he inherited it,” Rex said.
I get up and put the milk away. “Maybe. His dad was a military man. Do they make much money?”
“The Japanese military?” Rex asks.
So I tell him about Mr. Kaye’s folks—a white father and a Japanese mother.
“Huh. He doesn’t look biracial,” Rex says.
He catches my face and says, “Half and half.”
“He’s not half and half. He’s adopted.”
Just then the doors swing open and the three adults stand there like they’ve been the ones eavesdropping on us.
“Aren’t you kids supposed to be doin’ homework?” Mom says, pointing to our notebooks and textbooks still stacked on the table.
“What about the FBI man?” I ask. “What if he comes asking questions again?”
“I will deal with him,” Mr. Kaye says. “If he asks you anything, just say to ask me. Tell him I’m always here like a good little Jap, obeying Governor Sprague’s orders.”
“Come on, kids,” Mom says. “Let’s go home. It’s a school night.”
Mom and Mr. Kaye hug each other goodbye, which sort of alarms me because folks in Sea Park aren’t big on hugging, and when it happens, it’s usually at funerals.
We walk home and Rex goes to his room to do homework, and I go to my room to read, and Mom finishes painting her toenails.
• • •
Sometime in the middle of the night, Rex pulls me awake. “Jewels!” he whispers. “Wake up!” He jerks me upright.
“Knock it off, creep!”
“Shhh.” He sits on my bed and tugs on my overhead light.
I squint and look at him. “You sick?”
“No. Tell me again about Mr. Kaye being adopted.”
“What time is it? Can’t this wait?” I lay back down but he pulls me up again.
“Wake up, Jewels. This is important.”
“He told me he was adopted when his folks were stationed in Japan. So what?”
“Uh oh.”
“What?”
“We were learning about it in Modern Problems. If he was born in Japan, that means he’s Issei.”
“What say?”
“Issei. Look, when it comes to the Japanese in this country, there are Issei and Nisei. Nisei are Japanese Americans. You know, born here, but of Japanese parents. Issei are people who were born in Japan but live in America.”
My head is spinning, but it usually does so when Rex is figuring things out. “But what do they call the ones who were adopted by an American major and a Japanese woman?” I ask, yawning.
“I don’t know.”
“It’s stupid. If you live here you should be an American and that’s that. Enough of that Issei stuff,” I say through a yawn.
“Nothing’s that simple. One thing I do know: there’s going to be a big push to send the Issei back to Japan.”
“Why?”
“Because they think their loyalties are to their fatherland.”
“I thought the fatherland is that Nazi Germany thing,” I say.
“Fatherland is the place of one’s birth, Jewels.”
“I guess that’s why the FBI man said his real name is Iso? Moto? I can’t remember those weird names. Anyway, he called Mr. Kaye a Japanese name.”
“Because he was born in Japan and that’s his Japanese name,” Rex says, nodding his head like he does when he’s thinking deep.
“Well, he’s here now and he’s not a Jap. He’s Tommy Kaye and our neighbor and boss and plus the man who paid for your broken leg operation five years ago when you were dumb enough to play Tarzan trying to impress that stupid summer girl. Ambulance ride all the way to Portland? Or did you forget?”
His hand goes to his knee where he still has two long scars. “No, I didn’t forget.”
He stands up and pulls the light switch off.
“Rex?”
“What?”
“Do you think they’ll send him back to Japan?”
“Well, the FBI being here isn’t a good sign. Lots of people want to send them all back. Think they’re all traitors, just because their eyes slant.” He sort of chuckles and adds, “Lord knows, folks in town wouldn’t mind if Mr. Kaye just vanished.”
“Why? Everyone used to like him.”
“Sure, they did. When it comes to credit and borrowing. You know, like in the game of Monopoly? Tommy Kaye owns Boardwalk and Park Place but everyone who owes him money gets a big fat get-out-of-jail-free card.”
“I hate Monopoly,” I grumble, lying back down. “I always lose.”
Alone in the dark, I just want to fall back asleep, forget everything I don’t understand. But alls I can think about is that fat little Monopoly man with the spats and the mustache, holding the “go directly to jail. Do not collect two-hundred dollars” card. So I try to remember that name the FBI man told us—something Moto, which makes me think about Quasimodo and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Then that makes me remember that Maureen O’Hara was only eighteen when she made that movie. I use my fingers to count the years. Six. In six years, I’ll be eighteen and man, I’m going to need every one of those years to fill into something like Maureen O’Hara! So, that does the trick. Thinking about how much work that’s going to take makes me really . . . really . . . tired. . . .
CHAPTER 21
The FBI hasn’t come calling again, but according to the Sand Dune Telegraph, he stayed two nights at Babs Bishop’s Boarding House—“A View From Every Room.” Bet after those two days, he knows more about everyone in town than Father Donlevy, Selma O’Leary, and Bea Johnson put together. Then, just that like, he’s gone. Wisht it could be a case of out of sight, out of mind, but you just can’t get a man like a FBI special agent out of your mind.
• • •
My bike tire is, per usual, flat, and I got to walk to school today. It’s Friday, but I can take just about anything on a Friday. Rex says he’ll walk with me. Now, you don’t see brothers doing that very often. I don’t know if he’s scared that more FBI will come around or that the new club of rah-rah-rah do-gooders might bother me. The club calls themselves the SPORTS, which stands for the Sea Park Outdoor Reconnaissance Team, formed by none other than Eldon Johnson, Bully Hallstrom, and five or six of their toadies. I don’t exactly know what reconnaissance means, so I ask Rex on our walk.
“Well, reconnaissance is sort of like spying, like scouting out a situation and reporting back,” Rex says.
“Who they reporting back to?”
We stop. “I don’t know,” Rex says, sort of out of breath. “That’s a good question. The principal is letting them meet at school, so maybe that’s who they report to. But it’s nothing short of vigilantism, if you ask me.”
“Come on, Rex. Quit already with those big words. It really cheeses me when you talk above my head. I’m not your debate teacher or . . .”
“It’s taking the law into your own hands. Like martial law or militia or . . .” I cross my eyes—my standard “huh?” look. “Okay, it’s like exactly what’s happening to Mr. Kaye. Someone’s been vandalizing his property and no one’s doing anything about it. It’s like the whole town is the law and no one is doing anything to protect the common good.”
“But Sheriff Hillary is gone. There isn’t any law in town.”
“Go to the head of the class!” he says. “So everyone thinks a self-appointed gang like the SPORTS is okay. And it’s not. So Mayor Schmidtke steps in and gives those thugs a uniform. They’re just old jackets and caps from the Sea Park band, but that’s not the point. Giving them a place to meet and a uniform sanctions them.” My eyes go crost again. “It gives them permission. And just kids with wooden rifles is one thing, but I read that guerrilla groups with adults and real guns are forming everywhere,” he goes on.
“Go-rilla?”
“Yeah, like a bunch of armed monkeys,” Rex laughs. “I tell you, Jewels, we are one step away from martial law.”
“Oh,” I say, noticing I don’t have to walk so fast to keep up with him like I used to.
“So, you don’t have anything to do with the SPORTS, got that, Jewels?”
“Any of them? What if—”
“Don’t even give them the time of day.” He stops and looks at me. I see how his looks are changing. He looks like—I don’t know—more like a man, not a boy anymore. It’s like that shellackin
g he took sort of made his looks different. Harder, maybe.
“Anyway,” he says, “you see those jerks in those uniforms coming, you just turn around and go the other way. Uniforms should really be outlawed.”
“Well, I’ll bet a uniform helps knowing a Kraut from a Yank,” I say.
He smiles at me and nods. “That’s pretty darn smart, Shorty.” I like it when he has some pride in his eyes when he looks at me.
“Mom says there’s a time to play it smart and a time to play it dumb.”
“Well, she’d know,” he says, heading off toward the senior high wing of our school.
I notice that he’s walking like he’s older’n The Old Man.
• • •
So here I am, sitting in first period, my thoughts about as far away from the history of the Oregon Territory as, well, Tokyo. I let my mind search for something funny after worrying all through homeroom about Rex. So I think about Eldon’s SPORTS and how funny they looked marching into school today in those cornball, circusy band uniforms. Then I think about Rex’s idea of uniform-outlawing. What if some fairy sprinkled magic dust over a German battlefield and wammie!—all the soldiers are bare-butt naked! Naked armies hit me as pretty funny and I got to scrunch my lips to keep from laughing.
I look out the window toward the beach and my eyes land on the church steeple anchoring down St. Bart’s By the Sea. Then it hits me! It’s genius! I swear, it’s genius! I spurt out loud, “Quasimodo!”
The whole class laughs and Miss Thackery says, “Jewels, do you have something to share?”
“Uh, no. Well, yes, I mean, I need to use the girls’ room.”
Kids always think that’s funny like they don’t know about the call of nature. Miss Thackery hands me a hall pass and I go straight to my locker, collect my coat, and dash out of the school, heading back home. My brain is overheating; I’m planning things so fast. And I got the whole weekend to put my plan into action.
I’m not going to tell anyone—not even Rex. Nope, this is going to be just me and, well, of course Tommy Kaye will have to be told. Eventually.
• • •
Incommunicado Page 9
