Eyes of the Emperor

by Graham Salisbury

  “Bad, bad, bad,” Mr. Matsumaru said.

  It was the second mysterious boat burning in less than a year. The first one was a sixty-foot Japanese tuna fisher.

  A fireboat came racing in from Honolulu Harbor, but it didn't look like there was much left to save.

  “Pop built that boat for a guy from Kaneohe,” I said, moving closer to Chik and Cobra. “He was going to pick it up tomorrow.”

  “Tst,” Cobra said, shaking his head.

  Herbie squatted and crossed his arms over his knees, his scowling face telling me he was as suspicious as I was, because boats don't just explode like that. The last one, somebody poured gasoline on the deck and lit it. Nobody was ever caught.

  I leaned forward and peeked around Chik. “Maybe we can save the engine, Pop,” I said, remembering how we'd waited weeks for it to be shipped over from the West Coast.

  Pop didn't answer, but his friends mumbled how sorry they were as they watched the flames eat up just about every penny we had. Still Pop gave no hint of how he felt.

  I squatted next to Herbie. After the fire was out, we'd save what we could and start over. No question. If Pop had agreed to build the haole a boat, then he'd build him a boat—even if he had to borrow money to do it. Pop wouldn't even think about letting a promise or a debt go unpaid.

  Somehow, he'd find a way.

  But how'd it catch fire? It was too hard to believe it was an accident, like somebody leaving oily rags on board. We were too careful for that.

  I tried to think, but my mind was shaken. Twenty years Pop had worked here. Twenty. And nobody had ever bothered him. Now this.

  All I could do was go back to the Japanese problem, like maybe this was something about Japan and China, and too many Japanese in Hawaii, and people not trusting us, wondering if we would turn on them if the U.S.A. went to war with Japan.

  Then also it could have been about angry Hawaiian fishermen. Or maybe it was because of fear left over from sugar strikes, when so many Japanese workers had taken a stand against the sugarcane growers.

  Could have been a lot of things.

  When you got two Japanese boats burned up inside of a year, with no explanation, then you got to think the worst.

  Nobody spoke, all of us still as stones, watching the flames as the fireboat swept in with water flying like wings from its pumps. But the explosion must have popped a hole in the hull, because the beautiful Red Hibiscus went down.

  Poof! Gone.

  The flames snapped out like a match in a hurricane.

  The next morning Chik and Cobra were sitting on our steps waiting to go with me down to the harbor to help with whatever they could. I was lucky to have friends like them.

  Pop and Herbie were waiting for us at the pier. The sun was just climbing into a pink morning sky. Out to sea, the ocean breathed slow and soft, a body sleeping under silk.

  Herbie sat squatting on his heels. Barefoot, shorts with no shirt, ready to go down and pry parts off the sunken boat.

  If Pop suspected somebody of blowing up the boat on purpose, he didn't show it. Thinking about it made my head hot, but he was a rock. When he had problems he couldn't control, he just shrugged and said Shikataganai—which meant, pretty much, It can't be helped, why cry over spilled milk? What can you do?

  Pop, listen, I wanted to shout. If somebody does something bad to you, you got to do something about it. You can't just say, That's okay, burn my boat, because that ain't right. Sometimes I just wanted to shake him.

  After we lowered two rafts into the water, we tied them off and went back to Pop's shop for two hand-crank winches. We hauled them to the pier in a wagon.

  “Where you want these, Pop?” I said.

  “Put one on top each raf',” he said. “Then come wit' me. Herbie, you swim out and see what's lef' of that boat, and how deep we gotta go.”

  Herbie nodded, stood, stretched, and dove in.

  Me, Chik, and Cobra followed Pop back to his shop. He dug up two pairs of bamboo goggles and tossed them to Chik. Pop got a hammer, nails, and some old two-by-fours, and we headed back to the harbor, where Herbie waited, dripping seawater.

  “What you going do with these woods?” I asked, dropping the two-by-fours on the pier.

  Pop answered with a lift of his chin toward the rafts, meaning, You see soon enough.

  Fine.

  “How deep, Herbie?” Pop said.

  “Twenty feet, about.”

  “Anyt'ing lef' of it?”

  “Yeah. We can save some of it.”

  Pop nodded.

  We nailed the two rafts together with the two-by-fours, leaving about five feet of open space between them. We could use the winches to pull up heavy parts through the gap. Not a bad idea.

  Using small pieces of lumber as paddles, we made our way out into the harbor. I could feel the sun roasting my bare back. Almost all the fishing boats were out. The harbor was quiet.

  Cobra's muscles rippled in his back as he pulled water. He was built like a giant tuna, strong and powerful. Calm on the outside, but always on the edge of something on the inside. A typhoon trapped in a tin can. Struck like a snake when he got mad—which is why we called him Cobra.

  Chik was the opposite. Kind of bony, always antsy. All the time looking around, tapping on his leg like a drummer, nodding to music nobody else could hear. If you walked close enough to him you could almost feel the beat. Before the army cut it off, his hair was jet-black and combed with sweet-smelling Vaseline hair oil. He liked to puff up and walk around in his fancy silk flowered shirts. And he usually had two or three girlfriends going at the same time; right now he had Fumi, who he'd been chasing around since fifth grade, and a new one, Helen. How he did that without getting caught, I didn't even want to know. Me and Cobra called him Chickaboom—party boy.

  At first they called me Babyface, but I said, Cut it out, because I grew up in Kaka'ako and toughed it out at McKinley High just like they did.

  Those guys—what would I do if I didn't get into the army with them?

  The sampan's dark form wobbled below the raft. Herbie tied a rope around a stone anchor and rolled it into the water. We watched it tumble down and poof on the sand when it hit.

  “Let's go take a look,” Cobra said.

  All of us except Pop slipped off the rafts. Herbie and Cobra got the goggles first. Later, when Chik and me had burning red eyes, we would trade off.

  Warm water rushed in around me, the pressure stronger the deeper I went.

  The sampan was charcoal black where it had burned. Made me sick to see my nice paint job bubbled and ruined. But we could save the prop, the rudder, the wheel, and most of the hardware.

  I studied the hull, gliding in close and running my fingers over it. Just as I'd thought, the explosion had popped a hole in it, right by the fuel tank. Inside, I could see steel gaping like sharks' teeth, and the snapped iron straps that had held the tank in its chocks.

  Very suspicious.

  When we came back up I told Pop about the hole in the hull. He rubbed the back of his neck, probably wondering how the fuel tank could blow on its own.

  “We save what we can,” he said. “Bombye we try go get some dry-dock guys to help us bring up the res' of it with a crane.”

  He worked us like dogs long into the night. Chik and Cobra never complained as Pop cracked the whip. Seemed like old folks like him could only think of work, work, work! You start something, you finish it.

  At eleven o'clock he mercifully raised his hand. “ 'Nuff for now. Tomorrow we come back.”

  “About time,” I mumbled.

  We sank down into the water, then slowly came back up. Cobra grinned at me, water streaming from his face. Chik yawned and shook his head. They knew my pop and his stub born ways. Herbie was falling asleep, his eyes at half-mast.

  But Pop could go all night.

  If I ever got into trouble, that old goat would be the first one I'd want at my side.

  I nodded thanks and goodbye to Chik and Cobra
when we passed by their houses. They didn't have to help us out like that. But that's the way it was with us.

  One morning six weeks later I went downtown.

  It was raining, the sky gray.

  I was calm.

  And it was time.

  It was just something I had to do. Especially after we lost that boat. We were Americans, not a “Japanese problem,” and if I had to go behind Pop's back and join the army to prove it, then that was what I would do. Sure, I wanted to be with Chik and Cobra. But now it was more than that. Now it was about standing up for something. Pop would be proud of what I was doing, someday.

  Also, we needed the money. I would get paid just like Chik and Cobra, and I could give it to Ma. Ever since the boat burned, she'd been so quiet I could tell she was worried. She hardly ate anything, and she had lines on her face that weren't there before. With me making army pay, it would be different.

  Even though Chik and Cobra tried to talk me out of it, they vowed to come down from Schofield and watch me lie about my age. They thought it would be funny. “You dreaming,” Cobra said on the phone. “They going kick you out so fast your head going spin.”

  They were waiting for me, hunched under a tree just outside the recruitment center, trying to stay dry. I crowded in next to them. “Hey, baboozes, how long you been here?”

  “Little bit,” Chik said. “Got the early bus.”

  I took a deep breath, rubbed my hands together. “Let's do it.”

  “Last chance to forget this,” Cobra said.

  “Yeah,” Chik added. “Don't be crazy.”

  “I made up my mind.”

  Cobra threw up his hands. “We tried, ah?”

  I headed toward the door.

  “The guy going say, Go home, kid,” Chik said. “You watch.”

  But the recruitment officer barely glanced at my birth certificate. Just as he handed me the papers and pen, rain came smacking down so hard I could barely hear him say “Sign here, son.”

  I wrote: Eddy Okubo.

  Thunder rolled across Honolulu, and the rain moved out to sea.

  “Good luck, soldier,” the recruiter said, handing me a copy of the form I'd signed. I stuck it in my back pocket with my folded-up birth certificate.

  “Thanks,” I said, shaking his hand.

  We walked out, me with a new bounce in my step.

  “You don't know what you just did,” Cobra said.

  Who cared? I said I was eighteen and the guy believed it! And now I was in the army with Chik and Cobra.

  The sun peeked out bright and steam smoked off the streets. Inland, fresh white clouds grew up out of the mountaintops.

  “Ho, do I feel good,” I said.

  “Go back,” Chik said, stopping. “Go back and say, Oops, sorry, I made a mistake, tear up that paper.”

  Cobra snorted. “Too late. They got him now.”

  I put my arms around their shoulders. “Looks like you two goof balls stuck with me little bit longer, ah?”

  They laughed and shoved me as we headed home, just like we were back in seventh grade.

  “What your pops said about it?” Chik asked.

  “Said about what?”

  “Joining up.”

  “I didn't tell him.”

  “What! Ho, man, you really crazy.” He hunched his shoulders and cringed.

  Inside, I cringed, too, because Pop's idea of sending me to Japan for college was shot. He was going to explode.

  Or clam up.

  You never knew with him, because he lived his whole life inside his head. Ma always said, “Just let him alone, Eddy, let him be. Your daddy's a silent man.”

  I jammed my hands into my pockets.

  Chik kicked a crushed cigarette pack on the road. “Listen, don't tell the army you had Rotsie, or they might make you a lieutenant.”

  “What's wrong with that?”

  “Come on, punk. You too smart. You ain't going be no lifer. Anyone who can graduate high school when he barely sixteen going college someday.”

  I shrugged. Sure, but I had to get some money first. And besides, it was too late. Like Cobra said—the army got me now.

  Cobra patted my head. “You better get a football helmet because your pops going rap your skull with a stick. He might even kill you.”

  “Kill you twice,” Chik said.

  Probably. But what could you expect from an old man who refused to even try to understand the American way of life? We just lived in different worlds, me and him. That's all. I liked my island. I had my friends. I had the ocean. I could work and go fishing and live like a king with a couple bucks in my pocket. Japan was part of me, sure. But this was my country.

  Problem was, I could never figure out how to explain that to Pop. Maybe I could—

  No, no, no, don't think about that right now. Think about the sun on your back, breathe some clean air. Soak it up. Feel good for a while.

  But it was hard, because I was getting closer and closer to my house.

  Pop was raking leaves under the avocado tree when we reached the small dirt patch we called a yard. Chik and Cobra kept on going, walking backwards, grinning like the cowards they were around him—and around their own pops, too, for that matter.

  Pop glanced up when I came through the gate.

  He stopped and squinted at me, shadows from the tree spattered all over him. His thin eyelids sagged down at the ends, making me feel like I was being watched by a lizard.

  I nodded, then glanced at the house. Maybe Ma would come out to rescue me.

  I scratched my cheek, trying to think.

  Stupid… not to have a plan.

  I turned back to Pop and lifted my chin, Hey.

  He didn't blink. Dark, hooded eyes.

  I looked away.

  Opah, a small black and white mixed-breed mutt, came stretching out from under the house. I squatted to pet him.

  Think, think.

  Opah yawned, his eyes squeezing to slits, his breath like rotting fish.

  Pop started raking again.

  I stood up.

  “Pop,” I said, smiling, trying to look cheerful. But I didn't know what was supposed to come after that. “Uh… the yard looks nice.”

  Dumb.

  Pop leaned on the rake. Now that sour look said, You got something to say, say it, and stop bothering me.

  Okay, I thought. Just get it out, one time fast.

  “Pop, I joined the army today,” I said. “I was prob'ly going get drafted, anyway… you know, like Nick and Takeo? I thought, you know, I might as well get it over with… and…and…”

  This part wasn't very clear to me yet.

  “Well… somebody's got to stand up against the guys who burn sampans because they think we going…we…I don't know what they think, but it ain't right, you know? So I…I…I'll send you all my pay, and…”

  That was all I could think of.

  Pop's eyes darted back and forth, and I knew he was translating. I could have made it easier for him and said it in Japanese, but my English was better.

  He turned his head slightly, as if listening to a faraway sound. But his eyes didn't move, studying me for way too long.

  “Pop?”

  He sucked his teeth, then went back to raking leaves.

  And that was the end of it. Pop wouldn't look up again. Even if the avocado tree came crashing down, he would just keep on raking.

  Opah glanced up at me, like What's going on?

  I shook my head and started up the steps to the house. Funny how that old goat gets to me, I thought, because my hands were trembling.

  What he was thinking, I could only guess.

  Probably he was seeing all those years of Japanese school, all those Boy's Day celebrations with the Japanese red fish flag flying over our house, all the times we'd invited guests from Japan over for dinner so he could talk about his home and tell them how his sons were going to Waseda University—he was probably thinking about all of that—wasted. To him, my joining the U.S. Arm
y was the worst possible betrayal. That was what was banging around in his head. Probably.

  I kicked off my rubber slippers and went inside, letting the screen door slap behind me. I winced when I glanced at the flag of Japan nailed to the wall, and the picture of stifffaced Emperor Hirohito in a frame on the table by our sagging brown couch. If the haoles ever saw that, they would really think they had a Japanese problem. The Emperor's eyes followed me as I crossed the room. Spooky.

  Ma was in the kitchen, small and round, black hair turning to gray tied in a knot behind her head.

  She smiled, glad to see me home.

  “Ma,” I said. “I…I joined the army today. I was going get drafted anyway, so I…”

  She gasped and stepped back to fall into a chair. She stared at me a second, my words sinking in, her eyes welling with tears.

  I dropped down on one knee and grabbed her hand. “Ma, it's the right thing, specially now when people starting to worry about us because of what Japan is doing in … in…in China.”

  A tear slipped from her eye and rolled down her cheek, falling on my hand. “Your father, Eddy…he…”

  “I know, Ma, I know.”

  She rocked, taking her hand back and folding her arms across her chest, leaning into them. “Oh, this is so bad. He has such dreams for you. How can you do this to him, Eddy? For so long he has—”

  “Do you think I dream those same dreams of his? You know I don't. I have to live my own life.…I have to… to…”

  What?

  What do I have to do that is so hurtful to my family? How come I didn't think of that?

  “Look, Ma…I'll get paid thirty dollars a month, just like Chik and Cobra. We need the money, don't we? Right?”

  She turned away.

  “Ma, try to understand.”

  “Your father knows what's best for you, Eddy. You must respect his wishes. He has taught you better than this.”

  That was true.

  “I'm sorry, Ma.”

  There was nothing more to say.

  Later, when I told Herbie, he stuck to me like a tick, wanting to know if I'd get a gun, or drive a truck or a jeep or a tank. “Can you get me a canteen? One of those ones you hang on the web belt? Ho, man, the army! How come Pop let you do that? You're not even old enough.”