It was close to eleven-thirty, if his watch was right, the last of the flood still carrying him east, and he decided to motor west again in order to fish the tide turn. On the turn the salmon would pile up, milling on the bank by the hundreds, in schools, and some to the east would back in on the ebb so that his net would load up going both ways. He hoped for another hundred fish from his next set; it seemed a reasonable prospect. He was glad to have stuck it out in the fog and felt vindicated somehow. He’d made his drift successfully. There were fish in his hold, more to be had, and small competition to get them. He guessed more than two-thirds of the fishermen in the area had made the fog run for Elliot Head with their horns sounding across the water.
Kabuo stood at the wheel in his cabin with a cup of green tea on the table behind him and flipped once more through the radio channels. There was no talk now. All the men who couldn’t help talking had moved on, it appeared. Out of habit he checked his engine gauges and took a reading from his compass. Then he throttled up, turned tight, and motored west, adjusting to the north less than five degrees in the hope of stumbling across a buoy marker.
The bow of the Islander cut through the fog for ten minutes or more. One eye on the binnacle, the other on the spotlighted water before his bow, Kabuo inched forward on blind faith. He was, he knew, motoring against the grain of boats drifting down the bank. The protocol among gill-netters in such conditions was to lay on one’s foghorn at one-minute intervals and to keep a sharp ear turned toward the fog on the chance of receiving a reply. Kabuo, moving into the tidal drift, had signaled his position a half-dozen times when an air horn replied off his port bow. Whoever it was, he was close.
Kabuo backed into neutral and drifted, his heart beating hard in his chest. The other man was too near, seventy-five yards, a hundred at best, out there in the fog, his motor cut. Kabuo laid on his horn again. In the silence that followed came a reply to port – this time a man’s voice, calm and tactual, a voice he recognized. ‘I’m over here,’ it called across the water. ‘I’m dead in the water, drifting.’
And this was how he had found Carl Heine, his batteries dead, adrift at midnight, in need of another man’s assistance. There Carl stood in the Islander’s spotlight, a big man in bib overalls poised in his boat’s bow, a kerosene lantern clutched in one hand and an air horn dangling from the other. He’d raised his lantern and stood there like that, his bearded chin set, expressionless. ‘I’m dead in the water,’ he’d said again, when Kabuo pulled up against his starboard side and tossed him a mooring line. ‘My batteries are drawed down. Both of them.’
‘All right,’ said Kabuo. ‘Let’s tie up. I’ve got plenty of juice.’
‘Thank God for that,’ answered Carl. ‘It’s good luck to have run across you.’
‘Kick your fenders out,’ Kabuo said. ‘I’ll drift right up in close.’
They tied their boats together in the fog, underneath the Islander’s spotlight. Kabuo shut his engine down while Carl stepped across both gunnels and came aboard his boat. He stood in the doorway shaking his head; ‘I drawed ’em both down,’ he repeated. ‘Volt meter’s down around nine somewhere. Alternator belts were loose, I guess. I got ’em tightened up better now, but meanwhile I’m dead in the water.’
‘Hope we’re not in the lane,’ said Kabuo, peering up at the Susan Marie’s mast. ‘Looks like you put a lantern up.’
‘Lashed it up there just a bit ago,’ said Carl. ‘Best I could do, seems like. Lost my radio when the juice ran out, couldn’t call anyone. Couldn’t do anything to help myself, just drifting along this last hour. Lantern’s probably useless in this fog, but anyway I’ve got it up there. It’s all the lights I got just now, that and the one I’ve been carrying. Probably isn’t worth nothing to nobody.’
‘I’ve got two batteries,’ Kabuo answered. ‘We’ll pull one and get you started.’
‘’Preciate that,’ said Carl. ‘Thing is I run D-8s, you see. S’pose you run off 6s.’
‘I do,’ said Kabuo. ‘But it’ll work if you’ve got room. Anyway, we can refit your well. Or rig up some longer cables? It should go in just fine.’
‘I’ll measure,’ said Carl. ‘Then we’ll know.’
He crossed back over the boat gunnels then, and Kabuo hoped that underneath his facade there was part of him wanting to discuss the land that lay between them silently. Carl would have to say something one way or the other simply because the two of them were at sea together, moored boat to boat but to nothing else, adrift and battling the same problem.
Kabuo had known Carl for many years; he knew that Carl avoided circumstances in which he had to speak. He spoke mostly of the world of tools and objects when he had to speak at all. Kabuo remembered trolling for cutthroat with Carl – they were twelve years old, long before the war – in a borrowed, weathered rowboat. It was just after sunset and the phosphorescence in the water boiling underneath Carl’s rowing oars inspired him to comment – a boy so moved by the beauty of the world he could not keep himself from utterance: ‘Look at those colors,’ he’d said. And even at twelve Kabuo had understood that such a statement was out of character. What Carl felt he kept inside, showing nothing to anyone – as Kabuo himself did, for other reasons. They were more similar in their deepest places than Kabuo cared to admit.
Kabuo pried the cover from his battery well and loosened the cables from the terminals. He lifted one of his batteries out – twice as large as a car battery and twice as heavy as well – and carried it out to where he could rest it on his gunnel and pass it to Carl Heine. They stood each on his own boat, and the battery passed between them. ‘It’ll fit,’ said Carl. ‘There’s a flange in the way. It’s soft. I can bang it back.’
Kabuo reached down and took his gaff in his hand. ‘I’ll bring this,’ he said. ‘We can hammer with it.’
They passed into Carl’s tidy cabin together, Kabuo carrying a lantern and the gaff, Carl in front with the battery. A cased sausage hung from a wire beside the binnacle; the cot was neatly made up. Kabuo recognized Carl’s neat hand in things, his way of establishing a rigid order, the force that had driven him, years before, to keep his tackle box shipshape. Even his clothes, no matter how worn-out, were conspicuously neat and well kept.
‘Give me that gaff,’ Carl said now.
He knelt on one knee beside his battery hold and banged with the gaff at the metal flange. Kabuo, beside him, was aware of his strength and of the facility with which he approached this problem; he made each stroke count, put his shoulders into each, and did not hurry his blows. Once his right hand slipped, though, and grazing the soft metal came away bloody, but Carl did not halt. He gripped Kabuo’s fishing gaff harder and only afterward, when the battery was in the well, did he put his palm to his mouth and hold it there, taking back his blood in silence. ‘Let’s try starting up,’ he said.
‘You sure,’ asked Kabuo, ‘you got those belts tight? No point in starting up otherwise, you know. You’ll just run this battery down, too, and we’ll have another problem.’
‘They’re tight now,’ said Carl, working on his palm. ‘I put a wrench on ’em good.’
He pulled out the choke and threw his toggle switches. The Susan Marie’s engine wheezed twice below the floorboards, then coughed, rattled, and fired up when Carl backed down the choke.
‘Tell you what,’ said Kabuo. ‘You keep that battery for the rest of the night. I can’t wait around ’til you draw back up, so I’ll just run off the one I’ve got and catch you back at the docks.’
Carl slid the dead battery out of the way, tucked it in to the right of the wheel, then snapped on the cabin light and took a volt meter reading with his handkerchief pressed against his hand. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I’m charging now, but this’ll take awhile. Maybe I’ll find you later.’
‘Catch fish,’ said Kabuo. ‘Don’t worry about it. I’ll see you back at the docks.’
He worked the battery hold cover into place. He picked up his gaff and waited there. ‘I’
m off,’ he said finally. ‘I’ll see you.’
‘Hold on,’ answered Carl, still working on his hand – looking at it and not Kabuo. ‘You know as well as I do we both got something to talk about.’
‘All right,’ replied Kabuo, his gaff in his hand. And then he stood and waited.
‘Seven acres,’ said Carl Heine. ‘I’m wonderin’ what you’d pay for ’em, Kabuo. Just curious, that’s all.’
‘What are you selling them for?’ Kabuo asked. ‘Why don’t we start with what you want for them? I guess I’d rather start there.’
‘Did I say I was selling?’ Carl asked. ‘Didn’t say one way or the other, did I? But if I was, I guess I’d have to figure they’re mine and you want ’em pretty bad. Guess I’d ought to charge you a small fortune, but then maybe you’d want your battery back, leave me out here stranded.’
‘The battery’s in,’ Kabuo answered, smiling. ‘That’s separate from the rest of things. Besides, you’d do the same for me.’
‘I might do the same for you,’ said Carl. ‘I have to warn you about that, chief. I’m not screwed together like I used to be. It isn’t like it was before.’
‘All right,’ said Kabuo. ‘If you say so.’
‘Hell,’ said Carl. ‘I’m not saying what I mean. Look, goddamn it, I’m sorry, okay? I’m sorry over this whole damn business. I’d a been around, it wouldn’t have happened how it did. My mother pulled it off, I was out at sea, fighting you goddamn Jap sons a – ’
‘I’m an American,’ Kabuo cut in. ‘Just like you or anybody. Am I calling you a Nazi, you big Nazi bastard? I killed men who looked just like you – pig-fed German bastards. I’ve got their blood on my soul, Carl, and it doesn’t wash off very easily. So don’t you talk to me about Japs, you big Nazi son of a bitch.’
He still held the gaff gripped tightly in one hand, and he became aware of it now. Carl put one boot on the Susan Marie’s port gunnel and spat hard into the water. ‘I am a bastard,’ he said finally, and stared out into the fog. ‘I’m a big Hun Nazi son of a bitch, and you know what else, Kabuo? I still got your bamboo fishing rod. I kept it all these years. I hid it in the barn after my mother tried to make me go and return it over to your house. You went off to prison camp, I caught a mess of sea runs. Damn thing’s still in my closet.’
‘Leave it there,’ said Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘I forgot all about that fishing rod. You can have it. To hell with it.’
‘To hell with that,’ said Carl. ‘It’s been driving me crazy all these years. I open up my closet and there it is, your goddamn bamboo rod.’
‘Give it back, if you want,’ said Kabuo. ‘But I’m telling you you can keep it, Carl. That’s why I gave it to you.’
‘All right,’ said Carl. ‘Then that settles it. Twelve hundred an acre and that’s final. That’s what I’m paying Ole, see. That’s the going price on strawberry land, go and have a look around.’
‘That’s eighty-four hundred for the lot,’ answered Kabuo. ‘How much are you going to want down?’
Carl Heine spat into the water one more time, then turned and put out his hand. Kabuo put the gaff down and took it. They did not shake so much as grip like fishermen who know they can go no further with words and must communicate in another fashion. So they stood there at sea in the fog, floating, and locked their hands together. Their grip was solid, and there was the blood from Carl’s cut palm in it. They did not mean for it to say too much overtly, and at the same time they wished for it to say everything. They moved away from this more quickly than they desired but before embarrassment overtook them. ‘A thousand down,’ said Carl Heine. ‘We can sign papers tomorrow.’
‘Eight hundred,’ said Kabuo, ‘and it’s a deal.’
28
When Kabuo had finished telling his story on the witness stand, Alvin Hooks rose and stood before him insistently working on a hangnail. Studying his fingers as he delivered his words, he attended in particular to his cuticles. ‘Mr. Miyamoto,’ he began. ‘For the life of me I can’t understand why you didn’t tell this story from the start. After all, don’t you think it might have been your citizenly duty to come forward with all of this information? Don’t you think you should have gone to the sheriff and told him about this battery business you claim occurred on the high seas? I would think you would, Mr. Miyamoto. I would think you would go to Sheriff Moran and tell him all of this just as soon as you heard that Carl Heine had died so horribly.’
The accused man looked at the jurors now, ignoring Alvin Hooks entirely, and answered quietly and evenly in their direction, as if there were no one else present. ‘You must understand,’ he said to them, ‘that I heard nothing about the death of Carl Heine until one o’clock on the afternoon of September 16 and that within just a few hours of my having heard of it Sheriff Moran arrested me. There was no time for me to voluntarily come forward with the events as I have just delivered them. I – ’
‘But,’ Alvin Hooks intervened, placing himself between Kabuo and the jurors, ‘as you’ve just said yourself, Mr. Miyamoto, you had in fact – what did you say? – a few hours in which to seek out the sheriff. You heard about this death, an afternoon passed, and then you went down to the Amity Harbor docks with the intent of putting out to sea. You intended to fish until the morning of the seventeenth, at which time, if you’d decided to come forward, at least sixteen hours would have passed since you’d heard of the death of Carl Heine. So let me put this another way, a bit more consistent with reality – did you, Mr. Miyamoto, intend to come forward? Were you about to come forward with your battery story at the time of your arrest?’
‘I was thinking about it,’ said Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘I was trying to decide just what I should do. The situation was difficult.’
‘Oh,’ answered Alvin Hooks. ‘You were thinking about it. You were weighing whether or not to come forward and tell Sheriff Moran, in a voluntary way, about this battery incident.’
‘That’s right,’ said Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘I was.’
‘But then, as you say, Sheriff Moran came to you. He appeared at your boat on the evening of the sixteenth with a search warrant, is that correct?’
‘He did.’
‘And you were still considering, at that point in time, whether or not you should tell him your battery story?’
‘I was.’
‘But you didn’t tell him your battery story.’
‘I guess not. No, I didn’t.’
‘You didn’t tell him your battery story,’ Alvin Hooks repeated. ‘Not even in the face of imminent arrest did you offer any sort of explanation. Here stood Sheriff Moran with your fishing gaff in hand, telling you he intended to have the blood on it tested, and you didn’t tell him about Carl Heine’s cut palm – wasn’t that what you told the court, that Carl cut his palm using your fishing gaff? And that this is the explanation for the blood on it?’
‘That’s what happened,’ said Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘He cut his palm, yes.’
‘But you didn’t offer that as an explanation to the sheriff. You said nothing about having seen Carl Heine. Now why was this, Mr. Miyamoto? Why did you claim complete ignorance?’
‘You must understand,’ said Kabuo. ‘The sheriff had appeared with a warrant in hand. I found myself under suspicion of murder. It seemed to me best not to say anything. To wait until I … had a lawyer.’
‘So you didn’t tell the sheriff your battery story,’ Alvin Hooks said again. ‘Nor did you tell it after your arrest, even when you had an attorney. Instead you claimed – am I correct about this? – you claimed to know nothing about the death of Carl Heine, you claimed not to have seen him on the night of the fifteenth at the Ship Channel Bank fishing grounds. These claims of yours, these claims of ignorance, were all recorded in the sheriff’s investigative report, which has been admitted as evidence in this trial. Your story, then, immediately after your arrest, differs from the one you’ve told today, Mr. Miyamoto. So I ask you – where lies the truth?’
Kabuo blinked; his lips tightened
. ‘The truth,’ he said, ‘is as I have just described it. The truth is that I loaned Carl a battery, helped him get his boat started, made arrangements for my family’s seven acres with him, then motored away and fished.’
‘I see,’ said Alvin Hooks. ‘You wish to retract the story of complete ignorance you told Sheriff Moran in the wake of your arrest and replace it with this new one you’ve just now told us? You wish us to believe this new story?’
‘Yes, I do. Because it’s true.’
‘I see,’ said Alvin Hooks. ‘Well, then. On the morning of September 16 you returned from a night’s fishing and informed your wife of your at-sea conversation with Carl Heine. Is that correct, Mr. Miyamoto?’
‘It is.’
‘And then?’ asked the prosecutor. ‘What next?’
‘I slept,’ said Kabuo. ‘Until one-thirty. My wife woke me up at one-thirty or thereabouts with the news about Carl’s death.’
‘I see,’ said Alvin Hooks. ‘And then what?’
‘We sat and talked,’ said Kabuo. ‘I ate lunch and took care of some bills I had to pay. About five I headed down to the docks.’
‘About five,’ said Alvin Hooks. ‘And did you stop anywhere along the way? Errands, perhaps? Did you visit anyone or go anywhere? Speak to anybody about anything?’
‘No,’ said Kabuo. ‘I left around five and went straight to my boat. That was all there was to it.’
‘You didn’t, say, stop at the store to stock up on supplies? Nothing of that sort, Mr. Miyamoto?’
‘No.’
‘At the docks,’ said Alvin Hooks. ‘Did you see anyone? Did you stop at another boat for any reason, speak to any other fishermen?’
‘Straight to my boat,’ said Kabuo Miyamoto. ‘I didn’t stop for anything, no.’
Snow Falling on Cedars Page 38
