The Color of Air

by Gail Tsukiyama

  “What would you prefer?” Uncle Samuel had asked. “Two grass huts?”

  Auntie Nori stopped for a moment. “One would do,” she answered.

  Daniel smiled at the memory.

  The Hilo Spring Festival at Kalakaua Park was one of Daniel’s favorite events as a boy, the annual celebration that brought out not only the Hilo community and bigwigs, but also the plantation and dockworkers. Along with Wilson and Mano, he couldn’t wait for the festival every April, excited by all the food and games and the shave ice stand manned by Uncle Samuel. For days beforehand, the aunties prepared their best dishes: the Natuas’ kalua pork, Auntie Nori’s butterfish lau lau, his mother’s Portuguese chicken, long tables laden with food the locals brought to share. Everyone ate until their stomachs bulged, and then they ate more. It was the one day of the year that brought everyone together, the park bursting with music and hau’oli.

  Daniel crossed the street to Kalakaua Park and stopped short as a flock of birds burst from the banyan tree and into the sky. Ominous shadows lay under the large, beloved tree, its thick, gnarled roots fanning out like a road map. He looked again to see that sleeping bodies were nestled between the roots. Some men had blankets, while others lay curled up into themselves. He had just turned to leave when a large, thick-bodied, mud-colored dog came out of nowhere and charged at him, barking and growling with such menace, Daniel paused, heart racing, looking for anything to protect himself with. He grabbed a branch on the ground and stepped back, ready to swing, when, all of a sudden, the dog yelped in pain as a rope around his neck choked him roughly back with the force of his own momentum. Daniel quickly stole away from the salivating, panting dog and the sleeping men, who scarcely stirred.

  In Chicago, Daniel had seen hordes of weary people living on the streets with nowhere to sleep and little to eat, but still, he was startled. He was reminded of what Uncle Koji had told him the night of his homecoming party when he asked how the plantations were doing in these hard times.

  “Puli and the other cane plantations have been lucky, yeah. No matter how bad it gets, everyone still wants sugar in their coffee. Not the same for our hala kahiki brothers. Most of the pineapple plantations have had to shut down.”

  “On all the islands?”

  Koji sipped his beer and nodded. “Hard times, eh,” he continued. “We were lucky, yeah, the sugar plantations didn’t fire us. Cut our salaries and stopped hiring from overseas. But the cane workers, mostly still got their jobs. Never mind the Depression, the mainland’s still addicted to sugar.”

  Until now, Daniel hadn’t seen how the Depression had hurt Hilo in the same ways. He glanced back at the crowded park, so far away from the jubilant festivals of his childhood. Daniel shook his head; it was obvious things had changed even on the Big Island. He turned down the street and walked toward Hilo Bay.

  If he hurried, he might catch Uncle Koji at the train station.

  11

  The Sugar Train

  Koji guided the sugar train down the mountain, wiping sweat and coal dust from his face with his bandana. It was stifling in the cramped engine car, even after Pedro, his fireman, stopped shoveling coal into the fire. He began coughing again, and looked up at Mauna Loa, still shrouded in a massive gray plume of steam and gas and ash that rose into the sky and drifted toward Kona. Yesterday’s sun had been muted, the sky darkened by fog and a dusting of volcanic ash that cast everything into shadows, the dull, gray air hard to breathe. Today Koji was relieved that the trade winds had returned as the train traveled toward Hilo and the station. As long as the lava flowed away from the sugar plantations and Hilo, the sugar train continued its twice-daily runs, despite all-powerful and unforgiving Pele.

  The Hawaii Consolidated Railway ran three different train lines through Hilo, the main thread connecting all the mill towns from Mahukima to Kohala to Niulii. One line transported passengers from along the Hamakua coast. Another carried freight and goods to the warehouse down by Hilo Bay. The third line ran the narrow-gauge sugar trains. From March through November the sugar trains worked nonstop, either transporting sugar from the northern Hamakua coast mills to the port, or, like Koji’s train, traveling up and down the mountain carrying sacks of refined sugar from the Puli Plantation mill down to Waiakea, the deepwater port at Hilo Bay to be stored at the wharf warehouse, or loaded directly onto an awaiting steamship heading to the mainland. Every time Koji climbed up to the engine car, he was reminded of when he and Razor were teenagers at the end of the harvest season, catching rides up and down to Hilo on the sugar train. He’d learned everything he could from the engineer, Salvador, never dreaming that so many years later he would be the one running the train. When the train left Puli and rounded the cane fields, Koji thought he glimpsed Razor, only to look again and see it wasn’t him.

  Koji leaned out the engine window as the train slowed on its approach toward Hilo’s clapboard train station, with its simple ticket office and waiting room with wooden benches. He pulled the slippery cord to sound the whistle. Steam hissed as a plume reached toward the sky. He saw Daniel standing on the platform in the same spot where he’d waited for Koji when he was a boy. As the train rolled to a stop, Koji leaned farther out the window and raised his hand.

  Just like old times.

  * * *

  Daniel had just turned six, too young to understand what had happened when his father abandoned them. By the time Daniel was eleven or twelve, he was often waiting at the train station for Koji, wanting to know everything he could about Franklin. They sat on the old wooden bench just across from the tracks and talked, while Koji waited for his crew to unload the sacks of sugar from the railway cars and cart them across the road to the harbor.

  Then one afternoon when Daniel was thirteen, he finally said, “Tell me how I’m like my father.”

  Koji looked at him and gathered his thoughts. He paused to light a cigarette. “On the outside, you look a lot like him. Tall and skinny, dark eyes and a thick head of hair, movie-star island-boy good looks,” he said. He inhaled and exhaled smoke. “You’re athletic like him; you got his speed and agility. His stubbornness, too. The rest, everything on the inside, comes from your mother. Lucky for you, yeah,” he added.

  “Why did he leave us?” Daniel had asked bluntly. “Was it because of me?”

  Koji’s eyes widened with surprise. He sucked on his cigarette, taking his time to answer, smoke rings rising into the air and disappearing. “Oily hands,” he finally said. “Shame your father could never hold on to anything. His leaving had nothing to do with you. He let the only two good things in his life slip through his fingers, you and your mother. Some men just like that.” He dropped the cigarette and snuffed it out angrily with the toe of his boot. “He looked for ways to lose things. Lucky for me, yeah, I get to see you grow up and make your mother proud.”

  Koji shook his head at the memory. How could he have given Daniel such a rational explanation for something so irrational? At the time, Koji had confided in Razor that he wanted to tell Daniel that his father was a bigger son of a bitch than any of them realized. He wanted to fuel the boy’s anger, but Razor helped him to understand that he couldn’t do it. Neither of them would feel any better, and it only would have made Mariko’s life more difficult. Days, weeks, months turned into a year, and Koji saw Franklin’s absence in the deepening lines on Mariko’s face, and how the light in her eyes had dimmed, breaking his heart too.

  * * *

  In the station, Koji sounded the train whistle again: a short, short, long wail filled the air, the same greeting he used when Daniel was young. Moments later, he jumped down from the car in his T-shirt and baggy pants.

  “Look who’s here,” he said, and wrapped his arms around Daniel in a big hug.

  Daniel smiled. “Good to see you, Uncle Koji,” he said. “I wanted to thank you again for the new model railcar. Looks just like your engine.”

  “I thought it might remind you of us hardworking folks.”

  “It’s the
best one yet,” Daniel said.

  Koji shook his head. “You say that every time.”

  “It’s the truth, they’re all the best,” Daniel said. “I’ve missed getting to sit down with you and catch up.”

  “Our schedules keep changing daily since the eruption,” he said. “Never know where I am lately.” Koji scowled. He hated not keeping the train on schedule.

  “So much has changed since I’ve been gone,” Daniel said. “I was at Kalakaua Park . . . saw the men sleeping there.”

  “Shame, yeah,” Koji said. “But the sugar business keeps going, eh.” He gave a guilty shrug and changed the subject. “But I want to hear more about you. How you doing? You know your mother would be so happy to have you home. She’d be so proud, yeah. A doctor.”

  Daniel shifted from one foot to the other, his smile momentarily disappearing. He pulled out a handkerchief to wipe his face before meeting Koji’s gaze again. “I’ve been thinking,” he said. “Maybe I made the wrong decision.”

  “Coming home?” Koji asked. It was the first thing that came to mind. He always wondered if Daniel would ever come back after Mariko was gone. There was always the big city in him, and no one was more surprised than Koji when Daniel’s letter arrived saying he was on his way home.

  Daniel shook his head. “Medicine.”

  Koji looked at him stunned, not knowing what to say. Wasn’t becoming a doctor what Daniel had wanted ever since he was young? Doctoring was in his blood. He labored through all the letters and applications involved in getting into a good mainland university, helped by scholarships. Mariko was ecstatic when he was accepted into medical school after all his hard work, even though she worried about the cost. Her seamstress work barely covered her living expenses, but Daniel had applied for grants and worked part-time, and Koji had insisted on helping with the rest. “An investment, yeah,” he told her. “I may need a good doctor one day.” Mariko encouraged Daniel every step of the way. His success had always been hers. “Imagine, yeah, a Hilo boy returns a doctor,” she liked to say. “I know Pele’s watching over him.” Daniel was the first local boy he knew with a medical degree from the mainland.

  “Did something happen?” Koji asked. He saw a fleck of anguish in Daniel’s eyes and then it was gone.

  Daniel shook his head. “It’s . . .” he began, but then said, “It’s just that I’ve been holed up in the house for the past few days. Too much time to think,” he added.

  “Never a good thing, yeah,” Koji teased.

  Daniel managed a smile.

  Koji sensed his uneasiness but didn’t push. Something had to bring Daniel home from that big, fancy hospital in Chicago. Koji watched Daniel but he quickly looked away, just as he always did when he was a boy and wasn’t ready to talk. Instead, Koji smiled and stepped forward to hug him again, strong and firm.

  Koji would never let Daniel slip through his fingers again.

  12

  The Green Bungalow

  The morning after Nori visited Mama Natua, she walked down Kamehameha, past the wharf and up the road toward the green bungalow to see Daniel. She carried a palm leaf basket filled with freshly baked coconut tarts. She hadn’t seen him since his welcome home party. With the eruption causing so much commotion, she hadn’t even been able to check to see if he’d settled in comfortably. Now that the air had cleared, her impromptu visit also included a special favor to ask of him.

  The sky darkened and the air smelled of rain by the time Nori arrived at the bungalow. She knocked on the front door, a part of her still hoping to see a young, teenage Mariko behind the screen when it opened. “About time, yeah,” she always said, even when Nori was early. They’d hurried to her bedroom to do homework or gossip about boys and school. School had always been Nori’s solace. She loved the peaceful sounds of the classroom, the click, click, click of the chalk on the blackboard, the turning of pages, the wind rattling the windows, and the rustling palm trees outside. She loved math, the solid numbers that made complete sense to her when everything else didn’t. Adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing seemed like simple rules for life. The classroom walls were painted a soothing pale green, with a clock over the door and speckled gray tiles on the floor.

  Nori sat one desk away from Mariko. Between them sat Samuel Okawa, who always smelled salty like the sea, and often fell asleep in class sitting up, his eyes closed, his sudden snore waking him as the class erupted in laughter. When it happened, Nori watched Samuel’s cheeks flush with embarrassment and felt bad for him. She wasn’t the only one who kept secrets. She learned he’d been going out every night on his father’s fishing boat, working in the darkness before dawn while everyone else slept, hours and hours before school started. Only Mariko knew her deepest secret that she loved school and being as far away as she could from home and her drinking, fighting, furious parents, and how she often wished they were dead.

  * * *

  Nori knocked again. A few moments passed before she heard quick footsteps and the door swung open.

  “Auntie Nori,” Daniel said, his voice full of surprise, “good morning. It’s good to see you. Everything okay?”

  She nodded. “Everything’s fine, yeah. I just wanted to see how you were doing. Haven’t had a chance to talk since you returned,” she said, and smiled.

  “Come in.”

  Daniel led her toward the kitchen.

  As they walked through the living room, Nori realized that Daniel had rearranged some of the furniture, a table moved to a corner, a chair across the room. She had no business being upset by it, but it was a sharp reminder that it wasn’t Mariko’s house anymore. Thankfully, the kitchen was still hers, except for the train set that covered the Formica table. Where does he eat? Nori thought.

  “Sorry for the clutter,” he said, following her gaze. “I was trying out the new railcar Uncle Koji gave me.”

  His face was that of a young Daniel again, shy and flushed with embarrassment, so different from her boys who had lumbered into and out of rooms, leaving a mess in their wake without so much as a thought.

  Nori smiled. “Nonsense. A house should be lived in, yeah? It’s been quiet in here for much too long.”

  “Thank you for taking such good care of the house . . . of everything,” he said, and his voice caught.

  And there was Mariko in the room with them again.

  Nori placed the basket on the counter while he poured her a cup of coffee. “I was happy to come around and check on things, yeah. Made me feel like I was still visiting your mother,” she said.

  Daniel smiled. “Shall we sit in the living room?” he asked.

  “Can we stay in here?” Nori always wanted to stay where she felt Mariko’s presence strongest.

  Daniel nodded. “Of course,” he said.

  He placed the plate of coconut tarts in the middle of the Formica table, surrounded by his train set, then pulled out two chairs from the table for them to sit.

  “How are you?” she asked. “I’m sorry we haven’t had the chance to really talk. Since the eruption and all . . .”

  “I’m fine,” he said, then added, “It’s good to be home.”

  “Your mom would be so proud, yeah.”

  Daniel looked away from her and simply nodded.

  Nori saw a nerve twitch under his left eye, a storm lingering just underneath.

  “There wasn’t a single day your mother wasn’t proud of you, and rightly so, yeah. We’re all proud of you—not every day a local boy returns a doctor. Big deal, eh.” Nori finished what she started to say. She hoped he would tell her if something was bothering him. “Everything all right?” she asked.

  “Just trying to figure out what to do next,” he finally said.

  She watched him for a moment. “You were always the most complicated of the three boys.”

  “Is that bad?” Daniel asked.

  Nori smiled, thinking of Wilson and Mano. “Bad, no. You have always had bigger dreams than my boys. Nothing wrong with that, eh. They’re
happy chasing fish. All I’m saying is that you’ve already accomplished so much. You’re just back, yeah, there’s no need to hurry,” she said, and then added, “Your mother would want you to be happy. That’s all she ever wanted. Everything else will fall into place.”

  They were silent a moment. “Thank you for checking up on me,” he said.

  “Don’t thank me yet. I need to ask you a favor.”

  “Anything,” Daniel said.

  “Could you visit Mama Natua and give her a quick checkup?”

  “Is there something wrong with Mama?”

  Where should Nori begin? Everything is wrong, she thought. She absently stroked the small scar on the back of her right hand. Everyone in Hilo town knew and loved Mama, only now, Mama no longer knew them. Mama didn’t know her anymore.

  Nori sipped her coffee to clear her throat and said, “She has forgotten so much in the past few years, everything and everyone, yeah. I just want to make sure there’s nothing else wrong with her.”

  “Doesn’t she have her own doctor?”

  Nori shook her head. “Mama doesn’t trust the new ways, always relied on plants and herbs. She’s never seen a doctor, doesn’t believe in them.”

  Daniel leaned forward. “Then what makes you think she’ll let me give her a checkup?”

  “You’re not a doctor to her, you’re Mariko’s boy.”

  Daniel laughed. “How could I forget? One big, happy family.”

  “Hilo needs a good family doctor, yeah,” Nori added. “We need someone we can trust who understands the community, especially the older folks, not just all these haole doctors who practice medicine here for the warm weather and beaches.”

  Daniel laughed. “Coming from Chicago, there’s nothing wrong with the sun and beaches.”

  She saw a flicker of mischief return to his eyes. Daniel looked like Franklin, but his smile brought back his mother.

  “You joke, but most young folks don’t return once they leave.”