The Color of Air

by Gail Tsukiyama

  * * *

  Maile leaned against the front door. She took a settling breath before she inched it open. Ever cautious, she looked left and then right down the empty road before she stepped out of her cousin’s house into the stale afternoon heat. Early in their relationship, she’d been caught by him with her guard down back in Honolulu, and could barely open her tender and bruised eye that throbbed for a week. She had to learn, he’d said. She wasn’t going anywhere without asking him first. Why had she stayed after that? She’d been such a fool.

  Maile walked toward downtown and the Okawa Fish Market. Pele had quieted for the moment and the sky had cleared. As the streets grew more crowded, Maile began to sweat. The fear and anxiousness made her nauseous. She stopped near a building and turned back to look once, twice, and couldn’t shake the feeling that he was there, following her. She swallowed her anxiety and willed herself not to turn around again before she rounded the corner. One step, two steps, she whispered to herself, refusing to let him win. She was determined to leave his ghost behind. All she had to do was think of Daniel and Uncle Koji to remember there was a world of good men she didn’t have to be afraid of.

  Maile felt calmer as soon as she glimpsed Hilo Bay in the distance, knowing the Okawa Fish Market was just steps ahead. She wondered if the Hilo Aunties were still meeting to play Hearts every Saturday afternoon, and if the old-timers still gathered in the backyard. Maile had missed the market’s camaraderie, and she was anxious to check the bulletin board to see if anyone was looking to hire a teacher or a tutor.

  She quickly rounded the corner without looking back.

  17

  The Bulletin Board

  At the end of the day, Nori stood at the cash register, adding up the market’s receipts. She was delighted at how smoothly Mama’s exam had gone yesterday morning. Even more relieved when Daniel told them Mama was doing reasonably well physically. “A strong pulse,” he’d said, “a fighter’s heartbeat.”

  It wasn’t anything she didn’t already know. Mama was always a fighter.

  Then, this afternoon, Nori was taken completely by surprise to see Maile walk in, cautious at first as she peered through the screen door, only to smile wide when she saw Nori. Nori moved quickly around the counter to give the young woman a big hug. “You’re here!” she said, stepping back to take a good look at her. She was thinner and tired, or was it sadness Nori saw, a thin line between the two?

  “I returned late yesterday,” Maile told her.

  “Are you staying awhile?” Nori dared to ask. Maile paused and then nodded. She was home. Everything else would follow in time. It was almost too good to be true to have both Daniel and Maile return to Hilo within days of each other.

  Nori knew Mariko would have been ecstatic to have both her fledglings back home.

  * * *

  Nori looked up when the screen door whined open, and Kang, a young Chinese dockworker dressed in a faded shirt, dungarees, and a soiled bandana wrapped around his neck, hurried into the market, nodded at her, and walked straight back toward the bulletin board. At least twice a week he came in, quickly pinned up a few flyers on the board, and was back out the door again without saying a word or spending a cent, the slap, slap of his sandals echoing behind him. He was just one of many union supporters who came in to pin up announcements for the growing number of labor meetings.

  Jelly was fed up. “Enough,” she said, banging another can on a shelf she was restocking. “Ban them from coming in if they’re not going to buy anything!”

  “It’s why we put up the bulletin board, remember? More trouble than it’s worth trying to keep them out, yeah,” Nori reminded her again. “Even Pele hasn’t stopped them from organizing.”

  “Wouldn’t hurt to buy a piece of licorice now and then, eh,” Jelly mumbled.

  From the front window Nori watched Kang amble down the street handing out flyers before she walked back to the bulletin board to see when the next meeting of the dockworkers would be. On a light blue sheet of paper, black, block lettering announced that another meeting was being held at the longshoremen’s union headquarters down by the wharf.

  COME ALL BROTHERS!

  STAND UP AGAINST

  LOW WAGES AND POOR WORKING CONDITIONS!

  DECEMBER 1, 1935—7:00 P.M. MEETING.

  UNION HALL

  Nori sighed. If only talking could solve all the problems that were increasingly ending in violence. Like the persistent lava flow, the continuing labor issues were heating up again amid the never-ending Depression. Even though the Immigration Act of 1924 had prevented any more workers coming from Asia to Hawai’i, those who had already worked on plantations continued to rise against the long working hours and low pay. She shivered, recalling past worker strikes that had led to numerous deaths on Oahu and Kaua’i. It felt like a festering boil that would need to be lanced soon. But at what cost? More lives lost? She lost count of how many times she’d warned Razor to be careful when he first became involved.

  Nori reached up and pulled down several old flyers from the bulletin board. Every week it grew heavier with announcements. But as fast as the old flyers were taken down from the board, another round was back up.

  No one really knew where the bulletin board came from. One morning in 1911, a year after Nori opened the Okawa Fish Market, Jelly and her son Nobu carried it up from the basement. Before she knew it, Nori was helping them tack it up. It spread completely across the back wall.

  “Must have belonged to the bar, yeah, though it doesn’t look like it was ever used,” Nori said, stepping back to see if they’d hung it straight. There wasn’t a pinprick on it. “Maybe it’ll bring more folks in and out if they can leave messages on it.”

  “Let me start,” Jelly said.

  Nori watched her write something on a piece of paper and pin it in the middle of board, the lone slip strangely enticing on the big, empty board. It read, “Leave your message here. If you’re reading this, others will too.”

  Within three months, the Okawa Fish Market became the community’s center of communication. The locals checked the board religiously, knowing they could find whatever they needed on it. They’d tacked up everything from newspaper clippings to job openings to items for sale: snippets of white paper offering hope. Entire lives came to cover the board announcing births, marriages, and deaths. By the end of each month, it was blanketed with layers of flittering paper in all sizes and shapes. Nori and Jelly tried to take down all the outdated slips, only to have it cluttered again in days. She had no idea that the bulletin board would become the main conduit among all the locals in the community.

  The only thing Nori asked Jelly never to remove from the board was the brittle, yellowed-edged newspaper photo of her, Mariko, Leia, and Noelani, the Hilo Aunties playing Hearts, taken more than twenty years ago. It remained in the lower left-hand corner, the anchor that always held her steady, her eyes immediately drawn to the photo pinned there by Mariko so many years before. Nori’s fingers again whispered across their young faces, frozen in laughter. It felt just like yesterday.

  * * *

  The Hilo Aunties had played their first game of Hearts in October 1910—six months after the Okawa Fish Market opened. Nori was just twenty-three and shadow rains lingered that wet Saturday afternoon when she invited Mariko and Leia to come to the market after the lunch rush. Nori missed spending time with her two closest friends. Mariko brought along three-year-old Daniel to play with Mano. Leia was the oldest of them at twenty-five, and she brought along her vivacious and pretty sixteen-year-old sister Noelani, born unexpectedly to their middle-aged parents. Nori served plates of sliced pineapple and sweet mango from Mariko’s tree, took out a new deck of playing cards, and announced that they would be playing Hearts.

  “What’s Hearts?” Noelani had asked.

  “A card game, you’ll love it,” Nori teased. “It’s full of scheming at every turn.”

  Nori had learned the game from some local fishermen, and liked to watch them pla
y because it involved thought and cunning and losing “tricks” so that the player with the lowest score was the winner.

  “The opposite of life,” she told her friends. She dealt the cards until the deck was evenly divided among them. But when Nori began to explain how the game was played, she realized it was more complicated than she thought.

  It took several Saturday afternoons before they all understood how to play Hearts without pausing midway for instructions or to replay a hand. The first time they played a game straight through, Nori rewarded all of them with a cherry cola. With the fish market’s success, Jelly sold fish and worked the lunch counter on Saturdays. Still, it wasn’t long before her other customers simply came in, took what they needed, and left the money in the King Edward cigar box Nori left on the counter rather than interrupt their card game. As time went by, the children who came in to buy candy began calling them the Hilo Aunties as they lingered and decided whether to buy black licorice whips, or chewing gum, or salty dried plums, and dropped their pennies and nickels into the cigar box.

  The name stuck.

  The Hilo Registry had taken the photo on the second anniversary of the Hilo Aunties playing hearts together. “Shooting the Moon” the photo was titled, the big thrill of the game capturing all thirteen Hearts and the Queen of Spades in one hand, sending all the game-losing points to the other players. The four Hilo Aunties had been seated at their table staring seriously down at their cards, a differing degree of intensity fixed on each of their faces. But as soon as the photo was taken they had all relaxed into laughter and Noelani had tossed her cards across the table. Nori remembered hearing a second click and seeing the flash of the camera, which was the photo used in the paper.

  * * *

  The following week Nori was sitting in Mariko’s kitchen, giddy over seeing themselves when the photo appeared in the paper. “Slow day for news if we’re the pin-up girls!” Mariko had said. Daniel and Mano were playing outside. Franklin away again working at another construction job, on Oahu.

  A year later, he was gone for good.

  Nori glanced over at Mariko’s empty chair, her absence still a dull ache. She never thought Mariko would be the first Hilo Auntie to leave the table.

  Ghost Voices

  MARIKO, 1913

  It’s March and it has rained nonstop for the past four days. I haven’t heard from Franklin in more than three months. I can’t stop pacing from my bedroom down the hallway through the living room to the kitchen and back. Over and over. I’m afraid if I stop moving I won’t ever start again, collapsing right here on the floor. I no longer have the energy to be frantic. Now there’s only fear and anger coursing through my body and still, still, the sharp longing for him that only fuels my rage. Koji comes by every week to see if we need anything. I know he’d come every day if I asked him to, but the last thing we all need is more confusion. How can two men who grew up together be so different?

  I glance down at Franklin’s kitchen chair. I can almost see him sitting there, yeah, smoking a cigarette with his morning coffee, trying to pull me onto his lap. My anger suddenly rises like a quick flame and I pick up his ashtray, open the back door, and throw it as far as I can, its landing blunted by the rain and mud. The thick air smells of dying flowers, of misery. Before now, the longest period of time I hadn’t heard from him was just short of a week. He later told me there had been an accident on the construction job and he’d been laid up. “Believe me, sweetheart, I had no way to get word to you.” I believed him then because it was the first time, and Daniel was still a toddler and he had kissed me, sucking gently on my bottom lip. I begged him then to stay in Hilo. There was talk of a new federal building being built and they would need construction workers. Meanwhile he could work odd jobs or for the plantations. “Doing what?” he’d said, his anger rising. “I’m no knife swinger!”

  There were extended absences for a time or two afterward, but never more than a week, yeah, and he always sent money every month to supplement what I would make from my sewing and mending. This time I haven’t received anything from him since he was home at Christmas. Franklin left again just after the New Year and I’ve been alone with Daniel ever since.

  By February, I sent a telegram to the construction firm he worked for on Oahu and they were decent enough to have replied. “Frank Abe never returned to work after Christmas.” How could he have just disappeared into thin air? I can’t help but wonder how many of these inquiries they receive, frantic wives chasing after lost husbands. When did I become one of them? Nori, Leia, and Mama Natua bring food, which appears in the icebox as if it was always there. I feel nothing on most days, dead to the world around me. Except for Daniel.

  * * *

  Nights are the most difficult, when the shadows emerge to play tricks on me. Some nights my despair feels like a deadweight pulling me downward, drowning me. I know I’m luckier than most, I have a house. Daniel is asleep in the other room. He’s a smart boy of six who has stopped asking about his father after seeing how pale I’ve become, how I’ve stopped eating or sleeping much, walking around the house like I’m in a trance.

  “Are you sick, Mama?” he asks.

  He reaches out and places his open palm against my forehead, mimicking me, and I shake my head and begin to cry. I can’t say why I know this time is different, but this time I can feel it in my body, a small, hard seed in the middle of my chest.

  This time he isn’t coming back.

  Another month goes by. I no longer think of where Franklin is or why he has left us. I can’t think of a future without him, so I return to the past—one early morning just after we marry and he takes me to see Waianuenue Falls along the Wailuku River. As we walk along the path, thick and dense with foliage, the cool air smells of tinny, damp earth, moisture dripping from the banyan trees, the sound of rushing water falling in the distance. We are enveloped by a twilight composed of giant ferns, blooming wild ginger, and flourishing monstera plants that cocoon us in their own private world. He holds my hand and leads me forward, clearing the way for me to follow. I grip his hand as the damp air rushes at us and the thunder and crash of falling water grows louder. When we finally step out from under the shadows and into the open clearing, the shock of light stuns me.

  “Look!” Franklin yells above the roar.

  I shade my eyes to see the eighty-foot surge of foaming water crashing down into a dark, blue-green pool. Franklin wraps his arms around me and kisses me as a rainbow arches over the waterfall. Then he steps back and I instantly miss the warmth of his body.

  “All for you!” he says with a wave of his hand, making me believe at that moment he’s the magician who has conjured all of it up just for me.

  * * *

  By early April, Daniel and I are walking to the Okawa Fish Market for our Saturday afternoon game of Hearts. “Daddy had to go away,” I finally tell Daniel.

  Nori. Hilo Aunties. Hearts. It’s the chant I’ve carried in my head all through the morning, grounding me. I know Daniel’s excited to see Mano and Wilson, which will soften the news and distract him with play.

  “For work?” he asks, looking up at me.

  I nod. If I don’t say the words out loud, is it still a lie?

  “When is he coming home?”

  “I don’t know,” I answer, which isn’t a lie. “Until he does, we’ll be okay, yeah? We have Uncle Koji, the aunties, Wilson, and Mano.”

  It takes Daniel a moment to understand what I’m saying. I can see it in the way his gaze drifts away from mine in thought. He doesn’t answer right away as he normally would, and I don’t press. When we turn onto Kamehameha Avenue and start toward the fish market, Daniel reaches over and takes hold of my hand.

  You Can’t Hide

  November 27–December 4, 1935

  18

  A New Direction

  From the train station, Koji walked to the Okawa Fish Market, eager to catch Nori. The day had grown increasingly hot and humid, sweat prickling down the back of his nec
k as he picked up his pace, hoping she might know what was bothering Daniel. Koji hated to see him troubled. He heard a faraway rumbling and stopped, glancing up toward Mauna Loa. The volcano continued to erupt, smoking and spewing day and night; his only relief was in knowing that it didn’t pose any danger to Hilo town.

  The streets down by the docks were teeming with longshoremen. Koji edged his way around the groups of men lingering on the streets, stifling and foul-smelling, a chorus of Portuguese, Chinese, Tagalog, and Japanese languages all melded into one indistinguishable song. Even in hard times, everywhere he looked, notices were tacked up calling for workers’ meetings and rallies that were open to everyone. Everything felt louder and more insistent down at the docks, while meetings at the plantations were still held in tight secrecy, separated by ethnic groups, just as the owners planned. Even before his family arrived at Puli, workers were kept in their isolated villages on the plantation to keep them from unifying, pitting brother against brother if one faction should strike.

  In 1924, Filipino workers striking for better conditions on the island of Kaua’i had turned violent, leaving sixteen strikers and four policemen dead. Months later, the strikers were easily defeated by the wealthy mainland owners. Owners with the fancy names of Alexander and Baldwin, Castle and Cooke, and Theo H. Davies ruled with money and power. Koji learned the striking workers in Kaua’i had been arrested, or fired; their families evicted from the plantation in the middle of the night. Since the Depression, the union had kept a low profile. Now, the increasing union gatherings and the murmurs of strikes were signs of the ongoing battle—but lately, down on the docks it seemed like a raw nerve had been touched, and change felt imminent whether the owners wanted it or not. Hadn’t Razor told him this would happen all those years ago?