I’m glad to be at Edna’s Inn and Out right now so I don’t have to think about anything. Edna’s been checking in on Rex and me and invited us to come over for lunch. Rex stayed at home. He’s the captain of the debate team and you better believe they’re getting lots of stuff to debate this week.
Edna fixes me a hamburger, saying, “Might as well enjoy ’em while I can get ’em because we’ll all be eatin’ horse meat so’s our fightin’ boys can eat beef.”
I sort of just point to the end of the bar where the McAloon twins are sitting. I whisper, “Don’t say ‘horse meat’ around those McAloons.”
“They’re so busy rattlin’ their swords and writin’ editorials, a bomb could go off in here and they’d just think someone sneezed,” Edna says.
“What swords?” I ask, sort of leaning back to see one.
“Sword-rattlin’, Jewels. That means workin’ up more war than you need. Yak, yak, yak. The drunker they get, the louder they rattle them swords!”
“Oh,” I say, cramming down my burger. It’s been a long time since anyone’s fixed me a hot meal and man, I sure am sick of pancakes, so I tell Edna how good the burger is, horse meat or no.
Pretty soon the McAloon boys’ sword-rattling and glass-clanking grows louder and they’re laughing and patting each other on their backs. Finally, Frank dismounts his bar stool and says, “Hey, everybody! We got it! Listen to this!”
Leo joins Frank on the fireplace hearth so they are sort of on a stage. Two tipsy, identical twins. They even sway identical. It’s sort of funny.
Frank holds the paper, they both pop their spectacles on their noses, then Leo says, “A-one, a-two, a-three!” And on “a-three,” to the tune of the “Battle Hymn Republic” they sing:
Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of the squashing of the Japs!
Never more they’ll bomb us
While the navy’s taking naps!
We’ll murderlate, decapitate, and
Rub ’em off the maps!
Our truth goes marching on!
Folks think that’s pretty dang funny and it earns them applause and a round of beers. I turn to Edna, who is not laughing. I wipe the grin off my face.
“What’s wrong?”
“I don’t like this,” she says, looking hard at the McAloons.
“Why? Everyone else did.”
“Hey! Let’s go serenade Tommy Kaye!” someone says.
She looks at me and says, “That’s why.” Then, to the crowd she hollers, “I’ll blackball any man here who does and this is the only waterin’ hole in town!”
That shuts ’em up.
Edna lights a cigarette and says to me, “I tell you, I think we’d all be a lot safer around here if they just let those two old coots re-up. Let them go kill the enemy. Probably end up cleanin’ stables and givin’ mules enemas like they did in The Great War.”
“I thought they were heroes,” I say.
“They were heroes like I was Miss America.”
I’m just about ready to ask for another chocolate shake when the door blows open. But the person coming in gets all caught up in the blackout curtain cloth. Alls I hear is a muffled, “Merry Ch . . . oh, Christ! What the heck’s all this?” The cloth comes down and falls to the floor.
There, in the doorway, she stands, soaking wet, looking like a half-drowned I-don’t-know-what. In one hand she holds a live, but half-drowned, upside-down turkey, and in the other she holds a small, but decorated, Christmas tree, also half-drowned. The pockets of her coat bulge with ribbons bleeding color and soggy Christmas wrapping and crushed boxes.
“Merrrrrrrrrry Chriiiiiiiistmas!” she sings out, holding up her gifts. “I bring to y’all the bounty of our own most gracious provider, King Neptune!”
Now you know why Rex and me call her Malice Alice.
CHAPTER 9
“Close the door!” someone barks.
Frank and Leo rush to rehang the blackout cloth, cussing and telling each other what they’re doing wrong. Edna stands in front of Mom, hands on hips. “Where in blazes have you been?” she says, sounding more like a mother than a best friend. “Look at you!”
Mom stands taller, puffs out her uneven falsies, and says down to Edna, “I have been incommunicado, not that it’s any of your business.” Incommunicado is Mom’s way of saying a bender. Spree. On a toot. Out of sight, out of mind. You ought to see how Mom wraps her lipstick-stained lips around the word as she says it again, “Incomm-u-ni-ca-do.”
“Yeah, you look like you’ve been incommunicadoin’, all right!” Edna snaps. “Someday you’ll go there and not come back.”
“Let her go back!” someone calls out.
“Drop dead!” Mom hollers back.
“Everyone just shut up or get out!” Edna sure has a set of lungs on her.
Mom finally notices me sitting at the bar and there’s that goofy, hi-schweety-miss-me-love-me? grin on her blotchy face. “Jewels! Honey, this here’s a bar. Edna, what’re you doin’ lettin’ her in here? She’s just eleven!”
“Twelve,” I say, knowing times like this it won’t even sink in.
Then, the turkey makes a garbled gobble and Mom holds it up again. “It took some doin’, but I got him! And look!” She plops down the tree and it leaves a circle of sand, water, needles, and tinsel on the floor. “Already decorated! Oh, and presents! Look, all y’all!” She holds up a pair of thick knitted socks. “Presents. Think these’ll fit Rex?” She dangles the socks up in front of my face. “And there’s lots more where these come from! All up and down the beach! I tell y’all, it’s a Christmas miracle!”
“Gimme that thing!” Edna seizes the turkey and tosses it out the door. She turns Mom around and plops her down on the end bar stool.
The crowd just stares in amazement. I’m humiliated. Mom looks around and says, “Why’s everyone so glum? Somebody die?”
“Yeah, a couple shiploads of men, that’s all!” Frank says.
She turns on her stool to face the room. “What happened? Where?”
“What rock have you been under?” Leo asks.
“Pearl Harbor?” Frank prompts. “On Sunday? The Japs bombed Pearl Harbor!”
“That roadhouse down in Depoe Bay? Why would anyone want to bomb a dump like that?”
“Someone draw her a picture!”
I take her arm and get her to look at me. “Mom, we’re at war with Japan. How come everyone in the world knows it but you?”
Her face goes blank and believe you me, her face can go from happy and bright and let’s-have-another! to stone-cold sober and I-don’t-get-it in an instant. “Huh?” she asks.
“Mom, where have you been?” I ask with gritted teeth and lowered voice. I can feel my cheeks burn and the chocolate shake in my stomach rumbles.
“Fishing!” she snaps as though it’s my fault she is so confused. “Captain Jenkins headed us west to outrun the storm, but the darn radio went dead. Then what? That must have been about Tuesday. Then all the coast navigation lights went out . . .” Then, seeing she has everyone’s attention, she adds, “Anyone know what idiot did that?”
“Mom. Then what?”
“Oh, the seas! Up and down and up and down. We were all pukin’ our poor guts out. Got across the Columbia bar but near tore apart the engine. So we drift! What a week! You don’t know how scary things are when you think you’re one place and turns out you’re in another. Without radio or lights or navigation. Well, anyway, we found some backwater log boom and tied up.”
Now I’m feeling like crud for being mad at Mom. She was in danger a lot more than we were.
“So, you know those Tinker II boys. Out comes the bottle and the singin’ and I make us some fried fish. Jenkins gets us running again and we come back to Warrenton. I got in my car, started home, but lordy, I was tired and . . .”
“Drunk!” someone added.
“Dry up!” Mom goes on. “Well, I remembered this old clam-digger shack off Beach Drive and I just passed out, I mean,
rested there. Think I slept for a whole day. It was that dang turkey woke me up. You know, there’s just something out of sorts about a turkey gobblin’ here on the coast. I walk outside and all this stuff is scattered on the beach. So I gather it up, come here, and alls I get is yelled at.”
Then Frank jumps in with, “You mean to tell us you don’t know anything that’s been going on?”
“No. What happened?”
Frank, Leo, and a few others give her the rundown speckled with plenty of their own two-cent, sword-rattling opinions. No one knows much, but everyone knows the Mauna Ala went aground on the spit.
“And those socks and that tree, that turkey,” Edna says, “all those Christmasy things were on their way to the boys in Pearl Harbor. If there are any boys left in Pearl Harbor. You can’t keep those, Alice. You just can’t.”
Mom looks at the soggy homemade socks on the counter. “But I found ’em. You know the laws of salvage. My car’s full of this stuff. I was plannin’, well, Christmas for everyone . . .”
There’s a card pinned to the socks and the ink is pretty runny, but I can make out the words and read aloud: “Merry Christmas to our wonderful son, Joey! I didn’t know you’d be in sunny Hawaii when I knitted these woolies. Ha Ha! Your real present awaits you here at home. Can’t wait till you get your leave and can visit us here in snowy Kansas! Don’t get sunburned! You know your fair skin! Love, Mom and Dad.”
Edna takes the card, her eyes large with tears. The room has gone silent. I’m thinking these hand-knit stocks are the first real, touchable thing that makes us all realize and really feel what this war means. All the Joeys in Hawaii who won’t get their socks and their trees and their turkey dinners—and what all their deaths have brought us into.
“If you don’t mind,” Leo says, running his sleeve under his nose and taking the socks, “I think me n’ Frank’d like to keep these.”
Then ol’ Malice Alice says, “Aren’t you boys a bit old to hang Christmas stockings?” She looks around like she’s expecting laughter, but her grin quickly vanishes.
“No, you fool,” Leo says, handing one sock to his brother.
“As a reminder,” Frank finishes for him.
Alls Mom says is a weak little “oh.” Guess it’s all finally sinking in. Way to go, Mom. I’m a living, breathing pile of embarrassment. Maybe even shame. Boy, do I understand infamy now!
That pretty much breaks up the crowd. The tree gets tossed into the fire where it hisses and pops and curls all into itself until only the strands of tinsel are left.
One by one, Mom tosses the rest of her Christmas salvage into the fire and she stands watching it all burn. “We’ll stop by the dump on our way home,” she says to me. “Get rid of all the stuff I found. You drive, Jewels, honey. Mom’s tired.”
I grab the moldy old cushions from the back of our rusty Dodge and set them so’s I can reach the pedals, and I drive us to the dump.
I think this is the hardest thing we’ve ever had to do— us always being a scrape and a pull away from living in a dump ourselves—but we toss all the food, the presents, and the trees she’d salvaged. Mom finally turns to me. She’s still in her fishing gear, looking like a half-slickered fisherman and half-worn mermaid missing all her scales. Tall, thin, and even sort of statue-like.
She puts her arm around me and says, “Well, come on, Jewels, honey. Let’s us get on with this dang war.”
CHAPTER 10
Mom’s yawning and already dropping layers of clothes halfway into her bedroom. She’s in bed and sound asleep before I’ve even lit the stove to make some coffee. I look in on her and mutter, “Welcome home, Mom.”
Rex is out and you know how fast a kid gets bored without a radio or a telephone or a new magazine so I go next door thinking maybe Hero needs a walk. And I figure Mr. Kaye will want to know that Mom got back from her incommunicado pretty much in one piece.
Everything is as dark and dreary as February. So much for Christmas. Normally, Mr. Kaye would have the café and the restaurant all lit up in dancing, bright lights for the holidays. The café door is unlocked and I go right in, making my way up to Mr. Kaye’s apartment.
I knock on his door. No answer, not even Hero’s tail wonking on something, hoping for his walk. I knock again. Nothing. I turn the door knob and it opens.
“Mr. Kaye? It’s me, Jewels. Mr. Kaye?” I wonder if maybe he did leave like he said he might. But there’s a light on in what he calls his library and I creep toward the doorway. “Mr. Kaye? You here?”
I take a long, close look at the three midget bonsai trees Mr. Kaye has been working on. It’s what he calls his “sanity and serenity.” He has these little trees all over his apartment, the Look-Sea Lounge, and the greenhouse up at the Feed and Seed. He says he’s going to make a whole garden of them for tourists someday. Sort of a tree museum. Here’s a hint: don’t touch them unless you want to get your hand slapped and an earful of swear words. Bonsai are for grace and beauty and something else that I forget, but definitely not for touching.
Okay, I admit it. I can be a snoop. I don’t think I’ve even been in Mr. Kaye’s library before. There’re books, of course. Lots and lots. There’s a photograph in a tortoise shell frame on a table and I look closely at it. It’s of a young couple. The man is in a military uniform, only the officer kind. You know, the hat and braid and trimmings. The woman is Japanese, but not dressed like one. I mean, she’s sporting American clothes, looking pretty elegant, too. Her black hair is in a short bob like those uppity jazz women used to wear. The little boy standing between them is in a little sailor outfit like they used to dress boys in in the olden days. I look closer. Is it?
“Jewels?”
I whip around, embarrassed to be caught holding the picture frame. My face goes redder than my first name. Mr. Kaye spots the photograph.
“Is this you?” I ask, figuring I’m already caught dead to rights.
“Yes.”
“Who are these people?”
He takes the photo and smiles down at it. “Major and Mrs. Calvin Kaye. My parents.”
I look at the man in the picture and say, “You sure don’t look like your dad.”
“Actually, I don’t look much like my mother, either. I was adopted, Jewels. They adopted me when my father was with the US Embassy in Japan. I was four years old.”
Man, you could have squashed me with a feather. The things you learn about people you think you know when you just come right out and ask. I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone whose folks weren’t both white. I don’t think I’ve even met anyone who was even adopted.
Like he could read my mind, he says, “Wasn’t easy, growing up in a mixed family. My mother spoke perfect English but made sure I continued to speak perfect Japanese. I think it’s really the only Japanese thing about me.” His eyes landed on a bonsai sitting on a marble pedestal. “Well, maybe my love for bonsai, too. How’s that for irony?”
He sees my face and realizes I’ve got no idea what he’s talking about.
“Mom got back okay,” I say, changing the subject.
He smiles. I see he’s finally shaved and combed his hair, and he smells of some nice men’s cologne. “Good,” he says. “Where was she?”
“Just about everywhere. Then Warrenton. She just had to wait things out,” I say.
“She alright?”
“Yeah. Tired. Maybe a little hungover,” I say, keeping my eyes and voice low.
“That’s our Alice. Where is she now? I could sure use her help. Got a note that Virgil Johnson quit today. Didn’t even have the guts to tell me to my face. So I don’t have anyone to run the feed store. Not that there is much to run.”
Kaye’s Feed and Seed is just east of town, sort of out of sight and out of mind.
“But folks don’t stop feeding their chickens and cows just because of a war, do they?” I say.
“No deliveries. Able men are enlisting. Doesn’t matter,” he says. “Doesn’t matter. Payroll is going to be hard to me
et now.” He turns away and sits next to the closest bonsai. “But it would be good if Alice could see if maybe she can . . . I don’t know. See what she can do.”
“I’ll go wake her up.”
“No, no. Let her sleep. We’ll talk tomorrow. Have you been by the bowling alley?”
I hate to tell him but I do. “Sign on the door says ‘closed.’ I heard Billy McCormick’s dad said he can’t work there anymore.”
“God, what did I ever do to deserve this?” he whispers down to the photo I’m still holding.
I’ve never heard Mr. Kaye talk this way. I mean, he’s a businessman. And smart. Now he just seems sort of . . . lost. Well, I guess we all are in our first week of infamy.
“Where’s Hero?” I ask, noticing he isn’t on the end of the leash Mr. Kaye has draped over his shoulder.
“You know him, once he gets his nose to the ground . . . he’ll be back. He always finds his way back.” Then he turns and smiles at me. “Like your mother.”
“Did the governor say your dog has to stay inside, too?” I ask, thinking I’m being funny.
“Only Jap dogs. Like the Johnson’s pug. Nothing’s more American than a good old reliable bloodhound. Even if his name is Hero.”
“Well, he’s heroic, isn’t he?” I ask.
“Well, don’t tell anyone, but it’s H-I-R-O on his papers. As in Hirohito. The emperor of Japan. Never mind. He’s just good old Hero to us, okay, Jewels?”
“Well, I’ll go find him,” I say, taking the leash from Mr. Kaye. “Hero, not that emperor guy.”
He gets it, smiles, and tells me to get lost.
Which I do. More and more, I’m happy to get lost. Everything is getting too crazy. Sometimes I wisht I had my own incommunicado place to dive into and not have to hear, see, or feel any of this war stuff.
CHAPTER 11
I head toward the beach because, if I were Hero, that’s where I’d head. There’s a moon hanging up there somewhere, but it sure is dark out. But that wasn’t the ocean I just heard. It’s laughing. Boys’ laughing. I hold my breath to hear better. Eldon Johnson’s husky voice rings out from between two beach shanties. I creep closer.
Incommunicado Page 4