Charlie Chan Is Dead 2

by Jessica Hagedorn

  It happened that Mrs. Hattori and all the little Hattoris, five of them, all boys and born about a year apart, were with him when he paid his first visit to the house. When he told them to wait in the car, saying he had a little business to transact inside and would return in a trice, he truly meant what he said. He intended only to give the place a brief inspection in order to familiarize himself with it. This was at two o’clock in the afternoon, however, and when he finally made his way back to the car, the day was already so dim that he had to grope around a bit for the door handle.

  HISAYE YAMAMOTO was born in 1921 in Redondo Beach, California. In 1986, she received the American Book Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her work has been published and anthologized widely. Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories received the 1988 Award for Literature from the Association of Asian American Studies. Two of the stories in that renowned collection were the basis for a 1991 American Playhouse / PBS film, Hot Summer Winds.

  The house was a large but simple clapboard, recently painted brown and relieved with white window frames. It sat under several enormous eucalyptus trees in the foreground of a few acres of asparagus. To the rear of the house was a ramshackle barn whose spacious blue roof advertised in great yellow letters a ubiquitous brand of physic. Mrs. Hattori, peering toward the house with growing impatience, could not understand what was keeping her husband. She watched other cars either drive into the yard or park along the highway and she saw all sorts of people—white, yellow, brown, and black—enter the house. Seeing very few people leave, she got the idea that her husband was attending a meeting or a party.

  So she was more curious than furious that first time when Mr. Hattori got around to returning to her and the children. To her rapid questions Mr. Hattori replied slowly, pensively: it was a gambling den run by a Chinese family under cover of asparagus, he said, and he had been winning at first, but his luck had suddenly turned, and that was why he had taken so long—he had been trying to win back his original stake at least.

  “How much did you lose?” Mrs. Hattori asked dully.

  “Twenty-five dollars,” Mr. Hattori said.

  “Twenty-five dollars!” exclaimed Mrs. Hattori. “Oh, Mr. Hattori, what have you done?”

  At this, as though at a prearranged signal, the baby in her arms began wailing, and the four boys in the back seat began complaining of hunger. Mr. Hattori gritted his teeth and drove on. He told himself that this being assailed on all sides by bawling, whimpering, and murderous glances was no less than he deserved. Never again, he said to himself; he had learned his lesson.

  Nevertheless, his car, with his wife and children in it, was parked near the brown house again the following week. This was because he had dreamed a repulsive dream in which a fat white snake had uncoiled and slithered about and everyone knows that a white-snake dream is a sure omen of good luck in games of chance. Even Mrs. Hattori knew this. Besides, she felt a little guilty about having nagged him so bitterly about the twenty-five dollars. So Mr. Hattori entered the brown house again on condition that he would return in a half hour, surely enough time to test the white snake. When he failed to return after an hour, Mrs. Hattori sent Joe, the oldest boy, to the front door to inquire after his father. A Chinese man came to open the door of the grille, looked at Joe, said, “Sorry, no kids in here,” and clacked it to.

  When Joe reported back to his mother, she sent him back again and this time a Chinese woman looked out and said, “What you want, boy?” When he asked for his father, she asked him to wait, then returned with him to the car, carrying a plate of Chinese cookies. Joe, munching one thick biscuit as he led her to the car, found its flavor and texture very strange; it was unlike either its American or Japanese counterpart so that he could not decide whether he liked it or not.

  Although the woman was about Mrs. Hattori’s age, she immediately called the latter “mama,” assuring her that Mr. Hattori would be coming soon, very soon. Mrs. Hattori, mortified, gave excessive thanks for the cookies which she would just as soon have thrown in the woman’s face. Mrs. Wu, for so she introduced herself, left them after wagging her head in amazement that Mrs. Hattori, so young, should have so many children and telling her frankly, “No wonder you so skinny, mama.”

  “Skinny, ha!” Mrs. Hattori said to the boys. “Well, perhaps. But I’d rather be skinny than fat.”

  Joe, looking at the comfortable figure of Mrs. Wu going up the steps of the brown house, agreed.

  Again it was dark when Mr. Hattori came back to the car, but Mrs. Hattori did not say a word. Mr. Hattori made a feeble joke about the unreliability of snakes, but his wife made no attempt to smile. About halfway home she said abruptly, “Please stop the machine, Mr. Hattori. I don’t want to ride another inch with you.”

  “Now, mother . . .” Mr. Hattori said. “I’ve learned my lesson. I swear this is the last time.”

  “Please stop the machine, Mr. Hattori,” his wife repeated.

  Of course the car kept going, so Mrs. Hattori, hugging the baby to herself with one arm, opened the door with her free hand and made as if to hop out of the moving car.

  The car stopped with a lurch and Mr. Hattori, aghast, said, “Do you want to kill yourself?”

  “That’s a very good idea,” Mrs. Hattori answered, one leg out of the door.

  “Now, mother . . .” Mr. Hattori said. “I’m sorry; I was wrong to stay so long. I promise on my word of honor never to go near that house again. Come, let’s go home now and get some supper.”

  “Supper!” said Mrs. Hattori. “Do you have any money for groceries?”

  “I have enough for groceries,” Mr. Hattori confessed.

  Mrs. Hattori pulled her leg back in and pulled the door shut. “You see!” she cried triumphantly. “You see!”

  The next time, Mrs. Wu brought out besides the cookies a paper sack ful of Chinese firecrackers for the boys. “This is America,” Mrs. Wu said to Mrs. Hattori. “China and Japan have war, all right, but (she shrugged) it’s not our fault. You understand?”

  Mrs. Hattori nodded, but she did not say anything because she did not feel her English up to the occasion.

  “Never mind about the firecrackers or the war,” she wanted to say. “Just inform Mr. Hattori that his family awaits without.”

  Suddenly Mrs. Wu, who out of the corner of her eye had been examining another car parked up the street, whispered, “Cops!” and ran back into the house as fast as she could carry her amplitude. Then the windows and doors of the brown house began to spew out all kinds of people—white, yellow, brown, and black—who either got into cars and drove frantically away or ran across the street to dive into the field of tall dry weeds. Before Mrs. Hattori and the boys knew what was happening, a Negro man opened the back door of their car and jumped in to crouch at the boys’ feet.

  The boys, who had never seen such a dark person at close range before, burst into terrified screams, and Mrs. Hattori began yelling too, telling the man to get out, get out. The panting man clasped his hands together and beseeched Mrs. Hattori, “Just let me hide in here until the police go away! I’m asking you to save me from jail!”

  Mrs. Hattori made a quick decision. “All right,” she said in her tortured English. “Go down, hide!” Then, in Japanese, she assured her sons that this man meant them no harm and ordered them to cease crying, to sit down, to behave, lest she be tempted to give them something to cry about. The policemen had been inside the house about fifteen minutes when Mr. Hattori came out. He had been thoroughly frightened, but now he managed to appear jaunty as he told his wife how he had cleverly thrust all incriminating evidence into a nearby vase of flowers and thus escaped arrest. “They searched me and told me I could go,” he said. “A lot of others weren’t so lucky. One lady fainted.”

  They were almost a mile from the brown house before the man in back said, “Thanks a million. You can let me off here.”

  Mr. Hattori was so surprised that the car screeched when it stopped. Mrs.
Hattori hastily explained, and the man, pausing on his way out, searched for words to emphasize his gratitude. He had always been, he said, a friend of the Japanese people; he knew no race so cleanly, so well-mannered, so downright nice. As he slammed the door shut, he put his hand on the arm of Mr. Hattori, who was still dumfounded, and promised never to forget this act of kindness.

  “What we got to remember,” the man said, “is that we all got to die sometime. You might be a king in silk shirts or riding a white horse, but we all got to die sometime.”

  Mr. Hattori, starting up the car again, looked at his wife in reproach. “A kurombo!” he said. And again, “A kurombo!” He pretended to be victim to a shudder.

  “You had no compunctions about that, Mr. Hattori,” she reminded him, “when you were inside that house.”

  “That’s different,” Mr. Hattori said.

  “How so?” Mrs. Hattori inquired.

  The quarrel continued through supper at home, touching on a large variety of subjects. It ended in the presence of the children with Mr. Hattori beating his wife so severely that he had to take her to the doctor to have a few ribs taped. Both in their depths were dazed and shaken that things should have come to such a pass.

  A few weeks after the raid the brown house opened for business as usual, and Mr. Hattori took to going there alone. He no longer waited for weekends but found all sorts of errands to go on during the week which took him in the direction of the asparagus farm. There were nights when he did not bother to come home at all.

  On one such night Mrs. Hattori confided to Joe, because he was the eldest, “Sometimes I lie awake at night and wish for death to overtake me in my sleep. That would be the easiest way.” In response Joe wept, principally because he felt tears were expected of him. Mrs. Hattori, deeply moved by his evident commiseration, begged his pardon for burdening his childhood with adult sorrows. Joe was in the first grade that year, and in his sleep he dreamed mostly about school. In one dream that recurred he found himself walking in nakedness and in terrible shame among his closest schoolmates.

  At last Mrs. Hattori could bear it no longer and went away. She took the baby, Sam, and the boy born before him, Ed (for the record, the other two were named Bill and Ogden), to one of her sisters living in a town about thirty miles distant. Mr. Hattori was shocked and immediately went after her, but her sister refused to let him in the house. “Monster!” this sister said to him from the other side of the door.

  Defeated, Mr. Hattori returned home to reform. He worked passionately out in the fields from morning to night, he kept the house spick-and-span, he fed the remaining boys the best food he could buy, and he went out of his way to keep several miles clear of the brown house. This went on for five days, and on the sixth day, one of the Hattoris’ nephews, the son of the vindictive lady with whom Mrs. Hattori was taking refuge, came to bring Mr. Hattori a message. The nephew, who was about seventeen at the time, had started smoking cigarettes when he was thirteen. He liked to wear his amorphous hat on the back of his head, exposing a coiffure neatly parted in the middle which looked less like hair than like a painted wig, so unstintingly applied was the pomade which held it together. He kept his hands in his pockets, straddled the ground, and let his cigarette dangle to one side of his mouth as he said to Mr. Hattori, “Your wife’s taken a powder.”

  The world actually turned black for an instant for Mr. Hattori as he searched giddily in his mind for another possible interpretation of this ghastly announcement. “Poison?” he queried, a tremor in his knees.

  The nephew cackled with restraint. “Nope, you dope,” he said. “That means she’s leaving your bed and board.”

  “Talk in Japanese,” Mr. Hattori ordered, “and quit trying to be so smart.”

  Abashed, the nephew took his hands out of his pockets and assisted his meager Japanese with nervous gestures. Mrs. Hattori, he managed to convey, had decided to leave Mr. Hattori permanently and had sent him to get Joe and Bill and Ogden.

  “Tell her to go jump in the lake,” Mr. Hattori said in English, and in Japanese, “Tell her if she wants the boys, to come back and make a home for them. That’s the only way she can ever have them.”

  Mrs. Hattori came back with Sam and Ed that same night, not only because she had found she was unable to exist without her other sons but because the nephew had glimpsed certain things which indicated that her husband had seen the light. Life for the family became very sweet then because it had lately been so very bitter, and Mr. Hattori went nowhere near the brown house for almost a whole month. When he did resume his visits there, he spaced them frugally and remembered (although this cost him cruel effort) to stay no longer than an hour each time.

  One evening Mr. Hattori came home like a madman. He sprinted up the front porch, broke into the house with a bang, and began whirling around the parlor like a human top. Mrs. Hattori dropped her mending and the boys their toys to stare at this phenomenon.

  “Yippee,” said Mr. Hattori, “banzai, yippee, banzai.” Thereupon, he fell dizzily to the floor.

  “What is it, Mr. Hattori; are you drunk?” Mrs. Hattori asked, coming to help him up.

  “Better than that, mother,” Mr. Hattori said, pushing her back to her chair. It was then they noticed that he was holding a brown paper bag in one hand. And from this bag, with the exaggerated ceremony of a magician pulling rabbits from a hat, he began to draw out stack after stack of green bills. These he deposited deliberately, one by one, on Mrs. Hattori’s tense lap until the sack was empty and she was buried under a pile of money.

  “Explain . . .” Mrs. Hattori gasped.

  “I won it! In the lottery! Two thousand dollars! We’re rich!” Mr. Hattori explained.

  There was a hard silence in the room as everyone looked at the treasure on Mrs. Hattori’s lap. Mr. Hattori gazed raptly, the boys blinked in bewilderment, and Mrs. Hattori’s eyes bulged a little. Suddenly, without warning, Mrs. Hattori leaped up and vigorously brushed off the front of her clothing, letting the stacks fall where they might. For a moment she clamped her lips together fiercely and glared at her husband. But there was no wisp of steam that curled out from her nostrils and disappeared toward the ceiling; this was just a fleeting illusion that Mr. Hattori had. Then, “You have no conception, Mr. Hattori!” she hissed. “You have absolutely no conception!”

  Mr. Hattori was resolute in refusing to burn the money, and Mrs. Hattori eventually adjusted herself to his keeping it. Thus, they increased their property by a new car, a new rug, and their first washing machine. Since these purchases were all made on the convenient installment plan and the two thousand dollars somehow melted away before they were aware of it, the car and the washing machine were claimed by a collection agency after a few months. The rug remained, however, as it was a fairly cheap one and had already eroded away in spots to show the bare weave beneath. By that time it had become an old habit for Mrs. Hattori and the boys to wait outside the brown house in their original car and for Joe to be commissioned periodically to go to the front door to ask for his father. Joe and his brothers did not mind the long experience too much because they had acquired a taste for Chinese cookies. Nor, really, did Mrs. Hattori, who was pregnant again. After a fashion, she became quite attached to Mrs. Wu who, on her part, decided she had never before encountered a woman with such bleak eyes.

  THE KEEPER

  from FATHER OF THE FOUR PASSAGES

  Lois-Ann Yamanaka

  Sonny Boy, son of Sonia, the only one I did not kill. Three, I killed. Number One in cartilaged pieces on a surgical tray. #2, like a dead feeder fish, flushed out and down. A third, buried in a jar behind my mother’s house, fetal marsupial, naked pink.

  Sonny Boy, son of Sonia, stop your crying on this bed, your purple wail without breath. Feel the squinting of my eyes, the gritting of my teeth, the closing of my fists. Here is my hand to cover your mouth. Here are my fists to crush your skull. Do you want to die?

  They’re smoking and drinking to your birth downstairs. An
d I’m the single artist mother, breast-feeding lounge singer mother, earth righteous minority mother. But I can’t make you stop. Shh, they can hear you, godfuckingdammit.

  LOIS-ANN YAMANAKA is the author of a book of poetry, Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre; the novels Wild Meat and the Bully Burgers, Blu’s Hanging, Heads by Harry, and Father of the Four Passages; as well as a young adult novel, Name Me Nobody, and an illustrated children’s book, Snow Angel, Sand Angel. She is at work on a novel, Behold the Many. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize XVIII and XIX, the Asian American Studies National Book Award, the Elliot Cades Award for Literature, the Asian American Literary Award, and a Lannan Literary Award, among others. Born in Hololehua, Molokai, in 1961 and raised in Hilo, Pahala, and Keauhou-Kona on the Big Island of Hawaii, she lives in Honolulu, Hawaii, with her son.

  Your body stiffens. Fists clench. You cry without sound. A blue boy. Let me bounce you, let me slap you, let me sing to you, let me choke you, let me throw you out the window.

  I blow on your face. And in one long draw, you breathe me in.

  I am the keeper of words. This is your word to keep: God/the/son.

  Dear Number One,

  You are my first dead baby, a baby boy.

  I am on the green bed in Granny Alma’s Kalihi house. Alone, so Alone. My face is puffy and flushed. Scared, I’m scared. My belly is a round ellipsis. I don’t know who to tell. About you.

  Your aunt Celeste comes into the room and stares at me. My mouth opens, but no words come out. And then she knows.