by John Shannon
“Sure.”
“It violates every department policy I can think of, so keep your mouth very shut.”
Jack Liffey mimed zipping his lips.
“If I rub my nose like this,” Steelyard insisted, “I want you to leave whatever’s going on and go out to the car and wait.”
Steelyard punched some code numbers into his phone, probably an I’m-on-the-move signal, after which they trooped out to the parking lot just below the big incinerator stack on the hill.
“I love to ride in these big, wallowy Fords,” Jack Liffey said. “You’ve got some kind of jet engine in here, right?”
“It’s called the police interceptor package. It’ll catch a Hyundai with one cylinder missing or an old Toyota dragging an anvil. We in the law enforcement community like the elbow room and traditional engineering of a full-size American car, which means the power windows break down every week. It does have two hundred horsepower in its big, overweight V-eight engine, but the weeniest BMW six-cylinder can beat it to death on the highway.”
“Let’s hope we don’t have to fight any BMWs.”
Steelyard pointed to a row of police motorcycles, all tilted at the same angle on their kickstands. “The poor bike cops had to go over to rice-burning Kawasakis some years ago. Where’s the patriotism in that, I say? Okay, Jack, if I’m going to deputize you on this mission, I want you to learn the basic code of the police: Accept that which you cannot change, especially if it’s in large denominations.”
Jack Liffey laughed politely. He was having trouble discerning any stable mood in the man, but that was probably the point.
Gloria Ramirez found them wandering like dazzled kittens in a botánica off in one corner of El Mercado on the street level. The immense warehouse building was chockablock with two levels of shops selling foods and toys and clothing and jewelry, and the walls were beating with crowd noise and insistent ranchera music that seemed to emanate from a third level overhead. Maeve had passed botánicas on the streets in LA many times, and she’d thought the name was just Spanish for drugstore, but wandering around the colorful aisles, it became obvious that botánicas were purveyors of something far more exotic, like Santería, from the Caribbean or wherever, with all its ointments and magic charms and quasi-Catholic icons of saints who really stood for African gods. Maeve ended up buying a little square bottle of yellowish oil that was called Brain-up/Habilidoso, while Ornetta paid four dollars for a bottle called Come-Hither Oil/Aceite de Hechizar.
Maeve could tell that the policewoman was definitely off work, as she wore jeans and a red cowboy shirt, a getup Maeve usually didn’t like. It looked great on her, though—tight over her bottom and flattering where her waist narrowed a bit. The policewoman herded them in a motherly way toward a staircase, and Ornetta held their purchases up to the light from a side window to compare them. You could read some Spanish instructions on the backs of the labels, through the amber liquids. “It clear as day, Maevie: you don’t trust your brain, and I don’t trust my beauty.”
Maeve Liffey grinned. “A little edge never hurts; that’s what my dad says.”
Gloria took the tiny bottles and looked them over skeptically as they waited at a landing for a large family—squat, round adults, a couple of slow-moving grandparents, and more well-behaved brown-eyed kids than you could count—to troop down off the stairs.
“I’ve learned two things in my lifetime of bungled relationships with men. You cannot make someone love you, but if you’re really interested, you can always stalk them like mad and hope they panic and give up.” Ornetta laughed as the woman switched to looking at Maeve’s bottle. “And you can rely on your brains for about fifteen minutes, and after that it’s good to have large boobs.”
Maeve was startled and didn’t know whether to be offended or not. Her own breasts were fine, almost embarrassing, but Ornetta was two years younger and still developing, and she felt protective of her.
Gloria handed back their magic potions, and they headed up the stairwell. “I’m kidding, girls. Never take advice from other people. Never. They’re always much more screwed up than you think. Even me. What do I know? All the important men in my life have been taken away or wandered off in search of younger flesh.”
“What do you mean ‘taken away’?” Maeve asked as they came around a bend in the stairs into a sudden smell of crushed tropical fruit.
“Cancer, honey. One of them. Another one decided—or maybe learned—that he was gay. I don’t know which way’s the correct way to think about it. I guess that’s okay, but he was really smart and sweet and it makes me worry sometimes that the good ones might all be gay.”
“I sure hope not,” Maeve said.
“Me, too.”
They emerged into the din of a kind of broad, open level that stretched around three sides of the third floor. There were competing Mexican restaurants with competing mariachi bands going full tilt, bawling and strumming and trumpeting at one another. It was hard to talk without shouting. Maeve swore to herself that she was going to work harder at Spanish next semester, though almost all the college-bound kids at Redondo Union High were taking French or German. It was a crime to live in this city and not know Spanish, she thought. It was like being locked out of all the interesting buildings around you.
Gloria Ramirez seemed to have become den mother and seated them near the railing, overlooking the market stalls below. It was marginally quieter there, and once the menus arrived, she leaned close to help order for them in Spanish. They were all having some variation of the standard Norteño-Mex combinations of enchiladas, tamales, tacos, rice, and beans, but Ornetta had insisted on an extra portion of carnitas. She said so many African Americans were avoiding pork these days that she rarely got it at school and she loved it. The policewoman ordered a selection of Mexican soft drinks for them all.
Blessedly, the earsplitting bands took a break on the same cue, like going back to their corners between rounds, and they could talk without yelling. The food came right away, and they all sampled the drinks to see which ones they liked best. Gloria Ramirez ended up with the white horchata, which seemed to be a kind of rice water that neither of the girls liked, Ornetta had a Jarritos soda called jamaica that she said tasted like hibiscus flowers. And Maeve slurped at another Jarritos, a guava-based drink that had a weird furry, perfumy taste.
Maeve was so proud of bringing her two friends together that she made Gloria repeat the story of her Paiute ancestor Wovoka and the Ghost Dance as they ate. She knew Ornetta would love it, and then she insisted that Ornetta relate the tale of “The Revolt of the Rhinestone Animals,” one of Maeve’s favorites. In the back of her mind, Maeve wondered if she might just be testing Ornetta as a weapon she could use against her ornery grandfather. How could anyone resist Ornetta’s infectious energy and kindliness? Wasn’t everyone good-hearted down deep, just waiting to get over their feuds and intolerances?
Gloria Ramirez seemed to enjoy Ornetta’s story, resting her chin on interlaced fingers to listen and smile. She only nibbled at the food.
“I feel lost compared to the two of you,” Maeve said. “I’ve had such a boring middle-class white life.”
“Be thankful,” Gloria suggested. “Really colorful is an eight-year-old barefoot Indio orphan selling chewing gum on the streets of Tijuana.”
Maeve felt a bit hurt, as if she’d been accused of weeping crocodile tears over her privileged life. “I don’t mean anything snotty. You don’t really have to go all the way to Tijuana to find people with miserable lives.”
The woman nodded. “Yes. Imagine living inside your grandfather’s skull,” Gloria said. “Day in day out, with all that pointless hatred eating at you.”
Ornetta seemed to be listening intently.
“Do you think he’s hopeless?” Maeve asked.
“I don’t know him very well, but I do know people like him. My own stepparents were pretty sure they knew who were valuable members of the human race and who weren’t. I went back to se
e them when I was grown up, some kind of duty. When I went to college for a year, I pretty much cut myself off. I told them I’d made peace with my heritage, even visited my homeland up in eastern California and Nevada—and they were horrified. They’d done everything they could to make me hate what I was. I have no idea why anyone would want to hate Indians so, and then try to make an Indian girl hate herself. But the Paiutes I met don’t consider me an Indian because I was raised white. It’s funny; I might just be full-blood. It’s hard to know who my mom was with.”
One of the bands came back and started tuning up noisily.
“Eat up,” Gloria Ramirez suggested. “I’m going deaf. I’ll take you guys on a little tour of my home. You’re in East LA now. This isn’t LA.”
“Super!”
“Here’s Twenty-first.”
The address was about halfway across town toward Point Fermin—not far, in fact, from the Petricich place.
“This may turn out to be some distant cousin of Frank Ozaki’s. You will let me do the talking.”
The house was one of those sad little stucco bungalows from the turn of the century that suggested the builder was trying for some effect, but exactly what kind was a bit hard to determine. It was symmetrical with a half-round portico dead center in front, held up by pairs of too-slim Doric columns. The flat roof had a suggestion of castellations at the corners, and there were little red-tiled eyelids over each of the wide-eyed windows.
Jack Liffey followed Steelyard docilely toward the screen door. The unlatched screen rattled as he knocked. A very old, very short woman seemed to materialize slowly behind the screen, at about belly-button level. Her face was so wrinkled it almost suggested another species of life, and her thick gray hair was pulled back harshly, as if by a rake, and tied in a knot the size of a fist on the back of her head.
“Mary Ozaki?” Steelyard said. He showed her his badge wallet.
“Kuichi!” she called behind her. There was a flood of fluent Japanese, and eventually a woman who was not quite so old or so short appeared.
The first woman walked away with mincing steps, carrying a tiny suitcase. She seemed very disappointed.
“I’m Mary Ozaki. My mother,” she explained, with a nod toward the smaller woman. She opened the door, and they entered a small, dark living room. “Fusaye is ninety-six next month. For more than sixty years she’s been waiting for the ship that will take her and all the loyal subjects of the emperor back to Japan. Her bags are packed. She’s sure they won the war. Losing was inconceivable. We argued with her, showed her pictures of Hiroshima and Japanese troops surrendering, but they were all wartime tricks of the Americans. Then the streets filled up with Toyotas and Hondas, and what could we say?”
Her English was almost accentless, if just a little too precise to seem natural.
“Are you related to a Frank Ozaki, who once lived on Terminal Island?” Steelyard asked.
“He was my husband. Frank passed away seven years ago. Please sit down.” Both men sat on a sofa that seemed to puff out dust. “Terminal Island. My, my. I haven’t thought about that place in years, and it’s only right there.” She waved a hand languidly. “Our village was such a special little place. I grew up there. We had our own Japanese slang, our own street games.”
As their eyes adjusted, they could see it was a small room, with spindly bric-a-brac cabinets and antimacassars pooling everywhere like deflated ghosts. Steelyard pointedly didn’t introduce Jack Liffey. “Could I get you gentlemen some green tea?”
“No, thank you.” It didn’t appear that this room was used much. “Mrs. Ozaki, was your husband one of the men who refused to sign the loyalty oath during the war?”
She sighed and folded her delicate hands in her lap. For a moment she seemed to go into a kind of stasis.
“There’s no problem about it,” Steelyard reassured her. “That’s all over with. We just need to know we’re speaking about the same person.”
“You saw his mother, gentlemen. Can you imagine how she would have taken it if Frank had repudiated her and her husband and their country during the war? It would have killed her. They were Issei—first generation—and they couldn’t become American citizens under any circumstances. His mother told him over and over that signing that oath would spoil his chances to be asked home for the victory celebration. He knew better, of course, but he got his back up. He stood up in the meeting at Manzanar and said he’d sign it only if they’d let his parents out of the camp. But the government wasn’t interested in bargaining. You take an action in a moment of righteous anger and sometimes it stays with you forever.”
“Did it follow him after the war?”
“Oh, yes. During and after. Very much. He was taken away from us and immediately moved to a ‘troublemaker’ camp called Tule Lake, way up near the Oregon border. He carried what he did deep inside. All his friends ended up signing the oath, and most of them went off to the war in Italy and became heroes. I’m sure you know about the all-Nisei unit, the 442nd.”
“Yes, ma’am. Did these friends give him problems after the war?”
“It was more himself. I think it was like a sore that wouldn’t go away. He kept bringing it up. It cost him several jobs. One in the canneries, then working with a farm co-op growing garbanzo beans up in the hills. He left a print shop and a gas station, he was fired from a nursery. He’d just settle in somewhere, and then he’d pick a fight with one of the war veterans, or one day he’d just start shouting at nothing and walk away from his tools, so I’m told. He was a changed man, I know that. He had been easygoing, but now he was bitter. Eventually he focused all his bitterness on our missing belongings from before the war, even though it wasn’t much. They didn’t matter to me at all.”
“Tell me about that.”
“Where we lived was all fishermen and cannery workers. We were so isolated across the ferry, it was like a little Eden all our own. We had our own shops and grade schools, our own community center and celebrations and holidays. We’d cross over to San Pedro for big things like to buy a fridge or the latest dresses, and the older kids took the ferry to school.”
There was a burst of yelling in Japanese from a back room. Mrs. Ozaki smiled ruefully. “She’s telling you that the new Japanese viceroys of America will be lenient with you if you don’t hurt me.”
“Thanks,” Steelyard said. “I’ll tell the guys on the Bataan death march.”
Jack Liffey thought the remark was uncalled for, and it didn’t seem to be encouraging Mrs. Ozaki any, but he knew to keep his mouth shut.
“Yes, there were atrocities in the war. We can mention Hiroshima, too. I was an American citizen, and I lived three and a half years behind barbed wire in a wood building that could never keep out the terrible dust storms that rose off that dry lake. However, the country has apologized sincerely.”
“I’m sorry, ma’am,” Steelyard offered. “You people deserved better here, whatever happened overseas.”
Their hostess was quiet now for a while, and Ken Steelyard seemed to realize his best stratagem was just to keep his own mouth shut for a while. Jack Liffey was still having trouble connecting this big, short-tempered, outspoken man with the troubled kid with the golf ball in a ghost handkerchief. But there were probably an infinite number of ways of growing up, and they were almost all plausible. The tiny ancient woman now wailed a bit more from deep in the house, but there was no offer to translate this time.
“My husband never owned a boat himself, but he was second mate on a very nice tuna boat and went out all the time. The owner, Mr. Nishimine, was a fair man and always gave Frank a fair share of the catch. Poor Mr. Nishimine was picked up the first day. He turned the boat straight back toward the dock on December seventh, when he heard the news on the radio, and the police were waiting to take him off to prison with all the boatowners. They assumed they were spies. His family had to sell the boat to an Italian family for almost nothing. We were all given two days to clear off of Terminal Island.
“Peddlers came around immediately with their trucks, offering us a dollar for a table, two dollars for a sofa. Most people just sold all their stuff for what they could get, but Frank said he wasn’t going to be cheated like that. He had some savings. We took our furniture and dishes and some lovely dolls that his mother had collected and put them in San Pedro Moving and Storage up near Beacon Street.”
“Is that the place that’s Bekins now?”
“That’s it. Frank paid for six months in advance. It was hard to know how long the war would last. His mom insisted America would come to its senses at any moment and beg for peace. Frank’s dad just went very quiet and sad and later he died in Manzanar, in fact, just a few weeks before he would have been released. You know, all through our internment, Frank had made arrangements somehow to make the monthly payments to the storage company.”
“When he got out of the camp after the war, was he bitter?”
“He was different. It took a while for him to find us because after he voted no, he was transferred. He became very self-conscious after the war. He kept focusing on little things, things that seemed to me side issues. He kept thinking other Nisei were staring at him and hating him. He lost jobs, as I said. Our possessions had all disappeared from the storage company and he made a big fuss about that, though I told him I didn’t care a bit. Things kept eating at him. It seemed to me most of it was just excuses to be angry, and it was probably this anger that killed him eventually. A blood vessel in his brain broke.”
“I’m sorry. Did you two have any children?”
“A girl who’s back East teaching at Rutgers. Joy—she was the older and she teaches social history and has her own lovely family now with a Chinese man. And Joe. Joe—somehow he always went against his father’s wishes. I guess it’s what boys do. Anyway, American boys do. Frank never really said anything directly, but he certainly disapproved when Joe enlisted for Vietnam.”
“Which service?” Jack Liffey interjected, though Ken Steelyard turned his head fractionally and frowned hard at him.