House of the Red Fish

by Graham Salisbury

  “So, Jake,” I said. “What did the ad say? How much you ask for?”

  “Well, first I said, 1933 Ford truck, good condition, one known owner—”

  “One known owner?” I said.

  “You know of anyone else who owned it before Sanji?”

  “No, but he didn’t buy it new,” I said. “He didn’t have that kind of money.”

  “Still, we only know he owned it, so that wasn’t a lie.”

  Billy grinned and pulled up a hank of grass.

  “You hear something?” Jake said, perking up.

  A car drove up the driveway, its blue-painted headlights on. Parked. A guy got out. He nodded to us. He was about Mr. Davis’s age, thin with cheeks that sagged a little, and kind of startled-looking.

  “Evening,” he said. “I came to look at the truck. I spoke to a Jake Davis about it.”

  Jake pushed himself up and brushed the back of his pants off. “I’m Jake,” he said. “The truck’s in the garage.”

  We went over in a clump. The guy was dressed nicely, like he had plenty of money to buy Sanji’s truck.

  “Billy,” Jake said, when we were in the garage. “Pull down the blackout tarp.”

  Billy did, and Jake flipped on the garage light. “This is it,” Jake said, running his hand over the newly washed fender.

  “Hmmm,” the guy mumbled, walking around it, gazing at it first, then touching the paint, the seats. “How’s it run?”

  “Good,” Jake said.

  “Start her up, let me hear it.”

  Jake flipped off the light and nodded to Billy, and Billy rolled the tarp back up. Jake jumped into the truck. It started instantly. That Jake was a car genius, I thought. He backed it out of the garage and let it idle, headlights newly painted blue.

  “Can I drive it?” the guy said.

  Jake jumped out.

  The guy drove it out to the street, the sound of the engine fading away until there was only silence.

  “I hope he comes back,” I said.

  “If he doesn’t we have his car.”

  “Oh, yeah. Good.”

  Fifteen minutes later the guy drove back up. He parked and shut down the engine. “Works great,” he said. “What’d you say you wanted for it?”

  “One hundred fifty,” Jake said, cool as a businessman.

  The guy nodded. “I’ll give you seventy-five.”

  Jake stared at the guy, said nothing. Man, was he cool.

  “All right, eighty-five.”

  “It’s worth more than that, mister.”

  “You got papers for it? A title?”

  Jake shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “That’s a problem. Somebody might think I stole it.”

  Jake shrugged. “That’s why we priced it so cheap.”

  The guy snickered. “Well, where’d you get it? You steal it?”

  Jake gave him a steel-eyed gaze, and the guy backed off. “Okay, that was a joke. Whose truck is this, yours?”

  “It belonged to a Japanese fisherman.”

  “What do you mean belonged? He doesn’t own it anymore?”

  “He died. We’re selling it for his wife.”

  The guy thought a moment, nodding, his eyes on the truck. He ran a hand over the fender. “Tell you what. If this is just some dead Jap’s truck, you sell it to me for ninety dollars, keep twenty for yourself and tell the wife you could only get seventy for it, how’s that sound?”

  Jake continued to stare the guy down, only the guy didn’t seem to be aware of it. Or he didn’t care if Jake was giving him some bad stink-eye.

  “Now I’ll tell you what,” Jake finally said. “I’ll sell it to you for three hundred dollars and tell the dead Jap’s wife I could only get three hundred for it, how’s that sound?”

  The guy’s eyes narrowed down into a squint. He stepped closer to Jake, but Jake didn’t budge. “You got a smart mouth, kid, you know that?”

  “ Time to leave, mister. The truck’s not for sale.”

  “How about I talk to your father before I go?”

  “No need to do that,” Mr. Davis said.

  We all turned. Mr. Davis was standing in the darkened garage with his arms crossed. “My son’s right, the truck’s not for sale.”

  The guy crushed three shrubs and left a muddy track on the grass as he fishtailed down to the street.

  When Billy asked Jake if he could borrow back that trailer to take the pontoons down to the harbor, Jake slapped the side of his head. “What are you, stupid? What do you think we got sitting in the garage? A bicycle?”

  I laughed.

  “I didn’t think we could use the truck,” Billy said, rubbing his head.

  “Why?” Jake said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Well, now you know, so let’s load up.”

  It was early afternoon after a half day of school on the Thursday after Jake had told the creepy buyer to take a hike. Summer vacation was just a week away. Teachers were getting ready for final exams. We had all the way until Monday to study—or bring that boat up.

  Dragging those five-hundred-pound monsters into the bed of Sanji’s truck was going to be a killer. But at least we had a way to get the pontoons down to the canal.

  “Okay,” Jake said. “Let’s get this over with.”

  Jake pulled, Billy pushed, and I shoved those things up a wood-plank ramp into the bed of Sanji’s truck, grunting and complaining all the way. Jake wasn’t kidding when he said we’d need twelve guys to carry them. Made me cringe to think of that huge dirt field we had to cross, unless we could find a way to get the truck through the trees and bushes and drive them out to the canal. If we couldn’t, we’d probably have to hide the pontoons until we could get more guys. One thing was sure, if we did hide them and somebody found them and wanted to steal them, they wouldn’t get one inch before they stopped and said, “Forget this.”

  Actually, that would be funny to see.

  Mr. Davis came out from the dark garage into the sun. “Seeing you boys working so hard does my heart good,” he said, enjoying the show.

  Billy stood with both pontoon cases at his feet in the truck bed. Jake jumped out and closed the gate. “It was nothing, old man. Piece of cake.”

  Mr. Davis chuckled. “Take care, all right? Drive slowly. That truck might shimmy some if you get going too fast.”

  “Got it,” Jake said.

  We headed out, slowly, all three of us crammed into the front seat.

  “Your dad’s a good guy,” I said.

  “So’s yours,” Billy said.

  “True. I guess we’re lucky.”

  “That we are.”

  This is all for you, Papa, I thought. All for you.

  Jake drove through the quiet neighborhood and got as close as he could to the canal. He stopped to peer through the trees. On the other side of the street, houses slept.

  “Now what?” Billy said.

  “Let’s walk around, see if we can find a way to drive the truck through these trees.”

  “I’ll wait here,” Jake said. “If you find something, shout.”

  We found a dirt road in, but it was blocked off by a chain locked to two posts. Farther on we found a place where it might be possible to drive through the trees.

  “Too bad there’s no road here,” Billy said.

  “We could make one. Just plow on through.”

  Billy turned and whistled to Jake.

  Jake started up the truck and drove down to us, studying the bushes. “There’s no road.”

  “We’re going to make one. We’ll walk ahead of you and check for rocks. Just drive over the weeds, right in here.”

  Jake got out and studied the opening. He nodded, got back into the truck, and followed us through. Easy. The dirt was packed as hard as a paved road.

  We drove on out to the canal.

  Got out, thumping the doors behind us.

  Jake studied the sunken boats with his hands on his hips, whistling low. “You guys are
crazy. No way are you going to bring that boat up. I thought it would be smaller.” He shook his head and sighed. “This was a waste of time.”

  “No,” I said. “We can do it.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Gazing down on the Taiyo Maru, I could see his point. It looked impossible. Even to me, every time I saw it.

  “I heard these boats were sunk by a storm,” Jake said.

  “Some say that,” I said.

  “Seems odd that they’d all go down, don’t you think?”

  “There’s a hole in the hull of our boat. Somebody axed it.”

  “Huh.”

  Down the way two fishermen sat in the water on wooden stilt-legged chairs, fishing for mullet. No one wandered the shoreline on the other side of the canal where Keet and his fools had bombarded us with rocks.

  I looked up at the sun, now heading toward the sea. “We need to hide these pontoons,” I said. “Nothing much we can do today, anyway. Not enough time.”

  Jake scratched his cheek with his thumb. “Dad will be in deep you-know-what if somebody hauls these pontoons off.”

  “Who’s going to take them?” Billy said. “They’re too heavy.”

  “You got that right. I guess we can leave them here. Somewhere.”

  That somewhere was a patch of tall weeds in the shade of a tangle of dry trees, far enough away from where we’d hidden the boat parts that if Keet Wilson came around he probably wouldn’t find it. It would have to do.

  We guided Jake with hand motions as he backed the truck in. Billy lowered the gate and gazed in at the pontoons. “Can’t we just leave the truck here too, so we don’t have to carry these back to the water?”

  “Dream on,” Jake said. “Come on, twits, muscle up.”

  My hands had gone red and raw, and I was soaked with sweat by the time we’d dragged the two pontoons in their cases off the trailer and covered them with weeds, old brown leaves, and whatever else we could find. In the end it looked like a trash pile.

  Getting them all back over to the canal without the truck was something I didn’t even want to think about. But I would manage.

  I shook that thought out of my head, opening and closing my beat-up hands.

  That night we had a rare meal—hamburgers!

  Mrs. Wilson had given Mama some ground beef, something that was very hard to get. The closest I’d been to a hamburger since before the war was in the papers, when Wimpy ate them by the truckload in the Popeye comic strip.

  “I didn’t want to take it,” Mama said about the meat. “But Mrs. Wilson insisted. She said not to tell her husband.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  Mama thought a moment. “Mrs. Wilson is two people. One with Mr. Wilson, and one without Mr. Wilson.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Someday you will know.”

  “Kind of like Fumi?” I said.

  She frowned. “Fumi?”

  “Well, Fumi is two people too. First she jokes and bosses around army guys at her shop, and they all like it when she does that; then on the other side she is kind and generous to me and Ojii-chan and would never think to boss us around.”

  Mama shook her head. “Don’t tell me what goes on down there. This new Ojii-chan is too much for me already.”

  That made me laugh. “I know what you mean, Mama, believe me.”

  Mama cooked the meat in a frying pan.

  Grampa came in from the chicken coops and we sat at our kitchen table, Kimi and Mama on one side, me and Grampa on the other, the windows blacked out. One light-bulb lit the stuffy room.

  “These are so good, Mama,” I said.

  “We very fortunate, Tomi. Mrs. Wilson is good to me,” Mama said, truly thankful. “We lucky to be working for them.”

  I looked at her a moment, then nodded. It was probably true. The Wilsons weren’t so bad some of the time. We could get along.

  When we were this lucky we celebrated, even Grampa, who had his own special way of putting a hamburger together, a way that I copied because hamburger and eggs from our chickens went together like mustard on a hot dog at a baseball game. There was nothing better. What we did was take two pieces of bread, slap the cooked hamburger on one piece, then a fried egg with juicy yolk on the other, then put them together. Man, was that good. Me and Grampa ate in silence, in a little bit of heaven, you could say. For once, we agreed completely.

  I felt Mama’s eyes on me and looked up. “What?”

  She studied me a moment longer, then said, “Where you been going so many weekend, Tomi-kun? What you doing I don’t know about?”

  I glanced at Grampa, who went on enjoying his meal as if he weren’t even in the room with three other people. But he was listening. He didn’t miss a beat.

  “Nothing, Mama, I just doing things with my friends.”

  She frowned.

  Should I tell her? If I did she might get worried and make me stop, especially because of Mr. Wilson.

  She eyed me, her hands folded on the table in front of her plate. “I know you’re up to something. You can’t fool me.”

  I took a big bite so my mouth would be full and I’d be unable to say anything if she asked another question. At least it would buy me some time to think.

  When I didn’t answer, she said, “I only want to know one thing, and then I let this go. What you are doing—would your father approve?”

  I put the hamburger down and wiped my hands on my shirt, gulping down that huge bite.

  “Yes, Mama. For real, he would approve.”

  Early Friday morning we headed down to the canal.

  Besides me and Billy, we had Mose, Rico, Jake, and Charlie’s nephews, Ben and Calvin, who could probably carry those pontoons in one hand like a waiter with a tray.

  “How come you don’t just drive us, Jake?” I said. “We got Sanji’s truck.”

  “Somebody might want to see it tonight. I need to keep it good and clean. I wouldn’t want to chance getting in a wreck or anything either.”

  I shrugged. “Yeah.”

  “You need to think about those things,” he added.

  Billy snorted and nudged me. “Dad thought of it, not him.”

  Jake winked.

  At the canal, we headed in from the street. I scowled when I saw that the weeds leading into the hiding place were flattened, and I couldn’t believe we’d left it like that. We should have been more careful.

  But it was more than carelessness. The boards and weeds and trash we’d covered the pontoons with were torn away and scattered all over the place.

  The pontoons were gone.

  “I can’t believe this,” Jake said.

  A piece of paper flapped in the breeze, one corner stuck under a rock.

  A note.

  Calvin picked it up and read it silently. When he was done he looked up and grinned. “Looks like this going be more fun than I thought.”

  “Let me see that,” I said.

  We told you traitors that nobody’s

  bringing any enemy boat up out

  of the water. It’s down there for a

  reason and it will stay there for the same

  reason, no matter what you try to do.

  So start worrying, Fish Boy, because we

  might turn these things we found here over

  to the police. Probably you stole them from

  the army. We know your names, all of you,

  and we know where you live.

  It wasn’t signed.

  Billy snatched it out of my hand and read it out loud, his face turning pink with anger. “ That’s it,” he said. “ That moron’s gone too far.”

  “Now we talking,” Rico said, slapping a fist into his hand.

  Ben and Calvin nodded, grim.

  “Bad, bad news,” Jake said. “Those pontoons didn’t belong to us. Dad’s going to—”

  “I know where they are,” I said.

  ***

  We took the bus back up to Billy’s house, a silent ride. Seven sto
ne-faced guys in the backseats. Nobody sat near us. All I could think about was how creepy it felt to be robbed. Like an invasion, somebody coming in and messing with your private life. Made my stomach turn.

  We stood around in Billy’s yard, eight of us now, because Ben and Calvin got Charlie all worked up about it. I ran home to get Grampa, too, but he was gone. Mama was at the Wilsons’, and Kimi was playing out behind our house with Azuki Bean.

  “Kimi,” I said. “You want a real important job? Just for an hour or so?”

  We needed a lookout. We didn’t need Mr. Wilson to be anywhere near his own home when we did what we were going to do. If anyone came into that jungle I wanted to know about it.

  She nodded. “Something with the chickens?”

  “Naah, you too smart for that. This job is bigger than chickens.”

  She smiled, ready to work.

  With Kimi again riding high on Charlie’s shoulders, we took a muddy trail from Billy’s house into the damp jungle of trees, high grasses, vines, ferns, and bamboo thickets, slapping our necks and faces at the mosquitoes.

  The grass where Keet and his fools had driven their truck in was freshly flattened. We followed its trail around a couple of trees.

  The two pontoon cases were tossed in the weeds with the boat parts.

  Charlie lowered Kimi to the ground and squatted. He lifted a corner of a hatch cover from the Taiyo Maru and peeked under it, where a handful of lead weights lay in the mud.

  “Keet’s gone off the deep end,” Jake said. “This is personal, Tomi.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “But why, is what I want to know.”

  Calvin pursed his lips. “This punk needs to spend some time in jail. Look at this stash.”

  “Maybe we going stash his face,” Rico said.

  Mose frowned at Rico. “Stash his face?”

  “Yeah, it means stab my fist in his face and smash it.”

  Mose shook his head.

  “We better get to work,” Ben said. “Where we going take it?”

  “Bring it to the toolshed by my house,” Charlie said. “I keep my eye on it there. Don’t worry, Tomi. We watch out for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I mean that more than you know.”

  “No problem. You go take Kimi where she can watch for trouble.”