to save enough for another boat.
“Why’re you so quiet?” Billy said. “Still thinking about bringing it up?”
“I guess.”
“It’s too big of a job, Tomi. You’d need heavy equipment.”
“Maybe we could get it.”
He snorted.
“Okay, maybe we can’t get heavy equipment, but with enough guys … you, me, Mose and Rico. Some of the guys on the team, we could—”
“We’re ninth graders, not a salvage operation.”
“So?”
“So nothing. We’re just talking.”
We headed up toward Nu’uanu, where we lived. Billy’s house was on the estate next door to the one we lived on. From my house I could barely glimpse his place, a sprawling white house in the trees. Our house was a small shack on the Wilsons’ property. We only lived there because Mama was the Wilsons’ housekeeper. Mr. Wilson was a banker. They had a big house with a jungly green yard, a tennis court, a dog, Rufus, and one son—an eleventh grader named Keet.
Who was the one who’d sent the gasoline through my gut down at the canal.
We used to be friends, me and him. But around the beginning of sixth grade that easy world caved in and I quickly turned into his worst enemy. I don’t know why for sure, but Billy thought he knew. It took me a week to force it out of him. Keet Wilson had been told by his friends at school that white guys weren’t supposed to like Japanese guys, so what was he doing hanging around with me?
Fine, I thought. If that was the way it was. Fine.
I could live with that. I didn’t need him.
It was too bad, though, because I used to like Keet. I learned things from him. He was smart, very smart. All he had to do was hear something once and he remembered it. He craved anything to do with the military, too. Actually, he was obsessed by it. “You ever heard of Annapolis?” he oncesaid. “Well, that’s where I’m going.” He told me about the United States Naval Academy, and how you could learn to fly fighters there, and become an officer in the navy after you got out. He had his eye on flying off aircraft carriers. “Wow,” I said. “Maybe I’ll go to that academy too.” He laughed and said, “I don’t think so.”
Only now did I understand that laugh.
Still, we both liked the idea of being up there in the clouds. For me it was all about Papa’s pigeons, and the freedom I felt watching them, white specks circling in the blue sky.
Keet even used to watch them with me.
But that world crumbled long ago. First he just ignored me. Then he told me to stay away from him. Then he got dangerous.
One day in the jungle, he crossed the line.
It was right after Pearl Harbor. Keet started spying on me. He’d been creeping around with his .22 rifle one afternoon and caught me cleaning the buried katana. He pointed the rifle at my chest. “Give me that Jap sword,” he said. He wanted it, like the military was confiscating things from Japanese people all over the island, things they thought could be dangerous to the USA. I said something like
Over my dead body,
not afraid of him or his rifle, not when it came to the katana. I was even ready to break my promise to Papa not to fight.
It was just us, alone, face to face.
Lucky for both of us, he backed down. That day I learned something about Keet Wilson that the navy might not like— he gave up easy. Maybe he was afraid to fight. It seemed tome that if you were going to fly off an aircraft carrier into battle you needed all the guts you could find, and then some.
***
It was late, darkness now coming down like a hammer.
Billy walked faster, me right behind him, no money left for a bus.
Soon the crush of town faded away, replaced by wide streets and dark yards protected by thick hedges. Quiet, already asleep.
Or maybe ready to jump out of the bushes and start firing.
“You heard anything about your grampa yet?” Billy said.
“Not a peep. Like he fell in a hole somewhere.”
“It still doesn’t make sense why they arrested him.”
“He’s