Terminal Island (9 page)

Eight

“No No” Boys

He found a place to park, on the marsh side of Culver in front of a little boarded-up restaurant down on the Playa esplanade, and walked back to the wetlands. He had to hop a low fence, with a belligerent keep-out sign that vowed to prosecute him vigorously, before he made his way down a path through tall reeds toward the recognizable tall figure in the distance. Basically, the path was a narrow dike that rose only a few inches above the marsh.

Once away from the road, it was a remarkably peaceful place, though half a mile due west some huge apartments on a bluff loomed over the marsh. These few hundred acres of swamp were about all they had been able to save from the square miles of Howard Hughes property that had once occupied the floodplain beneath the Westchester cliffs—factory buildings where they made helicopters, parking lots, even a little airstrip. All of it now was in the process of being plowed under for the new condo complexes that were destined to jam the 405 solid with commuters forever.

He was startled when, not thirty feet away, a big blue heron unfolded its long wings all of a sudden and flapped once, as it lunged skyward awkwardly to flee from him.

“Take it easy, fella. I mean no harm.”

The heron in turn spooked some ducks, who rose in a noisy hullabaloo. Jack Liffey watched them soar and circle, and he simply could not imagine why anyone would want to shoot: one of these lovely beings out of the sky. He wished he could invent some form of tiny air-to-surface missiles to strap to their wings to even the odds.

A salty breeze chilled him a little, but it was basically sunny and brisk, another glorious winter day, the best season of the year in Southern California for his money.

“Tony!”

The man gave a broad answering wave, and bobbed beneath the reeds again. As he approached on the dike path he could see that the marshy field was crisscrossed by narrow ditches of clear water, spanned here and there by crude wooden bridges on the dikes. The ditches looked a little too tidy, as if someone had plowed them through the marsh in an attempt to drain it. Far beyond Watanabe, he could see the straight channel of Ballona Creek carrying urban runoff to the ocean. A rock breakwater walled it off from the wider Marina Channel on the far side, where sailboats were tacking back and forth on their way out. The breakwater was like a long nasal septum separating the two waterways for more than a mile. The yachtsmen probably didn't like the heavy metals in the creek any more than Watanabe did.

“Thanks for coming to me, Jack. I'm on the clock.”

“I like an excuse to get out here. I was on the wetlands years ago on a case, but those warning signs put me off now.”

Watanabe laughed. “Those signs are like ninety-year-old security guards. ‘Stop or I'll shoot … maybe,' ” he said in a quavery voice.

“One likes to honor the environment.”

Watanabe rested on his heels, checking some apparatus that dangled from a thin cable over one of the channels.

“How's the water here?”

“The technical term is, ‘It sucks.' Don't get any of it on you.”

“It can't be that bad. It looks okay.”

“It's not getting much better.” Tony Watanabe reached into a knapsack and held out to Jack Liffey an opened package of Oreo cookies.

“Is this the antidote?” He took one, and thinking inevitably of his childhood, twisted the two halves apart and licked off the filling.

“Junk food cancels junk water, I wish. I've got some news on your playing card.”

“I didn't come all this way for an Oreo cookie.”

“I talked to Masako, and she was surprised that I didn't recognize the term ‘no no' right away. At one time, she said, any Nisei or Sansei would have known it.”

“Refresh my memory about these words.”

The squat finally got to him: Tony Watanabe sat down heavily on his clipboard, as Jack Liffey crossed his legs and rested on an offered flap of a canvas bag. It was strange sinking below the level of the reeds, as if cut off from all civilization. The only sound was a faint white noise of traffic, far away, and an occasional airliner throttling back musically as it turned inland after taking off over the ocean. Down low, he could see tiny hovering insects making their way nimbly among the reeds.

“The first generation of Japanese immigrants are called Issei. They came before 1920, when the United States started to pass its anti-Japanese laws. It's odd what those laws did; they made a true generational issue for us. The Issei were mostly young when they came over, and then all of a sudden no more Japanese could come, so we don't have any in-betweens. The Nisei are their kids, the second generation, born before World War II. They're American by birth, but their parents weren't even allowed to apply for citizenship.

“I'm Sansei, the third generation. There's also something called the Kibei. They're Nisei who went back to Japan for a while for their education or just took the culture more seriously. They were American by birth, but they learned to speak Japanese and clung to their Japanese heritage. It's mostly these people the ‘no no' refers to.”

A big pleasure craft hooted coming down the Marina Channel, probably bleating its displeasure at a sailboat crossing its path. Glancing along the cleared path, Jack Liffey could see it pass seaward, old and square, with lots of dark polished wood and brass, like something Gatsby would show off to Daisy.

Watanabe had craned his neck. “I wonder who owns a boat like that these days,” he said.

“If you have to ask you'll never be invited aboard.”

Watanabe smiled. “Someone wrote, ‘Behind every great fortune is a great crime.' ”

“Balzac,” Jack Liffey said. “My experience tends to bear it out. I find there are some nice, modest crimes behind modest fortunes, too.”

Watanabe pursed his lips. “You know what our crime was, Jack? Believing we were all one big happy family at TBW, the way they told us, and, if we did our work diligently, we had a good job for life.”

He reached into the knapsack again with a tissue and offered Jack Liffey a circular pastry, the color of wood and as evenly shaped as a slice of a tin can. When he bit into it, it seemed to contain mashed kidney beans.

“Imigawa,”
Watanabe explained.

“Gesundheit.
I'm bitter enough about being laid off, but it was long ago, thank you. Tell me more about the ‘no no.' ”

“I presume you know about the internment camps where our people were sent after Pearl Harbor.”

“Is there an American alive who doesn't?”

Watanabe smiled, but there wasn't much humor in it. “Lots, I'll bet. My family sold or stored everything they owned. They gave up a grocery business over on Sawtelle. I think they got three cents on the dollar for it. I was only a child at Manzanar, four years old, but I remember my bigger brothers playing on a high school football team that only had home games.”

Watanabe was digging in the knapsack and finally found the piece of paper he was after. “Early in 1943, somebody decided they'd send a Japanese battalion to fight in Europe, but instead of just taking volunteers, some sadist in the government decided that first they'd ask for a loyalty oath out of everybody in the camps. These were folks who'd been locked up for more than a year by their own country. The Nisei they wanted to recruit were all Americans, but none of their parents could even aspire to citizenship. You can imagine the divided loyalties. There was a lot of anger in the camps, a real uproar. It was remarkable, really, that anybody ever signed on, but most did.”

He handed the paper to Jack Liffey, who folded it open on his knee.

“The oath was more like a questionnaire, but only two questions really mattered. Masako was a little girl, too, but she remembered it better than me. I had to download that from the ‘Net, the two notorious questions, numbers twenty-seven and twenty-eight.”

Jack Liffey glanced down:

27. Are you willing to serve in the U.S. Army in combat and go wherever ordered? Yes No

28. Do you swear allegiance to the USA and plan to defend it against all attacks by foreigners, and do you forswear any allegiance to the Japanese Emperor? Yes No

“Some people tried to organize the barracks Masako lived in to vote ‘no' and ‘no' as a bloc protest. There were plenty of guys who just wanted to go along and enlist, but some of the militants starting calling them
inu,
which means dog or traitor. There also were a whole lot of guys who were perfectly ready to fight for America, but only if the government let their parents out of internment. I mean, really. Would you fight for a country that locked up your parents and wouldn't let them become citizens? It was a real Catch-22 for them. Renounce Japan, and have your kids renounce it, and then have no country at all.”

“It doesn't make much sense.”

“The really amazing part is that after all the protests—Masako even remembers fistfights—almost everybody decided to go along and vote ‘yes yes.' You probably know that the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, made up entirely of Nisei—including my dad, incidentally—went to Italy and suffered more casualties and won more medals than any other unit in history.

“There were some holdouts, though. The army called them troublemakers, and most of them were sent to a high-security camp up at Tule Lake in northern California. Some were really pissed and were even repatriated at their request to Japan. Collectively, they were called the ‘no no' boys because of their answers to those two questions. There weren't all that many, and they'd all be in their late seventies or more by now. Does that help you narrow your search?”

“Thanks, Tony. I can't picture an eighty-year-old cat burglar wreaking all this vengeance, but I have a hunch it must connect up somehow.”

“Yeah, Masako picked up on the ‘no no' right away.”

Jack Liffey's legs, tucked under him, were starting to go numb. “I visited what's left out at Manzanar once. I was on a case in the Owens Valley. Do you remember it much?”

He shrugged. “Don't get too worked up with that long face, Jack. It wasn't fair, for sure, for sure, but on the other hand, it wasn't a death camp. The country's tried to make amends. Congress finally paid the survivors an indemnity.”

“Sure, and some joker in the highway department has planted a big sign declaring it Blue Star Mothers' Highway right at the camp entrance. Nowhere else on 395, just right there, as if to rub it in that you people were all enemies.”

“No kidding? I haven't been up there in a while.” He pursed his lips. “Somebody ought to do something about that sign.”

“As a friend of mine used to say …” Jack Liffey said. The friend was a radical historian named Mike Lewis, whom he hadn't seen in a while. “That's the kind of social problem that calls for a little dynamite.”

He stopped at a pay phone on the street near the Japanese American Museum downtown. So much for the old expression about dropping a dime on someone, he thought. It took him fifty cents to get a dial tone, and a lot more to connect.

“Yes,” the voice answered warily.

“Declan, is that you?”

“Is this Jack?”

“Uh-huh,” Jack Liffey said. “I wanted to make sure you were okay.”

“There's a cop car parked out front, but what good is that? There's an alley right behind the house, and the cop appears to be sleeping half the time anyway.”

“You could use my condo for a while, Dad. You could have it to yourself. I'm not there.”

“I told you what would happen if I left this place vacant. I'd have graffiti on my kitchen walls, and my TV would be in some swap meet the next morning.”

At least the old man hadn't thrown around any epithets, he thought. “Well, keep your doors locked and protect your valuables. This guy is coming back, I promise.”

The middle-aged Japanese American woman was very kind and kept bowing and making very small, timid gestures, which made him nervous. It left him feeling gigantic and maladroit, like some ham-fisted juggernaut who would break things if he didn't tiptoe. She took him through the exhibits section of the museum and downstairs to a big library, where she filled an oak worktable for him with manila folders of photographs, oral histories, and long lists of names. More than 110,000 people had been deported. There were 10 camps. Manzanar alone held 10,000 people. He learned one thing right away that astonished him.

Right across the channel from the docks where he'd played as a child, at the tip of Terminal Island—where he had seen only tuna canneries and parking lots—there had once been a thriving Japanese fishing town of 3,000 people. Before the war, a sprawling village of Japanese immigrants and a few Filipinos had wrapped around a big square inlet that served as a fishing harbor, just like the “American” one on the mainland.

He stared at one photograph that showed a block of two-story shops, Yoshioka General Merchandise, Eagle Drugs, a liquor store, dry goods, and—he strained his eyes and peered closely—Shoji Market. Beyond were row after row of identical frame houses. Cannery workers and fishermen. The masts of a few boats were visible to one side. An inventory of the buildings that the navy had flattened told him there had been several schools, a cultural center, and two churches—Buddhist and Baptist.

The librarian had provided transcripts of dozens of oral histories that the museum had accumulated. It had been a rough, working-class community—a law unto itself—and Nisei who moved in had had to pick up its rough-and-tumble street games and even a local slang that had grown up there. The grade schools in the village fed into Dana Junior High on the mainland, where he'd gone himself twenty years later. Sports varied from semiorganized street baseball to kendo and judo. One reminiscence talked about massive shoals of kids roaring through the streets playing a variant of kick-the-can. During the Depression, the village survived by swapping its fish for vegetables from the Japanese farmers who grew their crops along the Palos Verdes Peninsula on the far side of San Pedro.