Love and Other Consolation Prizes(11)
Yung didn’t know if that was a nickname. It was a strange word, in a strange dialect. To him the words meant: I’m girl.
As the others let her go, she sat next to Yung and caught her breath. Her eyes welling with emotion, she smiled at him and said, “Are you still going to marry me?”
EVERYONE PLAYS, NOBODY WINS
(1962)
The morning after Juju had visited, Ernest found himself dwelling on memories of that night in the cargo hold. He remembered how a few days later the ship finally reached Victoria, British Columbia, where the boys and girls were separated with little fanfare or explanation. I lost my baby sister after two days, Ernest thought. Then I lost my new big sisters in less than four weeks. I didn’t even get to tell them goodbye.
Beneath a sliver of a moon he’d been transferred with the other boys to a small sloop, presumably bound for Port Townsend, Washington—a gateway to the salmon canneries and sawmills. Or perhaps the oyster fields. The boys watched as the dark city slid by in the night a few hundred yards away. But they had only a glimpse before they were tied into burlap bags and laid on the deck. The sailors had told them the subterfuge was for the boys’ own good, in case the Coast Guard stopped the boat and customs officials wanted to inspect the cargo. They’d been told to lie perfectly still, silent, and not to worry. But on that first night, amid a flurry of ships’ horns, yelling, and what sounded like firecrackers, Ernest remembered clutching his mother’s hairpin.
In his mind’s eye the smugglers were the infamous Ben Ure and Lawrence “Pirate” Kelly, men known for bringing illegal Chinese workers into Washington via Deception Pass. But now, as a grown man, Ernest knew he’d probably been projecting. Maybe that was something he’d read in a history book—something to explain away the horrible, helpless feeling of being hoisted up and tossed overboard, falling through the air, crashing into the frigid water and tasting the salt. He heard cries for help and then the muffled gurgles of the other boys as they sank. Somehow he’d managed to use that hairpin to rip a hole large enough to fit his fingers through, then his hands, large enough to tear his way free. The other boys had drowned by the time Ernest reached the surface, their shrouded bodies bumping him gently in the darkness, bobbing on the incoming tide like driftwood.
Ernest closed his eyes and remembered lights flickering on the horizon, rising and falling beneath the waves as he dog-paddled to the nearest shore, shivering, his lips and fingers numb. The black water was so cold his skin tingled and then burned.
He saw the search beacon of a Coast Guard vessel in the distance, moving away from him. He was terrified and exhausted, at the point of drowning when a policeman on shore patrol must have spotted him—dove in and pulled him to shore. The policeman shivered as he wrapped Ernest in his coat, which smelled like coffee and cigarettes.
The policeman’s name was Ernest, and so Yung had been given his rescuer’s name, though he never saw the man again. But he never forgot his words: “You’re a lucky kid. In my twenty years on the job, Dead Man’s Bay has always lived up to its title.”
—
ERNEST SHOOK HIMSELF out of his daydreams and checked his watch. He grabbed his coat and hat, and went to meet his friend Pascual at Osami’s Barbershop.
They both lived at the Publix now, Ernest’s three years to Pascual’s thirty. With his friend’s fluctuating nighttime schedule, weeks could go by without them running into one another, so they’d adopted a routine of meeting every week for a shave and a haircut and then a late breakfast at the Linyen, Don Ting, or the Little Three Grand Café. His friend was an ardent fan of the many comic books and pulp magazines Osami always had on hand amid the local Asian papers. Pascual called the barbershop his reading room, so Ernest wasn’t surprised to walk in and find him already engrossed in an issue of My Greatest Adventure. The cover story was titled “I Was Marooned on Earth!”
That’s how Ernest felt.
“Kuya Ernest, I almost didn’t think you’d show up. What happened, you been avoiding me or something?” his friend asked as he reclined in a red leather chair while the barber slathered menthol-scented shaving cream on Pascual’s dark, windburned cheeks and his salt-and-pepper sideburns. “I went to the Black and Tan last night. That widow, Dolores, was asking about you. Maybe it’s time the Lone Ranger got back in the saddle. I know that, technically, you’re still married and all, and I know you’ve done so much for Gracie these past few years. I’m just thinking, maybe it’s time. Maybe she would want you to be happy or something.”
Ernest shook his head and smiled at the comforting sound of his friend’s Filipino accent, the way the word thing came out ting. Ernest grabbed a refolded newspaper from a wooden rack and sat in the adjacent chair as the barber’s wife rolled down his shirt collar and wrapped a seersucker cape over his shoulders. She pinned the fabric around his neck with a silver clip as he opened the paper. The coupons had already been cut out.
“The usual, Mr. Ernest?” she asked.
Ernest nodded and spoke to Pascual, whom he could see in the mirror, both of their images reflected back and forth, shrinking toward infinity. “I’ve been busy. Besides, which one is Dolores?”
His friend paused as Osami drew a straight razor across Pascual’s left cheek and then wiped the excess shaving cream on a towel draped over his arm. “So many older, single ladies who remember you from when you used to come with Gracie. I talk to them, but they always just want to know about you. And that’s your cruel magic, my handsome friend—you do better than me, even when you’re not in the building.”