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  She moved to Angeles Mesa, into the house on Edgehill where Frank lived with his mother. Frank’s mother cleaned houses now, and Frank worked every day at the store. Mrs. Sakai, after years of propositions, suggestions, pleading, and hints, was not joyous so much as relieved that her only son had finally married. She kept her dead husband appraised of the events, filling him in every evening as she paid her respects in front of the butsudan, and he seemed pleased with the match as well. The children came quickly—Rose about a year after the marriage, in 1948; Lois just a year and a half later. There was a brother too, three years younger than Lois, but he’d been stillborn, expelled from the womb with the umbilical cord twisted around his neck. For the first few years, Mary Sakai had stayed home with her children; when Lois was five, she went back to school and finally became a teacher. And there on Edgehill Street they had stayed, for seventeen years, until that other conflagration, the war turned inward, of 1965.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1994

  SITTING IN the lobby of the Marcus Garvey Community Center, Jackie couldn’t recall a time she felt more out of place. More like an overseas visitor, scared and clutching her passport. She’d expected something small—a rec room and a couple of offices—not this huge, sprawling facility, room upon room upon room, a layered concrete honeycomb of a building. And people everywhere—mostly women, a sprinkling of men, and a hive of small children, countless bees buzzing and swirling. She sat in her orange plastic chair near the receptionist’s window and tried to take everything in. The cowboy-hat-wearing security guard. The teenage boys examining books in the little shop area, busy as an airport newsstand. The auditorium, which had just hosted some kind of meeting and was now disgorging laughing, jostling women. Hers the only face that wasn’t black. No, here were a couple of Latino women, speaking Spanish. Hers the only face that wasn’t black or Latino. Out of place here. A stranger. A foreigner.

  Loda Thomas had told her to come—Jackie had called that morning between classes and run the name Curtis Martindale by her. She hadn’t heard of him. But then, an hour later, she called Jackie back and told her that there was someone in her office who might be able to help. A man, younger than Loda, who’d grown up in the neighborhood. She should come down that afternoon, Loda said. He wanted to see her in person.

  Jackie had been too embarrassed to tell Loda that she didn’t know how to get to the Crenshaw district, and so she’d gotten directions from Rebecca—for a price. That morning, in their Tax Law class, Jackie had been asked to discuss the long-term effects of Proposition 13, and Rebecca kept puncturing holes in the argument. Jackie knew, from the angle of Rebecca’s head and the mischievous teasing lilt of her voice, that her friend was getting her back for not returning her call about the notes.

  “So if I give you my notes,” Jackie said as they headed to the nearest sandwich stand for lunch, “will you stop attacking me in class?”

  Rebecca grinned. “Sorry about that. But you’re so much fun to mess with. You look so tormented and mortified.”

  Rebecca Nakanishi was Jackie’s teaser, tormentor, and occasional friend. She was like a smoke-bomb—at parties, at school, she exploded into rooms, as if she knew that someone was about to attack and she looked forward to the challenge. People rarely took her up on it. Rebecca had inherited her glorious black hair and olive skin from her Japanese father, and her green eyes and slender frame from her Irish-American mother. The physical elements worked well together, and she attracted—and appeared to be attracted to—reckless, strong-willed people of both genders. Jackie liked her, but was slightly afraid of her and could only take her in small doses. She couldn’t imagine what Rebecca thought of her.

  Rebecca jabbered on as they waited for their burgers, about job interviews and their professor’s bad haircut; finally Jackie loosened up and had to smile. And when Jackie eventually asked her for directions to Crenshaw, knowing that she’d gone to a reading in Leimert Park the week before, Rebecca was glad to give them—she flattened out a napkin and drew her a map.

  The map was perfect. After going home and doing some reading, Jackie traded her backpack for a purse, went down to her car, and set the map and her Thomas Guide on the passenger seat. It was a little after three. Judging from Rebecca’s directions, it looked like a twenty-minute drive to Marcus Garvey, but traffic was horrible, the boulevards even more clogged than usual because two parts of the 10 Freeway had collapsed in the earthquake. On Crenshaw Boulevard, just before the 10, there were several blocks of huge, old Craftsman bungalows, which had clearly been stately and gorgeous in some distant time. There was a slow-rolling hill, and from the top, a clear view of Baldwin Hills and Inglewood. The view was surprisingly pleasant, Jackie thought, but misleading—like a glimpse of the ocean that obscured the sandbars and sharks underneath.

  As Jackie emerged on the other side of the underpass, she took another breath. She was south of the freeway now, and was decidedly anxious. She locked her doors, and then felt ashamed of herself. But already the streets looked different than they did to the north of the freeway. The large old bungalows were replaced by liquor stores, discount clothing shops, fast-food places. On the left, she saw the Korean Catholic Church, Doug’s Wine and Spirits, and a burned-out gas station. On the right, Mama’s Soul Food, Victory Guns, two storefront churches, and a store sign that said—she looked twice to make sure—“98 cent Housewives etc.” Each place had a black accordion gate attached to the front. It seemed like every other building was vacant or charred from ’92, or cordoned off because of damage from the quake.

  At Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard she took a left, in front of the Baldwin Hills-Crenshaw Plaza. Now she was near her grandfather’s old store and old house, although she didn’t know exactly where they were. Jackie kept abreast of local news enough to know that this area was undergoing an economic resurgence— but if this was what it looked like when times were good, she couldn’t imagine what it was like when things were bleak.

  She counted off four blocks and saw the sign for Marcus Garvey. Then the building—the tall windows and glass doors, the wide flat honeycomb she couldn’t see the back of. There was a small green lawn in the front with manicured bushes and trees. The whole complex glittered against the tans and grays of the surrounding neighborhood, like a mirage in a desert—an idea that clearly had not been lost on the people who worked there. The sign read: “Marcus Garvey Community Center—an Oasis of Hope.”

  Now, in the waiting room, she pretended to read a magazine, half-listening to one of the women behind the front desk talk to a young man leaning into her window. Then someone was standing over her, and she looked up and saw Loda Thomas. She had the same grave face, the same stiff-looking waves she remembered from the funeral; when Jackie met her eyes, though, she smiled.

  “Thanks so much for inviting me,” Jackie said.

  “Not at all. It’s nice to see you again. And it’s always good to have people visit Marcus Garvey.”

  Loda took her on a short tour, pointing out the library, the classrooms, the dozens of offices, the exercise room, the kitchen, the computer facilities.

  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like this,” said Jackie, truthfully. Laura would love this place, she thought. It was part rec center, part school, part office. The building itself was not as nice as it had looked from outside. Some of the walls were painted a thick industrial lemon yellow, others were naked gray cinderblock. The floors were covered with a faded carpet, pukeorange and worn through in many places. The furniture all looked like garage-sale pieces or hand-me-downs from Staples.

  But the building was jumping. Swarming with life. And Jackie, despite her discomfort, couldn’t help feeling invigorated.

  “Yes, it’s quite a madhouse,” Loda said as they turned another corner. There were several small children clumped together in the hallway, and they scattered as the women approached. “We run several different programs here—literacy classes, which are my responsibility, a GED course, co
mputer training, after-school, day care. The after-school program is James’s baby. He’s who I’m taking you to meet. He started that several years ago, along with the young fathers program.”

  “I’m sorry, who is he again?”

  “James Lanier. He grew up a few blocks from here, and he was just a little boy when your grandfather had the store. He seemed very interested in talking to you. Which is something. He usually doesn’t make a lot of time for people who aren’t connected to his programs.”

  Jackie didn’t have time to wonder what this meant, because Loda had stopped in front of a closed door. She rapped lightly. From inside a muffled voice bid them to enter.

  Loda pushed the door open and stepped in. Jackie followed. The man behind the desk was looking down, writing something. “James,” Loda said, “this is Jackie Ishida. Frank Sakai’s granddaughter.”

  “Hi,” Jackie said. She was oddly nervous.

  The man looked up at them and rose from behind his small desk. He seemed huge in the tiny office, and Jackie had the impression that if he spread his arms, he could touch the walls on either side of him. Lanier was about 6’3", and he looked like the former athlete he was—big biceps, thick chest, and slim, solid hips, with a slightly rounded belly. His clothes were neat but not overly dressy—khakis, a white shirt, a thin black tie. He gave Jackie a quick, undisguised once-over, then held his large hand out over the desk. “James Lanier.”

  His voice was surprisingly quiet for such a powerful-looking man. Jackie shook his hand firmly, and the solid anchor of his arm made her feel both grounded and unmoored. She felt this man could see right into her, the neat structured piles of her, the lines of her she’d never cross or blur. “Hi. It’s nice to meet you. Thanks for seeing me today.”

  Her voice sounded false to her, and to Lanier as well. He waited a moment before he spoke again. “No problem. Thanks for driving down here.”

  Loda excused herself, and as she left, Jackie resisted the urge to say no, don’t leave, but if you leave, don’t close the door. But Loda left, and the door clicked shut. Lanier sat down and indicated that Jackie should do the same.

  Jackie sat in a plain brown desk chair. She looked around the office, at the books and folders on the table, the scattered papers on the desk, the pictures and plaques and children’s drawings on all the walls. She noticed the baby pictures on the bulletin board above Lanier’s shoulder and wondered if any of the children were his. “Nice office,” she said, too brightly, and Lanier raised an eyebrow.

  “It’ll do.”

  It came out harsher than he intended. But he wasn’t sure what he thought of this granddaughter. She was so clearly out of her element here. Different from Sakai, whom he hadn’t known well. But who was as much a part of the neighborhood as the eighty-year-old trees in front of his apartment. Rooted deep. Expected there. Permanent. And this fresh cutting, potted in richer soil, producing not nearly as special a plant. A stranger, outsider, even though her beginnings were here.

  Lanier, like Sakai, was an insider. It was his business to know the neighborhood, to be aware of which people were harmless; which kids were on a dangerous course he needed to try and disrupt; which kids were already lost. He lived and breathed Crenshaw, always had. Sometimes, as he drove to work in the morning, hearing palm trees rustle and seeing children walk to school and watching the sun start to come into its power, he experienced a joy so perfect and complete that he didn’t need anything else. It would pass—kids would get arrested, drop out of school, or die—but this one moment of perfect happiness, of one-ness with the neighborhood, was the thing that made it all worthwhile.

  But now, he felt bad for being abrupt with Frank’s granddaughter. He saw Frank’s angular face on her, his thin sharp blade of a nose. So he looked at her directly and said, “I’m sorry about your grandfather.”

  Staring down at her hands, she said, “Thank you.” Then, looking up, she saw that he meant it. He really had a good face. His forehead was wide and expressive, and running across it were three long wrinkles, just starting to lay claim in the flesh. His nose was stately, and Jackie noticed that when she said something, it registered not in his eyes but in his flaring, widening nostrils. His lips were full and moist, and his jaw was square and anvil-like; any fist that struck it might disintegrate on impact. The thing that both disturbed his face and underlined its perfection was the deep, inch-long scar just inside his left ear. James Lanier was on the verge of being a beautiful man, and his scar both pushed him toward that distinction and held him safely away from it.

  “We all are,” Jackie continued. “It’s been a crazy last few weeks, with him dying and the earthquake.”

  Lanier nodded. “Did you have a lot of damage?”

  “No, not really. There were some cracks in my walls and I lost a few plates. How about you?”

  “About the same. A few plates, a couple of lamps. And we didn’t have much damage here either, so it was real busy for a while—the schools were closed so all the kids were coming here.”

  “You know, on top of everything else, my poor grandfather had to live through another big quake. He hated them. My aunt told me that after the quake of ’71, he slept out in the back yard for a week.”

  Lanier smiled wryly. “There are people still doing that this time,” he said. A noisy group of people passed by in the hallway, and he waited until they were gone before he spoke again. “Were you close to your grandfather?”

  “No, not really. I used to be when I was younger, but then he moved further away, and I got older, and we kind of, just, you know. Lost touch.”

  “I didn’t know him well, either,” Lanier said, which made Jackie feel a bit less judged. “That’s why I didn’t go to the funeral. Didn’t even hear about it, actually, until Loda told me this morning. I was only about eight when his store shut down. But I do remember that he was always real nice—he gave the older boys baseball cards every time they got an A on a test. The kids I hung out with knew him better.”

  Jackie nodded. “I wish I could have seen him then,” she said, and she didn’t know this was true until she’d said it.

  You could have seen him now, Lanier thought, but he kept this to himself. It wasn’t his business to chastise her. And he was making her nervous, although this wouldn’t have been unusual, even if she wasn’t a stranger, and small, and Japanese. Lanier was the kind of man that other men loved—strong, understated, dependable. He gave his life to them, and to boys who had started the journey. And they accepted and admired him, his sternness and discipline. But women didn’t know what to do with him. He was like a mountain that provided no avenue for scaling, no trails up through the dense and thorny brush. So it was no surprise to Lanier that this woman didn’t know how to approach. Not that men understood him any better. Although they admired his purity, his complete independence, they couldn’t see that this strength came at the price of company and comfort. They didn’t know that half Lanier’s sternness was loneliness, calcified. The empty solitude on top of the mountain.

  “Anyway,” Jackie said finally, “that’s not why I came here today.”

  Lanier looked at her and nodded, waiting for her to continue.

  “I’m looking for someone who would have been a kid in the fifties or sixties, a boy who probably used to go to my grandfather’s store.”

  “Yes,” Lanier replied, “Curtis Martindale.” He hadn’t said the name out loud in years, although he’d thought it, dreamed it, watched it weave and twist and circle around him.

  Jackie leaned forward. “Do you know him?”

  “Used to. His daddy was my mama’s brother. Me and Curtis and his little brother Cory, we used to hang out all the time. Cory was my age and Curtis was older.”

  “Oh, great.” This was easier than she’d expected. “Well, I think my grandfather knew him. He mentioned him in some papers my aunt found after he died.”

  “That makes sense. He practically lived at your grandfather’s store, and he worked there for a coupl
e of years. A lot of the older boys hung out there.” He remembered a group of them sitting on milk crates out front. He in overalls, Curtis in his work pants and apron. James—Jimmy—wriggled in between Curtis and another boy, sweater warm and scratchy against his cheek. Anything to be next to his cousin. They were listening to the radio that Mr. Sakai had set up by the door. The Dodgers versus the Yankees, in the ’63 World Series. Mr. Sakai handing out ice-cold sodas, beaming, as the Dodgers swept the Yankees in four.

  “So why you looking for him?” asked Lanier.

  “Actually,” Jackie began, then stopped abruptly. She couldn’t think of a convenient lie, and she didn’t want to mention the money. But a partial truth was probably safe. “My grandfather left him something in his will.”