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.”
As the barber’s wife put a cloth on Ernest’s shoulder and wrapped a steaming towel around his face, Pascual spoke in a more serious tone. “You know, someone else passed by the club last night. Your daughter Juju—she went around, asked everyone willing to talk, and her questions were all about you, my mysterious kaibigan.”
Ernest felt his stomach tighten, and the towel felt suffocating.
“But no worries, no one said too much, mainly because nobody there knows anything. But you know your bata, she can be pretty insistent. She kept asking people about your childhood, about the neighborhood you grew up in, where you went to school, if you were adopted or anything, if you ever went by another name. Half the bar knows her from the newspaper or as your daughter, so they just played along, but I think she scared the other half. They probably pegged you for some kind of red spy or something. Which only made you more intriguing to Dolores.” Pascual shook his head. “Magic, my friend.”
Magic, Ernest thought. That was how Pascual somehow made a living as a full-time gambler and part-time nine-ball hustler at the Palace, a local disturbance in the shape of a pool hall. Pascual had once been a member of the International Longshoremen and Warehousemen’s Union, until the national branch called them Communists and tossed everyone out. He couldn’t fight the accusations because Filipino workers were being deported for associating with improper organizations. That’s how they’d met, more than thirty years ago, both as newly naturalized citizens.
“You didn’t tell Juju—” Ernest asked.
Pascual cut him off. “Nah, I didn’t say much. Not that I can remember anyway.” Then he shrugged. “Aw, I might have said a few things, but then to make sure I didn’t spill the beans, I switched to Tagalog, started talking like I just stepped off the boat from Luzon, which isn’t too hard after a few whiskey sours. Juju just laughed and went around, kept asking folks, but—you know, she hit the No-No Boys pretty hard back when she was a cub reporter, tore up the whole neighborhood, so even those who know her aren’t inclined to say too much. And me, I wouldn’t give you up for a million dollars, on my mother’s grave.” Pascual crossed himself, then blew a kiss toward the old tin ceiling, painted white. “Rest in peace, Mama. Diyos pagpalain.”
“God bless us all,” the barber’s wife said as she removed the towel from Ernest’s face and began applying shaving cream to his cheeks with a small boar-bristle brush. Ernest opened the newspaper and flipped through the local news pages, searching until he found her byline: Judy Young. And her piercing photo next to a neighborhood feature titled “WE MUST SAVE PIKE PLACE MARKET,” SAYS WING LUKE, SEATTLE’S FIRST ORIENTAL CITY COUNCILMAN. The headline seemed fairly benign, but the article about rescuing the market, which had fallen into disrepair after all the Japanese farmers and their families were taken away, didn’t pull any punches. The old internment camps were a taboo subject, but Juju had no problem addressing that particular elephant in the room.
Ernest remembered when his daughter had graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in journalism. He’d joked and called her Lois Lane.
She’d said, “I’d rather you call me Nellie Bly.”
Ernest heard a door chime and lowered the paper as a pair of Chinese boys, probably still in grade school, came into the barbershop with stubby pencils tucked behind their ears. One of them held up a pad of paper that had been printed with grids for Saturday’s lottery numbers and stamped by the Sun May Store around the corner.
Ernest said, “No thanks. I don’t play,” while he watched Pascual fill out ten sheets as though each set of numbers was part of a complex math equation, a riddle that could be solved with sound reasoning, cunning, and a pinch of guile. Then he handed the boys a sawbuck from his money clip and flipped them a silver dollar to split between them for running his lottery picks back to the mercantile.
“Hey, Donnie, if I win that ten thousand dollars,” Pascual shouted as they scurried to the shop next door, “I’ll give you each five—no, ten percent, eh!”
Ernest noticed Osami and his wife glancing at one another, eyebrows raised. Then they shook their heads in tandem and continued shaving. He listened as the barber’s wife spoke to her husband in Japanese, and then chuckled. She switched back to English and patted Pascual on the shoulder. “People been playing that lottery ever since I was born.” She extended the word born into two even syllables. “Nobody ever win that big prize money—nobody. And I guarantee, if someone ever does, you can bet it’ll be a Sun May cousin.”
Ernest smiled and stared out the window at Chinatown, a neighborhood not without crime or scandal, but no more or less than the Central District, or Fremont, Rainier Beach, or downtown Seattle for that matter. Now Juju was canvassing the neighborhood.
She’s tenacious, Ernest thought, just like her mother. Juju was placing small bets all over town, like Pascual playing the lottery, hoping to eventually cash in.
RISING FROM GRACE
(1962)
An hour later Ernest regarded a plastic angel that dangled from the rearview mirror of Juju’s red Volkswagen Beetle. As she drove them from Chinatown to her home on the south side of Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill, the ornament swayed back and forth and its golden thread entangled the figure’s halo, leaving the heavenly messenger looking as though it had been lynched.