![]() ![]() Hisao was lean and tough and worked methodically, never altering his pace. They drew water from a feeder creek and warmed themselves at a slash pile kept burning by his children-girls in rubber boots, including Hatsue-who dragged branches and brought armfuls of brush to it. His family lived in two canvas tents while they cleared their newly purchased property. When he was eight years old he'd seen the Japanese man trudging along behind his swaybacked white plow horse: a Japanese man who carried a machete at his belt in order to cut down vine maples. Ishmael decided to park at the bottom of the grade beside Gordon Ostrom's mailbox and walk the fifty yards up South Beach Drive, keeping his DeSoto well out of the road while he convinced Hisao Imada to accept a ride from him. Ishmael knew he would not ask for help, in part because San Piedro people never did, in part because such was his character. Hisao Imada was small enough most of the time, but he looked even smaller bundled up in his winter clothes, his hat pulled low and his scarf across his chin so that only his mouth, nose, and eyes showed. ![]() Ishmael recognized it as the Willys station wagon that belonged to Fujiko and Hisao Imada in fact, Hisao was working with a shovel at its rear right wheel, which had dropped into the roadside drainage ditch. At the intersection of Center Valley Road and South Beach Drive Ishmael spied, ahead of him in the bend, a car that had failed to negotiate the grade as it coiled around a grove of snow-hung cedars. ![]()
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