Read Online Under the Blood-Red Sun by Graham Salisbury - Free Book Online

He flicked his eyebrows and grinned. Billywaved and Keet turned, lifting the slab of fish to his shoulder on the palm of his hand.
    Papa winked at Billy. “You nice to give away that fish.”
    “No problem,” Billy said, and I laughed.
    For a few days I actually thought Keet was okay. I could forget about the past and maybe we could even become friends again.
    And then the spying started.

Black Zenith
    The World Series began on the first day of October, not a minute too soon. Keet was getting on my nerves.
    At first he’d started sneaking around, watching me out by the pigeons, and then, getting braver, he moved to the bushes around our house. One time, Grampa caught him nosing around the chickens and chased him away with a machete. Keet just laughed and called him a crazy old Buddhahead as he ran.
    So I was more than ready to listen to the Yankees and the Dodgers. Anyway, fifteen very-hard-to-get cents were at stake. You could buy a new baseball for that!
    I figured me and the Dodgers had a pretty good chance—Pete Reiser the slugger, Pee Wee Reese, and Mickey Owen the catcher. And Whit Wyatt, a twenty-two-game winner. Not bad.
    But the Yankees had Joe DiMaggio, ace pitcher Red Ruffing, and Joe Gordon the slugger.
    Grampa had a very good friend, an old goat with white hair named Charlie, the same Charlie who’d given Papa the opelu bait fish. Charlie was pure Hawaiian and worked for Billy’s parents as their gardener. He lived on the Davises’ place like we lived on the Wilsons’, but Charlie’s house was even smaller than ours.
    Grampa and Charlie spent a lot of their spare time together. Mostly they just sat around and talked. But sometimes Grampa managed to talk Charlie into going down to Kaka’ako with him to watch Japanese silent movies, the kind where they had a
benshi
, the actor-guy who would give you the dialogue. Grampa loved those movies, especially when they had samurai ones.
    Charlie was one of the nicest guys in the world. He’d never tell Grampa those movies were junk, even if he thought they were. He went along, though he probably couldn’t understand more than about ten words of Japanese.
    Anyway, Charlie had something that Grampa would have given half his chickens for—an old black Zenith radio that you could hear the police on. If Grampa loved anything, it was listening to the police talking to each other on that radio. Charlie and Grampa listened almost every night.
    Billy and I managed to talk Charlie into letting us listen to the World Series on his Zenith. Who wanted to listen to it at Billy’s house with Keet and Jake around?
    I didn’t know until we were sitting down to listen to the first game that Billy had already brainwashed Charlieover to the Yankees. In fact, Charlie couldn’t wait for the games to start. Poor Grampa just scowled. He hated American baseball, because he couldn’t understand what the radio said. Too fast. If he liked Japanese
yakyu
, the Japanese kind of baseball, he never said anything about it to me.
    The first three games went very well … for Billy. He was already telling me how he was going to spend my fifteen cents. Okay, so what? Brooklyn was behind two games to one, but they could come back. They still had four games to go.
    The day of the fourth game was a gray and stormy Sunday. Thunder rumbled around in the low clouds that sat heavily on the valley. Grampa had already gone over to Charlie’s to listen to the police before the game started, but I had to boil water in the backyard and help Mama wash clothes.
    Mama finally told me I was more trouble than I was worth and that I might as well get on over to Charlie’s house before I drove her crazy.
    I slipped on a sweatshirt and headed out into the trees. Lucky started to follow, but hurried back under the house when a big
crack
of thunder exploded in the sky.
    I took the trail to diamond grass, and checked to make sure the wind hadn’t blown off the two heavy tarps I’d put over the pigeon