Summer of the Big Bachi Read online

  “Stayin’ there.”

  Mas was surprised. “I thought you Japanese guys stay in fancy places.”

  “Maybe I’m not just an average Japanese guy.”

  Mas had to agree with that. They smoked silently for a few minutes, until Yuki finally spoke up. “I lied to you.”

  Yes, that much was for sure, Mas thought to himself.

  “Back at the exams. I said I was looking for Riki Kimura.”

  Mas stood still, listening to some sparrows chirp in a nearby bush.

  “It’s not him. Not really. I’m actually investigating someone else. Joji Haneda.”

  Mas blew out a stream of smoke.

  “What’s your connection?” Yuki asked. “Why is he so mad at you?”

  “What’s yours?” Mas replied. He wasn’t going to offer anything, at least not without getting more. An alley cat poked its nose into the bush, sending the sparrows away to rest on some telephone lines.

  “It’s related to a piece of land,” Yuki explained, “where my grandmother lives.”

  So, thought Mas, this all has to do with land, which meant money.

  “It’s not my property but my grandmother’s,” Yuki clarified. “It’s where her family house is—just on the outskirts of town. My grandmother inherited it because her older brother, Joji, was dead. Or at least we all thought that he had died. It’s not a big piece of land or anything, but it’s the location. There’s a new set of mansions they’re developing. Sort of retirement mansions.”

  Mas hadn’t been back to Japan in forty years, but he had watched enough Japanese soap operas to know their version of mansions was like those two-bedroom condominiums sprouting all around Pasadena.

  “So this developer’s been after us for the past five years,” Yuki said. “But then NHK compiled this report from America, about hibakusha in California. Who should we see on television, but this man named Joji Haneda.”

  Damn Riki. Mas remembered the CBS interview last year. Why did he have to be an ochoshimono and go after attention? Like bugs to light.

  “Joji Haneda in California, we think. What a coincidence. There’s another Joji Haneda over there. But then the developer starts getting ideas. What if this Haneda is the same Haneda? Then the land would automatically revert to him—you know, son over daughter. Calls are made to various governmental agencies. Faxes are sent to the consulate’s office. Turns out this Joji Haneda is born in the exact same year, exact same village. And his parents have the exact same names. Then all of us start wondering, Is this the same Joji Haneda? My grandmother gets excited. ‘Is this Joji Haneda my brother?’ She can’t tell on the television screen. It’s been fifty years, right? She wants to call him up, but I tell her not to. I need to find out for myself.”

  “How much dis land worth?”

  “Well, I guess, in American dollars . . . three million.”

  Mas nearly choked on his cigarette. Everyone has an angle, he thought. And this boy has a three-million-dollar one.

  “It’s not about the money.” Yuki furrowed his eyebrows, and his skin looked darker than ever.

  Yah, right, thought Mas. It’s always about money. With Akemi’s son dead, the grandson would be set to inherit it all.

  “Do I look like a person who cares about money?”

  “I see all kinds in my job,” said Mas. “Looks don’t mean nutin’.”

  Yuki’s jaw tightened. “I would never sell the land. That’s one thing my father told me before he died: ‘Hang on to it. Keep it in the family. Don’t let it go.’ ”

  “Thatsu all your business. Has nutin’ to do with me.”

  Yuki rubbed his head, the tips of his hair bristling forward. “You know him well. That man who calls himself Joji Haneda.”

  The ash of Mas’s cigarette had burnt down to his knuckles. Mas now had no doubt that Yuki had been pursuing him ever since the medical exams. He knew that he had to be careful—who knew what the boy was up to?

  Yuki continued his interrogation. “What was he talking about? Why was he so upset?”

  “I talk to lots of sonafuguns at a poker game, big deal. Dis free country. Why didn’t you go ova, ask him face-to-face?”

  “And tell him about this property that may be in his name? I don’t think so. I don’t know this man. He could pretend that he’s somebody he’s not.”

  Mas tapped his cigarette and watched the ash blow onto the sidewalk.

  “So you tell me, Arai-san. Don’t you know anything that can help me?”

  Mas swallowed. It was so early he wasn’t thinking straight. Or maybe he had known all along what was going to happen to Yuki Kimura. “Give me some paper and a pen.”

  The boy retrieved a mechanical pencil from his backpack and tore off a piece of notebook paper. Mas wrote down the information as best he could. “Her name is Junko Kakita,” he said. “She ova there in North Hollywood. You ask her whatsu goin’ on.”

  Just when Mas thought he had gotten rid of one kind of trouble, another kind came along. This time it was in the form of a seventy-something Nisei woman in jeans, T-shirt, tennis shoes, and bifocals. Lil Yamada. Mas didn’t know how she’d gotten to the hospital, but she was there, outside, by the pay phones.

  She was inserting quarter after quarter into the public phone like it was a video poker machine. She stopped for a moment and fumbled through her purse, most likely for more change.

  “Whatcha need?” Mas said, pulling a fistful of dimes and nickels from his pocket.

  Lil looked up, flustered. When she saw that it was Mas, her faced colored and hardened just enough for him to know that she was mad as hell. She hesitated, and then picked up some of the coins. “Thank you,” she said. “Calling Joe.”

  Mas let Lil alone for a while. He overheard her talking to her son, saying words like “concussion” and “tests.” But mostly she kept her voice and head down as if she were trying to keep dry in a rainstorm.

  As Mas snuck glances at Lil from the hospital driveway, the pain in his head and back slipped away. Instead, he felt a sharpness in his gut, one that Chizuko used to trigger.

  Chizuko had been the daughter of a small-business man, and smart. She was wearing glasses when Mas met her for the first time, at a meeting arranged by her grandparents and his parents. She wasn’t beautiful, but she didn’t seem to care. Mas was impressed with the way she sat. Her back was rail straight, her thin legs folded underneath her body. Her blouse was striped and neatly tucked into her skirt. Her shiny glasses were perfectly balanced above her tiny nose.

  This woman was a woman of principles, Mas had thought. And his hunch was right. Chizuko had the cleanest kokoro, character and soul, of any person he had ever met. She was the personification of chanto, of doing things just right. She read instructions to everything, from the Bisquick baking mix to tax forms to Dr. Spock to car manuals.

  And she followed each instruction with every power in her being. “Shift the car to D2 on the freeway above 40 miles per hour. You must do it. It says so in the manual,” she said as Mas was driving their new Datsun to San Francisco.

  She valued her female friends, and often gathered flowers in her garden, wrapped them up in newspaper, and presented bouquets on a regular basis. Sometimes she baked cookies or rolled sushi—strips of avocado and imitation crab stuffed into sweetened vinegar rice and covered with black seaweed. Always the rejects, the cookies with burnt bottoms, or crooked slices of sushi, were left for Mas and Mari.

  “Always the kuzu.” Mas munched on a piece of sushi in which the avocado and crab were coming loose from the rice.

  Mari fingered a cracked oatmeal cookie. “Yeah, how come we get the messed-up ones?”

  “Because you give the best away. Tastes the same, anyway, right?”

  Mas complained too, but he secretly agreed with Chizuko. Friends should be given the best of everything. But now, without Chizuko, look what he had served up for Tug and Lil. He had mixed them up in a world that they had no business in. He needed to separate them again,
but deep down inside he knew it was too late.

  After Lil finally got off the phone, Mas mustered up all the courage he could. “Tug orai?” he asked.

  “Well, you know how he is. The doctor wants to keep him overnight for tests, but Tug doesn’t want to listen. Says he’s fine.”

  “Umm.” Mas kept his hands awkwardly at his sides.

  “Didn’t even want to make a police report.”

  “Police?” Mas didn’t know how far they were going to get involved with this.

  “Well, this is a crime, Mas. Assault and battery. That man could have killed Tug.”

  Mas gritted down on his dentures.

  “To see him all banged up like that—” Lil shook her head. “Mas, how could you take him to a place like that?” Her eyes, magnified by her bifocals, were steely black. The sun was starting to rise, and Mas could see the strong lines around her mouth and chin. He wanted to run and escape, but he couldn’t. This was his punishment. His responsibility. He had to hear Lil out.

  “He’s an old man, Mas. I know he still thinks he can do anything, but we only have a few good years left to enjoy. Go places we’ve never been before together. Hawaii. Even Europe.”

  “Sorry,” said Mas. “Very sorry.”

  “I was worried sick. When he didn’t come home by eleven, I even went by your house.”

  “Very sorry,” Mas repeated.

  Tug and Lil were inseparable, especially as they grew older. They had met during the war. She was in a camp in Arkansas; he was in Camp Shelby, Mississippi. She and some other girls had formed a group to cheer up the Nisei soldiers. They made chicken teriyaki and rice; Tug was the only one who bothered to help. When he was sent overseas to Europe, they wrote each other every day until he was wounded. They got married a few months later in an army chapel.

  Lil paused and looked at her watch. “You must be tired now. Why don’t you go home?”

  “No, I fine.”

  “No, please, we’ll be all right.”

  As Mas stared at Lil’s face, he realized that she wasn’t trying to be polite. She wanted him to leave because she couldn’t stand looking at his face.

  By the time Haruo was released, it was already nine o’clock. It was way past breakfast, and Mas was hungry. “I’m stoppin’ ova at the store,” he told Haruo, who was resting in the passenger’s seat of his car.

  Mas was driving, and sped to the old Honda’s limit, causing the car to tremble and cough like Mari’s dog in its last days.

  Mas parked in front of Frank’s, a plain, one-story concrete building with barred windows. Haruo was sleeping now, so Mas entered the liquor store alone.

  “Hey, Mas, haven’t seen you around in a while.” A black man with grizzled hair stood behind a counter surrounded by rows of potato chip bags and shiny bottles of distilled spirits. He wore a short-sleeved cotton shirt over a white undershirt curved at the neck.

  Mas carried a couple of six-packs of beer from the refrigerated cases to the cash register and placed them on the counter beside a fishbowl filled with wrapped bubble gum.

  “Starting early, Mas.” Frank punched buttons on his old-fashioned cash register. “So, what, pack of Marlboros?”

  “Nah. Not today.” Mas pulled down a large bag of tortilla chips from a rack next to the counter.

  “Don’t tell me you quittin’. Heck, I should start selling those patches and nicotine gum. Can make a bundle, I think.”

  The cash register rang, spitting out the bottom drawer. “Nine-ninety,” Frank said, collecting Mas’s twenty-dollar bill. As he made change, he asked, “Hey, by the way, you see Yano’s kids anymore?”

  Mas shook his head. The Yanos had owned an old, rickety store next door full of pickled plums and dried seaweed. Mr. Yano had been tall for a Japanese. Most of his teeth were rotten, but that hadn’t stopped him from smiling all the time.

  “Yeah, I’ve been thinkin’ about ’em. That was a shame, I tell you. Now, why would anybody go and shoot the ole man—for fifty dollars, no less. That Mr. Yano, he wouldn’t hurt a fly. ‘Hey, Frank-san,’ he’d call out to me anytime I’d come through the door. He had some nasty stuff in there—long pickles in this mean brown stinkin’ stuff. What do you call it?”

  “Tsukemono.”

  “Yeah, su-KI-mo-no. Ooh-whee. He’d always pick that stuff up and shake it in my face.” Frank lifted the six-packs into a brown paper bag. “And remember how Yano liked your daughter. He would call something every time he saw her. What was it again?”

  Mas hugged the bag of six-packs, feeling the coldness against his chest.

  “It was that word, you know, for ‘daughter.’ Huh, Mas, ‘daughter’?”

  As Mas pulled the door open, Frank spoke again, this time louder. “Oh, now I remember. Mu-SU-me, wasn’t it?”

  Haruo awoke when Mas climbed into the car with the beer and chips. After they got back on the road, Mas scowled. “That ole man talk too much. Now he goin’ on and on ’bout Yano-san.”

  “Yano, Yano. Oh, yah, Yano.” Haruo patted down his strip of hair. “That was so kawaiso. Was gonna retire, huh? Rememba we all went down to Huntington to give blood for Yano-san. You got all dizzy, almost gotsu sick.”

  Mas had agreed to do it only because Chizuko had pushed him. Then later he found out that his blood type—AB—was not even compatible with Yano’s. “Yah, all for nutin’.”

  “Not for nutin’. I mean, Yano didn’t make it, but maybe you helped some other fella.”

  Mas cringed to think that his blood was now pulsing in a stranger’s veins and heart.

  “Even me, I plan to give my body to doctas after I die.” Haruo opened up the bag of tortilla chips and shoved some into his mouth.

  “They gonna take it?”

  “Oh, yah. Who wouldn’t? Everyone wants to know whatsamatta. Some people ask right out. You know those hakujins—’What happened to your face?’ I used to say, ‘Bomb, World War Two.’ Then the people got real quiet; didn’t wanna talk no more. Then I start changin’ my story. ‘Car crash.’ ‘Wife got mad.’ ‘Fire.’ People start noddin’ their head, tellin’ me about same kind of accident their brother, sister, in-law, was in.”

  Mas didn’t know how Haruo was going to help anybody by giving his body to science, but there was no use asking more questions. The ride back home was quiet, aside for Haruo’s licking his fingers, one finger at a time.

  “You’re lucky, Mas,” Haruo said finally.

  “Huh?”

  “You got no mark on you.” Haruo folded over the top edge of the plastic bag. “Itsu like it neva happened.”

  * * *

  Once he got home, Mas could not rest. He wandered from the refrigerator to the living room easy chair to the bedroom to the kitchen table. No matter where he wandered, he heard the ticking of the clock on his bowling trophy. He had grown used to the quiet, but now it felt so heavy that he couldn’t breathe.

  He remembered, years ago, whenever he returned from work, the house was full of smells and sounds. His daughter, Mari, was usually in the kitchen, her books sprawled out on the table, her strange-looking shoes called wallabies abandoned by the doorway. Chizuko, a full-length apron tied around her neck and waist, would be putting a tamale pie in the oven, or frying potato and ground beef croquettes over the stove. The whole kitchen would smell like freshly steamed rice, short-grain and sticky.

  But one winter day, no remnants of Mari were seen or heard. “What happened? Is Mari home?” Mas asked after closing the screen on the kitchen door.

  “Masao-san, take off your work boots. I just mopped. She’s somewhere. Maybe in her room.” Chizuko continued chopping her carrots.

  Mas left his lunch cooler on the kitchen counter and flung open Mari’s door.

  “Dad!” Mari looked up from her pink desk, her dark eyebrows pinched together. Her hair, long and frizzy, dominated her tiny body. On her teeth were metal braces, which cost Mas at least a grand. “Knock, I keep telling you. This is my room. Private.” A textbook was open on her
desk, and someone had drawn fierce lines and circles through one of the photographs.

  “Whatchu doin’?”

  “My homework, Dad. Leave me alone.” A large framed corkboard, which Mas had assembled and painted, was hung over her desk. Magazine clippings of young, pale hakujin boys with long hair were displayed on the board with thumbtacks.

  “Orai, orai.” Mas left, pulling the door closed until he heard the click of the latch.

  As they ate their curry rice that night, Mas knew that something was wrong. Mari didn’t fight to see her television program, and let Chizuko view the nightly news with Walter Cronkite. She went straight to her room afterward, and Mas could hear the static from her portable AM-FM radio behind the closed door. When Mari went to the bathroom, Mas snuck into her bedroom and took a closer look at her textbook. It had maps of Hawaii and Asia, photographs of hakujin men in helmets and uniforms. He flipped to the page that was defaced. A newsstand full of papers that read JAPS BOMB PEARL HARBOR.

  The next day, Mari seemed in a better mood. Even her bedroom door was open, and she had a large poster board on the shag rug.

  “Whatchu doin’?”

  “Homework.” Mari bent over the board. She wore striped kneesocks, which were worn at the heels.

  “Don’t bother her.” Chizuko was standing behind Mas, wiping her damp hands on the sides of the apron. “She has an oral project on Friday. World War Two. She’s doing it on Hiroshima.”

  Mari turned, her teeth glittering with metal. “Yeah, I’m going to interview you, Dad. Because you were there, right? That’s what Mom told me.”

  Mas went into the hall closet and took out a fresh T-shirt and jeans. In the bathroom, he stripped off his green-stained clothes and stuffed them in the hamper. He washed his hands with soap and hot water, trying to remove the dirt from his fingernails with a brush. But no matter how hard he scrubbed, he couldn’t get rid of those lines of dirt.

  Mari had Mas sit on his fake leather easy chair, while she settled on the couch. Her hair was pushed back with a headband, exposing her high cheekbones. She held a pen and notebook. She even crossed her bony legs, her striped socks cuffed at the knees. “Okay, tell me your full name and birth date.”