Blood Hina Read online

  Haruo noticed Mas’s discomfort and laughed when he finally caught his breath after one especially long smooch.

  “Mas, youzu just wait. Your turn’s comin’.”

  Mas knew what Haruo was getting at. Haruo had invited their professor friend, Genessee Howard, to the wedding tomorrow. Genessee had been just a tomodachi, a friend. How could she be more? She was a professor at UCLA, after all. Why would any woman with a head on her shoulders want to be romantically involved with Mas? He was out of her league, and Haruo was so blind with his own version of love that he couldn’t see it.

  Mas picked up an almond cookie from the lazy susan when Itchy Iwasaki, one of the heads of the Lopez, Sing, and Iwasaki mortuary in Lincoln Heights, approached their table. Mas wasn’t quite sure why he was there—this event was for the living (well, at least barely), not the dead—but he remembered that Itchy was distantly related to Spoon through marriage.

  “Good to see you at the track, Haruo.” He tugged at one of his trademark enormous ears. “Haven’t been there in years. No need to bet onsite with computers and everything.”

  “Oh yah, good to see you, Itch.” Haruo then awkwardly tried to change the subject to the mortuary—“business good, must be with all these funerals”—but Mas’s ears kept ringing. The track was off limits to Haruo, at least according to his counselor in Little Tokyo. What was he doing at the track, especially now that he was going to be a married man?

  “I’m not feeling too well, Haruo,” Spoon pronounced loudly, her fortune cookie broken but not eaten on a napkin in front of her.

  Both daughters, Debra and Donna, looked across the table with concern and accusation.

  “It’s probably from the MSG.”

  “I told them no MSG.”

  “But you know there’s always MSG.”

  As the two sisters argued, Mas’s head started to pound. Leftovers had been scooped into takeout boxes and bagged. Only more small talk awaited. As the best man, Mas was obligated to hang around, but assisting the bride-to-be was as good an excuse as any to make his getaway. He turned to Haruo, who was holding Spoon’s wrinkled hand. “I take her home,” Mas said.

  “Youzu sure, Mas?”

  “Yah. Get there faster if I go.”

  Haruo glanced over at the adjoining table of teenagers throwing chow mein noodles at each other and nodded his head. “Thinksu you’re right.”

  Spoon was obviously of the same mind because she nodded as Haruo whispered their plan in her ear.

  The two daughters were not happy—each vied for the right to escort Spoon home—until the old woman finally had enough. “Mas is taking me home. He is alone and has no one to worry about but himself, and Haruo needs to pay the bill.”

  With that, the daughters complied. Mas could have taken Spoon’s words the wrong way, but she had spoken the truth, no denying it. He was indeed very much alone.

  They walked out of the room, past the counter where crooked framed photos of Dodger stars hung on the wall. Mas grabbed two plastic-covered toothpicks and offered one to Spoon as they left the restaurant. She shook her head no, and Mas led the way toward his Ford truck parked on the far corner of the gravel lot. Since it had been stripped after being stolen some years ago, he had been busy improvising. In addition to the banana peel–colored car seat from a 1970 Chevy and a dashboard from another Ford truck, he’d found a side mirror from a semi at the junkyard. With help from his friend Tug, he was able to weld and screw on the mirror on the driver’s side. It was guaranteed that no other 1956 Ford could boast such an impressive mirror. While Mas was proud of the Frankenstein surgery on his vehicle, he sadly realized, in the dim light of the chop suey parking lot, that others might have a different opinion.

  He took out a screwdriver that he used to open the driver’s side door and then opened the passenger’s side. He swept an old rag over the yellow seat until Spoon stopped him.

  “Mas, I’m an old route woman. Little dirt never hurt me.” She smiled and plopped squarely into the seat. He wondered if she really wasn’t feeling well, or maybe she just needed an excuse to get away from all the people. Route men and route women were like gardeners; they spent much of their day alone, but instead of mowing lawns, they drove to faraway places, delivering palms to places like Palm Springs and birds-of-paradise to Disneyland. From Haruo, Mas knew that Spoon’s late husband had been not only a route man, but had studied botany at Caltech. A genius and a self-made businessman—how could Haruo compete with such a memory?

  “I guess being a best man isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be,” Spoon said as they were on the road to the freeway.

  Mas was surprised. How could Spoon read his mind?

  “You’re a loyal friend,” she said abruptly, causing him to almost steer the Ford across the yellow dividing line. “I’m glad Haruo has you.”

  Mas stole a glance at Spoon, all folded up in her white sweater like melting vanilla ice cream. There was something in her tone of voice that sounded sad, as if she thought Haruo would need him more than ever.

  The rest of the drive was quiet, other than the squeaks and shakes, ailments of the aging Ford on the 60 Freeway. Friends told him to donate the truck to some nonprofit (the talk of “volunteer” again) and get a tax write-off of the Blue Book value of the vehicle—maybe five hundred dollars, if he was lucky. But the Ford, even in its distressed, makeshift state, was worth much, much more to Mas than five hundred dollars. In fact, he would not accept any other car—new or used, circa 1960 or more recent—in its place. Yes, Spoon was probably was right. Mas was indeed loyal, and the more broken-down you were, the more loyal he was.

  City banners braggingh MONTEBELLO with an image of a flower drooped from lights on the main boulevard. Mas faintly remembered the rows of greenhouses all over the city in the fifties, although now the only flowers that seemed readily available around here were the plastic kind he often saw in Mexican restaurants.

  Spoon directed Mas to turn here and there. Finally they reached a plain, wooden ranch-style house, probably built in the sixties, when residential developments and smog had chased most of the flower farms and all of the fruit ranches from Montebello.

  In most cases, Mas would have just stopped long enough for a passenger to jump out of the truck, but today was special. It was the night before Spoon’s wedding, and Mas knew enough to walk her to the door.

  “There’s something I want for you to have,” she said. “C’mon in while I look for it.”

  Mas wanted to go home, but he obeyed and followed her into her house. A skinny girl with long hair was lying on her back on the couch, and she looked up toward the open door. The missing daughter—freckles all over her face. Sobakasu bijin, they used to say in Japan. Buckwheat beauty. Although this girl’s freckles looked more like buckshot that had taken the beauty out of her years ago. Still, there were remnants of something—high cheekbones and a well-defined chin—that resembled beauty for a moment in the right light.

  “My daughter Dee. I think you might have met her before.” In response to the introduction, the girl turned over on her belly like a piece of bacon that was close to being burned on one side.

  Mas didn’t care about receiving such a cold reception. Her not talking to him meant he didn’t have to talk to her. But why hadn’t she gone to the rehearsal or the dinner? She must have been the one who had taken off with Spoon’s car. She looked at least forty—a little too old to be pulling a high-school stunt like that.

  Haruo had mentioned something about the girl being in some kind of trouble. She was trying to get back on her feet, and Spoon and Haruo had both offered to take her in. Mas’s daughter, Mari, would never think of moving in with him under any circumstances. Well, she had a husband, a giant blonde hakujin gardener, and a young son now. For a long period of time, they barely talked, but now as Mari edged toward middle age, no month would pass without father and daughter speaking on the phone. Sometimes their conversations were brief. “Hi, Dad, how are you?” “Orai.” Not dea
d yet. “Howareyou?” “Takeo’s doing well in school.” “Datsu good.” “Well, talk to you later.” “Orai.”

  Their simple conversations would seem superficial to most, but Mas felt the weight of Mari’s phone calls—hearing her voice stoked embers of memory and feeling, which stayed warm for many weeks until she called again.

  Mas stuffed his hands in his jeans pockets and circled the small but tidy room. There were photos on a long side table, quite a few of Spoon with her late husband, Ike. Mas hadn’t ever met Ike, but he looked like a typical Nisei man, a dime a dozen. He’d been thin, with a thick crop of hair that seemed to progressively grey with each photo. He wore aviator glasses perched on a respectable nose, pretty high bridged for a Japanese.

  Mas wondered if these photos would be removed once Haruo officially moved in after the honeymoon in Solvang, a Danish village up the coast full of hotels with windmills. Haruo would never insist on it. While most men would be threatened by images of past lovers or husbands, Haruo proudly accepted them like members of his extended family. “You knowsu, Ike was a big shot in flowers? People all ova, even in Europe and Latin America, wanna talk to him.”

  “Ike supposed to go to camp in Arkansas, but gubernment sent him to Manzanar instead. Worked on a top-secret farming project ova there during World War Two. Honto, yo, no lie. Afta war, served ova in Japan.”

  “Ike met Nancy Reagan one time. Yah, at White House and everytin’.”

  Finally Mas couldn’t take it anymore. “Sounds like you gonna marry Ike, not Spoon.”

  “Can’t help it. Nuttin’ wrong in being proud of Spoon’s first husband.”

  Never heard you brag about your own ex-wife, Yasuko, Mas thought to himself. But then Haruo had lost his wife and house to craps, not death, so that might not be a thing to dwell on.

  Mas shifted his weight from one foot to the other as he waited for Spoon to reappear in the living room. The Buckwheat Beauty continued to ignore him, so he strayed to the fireplace, where an elaborate display was concocted out of stacks of shoeboxes.

  They were Girls’ Day dolls. On the bottom level were a line of five musicians carrying drums and flutes. On the second row, a line of three women were dressed up in white and red kimonos. At the top was the royal couple, the Odairi-sama and the Ohina-sama. In the Hiroshima countryside where Mas and his family grew up, they didn’t have such elaborate displays, but he knew Chizuko’s family had. In fact, when Mari was born, Chizuko’s relatives attempted to round up a family Hina Matsuri display, but all had either been burned up in the Bomb or eaten by bugs and mildew. They said they could send over a new one, but Chizuko told them not to bother. They were part of America now, and old traditions needed to die.

  Obviously the Hayakawa family didn’t feel the same way. Mas noticed that sometimes when multiple generations pushed the family tree farther and farther away from Japan, the new ones ran in the opposite direction to embrace the past.

  As Mas slipped on his old Thrifty reading glasses, he could more clearly see that the dolls on the bottom row were of the discount variety. The musicians were actually made of cheap, mass-produced ceramic, probably circa Heisei Period, 1989 to now. And with the benefit of twenty-twenty eyesight, Mas realized that the three maidens were actually plastic cartoon cats dressed in pink kimonos. Just omocha, nickel-and-dime toys.

  The royal couple, though, was different. They had exquisite white faces—wisps of eyebrows on high foreheads, fine aquiline noses, puckered V mouths, and fine detailed eyes whose black pupils seemed to follow Mas’s gaze. On their foreheads were two ash-gray smudges, mini thumbprints. Both figurines, dressed in colorful, multilayered kimonos of silk brocade, sat on fat pillows, their arms outstretched in front of them. The man, his hair topped with a tall hat shaped like a gourd, held a paddle, while the woman clasped a fan. Mas noticed that their wooden hands even had long, distinguishable fingers.

  He was about to poke one of these hina dolls when Dee stopped him.

  “Ah-ah-ah,” she said. “No touchy. Those two dolls on the top are old. My father brought them back after being in the Army in Japan. I think from a place called Fukushima.”

  Mas grunted. He’d known of other flower growers from the same area.

  “Girls’ Day’s on Monday,” Dee said.

  “Soka,” Mas acknowledged. The Girls’ Day Festival, or Hina Matsuri, was on March 3, three-three. What was it about that number? The only acknowledgement of Hina Matsuri in the Arai household came yearly from Mari’s Japanese school in the form of sakura mochi, a confection of sticky pink rice kernels formed around a glob of red bean and then wrapped in the salted soft leaf of a cherry tree.

  “I’ve been reading up on Japanese dolls.” Dee tapped a thick book on the coffee table. It seemed to weigh a good ten pounds. Mas knew that a good steak cost about ten bucks per pound and wondered if that was the case with books. “You know that Girls’ Day actually first had nothing to do with girls or daughters.”

  Eliciting no response from Mas didn’t stop Dee from sharing her new knowledge. “It’s all about sin and curses,” she said, narrowing her eyes. Her voice took on a hushed, syrupy tone—Mas knew that she was enjoying herself.

  “All the bad actions committed by a person would be transferred to these dolls. Not these fancy kinds, but paper ones. Then the people would crowd a boat full of these dolls and set them out on the seas.”

  And then? Mas waited.

  “Sometimes they’d even set them on fire. The dolls were scapegoats. You know, the things that people blamed unfairly. But then later on, the merchants of the Japanese samurai era took over and made them into something for children to protect the home and honor the emperor. Told families that their daughters would get married only if the hina dolls were brought out. Three-three on the lunar calendar. The time the peach blossoms should be blooming.”

  Momo trees once grew in Montebello. From a distance, during the height of their season, they looked like pink snow suspended in air. It made sense that a tradition like Girls’ Day would be tied into growing plants. Almost everything Japanese—even surnames—had some connection to nature. Didn’t matter that the momo trees in Montebello had been uprooted. Everything began in the dirt and ended there, too.

  “You’re supposed to have a full court of fifteen, so we had to improvise,” she said, referring to the toy cats and cheap substitutes. “But what really matters are the emperor and empress. Ours, you know, are haunted. My mother says they talk to her, especially the man—the emperor, right?”

  Nanda? What nonsense was Spoon spouting out? Maybe at her advanced age, her mind wasn’t working quite right. That might explain her decision to marry Haruo.

  “I’ve met you before.” Dee sat up, pulling her skinny legs toward her body. “At Haruo’s apartment, right?”

  Mas nodded.

  “You’re the best man?”

  Mas nodded again. These Hayakawa girls sure like to ask questions.

  “Don’t you think that he’s too old to be getting married again?”

  Although he most definitely did, Mas shrugged his shoulders. “None of my bizness.”

  “I think it’s your business. If you’re the best man, you’re the best friend then. Or are you just bullshitting everyone?”

  The girl was confusing Mas. And upsetting him as well. Never mind what Mas truly thought, what right did this hoito, beggar, have to judge her elder’s actions and use profanity on top of that? She was the one who was taking advantage of her mother’s weak nature and Haruo’s good one to let her crash in her childhood home when she should have been on her own for the past twenty years. For her sake, in fact, Haruo was bucking common practice and not officially moving in until after the wedding ceremony.

  It was then that Haruo’s beat-up Honda rattled up the driveway.

  “I’m going to bed,” Dee announced suddenly. As she got up, Mas noticed how her jeans hung loose at her hips, revealing a pierced navel. She gestured toward the door before she left the room. “Tell h
im to lock the door after he leaves.”

  Mas didn’t waste much more time in Montebello. There was obviously some kind of strain in the household. He wasn’t sure if it was from the washed-up freckled-face beauty or maybe the stress of the wedding. But something wasn’t quite right with Spoon, who had returned to the living room without whatever she was supposedly looking for.

  She didn’t seem too happy to hear her husband-to-be knocking on the door. “Haruo, you have your own keys, just let yourself in. This is going to be your house from now on. No enryo.” What happened to all that kissing mess in the restaurant? It seemed that all that affection had evaporated once Spoon returned home. If this was a sign of things to come, Mas wouldn’t be seeing Haruo much anymore.

  Mas said his goodbyes to the couple, eager to be released from so-called domestic felicity.

  The rest of the evening was the usual. Terebi, television, a Budweiser, and a swig of generic Pepto-Bismol to help his stomach recover from the chop suey. Just like with any other good thing, there was always a price to be paid.

  Sleep came fast—first in his easy chair and then at two o’clock in the morning on his sheetless mattress. He rolled himself in a blanket made by Chizuko; sometimes he could imagine the touch of her callused fingers moving the crochet needle back and forth.

  The ringing of the phone awakened him. “Hallo,” he spoke into the handset. His mouth felt pasty, and he moistened his cracked lips with as much spit as he could muster.

  “Mas.” It was Haruo.

  Sonafagun. Mas blinked hard, his hand reaching for the alarm clock. “Izu late?”

  “Itsu not that,” Haruo said. The reception was bad and Mas could barely hear his friend’s voice above the static. Where the hell was he calling from?

  Haruo continued. “Wedding’s cancel.”

  “Gonna rain?”

  “No, Mas, itsu ova. No wedding no more.”

  CHAPTER TWO