Summer of the Big Bachi Read online

  They soon became track buddies—sometimes even going in between gardening jobs during the weekdays. Type of lunch break, Mas told himself, didn’t have to tell Chizuko. But of course Haruo got found out by his wife, Yasuko. Yasuko seemed as gentle and pliable as a willow branch, except for her eyebrows. It was these eyebrows, or rather her lack of them, that revealed her true character. She had plucked every single hair and replaced the brows with two hand-drawn black strokes—ominous crows in the swaying willow branch.

  When she discovered ten betting stubs in Haruo’s back jeans pocket, all hell broke loose. She even brought Chizuko into the picture, claiming Mas was a corrupting influence. The lunch breaks to the track ceased, and Mas saw Haruo only when they got together on a sprinkler job.

  Haruo had lost out to the sweeping eyebrows, and come clean. That’s why Mas didn’t believe the lawn mower shop gossip several years later. The talk was that Haruo had collected money from his tanomoshi but had failed to show up to the meetings to make his monthly contributions. The tanomoshi clubs served as private banks among the Japanese. It was through their tanomoshi that Mas and Chizuko were able to buy their home, replace their old refrigerator that had wheezed like an aging dog. There were no contracts, just an understanding that you—in time—would replenish the pool of money.

  Occasionally, someone would take off with the money and disappear into the far northern or eastern suburbs, or maybe back to Japan. But Haruo wasn’t like that. If he borrowed a power drill—bam—it was back the day after, in addition to shiny homegrown eggplants and prickly long cucumbers. “Nah, got story wrong,” Mas told the guys at Tanaka’s Lawn-mower Shop.

  But then, two days later, Yasuko called for Chizuko. “He took a second mortgage on the house,” she wailed. “That good-for-nothing. Bookies callin’ every hour. Nothing. We have nothing now.” The house was lost. Eventually Yasuko packed up the teenagers and furniture and walked out. Haruo was now living in a small apartment in Los Angeles’s Crenshaw area, and regularly seeing a Japanese counselor in Little Tokyo to get gambling out of his system.

  Haruo was trying to purge himself from his past, but Mas needed the old Haruo for a moment—at least until he could find out more about another old gambler, that one called Joji Haneda.

  Mas navigated his Ford truck to the right side of the Santa Monica Freeway, toward the Arlington Exit. He didn’t like to go to Haruo’s anymore, especially after the riots. It wasn’t like anyone treated him bad, but it wasn’t quite the same. It was a feeling that hung out there, like the smog. Other drivers seemed on edge, like if you went a little over the yellow line, you would pay dearly—if not with your life, then at least with your car.

  “You too nervous,” Haruo had told him, launching into the same story of a small Japanese eatery called Kiku’s that sold plate lunches of fried breaded pork and dollops of sticky rice. During the torching of other businesses, mostly liquor stores, the neighborhood people came out and hung makeshift signs that said “Black-owned” all over the barred windows. “They save that business.”

  “Yah, yah,” Mas replied. He had heard it all. L.A. was always mixed up. Even here on the boulevard, next to a large church for blacks, was a sign in Spanish for a dentist named Hernandez. Inside the local grocery store, pink fish cakes would be stacked up beside white Mexican cheese, fleshy pigs’ feet, and chorizo sausage. But people weren’t like food and billboard signs. They didn’t like to rub up against one another, and Mas was no exception.

  Mas drove past a tiny barbershop, a clothing store with racks of discounts outside on the sidewalk, a Chinese restaurant with a police car parked along the curbside. On the corner was a gas station operated by a Korean family—the son, wearing a blue short-sleeved shirt, manned the pumps, while a grandma-looking woman sat inside, dispensing change through a hole in the bulletproof glass.

  Mas turned and parked his truck in the driveway beside Haruo’s apartment. It was a two-floor duplex. Haruo lived downstairs, on the left-hand side. Occasionally, the upstairs unit would host samba parties on Saturday nights, causing the whole building to pulse like a pumping heart.

  All was quiet today, aside from a shoddy lawn mower down the street. “Hallo.” Mas rattled the metal gated door. His back felt a bit stiff, and he was reminded of the pain he used to feel when he rolled his thirteen-pound bowling ball down Eagle Rock Lanes twenty years ago.

  After a few minutes, Haruo appeared, wiping his hand on a rag. “Oh, Mas.” He seemed surprised. “Come on out to the back.”

  They walked into the backyard, which was mostly full of weeds and dirt and an old metal incinerator. It was illegal to light those things up now, something about polluting the air. Now weeds encircled the contraption, and Mas noticed that a bird had started a nest at the top of the long pipe.

  In the far corner of the backyard, only about five feet by five feet and practically hidden by the weeds, was Haruo’s pride and joy: a vegetable garden with rows of eggplants, tomatoes, cucumbers.

  “I’m growing gobo now.” Haruo raised a tangle of long roots from a sheet of newspaper he had spread out. “You want some?”

  “What am I going to do with that?”

  “I dunno. Make some kimpira.”

  Mas glared. The only thing Mas cooked was rice, eggs (over easy), and hot dogs. He barely knew what was involved in making kimpira, which looked like a batch of old brown weeds tossed together. He had seen Chizuko make it from time to time, grating the gobo and salting it with chili pepper.

  Haruo lowered the snarl of dirt-clumped roots and sat back down in a lawn chair. “You look worn out, Mas. Not sleepin’ too good again?”

  Mas sat in the other lawn chair. “I’m sleepin’ fine,” he lied.

  “Gettin’ those bad dreams, huh?”

  “No bad dreams,” Mas lied again. One night of sharing a room at the Four Queens in Las Vegas, and Haruo thought that he was an expert on Mas’s sleeping habits. So what if I yell a couple of times in the middle of the night? Mas thought. It had to be from his daily habit of eating pickled plums before he went to bed. Or maybe at the Four Queens, it was because he hadn’t had his plums. Anyway, if those dreams were so bad, he’d be able to remember them, wouldn’t he?

  “So, you busy?” Haruo tried again.

  “Always busy.”

  “Hmmm.”

  Haruo seemed to be waiting for something, but didn’t have the guts to come out and say it. “So, you playing the horses, Mas?”

  “Go over Santa Anita for offtrack. But not the same watching them on TV.”

  Haruo nodded. “Pincay not doin’ so hot right now.”

  Mas looked suspiciously over to the sweat dripping from Haruo’s long white hair. His fake eye drifted, while the good eye was yellow and bloodshot.

  “My counselor says itsu orai,” Haruo explained. “Can watch on TV. Not like I have money down.”

  Mas stayed quiet and pulled a piece of old skin on his callused thumb. He could hear kids on the street calling out to one another. “So, you see anybody?” he finally said.

  “Huh?”

  Mas felt his head grow hot. You couldn’t be roundabout with Haruo. “I dunno. Just wonderin’ if you run into anyone these days.”

  “Who youzu talkin’ about, Mas?”

  “There’s lot of people in town. Summertime.”

  “Huh?”

  “Just wonderin’ if somebody call you.”

  “Whozu gonna call me?”

  “Forget it. I gotta go.”

  “Who, Mas? You talkin’ about Joji Haneda?”

  Mas’s chest tightened. “How come you say him?”

  “Dis guy came by the other day. Even give me a meishi.” Haruo went back into the house and came out with a plain white business card. Mas immediately recognized the name. Shuji Nakane. “Not him,” Haruo clarified, turning over the card. The name David Hawthorne was scribbled on the back. “Was a hakujin guy. This guy tole me Haneda’s in North Hollywood. You know him, Mas?”

  “Whatcha t
ell him?”

  “Tole him what I could. That we used to gamble. Play cards. But that I don’t do that no more. Then he started askin’ me about Hiroshima.”

  “Hiroshima?”

  “Yah, if I know him back then, stuff like that.”

  “Whatcha tell him?”

  “What can I tell him? Nutin’. I dunno Haneda back in Hiroshima. If dis Hawthorne wanted to know that stuff, he could talk to you.”

  “You went ahead and say that?” Mas felt betrayed.

  “No, I don’t involve you. I know you not the type of guy to talk about ole times, Mas.”

  Mas gripped the armrests of the lawn chair hard, so hard that the plastic began to separate from the metal.

  “You neva liked him, huh?”

  “What?”

  “You neva liked Joji. I neva knew why. Did sometin’ happen?”

  “Don’t even remember his face anymore.” As soon as Mas had said that, he knew that it was true. It was as if Haneda had been a bad sickness and Mas’s memories of the symptoms had faded over time.

  “Well, you never liked him,” Haruo repeated.

  “He stole that business deal.” Mas frowned, trying to contain his impatience. “That nursery, my idea.”

  “Nah, I mean back then—” Haruo continued, and Mas felt the hairs on his neck begin to rise.

  “What the hell, Haruo.”

  Haruo straightened his back, and glared at Mas through the strands of his graying hair. “I dunno . . . just sometin’ okashii, strange, I feel in the gut. I talked to Joji Haneda long time ago—”

  “What long time ago?”

  “He tole me you close, like brothas. Then sumptin’ happen.”

  Mas felt his stomach and head churn, like a rickety old washing machine.

  “I dunno why you got sometin’ against that guy.” Haruo stuffed his hands in his pockets. “You know each other since you little. That’s not natural. You need to talk about it. That’s what my counselor would say—”

  “Look, you’re the one need counselor, not me. Just because you make life bad with Yasuko . . .” Mas paused with regret.

  Haruo became quiet and returned to shaking off the dirt from the gobo root. “You sure you don’t want some?” he said after a while.

  Mas got up. “No, no need.”

  After Mas got back on the Santa Monica Freeway, it was already eleven and the sun was blazing hot. Mas wiped his wet forehead with the back of his hand. What was Nakane doing with this hakujin man, David Hawthorne? It was one thing to have Nakane at Tanaka’s, but a hakujin in the Crenshaw district? They were either fools or fearless. And if they were without fear, it was because they had backup, plentiful either in numbers or in brute strength.

  What was Joji thinking? When Mas had last seen him face-to-face, almost thirty years ago, they had come to an agreement. “I stay in L.A.; you stay in Ventura,” Mas told him. “I knowsu nutin’ about you.” And with that, Mas pressed down on his memories so hard that they lay thin and almost invisible. America was again his home; there was no place for Hiroshima anymore.

  Mas tried not to let his mind attempt to connect Nakane with Joji and with Hawthorne. Nothing to do with me, anyhow. If Joji’s in trouble, that’s his business. If he falls, he can fall alone. Mas squinted his eyes and focused on what was before him this day. Work. Work always managed to remove the sting of deep thoughts, at least for a short time.

  When he first started in Altadena, he’d had a total of three customers—all young hakujin couples living in small bungalows. Their lawns were tiny, rocky, and square, usually rimmed by hedges and gardenias. At first he had only a rusty pair of hedge clippers and a push mower. He would get a lift from his cousin, but dreamed of owning his own Ford, his own Custom Car. He had saved some money from his truck farming days, lost some on craps, but kept enough of a hefty sum to put down on a long-shot horse, Sweet Sister. His friends told him that he was crazy, that he should send for a wife from Japan instead. But the truck—a vehicle that would free him from his cousin’s crowded home of wailing babies and hormone-stinky teenagers—that was the ticket out on his own.

  Thanks to Sweet Sister, Mas had bought the Ford, which gained him more customers—so that finally he could afford his own studio apartment in Altadena and, what the hell, finally get hitched. His wife, Chizuko, sensed his devotion to the horses. “Uma, uma, uma,” she used to scream at him during their dinnertime arguments. “What about us—your wife and own daughter?”

  Mari sat in her booster chair, her silver-capped front teeth shining as she chewed a piece of liver. Like always, she remained quiet, her eyes focused on a large crack on the wall. Soon the argument would escalate; plates shattered against the wall and ceiling, soy sauce dripping over the crack like black blood.

  He would escape, get into the Ford, and drive for hours. Friends could come and go—disappear in a puff of black smoke—wives got sick and died; children left home. But his Ford and its tough metal hide could survive accident after accident, the blazing L.A. sun, hail, gunshots, and domestic strife. Unlike the aluminum-can Japanese cars, his Ford truck was solid, reliable, and, perhaps most important, a friend.

  Each year Mas added something new to his truck. In the old days, he merely secured hollow metal pipes in the back, which held lassos of green hoses. Mas remembered the times when he would drive home to McNally Street and see those dark eyes behind the backyard gate. “Daddy, Daddy,” Mari’s high-pitched voice would ring out. Mas saw a flash of yellow and then felt a slight weight in the rear. In the side mirror, he could see Mari’s then-tender fingers wrapped around those pipes.

  Later Mas got more elaborate and replaced the pipes with metal guards with holes to hold his rakes and push brooms. He also built runners for his lawn mowers from planks of wood, which he tied down with frayed rope.

  His star lawn mower was his thirty-nine-year-old Trimmer. The signature lawn mower of all Japanese gardeners in the 1960s, the Trimmer had blades twisted into a cylindrical reel, which provided lawns with the closest shave. The handle resembled a sawed-off pipe, and it lay low—good for men like Mas who were nowhere close to five feet six inches.

  His Trimmer was now faded and scratched, but its blades were razor sharp and its insides still roared like a tiger, thanks to Mas’s handiwork. He had replaced the engine with a Honda—the best—and every gear and spark plug was new and in top condition.

  His friends warned him about maintaining an open bed on his truck: “Get a cover,” they told him, “so danger, abunai, these days.” He even heard of one guy who kept a loaded gun in his glove compartment. Mas compromised by locking down the Trimmer with a heavy chain and a Master Lock. He preferred the openness of the truck, liked that when he looked in his rearview mirror, he could see his equipment against the expansive blue-gold sky.

  Lately, though, the sky looked brown, heavier than usual, and Mas’s tools seemed flimsy and cheap as he rattled over spilt gravel on the boulevard.

  Since his back was acting up, he knew that he should drive past Pine Street, just to take a look. But it was so late; today’s were truly a sorry-looking lot. He slowed the Ford and stared down at the men crowded at the curb on Pine. Frayed T-shirts. Chapped elbows. Twisted legs. He recognized most of them—Eduardo, Joe, Juan . . . family men, good enough, yet the meat on their arms lay limp and stretched.

  Some newer men leaned back against the graffiti-covered taco stand, their hands shoved in their pockets, their eyes narrowed against the morning sun. Their faces showed the betrayal and disbelief as well as the faint flicker of hope that Mas knew only too well.

  Mas’s gray-black eyes finally stopped on a tall, lanky teenager. The boy’s sinewy arms lay crossed, daring Mas to hire him, daring him not to.

  Mas took a puff from his cigarette and then smashed it down into his metal ashtray.

  “Mista Arai,” someone called out. A mustached man with thinning hair broke out of the crowd and looked into Mas’s open window. “You need helpa?” he asked, wrinkling hi
s forehead into thick lines. “I come.”

  Mas shook his head as he tore back the clear plastic wrap hanging from his pack of cigarettes. “Sorry, Eduardo. Some other time, okay, but need a young one today. That one, ova there.” Mas gestured with a fresh, pungent cigarette toward the teenager with his arms crossed.

  Eduardo shrugged and turned to the boy. Mas could make out about half the Spanish words rolling off the young man’s tongue.

  The boy showed no expression but sauntered over to the car window. Mas examined the boy’s fingernails on his right hand. The nail on his pinky was long and sharp, revealing a faint ring of dirt. Probably didn’t work yesterday, noted Mas, but had done hard work sometime this week. Would have energy today. His eyes, although suspicious, were still bright; Mas knew that the boy had not been in America long.

  The young man then took his turn looking over the mold-green truck. He surveyed the bed of the truck, the makeshift dividers and wire metal hooks holding rakes and green hoses, the greasy lawn mowers and gasoline-powered blowers. He dragged his finger along the dent on the side of the truck and then approached the front.

  He focused on Mas’s dark, leathery face—the prickly white whiskers, thin eyes—and then down to the brown arms laced with distended veins. The teenager licked his thick lips and then turned toward Eduardo. “No,” he said, the deep darkness of his left eye flashing toward Mas. “No, demasiado viejo.”

  Mas waited a minute, letting the words sink into his gut. Old. Yeah, he was. He pushed back his cap, arched his spine against his slippery, worn upholstery, and chuckled. Sixty-nine, but I can still beat your oshiri, you little sonafugun, Mas said to himself. I’ve probably mowed enough lawns to circle the entire world, maybe even two times, he thought. The kid was brazen, but Mas had to admire some of that; after all, hadn’t the boys back in Hiroshima call Mas mini-dynamite, an explosion packed in a five-foot-two-inch body.