Summer of the Big Bachi Read online

  Eduardo, on the other hand, wasn’t taking it well at all. His eyebrows seemed matted together like tangled fish netting as he chastised the boy for his impudence. All Mas could make out for sure was the boy’s name, Raul.

  “Okay, okay, Eduardo. Tell him go in truck. Fifty dolla.”

  “Sorry, Mista Arai. His mother—my sista—no good. Don’t live him right.”

  “Hell, I know I’m old. But no heart attack. Corazón good.”

  Eduardo’s bushy eyebrows turned up. “Not you,” he said, “the car. He say your car old, too old. He ride in a new Dodge van yesterday. Power windows, everything.”

  What the hell. Mas spat out his cigarette onto the cracked cement and felt the steam rise to his fatty ears. He shoved the door open, almost hitting Eduardo’s back. He stood face-to-chest next to the young boy. “Listen, you, Escucheme. This truck old—damn yes—but insides better than any Dodge van, you hear me?”

  Mas walked over to the truck’s bent hood, which reached his chin, banged it three times on the left side, and screeched it open. “See this engine? Rebuilt it. Come here. Look,” Mas ordered. The boy’s square shoulders were slightly stooped. He dutifully walked over to the truck’s open mouth and hung his long head toward the oily black engine.

  After Mas rattled off the parts that he had worked on during the past thirty years, he slammed the hood shut and climbed back into the truck. “Mista Arai,” Eduardo called out, but Mas merely muttered something under his breath and turned the key to the ignition. The motor rattled apologetically until it fired up into a roar with Mas’s right foot.

  The men on the curb looked up curiously, the smoke from their cigarettes curling in waves. Raul had returned to the group; he leaned against the building and stroked his chin with his one long fingernail.

  I’ll do the work myself, thought Mas, glancing back at the men in his rearview mirror. He narrowed his eyes and focused on a face—a long, hooked nose—and then it disappeared amid the brown faces. The blast of a horn startled Mas. How had he wandered into the middle of the road? He hit the accelerator, passing the graffiti-covered taco stand. His hands, slick and wet, slid around the skinny steering wheel, and as he changed gears, he heard metal scraping against metal. He remembered the words of his wife, Chizuko: “No need to lose your head over nandemonai mono. Your father, your brother, all die of stroke, lung cancer. Smoking no good, too, Masao-san.”

  “Outlived you, didn’t I, old woman,” he muttered, and took another drag on his Marlboro. He kept driving on and on, and before he knew it, he was nowhere close to his customers—one an East Indian couple who had a shar-pei dog that always pressed its pitiful wrinkled face against the window when Mas trimmed the hedges. Another customer was a doctor, a young one, who sometimes came home in the middle of the day, wearing green scrubs and paper-covered tennis shoes. And last of all, there were the broken branches. The dog, the doctor, and the broken branches would have to wait, because today Mas was going to North Hollywood.

  Mas didn’t know North Hollywood well—but then again, who did? It was just a blip in the smog, a short sprawl somewhere near another blip, Van Nuys. Beyond the haze you could see the outline of the Hollywood Hills and the white blocky Hollywood sign that always turned out better-looking on postcards than in real life.

  Mini-malls on every other corner, old-fashioned gas stations, and looming apartment buildings. No wonder he didn’t have any customers around here—no lawns.

  One place in North Hollywood Mas did know about was Keiko’s Ramen House. She advertised on the local UHF tele-vision station that broadcast Japanese programming on Sunday nights. In the commercial, Keiko looked like one of those dish-washing brushes—skinny body, with short, spiky hair that could probably clean out any filthy glass. She wore a yellow apron with a drawing of a hot steaming bowl of noodles. “Please come,” she said in a cute, high-pitched voice, bowing outside her establishment. The address then flashed below her in video letters and numbers. Mas couldn’t remember it exactly but knew that it was somewhere on Sepulveda.

  After almost forty minutes of driving back and forth, Mas spotted it. Shaped like a giant shoe box, the restaurant had a small, unassuming sign. But the neon letters displayed in the window cinched it: RAMEN.

  Mas parked his truck and went inside. It was three o’clock—too late for the lunch crowd, too early for dinner. Aside from a hakujin boy, sweat pouring down his shaven head as he slurped down noodles, the place was empty. A bookcase by the door was filled with fat Japanese comic books and women’s magazines. Day-old newspapers were neatly folded on the bottom shelf.

  Mas immediately looked for the spiked head of Keiko but saw only a Latino man in a paper hat behind the counter.

  “Hai, irasshaimase,” the cook said.

  Mas narrowed his eyes and sat down at the counter. Maybe coming here was not a good idea after all. A laminated menu was in front of him, between a bottle of black soy sauce and a cylinder of red pepper. He didn’t even bother to look at the choices, and ordered a bowl of miso ramen, as basic as a ham-and-cheese sandwich.

  Mas hated to eat out, especially now. He didn’t like to talk to strangers. He didn’t like to look at a long list of food items with foreign, fancy names. He didn’t like multiple pieces of silverware, two forks, two spoons. All you needed were a pair of chopsticks and a pair of hands to wrap around a hamburger or a carne asada taco.

  When Mari was growing up, they went to only one restaurant: Entoro in Little Tokyo. Entoro was also known as Far East Café, a chop suey house, the old kind before the new Chinese came to town. There, you got greasy homyu, looking like day-old Cream of Wheat in a tiny bowl; almond duck, slippery, fat, and buttery, with a crunch of fried skin and nuts; and real sweet and sour pork, bright, stinking orange like the best high-grade motor oil. Everyone went to Entoro, crowded around tables separated by wooden dividers like a giant maze of horse stalls. The upstairs area was open and reserved for special occasions. Someone married, go to Far East. Someone dead, go to Far East. It was simple and predictable. Same set of waiters, who doubled as the cooks, who happened to own the joint. And the menu—who bothered to even look? Mas wasn’t even sure they had menus, but he seemed to remember a bewildered hakujin family, probably visiting from out of state, looking lost while they perused some kind of stained sheet of paper in front of them.

  Far East Café closed right after the Northridge earthquake. Later, Mas heard that one of the waiters/cooks/owners had passed on. No sense in going out anymore, Mas figured. But now, against his better judgment, he was here, in Keiko’s Ramen House, in the middle of North Hollywood.

  The boy with the shaven head had left, leaving only murky broth at the bottom of the bowl. Mas felt strange here alone with the mustached cook, who was tossing tangled noodles into the vat of boiling water. What was he doing here? How could he expect to find someone he hadn’t seen for thirty years?

  It was that meishi, with its sharp, clean edges, fancy printing, and Hiroshima connection, that nagged at Mas. Why was this straight-from-Japan fellow looking for Joji Haneda? It meant trouble, a kind of trouble that Mas knew would touch him, too. His only hope was that the man everyone here knew as Haneda kept running, and stayed the hell away from L.A.

  The miso ramen, looking as limp as the sweaty chef, was surprisingly tasty. It certainly beat those instant ones that Haruo insisted on buying at his local grocery store.

  As soon as he slurped up the last bit of soup, he smelled something sweet behind him. It was Keiko, the Ramen Lady on the television commercial. The points on her spiked hair glowed bright yellow.

  “How was it?” she asked. Her voice was low and husky like a middle-aged barmaid. It didn’t match the high-pitched one on the television commercial, and for a moment Mas was too stunned to know what to say.

  Keiko then switched over to Japanese. “How did you find it?” she repeated.

  “Oishii. Very good,” Mas answered.

  “First time?”

  Mas nodded.
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  “How did you hear about us? Terebi?”

  Mas nodded again. “Saw your commercial.”

  Keiko smiled, obviously pleased with her public presence. “My voice too low, too sexy, they told me. Used a twenty-year-old who was working at the station on her summer break. Nice to be young, ne.”

  Mas didn’t dare to say anything more. He wasn’t used to snooping around, especially out here in the San Fernando Valley. This wasn’t his part of town, and it knew it. Mas was waiting to be tossed out, rejected like those broken branches he tended at one of his longtime customers’. They called it grafting, an attempt to attach something strange and new to an established tree. It usually didn’t work, either with plants or with people.

  “You don’t live around here,” Keiko said before Mas could get away.

  Mas shook his head and took out his wallet.

  “What, you have some friends out here?”

  Mas was thankful that his face was already sweaty and red from the hot noodles. She wasn’t going to give up, so Mas gave her what she wanted. “Yah, friend.”

  “Oh, really? Well, tell him to come try.”

  Mas grunted.

  “Maybe I know him. What’s his name?”

  Mas stared into Keiko’s eyes. What the heck? he thought. What did he have to lose? “Haneda,” he said finally. “Joji Haneda.”

  “Haneda-san? Junko-san’s friend? They were coming here almost every day last week. Told Junko she should try cooking herself once in a while.”

  Mas’s chest lurched. So it was fate after all that he was in this sweaty ramen house in the middle of North Hollywood. He had come this far. No sense in backing off. “Yah, Junko,” he said. “You don’t know where she lives, do you?”

  Keiko’s eyes flashed for one second. “Just a minute,” she said, disappearing into the back kitchen.

  Now I’ve done it, thought Mas. I’m not cut out to do this kind of sneaking around. He picked up the check and placed a crumpled five-dollar bill and a couple of ones on the plastic plate. She’s probably on the phone now, warning this Junko about a dirty old ojiichan at the ramen house.

  He pulled open the door, and almost walked smack into another Japanese woman, who was maybe around Mari’s age. Her eyes sloped downward like two tadpoles; her left one curved more than the right. At the bottom of the left one was a black birthmark, looking like one of those tattooed teardrops on some of the boys Mas picked up as day laborers. Only this mark was natural, not branded.

  “Excuse,” mumbled Mas.

  The woman flared her nostrils in irritation. She was one of those who hated old men, Mas figured.

  “Wait,” Keiko called out. “She let me borrow this. Her address is here.” She waved a shiny magazine titled Cosmopolitan and pointed to a mailing label. Mas walked over, and sure enough it had a name, Junko Kakita, and a North Hollywood address.

  Mas tried to make out the numbers and letters without his drugstore reading glasses, which he’d left in the truck. “Sank you, ne,” he said, reciting the address in his head.

  The tadpole-eyed woman stood close behind them. “Oh, Rumi-chan.” Keiko finally became aware of the woman’s presence. “This man is looking for Joji-san, Junko’s friend.”

  The young woman froze, aside from her left eye, which began to twitch. Mas was close enough to also see that her hands were trembling.

  Keiko didn’t seem to notice. “Tell Haneda-san that I hope he’s feeling better,” she said to Mas. “And come again.”

  Mas went back to the truck and pulled out his Thomas guide, which was under some rope behind the seat. It was 1987, published before the Century Freeway, but good enough for North Hollywood. He pulled his glasses out of the glove compartment, flipped through the pages, and found the street. It was a small one, and dead-ended before it could get anywhere.

  Driving over to Junko Kakita’s, he saw more of the same, plain apartments that looked like mini-motels. He finally spotted the address, a two-story unit with a line of doors and windows. Must be a Japanese owner, thought Mas, looking at the shaped juniper trees, or at least a Japanese gardener.

  “Numba D,” Mas muttered to himself. He looked at the line of metal mailboxes. There were only eight; the fourth one over bore the name KAKITA.

  It was on the second floor. A couple of rolled-up advertisements were hanging from the screen door. Heavy curtains were drawn. Mas tried to peek through the window but heard a male voice behind him. “She’s not there.”

  A Latino man in his fifties and about Mas’s height stood against the second-floor railing. “She left a couple of days ago.”

  Again, Mas didn’t know what to say. The whole thing looked suspicious, he was the first to admit. If he had caught a dried-up old Japanese man looking through his customer’s windows, he would have kicked him out, right on the spot.

  “You the one who going to take care of her plants, right?” the man, probably the manager, said.

  Before Mas could respond, the manager was opening the door and leading him inside. The living room was dark, aside from light coming through the open door and the edge of the drapes.

  The manager walked over to rows of at least twelve bonsai plants arranged on wooden planks over cinder blocks by the window. “Why she make such a fuss over those little plants?” he said. “Last time she accuse me of killing two of them. Said she was going to take fifty dollars out of her rent. I told her, ‘Next time, find someone else.’ ”

  Mas stuck his finger into the soil of one of the planters. Pretty dry. As he walked over the kitchen, he made a mental note of everything on the counter, table, and floor. Roll of aluminum foil, rice cooker pot soaking in the sink, stack of newspapers in the corner, with, yes, crib notes from Hollywood Park racetrack on the top. He filled an empty water jug with lukewarm water and proceeded to water the plants. There were juniper, pine, even a miniature maple. To look further authentic, Mas got out his pruner, which was dangling from his belt, and clipped some wayward leaves.

  The manager soon got bored waiting for Mas and went outside for maybe a smoke or who knows what. This was Mas’s only chance. He quietly crept down the hall. As he passed by the yellow tile bathroom, a smell hit his nostrils. Menthol, strong enough to burn the insides of your lungs. Mas knew that smell well. Salon Pas—thin pads that old gardeners like him stuck to sore backs and battered knees. Would a woman named Junko use those for her achy joints?

  Her bedroom was a typical woman’s, with a pink bedspread, even stuffed animals tucked in by the pillows. Simple dresser with a jewelry box, heart-shaped. But next to the box was a black plastic Casio watch. Strange, thought Mas. This woman, judging from her taste in furnishings and miniature plants, wasn’t the type to wear a cheap man’s watch that you could buy at the local drugstore for $9.99.

  He returned to the hallway, where a series of photos were displayed on the wall. Many were of a middle-aged woman with long hair and a rubbery face with too much makeup. In most of them, she was posed with other women—Mas recognized one of them as the tadpole-eyed girl he had run into at the ramen shop today. Another photo had a lot of girls and men in suits, holding beers and smiling like at a New Year’s party.

  The last one on the end was different. It wasn’t in a frame, just taped onto the wall. The woman was wearing a visor, sitting in front of a slot machine, with an old man. Mas tried to make out the man’s face. Japanese, with age spots. Hooked nose. Damn, there was no mistake. The resurrected Joji Haneda.

  The blood seemed to drain out of Mas’s fingertips, and his hands felt cold and clammy. Before Mas could figure out his next step, the screen door banged open and shut.

  Mas adjusted his eyes to the brightness emanating from the doorway. It was a woman dressed in all black, with a pair of huge sunglasses crowding her round face. She dropped her black duffel bag onto the floor. “You’re Joji’s friend, desho,” she stated more than asked. “I had heard that you’d be coming.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Mas thought that the ram
en lady had talked, but he soon figured out that something else was going on.

  The mistress went into her bedroom, closed the door, and then came out with a long white envelope. She plopped it down on the kitchen table and perched her sunglasses on top of her head.

  She was not a pretty woman. Her skin was blotchy and covered with blemishes. Her large eyes—her best feature—were ringed with dark makeup. Her hair looked like the mane of an obake, a ghost in those Japanese fairy tales. She was about fifty, trying to look like twenty-five.

  “There,” she said with a slight accent. “You check it.”

  Mas remained silent and picked up the envelope. Sure enough, a stack of twenty-dollar bills—must have been at least fifty of them. And some sort of receipt, folded in half.

  “You lucky to get that,” she said. “The bastard.”

  Mas pulled out the piece of paper, then pressed the envelope closed. He thought the woman was cursing him, but soon figured out she was talking about Joji Haneda.

  “He owe me at least that much. Probably more.” She went over to her bonsai and stuck her finger in the soil as if she were measuring the temperature. “Was going to take that money. But then, I don’t need Joji’s trouble. You know what I mean?”

  Mas nodded. He knew well what trouble Haneda could cause. But was that the same kind of trouble the woman was talking about?

  The mistress returned to the kitchen and opened her refrigerator. Smelling packages of wrapped raw chicken and white boxes of Chinese food, she hurled some food into the garbage can before pulling out a long, rectangular bottle of yam wine.

  Mas was confused, but somehow he fit into the confusion. He unfolded the receipt from the envelope. On the blank side was a map written with a crude hand. There was a square for a building and then a Los Angeles address on Second Street. Mas checked the intersection. Little Tokyo, blocks away from the chop suey house he once frequented.

  Mas stuffed the strange map deep into his jeans pocket and returned the envelope to the kitchen table. The mistress sat down and poured the clear liquid into two cups filled with ice. “Shochu,” she said. “From my hometown.”