Summer of the Big Bachi Read online

  Mas declined. He didn’t like drinking that stuff. It gave him a mean headache, and he needed to think clearly right now.

  The woman took a long sip of the yam wine and pulled the sunglasses off her head. “So, how do you know Joji? From his Little Tokyo days?”

  Mas nodded.

  “You better be careful. He’s not right in the head right now.” The ice in the woman’s glass clinked as she finished off her drink. She then started on the other one.

  “Whatcha mean?”

  “He left me in Las Vegas. Right there in the casino. Said he had to go to the toilet. Then never came back.”

  “Didn’t say anytin’?”

  “Well.” The woman circled the rim of the glass with her finger. “We did get into a fight.”

  “You fight?”

  “You know, at first it was all fun, exciting. We go to Las Vegas or Laughlin, and he would keep going and going—craps, blackjack, whatever. I’d keep stacking those chips up, higher and higher. ‘Keep on, keep on,’ I tell him. Trade them in for hundred-dollar chips, two hundred dollars. Can you believe one piece of wood could be worth five hundred dollars?” The woman finished the second drink and waited for Mas to pour her another. “When we went to the strip, the hundred-dollar tables, the people didn’t take us serious. Thought we were just nandemonai mono, trash. But Joji-san would take out those bills, and they all changed their minds.”

  The woman cupped the glass as if it were a wounded bird. “But he kept going. Like he couldn’t stop. Like if he stopped, something terrible would happen. That night I told him to stop. Take a rest. It wasn’t fun anymore.”

  Mas licked his lips. They were dry again, and he suppressed the urge to drink some of the wine.

  “I thought the whole point of him coming to Los Angeles was to spend more time with me. But I could tell that it was for something else. ‘What, Joji?’ I’d ask him.”

  The mistress emptied her glass while Mas traced his finger around a dark spot, probably spilt soy sauce, on the tablecloth. “I know what people were saying about us, about me. That I was only with him to get a green card. But it wasn’t like that. Really. We were close, like brother and sister. I knew things about him that you all could never even imagine.”

  Mas felt a coldness on the back of his neck.

  The mistress must have sensed his reaction, because she turned away abruptly. “You just like the rest of them. You believe what you want to believe.”

  Mas stayed silent for a good minute. “So when youzu gonna see Joji again?” he finally asked.

  “Who knows? Who cares?” The mistress poured more yam wine into her glass. “I’m going back to Japan, you know.”

  “Oh, yah?” Mas waited, but the woman’s long eyelashes, coated with black flakes, began to flutter. Mas knew that within ten minutes, the mistress, Junko Kakita, would be fast asleep beside her empty bottle. There wasn’t too much more Mas could get from her right now. She wasn’t letting on, but Mas knew she had the key to why Joji Haneda was in Los Angeles County. He excused himself and left the apartment, the map still in his pocket.

  Mas sat in his truck for a while before leaving North Hollywood. What was Haneda into now? Drugs? It would be nothing new. Mas remembered Haneda happily supplying young chinpira—wanna-be gangsters—with syringes of heroin and homemade alcohol made from car gasoline. But that was back then, when war orphans had little choice for survival. Whoever heard of a seventy-year-old drug dealer, anyhow? Haneda had the nursery, pretty successful, at least from all accounts at the lawn mower shop. To risk it all for more money didn’t make sense.

  Mas wiped away some sweat from his forehead when he saw a figure crossing the street. Skinny, wizened, almost bent over, and wearing a baseball cap.

  “Haruo,” Mas called out from the open window. The figure turned and then scurried back to the other side. Mas’s eyes stung from his sweat. He leapt out of the truck and then ran to the corner. It was all quiet, aside from a homeless man pushing a grocery cart filled with flattened cardboard boxes. It had been Haruo, hadn’t it? Or was Mas just seeing things in the brown haze of North Hollywood?

  “Gotta get outta here,” muttered Mas to himself. He needed to get where he belonged—back to San Gabriel Valley and his customers.

  In L.A., there were two kinds of customers. One was the short-term ones, who basically wanted a “mow and blow,” a clip of side hedges, and an occasional spray of insecticide. They were usually young or on the move and jumped from one house to another. You couldn’t count on these people, but work was work. Mas looked at them like extra change you find in the corners of your pocket.

  The other kind of customer was the lifer, the one you actually tried to hang on to. They gave hundred-dollar Christmas bonuses, plus maybe a box of See’s chocolate candy or a small trinket for Mari. They had large estates in shady neighborhoods of oak trees and ARMED RESPONSE signs. Get a couple of customers like these, and you know that you’ve finally made it.

  At the height of Mas’s career, he had a half a dozen of these customers. Hollywood doctors, actors, big businessmen. But now there was only one. Mrs. Witt. When Mas first worked at the San Marino estate, there were two Witts, the missus and the mister, a tight end for the old Rams football team. As the mister’s sports career began to fizzle out, his sex life grew, and he eventually left the missus for a Playboy centerfold. That was when Mrs. Witt became obsessed with her grove of fruit trees in the back of the house.

  With a saw and a knife the size of an apple slicer, she attacked each tree, cutting off branches and creating monstrous tree figures that looked like mutilated fingers. Mas was afraid. Who knew what a rejected middle-aged hakujin woman would do next? But then he noticed that she was attempting to do some amateur grafting. With Mas’s help, she attached different kinds of branches to the stumps, mixing a lemon with a tangerine, an American persimmon with a Japanese variety. Wrapping each wound with wax, string, or tape, Mas and Mrs. Witt became medics in the orchard recovery unit.

  Not all of the grafts were successful. Sometimes a stump would reject a branch, and Mas would find a broken branch lying forlornly on the ground. This upset Mrs. Witt to no end. She would curse and sometimes even scream, muttering the name of her ex-husband.

  Mr. Witt had been an immense man who almost filled the entire doorway of his San Marino home. His sandy-colored hair was almost the same shade of his skin, a bland background for his round, sunken eyes the color of blue slate.

  Most of his customers mailed their checks in, but Mr. Witt had insisted that Mas come to the door on the last Friday of the month. Mas often felt like Mari’s dog, Brownie, waiting for leftovers from their grilled teriyaki steak dinner.

  One day Mr. Witt handed Mas the usual cream-colored check and an additional treat, two tickets imprinted with the blue-and-yellow swirl of the Rams.

  “Sank you.” Mas’s fingerprints left green stains on the tickets. He preferred UCLA basketball on television, but it wouldn’t be bad to go to a Rams football game once in his life.

  “Wait a minute,” Mr. Witt said, disappearing from the doorway for a moment. “You have a son, right?”

  “No, girl. Mari.”

  “Well, she may like these anyway.” Mr. Witt brought out three black-and-white photos of himself in uniform. There was a posed shot of him, knee down on the field, helmet at his feet. In a candid shot, he was snarling as he blocked a defensive guard. Finally, a full head shot, his sandy hair teased up and eyes shining like marbles.

  Mr. Witt unfastened the top of a permanent ink marker with his teeth and scrawled on each photo: “To Mary, Good Luck and Good Playing, Bob Witt.”

  Chizuko wasn’t sure if they should let Mari go to the game: After all, she would be missing Japanese school, held every Saturday in a bare two-story building next to a nursery.

  Mari herself didn’t seem that excited. It was night, and she was wearing her headgear, apparently one of the last stages of her orthodontic work. A hideous contraption, the headgear had
hooks and bands that tightened around her skull and stretched down to her metal braces. She pulled her long hair out from underneath the bands into rectangular sections, hanging spongy curlers from the loose strands.

  Even when Mari remained unresponsive, Mas insisted. “Mr. Witt give to me. An insult if we no use.”

  “Get one of your friends. How about Haruo?” Chizuko said, cutting out an article on high school SAT scores in the Los Angeles Times.

  “No. Mari.”

  “But she has perfect attendance so far.”

  Mari clipped the last curler in place. “Who cares, Mom? It’s not like real school.”

  On the day of the game, Mas bought everything. He purchased the three-dollar color program, Rams banners, hot dogs—cotton candy, even.

  Mari didn’t seem that interested in the game. She instead kept adjusting her hair, which rippled in lines where her headgear was positioned at night.

  Mas tried to get excited about the game. But the plastic seats seemed too hard, the sun too bright, and the men in front of him drank too much. They yelled and hooted at the cheerleaders, analyzing the merits of each one. The Rams weren’t doing so well, either; balls were intercepted or else thrown out of bounds, hitting the green field beyond the chalk lines.

  It had been easier to be with Mari when she was younger, around five or six. When Mas brought home an old Cinderella book that he’d found in a customer’s trash can, her face brightened. She ran into her bedroom, reciting the story of the two evil stepsisters and the mice that helped the poor servant girl.

  At Christmastime, she waited for Mas to come home with cheap gifts wrapped in red-and-white paper, gifts of fruitcake and chocolate-covered almonds from his customers. She didn’t care that inside was just junk; she still arranged the presents under the flocked Christmas tree as if they were treasures of real gold and silver.

  But as she grew, her breasts peaked, her mensu started, and she became more and more distant, a stranger with secrets behind her bedroom door.

  They left the game early. As they turned back onto McNally Street, Mas parked the Datsun in the driveway, behind the Ford truck.

  “Oh, wait a minute,” he said, going into the garage. “Here, he gave you this.” The three black-and-white photos with the personalized message.

  “He spelled my name wrong. And he wasn’t even very good.” Mari frowned, flattening a bump in her hair. She left the photos on the car seat. Eventually Chizuko found them on the floor, underneath the car mat, and stored them in a box with other old photos that they knew they had, but never saw.

  There were no photos of Mr. Witt in his former house now. Mas stood in the hall and smelled something that made his nose itch, probably some perfume from an aerosol can.

  “Mas, I’m glad you made it.” Mrs. Witt placed her hand on her hip. Her arms were freckled and leathery like old snakeskin. “I have something to discuss with you.”

  “Dis so?” Mas pulled back his Dodgers cap. He had a feeling that he wouldn’t like what Mrs. Witt had to tell him.

  “Well, first of all, I wanted to discuss the trees, the ones we grafted last spring.” Mrs. Witt’s reading glasses hung from her neck.

  “The broken branches.”

  “Yes. Well, Mas, it’s a disaster. I think it may be the combination. I don’t know.”

  Mas followed Mrs. Witt into the grove in the back of the house. The trees, spaced out about three feet away from one another, stood like thin, emaciated bodies. Branches lay on the ground like amputated limbs. Only one tree seemed not to have rejected the grafted branches.

  “It’s a damn killing field,” said Mrs. Witt. “I haven’t had time to do anything with them.”

  Mas examined the bandages of the branches still connected to the root stock. “You’ve been cutting regular?” He pointed to the buds growing below the grafting tape.

  “Like I said, I haven’t had the time.”

  Mas took out a pair of clippers from his belt and cut off the invading buds.

  Mrs. Witt played with the tips of her glasses. “Actually, Mas.” Her voice grew higher, the rhythm faster. “I wanted to talk to you—”

  Mas looked up from a grafted branch. Mrs. Witt looked paler than usual. She took a deep breath, as if she were entering an ice-cold pond. “I wanted to tell you—oh, I guess I just need to spit it out. I’m going to sell the house, Mas. I wasn’t quite sure until a few days ago.”

  Mas blinked, hard. “What, you move?”

  Mrs. Witt nodded. “I’m going to move into a condo in Colorado Springs. My daughter lives there. I don’t get to see the grandchildren enough. So my real estate agent insists on digging up this grove and putting in Bermuda grass. I know that it’s a job for many people. But can you come over next week, survey, then maybe we can come up with some ideas?”

  Mas’s hand slipped away from a grafted branch.

  “Well, of course I’ll recommend you to the new owners, whoever they are,” added Mrs. Witt. “I mean, they may have their own gardener they like to work with, so I can’t make any promises. And, of course, there’s Mexicans who do mow and blow at any price. It’ll just depend.”

  Mas returned his clippers to the leather case on his belt.

  “I just need to get out of here, Mas. Make a new start. There’s just so much of him, everywhere. I mean, I love this house. But then, all it is, is a house. It can’t give me my grandchildren. You know how it is, Mas.” Mrs. Witt leaned against the trunk of the only healthy tree. “How’s your daughter, by the way? What was her name—Mary, was it?”

  “Ma-ri,” Mas said clearly. “And she fine.”

  Mas spent the rest of the afternoon collecting the rejected branches. He threw them down in a large pile on top of a tarp in his truck. As he stared at the broken branches jutting out in all different directions like severed arms and legs, he felt sick to his stomach. Must be the heat, he thought. Maybe I am getting too old for all of this.

  The thing about gardening was that you had plenty of time to think. Mas figured that’s why so many gardeners turned out to be gamblers, philosophers, or just plain crazy. The younger ones who dropped out said that the work was just too darn hard on their bodies, but Mas knew better. They didn’t know how to fill their heads.

  Today Mas felt numb, as if someone had banged him good. Nothing seemed to go right, like a gear had jumped to the wrong place. He tried not to think about the income lost if the new owners decided not to keep him on. Extra cash in the empty coffee can that he kept on the bottom of the closet was getting low; he would have to hit it big at the track just to come out even this year.

  As he loaded his equipment back in the truck, his thoughts returned to Haneda. Why was he blowing his money like some big-shot gambler? Mas hoped that he had stayed in Las Vegas, but he knew Vegas was only a place where vultures landed for a few days before coming back home.

  As Mas turned onto his street, he saw a black, shiny Lincoln Continental parked alongside the curb. A few neighbors had the same car, but theirs were twenty years older, with a generous share of dents and scratches. This one looked all wrong in front of his house, and when Mas walked up to his porch, he found his hunch was on target. Standing by the door was a man wearing large, gold-rimmed glasses and a turtleneck sweater. Shuji Nakane.

  The high-tone fellow didn’t waste any time. “You lied to me,” he said straightaway. Mas felt the anger flush up to his earlobes. What no-good Japanese man would call a stranger a liar in front of the stranger’s own house? He could push this Nakane off the porch into a long-abandoned rock garden filled now with broken glass and gravel.

  “You told me that you weren’t friends with Haneda-san,” Nakane said.

  “I have no business with you.” Mas made it a point to speak English. He didn’t want Nakane to get the wrong idea that they shared anything in common. He tore open the screen door, which flapped off its hinges. Mas had meant to fix that someday.

  As Mas fumbled with his keys, Nakane was unrelenting. “In fact, you knew
him very well. Like brothers.” He pushed a photo in front of Mas’s nose.

  It was an old-fashioned black-and-white photograph, about wallet size. At first Mas made no connection to the image, but then he began to focus more carefully. It was a stone bridge, the kind that you often saw in Hiroshima before the war. This one had been near the train station, Mas remembered. Three boys in black school uniforms stood on different spots on the bridge.

  “That’s you.” Nakane’s manicured finger pointed to the middle boy in between the other two, taller and lean. Those other two, in fact, resembled each other. Look-alikes with strong noses. But one was born in California, like Mas, while the other was a native Hiroshima boy.

  “Where you get dis?”

  “That is not your concern.”

  “Well, then, I have no concern.” Mas finally opened his front door and attempted to close it behind him, when the screen door fell down, almost knocking Nakane’s glasses off his face.

  “We can give you money for information,” hissed Nakane, stepping over the torn screen.

  Mas kept the door open a crack. “Whozu we?”

  “My associates and I. We are prepared to make you a generous offer.”

  “You be wastin’ money. I have no information.”

  “You were with him, weren’t you? When the pikadon fell. What happened to him? Where is he now?”

  “I don’t know no Joji Haneda. Don’t come round here anymore, Nakane-san. There’s nutin’ I can help you with.” His chest pounding, Mas slammed the door shut. He waited to hear the hum of an engine and pulled back the curtains an inch to see the Lincoln Continental drive away. After a good five minutes, Mas took a deep breath and went back outside.

  When Mas felt trouble coming, he usually closed his eyes a few seconds in hopes that it would pass him by. He had done so when the doctor, almost all green in his surgical scrubs, had told him that Chizuko had stomach cancer, stage four. Mas had blinked hard, yet the green doctor was still in front of him, and the tumor still in his wife.