Sayonara Slam

by Naomi Hirahara

  Yuki, on the other hand, looked utterly confused. He was probably taking in Genessee’s Afro and dark skin. “Aunt-tee?”

  “I’m Genessee Howard,” she extended her hand. “Hajimemashite. I’m Mas’s, ah—”

  “That’s my father’s girlfriend. You know, lady friend?” Mari interjected.

  Mas wished that he could sink into the floor, right then and there.

  “You didn’t say anything about having a girlfriend,” Yuki said in Japanese to Mas. “What about my grandmother?”

  “Who is his grandmother?” Mari understood at least that much Japanese.

  “Akemi Kimura. We lived with Arai-san here.”

  “What’s going on?” Born on a US military base in Japan, Genessee, whose mother was from Okinawa, knew enough Japanese to get by.

  Just then Yuki’s cell phone rang.

  Good timing, Mas thought.

  “Yes, waitaminute,” Yuki answered, gesturing for Mas to take over.

  “Hallo.”

  The voice on the other side was that of a man, probably a little younger than middle-aged. “This is the deputy coroner. I just want to inform Mr. Kimura about the cause of death in the case of Tomo Itai. It’s definitely cyanide poisoning. Ingested a few minutes before he died.” He promised to email the report to Yuki’s phone.

  As promised, just minutes after Mas got off the phone, the email arrived. Yuki bent over the report on his screen, mouthing out the English words. Finally, Mari couldn’t stand it any longer and grabbed it away. In about thirty seconds, she’d absorbed it all. “It was cyanide, Lloyd,” she told her husband. “He somehow got it into his system at the stadium.”

  Yuki insisted that he be driven back to the hotel immediately to continue work on his investigation into Itai’s murder.

  “Hai, hai,” Mas said, digging out his keys from his front pocket. He was really starting to regret agreeing to be the boy’s driver.

  Yuki was already waiting by the Impala when Genessee got in front of Mas before he was out the door.

  “I don’t understand, Mas. Who is that young man?”

  “Heezu nobody.”

  “He’s a journalist who is obviously investigating some kind of murder. And you look like you’re involved in some way.”

  Mas lowered his head. Shimmata. He’d been found out. He knew he should have been more forthcoming to Genessee, but that would have required energy. Energy that he couldn’t muster. It was easier to operate in his usual mode. Avoiding the truth.

  “I’zu his driver.” Mas didn’t bother to add “translator,” because that would have made it all the more ridiculous.

  “Did you have a relationship with that woman?” she asked.

  “Huh?”

  “I know you can hear me perfectly well. That woman. His grandmother. Akemi Kimura.”

  “Same class as her brotha. Datsu all.”

  “Why do I think that’s not all?”

  Embarrassed, Mas swung his gaze back to the living room to check if any of his family members were in earshot. They must have sensed that something was amiss, because the room was empty, yet all the dirty plates remained on the table.

  “Mas, what are we doing? We aren’t kids. I don’t need a ring around my finger, but I do need something. Honesty, for one. Do you get what I’m saying?”

  Mas looked away. He felt Chizuko’s spirit pressing into his chest. Out in the backyard, wilting cymbidiums were collected in the corner. If he opened his heart to Genessee, really opened it, wouldn’t his decades of life with Chizuko fall and blow away like dead leaves?

  “I- I- I-…” he stammered. Full words could not be formed.

  “I get it, Mas,” Genessee said, her chin jutting out. “I hear you loud and clear.”

  “Ojisan,” Yuki called out, tapping on his watch.

  “I gotsu go. Talk later?”

  “Don’t bother,” said Genessee. “Obviously talking to me hasn’t been a priority. So why change now?”

  Chapter Six

  You have some secrets, too,” Yuki said as Mas drove through the curves of the Pasadena Freeway. The freeway, the nation’s oldest operating one, had sharp whips of turns. During the day, you could see brown hills balancing tiny homes and a collection of historic Victorians painted in ridiculous colors of the rainbow. At night, however, darkness reigned. Lights were few and far between, and Mas’s headlights revealed the metal divider, scraped and dented from accidents of the past.

  Mas wasn’t in the mood to do true confessions in the Impala. Yuki had no right to his personal stories. They were Mas’s to hold close and protect. Once they were released in the form of words, they could be mangled and distorted. And Yuki, being a journalist, was a practitioner of the black arts.

  The next morning, thankfully, was dedicated to work. Not Yuki’s work. Real work. Gardening work for Mas’s one customer, a professor at UCLA. He lived in the Hollywood Hills, at the end of a windy one-lane road with no sidewalks and hardly any guardrails. Drive off the road and you’d be flying down a dusty bluff with only an occasional yucca plant to witness your fall. During the winter the fog often fell on the Hollywood Hills like a white blanket, and if Mas left his customers’ houses too late he’d have to literally inch his vehicle—before, his Ford truck and now, his Impala sedan—down the hillside, taking him a full hour to reach the populated lowlands.

  Mas had found this customer, McAdams, through another professor, Koichi Kawana, who taught landscaping classes through UCLA Extension. Kawana was famous throughout not only the Southland but even the nation. He designed the largest Japanese garden in the US, the one in Missouri. He’d worked on countless gardens in Southern California, where he lived. So when he began offering classes in Westwood, Mas, surprising Chizuko and most of all himself, signed up to go.

  The class was half Nihonjin gardeners, Japanese Americans like himself. But the other half were a mixed bag: a handful of hakujin retirees and more women than he had imagined. He always sat in the back and spoke to no one, except occasionally a couple of fellow gardeners with whom he was familiar. Homework was limited, but they had to submit a final project—a Japanese-style garden using the principles Kawana taught. Mas made a few false starts but finally came up with something. He began with the kidney-shape koi pond that had been at his home in Hiroshima and added flourishes from his years in California. A sago palm. Rocks from the San Gabriel Mountains. Birds of paradise, a tropical plant that had been officially adopted by the city of Los Angeles.

  Right about that time Chizuko was diagnosed with cancer, so Mas never found out how he did in the class. But then, out of the blue, years after Chizuko had passed away, he received a phone call. It was Kawana-sensei. Would Mas be open to working on an estate in the Hollywood Hills?

  The biggest challenge with this garden was that the foundation wasn’t flat. Most Japanese-style gardens were asymmetrical anyway, but to start off that way made it more difficult to move in rocks and containers of plants. There was already a bamboo thicket in the back, one that constantly multiplied. Mas always felt like he was in the jungle as he hacked back the poles.

  The McAdams family didn’t want to deal with a pond and fish, which would most likely attract the wild animals from the hills anyway. Mountain lions were sometimes spotted in the area, and raccoons, with their sharp, knife-like claws, were prevalent. So Mas decided to not fight the yard’s slopes but instead embrace them with the addition of rocks and a special kind of moss that grew in their crevices.

  His own daughter had never even seen the garden he created, and neither had his son-in-law. They were too busy with their family and daily lives, and Mas never thought of bragging about it. He usually went to do the maintenance of it solo, but today he picked up a helper, Eduardo Fuentes. Eduardo also worked part-time for his nephew, Raul, whom Mas had once cast as a villain. Raul had taken—well, maybe even stolen—some of Mas’s customers, but he’d finally realized that they were nickel-and-dime households anyway. Mas had started his career with t
hese tiny homes, and now it was time for someone younger to take over. At almost eighty years old, Mas was finally ready to pass the baton.

  Eduardo spent most of his time chopping at the wayward bamboo with his own machete while Mas raked away the twigs and fallen leaves. He’d built a wooden bridge to link the east and west sides of the garden, and he noticed that a few boards had warped, revealing rusty nails. He removed them with the claw on the back of his hammer and pounded in new replacements.

  They took a break about noon, and Eduardo kindly shared half of his torta with Mas. Mas could offer only a can of Coke in return. At least it was still cold in his plastic cooler.

  Eduardo knew about Lloyd’s job at Dodger Stadium and was eager to hear about their fertilizing procedures and how often they watered the grass. Talk that only another gardener would appreciate. “There’su a Japanese garden ova there,” Mas said abruptly.

  “At Dodger Stadium?” Frown lines marked Eduardo’s forehead. He chewed slowly, as if it would make his half sandwich last longer.

  “Past parking lot.”

  “Never knew that,” Eduardo said, swallowing. “Remember Fernando?”

  Mochiron, Mas thought. Of course. That pudgy pitcher from Mexico—nobody thought much of him, and then he came in for another pitcher who got hurt. Pitched a shutout. And then another win and another win and another. Until he had eight straight wins and five shutouts. Los Angeles went kuru-kuru-pa, and Mas had to admit that he went a little crazy, too.

  “Heezu good.”

  “Yah, he sure was.”

  They kept chewing their tortas there on the repaired bridge. Eduardo took a good look around. “Lookin’ good, Mister Arai. Lookin’ good.”

  After dropping Eduardo back at his house, Mas was unfortunately alone with his thoughts. He wasn’t one for music, but he flipped on the radio, hoping for news of a political scandal, or an athlete breaking a record, or anything to take his mind off his personal life. FM stations didn’t come in right; the Impala, like his ex-truck, the Ford, was old and had only the basics. He didn’t bother to get a proper replacement for the truck. Besides, most of his gardening equipment was stored at the McAdams’s house, since they were his only customer.

  He hadn’t slept well the night before, and the Impala wove over the lines on the Hollywood Freeway. He tried to think about Itai and who may have killed him. But his thoughts couldn’t remain straight in his head. What did stay were Genessee’s eyes. Her plaintive eyes telling him, “Mas, man up and tell me how you are really feeling!”

  Mas guided the Impala off the freeway at the next exit. He hated to admit it, but he needed other people—dare he even say friends—to help him figure out his current predicament.

  He found Antonio’s right where it had been located for the past twenty years. Mas had become acquainted with the restaurant relatively recently, because of the owners’ daughter, Juanita Gushiken. She was the steady girlfriend of Mas’s only legal-eagle friend, G.I. Hasuike, who seemed to be playing restaurateur more than lawyer these days. Mas parked in the lot, which was shared by the local laundromat.

  Getting ready to push open the restaurant’s glass door, Mas saw a sign posted at eye level: “We thank our customers for your patronage for the past twenty years. We will be closing our doors on June 1.”

  He furrowed his brow and entered the almost-empty restaurant. Juanita was chatting with a couple sitting in the far booth. He spotted G.I.’s shaven head in the only other occupied booth and walked over. “You’zu closin’,” he stated more than questioned.

  G.I. turned his attention from his phone. “Mas, it’s good to see you. We missed you at the baseball game. Juanita, look who’s here.”

  Juanita flashed a smile. After busing some dirty dishes into the kitchen, she came out with some fresh bread and green spicy sauce, placing them on G.I.’s table.

  “Sit down, please,” she said to Mas. He complied. Several years ago, he’d first sampled that green sauce and lived to regret it. Thinking it was guacamole, he slathered it over a slice of bread and nearly burned off his tongue. He knew better now and dipped a tiny corner of the bread into the chile sauce.

  Juanita explained the restaurant’s closure. “My parents are worn out. They want to take it easy. Travel some.”

  That made perfect sense to Mas, the gardener with his single customer.

  “Actually, we’re not giving it up,” G.I. clarified.

  Juanita nodded. “Mas, we’re opening up a Peruvian restaurant in Tokyo.”

  Mas choked on his bread. Tokyo. That was Japan. “Youzu dunno nuttin’ about Japan.”

  G.I. began laughing. “And you do? Mas, when was the last time you were in Japan? Or specifically in Tokyo?”

  “Ah, well,” he had to think. Truth be told, he’d never been in Tokyo in his life. Hiroshima was way south, and when he returned to California sixty-one years ago, he got on a boat in Kobe, also in southern Japan. “Itsu been a while.”

  “We went recently. Six months ago.”

  “I dunno dis.”

  “Well, you’ve been hanging out with Genessee. No time for your friends.” Juanita smiled widely and then paused. “Waitaminute. Everything is cool with Genessee, right?”

  Mas opened his mouth to answer, but no sound emanated.

  Juanita scooted G.I. farther into the booth with her hip and sat down across from Mas. “What’s going on? You can tell us.”

  G.I. again looked up from his phone. “Mas, woman problems? Not you.”

  The two of them kept poking and prodding, and finally it all came out. “I’zu not sure what happen. Yuki talkin’ about Akemi, and then sheezu mad. Like quiet mad.”

  “Ooooo, the silent treatment. Not good.” G.I. shuddered as if he were speaking from experience.

  “Who’s Yuki and…Akemi?” Juanita asked.

  “Oh, yeah, is Yuki in town?” G.I. and Mas had actually first met over Yuki’s legal troubles a decade earlier. “He’s the grandson of Mas’s old girlfriend. Her name is Akemi. Yuki’s a reporter or something, right, in Japan?”

  “Old girlfriend? No wonder Genessee’s pissed off.”

  Genessee wasn’t jealous of Akemi, Mas was sure of that. But she might be jealous of Mas’s dead wife and the place she occupied in his heart.

  “Why is this reporter in L.A. right now?” asked Juanita.

  Mas explained how Yuki was investigating Itai’s death. “Cyanide,” Mas told the couple.

  “Cyanide, holy crap,” G.I. said. “That’s pretty rare these days. Very underworld.”

  “Although didn’t some cult in Japan try to use it to poison a bunch of people?” asked Juanita, who also worked as a private investigator. “Wait, let me look it up.” She touched the screen of her phone and began searching. The whole world’s encyclopedia in something that weighed less than a deck of cards. She announced her results. “It used to be you could get it in feed stores. Or to clean machinery, metal or something. But it’s not readily available anymore.”

  G.I. was also consulting his phone. “Yup, that attempt to release cyanide gas in the Tokyo subway system happened in 1995. Maybe it’s easier to get cyanide in Japan.”

  “Do you think someone brought it from overseas?” Juanita asked.

  Mas had no idea. Certainly there were countless men and women who’d traveled from Japan and Korea. Could they have plotted to do this from another country?

  Just then his phone began to ring.

  “Look at you!” Juanita laughed. “You’ve joined the twenty-first century.”

  Mas removed his humble phone from his jeans pocket.

  “Oh, I spoke too soon. The twentieth century.”

  Mas ignored her teasing and flipped his phone open. It was Yuki, telling him that Sunny had called to say that the police had dropped off Itai’s computer at the Sawtelle house.

  The last thing Mas wanted to do was get back in his car, drive to Little Tokyo, and then take the 10 to the 405, notoriously the worst vehicle intersection in the nation. I
t was Saturday, but these days traffic on the weekend could be just as bad as during weekday rush hour.

  “Gardenin’. No drivin’ work for me today,” he told the reporter.

  “I suppose I can get a taxi.”

  “Go on, get a taxi,” Mas told him in Japanese. Didn’t the Japanese newspapers have budgets for these kind of things?

  “All right, I will.”

  Yuki sounded put out, but Mas was dead tired. Hell, I’m close to eighty, he thought. It’s a wonder I can do what I’m doing.

  “Well, tomorrow is the game,” Yuki said, emphasizing the need to arrive at the stadium on time. “The deciding one between Korea and Japan. This determines the championship.”

  After they agreed on a time to meet tomorrow, Mas closed his phone.

  Juanita switched into waitress mode. “Do you want anything to eat? Lomo saltada? Ceviche?”

  “Pisco?” G.I. said, grinning.

  Mas shook his head and pulled himself up to his feet. No, absolutely no liquor at this time of day. “So you’zu really leavin’?” He repeated the same question he’d asked when he first arrived. This time he directed it to Juanita.

  “Yep,” Juanita answered. “Japan has a population problem—not enough people. They’re happy to give long-term visas to those of us with Japanese blood.”

  “Even if we are the ugly stepchildren,” G.I. added. “Hey, you should visit us sometime in Tokyo.”

  Juanita gave a toothy grin. “Really, Mas, really. Don’t look so sad. You know nothing stays the same.”

  Before Mas left Antonio’s, Juanita squeezed his forearm and whispered, “Call her. I’m sure if you tell her how you feel about her, she won’t stay mad.”

  Mas sat in the Impala for a good five minutes, watching mothers and their young children carrying baskets of clothing into the laundromat. He wasn’t sure what he was going to say, but he knew he couldn’t keep silent. Every day that passed without any contact with Genessee meant it would be that much harder to reopen the closed door to their relationship. He flipped open his phone and pressed Genessee’s name. The phone rang and rang until her voice came on—not her live voice, but a recorded one. She spoke slowly, definitively, as if each word was essential and important. Mas couldn’t leave a message. His attempt would be an embarrassment, evidence that he should be forgotten and not pursued.