Summer of the Big Bachi

by Naomi Hirahara

  This other trouble was more familiar. It chased him through the corridors of his life, turned when he turned, flew over ocean and land. Mas, in fact, had gotten used to it, like a pebble in his work boot. Soon the sole of his foot would get so callused and blistered that he couldn’t feel a thing.

  Mas made it to the dead-end street faster than he had earlier in the day. An Impala with its bumper detached was parked in front of the apartment. Mas eased the truck right behind it and jumped out, not even bothering to check the door.

  The mistress’s apartment was dark, but a window was open and the drapes were pulled back. Mas pressed his face against the window screen. The duffel bag had been moved from the living room floor.

  “Kakita-san,” he called out. “Kakita.” No answer. Mas could only hear muffled sounds of a television and a clatter of pots and pans from a neighboring apartment. Damn woman. Sleeping off the power of the yam wine, he figured. He pounded on the door. “Missu Kakita.”

  There was the click-clack of high heels below on the concrete. Who was that passing by the foot of the stairs? A woman with long, dark hair? “Hallo . . .” Mas called out.

  The woman disappeared. Mas rushed down the concrete steps and out to the street. A child wailed from one of the open windows, and the smell of onions and spices soaked the air. This was one no-good place, thought Mas. Faceless people coming and going. The sidewalk was still, too still. Mas’s body pulsed, down to even the tips of his fingers.

  Then he heard it. It shrieked at first, as high-pitched as an air raid siren. Then a rumble like a summer thunderstorm. He knew the familiar music, a morning ritual. It was the song of his Ford Custom Car truck, now hurtling from its resting place in the hands of a stranger.

  In the darkness, Mas struggled to see the driver, but everything was happening too fast. He grabbed hold of the truck’s bed, as Mari had done years ago, and ran forward, desperately trying to keep it from leaving. His gnarled hands grasped for anything, the rakes with missing teeth, the loops of garden hoses, the Trimmer lawn mower, which was being tossed about with the stacks of broken branches. The truck squealed and squeaked before gaining speed and tearing up the road. Yell, he thought, yell. But all that came out was spit and air and wheezing. The ends of the rake were cutting into his palms, and the edge of a blower pressing into his forehead. Sonafugun, you not going to leave. You not leaving. But as the truck turned, Mas tripped into a pothole and felt a burning in his back. His face smacked against the concrete. Mas tried to look up. He heard the truck abruptly stop. With the motor still running, the door of the Ford was creaked open, and then footsteps, hard heels of a man’s dress shoes. The thief’s knees popped as he knelt down. All Mas could see was the tops of his brown leather shoes—a fancy kind with silly-looking tassels. “Keep your mouth shut about Haneda, or next time it’ll be more than your beat-up truck.” A male voice—but young, old; hakujin, Japanese, black, or Mexican, Mas couldn’t tell. Then something cracked against the concrete close to Mas’s head. The footsteps returned to the Ford, the door closed, and the engine revved one last time before the truck left the street. Mas struggled to turn his head, but saw only a broken branch with a piece of gauze bandage hanging from one end.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  “You needsu to see docta, real docta, Mas.”

  Mas glanced up at Haruo, who stood by the sheetless bed. Haruo’s hair, which covered the left side of his face, looked freshly washed and dried, even electrified, by the dry summer heat. Next to him was Stinky Yoshimoto, listening attentively. Why he was here, Mas had no idea. Stinky’s mouth was half-open, making him look like an eel awaiting its prey.

  “Acupuncture enough, yo,” Mas replied. He lay on the bed, staring at his peeling bedroom ceiling. A gauze bandage was wrapped around his torn hand, while the bruise on his left cheek ached.

  “Too bad about the Ford,” Haruo said. Mas still couldn’t quite believe it. How could he be without the Ford? The theft had done something serious to him. An anger, one he hadn’t felt in years, burned in his gut.

  “Sugokatta, ne, Mas,” Haruo continued. “You lucky. You could’ve caught them and gotten your head blown off like Morishita-san.”

  “Probably young ones, eh, Mas,” Stinky said, blinking furiously. “Maybe kurochans. Or those Mexicans.”

  Mas ignored Stinky—he wasn’t worth wasting time on.

  “Maybe the police will be able to find,” said Haruo, the forever optimist.

  “Ah.” Mas spit into a tissue and tossed it on the floor. “Not counting on them.” As it turns out, the police barely spent ten minutes asking their few questions. Name. Year of car. Model and make. Employer. Mas was going to say that he was self-employed, but gave Mrs. Witt’s name and her San Marino phone number instead. Never know if her connection would help things along.

  They did ask whether Mas saw anything, and he knew that this would be the time to come clean with the threat: “Keep your mouth shut about Haneda. . . .” But then more questions would follow. “How is he connected to all of this?” It was much easier to keep it all inside.

  Haruo pulled a strip of hair behind his ear, revealing a bubbled keloid by his sunken cheek. “Whatcha doin’ ova in North Hollywood, anyhowsu?”

  Pain jolted up Mas’s spine, and he turned on his side, grimacing. I should ask you the same question, he thought.

  “You there to find Joji Haneda, huh?” Stinky greedily asked, folding his hands together.

  Mas clamped down on his dentures. He didn’t know who he could trust, even somebody as worthless as Stinky. Haruo didn’t say anything either, so Mas knew that he was guilty. Stinky filled the silence with the time he had witnessed a liquor store robbery, the same story they had heard again and again. Every foolish word seemed to aggravate the pain in Mas’s back. Finally, he moaned, low but long.

  “I tell you, Mas.” Haruo bent over the bed, and Mas could see a fringe of his friend’s long hair. “You should see those docta, tada.”

  Stinky’s interest was piqued. “Free?”

  “They only come once . . . every two years,” Haruo stammered. “They here . . . this week—you know, the hibakusha doctors. Whatcha got to lose? Japan doctors, they good.”

  Mas felt for his box of cigarettes on the nightstand by his Budweiser. “Those Hiroshima doctas, what do they know?”

  “They’re wakai, Mas, but they’re educated.”

  “Young? Babies. Raised on Kentucky Chicken. They know nutin’ about the war, black market—nutin’ about it.”

  “That don’t matter. . . . They’re not history professors. It’s the karada that they’re interested in. Mas, I’ve been four times. They found nutin’,” Haruo continued. “Strong as a horse, they say. And it’s free for everything—blood test, shikko test. . . . Go to regular docta, cost you two hundred dolla, I bet.”

  “Easy,” interjected Stinky.

  Mas shooed away an especially large fly. “We’re just guinea pigs for them. They want to find sometin’ wrong, cancer, gan, in our eyes, ears, liver, hearts. So they can go back to the big shots and say, ‘Look what we found in these atom bomb survivors. Nasty, huh?’ ”

  “This the thing that happens, what, every other summer?” Stinky asked. Haruo nodded.

  Every other year in June and July came the doctors, a month before the television reports on the Bomb. It was for an international study on radiation exposure.

  What was the big deal? wondered Mas. He had survived Hiroshima and smoked a pack a day since age fifteen, yet still outlasted his wife and many others in their sixties. When you died, you died, and that was all there was to it.

  Mas turned to his side and tapped his cigarette ash into the tab of his Budweiser. It was no use arguing with Haruo. He could be like an untiring mosquito, buzzing around one’s ears until he sucked up what he wanted.

  “Honto, Mas, I take you. No problem,” Haruo insisted, while Stinky excused himself and went to the bathroom.

  Mas waited until Stinky had closed the bathroom door. “
Forget the doctas. I don’t care about none of that. I saw you, Haruo.”

  Haruo averted Mas’s gaze and began scraping some dirt under his fingernails. “Saw me where?”

  “North Hollywood. You were there. The lady’s place.”

  “What lady?”

  “Haneda’s lady.”

  “I have nutin’ to do with Haneda.”

  Mas couldn’t always tell if someone was telling the truth, but he could smell a lie fifty yards away. Right now the stench was unmistakable. “What does he want?”

  Haruo looked back at the closed bathroom door on the other side of the hallway. “I just talk to him on the phone,” he finally said.

  “He wants sumptin’. I know that guy.”

  Haruo shook his head. “Just wanna see ole friends. Thatsu all. Even asked about you.”

  Mas pinched his cigarette stub. “There’s nutin’ he needsu to know about me.”

  “I knowsu that. I don’t say nutin’ about you.” Mas heard the bathroom door open, and Stinky, zipping up his pants, reentered the bedroom. Mas wasn’t going to keep talking about Haneda, and Haruo seemed to understand. He straightened his hunched back. “Well, Mas, how about the exams? You gonna go with me?”

  “Can’t go. Got plans.”

  “You can’t work. No condition—”

  “Me no work.”

  “The races, Mas? Just call your bookie.”

  “Bookie? Who said anytin’ about gamble?”

  “Mas, whatsa matter? Just go few minutes—”

  “Dammit, Haruo, I don’t wanna see those sonafugun Hiroshima doctas.” Before he realized what he was doing, Mas flung one of his Budweiser cans just a few inches away from the wisps of Haruo’s white hair. It ricocheted against the mirror of the dresser, spurting out cigarette ash, and then landed on the floor.

  Mas immediately regretted his actions but said nothing. The North Hollywood incident had shaken him more than he cared to admit. The fly began to buzz and circle the room like a small aircraft losing gas. The three of them remained silent for about a minute.

  “Orai, Mas, have your way.” Haruo pushed back his hair. “Tomato in kitchen. Good ones, real red.” He walked past the bed, then out of the room, with Stinky following, peppering him with questions.

  I don’t want your pitiful tomatoes, Mas wanted to yell out. He couldn’t stand the puppy dog, his eternal friend. Why didn’t Haruo ever fight back, tell him where to go? Mas wondered. Be a man, a real man, for once.

  Mas lay back on the mattress and finished off the stub of his Marlboro. He should have asked Haruo to help him put the sheets on the bed. The buttons on the mattress were dark and soiled from sweat and dirt. Flies whizzed into the room from the broken window screen and landed on Chizuko’s old jewelry box.

  “Sonafugun flies,” murmured Mas, who could only follow them with his eyes. After a few hours, the flies just buzzed in the corner of the ceiling. They were just plain worn out and afraid to move.

  When the phone rang, the room was shadowy and dark. Mas flung his arm, knocking his beer can and television remote control from the nightstand.

  “Hallo,” Mas mumbled.

  “Yeh, Mas, it’s Tug. Tug Yamada. Hope I didn’t wake you.”

  “Oh, hallo, how are you.” Mas pictured the tall, sturdy Japanese American man who entered a room like a tugboat fighting a storm. Tug’s real name was Takashi, but like other Nisei, the second-generation Japanese Americans, he had to have a more “American” moniker worthy of veterans and Sun-day golfers. Mas always hated to call a grown man Tiger, Wimp, or Fats, but what could he do? A Nisei was a Nisei, and there was no changing them.

  “I heard what happened to you. I can’t believe how bad things are today. To have your truck stolen right underneath your nose.” Tug’s voice boomed over the line.

  “Yah,” Mas said.

  “Well, Lil made a tamale pie, and we want to drop it off. You just sit tight; we’ll be there in fifteen minutes.” The line clicked, and Tug Yamada was gone.

  Mas groaned and slowly pushed himself up. Tug’s wife, Lil, and Chizuko had met years ago, when their daughters were in the same preschool class. The Yamadas were Mas and Chizuko’s first full-blooded American friends. Tug had fought in the U.S. Army over in France—even had a missing half a forefinger to show for it.

  That shortened finger both terrified and entranced Mas; he tried time after time to avoid looking at the severed appendage, but his eyes were inevitably lured to it. It was a mark of citizenship, reminding him that while Tug was a red, white, and blue American, Mas was only a bloody Kibei born in Watsonville who had spent most of his early years across the Pacific in Japan.

  Mas eased himself to his feet and stared at the image in the dresser mirror. Large bags drooped from his black, beady eyes, and his long, outgrown hair stood up like a rooster’s crown. His cheek looked bad, like someone had tried to hull out a piece of flesh with a spoon. He groaned again, not for himself but for his duty to be presentable, a curse he learned from the always proper Chizuko.

  After changing his T-shirt and jeans, Mas surveyed the living room. His fishing gear lay sprawled on the scratched coffee table, and stacks of junk mail and unopened bills littered the floor. Mas swept everything together and threw the mess into the hall closet. Better, almost, thought Mas. He went to the midnight-black piano and wiped the edge of his T-shirt over the layer of dust. Framed photos of Mari—as a baby in a pink pinafore, as a high school graduate wearing a lopsided mortarboard—stared back at Mas. But there were no others after that. Mas had picked up a kindergarten photo, when he heard a knock at the door.

  “Your screen door’s broken and doorbell’s stuck, Mas.” Tug’s thick hands were wrapped around a casserole dish covered in aluminum foil. He plowed into the house, leaving the dish on the kitchen counter, while Lil followed ten steps back.

  “My gosh, Tug, you’re acting like you live here,” Lil said from the porch.

  “Come in, come in.” Mas held the door for the slight woman in the flowered dress. Her dark eyes were enlarged through her slightly tinted bifocals.

  “Got a screwdriver?” Tug had returned after circling the living room.

  Before Mas could answer, Tug was out the door. “It’s okay. Got one in the glove compartment,” he called from the porch.

  “He’s been like this ever since he retired.” Lil sat down on the brown couch. “I don’t know what to do with him, frankly,” she added, laughing.

  “What you want, Seven-Up, Coke?” Mas stiffly stood by his black easy chair.

  “Oh, no, Mas, just finished with dinner. We were so worried. What kind of world are we living in?”

  More evil than you can imagine, Mas thought to himself.

  “Was it just one person?”

  Mas nodded. “A man, datsu all I knowsu.”

  “You see his face?”

  Mas shook his head. “His shoes. Saw his shoes. Looks like the kind O.J. wore.”

  “The fancy Italian loafers? With the tassels?”

  Mas nodded again.

  “That’s strange,” Lil said.

  Mas had to agree. He said nothing about the warning issued by the thief. He bit down on his dentures to contain his anger. It was one thing for him to decide to stay out of somebody’s business; it was quite another for someone to steal his property to keep his mouth shut. Mas had no desire to dredge up old memories, but he wasn’t going to let some fancy-heeled sonafugun try to push him down.

  “So, is there any chance that they’ll recover your truck?”

  “Maybe in pieces.” Mas tried to lower himself in his easy chair but felt another sharp jab of pain in the middle of his spine.

  “You okay? Is it your back again?”

  “A little.” Mas looked out toward the backyard of withering eggplants and wilted cymbidium. “I’m a ole man, Lil.”

  “Have you gone to a doctor?”

  “Nah, what do they know?”

  “They don’t all have to be bad, Mas. Chizuko was
an unusual case.”

  Just stomach problems, Mas remembered Chizuko saying. Probably clear up in a few weeks. “So how about your daughter? She docta now?”

  “Joy’s finishing her residency in South Carolina. She might have a job back here in L.A.”

  “Yeah, sugoi, ne. She smart one, eh. So quiet.” Mas remembered the plain girl with a moon face and thin eyes like her father’s. The brother took after Lil—bright, round eyes and big white teeth.

  “Well, it’s taken her long enough to get to this point.” Lil smoothed out her flowered dress. Joy had been on her way to a Ph.D. in physics before she’d switched over to medical school. “But she’s no Mari. She can’t put words together like Mari can.”

  “That girl talks too much.” Too much back talk, no good, Mas had told Mari time after time. Those fiery black eyes had burnt holes through Mas’s forehead all through her junior high and high school years.

  “But that’s not bad.” Lil paused, and they both listened as something metal fell on the outside concrete steps.

  Lil’s rose-colored glasses glimmered. “I know it wasn’t easy, Mas, that Mari went through her stages. But I knew that she would make something out of herself. I mean, Joy’s doing well, and we’re proud of her, but Mari—she has something special. I tried to deny it, mind you. I guess I never wanted to sell Joy short. But I can admit it now, especially since Chizuko . . . Well, Joy has always played by the rules, but Mari, her spirit, that’s going to take her places.”

  Mas’s spine began to tingle, as if Lil’s warm, soothing words were lapping at his back. He never understood what “freelancing” was. How could a girl make money making movies? That was for guys who had connections. But he had to give her some credit. She was surviving in New York, although it seemed like she was living hand to mouth. “Heh, I don’t know. She cause a lot of trouble, no?”

  “Well, that’s what daughters are for,” laughed Lil as Tug barreled into the living room once again, a screwdriver in his hand. A few pieces of old paint were stuck in his white beard and hair.