Summer of the Big Bachi

by Naomi Hirahara

  “Whatsu dis?” Mas asked.

  “His booking number. You’re going to need it. Yuki wants to talk to you.”

  Finding the jail was no problem. Mas had once done a rose-pruning job for a Catholic church in Little Tokyo, just some blocks south. But visiting the jail was another matter altogether. A mini-mall was on the corner, selling bail bonds and breakfasts. Public phone booths stood like tombstones along the street. To the north were the twin towers, looking like any other kind of government building, aside from the thick windows and elevators lined with steel grids. What stayed with Mas the most was the quiet. Voices on the streets were hushed, as if everyone had a secret that was not worth celebrating.

  Two lines of waiting visitors wrapped around two buildings named Los Angeles County Sheriff Men’s Central Jail. Mas wasn’t sure where to go, so he took a chance and picked a line with mostly men. He figured that this was the place for hard offenders, those who had killed and maimed. Judging from the visitors in line, he was right.

  Nobody spoke, even those with friends. Then a man, maybe Chinese or Vietnamese, came up to Mas. He was a scrawny man, with thin hair that stood up like weeds. He asked something in a language Mas could not make out. Mas shook his head. “No understand,” he said. The man was looking for some kind of connection, an explanation, maybe. But Mas had no answers himself.

  Once his watch read five-thirty, the line began to move. Mas’s stomach began to growl, but he lost his appetite. He had been in a jail only one time, back in Hiroshima.

  Mas watched the others, most likely regulars. They put their belongings in lockers on one side of the waiting room and then got back in line toward a counter protected by thick glass. Two female officers wearing green uniforms and with their hair tied back in buns punched at a computer keyboard as each person passed by. Finally it was Mas’s turn. “Yukikazu Kimura,” he said. The officer asked him for the booking number, just like Akemi had said, and Mas pulled out an old receipt that he had used to jot down the number. He pushed the receipt through the glass, and in time she directed him to another officer, who stood by some sort of metal detector.

  Before Mas knew it, the officer was patting him down and rummaging through his pockets. He took out Mas’s Marlboros and matches from a local gas station and shook his head. “We’ll have to hang on to these for you,” he said.

  At that point, Mas wanted to head back home. He felt trapped, off balance. Why had that stupid Yuki Kimura come to America? He should have stayed in the new, improved Hiroshima. Very few had the guts to make it here, and the young ones were only fooling themselves to think they could.

  After going up the concrete steps, there was more waiting. What had the sign said—visitation only until six forty-five P.M.? There was only twenty minutes to go. Finally an officer directed him to a room separated from the other side by a thick glass window. There was a line of prisoners on the other side, seated next to red phones. Two chairs to the left, wearing an orange jumpsuit, was Yuki Kimura.

  Mas lifted the telephone receiver. It smelled funny, but he had no choice. “Hallo,” he said, looking at the boy through the bulletproof glass.

  “Hello,” Yuki answered. The boy looked terrible. His red hair was parted in the middle and lay completely flat. His eyes were rimmed with dark, puffy bags. “You weren’t at the court-house.”

  “No. Had yoji,” Mas lied.

  “Doesn’t look good,” Yuki said.

  Mas couldn’t say anything to make it better.

  “I have a request, Ojisan. A serious request.”

  “Whatsu?”

  “Send my grandmother back to Japan. I don’t care how you do it. Go with her, if you have to.”

  Mas almost felt like laughing. How could anyone force Akemi Haneda to do anything?

  “I have a bad feeling about this. Real bad feeling. The police need someone to blame. They might cut a deal with the Japanese government, and I may be tried over there. I don’t know which place will be worse.”

  Mas had heard about the high conviction rate in Japan, the aggressive questioning by police. More often than not, the suspect ended up confessing.

  “All I know is that I can’t put my grandmother through this. Better yet, take her to Hawaii, or even Guam. Some-where safe and quiet. Away from all of this.”

  “You knowsu she not goin’ anywhere.”

  “You don’t understand. You can’t mess around with these people.”

  Mas was confused. “Whatsu people?” As he stared at Yuki’s face, the table between them began to shake. Down the line of jailed suspects, a man in an orange suit banged the telephone receiver against the Plexiglas at a visitor, a woman. In a split second, two guards had grabbed the prisoner and were dragging him toward a back door.

  Mas and Yuki watched, saying nothing. The skin underneath the boy’s left eye began to twitch.

  A bell sounded, and then a voice announced over the intercom, “Visiting hours will end in five minutes.”

  “I must go,” Mas said, relieved that his own time was limited.

  But Yuki would not let him go so easily. “Come tomorrow, Ojisan,” Yuki said. “And then I will tell you.”

  As Mas got back into the Jeep, he began thinking about Riki again. Riki had been plenty sick, but the timing of his death seemed too convenient. With him out of the way and Yuki arrested, anyone could create a new history for Joji Haneda, U.S.A.

  The traffic on the Ventura Freeway was light, so Mas knew that he was meant to go to the Oxnard City Hospital again. He went straight to the third floor and wandered around until he found the same Filipino nurse he had talked to the first time.

  “Excuse, excuse,” he said.

  “Yes?” The nurse was holding a clipboard and seemed like she was in a hurry to go someplace else.

  “I talksu to you a few days ago.”

  The nurse wrinkled her forehead and then had a moment of recognition. “Oh, yes, I remember. You were visiting—”

  “Joji Haneda.”

  “Yes, yes.” The nurse’s voice took on a strange tone, and she looked at Mas nervously. “How can I help you?”

  “Well, I just wonderin’. I meansu, he looked bad, but still seemed to die all of a sudden.”

  The nurse glanced down the hall and then pulled Mas into an empty hospital room. “Who told you?” she asked. “What did you hear?”

  “Nobody tellsu me anytin’. Riki—Joji, I meansu—an ole friend. I don’t wanna cause any trouble. Just can’t rest unless I knowsu the truth.”

  The nurse ran her hand through her straight black hair.

  Mas tried again. “Just sumptin’ funny, I think.”

  “That’s what I thought.” The nurse lowered her voice. “I told the doctors that it was very strange. The oxygen mask had been in place, at least when I saw him last. He wasn’t strong enough to take it off by himself at that point. But after his monitors indicated that his vitals were taking a nosedive, I ran into his room, and his mask had been removed.”

  Mas bit down on his lip. He remembered Riki’s gulping down air from the oxygen machine during their last meeting. “Where’s mask?”

  “Here.” The nurse pointed to the vinyl chair in the corner, as it was set up in every room. “Now, you tell me—how did that mask get there?”

  Apparently the doctors hadn’t paid any attention to the nurse, and Mas understood. Doctors and hospitals were always worried about getting sued; at least that’s what one of Mas’s young doctor customers kept telling him. So if Riki’s death had been helped along by someone else, who could it have been? The nurse didn’t remember Riki’s having had too many other visitors. Even the wife and children had stopped coming around.

  “You can try to make your case with the hospital, even the police,” the nurse said. “I’ll lose my job if I make too much more of a fuss. But you, an old friend, that’s different.”

  Mas shoved his hands in his jean pockets, thanked the nurse, and left the building.

  The next day, Mas knew wha
t to do. He went to the jail early in the afternoon, and left his cigarettes in the Jeep. He brought the sports page to read in line. Finally, he was back in jail, with Yuki looking at him from the other side of the glass.

  Yuki’s skin, even the whites of his eyes, looked yellow and diseased. How long he would survive in jail, Mas didn’t know.

  Yuki didn’t waste any time. “I haven’t told you the whole truth,” he said. “I didn’t tell you about the land.”

  “Your property?”

  Yuki nodded, his voice now barely above a whisper. “I made a deal,” he said. “With this one development company. Ten million dollars.”

  “Nakane.”

  Yuki nodded again. “Of course, I wouldn’t sell it to them while Obaachan was alive. I couldn’t, anyway. It’s all under her name. And she refused to deal with any developers. She’s just like my father: wants to hold on to the land no matter what. But after my father died, money was tight. For both of us. Obaachan was too proud, but not me. So I made a deal with Nakane. He’d give me a hundred thousand up front, and I’d make sure that the land was undisturbed. We’d put a fence around it. Make sure that no one else had access to it.”

  “Fence?”

  “I know; it didn’t make sense. But I agreed. And then I started feeling guilty. What was I doing? Obaachan was my only family, and here I was, making deals behind her back. So I changed my mind. I even offered to repay the money in monthly installments. Nothing was on paper, anyhow. Well, Nakane was so angry. Threatened to get rid of me, and Obaachan, too. Next thing I know, he’s on his way to America to find out about this Joji Haneda in California.”

  “Whyzu dis land so special?”

  Yuki pressed his hair back. “That’s what I thought at first. It’s small; can hold only fifty apartment units. And it’s right by some factories by the water. Who would want to live there?”

  “Where’s dis place, again?” Mas listened as Yuki described the location. Ujina. He knew it well. Full of factories back then, pumping out gray smoke while producing airplane propellers and other military equipment. He knew a couple of boys who had lived in the area. Mas pictured the makeshift shacks, the bald lightbulbs lighting up the shantytown at night. Why would such a piece of land be so valuable?

  “I have some theories,” Yuki said. “But I can’t do anything locked up here. I need your help, Arai-san. Can you give it to me?”

  The last thing Mas wanted to do was make a long-distance telephone call, much less one to Hiroshima. But after a few tries and pressing a series of zeroes and ones, he finally got a funny dial tone that sounded like blips more than rings. About the fourth blip, a male voice came on. “Moshi-moshi, Shine magazine. Noguchi speaking.”

  Mas took a deep breath and put all his energy into speaking the most proper Japanese that he could muster. “Excuse, is this Noguchi Nobuhiro? Kimura Yukikazu’s friend?”

  “Yes, who is this?”

  “Ah, Arai Masao. Calling from America.”

  “What’s happened to Yuki? We heard about his trouble; we’ve been trying to call the police and sheriff’s departments, but no one can give us a clear answer.”

  “Ah, yah, he’s in some trouble. Needs your help.”

  “Yes, of course, anything. What can I do from way over here?”

  Mas swallowed before speaking. “Land. Haneda land in Ujina.”

  “Where they are hoping to build some new mansions?”

  “Yah, Yuki needs you to do research, find out about that land during World War Two.”

  “So—” said Noguchi. “I believe there were a lot of defense factories in that area.”

  “Ah, yah, well, I think Koreans working and living there, too.”

  “Of course, of course.”

  Mas could hear the reporter typing on some kind of keyboard.

  “I’ll do some nosing around and then I’ll call you back.” The reporter jotted down Mas’s Altadena phone number and then ended the phone call.

  About an hour and a half later, the phone rang. Mas had placed the tan telephone on the middle of his kitchen table, right next to a half-eaten rotisserie chicken.

  “Hallo, hallo.”

  “Arai-san? It’s Noguchi. I’ve consulted with another reporter, and we’ve discovered something very interesting.”

  Arai’s hand grew wet as he held the telephone receiver tight to his ear and heard the Shine reporter’s findings. The conversation was short but fruitful. Mas now understood why everyone was in a rush to find a Joji Haneda in America.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The funeral was set for seven P.M., so that meant Mas and Haruo had to leave by six P.M. Punctu-ality was key for every Nisei, and no one was ever late to a funeral. But Mas was in fact behind schedule. He had called Haruo to go on ahead, so he was surprised to see his friend waiting for him on the porch at six-thirty.

  Haruo was wearing a polyester brown suit and thick tie from the seventies. His hair had been oiled and combed back, fresh teeth marks at the side part. Mas could smell a healthy dose of aftershave lotion, probably stored in Haruo’s family medicine cabinet for decades. Haruo Mukai was looking good enough for a funeral.

  As Mas wrapped a skinny tie around his neck on the porch, Haruo held out an envelope.

  “Whatsu dis?”

  “Koden,” said Haruo.

  “Koden?”

  “I put thirty in yours. Figured you knowsu Haneda for a long time.”

  Koden? Mas felt like laughing. Why help out the very family who was cheating his friends out of millions of dollars? “I not gonna give koden,” he declared. “Not gonna give nutin’ to those people.”

  “Mas, you gotsu history.”

  It was no use. Mas didn’t have time to argue with Haruo.

  “Betta put your name on back,” said Haruo.

  Retrieving a pen from the kitchen, Mas wrote in block letters JOJI HANEDA and then the Hanedas’ old address in Hiroshima.

  Mas had not been to Evergreen Cemetery for a few years. They passed Mexican bakeries, closed for the night, and liquor stores, open but windows barred. On the sidewalk, a middle-aged man pushed a small cart, a bell ringing.

  He remembered his friend Ichiro “Itchy” Iwasaki, who had worked a brief time at a nearby mortuary after getting laid off from his job as a janitor at City Hall.

  “Terrible work,” he’d told Mas, describing a midnight trip to pick up a 103-year-old woman from a nursing home, weighed down by all her money and paperwork tied around her waist. There was the middle-aged man who had committed suicide in a deep freezer, alongside iced shrimp and Fudgsicles. The most heartbreaking was an infant, not even two months old, who had died in his sleep with a mobile of sheep and clouds overhead.

  Itchy, like the other mortuary workers, had had the option to watch a cremation. Might help in explaining it to the loved ones, his boss explained. But Itchy had declined. “Hey, this is just to tide me over. Not a career move or nutin’.”

  The cemetery itself still looked the same, except the grass from the outside of the iron gate looked a little brown and sparse. Haruo steered the car into the driveway, following a line of new Hondas and Toyotas—tan, light gray, and wine-colored—waiting to park near the chapel.

  The lot seemed to be filled. “Many people come to say good-bye to Haneda,” said Haruo, his suit jacket overwhelming his skinny shoulders and arms. He followed a loop in the road lined with palm trees, and parked next to a giant sphere, someone’s strange grave marker.

  Mas told Haruo to go ahead inside, and then walked outside the chapel. A tall monument stood in the back next to a patch of grass. It was skinny and pointed; at the top was a concrete man, helmet on his head, hands at his sides, and a rifle hanging from his shoulder. There was a plaque with a verse:

  Those who lie here gave their lives,

  That this country,

  beset by its enemies,

  might win out of their sacrifice

  victory and peace.

  —Dwight Eisenhower


  Surrounding the monument were plaques set into the ground with names of dead Nisei veterans, some marked with the Buddhist chrysanthemum; others, the Christian cross.

  Beyond the soldiers were more graves of mothers, daughters, fathers, sons, all Japanese. Beyond that were black families, even a good number dating back more than a hundred years. Some tombstones had oval photos of older black women wearing corsages, and black men in felt hats. There were cement angels looking over the graves of babies, born and dead within the same year. The markers weren’t lined up straight and perfect, like at some of the high-tone cemeteries in the hills. Instead, the ground had shifted, causing some to rise like crooked teeth.

  It took Mas a good ten minutes before he found it. A headstone, short and squat, shaped much like his late wife herself. The letters were filled with dirt, and Mas felt a pang of shame. He should have come earlier, he thought, trying to scrape the letters clean with the edge of a matchbook.

  After Mari had been told of Chizuko’s cancer, she didn’t want to go back to school. But Chizuko insisted. They didn’t know how long she had—maybe six months, maybe another twenty years. “You can’t do anything here at home,” Chizuko said. “You study hard, get good grades. That’s best medicine for me.”

  Chizuko was fine during the winter and spring quarters, but experienced a setback in the summer. It was as if she could let down her guard because her daughter was on academic break.

  “What’s wrong with you?” Mari was wearing a dress with nylons. She had gone to the hospital right after her job at a law firm downtown. She now stood in the doorway of the den.

  Mas lowered the volume on the television. “Huh?”

  “Why don’t you support Mom more?”

  “I go, ebery day.” He went religiously to the Beverly Hills hospital, seven days a week, from three to six o’clock.

  “But you don’t talk to her. You just sit there, watching old TV shows. And when you do talk to her, you guys end up fighting.”