Summer of the Big Bachi

by Naomi Hirahara

  “Well,” Akemi said, “it’s up to us, isn’t it? We’ll find out what’s going on.” She then turned to Mas. “Masao-san, I wish you were coming with us to the airport. Tell me that we will see each other again.”

  Mas blinked hard two, three times. “Oh, yah.”

  “You come and visit us in the new, improved Hiroshima.”

  “Of course,” Mas lied, standing stiffly as Akemi gave him a brief hug.

  Yuki knew enough not to touch Mas, and bowed instead. “If there’s anything I can do—”

  “Oh, yah, send me a copy of that drawing.”

  “Drawing?”

  “The one of the man with one leg.”

  Yuki unzipped his day pack and took out the illustration. “Here, you can have this. It’s a copy.”

  “Wait.” Mas went into the bedroom and returned to the front with another image. The black-and-white photograph of the boys on the bridge.

  “What’s this?”

  “Joji Haneda. Your grandmother’s brother.” Mas pointed to the tall boy on the left-hand side. On his uniform was the white ID tag with a letter O faintly readable.

  “And the others?”

  Mas hesitated. “Schoolmates. Friends.”

  Yuki didn’t bother to ask where Mas had obtained the photo. He took the snapshot and placed the drawing in Mas’s hands. Yuki then bowed again, picked up the suitcases, and headed for the Jeep. When he reached the middle of the driveway, he turned around. “Ojisan, I’ll take you to a pachinko parlor or, better yet, boat racing. We’ll see how well you’ll do in that.”

  “Orai, orai.” Mas waved from the porch and stood there until the Jeep disappeared from McNally Street. In the balmy sunshine, he studied the color drawing of the man without the leg. This is what Joji Haneda was trying to tell the world. That he wasn’t Riki Kimura, type A, but Joji Haneda, O. The circle that he was trying to draw was his identity, a message that lasted more than fifty years. Mas was just happy that he was around to figure it out.

  Mas was in the garage when Tug came by, five hours later. He seemed a little more subdued than usual, and Mas figured it had to do with the boy’s leaving. Tug gave a brief report about going to the airport, asked a few questions, said a few words, but pretty much revealed nothing. It wasn’t like Tug. He wasn’t the kind to hide his thoughts. He was direct and big, in body and spirit.

  Mas made some comments about a new gadget they were selling at the local hardware store, but still little response. Mas expected Tug to show some interest, but he merely sagged on the Coleman cooler.

  “Youzu okay, Tug?”

  Tug took out a handkerchief and mopped up the sweat on his forehead. “I had to get out of the house. It’s Joy. She’s back home for a week.”

  “Oh, yah.” Must be nice for her, thought Mas, get a break from hospital work.

  “She and Lil have been at it the whole time. She’s thinking about quitting medicine, Mas. She’s done all the course work, internship, almost done with her residency, and now she says it’s not what she wants to do with the rest of her life.”

  Mas felt numb. Even though the Yamadas weren’t the type to ibaru, make a big deal of it, Mas knew that they were in fact very proud of Joy.

  “What she wanna do instead?”

  “Paint.” Tug kicked a piece of wire Mas had left on the garage floor. “We should have never enrolled her in those Pasadena art classes.”

  “Maybe she just feel dis way now. Temporary.”

  “It’s not just a phase, she says. How are you going to pay off your loans? I ask her. Those are going to have to be some damn good paintings.”

  Mas flinched. For Tug to curse, even say a word like “damn,” meant he had reached his limit.

  “It’s not even the worst of it, Mas,” Tug said. “I wouldn’t normally tell just anyone this, but I know you’d keep this under wraps.” Tug took a deep breath. “She says that she’s been in therapy, counseling. For a year now.”

  This counseling was an epidemic, thought Mas. Good thing Haruo wasn’t around to talk about how great it was to dump your feelings onto a complete stranger.

  “She says that she’s been trying to be a good Japanese girl her whole life, and she needs to break out of it. I don’t get it, Mas. We tried to be good parents. I don’t know where we went wrong.” A bus paused at a stop down the street; the door folded open and then shut. It spilled exhaust as it left. “I guess what hurts the most is that she didn’t come to us with her problems. She didn’t trust us. Now she’s telling someone about how terrible we are as parents.”

  “No, Tug,” Mas interrupted. “You and Lil are good parents. You take care of her, take her to church, tell her what’s wrong, what’s right. She a nice girl. Itsu just that we all got problems. May have nutin’ to do with mother, father. Some-times sometin’ happens, changes everytin’.”

  “Maybe, maybe.” They remained quiet while Mas cleaned his tools. “By the way,” continued Tug, “I wanted to ask you. Haruo’s not back gambling, is he?”

  “Whatchu mean?”

  “Well, I went to pick him up to go to the airport, and what do you know, he was running that incinerator in his backyard.”

  Mas balled up his cleaning rag.

  “He was smoking up that entire block. Neighborhood kids were in his driveway. They thought he was burning a body or something.”

  “Howzu they get dat idea?”

  “You know kids. So I was a bit worried. He put it out as soon as I came, but when he went back into the house to make sure he had turned off the stove, I checked.”

  “And?”

  Tug pulled out a bill from his pocket. It was only about half a greenback, burned, yet still clearly showing Ben Franklin’s face.

  “Money.”

  Tug nodded. “Now, I don’t know what he was doing burning one-hundred-dollar bills. I didn’t say anything, but wondered if you could talk to him. You’re his best friend, after all.”

  This time Mas didn’t hesitate. “No worry, Tug,” he said. “I take care.” So it had been Haruo, thought Mas. He had been there that night after Yuki was arrested. Haruo was the king of second, third, and fourth chances. And now, by getting rid of Nakane’s thirty-thousand-dollar bribe, he was trying to give a chance to Mas.

  After a few more minutes, Tug rose to go home. “Well, Mas, life’s going to be a lot quieter, huh? What’s next?”

  “No idea,” Mas said. “No idea.”

  The house on McNally Street was especially quiet this evening. Mas picked up his usual routine—a cold Budweiser, and the horse race broadcast. This is what he wanted, right? For the dust to resettle in the corners of his room.

  Mas turned off the television set and sat at the kitchen table for a while, maybe a full hour. Crickets chirped, and children called out to one another on the street. Mas picked up the message that Akemi had apparently written to him a few days earlier. MARI CALLED, it said in capital letters.

  It took Mas three tries. On the first attempt, he forgot to dial one before the number. On the second, he hung up before anyone could answer. On the third try, he let it ring and ring, until he heard her voice. It sounded so real that he began to talk, and then realized that it was only the answering machine.

  “Itsu Dad,” he finally said, and before he could add anything else, a beep sounded, ending the message.

  The next morning, Mas did what he had always done on Fridays for most of the past thirty years. He went to the Witts’ in San Marino.

  As he eased Tug’s pickup truck into the driveway, Mrs. Witt waved her hands from the back doorway as if she were directing a train to stop. “Mas, I need to talk to you,” she cried out. Mas noticed that her fingers were dark purple. Dying those T-shirts in her vats again, he noted. “I’ll wash up and meet you in the orchard,” she said, her hands dripping purple.

  Mas got out of the truck and opened the rear door. Tightening his grip on his wooden toolbox, he headed for the broken branches. Weeds and dandelions everywhere. Most of the t
rees had been chopped down, except about a half a dozen. And then, in the back row, he saw it. A branch that remained fused to its new home. Mas tripped over some extended roots and checked the connection. Fine. Fine. The leaves were waxy and bright green. He yanked a leaf to get a better look, and then, hidden by a bend in the branch, was a small persimmon the size of a baby’s fist.

  “They found it.” Mrs. Witt was a bit breathless. She was wearing a white gauze top and loose blue shorts. Her hands were still purple, but dry now.

  “What?” Mas released the leaf.

  “They found your truck.” Mrs. Witt wiped some sweat with the back of her hand. “Can you believe it? They just called me, about ten minutes ago. Good thing you gave them my number. Tried your place first, but couldn’t get an answering machine. They want you to go in. It’s the police in South Pasadena.”

  “Get my truck?” Mas blinked hard and adjusted his baseball hat. Sonafugun. The Ford was still around. “So nutin’ wrong with it, huh?”

  “I didn’t say that. I don’t know the condition of your car; you got to go to their impound lot for that. But they did find it. How did you get here, anyhow?”

  Mas gestured toward Tug’s pickup in the driveway. “My friend’s. I just come to see the broken branches.”

  “Well, Mas, you don’t have to worry about that. I called in some tree people, heavy-duty guys with tractors and that sort of thing. I knew you were recuperating, and I had to get moving on the house.”

  “So you gonna move for sure.”

  “Yep. Sure looks like it. Even found a condo in Colorado Springs. It’s for old people. Retirees.”

  Mas wrinkled his forehead. Neither Mrs. nor Mr. Witt—Mas had seen him recently on a television commercial—had aged gracefully. They were barely sixty, if even that, and their skin had lost all its luster.

  “I’m working on a project now, tie-dyed pajamas for my grandkids.”

  “Thatsu nice.” Mas didn’t know what else to say.

  “So, you are coming back, right? There’s loads to be done. I’ve got algae all over my koi pond, and hedges have to be recut. I want to put the house on the market by August.”

  “Next week,” said Mas. “After I getsu my truck.”

  Mrs. Witt seemed satisfied and headed back toward the brick house. “By the way . . .” She turned. “How are you doing?”

  Mas reached up and grabbed hold of the tiny persimmon. “Fine,” he said, pulling down. “Just fine.”

  The police headquarters in South Pasadena had recently been renovated. It was in a desert style, with a fake adobe facade and tile in green and blue, looking more like a Southwestern Holiday Inn than a den of cops and robbers. Mas had been there once, when he needed to get information on getting a license to work in the city. A young girl, her brown hair tied up in a ponytail, sat behind the glass window. Wearing a black uniform, she spoke through a slotted plastic circle. “On the other side, sir, in City Hall.”

  This time, there was no ponytailed girl, but a dark boy who looked like a Hawaiian. Mas followed the boy, whose leather holster squeaked as he passed by a couple of offices and then entered a wide room lit up by long fluorescent bulbs. “Detective Benjamin, this is the owner of the truck that was found this morning,” the Hawaiian boy said before returning down the hall.

  Detective Benjamin was a solid man with damaged red hair like Pacific Ocean seaweed. His face was marked with a million freckles, which from a distance made him look tanned. “Mr. Arai, is it? Here, have a seat.” He pulled out a hard wooden chair next to his metal desk.

  Mas felt nervous—guilty, even. I’m the one whose truck was stolen, he reminded himself. This isn’t about the money.

  The detective rummaged through a pile of files in a wire basket and pulled out a manila folder. “Well, a 1956 Ford, huh?” he said, holding the folder open. “A classic. One of my friends restores these beauts. Even provides the cars for our annual Fourth of July parade.”

  “Izu my truck here?” Mas squeezed the sides of the wooden seat.

  “No, we had to send it down to the impound in Alhambra. But I’ll get to that in a second.”

  Mas bit down on both lips and waited.

  “Yep, your truck was just collecting parking tickets on the edge of town near the L.A. border. They did get some fingerprints off the vehicle.” Detective Benjamin flipped through the pages in his file.

  “Well, here’s one suspect.” The detective tried to smooth out a flimsy piece of paper on the flat surface of his desk. “Recognize him?”

  Mas squinted and wished he had his five-dollar reading glasses from Thrifty’s. It was a typical mug shot, photographed against a white background. A hakujin man in his fifties with dirty-blond hair.

  “Daniel Hawthorne,” the detective said. “Also known as David or Dale.”

  Hawthorne. The man who had visited Haruo in the beginning of summer.

  “Has a record.” Detective Benjamin read from his folder. “Filed phony immigration papers. Accused of identity fraud but not convicted.”

  “I-den-ti-ty—”

  “Ya know, identity theft, like stealing money from credit card accounts. False identities and so on.”

  False IDs? Mas tried to keep himself from laughing. There was no doubt that this Mr. Hawthorne was in league with Shuji Nakane. “Probably wear fancy shoes,” Mas mumbled.

  “Excuse me?” the policeman asked, and Mas just pretended that he was clearing his throat. The detective continued to go on about police procedures, but Mas was more interested in the found truck. “My lawn mower not in there?”

  “Lawn mower?” Detective Benjamin laughed harshly. “No lawn mower. Actually, I don’t think you’ll find any extras on your vehicle.”

  Mas swallowed. Phones rang on other metal desks. Other men slurped down mugs of coffee and chewed crumbling cake donuts while taking notes.

  “Here.” The detective slipped a piece of paper with a yellow attachment in front of Mas. “This is the release form. Show me some identification, sign it, and then you can get your car.”

  Mas tried to prepare himself for the worst. He imagined the truck’s body almost stripped, the door handles yanked off. The smog was especially thick that day, and Mas could barely read the hand-painted sign on Main Street in Alhambra. He circled the fenced lot and parked a block away from Saul’s Towing, almost afraid that the impound would suck in Tug’s truck like a gigantic magnet.

  The clerk was most likely the owner of the lot, judging from the way he flipped down his reading glasses and studied Mas’s paperwork with weathered hands. “Seventy-dollar charge for the tow, and fifteen dollars a day. That’ll be eighty-five dollars.” The clerk wrote the figure on a white form complete with carbons in pink and yellow.

  “Eighty-five dolla? But my truck was stolen. The police brought it ova here.” Mas pressed his work boot against the foot of the counter. It was a high counter that reached up to Mas’s chin. He noticed that it was bent in a few places.

  The clerk held on to the forms. “Did they get who did it?”

  “They found fingerprints. Thatsu all.”

  “Well, sue him, then. But you still have to pay the fee.”

  Mas felt the anger rise to his head. What the hell? Why did he have to fork out the money to retrieve his own property? He felt like adding another dent to Saul’s counter.

  “Look, someone’s gotta pay,” said Saul. “I’m offering the service, but I’m not doing this for free. You can’t expect the police to pay. That’s taxpayers’ money. That leaves you. You want the car, pay for it. Think of it as a deduction on your income taxes.”

  “Letsu me see the truck.” Keys hung in rows from nails on the wall behind the clerk.

  Saul shook his head. “Look, this is not a used-car lot. I’m not doing this for my health.”

  Mas pulled his wallet out of his back pocket. He already knew that he had only two twenty-dollar bills and a couple of George Washingtons, but he looked anyway. His thumbs extended the torn lining of th
e wallet. “I don’t have eighty-five dollars right now.”

  Saul shrugged. “Nothing I can do for you, sir. Just come back with the cash. We accept Visa, Mastercard, too. And remember, it’s an extra fifteen bucks each day.”

  * * *

  Mas returned to the house and rummaged in his closet for his Yuban coffee can. His stash was down to almost nothing, but he was still able to put together sixty bucks. With the forty in his wallet, he was covered. The Ford was going to come home.

  Mas drove back to Alhambra and reentered the one-room office of Saul’s Towing, where an oily-faced kid had replaced the middle-aged owner. After handing the kid his paperwork and cash, he waited in the gravel-covered driveway. He looked down at the toes of his work boots. They were getting worn out; he’d be needing a pair by this fall, he thought, and then heard a familiar squeak of metal hitting metal. The Ford.

  The engine sounded the same, but the body had gone through hell. The kid jumped out of the driver’s seat, like he was tumbling out of a hay ride, when Mas noticed there was no door on the driver’s side. Or the passenger’s, either. “Sonafugun. Sonafugun,” Mas muttered, as if he were saying magic words to turn the Ford back to the way it was. The front grille had been ripped off, as well as the front bumper. Wires that had been attached to the headlights had been cut and now poked out like slashed veins. The Ford had been blinded.

  Mas circled the truck. The flatbed was still in place, but the tailgate had been disconnected. Aside from a rake that hung from a wire clip Mas had installed, all the equipment, including the Trimmer, was gone.

  Mas was afraid to look inside the cab. They had tried to carry out the seats, but failed. The steering wheel, nicks and all, was still in place, but the end of the stick shift was missing. And the ashtray—what the hell were they going to do with that?

  As he surveyed each piece of destruction, Mas felt the rage build up inside of him. It was like they had stripped him naked and paraded him around the city. Their grimy hands had gone through the glove compartment, the seats, and the bed of the truck. Even though Mas couldn’t see their fingerprints, he felt them everywhere.