Mas had seen Haruo in bad shape before. The worst was when he helped him move into his one-bedroom apartment in the Crenshaw District after the divorce had taken away his house and his children. Haruo had let his hair grow even longer than usual, and it practically circled his neck like a scarf. He’d stopped shaving, so even the scarred side of his face, the left, started sprouting long, sparse, wiry whiskers that resembled those on a catfish. Mas, who usually didn’t take much stock in appearances, had to admit even he was a bit revolted. If he’d run into Haruo on a street corner, he would have immediately crossed to the other side.
When Haruo fell into depression, he didn’t hole himself up in his apartment. No, he’d wander out to card clubs in Gardena, casinos in Hawaiian Gardens, underground poker games in San Gabriel—anything that would divert his attention from his insides. He’d place bet after bet on green felt tables until his pockets were empty, and then he’d make deals with Mama-san loan sharks out in the parking lot, mortgaging any last thing he owned at the risk of his life. Haruo often even forget to eat. Actually, the gambling started to feed off of his body, taking anything good and productive and fueling it into chances, odds, and promises that never seemed to materialize.
It pained Mas to witness his friend transform into this frenzied and emaciated state, especially since Haruo’s usual sunny optimism was the only thing able to pull Mas out of his own dark slumps. So Mas wasn’t that happy to be driving out to Crenshaw this morning, fearful of what he might find when he arrived at the chain-link fence around Haruo’s rent-controlled duplex. He had disconnected his telephone a couple of days ago in preparation for his new marital status and move, so he’d been making his calls on a sticky pay phone outside a neighborhood liquor store. Trouble was, he kept running out of change to feed the phone. The only way Mas could continue their conversation without being cut off was in person.
Mas spotted two bony ankles in zori slippers underneath the Honda Civic in the driveway. His heart leaped—surely Haruo hadn’t done anything drastic—and he pulled desperately at one of the feet. Haruo was actually heavier than he looked, and Mas didn’t get very far. “Ah—” and then a hollow sound of something banging against the bottom of the car. A few moments later the legs squirmed out from below the car and Haruo, his clothing smeared in black oil, emerged.
“Mas, itsu you. Thought maybe youzu the neighbor kid.” He rubbed his oily hands on the front of the torn jumpsuit he was wearing over his jeans and T-shirt. He was having car problems, he explained, and was hoping an oil change would be the magic solution. He told Mas to go into the duplex while he washed himself off with the garden hose.
The apartment was as bare as Mas had ever seen it, making it look much larger than it really was. Only boxes, like giant building blocks, sat atop each other on the threadbare rug. A plain black suit, a clearance item from the now-shuttered Joseph’s Mens Wear in Little Tokyo, hung from a wire hanger from one of the grooves of the heater against the wall. The suit had been for funerals but was going to be baptized for a happier occasion today. In fact, the ceremony would be happening four hours from now, Mas noted, as he glanced at the Casio watch wrapped around his wrist with twine.
Haruo, who’d shed his messy jumpsuit outside on the stairs, must have noticed Mas’s sad examination of the empty apartment. “Yah, gotta find me new place now.”
Mas frowned.
“Already tole landlord I’m gonna move out. If I wanna move back in, have to pay double.”
Mas felt a streak of pain surge down into his toes. Sonafagun. Haruo’s Social Security barely covered the cut-rate rent he’d been paying for the last fifteen years.
Haruo shrugged his shoulders. “Shikataganai, huh?” Mas used to be a big proponent of shikataganai, it can’t be helped. Wasn’t that the official slogan of most Japanese out there, at least of Mas’s generation? Got thrown in camp. Shikataganai. Someone break into my house in broad daylight and take all our jewelry. Shikataganai. Insurance not going to pay for wife’s experimental cancer treatment. Shikataganai.
Lately, though, shikataganai was starting to lose its charm. Shikataganai made you swallow your anger when you should be beating your chest and yelling. Shikataganai made you sit still when you needed to move forward. Shikataganai made you think that you deserved bad things. And Haruo, of all people, deserved a lucky break. No amount of shikataganai would convince Mas otherwise.
They sat in the kitchen on top of boxes, sipping from room-temperature cans of Budweiser like morning orange juice. There was nothing else to drink, and Haruo, anyway, seemed eager to embrace the temporary buzz of beer. Mas waited to hear exactly why Spoon had canceled the wedding. By beer number three, Haruo’s lips really loosened.
“You saw those ningyo, you knowsu, the two ole dolls, in Spoon’s house.”
“Yah, for Hina Matsuri.”
Haruo nodded. “They just gotsu those dolls and now they’re gone. Pah—gone.”
“Whaddamean, gone? Just see them last night.”
“Somebody take them. Right there in the house. No one break in.”
“Gotta be dat girl,” Mas tried to remember the daughter’s name. “Ya know, the sobakasu bijin.” “Who?” Then Haruo laughed. “Yah, she gotsu freckles, but I don’t know if she a beauty. Datsu Spoon’s youngest, Dee.”
Mas wasn’t going to be a sukebe—nasty old man—and argue the pluses and minuses of the physical attributes of a girl young enough to be their daughter.
“Dee the one who saysu I stole the dolls. Spoon saysu dat I need to lay low.”
“Do shite?” Why in the hell should he? “Itsu not like they gonna report to police.”
The pupil in Haruo’s fake eye began to float out of position.
“You meansu they goin’ to?”
“Not Spoon’s idea. Itsu dat girlu, Dee. They already called the police, but takes them awhile to get there.”
Mas cursed silently. “Anyway, what would you want wiz those dolls?” Kid’s stuff, weren’t they?
Haruo’s right eye blinked hard, while his fake one stayed eerily open. “Saysu I sell them. To gamble.”
Mas took another swig of his beer, his tongue feeling the sharpness of the open aluminum tab.
“I quit. You knowsu. After I meet Spoon, I don’t even have the feeling anymore.”
Mas placed the half-empty can on the linoleum floor.
“Dis Dee no fan of yours, Haruo.”
“Tell me sumptin I don’t know, Mas. None of those girls like me too much. Can’t blame them—their papa was a big hero.”
Again, platitudes about the dead husband. “How did dat guy die, anyhowsu?” Mas expected to hear the usual—cancer, heart attack, complications from diabetes. But Haruo surprised him.
“Jiko.”
“Accident? What kind?”
“Truck went off the road. Down there in Imperial Valley. In a small town called Hanley, 1980s sometime.”
“Whatsu he doin’ ova in Imperial Valley?” Imperial Valley was a former dust bowl next to the Salton Sea, a pitiful pool of salt water trapped inland near the Mexican border. Mas had worked there in the tomato fields for a truck farmer, just one stop of many throughout the Southwest before he got into gardening.
“Some kind of flower deal. Heezu with his flower market buddy, Jorg de Groot.”
“Neva heard of no Jorg de Groot. What kind of name izu dat?”
“Orandajin. Papa was a Dutchman.” Both Mas and Haruo were well aware of the Dutch contributions to horticulture in California. “You seen their old farm, I bet. Right there on a hill in Montebello. Birds-of-paradise.”
Mas thought back and nodded his head. Sure, he remembered, he told Haruo. He had a gardening customer in Montebello at one time, in fact. A wooden ranch-style house like Spoon’s, only larger on a sloping hill. One day, a dog took off with Mas’s lunch and he chased him into a field of birds-of-paradise. These plants were young yet. The long blade-like leaves hit just below his knees. The flowers did indeed resemble birds, cranes with crowns of brig
ht orange and beaks of dirty purple. From their clumped nests of leaves, the birds-of-paradise seemed ready to chirp and cry for food.
“Well, dat used to be Jorg de Groot’s place,” Haruo said after Mas attempted to describe what he saw. “Son moved the whole operation down to Oceanside. Widow lives right across the street from Spoon now. Dat Jorg and Ike longtime friends, even before the war. When Ike was sent ova to camp in Manzanar, it was the de Groots who watch ova his family’s place. They took good, good care.”
Mas had heard stories of such hakujin, black, and Mexican do-gooders. Ones who didn’t seek to gain from the Japanese being kicked out of California during World War Two. Ones who paid property taxes for the Japanese while they were locked up. Some even went all the way out to the makeshift prisons at racetracks, deserts, and swamplands to make sure their former neighbors were okay. Those weren’t the run-of-the-mill type people, however. Mas didn’t know if the shoe had been on the other foot, he would have done the same.
“Anyway, both of them die, right on the spot in dat accident ova in Imperial Valley.”
Mas bit down on his dentures.
“Spoon’s daughters still pretty young, in their twenties. Dee being the youngest was Daddy’s little girl, you know? Took it hard.” Mas nodded.
“So I guess that’s why those Hina Matsuri dolls were a big deal for her. They were missin’, but just found. For a long time, in an ole safe-deposit box under Jorg’s name.”
Why would the Hayakawa dolls be in this other’s man’s safe-deposit box? Didn’t make any sense.
Apparently the Hayakawas were surprised as well. Turned out that no one alive in Jorg’s family knew about the safe-deposit box, which had been opened in a bank in San Diego. The box had been free of charge at first, but the bank had instituted an annual fee a few years ago. Jorg, being dead, wasn’t able to make the payments, which meant the contents went up for auction.
“Sum doll people ova in San Diego buy the whole thing. But then Sonya find out and tellsu Spoon whatsu goin’ on. Spoon go on the computa and buy the dolls back, but they cost her and cost her good.”
“How much?”
“She don’t tell me but I knowsu itsu a lot. Don’t know where she got the money. Sheezu flat broke—tole me dat she don’t even wanna a weddin’ ceremony. But I insist. She got married in camp, you knowsu. Second time around, I figure she deserve a white dress.”
Mas’s mouth was full with beer, and he took his time swallowing. So that’s why Haruo had gone to all this trouble with the ceremony. He wanted to give Spoon something she wasn’t able to have behind barbed wire. The thing was, Haruo also didn’t have an extra dime to his name, but he claimed that his boss, Taxie, had given him an advance against his wages.
“How long youzu stay ova there last night, anyhows?” Mas asked.
“Ten. Spoon so tired, she fell asleep on the couch.”
Mas then remembered what Dee had told him to remind Haruo. “You lock the door?”
Haruo pulled and twisted a long strand of grey hair, and his fake eye meandered. “I dunno if I did. I plenty tired, too, Mas. I came back here, went straight to bed, and then my landlord bangs on my door in the middle of the night. Emergency, he say. Gotta call Spoon.”
Haruo’s stingy landlord, however, didn’t let him use his phone. Instead, he had to walk two blocks underneath helicopter search lights—a nightly occurrence in this neighborhood—to the liquor store’s pay phone.
Haruo then didn’t say anything for a while, and Mas feared that his friend would break down right in front of him. But thankfully, although Haruo’s good eye was unusually shiny, he shed no tears. The pupil in his fake eye had somehow floated into its proper place for a moment. In the right light, with his head down, a stranger would not have noticed how truly ravaged Haruo’s face was.
Mas wanted to leave, but he knew that it was too early yet. He cleared his throat. “Whatsu her girl’s story?”
“Dee? Oh, sheezu been in some trouble. Spoon been up late at night worrying about her.”
“What kinda trouble?”
Haruo rested his grizzly chin atop clasped hands. “Maiyaku.”
Drugs? “Like hiropon?”
“They gotsu a lot of drugs besides heroin, Mas.”
Mas frowned. When did Haruo become an expert on drugs?
“Sheezu been hooked on cocaine. And new ones dat they stir up and cook in a house.”
Sonafagun. That explained her sallow complexion and that pierced navel. Mas knew some drug addicts in his time. Boys and even some girls who wandered amid the rubble of Hiroshima a year after the Bomb, their wasted bodies shaking from the effects of drinking gasoline and shooting hiropon.
“Started right after high school. Got better and then went downhill after her divorce. Went through rehab. You knowsu rehab, Mas?”
Mas sneered and said yes, even though he wasn’t sure. But from the context, he knew that this rehab had something to do with drying the girl out.
Haruo, a recent veteran of counseling, thought that people could change, be transformed. But Mas was more skeptical. Based on his postwar experiences, drug addicts couldn’t be trusted. Sometimes an old dog was just that, an old dog. The tricks it knew would just be repeated—the bad ones more than the good.
What Mas didn’t understand was why Spoon was believing her drug-addled daughter rather than her future husband. If her faith in Haruo was so shallow, then good riddance. He even expressed that to Haruo in so many words, but his friend wouldn’t accept any talk of Spoon’s shortcomings.
After close to an hour, Mas got up and crushed the beer cans against the floor with the heel of his work boot.
“Listen, Mas, gotsu a favor to ask.”
Mas threw the flattened cans in a corner and waited.
“Spoon’s been callin’ everyone, tellin’ them don’t bother comin’ to the garden in Little Tokyo. I got a few more on my side I gotta tell—Wishbone and Stinky. Do you think you can handle?”
Wishbone and Stinky were two peas in a pod. You tell one, then you’ve told the other. Mas said he’d pass the word to them and made his way to the door.
“I’m orai, Mas. No worry, no worry.” Haruo was forcing a smile, but Mas noticed how the sides of his mouth were trembling. How long would it be before he was in those card clubs again?
CHAPTER THREE
Mas had half a mind to drive straight home and sit there, playing solitaire on the kitchen table. But a yakusoku was just that, a promise. He didn’t make it a habit to make promises, but when he did he always honored them. So he was off to carry out his mission as a messenger of bad tidings to Wishbone and Stinky.
As it was Saturday morning, Mas knew he could find them at Eaton Nursery in Altadena. Wishbone used to have his own place, Tanaka’s Lawn Mower Shop, but the property was sold to a beauty shop that only lasted a year. Now the whole building had been razed to make way for condominiums, rabbit hutches that seemed to be multiplying all over the area.
Wishbone was always chasing money, and judging from his lack of it, the chase was ongoing. That explained why he always seemed to partner with the shadiest men who traveled through their world of lawn mower shops, nurseries, and even retirement homes.
His sidekick, Stinky, was now working part time at Eaton Nursery, an old-time business nestled at the base of the San Gabriel Mountains. Eaton Canyon was the closest thing to Yosemite, as far as Mas was concerned. The canyon cut through brown hills speckled with yucca plants, poison ivy, and tree poppies, its blooms like sunny-side-up eggs quivering in the breeze. Eaton Canyon felt the change of seasons more intensely than anywhere else in the valley. Wildfires eagerly lapped up the dried-up brush in the summer, while heavy rains, which would descend about every other year, accumulated in the concrete wash and sometimes overflowed into the first floor of homes. It was a wild and often unpredictable region, which mirrored the personality of the residents who’d been there the longest. They were the type who actually thought Wishbone and even Stinky,
who didn’t get paid but still went into the nursery every day, were charming, believe it or not.
Wishbone was already out front with his walker, directing a worker to load some ficus plants into a truck. When he saw Mas, his pockmarked face cracked into a grin. “Thought you’d be in your monkey suit by now.”
“Yah, well, datsu why I’m here.” It was best to get right to the point. “No wedding. Cancel.”
“So Spoon came to her senses, huh?”
Why would someone automatically think that Spoon and not Haruo had called it off? Mas groused privately. His duty done, he was prepared to leave but was stopped by Stinky.
“What happen?” Stinky’s pants looked like they were hand-me-downs from a man twice his width. A worn-out belt cinched the pants high on his body, just below his chest.
“You owe me an Andrew Jackson, Stinky,” Wishbone interrupted.
Stinky hiked up his pants even higher. “You say two days. I say a week.”
“Wait a minute.” Wishbone dug into his pocket and pulled out a small spiral notebook. “Dang it,” he said, perusing its pages. “A gardener from Norwalk bet that it would never happen.”
Mas felt his stomach sink. They were wagering on when the Haruo-Spoon union would fail? His disapproval must have been written on his face, because the other two men grew quiet.
“Listen. Don’t get that way, Mas,” said Wishbone. “A full-blown wedding? At our age? Even you knew it was a joke, right?”
“No one can blame him from gettin’ cold feet,” added Stinky. “I thought he’d run after the ceremony, but it’s better to do it before, anyways.”
“Haruo didn’t do no kind of runnin’,” Mas said.
“So it was Spoon! We should have wagered on that too.” Wishbone’s face fell as he contemplated a missed betting opportunity.
“No, Spoon’s house just gotsu some trouble. A dorobo got into the house and took some dolls.” The minute Mas spilled the details, he regretted it.
“And they think Haruo did it!” Stinky exclaimed. “Is he gonna be locked up?”
Mas shuddered—he couldn’t let his mind go there. Haruo in jail? He’d probably smile for his mug shot and thank the jailers before being eaten alive inside.
Blood Hina Page 3