Summer of the Big Bachi

by Naomi Hirahara

  And now, why had Shuji Nakane and this red-badger boy descended upon Los Angeles at the same time? It was as if goblins had been released from tightly secured boxes. Who had let them loose? Mas had a sneaking suspicion that it had been Joji Haneda, seeking a final bachi that would send them into hell.

  “Oh, I’m tired.” The reporter sank into the plastic chair next to Mas with a steaming cup of coffee. “Got in last night. Jet lag.”

  Mas could get a better look at the boy. Why hadn’t it hit him before? The physical similarity was there. He was tall and lean. High cheekbones. And those eyes, sharp enough to see a lie fifty meters away. On the boy’s arm was a tattoo, barely visible because of his dark tan.

  Mas must have stared too long at the tattoo, because the boy responded. “It’s a wild boar. Ugly, huh?” he said proudly. The creature was squat and hairy, like a mountain yam with tusks. “I was born in the Year of Inoshishi. Like my grandmother.”

  “So . . .” Mas said without thinking. He remembered. Akemi had told him once that she was as stubborn as a warthog.

  The reporter placed his cup on the floor. “How come you’re not in there?” He gestured toward the different rooms in which doctors measured blood pressure and heart rates.

  Mas shrugged. “What for? What can they tell me that I dunno already?”

  “It’s for the future, desho? For my kids and their kids.”

  “You got kids?”

  “No.” The reporter laughed, and Mas noticed that his lower front tooth was pushed in. “I’m not even married. But I’m speaking generally.”

  Mas pulled at some callused skin around his thumbnail. “Everyone knows the Bomb is bad. All the tests in the world don’t change anytin’.”

  “A lot of people don’t know. They don’t even care anymore. Most of the hibakusha have died—” The reporter then blushed a little. “Gomen,” he apologized. “I didn’t mean—”

  “Don’t worry,” said Mas. “I am dead. Just look alive.”

  The reporter looked puzzled for a minute.

  “I’m kidding,” Mas said. “Itsu a joke.” What was wrong with young people these days? he thought. No sense of humor.

  “Oh,” the reporter said. “Well, I even go in for exams. Back in Hiroshima.”

  Mas pinched his dead skin into a tiny ball. “You not there fifty years ago.”

  “They want to test the second generation, and even the third, like me. See if there are some latent effects.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “And nothing conclusive.”

  “Ah—”

  “But my first test results came back with an abnormal number of white blood cells.”

  Mas shifted in his seat. “You get it checked out?”

  “They couldn’t figure out why. The doctors check now, once a year.”

  “You look plenty healthy,” said Mas.

  “I just look alive,” the boy said, picking up his cup from the floor. He then looked squarely at Mas. “Joke,” he said.

  “Oh.” Mas pursed his lips. The boy was smart; there was no getting around that. They sat in silence as doctors in white coats passed by with clipboards and long white strips of paper. “So, your grandmother have many kids?”

  “No, she just had one son, my father. His name was Hikari—”

  “Hikari?”

  “I know, a strange name. Not Buddhist or Christian. He was named after the light of the bomb. I guess Obaachan felt that hikari could stand for something good. ‘My child of light,’ she called him. While the others came out with big heads, he was perfect—that is, until he hit fifty.” The boy scratched his arm, near his tattoo. “He died last year. Lung cancer. Never smoked a cigarette in his life.”

  Mas wanted to say that those things happen; you can’t blame the Bomb. Accept it, go on, and forget.

  “Growing up, I hated America. I figured they were heartless. Barbarians. Then Obaachan sat me down. She said, ‘If you hate America, you hate me.’ I didn’t understand. Then she brought out a passport, hers, stamped U.S.A. She kept her dual citizenship the whole time. But she never came back to America.”

  Mas’s secret question had been answered. Akemi had not set foot back in California and, most likely, would not in the future.

  “She’s the one who told me to accompany the medical tour this year. She’s hoping that I go back to school and become a decent salaryman, I think. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.” The boy turned a new page in his notebook. “I’d like to interview you, when you have the time.”

  “No time for interview.”

  “It’ll just take an hour or so.”

  An hour? An eternity. Mas shook his head more vigorously.

  “There’s about one thousand of you here in America. Those who survived the Bomb. Every year, fewer and fewer. Don’t you think that you have a responsibility to tell your story?”

  Mas’s ears began to grow warm. Responsibility? I have no responsibility to you, red-haired boy. “Plenty of folks ready to talk. They all ova dis place. Betta catch them before they leave.” Mas shook his finger over his head as Yuki finally rose.

  “You don’t have to tell it to me. But at least your children and your grandchildren. They deserve to know. The pikadon is still inside of them, after all.”

  Yeah, yeah. Mas wished the boy away, and in a matter of minutes he got his wish when Yuki disappeared down the hall. Mas continued waiting in the folding chair. His eyes felt as though they were covered in a sticky film. He rubbed them with his fists until they were dry again.

  They say that they can fix my face,” Haruo said as they left the medical building. “Tada. Only thing is, I gotta go to Hiroshima. In a airplane.”

  “You had that face for fifty years. Why do you have to change now?”

  “Think, Mas. I can go to my grave with a beautiful face.”

  A waste, thought Mas. Such a surgery should be reserved for young girls looking for a future husband. Not an old man close to seventy who might not even last another five years.

  “You can go with me, Mas.”

  “Ha.” Mas took out a fresh cigarette. “I don’t think so.”

  “But I don’t wanna go by myself.”

  “If you do such a foolish thing, you deserve to be by yourself.”

  “So, I saw you talking to that boy. Whatsu his name, Yuzo?”

  “Yuki.”

  “Yah, Yuki Kimura. Nice boy, huh?”

  “Heezu orai. Gotsu too many questions.”

  “Well, heezu a reporter. Thatsu his job. You can’t get to the truth without asking questions.”

  Mas grunted and stared out the dirty passenger window.

  Haruo rattled on and on about the people, new and old, he encountered at the medical exams. Mas, on the other hand, was disturbed by his meeting with the boy. Even when he closed his eyes, he could only think of that terrifying illustration drawn in muted colors. It was even more frightening than a real photograph. It held secrets—the crooked circle, the cloth ID—that became magnified in the artist’s hand. Had he gone quickly, he wondered, or was he alive when the maggots began to eat his body?

  Mas remembered when the military police paid a visit to the Haneda household during the war. On the day Mas was to report for work at the Hiroshima train station, he noticed a couple of old women gathered outside the Hanedas’ home.

  “The MPs were here,” hissed one gnarled woman, a bamboo basket filled with sweet potatoes tied on her curved back. “Took away the girl. She’s a strange one, all right.”

  Akemi did not return for several days. Mas heard stories of the military police seeking out inu, those who aligned themselves with the barbarians. Radios were confiscated, English-language letters and cards burned. The old women whispered rumors of the MPs forcing girls into corners, slipping their hands into shirts, the rolling of loose buttons.

  Akemi finally returned home. She sat on the stone steps of her house. Her head was now completely shaven.

  “Masao-kun,” she ca
lled out as Mas walked past the Hanedas’ gate. “Masao-kun.” But Mas kept walking as if he had not heard.

  CHAPTER SIX

  After Mas returned home from the exams, he didn’t leave the house for three days straight. He darkened all the windows and didn’t even start up any fans. The whole of the house became as hot as a barbecue, but Mas didn’t care. Let me be roasted alive, he thought. For three days and three nights, Mas left the phone off the hook. Nobody, not even Haruo, bothered to come around.

  The television was on the whole time, the volume at low. Mas watched some of the sports broadcasts, but he wasn’t a baseball fan. It was too slow, too methodical. Mas liked old-time basketball, when UCLA and coach John Wooden ruled the courts. Even Chizuko watched the games with vigor, cheering and yelling at every guy in blue who missed a basket. While Mas closely followed the point guards, Chizuko loved the tall man, Lew Alcindor. He was as awkward-looking as a giant praying mantis, but when he released that ball in a hook, it was more beautiful than any prima ballerina. When he announced that he had converted to Islam and was changing his name to Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Chizuko thought he was plain crazy. “How can you just change your name like that?” she said. “Your name is everything.”

  “How ’bout you? You changed your name to Arai.”

  “That’s different.” Chizuko frowned. “Women are used to that.”

  “And back in Japan, they have yoshi, desho? People adopt grown men all the time to carry on the name.”

  Chizuko didn’t like to lose a fight. “People will get confuse. He’s a big-time basketball star.”

  Mas shook his head. “Pretty soon, you won’t even rememba Lew Alcindor,” he told her. “His past all gone.”

  Turns out that Mas was right. All the fans, even Chizuko, eventually adjusted to the name Kareem. Lew Alcindor was gone, and nobody seemed that sad about it.

  On Tuesday morning, Mas finally dragged himself off his mattress to scramble up some old eggs, soy sauce, and rice. He heard someone rapping at his screen door. The neighbor’s dog again? Now the doorbell, ringing clearly after Tug’s handiwork. Mas stood on tiptoe to look through the peephole in his front door. Red hair and a dark face. How had the boy figured out where he lived?

  “I know you’re home, Ojisan,” Yuki called out.

  Mas cursed silently and finally cleared his throat after not having talked for more than seventy-two hours. “I tole you that I had nutin’ to say.”

  “That’s not what I heard.” Yuki was almost yelling. “That’s not what my grandmother said.”

  Mas turned the key that he had stuck in the dead-bolt lock. No sense in having the whole neighborhood hear about his business. He opened the front door to reveal Yuki behind the beat-up screen door.

  Yuki was in all black, like a midnight thief. “I spoke to her a couple of nights ago.” His voice now was lower but intense. “She told me that she lived next door to a Masao Arai back in 1945.”

  Mas swallowed a fistful of air.

  “Well? You going to let me in?”

  Mas held out the loose screen door, and the boy went to the living room and sat on Mari’s old piano bench. “Why didn’t you mention that you knew her?”

  “I forget. My mind not workin’ too good.”

  Yuki stared at Mas’s face long and hard. Mas stared back, trying not to blink. Young people always thought old people were losing their minds. Maybe this kind of thinking would help Mas today.

  “She said that she even went around with you at one time.”

  Went around? Mas almost spit out his dentures. Nobody dated back then. Besides, it had been only one kiss, and she had been the one to go after Mas. “Itsu war. No time for girlsu. She a lot older than me, anyhowsu.”

  “Older? I thought that you didn’t remember her.”

  Mas cursed himself. He usually didn’t slip up like that, especially concerning made-up stories. He tried to cover himself. “Your age. Izu not old enough to be your grandpa.”

  “Is that so?” Yuki rolled his eyes and snorted. “You must be at least seventy years old.”

  “Sixty-nine.”

  “Close enough.”

  Yuki took a fresh cigarette out of his day pack and tapped it against his knee. I hope you not thinking of smoking in my house, Mas thought. It was one thing for his own Marlboros to pollute his rooms—quite another for this young Japanese boy to light up his funny cigarettes inside without permission.

  “So who tole youzu where I live?”

  “Asked around.”

  Asking questions about me? Mas was both annoyed and worried. Why would this boy go to all this trouble to find a rotting house in Altadena? Mas made it a point to get a look at the boy’s shoes. Black high-top sneakers, old-style, with white circles on the sides.

  “Look, you betta go now. I dunno nutin’ from fifty years ago. Izu still sick, anyhowsu. No feelin’ too good, rememba?”

  Yuki stuck the cigarette in back of his ear. He looked like he wanted to ask Mas more questions, but the old-fashioned, Japanese side of him prevailed. Honor your elders, right? thought Mas.

  “This isn’t over, Ojisan,” Yuki said on his way out.

  No, Mas had to agree, not by a long shot.

  By this time, Mas had lost his appetite. He returned to his bedroom, where his sheets were damp with sweat. After balling them up at the foot of his bed, he lay down on the bare mattress. There was an intensity to the heat; it coated his body, the entire bedroom. It had become a furnace, orange flames everywhere.

  “Water, Daddy, water.” It was Mari, her hair tied back like an old lady’s. There was a package in her hands, wrapped in a blanket.

  Mas rushed over to the sink and turned the faucet. Bone dry. The tub. Dry. Shower. Dry. Mari was crying now; she needed his help. He could see her eyes—dark and filled with fear. “Help, Daddy, help.” Everything was burning hot; the palms of his hands burned as he touched doorknobs and appliances. There was a glass door now, separating him from his daughter. “Mari-chan, Mari-chan,” he bellowed. Mari seemed to be getting smaller and smaller, although her head remained the same size. No, it couldn’t be, but— The realization hit Mas hard. Mari was melting. He pounded the glass door. Kicked it with his foot. Then it disappeared, and Mas rushed over to his daughter, whose head was barely visible in the sticky ooze of her body. “Take care, Daddy, take care,” she called. Mas realized she was talking about the bundle wrapped in a blanket. As Mas lifted the package, the blanket opened to reveal the charred remains of a baby. He felt vomit rise to his throat, and before he knew it, he was screaming.

  Mas, Mas, old man. You were having a bad dream.” Someone was pulling at his sleeve. Pure white hair and beard—it was Tug Yamada.

  Mas focused on the peeling paint on his ceiling. His hands brushed against the mattress. Warm but not burning. The light was dim through his dusty window blinds.

  “Didn’t mean to scare you. The door was open, and I thought that you were in trouble.”

  Mas blinked. There was no daughter, no baby; at least not now.

  “Whatsu the time?”

  “About seven-thirty.”

  Seven-thirty. Mas couldn’t believe that he had slept all day after Yuki’s visit that morning.

  “Are you okay, Mas? You were really yelling a few minutes ago.”

  “Yah, yah.” Mas tried to get up, but his muscles had become as soft as pounded rice cakes.

  Tug went to the door and picked up a grocery bag and his red tool kit that he had left in the hallway. “Sent here by Lil, fresh peaches from Fresno,” he said, gesturing to the paper bag. “And I came to fix your water problem, once and for all.”

  “Water?” Mas’s head felt as though it were stuffed with cotton balls.

  “Your toilet. Last time I was here, I noticed that it was leaking.” Tug walked down the hall, probably to leave the peaches in the kitchen.

  Damn. Mas was finally awake enough to drag himself out of the bedroom. “No, no, you don’t hafta.” Mas followed Tug from t
he kitchen to the bathroom. “Honto, really, Tug.”

  Tug had just retired from the County Health Department as a senior inspector at age seventy-two, and Mas knew he had keen eyes to spot the gathering place of bacteria and other deadly organisms. He would note the streaks of week-old toothpaste, sticky pools of hair and scum.

  Tug had already made himself at home in the bathroom. His large body sagged on the edge of the bathtub as he opened his toolbox on Mas’s worn blue bath mat. He took out a large, grooved rubber ball, a new float ball for the toilet. “Remember when we did this during the drought? I bet you still have the same equipment from back then.”

  Tug pulled off the ceramic lid to the tank and jangled the chain to the flush valve. “Yep, sure looks like it. When we were here last week, I heard some water running. You don’t want to be wasting any of that stuff; they say another drought’s coming. Plus you don’t want your bill to be sky-high—not with our set incomes.”

  “Not retired yet, Tug.” Mas still felt dizzy, and leaned his elbow on the edge of the sink. He watched as Tug tinkered with the toilet bowl tank and then struggled to untangle a chain attached to a new flapper flush valve. The stub of his amputated forefinger stuck out like a frightened sea creature.

  Finally Tug seemed to give up. “Here, Mas, old man. Maybe you’d have a better crack at this,” he said, holding out the valve.

  “A lot of trouble, huh?” The words came out before Mas could swallow them in his throat. He had never made mention to Tug’s face of his war injury.

  “Well, after almost fifty years, you kind of get used to something that’s missing. I can even type with it—can even beat my grandson at computer games.”

  Tug spread out his huge left hand, accentuating the silhouette of his forefinger cut off at the knuckle. “At work, if some restaurant was giving us some trouble, I would just make sure they saw my finger and make some reference to ‘the gang.’ Bingo—yakuza, they’d start thinking. That would keep them quiet. But little did they know that Japanese gangsters have the pinky cut off.”