“Yes, how can I help you?” she said in Japanese. She didn’t seem the slightest bit fazed by Mas’s appearance. In the background Mas could hear the beat of music that Mari used to listen to in the 1970s.
“Ah—” Mas tried to compose the words in his mouth.
“Okyaku-san, do you have a membership?” she asked in a singsong voice.
“No, just lookin’ for a friend. Young one, about twenty or so. Red hair.”
“Oh, yes,” the hostess replied immediately. She held back the silk curtain so Mas could enter the heart of Chochin’s. The room, about the size of Mas’s whole house, was awash in blue and loud American music. A ball covered with small mirrored squares hung from the ceiling, covering the guests with dots of blinding white light. Pitiful, Mas thought, looking at the red-faced middle-aged men sitting with young girls of all races about half their age. Finally the kimono-clad woman gestured to a booth in the corner, where Yuki sat. Next to him was the girl with the tadpole eyes. She had something glittery rubbed over her eyes and wore a halter top that revealed the pure whiteness of her arms and shoulders.
“Ojisan,” the boy said as Mas approached. He was grinning from ear to ear. On the table was a bottle of Johnnie Walker with a tag, YUKIKAZU KIMURA, hanging from its neck.
Stupid, Mas thought. At least use a fake name. “We needsu to leave,” Mas said, ignoring their motions to sit with them.
“You get what you needed?” Yuki’s voice took a more serious tone, and Mas could have kicked him. Not here, he thought, not in front of the girl. But the hostess’s face was a complete blank; she was apparently well trained to look invisible during conversations between men. Mas could imagine all the business, both legitimate and illegitimate, that occurred within the four walls of Chochin’s. The girl didn’t even seem to acknowledge that she and Mas had met once before.
Mas tugged on Yuki’s T-shirt with his right hand, the pink box firmly in his left. “We needsu to get out of here,” he said in the boy’s ear. Yuki finally nodded and said his good-byes, slipping a twenty-dollar bill underneath the girl’s empty glass.
When they finally got back into the Jeep, Yuki showed Mas a square Polaroid photo. “A souvenir,” he said. He had had his picture taken with the hostess. “She was kawaii. Kind of quiet, though,” he said, throwing the photo in the glove compartment. Then he noticed the box on Mas’s lap.
Mas was careful to look away. “Got hungry. Went ova to that place across the street. Got some stuff for your grandma.”
That was enough for Yuki. “Where’s Nakane?” he asked.
The lies came easily to Mas’s lips. He was not ashamed. One after another, they dribbled out like rain. Nakane didn’t seem to know about the mistress. He had given up and was planning to return to Japan. They didn’t have to worry about him anymore.
“He told you all that?” Yuki got back on the Santa Monica Freeway, this time going east.
“Yah.”
Yuki then hit the steering wheel and cursed.
“What?”
“Your jacket. I left it at the bar.” The boy was in his T-shirt, the tattoo poking out below his right sleeve.
“Don’t worry.” Mas held on to the pink box. “It was old. Just leave it there.”
As they approached McNally Street, Mas’s stomach turned. Parked in front of Mas’s house was a sheriff’s car with its blue lights flashing.
Mas and the boy were on the same wavelength. “My obaachan,” Yuki whispered, and Mas felt immediately ashamed. The boy obviously cared about Akemi. How could Mas have doubted him?
They ran into the house, fearing the worst. But there was Akemi, unhurt, standing there with two officers.
“What happened?” Yuki asked his grandmother, but before she could answer, the officers grabbed Yuki’s arms.
“We have to take you into custody,” said one of them, a tall black woman, fastening a handcuff around his wrist. Yuki started to resist, but Mas pressed his palm on the boy’s back. Don’t fight, he thought. You may think this is a land of black and Nihonjin TV newscasters, but it’s more complicated than that. Before anyone could say anything more, the other officer, a short hakujin man, answered their silent questions. “We’re charging him with murder,” he said, “in the death of Junko Kakita.” While murmuring something about rights and lawyers, they led Yuki out the screen door that Tug Yamada had fixed, down the driveway, and into the black-and-white squad car.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
“One more time. Just tell me one more time.” G. I. Hasuike’s eyes were so bloodshot that they looked like red marbles. Mas didn’t know who else to call at midnight. G. I. wasn’t the best, but he, at least right now, was their only shot.
Akemi, sitting on Mas’s couch, took another breath. “They came saying that they had a warrant for Yuki’s arrest. That lady died in the hospital. They have a witness now, saying he did it.”
“A witness,” G. I. muttered. Mas hadn’t noticed the first time, and now saw that his hair, fastened in a ponytail, reached his waist. “Who?”
Akemi shook her head. “I don’t know. But you got to get him out of jail.”
G. I. nodded. “He’ll have to stay there overnight. The arraignment will be scheduled probably during the next few days, and then they’ll move the case from municipal to superior court. That’s what they do in felony cases.”
Akemi pulled a pillow from the couch and squeezed it hard. Someone was knocking on the door, and Mas looked through the side window to check. It was just Haruo. Mas had called him; Haruo was attached to the boy and would want to be informed. Now, with four of them in the living room, G. I. kept going about first- and second-degree murder, involuntary manslaughter, continuances, and setting bail. Mas had little idea about the meaning behind the terms, but G. I. apparently did.
“They’ll assign him a PD, but then I can come in. That is, if you want me to represent your grandson.”
Akemi nodded again.
G. I. stood up and then clutched Akemi’s shoulder. “It’ll be all right, Obasan. Gam-BA-re,” he said in broken Japanese. His pronunciation was terrible, but it didn’t matter. They were all in this together.
Mas couldn’t sleep that night. Even some two hours after G. I. and Haruo left McNally Street, Mas wandered the rooms of his house like a ghost. This was his fault. Why had he given Yuki directions to the mistress’s house that morning at the hospital? And how could the mistress have just died like that? She had had all the answers, and Mas had been planning to get them from her in time. But now the time was gone.
Mas wanted to make this whole thing right. Somehow. He knew how to play the game in dingy rooms in Little Tokyo and other places across the country, and even Hiroshima circa the 1940s. But the police and courts—those were way out of his league. That was a world G. I. and other Sansei understood. They could swim in those waters. If they were any good, they could avoid becoming someone’s next meal. If they were real good, they could pop out of a rock and bite unsuspecting prey right in the face. The next few days would reveal just how good or bad G. I. Hasuike was.
As Mas wandered to the kitchen, he noticed a sliver of light under Mari’s old bedroom door. Akemi was still up, like him. He softly rapped on the door.
“Come in, Masao-san,” she said.
She was wearing slacks and a nice blouse, as if she were ready to go to the courthouse with G. I. at three o’clock in the morning. She gestured for Mas to sit on the bed. He complied.
“Can’t sleep,” she said. “Every time I lie down, I picture Yuki there, alone. It must be cold in that jail.”
“Heezu tough. He be orai.” Mas put his hands on his knees and studied the looped rug on the floor of Mari’s old bedroom. The rug had been from one of his customers. A widow who had been cleaning her attic. Mari had immediately fallen in love with it, remembered Mas. She’d said it reminded her of the pioneer days. What pioneer days, she didn’t say.
“He’s all I have, Masao-san. I still can’t believe that his father is de
ad. The cancer just spread through Hikari’s body in a matter of months. It’s like that shadow that was following us for fifty years had finally caught up.”
Mas regretted knocking on Akemi’s door. This was the last thing he wanted to talk about now.
“Before he died, I wanted to tell Hikari the truth. About his father. But I didn’t know his first name. Just the last. Sato.”
Mas was jolted from his daydreams. “Sato,” he said aloud.
“I know,” Akemi continued. “There are thousands of Satos out there. I don’t think you knew him. He was older. Part of the military police, at the time you three were working at the train station.”
The MPs. They had come to the Hanedas almost once a week.
“You know they questioned us, right? My mother, Joji, even the maid. They wanted to know about our ties to America. If we kept in touch with my father in Los Angeles. You remember, Masao-san? You gave me the coals so that I could burn my English books one morning.”
Mas nodded. He could still feel the coldness of that winter morning and feel the chalky charcoal on his face.
“He was just one among many. They accused me of horrible things. Sato wasn’t as cruel, but he seemed as though he knew a secret. That he was above all of them. They poked me with their batons, and then began to jeer me. ‘Is it true what they say about gaijin women?’ they said.” Akemi’s voice remained steady but was softer, as if a volume knob inside of her had been turned down to low. “They did nothing the first time. But they kept calling me back in. I couldn’t sleep at nights, Masao-san. I still can’t.”
Mas felt his blood stir. Those sonafubitchi MPs—what had they done to Akemi?
Akemi must have sensed Mas’s anger, but she shook her head. “No, no, Masao-san,” she said. “That’s the thing. They said awful, terrible things, even slapped me once. But they didn’t go as far as . . . You see, I ran into Sato one evening on my way to the bathhouse from my aunt’s house. I lived at her place for a short time to be close to the factory. He must have lived downtown, I guess. I was afraid. I immediately put my head down, hoping that he would not recognize me, but he did. He wasn’t wearing his uniform. Just simply a cotton yukata, and geta on his feet. ‘Haneda-san,’ he called out. And we talked. I thought in the beginning that it was a trick, so I said nothing. But then the next evening I met him again, and the next night and then the next.”
Mas bit down on his gums. His dentures were still floating in some water in the bathroom, but he didn’t care. There was no vanity between him and Akemi.
“I began to trust him. I know it sounds crazy.” Akemi brought her freckled hands to her face. “I was so lonely, Mas, you have to understand. Before I knew it, it had happened. Later on, it was almost worse than a physical rape. He ignored me, Masao-san. Like I was a piece of trash, or an animal. Like it was my job to service him.
“I tried to pretend that I wasn’t pregnant. I denied it to myself. I tried to work especially hard in the factory, hoping that the baby would just dissolve and leave me. Just the stupid thinking of a nineteen-year-old. How could I tell my mother? She had suffered so much. But Joji knew. He told me not to worry. That he would take care of us. He had a plan, he said, but he never told me what.
“Even after the pikadon fell, I still expected that Joji would come back. I know that it sounds stupid, but I thought that my brother was more powerful than any bomb. We even went down to the train station, or at least where the train station used to be. We searched underneath every burnt limb, every piece of broken concrete. After hours and hours of searching, we finally ate the rice balls we had packed. Like a picnic in the woods—only this picnic was in the middle of a nightmare.”
Mas continued clutching his knees. He felt dizzy, and now the loops in the rug seemed to swirl.
“I needed something, Masao-san. I needed some proof. Later on, they sent us a bone and said it was Joji’s. We knew that it was the bone of a horse. But it helped Mama, at least. There was something she could bury.” Akemi stared at Mari’s wall full of high school mementos and photos of hakujin boys with long hair.
“I wanted to talk to you, but you were too weak, I guess. Within days, Mama finally noticed the obvious. I was at least three months’ pregnant. Mama didn’t ask questions, but she didn’t speak of me to the neighbors, and told me not to go outside. I guess everyone assumed that I was dead. She took me away to our relatives in the countryside. We made up a lie, that I had married. My husband had been a soldier in the war. When they asked me his name, I just said Riki Kimura. I don’t know why. I barely knew him. But what I knew, I liked.”
Mas let out a funny hacking noise, and Akemi caught on immediately. “Mas, you didn’t have it as bad as us,” she said, almost angry. “You didn’t know. Riki Kimura—yes, he was a troublemaker. But he also fought for us.”
“Heezu just out for himself. Like a big shot.”
“Maybe. Maybe for some reason he felt like an outsider, too.” Akemi folded her hands together, and Mas kept his mouth shut. “When I came back to Hiroshima, when Hikari was only two, I heard that Riki Kimura had disappeared. That his family’s house had been destroyed. It was so convenient—can’t you see? Riki Kimura could officially be my son’s father. I could even claim we were married. The records were all gone.”
“So Yuki thinks Riki Kimura is his grandfather?” Mas remembered the square name tag that Yuki had proudly shown them that day of the medical exams.
Akemi nodded. “It all started with my son, Hikari. Having no father, no brothers, no sisters, he was lonely. I filled his emptiness with stories about Riki Kimura. Even in my eyes, Riki became bigger than life. I could say anything about him. That he was Japanese—not Kibei, like us—but he still stood up for us. That he was brave and good. I couldn’t tell my son the truth. That I had had sex with a man I knew only as Sato. That he was a rokudemonai hito, a worthless person. And that I was even more contemptible, because I was so weak.”
“It was wartime. Thatsu the past, Akemi. We all do things back then.”
“And Yuki, he heard all the stories from his father. He can’t know what really happened.” Akemi dabbed at the wetness around her eyes with her fingers. They were bent, like crooked nails—from arthritis, no doubt.
“Akemi-san.” Mas had to explain. Akemi had a right to know how her brother had died.
But once again Akemi stopped him. “I’m very tired, Masao-san,” she said.
Mas himself was exhausted. He felt that he could sleep for days or even weeks. He rose to leave.
“Masao-san.”
Mas waited.
“This is not your fault. If I didn’t have that stupid hope that Joji was somehow alive, Yuki would have never come here.”
Mas closed the door behind him and then checked the dead bolt on the front door. Then he remembered. The pink box. Tripping over the torn-up driveway in his bare feet, he opened up the Jeep. The dome light revealed nothing. Mas fervently traced the car floor with his fingers. But it was no use. The pink box and thirty thousand dollars were gone.
The next morning, the sheriff’s deputies were at the door again. Akemi called G. I., who came within twenty minutes in the same wrinkled outfit he had been wearing the night before.
Mas, Akemi, and G. I. stood on the withered lawn, the dandelions brushing their ankles, and watched through the open door as the deputies proceeded to dismantle everything from the couch pillows to frozen vegetable packs in the freezer.
“Whatsu they lookin’ for?” Mas asked G. I.
“Any kind of evidence. The money.” Dried drool left a mark like a snail’s trail down his chin.
“Money?”
“Yeah, the authorities have information that the dead woman had thirty grand in cash. And now it’s gone.”
Mas’s chest began to thump hard. The money. Where was it? Had Yuki brought that pink box in? It didn’t make sense. Or maybe some of the neighborhood kids.
In fact, a whole line of them sat on their bikes by the street as the p
olice searched. Mas approached them, forgetting that he was still in his pajama bottoms and slippers. “You kidsu not come ova here last night?”
The boys, all around eight, looked at one another blankly.
“You don’t play with dis car, huh?” Mas pointed to Yuki’s rented Jeep.
“No, uh-uh,” the tallest one said. He was wearing a black and red tank top with the number 32.
Mas studied their faces. Their skin, ranging in color from toffee to black-blue, was smooth and unblemished, like perfect plums.
“You pushin’ drugs, mister?” number 32 said. “That’s what my mama says.”
On any other day, Mas would have shooed the kids away, but this day was anything but ordinary.
Another one piped up. “Hey, mister, was that kid livin’ here some kind of gangster or sumptin’?”
Mas gave up and joined G. I. and Akemi on the lawn. Those kids were no help. They saw only what was right in front of them, when the truth was buried somewhere deeper.
As soon as the police left, G. I. and Akemi headed for the courthouse. Mas stayed home and surveyed the damage. It was bad. Clothing and fishing poles spilled out of closets. Soup cans and ramen packages lay on the floor. The air conditioner in the living room had been taken apart.
Mas went into his room. The mattress had been overturned, and even the coffee can in the closet had been dumped, leaving a pile of change and a few balled-up dollars.
That damn Shuji Nakane. That guy was the one who had set up Yuki. But what could Mas say to Akemi and G. I.? That he had accepted hush money?
Within an hour, the house still looked pretty much the same. All Mas was able to do was put the mattress back on the bed frame and then lie on top of it.
That’s the way Tug found him when he came over that afternoon. “Heard about the trouble.” Tug stood in the doorway of Mas’s bedroom.
Summer of the Big Bachi Page 18