Gasa-Gasa Girl (5 page)

The bald man’s face flushed red, his head now a distressed lightbulb. “You move your damn car, or else I’ll be telling Miss Waxley to do it.”

J-E rose, dropped his still-smoking cigarette on a step, and swore under his breath. “Asshole. Makin’ trouble all the time. Wouldn’t surprise me if he offed Kazzy himself.”

Crushing the cigarette with his waffle sole, he looked apologetically at Mas. “I’ll catch you later, man.”

Mas nodded back. He knew the sting of
urusai
neighbors complaining about the volume of a gas blower or lawn mower. The thing was, they had a job to do, and nothing was going to happen in America without some kind of inconvenience to somebody.

The driver never returned, but two other people came through the back gate a few minutes later.
Hakujin
men, again in fancy suits. One was short, almost Mas’s height, in a brown suit and an orange tie the color of a sea urchin’s guts. Even the front of the man’s reddish brown hair was splayed out like the spikes of a sea urchin. The other man was taller, with a solid body like a mini sumo wrestler’s. His gray pin-striped suit seemed a little tight on him, as if he had recently gained weight or muscle.

“Oh my God, look at that.” The sea urchin pointed to the yellow police tape fluttering in the breeze across the pond.

“The last resting place of Kazzy Ouchi.” The sumo wrestler spit on the concrete. It was so cold out that Mas noticed the man’s spit came out slow and even seemed to harden right there on the cement walkway. “Good riddance.”

“This isn’t going to mean the end of the garden, right?” The sea urchin’s voice went up an octave higher.

“No. Don’t worry about it, Penn.”

The men noticed Mas for the first time. Examining Mas’s brown, leathery face and worn jeans, they must have figured that he was no threat to them. “Are Becca and Phillip inside?”

Mas nodded. “Wiz police.”

The men exchanged glances. They didn’t seem too eager to enter, but with Mas sitting out on the stairs as a witness, they didn’t have much choice.

F
inally, after about forty-five minutes, the back door opened again. It was Detective Ghigo, his tie loosened and eyes bloodshot. “Okay, Mr. Arai, we’re ready for you.”

Mas followed Ghigo through the dining room into the living room. A gloomy gray light from the large picture window in the front cast a pall over the surroundings. On the large couch sat the son-in-law, wearing the same work clothes as yesterday, and Mari, carrying the baby. They must have come through the front door, thought Mas, grateful that everyone was back together, safe and sound. Another older woman, a
hakujin
with silver hair piled on top of her head, sat in a high-backed armchair. Miss Waxley, the driver’s boss, Mas figured. Both the sea urchin and sumo wrestler were standing awkwardly next to the picture window.

“This is your father, is that correct?” Ghigo asked, pulling at Mas’s coat as if he were a piece of old furniture found in the trash.

Mari glanced down at the Oriental rug in the middle of the room and then lifted her head toward Mas. She had gotten much thinner; her face was now angular, much like during her teenage years. But she had also aged—her eyes had lost all their sharpness, and her skin was as sallow as raw fish that had been left out too long. Her hair had been clipped short like a boy’s, and poking out from the top of her head were quite a number of gray strands.

Mari licked her lips. “Yes, he’s my father,” she said.

“Well, your father verified your story. That you were at home taking care of the baby this morning.”

Takeo was sleeping in Mari’s arms. His face was no longer so red as in his earlier photograph, and even with his eyes closed, he somehow looked more Asian.

“So we can go?” asked Lloyd.

“Yes.” Detective Ghigo nodded. “You all can go. But don’t be planning any trips to California.”

As Lloyd went to retrieve a baby stroller left in the hallway, Mas patted down his coat pockets. Empty. “Gloves, forgot my gloves,” he told the son-in-law. Mas went through the back door, and sure enough, he found the gloves on the stairs. What a sonafugun mess, thought Mas, taking one last survey of the garden. He expected to see the pure whiteness of the gardenia left in the middle of the dirt path. But the path was completely empty, as if it had been swept clean.

“I
think they are going to close down the whole project, the garden and the museum,” Lloyd said. Mari pushed the stroller, one of these elaborate kinds with patterned cushions and even a holder for drinks.

“What do you expect? Kazzy’s dead.” Mari bent down to adjust the blanket over Takeo. He was starting to fuss, making hiccupping noises. Mari then noticed Mas at her side. “It’s a real screwed-up situation,” she said to no one in particular, followed by a couple of double-dose bad words.

Mas hated to hear his daughter curse, much less in front of the baby (who knew what he could absorb?), but it wasn’t anything new to him. Ever since she had moved to New York for school, it seemed that the East Coast had coarsened her, stripped her of any good manners learned from their detached single house in Altadena.

A large truck was parked outside the neighbor’s home, a two-story white building with columns. The back of the truck was open, revealing some fancy wooden furniture. The man with the lightbulb-shaped head was now shouting instructions to some deliverymen who were raising a load ramp from the back of the truck.

When the neighbor spied Lloyd and Mari, he switched his focus to them. “I can’t have all these cars here,” he told them. “Miss Waxley’s Cadillac was parked outside my place again.”

“Dammit, Howard,” Lloyd said. “Kazzy’s dead.”

The neighbor didn’t register any emotion. “I know, I know. I’ve already spoken to the police. I’m the one who called them when I heard a gun go off at nine last night. They couldn’t find a thing wrong; they didn’t take my call seriously, I guess. But all this ruckus proves what I’ve been saying: that garden and museum thing has no place in this neighborhood. Take it over to downtown Brooklyn, or Manhattan. But not here.”

Mari looked like she was going to verbally slash the neighbor, but Lloyd pushed her forward. “C’mon, Mari. We’ve had enough excitement over the past twenty-four hours. Just let it go.”

They made it a few doors down until Mari apparently couldn’t hold it in any longer. “He’s a damn racist,” she muttered, tightening her grip around the stroller’s handlebar.

“He’s not against other races; he’s just against everyone. A nondiscriminatory hater.” Lloyd was trying to tell a joke, Mas figured, but it wasn’t registering with either Mas or Mari.

They turned the corner and walked down Flatbush Avenue, past coffee shops smelling of bacon grease and syrup, laundries with stacks of thin brown-paper packages in the window, and bakeries offering pastry cones filled with light-pink cream. Mas could feel Mari’s anger now redirecting from the neighbor to her father, and could almost hear his daughter’s thoughts.
Why did I ask him to come? I didn’t want him over here in the first place, and now see what has happened.

Once they were back in the underground apartment, Mari and Lloyd took Takeo into the bedroom and closed the door behind them. Mas, meanwhile, folded up the futon and blanket and placed them in a wicker chair by the fireplace in the living room. As he fumbled to take his cigarettes out of his pocket, Mas noticed that his hands were shaking. Even though Kazzy had been a stranger, it had been a shock to see the dead man’s face. That was the strange thing: both Mari and Lloyd had known the man well, and they didn’t seem that sad at all.

Mari was hard to predict when it came to emotions. During Chizuko’s funeral at a mortuary in Little Tokyo, Mari wore sunglasses that would occasionally slip down her small nose. At first Mas thought that her pride was taking hold, her reluctance to let people see her weak and vulnerable. But as mourners passed by Chizuko’s casket, Mas got a good sideways glance at his daughter’s profile. Her eyes were clear and dry, not a speck of any kind of weepiness. Mas realized then that the dark glasses were to hide her lack of emotion, not her excess of it.

Mas had wanted the funeral banquet to be at Far East Café, only about six blocks away from the mortuary, but Mari opted for the chop suey house in Monterey Park, a suburb east of downtown Los Angeles. “More people live out there,” she announced. “And there’s plenty of parking.” End of discussion.

Mas and his daughter had been seated at one of the round tables next to each other, but most of the time Mari was out of her chair. During one particularly long absence, Mas got up to look for her and thought he saw her by the cash register, arguing with one of the waiters. He was then waylaid by some family friends who spent a full useless fifteen minutes telling him what a saint Chizuko had been, how strong she was during her radiation and chemotherapy treatments.

Mas finally found Mari outside in the parking lot, where she was leaning against the yellow brick wall, an unfiltered cigarette in her hands. Her dark glasses were off her face, and tears watered down her cheeks.

“What happen?”

“They ran out of the damn
pakkai
.”

“Itsu
orai
.” Who cared about missing out on a serving of sweet and sour pork after seven other courses?

“It was Mom’s favorite,” she said.

But Mom not here, Mas was about to say, then stopped himself.

“It was mine, too.” Mari pushed up her dark glasses and went back into the restaurant.

Mas hadn’t seen Mari many times since then. He had given her all of Chizuko’s jewelry—the wedding ring, the string of pearls from Hiroshima, and even the cheap stuff she had received from customers when she began cleaning houses after Mari started school. Mari had taken all of that, as well as some old black-and-white photographs and Chizuko’s Japanese hymnal from her days as a schoolgirl in Hiroshima. Mas didn’t understand why she wanted the black hymnal, since Mari couldn’t really read Japanese well and, as far as he knew, had quit going to church. But that was all part of the mystery called Mari Arai. Now Mari Jensen.

Lloyd came out of the bedroom first. “I’m going to get some Thai food,” he announced, grabbing his keys from the kitchen table. His voice sounded funny, and Mas knew that both he and Mari had been talking about him.

“I go wiz you.”

“No, it’s okay, Mr. Arai. Really. I think Mari wants to talk to you.” The son-in-law looked dog-tired. His hair was tied back in a ponytail, and both the sides of his face and chin showed a healthy crop of golden beard stubble.

“I pay, at least.” Mas reached down for his wallet. Again, Lloyd shook his head.

“No, Mr. Arai, it’s fine.” He went to the door and stopped as if he wanted to say something more. But he pushed forward, locking the gate behind him. Through the small barred window, Mas watched Lloyd’s work boots reach ground level and then disappear toward the street.

The living room became progressively darker, but instead of turning on the lamps, Mas folded his hands together and sat back on the couch. He left the cigarettes on the coffee table. No sense smoking in a sick baby’s house.

After some time, fluorescent light washed over the room. Mari had opened the bedroom door. “He’s finally asleep,” she said. Mas was surprised that Takeo could rest with so much light. She closed the door softly and turned on the kitchen light. She brought down an old aluminum cookie tin from one of the shelves, and after she pried it open with her fingernails, Mas realized that it was an
okome
canister, which held their daily supply of rice. As Mari began measuring cupfuls of rice into a rice cooker, Mas finally said, “I dunno your baby’s sick.”

“Yeah, I should have told you. But it was too hard to explain over the phone.” Mari closed the tin and returned it to a shelf.

Mas wondered where his daughter had wandered to last night. He knew that she had inherited his personality: flashes of explosive anger and fear, a need to escape for miles and miles. In Mas’s case, he would drive away in his Ford pickup. Mari, on the other hand, had to rely on her legs and public transportation.