Blood Hina (8 page)

Haruo just needed to go away for a while, Mas told himself. Take a vacation. Everything would probably blow over—the Montebello police surely had more serious crimes to worry about than two stolen dolls. Mas would just tell Haruo to keep his distance from Spoon. Even though she seemed pleasant enough, she was starting to smell
kusai
, and Mas didn’t want that stink to further ruin his friend’s life.

After coming to his solution, he felt much better. He even stuck his elbow out the open window and felt the wind blow on his cheeks and earlobes. He’d soon be home, enjoying ten-minute boiled Sapporo ramen noodles. Just thinking about that salt on his lips and tongue made him salivate.

Back in Altadena, he turned onto McNally Street and immediately noticed an old Honda, the red color faded and its doors battered with decades of dings, parked in front of his house. And a familiar figure seated on his porch beside two duffel bags and a suitcase. If he hadn’t been spotted by his visitor, he would have done a U-turn and pressed down on the gas. But it was too late.

“You needsu to leave L.A.,” Mas insisted. “At least for little while.”

“Where I gonna go? Gotta work.
Shigoto
hard to come by these days.”

Haruo was right. He was lucky to receive even his
meager wages from the flower market. The demand for a seventysomething man with only one good eye was limited indeed.

“Nowhere else for me to go, Mas,” Haruo repeated, now talking about living at Mas’s house.

How about your own grown daughter and son?
Mas said to himself. Haruo must have read Mas’s face, because he added, “Don’t want to be a
meiwaku
to Clement and Kiyomi.”

And you want to be a burden to me?
Mas silently responded. But he understood where Haruo was coming from. Haruo had just started to rebuild relations with his daughter, whereas Clement, a mama’s boy, was less forgiving.

“I figured that you have all dis space just for youzu.”

“Orai, orai
. You stay, but only two weeks,
yo.”
Mas tried not to think about what would happen if Haruo overstayed that time period. That was tomorrow’s problem, not today’s.

“Where you been, anyway? Been waiting here for two hour,” Haruo asked him straight-out, and at first he didn’t know what to say. Without knowing what was really going on with the dolls and Spoon, it served no purpose to get Haruo all tied up in knots.

“Just had
yoji.”

“Bizness? When you do have bizness, Mas?”

“I still have thingsu to do,” Mas said a little too harshly. He was always sensitive to any insinuation that he might have a lot of time on his hands now that he was semi-retired.

“Well, another thing…” Mas waited. “My car’s still not workin’ too good.”

“Saw it out on the street.”

“Yeah, well, I had it towed ova here.”

Chikusho
, Mas cursed under his breath. The sheriffs ticketed for overnight parking, so the pitiful heap needed to be moved into the driveway. With Haruo in the driver’s seat steering, Mas pushed from behind. The car had barely moved a few inches when some neighbor children joined in to help. When it came to broken-down cars in this neighborhood, it didn’t matter if you were on your way to rob a bank or keep a date with a mistress. Everyone got a push, because that’s the least that each person deserved in this life.

They eased the car onto the driveway, and the children disappeared as quickly as they had appeared. Mas looked forlornly first at his Datsun elevated on cement blocks and then at the Honda. He now had two dead cars sitting on his driveway.

Dinner was next on the agenda. There was only one ramen package in the cupboard. So the noodles went to Haruo, while Mas was left with heels of old bread and some peanut butter. As the peanut butter stuck to the roof of his dentures, Mas could have cried right then and there at the kitchen table.

Haruo was smart enough to stay quiet for most of the evening. He washed his ramen bowl and even scrubbed the stained counter grout with an old Brillo pad and some cleanser.

Mas wanted to tell Haruo not to bother, but then they both believed in earning your keep. If this was his method of payment, Mas needed to accept it. “What time you gotsu to be at the flower market tomorrow morning?” Mas finally asked.

“I can take bus.”

“I drive youzu,” Mas said.

Haruo began to protest but then apparently thought better of it. “Gotsu be there by four.”

Four it was.

“One thing, if youzu gonna hang around the flower market, police gonna be callin’ for you. Maybe betta if you go to them first.” Mas removed Officer Chang’s business card from his wallet and gave it to Haruo.

Just the mention of the police made Haruo’s scar bulge out. “Izu don’t wanna to talk to them. Don’t they have to arrest me to make me talk?”

Mas sighed. It probably wouldn’t be a bad idea for Haruo to avoid the police, at least for a couple of days. When Haruo was nervous, there was no telling what he’d say.

Pulling a cold Budweiser from the refrigerator, Mas escaped to his bedroom, where he read the Japanese newspaper he got in the mail. When he returned to the living room an hour later, Haruo was already passed out on the couch. Pulling a blanket crocheted by Chizuko over his friend’s pitiful body, Mas couldn’t see the knotted keloid scars. With his face pressed against the pillow in the dark light, Haruo looked normal, like any old man worn out from the day or his whole life.

CHAPTER FIVE

M
as didn’t sleep well, which was always the case when he knew he had to wake up early. Rather than take the risk of oversleeping,
asanebo
, he preferred to take the route of hardly sleeping at all. As a result, his eyes burned as he concentrated on the dips and turns of the Pasadena Freeway, the oldest operating highway in the nation. The freeway was full of deadman’s curves—bashed guardrails and skid warnings of what lay ahead. Mas was ready to go when his time was up, but he was committed to leave the world alone—no plans to have anyone else’s blood on his hands, especially a friend like Haruo’s.

Haruo was chattering nonstop, wired from three cups of instant coffee. Usually such
urusai
talk so early in the morning got Mas in a particularly bad mood, but Haruo didn’t require him to listen, so he didn’t. Mas actually liked having a reason to get up early, like when he had dozens of customers six days a week. Now, because of his bad back and age, that number had dwindled to half a dozen. So it was actually nice to have some kind of purpose to rise before dawn, even if it meant serving as Haruo’s chauffeur.

Haruo had gotten that job at the flower market a few years ago. He described himself as the right-hand man of
Taxie, the manager of Freeway Flowers, but Mas knew that Haruo’s title was closer to grunt. He wrapped flowers into newspaper, helped customers load up their vans and trucks, retrieved handcarts, swept the concrete floor, and bought coffee for the rest of the workers. It was honest and physical work, which Mas had hoped would keep him out of trouble. And so far it had.

The flower market was already going full throttle at four o’clock in the morning, judging from the line of vans and trucks waiting by the parking kiosk. Most everything around the area was aging concrete—the public lots, neighboring dives, and the flower market itself. It had been the belle of the ball in the 1960s, a sleek everything-under-one-roof building, the biggest of its kind perhaps in the world. But that’s when people still grew flowers in places like Blue Hills, as East Whittier was once called, and Dominguez, which, in its present-day incarnation as Compton, was known more for drive-by shootings than delphiniums. There was no flower growing now in Los Angeles County, aside from a few holdouts in San Dimas and Palos Verdes and, of course, nurseries that grew their plants underneath electrical towers.

The market still sold blooms, but instead of carnations from Hawthorne and gladiolas from San Diego, the flowers came from towns in Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Thailand. From the buyers’ standpoint, a rose was a rose; it didn’t matter whether it sunned itself in a greenhouse in Northern California or outside in a field in South America.

It was Mas’s turn at the parking kiosk. He rolled down his window, and Haruo scooted over to the driver’s side so far that he was almost sitting in Mas’s lap.

“Heezu just gonna drop me off, Johnny,” he explained to the parking lot attendant.

“No, gonna park,” Mas corrected Haruo. “Needsu to talk to somebody.”

Haruo just seemed happy that Mas would be going into work with him, so he didn’t ask why or whom he was planning to talk to. He navigated Mas through the covered lot to an empty spot between an old van and a shiny SUV.

After parking, Mas walked sideways in between the van and the Ford, only to discover a couple of alley cats meowing at them.

“Hallo,” Haruo got down on his knees and greeted them like old friends. Before Mas could warn him not to, Haruo was scratching their chins and nuzzling the matted fur on their cheeks.

Mas grimaced. “No tellin’ what kind of
byoki
those cats have.”

“These cats so
kawaii
, how can they be sick?”

Mas spit on the concrete. Yah, cuteness can fool you, draw you, and before you know it, it can even kill you. That was the case with old men and young girls. And, who knew, maybe with kittens.

“These
neko
work hard, you know? Catch a bunch of rats each day, most likely. I feedsu them eberyday before I go home.”

“C’mon.” Mas gestured to the entrance of the flower market. “Youzu gonna be late.”

Punctuality for Mas and most men and women of his generation and background was paramount. There was no excuse for being late. Bad traffic, accident, death in the
family, earthquake, even a police investigation—it didn’t matter. The hands on the clock and the digital numbers on a watch ruled their world.

They walked down an expansive hall, past offices for orchid traders, a wholesale florist supply center, and a store selling pots, down the escalator onto the main floor, the air thick with a mixture of car exhaust and the fragrance of flowers. It was such a powerful punch that it almost set Mas back a few stairs up the escalator. Haruo, on the other hand, had become immune to it. Whether it be bad or good, if you lived with the same thing day after day, your body just took it for granted.

Mas followed Haruo through a maze of open-air stalls. Signs with the number and name of each business dangled from above via chains. He saw the greens man, with stalks of shiny banana leaves, furry ferns, and striped crotons; the tropical flower outfit, with long boxes full of magenta dendrobrium leis and stalks of lobster-claw heliconia; and a local grower of misshapen sunflowers and gypsophila, resembling a rain of dandruff.

Each stall had a different specialty, and each was in a war—albeit a friendly one—with each other. Standing orders for regular customers had been bunched together hours earlier and sat in buckets of water. Florists and event planners trolled other stalls to see if any offerings struck their fancy. Many times it wasn’t only about only the beauty of their products but also their price. By the end of the morning, there were deals to be had, because flowers weren’t like cans of beans—they had a limited shelf life, usually less than forty-eight hours.

As they turned the corner around some chrysanthemum growers from Carpinteria, Mas came face to face with just about the last female he wanted to see. She was wearing a white T-shirt and jeans and was casually leaning against a cart filled with pompon chrysanthemums. On her feet was a pair of old-fashioned Converse basketball high-tops, the kind that Mari used to wear. “I’m getting some new wheels soon,” Mas couldn’t help but hear her boast to an Asian man in his forties.

Mas blocked Haruo from her view and told him to get the hell out of there. As Haruo slipped away to report to Freeway Flowers, Mas knew he had to confront the Buckwheat Beauty. He stood right in front of her, his eyes reaching the top of her chin. “You gotsu it all wrong,” he said.

The man she’d been talking to became busy with a customer, and Mas gave her no space to avoid him.

“Haruo didn’t have nuttin’ to do wiz those dolls,” he declared.

Dee folded her arms. “Then why did he run in the opposite direction when he saw me right now? And why isn’t he talking to the police?”

“Maybe he don’t like being accuse. Youzu already tellsu police he did it. Now he gotta prove he didn’t.”