Summer of the Big Bachi (4 page)

 

 

Each year Mas added something new to his truck. In the old days, he merely secured hollow metal pipes in the back, which held lassos of green hoses. Mas remembered the times when he would drive home to McNally Street and see those dark eyes behind the backyard gate. “Daddy, Daddy,” Mari’s high-pitched voice would ring out. Mas saw a flash of yellow and then felt a slight weight in the rear. In the side mirror, he could see Mari’s then-tender fingers wrapped around those pipes.

 

 

Later Mas got more elaborate and replaced the pipes with metal guards with holes to hold his rakes and push brooms. He also built runners for his lawn mowers from planks of wood, which he tied down with frayed rope.

 

 

His star lawn mower was his thirty-nine-year-old Trimmer. The signature lawn mower of all Japanese gardeners in the 1960s, the Trimmer had blades twisted into a cylindrical reel, which provided lawns with the closest shave. The handle resembled a sawed-off pipe, and it lay low— good for men like Mas who were nowhere close to five feet six inches.

 

 

His Trimmer was now faded and scratched, but its blades were razor sharp and its insides still roared like a tiger, thanks to Mas’s handiwork. He had replaced the engine with a Honda— the best— and every gear and spark plug was new and in top condition.

 

 

His friends warned him about maintaining an open bed on his truck: “Get a cover,” they told him, “so danger,
abunai,
these days.” He even heard of one guy who kept a loaded gun in his glove compartment. Mas compromised by locking down the Trimmer with a heavy chain and a Master Lock. He preferred the openness of the truck, liked that when he looked in his rearview mirror, he could see his equipment against the expansive blue-gold sky.

 

 

Lately, though, the sky looked brown, heavier than usual, and Mas’s tools seemed flimsy and cheap as he rattled over spilt gravel on the boulevard.

 

 

Since his back was acting up, he knew that he should drive past Pine Street, just to take a look. But it was so late; today’s were truly a sorry-looking lot. He slowed the Ford and stared down at the men crowded at the curb on Pine. Frayed T-shirts. Chapped elbows. Twisted legs. He recognized most of them— Eduardo, Joe, Juan . . . family men, good enough, yet the meat on their arms lay limp and stretched.

 

 

Some newer men leaned back against the graffiti-covered taco stand, their hands shoved in their pockets, their eyes narrowed against the morning sun. Their faces showed the betrayal and disbelief as well as the faint flicker of hope that Mas knew only too well.

 

 

Mas’s gray-black eyes finally stopped on a tall, lanky teenager. The boy’s sinewy arms lay crossed, daring Mas to hire him, daring him not to.

 

 

Mas took a puff from his cigarette and then smashed it down into his metal ashtray.

 

 

“Mista Arai,” someone called out. A mustached man with thinning hair broke out of the crowd and looked into Mas’s open window. “You need helpa?” he asked, wrinkling his forehead into thick lines. “I come.”

 

 

Mas shook his head as he tore back the clear plastic wrap hanging from his pack of cigarettes. “Sorry, Eduardo. Some other time, okay, but need a young one today. That one, ova there.” Mas gestured with a fresh, pungent cigarette toward the teenager with his arms crossed.

 

 

Eduardo shrugged and turned to the boy. Mas could make out about half the Spanish words rolling off the young man’s tongue.

 

 

The boy showed no expression but sauntered over to the car window. Mas examined the boy’s fingernails on his right hand. The nail on his pinky was long and sharp, revealing a faint ring of dirt. Probably didn’t work yesterday, noted Mas, but had done hard work sometime this week. Would have energy today. His eyes, although suspicious, were still bright; Mas knew that the boy had not been in America long.

 

 

The young man then took his turn looking over the mold-green truck. He surveyed the bed of the truck, the makeshift dividers and wire metal hooks holding rakes and green hoses, the greasy lawn mowers and gasoline-powered blowers. He dragged his finger along the dent on the side of the truck and then approached the front.

 

 

He focused on Mas’s dark, leathery face— the prickly white whiskers, thin eyes— and then down to the brown arms laced with distended veins. The teenager licked his thick lips and then turned toward Eduardo. “No,” he said, the deep darkness of his left eye flashing toward Mas. “No,
demasiado viejo
.”

 

 

Mas waited a minute, letting the words sink into his gut. Old. Yeah, he was. He pushed back his cap, arched his spine against his slippery, worn upholstery, and chuckled. Sixty-nine, but I can still beat your
oshiri,
you little sonafugun, Mas said to himself. I’ve probably mowed enough lawns to circle the entire world, maybe even two times, he thought. The kid was brazen, but Mas had to admire some of that; after all, hadn’t the boys back in Hiroshima call Mas mini-dynamite, an explosion packed in a five-foot-two-inch body.

 

 

Eduardo, on the other hand, wasn’t taking it well at all. His eyebrows seemed matted together like tangled fish netting as he chastised the boy for his impudence. All Mas could make out for sure was the boy’s name, Raul.

 

 

“Okay, okay, Eduardo. Tell him go in truck. Fifty dolla.”

 

 

“Sorry, Mista Arai. His mother— my sista— no good. Don’t live him right.”

 

 

“Hell, I know I’m old. But no heart attack.
Corazón
good.”

 

 

Eduardo’s bushy eyebrows turned up. “Not you,” he said, “the car. He say your car old, too old. He ride in a new Dodge van yesterday. Power windows, everything.”

 

 

What the hell. Mas spat out his cigarette onto the cracked cement and felt the steam rise to his fatty ears. He shoved the door open, almost hitting Eduardo’s back. He stood face-to-chest next to the young boy. “Listen, you,
Escucheme
. This truck old— damn yes— but insides better than any Dodge van, you hear me?”

 

 

Mas walked over to the truck’s bent hood, which reached his chin, banged it three times on the left side, and screeched it open. “See this engine? Rebuilt it. Come here. Look,” Mas ordered. The boy’s square shoulders were slightly stooped. He dutifully walked over to the truck’s open mouth and hung his long head toward the oily black engine.

 

 

After Mas rattled off the parts that he had worked on during the past thirty years, he slammed the hood shut and climbed back into the truck. “Mista Arai,” Eduardo called out, but Mas merely muttered something under his breath and turned the key to the ignition. The motor rattled apologetically until it fired up into a roar with Mas’s right foot.

 

 

The men on the curb looked up curiously, the smoke from their cigarettes curling in waves. Raul had returned to the group; he leaned against the building and stroked his chin with his one long fingernail.

 

 

I’ll do the work myself, thought Mas, glancing back at the men in his rearview mirror. He narrowed his eyes and focused on a face— a long, hooked nose— and then it disappeared amid the brown faces. The blast of a horn startled Mas. How had he wandered into the middle of the road? He hit the accelerator, passing the graffiti-covered taco stand. His hands, slick and wet, slid around the skinny steering wheel, and as he changed gears, he heard metal scraping against metal. He remembered the words of his wife, Chizuko: “No need to lose your head over
nandemonai mono
. Your father, your brother, all die of stroke, lung cancer. Smoking no good, too, Masao-
san
.”

 

 

“Outlived you, didn’t I, old woman,” he muttered, and took another drag on his Marlboro. He kept driving on and on, and before he knew it, he was nowhere close to his customers— one an East Indian couple who had a shar-pei dog that always pressed its pitiful wrinkled face against the window when Mas trimmed the hedges. Another customer was a doctor, a young one, who sometimes came home in the middle of the day, wearing green scrubs and paper-covered tennis shoes. And last of all, there were the broken branches. The dog, the doctor, and the broken branches would have to wait, because today Mas was going to North Hollywood.

 

 

 

Mas didn’t know North Hollywood well— but then again, who did? It was just a blip in the smog, a short sprawl somewhere near another blip, Van Nuys. Beyond the haze you could see the outline of the Hollywood Hills and the white blocky Hollywood sign that always turned out better-looking on postcards than in real life.

 

 

Mini-malls on every other corner, old-fashioned gas stations, and looming apartment buildings. No wonder he didn’t have any customers around here— no lawns.

 

 

One place in North Hollywood Mas did know about was Keiko’s Ramen House. She advertised on the local UHF tele-vision station that broadcast Japanese programming on Sunday nights. In the commercial, Keiko looked like one of those dish-washing brushes— skinny body, with short, spiky hair that could probably clean out any filthy glass. She wore a yellow apron with a drawing of a hot steaming bowl of noodles. “Please come,” she said in a cute, high-pitched voice, bowing outside her establishment. The address then flashed below her in video letters and numbers. Mas couldn’t remember it exactly but knew that it was somewhere on Sepulveda.

 

 

After almost forty minutes of driving back and forth, Mas spotted it. Shaped like a giant shoe box, the restaurant had a small, unassuming sign. But the neon letters displayed in the window cinched it: RAMEN.

 

 

Mas parked his truck and went inside. It was three o’clock— too late for the lunch crowd, too early for dinner. Aside from a
hakujin
boy, sweat pouring down his shaven head as he slurped down noodles, the place was empty. A bookcase by the door was filled with fat Japanese comic books and women’s magazines. Day-old newspapers were neatly folded on the bottom shelf.

 

 

Mas immediately looked for the spiked head of Keiko but saw only a Latino man in a paper hat behind the counter.

 

 

“Hai, irasshaimase,”
the cook said.

 

 

Mas narrowed his eyes and sat down at the counter. Maybe coming here was not a good idea after all. A laminated menu was in front of him, between a bottle of black soy sauce and a cylinder of red pepper. He didn’t even bother to look at the choices, and ordered a bowl of miso ramen, as basic as a ham-and-cheese sandwich.

 

 

Mas hated to eat out, especially now. He didn’t like to talk to strangers. He didn’t like to look at a long list of food items with foreign, fancy names. He didn’t like multiple pieces of silverware, two forks, two spoons. All you needed were a pair of chopsticks and a pair of hands to wrap around a hamburger or a
carne asada
taco.

 

 

When Mari was growing up, they went to only one restaurant: Entoro in Little Tokyo. Entoro was also known as Far East Café, a chop suey house, the old kind before the new Chinese came to town. There, you got greasy
homyu,
looking like day-old Cream of Wheat in a tiny bowl; almond duck, slippery, fat, and buttery, with a crunch of fried skin and nuts; and real sweet and sour pork, bright, stinking orange like the best high-grade motor oil. Everyone went to Entoro, crowded around tables separated by wooden dividers like a giant maze of horse stalls. The upstairs area was open and reserved for special occasions. Someone married, go to Far East. Someone dead, go to Far East. It was simple and predictable. Same set of waiters, who doubled as the cooks, who happened to own the joint. And the menu— who bothered to even look? Mas wasn’t even sure they had menus, but he seemed to remember a bewildered
hakujin
family, probably visiting from out of state, looking lost while they perused some kind of stained sheet of paper in front of them.

 

 

Far East Café closed right after the Northridge earthquake. Later, Mas heard that one of the waiters/cooks/owners had passed on. No sense in going out anymore, Mas figured. But now, against his better judgment, he was here, in Keiko’s Ramen House, in the middle of North Hollywood.

 

 

The boy with the shaven head had left, leaving only murky broth at the bottom of the bowl. Mas felt strange here alone with the mustached cook, who was tossing tangled noodles into the vat of boiling water. What was he doing here? How could he expect to find someone he hadn’t seen for thirty years?

 

 

It was that
meishi,
with its sharp, clean edges, fancy printing, and Hiroshima connection, that nagged at Mas. Why was this straight-from-Japan fellow looking for Joji Haneda? It meant trouble, a kind of trouble that Mas knew would touch him, too. His only hope was that the man everyone here knew as Haneda kept running, and stayed the hell away from L.A.