Gasa-Gasa Girl (11 page)

“Excuse me if I sound uncultured,” interjected Ghigo. “But why do you care who’s on the board? How much money do you get?” Mas listened intently. He was wondering the exact same question.

Miss Waxley laughed, covering her mouth with a hand dotted with age spots. “Quite the contrary, Detective Ghigo,” she said. “You are usually expected to give money when you’re named on a board.”

“So who cares who’s in and who’s not?”

“The board decides the future of the garden and museum,” explained Becca. “If the board votes to shoot the project down, it’ll eventually die.”

A
fter forty-five minutes of this incessant talking, Mas had to leave. He felt bad abandoning the sycamore, but he figured a few more days of being attached to its infected limb would do no extra damage.

The route back to the underground apartment was remembered by Mas’s legs, which automatically carried him past street signs, bus stops, bakeries. He turned on Carlton and unlocked the gate and door of the apartment, and was greeted by the friendly smell of cooked green onions, fried bacon, and soy sauce. Fried rice, the way Lil Yamada had taught Chizuko to make it when she first arrived in America. It had become Chizuko’s specialty dish, now reprised in Brooklyn.

Mari had returned without Lloyd or Takeo, but with two other guests—Tug and his daughter, Joy.

“Mas, old man, we were wondering where you were,” said Tug, getting up from his chair at the kitchen table, which had been moved into the living room. Mari smiled and scooped a serving of fried rice from a wok onto a plate in front of an empty chair. Her hair was wet, freshly washed. In fact, her whole spirit seemed freshly watered. She told him what he had already sensed: Takeo was doing much, much better, and would be released from the hospital after undergoing a few more tests.

Before he took his seat, Joy acknowledged him. “Mr. Arai, I haven’t seen you in ages. Maybe even ten years.” Joy didn’t mention Chizuko’s funeral, but that had been the last time, they all knew. Joy had the same moon face, and wore a dark-blue kerchief over her head. Her hair lay in two long braids, like those women in Hong Kong kung fu movies, except the right one was dyed bright pink and the other electric blue. When Mari was a teenager, she often said that Joy had “tight eyes,” claiming that she herself found that kind of thin eyes attractive.

“Yah, long time,” Mas replied. He couldn’t believe that this two-tone-braided girl had been close to becoming a full-fledged doctor after completing her residency in South Carolina. He had once viewed her as being quiet and bland, like a boiled egg, but it was quite obvious that her shell was now broken.

“Well, Dad,” said Mari, pulling out a chair for Mas, “tell us where you’ve been.”

Mas took off his jacket and started from the beginning. He mentioned the sycamore, but quickly went on to the suicide letter and conversation at the Waxley House. Mari kept interjecting, filling in Mas’s blanks. The sea urchin, Penn Anderson, worked with Phillip at Ouchi Silk, Inc., while the sumo wrestler, Larry Pauley, was a senior vice president of Waxley Enterprises, which donated money to the Ouchi Foundation. And Miss Waxley was the only child of Mr. Waxley, and chairman emeritus of the company.

“Who is this Waxley fellow?” asked Tug.

“The late, great Henry Waxley?” Mari said. “He started Waxley Enterprises, a shipping company, before World War Two.”

“Oh, yeah, wasn’t there a biography that came out recently?” recollected Joy. “Sounds like he was a real SOB. A control freak, right?”

“Joy.” Tug frowned and wiped his beard of any stray grains of fried rice. “He was a successful businessman.”

“No, Mr. Yamada, Joy’s right,” said Mari. “I heard Waxley was a hard man to deal with. Actually, Kazzy was no better.”

Mas didn’t know why these daughters had to
warukuchi
so much.
Warukuchi
literally meant bad-mouth, and they were freely talking bad about men two and three times their age.

“Kazzy was lecherous, Dad,” Mari maintained. “A
sukebe
. He even propositioned me when I was four months pregnant with Takeo.”

“What an asshole.” Joy tossed her blue braid behind her shoulder while Tug took a big swig of water.

“Maybe youzu get it wrong,” Mas countered.

“No, Dad, I didn’t misinterpret that. It was pretty clear what he wanted.”

The four of them became quiet. Mas didn’t know whether to be happy that Kazzy was dead or to view his daughter as being
shinkeikabin
, too sensitive. He watched Mari circle the table, collecting dirty dishes, until she stopped at his side. “Oh, I forgot to tell you,” she then recalled. “Haruo left a message on the answering machine. Wasn’t quite sure what he was talking about.”

After she took the dishes to the sink, Mari turned the dial counterclockwise on the aged answering machine.

“Mari, don’t you think it’s time to go digital?” said Joy. “Damn, girl, you guys live like you’re just out of the eighties.”

“What can I say? Lloyd and I are old-school.”

“More like prehistoric.”

Mas waved the girls to be quiet as he positioned his ear toward the machine’s speaker.

It was indeed Haruo, first breathing hard like he had run up a bunch of steps to make this call.

“I gotchu Mystery Gardenia, Mas. Call me as soon youzu getsu dis message.”

Mas looked at Tug and didn’t waste any time. Since Haruo had been up for his graveyard shift, he was probably already in bed, wiped out from the day’s activities. But Haruo wasn’t the type to mind if anybody interrupted his slumber, especially if it meant that someone out there needed him.

Haruo answered after the sixth ring. He had indeed been sleeping, but Haruo being Haruo, it didn’t take him long to start talking, his words dribbling out like a steady rain.

“You be proud of me, Mas. Izu found your Mystery Gardenia.”

Haruo’s search actually began in the Flower Market, where he now worked part-time, a concrete refuge in downtown Los Angeles amid wandering transvestites, fenced factories protected by coils of barbed wire, and refrigerator box after box (apartments for the homeless). Inside, on the first floor, however, were rows and rows of blossoms—either grown locally in Southern California or imported from Latin America and Asia. Haruo always spoke about how he loved the scent of flowers. Like Mas, he had survived the Bomb, but unlike Mas, he always talked about sweet smells, whether they came from a garden or a woman’s kitchen. The Bomb might have destroyed Haruo’s face, but his nose was as strong as ever.

Haruo worked for his friend Taxie, an old-time chrysanthemum grower. They had an established routine. From two o’clock in the morning, Taxie was the front man, greeting the customers and showing them their flowers soaking in water. Haruo, on the other hand, worked in back, toward the cash register. He was the one who wrapped the dripping bunches in sheets of old newspaper and carried the flowers onto their customers’ metal carts.

Mas thought it was well and good that Haruo was making some extra cash at the Market, but he had some concerns as well. The Market was rampant with gamblers. The game of choice was liar’s poker, in which men brought out dollar bills from their pockets and wallets and gambled off of the bills’ serial numbers. This wasn’t the best environment for a recovering ex-gambler like Haruo, and Mas sometimes wondered when his friend would succumb to the temptation. But today was no day to go into a man’s addiction.

“So whatsu the Mystery Gardenia?” asked Mas, hoping for a short explanation.

“You knowsu Kanda Nursery? Only gardenia grower in Market. Roses, carnation, they all come from Latin America,
yo
, but gardenia plants, they have
mushi
, whatchacallit, worms in soil. No out-of-country gardenia allowed. So Kanda doin’ good.”

Mas knew about the nematodes, wormlike parasites that could burrow near the roots of gardenia plants. The greenhouses of Kanda Nursery must be either north in Ventura County or south in Orange County, he thought.

“Well, anyways, I go ova to Kanda’s stall and talk to the son. Good thing I brought ova donuts one day at the Market. He rememba and then make time for me. I tell themsu they gotsu the biggest gardenias I ever seen. He tell me about their special Mystery Gardenia. Thatsu whatchu call dat type, you knowsu, Mystery Gardenia. Ship all ova the country, I think. I tellsu them about the gardenia you lookin’ for. ‘No way,’ he say. ‘No way you can find who grow dat flower.’ But I tellsu him how big and beautiful you say it was. So I guess heezu gotsu some
hokori
.”

Mas knew that if you complimented a man on what he grew or made with his hands, you had a friend for life. Although Haruo didn’t have a lot of common sense, unlike Mas, he had smarts on how to get along with people.

“Then he tellsu me, ‘You go with my dad to ranch.’ The father turns out to be Kibei, Mas, just like us. Name Danjo. Skinny guy, as skinny as a broom. But mouth,
okii
, so big thatsu you could sweep a whole day’s worth of leaves in there. Born in Riverside, but spent time in Tottori.”

“Yah, yah,” Mas said impatiently. He didn’t have time to hear Danjo Kanda’s life story.

“Anyhowsu, the nursery in San Juan Capistrano. You knowsu, the place where the birds come.” Mas had heard that swallows were supposed to visit the quaint town every spring. He didn’t know if the story was fact or fiction, but he wasn’t surprised to hear that Haruo had been charmed with the idea of a cloud of swallows descending on the town’s old mission every March.

“I tellsu you, datsu a nice place. Cool. Not far from ocean. I’m thinkin’, when I retire, I should move to dis place,” said Haruo, knowing full well that retirement would never be in the cards for either him or Mas.

“So I get out of truck and see greenhouse, four of them, plastic, all lined up. I tellsu you, Mas, smellsu so good, like a ladies’ cologne. Then when I go in, smell like wax. Danjo’s wife doing hand tailorin’, you knowsu, put flower in wax, then cold water.

“I go ova, take a closer look. I rememba whatchu say about flower, hair in the middle. Then I checksu what she doin’, and then I shout out, ‘Thatsu it, thatsu it.’ I solve Mas’s mystery.”

Haruo took a deep breath and then spoke so loud that even Tug and the two girls could hear. “They use
shuji
brush for the wax. Hand tailorin’. Those brushes gotsu animal hair, Mas. You get me?”

Mas nodded. He was familiar with hand tailoring, as he had some friends up in Mountain View, not far from San Francisco, who were in the flower nursery business. Apparently the pollen from the gardenia flowers got on ladies’ fancy dresses, so they dipped the half-open flowers in warm wax to seal the pollen. But Mas remembered seeing it done by hand, no brushes.

“And they gotsu New York customers,” said Haruo, who proceeded to read off a list of five flower shops in Manhattan and Brooklyn. The effort Haruo expended to recite his story had taken its toll. Afterward, he seemed to deflate like a punctured balloon, and weakly excused himself to finish out his sleep.

“What’s
shuji
?” Mari asked after Mas hung up the phone.

“You know, Japanese calligraphy. Didn’t you take it in Japanese school?” Joy took the end of her pink braid and mimicked a brushstroke on the kitchen counter.

“Must have missed that session.”

As a teenager, Mari regularly ditched her Saturday language classes, opting instead to smoke cigarettes three blocks away on a corner of Koreatown. Mas had seen her one Saturday on his way to a customer in Hancock Park.

“What’s this about the animal hair?” asked Tug.

Mas explained Detective Ghigo’s identification of the deer hair on the gardenia flower.

“Makes sense,” agreed Joy. “Those Japanese calligraphy brushes are usually made of deer hair. Some use goat, horse, or even raccoon. But your regular Western brush is either synthetic or made of hog or sable hair.”

Mari laughed. “Wow, you belong on
Jeopardy!
, girl.”

“Well, brushes, they’re my tools of the trade now. Anyway, you’re the one who went to Japanese school for thirteen years. You should know all that cultural stuff and at least a thousand
kanji
, right? In my measly two-year experience, I barely got through
katakana
and
hiragana
.”

In Japanese, there are three levels of writing: two phonetic versions,
katakana
and
hiragana
, and then the highest level,
kanji
, modern-day hieroglyphics. All three types could be traced back to the Chinese.

Mas had no trouble remembering
katakana
and
hiragana
—there were only about forty symbols in each—but
kanji
, numbering in the tens of thousands, was another matter altogether. Over the years, Japan had simplified
kanji
, but Mas was actually more at home with the complicated versions issued during the Meiji Era in the late 1800s.
Kanji
after
kanji
had been drilled into Mas’s head by a fierce junior high schoolteacher until school was eventually canceled during World War II. Mas sometimes felt that he belonged more to the era of Meiji, “Enlightened Rule,” than today’s era, Heisei, or “Peace Everywhere.”