Gasa-Gasa Girl (13 page)

“You knew Kazzy Ouchi?” asked Tug.

“Of course, we all did. I mean, I didn’t socialize with him. Different circles, you know. But I knew his first wife—you know that he was married three times?”

Three times? thought Mas. The man was an
aho
. What did he think he was, a Hollywood movie star?

“Yeah, the second’s in Hawaii, and I think the third went back to Japan. But the first one was the sweetest. Harriet. Shimamoto was her maiden name. Was the mother to the two kids, Phillip and Rebecca. Went to church. My kids were in the same Sunday school. After the divorce, she moved to Brooklyn Heights with them. Didn’t care to be in the middle of Manhattan anymore, I guess. Who could blame her? A few decades later, a couple of strokes did her in.

“That’s what usually happens to the wife after a divorce. She stays single, while the ex-husband finds another woman right away. When I heard Kazzy was trying to restore that garden, people were saying that he was doing it on behalf of the community, to preserve our history. But I knew the truth. He was just feeding his male ego, making a monument to himself.”

“But I thought he was doing it to honor his parents,” said Tug.

“He just wanted to show how he was connected to one of the most powerful families in New York. The Waxleys. Just a big show-off. Wanted everyone to know that he was a Japanese Horatio Alger story, from rags to riches.” The woman began to realize that she had said too much to complete strangers. “How come you want to know about Kazzy?”

To Mas’s relief, Tug stepped in as their official spokesman. “His son-in-law,” he said, gesturing to Mas, “works over at the Waxley House. We’re looking into who killed Kazzy.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know much. But you should talk to Jinx Watanabe. They were friends from the war.”

“I know Jinx,” Tug said.

“Well, I’ll find him for you.” The woman disappeared into the crowd, and Mas excused himself to go to the bathroom. The men’s room was underneath the stairs. The floor was made of tiny tiles, and the entire L-shaped bathroom was drafty like a meat locker. Mas could even feel the coldness of the tile floor through the thin soles of his shoes. In addition to a single urinal, there were two stalls. Mas went into the empty one, only to discover that the latch was broken. He had to resort to sitting on the edge of the toilet while he stretched out the tips of his fingers to keep the door closed.

The man in the neighboring stall flushed the toilet, and Mas could hear the jangle of the man’s metal belt buckle as he got ready to go. Meanwhile, another person had stepped into the bathroom. When the man next to Mas opened the door of his stall to wash his hands, he addressed the newcomer. “Hey, Elk.”

No reply, just the sound of water running in the sink. The door swung closed, but the running water continued. Mas looked through a crack by the hinges on the stall door. All he could see was the back of a balding man’s head, which was shaped like a dinner roll.

Mas stood up, flushed the toilet, and zipped up his pants. He opened his stall door, keeping his eyes on the tile floor as he neared one of the two sinks.

Elk was washing his hands vigorously with a large bar of soap the color of green tea ice cream. As the bathroom had its own powdered soap dispenser, this must be special soap that Elk had brought in. Its smell was stronger than any kind of average cleanser. Mas recognized it as the same kind used by his friend, a linotypist who had worked at one of the Japanese American newspapers in Little Tokyo.

Mas pushed down the metal lever for the powdered soap, trying to think of a clever line to start a conversation. Finally, all he could manage was “You Mamiya-
san
?”

“Huh, I dunno you.” The man peered into Mas’s face. His eyes were magnified by his thick glasses so they looked like giant black pearls in open oyster shells.

“Izu Mas Arai. From Los Angeles.”

“Los Angeles? What you doin’ here?”

“Gotsu a daughter. Sheezu connected with the Waxley House.”

Elk’s eyes snapped wide open.

“Waxley House? Where Ouchi died?”

“You knowsu anytin’ about Ouchi-
san
?”

“Only that he was one of the top dogs among us Japanese. He was goin’ make a museum for us. But then someone gets rid of him.”

“Anyone wish sumptin’ bad on Ouchi-
san
?”

“Well, they all do, don’t you know? They don’t want us to succeed, really. They’ll give us a few crumbs, but that’s all. Must’ve been that group, the ones who passed around that petition. That’s who I would be lookin’ at. I know their type. I lived in a hostel in Brooklyn during the end of the war. That sonafugun Mayor La Guardia didn’t want us. Even though I’m from Seattle, I told myself that I was going to stay in New York just to spite them.”

Them, Mas wondered. Was he talking about the mayor, the others who were against the Nisei, or perhaps someone else altogether?

Mas went to the paper dispenser, only to see that it was out of paper towels.

“You better watch yourself,” Elk said. His glasses had slipped a little down his nose so Mas saw four eyes peering at him. “They’ll do anything to get rid of us.”

M
as left the bathroom in search of Tug, who was with a short, graying man with a wide-open forehead. “This is my friend Mas Arai,” Tug said, introducing him to Jinx Watanabe. Mas didn’t want to ask what “Jinx” stood for; it seemed better for everyone if that information stayed unknown.

“Hallo,” he greeted Jinx.

“What camp were you in?” Jinx didn’t waste any time trying to figure out where to place Mas.

“Mas wasn’t in camp. He’s Kibei. Was in Japan during the war.”

“Oh, you one of those strandees.” Jinx nodded, biting into a crumb cake. Mas didn’t know if he had necessarily been stranded, since the only home he knew at the time was Japan. He’d had plenty of close friends, however, who’d been teenagers when they first set foot in Japan, and definitely felt more stranded there than in the States.

“Whereabouts were you? Wakayama? Kagoshima?”

“Hiroshima,” Mas replied.

Jinx’s cheeks colored, while his wide forehead remained pale. “Hiroshima. I went over there in 1947 during my leave. I was part of the Occupation in Tokyo, but I wanted to take a look-see at what happened down in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Awful stuff.”

“Mas was in the Hiroshima train station. Only a couple of miles from the epicenter, right?”

Mas swallowed some spit. The last thing he wanted to do was revisit Hiroshima. “So youzu in the Army?” he asked, trying to take the focus off himself.

“Yeah, actually, I was part of the Military Intelligence Service. You know, MIS?”

This MIS Mas had heard about at Tanaka’s Lawnmower Shop back home. A bunch of Nisei—most of them pretty good in Japanese—had been trained to break codes and interrogate Japanese POWs in the Pacific. It had been top secret; a lot of the MIS-ers, in fact, had carried that secret to their early graves. But more than fifty years later, the government finally seemed to give them a green light to talk. No wonder
hakujin
people seemed to not know anything about the Nisei—not only were the Nisei not the kind to flap their mouths, but they had sometimes been explicitly barred from speaking the truth.

“Actually, that’s how Jinx knows Kazzy Ouchi. They were at the language school together in Minnesota,” Tug explained.

“Yeah, that’s too bad about Kazzy. That’s no way that a man like him should have died. Buried underneath a pile of garbage. Kind of strange, about the vandalism. Asians don’t have that much trouble here. Must have been some kids. A prank that got out of hand.”

“So you knew Kazzy well?” asked Tug.

“My wife had been close to his first wife. Kids used to come over all the time. I kind of lost touch with him myself after language school at Camp Savage. He was a big shot, after all. Didn’t have time to go to church or hang out with us nobodies.

“He was actually my instructor at Camp Savage. If you excuse me saying this, he was a strict SOB. A real Mr. Chanto, you know, everything had to be just right.”

Mas nodded.
Chanto
had been Chizuko’s catchphrase. Everything had to be done according to the rules. They weren’t written in stone, but floated around every Issei and Nisei’s head.

“Kazzy was a stickler for grammar, proper usage of Japanese,” explained Jinx. “Was really into honorifics, you know, how you address people,
kun
,
chan
,
san
,
sama
, all that stuff. Got mad as hell if we made a mistake and spoke as if we were higher in status than we were. It was all BS to most of us. We were Americans, after all. We were going to be questioning POWs, not the Emperor of Japan.”

“Where heezu learn Japanese?”

“I guess his dad had been educated back in Japan. Although here the old man did mostly domestic work and gardening, he knew a lot of formal Japanese. Tutored Kazzy, I guess. Too bad the father died so suddenly when Kazzy was just a kid. Must’ve been rough to be orphaned like that, but that helped him later to be an independent sonafugun.”

“What happened to the mother, anyway? She was Irish, right?”

“I heard that she died in childbirth. Second kid. The baby didn’t make it, either. Kazzy’s father died soon after. Probably from a broken heart.”

Finishing up their conversation with Jinx, they searched for Tug’s florist friend, Happy Ikeda. Happy Ikeda, as it turns out, looked nothing like his nickname. He had heavy lips, the lower one more swollen than the upper, giving him the appearance of a permanent pout.

“Yeah, I know Danjo Kanda’s Mystery Gardenias,” Happy said. “Order them all the time. But trying to find who sent that particular gardenia, that’s a hard one, Tug. That’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”

A
fter Tug and Mas drained all the information they could from Happy, they left the church for the train station. “I guess you’re wondering what’s going on with Lil and Joy,” said Tug in front of the stairs to the platform for trains en route to Brooklyn. Mas could tell something had been weighing on his friend’s mind.

“I promised Lil that I wouldn’t tell you, so I can’t get into the details, Mas. But I’ll just say that we’re having a problem. A big one.”

“Gotsu to do with Joy leavin’ medicine?”

Tug laughed. “I wish it was just that. We could get through that.” He smiled weakly, and Mas was afraid for his friend and himself. Tug and Lil had been Mas’s rock. Life had enough uncertainty already; with the Yamadas teetering on the brink, Mas didn’t know what he could actually count on.

“It’s just like that childhood rhyme,” said Tug. “The one about Humpty-Dumpty sitting on the wall. Well, my daughter’s fallen, and I don’t know how to put her back together again.”

W
hen Mas came home from church, there was a telephone message for him from Becca Ouchi. Kazzy’s body had finally been released from the coroner’s, so they were going to have a memorial service on Tuesday, with a reception at the Waxley House. Could Mas come over to clean up the garden and treat the sycamore on Monday? “Sylvester’s looking bad,” she said. Mas couldn’t tell whether the warbling in her voice was from emotion or just the worn-out phone message tape.