The next day the sun was out, causing the daffodils in Mari and Lloyd’s pitiful backyard to stand as straight as chopsticks. It was as if Tug’s Kamisama knew that today Takeo was coming home. Mas took an extralong shower, even dragged a disposable razor across his chin and the sides of his face. After getting dressed in a fresh shirt and jeans, Mas cracked open a new plastic container of Three Flowers oil. A fingerful of grease, two swipes of a comb, and he was ready.
At the hospital, he, Lloyd, and Mari met with the East Indian doctor again. She spoke as if Mari and she were old friends-for all the time Mari spent in the hospital, they might as well have been short-term sisters. Mas was continually amazed at how much the world had changed. Now so many girls Mari’s age or even younger (attorney Jeannie Yee, for example) seemed to be vital members of the working world. He supposed that the hakujin men were still on top and would always be, but now the number two man could be black, Latino, or even a woman.
“It’s such a beautiful day; you should take a short walk in the sun on your way home,” said Dr. Bhalla.
“Won’t that be too much for him?” Mari clutched at Takeo, cocooned in a pure-white blanket.
“He’s been cooped up long enough in here. Isn’t there a park or something where you can go for half an hour?”
Lloyd unhinged the collapsed stroller and expanded it like an accordion. “I know exactly where we can take him.”
The Brooklyn Botanic Garden felt comfortable to Mas even though he had never been there before. The bare wisteria trees twisted around the wood-framed archways like frayed rope, their branches bent like arthritic fingers. But they held the promise of what was to come in a few months. L.A., on the other hand, barely showed any signs of seasons. Sure, every spring the lavender blooms of the jacaranda trees popped open, spreading sap and petals on luxury cars, to their owners’ dismay. Around the same time, the flowers of the long-stemmed agapanthus plants exploded like white and purple hanabi, fireworks, in freeze-frame. But perhaps the biggest seasonal rite of passage was the summer forest fires eating dried-up hills surrounding Los Angeles. Mas remembered one time a fellow gardener’s truck came close to becoming molten metal when flames jumped the Glendale Freeway in search of more dead brush. That summer, flakes of ash like crushed dried seaweed covered Mas’s driveway and got stuck in the dandelion heads on his lawn. And everywhere, there was the scent of smoke.
No fragrance, either good or bad, was coming out of the Brooklyn Botanic Garden this early in spring here. They passed the herb garden, and Mas noticed a cement planter with a sign, MUGWORT. Mugwort was used to make moxa, cigar-shaped sticks that Japanese used to burn against their skin to relieve their aches and pains. But instead of the leafy plant, there was only a blanket of brown pine needles and weeds underneath the plant’s name.
Down the path was the familiar construction of a Japanese-style fence, simple planks of wood assembled without any signs of nails. And then, as if the fence slid across to make way for the view, Mas walked into the world of Takeo Shiota. Beyond the seven-foot stone lantern and an open wooden house along the kokoro -shaped pond was the torii gate, bright persimmon orange and wading in the green water. Of course, it wasn’t as grand as the gateway Mas remembered at Miyajima. The New York version looked like an oversized toy, yet it still made its impact. Mas stood still, his hands balled up inside his pockets. He remembered going to Miyajima on a train and then a boat with his mother and his two oldest brothers one time when he was seven. The fog had first hidden the tree trunk posts of the torii, and then, like a curtain, the mist lifted. Had a giant placed the torii there in the water? he had asked his mother. “ Bakatare, baka, ” his brothers spit out, spinning their black school caps on the ends of their fingers. His mother said nothing, but Mas could feel her hand faintly squeezing his shoulder.
“Not bad, huh, Arai- san?” Lloyd said. He then pointed to the rectangular sign at the top of the gate and read the Japanese characters. “ DAI-MYO-JIN. Great bright God. Enlightenment, right?”
Mas shrugged his shoulders. Here again, the sign, like the message left by Kazzy’s father on the bottom of the concrete pond, was hard to understand. But what Mas could appreciate was the sweeping arch of the top crossbar and the straight line of the bottom bar right underneath it. The arch seemed to lift the whole gate out of the water, clearly transporting people to another place and time.
“What happen to this Shiota?” Mas had never heard of the landscaper before he stepped foot in New York.
“Died in an internment camp. Actually, I haven’t been able to verify his exact year of death. Some say 1943, but his relatives back in Japan think it’s 1946. But either way, he didn’t spend his last days in New York.”
“No camp ova here, desho?”
“Yeah, the Nisei in New York were safe, but some of the Issei pioneers, even diplomats, were taken away. There were these State Department internment hotels, I guess you can call them. One was in North Carolina, where I think Shiota might have been.”
Mas frowned. A man who created this would be viewed as a threat? Didn’t make sense.
“He even had a hakujin wife. But no kids. That’s probably why no one knows anything about him. She sent her in-laws care packages after the war, but we don’t really know what happened to her later in life, either.”
As Mari bent over the stroller, Mas and Lloyd made their way to the wooden house by the pond. It reminded Mas of a similar structure in a botanical garden not far from his house in Altadena. They sat on a bench, their faces shaded by the extended roof. Next to them were a couple of hakujin women in nuns’ habits who spoke softly in a language Mas couldn’t make out.
There had been one thing that Mas had wanted to ask of Lloyd. “Whyzu you a gardener in the first place?” he finally asked.
“Probably the same reason why you are. I love plants, being outdoors.”
Yeah, yeah, thought Mas. That’s what the hakujin always thought. “But youzu write, desho? A type of poet, datsu what Mari said one time.”
Lloyd laughed. “That was a long time ago. I was an English major at Columbia. I considered teaching English, but got hooked on horticulture instead. My PhD is on hold right now, but I hope to go back to it.”
It was easy to lose sight of your first love, your first passion. Mas had wanted to become an engineer in Hiroshima, but over time he’d had to successively scale back his dreams. “I planned on buyin’ nursery,” he told Lloyd, “by the beach. Deal fell through, and besides, Mari and Chizuko make a big, big fuss. Don’t wanna move away from friends.”
“So you sacrificed for your family?”
Mas never thought about it quite that way. “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe.”
Lloyd jutted out his jaw and ran his fingers through his oily, thin hair. “Do you think the man in the Impala was really out to get you? I mean, maybe Tug got into his lane accidentally, you know. A type of road rage.”
“Hard to say,” Mas said. But Tug was convinced that they had been followed. And something else was kusai, stinky. “Youzu ever meet dis Anna Grady?” Mas asked.
“Yes, an attractive woman. But then, Kazzy always went for the pretty ones.”
It made sense to Mas that Kazzy would have been consumed by beauty. Based on the last outfit he wore alive, the shoes and the suit, he seemed like a man who needed to be surrounded or touched by pretty things. Mas was hardly tempted by good-looking packages. It was like the Japanese folktale of the Tongue-Cut Sparrow: A greedy old lady, who had savagely clipped off the tongue of a wayward sparrow, forced her way into the Sparrow World. Her kind husband, a former traveler to the Sparrow World, had brought home a great treasure in a small box. Like her husband, the old woman was offered a choice between a small or a large gift. The woman chose the larger, only to discover that the box was full of demons. In Mas’s experience, the same could hold true for beautiful women.
“Why he callsu it quits wiz her?”
“You know, that’s a good question.” Lloyd balanced his right ankle on his left knee. “It could be because he found out he was sick. Did you get a chance to read the other pages in the journal?”
Mas shook his head. After all the excitement from yesterday, reading about buying meat and cleaning house was the last thing that Mas wanted to do.
As they sat in front of the green pond, koi splattered with bright-orange, white, and black markings whipped their fins and tails toward the water’s surface. Kissing the air with the circles of their mouths, they begged for food. But Mas wasn’t about to stick a nickel in a machine that offered brown food pellets instead of gum balls. He’d leave that for lovers and children, people who thought nothing of wasting money for a bit of happiness.
After ten more minutes, it was time to leave the garden. Mas and Lloyd passed through the turnstile while Mari rolled Takeo’s stroller through an adjoining gate. They had reached the ticket booth when they saw Detective Ghigo, the flaps of his overcoat blowing back from the wind: a black crow bringing bad news. He was with another man, short and bald. “Mari Jensen,” Ghigo said. “We have a warrant for your arrest.”
In the time it took Mas to blink, a pair of metal handcuffs was fastened on Mari’s skinny wrists.
“Whatthe-” Mas felt like someone was peeling away at his heart.
“Get the hell away from my wife!” Lloyd went for the bald detective, but Ghigo stopped him.
Mari’s eyes widened like those of a squid waiting for its head to be lopped off. Her skinny legs were planted next to the stroller. No set of handcuffs was going to keep her away from her son.
“Itsu suicide,” Mas blurted out, even though he didn’t believe it. “Ouchi- san killsu himself.”
Ignoring Mas, Ghigo recited some police language in Mari’s ear, including something about murder and a lawyer.
“We callsu Jeannie,” Mas declared.
Mari nodded. “And get Takeo right home.”
The attorney, Jeannie Yee, didn’t waste any time. She was at the front door of the underground apartment soon after she had stopped to see Mari at the police station. “It’s all circumstantial evidence,” she said after she settled herself on a chair in the kitchen.
Mas looked blankly at Jeannie. Instead of a suit, she was wearing a plain white shirt. A plastic headband kept her thick hair away from her face.
Jeannie tried again. “I mean, they have the gun-which, by the way, they did trace to the half-rate production house that Mari had worked for-and they have the bullet-”
“Bullet,” Mas couldn’t help but murmur.
“Yes, the bullet. Aren’t you the one who found it, Mr. Arai?”
Lowering his head, Lloyd squeezed his wedding ring tattoo. “I had to turn it in, Mr. Arai,” he finally said. “They would have found out sooner or later.”
Inu. Dog. Cheat. How could he sell out Mari like that? Mas felt his whole world turn. Had he misjudged Lloyd that badly? He had given that bullet to Lloyd because the son-in-law was the main man in his daughter’s life. It was his responsibility to keep his family safe.
He wasn’t supposed to give it to the authorities. Perhaps Lloyd was tired of Mari, had a woman on the side. Did he want Takeo to himself? If that was his plan, it wouldn’t happen without a fight from Mas.
“Look, guys, we have to focus here.” Jeannie spread her fingers on the surface of the table. “Apparently an anonymous source has been feeding Ghigo information. First someone called about Lloyd having an argument with Mr. Ouchi, and then made mention that Mari had filed a complaint with her independent filmmakers’ union that Kazzy had been sexually harassing her.”
“Who told Ghigo that?”
“That’s the thing,” Jeannie explained to Lloyd, “it’s a-non-y-mous. Ghigo doesn’t even know. They used a voice-altering device, so we don’t even know if it’s a man or a woman.”
Mas was surprised that Jeannie had so much inside information. So was the son-in-law. “Ghigo told you that himself?”
Two pink marks like those atop baked rice cakes appeared underneath Jeannie’s eyes. “Yes,” she said, and then attempted to change the subject. “Is there anyone who would be out to get you or Mari?”
“Who are we? Nobodies. We have nothing,” said Lloyd.
Mas grunted in support.
Lloyd raised his head. “Why would anyone think that we would be any kind of threat?”
Mas pushed his tongue against a space in between the roof of his mouth and his dentures. “Phillip, the son, he no good.” Didn’t want the garden in the first place, wasn’t that what he had said?
“Yup, Ghigo’s looking into that.” Again, the girl lawyer seemed one step ahead. “These charges against Mari won’t stand up. No judge wants to waste the taxpayers’ money going through with this. This won’t go past a preliminary hearing.” Jeannie shot words like machine-gun fire throughout the room. “They just need someone to hang the crime on, since it’s gotten so much media attention.”
“Media? You meansu Post?”
“The Post started it, but now it’s beginning to get some national news coverage. You have to admit that it has a sexy angle: business tycoon killed in a Japanese garden in New York.”
Mas saw nothing sexy in that, especially since he was the one who had seen the dead body.
“They are playing it as a hate crime, and that’s the last thing the NYPD or the tourist industry wants. They need to arrest someone, quick and fast. With Mari’s connection to the gun, she’s a logical suspect.”
Mas was getting angrier by the minute. So Mari was a convenient scapegoat, is that what the attorney was saying?
Jeannie picked up a pen and began scribbling on papers in a manila folder. “Oh, yeah, there’s also the matter of the bail.”
“Will they give her bail?” Lloyd asked.
“Well, I figure that with her clean record, good reputation, and, of course, being the mother of a sick baby, the judge will be lenient.”
“How much?”
“I think that we have to be prepared for fifty thousand dollars.”
Mas gulped.
“You’d need something worth at least fifty thousand for collateral. And then ten percent of that in cash. Could you come up with that?” Jeannie pushed back her headband, and Mas noticed that her hairline was shaped like a vampire’s. An American ghoul who sucked blood.
“Look around, Jeannie. Does it look like we have that kind of money?”
“How about relatives? Friends?”
Mas shifted in his seat. “Izu put my house up.” To hear himself say it even shocked Mas, not to mention probably Lloyd.
“No, no, Mr. Arai. We can’t have you do that. There’s got to be a better way.”
“Anybody else?” asked Jeannie.
“My parents,” said Lloyd. “I can ask my parents.”
Why not? thought Mas. Go to the husband’s side.
“Good. We’ll get Mari out of there right after the arraignment.”
After Jeannie left, Mas felt his belly get cold and hard. The last thing he wanted was to be alone with Lloyd, the traitor.
“Mr. Arai, this will just blow over, I know it,” said Lloyd, oblivious to Mas’s aloofness.
That night Takeo cried continuously. In Lloyd’s gangly arms, Takeo looked as compact as a football. Lying on the couch, father rested son on his shoulder, then his chest, and finally his belly. Mas couldn’t take the noise anymore and reached for the baby.
Takeo’s face was as red as the ripest tomato. He had little bumps on his body-Mari said that he had problems with dry, itchy skin. He slept with mittens on his hands so that he didn’t scratch himself.
“ Nen nen kororiyo okororiyo, ” Mas sang, then paused. He couldn’t remember the rest of the old lullaby. So he kept repeating it. Nen nen. Sleep. Kororiyo okororiyo. Rock, rock. Yet Takeo didn’t sleep. He kept crying, hungry for only one person, his mother.
The next day, Lloyd left with a driver in a Lincoln Town Car for the arraignment. No babies allowed in the courthouse, so Mas was the one who would have to stay behind with Takeo. It was just as well, because Mas couldn’t stand to see his handcuffed daughter in an oversized jumpsuit, standing in front of a judge.
Mas had slept maybe three hours, if you combined the little snatches of sleep here and there. His sweater, in fact, was damp with tears, sweat, and hanakuso from Takeo’s eyes, overheated body, and nose. The grandson was finally sleeping in his crib, although every half an hour his legs and arms would jerk as if he was having a bad dream. That he inherited from the Arai side, thought Mas, wondering what kind of nightmares a baby could have.
At about eleven-thirty, the phone rang, and Mas felt his heart lurch. What had happened with Mari? As he expected, Lloyd was on the other line. “There’s a snag here on the bail situation, Mr. Arai,” he said.
“Whatcha talkin’ about?” Mas felt his head and fingers go piri-piri with a bad tingling sensation.
“Bail’s set higher than Jeannie expected. A hundred thousand dollars. My parents don’t want to provide any money for bail. We’re flat broke. In fact, we’re in the hole. We’re almost maxed out on our credit cards.”
“Youzu take my house,” Mas said. He had bought it back in the sixties for three grand, but with the rising L.A. housing prices, the house had now far exceeded the three-hundred-thousand-dollar mark in value.
“You wouldn’t have to give it to us. Just put it up for collateral. But we would need probably ten thousand dollars in cash. We’d pay you back, every penny.”
Mas squeezed the phone receiver so hard that sweat was dripping down his arms. He listened carefully as Lloyd told him to take Takeo up to Mrs. Knudsen, the neighbor, then go to an office in Brooklyn. “Worm’s Bailbonds,” Lloyd said. “He’ll be expecting you.”
Worm Lewis was like a human snowman-everything about him was perfectly round-his belly, head, and green eyes. Even the silver buttons on his vest were round balls. But instead of a coal smile and pipe, he wore a frown, which held an unlit cigar.
“So you’re the father?” Worm looked through round-framed glasses at Mas. They sat on opposite sides of Worm’s metal desk, surrounded by stacks of white papers, manila folders, and brown accordion file holders.
Although it had cooled to fifty degrees outside, the one-room office was hot and suffocating. The walls were covered in wood paneling; the floors, linoleum. A space heater two feet away glowed with coils of bright orange.
Mas felt sweat drip into his ears. He had already taken off his jacket and wanted to do the same with his sweater. He wouldn’t dare to get half-naked in front of Worm Lewis, however.
“Yah, Izu Mas Arai.”
“Where you from?”
“ California,” said Mas. “ Altadena. Whatsu dis gotta-”
“Listen, you want to post bail, I need information.” The unlit cigar remained in Worm’s thick lips.
Mas smoothed out a piece of paper that he had folded up into his pocket. “Dis all information I have.”
Worm began typing on a keyboard connected to a computer that seemed to have seen better days. Red duct tape held together its rectangular hard-drive case.
“Hmm, first-degree murder, this is a bad one. So what happened?”
Why do I have to give play-by-play? Mas wondered. He was too afraid to question the bail bondsman. This was Worm’s world, not his, and Worm had the key to set Mari free.
“Dis guy Kazzy Ouchi shot dead. Last Thursday.”
“Kazzy, what kind of name is that?”
Well, what was Worm? thought Mas, practically biting his tongue. “Kazuhiko heezu full name, I think. Anyhowsu, American. Born here.” Like me, Mas added silently.
“So what connection did he have with your daughter?”
“My son-in-law’s boss.”
Worm shifted his cigar to the other side of his mouth. The cigar was half-chewed, and Mas wondered if he had had it in his mouth all day. “Some kind of love connection?”
Mas felt his mouth go dry. “Heezu old man. Older than me.”
“Happens all the time. I’ve seen it all, you know.” Worm typed Mas’s residence into his computer. “How much equity do you have in the house?”
“Paid off,” Mas said.
Worm printed out some paper and pointed to sections where Mas had to sign. “Now, you realize if your daughter hightails it out of here, you’ll have to forfeit the house, right? We’ll take a hundred thousand from the sale.”
Mas closed his eyes. The McNally house, the small ranch-style home. Two bedrooms. One bath. Porch with a Japanese pine and rocks in the front. The only house he had ever owned.
Mas opened his eyes and stared into Worm’s round face and noticed a large wart on the side of his left nostril. “Yah, I understand.”
“So, I’m going to need ten percent. That’s our fee.”
Even though Lloyd had told him to be prepared, it was still a shock to hear it. Worm stapled a set of papers together. “Ten thousand dollars,” he said. “Cash, credit card, or some kind of loan agreement through us.”
Mas looked at stickers of different credit card companies stuck to the side of the desk. Visa, MasterCard, American Express. Even a credit card from Japan.
Mas pulled out his new credit card, never been used. How was it that he had come to New York City with a fifteen-thousand-dollar line of credit and a paid-off house and a few days later was ten thousand dollars in the hole and in danger of losing his home? This is a sacrifice for Mari, he told himself. This is for my daughter.
Mas was making salami sandwiches when Lloyd and Mari finally came home. He had picked Takeo up from the neighbor’s place, and the baby was fast asleep. Before peppering them with questions, he gave them a chance to see Takeo and change out of their dirty clothes.
Mari was the first to emerge from the bedroom. “Thanks for putting up the house,” said Mari.
“Jail pretty bad?” Mas had gone to visit someone at a jail in L.A. for the first time last year and hadn’t relished the experience.
“We don’t need to talk about it right now.” She picked up one of the salami sandwiches and ate it musha-musha, as if it were the best thing next to pickled mackerel sushi.
The phone rang and Mari answered, with a ball of salami sandwich bunched up in her left cheek. She stopped chewing and asked a few questions. Her dark eyebrows furrowed like a wire spring pressed together too tight.
“That was Anna Grady,” she said, getting off the phone. “Seiko is dead.”