The son-in-law was on the phone, sitting on the stairs that led to a wall. Mas remained seated in a beat-up easy chair in the bedroom and recalled the telephone message that Lloyd had just replayed for him in the kitchen. It was an old answering machine, the kind with a large dial for play and rewind.
“I’m not sure how I ended up here.” Mari’s voice, which had once been as solid and defined as polished stones, now sounded limp and flimsy. “I was taking Takeo for a walk, and before I knew it, we were on the subway, and now we’re in Manhattan. I think we’ll just stay the night over here. I’ll call you back later.”
In the other room, Lloyd had apparently gotten up from the nowhere stairs and was pacing on the hardwood floors in his work boots. He was still on the phone, perhaps with one of their friends. “She turned off her cell phone,” Lloyd was saying, “or else forgot to charge it again. I don’t know what’s going on with her.” And then in a hushed tone that Mas could still hear: “Her dad is here for the first time, for God’s sake. Why would she just take off like that?”
Mas pressed the palms of his hands against the arms of the chair. He ached for a cigarette, but hadn’t had time to stop by a grocery store.
Lloyd ended the phone call soon afterward and then stepped into the doorway of the bedroom. “Our friends in the Village are going to call as soon as they see or hear from Mari. I’m sure they’ll turn up somewhere.” Lloyd’s words were spaced out far apart from each other, as if he didn’t quite believe them.
Lloyd ran his hand through his hair, and Mas noticed that instead of a gold or silver wedding ring, he had a black and blue tattoo around his ring finger like a modern-day yakuza. Mas shuddered to think that Mari might have branded herself as well. “The thing I don’t get is,” Lloyd continued, “why would she pull this on the day you’re supposed to arrive?”
Mas traced the back of his dentures with his tongue. This Lloyd Jensen was an amateur. For the length of his body, it seemed that his brain should be much bigger. Obviously, Mari wanted to make sure that her father got a big dose of bachi, retribution, for all those times he had left the house with no word.
“Sure she come back,” Mas said.
Lloyd didn’t seem comforted by Mas’s words. “Takeo needs his light treatments. What the hell is she thinking?”
Mas stayed silent.
“You don’t know what’s been going on, do you? Not any of it.”
Mas shook his head, not knowing if he wanted to.
They went into the tiny kitchen, where Lloyd boiled water for tea and Mas sat at a small wooden table. Lloyd removed a flowered canister from the refrigerator-a cylindrical tin that reminded Mas of one that Chizuko once had. He poured loose green tea, which looked like dried grass cuttings, into a small teapot. Mas was surprised. He thought for sure the son-in-law would have thrown a couple of tea bags in boiling water.
“Jaundice,” Lloyd finally said. He put two large ceramic cups, the kind that sushi bars use, steaming with hot tea on the table.
“Huh?”
“Takeo was born jaundiced.” Lloyd sat back on a wooden chair that creaked from his weight. “His liver was unable to break down his bilirubin, so we’ve had to use an ultraviolet lamp.”
Mas couldn’t figure out what his son-in-law was telling him.
Lloyd tried again. “It’s a disorder where the skin, eye whites, are all yellow.”
Mas nodded. “Sure, Mari had that.”
“But this was a serious case. He may even need a blood transfusion.”
Blood transfusion? A little baby? Mas took a sip of the green tea. The heat burned his tongue, and he was happy for it. Mas couldn’t help but wonder if his being a hibakusha, an atomic bomb survivor, had anything to do with his grandson’s health problems. Two generations removed from the Bomb-could there still be a connection? Impossible, thought Mas.
“So dat why Mari call me in the first place?”
“No, it was the garden. It’s all about the garden.”
Lloyd went to the overloaded desk, shuffled some papers, and finally drew out a skinny book and a stack of photographs looped together by a rubber band. He leafed through the book and held two pages open toward Mas, who pulled down his glasses from the top of his head. It was a drawing of a curved light-blue pond surrounded by green and pink trees, most likely cherry blossoms.
In the center of the pond was an orange torii, a giant gate that reminded Mas of the one at Miyajima, an island not far from his family’s house in Hiroshima.
“ Brooklyn Botanic Garden,” Lloyd said.
“Your garden?”
Lloyd laughed. “No, I wish. It was built a long time ago. One of the first Japanese gardens in the U.S., around 1915. It’s only about five blocks from here.”
Mas traced the outline of the pond with his left index finger, a week’s worth of dirt still left underneath his fingernail. “ Kokoro, ” he said without thinking.
“Yes, yes.” Lloyd almost dropped his tea mug. “The shape of the pond.”
“Dis kokoro shape famous.” At least that’s what Mas learned from a few classes attended at the gardeners’ federation in L.A.
“ Kokoro, the Chinese character for heart, right?”
Heart? Mas didn’t put kokoro in the same category as heart. Kokoro didn’t live in the chest, but in the gut, and from there, it burned throughout one’s body. “You knowsu Japanese?”
“Never really studied in school, but I’m going to have to take at least two years’ worth for my doctorate-that is, when I can go back to school again. I’m planning to do my dissertation on Takeo Shiota, this garden’s designer. That’s his photo up there.” Lloyd pointed to the image of the Japanese man in the straw hat.
Mas couldn’t follow all of Lloyd’s words, but recognized the name. “Takeo?”
Lloyd smiled. “Yes,” he said, “like our Takeo.” He then paused and narrowed his eyes. “Damn, it’s one thing for her to have a meltdown, but why take Takeo with her?”
Mas didn’t know whether to defend Mari or add his two cents about his daughter’s mood swings. He chose instead to play it safe and keep his mouth shut.
“She doesn’t sleep well, you know,” the son-in-law continued. “Has nightmares but can’t remember any of them. She says it runs in the family.”
That it did, with both Mas and Chizuko. Chizuko would periodically wail and cry in her sleep, but wouldn’t recall anything the next morning. It was as if she exorcised all her demons from her life in Japan in the other world behind closed eyes. Lately Mas was remembering more and more of his own nightmares, which he considered more of a curse than any kind of illumination.
“Garden, youzu talk about garden.” Mas attempted to change the subject.
“Oh, the garden.” Lloyd removed the rubber band from the stack of photographs. “This is my garden.”
The first shots were of a dirt hole, a residential excavation next to an odd mansion with a pagoda-style roof above a frame like the Craftsman houses in Pasadena. In later photographs, the cement bottom of a koi pond had surfaced, and cherry blossom trees, their roots bundled in burlap, had been brought in. A pile of rocks was stacked in a corner. Where had they gotten their rocks? wondered Mas. These days even rocks were worth a premium.
“This Japanese garden had been covered over during World War Two,” Lloyd said. “It’s part of an estate that was once owned by a shipping magnate, Henry Waxley.”
Apparently Henry Waxley was one of those men who owned companies that owned more companies. Lloyd even had a book about Waxley’s life. It didn’t matter that Mas had never heard of him. Men that powerful chose to rule in the shadows-that way they could move around and make their deals without much public fanfare. By the time regular people figured out what had happened, it was too late.
To be closer to his business empire, Waxley, his wife, and their newborn daughter had left the estate to move to Manhattan in the thirties, Lloyd explained. Distant relatives moved in and bought the house, but lost the property after a particularly nasty divorce.
Happened all the time, thought Mas. He had heard about farmers losing their acreage after these family breakups.
“So new owners took over in the forties.” Lloyd took another sip of his tea. “After one of their cherry blossom trees was cut down in the middle of the night, they decided that it might be better to get rid of the entire garden, during the war at least. Too many people against anything Japanese.”
The next photo showed a tall, Asian-looking elderly man in a tasteful gray suit, the brim of a felt hat darkening the left side of his face. “This is the man who took over the house last year. My boss, Kazzy.”
“Kazzy?” That was a nickname only an American-born Nisei would own.
“Short for Kazuhiko. Kazuhiko Ouchi. They also call him K- san. The Waxley estate is where his parents had worked. His mother was a maid; his father, the gardener.”
Mas looked closely at the man’s face. “Don’t look Japanese.”
“He’s hapa.”
“ Hapa, ” Mas repeated. He was surprised that Lloyd knew the term, which meant half Japanese, half something else. There were tons of hapa today (Takeo, for example), but from Mas’s generation? He didn’t know of any in L.A., but then hadn’t there been laws in California against Japanese marrying hakujin before World War II?
“Even has blue eyes,” added Lloyd.
A blue-eyed Japanese? Mas took a second look at the man’s face. Sure enough, the right eye seemed to have a glint of silver metal in it.
“His mother was Irish. His father was from Nagano Prefecture, Japanese Alps. Kazzy was born in the Waxley House. His mother died when he was young, and then his father shortly thereafter. He was on his own at age twelve. Became a multimillionaire in textiles, mostly silk. All after the war.”
An orphan and a self-made millionaire. This type of man is different from the rest of us, Mas said to himself.
“But he’s a hard man to deal with.”
“Naturally,” said Mas. “You make it big, have to be hard.” Especially being Nisei in the 1950s, he thought, but he knew that this giant gardener probably wouldn’t understand.
“He has his own private group, the Ouchi Foundation, to fund the restoration of the garden and make the house into a museum.”
“Museum?”
“It’s going to tell about the Japanese in New York. The garden will come first, and then the museum. Kazzy handpicked me to be the director of landscaping.”
Mas almost started to laugh. Fancy title for a low-down gardener.
Lloyd must have noticed Mas’s grin on his face. “No, really. You can even ask Mari. I was working on a special project for the city in Central Park. Mari was there, bringing me lunch. And then this hapa man in his felt hat comes over and tells me that he’ll match my salary and more, with full medical benefits, to be his landscaping director. I checked him out, of course. His company, Ouchi Silk, is still in business, but not as big as it used to be.
“He took me out to dinner and told me about his grand plan: to document the history of Japanese Americans on the East Coast. He said that I was part of the Japanese American community, too, because I was married to Mari.”
Mas scoffed inside. Why would a hakujin person want to be anything other than hakujin?
“Mari even turned down a documentary project to help out on the fund-raising video. Waxley Enterprises and Miss Waxley, Henry’s daughter, have given a substantial amount of money, but we are filing for nonprofit status soon. Mari and I feel really strongly about this project. We’ve even pledged some money ourselves.”
So they had everything riding on this Japanese garden. Mas was a savvy enough bettor that he would have told Mari never to put your money on such a dark horse. But then he hadn’t been around to tell her and she wasn’t in a place to listen.
“I look at it as something I’m building for the future. Our future. And Takeo’s.”
Lloyd was a dreamer, his head not on practical matters. Mas pushed his top dentures hard against his gums. This was not a good sign. With the addition of Mari, there were two dreamers leading the family.
“We’re supposed to open in a couple of months, but recently there’s been vandalism.” Lloyd went through more photographs, which revealed the half-planted garden full of garbage and splattered in white paint.
“Teenagers?” Even at Evergreen Cemetery in East Los Angeles, where Chizuko was buried, somebody had knocked down some of the older tombstones, apparently a youngster’s prank.
“Probably. But the police can’t figure it out. And Kazzy hasn’t been of much help. He’s accused the whole staff; well, he’s fired three of us so far. There’s only the administrative assistant-his daughter, Becca-and myself left. Kazzy said that between the two of us we should be able to take care of the garden, which is crazy. If I could get out now, I would. But with Takeo being sick and all, we need the insurance. Times are tough; it’s not like these jobs are easy to come by.
“That’s why Mari called-to ask your help. Kazzy doesn’t want to pay for extra workers; somehow we’ve already gone over budget by thousands of dollars. I have friends who might have come out, but we figured that they would get tired of it. We were talking to Mr. Yamada about our problems, and then he mentioned you. Said that he thought you’d be open to helping out.”
Mas bit down on his dentures. So that explained it. Mari had cried out to him-not to be a father or even a grandfather, but to serve as a common laborer. Only worse, because they wanted him to work for free. And to top it off further, it had all come from Tug-just like he had thought.
“ So – ka, ” Mas finally said.
“It’s not that we wouldn’t pay you eventually,” Lloyd added. “I know that you’re neglecting your own customers to come here.”
Mas grunted. He had asked his best friend, Haruo Mukai, to look after his nine customers back in L.A. But since Haruo had gotten a part-time job selling chrysanthemums at the Southern California Flower Market, Mas had to also depend on a no-good gardener, Stinky Yoshimoto, who cut down bushes and trees so severely that their forms looked like the bodies of amputees.
“We’d just pay you later, when Kazzy sees that all is going well. And quite frankly, the fact that you’re Japanese may calm his nerves.”
“Nerves?” This Kazzy- san was sounding more and more like a man gone kuru-kuru-pa.
“He’s just a little on edge. The opening is supposed to be in May, but the vandalism really set us back. Now Mari wants us to walk away from the project.”
Not a bad idea, thought Mas.
“But she seems to forget that my work at the garden paid for her insurance when she was pregnant, the rent, and other bills. We’ve used up our savings. She thinks that we can live on nothing, on air. Maybe we once could, but not now, with Takeo.”
Mas hadn’t known Mari was hanging by a financial thread, in spite of the fact that she had some kind of fancy degree from Columbia University. To live from paycheck to paycheck-like father, like daughter.
Lloyd pulled back his hair behind his ears and cradled his head, as if he had been physically battered. He finally looked up, and Mas noticed that his son-in-law had black flecks, like splintered glass, in his muddy-colored eyes. “Here you are, on your first night in New York, and I should be taking you out to dinner. But I have to go look for Mari and Takeo.”
Mas wanted to join Lloyd in his search, but he knew that he would only slow down his long-legged son-in-law. And besides, Mari had probably disappeared because of him. Mas figured he would be the last person she would want to see.
“There’s salami in the fridge and a baguette by the toaster oven. And there’s plenty of restaurants in the neighborhood within walking distance.”
“No worry about me,” said Mas. “Youzu just find wife and kid.”
After the son-in-law left, Mas opened the refrigerator for the salami, but opted for a six-pack of strange beer instead. Made somewhere in Europe, the beer was as thick as syrup and dark as Coca-Cola, but it still did what it was supposed to do: help ease Mas’s troubles. Lloyd had placed a couple of blankets and a futon covering on the couch, as well as two limp pillows. Mas turned on their rickety television and watched the news. The anchors and reporters looked more subdued than the ones in Los Angeles. They didn’t seem to force fake smiles and banter, and instead of bright-blue skies and palm tree backgrounds, the sets were simple, painted in basic blue, red, and black. The stories, however, told of the same kinds of shootings and gang violence, only in neighborhoods he had never heard of. Mas switched from one channel to the next. Unlike L.A., there were no Japanese American reporters, reminding Mas that he was in territory where he didn’t belong. He drank another beer and then a third, feeling the alcohol loosen the tightness in his neck and shoulders. Soon the couch in the Park Slope apartment became his friend, cradling him to sleep amid the muffled noise from outside, where his daughter, grandchild, and son-in-law were wandering somewhere, loose and separate.
A crab was pinching Mas’s big toe. It appeared out of nowhere, and then dozens of minicrabs descended on Mas’s body from cracks in the floor, the walls, the ceilings. As they traveled, their spindly legs made clicking sounds. Soon the sounds became louder and louder, merging together into a shrill pitch.
Mas woke up and shook his head to clear his mind from the dream of crabs. He paused a moment to get his bearings. The phone by the nowhere stairs was ringing. Mas didn’t know whether to answer or not, but it could be important. News about Mari.
“Hallo.”
“Mas-?”
“Hallo,” Mas repeated. The voice on the other line sounded familiar.
“Itsu Haruo.”
Haruo. Mas’s skinny friend with the fake eye. At first Mas was going to ask how he got Mari’s number, but then remembered that he had given Haruo the number in case of emergencies. “Whatsu the time?”
“Youzu just get up? Itsu four o’clock ova here. Izu at the Flower Market. Itsu a slow day today-just wanna make sure you got to New York orai.”
“Izu here,” Mas said. But nothing was all right. “Mari’s missin’. Son-in-law gone to find her.”
There was a pause on the other end. Haruo finally murmured, “Missin’. That makes no sense. You say sumptin’ to her, deshō?”
Mas didn’t like what Haruo was trying to say. “Haven’t even seen her. Or the grandson.” Mas didn’t want to get into Takeo’s health problems right now.
“You call the police?”
Mas couldn’t imagine getting them involved. “She left a message, Haruo. No funny business, Izu sure. Just a lot of stress right now, money and work.”
“I see,” said Haruo. Mas could imagine Haruo nodding his head, his shock of black and white overgrown hair barely covering the keloid scar on his face. Since going to a counselor in Little Tokyo for his gambling addiction, Haruo considered himself an expert on anything troubling somebody’s mind.
“I gotta go, Haruo.”
“You callsu me when they find her. You promise, Mas? You gotsu both my numbas, here at the Market and home.”
“Yah, yah. Got work to do, Haruo.”
Before Haruo could ask what kind of work, Mas hung up the phone. There was no sign that the son-in-law had returned to the underground apartment during the night. The heater had been left on, so the front room was now uncomfortably warm. The futon and the two blankets, apparently kicked off by Mas during the middle of the night, were crumpled on the brown rug beside the scratchy wool sweater he had been wearing-a hand-me-down from a customer’s teenage son.
Mas tore pieces of the French bread and balled up the soft insides for his breakfast meal. He noticed an old jar of Nescafé and warmed water in the teakettle over the stove. After sipping a strong cup of coffee (two heaping teaspoons of Nescafé) sweetened with another two teaspoons of sugar, Mas made a decision. He couldn’t just sit there and do nothing. Pulling on the wool sweater, he stumbled to the desk and waded through the papers. Beside the stack of photographs were some brochures of the Waxley Garden sponsored by the Ouchi Foundation. Taking a brochure and a map of Brooklyn, Mas headed out from the underground apartment in search of Lloyd’s garden.
Tug had told him that most New Yorkers survived without cars, and Mas believed him. It was barely eight o’clock and the sidewalks were filled with well-wrapped men and women holding briefcases, duffel bags, tabloid newspapers, and disposable cups of steaming coffee. Mas stopped by a sycamore tree growing in a dirt square and studied the map. There was a diamond of green labeled Prospect Park, where Takeo Shiota’s Japanese garden lived. A few blocks north was the Waxley House.
Before Mas could tackle any real work, he needed reinforcements. He walked across Flatbush Avenue toward a grocery store, its facade covered in thick plastic strips like those of a car wash. Bright orange and red gerber daisies were bunched up, their stems soaking in water next to a large open refrigerator holding plastic containers of cut-up cantaloupe and honeydew melon. Inside, the small market reminded him of his neighborhood liquor store back in Altadena. Boxes of cereal and cans of soup were stacked high up to the ceiling-no space was wasted. Behind the front counter were a young Asian girl and a man about Mas’s age, perhaps her grandfather. The man studied Mas for a moment, and Mas stared back. The man wore a light-blue button-down shirt and a puffy vest. His graying hair was parted to the side. He looked respectable. Mas figured that he was meant for better work than he was doing. “Marlboro,” Mas said to the man.
“Marlboro?” the man repeated as if he didn’t quite understand.
Mas nodded, and the man drew out a pack from a line of cigarette cartons organized against the wall.
“You Japanese?” the man finally asked, after Mas pushed a ten-dollar bill across the counter.
Mas didn’t know if it was a trick question. He knew that the Japanese weren’t much loved among other Asians, especially those straight from the Pacific. “Yah, but Izu born here.” Mas waited for his change. “ California.”
“Oh, California.” The man slid the change from the curved slots of the cash register. “My sister in California. Los Angeles.”
Mas nodded. “Me, too.”
“ Los Angeles a very good place.”
Mas agreed. It didn’t matter that L.A. had been hit by its share of riots, earthquakes, fires, and even tornadoes. Most city folks knew little of the tornadoes, but Mas knew enough nurserymen to have heard about the plastic roofs of their greenhouses flying off in the wind, leaving behind only a twisted metal frame. L.A. was for the toughest of the tough, and apparently this store owner’s sister qualified.
Mas shook the package of cigarettes over his head in appreciation and made his way through the plastic strips to the sidewalk. With a fresh cigarette finally in his fingers, Mas couldn’t help feeling a little optimistic. Mari, the baby, and the son-in-law had to be together by now.
The Waxley House was a strange blend of styles, looking a lot like a child who didn’t know how to dress. On the bottom, the house was all dark wood, simple and clean lines. But on the top, it was brightly painted with swirls of red, green, and yellow, reminding Mas of those Chinese-influenced temples in Japan. He thought he even spotted a wooden dragon where the peaks of the roof met.
The grass in front was freshly seeded, and the familiar smell of steer manure burned Mas’s nostrils. He was surprised that Lloyd didn’t use chemical fertilizer pellets-odorless and definitely high-technology. Mas didn’t want to admit it, but he was impressed that Lloyd had opted for the old way instead of the new. Stuck in the steer manure was a rectangular sign:
Waxley House and Garden
est. 1919
Operated by the Ouchi Foundation
The door to the front seemed to be ajar, but Mas felt funny about going through the house. Seeing a gate to the side, he chose instead to enter the garden through the back way, his favorite approach to a strange place.
A large, leafless oak stood on one side of the property, making it look nothing like a Japanese garden. A couple of dozen cherry blossom trees had been introduced to the property, but their branches drooped as if they were in mourning. Mas went forward for a closer look. What the hell? The trees had been massacred-the branches pulled down and broken.
Mas also noticed the outline of the koi pond for the first time. Undoubtedly because of the weather, the pond was dry, with no signs of either fish or water. It was, however, filled with debris and trash; the vandals had indeed hit again.
“The police were already here; you just missed them.”
Mas turned to face a woman who was the size of two Maris-at least widthwise. She had a round face and short reddish brown hair that was chopped at an angle. She must have been around forty but had at least three sets of earrings dangling from one earlobe. Something about her eyes seemed Japanese.
“You must be Mari’s father, right? Lloyd mentioned that you’d be coming-you look just like Mari. I’m Becca Ouchi. I work with Lloyd.” She reached out her hand, a heavy silver ring around her thumb. Mas tentatively squeezed the woman’s hand. It was soft yet firm, like a slightly overstuffed pillow.
“Lloyd and Mari have been so great. My father’s not the easiest person to work for, but they’ve really been so devoted. And we’re all wild about Takeo. He’s like a member of our family. My brother, Phillip, says sometimes it seems like K- san and I favor Takeo over his children.” Becca laughed and then glanced at her watch, which was shaped like a sundial. “K- san should be here soon-I’m sure he’d love to meet you. He must be running a little late. And Lloyd, too. Is he on his way?”
Mas grunted. He didn’t know how to answer the woman’s question. He took stock of the damage again. “Terrible,” he muttered. The woman, on the other hand, didn’t seem that rattled at first glance.
“I’m used to it now. It’s quite an adventure: what havoc will I discover at the garden today?” She was trying to make a joke, but Mas noticed that her eyes were filled with tears. “K- san is going to be so pissed. This is the last straw; he’s going to close it down for sure now. Phillip will be happy to hear that.”
Becca went on. “He doesn’t understand how important this place is, to both K- san and me.”
K- san was this Kazzy Ouchi, so this was the daughter? Why was she calling him by his nickname? Must be a strange New York practice.
Becca must have picked up on Mas’s reaction. “I didn’t grow up with my father, so I never really called him ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy.’ K- san just worked out better.”
Mas didn’t know why women-at least those not related to him-always wanted to tell him their troubles. He was usually minding his own business, raking leaves by a customer’s back door or buying cigarettes and beer at the local liquor store, when some lady would appear right next to him, ready to spill her guts. Was it because they knew that he would keep his mouth shut or that he had no one, at least no one who mattered, to reveal their secrets to?
Mas looked over the garden once again. It wasn’t large, maybe fifteen hundred square feet, but Lloyd seemed to have put up a valiant effort. Azalea bushes and sculpted pine trees had all been arranged artfully around the dry koi pond. A thatch of bamboo was planted in the left-hand corner-Lloyd should be careful that the bamboo didn’t crowd out the rest of the plants, Mas thought. Bamboo, which could spread as fast as wildfire, was hell to deal with. A toro, a cement Japanese lantern, had been placed on the north side of the path next to three good-sized rocks. By a wooden shed in the other corner was a pile of smaller rocks, most likely to be eventually used to outline the edge of the pond. The pond itself was shaped like a hyotan, or gourd-not the classic kokoro shape, but a popular choice nonetheless. It was simple and uncomplicated, almost like an hourglass figure of a shapely woman. A bridge, trimmed with cut bamboo poles, stretched over the pond.
“You should have seen it-all covered over,” said Becca, obviously noticing Mas’s study of the pond. “It had been used as a badminton court. When the Waxley House recently came back on the market, K- san bought it and unearthed the pond. He’s restoring it the way his father would have wanted it to be.”
Mas nodded.
“My grandfather was Mr. Waxley’s gardener. He built this garden in K- san ’s honor. Look, there’s even a dedication to him carved into the base of the pond.”
Becca began to push through the debris with her bare hands, but Mas waved her off. No matter how much he didn’t want to get involved in this mess, it wasn’t right for a lady-even one with three holes in her ears-to go through trash. He removed a pair of work gloves that he had stashed in his inside pocket. He’d figured that New York would be cold, and he’d had no time to buy proper gloves. He told Becca to bring over a shovel and some gauze or tape from a first aid kit. Becca seemed confused by the second request, but went dutifully anyway toward the toolshed in the corner.
Meanwhile, Mas wheeled a couple of plastic trash cans from the gate to the pond. When Becca returned, Mas brought her to the trees and showed her how to tape the cut branches together again-a grafting technique that he was very familiar with from years of work for Mrs. Witt, a former customer who had a passion for hybridizing different types of persimmons. Mrs. Witt had moved and the grafted trees had been pulled out months ago, but Mas had taken a few seeds from a persimmon mix and planted them in his backyard. You’d never know what Mother Nature would bless and what she would curse.
As Becca attended to the trees, Mas shoveled out the trash from the pond. Plastic tofu containers, empty cartons of soy milk, orange peels, coffee grounds, balled-up Kleenex, Pepto-Bismol bottles-a strange mix of the health conscious with the sick. With each shovelful of trash, Mas could better appreciate the pool maker’s handiwork. The pool was shallow on the outside edges and progressively deeper toward the middle. Since koi, which sometimes grow heavier than cats, need a lot of water to swim around in, the pond was at least four feet high at its deepest point. Kazzy Ouchi’s father had obviously known what he was doing.
With one trash can overflowing, Mas squatted on the bridge and dug toward the middle of the pool. The tip of the shovel hit something more solid, but it wasn’t the concrete bottom. Mas kept poking, but he couldn’t come up with anything besides coffee grounds. He finally jumped down and reached into the debris with one gloved hand. Funny. A black shoe. But not the kind of shoe that you’d normally find thrown away. It was fancy leather and, aside from the coffee grounds, not at all damaged. Mas pulled at the shoe and then immediately dropped it. Heavy, as if weighted down-no, it couldn’t be.
Mas waded through the trash, suddenly spurred on.
“Mr. Arai, what are you doing?” Becca turned away from one of the cherry branches, the medical tape still in her hands.
As Mas pushed away some dead leaves and more coffee grounds, he could now see a man’s face. Mas had seen his share of dead people years ago in Hiroshima during the aftermath of the Bomb, but they had been scorched, not frozen like this in the cold. The man’s skin looked like old chicken skin, and his eyes were still open, a funny gray color, like steel wool smeared with cleanser. Mas knew who it was even before Becca came over and gasped, “K- san.”