Summer of the Big Bachi by Naomi Hirahara Read Free Book Online Page B

found his hunch was on target. Standing by the door was a man wearing large, gold-rimmed glasses and a turtleneck sweater. Shuji Nakane.
     
     
The high-tone fellow didn’t waste any time. “You lied to me,” he said straightaway. Mas felt the anger flush up to his earlobes. What no-good Japanese man would call a stranger a liar in front of the stranger’s own house? He could push this Nakane off the porch into a long-abandoned rock garden filled now with broken glass and gravel.
     
     
“You told me that you weren’t friends with Haneda- san, ” Nakane said.
     
     
“I have no business with you.” Mas made it a point to speak English. He didn’t want Nakane to get the wrong idea that they shared anything in common. He tore open the screen door, which flapped off its hinges. Mas had meant to fix that someday.
     
     
As Mas fumbled with his keys, Nakane was unrelenting. “In fact, you knew him very well. Like brothers.” He pushed a photo in front of Mas’s nose.
     
     
It was an old-fashioned black-and-white photograph, about wallet size. At first Mas made no connection to the image, but then he began to focus more carefully. It was a stone bridge, the kind that you often saw in Hiroshima before the war. This one had been near the train station, Mas remembered. Three boys in black school uniforms stood on different spots on the bridge.
     
     
“That’s you.” Nakane’s manicured finger pointed to the middle boy in between the other two, taller and lean. Those other two, in fact, resembled each other. Look-alikes with strong noses. But one was born in California, like Mas, while the other was a native Hiroshima boy.
     
     
“Where you get dis?”
     
     
“That is not your concern.”
     
     
“Well, then, I have no concern.” Mas finally opened his front door and attempted to close it behind him, when the screen door fell down, almost knocking Nakane’s glasses off his face.
     
     
“We can give you money for information,” hissed Nakane, stepping over the torn screen.
     
     
Mas kept the door open a crack. “Whozu we?”
     
     
“My associates and I. We are prepared to make you a generous offer.”
     
     
“You be wastin’ money. I have no information.”
     
     
“You were with him, weren’t you? When the pikadon fell. What happened to him? Where is he now?”
     
     
“I don’t know no Joji Haneda. Don’t come round here anymore, Nakane- san . There’s nutin’ I can help you with.” His chest pounding, Mas slammed the door shut. He waited to hear the hum of an engine and pulled back the curtains an inch to see the Lincoln Continental drive away. After a good five minutes, Mas took a deep breath and went back outside.
     
     

     
When Mas felt trouble coming, he usually closed his eyes a few seconds in hopes that it would pass him by. He had done so when the doctor, almost all green in his surgical scrubs, had told him that Chizuko had stomach cancer, stage four. Mas had blinked hard, yet the green doctor was still in front of him, and the tumor still in his wife.
     
     
This other trouble was more familiar. It chased him through the corridors of his life, turned when he turned, flew over ocean and land. Mas, in fact, had gotten used to it, like a pebble in his work boot. Soon the sole of his foot would get so callused and blistered that he couldn’t feel a thing.
     
     
Mas made it to the dead-end street faster than he had earlier in the day. An Impala with its bumper detached was parked in front of the apartment. Mas eased the truck right behind it and jumped out, not even bothering to check the door.
     
     
The mistress’s apartment was dark, but a window was open and the drapes were pulled back. Mas pressed his face against the window screen. The duffel bag had been moved from the living room floor.
     
     
“Kakita- san, ” he called out. “Kakita.” No answer. Mas could only hear muffled sounds of a television and a clatter of pots and pans from a neighboring apartment. Damn woman. Sleeping off the power of