Naomi Hirahara - Gasa-Gasa Girl

Tug slipped the end of his pipe into his mouth. Mas knew that Tug had no intention of lighting his pipe; it just felt good to bite down on something at times like these. Tug seemed deep in thought for ten minutes straight. When Joy pulled on her coat to leave, Tug finally spoke. “Heard of some of those flower shops Haruo was talking about, Mas. Have a friend who’s a florist. I saw him at church last Sunday. I’ll make sure he’s going tomorrow. So, how about it, Mas-you game to go with me?”

Mas dislodged a piece of bacon from underneath his lower denture. The last place he wanted to spend his Sunday morning was cooped inside a Christian church or even a Buddhist temple. But if that’s where the answers were, that’s where they had to go.

“You guys aren’t playing detective, are you?” asked Joy. “You better just leave that to the cops. No telling what kind of trouble you can get into. This is not Pasadena. It’s not even L.A. ”

Normally Mas would have agreed with Joy. But things had changed for Mas recently. He had been running away from life, from the Bomb, for more than fifty years, but finally he’d had to face his past; in the same way, he had to find out who had killed Kazzy Ouchi, or else the future sequence of events would ball up into a boulder, sending them all off the edge.

With that the Yamadas left, soon followed by Mari, who went to relieve Lloyd at the hospital. Mas was drying off a glass when Lloyd returned. As Lloyd sat drinking one of his dark foreign beers, Mas quietly told him that Takeo had been named the new member of the Ouchi Foundation board. Lloyd was not surprised. “I knew that,” he said. “Kazzy did mention to me that when he died, Takeo would be next in line. We can help guide the future of the garden and the museum. Not be just hired hands anymore.”

Mas pursed his lips. What would Detective Ghigo call this? A damn good motive.

“No matter what Kazzy thought of Mari and maybe even me,” explained Lloyd, “he really adored Takeo. I don’t know why. Maybe he saw himself in Takeo. He was always worried about Takeo’s health, especially lately. All that stuff about Lou Gehrig’s makes sense. Maybe he knew that he wasn’t going to be around that long, and wanted to make some sort of amends.”

Mas pulled out the newspaper article that he had torn from the Post. “You see newspapa?”

Lloyd nodded, taking another swig from his beer. “I’m still trying to figure out where that reporter got his information. I wanted to return his call, but Jeannie advised me not to. It’s so frustrating; I want to defend myself, but I can’t. So far, I’ve been able to keep this article away from Mari-not to worry her, you know. And I erased the phone messages from those reporters. But I’m sure she’ll hear about it, sooner or later.”

As Mas listened, he tried to figure out if his son-in-law was hiding anything. This was his grandson’s father, his daughter’s husband. That counted for something. After half an hour of watching the news with Lloyd, Mas went for his jacket, hung over a chair, and took out his pack of Marlboros. He then gently tipped the cigarette pack onto the surface of the coffee table and watched as the bullet rolled and finally stopped in front of where his son-in-law sat.

Mas stuffed his hands into his coat pockets on the corner of Twenty-fifth Street and Seventh Avenue in Manhattan. He had made it to church an hour early, proof that he was getting used to the underground train. He had been so relaxed, in fact, that he had managed to doze through most of the commute, dragging himself out at Penn Station. He bought a hot dog from a cart for breakfast and walked to the intersection across the street from the church, waiting for Tug to arrive.

Other than a worn-out cross next to the glass door, the church looked like any four-story office building in a neighborhood of discount clothing outlets and tropical juice bars. A homeless man slept outside the industrial metal gates, which had been unlocked and pushed open by a Nisei man at about nine-fifteen. They even seemed to know each other, since the Nisei gingerly walked over the homeless man’s body so as not to wake him.

Mas didn’t understand the concept of church. He figured religion ran in someone’s family like diabetes and thinning hair. So he was surprised when he learned that Tug was actually the first and only one among his brothers and sisters to become a Christian. His conversion had happened at the hands of a Christian Nisei soldier from Hawaii who had apparently saved Tug’s life on the war front in Italy. The soldier was wounded badly and later died, so it only made sense that Tug would pick up the Hawaiian man’s religion. That kind of gratitude Mas could appreciate.

Tug told Mas that converting to Christianity had not won him any popularity contests in the extended Yamada family. As the chonan, the oldest son, he was responsible for inheriting and taking care of the family Butsudan, the Buddhist altar. Any good son knew that every morning he must burn a stick of incense, put out a tangerine or a bowl of rice, and say a few chants in memory of the dead parents, whose framed portraits were usually placed on the arms of the altar. But Tug refused, saying that he wouldn’t participate in ancestor worship. His first allegiance was to his Kamisama, his God, Jesus. Tug’s brothers and sisters were aghast, calling him ungrateful and disrespectful behind his back. His younger sister took charge of the Butsudan, usually lighting two sticks of incense-the extra one to make up for the chonan ’s obvious deficiencies. Soon after Tug shared that story, Mas noticed how Tug’s parents’ photos were prominently displayed on a polished tansu, a Japanese chest of drawers, in the Yamada living room. More often than not, a bowl next to the photos was filled with fresh oranges or apples. Although Tug had sworn off ancestor worship, it was obvious that he had created an altar of his own, Nisei Christian style.

As Mas opened and closed his hands to better circulate his blood in the cold, Tug rounded the corner on the other side of the street. Tug was wearing a suit and tie, and Mas suddenly felt self-conscious about his appearance. The homeless man, in turn, was shuffling away in a pile of torn blankets. It was indeed time for church.

Mas followed Tug through the glass doors, down a dim corridor, and finally to a set of open double doors. The same Nisei man who had unlocked the metal gates earlier stood smiling, offering both Tug and Mas sheets of paper, a program of the morning’s events. It was too early for Mas to smile, so instead he bowed his head, surreptitiously brushing away a few grains of rice stuck to his sweater from the night before.

The main sanctuary was a narrow room with wooden pews, a stage, and a large cross in front. The unfamiliar room scared Mas. There were no windows-what would there be to look at, anyway? Most of the back pews were filled, black and gray heads everywhere. Most of them seemed to be Nisei old-timers like Tug, with a few younger Japanese foreign students, their hair misshapen from their pillows and sleep still in their eyes. Tug nodded to a few friends dressed in crisp suits and dresses, and Mas wondered which of them was the florist who might hold the key to the Mystery Gardenia.

Mas followed Tug in between a row of open pews. The hard seats were all set up to look forward and gaze at the cross. Mas imagined himself pinned down on that cross, his hands forced away from his body. He had only gone to church a couple of times with Chizuko, but that building was round with panels of windows. Mas didn’t know if it was the gardener in him, but he felt that anything holy had to have at least a speck of green in it.