Naomi Hirahara - Gasa-Gasa Girl

Mas balanced one of the crates on the rubber trash can. Holding on to a pipe alongside the wall with his good hand, he lifted himself onto the trash can and then one more step up on the crate, blackened by mildew and other decay from the water and snow. The wood slats were starting to come loose from the frame; Mas knew that he would only be able to stay on his unstable perch for a few minutes.

Still hanging on to the pipe, Mas lifted his body so that his eyes were at least an inch above the window frame. There were five good-for-nothing boys drinking beer, some of them guzzling the foreign kind that Lloyd liked. They sat sunken in couches and stuffed chairs around a low table. On the table, besides the dozens of open beer bottles, were packages of pills. On one corner were stacks of money.

Throughout the years, Mas had seen his share of changes. Computers. Telephones that could float around without a cord. Cars that ran on electricity. But some things never changed, in particular a man’s lust for drugs and sex. Back in Hiroshima right after the war, it had been hiropon. Heroin. Mas had watched one orphaned buddy after another fall to its temptation. If it wasn’t hiropon, then it was alcohol that was actually meant for cars. Teenage drunkards-all chinpira, would-be gangsters-burned their insides drinking that stuff, but apparently in a strange way it also eased the pain in their heads.

Mas didn’t know what chinpira of today had to be sorry for, but he had seen enough. The crate underneath him was ready to crack open, so he lowered himself onto the lid of the garbage can. As he jumped to the ground, he heard a slight sound, the crunch of gravel. An arm went around his neck and tightened against his throat.

Mas struggled to breathe. Feeling a surge of adrenaline, he instinctively bent forward and let his attacker flip over his back as easily as a sack of rice. Luckily it wasn’t the pill-popping teenager in the beanie. Mas would have had no chance against that power. Instead, it was Phillip Ouchi, a weed of a man.

Phillip remained on the soiled concrete, shocked and maybe even dismayed that he had been overturned by a seventy-year-old man. Mas knew that he might try something again, so he grabbed a loose wooden slat and waved it, nail side down, in front of Phillip’s face.

“What do you hope to achieve, Mr. Arai?” Phillip asked, breathless, but with the same nasty attitude he’d shown at the Waxley House.

Mas tightened his grip around the slat with his right hand, while his bandaged left hand pulsed with pain-probably all the extra blood and excitement churning through his body.

“Hey! Hey!” Phillip suddenly called out.

Now, what was the sonafugun trying to prove? Mas then heard the squeak of a hinge and the opening of the door behind him.

The five chinpira, including the one with the beanie cap, circled Mas and Phillip. The beanie cap boy had a gun in his hand, and the tallest guy of the bunch had brought out some long and skinny object-perhaps a lead pipe to beat Mas?

“What’s going on here, Mr. O.?” the beanie cap boy, obviously the ringleader, asked Phillip, who was now struggling onto his feet.

“This man followed you from the Waxley House. I trailed him the whole way here.”

“So what happened, you tripped?”

Phillip said nothing and looked down the length of the alley.

“Dang, I think the old man knocked him down,” one of the teenagers spit out, and then all of them began laughing.

“He looks about a hundred years old.”

“Seventy,” murmured Mas.

“Excuse me?” The beanie cap boy raised his gun to Mas’s chin. The nozzle felt cold and smelled smoky, as if it had been fired recently.

“Izu seventy.” Mas felt his knees shake, but he still managed to stay standing.

“You hear that-he’s seventy,” the ringleader announced to his friends. He then looked at Phillip. “So, Mr. O., you got punked by a seventy-year-old.”

All the young men began laughing.

Phillip brushed the seat of his pants as though the condition of his clothes were more important to him than the teenagers’ jeers.

The ringleader turned his attention back to Mas. He had lowered the gun, and Mas managed to swallow. “So why were you following me?” the teenager asked.

“I see youzu get money. Tryin’ to figure out why.”

“He’ll probably go straight to the police, Riley,” Phillip said. So Riley, that was the kid’s name.

Mas shook his head. “Die on drugs, I no care.”

“Then what do you care about, old man?”

“Kazzy Ouchi. How he die.”

Riley’s face turned instantly darker, like clouds before a summer shower. “Had nothing to do with that. I told you,” he said to Phillip.

“He doesn’t know what he’s talking about,” Phillip said. “His daughter and son-in-law are suspects, so he’s just trying to point the finger at anyone he can.”

Riley took hold of Mas’s right wrist. The wooden slat clattered to the ground. The teenager had taken note of Mas’s injury, because he gestured for one of his other chinpira to grab Mas’s bandaged left hand. This one knew what he was doing, because he pressed into the very softness of the wound. Water sprang to Mas’s eyes, but he kept from dripping tears down his face. He wouldn’t give any of these sonafuguns the satisfaction of seeing him cry.

“I don’t want to hurt you, grandpa. Just forget you’ve seen anything, and you’ll have no problems,” Riley said.

Mas knew that the ringleader was talking about the drugs, so he nodded.

“And drop the whole thing with the dead man in the pond. It was suicide, you got it? The old guy shot his own brains out.”

Mas nodded again, but he had no intention of going along with the boy’s demands on that one. They released his hands, and Mas noticed that the bandage around his left palm was now bright red from a flow of fresh blood.

“And you,” Riley said to Phillip, “get the hell out of here. I’ll need an extra grand now with this complication.”

Phillip looked like he was going to protest, but he must have realized that he was physically overmatched. He stumbled down the alley, a stain visible on the back of his pants.

One by one, the young men returned to the room behind the red door, the last one being the tall teenager with his long and skinny weapon. With the light above the door, Mas could finally see that it was not a lead pipe but actually a shiny new top-of-the-line Weedwacker.

Mas barely made it back to the underground apartment. His left hand had finally stopped bleeding, but both hands were still trembling. Those sonafuguns had stolen the equipment from the garden, Mas was convinced. The beanie cap boy had claimed that he had nothing to do with Kazzy’s death, but he was a damn usotsuki, a liar of the worst kind.

He dropped his dentures into one of Mari and Lloyd’s drinking glasses and gritted his gums together. This was too much for him, he finally had to admit. He collapsed onto the couch, hoping for even nightmares to take over his reality.

“I thinksu I needsu to go home now,” Mas said to Haruo the next morning. He hated to admit defeat, but enough was enough.

“Mari still needsu you. Garden not finished. You can’t leave sumptin’ chutohampa.”

Half-done, so what? No different from when I came, thought Mas. He poked at the soiled bandage around his left hand. More blood had seeped through during the night.

“And whaddabout Ouchi- san ’s death?” Haruo continued. “You can’t leave dat alone.”

“Police, they figure it out. I’m dead, Haruo. Ole man. Not cut out runnin’ around in a place I have no business in.”