Naomi Hirahara - Gasa-Gasa Girl

Riley coughed and strained for air. He desperately exchanged glances with Mas, who knew that this hanatare, a runny-nose punk, wasn’t worth killing. In fact, the boy was literally a hanatare, because two lines of snot were streaming out of his nostrils.

“I thinksu you betta let him say sumptin’,” Mas told Lloyd.

As soon as Lloyd let go, Riley dropped his head, gulping down big breaths. He coughed, letting strings of mucus fall to the floor. “This is screwed, man. I didn’t mess with your wife.”

“You know who I am.”

“Yeah, I’ve seen you at the garden.” He bent down again, and then made a sudden move for the cushions on the couch. Lloyd beat him to it, and a gun clattered onto the ground. Mas scooped it up, and before he knew it, he was pointing it at Riley. Mas had held guns before in his life. One was a distant relative’s shotgun in Watsonville. When they weren’t harvesting lettuce or picking strawberries, Mas went with a second cousin to shoot at geese, ducks, and pheasant at a nearby farmer’s ranch.

And later, in Texas, as Mas traveled to different labor camps during tomato season, he had an opportunity to handle a coworker’s pistol, which they took turns aiming at empty beer cans. That was a wild gun, whose force bruised Mas’s hand in spite of the thick calluses that padded his palms like gloves.

But this gun’s handle was as smooth as polished stone. It was compact and neat, a streamlined weapon that any man would be proud to own. Lloyd must have felt Mas’s excitement, because he gently took the gun from his father-in-law’s shaky hands and held it in his own.

Riley knew he was really beat this time, and leaned back against the wall.

By now, Lloyd had noticed the expensive garden equipment lined up on the other side of the wall. “You ripped us off. That equipment is from the Waxley House.” Lloyd held the gun tighter and aimed it toward Riley’s head. “You’re the one who killed Kazzy.”

“Listen, listen.” Riley raised his hands. “I explained that all to Phillip. I found the guy there. He was already dead, okay? I saw the gun and I was going to keep it, but when I heard the cop cars, I threw it in the trash can down the block. I wasn’t paid to deal with that.”

“Why were you in the garden in the first place?”

“Phillip paid me to vandalize the garden, that’s all. I don’t know what the hell why. Maybe he was getting back at his dad, okay? I used to have an internship at his company. Phillip would come in, thinking he was all that, and then the old man would overturn his decisions. Maybe he was sick of it, I don’t know. Anyway, I got in a little trouble-borrowing too many office supplies-and I got fired. Then, out of the blue, Phillip calls me. Says that he has a little job for me to do. It was easy. Just go to the Waxley House late at night a few times and make a mess. Dump trash. Tear down the branches. I was doing that kind of stuff in junior high.

“But killing Kazzy-that’s not anything that Phillip proposed. And I wouldn’t have done it if he had. I have a good thing going here. I don’t need to kill people to make money. I just have the gun for protection.”

“How about the equipment?”

Riley’s face looked sheepish and, for once, more his age.

“For my girlfriend’s dad. She wanted it as a birthday present. I guess he likes to garden.”

Lloyd lowered the gun. “Well, I guess we’ll hang on to this right now. You return the equipment back to the garden, and we won’t tell anyone that you stole it.”

“So when can I have the gun back?”

“We’ll see,” said Lloyd. “We’ll just see.”

Mas didn’t think that it was a good idea for Lloyd to go into the Ouchi Foundation board meeting with a gun in his pants pocket, but there was no stopping him now. Lloyd was pretty quiet and reserved for a hakujin, but now an aggressive part of him-maybe a past generation of hunters who wore coonskin caps-was coming out. Men like Tug and Lloyd, with their sedate, decent exteriors, had pushed down their dark sides for so long that their primitiveness was more concentrated and pure and, as a result, more dangerous. When their anger was unleashed, you had to take a step back and stay out of their way.

As they approached the Waxley House, Mas was shocked to see the state of the sycamore. Someone had taken what looked like a chain saw to the poor tree. Stripped of branches on the right side, it seemed as though it could topple over at any time. Perhaps that was the state of the Waxley House as well.

Mas followed Lloyd into the house and then into the dining room. The fry-pan-faced attorney sat at the head of table. Becca was at his right and Phillip across from her. Miss Waxley’s back was toward them, and to her right was Penn Anderson, his orange hair uncharacteristically drooping down like a wilting plant. To her left was Larry Pauley, who looked like something wild had been unleashed inside of him. He wore a wrinkled long-sleeved dress shirt over a pair of jeans ripped at the seams.

Phillip was the first to say something. “It’s not right for him to be here.” There was an annoying thin shrill to Phillip’s voice. “His wife has been charged in my father’s murder. There’s a huge conflict here.”

“Don’t talk about me like I’m not in the room,” Lloyd said. “I have every right to be here, according to Kazzy’s will.”

“Kazzy’s not around now. We’re the board, and we should decide,” Phillip pushed back.

“Did they decide that the garden should be destroyed?”

Becca, who had been nervously fingering one of the three earrings dangling from her earlobe, became alert. “What?”

Lloyd laid his cards on the table. “You paid a teenager to vandalize the garden.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Phillip stood as straight as one of the shovels in the toolshed.

“Some kid named Riley.”

“Riley?” Becca asked. “Didn’t K- san fire him for stealing from the company?”

“Listen!” Phillip exploded, the volcano finally erupting. “Our father was pouring millions into this place. It didn’t make any good fiscal sense. Ouchi Silk is on the brink of bankruptcy. Who wears silk anymore in America?”

“So you hire a criminal to deface our garden.” The siblings were going at it-two crocodiles facing off, their tails whipping back and forth.

“There was no stopping Kazzy, Becca. He was like a man possessed. He had to restore this whole place like he remembered it, sixty years ago. Why? Mr. Waxley is the one who kicked him out of here in the first place.”

Miss Waxley then reared her head and joined the fight. “I won’t allow you to talk that way. Our family is the one who gave Kazzy his start. Our foundation, don’t you forget, has also poured good money into the garden. My father was just trying to get Kazzy on his own two feet. And look what happened! Perhaps Kazzy owed his success to my father.”

Before the two families clawed each other further, Lloyd stepped in. “I didn’t come here for this. All I want are the financials.”

The group stared at Lloyd, trying to comprehend what he had just announced. Penn looked like he was going to dissolve into his chair, whereas Larry seemed to rise up, an obake coming back from the dead.

“If I’m officially on the board, I want to see the financial statements,” Lloyd repeated.

“What?” Penn followed Larry’s lead and stood up as if he were a marionette whose strings were being lifted by his puppeteer.

“The quarterly statement since the foundation was created. Tax filings, et cetera.”

“That’s not going to happen. You have no right to any of those documents,” Larry said, pointing an overstuffed sausage-shaped finger at Lloyd.