“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.”
chapter three
The police came within fifteen minutes-stocky men stuffed in blue uniforms and windbreakers. They spent most of their time speaking to Becca, whose nose and eyes had become red and swollen from her crying. They barely acknowledged Mas, who was used to and even happy being overlooked.
The policemen took Becca into the house. Mas stayed outside in a corner of the garden and watched as more men and women, their hands gloved and mouths covered with cloth masks, came in to retrieve the body. They walked into the concrete pool, and as they lifted Kazzy’s shoulders, Mas noticed that a piece of the back of his head was missing. A woman wearing rubber boots waded into the trash, picked up something the size of a smashed peach and stained with the color of chocolate syrup-no doubt blood-and placed it into a plastic bag.
Mas felt woozy, his mouth raw as if his teeth had been extracted again with a double dose of novocaine. He welcomed the numbness, postponing the time when memories of dead bodies, both past and present, would haunt his mind.