“Nice.” Mas never thought much of art, even though he had a torn screen in his home. But his was the generic kind, with an image of a couple of sparrows resting on a bare tree branch. The screen that this Howard Foster had was the real deal.
Mas circled the core of the house. Unlike the Waxley House, which had a staircase in the middle, a staircase appeared on the side of the building, across from the fireplace. “You here all by yourself?”
“Yes,” Howard said, and then frowned. “Why do you ask?”
“No reason,” Mas replied, but he was actually wondering about the neighbor’s alibi. Sure, he had called in a report about hearing a gun going off at nine that night. But couldn’t he have shot Kazzy first and then called the police when he got back to his house?
Howard stood in front of his prized Buddhist painting. “So, looking at this, would you say that I was a Japan hater? That I’m a racist?”
Mas didn’t know what to say. It reminded him of one of his customers, who had decorated his house with moose heads and bear rugs. Did that mean he was an animal lover?
“Well, I’m not a racist,” Howard answered his own question. “Just a man who takes pride in his house. Can you imagine if they make the Waxley House into a museum? There’ll be visitors coming through there every day. I want peace and quiet, not crowds. That’s all that I was doing with that petition. Now I’m getting crank calls, angry letters. Being harassed by the police. Somebody even threw eggs at my house a couple of days ago. So tell your people to back off.”
What people? thought Mas. He had no people besides Mari, Lloyd, and Takeo. And they were too preoccupied to be thinking about throwing raw eggs at the neighbor’s house.
“Youzu talk to Becca. Thatsu best way,” Mas finally said.
“I can’t talk to her. She’s crazy. Unbalanced.”
Mas headed for the door, attempting to make his escape.
“Tell them to back off,” Howard repeated. “Stop telling lies, slandering me. I told the police that I’m going to file a grievance against the Ouchi Foundation, and I won’t stop there, if you know what I mean.”
Once Mas arrived at the Waxley House, he decided to forgo seeing Becca at the front door and went straight for the garden. He’d been up for only two hours, and he’d had enough of people already.
Like all gardens, Lloyd’s garden looked different in the early afternoon than in the morning. Mas preferred the early hours, when there was a hush over the trees and bushes, as if the insects hadn’t fully awakened yet. He checked the tape on the wounded cherry trees and was happy to see that the tight blossoms, mini baby fists, were ready to break open at the first sign of sun. He raked a few dead leaves and clipped off the unruly sides of a pine. He even began moving the rocks from the pile by the shed to their proper places around the pond. Walking to the far north side of the pond, Mas noticed that Lloyd had installed a tsukubai, a stone washbasin. The stone was the size of a bowling ball, the top and middle hollowed out to hold water. A piece of bamboo served as the water spout, but of course everything was still dry, because the pumping system had not been fully installed. This kind of tsukubai was used by followers of the tea ceremony. Mas was no expert on the tea ceremony, but had a former customer, a chado sensei, who had a special tatami room beside her kitchen for her classes every Tuesday. She made her students cleanse their hands in a makeshift tsukubai outside her screen door. Mas was told it was for purification purposes, but he just enjoyed seeing the women, even the old ones, in brightly colored, stiff kimono once a week.
Mas walked from the tsukubai to the bridge over the pond. The yellow police tape was still haphazardly draped over the gourd-shaped concrete floor. Mas squatted down to get a better look at the inscription Becca had been trying to show him that first day. Carved on the side, probably with the end of a stick while the concrete was still fresh, were the kanji characters, ko, and, short for ikiru. “Child lives”? Strange. What had Kazzy’s overeducated father been trying to say with this message? These artistic erai types had all kinds of sayings that made no sense to Mas.
Next was Sylvester the sycamore. Mas tentatively made his way to the toolshed. As he reached down for the handsaw, he couldn’t help but feel for the small indentation that had once held the bullet. Armed with the saw, Mas set up the ladder by the sycamore and went straight to work. The handsaw was old, probably from the seventies. Years of rain had seeped into the wooden handle, so Mas should have seen it coming. But he didn’t. With each push and pull of the saw, the wooden handle jiggled and the metal blade curved back and forth, instead of remaining straight. Seeing little result from his effort, Mas cursed under his breath and dragged the blade forward with all his might. The handle burst free, the blade sinking its rusty teeth into the soft tissue of his left hand, in between his index finger and thumb. A streak of blood immediately dripped down his hand. The wound burned so badly that Mas feared that he would do shikko in his pants. Mas was too stunned to even hear himself yell.
“Mr. Arai!” Becca poked her head from the upstairs window. “What have you done to yourself?”
Becca wrapped Mas’s hand in a dish towel and guided him up the staircase to the second floor of the Waxley House. Once they reached the top of the stairs, Mas could see that there were two rooms at opposite ends of the hallway, perfectly symmetrical like a set of weights on a barbell. Both doors were wide open. A TV set and fancy electronic equipment were stored in the room on the right, while an old-fashioned desk and typewriter sat in the left. They headed to the bathroom that was right smack in the middle.
“I’m so sorry,” said Becca. Mas sat on the closed lid of the toilet. “I should have told you not to bother with Sylvester without the proper tools.” Becca made Mas keep his hand elevated. She opened up the medicine chest and took out a plastic bottle of antiseptic and a tube of Neosporin. From the cabinet at the bottom of the sink came a roll of gauze bandage and some white tape.
“I think I’d better take you to the hospital. You might need some stitches. And definitely a shot for tetanus.”
Mas shook his head. He’d had enough of hospitals on both coasts. He had had his share of gardening war injuries over the decades; a sliced hand was as common to a gardener as a black eye to a boxer.
Becca must have realized that it was useless to argue with Mas. She soaked a cotton ball with the antiseptic and pressed hard against the cut, making sure that it hurt. While she was wrapping the gauze bandage, the phone rang. Becca went into the room with the TV equipment to take the call. She spoke about fruit platters, cheese, and other kinds of appetizers that Mas had never heard of. The bandage still dangling down his arm, Mas walked out of the bathroom, looked both ways, and headed for the unoccupied room-the one with the old-fashioned desk and typewriter. This had been Kazzy’s office, Mas figured. A row of bookshelves lined one of the walls. A small circular table sat in the middle, while a wooden desk, looking like it belonged in the TV Western Bonanza, was against the wall by the window. The desk had a roll top, which had some sort of lock, but it was a Cracker Jack kind that could be jiggled open with a nail file. Above the desk on the wall was a framed black-and-white photograph of a hakujin woman with a broad face and laughing eyes. Mas saw a slight resemblance to Becca. Must be the grandmother, Kazzy’s mother. On a small table was the ancient typewriter, labeled Remington. Mas remembered seeing that kind of typewriter at his janitor friend’s workplace, the Kashu Mainichi, once the number two newspaper in Little Tokyo. Now it was number zero, because it went belly-up in the early nineties. Housed in an old factory on First Street, the newspaper staff worked amid pigeons resting on a beam near a skylight, while one of the staff members’ cats prowled on the cement floor.