Free Summer of the Big Bachi by Naomi Hirahara Page B

message that the man had tried to leave before he died. I’ve tried to decipher it. But nothing.”
     
     
“So what about this Riki Kimura?” asked Haruo. “Impor-tant guy?”
     
     
The reporter shook his head. “No, no. He was my grandfather.”
     
     
“Grandfather?” Mas couldn’t help blurting out. “Whatsu your name again?”
     
     
“Yuki. Kimura Yuki.”
     
     
How could that be? They had all been fifteen, sixteen years old. Just teenagers. Too busy with work at the train station to even think about girls.
     
     
The boy continued his story. “They never found his body. . . . Eventually, my grandmother was called in and given a large bone, supposed to be my grandfather’s remains. It wasn’t, of course. Probably a horse bone.”
     
     
Haruo nodded. “Somehow that made people feel betta.”
     
     
“We were able to meet last year with the woman who drew this picture,” the reporter explained. “She also kept this all these years.” He took an envelope from his wallet and carefully lifted a square piece of cloth. Kimura, it read. Riki. And the letter A .
     
     
Seeing the cloth name tag, Mas felt dizzy. A weight seemed to drop to the pit of his stomach. He could still hear Haruo and the boy talk, but he could barely make out the words.
     
     
“I rememba these,” said Haruo. “We all had to wear them. IDs. His blood type, A, ne. ”
     
     
“She kept this for us. But look— flawless, not burnt at all. Strange, we thought. Why would Grandfather be so charred in this drawing, but this so perfect?”
     
     
Mas leaned against the wall. His legs seemed almost to buckle under him.
     
     
“Hey, you orai ?” asked Haruo, taking hold of Mas’s elbow.
     
     
“Back,” Mas said, pounding his spine with a closed fist. He hit himself so hard that even his chest seemed to rattle.
     
     
“Can I help—” Yuki folded up the cloth square and placed it in his wallet.
     
     
“No,” Mas said, a little too loudly and a little too quickly. But the boy ignored him and, together with Haruo, guided him to the front of the line.
     
     
Yuki pounded on the locked door. “This ojisan needs to sit down. He needs some medical attention,” he called out.
     
     
The crowd murmured, and within a few minutes the door opened.
     
     

     
Mas refused to be seen by any doctor but did agree to rest in one of the hard folding chairs lined up against the wall near a coffee machine.
     
     
Haruo was soon directed into one of the examination rooms. “You sure you don’t want to—”
     
     
“I wait, Haruo.” Mas spoke so sternly that Haruo merely nodded and disappeared through a curtain divider. If Mas had his truck, he would have left, that minute, that second. How had that ID, so perfect, appeared on the dead man’s chest? Had it all been planned, calculated, from the very beginning?
     
     
The red badger returned to Mas’s side, this time with a Styrofoam cup filled with water.
     
     
Mas accepted the cup. His lips were parched as if he hadn’t had a drink in days. “Your grandmother,” he finally said. “Is your grandmother still alive?”
     
     
Yuki nodded. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Her name is Akemi. Actually, we’re looking for her brother, who may be over here. Haneda is his name. Haneda Joji.”
     
     

     
Akemi Haneda was a couple of years older than Mas. A strange girl with an awkward American accent, she had a round face, round eyes, and deep dimples like someone had poked her cheeks with a pointed stick. She and her younger brother, Joji, had moved into the neighborhood around 1939. Mas spoke to her for the first time when she was burning something in her backyard in the middle of the night during the war.
     
     
“Do you have any coal you can spare?” Her long hair had been recently chopped to her earlobes, and she wore a thick, padded jacket and loose pantaloons. Mas at one time had thought she was pretty, but now she looked more like a boy.
     
     
He grudgingly gave her some dead coals from their table heater and watched as