Supervolcano All Fall Down(83)

Hoping Patty hadn’t found out something too much like that, Louise rushed toward the older woman’s office. She almost ran into Mr. Nobashi, who was coming out. The salaryman looked upset, too: not only because Patty was crying but also, Louise judged, on account of what had made her cry. Whatever it was, he must have told it to Patty, and the telling must have set her off.

“Oh. Mrs. Ferguson,” he said. He wasn’t terrific with English. What he did to her name usually made her want to snicker. Not this morning. And what he did next scared the crap out of her: he bowed low, the bow of inferior to superior, and went on, “So sorry. I am so sorry.”

“So sorry for what? What happened?” Louise managed. Patty’d told gruesome stories about the manager from Japan who’d worked here before Mr. Nobashi. The guy’d thought the rules here were the same as they were on the other side of the Pacific. He’d gone home in a hurry, and the company got hit with a big, juicy sexual-harassment suit.

Mr. Nobashi had to know about that. In all the time Louise had worked here, she’d never heard that he’d fallen off the path of virtue. And if he chose now to do it, would he come on to Patty? She was about as sexy as a snapping turtle, and had the same kind of wattle under her chin. Wouldn’t Mr. Nobashi decide to try and butter his biscuits with somebody younger and cuter?

But Louise turned out to be wasting her time worrying about that particular misfortune. “Hiroshima call me just now,” Mr. Nobashi said. “Oh, Jeeesus Christ! How I can tell you? Home office say, with times so hard, we not profitable enough in America. They close this office. They send me home. You people . . .” He gave that humiliated bow—that had to be the kind it was—again. “So sorry!”

“Close . . . this office?” The words sounded as strange, as wrong, coming from Louise’s lips as they had when she heard them from her boss. The ramen company’s corporate headquarters in the USA had been here on Braxton Bragg Boulevard since the 1970s. Wouldn’t closing it deprive college students yet unborn of the chance to harden their arteries with cheap shrimp, chicken, beef, and Oriental noodles?

More to the point, wouldn’t closing it pound one more nail into the coffin of San Atanasio’s economy? Most to the point, wouldn’t closing it cost one Louise Ferguson her job at a time when people swarmed like so many starving locusts on any work that appeared? Too often, that was about what they were.

“Hai. Please believe me, I do everything I know how to do to stop this,” Mr. Nobashi said miserably. He spread his hands, palms up. “I fail.”

Patty came out of her office. Her face looked like the Mask of Tragedy with runny mascara streaks. “I been here twenty-six years,” she said, maybe to Mr. Nobashi, maybe to Louise, maybe only to herself. “Twenty-six years,” she repeated. “What am I gonna do without this place?”

Mr. Nobashi bowed to her the same way he’d bowed to Louise, or it might have been even deeper. “Please excuse me,” he said. “I am so sorry. Oh, Jeeesus Christ, I am so goddamn sorry.” For the first time, Louise heard him spice up his English the way he did his Japanese. He went on, “Like I tell you before, I do all I can to keep this location open. I think company make big mistake to close it. But I cannot stop them.”

It’s not my fault. That was what he was trying to say. No doubt it was the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It cut no ice with Patty. “You’re closing this place,” she said in J’accuse! tones that made it sound as if Mr. Nobashi would be out front in person, nailing boards across the doorway. “What am I supposed to do for work now?”

It was a good question—a hell of a good question, in fact. It was the good question uppermost in Louise’s mind, too. Mr. Nobashi had the grace to look distressed. And well he might. They were sending him back to Hiroshima. They weren’t firing him, laying him off, downsizing him, shit-canning him. Call it whatever you pleased, but they weren’t doing it to him. Whereas the ramen works’ American employees . . .

“Before I leave this country, I write you most excellent letter of recommendation,” Mr. Nobashi said. “And you also, Mrs. Ferguson.” Before either woman could interrupt to tear him a new asshole, he rushed on: “I know this is not enough. Please understand, I know very goddamn well. But it is the only thing I can do now.”

He sounded like somebody throwing old clothes in a trash bag to give to the Red Cross after an earthquake—or after a supervolcano eruption. Yes, he was doing what he could. That wasn’t anywhere near enough, though, not if you had the misfortune to be on the receiving end.