We Are Not Free

by Traci Chee

  I am rooted to the spot, blinking. I know I should be running too, but I can’t seem to make my legs move.

  Someone, I don’t know who, seizes my hand, pulling me along behind.

  A truck screeches to a stop ahead of us. It is dark with yellow eyes. Half a dozen internal police officers spill out, swarming the street.

  “Halt!” someone shouts. “Don’t move!”

  They are knocking down bodies. People are being hauled toward the truck by their ankles, like carcasses. Someone is screaming as he’s wrestled to the ground.

  I freeze again.

  I can’t help it. I remember this feeling, this sense that everything around me is thin, and sharp, and brittle, and if I make a move, if I make any move, something is going to crack, someone is going to crack, someone is going to get hurt.

  “Yosh, come on!”

  I hear Stan yelling, but I can’t do anything. I am drifting out of my body. I am leaving my legs, and arms, and chest behind. I am a bird, or I am a puff of smoke, and the things that happen to my body aren’t happening to me.

  “Kiyoshi, move!” he shouts.

  I stumble, confused. I am back in my own head, my own feet. Did he push me? Stan’s face swims into focus: the hair falling over his forehead, his thick brows, the rims of his glasses, and his black, panicked eyes. Mary and Tommy and Aiko are there too; their lips are moving; they are begging me to move, to run, to come with them. All around us, the internal security men are throwing people into the barrack walls or hogtying them in the dirt.

  “Get them out of here!” Stan gives me another shove.

  I finally come to my senses. My face burns with shame. What was I doing, waiting for so long? When my friends were counting on me? Quickly, I grab Mary’s hand, and her fingers clamp around mine as we take off with Tommy and Aiko. Behind us are the thunder of footsteps, cries for us to halt.

  But we don’t.

  I can’t.

  Stan told me to get them out of here. Stan trusted me to take care of them.

  Stan—

  Too late, I realize he isn’t with us. As we reach the nearest firebreak, I turn back in time to see two big men in black-billed caps force Stan to his knees.

  “Hey, what’s the big idea?” he’s saying, and I am thinking, Shut up. Don’t move. Don’t say anything. Don’t move, Stan. But he is too far away, he is not in my head, he cannot hear me, and he continues, “I didn’t do anyth—”

  Crack! One of the policemen strikes him across the jaw. His glasses fly from his face as he hits the dirt.

  “Stan!” Mary is running at them. Mary is a locomotive. Mary is screaming black smoke.

  No, no. Not Mary, too. I want to reach for her, I want to yank her back, I want to protect her the way I can’t protect Stan, but I am too scared, or I am too small, too frozen, too stupid, too weak.

  Instead, it’s Aiko who grabs her. Aiko is saying something in Mary’s ear. Aiko is getting her to run.

  For a second, I think they’re going to leave me; I think they would be right to leave me, but then they take me by the hands, and they drag me after them into the firebreak, away, away, with the sounds of clubs on bodies, the muffled, fleshy impacts, fading quickly into the dark.

  FRI., NOV. 5

  The next morning, as soon as the dark weight begins to lift from the sky, I walk to the Katsumotos’. I don’t know if I slept last night, but if I slept, it wasn’t much. I couldn’t stop thinking about Stan, kept hearing the crack of his jaw and the burn in his voice, shouting, Get them out of here!

  I heard what happened last night was that a bunch of men tried to stop the trucks from delivering food to the strikebreakers brought in for the farm work. The men surrounded the project director’s house, eighty guys, someone said, although another said thirty. No one knows what really happened.

  In their barrack, the Katsumotos are already awake. Mary and Paul are at the table with Mr. K., who is sucking on a pipe as if it’s lit, although it isn’t, and glowering at yesterday’s newspaper as if he’s reading it, although he isn’t, while Mrs. K. paces from the coal stove to the window, peeking through the curtains, then back to the stove, where she lifts the lid on a pot, and the apartment fills with the scent of miso soup.

  They haven’t heard any news about Stan. They don’t know if he was charged, or if he was injured, or where he’s being held.

  Crack!

  His glasses sailing through the darkness.

  “I’m sorry,” I say, though I know the words are inadequate. They cannot bring their boy back to them; I cannot undo what I did not do; I did not act fast enough; I could not act at all.

  “It’s not your fault,” Mrs. K. says, pointing to the table, where there is a bowl of miso soup for me. “Please, sit.”

  It’s Stan’s bowl.

  I look away.

  His arms being wrenched behind his back, and his face being pushed into the dirt. My fault, I think.

  Too small, too stupid, too weak.

  I wasn’t always like this, or at least, I don’t think I was.

  I know I started freezing up when my stepfather, Mr. Tani, would hit me, but I don’t remember the first time it happened.

  I remember one time, though, not long after my mother married Mr. Tani, we were in the orchards for the orange harvest, when I’d climb the trees with the fruit picker to collect the oranges the men couldn’t reach from the ground. I remember the bark, rough against my palms, and the leaves of the tree flashing green and yellow, with shards of blue sky beyond, and I remember finding a bird’s nest: four perfect speckled eggs cradled in twigs and feathers of cloudy gray.

  I remember Mr. Tani yelling at me. It was time to go home, or it was time to move to the next tree, or he had been fired because he was drunk on the job again.

  I don’t know if I moved, or if I moved too quickly, or too slow.

  Did he grab my ankle? Did the branch snap beneath me?

  The next thing I knew, I was on the ground, and so was the nest. Inside, the eggs were cracked, the mottled shells laced with fractures. I remember looking at those breaks and knowing, knowing that they meant death, and stillness, and cold, those baby birds slowly dying within, and maybe not even knowing it.

  Because of me.

  Mr. Tani was knocking me around by then, shouting at me to get up, but I couldn’t move anymore. I was immobile, frozen, petrified, staring at that nest, at those eggs, at those breaks, so delicate; I swear I could hear them crack as they spread across the shells.

  And those baby birds dying inside.

  There’s a knock at the door, and Mrs. K. rushes to answer it, but it isn’t Stan, or an internal security officer with news of Stan.

  It’s Tommy and Aiko. They don’t know any more than we do about what happened to Stan, but they tell us they heard on the way over here that the Caucasian staff showed up at the administrative offices this morning, and they found a broken baseball bat. They found blood on the walls and on the bat, and black hairs amid the blood.

  Were they Stan’s?

  My fault.

  I stare down at my bowl, watching the green ribbons of wakame churn in the broth. My stomach churns, too, as I force myself to take another bite.

  “A bat?” Mary slams down her empty bowl.

  “Mary,” Mr. K. says, “please.”

  I admire her for her bravery, and for her ferocity. Mary is the kind of person who acts, heedless of danger. She is the kind of person who would never freeze.

  As Mary and her father start arguing, I finish my soup, get up so Aiko can sit at the table, and peer out the front window. On the street, groups of people are on their way to work or school, huddled together like clumps of dandelion seeds floating over an overgrown ditch.

  As I watch them, I hear a voice crackle in the distance: “DISPERSE.”

  Then screams.

  At the end of the street, shapes appear in the fog—military police in their helmets and gas masks. They’re storming down the road, monstrous, boots thudd
ing on the ground. Behind them, a column of armored vehicles crawls along the street.

  “DISPERSE.” The loudspeaker crackles again. “RETURN TO YOUR HOMES.”

  People are already running, but the soldiers don’t give them a chance to clear the roads. One of them flings a gas grenade into the middle of the street.

  People shriek and scatter as noxious white smoke hisses from the canister. They are coughing, they can’t breathe, they are—

  I should help them. I should do something. But I can’t.

  Mr. K. is already at the door, throwing it open; he is motioning someone inside. They are trying to wash her eyes with water; she is retching and crying—

  Outside, the army trucks roll past, blaring commandments from the loudspeaker:

  “RESIDENTS ARE CONFINED TO THEIR BARRACKS. ONLY ESSENTIAL PERSONNEL ARE TO REPORT TO WORK. SCHOOL IS CANCELED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. ALL OUTDOOR GATHERINGS ARE PROHIBITED.

  “TULE LAKE IS UNDER MARTIAL LAW.”

  WED., NOV. 17

  Stan writes that he is in the stockade, the 250-by-350-square-foot area beyond the motor pool at the southwestern edge of camp. He says he’s being fed well, and he asks for a change of clothes, a shaving razor, and maybe one of those law books from the library, if we can get it. He doesn’t mention any mistreatment, but the mail is being censored through the military police, so we can’t be certain of anything.

  We’ve been permitted to leave our barracks, but school is still canceled, so Mary, Aiko, Tommy, and I loiter by the motor-pool fences, which is the closest we can get to the stockade, hoping to get a glimpse of Stan. To pass the time, we play catch, or we sit and talk, or we watch the coal crew or the farmers filing onto the work trucks at bayonet point.

  One day, Aiko brings a stack of comic books for Mary to give to Paul. They look well cared for, no wear on the spines, no creased pages. Tommy has told me Aiko loves comics almost as much as she loves softball and one of the guys from their old camp, Mas Ito, who’s now in basic training at Camp Shelby, Mississippi.

  Gingerly, I leaf through the comic book at the top of the pile. When I was younger, I used to borrow comic books from the boys at school and read them at lunchtime, devouring every page, as if by memorizing it or loving it enough, I could somehow make it mine.

  Mary frowns. “Why’re you giving these up?”

  “I don’t want them anymore,” Aiko says with a small, sad shrug.

  “Yeah, but why?”

  Aiko scowls, which is an expression I think she must have learned from Mary, because for a moment, they look like they could be sisters. “Because they fight Japs,” she says.

  We all glance at the soldiers stationed at the nearby guardhouse with their submachine guns.

  “I’ll see if Paul wants these,” Mary says.

  Sometimes, when the guards get bored, they demand to see our identification cards, which have been issued to everyone aged twelve and older. We always have them, because people who are discovered without them are immediately arrested.

  Some come back. Some don’t.

  That’s the way it is in Tule Lake now. They say the army is here to retain order, but there’s no order. Every day, I hear about more people being arrested—for curfew violation, or for making wisecracks about the internal security officers, or for having the same name as one of the so-called agitators. They say they’re here for our safety, but no one feels safe when they’ve got a gun pointed at them. People disappear. People are held without charges or trial.

  And still, we wait by the motor-pool gate, and look, and hope. What else can we do, when we have so little power?

  * * *

  One night, I wake up sweating. Somewhere, someone’s shouting. Bang! Something crashes against the floor.

  I’m half-asleep still, half dreaming. I must be. He’s not here. He can’t be here.

  Mr. Tani.

  My stepfather. He’s found us. He’s come to Tule Lake. I can hear his voice again. He’s going to hit me. He’s going to haul me out of bed, calling me stupid, calling me slow, calling me weak, over and over, so many times, I start to believe him.

  Thud, thud, thud! someone knocks.

  I stare up at the ceiling, my blood roaring in my ears like distant truck engines. For a second, I am bound in my blankets, pinned here, frozen, waiting.

  Mr. Tani.

  Except I realize it can’t be Mr. Tani, because Mr. Tani never knocked. He just barged in, smelling of sake, and started throwing me around.

  “Get up, Japs!” someone shouts. “Surprise inspection! Get out here!”

  I blink as the feeling returns to my body, and I carefully peel back the covers, swinging my legs over the edge of the cot. My limbs feel shaky with fear, or relief, or both.

  It’s not Mr. Tani.

  It’s the army.

  Sporadic lights shine through the windows as Mother, Kimi, and I pull on our coats and boots.

  “Hurry up!”

  Mother is trembling, so Kimi and I help her out of the barrack and into the street. Outside, our neighbors are lined up with their hands behind their heads.

  The sight of it stops me in my tracks. We look like criminals.

  We aren’t criminals.

  “Get over there,” one of the soldiers says, jabbing at Mother with a Tommy gun.

  Mother freezes. In the floodlights, she looks like a cornered animal, barely daring to breathe.

  There is that feeling again, that feeling as if the world is a sheet of ice, as if it will shatter, as if there will be a snap! and we will be on the ground as gunfire rains over our heads.

  “Move!”

  Carefully, Kimi and I each take one of Mother’s arms and guide her toward our neighbors. The frosted ground crackles with every step.

  We stand by, immobile, as they charge into our homes. Through the open doors, we hear the sounds of our belongings being ransacked: cots being overturned, drawers being thrown to the floor, chests being kicked over. Up and down the block, they’re hauling away radios, and kitchen knives, and a Japanese printing press.

  Suddenly, there’s a cry from one of the barracks and the sound of a scuffle, and a Japanese man is frogmarched down the steps. Despite being in nothing but his underclothes, he looks proud: his back straight, his chin held high.

  How does he do it? How does he look so serene?

  “Who is that?” I whisper to Kimi.

  “One of the judo teachers,” she says. “They say he’s one of the instigators of the incident at the director’s house, but—”

  “Shut it!” one of the MPs—military police—barks, prodding her with a bayonet.

  She snaps her mouth shut with an audible click.

  Mr. Tani never hit Kimi or Mother the way he hit me, but I know it affected them, having to listen to it, or to watch it, if they weren’t pretending to be asleep.

  Sometimes I think I should be angry at them, and sometimes I am, for letting it happen, but then I think about how if things had been different, if Mr. Tani had knocked one of them around instead, I think I would have frozen, the way I froze when they took Stan. I would have let something bad happen to Mother, or Kimi, or both, and I already hate myself for letting it happen to me; I don’t think I could live with it if it had happened to them.

  When the judo teacher is loaded into a truck with the rest of the contraband, one of the children starts crying. I can’t tell where the sound is coming from, because there’s a spotlight mounted to one of the jeeps, and it keeps crossing and recrossing us: bright and dark, bright and dark, bright and dark.

  Soldiers are emerging from our barrack now, carrying Mom’s rice barrel, a couple of jars of tsukemono she’s been saving, and canned goods we bought from the co-op when we could.

  “That’s our food,” Mom says in a panicked whisper. Her face is taut with fear. “What are we going to eat, Yoshi? They’re not feeding us enough in the mess halls anymore. That food is all we have—”

  On the back of my head, my hands are starting to shak
e. I should do something. I should try to stop them, or reason with them, or plead.

  But I can’t, and neither can she, and neither can any of us. What can any of us do? They are armed, and there are more of them, and I am just one person, one boy, one stupid boy, one useless boy, who can’t even protect himself.

  Bright and dark, bright and dark.

  The child is still crying.

  SUN., NOV. 28

  A few days after Thanksgiving, I’m on my way to the Katsumotos’ barrack to help them make tsukemono for Stan and the other prisoners. Each ward is sending something in preparation for the holidays, and although Mother, Kimi, and I don’t have enough to spare, the least I can do is help.

  As I’m passing one of the mess halls, an army truck drives up, laden with food: eggs, cans, bread, rice, wilted bunches of chard. The soldiers on the back of the truck don’t bother getting off to unload, however. They simply check their clipboard and heave the food onto the ground. Crates shatter. I flinch. It actually hurts, seeing the cartons of eggs break, the sacks of rice split, spilling thousands of white grains into the dirt like miniature avalanches.

  As the soldiers drive off, the mess-hall staff rush to save what they can. Kneeling, I help them scoop up broken pieces of spaghetti, bruised apples, and mackerel that smells as if it’s already turned.

  They scurry back to the mess hall, leaving me in the road, surrounded by scattered grains of rice, which I begin to pick up, one by one, filling my handkerchief with them.

  They can be washed; they can be eaten. We won’t even know the difference.

  I still remember the taste of dirt on my tongue. We’d have nothing to eat, and Kimi would take me out to the weed patch behind our apartment, where she’d put a pinch of soil in my palm.

  “Just swallow,” she used to say. “It tastes bad, but when it gets to your stomach, you’ll forget you were hungry.”

  With a handful of rice in my handkerchief, I walk the rest of the way to the Katsumotos’, where Mary, Mrs. K., and I spend the evening slicing daikon, napa cabbage, beets, and turnips that are only slightly bad. We cut off the ruined parts and toss the rest into jars with salt and garlic, or turmeric, sugar, and vinegar, and soon, the whole apartment smells of pickling liquid.