Dripping eaves woke him. But when he went to the house to fix breakfast, he heard another noise.
“Who’s that?” he called out, thinking a pack rat might have gotten in. The noise stopped, then he heard laughing. “McKay?” he called out again but there was no answer. The long hall from the kitchen smelled musty. He threw open the door to the living room. It was a two-story-high room with huge mullioned windows that looked out on Heart Mountain and the floors were covered with Navajo rugs. Bobby stood at the windows. He saw elk a great distance away, moving single file into the timber.
“Owwwww …”
Bobby spun around. Behind the couch Pinkey sat on the bare floor propped against the liquor cabinet, whose lock he had opened with a hacksaw. His face was smeared with blood and he laughed when he saw Bobby—a sound like a cry. His broken leg, newly casted but already filthy, stuck straight out.
“Why you do this?” Bobby implored, leaning toward him. There was a note of pity in his voice.
Pinkey’s eyes hardened. He picked up the hacksaw and began shaking it. The sharp teeth almost cut Bobby’s face.
When Bobby took it from him, Pinkey blinked. His empty hand still shook in the air.
Bobby sat cross-legged before him. “Stop it now,” he said.
“I’m dying,” Pinkey mewed, rubbing his dirty face.
Bobby helped the old man to his feet and led him down the long hall to the kitchen. He heated water and made a thin broth as Pinkey looked on.
“I need some medicine now …,” Pinkey stammered.
Bobby poured two tablespoons of whiskey into a glass and held it to Pinkey’s mouth, then wiped his face with a hot towel.
Pinkey smacked his lips. “Thank you, Bob …,” he said gratefully and leaned back in the chair. The room was warm from the cook stove and after sipping some broth, he dozed off quickly.
Four buckets of water came to a boil on the cook stove. Bobby poured them into a big galvanized tub on the floor. Naked, except for the cast which went from his knee to his ankle, Pinkey insisted on bathing with his hat on. Bobby tested the water with his elbow.
“Hey, this ain’t baby formula we’re cookin’ up, is it?”
Bobby shook his head.
“How the hell do I get in?”
Bobby offered his shoulder for support. Pinkey leaned on him, hopping on his good leg to the rim of the tub. Then, holding his casted leg in the air, eased himself in with a splash. He rubbed his face with the warm water.
Bobby looked in the direction of the Camp. He felt his resolve not to go there weaken, then busied himself at the stove, stirring the broth which Pinkey refused to drink now. When he thought of Ted’s disgruntled letter, he felt relief and disappointment at once. He could not bear to think of Champ and the neighbor boy, Henry, at all.
Pinkey hummed as he washed behind his ears. He let his hands float on top of the water and gathered bubbles toward his chest until he had amassed two prodigious breasts. When they dissolved, he asked Bobby to help him out of the tub. He hopped to a chair and Bobby handed him a towel.
“You think I bad now, should go to Camp with other Japanese?” Bobby asked the old cowboy.
Pinkey stopped drying himself. He looked up, then dabbed his mouth dry as if he had just finished an elegant meal. “What the hell are you saying, Bobby?”
Bobby just stared at him. Pinkey cleared his throat.
“Well the way I see it, Bob, you and I’ve been on this outfit a long time and I figure we’re just about the same man. We both come away from home when we was kids and we know how to survive without having nothing of our own. And we know what makes people tick because we’ve had to put up with so goddamned many of them, like ’em or not, just to get a damned paycheck. And we’re both gettin’ old.” Then he slapped his belly and pulled at the extra flesh around his middle. “And under this is just an ol’ boneyard, ain’t it? Just a bunch of bones. And once they’re scattered on the ground, who will know which is Japanese and which is American, which is a cook’s and which is a cowboy’s, which is the coyote’s and which is mine or yours?” he said in a slow, deliberate voice, then finished toweling himself dry.
Bobby let himself down on a chair in front of Pinkey. He was wearing a padded silk jacket one of the Chinamen from the railroad had willed to him. He dug into the pocket and pulled out a news clipping, unfolded it, and ironed it out smooth with his hand on Pinkey’s leg. Pinkey looked.
“You read it. I ain’t got my readin’ glasses on,” Pinkey said, though Bobby knew he was illiterate.
Bobby read the headlines: PARK COUNTY SAYS NO TO JAPS HERE.
Pinkey listened, his head tilted to one side, his eyes closed dreamily, then he looked at Bobby for a long time before speaking.
“Well hell, Bobby … that’s just a newspaper.…”
Bobby finished the ranch chores early that day. Pinkey had fallen asleep by the fire and Bobby was careful not to wake him. In the hallway he bundled up in a wool coat, boots, and a muffler and left the house by the kitchen door. He walked south toward the Camp. Two of the ranch dogs followed him, whining dolefully. At the place where the road became the creek and the creek the road, Bobby thought about how easily one thing can become another. By midafternoon he reached the gates of the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp.
Three young Nisei boys goose-stepped by the guardhouse and saluted. “Heil Hitler!” they boomed out, then ran as the guards stepped toward them. Bobby slipped through the gate unnoticed.
There were so many people, and rows and rows of buildings stretching almost to Heart Mountain itself, Bobby thought, and a commotion he had not experienced for many years. He walked, down one “avenue”—a muddy track—between barracks, crossing by a bathhouse, then a mess hall, and down another avenue to the end, and up the next one among so many people with Japanese faces.
Bobby watched new evacuees pick through piles of scrap lumber at the end of each barrack for building material. Teenage girls passed him and said hello in perfect, unaccented English. Old women wearing kimonos and getas shuffled between the shower houses and the apartments, holding soap and towels. He looked at faces. Were there any Korematsus here? he wondered.
At the end of one barrack building, on the Heart Mountain end of camp, two old men hunched over a Gō board. One player made his move, then the other one grunted something in Japanese. Bobby listened. He gargled the words in his mouth. He could say them—the sounds hit his throat in a familiar way but no longer carried any meaning. He felt dizzy. How could he have forgotten so much? His throat stiffened and there was a hammering inside his head as he tried to repeat the words in a way that meaning came with them.
The other player took his turn. The sound of the black stone snapping against the wooden board was like a switch going on inside Bobby. He made a slight bow. Speaking Japanese, the men asked if he would like to sit in on a game.
Bobby watched as the black and white stones moved across the board. He thought they looked like sheep, wandering over the countryside, for Gō is a geographical game in which the player who takes the middle way—accumulating not too much territory, but enough to hold sway—wins.
“Korematsu?” Bobby asked suddenly, interrupting the game.
The two men gazed at him.
“Anyone here named Korematsu … from Osaka … old man like me, farmer in San Jose … girl … no … woman now, fifty years old … Guadalupe, California … marry lettuce farmer?”
Again the two men looked at each other and shook their heads at Bobby, then continued the game.
When the Camp’s dinner bell rang, it was getting dark. Bobby stood up from the table, alarmed at how quickly the time had passed.
“Kon ba wa,” the two old men said and bowed.
Bobby bowed and they parted. At first, he could not remember the way back to the gate. He walked the length of the mess hall the wrong way. Inside, he saw all kinds of people sitting down on long picnic benches, eating. The food did not smell good. He rounded the building, rea
lized his mistake, then went back the other way, crossing “avenues” until he came to the gate. A sentry guard came out.
“Where are you going? Do you have a pass?”
“No live here. Cook for twenty year, Heart Mountain Ranch,” Bobby said and pointed up-country.
The MP turned to his partner. “We have another joker out here.”
The other guard appeared. “What’s your name, boy?”
“Not boy. Old enough to be your grandfather.”
The two guards laughed uproariously. On the hill behind them a family of coyotes began yipping and howling. Bobby’s dogs, waiting patiently, growled and took off. Bobby tried to call them back but they wouldn’t come.
“What’s your name?” the MP asked.
Bobby gave his name. He looked in the direction of the ranch but could see no lights. He patch of clear sky the Big Dipper bent its elbow down where the ranch should have been. To the northwest, a haze of white snow clouds was taking the sky. Bobby thought of the trains that had brought the evacuees here. They had traveled over track he had helped to build: they were bringing everything he had forgotten he was back to him.
The soldier motioned Bobby into the guardhouse. They had been reading comic books and drinking Coke. Bobby sat down and folded his hands. He stared at the floor and a feeling of shame passed through him. The dogs had run the coyotes off and now there was a terrible, raw silence. Then a voice outside the guardhouse said his name, and a short ruddy man wearing a gray Stetson cocked sideways on his head and propelling himself forward on crutches appeared, talked to the guards, and took Bobby home.
5
Saturday, October, 1942. The first edition of the Heart Mountain Sentinel came out today and I think it’s going to be a fine weekly paper. I say this, because I’m a copy editor along with Ben Iwasaka, also from Berkeley. He’s a law student there. “Now we’re both members of that suspect species, the journalist,” he said when I walked through the door this morning. No one else thought it was funny but that’s because they haven’t grown up reading Hearst newspapers. But what harm can there be in a little local paper? We try to put forward national news having to do with relocation. There’s a social page, a column that gathers news from the other nine relocation camps, and the usual editorial page, camp sports, activities, letters, and classifieds. Issei-owned businesses from Utah, California, Oregon, and Washington are buying ads. Anyway, it’s a job, which I need—both for the money and to keep my mind off other things … this deep wrenching away from things and people I love … like yesterday when I woke and thought I was in Chinatown …
A journalist … a historian … I wonder what the difference is, because I fear my tendency as a scholar is to put thing in neat blocks, to control what has been the uncontrolled destinies of other peoples … I’ve resolved not to fritter all my time, and to give some thought to definitions.
Ben asks, Why history, why not politics, something that exists in the present.… In response, I came up with this: History, in our case, is not the event of evacuation, transfixed in time, but an accumulation of the movement of human wills over time and continuing now.… There was not one cause for our internment, but many—a deep-seated racial prejudice working on top of fear, distrust, and greed. So how is one to say exactly where history begins or ends? It is all slow oscillations, curves, and waves which take so long to reveal themselves … like watching a tree grow.
Journalists, beware! History is not truths versus falsehoods, but a mixture of both, a mélange of tendencies, reactions, dreams, errors, and power plays. What’s important is what we make of it; its moral use. By writing history, we can widen readers’ thinking and deepen their sympathies in every direction. Perhaps history should show us not how to control the world, but how to enlarge, deepen, and discipline ourselves.
Sunday, our day off after the Saturday edition is out. I feel light-headed and oddly happy, like a criminal with a new identity. When you’ve lost everything, what’s there to worry about? I went to Block 7-22-3, where Ben lives, and we walked together to the mess hall. He said he hated school and someday wanted to run for a political office. Now that would be something, a Nisei governor! Just then, I stuck my hand in my pocket and pulled something out: it was the badge Li had made. I gave it to Ben and he laughed, because it said: I AM CHINESE.
Monday. It was so cold this morning my mother’s hair turned white with frost as she walked from the bathroom to the barracks. It snowed, and after, there was a ground blizzard. It’s nature’s way of getting at you twice—first on your head, then up between your legs, and both ways, it blinds you. Mom is disgusted at how late I sleep in when we’re not on deadline at the paper. She doesn’t know I’m part owl and get my work done at night. Whenever I can, I skip breakfast, get up about ten, have coffee, then help Pop build furniture for our “home away from home” … Already, the many domestic and aesthetic touches are showing … there are curtains, tables and chairs, bookshelves, paintings and drawings hung on the walls, and outside, rock gardens are taking shape here and there.
One of the many differences between the two generations here is that while we Nisei feel like caged lions, the old folks are taking a vacation for the first time in their lives, and dedicating their time to their beloved arts and crafts. Already, Mom has signed up for a class in ikebana, and Pop has joined a group that sings old Japanese ballads—unusual for him. It’s ironic that Uncle Sam, by putting us all together, is only encouraging the very thing Caucasians hate and fear—our Japaneseness. Every day, this camp looks more and more like a Japanese village. This nostalgia for the old ways bothers me, though, because in the end, I’m afraid it will be damning.
Pop told me how ashamed the Issei women are about using the toilet with no privacy. That’s when being a simpleminded jock comes in handy. I suffer no shame! At dinner, another old Issei said, “When you don’t have something, you fight for it. When you aren’t allowed to fight, you get numb.” I wonder if that will happen to me? I went back to the office, my resolve strengthened. I’m trying to get a grip on what’s happened to us and what it implies. The terrible failing of the democratic process nearly blinds me when I try to sort it out. Why, for instance, aren’t the German and Italian immigrants behind barbed wire? I guess we all know the answer to that, but it’s damned hard to swallow.
Most everyone in this “city” is sleeping now. Here and there I see a curl of smoke going up or hear a baby cry or see an old Issei stumbling toward the bathroom with his kimono on. I like to look at the stars. That’s something I didn’t have time for in Berkeley. The little window by my desk faces north and the Big Dipper is so big I can’t quite see it all.
I really came to the office to think about Li. Living in the same room with Mom and Pop, I find I censor my thoughts. But here, I can imagine lying with her in the little room we had in Chinatown. It was much noisier there because so many restaurants stayed open late, but it was a sweet noise, our secret love music. She’d lie under me and I’d tell her we were swimming and I’d make her lie on my back the way baby whales do, then I’d tell her we were on our way to Mexico and I’d spread her legs. She didn’t have much hair down there and it was beautiful to see how she was built. When it rained hard we seemed to be able to make love longer—sometimes four or five times in a night.
I have a hard-on now. Well, what did I expect? It thumps against this desk and makes a sound like a bird flying against the window. Even though I say these things, Li is beginning to seem remote to me. How long has it been? I don’t want to start counting days like a damned prisoner. It seems like years. But that’s the purpose of exile, isn’t it? To fortify our feelings of separateness (not to speak of helplessness). Love is an attempt to bridge the distances between us, to conquer separateness. Now I’m standing at a road-cut where the bridge has washed away. Do I really love Li? Or was our affair only an entertainment? Perhaps what I’ve thought of as love has been only self-interest, a vanity.
6
McKay woke with a s
tart. He had slept hard without moving and the blond curls on one side of his head were punched in flat. His leg hurt where it had been broken and he rubbed it as he swung his feet to the floor. He was supposed to remember something, but what was it? The tequila had been passed around at the roping arena the night before.
When he stood the room went black. There was no heat and he trembled as he pulled on his long underwear. One side of his face looked old; the eye twitched and the soft flesh under the eye was gray, as if ash had been smeared there. The other side, the bright side, looked childlike, and his mouth was pulled down, then up, in a wry, effortless smile.
It was the third day of a savage unseasonable storm. He had to ship cattle and hoped the storm would blow over. He limped into the hallway of the big house and called for Bobby. No answer. The house had never seemed so quiet. He could feel the cold coming up through the pine floor and the toes on his left foot that had once been frostbitten ached. He stood at the entrance to the living room. It was still dark but the room glowed. A thin layer of snow covered everything—couches, chairs, the inside of the fireplace, the Navajo rugs on the floor. Where wind had driven under the doors, there were mounds of snow, like tiny dunce caps toppled over. He knew what day it was now: the anniversary of his parents’ death.
He lit a kerosene lamp and stood at the fireplace. On the mantle was a silver-framed photograph of his parents, taken the day they drowned. His mother was bundled in a fur coat. Her gray eyes sparkled. Her head was turned to one side and she was smiling at McKay’s father, whose black hair stood on end. It had been windy and he had the hurt, far-off look of someone who only finds happiness elsewhere.
McKay remembered the bull sale in Red Lodge, Montana, when his father disappeared with a woman who came out of the stands and stood by the door. McKay did not see him again until late that night when he came back alone to the bar. He looked shaken. McKay ordered him a shot. After emptying the glass RJ started talking. “I love your mother,” he began. “That woman was someone I’ve known many years, someone I could have married. But things happen. I met her after I married your mother. Life’s a lot of compromises. But that’s good, that’s human, that’s how the coyote survives.”
Heart Mountain Page 5
