Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  “Ship take long time. Very rough. People sick all over. Only one other man on board. All others—girls. Picture brides. You know? Mail order. Have photograph of man they marry. That’s all. Never meet before. Just picture. Two days before reaching San Francisco, one girl so scared she jump overboard. That girl’s friend … she very beautiful … she come over to me. Write poems to each other every day. Like in Heian times. The day we are coming to port, don’t know what to do. She stand in bow of ship and look at picture of man she supposed to marry. When she see land, she tear picture up and throw over railing. We get off boat, and he’s there. Right in front. Oh, so ashamed. She grab my arm like married woman and we walk by. Very bad thing we do, but in those days, love matches not common. Not common at all. After, I work for farmer. Then lease own land. Couldn’t buy; no Japanese can. Land on coast. Very beautiful, like Japan. Grow daisies. Many, many acres of them. So thick—like snow.”

  The Wild Man rearranged the dog and covered him with a torn blanket, then he looked up and smiled at Mr. Abe.

  Carol Lyman thought of the places these people had lived; how the places she had come to looked as if a river had run through them and swept all the small comforts away. Because it was dark in the bar, her eyes were closed sometimes, sometimes open. Maybe she would die tonight, she thought, flanked by three strange men. Yet her body felt light. She had not touched any part of a man for many years and now Snuff’s arm pressed firmly against her back. A fly trapped under the dog’s blanket buzzed. The dog’s eyes opened, an ear twitched, then sleep overtook him again.

  “Carol?” Snuff said.

  “I can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I’ve never told anyone.”

  Mr. Abe looked at her. “Nothing to lose, huh?”

  Carol smiled. The Wild Man relit the candelabrum and their faces glowed. Carol cleared her throat.

  “I spent a summer near here twenty years ago. I was young and had come to stay at a ranch. In August there was a party at the Heaney ranch on the other side of the mountain. We started out horseback and rode all day. We arrived just as the fiddle players were tuning up. It was a lovely party. Paper lanterns had been strung across the veranda and through the trees. There were tables and tables of food. Everyone came. Even the sheepherders. I remember how they stood at the door and wouldn’t come in at first. They had their dogs with them.

  “During the evening I wandered down a long hall into another part of the house. I heard someone coughing, so I peeked in. Henry’s brother, Carter, was lying in bed. He was the handsomest man I had ever seen. He had thick wavy hair the color of chocolate and a straight nose and big glowing eyes. Every feature was perfect. He looked like a young god. He told me he had pneumonia. His cheeks were very flushed and he kept clutching my hand and asking me to stay and talk to him. So I did. We talked about everything. I had never spoken that way to a man before. Once someone came in and checked on him. We were alone for the rest of the night.”

  Carol paused, then continued.

  “He was the father of my son, Willard,” she said quietly.

  A long silence followed. Not disapproval as Carol suspected, but rather, they were waiting for more. She looked at her audience. Mr. Abe was sitting cross-legged straight as an arrow. He didn’t look old now. His face was bright. The Wild Man stroked his dog.

  “The terrible thing was …,” Carol began, looking around. “I didn’t even know his name until I read it in the Billings Gazette … it was his obituary. He died a few days later—the day I left on the train.”

  Snuff gave her a surprised look.

  “I lied before,” she said to him. “He never asked me to marry him. It was only that one night. Half a night. That’s not very much time for two people to have when they love each other.”

  Snuff put his hand on her arm. She continued.

  “The doctors didn’t know what made Willard not right. He’s retarded. Maybe it was Carter’s illness, transferred something … or maybe it was something in me. He was so handsome, though; that’s the strange thing.…”

  Carol looked at the others. All at once the arbitrariness of their lives seemed absurd. This bend in the road and the little towns on either side, linked by great acreages of desolation, had neither accepted nor refused them. There was room here, that was all—a geographical accident. What they had done, how far they had drifted was of no concern. The convulsions of weather and seasons would always be greater than they were. That was a comfort, too, Carol thought.

  She felt tired and cold suddenly and laid her head against Snuff’s knee. A warm wind rattled the doors and windows of the bar. After a while she slipped into a light sleep. She dreamed she was on a boat, though the sea swells she thought cradled her were Snuff’s arms and the back legs of the dying dog, and the Wild Man’s knees, and Mr. Abe’s folded hands. The boat passed over a school of fish. Then she could see herself from up in the air as though she were flying. It was not water that held the boat, but fish. A clap of thunder woke her.

  “What time is it?” she asked, startled.

  Snuff looked toward the grimy window and shrugged. Rain undulated across the darkened mill, slapped at the road and the windowpanes, then ceased. A car drove by. There were three gunshots this time. The Wild Man stood excitedly and ran out the door, shaking the candelabrum at the sky. “Here I am! Can you see me? Go ahead, shoot me. You can have me. Come on!” As he yelled, wind extinguished the candles one by one. When he went back inside, he found that the dog had died.

  At daylight, they stood, stiff from the long vigil. A red belt of light, had widened in the east. It looked like a shield held up to do battle with night. Outside, the Wild Man walked away from the others. They watched as he clambered up the pink dune of mineral tailings—over the crest of one, down the backside, up another. Mr. Abe’s eyebrows lifted. His long forehead was like something you could land a plane on. He pointed to the pink mounds.

  “Like cherry blossoms,” he said. “Same color.”

  Carol smiled at the wizened old man. She thought she had never seen a morning like this, a more exquisite bend in the road. She wrapped her long arms around herself and felt ribs under her sweater. Trembling from the cold that comes just before sunrise, she rocked back and forth on her feet. Snuff touched her shoulder.

  “You look like a bride,” he said.

  When the pink came out of the sky, the pink mounds turned to the color of snow and the air took on a transparency—like the hottest part of a flame.

  A car barreled down the highway toward them. It was Pinkey and two other cowboys. They waved wildly as they passed, then the one in the backseat drew a pistol and shot three times in the air.

  The Wild Man sat perched on a pink mound. The candles had fallen out of the holder and he held the empty candelabrum above his head as though proposing a toast. He started laughing. Then he stretched his legs straight out and let himself slide. He kicked over to his side and rolled. Pink dust coated his body. He rolled and rolled, laughing, and when he hit the bottom of the mound, he stood up and shook like a dog.

  Abe-san held his hand over his mouth.

  “You look like geisha,” he said and patted the Wild Man’s white cheeks.

  The Wild Man’s black eyes gleamed. He lifted his head to the sky and howled. After, he walked back toward the bar followed by the others. A buzzing noise stopped them and they looked: the neon sign over the bar door lit up suddenly and began its habitual blinking once again.

  8

  McKay watched the elk move out of the alfalfa field at dawn. He had been walking the pasture beyond the lake with a .22 rifle slung on his back. The lake was green and still and the elk ran, single file, up Eagle Nest Creek toward the falls.

  The chatter of a prairie dog stopped him. They were a nuisance to ranchers, turning an acre of grain into a desert. McKay scanned the hill. Three prairie dogs stood upright on mounds of excavated dirt—like pitchers in a baseball game. He shot once and missed and shot again. A s
cream came from behind a windbreak of cottonwoods at the top of the hill.

  McKay dropped his gun and ran toward the trees. Jumping the ditch, he saw an old Japanese man, blood-covered, holding his arm. Working quickly, he unknotted his neck scarf and tied it above the wound.

  “I didn’t see you,” he said, trying to sound calm. “I didn’t see you.…”

  The man had a delicate nose, upswinging eyebrows, and a long shining forehead. His face was covered with sweat. He watched the young man tie another piece of cloth around the wound and thought his eyes were as blue as delphinium.

  “What’s your name?” McKay asked.

  “Abe.”

  “You’ll be all right, Mr. Abe,” McKay said.

  McKay was surprised at how light the man was—light as a banty rooster, he thought—as he turned onto the dirt road that would eventually lead to town.

  The old man watched the sky as he was being carried. “Yellow singing bird,” he said. His arm felt as if sharpened rocks had been screwed into the bone. He wanted to hear the song of the bird he had been looking for when the bullet took him down, the bird with the yellow chest, but he didn’t see any now.

  It began raining softly. McKay hadn’t noticed the clouds. They rolled in so low, they seemed to skim his head. Even though the old man was light in his arms, McKay’s bad leg started to hurt. He realized he was limping. He would pace himself, and tried breathing in a deliberate rhythm, but the air came up through his chest in quick bursts.

  McKay thought of his brothers in the war. They had been wounded and someone was carrying them. Their blood dripped on the ground and looked black where it mixed with sand. They were on a beach and there were planes crashing into the water near the horizon. The two brothers hung limp because they were dead.

  McKay stopped for a moment to get his breath. He looked at the old man. Where had he come from, McKay wondered. Did I shoot him out of the sky? “You’re going to be all right. I didn’t mean to hurt you. You’ll be okay.”

  “Came out with harvest crew. Went for walk to see birds. Ones with yellow chest, big song …,” Mr. Abe said.

  “Meadowlarks.”

  “Hai.”

  McKay looked at the old man. “Are you all right?”

  “Hai.”

  They were rain-soaked now. When McKay stumbled once, Mr. Abe let out a cry. Otherwise he was silent. At a spring on the top of a hill McKay put the man down. It was dry inside the grove of junipers. McKay cut off the tail of his shirt with a pocket knife and dipped it into the water and wiped the man’s face with it. Then he cupped his hands and brought water to his lips. When they had rested, McKay cut the shirt away from the wound and squeezed water over it so he could see how deep it was. Then he cut another piece of shirt, covering the wound again and the two men continued on.

  Not long after they reached the fork in the road that led to the town of Luster, an army car came into sight and stopped by the two men. They had been looking for Mr. Abe, they said. A woman in the backseat pushed forward frantically and stepped out of the car.

  “Grandpère … what have they done to you?”

  She stroked his forehead and touched his wounded arm and looked at McKay.

  “I shot him by mistake. I didn’t see him. He was behind some trees.”

  They slid the old man onto the backseat of the car. Mariko cradled his head as they sped toward the hospital. In the rearview mirror McKay watched the woman. She looked up once.

  “Why did you do this to him?” she asked.

  McKay, in the front seat, turned around to face her. “I’m sorry.”

  “So you had a little farm accident, huh?” one of the army men said to McKay smugly.

  “I said it was an accident.”

  “I thought you was a Jap-lover,” the other man said.

  McKay glowered at him. “I looked at the wound. It’s not too bad. He lost some blood, that’s all.” Then he stretched out his bad leg, rubbing it where one of the breaks had been, and closed his eyes.

  On the highway, they passed the hermit’s green shack on a hill where three dogs were chained to a post and gunny sacks spilled over with tin cans near the door. They passed the Mormon church’s grainfields, and the victory gardens with signs commemorating a son’s or brother’s or husband’s batallion. They crossed the Heart Mountain canal where McKay’s parents had drowned, passed the beauty shop, and started down the main and only paved street of Luster, where almost every other building housed a bar.

  When McKay opened his eyes he turned to Mariko again. Mr. Abe had a smile on his face and seemed to be resting comfortably. Mariko stared straight ahead. The cords in her neck stuck out and McKay could see the quick intelligence in her eyes. She had a fine nose and a downward curve to her upper lip and cheekbones that spread sideways like gull wings. Her hair had tumbled out of the tortoiseshell barrette and each time she pulled it back, the gloss of it shone in her white hand. Her hair was so black it looked blue.

  “Our ranch borders the Camp.”

  She stared at him.

  “I’ll take full responsibility. Anything I can do.”

  Mariko nodded yes.…

  The hospital’s only two nurses greeted the army car at the front door and helped Mr. Abe to the examining room. After a wait, Doc Hoffman arrived with his black bag. He had come out of retirement as part of the war effort to replace the town’s younger doctor, who had gone to the front. He had a double chin and heavy-lidded eyes and always looked as if he had been awakened from a long sleep and everyone knew he was incompetent.

  After the nurse cleaned the wound the doctor inspected it. McKay had been right. It was a shallow wound and the bullet hadn’t hit bone, but he needed blood. McKay rolled up his sleeve and offered his arm. Mr. Abe shook his head.

  “Not O type. O negative.”

  The doctor looked embarrassed. He had forgotten even to ask the old man’s blood type. McKay and the fat nurse looked at each other and the nurse rolled her eyes.

  “Pinkey,” McKay said.

  The nurse groaned. “Oh no, not him again.”

  The army men were dispatched to McKay’s ranch. McKay wrote a note for them to give to Bobby. It explained that the men were not there to take him away, only to take Pinkey into the hospital.

  The nurse gave Mr. Abe something for pain. He sat cross-legged on the examining table and refused to lie down. He was thirsty and Mariko brought ice water. The sheriff arrived and questioned McKay and Mr. Abe about the incident. When he asked the old man if he wanted to bring charges, Mariko looked sharply at McKay and the old man said no.

  The sheriff left. Now McKay was alone in the room with Mr. Abe and Mariko. She frightened him. Sometimes their glances met, and they would both look away.

  When Bobby Korematsu saw the army car pull into the yard, he ducked behind the kitchen sink. The man with the crew cut knocked on the door. Bobby stayed down.

  “We’re not here to arrest anyone. There’s been an accident. Open up,” the man yelled.

  Finally Bobby let them in. They showed him McKay’s note, which he read carefully.

  “It’s his blood type. This hired hand of yours … he’s the only one around whose blood matches.”

  Bobby looked at the army man, then at the note again. “Okay. I get him.”

  When Pinkey finally arrived, accompanied by the army men, he stood at the entrance to the emergency room, then walked to Mr. Abe. “I sure am sorry about this and I hope you don’t mind taking in an old cowboy’s blood. It ain’t nothing to brag on and it’s a little whiskey soaked, but I don’t mean no offense by it,” he said and stepped back.

  “Have at it, Betsy,” he told the nurse and rolled up both sleeves.

  McKay looked at his hired hand. “You’re too drunk to give blood.”

  “I’m as sober as a pig in high heels,” he announced and tiptoed around in a tiny circle.

  Mr. Abe tipped his head back, laughing, and his face—most of it forehead—shone.

  “Sit d
own, Pinkey,” the nurse commanded.

  “I forgot to tell you; I faint when I see needles.”

  “Don’t look.”

  “I already seen it.”

  “I’ll just throw a bucket of water on you, if you do.”

  She jabbed the needle into Pinkey’s arm and Pinkey whimpered. The nurse who took the blood doubled as the lab technician.

  “Doc, do you think you can handle things while I’m gone?” she asked and winked at McKay.

  Now Mr. Abe lay on his good side and rested. Mariko brought more water, then paced the floor. The four men simply watched her. After another long wait the nurse returned with Pinkey’s blood. It filled a whole bottle. Mr. Abe sat up, resuming his cross-legged posture. The nurse had been called from home and her hair was still in pin curls. She had fat arms. Pinkey watched as the flesh swayed under the part of the arm where the muscle should have been. He flinched as the needle slid in then pushed his white stool closer and watched, almost mesmerized, as his blood began sinking from the bottle, traversing the tube, and disappearing into another man’s body.

  McKay felt weak in the knees and sat down. His cheeks were flushed and he wondered whether he might not be coming down with something. He looked at Mariko holding her grandfather’s hand. It wasn’t her Asian features that made her seem exotic, but the expression on her face—unguarded, and comprehending; wild, indignant, and hurt. Like an elk, he thought. Her dark eyes blazed.

  “Does it hurt much?” she asked her grandfather.

  “Much better now. Getting new blood,” he said and pointed to Pinkey brightly.

  “It ain’t exactly new,” Pinkey said out of the corner of his mouth.

  McKay excused himself and went downstairs for coffee. He was having trouble keeping warm. The cafeteria was empty except for the other nurse, whose ribs showed through her sweater when she bent over. She had long teeth like a jackrabbit’s and had made clucking sounds when Pinkey had come in weeks before with a broken leg. McKay poured a cup of coffee, then set it down because he felt dizzy.

  “Excuse me,” he said to no one in particular and left the room hurriedly.