“Will do.”
“And put that Cobb’s Creek on Pinkey’s tab, goddamn it, not the ranch’s.”
Snuff laughed because he knew it came out to the same thing.
A week before Christmas, Abe-san invited McKay to the Camp’s Christmas party. When he arrived, an Issei Santa Claus gave out gifts to the children. The Santa was an old man with a narrow face, so skinny, the costume fell in folds from his neck, but his eyes shone and he squeaked in delight with the children.
After refreshments there was an art show: flower arrangements by the ikebana club; charcoal drawings of Camp life by Estelle Ishigo, a Caucasian who had relocated with her Nisei husband; and Mariko’s “Fifty-two Views of Heart Mountain,” in the style of Hiroshige, a card said.
McKay was not prepared for what he saw when he came to Mariko’s work. The paintings were ink washes on smooth, double-folded paper that accordioned out into a scroll. The images themselves were a kind of blank composed of only a few brushstrokes. Yet, something strong appeared in the emptiness. She had used yellow, blue, and black ink and a tenacious softness washed over the desolate landscape rendered there.
Some of the views were imagined—parts of the mountain she had never seen, like the alluvial fans above his ranch. In one, the mountain soared beyond the picture frame. Only its midsection could be seen. Yet no other image had given a sense of the mountain’s wholeness in quite this way, McKay thought. Another view showed the top of a waterfall. How had she known there was one behind his ranch? A wide swatch of water cascaded over the rock. Almost the whole painting was a vertical tongue of water.
The last five were not landscapes but Camp scenes. Heart Mountain was included, the view straight down the long rows of barracks, its blunt peak barely inked in. In the foreground of another painting three women, dressed as courtesans, appeared to be playing samisens, but when McKay looked more closely, he saw they were holding machine guns.
After, the Buddhist and Christian children gave a joint pageant. Joseph, Mary, and the Buddha all slept at the same inn, a ryokan. In the crush of people McKay had not been able to find Mariko. He sat on a hard folding chair next to Mr. Abe and when the play was over, he rode home.
An antelope heart is not big. No bigger than a man’s fist and in some light it shines. McKay had saddled his “long circle” horse before dawn and ridden the old mail trail south along the creek lined with house-sized boulders. He thought of the day the finches and pine siskins had passed through the ranch, down from the high mountains. How slender their necks looked as they balanced on thick stalks and reached across the emptiness—the same emptiness Mariko’s paintings were about—for seed. Now he heard only the three-note whistle of the red-tailed hawk and the wind, less fitful but more labored, bringing winter in.
The wind, having shifted away from the north, was in his favor and with binoculars, he glassed the small band as he rode the edge of the juniper. Finally, he picked out a dry doe and got off his horse. He pulled his rifle from the scabbard—slowly, as if there were no such thing as motion or gravity—then stepped out in front of the trees and fired, a 250-yard shot.
The antelope that fell had been drinking. She lurched forward on her knees, then tilted her head to one side as if trying to see down into the earth where the dead go. When McKay reached her, he could see where her black horn had carved a crescent shape in the dirt. Heart Mountain rose amid spears of gold light and the mountains behind, the Beartooths, were the color of wild plums. After he gutted out the antelope he held the heart in one hand and traced the route of the main artery with his finger. The thought of the steady, racing pump as the antelope ran, mouth opened to the wind, made him want Mariko.
McKay covered the carcass with cedar boughs, then tipped his horse into a trot, not north toward the ranch, but south again, out onto a long terrace of land that overlooked the relocation camp. He rode hard and when it started getting dark he closed his eyes. The thought of winter, of whiteness unobstructed, made him feel sick. What the hell was he doing way out here at dinnertime, he wondered. He opened his eyes. There was a white flash. Then he saw: the lights in the guard towers had been switched on.
Loneliness does not originate in one particular thing, an old Japanese poem his mother had taught him began. He could not remember the rest. Evening came over the pines on the mountain, inking them black. There were no leaves on the trees so the wind modulated a sky suspended between sunset and moonrise and McKay knew he had come to see, no, to behold Mariko.
He did not ride directly to the front gate but instead turned north and west away from it. He circled the entire camp once. It was dark and he could see into some of the barracks: framed lives like cartoon strips of people who shouldn’t be there, but on their farms and fishing boats and stores. Where the fence drew near the living quarters, the mass of lights stunned McKay. His pulse raced. He felt as if the path made by the fence builders around the Camp were a drug, a black vein. This is the way a hyena circles, or a bachelor coyote kicked out of the den. Was it that or a pilgrimage? He thought of the Mexican penitentes he had seen as a child walking on their knees and the bits of flesh left behind on the steps of the cathedral, and of the first time he had made love, wrapped in a canvas dam in a dry irrigation ditch, how his face had rubbed into the red dirt on the side of the ditch. A clod had fallen into his open mouth and he had laughed as the taste of it mingled with the taste of Madeleine.
She had called him from Omaha. The calves had sold fine and she said she wanted to stay on and visit her parents if she wasn’t needed at the ranch. When she asked McKay how he was, he had replied, “I’m fine. I’m great. I’m like a fish on ice”—the same thing he had told his brother.
In her absence, in everyone’s absence, McKay and Bobby had taken to eating oyaku donburi for breakfast every morning. The donburi was made of chicken, scallions, and eggs sautéed in shoyu and sake, put over rice in a bowl. “A meal in a bowl” it was called. They washed it down with more sake than they needed so early in the morning, but they didn’t care because it was the only way to bridge the gap between Ted’s letters, the long wait for word about Henry, and Madeleine’s return.
McKay thought about the day Madeleine came home with Henry on her arm. “My husband,” she announced. McKay thought it was a joke being played on him. But the look of elation and discomfort in Henry’s eyes told him something different.
“How could you?” McKay asked. “Without me?”
In the months to come he and Henry grew close. They rode colts together and in the summer, when the rodeos began, Henry heeled while McKay headed steers in team roping. “I love you, you sonofabitch, but only because you love Madeleine,” McKay told him.
The three of them went to dances together. McKay and Henry took turns cutting in on each other. The time they drove home in a blizzard and went off the road, the three of them had to bundle up in two sleeping bags zipped together until morning.
“Don’t you think there can be too much of a good thing?” Henry quipped. Madeleine laughed but McKay poked his head out into the frosty air and in a solemn voice whispered, “No.”
McKay slowed the colt to a walk as he neared the buildings. A heavy carapace had come down on him, front and back like a hard chitinous shell and under it he felt his heart beating and the cold trickle of antelope blood on his chest. He kicked his horse into a trot.
A smell rose from the path. No. It came from a vent in the mess hall—a smell of beef hearts stewing. He thought of Mariko’s feet. Now he couldn’t even think of what her face looked like, but her feet were cloven hooves and she could run, open-mouthed, like an antelope, to or from him—either way.
He rode south toward the gate. Pools of light lay on the rough ground. As McKay approached, a man’s voice boomed out in the darkness.
“Stop where you are.”
Now the light reeled in McKay’s direction and he kicked his colt into a lope.
“Harry, you bastard, it’s me,” he yelled.
There
was a burst of rifle fire over his head.
“Stop where you are.”
McKay’s horse made a sliding stop and he dismounted hurriedly.
“Harry, you bastard, is that you up there?”
“Who’s there?” a voice shouted sternly.
“Stop shooting and look.”
“Name, please.” The man shone a flashlight in McKay’s face.
“Who the hell do you think it is?”
The guard leaned over the railing of the tower. “Well, you SOB … why didn’t you tell me it was …”
“Shit, you must need a hearing aid. And you always did need glasses.”
“I didn’t hear anything but that horse.”
“That’s because you were too busy shooting.”
“Well you could have let me know you were coming.”
“The walkie-talkie on my pony’s broke.”
“McKay, what are you doing out here at this time of night?”
“Need to see someone.”
“Jesus, you’re goofier than ever.”
“You’re still a lousy shot.”
Harry, the guard, descended the stairs from the tower. At the bottom he squatted on the ground beside McKay and whispered conspiratorially.
“What can I do for you, McKay?”
McKay looked his old high school friend in the eye. “Harry, I need to get into this sonofabitch,” he said, motioning beyond the wire.
“I can’t do that for you. Visiting hours are over.”
“You can damn well look the other way.”
Harry stared at the cold ground and drove a stick through the dust. “Jesus.”
McKay stood impatiently.
Harry stood too and rubbed his forehead wearily. “Okay, I’ll write you out a pass.”
“Thanks, Harry,” McKay said and handed him the colt’s reins. He turned his back, unbuttoned his pants and relieved himself. Then he stepped through the wire.
“Hey, wait. I’ve got to give you your pass.”
“Keep the paperwork for me. I’ll just lose it,” McKay said, grinning in the dark.
The colt nudged Harry’s arm. “Hey, is this the colt bucked me off last spring?”
“Yea, but he’s copacetic now. You can ride him.”
“You lyin’ bastard.”
McKay walked in the direction of Mariko’s barrack. It was dark now and the ground was rough and he didn’t have a flashlight. He wished he had taken the flask off the saddle. Hell, Harry’s probably drinking out of it or maybe he’s gotten too damned righteous for that, he thought, and walked on unsteadily.
On a little rise above the barracks, he came on two lovers silhouetted by the lights. Their heads moved together, then apart. He called out. They stood abruptly and straightened their clothes. When McKay limped toward them, they ran. He sat where they had been necking and thought he could still feel the warmth of their bodies in the dirt. That morning he had read in the papers about Guadalcanal and the fight to keep Henderson Field and wondered what it was like to be there, at close range, under fire. The lights below looked like an airbase. McKay imagined walking down to the landing strip, climbing in a plane, radioing the tower for takeoff. He would fly over dark water dotted with ships, yes, Japanese ships, and for once the errant bomb that for some time had been flying beside him would be stashed underneath, neat and tidy in the belly of the plane until he let it drop, and once he had sent it plunging, the air would suddenly feel light—light as a summer night in Wyoming—and he would be dead.
As McKay walked between the barracks his chest pounded and he wondered if he was having a heart attack. He didn’t care. A door slammed and opened again and he saw Will Okubo storming out of the last apartment and Mariko standing there. She didn’t see McKay at first, then her eyebrows lifted straight up into the middle of her forehead with an elegance and innocence he had not expected. She grabbed McKay’s hand and pulled him into the doorway.
“Why are they shooting? Who are they shooting at?”
“Me. But I know the guy. He’s a lousy shot anyway,” McKay said nonchalantly and smiled.
“They shot an old man in another Camp last week. He was looking for arrowheads.”
McKay looked at her. She was still holding his hand. He could smell her French perfume. He felt as if the errant bomb which had been following him all these days was her body—the slim hard torso moving close, then keening away like the hull of a boat, a hull of desire.
The evening breeze that had inked the pines black lifted her hair. Then his head was under it, his lips against her neck, and they were turning in a circle away from the door and he heard the whistle of a distant train coming closer, the train bringing Madeleine home—a Christmas Eve surprise—and forgot about it when Mariko’s strong painter’s fingers pressed into his back like dowels and he felt the length of her body against him. And once, when he opened his eyes, he saw the Northern Star.
“Why are you here?” she gasped.
McKay reached into his pocket, badly stained with blood now. He felt the firm, slippery muscle—not his own, but the antelope heart—and, holding it in the palm of his hand, presented it to her.
12
The night before Madeleine boarded the train for Wyoming after a month away she bit her tongue so hard in her sleep, there was blood on the pillow in the morning. Henry had come to her in a dream. He was sitting on a stool with one leg crossed over the other, talking to her. He said he had tried to make arrangements to see her but there wasn’t time; he had to go somewhere. Outside, planes were flying up a narrow canyon and crashing into a rock wall. When she saw him next he was naked, standing by a window with his back to her. Then he turned around and said he couldn’t watch those planes; he couldn’t look anymore. She always called Henry her little monkey because he wasn’t tall and whenever she woke from nightmares, he made faces until she smiled.
In the morning she pulled all the shades in her parents’ big house and sat on the floor of the closet where her prom dress still hung. She counted—the number of letters in Henry’s name, the number of days, weeks, months since she had taken the train to Omaha, then gone to Kansas City, where her parents lived. Their house was built high on a hill overlooking the river. At seven, her mother came into the darkened room. “I’ll make you some hot milk,” she said upon seeing her daughter curled up on the closet floor.
“I feel like a bum calf when you do this to me,” Madeleine said and when her mother said, “What?” Madeleine said, “Never mind.”
The house was decorated for Christmas with a spruce that touched the living room ceiling and a gingerbread house and silver bowls in the shape of shells filled with ribbon candy.
“Everyone’s waiting for someone,” Madeleine’s mother continued. “And everyone’s waiting for this dreadful war to end. Remember, you’re not the only one.”
When the Rocky Mountains came into view, Madeleine was sitting in the dining car of the train. A waiter served her a sliced chicken sandwich and a single rose shook in its silver vase. The triangular shape of Long’s Peak looked like geometry: she was on the south end, Henry was west, McKay north.
She thought of Henry, his green eyes, the one deep line that traversed his forehead and funneled sweat to his temples. It had been a year. Her parents thought she had married down. They asked for what she called “his pedigree.” She told them he didn’t have one but he made her laugh and had a feel for livestock and was gentle with her and could raise animals from the dead. That hadn’t been enough to satisfy them but she was married to Henry anyway on a weekend by a justice of the peace who had given them a speeding ticket on the way into town.
When her father asked what had happened to McKay, she had answered, “Nothing, he just didn’t ask me to marry him, that’s all.” As the train moved toward Long’s Peak, she thought of the way Henry’s chest felt against hers, the back of his neck, his knees, but every time—as if an electric wire had jogged her memory the wrong way—she saw McKay.
In the tile
d bathroom of the Denver train station, where she had to change trains, Madeleine took stock of herself. Everywhere around her were men and women in uniform: WACs and WAVEs, army nurses and medics, men in the infantry, air corps, sailors and navy flyers.… She wore brown gabardine riding pants, a white shirt, cowboy boots, and the belt buckle she won roping with McKay in high school. When she leaned forward to put on lipstick, the tube dropped to the floor. The tip, shaped to the contour of her lips, chipped off. A woman in a WAC uniform stepped on it by accident and a woman holding a crying baby who had probably never seen its father bumped into her from the behind. Madeleine walked out the door.
Outside she gazed north. One side of Long’s Peak was flattened and bright with sun on snow. The air was crisp. She took a deep breath. She might have been going to see Henry but where do you go to see a man missing in action, she wondered, then walked out to the platform where the train to Wyoming awaited her.
“How do I look, honey?” Loretta twirled around in front of Dutch and Pinkey at the train station. She was wearing wool trousers and a white shirt with the scarf Pinkey had bought for her at the dime store.
“You don’t look like a honky-tonk cowgirl no more,” Dutch said a little wistfully.
She pressed against him. “Keep it buttoned up, okay?” she said, placing her hand flat against his fly.
“What about me?” Pinkey asked just as the steam engine came down on them with a deafening roar.
“You, too,” she yelled to Pinkey, fumbling nervously in her purse for the ticket.
They walked her to her car. A Negro porter descended the steps, looked at her ticket, and directed her inside. Pinkey stared at the man: his eyes glittered and the inside of his mouth looked like bleeding flesh. Pinkey couldn’t remember the last time he had seen a black man. It made him smile to think he had seen so much of life, even here, in Luster. “I’m getting plumb cultivated,” he thought.
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