Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  Loretta hung out the window and let her arm down to the two men. She looked uncertain about her decision to leave. Pinkey noticed the way her breasts filled her white blouse as she leaned. He wanted to touch them one last time.

  “Will you miss me?” Loretta asked.

  “You bet we will,” Pinkey volunteered. “We’ll be true. Hell, I can feel myself turning back into a virgin already.”

  Dutch laughed nervously as the train clunked forward. The sky had a smothered look and steam from the engine added to it. Loretta threw a kiss and the train that brought Madeleine home for Christmas took Loretta away.

  Madeleine stood on the end of the platform with her slicker over her arm, clutching her vet bag. Some of the men nodded as they walked by, assuming that McKay would be there to pick her up. But no one came.

  “Hello, you little heifer.”

  Madeleine wheeled around, then gave Pinkey a hug.

  Pinkey looked over his shoulder at Dutch. “See how easy it is: out of the arms of one, into the arms of another.”

  “Oh shut up, Pinkey,” Madeleine said. “Are you giving me a ride to the ranch? Where’s McKay?”

  Pinkey studied her for a moment, then pushed his hat back on his head. “Don’t know where McKay is. Hard to say these days.”

  “We’ll give you a ride if you find us an outfit to drive,” Dutch volunteered.

  “Yea, let’s steal us a nice Caddy,” Pinkey mumbled.

  A black coupe swerved in alongside the platform and Carol Lyman put on her dark glasses, then came around to the front of her car.

  “Need a ride, Madeleine?”

  She picked up Madeleine’s suitcase and hoisted it into the trunk and the two women drove off. “Merry Christmas,” Madeleine heard Pinkey yell, and looked out the window. It had been fall when she left and now the country was covered with snow.

  “Where’s McKay?” she asked.

  “Busy I guess,” Carol said flatly as the car pulled away from the station, north through town.

  “What’s new around here since I’ve been gone?”

  Carol thought for a moment. “There’s been a funeral, for that Dickens boy; McKay said he’d gotten two letters from Ted, nothing from Champ, of course. Anything from Henry?”

  “No,” Madeleine replied and looked at her driver. Carol sat very straight when she drove. Her dark glasses were on the dashboard and from time to time, she touched them, folding the bows back, or held them in her hand on the seat.

  “How’s McKay?” Madeleine asked.

  “Don’t you know?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Oh, I just thought you would know more than I do.… Well … he’s been awfully damned nervous. Just looks kind of upset all the time; of course, that’s been since the shooting.”

  “What shooting?”

  Carol looked at her again, then back at the road. “Oh … thought you knew … shot a Jap. Really tore him up pretty bad.”

  “Tore who up?”

  “Oh, not the Jap … he’s an old man … just wandered off and McKay’s bullet grazed him.”

  “God,” Madeleine said.

  “Just a scrape really. Lost some blood. Carried that old man on his back for miles.…”

  Madeleine rolled the window down. The closed car made her feel sick. She looked out at the familiar landscape—the one paved street of brick and frame houses giving way to grain and hay fields, and those to rangeland studded with sage.

  “Sometimes when you’ve been away and come back, everything looks so big … so much bigger than I remembered … kind of empty almost.…”

  “Things always look that way,” Carol said.

  13

  Before everyone came back that night—everyone being Pinkey and McKay—Bobby lit the candles on the Christmas tree. It was a tall cedar McKay had cut in the draw above the heifer pasture and dragged in behind his rope horse. Bobby lay down on the rug under it. It would be a long night, and, expecting no one, he let his mind wander. The room was dark and he thought looking up into the lighted tree was like looking into a city—each light was a room with a stranger inside.

  The last year Bobby cooked for the railroad crews, when he was thirty-nine, he spent a Christmas Eve like this one alone in a section car. It had been put off on a siding near Laramie and when the other men went into town, Bobby stayed behind. He remembered lying on his bunk looking out at the foot of snow that had fallen and blown into hard drifts against the car. Once a train passed on the other track and a long time after the whistle sound dissipated, a man knocked on the door and stepped inside.

  Bobby knew the man. He delivered groceries to the railroaders every week, mailed their letters, bought their cigarettes, advised them on where to go to get girls when they went to town. He was young but his face had weathered and he had pale red hair. The diamond ring on his finger shone in the window light. Bobby had known him only to say hello, though the man had brought Bobby special treats—a cake from the bakery and a bottle of whiskey on occasion. Bobby was pleased by the visit. The man set a small gift on the table between them.

  “It’s Christmas Eve,” he said quietly. That was all.

  Bobby made coffee and they sat for a long time while the red-haired man smoked nervously. He informed Bobby of some of the local news—a restaurant that had burned down, an illegitimate baby, and so on. Bobby liked the way the smoke curled up one side of the man’s face and tangled in his hair. In the dark, the red tip of the cigarette moved like a wand, carving designs that vanished between them.

  He asked Bobby about Japan, what the rooms looked like, and Bobby told him of the kimonos and the baths and the Osaka wharves. Then the visitor told how he had been born in a sheep wagon on the edge of town during a blizzard that killed a hundred ewes and lambs as well as the camptender. After, his father had gone on a two-year binge and later, his mother was committed to the state institution.

  “I was really raised by the herders,” he said. “And I was born on Christmas Eve. So you see …”

  The gas lamp flickered as the man spoke, as if taking breaths between words. It made the narrow car seem to move again, clicking over tracks, and Bobby wished his friend a happy birthday.

  At midnight the man asked Bobby to open the package. It wasn’t much, he warned. Inside was a silk scarf. Not the kind the cowboys wore, but patterned, with bars of silver and blue, like the sky, Bobby thought, and he tied it around his neck. When he stood to adjust the lamp, the red-haired man jumped abruptly to his feet, grabbing Bobby by the waist. Bobby didn’t move, and when he looked up, the man closed his eyes and turned his head away.

  “What’s wrong?” Bobby asked in a small voice.

  The man didn’t reply. They just stood that way for some time.

  The man’s hands finally dropped. Quickly he unfastened Bobby’s trousers and let them fall. He clasped his hands at the small of Bobby’s back where it felt so warm and pressed his cheek to him.

  They lay together on the floor of the section car with the gas lamp faltering, naked except for Bobby’s long scarf. Another train passed. Its whistle sounded like something green, Bobby thought, and the trembling he had felt in his own body seemed to spread everywhere now. The silverware in the drawer above their heads rattled.

  He couldn’t remember whether they slept then but he remembered remembering: the time his parents had taken him on a boat down the Inland Sea of Japan. The first night, the son of a samurai practiced swordplay up and down the decks and on either side, the lanterns of tiny villages glowed, and the next day, when they reached the southern island of Kyushu, he saw the single spray of steam from a hot spring jetting into the frigid air.

  On the way home from the Camp, McKay put his colt into a steady, even trot. The horse wove a path through the sagebrush until he came to the creek that divided the Camp from the ranch. He stopped when he saw the water. It had frozen and thawed and a middle strip of blue water showed under the thinnest pane of ice. The colt lowered his head and snorted,
then balked. McKay worked him up and down, backing and turning and bringing him forward to the crossing again, letting him smell the frozen water. Finally the colt stuck his neck out, almost pulling the rein from McKay’s gloved hand, and leapt over the creek like a jaguar, McKay thought, because he had seen one do that in Mexico when he was a boy, and when the colt came down on the other side he kept running. McKay squeezed him hard with his left knee and turned the colt uphill and let him run until he wasn’t scared anymore. Near the top of the hill the colt stopped. McKay backed him a few steps, gave him a loose rein, then turned him toward home.

  It was night. In the breaks, the pine tree tops creaked. The day before Christmas Eve merged in his mind with Christmas Eve, because he had been going back and forth to the Camp so often. A train whistle shrilled across the open space. He would be too late to pick up Madeleine, he thought, a little ashamed.

  When he reached the corral, his horse was wet with sweat and the long hairs of his winter coat were frosted. McKay lit the Coleman lantern and hung it from the saddle shed. Then he pulled the saddle and rubbed the horse down with a clean towel and began walking him.

  The three bright stars of Orion’s belt rose and the long tail of Eridanus hung down over the Camp—over Mariko’s head. The lantern swung and McKay and the horse moved in and out of its stirring light.

  When he stopped to feel the horse’s chest, he saw the lights on the tree inside the house. Bobby must have lit them. It was Christmas Eve after all, he decided. He wondered whether Madeleine had gone straight home. The lantern’s constant whirring sound sputtered as it ran out of fuel, and when he put the horse away, the lantern faded slowly like the fade at one of Harry Vermeer’s movies. McKay looked up. A single falling star seemed to come right at him, then opened out into a reddish gold glow and vanished. “Well this sure as hell ain’t Bethlehem,” he said aloud to the sky. His spurs rang as he walked to the house.

  14

  As if it mattered. His screened porch felt more like a cell than the Camp did to him. He could not see the Camp from there, only the flare of lights like the sun’s corona. When the screens were wet they smelled like rotting mineral. Extreme cold had taken all the other fragrances away.

  He had received another letter from his brother Ted, who said he had been transferred to a converted hospital ship and had seen so much dying going on, he had forgotten that the human body is capable of giving birth. The lagoon reeked of decomposed flesh. He wanted McKay to know that he was all right and that no new news had been learned about Henry. Then he added a postscript. One of his friends from the Stanford Army Medical Unit heard from his wife that she was leaving him. He jumped down the stairs at the hospital in Palermo. “He would have been the best doctor of all of us,” Ted said. “He had the biggest heart. But then again, that quality might have made him unsuitable for the job.”

  McKay lay on his cot. His head felt as if it were unraveling. He had circled the Camp like the bituminous raven, gliding for days on a single wing beat. The people in the Camp slept on cots too, though they’d had to make their own mattresses by stuffing straw into ticking cases. He knew, because he had provided the straw.

  Just after Christmas word got around that he was visiting the granddaughter of the man he had shot. Someone wrote him a hate letter which expressed shock at the idea that he had “allowed an intimacy to develop with a dirty Jap.” After he read it, he held the paper with a gloved hand and stuffed it into the cook stove to burn.

  Now McKay stood with his hip pressed against the cold screen and thought of how Mariko had hated him at first, then turned inexplicably toward him. Sometimes the fierceness of their attraction made everything go black, as if burnt, or else it was a black thing tunneling through ordinary air. He thought passion was like war. It was weightless and heavy at the same time. It became a catch in the breath every breath and left a long wake and widening rings of concentric circles as if to mark the place where a rock had sunk in a lake or a trout had surfaced.

  He thought of the day tears broke from Mariko’s eyes and fell down the side of her face into her ears and how he had caught them with both his fingers and tasted the tears. At that moment the carapace broke. He saw it float from him. It had not been anything like a tortoise shell, but metallic, the outer skin of the errant bomb that had come too close and held him rigid all those days.

  Now Christmas was over. Later that week Pinkey went to work again cleaning the calving barn and Bobby pointed out the ridge where he wanted his ashes buried when he died—above the ranch on the flank of Heart Mountain, the very ridge where McKay watched the elk walk single file almost dutifully, down the frozen creek bed that divided the ranch from the Camp into the year nineteen hundred and forty-three.

  PART TWO

  1943

  What is this flooding me, childhood or manhood …

  and the hunger that crosses the bridge in between?

  —Walt Whitman

  15

  To hell with everything, that’s my New Year’s resolution. I’m a different person than I was, with an altered destiny, but who cares? My interest in history has taken a political bent, and swimming, which was my discipline, my art so to speak, has been beached for a while. I’ve gotten a good, strong dose of my Japanese heritage, but really, what’s there to celebrate? A year of war in the Pacific, a year of legalized racism, a year in a concentration camp.

  After too much sake, I sacked out at Ben’s. In the morning went “home.” Mom and Pop were sitting together on the edge of the bed. I knew something funny was going on when they asked me to sit down. Boy, oh boy, did they drop a bomb on me. “Your father has something to tell you,” Mom began. Pop cleared his throat and began speaking without looking at me. “You have older brother we never tell you about,” he said. “He’s in Army Air Corps. He fly twenty-six mission so far in Europe and North Africa. We just find that out too. He ask us to tell you, so we tell you, now.”

  I sat down on a stool in front of them. Mom was wringing her hands. I couldn’t talk for a long time. Everything around me shut down and all I could hear were the words “You have a brother.” Finally, I tried out his name: “Kenny.”

  I have a brother. Stephen Kai Nakamura has a brother. I’m not an orphan; I’m not an only child.

  It’s useless asking Issei questions, even my own parents. They just grunt or look away. I flew off the handle, picked up a stool and smashed it against a bed. Mom screamed something in Japanese. I stopped thrashing about and looked at her. “Why have you done this to me?” I asked.

  This afternoon they showed me a picture. Kenny sure doesn’t look like me. He’s smaller and leaner. He’s the only Nisei flier in the whole country and here I am, an “enemy alien” locked away. When I asked Mom how I was different from Kenny she said, “You’re both smart, but he’s not cocky.”

  Went to the latrine in the middle of the night, sat on the can and cried.

  The next day I tried to stay calm but it’s just too much to take in at one time.

  Fixed the stool I broke. Pop even helped me and finally we were able to talk. I asked them why they had sent their two sons away to be raised by strangers. What was wrong with what they had to offer? Mom cried and cried, then Pop spoke. He told me how poor they were when we came along, and afraid for us. They weren’t treated well in California—“Things were done to us, or behind our backs, and we want you to be real Americans,” he said. “To own land and become citizen and to speak without accent. How could you have that living in a shack with them, in a household where only Japanese was spoken?”

  “I wouldn’t have cared,” I said.

  Kenny is a turret gunner on a “Liberator”—that’s a plane. According to the casualty lists, turret gunners don’t last very long. They sit in the tail with a gun, very exposed. Will I ever meet him? Maybe it would have been better never to have known of his existence. But Mom keeps saying he has a lucky charm—an Issei wives’ tale—something about tiny holes behind his ears that indicate a charmed
life. “He’ll live,” Mom says. But I’m not counting on that or anything.

  We have a small library here and I’ve been reading Defoe on the plague, The Narrow Journey to the Deep North by Basho, Samuel Pepys, some World War I journals, and Ernie Pyle. All my ideas of history have broken apart. Aren’t diarists really historians and aren’t historians really failed novelists?

  These thoughts—while stuffing myself on Li’s New Year’s box full of my favorite foods: cookies, dried ginger, panettone, jasmine tea. The accompanying letter was less bountiful. It went something like this: “How are you? I am fine. Jimmy Wong says to come home; he has a job for you.” But what the hell. War is war and absence does not make the heart grow fonder. Shared the food with the usual gang—Ben Iwasaka, Emi, Mariko, Will, Abe-san, and Mom and Pop. We sat in a circle on the floor by the stove and ate and drank tea until there was no more. I told everyone about Kenny. Odd feelings overtake me when I talk about him. I’m not “me” anymore; I’m someone’s brother.

  The next day, the talk at work was about the Nisei girl found screwing an MP in the linen closet. We had a good laugh imagining the look of the Issei who opened the door on them. The MP jumped up and pulled his gun. The old woman ran, and the girl buried her head in the towels and screamed. If this is consorting with the “enemy,” who cares? C’est la guerre.… He was probably a nice guy. Harry something … No, I’m lying. He’s probably a cad and she’s a lost little girl, and he’s ruined her.

  Afterward, a committee approached the administration with a proposal for a red light district. The idea was met with scorn. Yet it’s true—things have gotten out of hand around here: illegitimate births, etc. Like all prisoners, we find that our hungers intensify and we do almost anything to satisfy them.

  Later. I’ve retreated to the latrine again because the lights are on all night and I can’t sleep. Mom told me stories about when Kenny was a baby and I feel I’m getting to know him. But I’ve had this crazy thought too: maybe everything they say is a lie; maybe there is no Kenny; maybe I’m not their son.