Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  “I’m not sure I want to do this,” I said.

  He ignored me again and showed me where to sit. I slumped, bracing myself with two hands, and he walked around behind me and kneed me in the back, then lifted one ankle so it rested on the opposite knee.

  “There.”

  “Now what do I do?”

  His eyebrows lifted. “Nothing,” he said.

  It’s easy to lose track of time in the dark. I don’t even remember whether I had my eyes opened or closed. All I knew is that my ankle hurt like hell and I was bored enough to fall straight over sideways, asleep.

  Abe-san righted me. He was sitting too, but facing the wall. I kept thinking about thinking, and about how much my feet and legs and butt hurt and about getting laid. But what did all that have to do with Abe-san’s Zen?

  Finally, he got up and said I could go home. Was it still night or was it morning? I could barely put any weight on my feet at first, but I felt good. Not sleepy, but relaxed … but good God, that’s hardly worth the effort.

  Effortless effort. I’d heard him say that a few times. Another riddle that makes little sense to me. Saw Mariko on her way to class and she asked how I’d liked Zazen. I gave her an unenthusiastic shrug and said it was all right. “But what’s the point?” I asked.

  “Oh, there isn’t one,” she said and went on her way.

  Monday. Mariko and Will had a fight today. He calls her “Mariké.” Sometimes they speak in French, then English with a little Japanese as asides. It was all because Mariko isn’t militant enough. “I want to paint.” That’s what she finally screamed. Will accused her of all kinds of things—he called her inu (“dog” or “informer” in Japanese) and said she was a bourgeois and nothing else. His heroes are Gandhi and Baudelaire—he quoted from them, and she said, “I can paint. That’s all I can do.” Then I heard him hit her.

  Oh God, that hurt me when she cried out. I started to run to their room, but froze at my own door. There was a long silence. I heard Will apologize, then he said in a little boy’s voice, “What about me?”

  Later. Mom said Will is hinekureta, which means “warped” and “twisted,” a person who pretends he doesn’t need love and doesn’t know how to love others. He came to see me after the fight and I pretended to be asleep.

  Something about when Will hit her made me go crazy. When I went to her studio she acted as if nothing had happened. But the walls between us are paper thin … she must have realized I heard them. Anyway, her eye was beginning to swell and turn black. “Hello Mar …” That’s all I could say. She must think I’m a dolt. What a beautiful woman she is. She wears Will’s clothes and piles her hair on top of her head samurai-style, but tussled with long strands hanging down. “Are you okay?” I asked. She bit her lip and nodded yes. I wanted to hold her safely in my arms but instead, I asked her if she would do a series of sketches for the newspaper—of Camp life. She agreed to the idea and then showed me some of her work.

  Her “Views,” à la Hiroshige and Hokusai, are stunning. One set is a series of “pillar prints”—hashira-e—five inches by twenty-eight inches laterally, to hang on a pillar. They’re portraits of people in the Camp doing what they do—sitting around a potbellied stove, working in their rock gardens, playing baseball, sleeping, using the latrines, washing clothes, lining up for the mess hall, holding hands at the movies.

  The other series is painted on long horizontal sheets. They’re done in the style of the Genjii scrolls with a “roof blown off” perspective. One is allowed to look down into many rooms at once, at many lives. The perspective is flattened and skewed on a diagonal. There’s a feeling of movement in time, not because we’re fooled into thinking we’re seeing frozen bits of action, but because the design is so overpowering. It picks you up and takes you where it wants you to go and you surrender to its flat, imperious momentum. I might add that in these she has laid our block wide open.

  She told me about Hokusai’s life. He was poor and lived haphazardly. He moved ninety-six times in his life. Dipped a rooster’s feet in paint and let him run over big sheets of paper; made a sixty-foot-high painting of the Daruma, and was also a master of the shunga, erotic prints. Every time he started a new series of paintings, it seems he changed his name.

  After, Mariko gave me something strong from a little bottle on the table where she mixes her paints. She told me about drinking absinthe in Paris. “What it does to your mind … oh! là là …,” she said in a lilting French accent. She laughed and when I blushed, she pressed her knuckles against my cheek. I felt like a fool.

  Saturday night. Talked with Will. Didn’t mention the fight. He looks paler than usual; his skin is like marble and there are black circles around his eyes. Some of his “comrades” came by. He surrounds himself with punks and troublemakers. Like me in Chinatown. I can’t forgive him for hitting Mariko, but it’s not my business. Instead, things are subdued between us. I know he senses the change and the thought of it makes him even angrier.

  Looking around the room where he and Mariko live, I see she’s messy and he’s neat. There’s a flat river rock on the floor beside his bed, which is pushed next to hers, and on it, a red leather-bound volume of Baudelaire and a Japanese fan. He’s the kind who doesn’t need much. I wonder whether he’ll ever feel at home.

  Turned into a regular all-night bull session. Finally moved to the mess hall so we didn’t keep everyone awake. Yuri and Eddie are fishermen with tattoos all over their arms. Yuri smokes a pipe and when he laughs he sounds like a seal. Tom runs the liquor combine here. I guess that’s where Iwasaka gets his sake. He’s big as a sumo wrestler and mean, but he has a soft voice. Carl’s the smart one, the clever city boy and the worst troublemaker. I believe he would kill anyone who obstructed his beliefs. Will lets them yak and argue, then clears his throat and lays down the law. It’s amazing, but they listen. He orchestrates their temperaments, the extravagant differences between them, and at the end of the night, they are of one mind. We’ve decided to take turns reading and interpreting the American Constitution, to come to a better understanding of our loyalty questionnaire case.

  Monday. Two days of gloom. The ground is bare and the sky is gray and the trees are leafless. I’ve never seen a place that looks so dead. The Issei are in a state of shock over it. They had such high hopes for spring, thinking it would be like Japan, with cherry trees blossoming. I asked the guard just when spring did come to the Big Horn Basin. He gave me a funny look and said, “How do I know? I’ve only been in this state eighteen months.” When I told Pop the joke, he didn’t understand.

  18

  “Willard, you drop that blind.”

  Willard did as he was told and when the blinds clapped shut, dust blew onto his arm. He had been watching Mañuel’s roosters.

  “Get ready. You’ll be late for work,” Carol Lyman snapped at her son. It was Thursday again and she was eager to get on the road and enjoy her “day of freedom.” She watched Willard walk across the living room as she put the final touches of red polish on her nails.

  “And get a coat. It’s winter, you know.…”

  On the way back through the room, Willard peeked at Mañuel’s yard a last time. He wanted to touch the roosters’ red combs. Then he wondered what it felt like to have feathers.

  “That’s enough for one morning. They’ll be here when you get home,” Carol said. After she helped him into his coat, they went to their jobs in town.

  The next week the Stockyard Café closed down because of the rationed meat, coffee, sugar, and fuel oil to heat the place. Carol took the news calmly, bought two magazines at the drugstore, and drove to Snuff’s.

  That same week Rose had found Willard slumped between the aisles of the canned goods and dry cereals. She thought he was sick. When she looked into his vacant eyes, he lifted his head. His face was round and sweet and had not hardened. His mouth opened as if he were going to speak, but the sound that came out was like a horse’s groaning when the cinch is pulled up too tight.

/>   “Willard, are you going to get to sweeping or do you want to go home?” Rose inquired.

  No one knew if Willard could talk. He lifted his heavy body and shook his head.

  “Willard, what’s got into you?” Larry asked, coming around from behind the meat counter.

  Willard gazed at the street as if he hadn’t heard and his hooded eyes didn’t blink.

  “Willard …,” Larry said.

  Willard picked up his willow from the floor. Three strands of tinsel hung from a broken branch. He regarded the small tree with affection and reverence, then tipped it away from his body like a flagpole and marched out the door.

  The lunchroom of Rose’s boardinghouse across the street was dark. She served meals family style, then shooed everyone out, because once she had come back in the evening and found Pinkey and Dutch cooking steaks for everyone in the bar next door. It was a big room with shiny floors and long tables with bench seats. Willard leaned his willow against the picture window that framed a piece of the town and gathered in the failing light of a January day. An odor of food still hung in the room. Willard liked the smell. He saw his mother’s black coupe parked out front.

  “Willard? Are you in there?”

  When she entered the lunchroom she saw the willow silhouetted against the picture window first. It made her think of the dead tree she had seen by a lake once, filled with herons—one to a branch. From a distance their oval bodies had looked like severed heads.

  “Willard? Where are you? Rose said you’re sick or something.…”

  Willard hiccuped, stood, and grinned in the dark.

  The next day Carol took Willard back to work because he wasn’t sick. He did not stay long. He helped Larry spread fresh sawdust behind the butcher counter and refilled the spindles with string, then ambled out the front door of the store and walked east, toward home. His branch pendulated. He took a firmer grasp and leaned into the northwesterly blast.

  When a truck rumbled to a stop, Willard saw it was Mañuel.

  “Weelard … venga … get in.…”

  Willard pulled himself into the narrow cab. In the back, on the pickup bed, empty bird cages were stacked crookedly and rattled when the truck jerked into motion. Mañuel’s favorite rooster rode in the front seat. The bird had picked all the stuffing out of the upholstery, and Willard sat on the bare springs. Mañuel liked to sing when he drove. The rooster stood on the seat between the two men and tipped his head to one side when Mañuel’s quavering voice broke and slid into an even higher note. Once, Willard eased his hand to the chicken’s head and let his finger run over the ruffled, rubbery comb.

  When they reached Mañuel’s house, Willard helped carry the cages into a south-facing shed and watched attentively as the birds were watered and fed.

  The next morning Willard refused to go to town. Instead, he climbed over the fence that divided his mother’s yard from Mañuel’s and stood among the caged birds all day. When Mañuel came home from his job at the sugar beet factory at four, he did not seem surprised to see Willard there. Wordlessly, he handed the boy the watering can. From that day on, Willard didn’t work in town again for a long time.

  It was a seven-day-a-week job for which Willard received twenty-five cents a week, plus the fine meals which Mañuel and Porfiria allowed him to eat with his hands: chile verde or carne asada wrapped in a flour tortilla, strong coffee, and posole. One Sunday, after Mass, a tequila bottle was passed around. The first time Willard took a swig, he thought fire had erupted around his Adam’s apple and burned upward, fanned by the oxygen he knew must be trapped in the globe of his head. With the second swallow, he thought of kerosene and hoped he would burn like a lamp.

  That night, when he climbed the fence and went into his own house, Carol met him at the door and gave him a kiss on the cheek. She pulled back in disgust.

  “You smell like something. I hope you haven’t set anything on fire.”

  Willard wanted to say that he was made of fire, that he was the color of a rooster’s comb, because then she would be proud of him.

  “Oh, I get it,” she said and sniffed again. “You’ve had a little nip. Well, that’s all right, Willard.…”

  Willard looked at her, disappointed. Then, exhausted from the excitement of the day, he went to bed.

  That evening in the living room, Carol could feel the cold coming up through the floor. It was February 20, 1943, and she read in the paper that so far, 61,126 men and women had been killed or wounded or were missing since the beginning of the war. The movies were listed on the next page. Springtime in the Rockies was playing. She noticed that the worse the war got, the more cheerful the movies became, and did not know whether this was American perversity or Yankee ingenuity. When she mentioned this thought to Velma Vermeer the day they had tea together—a ritual they started when they first met and continued once a year—Velma said, “Oh, that’s Harry’s domain. I have no ideas on the subject,” then ran in to answer the switchboard. Velma was the first person Carol had met on returning to Luster after a long absence. Some people thought they looked like sisters, though Velma was twenty years older. “And she was married to such a strange little man,” Carol thought. “No one I would have married.”

  Carol poured herself more tea. She thought about Harry Vermeer, Velma’s husband. He had owned the one movie theater in town. Every Saturday night he threaded up the film and, at six-thirty, opened the doors, took tickets, sold popcorn. At exactly three minutes to seven, he ran up the narrow stairs, dimmed the house lights, and switched on the projector. He had wanted a real movie palace with velvet curtains and padded seats, and little lights in the ceiling to look like stars. Instead, he had only what Luster could offer—a stucco building with hard seats and a projector whose light was growing dim.

  Velma swept through the door carrying a plate of madeleines—sweet, shell-shaped cakes sprinkled with powdered sugar.

  “Oh goodness, I’ve never had these before,” Carol said. The one she took crumbled in her hand.

  “These were Harry’s favorites.… Proust made them famous … the writer, you know.”

  Carol gave Velma a blank look and ate the crumbs.

  “Do you remember when Harry tried to bring opera to Luster?” Velma continued. “That terrible woman who came by train from San Francisco. I’ll never forget how thin she was … just like I’m getting …,” Velma said. “Harry was so disappointed … no, worse.… I don’t think he ever recovered from the shock of his failure. He had advanced her a hundred dollars and all she did was cough in his face and collapse on the platform. She died right there, before a single note of music escaped from her throat.”

  “Then there was the circus,” Carol said.

  The memory made Velma clasp her hand to her mouth. “Land’s sake, I’d forgotten about that,” she said, her mouth full of cake.

  “That giant …”

  “All folded up in the back of that station wagon.”

  “Was that all there was to it—just one man?”

  “The poor thing … I don’t know how he managed … he was like a big dumb animal, standing there for people to stare at … but he was a human after all …,” Velma said.

  “But how does someone get that big?” Carol wondered.

  Velma looked out the window at the street. “Harry and I had a terrible row after the circus ordeal. I told him he looked like a badger.” Velma looked down. “Have another, please.”

  “What are they called?” Carol asked.

  “Madeleines …”

  “Like Madeleine Heaney?” Carol asked.

  Velma looked disconcerted. “No, Proust.”

  The switchboard buzzed and Velma ran into the next room to answer the call. Gazing at the tiny switchboard lights going on and off, Carol felt envious. She took another cake and held it in the palm of her hand and wondered why it was shaped like a shell and whether Madeleine Heaney had been named after them and who this Proust was.

  She remembered the night Harry killed himself
. She had been at the movies with Snuff, but it must have happened after they left the theater: he slit his wrists inside the projection booth and lay in a pool of blood all night with the white leader turning round and round on the reel. That was the night the projector bulb burned out.

  When Velma returned Carol noticed how thin she was. Her skin was becoming transparent. “You must know everyone,” Carol said appreciatively.

  Velma looked surprised. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that—it’s just voices.” She poured more tea. “I don’t think I would want to know everyone—like a doctor does—would you?”

  “I wouldn’t mind. Here, have a cake. You haven’t eaten.…”

  “And there’s less and less of it, now that Harry has died.”

  “Less of what?” Carol asked.

  “Oh, you know, rubbing elbows.”

  “But isn’t it lonely?”

  Velma gazed out at the street. “Not at all. I’m quite content … as long as I have that,” she said, meaning the switchboard.

  “What a comforting thing for people to know you’re here … on the other end.…”

  “At the middle,” Velma said. “Isn’t that what they call me? The Middle?”

  “Yes,” Carol said smiling. “The Middle.”

  Velma wrapped her hands around her waist. “Some people think I do this just so I can listen in.…”

  Carol looked up from her tea. “Oh? But you don’t, do you?” she asked, and both women burst out laughing.

  Now Carol thought about Velma. “We really are nothing alike,” and for the first time she was glad to be who she was and not someone else, at least not Velma. “But I wish …” She stopped the thought before it grew out of control. “Why am I always hungry for more?”