Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  Much later she tiptoed down the hall and stood in the doorway to Willard’s room. His breathing was labored and she thought it odd that he was alive at all. To have a living being come out of your body—whole and separate, a complete stranger. Her eyes moved over the salmon walls of the room. At night, when Mañuel’s yard light was on, they looked like flesh, and the shadows of roosters paraded across the ceiling, grotesquely oversized. She thought of the room where she had conceived Willard. Its walls were not fleshlike at all, but log with the bark still on. Willard’s father had smelled bitter. It was a sick person’s smell, and his hands were hot from fever. Sometimes she felt his presence so strongly she spoke to him. It had happened in the black coupe, in the hallway, at Snuff’s. He seemed to fill the whole room but he wasn’t big, and she could feel his warmth against her shoulder. “Dear one,” she began. “How are you? Do you see him?” she asked and pointed to the lump under the covers that was Willard. “Don’t laugh at me. They say you were always laughing, but when we met you hardly laughed at all. You were so sick. I love you.…”

  Willard turned in his sleep and groaned.

  When Carol lay down on the carpet in front of the furnace that evening, her black shoes looked like rocks tied to her ankles and part of her plain white slip slowed. Sometimes when she dreamed about Willard’s father, his skin was gray like ash and when he smiled his dimples showed. In one dream he was lying on a coffin and winked at her when she filed by. In another she tried to hold him, but he shook out of her grasp like some object moving very fast, and she couldn’t make out his eyes or lips, which are what a lover needs to see. Then he came back in full color and before her eyes, disappeared.

  Carol stood. The side turned toward the furnace felt hot. She buttoned her sweater down to her waist and walked into the kitchen. One of the pears a railroader brought from California toppled onto the counter into her hand, and she lifted it to her mouth and took a bite and let the juices run down her chin.

  She bent her head under the faucet and washed her hair. She wanted to sing, but she thought it might wake Willard so she hummed softly to make it seem as if there were more than one person in the room. Ghosts don’t do things like that—they don’t sing, she thought, but they laugh, except it’s always with a funny look in their eyes.

  She rubbed her wet hair with a clean dish towel, then, fishing bobbypins out of an ashtray, made curls so tight they pulled the skin away from her skull up into tiny points.

  She sat down in the armchair in the living room and turned out the light. She leaned her wet head back. The word suicide came into her mind. It was a word she had carried around with her for a long time. She was a fastidious woman, and the idea of cutting her wrists or making any kind of mess did not appeal to her. Yet the word lay calmly under the skin of her forehead. Sometimes she opened the word like a suitcase and brought out various instruments of death, held them close, then put them away.

  In the kitchen she shone a flashlight on the thermometer. Twenty below zero. “I feel so unfinished,” she said aloud, but only to herself this time. No blood or melodrama for her. She only wanted extinguishment, something quick, an end to restlessness. She put on a coat and boots and went to the car. The air was so cold her feet and hands became numb immediately. The door of the coupe had frozen shut and she had to yank it violently to make it open. She wondered how long it took to die in such cold. Inside, she opened the glove compartment. Then, by the overhead globe light she counted her ration cards—“A” for gasoline—and computed how far from herself she could travel in one day.

  19

  The song of the western meadowlark, the very bird Mr. Abe had been looking for when McKay had shot him, awakened McKay. When the sun came up the sky looked like a flame blown sideways. Between the ranch and the Camp the country was still dark and Heart Mountain’s one east-facing slope took on the color of fire.

  “Could it really be spring?” McKay wondered. He turned on his back, then rolled forward and stood on the shaky cot, touching his hands to the ceiling of the screened porch. He felt as if he had slept all winter and was getting up for the first time.

  “Bonsai,” McKay said when Bobby burst into the room with a cup of green tea.

  “Bonzai or bonsai?” Bobby asked, looking up at McKay.

  “Bonsai. Want to get some with me this morning?” he asked.

  “Get down from there,” Bobby said, trying to hand McKay the tea.

  McKay jumped off the cot lightly and took the cup between his hands. When he was a child, McKay, with his mother and Bobby, had taken the team and wagon to a rocky slope of Heart Mountain where the pines grew stunted and bent by constant prevailing winds. They’d dig up one tree and take it home and plant it somewhere around the house or in front of Bobby’s cabin, and each year they looked forward to finding a new one.

  “Bonsai cultivate your mind,” Bobby always said. “It improve you, relax eye if look at it long time. Don’t need to sleep after.…”

  McKay had liked the part about not needing sleep when he was young. It meant he could stay up and watch the constellations shift. His father had learned celestial navigation in Mexico and had taught McKay to read the sky. For this reason, McKay gladly helped dig up each new tree, then, replanting it, he’d sit before it, staring hard.… “I’ll never have to sleep again,” he reported enthusiastically to his mother. He remembered she let him stay up as late as he wanted that night, playing checkers and looking at the stars, until finally, he fell asleep.

  “Did you carry me to bed that night when I was about seven and Mother said I could stay up all night?”

  “Yes. You very heavy too!”

  McKay dressed.

  “Who these trees for? Here?”

  “No. They wanted some at the Camp.”

  “For that woman?”

  McKay looked up. “No … for her father and some of the other men who want to make gardens over there.”

  Bobby folded his arms.

  “Now what?” McKay said.

  Bobby looked into McKay’s eyes. “That woman …,” he said tentatively.

  “Who? Mariko?”

  Bobby nodded.

  “Well, what?” McKay asked impatiently.

  Bobby shook his head.

  “Because she’s Nisei?” McKay asked, grinning.

  Bobby clucked his teeth. “She won’t be happy here. Like caged lion. I know. I watched her.… It’s not good.”

  “It’s good for me, Bobby,” McKay said and walked to the kitchen.

  Bobby and McKay ate a breakfast of deer steaks and eggs. The extra leaf had been taken out of the table after roundup and now they sat wedged against the kitchen wall again. When McKay poured coffee, the lid fell into his cup.

  “Shit,” McKay snapped.

  Bobby looked at him. McKay had lost weight during his illness and now he was irritable. As soon as they finished eating he pushed his plate away.

  “I’m going to harness that team now. See ya, Bobby.”

  Bands of clouds hung around the mountain. McKay drove the team into them, then rose out of the mist, and was obscured again—like a moon rising—Bobby thought. He watched until the wagon was no bigger than a toy.

  When McKay reached what they called “the bonsai field,” he stopped the team, tied the lines, and jumped down with the shovel. There was no wind and the tortured shapes of the trees seemed oddly unnecessary. Junipers and pines grew out of cracks in rocks, the trunks twisted and bowed away from the prevailing wind and the green needles reached up like opened hands. The thaw was coming out of the ground and when McKay dug down the soil was wet and flecked with frost.

  Choosing the trees carefully for their unique shapes, he dug wide and deep, sliding a hand under the roots still clotted with dirt, as if under the head of a baby. He lined them up on the back of the wagon. They had grown singly on the mountain. Now, in close company, the needles of the wildly twisted trees touched.

  When McKay pulled up to the sentry gate he saw Harry, the gua
rd, who shook his head and groaned. “Now what?” he said, peering at the back of the wagon. “Wait here. I’ll call. Jesus, McKay …”

  In the guardhouse, Harry picked up the black receiver and dialed while McKay looked on. McKay didn’t know whether Harry could be trusted. He hoped Harry didn’t like his job.

  “The Camp boss’ll be right over. Sorry, but he’s got to inspect this sonofabitch before I can let you drive to the living quarters.”

  McKay filled his jaw with snoose, then offered Harry some.

  “Can’t … not on duty.”

  “What’d you take a shitty job like this for, Harry?”

  Harry’s face froze for a second.

  “You could have at least got a defense job,” McKay continued.

  “In one of those sonofabitching cities?”

  McKay shrugged.

  “My ma and pa needed me around … but not full-time, see, so I got me one of these stay-at-home-army jobs.… It’s not so bad, really.…”

  McKay squinted at him.

  “What have we got here?” the Camp manager asked and walked all the way around the wagon.

  “Just some trees … for some of the old-timers.…”

  The manager looked over the rims of his glasses at McKay.

  “Um huh …” He reached his arm in and touched the dirt around the roots of the tiny pines.

  “That’s all that’s in there … just dirt and trees.”

  “And where do you mean to take them?”

  “I’d like to drive it down to Block 4 E. Mr. Abe’s block, down at the end there.”

  The manager looked McKay up and down. “I knew your father.…”

  “Yes …,” McKay said quietly.

  “Just this once … Harry, let him through.”

  “Thank you, sir.” McKay tipped his hat and climbed on the wagon.

  It was an old gentle team, and the commotion of children playing, radios blaring, teenage girls strolling arm in arm did not bother them. McKay turned down the lane that faced Heart Mountain, which Mariko referred to as the Champs-Elysées. In the distance, the edge of a front moved toward the Camp. Clouds flew in three directions at once, and the belly clouds, the ones that hung low and black under the limestone tusk, broke into soft screens of snow. A trance held McKay. The snow stopped and the wind turned a funnel of dust and debris toward the horses, then veered away. McKay slowed the team. A single thought fastened to the bottom and top of his mind, and the noise of the Camp peeled away as he drove straight west, toward Mariko, toward Heart Mountain.

  When the clouds shifted north, they looked like long tattered sandbars. “I wish I could be more moderate in my desires, but I can’t,” he said half-aloud though he did not think there was anyone to whom he could address such a prayer. He pulled to a stop at the westernmost block facing the mountain. The wind eddied around his head a last time, then the front pushed northeast. The notes of “September Song” came from an apartment whose one door had been thrown open by the wind. The mare pawed the hard ground.

  “Quit,” McKay barked, and she did. He tied up the lines.

  A young man with round glasses and broad shoulders greeted him. “Hello,” he said and extended his hand. “Kai Nakamura … I talked to you for the Sentinel after that accident.”

  McKay half stood, looking down from the wagon, and nodded his head. “You bet. How you doing?”

  Kai made his way around to the back of the wagon. “What have you got in here?”

  “Just some trees … for Mr. Abe … hell, anyone that wants one.” McKay jumped down.

  Kai looked at McKay squarely in the eyes.

  “Would there be an extra one for my father?” Kai asked.

  “Hell, yes.” McKay looked up again and smiled. “Any one he wants.” He hopped up on the wagon box and began moving the little trees to the back, where they could be inspected. The left side of his chest hurt.

  “This is my father, Mr. Nakamura,” Kai said.

  McKay looked around, then held out his hand. The old man bowed. His glasses were still bent and the pained expression on his face seemed to have frozen there. McKay straightened up and tipped his hat politely.

  “Why don’t you come around to the back … no, this way—you don’t want to step in front of those old horses; they’re kind of skittish—and you can take a look at these trees.”

  Kai steered his father to the back of the wagon. He stood some distance from it—a formal distance, McKay thought—even though the old man’s eyes darted from tree to tree. Kai nudged his father forward.

  “He wants you to pick one out,” Kai whispered.

  “My family always went once a year to get one of these … kind of a family tradition …,” McKay explained, picking up one of the trees and holding it out to Mr. Nakamura. The old man shielded his eyes from the sun and gazed flatly at the specimen. McKay looked at the tree, a juniper whose trunk looked like a twisted lock of hair, then at the old man. Kai sighed audibly.

  “Do you like that one, Pop?”

  Mr. Nakamura did not appear to have heard his son.

  McKay put the little tree down and brought another one forward. Mr. Nakamura stood rigidly and made no response.

  “Pop?” Kai asked impatiently.

  “That’s okay … there’s plenty here,” McKay said.

  Standing on the wagon box, McKay looked for a tree he thought would please the man. He picked up the pine whose trunk bowed twice before shooting up and back the other way. “Two waves,” he said, meaning the shape of the trunk of the tree.

  Mr. Nakamura gave the young rancher a quizzical look, then smiled.

  McKay held the tree out to him. Mr. Nakamura inspected it closely. He did not touch the wind-tortured trunk or the green, fanlike needles with his hands, but twisted his head this way and that so as to see each part of the tree from a different angle. Then he stepped back and bowed.

  Kai helped his father carry the tree to the front of their apartment and, when the old man decided where he wanted it, dug the hole.

  “Good morning,” McKay said.

  “Ohaiyo,” Abe-san said, his eyes squeezed against the bright sun. He looked at the trees admiringly. “These trees are trying to decide who wants to come home with me,” he exclaimed.

  A song blared from a radio somewhere in the block.

  “Ahsooo …,” Abe-san hissed, and light as a deer on his feet, sprung forward until his chest pressed against the wagon box.

  “They’re all for you …,” McKay began.

  Abe-san shook his head, smiling.

  “This one?” Then McKay lifted a shaggy juniper whose double trunk twisted together straight up in a rigorous embrace.

  Abe-san squealed with laughter, nodding his head yes. “Big lover, like you,” he said, beaming.

  McKay regarded the tree. Then he looked at Abe-san and a crooked smile broke across his face. “Where is she?” he whispered.

  Abe-san’s face dropped. “She’s very bad now.”

  “Where?” McKay insisted.

  “Not want to see anybody.”

  McKay jumped off the wagon and stood face to face with Mariko’s grandfather. “Please …”

  “Yes,” Abe-san said, but there was something sad in his smile.

  “As long as I’m digging …,” Kai broke in, holding up the shovel. “Where do you want this?” he asked.

  Abe-san pulled away from McKay and looked at the shaggy juniper. He was wearing a kimono and getas, and when he walked, his body didn’t move up and down, but glided. “Here …,” he said to the young reporter, indicating the spot where he wanted the hole dug.

  McKay saw Mariko in the doorway. Her hair was disheveled. She had a cut on the right side of her mouth and a black eye. He walked slowly from the back of the wagon. His hands were black with dirt, and some of it had rubbed across his face, and his hat was pulled down low on his forehead because of the wind.

  He wanted to hold her but couldn’t. “That’s a hell of a shiner,” he said, tryin
g to sound jaunty, but his voice cracked. He remembered the first time he had stumbled across the flats to her block, and how she had stood in the doorway, pulled him against her suddenly, and turned with him to the middle of the room where they could not be seen, and when the spinning stopped, how the room kept moving and made him think of the spiral shapes of seashells with tiny animals crouched inside.

  “Are you okay, kid?” he asked gently.

  Over his shoulder he heard Kai whistling loudly, as if to draw the attention away from the apparition in the door. Mariko stepped back into the shadow and McKay followed. He saw how the bruise had begun to yellow on the top of the lid and cheekbone, and the clotted blood by the side of her mouth was peeling away. He didn’t know what had happened and he wasn’t sure if he wanted to know. Mariko turned her back to him.

  “I’m not in the mood to talk now …,” she began.

  There was a long silence, but McKay didn’t leave.

  “I’m sorry I haven’t been to see you for so long.… I’ve been stuck in a maternity ward,” McKay said.

  Mariko turned around, surprised.

  “Heifers. Two hundred first-calf heifers. They need a lot of attention.”

  Mariko chuckled. “Oh …”

  McKay looked nervously out the door. “Look, I can’t stay very long, the MPs are on my ass.…”

  Mariko lay down on the straw mattress and held her arm over her bruised eye to keep the sun out. “I’m not sure that I know why you come at all,” she said weakly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t know what you want with me.”

  McKay’s face fell. He tried not to let it show. He wanted everything he had done and said to be a lie so her words wouldn’t matter, but he couldn’t stop the sudden sliding, the blackness that came.…

  “I mean, what do you want with someone with a Japanese face? You love me because I’m strange, isn’t that it? Why me, when there must be so many others … I don’t understand. You barge in here, into our lives, but I don’t get it … sometimes I wonder if you find all this merely amusing. An entertainment until the war ends …”