Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  “I know what year it is, for God’s sake—” McKay said.

  McKay rode to Madeleine’s that afternoon. When she opened the door he saw how pale she was.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  She barely let him in the door. It was a low-ceilinged house, cluttered with books, old bits and spurs and rawhide riatas, vet supplies, catalogues, and three-year-old magazines opened to unread stories.

  “Nothing,” she replied sullenly, sitting on the couch.

  McKay stood in the middle of the room. When he went near her, she stiffened.

  “Look, I don’t really want to see you,” she said.

  “Madeleine—”

  “Please, McKay,” she said weakly, as if his presence had begun to overpower her.

  “What’s happened?” he said, though he had begun to understand.

  She saw his face soften with dismay.

  “I was pregnant,” she said, “but not now.”

  “What do you mean?” he asked.

  “I had a miscarriage.”

  “When?”

  “That day, when the water came and I never showed up to meet you. Then you went off—”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Goddamnit, I didn’t feel like it,” she snapped.

  McKay collapsed on the couch beside her but looked straight ahead.

  “I lay down in the grass. Then it was over.”

  “I should have ridden until I found you,” he mumbled.

  She closed her eyes.

  “Are you okay now?”

  She looked at him. “I feel very sad,” she said slowly.

  McKay searched his memory. Had he known all along? And if he had known, why didn’t he go look for her that day?

  “I had no idea,” he said. “I should have kept riding. Then Bobby told me you were sick.…”

  Madeleine sat with her chin tucked in, McKay at her feet.

  “We could have had a child,” he said, with a look of crushed astonishment.

  “I’m not sure how we could have arranged that,” Madeleine said bitterly.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered, would it?”

  Madeleine shrugged.

  “Come here.” He put his finger under her chin. “I wouldn’t have abandoned you.”

  “But you weren’t there.… You were somewhere else.…”

  He looked down.

  “It’s not your fault,” she said softly.

  “I should have called.”

  Madeleine drew her robe around her. “Why don’t you go now, please.”

  McKay walked to the window but didn’t see the storm had lifted. He went back to her. “God, I’m sorry, Madeleine. You’ve had to go through all this.…” He closed his eyes, then looked at her. “A child … It was conceived in love, wasn’t it? They say those are the best children—the moment of conception …”

  “I was thinking about Henry …,” she said, shaken.

  McKay looked at her. “Don’t make me go yet,” he said.

  She felt suddenly trapped, but when he put his head on her chest between her breasts, she touched his face. Her neck was all wet because he was crying. She hated his weight. His body rose under her hands like something yeasted and, touching it, she felt relieved and emptied; she felt desire. How perverse, she thought. His skin was smooth and hot. He was like a jewel—turned, cut, polished, inaccessible—and his wild, peevish frailty came from that near-perfection and from his ardent privacy.

  “Even when I let you in, it didn’t work,” she whispered. “It’s always wrong.”

  She wanted to push him off, to be done with him, but she couldn’t. She held him and drove her hand into his gold hair.

  On July 24, McKay drove to the Heart Mountain Relocation Camp as Mariko’s letter directed. McKay proceeded through the sentry gate to the rec room of Block 4. It was the first day the ban on passes had been lifted and there were a number of visitors waiting in the hall. McKay took off his hat and leaned against the far wall, opposite the door. A gang of young children ran in and out, tied together at the waist with laundry line, screeching as one or the other fell and was dragged for a while. Three women from the Mormon church sat in chairs against the wall and a farmer and his wife from the valley told McKay they had come about rehiring a girl who had done kitchen work for them.

  McKay saw Mariko coming. She wore boots and her long strides looked purposeful. She studied the ground as she walked, but when McKay stepped out of the shadow she broke into a smile. They faced each other on the steps.

  “Hello,” Mariko said, then dug into her pocket for a cigarette and a match.

  “The paperwork’s backed up on passes to get out of here. That’s why …”

  “How have you been?” McKay asked.

  Her hand shook as she took the cigarette from her mouth. “Fine.”

  McKay held one of her arms in his big hand but she pulled away.

  “Look, Will’s lurking around here somewhere. He’s gotten pretty embroiled. I think they’re sending him off soon—”

  “He hasn’t hurt you again, has he?” McKay asked.

  “No.” She relit her cigarette and they sat down.

  “I’ve missed you,” she said under her breath.

  “I’ve been out to California to see my brother,” McKay said and played with his hat between his hands. He looked up. “I wish I could take you up there now,” he said, pointing to the top of Heart Mountain. “There’s a waterfall.… I’ve got this horse you’d like. Everytime I catch him I have it in my mind that I’m catching him for you. We call him Rudy after this old sheepherder who thought he was good-looking but he wasn’t.”

  “How do you know I can ride?”

  “You’d ride fine.”

  “How can you tell?”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Yes.”

  “By the way you make love.”

  Mariko laughed nervously. She saw Will in the distance, walking between barracks, but he did not see her.

  “We’d go out at dawn and Bobby would make lunches for us and we could ride all day and make love whenever we wanted to,” McKay continued.

  “Pinkey told me about how Bobby came to your ranch when you were sick. He said Bobby saved your life.”

  “Probably,” McKay said.

  “And he raised you?”

  “Since the folks died. Hell, he’s still trying to raise me.”

  “What does he think of us?”

  McKay scowled. “He’s worried.”

  “That I’ll hurt you?”

  “Maybe, or that I’ll hurt you, or Will, or the people in town.”

  “I don’t care; do you?”

  “No,” McKay said. “Were you okay after I left you off that night?”

  “Yes. I felt wonderful.”

  “So did I.”

  “Wouldn’t it be grand to have a whole day?”

  “A whole night.”

  “A whole week …”

  “Or a very long time,” McKay suggested.

  “But it wouldn’t be the same after a long time, would it?” Mariko said.

  “Not the same but …”

  “Maybe people are only happy for short periods.…”

  “Is that what you think?”

  “I’ve never been happy with a man … yet … where it was truly mutual … and even then, I don’t know how long it would last.”

  “Maybe you can’t think of that.”

  “Yes, perhaps not.”

  “But were you happy that night?”

  “Yes. But let’s not talk of it now—”

  “Why?” McKay asked.

  Mariko let out a shrill laugh as if she were being tickled. “Because …”

  McKay looked at her. “Why?” he asked, teasingly.

  Mariko leaned against him for a second. “God, I can’t stand not touching you.…”

  McKay let out a sound—a sexual laugh—and rubbed his forehead shyly. The sound erupted again despite hims
elf, of pain mixed with desire. He stood abruptly. “Okay. We’ll talk about cattle prices, hog fences, farm equipment, conception rates … no … that’s too …”

  Mariko shaded her eyes and looked up at him, laughing brightly.

  “Ummm … how about pickup trucks and squeeze chutes?”

  “Tell me more about Bobby and your family. Tell me everything about yourself,” she begged.

  McKay leaned forward on his elbows so that his head almost touched her knees.

  “Like what?” he asked.

  “Pinkey told me your parents were killed.…”

  “Yes …”

  “And after, was Bobby like your father?”

  “No one was like my father,” McKay said brusquely. “They couldn’t be, because no one knew him. He was always receding; he was always someone you saw on the horizon who never got any closer. The only thing he loved was his ranch in Mexico. For a while he used to bring up whole families from the village but when the snow flew, they did too. Sometimes he went with them. He took me once. I think I was about seven. We drove around in a jeep and the people in the villages came out and touched my hair. They’d never seen a blond. I don’t know why he didn’t just move us all down there. But there was a reason … he wouldn’t tell me though. Maybe it was because he wanted it all for himself. He was ungenerous in that way. No … Bobby was more like a mother to me. Not quite that either … my mother and he and I did things together … collected flowers and worked in the garden, and talked about things.… She used to read translations of Japanese poems—from the Kokinshu—do you know it?”

  “Yes, of course.”

  “She wanted Bobby to hear those things and some of the stories too. I was fifteen when they died. I was the youngest.…”

  “That must have been hard—”

  “Then Pinkey did some of the raising too … the hell-raising.…”

  McKay sat down on the steps beside Mariko again. “But what about you? You have parents, don’t you, or did you hatch?”

  “They live in Japan,” she said, looking out at the Camp. “Of course there’s no way for me to know what’s become of them until after the war.…”

  “No …”

  “And your brothers … are they in Europe or the Pacific?”

  “The Pacific.”

  Mariko nodded her head. “My father’s a potter … they live on a little island in the south of Japan … Tanegashima.… The Portuguese landed there in the 1600s and brought the first guns ever seen in Japan. My mother makes paper … dyes it. She makes an ink that floats on top of water and dips the paper in it.… But they’ve lived all over. They were bohemians … we lived in Paris and also New York—Greenwich Village—all kinds of places, sometimes with other artists because we couldn’t afford our own rooms, but it was always lively and exciting for me. I met a lot of painters. But they always loved their little island and so they went back a few years ago.”

  McKay rubbed his calloused hands together. “I don’t believe this war was inevitable, do you?”

  “In Europe, it seemed so. Everything we believe in was threatened and everyone we knew.… What can you do but fight back?”

  “But what made it begin … I don’t mean what the damned papers said, I mean what made it something that could not be turned around?”

  Mariko looked out over the Camp again. “I don’t know.”

  They were silent for a while.

  “Do you love me?” Mariko asked at last.

  “Yes,” he said. “Jesus … can’t you get out of here today?”

  “No … not yet … I don’t know when.”

  They stood.

  “How’s Abe-san?”

  “He wanted to see you, but he’s working on a new mask.”

  McKay put on his hat and stood in front of the building’s steps. The dust was like powder. “I’ve got to go and I don’t want to,” he said.

  “Good-bye.” She held out her hand, smiled, stepped forward, holding him for an instant, then turned on her heels and walked away.

  When the leaves changed in late August, tufts of orange showed in the green, then the red rode up on the orange and the leaves on the south side of the tree fell first. It turned cold and a foot of snow dropped, breaking the tops of the cottonwoods, then the warm Indian summer days returned.

  After, the warm days went on and on, rainless and windless until the end of October, when a bitter wind tore down out of the Arctic and the leaves that had fallen in the yard of the ranch house were carried away. McKay came to understand that when the war ended he might lose Mariko. But pain or pleasure, possession or loss—what did it matter?

  He thought of his time with her as “passions,” Stations of the Cross. Long ago, an old man his father had brought up from Mexico had read the poems of St. John of the Cross and St. Teresa—“Por qué, pues has llagado/ a aquaeste corazón, no le sanaste?” Why do you wound my heart and then refuse to make it heal?—and he had not known then what those words had meant.

  Now he lay on his cot night after night. The swirling arms of war had embraced almost everyone, he thought. When the wind blew, his cot seemed to stand on end and when he slept, he dreamt that he told his brother, “There’s no blood in my brain because, they won’t let me lie down anymore,” and indeed, Champ had said that being at the front is like being picked up by a wind and thrown. “And I’ll be damned if that’s courage,” he had said.

  26

  Dillon Meyer, the director of the War Relocation Authority, announced back in July that the so-called loyals would be segregated from the “disloyals” in order to “promote harmony in the relocation centers and facilitate the outside relocation for loyal American citizens and law-abiding aliens.” In other words, he was ridding the Camps of the troublemakers. Will was on that list, of course, as well as Shig, Ben, Frank, and Masao. I remember when I saw them together after the list was posted, Will only smiled at me and said, “You should be coming with us,” though not in the unkind way he had said it before. I guess it was too late for reprimands. I was sorry that I wasn’t a “No-No boy,” that I wasn’t being segregated with them. By August 903 evacuees had been slated to leave for the Tule Lake Internment Camp. That included 242 children. The whole idea was absurd—just another disruption, as if we hadn’t been torn apart enough—and I knew that many were going only to preserve the unity of the family, not because they had been activists. The only ones I wouldn’t be sorry to see go were the Kibei who had gone around denouncing America and singing the Japanese national anthem every time someone in uniform came to camp. They weren’t doing our cause any good.…

  The day Will was to leave I saw Mariko bringing breakfast to their apartment so I went over. Will never ate breakfast—I knew that—and he said the Camp coffee was like weak horse piss but he drank it anyway out of a bowl he borrowed from Mom because, he said, that’s how they drank their morning coffee in Paris. I pulled up a chair next to him. Mariko was wrapping a package full of food people in the Camp had collected for the men being segregated. For weeks and months Will had been venting his anger at all of us and at the U.S. government … now he was silent and those of us around him felt helpless. He sat on the edge of his cot wearing his white beret and black pants held up by suspenders—exactly what he wore the day we arrived.

  I noticed Mariko moving around the room like a cat—a bit warily. And for good reason. He had hit her once—hard enough to give her a black eye—and I think he had struck out at her other times. Afterward, she had moved her cot to the other side of the room, against the wall that adjoined my apartment. That was the day I moved my bed to the same wall because I knew that when we slept, Mariko’s face would be only a few inches from mine. How many times I awakened and thought I could feel her touching me. She’d pin my wrists above my head and put her hand against the small of my back, right where the spine ends.… Sometimes I really did hear her cough or moan and hoped it wasn’t because of what Will was doing to her—good or bad—I wanted him to leave her alone.r />
  I had told Mariko that when Will saw injustice he did not know how to fight, so he struck out—at everyone. He had uncovered a great moral void and discovered that racism is as American as democracy. He couldn’t stand it.…

  Sitting there, watching him sip coffee, I didn’t know how to feel—relieved or sad. I would miss him. He’s been my political conscience. Now it would be up to me to come to terms with the issues of loyalty to one’s principles versus loyalty to a nation which has turned its back on us. I watched Mariko. She sat on Abe-san’s low stool with one leg crossed.

  “Do you have all your things?” she said to Will at the last. “I noticed you left some of your clothes.”

  “They’re the ones you like to wear,” he said.

  “But you’ll need them.”

  He gave her an absent look.

  When the MPs came for him, they behaved as if he were a violent criminal. They handled him roughly and handcuffed him. I wanted to slug the self-righteous bastards. Will stopped at the door and told me to keep the spirit of resistance alive at the Camp. “Show them no concentration camp can be “a happy camp.” I promised I would. The MPs jerked at him. The rougher they were, the more victorious he looked. At the last moment, he turned and said, “Tant pis,” almost spitting the words. Then he smiled, but a smile that reeked of contempt.

  I walked him to the waiting car. We didn’t talk. The wind was like metal shavings hitting my head. I thought of the day we had arrived; walking to the edge of the Camp together. We were speechless then too, and that old wave of nausea—landsickness after so much travel—came back over me.

  I touched his shoulder and when he looked at me, his face twitched. He’s human, I thought, and I love him.

  “Good-bye, Will,” I said, but only after the car had taken him away.

  When I went over to Abe-san’s a few nights later, he was digging carrots out of his garden. He turned and said sharply, “What do you want?” Maybe he’s just a flower grower after all—this other stuff has been a sadistic game.

  Went to see Ben. Some of those tough Terminal Island guys were hanging around. They’d been drinking and when I walked in I heard one of them say, “Here comes four eyes.” It made me laugh to think these guys are the sons of fishermen and they can’t swim.