Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  Two more men came into the bar. They worked at the ranch where Vincent had worked, and Pinkey bought their drinks.

  “Thank you,” the tall one said, lifting his glass. “I owe you one.”

  “You greenin’ up over there?” Pinkey said.

  “Oh, it’s starting,” Stubby said. “We’ll be branding next week.”

  “Not us,” Pinkey laughed. “We’re doing double work … got all them cows of Henry’s … and we’re running late as usual.”

  The others laughed appreciatively.

  “Had a set of twins the other night, and I’ll be damned if that ol’ cow ain’t supportin’ the both of them. Two little heifer calves. God, if she ain’t a dairy lookin’ ol’ rip.…”

  Pinkey passed the bottle of whiskey down the bar and the other two men refilled their glasses.

  “Where is this Cobb’s Creek, anyway?”

  “Tennessee,” Pinkey said.

  “I bet there ain’t no brookies or cutthroats on that whole damned creek,” Stubby said.

  “I bet not either.”

  “You been there?” he asked Pinkey.

  “No.”

  “I heard from some hunter was through here that a man can’t even pull his fly rod out without it getting snagged on a tree. I guess that’s all they have is trees in that country.”

  “That’s about how Alabama was,” Pinkey said.

  “Damn … how could a man live ass-up to a bunch of trees? I’d go plumb crazy not being able to see.”

  “Wouldn’t want to run no cattle in there,” Stubby said.

  “Hell no, it’d be like ridin’ blind.”

  Even though it was raining hard, Snuff went outside without a coat or hat on and stood in the parking lot looking down the road.

  The phone rang. The three cowboys glanced at each other, then the tall one stepped off his stool, reached over the bar and answered it.

  “Snuff’s,” he growled into the receiver.

  “Who? Can you talk louder?”

  “You bet … no … he’s right here,” he said, holding the phone out to Pinkey.

  “It’s for you,” the cowboy said.

  “Who?” Pinkey asked.

  The man shoved the receiver into Pinkey’s chubby hand.

  “My, my, my,” Pinkey chortled, then held the phone to his ear. “Hello? Who? Loretta? That you? Well, where are you? You are? When? I’ll be there. You bet. Who? Dutch? Hell, you don’t want to see him—he’s off somewheres.… You do? Hell, kid, I knew you loved me. You too. I will.” When Pinkey held the receiver out, Stubby took it and put it back on the cradle.

  “Oooowwweee,” Pinkey yelled. “I’m in love!”

  Snuff came back in. His hair was plastered down and his clothes soaked through. Pinkey lifted his glass in a wordless toast and gulped the whiskey effortlessly, then spun on his stool to greet Snuff. Snuff gazed expressionlessly at the three men.

  “Close up for me when you’re done, will you, Pinkey?” Snuff said and walked down the hall.

  “What’s eatin’ on him?” the tall one asked.

  Pinkey shrugged.

  “Boys, I’m in love,” Pinkey announced again.

  “In love or in lust?” Stubby asked.

  Pinkey threw up his hands in the air. “Let’s not sweat the little stuff,” he exclaimed. “She’s been working in one of them airplane factories.”

  “You gonna tie the knot?” the tall one asked.

  Pinkey scratched his head. “Hadn’t thought that far along …”

  “Come on, Pinkey … why not ask her?” Stubby urged.

  Pinkey rubbed his forehead, then looked up. “What if she said no?”

  “In my opinion, you’d be coming out of this thing a lucky man,” the tall one said.

  Stubby laughed, then went behind the bar and brought out another bottle of whiskey. “Don’t forget to put this on your bill,” he said to Pinkey and winked. “I’ll bet you another bottle she’ll say yes if you ask.”

  The tall one reached into his pocket and pulled out a bill. “Me, too,” he said. “Who the hell are we marrying, anyway?”

  “Loretta Wilkins …,” Pinkey said proudly.

  Stubby choked on his whiskey.

  “Hell, she ain’t that bad,” Pinkey said.

  They all laughed.

  “Hand it to me again,” Pinkey demanded.

  The tall one reached across the bar and gave Pinkey the phone. He dialed zero. “Velma? I want to send a telegram. This is Pinkey. Oh hell, charge it to the ranch.”

  When Velma was ready, he dictated the wire: “Loretta. Wanna get hitched? Please reply care of Snuff’s. Pinkey.”

  When Pinkey put the phone down, he ordered another round of drinks. “How long do you think it’ll take to get an answer?”

  “Hell, Pink, I don’t know, but I aim to stay right here until that phone rings.”

  “You’re on,” Pinkey said, drinking. He looked out the window. The rain came down straight and heavy now, and it was getting dark. “I don’t even have to go home until it stops raining. Ranch rules,” Pinkey exclaimed cheerfully.

  “That McKay’s a real understanding man,” Stubby said, laughing.

  “Yea, here’s to the kid,” Pinkey said, raising his glass.

  “Here’s to the beautiful Loretta,” the tall one said, and all three drank.

  Snuff got up from Venus’s bed, where he had been lying. He smoothed the green wool blanket, then walked out the back door. Up from the row of cabins, he heard pond ice crack and saw a pair of mallards moving effortlessly on the water. He walked up the winding road. He couldn’t understand what had happened—why Carol had run out on him before the wedding. Halfway up the hill he turned and looked down on the ramshackle buildings and the way the white dust from the mill had coated a hundred acres of greasewood. Under his ribs a knifelike pain turned in his gut. He doubled over, reeling. “Goddamn you!” he groaned, looking skyward. “Who are you anyway?” he yelled in a fury, straightening up. He stood with his hands held, not clenched, but straight like knives at his side. “Was I really asking too much?” His own answer was no. Another pain hardened below his heart and he fell to his hands and knees in the mud.

  37

  January. Heavy damage from kamikaze attacks. Mochi making for New Year’s. I think of the green dragon weaving through Chinatown. The longer the dragon, the longer one is expected to live. If I did not like myself a year ago, or even yesterday, what am I to think today? A warm chinook blew through and I heard birds. They say that by the time the snow melts off, green grass will have begun to grow. So it is with me. My cynical troubled, doubting mind churns and yet …

  Abe-san says I must “cultivate my spirit,” that everything I am, everything I need, is inside me, and it is no longer necessary to destroy what I do not like elsewhere. What I want is to see clearly what’s been done and to whom and why.

  I realized at some point that my single-mindedness and bitterness had become obsessive. But after last March, when the Fair Play Committee broke up and I returned to my “studies” with Abe-san, the narrowness melted away. Even this place looked changed—wider somehow, flatter, but more vivid. Abe-san says that is because I have started to live with emptiness. Yet I have to keep asking him what that means.

  The night I watched him perform his Noh and asked what Noh was all about, he said, “When you do something, you should burn yourself completely, like a good bonfire, leaving no trace of yourself.”

  Heard last week that the West Coast Exclusion Act has been lifted. This was announced in Public Proclamation 21. “The people of the states within the Western Defense Command are assured that the records of all persons of Japanese ancestry have been carefully examined and only those persons who have been cleared by military authority have been permitted to return. They should be accorded the same treatment and allowed to enjoy the same privileges accorded other law-abiding citizens or residents.”

  This means that if we can get a leave clearance pass, we wil
l be allowed to return to California, Oregon, and Washington—these being the coastal regions from which we were evacuated three years ago.

  February. Mom and Pop heard from Kenny. He doesn’t write to me. He is now flying missions in the Pacific and is the only Nisei to be allowed to do so. “I wanted to make a point about loyalty,” he wrote. No comment from me. Even Mom and Pop looked a little stunned by the news.

  March. Had another “interview” with the Camp director, who said I still didn’t have my leave clearance pass, but thought I would soon. Then Mom, Pop, and I would be free to leave Camp and go home. But home to what? We have nothing there and will have to start all over again. Mariko can’t get her pass either because of her association with Will. So it looks like we’re all stuck here for a while. Pop tapped me on the shoulder as I was writing in my journal and said, “Don’t want to go back. No store, no house, no car. What old man like me do? Want to die here.”

  April. Emi and her family are to leave tomorrow. There was a going-away party for her and we danced like two bears, hugging affectionately. But the news from Los Angeles is not good. They owned some property and left it in the hands of a “friend,” who apparently sold it, for a fraction of its value—sold it to himself—and the money they received for it is already gone.

  Another day. Pop said he’d been thinking of flowers. In the old country, they’d go on all-day outings to every city park and view the cherry blossoms: at their peak; when the wind blew through them; and when they had scattered on the ground. “Beautiful every way,” he volunteered. The Danish sea captain who is caring for his bonsai wrote him a note in a rough hand and said “The little tree, she is healthier every day.” We sat outside on the doorstep and I shared a candy bar with him. He said he worried about the cherry trees in Japan during a war with no one to view them. “Maybe they’re happy just being trees,” I said. I’ll always remember the first spring we were here. One morning he jumped out of bed excitedly and motioned us to the window. But what he thought were cherry blossoms in the distance was only snow.

  38

  In April the winds abated, and for a week the temperatures reached eighty degrees. The war in Europe was rapidly coming to an end, and the war in the Pacific had intensified with Operation Iceberg, the invasion of Okinawa. Four hundred and fifty thousand army and marine troops were landed there, among them Champ, recently sent back into action. On April 1, Roosevelt died and Truman became president. The first German death camps were liberated by American forces—Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald. Snuff’s wedding day, April 21, came and went. Snuff was admitted to the hospital again with another ulcer attack and told to keep off the bottle. A few days after, Mussolini and his mistress, Clara, were shot and hanged by their heels in the main square in Milan. The next day, April 29, Hitler married Eva Braun, only to commit joint suicide on the thirtieth.

  “At least he got the old gal to marry him,” Pinkey said, putting the newspaper down. The steam from his coffee cup wetted a corner of the front page. He was disconsolate because Loretta had not answered his telegram nor shown herself in town since the phone call, nor had Snuff heard from Carol.

  “We’re a hell of a pair,” Snuff said, sipping tea. “Look at me, drinking tea like an old maid.”

  “We’re eclipsed,” Pinkey said, because he still believed the eclipse of the moon he had ridden under was a permanant shadow, one that had no end or edge.

  That night Snuff offered to take Pinkey to the movies to see For Whom the Bell Tolls. Halfway through, Snuff regretted his choice. He could not reconcile himself to the loss of Carol, who had come into his life—like a stray, he liked to say—though Ava Gardner she was not.…

  “Ah hell,” Pinkey exclaimed when the lights went up, because he was caught dabbing at his eyes. “You better take me on into the ranch,” he said. “I’ve had enough excitement for one day.” The two men drove home silently.

  Carol Lyman lay out in the sun by her sister’s pool. Emily’s husband had been killed in the early part of the war and it was 1945 now, and she already had several boyfriends under tow. Her victory garden consisted of cactus, hot peppers, tomatoes, muskmelons, and watermelon, which she watered in the middle of the night when the air was still hot but the blistering sun was gone. For days the two women waded back and forth across the pool suspending Willard with their hands under him. Will he ever float, Carol wondered. Whenever they touched his back he laughed, then began thrashing, sinking head first like a punctured blimp. After the lessons, they stretched out in the sun until their skin was very dark and the white stripes under their bathing suits looked like scars. The dry air had a mineral and flower fragrance. Carol wore hibiscus in her hair. Each time she thought about Snuff she made herself put an X on a pad of paper until the pad was filled and Willard drew a picture of a rooster and their house in Luster. He wanted to go home.

  Carol packed their belongings and took the train north and east again. It was May 6th, and the heat was so severe she found it hard to breathe. Before leaving they bought a basketful of dates, oranges, and nuts, which they ate while watching the scenery go by. The land changed from sand to red cliffs, to mountains, to high sagebrush plains, and within thirty hours they were in Wyoming again.

  She had not stopped thinking of Snuff. All the way to Laramie, she blamed herself for her failure with him, blamed it on her rigidity, her lack of spontaneity, her bad genes. When she contemplated starting a new life elsewhere, her ties to Luster pulled her. What, in all that desolation, could it possibly be? Her sister, who went nowhere, had given Carol her gas coupons, which she used in Laramie. She had the coupe filled. They started north slowly. At the Big Horn River, she and Willard roasted hot dogs and marshmallows over a twig fire, and at dusk she saw a tree with five herons perched in its branches. They were hulklike, almost grotesque, too big for the narrow trunk. The bright sky silhouetted them. She pointed out the tree to Willard, and he raised his willow so that it looked like part of the tree, as if the birds had come to rest on its pale branches.

  “It’s our tree of life,” she whispered.

  Willard grinned.

  Then they heard the wing bones creak as the herons flew over.

  May eighth, VJ Day in Europe. The Germans surrendered and came to Eisenhower’s advance headquarters in Reims to sign the truce. They sat around a plain wood table in a school building and the mood was tense. Carol Lyman heard on the radio how Trafalgar Square and Times Square went wild at the news but in the tiny Wyoming towns she drove through that day, the celebrations were grimly quiet. In one, with a population of twenty, the two stores were closed, a church bell rang, and the spacious community hall, built of logs before the turn of the century, was decorated with black crepe paper because five of the seven men who went to war from that town had been killed.

  Carol and Willard drove home that night. From the hill she could see the lights of the mill and the string of green roofs. Willard wiggled in his seat when they passed Snuff’s, then he squealed and hit his head on the dashboard until she stopped.

  “Willard, what’s gotten into you?” she asked.

  He turned around in his seat and motioned toward the bar.

  “Oh, for goodness sake, we have to go home.”

  He threw himself against the dash again.

  “Stop it,” she screamed, then turned the coupe around.

  Just inside the front door she paused. Her hair was shorter now because she’d had it cut in Palm Springs for the “softer look” Venus had suggested, and in the dark entry, she smiled at her small victory over self-hate.

  “Hello …?” she called out tentatively.

  A pot of coffee simmered on the stove and the back door banged shut. Willard seated himself at the bar and stuck his big hand into the pickled egg jar. Carol called out again, but no one answered. Down the hall, she peered into Snuff’s room. The bed was made and both windows were wide open. She sat on the bed, their bed. Had she come home? she wondered. She pushed her hand into the V neck of her dress; her sk
in did not feel like her own.

  “Is that all you wanted, a pickled egg?” she asked Willard. He peeled a second egg slowly, then deposited it, unbroken, into his mouth.

  “Well, no one’s home, I guess,” she said, and hung her heels over the rung of a stool. She poured herself a cup of coffee. The wind had come up and after the back door slammed shut for good, she could still hear some part of the roof banging. A car drove up but she could not see who it was because the flannel curtains had been closed against the sun. She took a sip of coffee and waited. A car door opened, and another one, then two doors closed and one car pulled away. She put her cup down and went to the window to look. Just mounting the hill some distance away, she could see the tail lights of an automobile going north.

  Carol went outside. A drift of white dust hit her and she could feel the grit in her teeth. Next to her coupe she saw footprints and tire tracks. Shading her eyes, she peered inside. A bundle lay on the seat. She opened the door cautiously. It was an old blanket, faded by sun, and the satin trim had torn half off. When she reached her hand toward it, the bundle moved.

  “Oh …,” she gasped and jumped back.

  The baby howled and she saw a tiny hand make a fist.

  “Oh my God,” she said, clapping her hand over her mouth, then reached in again and slid the baby across the seat, toward her.

  The baby yowled. Her hair was one black tuft that stood up from the top of her head, and her dark eyes searched Carol’s face. She carried the baby inside.

  “Carol?” Snuff stood in the middle of the room with a grocery bag under his arm. He set the bag down slowly as she approached.

  “What’s—”

  “I found her on the front seat, someone just left her there.” She pulled the blanket back from the baby’s face. “Look at this hair,” she said, touching the fuzz. “You can still see the tracks. They go north.…”