“That Driftwood stud of Jesse’s.”
Champ nodded, never taking his eyes off the horse. “How’s he feel about ‘crips’?”
“He’s broke to canes and crutches and he’ll stand all afternoon while you get on. The rest is up to you, I guess,” McKay said.
“How hard does he buck?”
McKay grinned. “Oh, not too bad …” He kicked the dirt with his boot. “Try him.”
Champ smiled and pulled down his hat. “You dirty bastard,” he growled at McKay and stroked the colt’s neck.
“I’ll leave you two alone. Bon voyage,” McKay said, then walked back to the house.
Champ picked up the bridle reins and the horse stepped toward him. He rubbed the horse on the front on the face, then let his hand slide down the soft muzzle.
“Hello, you good-looking sonofabitch,” he crooned. “Jesus … where d’ya come from anyway? You weren’t here when I left …,” he said, and struggled with his balance as he lifted his foot into the stirrup.
McKay woke and heard laughter. It was four in the morning and he couldn’t understand where the noise was coming from. Then he remembered he wasn’t on the screened porch. He got out of bed and walked to the landing of the stairs. Below, in the living room, alive with kerosene lamps and candles lining the mantle over the fireplace, Champ and Pinkey sat on Mexican stools with a bottle between them. McKay watched as Pinkey tried to pour. When he brought the bottle to the rim of the shot glass, both hands were shaking so hard, the whiskey splashed over the top.
“Here, let me try,” Champ said, amused, then pressed his hand to the damp spot on the rug and wiped his face with it.
Pinkey handed him the bottle and shot glass. Champ’s hands shimmied.
“Hell, I can’t do it either,” he said, laughing, then tipped the bottle to his lips.
McKay moved toward the stairs.
“Hey there,” Pinkey yelled up to him. “He’s got the shakes worse than I do. Did you see that?” Pinkey’s chin was wet and he needed a shave.
“Can’t sleep either, huh?” Champ said cheerfully.
“Too goddamned much noise. It used to be quiet around here,” McKay said, smiling.
“Yeah, I bet, with you and that girlfriend tiptoeing around.…”
McKay glared at his brother.
“Here, tits up,” Pinkey muttered.
“It’s supposed to be bottoms up,” McKay said.
“I don’t care. I don’t like that other stuff.…”
“What other stuff, Pinkey?” Champ asked, teasing.
“Hey, are you going to pour me a drink or not?” McKay interrupted.
Pinkey handed McKay the bottle. McKay filled the shot glass twice, then wiped his lips and passed the bottle around. Champ and Pinkey talked about women and horseflesh and army nurses.
“Yep, not a damned thing’s happened since you’ve been gone except that I got laid in ’43.…” He turned to McKay. “Was it ’43 or ’44? Hell, all them years are the same to me, but anyway, that’s not a bad average for an old man like me.”
McKay looked at Pinkey. “God, if your eyes ain’t red …”
“A man’s got to live up to his name,” Pinkey retorted. “Besides, it’s from the hay,” he said, holding his arms out. “Lookee there,” he said and showed the scratches on his arms to McKay. “You’d think I’d been in a catfight.”
“And you lost,” Champ added.
When Pinkey went outside to relieve himself McKay and Champ sat in silence. McKay could hear Champ’s body shaking the whole chair. “Flak happy,” “shellshock,” “battle fatigue”—those were the words Champ had used earlier. He had been in the hospital again, this time for paralysis and a loss of speech. “They put me in the nuthouse … can you believe that? Then they’d wake me up real early in the morning and take me down to this room for an ‘Amytal chat’—some drug that put me to sleep. It was sleep, but I talked during it. Then they taught me how to walk again and I was reassigned … see, everyone in my unit had been killed but me.”
McKay turned the shot glass in his hand. There was nothing to say now. Champ was home; Mariko was gone. Ted and Henry would be home soon.
He thought about how Champ had limped into the corral using his cane, how when he caved in with pain once and fell to his knees, how the horse had gone to him and put his nose on Champ’s shoulder as if that moment had been rehearsed. That’s why he and Champ didn’t have to make peace. They both hated that sort of thing.
“I’m hungry,” McKay said. “Have I ever made you my special eggs?”
Champ groaned. “You mean the ones that smell like formaldehyde?”
“Can’t we have something normal?” Pinkey said, stumbling down the dark hall.
McKay held the swinging door to the kitchen open. “What would you know about normal?” he asked as the old cowboy pushed in.
The sounds in the house, the human sounds of laughter and cooking and talking, continued to trouble McKay. Bobby began a siege of cooking and weekly trips to the grocery store in town. Their meals were boisterous. Bobby made special tonics for Champ and settled their quarrels by clucking his false teeth, then whittling them at the table until the anger had passed.
McKay had taken down his screened porch, folded his cot, rolled up the screens like maps and tied them with canvas straps. It had been hot and once the screens were gone his “cell in wide-open space” filled with darting mudswallows. Now it was no more. Even if the cell was gone and the Camp emptied out, the mountains hemmed him and solitude smeared the walls and floors of the house with its shine.
Later, sitting on the cement slab of his screenless porch, he had felt a sudden, foolish sense of well-being. How could that be? Where did unfounded pleasure come from?
McKay lay on top of the bed. He couldn’t sleep and it was hot but the air had something of autumn in it—it smelled of dry ice. He dressed quickly and left the house by the back stairs. He didn’t know which horses were in the corral and he couldn’t see—one looked like another—so he caught the first horse who let himself be caught, saddled him, and rode to the river. It was late in the year and what water there was ran shallow. The sandbar had widened and what started as river rock was fine sand in the middle of the island. The driftwood had dried and bleached all summer in hot sun and the grasses were grazed to nothing.
McKay took off his boots and spurs and curled his bare feet over rock. Above, the Milky Way had slipped from the middle to the west side of the sky. Once, McKay had seen the river shift. High water—water that seemed to move over the top of water that was already there—took the gravel bar as its center. The next year it shifted back. But the “Great River,” as Mariko called it—the Milky Way—was always on a slide. It was the great heart of the sky.
McKay walked the length of the tiny island. He could see where the elk had been. Tracks covered one end. He thought about what Pinkey always said: how reading tracks came more naturally than reading words.
He caught his horse and crossed the river. On the other side the tracks were visible, then disappeared in grass. But the grass showed where they had gone: it folded out from an invisible trail and here and there, seedless heads were bent down and had not straightened. Ahead, a patch of timber was collared by snow.
He led his horse into the trees. Darkness was another hue there—it had no sheen; it was all purples and blacks drenched by black. The errant bomb had gone, the hard carapace, the shrapnel—all behind him. What lay ahead?
He came on a deadfall, a ruin of pines and spruce lying across each other, midsections broken, torn roots lifted into air, and the slender, lighter limbs crosshatched in a rotting canopy over his head. He and the horse threaded a way through, picked up the tracks, and followed them to a clearing.
Where the elk had grazed the grass was nipped down to roots. McKay stepped on his horse again. The tracks widened into a game trail: down a hill, across two dry creeks, then out onto land that had shelved to a high plain. Now the black was broken; a
long tail of stars hung down vertically like a ladder. He wondered how far the Milky Way had slid, if it was under him now like a belly band, if it slid at all. Once, when he got off his horse to look at how the elk’s hooves had stamped the dirt, he thought he could smell the musk of their passing.
The trail dove down into the breaks. Ahead was a fence. He saw where they had jumped it. One calf hadn’t cleared the top wire and died hanging there. He pulled the calf to the ground and rode down the fence line. He knew where the gate was because it was his gate, the gate to his lower pasture. The tracks led through the grainfield to the lake. There was just enough starlight to see the animals and he could hear their clattering on rock. As he rode closer he could see some of the calves still had spots on their flanks. His horse was thirsty and McKay let him drink. The elk calves made soft barking sounds and played half in, half out of the water, and the water looked like the shadow timber makes—a hard shade.
Then there was only Venus, the morning star, and the sky, having lost its darkness, went blank, unable to pick up another hue. McKay thought about the errant bomb, how its metallic glare must have fallen onto the lake because when dawn came, the water hardened into sheets of silver.
Turning his horse for home, he glanced back. Wind blasted the lake into tiny crenulations that peaked and flattened, took the light as it came, and carried it forward to water’s edge where the calves gamboled until the errant bomb’s lid of solitude had been trampled into day.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Heartfelt thanks to those who assisted me by generously sharing their wartime stories: especially, Carl Iwasaki, Frank Emi, and Estelle Ishigo, interned at Heart Mountain; Charles Kikuchi, whose diaries were begun at Gila; Miné Okubo, painter, who was interned at Topaz; Robert Broad-water, who survived the Bataan Death March and was a prisoner of war in Japan; Dr. John Merritt, who was both doctor and patient in the Pacific; Bea Iwasaki, whose brother was the first Nisei to join the Air Corps; the painter Masami Teraoka, who lived through the war a hundred miles from Hiroshima; and my parents, Grant and Gretchen Ehrlich, who participated in the war effort “stateside.” Thanks also to those who provided research materials: the Bancroft Library, Berkeley, California; the UCLA Special Collections; the Smithsonian Institute; the National Archives; Pat Johnson of the Greybull Library; Wayne Johnson of the Wyoming State Library; John Roland, Northwest Community College Library; the Japanese-American Cultural and Community Center, Los Angeles; Col. Pat C. Hoy II; Pat Crosby; Barbara Schenkel, bookseller; Brian Petersen; Elaine Moncur, rancher on Heart Mountain; Peggy Ann Lloyd, typist. For their interest, hospitality, and concern in Kyoto, Japan, deep thanks to the Noh mask carvers Aya and Noyetsu Iwai; and Professor Aseyeda, who gave us entry to Kyoto’s Noh theaters. Thanks to those Japanese-Americans whose books, diaries, drawings, and paintings fleshed out an unfortunate event in history I was too young to witness.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gretel Ehrlich is an award-winning writer and naturalist. Born and raised in California, she was educated at Bennington College and UCLA Film School. She is the author of thirteen books, including the essay collection The Solace of Open Spaces (1985), the novel Heart Mountain (1988), and the memoirs A Match to the Heart: One Woman’s Story of Being Struck by Lightning (1994) and This Cold Heaven: Seven Seasons in Greenland (2001), as well as The Future of Ice: A Journey into Cold (2004), and, most recently, Facing the Wave: A Journey in the Wake of a Tsunami (2014). Her prose pieces have appeared in Harper’s, the Atlantic, the New York Times Magazine, and National Geographic, among many other publications. Ehrlich lives in Montana and Hawaii.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1988 by Gretel Ehrlich
Cover design by Mauricio Díaz
ISBN: 978-1-5040-4286-4
This edition published in 2017 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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New York, NY 10038
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GRETEL EHRLICH
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