Four-Four-Two

by Dean Hughes

  Yuki gripped May’s hand. “I was almost sure I would never see you again,” he said. He looked around. “Or any of you.” The room fell silent, and soon tears were in everyone’s eyes. Yuki reached his other hand out to Kay. She was a skinny little thing, but cute, and he was glad she hadn’t changed too much.

  After a time the family walked together to the dining hall, and even though there were not so many people lined up for dinner as there once had been, Yuki created a bit of a sensation. An article in the Topaz Times had reported that Yuki had received a Silver Star. The description of his heroic acts had been quoted from the citation that had been included with his medal, so everyone had read that he’d faced enemy fire and put his own life on the line to save the men of his platoon.

  People kept coming, everyone wanting to shake his hand, tell him how glad they were he had survived his wounds and how proud they were of him. But some of the people had lost their sons, and he hardly knew what to say to them.

  All the while, Yuki knew that he needed to see Shig’s family. Mother had told him that the Omuras hadn’t moved away yet. He wasn’t sure he was up to talking to them, but he also knew it would be obvious he was avoiding them if he didn’t go by right away.

  So after he ate his dinner, Yuki walked to the barracks where the Omuras lived. He found no one there and assumed they had gone to their own dining hall in their block of barracks. He waited for them to return, and while he waited, he became increasingly nervous. He was standing outside the barracks, shivering in the late-afternoon cold, when he saw Shig’s parents, with Keiko, walking toward him. Mr. Omura was a small man, so much like Shig in his appearance that it was startling—and painful for Yuki to look at him.

  Yuki took a better look at Keiko and realized that he hardly knew her. He had known that she was eighteen now, but in his mind she had remained the innocent kid he had liked to dance with. She was still pretty, but she had taken on a graceful way of walking that he never would have expected. And her round face had become more sculpted, more womanly.

  Yuki stood before the three of them, bowed his head a little. Mr. Omura responded to his bow, stopped and lowered his head for a moment. “Yukus, we heard you were back. It is wonderful to see you,” he said.

  Yuki took a breath. He had wondered whether the Omuras hated him, whether they blamed him. He had prepared himself to accept their anger quietly if they refused to talk to him. Mrs. Omura walked close, took Yuki’s hand in hers. “It’s so good to see you,” she said. Yuki had written one letter to the Omuras while he was still in the hospital in France, and he had told them, in general terms, that Shig had died valiantly, but he had not heard anything back from them.

  Keiko was staying close to her father. Yuki could see that her face was flushed. She clearly didn’t know what to do. Yuki didn’t know either. “It’s nice to see you, Keiko,” he finally said. “You look . . . very nice.”

  He saw her color deepen. She was wearing a pale blue dress with a white collar. She seemed rather dressed up for a weeknight, and he wondered, had she heard from someone that he had arrived? Had she put on her favorite dress for him? Had she been looking forward to this moment, or did she have lots of boyfriends now?

  But there were other matters he had to deal with before he worried about that. “I have some things I need to say to all of you,” Yuki said.

  Mrs. Omura touched his arm. “Come in. Sit down with us.”

  So they walked inside to a room the same size and shape as the one the Nakaharas lived in. Mrs. Omura had done even more to fix theirs up. There were cloth coverings on the walls—cream-colored sheets—and there were prints of mountains and lakes. A little lampshade covered the lightbulb that hung in the middle of the room. It seemed a feeble attempt to make such a place a home, but Yuki admired Mrs. Omura’s neatness, her obvious desire to make the best of things.

  Yuki sat down with the Omuras on wooden chairs that Mr. Omura set out in a kind of rectangle. “You were badly wounded, I believe,” Mr. Omura said. “You didn’t say much about that in your letter, but I think it was worse than you admitted.”

  “By the time I wrote to you, it wasn’t so bad,” Yuki said. “I was shot here.” He touched his chest. He thought of saying that he had been lucky to survive, but that would only raise the question of why Shig had not been as fortunate. “I’m doing quite well now. I know I look awful, but I’ll get my strength back.”

  “I’m sure you will,” Mr. Omura said.

  And Mrs. Omura said, “You look fine, Yukus. Don’t worry about that.”

  Yuki glanced at Keiko, saw that she was looking back at him. He wondered what she was thinking. Was she shy to be around him now, or was she hoping he wouldn’t pay attention to her?

  Yuki took a breath. With his eyes directed straight ahead, not at any faces, he said, “Mr. and Mrs. Omura, I was the one who convinced Shigeo that he should join the army. I wish now I had never done that. I want you to know how very sorry I am. I wish he had never listened to me.”

  “No, Yukus,” Mr. Omura said. “This is not right.” He waited for Yuki to look at him. “Shigeo brought great honor to our family. It’s what you said in your letter, and it’s what your platoon leader said in the letter he sent us. We are very proud of our son.”

  “It wasn’t you, Yuki,” Mrs. Omura said. “He made up his own mind. He talked with us over and over about his decision. When he decided, he told us he would never feel good about himself if he stayed home while others went away to defend our country.”

  “But I’m the one who kept saying that to him.”

  “That doesn’t matter. It’s what he felt too. And he wrote letters to us, saying that he was proud to wear the uniform of his nation. He told us he was proud to be part of such a fine group of soldiers.”

  Yuki felt forgiven—more than he thought he deserved. He didn’t want to shame himself in front of Keiko, but he couldn’t hold back his tears. He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, and fought to control himself. When he could find his voice, he said, “We were brothers, Shig and I. We got each other through so many battles, and we always came out all right. And then we were both shot on the same hill.” He fought his emotions hard again, and then he said what he had never said out loud. “I don’t understand why he died and I lived. The world would be a better place if it had been the other way around.”

  “No, Yuki.” Mrs. Omura got up and stepped toward Yuki. She placed her hand carefully on his shoulder, and then she put her fingers under his chin and lifted it. “You must never say this again, never think it. These are things we do not understand. God decides, and in our family, we trust God. Shigeo was a noble boy, and he will be precious in our hearts forever, but we have no regrets about his service. He sacrificed his life for the good of our world.”

  Yuki drew in a breath. He finally felt some relief after all these weeks of worry and remorse. “Thank you,” he whispered.

  “Can you tell us anything more about his death?”

  Yuki nodded. “Yes.”

  Mrs. Omura walked back to her chair and sat down.

  Yuki tried to think what to say to them. He didn’t want to put all that blood in their minds. “Shig was small, of course,” he said, “and some of our trainers didn’t think he would make much of a soldier. But he became a courageous fighter. I want you to know, we were both wounded trying to save Americans who were trapped behind enemy lines.”

  “Yes. This is what we have been told,” Mr. Omura said.

  “But what Shig did was especially brave. I was in a bad spot, but he came to help me. When the bullets knocked him down, I tried to keep him alive, but he was hurt too bad. His heart kept beating for about a minute, but he wasn’t conscious. He didn’t have to suffer.”

  The picture of it all—Shig on the ground, the open wound in his abdomen—came forcefully back to Yuki’s mind. But he described none of that.

  Tears were dripping from Yuki’s chin again.

  “This is war,” Mr. Omura said. But te
ars were in his eyes too, and that was something Yuki had never expected from him.

  Yuki glanced at Keiko and saw that she was also crying. She met Yuki’s eyes for just a moment, and then she whispered, “You did what you could, so don’t blame yourself. It’s good that one of you could come back to us.”

  The words were huge to Yuki. He had worried for weeks that she would hold him responsible, would not want to see him.

  “Life is full of pain,” Mr. Omura said, “and I was raised to accept pain, not pity myself. We must be thankful that Shigeo is beyond suffering now.”

  Yuki nodded. But that seemed enough talk about pain; he wanted to say something that might leave them with better memories of Shig. He related some of the experiences he and Shig had shared. He told them of Shig running up the wall at Camp Shelby, showing the others how to make it over the top. He described the buddhaheads and the fun they liked to have, even told them about Muki Shimuzu offering to fight them on their first day in Mississippi—although he didn’t tell them that Muki had been shot through the hip and carried off the battlefield, and would probably suffer difficulty with that all his life. Instead, he said a few things about digging foxholes together, looking out for one another. He described the day he and Shig had been blasted in the face and then sat in an alley and talked about their chances of getting home. But that was a little too tender for everyone, and Yuki decided he had said enough.

  An hour had gone by, and everyone seemed satisfied with the conversation. Yuki finally thanked Mr. and Mrs. Omura for their goodness to him, and said, “We’ll talk again. I have other stories, if you want to hear them.”

  “Yes. We would like that,” Mr. Omura said. He shook Yuki’s hand.

  Yuki was stepping toward the door when Keiko touched his arm. “Yuki, do you remember the soda fountain I told you about in one of my letters?” she asked him.

  “I do.” And then he took a chance. “I read your letters many times, Keiko. They meant a great deal to me.”

  She blushed, looked down. “I’m glad to know it.” She hesitated, and then said, “Would you like to see the soda fountain? I can show you.”

  This was what an American girl would say to a boy, and both her parents glanced down, clearly embarrassed. But Yuki liked the way Keiko was smiling. It was as though she were saying to him, “Would you like to be yourself again?”

  The answer he gave her—and himself—surprised him. “Yes, I’d like that. Maybe I could come by sometime and—”

  “We could walk over now. It’s still early.”

  Yuki nodded. “Okay. That sounds swell. Thank you.” He glanced at the Omuras. They looked pleased, and that relieved him. So he opened the door for Keiko, and she glanced at him as she walked out. He saw what seemed to be a glimmer of satisfaction and enough spark to suggest flirtation.

  When they reached the little soda fountain, it didn’t look like much from the outside, but it was the real thing inside. There were young people at the counter and the tables, and some were dancing in a little space at the far end of the room. The jukebox in the corner was playing a jive tune, rather loudly. It was as though his years in California, forgotten for such a long time, had suddenly dropped out of the sky and landed in Utah. “Let’s dance,” Keiko said.

  Yuki hadn’t thought of doing such a thing. He wasn’t sure that he still knew the steps. But he smiled. “Okay,” he said. “Help me remember.”

  It was surprising how it all came back, not just the steps, but the feel of it, even his energy. His body, his soul, hadn’t felt this animated since he had left Topaz almost two years earlier. And Keiko was like a glint of life itself, wonderful to look at. Her dimples were flashing now, and she was both that sixteen-year-old girl he remembered and this new young woman he had just met.

  They danced a couple of dances, they ate some ice cream, and after a time they walked outside into the cool air.

  “Are you really okay, Yuki?” Keiko asked. “From Shig’s letters—and yours—I could tell that everything was really hard, even if you wouldn’t come right out and say it.”

  Yuki didn’t know how to tell her, didn’t want to tell her, but he admitted, “It was worse than I . . . expected.” Then he looked into her eyes. “Keiko, war should not exist. It’s the worst thing human beings have thought up. It made me feel . . . dirty . . . to be part of it. Shig felt the same way.”

  “You and Shig were brave, though. You—”

  “We were scared. Every minute.”

  “But you didn’t let that stop you. You’re a hero now.”

  “Keiko, we did our best. We all did. But it’s not like the newspapers make it sound, or the movies, or . . .” Yuki stopped, and he made a decision. That was all he was going to say. No one could understand—except those who had been there.

  He and Keiko walked out toward the barbed-wire fence. Keiko told him that the guards didn’t worry anymore whether anyone approached it. What Yuki liked was being far enough away from the tar paper barracks to feel the grand space out under the sky. He knew the cold would soon force them back to their barracks, but for now, he wanted to be alone with Keiko, wanted to feel himself part of the universe. The first stars were coming out, sharper here in the desert than they had been in Europe. The beauty of that sky, the fading mountains off to the south, even the cold breeze seemed to say that God hadn’t given up on the earth, no matter what humans chose to do to one another.

  “What are you going to do now, Yuki?” Keiko asked.

  “I don’t know. Maybe go back to California.”

  “We feel the same way. We want to go back to Berkeley, or somewhere around there. And I want to go to college.”

  “You’re really smart, aren’t you?”

  She laughed. “I don’t know. I just know I’d like to be a teacher, but no one will hire me to teach in regular schools, so I don’t know what to study.”

  “Be a teacher if that’s what you want. Don’t let anyone stop you.”

  “That’s easy to say, but I’m not in control. I can only do what America will let me do.”

  “Things are going to change, Keiko.”

  “How? White people still don’t accept us. What will change that?”

  Yuki liked to think that the valor of the Nisei soldiers would make a difference in the way the nation thought about Japanese Americans—but he wasn’t sure that it would. He tried to think why he still trusted that change was coming. He was quiet for a long time before he said, “All my life I’ve wanted to be like everyone else—and pretend I’m not really Japanese. But that doesn’t work. There was no better regiment in the army than the Four-Four-Two. But it wasn’t that way in spite of our Japanese heritage. It was that way because of it. I think you should just go forward and be who you are. Once people really know you, they won’t want to stand in your way.”

  Yuki was surprised by his own words. They were part of an idea that had been forming in his mind, but it wasn’t something he had felt with such confidence before. He was pretty sure Keiko’s future—and his—would be more difficult than he was admitting to her. But he was right all the same; he was sure of it.

  “I don’t know, Yuki. I don’t think many people want to know us. It’s easier to hate us—in a lump—than it is to get to know us one at a time.”

  “I know. But we’re all like that. I’ve seen it in myself—you know, in the war. I wanted to hate all Germans, but every now and then I’d find out they were just regular people. After one of our battles, I found a German boy on the ground. He was dead, but he was curled up on his side, like a little kid in bed. All I could think was that he didn’t want to be in this war any more than I did. It was probably the same for most of the Germans.”

  “But then, how could you . . .”

  “Kill them?”

  “Yes.”

  She was looking into his eyes, as though she wanted to understand what he had been through, but Yuki knew he could never tell her everything. He didn’t want her to know that he was the one who
had killed that German boy. He would think about that all his life, but he didn’t want her to bear that burden with him.

  “I’ll tell you the truth. We mostly fought for each other—our Japanese brothers. But our Nisei regiment also lost a whole lot of men trying to save the lives of white guys we didn’t even know. A lot of our men, including Shig, sacrificed their lives for those guys. By then we knew that they were our brothers too.”

  “I’m proud of Shig that he did that.”

  “You should be. In battle, you see it all the time: One guy lays down his own life to save the life of another. That’s the one thing from war I want to remember. It gives me hope.”

  “But someone always thinks up another war. I don’t know if the world will ever have peace for very long.”

  Yuki thought of the word “peace.” It had always meant “no war” to him, but now it meant something he longed for more than anything else: comfort within himself, trust that the world was a good place and that he had a rightful role to play in it. “I want to believe that everyone’s better impulses will win out sooner or later,” he told Keiko.

  Keiko smiled up at him. “Well . . . you give me hope, and I haven’t felt too much of that while I’ve been locked up in this camp.”

  Her words amazed Yuki. He had spent so many months feeling hopeless that he had never expected to find hope for himself, let alone offer hope to anyone else. He took a long breath and felt something let go. He had been tense for such a long time that he had forgotten how it felt to let himself . . . breathe. Just breathe.

  Shig had died and Yuki had lived. Yuki knew that would always hurt, but he also knew he had to do the best he could with the life he had been granted—not just for himself, but for all the friends he had lost.

  Keiko was as bright and beautiful as anyone he knew, and she was very close. He wanted more than anything to kiss her. It seemed a little too soon, too forward, to do that just yet . . . but he had felt dead these last few months, and now her eyes seemed to be saying, “Come back to life, Yuki. It’s all right to do that.”