Deep Purple

by Parris Afton Bonds

  “I know the gentleman,” Amanda said curtly. “Nick Godwin— not Howard Hughes.”

  “Wow!” Betty breathed. “Isn’t he the owner of that palatial estate near Tucson—the Ironhold or something like that?”

  “The Stronghold,” Amanda corrected, smiling. “Yes, I guess you might say he’s more or less the owner,” she said, repeating a phrase Nick had used at their first meeting.

  Christmas Eve day she rose earlier than usual in order to get a shower before the stampede began to the combination laundry/washroom. Like everyone else, she wore only pajamas and robe as she made her way to the washroom. The winter wind was terribly cold and strong sweeping down across the open desert, and she was in too much of a hurry to reach the warmth of the washroom to look where she was going.

  She was thinking how grateful she was for her homemade getas, the traditional wooden clogs, because they were built high enough to clear the mud puddles that swamped the area about the washroom. Next she looked up to find Sam Tsuruda blocking the washroom door.

  “You’re out early, Miss Shima.”

  She shivered as the wind whipped around her, blowing her robe high. “No earlier than you.” She made to move around him, and his stocky body stepped between her and the doorway again. “You’re breaking curfew law,” he said, leering.

  How she wanted to tear that greasy smile from his face. “At six forty-five the curfew is lifted—ten minutes, Mr. Tsuruda. I can’t imagine administration throwing me under lock and key for taking a bath ten minutes early.”

  His protuberant eyes slimed their way down the length of her body, fastening on to the way the wind-whipped robe clung to her curves. “They wouldn't have to know about it, would they? They wouldn’t have to know about extra rations of clothing or extra portions of food.”

  “Mr. Tsuruda, I am cold! Now are you going to let me pass? I don’t intend to freeze standing here arguing with you.”

  “I can keep you warm,” he muttered. His arms went about her in a bearlike hug. Together in the semidarkness of dawn they struggled. “This is ridiculous!” she raged, helpless as his hands fumbled at her robe ties while his mouth groped across her twisting head for her lips. She tried to scratch him.

  Somehow, in the jostling, he slipped in the muddy water, splashing mud over both of them. She lunged for the door, more to keep her balance than in hope of the refuge it offered. She looked down at Tsuruda, who looked so silly sprawled face down in the mud, and burst out in laughter. He staggered to his feet. A drop of mud clung to the broad tip of his nose.

  “You dare to laugh!” he roared like a bear.

  Quickly she stepped inside the washroom, leaning against the closed door as she gasped with laughter. By the time a birdlike old woman arrived to do her laundry on the washboards, Amanda had recovered her aplomb. The outlandish incident was over as far as she was concerned.

  When she returned to her quarters, her father was still in bed, which was unlike him. He was coughing, trying to sit up. She put one arm about his waist and the other around his shoulders and maneuvered him into a sitting position. She hurried for the cough medicine the clinic doled out and poured a teaspoon. The clinic kept saying he would improve more visibly after the winter was over.

  But the cold at Poston seemed far worse than the winters in Tucson. Their rooms froze at night, and Amanda would take their extra clothing and lay it over her father. “It’s no use.” He smiled at her as he swallowed the vile-tasting medicine. “It’s my bones that are frozen, daughter.”

  “We shall take care of that," she said, smiling. With the little she had saved from her monthly salary she had ordered a sheet-iron stove through the community cooperative. That night, Christmas Eve, her father would be warm for once!

  She put him back to bed and tucked the blanket from her bed around him. "I’m going to help decorate the mess hall for Christmas,” she told him, kissing his still-smooth cheek. "And I shall be back soon with some breakfast.”

  She was in and out the rest of the day, checking on her father. By dinnertime he felt well enough to go with the rest of the evacuees to the mess hall. Christmas seemed forced as they trooped inside for the special dinner. Some of the younger men and women concocted a drink of grape jam and lemons, but it took a great deal of imagination to pretend it was the real thing.

  More than one time during the Christmas Eve celebration she caught Tsuruda’s weasel eyes on her, lingering over the way her jeans hugged her derriere. For once she wished the grape drink was inebriating. The gloom of the camp and her father’s worsening condition combined with Tsuruda’s blighting presence depressed her more than ever.

  Later that night she lay awake, listening to the man and wife in the room next to theirs as they made love. The whispered words, the gasping pants. She thought about Bob. Should she have married him? But as the woman’s soft cry of ecstasy reached her ears, it was not the thought of Bob that burned like a fever in her thighs and the pit of her belly. Her legs twitched. She tossed on her stomach, then on her back again. She pounded the moldy pillow with her fist and flopped it over, trying hopelessly to fluff it.

  “You’re not waiting up for Santa Claus?’’ her father teased from the other side of the room.

  “Hardly.” At dawn, just as she was getting to sleep, her father began to cough again, and she gave up and rose for the day.

  On New Year’s Day two events occurred—an ominous forecast of the year to come, she thought. She was leaving for the mess hall again, this time to help in the making of mochi, a special kind of rice used in celebrating the traditional Japanese new year. But as she put on the shabby coat, her father began to cough. This time blood spittled the handkerchief that he tried to hide from her. Even the black stove warming the room from the corner had not seemed to help.

  Reluctantly she went on to the mess hall. She barely heard Betty as the young woman ran on about the special guy she was interested in who lived in the bachelors’ quarters. Amanda’s mind agonized over her father as she pounded her wooden mallet into the rice.

  Betty, working the sticky mass into rounded cakes, said, ‘‘I have told Tim about you, and he is very much amazed that you, a female, are a lawyer.”

  “Not quite,” Amanda replied dryly. “If I had already been sworn in, you can be sure I would have challenged the whole constitutionality of the evacuation.”

  Betty’s fingers halted in shaping the cake she held. “How?”

  Amanda smiled. “No need to be impressed. It’s not that difficult. I’d file a writ of habeas corpus, contending that the War Relocation Authority has no right to detain loyal American citizens who are innocent of all the various allegations the Army used to justify our evacuation.”

  But her smile faded. It was difficult—impossible—without her Certificate of Admission to the Bar. Less than two or three months and she would have been eligible for the swearing-in and her certificate! She smashed the mallet down on the boiled rice with a satisfying thud.

  She left the mochi-making early, anxious to get back to her father. Outside the room’s flimsy door she could hear his hacking cough. When she entered, he smiled, but she could see the strain of his illness written in the shadowy eyes and the skin that was far yellower than his natural coloring. “We’re going to get a doctor," she announced firmly, trying to hide her fright.

  Her father caught her wrist. His bony fingers still held a surprising amount of strength in them. "Amanda, a few hours either way isn’t going to make much difference. It's New Year’s. Let the doctors celebrate. Tomorrow will be soon enough.”

  At first she refused to return for the New Year’s celebration, but her father insisted. Knowing he would only wear himself out in trying to make her go, she acceded, though she did not plan to stay long.

  As it happened, she never made it to the mess hall. Since she was late leaving their quarters, everyone was already at the mess hall. She hurried along through the shadows, clutching her coat around her. Suddenly a gorilla-like figure loomed befor
e her. Mistakenly, she judged it best to keep walking rather than show fear. She began to veer to the lighted portion of the dirt street. The shadowy figure lumbered across her intended path, and now she saw the face. Sam Tsuruda.

  “What do you want?” she asked, forcing a calmness to her voice her pounding heart did not feel.

  “Inu!" he growled. “Bitch!”

  She took a step backward, prepared to run.

  “You are a silly woman,” he hissed. “You do not know the proper respect that a true Japanese woman should show!”

  “I am not a Japanese woman.” Another small step backward. “I am an American.”

  Tsuruda’s hamhock hands grabbed for her. “You are a traitor who must be disciplined!”

  She dodged, but his hand caught her coat. The buttons gave way at his yank. She tripped and went sprawling in the mud.

  “No!” she screamed. She kicked out and must have struck his groin, because he released her immediately and doubled over with a bellowing grunt. She scrambled to her feet and ran. In her ears she could hear her frightened panting, but she was afraid it was the footsteps of an infuriated Tsuruda closing in on her.

  The door to her room gave way under her panicky hands. Her father turned from where he lay on his side and looked up at her. “What is it?” he demanded.

  She crossed to her cot and sat down, shaking. “I don’t know. I—I suddenly didn’t feel well.”

  “Your coat—”

  “I was hurrying back and stupidly didn’t watch where I was going. I—I tripped over that barbed wire around that septic-tank hole and tore it.”

  She did not think her father was thoroughly convinced, but at that moment he was probably feeling too bad to investigate further. She lay there on her cot, staring throughout the night at the skeleton roof of the ceiling and listening as one by one their neighbors returned to their quarters, laughing and singing.

  Their festive spirits annoyed her. She could not seem to think logically. Everything seemed so bleak. She kept telling herself that at night—in the darkness—things always seemed worse than they actually were. But the next morning, gray and overcast with another approaching cold front, the state of affairs seemed no better.

  Sam Tsuruda continued to hound her, although as yet he had made no further overtures. Her father’s situation was even worse. One morning six weeks later, when he did not feel well enough to rise from bed, she knew something had to be done.

  She went to the mess hall to get some breakfast for her father, hoping she would not run into Tsuruda. He frightened her almost as much as her fear for her father’s health did. She vacillated over reporting Tsuruda to administration. Tsuruda was a barracks captain and carried considerable influence, while administration was well aware of her discontent with its policies. She doubted she would get much sympathy from them. She could, of course, request a transfer to another barracks, but that would hardly assuage Tsuruda’s wounded vanity.

  After she fed her father, she went to the clinic. The doctors— there were three to serve Poston’s twenty thousand people—told her that unless her father was dying, she would have to bring him to the clinic to be checked.

  “He is dying,” she told the oldest doctor, who looked tired himself. Dr. Niosha glanced through her father’s file, which noted only a moderate case of tuberculosis. But she was persistent.

  The doctor ran his fingers through his graying hair. “I’ll come over to your barracks at lunchtime then."

  Taro agreed apathetically to let the doctor check him. The two old men bowed low after she introduced them, but her father immediately sat down again, weakened by the small effort.

  Dr. Niosha took his stethoscope from his black bag and, after ordering her father to remove his shirt, began to listen to his wheezy breathing. After taking his pulse and temperature, he turned to her, saying, "The tuberculosis is, of course, degenerative, but it’s pneumonia I’m concerned about right now. It seems to be a mild case, but it needs to be watched carefully. We’ll have to move your father into the clinic, where he can receive immediate attention. I’ll make arrangements at once."

  That afternoon she watched the camp ambulance halt in front of their quarters and load her father into the back. She held his hand before they took him away, telling him she would be by to see him as soon as she finished work.

  But she did not go to the newspaper’s office. She walked the three miles through the freezing wind to the administration offices, a white two-story frame building. She knew that she and her father had to leave. It wasn’t just Sam Tsuruda’s threatening presence. She would not let her father die inside a concentration camp.

  Taking a number, she waited her turn to see the project director. He was an older man, a Caucasian, with salt-and- pepper hair and a kindly face that gave her hope her request would be granted. “Yes?” he asked when she took her seat before the desk that was mounded with papers.

  “I have been told that the WRA is permitting a few Japanese families to leave the camps if they are sponsored by reliable persons on the outside.”

  The project director folded his hands before him. “This is true. But it often is difficult to find sponsors that the WRA will approve. Usually a church or even a large company, like Goodyear or Westinghouse, guaranteeing housing and employment, is what the WRA looks for. And right now we have very few such offers and a long line of waiting families.”

  “I realize that. But I believe I can present a sponsor for my father and myself who will more than satisfy WRA's requirements for sponsorship.”

  “Oh? Who?”

  “Senator Nick Godwin.”

  CHAPTER 56

  "l will not have you obligating yourself for me,” Taro declared vehemently as Amanda began to pack their things. “We must all die sometime.”

  She continued folding their few belongings into the duffel bag. “True. But you are not going to die in a concentration camp. And I am not obligating myself.”

  Knowing the emotional war that existed between her and Nick, her father was most reluctant to leave Poston despite the wire Nick had sent immediately in response to the project director’s wire of inquiry. Nick informed the project director he would be most happy to serve as sponsor and assured the WRA that housing would be found for her father and herself as well as employment when Taro Shima’s condition had stabilized.

  The last thing Amanda did before they left Poston was to give the highly prized sheet-iron stove to Betty. The two women hugged each other tearfully. “As soon as I put out my shingle,” Amanda said, blinking back her tears, “I’ll represent you in court. We’ll get you out yet.”

  A passenger train was to take them to Phoenix, Arizona’s capital, where Nick and Danielle now resided. Her father found it wasteful that an entire sleeping coach should be reserved for the two of them. Amanda tactfully remained silent during the trip. Looking out the window as the train puffed to a wheezy halt in the Phoenix depot, she wondered just exactly when Nick would demand compensation for his benevolent gesture of assistance.

  If there ever was a blackguard, it had to be Nick Godwin. He had waited, warmly ensconced in the capitol building, biding his time. He knew that sooner or later she would be driven to surrender. The only thing that would probably save her from being attacked right there in his car would be her father’s presence! Would even that stop a determined man like Nick Godwin?

  When she and her father descended the coach’s steps, a brown-uniformed man of perhaps fifty years greeted them with a wheelchair. “Miss Shima?” he inquired politely.

  She nodded, puzzled, and he said, smiling, “Senator Godwin told me I would recognize you by your hair. He has sent me to bring you and your father to his house. He apologizes for not being able to meet you personally, but he is in a committee session right now.”

  Nick’s limousine edged its way through the capital’s noon traffic and out Center Street past the sparsely settled suburb of Scottsdale. She supposed she should not have been surprised to learn that Nick had
leased a luxurious guest-ranch resort. A glistening white stucco one-story building with a red-tiled roof, it sprawled eleven miles northeast of Phoenix in the valley between the Camelback and Mummy Mountains. Nick had assured the project director they would be furnished housing—but a villa? What would Danielle think about Amanda and her father’s coming to stay? Nick must have been out of his mind to actually bring her and her father to his house.

  When the chauffeur halted the limousine in the drive that encircled a large multi-tiered fountain, she leaned forward and said, “Is Mrs. Godwin in?”

  The chauffeur’s sun-wrinkled eyes darted a furtive glance in the rear-view mirror. “No, ma'am. Mrs. Godwin’s in New York.”

  Oh, that was just great! Now there was no watchdog to ward off the beast!

  Then, with watchdogs still on her mind, a large scruffy mongrel followed on the heels of a stout, aging woman who came down the flagstone walk to welcome them. “The housekeeper, Mrs. Rawlings,” the chauffeur introduced.

  But Amanda wasn’t even listening. "Trouble! Father, it’s Trouble!” she cried, kneeling to wrap her arms about the ecstatically yelping dog.

  An enigmatic smile passed over her father’s face. "It seems Mr. Godwin intends to be at his most persuasive while we’re here."

  Apparently Trouble wasn’t the only surprise Nick planned for them. Both Amanda and her father were astounded to find a nurse in her father’s room. The tiny old lady in white, who must have been as old as Taro, straightened from fluffing the bed’s pillow. “Mr. Shima! I’ve been expecting you all morning.” She practically bubbled. “I’m Nurse Haines, and Senator Godwin has hired me to look after you.”

  Taro bowed as much as could be permitted from the wheelchair the chauffeur pushed, but not before Amanda saw him roll his eyes heavenward. “I am a blessed man.”

  She ignored the frustration in his voice. “It’ll be good for you to be pampered for a while.”

  “I’ll help you out of those clothes,” Nurse Haines said, “and we’ll get you comfy-cozy.”