Fast Backward

by David Patneaude

  “You don’t know that, Chuck.” Mom fingers the internment article. “There’s nothing in here about who has to go or can’t go or can go if they want.”

  “Who would want?” he says.

  She levels her gaze at him, letting him know who would want, and he drops his eyes and peers into his empty coffee cup, and the small grin returns.

  “We’ll see,” he says finally. “But based on what I’ve learned, and what happened with the roundup of Japanese Americans, I have a feeling this is going to happen quickly. As close as we are to sensitive military facilities, for me quickly could mean tomorrow.”

  “Cocoa knew,” I say. “She told me before we left for the route. The specific stuff. The scheme. The date. We decided not to wake you.”

  “I appreciate it,” Dad says.

  “When did you remember the details, honey?” Mom says.

  “During the night, I woke up with the memories gnawing at me. I tried to go back to sleep, hoping for more, but I couldn’t. I decided to tell Robert and go on his route with him.” She flashes me a look. “With so many new customers, he needs the help.”

  “I’m sorry your sleep is so troubled,” Mom says.

  “If I can be useful,” Cocoa says, “it will all be worth it.”

  Dad puts on a fresh pot of coffee and goes back to his newspaper while the rest of us take stock of our new wealth of food. It’s good being distracted, even for a few moments, by something that doesn’t cause heartache.

  While we’re organizing breakfast, Pete and the captain knock and walk in. They say good morning to the group but otherwise ignore the actual Hastings family and our long faces and focus on the golden goose.

  While she uses her skinny arms to whip up a bowl of pancake batter, she tells them that she hasn’t come up with anything. “Sorry,” she says. But she does tell them about Dad’s problem, how she woke up remembering the history of the United States putting pacifists in concentration camps. Dad tells them about the call from his friend. We give them the papers to read.

  Pete is quiet, biting his tongue. He doesn’t tell Dad “I told you so.”

  “How soon, Chuck?” the captain says.

  “The paper says it begins tomorrow.”

  “What are your options, Dottie?” the captain says.

  “We don’t know,” she says.

  “She’s staying here,” Dad says. “She’s got Bobby and Cocoa to look after.”

  Cocoa stops stirring. She looks at the captain, maybe waiting for him to say something about where he expects her to be, but he doesn’t. So far, he doesn’t have any reason to.

  After breakfast, Cocoa and I are outside weeding the garden when an approaching car puts an end to the quiet. By the time we walk around the corner of the house, the sheriff’s car is turning into our driveway.

  The dusty Ford comes to a stop behind the DeSoto. When Sheriff Wally opens his door, we’re standing a few feet away. “Hey, Bobby,” he says. He puts on his Stetson and pulls it down snug. The hat’s white, but I’m not fooled; he’s up to no good.

  I tell him “Hi” while he gives Cocoa the once-over. Instantly I wish that both Pete and Captain Nelson hadn’t gone to the base camp to meet with important people and make important phone calls having to do with the bombing and Cocoa and the impact of the relocation order, all lumped together in what I’ve heard them call the situation.

  At the base camp, Trinity, they’re also trading the truck for a car for our trip to Albuquerque, which is going on as scheduled. Pete said he’d call if they were going to be more than an hour, but an hour hasn’t yet passed and now we have this situation right here.

  “This the mystery girl?” the sheriff says.

  “Cocoa,” she says.

  “Right,” he says. “Cocoa.”

  “This is Sheriff Wally,” I say.

  “Good to meet you, Cocoa.” He stalls.

  “Your dad in, Bobby?” he says finally.

  All evidence points to him being in. Why lie? “In the kitchen. Working on a story.”

  “I won’t take much of his time.”

  Feeling like Judas or Benedict Arnold or some other asshole, I lead him inside.

  Dad’s at the table with his back to us, facing a mostly blank page spooled up in his typewriter. He turns and eyes Wally like a condemned rooster. His battered face looks better, but not much. “Wally,” he says.

  For a moment Sheriff Wally is speechless as he eyes Dad’s face. Maybe he’s thinking about asking what happened. Maybe he’d rather not know.

  “Got something for you, Chuck,” he says. He glances at the newspapers on the counter. “You’ve read the news.”

  Dad waves me away, but I pretend not to notice. From the bathroom, the sound of the shower tells me where Mom is. I’m glad she’s missing this.

  “The roundup,” Dad says.

  Sheriff Wally nods. “The FBI came around this morning. They’re shorthanded for this operation, and they kind of deputized me. No choice.”

  “That’s fine, Wally,” Dad says.

  “They gave me some instructions to deliver.” Sheriff Wally removes a thin stack of envelopes from his jacket pocket. He hands Dad the top one and puts the others back. Dad’s name is typed on the envelope: Charles Robert Hastings. I recall the other envelope with Dad’s name on it, the one that contained the fake letter we gave Pete. It seems so long ago.

  This envelope is barely sealed. Dad pops it open and removes a sheet of paper. Sheriff Wally and I wait, as still and silent as yuccas on a calm day, as Dad unfolds it and reads. Slowly, like the words are written in some foreign language.

  “Tomorrow morning?” he says. It’s a rhetorical question, and the sheriff doesn’t answer.

  “One suitcase,” Dad says, his eyes still on the letter.

  “Somewhere warm, I hear,” the sheriff says.

  “It says families are eligible to accompany the miscreants.”

  The sheriff frowns at miscreants, possibly struggling to pluck its meaning from the context. Finally, he nods. “You’ll need to make that decision before the agents arrive.”

  “I can’t ask my family to go,” Dad says, ignoring me. I hear a click. Cocoa’s standing at the screen door.

  “Wouldn’t be an easy life,” the sheriff says.

  Dad goes back to staring at the letter. I sense the tears again and I try to distract myself: bike rides, walking in the desert, watching the sun come up. With Cocoa.

  In the distance, the shower shuts off.

  “I best be going, Chuck,” Sheriff Wally adds. “You’re only the first.”

  “Lucky me.”

  “You’ll be fine.” The sheriff extends his hand. “Sorry.”

  “Not your fault,” Dad says, swallowing the sheriff’s hand in his own. “Fear and flag waving make for an ugly—but formidable—marriage.”

  I don’t know that Sheriff Wally follows what Dad is saying, exactly, but he nods once more and hurries through the door, tipping his hat to Cocoa as he brushes past her.

  Mom walks in. Her hair is wrapped in a towel. She is wrapped in a robe, and barefoot. “Did I hear voices? A car?”

  Dad hands her the letter. “Sheriff Wally. New errand boy for the FBI.”

  Mom sits beside Dad and takes his hand while she reads. She tries to keep her face neutral, but her shoulders move with a silent sigh.

  “Tomorrow morning?” she says. It’s the same question Dad lobbed at Sheriff Wally, but this time there’s an answer.

  “Won’t take long to pack. I’m going by myself.”

  She shakes the letter at him. “This says you can bring your family.”

  “You’ve seen photos of places where they’ve stuck the Japanese Americans, Dottie. Tarpaper shacks. Communal bathrooms. Crowded mess halls. Wind and dust and mud. What kind of life would that be for you?”

  “We’d be together.”

  “I’d hate myself,” he says. “It’s all my doing. My fault.”

  “It’s not your fault,” s
he replies. “It’s your life.”

  TWENTY-FIVE

  From outside come the sounds of another car, and Pete and Captain Nelson walk in.

  Pete knows us well enough to know something’s happened. He glances at the radio.

  “What now?” he asks.

  Mom picks up the letter by a corner, as if it’s poisonous. “It’s official.”

  Pete reads it and passes it on to the captain. “Not much time to decide, Dottie,” Pete says.

  “Hours,” she replies.

  We talk about what the letter means. Dad fights to hold himself together. His eyes water, his voice quivers. This isn’t another attack on the country, but it’s an attack on him, and his family, and countless other pacifists and their families, and the Constitution. The captain doesn’t say much besides offering his regrets, and once again, Pete keeps his thoughts to himself. This isn’t a time for lectures, or quarrels.

  “You’d have to give up your job to come with me,” Dad says to Mom. Apparently, he’s been rehearsing.

  “We’ll look after the place,” Pete tells Mom. “Including the critters. And Cocoa, of course.”

  “The government will have no problem backing up Pete in the role of her custodian and caretaker,” the captain says. “Food, clothing, personal needs, medical care, education, transportation, anything.”

  “Robert will also stay,” Cocoa tells him.

  Mom looks on the verge of saying something, but Pete beats her to it. “Makes sense.” He winks at me. “Loneliness averted. And no harder for the captain and me.”

  “I get the impression that Robert is very self-reliant,” the captain says. “Besides, who would bring us our newspaper?”

  “And do the chores?” Pete says.

  Despite everything, Dad chuckles. It’s rare that Dad chuckles at anything Pete says.

  “I can’t imagine it,” Mom says to me. “Dad, all alone. Or me with him, but you and Cocoa here by yourselves.”

  “We’d have Pete,” I say. “And Captain Nelson. And Cocoa and I are both self-reliant. She’s raised herself, for God’s sake.”

  “Don’t I get a say in this?” Dad says.

  “No, Chuck,” Mom says. “I won’t blame you for what’s happening, but the rest of us have to figure out how best to deal with it.” She eyes me. “You’d really want to stay, Bobby? Whether or not I go with your dad?”

  “I might be able to help.” It’s the least hurtful—and embarrassing—reason I can think of.

  Mom goes quiet, head in her hands, while the rest of us sit or hover nearby.

  “I have no idea what I’m going to decide,” she says at last. “But I have the rest of my day here, and then my work time, and then the night, to think. And pray. And in the morning, I’ll know.”

  A half hour later we’re on the road to Albuquerque; Pete drives, the captain rides shotgun, with Cocoa and me in back. Mom has packed us sandwiches, which we’re inhaling. Once we’ve passed Socorro, everything’s new for Cocoa, and she spends most of the time gazing through her window. Like mine, hers is rolled down a couple of inches.

  She smiles with her eyes. “So many plants. Fertile hills. So much blue above them. The air tastes like rhubarb pie.”

  “We’re going to try to keep it that way, Cocoa,” the captain says.

  Our first stop is the library. I’ve visited it a couple of times with Mom and Dad, and once, before the war, with my schoolmates. It always impresses me with its size and design—towers, beams, nooks and crannies and places to hide from impatient parents, the countless books sitting on endless shelves.

  Once inside, Cocoa’s eyes dart everywhere—books, magazines, newspapers, high ceilings, art on the walls. I can feel her itch to explore.

  But the librarian—a woman Mom’s age, but skinny like a stovepipe—is expecting us. When she looks up from her desk and sees two soldiers and two kids walk in, she hurries over.

  “Can you show us where to locate the atlases and maps first?” Captain Nelson asks. “Miss Lang, is it?”

  “You can call me Trudy, captain. I’ve already set aside materials I thought you’d find interesting.”

  The captain tells her thanks and gives her an appreciative smile. She responds by blushing, then leads us to a small room behind a door that says MEETING. In the room is a long table and eight chairs. On the table is a stack of atlases surrounded by maps, some folded, some flat, a couple framed. She leaves after telling the captain to be sure to let her know if she can be of any additional help.

  Eyes flashing, Cocoa circles the table, studying the maps—United States, Eastern states, Southern states, Alaska, Hawaii. She sits and opens an atlas and finds the pages that show in detail the Hawaiian Islands. She begins taking notes. The rest of us open other atlases, locate coastal areas in the US and Alaska and even Europe, and bookmark them with scraps of paper.

  She’s through the atlases and into the maps when Trudy and a high-school-age girl show up pushing carts loaded with a set of the Encyclopedia Britannica—I count twenty-four volumes—and a variety of magazines, including Life, Look, Collier’s, The Saturday Evening Post, National Geographic. When Cocoa glances up and sees the onslaught, she doesn’t look overwhelmed. She looks excited. She puts her head down and gets back to work.

  Trudy and her helper leave. Captain Nelson, Pete, and I remove the encyclopedia volumes and magazines from the cart and replace them with the atlases and maps Cocoa’s already seen. While she continues to study them, the captain and Pete comb through the encyclopedia set and I attack the magazines. Like Pete and the captain, I’m looking for photos, and when I find one I think might be worthwhile, I bookmark it.

  While I’m paging through a Collier’s, I find something that isn’t a photo but might still be useful. It’s an article on a Nazi death camp in Poland. Shocking. Sickening. Hate, boiling over.

  I mark the article for Cocoa, but I think of Dad. I tell myself he could be worse off.

  She’s almost through the maps when she pauses at a map of the Northeastern states. She zigzags her finger down the coastline, into and out of harbors. She goes to the cart and retrieves an atlas and stands over it, turning pages.

  The rest of us hold our breath. The room is dense with heat. Pete opens the only window.

  She stops. Maine. Moves on. Massachusetts. Boston and its harbor. Fingers drift along the tiny shoreline. Pages turn. New York. New York City. Rivers and harbor. More fingering. Note taking.

  “Can I help?” Afraid to break the spell—if one exists—I barely breathe the words.

  “The encyclopedia, Robert. The volumes containing Boston and New York.”

  Heart thumping, I bring them to her.

  She opens the B volume. We’ve all drifted closer, looking over her narrow shoulders as she locates the entry on Boston. There are photos. Beacon Hill. The Old North Church. The waterfront. She stares, taking in the images, perhaps trying to lodge them in her brain to cast light on the shadowy things stored there.

  She opens the second volume to New York City. Again, there are photos. Liberty Island with its inspiring statue. The skyscrapers of Manhattan. The Bronx, Brooklyn, Queens, Staten Island. Coney Island with its famous amusement park. Ships and ferries everywhere. She lowers her face to the book, as if she’s trying to conjure up a third dimension, a smell.

  She closes it. “Can we visit the movie theater now, Captain Nelson?”

  “Of course.” I know he has questions. We all do. But we walk wordlessly out of the small room and across the big one. As we pass Trudy’s desk, the captain lets her know how much we’ve appreciated her help. She tells him it was nothing. Anytime. I can feel her eyes on us—on him—all the way out the door. Motherly, I tell myself. Smiling.

  At a phone booth near the library entrance, Captain Nelson makes a call. Then we head out. In the front seat, he and Pete talk baseball, and in the back, Cocoa sits taller, closer to me, studying her notes and sketches. I feel the presence of something positive.

  There’s
a lineup, mostly kids, outside the Ranch Theater when we pull up to the curb. Marie and Theresa, two girls from my class, notice me getting out of the Army car but pretend they don’t. They giggle, study the movie posters on the building wall, gaze at the ground.

  Once they learn that my dad is going to be locked up, I’ll be even more of a pariah.

  They don’t look back toward me until Cocoa slides out, notebook and pencil in hand, and joins me on the sidewalk. Then the captain emerges, all uniform and ribbons and upright bearing and strong jaw. Pete walks around the car, favoring his bad leg but also impressively handsome, and gives Cocoa and me a smile.

  A man hurries over and introduces himself—Mel, the theater owner—and tells us he booted out the kids so we’d have the place to ourselves. His high forehead and unruly fringe of hair make him look like Larry of The Three Stooges. Marie and Theresa watch open-mouthed as he escorts us to the door.

  Popcorn. In the lobby, the smell is thick. My mouth waters. Cocoa swallows. Mel tells the kid behind the refreshment counter to bring us four bags of freshly popped and four Cokes.

  “What we’d like to see,” the captain says, glancing in Cocoa’s direction, “are any newsreels you have that would give us a look at the northeastern US, particularly Boston and New York. Also, any Naval vessels anchored or docked in a northeastern harbor. Especially anything that shows ships’ numbers.”

  “Does this have to do with yesterday?” Mel asks. He looks anxious, an expression I’ve noticed on lots of faces today.

  The only answer Mel gets is an intense gaze from the captain, so he swallows his question. “Sure,” he says. “I have our collection practically memorized. You folks go find yourselves the best seats in the house while I go up to the projection room and get things rolling. If you want to see something twice, wave an arm and I’ll backtrack.”

  “Thanks, Mel,” the captain says as the owner makes his exit. A moment later we all thank the refreshment counter guy when he beckons us over for our hot popcorn and icy Cokes.

  We find seats. The lights go down. Under other circumstances, this might feel like a date. Cocoa and I would lean into each other. We’d eat popcorn and drink Coke, but we’d be sharing. I’d hold her hand, and she wouldn’t let go.