Clark and Division

by Naomi Hirahara

“You did not sleep well,” my mother declared as she got ready for work while Papa snored, his right leg occasionally jerking awkwardly.

  I lay in bed and stared at a black spot on the ceiling. I wasn’t sure if it was an old nail or a spider, taunting me. What happened to you, Rose? I had thought to myself all night. I hadn’t been here to help her when she needed me the most. I was so angry at the government for keeping us apart. I should have been on that bus out of Manzanar with her—in fact, our whole family should have been.

  She had been violated in the worst possible way and then maybe even killed because of it. I knew Tomi was too emotionally wounded to seek justice, but I couldn’t pretend nothing had happened. Whoever hurt my sister was still out there. I couldn’t let him get away with it.

  Mom was in her slip, her brassiere holding up her breasts, which otherwise would have sagged like fresh soft New Year’s mochi. While visiting our relatives in the countryside of Spokane years ago, the whole family had bobbed in a Japanese-style wooden bath. I remembered how I had marveled at my mother’s body then, the sway of her large, heavy breasts and the curve of her buttocks. Her muscles now had atrophied and she had become a different type of woman, her body foreign to me yet foreshadowing who I might become. She quickly got into her cotton housedress and whispered goodbye before leaving the apartment.

  I got up from my bed shortly thereafter and lifted the mattress. I pulled out Rose’s diary and flipped to the back, where I had placed the ripped edge of what seemed like a movie or carnival ticket with the number twenty printed in red.

  I toasted a slice of bread on a wire grill over our hot plate and dabbed some strawberry preserves on top. As I chewed my breakfast at our table, I was transfixed by that ticket stub. I knew that I couldn’t report for work like it was an ordinary day.

  I went to the hallway pay phone, dialed and made my voice as raspy as possible. “I came down with a cold,” I told Nancy. “Can you let everyone know?”

  “Good thing that you caught me before I was out the door. I’ll leave a message for Mr. Geiger. Hope you get better quick. Summer colds are the worst.”

  I felt a pang of guilt about lying to Nancy. She had been nothing but kind to me. “Yes, hopefully I’ll feel better by tomorrow.”

  There were at least three movie theaters in our neighborhood: the Windsor on Clark north of Division, the Newberry across the street from Bughouse Square, and the Surf at Dearborn and Division. I needed to start somewhere so I decided on the Surf because it seemed the most approachable. I slipped the ticket stub in one of the envelopes for the koden thank-you cards. Ever since my grammar-school years, I had been so careless with my belongings that my mother had dubbed me Nakusu Musume, “Daughter Who Loses Things.” I couldn’t let anything happen to this item from my sister’s diary.

  The Surf was a ridiculous name for a theater near the Clark and Division neighborhood in Chicago. It was located on the first level of a gray multilevel walk-up. The large entrance was framed by light bulbs arranged in a half circle. Since it was late morning, the electricity was off. I feared that the ticket booth would also be closed, but someone was moving behind the glass window.

  “Hello.” I rapped my knuckle on the pane, where a sign, war bonds and stamps sold here, was on display.

  A dark-haired woman looked up, startled by a customer this early in the morning. She was in the middle of transferring coins into the compartment of the cash register. “Our first matinee isn’t until one-thirty,” she said through the porthole of the ticket window. She was tall with bright red lips, a wad of gum visible on her tongue.

  “Oh, I’m not here about that. I had a question for you. If you recognized this—” I carefully removed the ticket stub from the envelope. I took more time than the woman had patience for; she sighed deeply and rapped her manicured fingers on the counter by the register.

  “Can’t see it.” She continued to vigorously chew her gum.

  I slipped the torn ticket stub into the open slot of the window.

  “This some kind of joke? Don’t think you can get in with this.” The cashier shoved the stub back through the slot. She showed me a roll of tickets, which were tan with a long row of numbers stamped on the end. “Did you want to buy a ticket or what?”

  I shook my head and placed the stub back in the envelope. I retreated to the sidewalk and then returned. “Twenty-one ten-cent stamps,” I ordered, pulling out some dollar bills from my purse. At least I could complete Rose’s album of war bond stamps.

  I didn’t even have to refer to a map to reacquaint myself with the directions to the East Chicago Avenue Police Department. The mortuary, the War Relocation Authority office, the coroner’s office and this police station were now all indelible parts of my Chicago life. The police station was a straight shot south on either LaSalle or Clark. I marched up the steps, into the lobby and straight for the front counter. “Sergeant Graves, please.”

  The police officer manning the desk appraised me. He was balding, with deep lines etched in his forehead. The few strands of long white hair he had were slicked back with grease. “Is he expecting you?”

  “No, but it’s very important. It’s about Rose Ito’s case. The woman who was killed on the subway tracks at Clark and Division.”

  The officer’s face darkened a bit, his eyes blinking a tad out of rhythm. It was scarcely enough for anyone to notice, but I did. He told me to wait and then returned in a minute or so, too soon for him to have determined the sergeant’s whereabouts, in my opinion.

  “Sergeant Graves is unavailable right now. Would you like me to leave a message for him?”

  “Yes, tell him to call this number.” I recited the pay-phone number to him two times. “I have some information for him. He’ll be very interested.”

  I remained in front of the counter until he finished writing the note. He looked up, annoyed to still see me there. “Miss, you’ll have to move on. There are people waiting.”

  Sure enough, there was a shrunken old hakujin woman with a scarf around her head behind me and a young black man behind her.

  The curt dismissal didn’t make me feel that the Chicago Police Department was taking me seriously. I turned toward the exit and looked back for a moment, only to see the same officer ball up the note with my information and throw it into a wastepaper basket. How dare he! I wanted to protest, but who would hear me? My cheeks grew hot and I hung my head as I walked down the station steps.

  What would I have done if I was in this same situation in Tropico? Would it have made a difference? Well, first I would have been on my home turf, where I knew the bend of the winding streets and the pitiful concrete bed of the Los Angeles River without looking. The familiar crunch of the wilted lettuce on the concrete floor of the produce market. I’d be standing on what I knew. Los Angeles. My birthplace. My father’s American home since the early 1900s. The government had spit us out, but the land had not. Our Japanese-language newspapers—and there were many in Los Angeles before World War II—had been powerless against our wholesale expulsion from the West Coast. But a criminal case like this? The more sensational rags, not to mention the hakujin ones, would have featured an attack on a Nisei woman on their front page. Rose Ito’s plight would not have been ignored.

  The dread in my gut expanded. If the police weren’t going to help me, was it up to me to figure out who Rose’s assailant was? If he was indeed a serial sex maniac, odds were that he would strike again.

  I felt that my world was spinning out of control, even more erratically than when I was in Manzanar. At least in camp, we had each other. There was some kind of structure to our lives—block managers like Roy ensured that there was some sort of representation and leadership in place. We had fighters and troublemakers who challenged WRA policies, although most of them were eventually shipped out to Tule Lake. Here in Chicago I didn’t know where to turn. The government told us to stay away from one another yet w
e only had one another.

  “Miss Ito?” In my preoccupation, I hadn’t noticed that the authority figure that I was looking for was standing right in front of me.

  “Sergeant Graves,” I said, amazed that he remembered my name. “I was looking for you.”

  He looked down at me with compassion. Someone had heard my prayers.

  We moved to the side of a nearby diner, where I relayed everything I had learned about Rose’s rape. I didn’t share Tomi’s name, and of course he, being a law-enforcement officer, pressed me on it. “We’ll need the witness’s name.”

  “Uh—” I paused. “I do have a piece of evidence. The attacker left this behind.” I opened up my purse and the war bond stamps fluttered to the ground. Graves bent down and retrieved them for me. “You’ll want to keep those in a safe place,” he said, and I nodded, flustered. I finally handed him the envelope with the ticket that had been in Rose’s diary.

  Grasping the corner of the ripped stub, Graves didn’t seem impressed with the evidence. “Doesn’t look like anything related to transportation. A movie is going to cost more than twenty cents. Maybe something in the red-light district.” He returned it to the envelope and handed it back to me. “We’ll really need the witness to come forward. That’s the only way we can investigate this alleged crime.” He added that he appreciated my coming forward. “I have a meeting at the station, but we’ll continue this conversation.”

  I watched the sun bounce off of his golden head of hair as he walked down Chicago Avenue. I knew that Sergeant Graves was right. Tomi needed to talk, but she was so fragile. I didn’t want to push her too hard. In the meantime, I had to deal with the gun. I was convinced that there was only one place Rose could have gotten it.

  Instead of walking up Clark and putting myself in danger of being spotted by my Newberry co-workers, I walked up LaSalle, past the Moody Bible Institute and our apartment, and made a right on Division. I turned at the Mark Twain Hotel and then north on Clark.

  My palms became sweaty as I passed the pawnshop and neared Aloha. I pictured that lecherous sukebe man placing his fat, soft hands on my body. Would I be able to scream if I encountered him again?

  The same blonde woman, this time in a bright-orange halter-top dress, stood in the doorway, her right hand bracing her against the doorframe. A few hairs were visible in her bare armpit. “Hello, doll,” she called out to me. “Good to see you again.”

  I gestured that I wanted to enter, and she lowered her arm for me to pass. The small bar was empty. I proceeded down the stairs to the basement.

  “Wait—” the woman called out, “you’re not allowed—”

  The basement was filled with a thick layer of cigarette smoke. Beneath the cloud, men of all races and ethnicities were eyeing their cards, throwing dice and jangling poker chips. I was shocked to see so many men involved in illegal activity in the middle of the day.

  I scanned the room for anyone that I knew. A few of the gamblers were US soldiers in uniform. They must have been on furlough, seeking as much enjoyment as they could on leave. A few of them ogled me and I felt naked for a minute. Across the way was the large hakujin man I had dreaded to see. Apparently he had also noticed me, as he was making his way toward me.

  I slid through the narrow space between the felt tables, searching the faces frantically. Finally I spotted him in a corner. Hammer looked like he had bathed. He was wearing a striped short-sleeve shirt and denim trousers, his zoot suit abandoned. He had a cigarette behind each ear.

  “You shouldn’t be here, Tropico,” Hammer murmured. “I’m on a roll.” He threw the dice again on the green felt table. “Dammit,” he cursed. “You better have a good reason to ruin my luck.”

  I had no remorse. My rotund stalker stopped in his tracks when he saw that I was speaking to Hammer. “We need to talk. Now.”

  Hammer must have felt my sense of urgency. He pointed toward the stairs and we plowed through the crowd. At the makeshift first-floor bar we claimed a couple of stools.

  The blonde woman served us. “You’re not allowed down there,” she scolded again.

  “She’s Geet Ito’s kid,” Hammer told the woman. “She knows to keep her mouth shut.”

  I ordered a beer because I thought that I might need some liquid courage to interrogate Hammer. I poured the can of lukewarm beer into a glass and took a long sip while Hammer downed half a glass of whiskey.

  “You know there’s a sex maniac loose here among the Nisei,” I said, wiping a bit of beer foam from the corner of my mouth.

  “Yeah, what of it?”

  “Do you know who it could be?”

  “Why would I know?”

  “How about those scratches on your face that day after the Aragon dance?” Now they were only thin scabs, faintly visible.

  “What are you—a cop or something?” Hammer recoiled from me. “It’s none of your business. I don’t owe you anything.”

  “You owe me everything, Hammer. Your whole life. Because of what you did to my sister.”

  Hammer darted his eyes across the surface of the bar. He looked at everything but me.

  “You knew she was pregnant.”

  Hammer’s whole body jerked. “I didn’t do that to her. I’ll kill the guy who did.”

  “So you suspected that she was . . . raped.” To say it out loud devastated me and now I was crying. I covered my face because it was painful to be so public with my grief.

  “She never really said what happened. I didn’t know if it was Roy.” Hammer’s voice softened. “This winter, her face got this hardness to it. It never had that, even in camp.” He played with the flap of a matchbook on the counter. “I remember her from camp. I used to watch her go back and forth from your barracks to the mess hall to the garden. It was like the wind was moving her.”

  My chest shook with more cries.

  “She told me that she had to get rid of it.”

  I wiped my tears with the back of my hands. “Wait. Did you help her to get an abortion?”

  Hammer didn’t answer my question. He took a last sip of his whiskey. “She was most worried about you.”

  “About me?”

  “That she would lose your respect. She talked about you all the time.”

  “You never told me that.”

  “She said that you were always trying to make her better. To get her to write her thoughts down. To think about things more.”

  I would never have tried to improve Rose. Why would I dare? “She was my hero. She still is.”

  “Well, then, live your life. That’s what she wanted for you.”

  “I can’t let whoever hurt her get away with it.” To allow the culprit freedom would be disrespecting my sister’s memory. Perhaps Hammer, being an orphan, was used to an impermanence of family relationships. I could not—would not—forget. “Did you give Rose a gun?”

  “Why, did you find one?”

  “Answer me, Hammer.”

  Hammer averted his gaze from my face. “She wanted one, but I told her that she was crazy.”

  I couldn’t tell if Hammer was telling the truth or not. Before I could question him more, I felt the presence of someone next to me and turned to look.

  “Pop—”

  When Pop was mad, Mom used a Japanese expression to describe it: his eyes changed colors. Now they were the darkest black against his bloodshot whites. “What are you doin’ with my daughta?”

  “Nothing, old man.” Still hunched over his empty glass, Hammer kept his back turned to my father.

  “You good-for-nothing son-of-a-gun—” Pop was seething, his body erect and almost shaking, a stick of dynamite ready to explode.

  “Pop, it’s okay,” I said, purposely keeping my voice as soothing as possible. “I came here to talk to him. He was trying to help Rose.”

  “I rememba you from Los Angeles. No-g
ood worker back then.”

  Hammer slowly faced my father. Now his eyes were steely mad.

  “No, stop.” I jumped off the stool.

  Hammer extended his chin, asserting his physical dominance over my father, who must have been at least six inches shorter. “I dare you to say that again.”

  “Lazy boy.” Spit flew from Pop’s lower lip and landed on Hammer’s shirt.

  I pushed my way in between the two, but I was too late and felt something smashing my head back. I don’t know whose blow I interrupted, but I screamed and the two men immediately stepped back, releasing me to fall on the floor.

  “Aki—” Hammer was on his knees, leaning over me.

  “You get out!” my dad bellowed.

  Rocky, who had been nowhere to be found, appeared then to pull Hammer out of the room.

  My face stung, but a part of me had to laugh. It had taken this for Hammer to finally say my real name.

  When Pop and I, holding a wet dish towel over my eyes, walked into the apartment, Mom dropped the colander she was using to strain pasta in the sink.

  “What happened?” She rushed over to me while Pop locked the door. I sank into one of the chairs as she removed the stained towel and examined my eye, which was swollen shut. I’d be sporting a shiner tomorrow.

  “What were you doing in Aloha?” My mother’s voice was an octave higher than usual.

  “Talking to that good-for-nothing Hammer boy,” my father muttered, removing his shirt, which was missing at least one button.

  “Hammer was trying to help Rose,” I repeated. “He was there when we weren’t there.”

  “Yamenasai!” my mother screamed. Stop it! She was tired of my shenanigans. She was tired of all the trouble I was causing. And then she burst into tears. She hadn’t cried when we had to move out of Tropico. She hadn’t cried when we arrived at Manzanar. She hadn’t cried when we heard Rose had been killed. But now, on the day I got a black eye, she cried for hours.

  Chapter 17

  The next few days I stayed away from work at the Newberry because nobody would have believed me if I told them I got my black eye from walking into a door or falling in the bathroom. It was an ugly goose egg the color of a decomposing plum. When I looked at myself in the mirror, I couldn’t help but think that I was split like this inside—one half battered and bruised, and the other half completely unblemished.