We Are Not Free

by Traci Chee

He raises an eyebrow. “I’m not on your dance card, Nakano.”

  I lift my head proudly, crooked wig and all. “Forget the dance card!” I say, and, laughing, I pull him into the crowd.

  V

  WILD BOY

  FRANKIE, 19

  JANUARY–FEBRUARY 1943

  Me and Stan Katsumoto are hanging around by 1-9-E, so-called “City Hall,” when the army jeep comes roaring toward camp, and I’m not gonna lie, the sight of the tires kicking up a dust cloud in the cold January morning makes me wanna hit something.

  The army guys are here to recruit volunteers for Roosevelt’s new combat team. See, we don’t got liberty, we don’t got property, but you better believe we’ve got the Great American Right to die for a country that doesn’t want us.

  The gates open. The jeep rolls into camp.

  Out on the greasewood flats, the dust cloud rears up like a buckskin stallion. For a second, I can see laid-back ears and bared teeth and sharp hooves pumping the air. Then it collapses into nothing.

  I dunno why, but it feels like a punch in the gut.

  Four ketos get out of the jeep, followed by a nihonjin guy. That’s why we’re here, see. Last Thursday, the newspaper listed the army guys who were coming—Lieutenant Something-or-Another, a couple sergeants, and a technician with a Japanese name—and we wanted to know what kind of asshole would walk into a camp filled with his own people and ask us to enlist.

  Little fella looks shocked, to tell you the truth, like it’s the first time he’s laid eyes on a relocation center.

  Stan smirks. “He doesn’t walk like he’s got balls of steel. But I guess looks can be deceiving.”

  I laugh. Stan’s always been twice as smart as anyone I know, with a smart mouth to match. He should’ve been in college or something by now—he coulda been sponsored by the Quakers, who’ve been helping kids get settled in all sorts of places in the Midwest—but for some reason, he stayed in camp with the rest of us.

  The army guys are headed into the Camp Director’s office across the street, filing up the steps like good little soldiers. The nihonjin guy’s last, of course, and when he turns to get the door, we lock eyes.

  The shocked expression on his face turns to something else. Something like pity.

  He can shove his pity up his ass.

  I’m not close enough to spit at his feet, but I spit as far as I can into the road, raising a puff of dust in the middle of the lane like the explosion of a tiny bomb.

  The guy grimaces and closes the door, and me and Stan are left alone on the street.

  * * *

  You know, my pop fought for this country thirty years ago? He was on the front lines with the 82nd in France. Loves horses, that guy. When I was seven, he took me to a horserace. I remember the excitement, the starting bell, the animals charging around the track, the most beautiful sight I’d ever seen.

  Then it all went wrong. One of the horses got hurt somehow. He was on the ground, screaming, and all these guys started jumping out from nowhere. I thought for sure they were gonna help him, get him a stretcher or something.

  Pop had gone gray. He kept tugging me toward the exit, saying things like, “You don’t wanna see this, Frank.”

  I remember the gunshot, how the horse stopped screaming, but I don’t remember much after that.

  My vision going white at the edges. That asshole with the gun. I remember pulling away from my pop, barreling down the steps like I was gonna murder someone. Like I was gonna pummel them into the dirt for destroying something so beautiful.

  But I was just a goddamn kid, and they caught me before I reached the track. They hauled me away, kicking and shrieking, and that was the last time we ever went to the races.

  * * *

  After dinner one night, me and the boys are on the edge of camp, tossing rocks over the barbed wire. There’s plenty to throw. Rocks are maybe the only thing that’s plentiful here besides dust and anger.

  For maybe the hundredth time, I think about leaping that fence. It’s only about three feet high, and kids like Yum-yum’s brother, Fred, sneak through all the time to catch scorpions in the desert. I could go running out there, out with the wild horses they say roam this part of Utah, free as the goddamn wind.

  But I’d never abandon Mas and the boys, or my uncle Yas, who took me in when my parents shipped me out to California.

  The whole camp’s buzzing with the news today. Everyone seventeen and up has gotta do this questionnaire to see who’s loyal and who’s not. If you’re loyal, you can volunteer for Roosevelt’s combat unit. It’s Nisei-only, which is a shit idea, if you ask me. If Uncle Sam sends ’em to the Pacific, the other battalions are gonna mistake them for the enemy.

  “They won’t get sent to the Pacific,” Mas says, pitching a stone so far into the desert, it disappears from sight. He’s got a good arm, that guy. That’s why he was a star quarterback in high school.

  Me, I was a delinquent. I would’ve dropped out of school, too, if Mas hadn’t made me go to class, if he hadn’t made me sit down with Shig and Minnow at their kitchen table, answering questions about algebra and history no one gives a shit about now.

  “Oh yeah.” Stan kicks around in the dust for another rock. “Let us too close to the Empire, and we’ll be pulled back to Hirohito like magnets. We won’t be able to help ourselves! It’s science!”

  We laugh, but Stan’s right. The government’s got a few Military Intelligence guys training to do translation over there, but no way they’re gonna let five thousand of us into the Pacific, where we can give away America’s game to the enemy.

  “Isn’t that what the questionnaire is for?” Tommy asks in that namby-pamby way of his. “To make sure everyone who volunteers is loyal?”

  Sometimes I dunno why Mas and the others let Tommy hang around. He’s so small and scared all the time, and he’s not even related to them, like Minnow. Tommy’s scrappy kid sister Aiko is always trying to tag along with us too, and to be honest with you, sometimes I’d rather she came than Tommy. At least she can handle herself in a fight.

  Reaching over, I rough Tommy up a little to teach him not to ask stupid questions. I go easy on him, though, and let him squirm out of my grasp. He’s one of us, after all. “Bottom line is this,” I say as he tries to comb his hair straight again. “To them, we’ll always be Japs.”

  “That’s what the combat unit’s for, though,” Twitchy says. “To prove to everyone we’re not.” He throws two stones, one after the other, so fast they let out a loud clack as they collide in midair.

  Damn. Is there anything Twitchy isn’t good at?

  Minnow’s jaw drops like he’s thinking the same thing. I swear to God, that boy would follow Twitchy Hashimoto to the ends of the earth without even being asked.

  “You thinking of volunteering, Hashimoto?” I ask.

  But it’s not Twitchy who answers.

  “I am,” Mas says.

  We all stop what we’re doing to stare at him. His kid brothers, Shig and Minnow, exchange a sick glance like they already knew. Wonder if they already tried to talk him out of it, not that you can talk Masaru out of anything once he’s made up his mind.

  I feel like he’s socked me in the gut, and if you’ve seen Mas, you know how much that’d hurt. How can he do this to us? To me? The U.S. government put us here, and he’s going to go fight for them? I mean, I knew Mas fancied himself an all-American boy, but I didn’t think he’d betray the rest of us for a country that clearly doesn’t give a shit about him.

  “Really?” Tommy asks.

  “GI Ito.” Stan starts whistling “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

  Mas glares at him for a second, and then he looks at me like he’s asking me to understand, even though I could never understand, never in a million years. “I still believe in this country.”

  “Plus, it pays better than any job you could get around here,” Twitchy adds, breaking the tension.

  “What about you, Frankie?” Shig asks, nudging me. Good ol’ Shig, h
e’s always the one to notice when someone’s being left out. “You gonna do it?”

  I try to laugh, but it comes out kind of strangled. “Already tried, remember?” I wanted to enlist right after Pearl Harbor, but they wouldn’t let me. 4-C. Enemy alien. Ineligible to fight for my own damn country. “They wouldn’t take me then, so why should they have me now?”

  I pick up a rock and hurl it as hard as I can into the darkening sky, hoping it’ll break on impact, hoping it’ll make a crater, hoping for something, but it lands on the other side of the fence without a sound.

  * * *

  Sometimes I get so angry, I can’t see straight. My vision tunnels, and all I can see is my anger: bright, blinding, white. White as this keto bastard standing in our gymnasium, telling us we’ve got to make sacrifices for the greater good. White as a baby’s ass, this guy is. Lieutenant What’s-His-Face. Who cares? He’s gonna be gone in a week or two, and we’ll still be here, eating the same shit, shitting in the same holes. It’s no skin off his nose whether we join up or not, whether we fight or not, whether we kiss Uncle Sam’s ass or not. It’s not his family, his freedom, on the line.

  Lieutenant Whatever is describing the new unit now. He says, “All-Japanese.”

  He means, “All-expendable.”

  Who d’you think is gonna get the most dangerous missions? The jobs nobody else wants ’cause they’re too risky? The Japs. Line us up so we’ll get picked off—pop! pop! pop! That’s five thousand less of us they have to deal with.

  Lieutenant So-and-So says the combat team is gonna show the ketos how American we are, how wrong they were to lock us up. Like it’s our job to fix the prejudice in this country.

  As soon as the questions are done, I explode out of the meeting. I want to hit something. I want something to hit back.

  Twitchy, Stan, and Mas are on my heels. We stand there as the rest of the crowd floods around us, chattering excitedly, and some piece of shit starts up a chorus of “God Bless America.” Soon, more and more voices join him, like if they sing loud enough, they’ll turn their yellow faces white.

  I can’t stand it. Don’t they see how backward this all is? How insulting? I run at the nearest singer—I don’t give a shit who it is; they better cut out that goddamn racket. I take a swing. My fist connects with someone’s stomach.

  I hear the whoosh of air leaving him.

  I grin.

  I’m fighting. I’m grappling and punching and grunting. I don’t even know why; I just want to fight. I want to fight the soldiers on the watchtowers and the project director and Lieutenant What’s-His-Name. I want to fight the fucking president of the United States. I want to fight every pasty senator who voted to put us here. I want their noses to bleed.

  I’m going down in a storm of fists. I’m catching kicks in the ribs. They’re dogpiling me, hitting me as hard as they can.

  Let ’em.

  I’m no good for much of anything, but at least I can take a hit.

  People are shouting, hauling bodies off me, and all of a sudden, I can breathe again. Stan Katsumoto and Twitchy have got me by the arms and they’re dragging me out of the fray while Mas comes between me and those government stooges.

  He’s one of the good ones, that boy. He’s the one who stuck up for me in that street fight with the Italians just after I moved from New York. He’s the one who let me in with the Japantown boys. He’s the one who straightened me out when nobody else could. Without Mas, I’d have been knifed or jumped or maybe I would’ve just drifted away, no ties to anybody.

  “Walk away,” he tells the crowd in that deep voice of his. In the lamplight, he’s all shoulders and a silhouette that belongs on a recruitment poster.

  GI Ito.

  Japanese Captain America.

  He’s the kinda guy who speaks, and you listen. He’s the kinda guy who says to walk away, and you do.

  So they do. They mutter and disperse and, thank Christ, no one’s singing anymore.

  “What the hell, Frankie?” Mas whirls on me as the last of them go. “What’s the matter with you?”

  I shrug off Twitchy and Stan. “I don’t know, okay? I don’t know. The whole thing just makes me so mad—”

  “Everything makes you mad,” Mas says.

  “Because everything is fucked!”

  He comes at me then, and for a second, I think he’s gonna hit me. But that isn’t Mas’s way. He just gets right up in my face. He’s got a good three inches on me, that boy, and he says, real low, “Yeah, it is. But you can’t fight everything, Frankie. You’ve got to pick something to fight for, or you’ll wear yourself out trying to fight the world.”

  * * *

  When I wake up the next morning, Uncle Yas is sitting by the fire, sewing the patch back onto Pop’s WWI jacket. Yas was a tailor back in Japantown. Best in the neighborhood, if you ask me. But he can’t see so well anymore. Got joints that hurt in the cold. He’s the reason I stayed, you know, instead of heading back to New York. He needs someone to take care of him.

  “You don’t have to do that.” I swing my legs over the edge of my cot and pull on a sweater.

  “Tch,” Yas says. “Did you get in a fight again?”

  I touch my lip, which is painful and swollen where it’s been split, and grin. “You should see the other guy.”

  He squints at me. “I don’t know why you went to that meeting in the first place. You already said you weren’t going to volunteer.”

  I get up, taking the jacket out of his gnarled hands. “I dunno.”

  “So you just went to get riled up.”

  “I guess.”

  As I sit down across from him and start sewing, he leans over and cups my face. His palms are smooth but hard. “You’re a wild boy, Frankie,” he says. “You aren’t meant to be penned up in a place like this. If you stay here, you’re going to get yourself into trouble not even your friends will be able to get you out of.”

  I glare down at the red double-A of Pop’s “All-American” patch and jab the needle through the fabric. “I’ll be all right, Uncle Yas,” I say, even though I don’t know if I believe it.

  * * *

  Pop says thousands of horses died in the war. Killed by machine guns and poison gas and starvation and a hundred other things. He says there’s so much wrong with the world that it makes you wanna tear it down to the foundations.

  I think about that a lot, you know, those foundations. And sometimes I think that if I just rammed my head into them hard enough, for long enough, all the backward frameworks and rotten girders of the world would crumble. And maybe then we could build something better.

  * * *

  It’s the last citizens’ meeting before they start administering the questionnaire, and here I am again, standing at the back of the room, grinding my teeth, because Mas is in front of the crowd talking all kinds of nonsense. He’s got to fight for democracy everywhere, he’s got to oppose tyranny wherever he finds it, bullshit like that. Tell you the truth, I stop listening after the first few minutes because all I can think is, Tyranny is locking us up. Tyranny is taking our freedom. Tyranny is right here. Tyranny is American.

  I’m so mad, I could hit him. What’s he thinking, trying to recruit us? Mas is supposed to be smarter than this.

  About half the crowd is eating it up. He’s got them slobbering at his feet, ready to throw themselves on the Germans’ bayonets in the name of the red, white, and blue.

  The other half is as pissed as I am. A lot of them are Kibei—you know, guys who were born here but got sent back to Japan to be educated—but not all of them. Some of them are guys like Stan Katsumoto, who lost his family’s store in the evacuation. That little store his mom and pop worked so hard for, sold off piece by piece to the lowest bidder. You’d be a sucker not to be pissed about that.

  But I’m the only guy who hates Mas for this. For betraying us like this. For abandoning me like this. Because I don’t want to put my life on the line for this goddamn country, and that means while he’s off pl
aying soldier boy for Uncle Sam, I’m gonna be rotting in this fucking camp without him.

  I want to scream at him. I want to beat some sense into him. Don’t go, Mas. They don’t give a shit about you. We give a shit about you. We’re your family. I’m—

  * * *

  I’m so mad, I stalk the Topaz streets after the meeting, getting madder with every step. How could he do this to me? How could he leave me? He was supposed to be the guy we could all rely on.

  I’m ready to pummel someone. Just give me an excuse. C’mon.

  And all of a sudden, I’m on Mas’s block.

  They all look the same, these barracks, but Mrs. Ito’s got a neat little rock garden in the plot outside the front door. I’d recognize those stones anywhere because I helped haul ’em here.

  My fists curl.

  Mas.

  C’mon.

  My feet are carrying me forward. I’m seeing white.

  But before I make it there, a couple guys sneak out of the shadows. I can’t see their faces because it’s dark and the streetlights aren’t so good, but one of them picks up a rock from Mrs. Ito’s garden, hefts it, and draws his arm back like he’s Bob Feller pitching for the Indians.

  The fuckers are going to smash Mas’s windows.

  I forget I was ever mad at Mas. I forget I was ever mad at anyone except these spineless bastards. I charge them, barreling straight into the one with the rock. It falls from his hand as we stagger into the street, grunting.

  He’s hitting me over the back of the head, but I’m so mad, I barely feel it. I get in a few good punches, and the breath goes out of him as he stumbles back, wheezing.

  The other guy tries to grab me, but I shove him off and hit the first guy again. My knuckles split on something, maybe his nose, I dunno. I don’t give a damn. I just hope it hurts.

  But before I can hit him again, they run. I spit after them, tasting blood on my tongue.