Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet

by Jamie Ford

  Beatty's backhanded wave, dismissing him to the rear step of the mess hall, all but confirmed it.

  Henry traced the dirt road to the nearest gate and followed the path between the two barbed-wire fences. This no-man's-land was actually a modestly trafficked walkway leading a few hundred yards to a latticed area designated for visitation with the prisoners (as they called themselves) or evacuees (as the army made a habit of calling them).

  The path led to a seating area along the interior fence line, where a small procession of visitors came and went, chatting and sometimes crying as they held hands through the barbed wire separating the prisoners from those on the outside. A pair of soldiers in uniform sat at a makeshift desk on the prisoners' side, their rifles leaning against a fence post. They looked as bored as could be, playing cards, stopping occasionally to inspect letters that were being handed out or whatever care packages were being delivered.

  Because he'd been working inside the camp, Henry could have walked right up to the soldiers at the desk from the mess hall, but the fear of straying too far and being mistaken for a resident of Camp Harmony was very real. That was why Mrs. Beatty had him hang out behind the mess hall, either on the steps where the kitchen workers knew who he was or in her truck when they were preparing to leave. Even with his special access, it seemed safer to go about visiting the camp's residents the proper way, if only to keep Mrs. Beatty happy so she'd continue bringing him with her.

  Henry stood at the fence, tapping the wire with a stick, unsure if it was electrified-

  -he was certain it wasn't, but was wary nonetheless. To his surprise, the soldiers didn't even seem to notice him there. Then again, they were busy arguing with a pair of women from a local Baptist church who were trying to deliver a Japanese Bible to an elderly internee, a woman who looked ancient to Henry.

  "Nothing printed in Japanese is allowed!" one of the soldiers argued.

  The women showed him their crosses and tried to hand the young soldiers pamphlets of some kind. They refused.

  "If I can't read it in God's plain English, it ain't coming into the camp," Henry overheard one of the soldiers say. The women said something to the Japanese lady in her native tongue. Then they touched hands and waved their good-byes. The Bible left the camp the way it came, and the old woman retreated empty-handed. The soldiers went back to their card game.

  Henry watched and waited until he saw a beautiful slip of a girl walk up the muddy path in a faded yellow dress, red galoshes covered in mud, and a brown raincoat.

  She stood on the other side of the fence, her smiling face, pale from food poisoning, framed by cold metal and sharp wire. A captured butterfly. Henry smiled and exhaled slowly.

  "I had a dream about you last week," Keiko said, looking relieved but happy, and even a little confused. "I keep thinking, this must still be a dream."

  Henry looked along the fence, then back at Keiko, touching the metal points between them. "This is real. I'd rather have the dream too."

  "It was a nice dream. Oscar Holden was playing. And we were dancing--"

  "I don't know how to dance," Henry protested.

  "You knew how to dance in my dream. We were dancing in some club, with all kinds of people, and the music--it was the song he played for us. The song from the record we bought. But it was slower somehow ... we were slower."

  "That's a nice dream." Henry felt it as much as she did.

  "I think about that dream. I think about it so much I dream it during the day, while I'm walking around the dirty camp, walking back and forth to the infirmary to help the old people and the sick with my mom. I dream it all the time. Not just at night."

  Henry rested his hands on the barbed-wire fence. "Maybe I'll dream it too."

  "You don't have to, Henry. In here, I think my dream is big enough for the both of us."

  Henry looked up at the nearby guard tower, with its menacing machine guns and sandbags to protect them. Protect them from what? "I'm sorry you're here," he said. "I didn't know what else to do after you left. So I just came here trying to find you. I still don't know what to do."

  "There is something you can do--" Keiko touched the fence too, her hands on top of Henry's. "Can you bring us a few things? I don't have any paper or envelopes--no stamps either, but if you bring me some, I'll write to you. And could you bring us some fabric--any kind, just a few yards. We don't have any curtains, and the searchlights shine through our windows and keep us up at night."

  "Anything, I'll do it--"

  "And I have a special request."

  Henry traced his thumbs over the backs of her soft hands, looking into her chestnut brown eyes through the jagged coils of fence.

  "It's my birthday next week. Could you bring all that stuff back by then? We're going to have a record concert outside that day, right after dinner. Our neighbor traded with the soldiers for a record player, but they only have a scratchy Grand Ole Opry recording--something like that, and it's terrible. The soldiers are going to let us have a record concert, outdoors, if the weather clears up. They might even play the music for us through the loudspeakers. And I'd really like to have a visit on my birthday. We can sit right here and listen."

  "What day is your birthday?" he asked. Henry knew she was a few months older than he was but had completely forgotten her birthday in the confusion of recent events.

  "It's actually a week from tomorrow, but we're trying to have our first camp social, something to make this more of a camp, and less of a prison. Next Saturday is the day they've proposed for the record concert, so we'll just celebrate it then."

  "Do you have the record we bought?" Henry asked.

  Keiko shook her head, biting her lip.

  "Where is it?" Henry asked, remembering the empty streets of Ni-honmachi, the rows of boarded-up buildings.

  "It's probably in the basement of the Panama Hotel. There's a lot of stuff there. It's where Dad put some of the things we couldn't fit in our suitcases, things we didn't want to

  sell either--personal things. But it was being boarded up as we left. I'm sure it's shuttered now. You'll never get in, and if you do, I don't know if you could ever find it. There's so much."

  Henry thought about the old hotel. The last he recalled the ground floor had been boarded up completely. The windows on the upper floors--the ones left uncovered--had all been broken by rocks thrown by kids below in the days since the evacuation. "That's okay. I'll get what I can and bring it back next Saturday."

  "Same

  time?"

  "Later. Next week we're back here in Area Four, helping with dinner, but I can meet you here afterward, around six. I'll probably see you at dinner if you come through my line."

  "I'll be here. Where am I going to go?" She looked around, eyeing the long stretch of barbed wire, then glanced down, seemingly noticing how muddy she was. Then she reached in her pocket. "I have something for you."

  Henry reluctantly let go of her other hand as she pulled out a small bundle of dandelions, tied with a ribbon. "These grow between the floorboards of our house. Not really a floor, just wooden planks spread out on the dirt. My mom thought it was horrible to have all these weeds growing at our feet, but I like them. They're the only flowers that grow here. I picked them for you." She handed them to Henry through a gap beneath the wire.

  "I'm sorry," Henry said; he suddenly felt foolish having come empty-handed. "I didn't bring you anything."

  "That's okay. It's enough that you came. I knew you would. Maybe it was my dream. Maybe I was just wishing it. But I knew you'd find me." Keiko looked at Henry then took a deep breath. "Does your family know you're here?" she asked.

  "They don't know," Henry confessed, ashamed of his mother's ambivalence and his father's joyfulness. "I'm sorry I didn't tell them. I couldn't ... they'd never let me come.

  I hate my father, he's--"

  "That's okay, Henry, it doesn't matter."

  "I--"

  "It's okay. I wouldn't want my son coming to a prison camp either
."

  Henry turned his hands upward, feeling Keiko rest hers in his as they both felt the sharp metal of the wire sway between them, unyielding. Looking down, he noticed there was dried mud beneath her fingernails. She saw it too, curling her fingers in, then looking up to meet Henry's eyes.

  The moment, for what it was, ended abruptly as Henry heard honking in the distance. It was Mrs. Beatty in her truck, waving him back. Evidently she suspected where she might find him.

  "I have to go. I'll be back next week, okay?" Henry said.

  Keiko nodded, swallowing her tears but finding a smile. "I'll be here."

  Home Again

  (1942)

  Henry woke up Sunday morning feeling like a new man, even if he was only twelve--going on thirteen, actually. He'd found Keiko. He'd seen her face-to-face.

  And somehow, just knowing where she was became a comfort, even if that place was a mud-soaked prison camp.

  Now all he had to do was find a few items to bring back to Camp Harmony by next Saturday. But what about the Oscar Holden record? That'd be a nice birthday gift, he thought. If he could find it.

  In the kitchen Henry found his father, still in his robe, poring over a map of China from a National Geographic magazine he used to keep track of the war. His father had pasted it to a corkboard with small sewing pins stuck here and there to indicate major battles--blue for victories and red for defeats. There were several new blue pins. Still, Father was shaking his head.

  "Good

  morning,"

  Henry

  said.

  "Jou san," Henry's father replied, tapping a spot on the map with his worn fingernail. He kept muttering a phrase in Cantonese that Henry didn't understand,

  "Sanguang Zhengce," over and over again.

  "What does that mean?" Henry asked. It sounded like "three lights."

  He and his father had settled into a pattern of noncommunication months ago.

  Henry knew when his father was lamenting something; all he had to do was ask a question. Even if it were in English, if the tone sounded like a question, Henry would get an explanation of some kind.

  "It means 'three tiny lights'--it's a joke," Father said in Cantonese. "The Japanese call it 'three fires.' They call it 'Kill All. Burn All. Loot All.' They closed the Burma Road, but since the bombings at Pearl Harbor, we're finally getting supplies, from the Americans."

  Aren't

  you an American? Henry thought. Aren't we Americans? Aren't they getting supplies from us?

  Henry's father kept talking, whether to himself or his son, Henry couldn't be sure.

  "Not just supplies. Planes. The Flying Tigers are helping Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalist army defeat the Japanese Imperial invaders--but they're destroying everything now. The Japanese are killing civilians, torturing thousands, burning cities."

  Henry saw the conflict in his father's eyes, in how he stared at the map, happy and sad. Victorious and defeated.

  "There's good news for us, though. Hong Kong is secure. The Japanese have been contained in the north for months. Next school year, you can go to Canton."

  He said it like it was a birthday, Christmas, and Chinese New Year's all rolled into one. Like this would be welcome news. His father had spent most of his school years in China, finishing his education. An expected rite of passage. Sending their children to stay with relatives to attend Chinese school was what most families--traditional Chinese families like Henry's--did.

  "What about my scholarship to Rainier? What about just going to the Chinese school on King Street, like the other kids? What if I don't want to go?" Henry said the words, knowing his father would understand only a few: scholarship, Rainier, King Street.

  "Hah?" his father asked. "No, no, no--back to Canton."

  The thought of going to China was terrifying. It was a foreign country to Henry.

  One without jazz music or comic books--or Keiko. He envisioned staying at his uncle's house, which was probably more of a shack, and being teased by the locals for not being Chinese enough. The opposite of here, where he wasn't American enough. He didn't know which was worse. It made Keiko's situation, while bleak, seem so much more appealing. Henry caught himself feeling a twinge of jealousy. At least she was with her family. For now anyway. At least they understood. At least they wouldn't send her away.

  Before Henry could press his bilingual argument, his mother appeared from the kitchen and handed him a shopping list and a few dollars. She often sent him to the market when there was only a little buying to be done, especially since Henry seemed to have a knack for negotiating bargains. He took the note and a steamed pork bau for breakfast on the way and headed down the stairs and out into the cold morning air, relieved to get away for a while.

  Walking down South King toward Seventh Avenue and the Chinese marketplace, Henry thought of what to get Keiko for her birthday--aside from paper for writing, fabric for curtains, and the Oscar Holden record, which he was bound and determined to find.

  The first two items would be easy. He could pick up stationery and fabric at Woolworth's on Third Avenue any time during the week. And he knew where the record was. But what would she want for a birthday present? What could he buy that would make a difference in the camp? He'd saved all his money from working with Mrs. Beatty What could he buy? Maybe a new sketchbook or a set of watercolors? Yes, the more he thought about it, art supplies would be perfect.

  How he'd actually get the record, though, that question remained unanswered as he walked past the marketplace and into Nihonmachi. Two blocks over on South Main, he stood before the boarded-up facade of the Panama Hotel. There was no way in--it would take a crowbar and more muscle than rested on Henry's small shoulders. And once he made his way in, where would it be?

  He had the money--why not buy a new one? That made more sense than trying to break his way into the old hotel. But that too seemed fruitless as he walked from Nihonmachi toward downtown and the Rhodes Department Store. He had doubts about whether they'd sell it to him, especially after all the trouble he and Keiko had gone through the first time. Those doubts were magnified when he walked past the Admiral Theater. The marquee featured a new movie called Little Tokyo, U.S.A. , which piqued his curiosity yet made Henry wary and nervous.

  The publicity photos were of big Hollywood stars--Harold Huber and June Duprez, made up to look Japanese. They were playing spies and conspirators who'd helped plot the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Judging from all the torn ticket stubs and cigarette butts that dotted the damp sidewalk, the movie was a hit.

  Rhodes was out of the question. Henry wasn't trusted in these parts of town. And the Black Elks Club was still closed down--no hope of going to the source, Oscar Holden himself, to buy a new record. Henry kicked a can on the sidewalk, his stomach knotted in frustration.

  Maybe

  Sheldon?

  Henry zigzagged back in the direction of South Jackson, where Sheldon sometimes played on Sunday afternoons; usually when there was a new ship in town, bringing restless sailors and their dates to the neighborhood.

  His walk back took him past the Panama Hotel again. The massive marble entrance that he was never allowed to enter was now boarded up. Henry looked at the shopping list his mother had given him. He probably had another thirty minutes before his parents would worry about him being late.

  Thinking there must be a back way in, Henry slipped down the alley, behind the vacant and boarded-up Togo Employment Agency. The alley itself was piled with boxes and heaps of garbage, stacks of clothing and old shoes. Belongings that no one wanted, thrown out, but still here since the garbage service to this area had evidently been suspended. Behind the hotel, Henry looked for a freight entrance or a fire escape he could shimmy up to one of the many broken windows on the second floor.

  Instead he found Chaz, Will Whitworth, and a small gathering of other boys trying to gain entrance too. They were looking and pointing at the second-story windows.

  Some threw rocks, while others pawed through
the boxes left behind. One boy Henry didn't recognize had found a box of dishes and began throwing them against a brick wall, shattering them, pieces of fine porcelain china raining down.

  Before Henry could yell, or run, or hide, they saw him. One, then all of them.

  "It's a Jap!" one of the boys yelled. "Get him!"

  "No, it's a Chink," Will said, stopping the boy for a moment as they all stalked in Henry's direction.

  Chaz took control of the situation. "Henry!" Smiling, he seemed more happy than surprised. "Where's your girlfriend, Henry? She's not home if you're looking for her--and your nigger friend ain't around today is he?" he taunted. "Better get used to me. My dad's going to buy all these buildings, so we might end up neighbors."

  Henry's knees felt wobbly, but his jaw was clenched tighter than his fists. On a pile of garbage lay an old broom handle, almost as tall as Henry. He picked it up with both hands and gripped it like a baseball bat. He swung it once, then twice for good measure. It felt light and sturdy. Sturdy enough to hit a curveball the size of Chaz's head.