“Oh shut up,” Pinkey said. He slid his hand across the overcoat. Camel hair, he thought, or maybe cashmere.
Two women rolled Pinkey into the X-ray room on a gurney. The hospital was understaffed because of the war and there were no orderlies. Pinkey lay back, his hands folded behind his head.
“Do you want to take my pants off now or later?” he asked the two nurses and winked. They smiled and said nothing.
The transfer to the examining table proceeded with difficulty. Pinkey refused to help. On the contrary, he was a deadweight for the two women. McKay burst in. The hospital had called him when Pinkey arrived, and with one motion he lifted his hired hand to the table.
“For God’s sake, Pinkey …”
Pinkey gave McKay a grin. “Where’s the cards, the flowers, the candy?”
“Oh, they’re just floodin’ in.”
Pinkey turned to the nurses. “Are you going to strip me now?”
“Sorry, old man, maybe another time,” the heavier of the two replied. Then she split the seam of his trousers with a razor.
“Stop it! My new pants …,” Pinkey howled.
“Just slap the sonofabitch,” McKay said, smiling and motioning to the nurse to continue cutting.
The hospital let Pinkey sleep it off in the vacant labor room for no extra charge. He slept until the pain in his leg woke him. When he opened his eyes the walls of the room folded around him and spun. He closed them again. The beads of darkness under the lids spun too, zooming backward then bursting against some inward wall the color of garnets. He felt a terrible weight in his body. Maybe they put a body cast on with my arms inside so I can’t hold a bottle, he thought. He tried to move his arms and there was a sickening crash. The room filled with light.
“Did we fall out of bed?” a big woman in white asked. She helped Pinkey up.
“I guess my wings broke,” he said.
“Up we go. Now we’ll put these sides up so we don’t try to fly again.”
Pinkey felt the hard bed under him again. When the nurse’s face came close he thought he heard a terrible roar like snow falling from a roof. Then the room went black. He tried to lie still but his shoulders twitched and his body splintered like rotten wood. He saw a bottle somewhere in front of him and when he reached for it, it broke, but the whiskey didn’t spill. It had turned solid, like something frozen, then all at once, it shattered. His arms lengthened, reaching for it. He tried to think of why the need came on him. Then his arms were fifty yards long, his hands like tiny knobs, and still he could touch nothing and the need grew, a malevolent bloom.
“You havin’ a baby or do you want to go home?” McKay asked, throwing light into the room.
Pinkey sat up and looked around. “Am I dead?”
“How the hell do I know. I ain’t the doctor.”
“What time is it?” Pinkey asked.
“Time to get out of here before we’re snowed in for the winter.”
Pinkey suddenly felt clearheaded and slid off the bed. He hopped a few times, hanging on for balance. McKay handed him his hat, then the crutches. “God, if you don’t look like a jackrabbit …”
A fog swallowed the road ahead of McKay’s pickup and mixed with steam off the river. They drove north in the dark. Ahead the sky began to clear.
“What’d you have to go and get drunk for?” McKay asked. He was tired.
“That’s why.”
“What’s why?”
“Because I’m tired of having reasons. Why can’t a man just go and do stuff?”
“Well you ain’t going to be doing much with that thing on your leg.”
From out of the dark a road sign loomed: WELCOME TO BIG MONTANA. A horse ran in front of the truck. McKay swerved hard.
“Hey, that’s my mare,” Pinkey shouted and motioned to the sorrel horse eating grass on the side of the highway, which McKay referred to as “government feed.”
The truck skidded to a halt. Pinkey looked. He could see the blurred outline of the calcium plant. A half-moon shot up from an empty railroad car and shone like a pinhole in ice. Pinkey’s saddle had been dumped on end under the bar sign, which pulsed, throwing a bloody pool onto the snow every second or so.
McKay backed his pickup to a sidehill and loaded the mare. Pinkey rolled down the window. “I named her Eleanor. For Eleanor Roosevelt.”
When McKay slapped the mare on the rump, she jumped in and the top of her back steamed where snow had melted and the ice hanging in her mane clanged like crystals.
McKay turned his truck around. Now the sign read: WELCOME TO WONDERFUL WYOMING. Pinkey inspected his cast as if seeing it for the first time. He drummed on it here and there and discovered some of the plaster was still wet.
“Don’t you worry about them cows. I left them on autopilot. And don’t worry about this cast neither. We’ll cut her off in a coupla weeks and I’ll be good as new.”
McKay smiled. Pinkey pulled his coat tightly around him and cradled his head with a gloved hand. A wheezing snore came from his half-opened mouth as soon as he closed his eyes.
McKay drove slowly on the ungraded ranch road so as not to jar Pinkey’s leg. Once he stopped to check the depth of a mud hole, and when he climbed back in, he glanced at his passenger. Pinkey’s beard was growing out gray and his pink cheeks were a mass of capillaries broken into a fine mesh.
The truck lurched. Fins of slush sprayed up on either side. In his sleep, Pinkey felt McKay’s eyes on him. It was like heat penetrating his heavy lids. He wanted to laugh but his body made no sound.
3
Kai Nakamura lay across the bed with only a shirt on. It was late and it was raining again. After Li made love to him she rested her head on his stomach.
“You nervous. Everything noisy in there.”
Kai shifted, laughing, and pulled one knee up. He reached over her hip and lit a cigarette. The room smelled of green vegetables and cooking oil. Li climbed off the bed.
“Here,” she said, pinning a badge to his shirt. She kissed his chest where the shirt was open. His shoulders were big because he was on the Cal Berkeley swim team. He read the badge. It said, I AM CHINESE.
The noise of the city wallowed in the room, a mechanical gargling of horns, rain, music, and engines. On the fire escape the potted chrysanthemum he had given Li for her birthday tossed about in the wind. He ground out the cigarette until it looked like a pig’s flared snout and clasped Li’s head tightly in the crook of his arm. He thought her hair shone like the stalks of black bamboo. He rolled her from side to side. Locking his arms across the small of her back, he entwined his legs with hers until she wriggled from him. He grabbed her again and pinned her on her back with a wrestler’s hold.
“Hello,” he said.
Li smiled. She knocked at his shins with the tops of her feet, then went limp. Kai dropped heavily to her side. He was thinking ahead, about the next day and the next, and a coolness had gone through him. Li examined his face.
“Who are you?” she said.
There was a knock on the door. Kai scrambled under the covers as Jimmy Wong, Li’s older brother by twelve years, burst into their room. “No more Chinese women for you!” he announced, laughing. He handed Kai the San Francisco Chronicle. The headlines read, ALL JAPS MUST GO. Kai sat up propping himself against the wall. He leafed through the newspaper: “… it makes no difference whether the Japanese is theoretically a citizen. He is still a Japanese. Giving him a scrap of paper won’t change him. I don’t care what they do with them as long as they don’t send them back here. A Jap is a Jap.…”
Jimmy sat on the edge of the bed and stared out the window. The building that housed the dumpling shop and mah-jongg room across the street was dark. A fire escape clung tentatively to its side and the green dragon—a symbol of vitality and long life—used in the New Year’s parade where he had met Li lay unfurled against three upstairs windows.
Jimmy turned to Kai and whispered: “You stay here. Wear badge. Marry Li. Keep go to college. Cha
nge from great Japanese scholar to great Chinese scholar.”
Kai laughed. “I’m not either. I’m just American boy with slant eyes. Chinese wouldn’t have me,” he said.
Li reentered the room with two bottles of Coke. She uncapped them with the bottle opener by the bed and handed one to Kai and the other to her brother. The rain intensified. It slapped hard at the one window. Against city lights the drops looked black and fog enclosed the streets of Chinatown like sea-lanes leading to places no one in that room knew.
Kai unpinned the badge and twirled it between his fingers. It pricked his thumb. A drop of blood appeared and Li licked it away. After, Kai flung his hand over his head in a mocking backstroke. He thought about swimming from this dank room so redolent with intimacy. He would swim backward from the trancelike, forward motion of time, starting in San Francisco Bay, doing the backstroke under the bridge, the crawl out into the channel, then float past the Farallon Islands into rough seas.
Li opened the window. A surge of wind rushed past the bed. She pulled the chrysanthemum, whose heavy blossoms were bent completely over, into the room.
“Look what’s happened,” she said.
Kai didn’t look at the plant but at her. Perhaps this was the last time he would see her. In two days he would be evacuated. Whatever else happened he would remember her diminutiveness and the tart taste of her skin.
After he left Li on that last night of freedom, Kai waited for sunrise at an all-night upstairs teahouse where he was known by the waiters. It would have been dangerous for him to walk the streets because a curfew and a five-mile travel limit had been placed on “all persons of Japanese ancestry.” Even the binoculars he used for baseball games had been confiscated. Evacuation notices were posted on power poles all over the city. He and his friends had read them and had taunted the man pasting them up. Now, he sipped black tea and waited for sunrise alone.
At eight he boarded the ferry for Richmond. He hadn’t seen his parents for two years, though they lived less than ten miles apart. When he was twelve, Kai had been sent to an orphanage and later, to live with a Caucasian professor and his wife to learn “the American Way.” The American Way had brought him, at twenty-four, a Ph.D. candidacy in history.
The man at the ticket office, a Filipino, hesitated before giving Kai passage on the ferry, adding insult to injury because the Filipinos hated the Japanese as well.
Kai walked the streets of Richmond. Turning a corner, he saw his parents’ tiny frame house. In the front yard, a cypress had been pruned into an odd, windblown shape, and a single vine crawled a trellis up one wall.
He knocked on the door. When Mr. Nakamura opened it, he did not recognize his son. “Who are you looking for?” he asked briskly.
Kai shoved his hands into his pockets and stepped back, chuckling. “Pop, it’s me,” he said, but his father only stared uncomprehending.
He heard his mother. She pushed past her husband and let out a gasp. “Oh … it’s you—come in.”
“Don’t mind him,” she whispered, “it’s just that you’ve changed,” she said, smiling. She turned to Mr. Nakamura. “He has grown so big, desu-ne?”
Kai’s father stood to one side and nodded yes.
The house was bare. All the furniture had been sold or stored for safekeeping. In the living room Mr. Nakamura sat on a packing crate and bent toward the big radio. It lit his face like a jack-o’-lantern.
Kai’s mother called from the kitchen. She was stirring scallions into broth, shoyu, and sake, then eggs and eel.
“I don’t eat this food very much anymore,” Kai said.
“Oh, this is special for you. Unagi donburi. You always liked it,” she said, though Kai could remember liking no such thing.
He looked at his mother. He resembled her in build and the shape of his face but he still wondered if these were his parents. When they spoke during the meal he could not understand what they said.
After lunch Kai and his father drove to Japantown. Mr. Nakamura wanted to show his son the store. On the way, he saw a sign in the morgue: I’D RATHER DO BUSINESS WITH A JAP, and a crudely handwritten one in the barber shop: FREE SHAVES FOR JAPS. NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ACCIDENTS.
“How’s business been going, Pop?”
Mr. Nakamura grunted. “No good now.”
It was a Wednesday but Japantown was deserted. The noodle shop, the mochi shop, the restaurants were all closed. Mr. Nakamura pulled up in front of his hardware store and unlocked the door. It was housed in a triangular building at the end of a block flanked on two sides by narrow streets.
Inside Kai walked up and down the aisles. There were shelves of tools: planers and chisels and saws, garden tools and seed packets, and a ceiling-high stack of black twine rolled into balls. In another aisle were kitchen goods: bamboo steamers and water ladles, cast iron pots with wooden lids, chopsticks and scrub brushes, and a penny jar full of bubble gum.
Mr. Nakamura took his place behind the counter. When he came to America he worked as a laborer on a celery farm, a chicken-sexer, a flower grower, and now the owner of Japantown’s only hardware store. Above his head was the business license he had framed austerely in black and next to it, a photograph of the Great Buddha at Nara.
“For God’s sake, Pop, take that down,” Kai said, pointing to the photo.
Mr. Nakamura stood motionless. Kai slid a penny into the gum machine and popped a jawbreaker into his mouth. His father turned away in disgust and struggled with a locked door. Kai helped him. Finally the door swung open. Instead of the street, there was a garden, no bigger than a closet, with stepping-stones, mossy banks, a stone water basin, three flowering shrubs, and, against a tall fence, a thicket of black bamboo.
“I sell business yesterday,” Kai’s father said solemnly. “Seven hundred dollar. The car too. But didn’t show them this.”
Kai spit the gum into his hand and stared at the massive block of stone under his feet. Already the moss had begun to grow beyond its borders. Across the street a gong in the Buddhist temple rang. Kai heard glass breaking. He turned around. His father had broken the picture frame and held a match to the photograph of the Buddha. The glossy paper lifted and curled toward him and became ash.
They locked the store and drove home in the Studebaker. Sometimes the horn stuck and Mr. Nakamura had to lift the hood and pinch a certain wire, but not today. They glided through empty streets. Their first night of evacuation would be spent at a racetrack in converted horsestalls. The idea amused Kai at first, and he thought of getting a rake from the store for the manure, but changed his mind.
“Seabiscuit, here we come,” he said, though quietly, so his father would not hear.
The next morning Mrs. Nakamura swept the floors a last time though the house appeared to be spotless. Three large suitcases and a bulging duffle bag were set out at the front door. At the last moment Mr. Nakamura parted with his beloved possession: a potted bonsai he had grown from seed. The neighbors, who were Danish, were to care for it. Mr. Nakamura explained the strict watering and pruning schedule, then handed the tree to the sea captain.
“It is very beautiful, this little tree,” Jan Carlson exclaimed. He was tall and in his big red hands the tree looked even smaller. “Don’t worry; it will live longer than this damned war,” he shouted. “It will be very healthy tree when you return. I will have it for you, sure.”
Mr. Nakamura looked at the man, his eyes glazed with shame, then bowed deeply.
Two days later Kai and his parents were on a train. All through the cars he could see only black hair, dark eyes, the sound of a language his parents had forbidden him to learn. The journal he began keeping that day was a way of steadying himself against drastic change. Already, the lullaby rocking of the train felt deathly to him. He dreamed the tracks were his arms. He was holding Li. The heavy cars rolled over them.
When Kai woke his arms were asleep. He had been sitting on his hands to keep warm. Out the train window he could see the desert under a moon. He thought it l
ooked like the palm of a hand on which no lines had been drawn.
Like a great elastic band the train stretched Kai away from the places and people he knew well. He opened his journal:
As I look out the train window I can see green hills dotted with houses. Strange but I hadn’t noticed the soft greenness before. I remembered in the hurried retreat I had left my room in turmoil. An Issei would have been ashamed to leave the place in less than perfect order so as not to betray any confusion in his mind. But as for confusion, I’m feeling plenty. Everyone on the, train is asking what will happen to them when we get to the Camp, but I’m asking what will become of us when we return—if we ever do.
The train clicked and swayed. Kai continued writing:
A child is crying. I think it is very young, only four or five days old. The mother described her experience of hearing news of Pearl Harbor. She said, “I felt as if I had lost all the color in my body.” Then came February 19 and the signing of Executive Order 9066:
Whereas the successful prosecution of the war requires every possible protection against espionage and against sabotage to national-defense material, national-defense premises, and national-defense utilities as defined in section 4, Act of April 20, 1918, 40 Stat. 533, as amended by the act of November 30, 1940, 54 Stat. 1220, and the Act of August 21, 1941, 55 Stat. 655 (U. S. C., Title 50, Sec. 104):
Now, therefore, by virtue of the authority vested in me as President of the United States, and Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy, I hereby authorize and direct the Secretary of War, and the Military Commanders whom he may from time to time designate, whenever he or any designated Commander deems such action necessary or desirable, to prescribe military areas in such places and of such extent as he or the appropriate Military Commander may determine, from which any or all persons may be excluded, and with respect to which, the right of any persons to enter, remain in, or leave shall be subject to whatever restrictions the Secretary of War or the appropriate Military Commander may impose in his discretion: The Secretary of War is hereby authorized to provide for residents of any such area who are excluded therefrom, such transportation, food, shelter, and other accommodations as may be necessary, in the judgment of the Secretary of War or the said Military Commander, and until other arrangements are made, to accomplish the purpose of this order. The designation of military areas in any region or locality shall supersede designations of prohibited and restricted areas by the Attorney General under the Proclamations of December 7 and 8, 1941, and shall supersede the responsibility and authority of the Attorney General under the said Proclamations in respect of such prohibited and restricted areas.
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