Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  “Why don’t you walk over to that post and then walk back to me,” the recruiter said.

  McKay rolled his eyes at Pinkey, then walked to the post and back.

  “That’s a pretty bad limp you’ve got, sonny.”

  “It’s on the mend. Look, I’ve got to get out of here. I’ve got to go over there with my brothers …,” McKay pleaded.

  The recruiter scrutinized the pair once again. “I appreciate your interest, and I’m going to put a note right here on your file about your willingness to do service for your country, but at the moment I think you’ll be doing more good raising food. It’s the fight we can wage here at home, the fight against food shortages.”

  The recruiter folded his hands over McKay’s file.

  “Come on, we’ve got chores to do,” Pinkey said, pulling at McKay’s arm.

  When they were out on the street, McKay saw the director of the Heart Mountain Camp pass in a car.

  “Hey, I’ve got to talk to you,” he yelled at the man, who turned, bewildered, and kept driving.

  McKay laid his head back against the seat. He let Pinkey take the wheel, even though Pinkey’s license had been suspended for drunk driving years before. “Is there anyone here with me?” McKay wondered, as Pinkey ground down through the gears. McKay swallowed. Something hard stuck at the back of his throat. Though it was midday, the moon was still visible, and he thought the sun and the moon were only stones—fatuous in their illusion of mass and brilliance. A raven winged over the hood, and he could not help but think of Mariko lifting over him.

  Pinkey grinned. He was going only thirty miles an hour, but he straightened his arms against the steering wheel as if taking turns on a racetrack. McKay tried to count how many times he had bailed Pinkey out of jail. Twenty times? “Let’s cut the sonofabitching wire,” he said, breaking the silence.

  “What wire?” Pinkey asked.

  “At the Camp …”

  “They’ll just shoot you down.… Is that what you want?”

  McKay closed his eyes. He saw the fire a bullet makes in the dark and the zinging sound of its passage. His lips were chapped and he licked them with his tongue, then pressed his head against the frosty window. He knew the truck was moving—when he opened his eyes the landscape strobed by. The sun shot hard through the glass, rolling geometric shapes over the dashboard. He held his head. His mouth opened, and from it came a silent, then barely audible cry.

  20

  March. Out of 2,300 men in Heart Mountain eligible for the draft, only 38 have volunteered for the all-Nisei combat unit. Approximately 400 Issei and Nisei here have applied for repatriation to Japan. I think they’ve signed their lives away. They won’t be welcome there or here. Sad.

  Much to everyone’s surprise, the resistance has become quite solid. Even the block leaders—the “blockheads”—who have been conservative in all things refused to capitulate and made a declaration of nonpartisanship, refused to take on the responsibility of forcing their residents to comply with the army. Good for them.

  Jack, Taki, and Emi came over with some rumba records tonight. It was fun watching them dance. Emi insisted on teaching me the tango. It was something to laugh about. Had to turn the volume up high because the wind’s roar had become deafening. It felt good to drown everything out. There’s so much bad blood here, coming from within and without. I don’t know which is worse. We’re split in so many directions at once, even our self-hate, at which we’re becoming expert, is fractured. Which self should we hate—the self that hates the Issei and is a patriot, the self that sides with the Issei and is a disloyal, the self that feels betrayed by his slant eyes and American stomach?

  What the press refers to as “the Japanese problem” has seen a revival. One of our congressmen who has never deigned to visit the camp reported that we’re being “pampered” and “coddled”; that we’re idle, fat-waisted; that we have wine with meals; that we hoard food which was intended for the citizens of Wyoming; that while we’re luxuriating here, the boys in Guadalcanal are starving. I invite him personally to come live among us, to eat stewed beef hearts and sour milk; to rot—not idle—the best years of our lives away; to be jailed, having committed no crime; to be peered and poked at by outsiders as if we were in a zoo; to be hated, spat upon, turned away at restaurants and barbershops; to be the brunt of vicious cartoons.

  Saturday. Got only one letter from Li. How can I blame her? It must seem as hopeless from her point of view as it does from mine. Can we even be sure that if the war were over tomorrow we would be allowed to return home?

  Monday. Had tea with Abe-san, Mariko, and Will. The Heart Mountain Congress has reached a stalemate since the end of registration. Will is skinnier than ever, downright gaunt. He talks emphatically, cynically, brilliantly. But I fear for him. From reading the newspapers, the mood of the country seems more racist than ever, and surely there will be repercussions for those who protested, if not for all of us.

  Asked Abe-san where he thought racism came from. He smiled and touched his head with his long fingers and said, “No imagination.” Then Mariko asked what I thought, and I said hating others must come from hating ourselves. Abe-san threw his head back and, sucking in air, said, “Same thing!”

  Friday nite. Tonight is the “anniversary” of my coming together with Li. Funny, I should be thinking about it so hard now, when I feel her attentions waning. It makes me wonder if human beings’ drive to “pursue happiness” is fuelled solely by discontent. We seem to be at odds with the world and spend our lives struggling trying to make it fit us, and not the other way around. So it is with my feelings for Li, for anyone. How I ache for what I cannot have tonight.

  Looked up a map of China. We’re getting quite a good library together now, considering where we are. The River Li runs north and south. She was named for it; her family fished and farmed on its banks a century before.

  Went home after a short bull session with Iwasaka and a cup of sake. Thought I’d talk to Will. Instead, found Mariko asleep on her bed. She had thrown off all the covers and lay sleeping, curled and smooth and perfect as a seashell, naked.

  It shocked me. Not the nakedness, but her beauty. What a fool I’ve been all evening, drowning myself in sorrows over things past, when what is before me, what is in the present can move me so.

  Later. Looked in the mirror for a long time. It’s not narcissism—I’m trying to see “the mask,” the Japanese in me, the American. But the more I look the less I see. The racial mask is inside the head, a projection, as if the flesh were a blank screen on which we inflict stereotypes. If I look Japanese and think American, does that change my facial characteristics? Am I more than who I think I am; am I double?

  Sunday evening I put my journal away and went to Abe-san’s. I can’t remember when I started taking off my shoes at his door—just like an old Issei.

  Found him in a pile of wood shavings, carving a new mask. He looked up at me, then continued working. Light from the window cut his face in half, as if he, like the mask, were only half-finished. “Every cut I make is a cut toward Nirvana,” he likes to say. I sat down on the floor in front of him. Ever since the night I came to sit Zazen and he refused me, I’ve gotten a little nervous, never knowing when I’ll get the boot again, or why.

  Finally he put down his chisel and swept the floor. He gathered the shavings in a dust pan and poured them into the wood stove. Flames shot up under the lid, then died down.

  “Do you know Ikkyu?” he asked.

  “Who?” I thought he meant someone at the Camp.

  Abe-san sat with his hands on his thighs:

  “Ikkyu was Rinzai Zen master. Later, was abbot of Daitoko-ji in Kyoto. They say he was crazy—call him Unsui—‘Crazy Cloud’—because he didn’t follow rules. He live in Kyoto in 1400s—very bad time. There were wars, droughts, corruption in Buddhist temples. Kyoto burn down and when people go hungry, monasteries have food. Ikkyu hate all this. When he was young—younger than you—and he go find teacher, but
teacher would not let him through gate, so Ikkyu sat outside with nothing to eat or drink, nothing to sleep on. He wait. Finally, teacher send someone out with bucket of water—throw on Ikkyu’s head, but still, Ikkyu would not go away: Finally teacher let him in and he attained enlightenment.”

  Abe-san grasped his knees and rocked backward.

  “Why does he talk about brothels, then?” I asked.

  Abe-san scowled.

  “Ikkyu would say to you, ‘Good and evil are not two; false and true are same.’”

  I shifted restlessly, and Abe-san continued.

  “If you are enlightened, does not mean there is no pain, no confusion in your life. To Ikkyu, desire and—letting go of desire—same thing.”

  I made a sound—embarrassed laughter, because I knew he saw I didn’t really understand. But who could unless they already knew these things, then there would be no need to understand.

  “Ikkyu wander all the time and write poems. He live like hermit in mountain. Other times, he live in very poor section of cities, Kyoto and down by Osaka, in Sakai. He fight with abbot of temple; that abbot was corrupt man. Ikkyu have lover, blind woman—Mori—and when he become abbot of Daitoko-ji, she live next to temple ground. Ikkyu spend whole life fighting. He live like old Tang master. They were eccentric. They practice wild and free. He was only monk to talk about sex. Others did what he did too, but they try to hide it.

  Abe-san tipped his head to one side and looked into my eyes. “When Ikkyu abbot, he move far from temple to mountain. Many artists come there. He was fourteenth-century bohemian. Artist, poet, and painter, gather there; tea ceremony and Noh theater begin then. He was first monk to live Zen outside monastery … he follow no rules. But what are rules for? In Zen, they are only reminder. Ikkyu don’t need them. He was furyu—full of passion. He see everything, he mix with everyone, afraid of nothing.… Whole world was his monastery—his discipline.”

  Abe-san grasped his knees again and tilted so far back I thought he would fall over, but he didn’t. He righted himself. “That’s how I wish I lived my life,” he said.

  Went for a walk that evening. It was cold but I continued on. I did not like what I had become. That’s all I knew, but maybe that’s all I needed to know.… I remember stopping in front of one of the barracks to listen to a jazz band play over the radio. The music sounded flat—it had the kind of depth that comes from bitterness, not wonder. That’s how I was too. I walked on. I kept feeling a pocket of something inside me, a, ruined well. “But I’m too young to feel like that,” I said aloud. At the end of rows of barracks, I looked back at the Camp. For a minute I hated Abe-san and all those old Issei with their ideas.… Then I remembered how he had gazed at me while talking about Ikkyu.…

  The Camp looked as if something had collapsed even though all the shabby buildings were standing; the people walking around were steel bearings rolling aimlessly, and the dust—always the dust—rose senselessly like exhaled smoke.

  I walked to the waterhole, the one used by children in the summer. The water was shallow and cold. What was I doing here? I took off my clothes hurriedly and sat down on the “beach.” Some beach. I could see snow on top of Heart Mountain.

  The water numbed my feet but I went all the way in, crouching to let it wash over my back. For a moment, I floated. When I saw how white I was and how my belly had grown, I felt disgust. Once I asked Abe-san where in the human body the soul resided. Barefoot, sitting cross-legged, he laughed. Then he picked up his foot by his little toe and said, “Here!”

  A half-moon sailed through clouds. “Deliver me,” I said out loud. “From myself.” I rolled over and dogpaddled in a circle. When I stood up, my feet sank in the muck. The water tickled my waist. I tried to see the whole moon, not just the half that was reflecting sunlight, because I knew my inclination was to reduce everything to controllable parts … just like those monks Ikkyu hated … right and wrong, self and other.… That’s what “historical detachment” will do for you. Bullshit. I’d been fending everything off, protecting myself … but from what?

  When I pounded the cold water with my fists it splashed into my face and came down like tears.

  21

  The morning the last of the river ice went out, fifty elk came down to the river. They drank, then waded to the island. Their tracks flattened the sand where it had mounded up in tiny dunes and in among the river stones their black scats lay polished as pebbles. Heart Mountain rose above them. It was misted rock, the top vermillion half floating above the base and the base floating above the ground. “It looks torn,” McKay thought, as he finished morning chores and reconnected a water line that had frozen during the winter. He felt as if he had stones in his throat; the exacerbating fact of Mariko’s absence stood up in his mind like a tree.

  McKay rode out through the west pasture, roping, doctoring, and ear-tagging calves. He and his brothers had always loved these early spring days “when a man could get his rope down and let his horse run awhile.” When he finished, he rode to the river. Overhead the clouds looked more like waves, the kind of waves that come toward shore but never break, whose cresting swells suddenly flatten and return to deeper water. He thought he had reached the bottom of his loneliness, but now another depth revealed itself—one that he could not push beyond and as he approached the river, orange and scarlet clouds traveled over him without breaking.

  He stepped down, slid the hobbles from the D-ring at the back of his saddle, and hobbled his horse. Since the day he had been turned away from the Camp, unable to see Mariko, his mouth and head had felt thick and spongy, as if his craving for her had become waterlogged. He walked to the tip of the gravel bar and lay down on the rocky edge. Where the current had scooped out a deep hole, the water was turquoise. Two or three small trout headed into the stream and held themselves, fluttering, near the bottom. When he put his hand into the water, it turned numb.

  McKay walked. Halfheartedly, he twirled once, because he was thinking of the way he had circled the room with Mariko in his arms. Then he sat with his back against a piece of driftwood. He pulled his heavy coat on and closed his eyes. When he was a child, Bobby had told him that if he listened—really listened—he could hear everything in the world. He could even hear the future coming.

  He tried to make his mind quiet. Every few seconds a chunk of ice floated by because upstream, at ten thousand feet, it was still winter. The wind came out of the northwest and all along the tops of mountains snow sprayed straight up and came down finely sifted, like flour. He listened. At ten thousand feet, wind blew through pines, but above, where there were no trees, who knew how long those spring winds had been blowing, since sound is only a function of resistance to what no longer flows freely.

  He heard the ache in his body fasten itself to his throat and groin and over that, gusts skating down the river and the river sounds rising in the interludes. The gravel bar was a bridge whose connecting ends had washed out. What was on the banks that he so hungered for? The ache set up in him like cement. He unfastened his pants. He did not want to think of her now because he did not want to use her this way, but her face streamed in, shunting against him like a train. A chunk of ice knocked the shore, then bumped out into the current. He held himself. It was not pleasure he wanted but knowledge: full knowledge that surpasses consciousness. Then he did not need to think. Her presence moved his hips skyward, toward turbulent winds no one could see, and the river flooded through his body soundlessly.

  By the time the last five hundred cows had calved, the first five hundred were old enough to brand and turn out into spring pasture. Bobby cooked wild turkey and a side of beef, and the women brought potato salads, bread, cakes and pies, and the neighbors who came worked. Madeleine, Jesse, and Pinkey roped while Bobby vaccinated and McKay branded, and some of the children from town held the calves when the ropers dragged them to the fire. When Pinkey tired, he changed jobs with McKay and held the red-hot branding iron to the ribs of each calf while the hair and flesh smell curle
d over his face. After their ordeal the branded calves bucked out across the pasture, and four days later McKay, Pinkey, Madeleine, Jesse, and his children moved a thousand pairs to spring pasture. At the first water crossing, the calves tried to turn back. McKay dismounted and carried one or two across—and after much whooping and hollering, the others high-stepped through. It is wind and water that bring spring in, McKay thought, water that takes the ice away, and he was happy to ride with his chaps dripping. The cows moved slowly because of the calves. The crew drove them up the great alluvial fans of Heart Mountain, crossing three ridges at its base—buttresses for the limestone tower above them.

  McKay and Madeleine rode point at the head of the herd and turned the lead. When the cattle broke into a run, they rode hard and fast, down through willows, spooking the herd up and out of a creek bottom, loping across a wide bench through the last gate to a ten-thousand-acre pasture.

  As they rode back in the dark, a bottle of schnapps was passed. Bobby drove the chuckwagon and fed the roundup crew as they moved up and across the mountain. He kept the fresh horses watered and grained, because the riders could use the same horse only every third day. So there were forty or fifty horses in the remuda. Because of the war they never knew whom they could get to ride with them, so they had to have plenty of gentle horses, and during the rest of the year McKay worked hard with up-and-coming colts as well as the older ones in the herd. He tried to use them enough so they weren’t bored but rest them enough so they didn’t turn sour.

  Pinkey had always trained the stock dogs, though the word train didn’t describe what he did. There were no shouted commands such as “Heel” or “Come.” He merely let a young dog follow him everywhere while he talked softly, cautioning him about this and that, letting the dog feel his way around a horse or a herd, calling him back from retrieving a cow, feeding the dog whatever he, Pinkey, ate, and letting him sleep on the bed.