Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  When McKay looked around, Pinkey was gone. Then he saw him with a reluctant Janine on his arm, coming down the hall. They danced a polka. The tempo increased until Janine’s feet left the floor. The other dancers made room for them. Janine pounded Pinkey’s back with her fist to make him stop, but he would not. He fell ignominiously to the floor.

  Vincent went to him.

  “Dance with your mother,” he pleaded, laughing. “She’s too much for me.”

  Vincent helped his mother up. She brushed a loose strand of hair back from her face and when the bombast of the polka stopped and something slower played, Vincent took her in his arms and moved off in an awkward two-step.

  Four men Snuff didn’t know appeared at the front door. Carol Lyman saw them scanning the room. “They’ve come to make trouble,” she thought.

  “Who’s that?” Madeleine asked.

  “I don’t know,” Carol said.

  Vincent followed McKay to the back door.

  “Where are you going?” McKay asked.

  Vincent motioned toward the parked car. “Some guys said there was a present for me in that car.”

  McKay raised his eyebrows and smiled. “I bet there is.”

  The waning moon’s half-light seemed to drill the cold even deeper into the ground. A kid who’d lost an arm in an auger pulled an unlabeled quart of booze from under his coat and handed it to Vincent.

  “Drink this first and you’ll see more than stars,” he promised. “Then you can look in the back of the car.”

  Vincent took a swig, then handed the bottle back to his friend.

  “No, take another one. Live it up, Vincent; this is your last night of freedom.”

  Vincent drank. McKay buttoned his jeans and sidled over to the parked car. A young woman, bundled in blankets but apparently naked, because he saw her white slip and bra on the floor, lay across the backseat.

  “I’ll be right back,” the one-armed boy said as he opened the door for Vincent, then handed the bottle in. “Have some fun,” he said. McKay filled his lower lip with snoose and went back into the dance.

  The four strange men stood in a knot in the middle of the dance floor. Jimmy Big Elk also saw they were looking for trouble but when he tried to get out from his booth, his legs would not hold him, so he stayed.

  “Hey, Harry—” McKay yelled over the crowd from the end of the hall. He recognized his friend, the guard from the Camp, among the strangers.

  “Come have a drink,” he yelled again.

  The knot of men moved toward him. He thought the malevolent look on their faces was a joke, or else, they were bringing bad news.

  “You fucking Jap lover,” Harry screamed, then fell on McKay, kneeing him and slugging him in the face. McKay tried to shield himself from the blows of the others but could not. The fists were coming from all directions. He tasted blood and felt his breath sucked from him before the men were pulled away.

  Snuff pushed toward McKay and jerked Harry backward by his collar.

  “You get the hell out of my bar and don’t ever come back,” he said. Orval, Jesse, Pinkey, and Clementine pulled the others off, and before anyone else could get there, Madeleine was on the floor beside McKay, holding his head on her knees. Carol handed her the bar towel Snuff had used on her wrist and Madeleine dabbed at the two cuts on McKay’s face.

  “What was that all about?” she asked.

  McKay looked up at her. “You don’t want to know.”

  After midnight some of the well-wishers left because they couldn’t find Vincent to say good-bye. McKay’s left eye had swollen shut but he kept dancing and Pinkey lay head down at the booth next to Jimmy, who kept droning his one song. When the fiddler played “September Song,” Pinkey jerked awake and called out for Janine, who had gone to bed a few hours before. When no one paid any attention to him, he stumbled out on the dance floor and teetered in circles as if dancing with a woman, though he was by himself.

  “Hell, by morning he’ll be telling me he danced that one with her,” McKay quipped as Madeleine fished another ice cube out of her drink to put to his eye.

  When the song stopped, Snuff turned on the lights, and everyone laughed as Pinkey wobbled all alone in the middle of the room. Jimmy Big Elk was snoozing, ensconced in his red booth.

  “Where’s Vincent?” Pinkey barked.

  The party-goers didn’t know.

  “Well goddamn—” he said, then began looking under all the tables and behind the bar. He opened the door along the hall—Venus’s rooms and the broom closet, where he found only brooms. When he opened the back door a blast of cold air blew in.

  “Hell, it ain’t that cold out,” he mumbled and stepped down into the snow. The parking lot in back, paved with bottlecaps, many of them his, was empty. He walked to the Wild Man’s cabin. The moon had set and very quickly his feet and hands felt numb though he didn’t care. Janine was sleeping.

  “If you’re drunk get out of here,” she said, lifting her head.

  “I can’t find Vincent,” Pinkey said.

  She sat up, her long braid hanging down the front of her nightdress. “I haven’t seen him. Maybe he just went home.”

  Pinkey could feel himself weaving a little bit in the dark.

  “Can I sit down for a minute?” he asked.

  She glared at him and before she could protest he dropped heavily onto the edge of the bed. He felt the weight of an inconceivable anguish. He wanted to lie down and sleep next to his wife and feel her ampleness press against him; she had always been so warm on those cold nights, at least the ones she would sleep with him, which in the last years of their marriage weren’t many because he was always on a tear or sobering up from one enough to start another.

  “Help me look for him. I ain’t too steady on my feet anymore.”

  Without a word, Janine climbed out of the narrow bed and put on her clothes.

  The clouds had dissipated and now the stars wheeled around Pinkey’s head.

  “Look, the Big Dipper’s all screwed up,” he said.

  She looked.

  “The sonofabitch is upside down, see … the dipper’s stickin’ straight up—it’s all goin’ to spill out.…”

  She gave him a disgusted look. They walked through the cobbled parking lot, then around to the front of the bar where the flashing sign drove its red and pink stains into the snow. He took Janine’s hand.

  “Here, let me help you cross this busy street,” he said mockingly. He looked up and down the narrow highway. No cars in either direction, not even the distant roar of a truck. “Silent fucking night, silent fucking night …,” he began singing. Snow squealed under their feet.

  The calcium mill was a hollow wooden shed all dusted white, which seemed to rise out of the snow the way an adobe building rises out of dirt. At one end a mound of powdery mineral bulged from two open doors. An empty railway car was parked at the back. Pinkey steered Janine over to it. He stood on his toes and peered in. No bums, he thought. Where in the hell are all the bums? “Where is everybody?” he cried.

  “I used to could jump into one of these things when she was a-movin’,” Pinkey bragged.

  “You could not. We were both too short,” Janine reminded him.

  Pinkey appeared not to hear.

  “I’m going back. It’s too cold out here,” Janine said and began walking.

  Pinkey followed behind her obediently. The wind was in his face and he tucked his head down under his coat collar. Now the bar seemed to be a long way away. The snow from the ground whirled up, mixed with the calcium dust, and he couldn’t see.

  “Hey … where are you? Where is everyone?” he yelled again.

  He heard a scream and pulled his head out of his collar, opening his eyes against the stinging snow. He saw something dark huddled down near the great white mound.

  The scream didn’t stop, but was amplified. It had come from the top of Janine’s lungs and now a new sound surged, a low, trembling wail. Pinkey bent down to whatever horror she h
ad stumbled upon. When he crouched next to her, he saw Vincent.

  Finally, he stood. He felt as if his clothes had emptied out. No flesh filled them, no human commotion. Nothing came from his lungs, though he wanted it to—the nothing he had been singing about earlier, the nothing night, and now the nothing son. When his body contorted into motion, he found himself running toward the bar and an image of Vincent fixed itself before his eyes: the blue face whitened by a skiff of snow, the black cowboy hat tipped off the back of his head, and the beautiful braids flung out, then bent under like broken legs.

  McKay ran back across the frozen highway with Pinkey. He ripped open Vincent’s shirt and lay his head on the strong, hairless chest and put two fingers against his neck where the jugular should have been pumping blood, but was not, then, slowly, sat back on his heels.

  McKay hung Pinkey’s black gabardine suit on the iron triangle Bobby rang to call them in for dinner because the fabric smelled like mothballs. Bobby lent him one of his clean dress shirts because they were similar in size, and McKay polished his boots. Just before it was time to leave, Pinkey slumped on the stool and asked for something to wet his whistle.

  “What you need?” Bobby asked, standing in the middle of the kitchen floor.

  “I don’t know,” Pinkey said. His voice sounded hoarse but inside he felt lighter than he had ever felt, not the lightness that comes from relief, but the featherweight emptiness that comes when death is so near.

  Bobby took a bottle of the ranch’s best whiskey from the shelf and filled a small glass.

  “Please—” he said to Pinkey and placed the glass in the old cowboy’s hand.

  Pinkey drank.

  “More?” Bobby asked.

  Pinkey shook his head numbly. “You know … when I took Vincent into that funeral parlor I had to wait in line. Someone else had gotten in there before us.” He set his glass down hard. “It was the middle of the goddamned night,” he yelled.

  Bobby nodded, listening, then set a glass of ice water by the whiskey.

  “I guess a man has to wait in line even if he’s dead …,” Pinkey continued. “It was that Markham kid from the Three Six’s Ranch, come in from the front in Italy.…”

  Bobby refilled his glass.

  Vincent’s body was laid next to a big hole in the ground. Janine and Pinkey and Jimmy filed by the casket, then stood by as the others in the funeral party did the same. Janine was wearing an unfitted flowered dress with a silk jacket her daughter had won running barrels at Crow Fair. She had wanted Vincent to be buried on the reservation, but Pinkey wanted him “planted on the outfit,” as he put it, because that’s where Vincent had spent most of his childhood, and this one time she conceded because she had her way about not having an autopsy, “I don’t want no white man’s hands inside my boy’s body,” she said, not so much because of the bitterness she felt about Pinkey, but because she did not want the process of dying, of being dead, to be tampered with. “It’s none of our business,” she said. “He’s gone. We have to help him now.”

  When everyone had viewed the body, the pallbearers—McKay, Snuff, and two Indian boys who had come on the train that morning—closed the casket and lowered it down into the hole with ropes. The ground was frozen but because of the war, the gravediggers had dug extra graves and covered them in order to accommodate the soldiers coming home in boxes.

  Pinkey looked at his wife from under the brim of his Stetson, which he had brushed clean and sprinkled with talcum powder to cover the stains. Suddenly he wanted to go home with her, to her Indian house, filled with the smell of fry bread and stew. They would play cards and learn how to hurry up and die since now there was no child to live for, and in the meantime, they would move cattle together the way they used to—across the rolling hills of the Wolf Mountains, whose dense thickets of wild plums lining every draw reminded him of the way a woman looked with her legs spread.

  The Lutheran minister started a prayer. Lutheran, not because Vincent had gone to that church, but because the owners of the ranch where he worked were German pioneers—and Pinkey took off his hat and bowed his head but could not pray. “There ain’t no God and there never has been anything like one in the whole world,” he thought. His shoulders felt tight. He wanted to yell at the top of his lungs. When he looked up, he caught Janine’s stare. It was a sharp, sad look, and her dark eyes …

  “Amen.”

  The pallbearers began covering the coffin with shovelfuls of dirt. Pinkey knelt by the grave and stared in. A chinook wind had come up and it blew warm air around his ears. He wanted to lie in the dank hole with his son.

  Then Pinkey heard the voice, the low, crackling growl of the old man, the grandfather. Jimmy Big Elk tapped his cane on the hard ground and the volume of his voice doubled. Janine joined in along with the high, falsetto voices of the boys from the reservation. The minister’s prayer was drowned out and the mourners could not hear anything else but song. The chanting continued. The wind picked up and the sudden warmth melted the top of the snow and Pinkey thought he could smell something from the mountains, maybe pine. He was glad when the minister left, sneaking off like a hyena, and after, he stood by Janine and let the vibration of her voice enter him. Then as suddenly, the song stopped. Very quietly Janine said there would be a feast at McKay’s. She clasped Pinkey’s hand as she talked because she was shy and Pinkey looked down and saw her big brown hand over his white one and in the first truly sober moment he’d had for years, felt ashamed of the pain he had brought her.

  The mourners came by to pay their respects. Then the need for a drink seized him. It was winter and already the sky was getting dim. He wished it would get dark and stay that way. He wanted that. He took more steps, then climbed over the picket fence around the graveyard, out into the white sea of a plowed-up, snow-covered grainfield. Once he stopped and looked back. Janine was watching his disgraceful retreat. He tried to make himself return to her, but couldn’t. “I’m just a running fool,” he said to himself. All during the funeral he had wanted to rip open the casket and prove it wasn’t true that Vincent was dead. “Let them have their marriages and funerals,” he thought, “none of it is true.” When he reached the highway he thought he saw Vincent’s pickup coming toward him, beginning to slow, slowing to give him a ride to the first bar in town.

  29

  Secretary of War Henry Stimson announced that the Selective Service was “throwing open its arms to Japanese-Americans” and we Nisei would now be eligible for the draft. Many had been in the army before Pearl Harbor but after, were immediately reclassified 4-C—ineligible because of ancestry. In that way they invalidated our efforts to prove our loyalty long before the camps came into being. I don’t think there is one of us who wouldn’t have gladly enlisted if we had not been put into Camps. Why must our “struggle back to America,” as someone called it, have to be paid for with one big leap from imprisonment to giving away our lives?

  The draft aside, Mom and Pop and I have given some thought to relocating to a midwestern city; 1,566 evacuees have relocated out of this Camp to places like Des Moines, Chicago, Milwaukee, Cleveland. After dinner one night, I told them that I had turned down an opportunity to go back to graduate school.

  Mom looked surprised. “But why?” she asked. “We wouldn’t have minded, would we?” she said to Pop, who nodded in silent agreement. I hadn’t expected that; I was glad I had decided to stay. It’s not just out of giri—duty—but out of curiosity, as well. There’s every kind of person here, from every kind of background, all ages and states of health, all kinds of minds … and there’s Abe-san too. Mom realized this when she said, “It’s good for you to stay. You will learn about life here, and about where you came from.”

  Later that week—the last week of January 1944—I made my first step toward fulfilling my vow to Will and took part in getting the Fair Play Committee into full swing as a response to the draft notice. We elected a president and a vice president and announced that membership was open only to Ameri
can citizens whose loyalty to the United States is indisputable. We declared a two-dollar membership fee, and in short order, tallied up 275 members, bought a mimeograph machine with the dues, and began distributing daily bulletins to keep people informed. That same week, a new ally appeared: James Omura, editor of the Rocky Mountain Shimpo in Denver, gave us a column in his paper. Our articles will appear regularly there.

  We will resist this draft!

  While I was writing this, Mom was scrubbing the apartment from top to bottom for the second time. Pop and I had to take the furniture out, wash the curtains, straighten up the rocks around the flower garden, and rake the dirt in front of the barrack. Why? Because Kenny telegrammed and said he was coming for a visit. The thought of meeting my brother for the first time has been almost more than I could ingest. I struggled with the thought—going over and over in my mind what he would think of me, a nearsighted Ph.D. candidate going soft in the head and soft in the body from years behind barbed wire. What if, after all this, we found we couldn’t get along? But I don’t think either of us would let this happen. Too much time had already been wasted and who was to know whether Kenny would survive his next missions? Nothing could have deterred me from liking him. No, the word like isn’t strong enough—I need him probably far more than he needs me.

  Later. Ben came around just as I was going to dinner. He looked stony-faced, then he blurted it out.

  “The guys think we ought to boycott Kenny’s talks. He’s talked to the papers and publicly denounced the Fair Play Committee. If we boycotted, could we count on you too?

  I looked at him incredulously. At that moment I didn’t give a damn about politics. “How can I boycott my own brother?” I said.

  “In the Civil War, there were cases of brothers fighting against brothers …,” Ben said.

  “I’ve never even met him …,” I said.

  “That might make it easier.”

  Then I exploded. “You can say that, Ben,” I began. “You have a big family. You have a wonderful father, and brothers and sisters … what’s another brother to you? How could you understand what it’s like to be alone all your life … you can’t know … try to think what it’s like. It’s damned lonely. I’m not going to go against Kenny and I’m not going to change my mind about Fair Play either.…”