Heart Mountain

by Ehrlich, Gretel;

  I stormed off and ate alone. The next thing I heard was that the committee decided not to stir up any dust, and I was glad. “Maybe we’ll learn something from each other,” I told Ben later that night, and he apologized.

  The Camp Director has quite a celebration planned for Kenny’s visit. I wonder if I’ll have any time with him at all. There’s a welcoming reception and banquet, various meetings, a dance, and on Thursday, he’ll give his talk in the high school auditorium.

  Monday. When Kenny came to the door of the apartment, Mom just put her hand over her mouth and stood there, struck dumb. He was smaller than I thought he’d be—small and lean—but he carried himself like a soldier. Mom went to him and felt the medals on his chest like a blind woman, while Pop bowed. Kenny had to wait until Pop’s head bobbed up so he could shake his hand. Then Kenny turned to me.

  “Hello, Kai,” he said and I laughed with embarrassment.

  “You know who I am?” I asked, after the fact.

  “I know—”

  Then I tripped on something and fell against him. He clapped me on the back as if I had choked and we laughed. He’s small and tensed like a bobcat ready to spring. When I looked up, I saw Pop wiping away tears.

  Before I knew what had happened all of us had our arms around each other, our heads together in a circle—crying like babies and passing Mom’s Kleenex box around. A family. For the first time. I hadn’t known it would feel that good.

  Mom made Kenny sit down in an overstuffed chair she had borrowed from a friend in another block. Pop and some other men had carried it on their shoulders to the apartment. Then Mom had stayed up all night reupholstering it, but as soon as Ken sat down, I heard something rip. It didn’t matter—all those preparations seemed silly compared to just having him there.

  Friends from all over the Camp had brought food to have around while Kenny visited. Other soldiers had visited the Camp and each time, it was an occasion for people to show their appreciation of what any soldier had to endure. But Kenny was even more special—the first Nisei to break the color line and join the rank of fliers. He had been all over the United States giving speeches and his picture had been in magazines.

  Mom laid out food on a white tablecloth on two tables pushed together. We wouldn’t have to go to the mess hall for a week! And neighbors—mostly Issei—filed by, bowing at the door, and moving quickly on.

  I couldn’t stop staring at him. He was in army uniform. His boots were shiny enough to see your face. His cap, pulled down on his forehead, pushed the skin against the bridge of his nose and his eyes moved quickly from Mom and Pop to me. “I can’t believe it,” I said. And he said, “Believe what?” “That you exist—that you’re alive.” Then Mom told me to stop talking that way; it was bad luck she said, though I couldn’t figure out why.

  When Kenny stood, I could tell he was a soldier just by the way he held himself; I kept thinking he was going to salute.

  He’s about five foot nine and couldn’t weigh over a hundred and fifty. He wears a silver ring he bought in Egypt—it cost all of forty cents, he told me—and on it are engraved three pyramids. “It’s my good luck charm,” he said when he saw me examining it. He’s already won two Distinguished Flying Crosses. Mom and Pop wait on him as if he were royalty. He suffered frostbite on his face during one of his missions and only one side of his face moves when he smiles. Finally he took off his cap and rubbed his face. “I’m so tired,” he confessed. “Could I sleep for a little while?”

  Mom’s face went blank. This wasn’t what she had expected.

  “How many missions have you flown now?” I asked and he shrugged at first, then he said, “Around thirty-seven.” I wanted to pull my chair up close and start asking questions, but I could see he needed sleep.

  He lay down and Mom covered him with two extra blankets. We watched him sleep. I didn’t want to let him out of my sight—ever. In a way it was like watching a stranger, but I like to think I saw myself in him too—whatever traits we shared. We stayed like that—around his bed—all afternoon.

  Later, I lay on my cot. I must have fallen asleep because a terrible scream woke me. I didn’t know where it was coming from, but I yelled out, “What’s wrong?” Then I saw Kenny lying face down on his bed, shaking. His hands were over his face and his body twisted horribly. When he screamed again, I grabbed his arms. “Kenny, it’s all right; you’re here with me.” This time he didn’t know who I was. Mom came over with a lantern and said his name and his face relaxed. “Oh no … I’m sorry—” he said. I held him and kept saying his name. Finally he looked at me. “Hello, Brother. I guess I was having one of those nightmares.…” Then he lay back again and I gave him one of my cigarettes and we smoked for a while without speaking, and when he turned to put his out, he said, “I’m glad you’re here with me.”

  The next morning Kenny washed his face with a hot towel Mom had brought. She pushed his ear forward and looked: “Soooo … desu … still there.” “What’s still there?” I asked and felt behind my own ear for something. “No … no. You don’t have them,” she said. “Have what?” Pop glared at me. He thought I talked too much. Exasperated, he said, “Lucky holes behind ear, that’s what.” Kenny wiped his face. “Can I have a look?” He stood patiently, like a horse being inspected. There was a tiny pinprick of a hole behind each ear. “What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked my parents. They looked at each other and smiled. “Good luck,” my mother said. “He has it.” Kenny shrugged, embarrassed.

  After breakfast Mom and Pop picked up the mail and went to the Camp store run by a man who had lived not far from them in Richmond. When they had gone, Kenny lay down again, propping his head on his hand. I pulled up a chair but was speechless.

  Sensing my difficulty, Kenny asked what was on my mind.

  “How long have you known about me?” I asked finally.

  Kenny lay on his back, turning a Zippo lighter over and over in his hand. “Since I was about fourteen,” he said.

  “But I only just found out.…”

  Kenny looked over at me. “I know. I made Mom and Pop tell you … in case something happened to me on a mission. See, I made out this will so that all my stuff will be sent to you.”

  I wanted to stand up and move around the room but I sat, frozen. “Who raised you?” I asked.

  “A foster family—like you. Mom was afraid Pop might hurt us—not hit us or anything, but by acting, you know, crazy—so I went inland, and it was different for me when the war came. I wasn’t evacuated. Anyway, they had a real nice little ranch in the foothills. Gold country like where Bret Harte used to write about. I was in the 4-H, I did all that ranch-kid stuff—showed pigs and steers and got laid the first time in a great big haystack.” Kenny paused to look over at me. “What about you?”

  “I ended up in an orphanage,” I said. “It was really okay. I learned to fight—like a little Filipino.” Kenny laughed because Japanese and Filipinos never got along.

  Then he sat up and put his feet on the floor. “Do you think Pop is any better?”

  “No.”

  “Poor Mom.”

  “She’s got a hell of a lot of patience.”

  “I didn’t get any of that.”

  “Neither did I.”

  “I noticed.”

  The door swung open. “Very special surprise for you boys,” Mom said, putting a package down on the unsteady table in the middle of the room. She opened it. Ice cream.

  “Read it,” she said to us.

  “Rainbow sherbet,” we sang out in unison as if we had always done these things together.

  “Mom, can you say that yet?” Kenny asked, smiling.

  Mom took a deep breath as if to speak, then collapsed in giggles, shaking her head.

  “We eat, not talk. Okay?” she said.

  Kenny and I shared a spoon.

  Later, I told him about Li and he told me about his girlfriend Betty, who stopped writing him when she found out he had signed up for more missions, and about
his friends in the Air Corps, and all the trouble he’d had getting in. “Even after they let me into the army, I was questioned all the time in the barracks about what nationality I was, or if I was Chinese, or if I knew how to write English … and always, we were called Japs. Then I was on KP duty for twenty-one days and no one in the barracks talked to me until finally this big guy from Chicago just came up to me and said, ‘Hey, want to go to the movies with me tonight?’ and I almost cried with relief.” Once the ice was broken, things changed for him, he said, and he was assigned to a squadron and a crew and after that he never had to worry about not being accepted again.

  Talking … talking … with my own brother. I still can’t believe it. Even Mom and Pop became quite animated during Kenny’s visit and the four of us were able to have some experience of what a family is like.

  In the meantime, he had obligations to fulfill. He talked to the kids at the grammar school and high school, as well as the Boy Scouts, the USO club, and a parent’s group. I had work to do. We were putting out an especially big issue at the Sentinel to cover his visit, and he told one of the groups that he had never seen as many Japanese-Americans in one place, and was disappointed in the attitude of some of the Nisei toward the draft.

  What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.

  Thursday, Kenny put on a clean uniform, which Mom had brushed off and hung up, and he combed something through his hair to make it stay in place. An MP came for him in a jeep and asked whether we wanted to ride with him, but Mom and Pop wouldn’t get in. So Kenny got out and we all walked to the other end of the Camp and people came out of their barracks all the way along and brought him little gifts or flowers and crowded around to ask for his autograph. Near the last row of barracks someone threw a tomato at me. It hit the back of my leg. Kenny stopped. “Was that for me or you?” he asked. “Look, Kenny … there’s a lot of things going on here you don’t know about yet. I’ll explain later,” I said. He gave me a funny look. “Should you tell me now?” he asked. “No,” I said, “not now,” and walked on.

  It must have looked odd—a war hero and a troublemaker walking side by side. In my mind, however, there was no contradiction. I wasn’t a conscientious objector; I was fighting on principle for our rights and hoped that if Kenny had been in my shoes or I in his, we would have done the same things.

  The front row of the hall had been roped off—like at a theater—for Mom and Pop and me. Almost two thousand people turned up for the talk. I was glad they hadn’t boycotted him and even felt proud. Kenny told what it was like to be a turret gunner—about the fear and the loneliness and the cold, and how great the Air Corps is; then he reminded the audience that he was the first and only Nisei allowed in that branch of the armed services and how this must change. Typically, the audience took these messages in silence. No hoots and hurrays—that’s why the younger generation, the Nisei, have to be the troublemakers.… When he got off the train in Denver and tried to hail a cab, he told how another man came from behind and hopped in. The driver leaned out and asked where he was going and when Kenny told him, he said it was close to where the other guy was going and to hop in. But the passenger slammed the door closed and said, “I don’t want to ride with any lousy Jap” and the cab drove off, leaving him on the curb. Then he recalled the day he had to give a talk in San Francisco at the Commonwealth Club to some wealthy Caucasian businessmen. The headline in the Chronicle read: JAP TO ADDRESS SF CLUB. He began his speech: “I learned more about democracy than you’ll ever find in all the books. Because I saw it in action. When you live with men under combat conditions for fifteen months, you begin to understand what brotherhood, equality, tolerance, and unselfishness really mean. They’re no longer just words.…” That’s how he began, and afterward those men came up to him and shook his hand and called him “Sir.”

  Like those businessmen, I used to read war stories in the papers—Ernie Pyle’s reports and the hard news. But I had never heard them firsthand, especially from a brother.

  Turret gunners could go home after twenty-five missions—if they survived—but Kenny signed up for more. He described the raid over the Polesti oil fields, watching the planes next to him burn, then waiting all night for the others to come back. Fifty-four Liberator bombers were lost on that raid.

  But there was more to his message than bombing missions. He said: “I find prejudice directed against me and neither my uniform nor my medals have been able to stop it. I don’t know for sure if it’s safe for me to walk the streets in some parts of my own country. This war will not be over until my fight against intolerance is won.”

  Afterward, a huge mob formed around him. One girl had him sign his name on her arm and swore she wouldn’t wash until she got out of Heart Mountain. He was kind to everybody, but I could see he was still very tired so I helped him get away and we took a devious route back to the barrack. I was shaken—not by the mobs but by his stories. What kind of lard-assed coward was I, pontificating from this Camp while Kenny flew through sheets of gunfire and watched his friends drop out of the sky?

  “Are you going to tell me about that tomato?” he asked when we were back in the room.

  “I’m a draft resister,” I said, very coolly, and he asked me to explain. I told him about Will and the Heart Mountain Congress, and how, after they segregated the loyals from the disloyals, the Fair Play Committee was formed. I talked as eloquently as I could about constitutional rights, how refusing to go for our physicals was a way of fighting for democracy, against American fascism.

  “I believe in fighting to prove our loyalty,” he said. “It becomes unquestionable then. That’s why I keep signing up for more missions. I’m going to ram it down their throats,” he said, slamming his fist into his other hand.

  “That’s what we’re doing too—that’s why we’re resisting—”

  “I can’t go along with that. The only way to prove our loyalty is to put our lives on the line.”

  “What are you?” I yelled. “A JACLer?” I hadn’t realized how angry I’d become.

  He scowled at me. “I’m a fighter. I’m a soldier. I’m an American citizen. I don’t need anyone else to tell me how I feel. I’ve lived it. I’ve sweated it out in the tail of a plane.”

  I looked at him. “Are you really my brother?” I asked.

  He said yes.

  “Then don’t go against me.”

  “I’m doing what I know is right.”

  “So am I,” I said. “We stand for the same thing; don’t you see that?”

  “No. You re disloyal.”

  “I’m not!”

  “That’s what it looks like to me.”

  “But you said yourself that this is a war against intolerance, against racism.…”

  “Yes. But that’s the only thing we agree on.”

  “You’re not making sense.”

  “Look, I’m very tired.”

  “Wait.”

  Kenny started to walk off and I grabbed him. He spun and his hand came toward me. When I ducked, he laughed. His face looked ravaged for a second, then he regained his calm.

  “I’m not going to change my mind,” he said calmly.

  “Will you go against us if this comes to court?”

  He looked at me. “I can’t say.”

  We walked. I felt a terrible repulsion toward him, as if I didn’t want any part of our bodies to touch.

  “You’re not my brother, are you?” I asked.

  He smiled faintly. “I think we are.”

  I ran ahead of him past the end of the barrack into the dark.

  That night I couldn’t sleep. I had pulled Kenny’s bed near mine, and later I wished I hadn’t. Pressing my ear against the wall, I listened for the sound of Mariko’s breathing. Abe-san coughed in his sleep. Light from outside shone on Kenny’s head. I couldn’t believe what had happened.… If I said I felt torn before, I didn’t understand what those words meant. It was more like being clawed to death than being torn neatly like paper. Looking over at
him, I thought of the night before when a nightmare had awakened him and I held him and he was sweating even though it was cold … and how only one night later, I felt deeply betrayed. I lay down and stared at the ceiling. “Don’t let him intimidate you,” Ben had said. This was much worse than fighting with a friend because, if it were true that we were brothers, somewhere the root had divided and bent in opposite directions. Who or what was to blame? Yet, the fact that he’s my brother …

  I turned over. Just before daylight, sleep came.

  Saturday. I had to swallow my pride when the Sentinel came out. The headlines read: “NAKAMURA ‘TAKES’ HEART MOUNTAIN. COMMUNITY CELEBRATION FEATURES VISIT OF HERO. Sgt. Kenny Nakamura, who blazed his name in the eternal halls of fame from the turret position of a Liberator bomber over Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, this week literally captured the Heart Mountain residents. Speaking informally before many groups, Sergeant Nakamura impressed his listeners with his modesty and sincerity …,” etc.

  Monday. Kenny’s gone. Maybe it’s too hard to compare waging a war against intolerance from a tar paper barrack to waging one from the tail of a plane. Mom and Pop have been hurt badly by what happened between Kenny and me. Pop has gone comatose again. Abe-san came over and massaged his feet and talked to him but it did no good this time. He has shut us out. Later, went to Abe-san’s to talk. I tried to take the larger view of things, to understand what wars are about, then go backward and understand what divided Kenny and me so deeply. I kept thinking of the things Abe-san has taught me: how to follow my breathing, how to empty my mind.

  Mom came over, removed her shoes at the door, and sat down with us. She had never behaved so informally before. Abe-san poured her some tea. He was so gentle with her.…

  They call the two fronts “theaters.” What an appropriate usage. I couldn’t help compare the theater of war with the theater of … what should I call it … the spirit? That which Abe-san has been teaching me. People are always talking about ART versus LIFE. That was Will’s big stumbling block. I see them as the same. What passes for “life” these days—i.e., the frontline, is perhaps more “theater” than Abe-san’s Noh. I doubt that the army teaches much about the ideals of the warrior. They teach you to kill and brainwash you into hating the enemy (even though, in the next war, that “enemy” will probably be the ally), and the good things that come out of that situation—what Kenny talked about: democracy in action, selflessness, color-blindness, democracy without discrimination—seem to arise despite the drill sergeant’s teachings, and from this we know the goodness of human beings. But I can’t help thinking of that “theater” as compared to the theater of yugen—grace, natural elegance, tenderness, loneliness, radiance; of hana, that which is rare, haunting, flowering; or ran-i: effortless effort, emancipation, harmony.