Mrs. Nakamura trotted by her husband’s side. Once the pallet tipped precariously and she held her hand to her mouth and screamed. He made no attempt to save himself but at the last moment, the carriers righted the “chair” and proceeded toward the waiting train.
Kai thought of Kenny. Home from more than fifty missions, he had survived, then volunteered to go to Japan and help liberate American prisoners.
Kai was glad Kenny couldn’t see this farce with his father. Perhaps he already knows and that’s why he makes himself scarce, unafraid to die, he thought. Now he, Kai, would take the same steps. To be inducted into the army after the fighting was finished was not the same. He felt foolish for a moment, then relieved to have a reason to leave his parents, even though it would not be to resume his old life of study and lovemaking on Grant Avenue. The old life was gone. Like Li’s failure to respond to his letters, the past no longer called for his return.
Kai pulled his father up the stairs of the railroad car under the arms, then carried him to an empty seat. He bent down to ask his father if he was all right. Though it was only nine in the morning, the sun was very hot and beads of sweat dropped from his forehead onto the scuffed floor of the train. Mr. Nakamura sat rigid. His glasses were half off and Kai straightened them, then dusted off his father’s jacket. Someone bumped Kai from behind, going by with luggage, and he fell over his father’s knees. Righting himself, he felt exasperated.
“Stop being a child. Stop acting this way, you stupid old man,” Kai burst out at his father, then turned away, thinking only of Abe-san.
Someone tapped Kai on the shoulder and he jumped.
“Mariko, what are you doing here? I thought you had gone …,” he said.
“He’s dead,” Mariko said, then collapsed in Kai’s arms.
“I know,” he said. “You should have told me that night.…”
Mariko looked up and gave him a crushed, astonished look.
Kai held her tightly. People pushed by and Kai pulled her into the seat across from his father. Two teenage girls took the seat behind them and began whispering and laughing loudly. A baby screamed and hit its mother’s chest with its fists, and two Issei couples fanned themselves, staring at the woman draped across Kai. When Mrs. Nakamura returned from checking on the baggage, she sat down next to her comatose husband and glanced furtively at Kai and Mariko, then turned her head away from what she could not understand. Mariko’s hair had fallen from the knot at the top of her head and Kai brushed it gently from her face.
“Oh my darling,” he said. “My darling …,” and held her again.
The train lurched once, then a great burst of steam came from the engine. Outside he could hear someone yelling to wait.
At first he thought it was McKay’s voice, then he saw it was one of the hakujin who had worked at the Camp, holding up a teddy bear left behind by a child. Kai felt relieved before he knew why. He looked at Mariko.
“Are you coming … with me?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“What about your things? Where’s your luggage and car?”
“I don’t care,” she said.
“I know, but—”
They looked at each other. Under the porcelain lids and eyes, the extravagant cheekbones, her full lips were chapped and half-opened. It wasn’t a smile nor was it pouting and self-pity, but a wild vulnerability showing, as if daring life to give her whatever it had in store and more. The train lurched again, then started to move.
“But this train is going to San Francisco,” Kai said.
“I know. Do you mind?” she asked.
“No.”
“Abe-san gone. I can’t believe it,” Kai said to himself. He thought of the first time he had seen the old man. It was in a train and he was sitting a few seats ahead. His gray hair was tied back neatly and tucked into his kimono and the great expanse of his forehead shone and wrinkled when he smiled, like an ocean.
The train stopped and bursts of steam rolled across the train window.
“Are you all right?” Kai asked Mariko.
She nodded yes, but fidgeted in the seat. Kai closed his eyes too. His forehead felt hot and his glasses clouded up as if he were about to cry.
He mumbled something.
“What?” Mariko said sleepily.
“Nothing—”
Kai covered his eyes with one hand. Was the train moving or was the Camp moving like history itself, on a great scroll, turning in and out of time? Kai looked out the window and saw the sentry gate go by and the rows of barracks, the tall smokestack of the hospital, the mess halls, the latrines, the store and office buildings, the baseball diamond, the hill where the boys were arrested for sledding, the rock gardens, and more than that, he thought he could see the days go by, about a thousand of them, a thousand days filled with whatever one fills waiting with, days like hollow trees and the edges of days breaking off into the next morning and the odor boredom brings of something burning, something dead.
Now this, he thought. Has history brought me this woman? She leaned against him. He did not know why she was there or how long she would stay. He had seen the narrative scrolls of the Heian period, the emaki—multiple lives painted in what she called “flat depth,” nothing like Western perspective. How moving that flatness was, because it portrayed no past or future and therefore no history, only what was in the present, what was multiple, what was possible to bring before his eyes. Now she was here, with him, she who had eluded everyone, astonished everyone with the power and seamless beauty of her work.…
“Mariko …,” he whispered. She lit a cigarette and pulled her hair to the top of her head, then let it drop loosely. He wondered if he had lost all the strength in his arms: four years away from swimming. At times all he could think of was water breaking over his shoulders and hands like knives cutting a way through oncoming waves. Abe-san dead. He took a deep breath and looked at Mariko. Her eyelashes were wet but there were no tears. The feel of her body had surprised him. How many times had he made love to her in his mind over the years; and then, the other night, he almost … She smiled at him, but there was a distant look in her eyes. Kai leaned back and propped his feet up. The train stopped, then lurched backward. Mariko pulled her wild, roped hair back into a knot again, but already a few strands had come loose.
“What about McKay?” Kai asked at last.
Mariko looked surprised. “We had to stop,” she said solemnly.
“Just like that?”
“No. We love each other as much as two people can love each other and we gave each other up.”
Kai stared out the window. He could not help wonder if there was anything for him in this. He felt his shoulder touch Mariko’s again. It sent electric shocks through his body. Perhaps the army wouldn’t be so bad, he rationalized. He’d get an intelligence job, maybe learn Japanese. The irony alone delighted him. He looked at Mariko. Her eyes were closed but she was not sleeping. He wondered where she would be while he was in the service and if she would wait for him. The whistle sounded and the train lurched forward again. He had forgotten they weren’t moving. That’s the effect Camp has had on us—you don’t know whether you’re going backward or forward and you don’t give a damn, he thought.
As the train picked up speed, Kai felt his heart race. The twin realizations of Abe-san’s death and Mariko’s intimate presence hit him like shock waves. He kept looking at her.
“Mariko …,” he said breathlessly. He took a strand of her black hair between his fingers and delivered it to the top of her head. “I couldn’t tell you before … I was inducted into the army.”
She pulled away and looked at him gravely. “No …,” she began. “No you weren’t, were you?” she asked incredulously.
Kai nodded. He felt like a child.
“Oh, you poor boy … you poor, stupid boy.”
He looked out the train window and watched the last of the Camp slide by. It seemed as though they had been on the train for many hours, yet they had moved only half a mile.
<
br /> “I’m sorry,” he said.
In the distance a single cloud wrapped itself around Heart Mountain like a tourniquet. When it unwrapped itself, he saw the place where a piece of the mountain had slid. He couldn’t believe his eyes. “Look,” he said to Mariko. He had never felt her against him before this day and now he wanted to stand up in the middle of the aisle of the moving train and hold her tightly until her eyes glittered the way they did the night she stepped down from McKay’s truck around the corner from the Mayflower Café in the rain.
“It’s like in the legend—when the medicine man died.…”
She didn’t know what he was talking about.
The train rocked slowly on the tracks and the Camp was gone. Now, the landscape was only sagebrush. When the whistle blew, Kai’s mother stood suddenly and lifted the window. She leaned into the dry rushing air and looked back toward the place that had been her home for four years. Then, half in and half out of the train, she bowed deeply to what had already passed by.
McKay had spent the day in a tree. It was an Englemann spruce, an easy tree to climb. Twenty feet off the ground he sat on a limb and rested his back against the trunk. He could see where some of the branches had been torn off in the blizzard, torn and thrown down on the ground. He wondered if a tree has the same sense of inviolability as a human has—and despite that, loses its limbs anyway. He thought of soldiers coming home.
The branches above him rattled. A locust held itself vertically to the trunk. McKay climbed higher. The view is always changing, he thought. Sap from the tree made two of his fingers stick together. He hated it when people came to the mountain “to see the view” because, as Mariko always said, “Everything is a view of something.” The limbs on the tree spiraled up and down the trunk as if the trunk had been spinning when they grew there.
He stretched out. “Out on a limb,” he thought smiling, the way Mariko stretched out in his mind, bright and soft and sharp as the needles that brushed his face and powdered him with yellow pollen.
When the wind came again he thought the tree was a finger that stirred life and death and especially death into the world. The wind tore at the branches and the finger stirred harder, digging into the ground, burying the war dead or else sculling them on homeward currents of air. There was movement every place he could imagine: prisoners in Germany going home to Poland, America, France, Holland; prisoners in America going home to Germany; prisoners in the Philippines, Manchuria, and Japan going home to England, Australia, and America.…
One twitch of the finger causes such a stir.… He didn’t want to move. Then he did. He climbed higher and farther out on a limb. “Out here,” he thought, “beyond victory and conquest, beyond despair, beyond possessiveness.…”
The branch sank and lifted. He thought of the day he had been bucked off in the water, how the rapture worked through his body.
When he looked down from the tree, what was left of the green pastures leeched into a white sky. “Out there is something beyond happiness,” he said aloud, though he could not think of what that might be.
Two miles down the line the train stopped to pick up freight and while Kai was getting beer, Mariko opened the door of the passenger car and jumped to the ground. She walked north toward Luster. Some people stared at her; some did not. What difference did it make? At the reservoir, ten Canadian geese rose up, honking and circling, then landed again. It felt good to walk. A thin mist obscured the top of Heart Mountain so that it appeared to rise and then disintegrate. “Grandpère, I can’t leave you yet …,” she said under her breath, though she did not know why she was going back, if it was to get away from Kai, or …
She saw a man on the street corner holding a willow. When she passed, he waved the branch at her and she waved back and he smiled. A huge sign across the grocery store window proclaimed: PEACE * VICTORY. She passed the hardware store and lumberyard and funeral parlor where the walls were pink, and across the street, the Cactus Bar and Rose’s yellow boardinghouse, whose windowpanes merely reflected the sky.
A truck stopped in the middle of the street. When she turned, she saw McKay. He opened the passenger door. For a moment she did not move. Is this why I came back? she wondered. He leaned toward her and extended his hand. Finally, she let herself be lifted into the cab.
The truck moved down the street. She looked out the window at the sidewalk, then at McKay.
“I didn’t come back to stay,” she said at last.
“I know,” he lied.
She leaned her head back against the seat and let her legs splay out in front of her.
“I was on the train. I was going to San Francisco with Kai …,” she said, as he braced his hands against the steering wheel.
“He was going to show me the sights.…”
McKay nodded silently.
The truck rolled past a cornfield, then he turned up a hill and drove into a stack yard. The hay had already cured in the sun and the stack, neatly and tightly arranged, looked like a Mayan temple. McKay pulled to a stop. The wall of hay was golden with sun. He turned to her slowly.
“My brothers are coming home,” McKay said.
“When?”
“Champ’s coming in two weeks.”
“That’ll be wonderful.…”
“No it won’t. Has the train left yet?”
“Yes. I jumped off down the tracks a few miles.”
McKay leaned back against his door. “Look … you can stay at the ranch until you’re ready to go.…”
Part of her long hair fell across her face. She lifted it. “Then it would start all over again.”
“It hasn’t ended.…”
“But it’s just easier if we don’t see each other.…”
“Easier?” McKay said bitterly.
She put her hand on his thigh but didn’t look at him.
McKay leaned his blond head against her shoulder. “Do you want to go somewhere?” he asked. “We could use Pinkey’s room. I have the key.”
She closed her eyes, then shook her head.
McKay started the engine and backed away from the towering haystack.
“Where are you going?” she asked.
“Wherever you want—”
At the highway he stopped, resting both arms on the steering wheel.
“I guess I’ll get my car now,” she said at last.
McKay turned north onto the pavement.
Ahead, Heart Mountain had reappeared. The pine trees growing up its east slope looked like shorn hair and the huge outcrop of limestone facing north was stained with red threads.
“Is it over, then, or should I visit you when you get settled?” McKay asked.
She turned to him. “I want you to visit.”
“What about Will?”
“We’re getting our marriage annulled.”
The truck slowed at the turnoff to the ranch. Mariko’s car, mud-splattered, was parked on the gravel road.
“The battleship,” she said, looking at it.
“You can’t drive to Paris, can you?”
She laughed. “Maybe I’ll drive it off a cliff.…”
They got out and McKay opened the door of her car. The inside smelled musty. Mariko poked her head halfway in and drew back.
“Now I don’t want to go …,” she said.
“You don’t have to.…”
He kissed her. Then they walked up a hill behind the car, away from the highway, and down the other side. There were no trees, no privacy, so they lay down by a low juniper. The ground was littered with blue berries and soft twigs—unlit kindling, McKay thought.
Passion is not always a fire. He unbuttoned her sweater and she shivered. It was September 1945 and the earth had already grown cold. He told her he loved her and that he understood he must let her go and that lying with her now was not part of trying to make her stay. She nodded, then pulled his shirt apart and kissed his chest. He looked at the sky and remembered Bobby’s dream the night before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima—ho
w the rain was black and streaked the sky with needles; how it fell into a terrible fire. Now, the sun set below the horizon and the sky looked like a blue flame. There is an end to war, he thought, but there is no end to time.
48
“Where is she?”
Those were the first words Champ uttered when he stepped in the kitchen. Bobby clucked his teeth once, then pulled a sheet cake down from the cupboard, ice cream from the freezer, plates and forks and laid them out on the kitchen table, newly endowed with an extra leaf so that it almost stretched to the hall door.
At the sink, McKay cupped his hands under the cold water and washed his face. Then he turned to his brother.
“She’s gone,” McKay said flatly.
Champ pulled out a chair. His cane dropped noisily to the floor.
“Thought about getting the damned thing cut off and wearing a peg leg, but those sorry butchers they call doctors wouldn’t do it,” he said, slicing the cake.
“When you’re finished, I have something to show you,” McKay said.
Champ squinted at his brother. “Looks like it’s been a pretty good year,” he said with a full mouth. “Grass looks good.”
“Yep.” McKay sat at the table but didn’t eat.
“Good cake, Bobby … better than ever before,” Champ said.
McKay picked the cane up from the floor and handed it to Champ.
“Okay … I’m coming …,” Champ said, grinning.
The blue roan colt was saddled and Champ’s bridle with its silver Garcia bit and reins with rawhide knots hung from the saddle horn. When McKay stepped to the middle of the corral, he snapped his fingers once and the colt laid his ears back and walked to him. McKay bridled the horse, then handed Champ the reins.
“He’s yours, Champ. Welcome home.”
Champ’s cane sank in the soft dirt. He limped toward the colt, looked at his head and ears, the deep chest and long neck, then back at McKay.
“Where’d you get him?”
“He’s out of Lena.… I raised him, started him when he was two. God, he was a scrappy little bugger at first.”
Champ appraised the horse once again. “Who’d you breed Lena to?”
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