The question hangs in the air. Under normal circumstances it would be an expected question, the kind of question a woman might ask a man she hopes to keep around—if Bonner could flatter himself to assume that’s what Rosalind wants now: to prolong their time together. But Bonner also senses an unreadable element in the question’s tone and delivery. Once again she seems less interested in Bonner himself and more interested in his investigation and the politics that orbit him.
“It depends,” he says, repeating his earlier response to the same question, “on how much evidence I can turn up for my report.” He pauses. “Someone has to account for the deaths of these two men,” he says, but as soon as the words leave his mouth, his gut tells him he wants this to be true, but it isn’t.
Rosalind stiffens. She sits up with a restless air, holding the covers to her bare chest, looking around for her discarded nightgown. Bonner rolls over to his side and props his head up with one hand, frowning as he watches her. Her sudden agitation has him equally unsettled. He isn’t entirely sure of what he wants—whether he wants her to stay or to go—but he doesn’t like watching her move away from their warm huddle in the bed or watching her slip the thin white nightgown back over her head.
“I don’t see why,” she replies to his assertion that someone had to account for the deaths of the Yamadas, her voice hard—angry, almost. “American boys are dying all over the Pacific; why should we care about a couple of Japs who die here in a plane crash?”
Bonner studies Rosalind’s face, taken aback by her sudden callousness. She returns his stare but does not soften. Her features are hard, her expression chilly. Bonner knows lots of folks feel that way nowadays. He is surprised, however; he didn’t suspect his hostess belonged to their number.
Rosalind, now in her nightgown, stands beside the bed, holding Bonner’s gaze as though deciding how much to tell him.
“If you ask me,” she says, “I’m glad they’re dead. Two less Japs to worry about.”
Her tone suggests she is finished with the conversation. With the ghost of her ugly remark still hanging in the air, she takes one more lingering look at his face—almost as if trying to memorize his features—then turns and leaves.
Agent Bonner stares at the floating white shape of her nightgown as she retreats through the doorway and down the hall. He doesn’t bother to get up and close the door; he knows she will remain in her own bedroom, remote and distant, for the rest of the night. Whatever the interlude was to her, she is done with it—and him—for the time being.
After a minute, he lies back and stares at the ceiling, thinking, still disturbed by her hateful attitude toward the Japanese. She is hardly alone; hers is a popular viewpoint. Two less Japs to worry about. Even Reed probably would agree, even if he might phrase it more diplomatically. Bonner knows Reed has a knack for wrapping such sentiments up in the more respectable garb of patriotism.
It used to do the trick for Bonner—Reed’s patriotic version of events, that is. But somewhere along the line, the rhetoric crumbled for Bonner. If Bonner was pressed to name a particular point that this happened, he would pick the day Jeanne Minami accosted him near the main entrance of the Manzanar Relocation Center.
In the years leading up to Pearl Harbor, Bonner and Reed and a handful of others led the F.B.I.’s efforts to monitor suspected Japanese spies. When it was discovered that a Japanese spy living in plain sight in Hawaii had sent critical messages through the consulate that led to the surprise attack, their work took on new importance and grew much more demanding. Suddenly, Bonner found himself knocking on countless Japanese-American doors, seizing suspicious contraband, and interviewing countless heads of household.
It was how he crossed paths with the Minami family. Fujio Minami owned a small fleet of fishing boats that he kept in the San Pedro Harbor, and lived with his family in the Japanese community on Terminal Island. When Executive Order 9066 was passed in February 1942, the F.B.I. moved quickly to clear out this community, taking all first-generation Japanese into custody for questioning. Families of these men and other nisei were interned, and most of them were eventually brought to Manzanar.
Fujio Minami presented a problem for the F.B.I.—his boats and fishing shack were outfitted with an extraordinary amount of high-powered shortwave radio equipment. He had also developed a pastime of reading about Japan’s history of shoguns. He was old and his English was awful; he’d lived his whole life only speaking to other Japanese in his tight-knit community. When they asked him whom he wanted to win the war, he said, “Japan.” Bonner wasn’t entirely sure that the old man meant to say he wanted Japan to win. It seemed just as likely that Fujio thought the F.B.I. was asking him to make a prediction based on his knowledge of Japan’s military history, or perhaps was even reporting the winner of wars he’d learned about in school as a boy, as he sometimes added the names of various samurai clans, names that were lost on his interrogators. Either way, he continued to deliver the wrong answer, time and time again. The F.B.I. promptly sent him off to a detention center in North Dakota to be kept under more rigorous watch.
Despite Fujio’s poor English-speaking skills and lack of cultural assimilation, he had three very Americanized adult children: Fred, Jeanne, and Bill Minami. They had been born in America and been granted the citizenship that Fujio had all his life been denied. The oldest, Bill, was outraged to think his father was going to be sent to North Dakota and treated as a war criminal. When they interviewed Fred, asking him to explain away the abundance of radio equipment his father owned—“He’s a fisherman who can’t afford to lose a boat” was all Fred would explain, shaking his head as though disgusted by their inability to grasp the obvious—he made it clear he did not intend to cooperate, and planned to start trouble.
“We’ll protest,” Fred threatened. “This is unconstitutional. You can put us in the camps, but we’ll protest there, too. We have the right to free speech. You can’t just shut us up.”
Fred was unusual. Almost all of the Japanese the F.B.I. interviewed simply answered their questions and sat quietly, hoping for the whole ordeal to be over. Bonner found he had a certain measure of respect for Fred, for his demonstration of incensed behavior that was—ironically enough—most American of all. Bonner’s peers did not see it the same way. Fred was in danger of being added to the growing list of enemies of the state, and shipped off to North Dakota himself.
Bonner took him aside and attempted to befriend the young man, who was only a year or two younger than Bonner himself. Bonner was sympathetic. He explained to Fred how difficult the F.B.I.’s job had become. He told Fred about Tadashi Morimura, the spy in Hawaii, how “normal” he seemed, and how Japanese-Hawaiians had trusted him. They talked about the lives lost in Pearl Harbor, and Fred seemed every bit as grieved over the loss of American life as Bonner. By the end of one long chat in particular, Bonner had even managed to convince Fred to join the Army.
“I’m sure if you enlist, they’ll ease off your father,” Bonner said. “They’re likely to send him home from North Dakota.”
Never mind that “home” was now a camp in the desert surrounded by barbed wire; Fred was eager to see his father back with the rest of his family, healthy and unharmed.
“Are you sure?” Fred asked.
“I don’t see why not,” Bonner replied. After he said it, he wasn’t so sure, but Fred looked gratified, and Bonner was certain Fred Minami would not talk himself into worse trouble with the F.B.I.
Fred signed up, and the last Bonner heard, Fred had been dispatched to Italy. He didn’t give the matter much more thought—until F.B.I. business brought him out to Manzanar one particularly fateful day. That day, as Bonner drove into the camp and got out of his car, a small ceremony was taking place near the main entrance. When he heard a lone bugler playing taps, he understood it was a ceremony to honor a fallen soldier.
He stood a short distance away to watch, curious to see how thi
s long-standing American ritual would be conducted in one of the camps. Five families were lined up, seemingly at attention, while an Army officer delivered a folded flag into each family’s hands. When the Army officer reached the fifth and final family, Bonner experienced a vague flicker of recognition. An older woman and her two adult children. He realized he was looking at what was left of the Minami family.
Before Bonner could react, he was recognized in return. Jeanne Minami, who had been standing quietly at her mother’s side, looked up and spotted Bonner. All at once, her eyes filled with hatred and she began to run in his direction. Bonner was not at all prepared for the onslaught, the blows she rained down upon him as she screamed at him, “You! You’re the one! You lied to him! He enlisted because of you! You told him our father would be released! Now our father isn’t here and my brother is dead!”
A camp guard peeled her off Bonner, dragging her back to where her startled mother still stood, holding the American flag folded into a tidy triangle. But Jeanne wasn’t done. She freed herself from the guard’s grip, knocked the flag from her mother’s hands, and in one final shocking gesture spat on the flag where it lay in the dirt.
A gasp was heard all around. This was not the kind of behavior accepted by the Japanese community, camp or no camp. The guards at Manzanar asked whether Bonner wanted her sent to another facility—to Tule Lake, perhaps—but he said no. He didn’t say so, but part of him felt Jeanne was right: He’d made Fred a false promise. He’d been almost callous in his casual reassurance, and now Fred’s blood was on Bonner’s hands.
After that incident, Jeanne’s situation did not improve. The other evacuees—many of them still, by some miracle of faith, patriotic to America—remembered the image of her spitting on the flag. The older issei and younger nisei alike shunned her, and Jeanne became an outcast. When she was found trying to organize a protest with a small, unpopular group of rabble-rousers in the camp, the white guards, who had also taken deep offense to her outburst, did not hesitate to report her.
The last Bonner heard of her, she had been transferred from Manzanar to Tule Lake.
Bonner decided he’d had enough of fieldwork and put in a request for desk duty, which he knew he would be granted on account of its undesirability. He was still horrified by what had happened in Pearl Harbor, but he didn’t know what to think anymore about Executive Order 9066. He wanted to sit in an office with only the paper version of Japanese evacuees around him. He felt he couldn’t cause any further harm that way, and he’d still be doing his duty to America, to the F.B.I.—and even to Reed, for that matter, who daily tried to force Bonner to agree that the Minami family was troubled and that for all they knew Old Man Minami might really be a spy after all.
Now, as he drifts off to sleep in his room in Rosalind MacFarlane’s boardinghouse, the images in Bonner’s brain begin to merge: Rosalind’s disgusted face as she said Two less Japs to worry about, and Jeanne’s face as she accused Bonner of deceiving and ultimately killing her brother. There is some quality both faces have in common, Bonner realizes—something that goes beyond simple anger. But as the faces continue to merge together, Bonner can’t quite put his finger on the commonality he is sure exists that ties these two women. He is too tired, he decides, and allows himself to slip into the dark void that is, by contrast, a comfort.
29
Earl Shaw’s Flying Circus
Santa Rosa, California * July 13, 1940
They left Sonoma and moved a little north, camping on the outskirts of Santa Rosa. Despite losing one of their two biplanes, the barnstorming group nonetheless pressed on, determined to salvage the flying circus. Louis and Harry attempted to come up with a new stunt routine using only one plane, hoping that if they made it daring enough, they could attract as much attention as before. But Hutch and Buzz found themselves at a more awkward impasse. While no one mentioned it directly, everyone was acutely aware of the fact that a flying circus with only one biplane only needed one pilot.
Harry immediately proposed a solution for this dilemma: He wanted to attempt a car-to-airplane transfer.
“Not only will we need a steady pilot, but we’ll need a steady driver,” he pointed out.
Buzz volunteered to drive, and the five of them—Buzz, Hutch, Ava, Harry, and Louis—tuned up Earl’s old Model A. They tried the stunt out in a wide, flat field early one morning, before the summer heat thinned the air.
“Drive ’er at an even pace,” Hutch advised Buzz.
“Hah, easier said than done over these rutted fields. Here goes nothin’!”
Hutch took off in Pollux, circled, and came in for a low, slow flyover as Buzz drove along in tandem.
“Now, Eagle! Lower ’er down!”
Up in the air with Hutch, Louis threw down the ladder they’d made out of rope and wood from a hardware store. It unfurled with a clatter and trailed behind the Stearman like a strand of long hair blowing in the wind, the bottom rung five feet or so above the roof of the Model A.
“All right, Crane!” Buzz hollered. “Time to fly!”
Harry climbed up out of the truck’s bed, then onto the roof of the cab. He raised his hands in the air, ready to catch the ladder.
Watching from a distance, Ava held her breath.
“That boy is plumb crazy,” Cleo commented, likewise breathless and riveted.
“He’s just trying to make up for Earl’s loss,” Ava said.
“Hah—maybe, but that’s not the whole of it, and you know it,” Cleo said. “That boy’s a born daredevil if there ever was one. Graceful, and never one drop of fear in him. He’s got a real rare gift.”
Ava was surprised. She had never thought her mother paid Harry much mind, and she was curious to know more about her mother’s opinion. But Cleo had already returned her gaze to the skies.
Just then, a hooting and hollering sounded. Ava looked back and saw that Harry had caught the ladder. Once it was clear that Harry’d gotten a grip on the lower rungs, Hutch pulled up on the stick and the Stearman lifted up, up, up, and away from the ground. For his part, Harry began to climb the ladder with easy, aerobatic gusto.
Ava realized: Her mother was right. Harry was a natural. There was absolutely no fear in him. No fear at all.
* * *
Once they perfected their strategy and execution, their single-plane-stunt barnstorming show wasn’t half-bad. Louis and Harry worked out a few additional stunts to include in their wing-walking routines, often performing simultaneously, one of them hanging off each wing.
But it was true that when it came time to sell rides, the flying circus wasn’t able to take as many people up for scenic tours as they had previously. It simply took too long; during the extra time it took to take the same number of people up as before, many spectators changed their minds, wandered off to eat and socialize, and decided to give it a pass after all.
Earl in particular was frustrated by the futility of the situation. His remedy for the missing revenue was to change the way the circus did business—in particular, their patterns of travel and advertisement. Ava had already felt that Earl was throwing caution to the wind when he began printing handbills to draw more spectators. Now he had more handbills printed than ever before, and ordered them to be flagrantly plastered all over the main streets of every town they visited: COME AND SEE EARL SHAW’S DEATH-DEFYING FLYING CIRCUS STUNT ACT!!! the handbills shouted at passersby. He’d also discovered that the earlier they announced their arrival, the more people would venture out to see the show. Earl often sent Ava, Harry, and Louis on ahead to the next town to paste up handbills a week or so in advance of their performances there.
“Builds the suspense!” Earl insisted. “Gives these poor farming families something exciting to look forward to!”
In addition to all this, they traveled closer and closer to San Francisco than they ever had before, and moved more slowly from town to town. Over the past few years
, the flying circus had always kept brief engagements, moving on quickly and quietly. Now, as July gave way to August and finally September, Earl persuaded them to linger in the small towns that circled the San Francisco Bay, from the east side near Oakland, around to the little villages dotted around Marin County in the north and back again. They began to make a sort of familiar circuit, a horseshoe pattern around the bay.
“I dunno,” Hutch said, shaking his head. “We oughta be keepin’ our heads down in these parts . . . There’s Navy folks near the bay, and we’re cuttin’ it awful close to the city now.”
“City folks pay more money!” Earl urged. “They gossip to their neighbors and friends! After all, there are no riches in anonymity!”
In some ways Earl was right: Attendance ticked up noticeably. The crowds grew thicker and thicker. Folks remembered them, even began chanting out demands for particular stunts. They had only one airplane, but by stirring up enough fuss, they were making a living again as July turned into August and then September.
30
Earl Shaw’s Flying Circus
San Rafael, California * September 29, 1940
Finally, toward the end of September, the barnstorming group moved closer than ever to San Francisco when they planned to perform throughout a series of little towns in Marin County—Fairfax, San Anselmo, and Larkspur. While preparing to put on a show in the little town of San Rafael, Harry had gotten so accustomed to the car-to-plane transfer he was yearning for a new thrill.
“What if . . . what if I got back into the car?” he asked the others.
“You mean do a transfer to the plane and then eventually climb down to the car?” Hutch asked.
“Sure,” Harry replied. “It could be my entry and my exit from the stage, so to speak.” He paused and looked around at Hutch, Buzz, and Louis. Ava was only a short distance away, gathering dry weeds near their campsite for kindling, but she knew he was avoiding her glare. He already knew she hated everything to do with the car-to-plane transfer. It was a terrible, harebrained idea, she’d told him. Too dangerous.
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