No-No Boy

by John Okada

  “Tell me about it first.”

  “Sure.” He turned the car into a park and drove slowly along a winding road, with trees and neat, green grass on both sides of them. “It’s not important how I lost the leg. What’s important are the eleven inches.”

  “I don’t understand that about the eleven inches.”

  “That’s what’s left.”

  “I see.”

  “Do you? Do you really, Ichiro?”

  “I think so.”

  A mother and a child strolled across the road ahead of them and Kenji slowed down more than necessary. “What I mean is, I’ve got eleven inches to go and you’ve got fifty years, maybe sixty. Which would you rather have?”

  “I don’t quite follow you, but I’ll settle for eleven inches.”

  “Oh?” Kenji was surprised.

  Ichiro regarded the thin, sensitive face carefully and said bluntly: “I wasn’t in the army, Ken. I was in jail. I’m a no-no boy.”

  There was a silence, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. Ichiro could tell instantly that it did not matter to Kenji, who drove the new Oldsmobile aimlessly through the park because it was as good a place as any.

  “Still,” he said finally, “you’ve got your life ahead of you.”

  “Have I?”

  “I should think so.”

  “Would you trade places with me? I said I would with you.”

  Kenji laughed softly. “I’ll forget you said that.”

  “No, I meant it.”

  “Let me tell you about the eleven inches first.”

  “I’m listening.”

  Rolling down the window, Kenji let the cool air blow in on them. “Turned out to be a pretty nice day.”

  Ichiro waited without answering.

  “The doctors didn’t have to work too hard. The machine gun had done a pretty good job. They were pretty proud about having saved my knee. Makes things a lot easier with a sound knee, you know.”

  “Yes, that’s not hard to see.”

  “They gave me a leg and it worked out pretty well, only, after a while, it started to hurt. I went back into the hospital and it turned out that there’s something rotten in my leg that’s eating it away. So they cut off a little more and gave me a new leg. As you’ve probably guessed by now, it wasn’t long before I was back in and they whacked off another chunk. This time they took off more than they had to so as to make sure they got all the rottenness. That was five months ago. A couple of days ago I noticed the pains coming back.”

  “Bad?”

  “No, but it’s starting.”

  “Does that mean . . .”

  “Yes. I’ll go back and they’ll chop again. Then, maybe, I’ll only have eight inches to trade for your fifty or sixty years.”

  “Oh.”

  “Still want to trade?”

  Ichiro shuddered and Kenji rolled up the window.

  “How much time do they give you?”

  “Depends, of course. Maybe the rottenness will go away and I’ll live to a ripe old age.”

  “If not?”

  “They say a fellow ought to trade in a car every third year to get the most out of it. My brother can take care of that.”

  “How long?”

  “Two years at the most.”

  “You’ll get well. They’ve got ways.”

  “Let’s talk about something else,” said Kenji and drove faster until they were out of the park and once again headed toward Jackson Street.

  They didn’t talk, because there was nothing to say. For a brief moment Ichiro felt a strange exhilaration. He had been envying Kenji with his new Oldsmobile, which was fixed to be driven with a right leg that wasn’t there any more, because the leg that wasn’t there had been amputated in a field hospital, which meant that Kenji was a veteran of the army of America and had every right to laugh and love and hope, because one could do that even if one of his legs was gone. But a leg that was eating itself away until it would consume the man himself in a matter of a few years was something else, for hobbling toward death on a cane and one good leg seemed far more disastrous than having both legs and an emptiness that might conceivably still be filled.

  He gripped his knees with his hands, squeezing the hard soundness of the bony flesh and muscles, and fought off the sadness which seemed only to have deepened after the moment of relief. Kenji had two years, maybe a lifetime if the thing that was chewing away at him suddenly stopped. But he, Ichiro, had stopped living two years ago.

  I’ll change with you, Kenji, he thought. Give me the stump which gives you the right to hold your head high. Give me the eleven inches which are beginning to hurt again and bring ever closer the fear of approaching death, and give me with it the fullness of yourself which is also yours because you were man enough to wish the thing which destroyed your leg and, perhaps, you with it but, at the same time, made it so that you can put your one good foot in the dirt of America and know that the wet coolness of it is yours beyond a single doubt.

  “I like you, Ichiro,” said Kenji, breaking the silence.

  Ichiro smiled, a little embarrassed. “I could say the same about you,” he said.

  “We’ve both got big problems, bigger than most people. That ought to mean something.”

  “Whose is bigger?”

  “Huh?”

  “I was thinking all the time we were silent and I decided that, were it possible, I might very well trade with you.”

  “For the eleven inches or for the seven or eight that’ll be left after the next time?”

  “Even for two inches.”

  “Oh.” They were getting close to Ichiro’s home and Kenji took his time as if reluctant to part with his friend.

  Soon, however, they were in front of the grocery store.

  “Well?” asked Ichiro, opening the door.

  “Mine is bigger than yours in a way and, then again, yours is bigger than mine.”

  “Thanks for the lift,” he said and climbed out onto the sidewalk.

  “I’ll pick you up tonight if you got nothing better to do,” said Kenji.

  “That’ll be fine.”

  He watched the Oldsmobile pull away and then pushed open the door which jingled the bell of the grocery store with home in the back end.

  His mother was at the counter ringing up a loaf of bread and a bag of Bull Durham for a white-haired pensioner. She glanced briefly at him, her eyes sharp and troubled. Feeling uneasy, he made his way past her into the kitchen.

  Taro was playing solitaire at the kitchen table, his hands mechanically flipping and shifting the cards as if he found no enjoyment in the game. The father sat opposite his younger son and watched, not the cards, but the face of his son, with a kind of helpless sadness.

  He sat on the end between them and watched for a while.

  “No school?” he said finally, noticing that it was still only a little after one o’clock.

  “Keep out of it.” His brother spit the words out angrily without taking his eyes off the cards.

  Ichiro looked at his father with the unanswered question on his face and failed still to get an answer because the father did not remove his gaze from Taro.

  “You will wait, ya? Please, Taro. It is not long.”

  He turned up the ace of spades and piled several cards in rapid succession upon it.

  His mouth still open, the father forced more words out of it: “Mama does not understand, Taro, so you must understand her. Try. Try to understand. Until June. Then, if she still says no, you go. Anyway, finish high school.”

  “What’s going on?” Ichiro looked from Taro to his father and back again and got no reply.

  “That is all right, ya? June, you finish high school. Then, if you still feel the same, I will say nothing. Only a few months. Okay?”

  The old man sig
hed, the weight of the problem noticeably too much for him. “Ahh,” he groaned, then “Ahh” once more. He rose and got the bottle from the cupboard and wet his throat amply. After only a slight pause he took a second, shorter drink and returned the bottle to the shelf. Seconds later, he was back in the chair looking at Taro in the same lost fashion.

  Ichiro tried again: “What’s going on?”

  “Birthday party,” said Taro, looking up with a wry grin. “You gonna sing for me too?”

  “I might.”

  “Sure, you can get your buddies from the pen and do it right. You can sing me happy birthday in Japanese. I’d go for that.”

  The blood rushed to his face and it was with considerable difficulty that he kept himself from swinging at his brother. “You hate me that much?”

  “I don’t know you.” He shifted the diamond six to a club seven and put up the seven of spades.

  “Ichiro,” said the old man and he still did not take his eyes away from the other son.

  “Yeah?”

  “Taro is eighteen today. He came home at lunchtime, when he should be in school. Mama said: ‘Why are you home?’ ‘It is my birthday,’ he said. ‘Why are you home?’ said Mama, ‘why are you not in school like you should be?’ ‘I am eighteen and I am going in the army,’ he said. We were eating, Mama and me, and Taro stood here beside us and said: ‘I am eighteen and I am going in the army.’”

  “Are you?” he asked his brother.

  “For crissake. You want me to write it down? You want me to send you a letter? I said I’m goin’ in the army. You think the old man’s just talkin’? Besides, it’s none a your business.” Extracting a red ten from the discard pile, he played it on a black jack, which enabled him to make several advantageous moves.

  “You realize Ma won’t get over it, don’t you?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  The answer did not disturb him. If he were eighteen and in Taro’s shoes he would probably do the same thing. And not having done it when it was his to do, there was really nothing for him to say. It was not Taro who was rejecting them, but it was he who had rejected Taro and, in turn, had made him a stranger to his own parents forever.

  “Think it over,” he said weakly, “give it time.”

  Taro threw the cards in his hand on the table and swept them onto the floor with an angry sweep of his arm. “It’s been nice,” he said and he might have been on the verge of tears. “I got things to do.” He stood and looked down at Ichiro, wanting to speak but not finding the words in himself to tell his brother that he had to go in the army because of his brother whose weakness made it impossible for him to do otherwise and because he did not understand what it was about his mother that haunted him day and night and pulled his insides into meaningless bits and was slowly destroying him. And it was because of these things and because he was furiously mixed up that he had to cut himself free and spare himself the anguish of his brother which he knew must be there even if he was a stranger to him, and maybe that was still another reason why he was going.

  In that brief moment when Taro looked at Ichiro and felt these things which he could not say, Ichiro felt them too and understood. So, when Taro stalked into the bedroom and banged the drawers and packed a small bag, he felt the heaviness lifting from his own shoulders. He did not even turn to look when Taro swept past him on the way out, for he saw in the fearful eyes of the father the departure of the son who was not a son but a stranger and, perhaps more rightly, an enemy leaving to join his friends. Then the bell tinkled to signal the opening of the door and it tinkled again as the door closed and shut them off from the world that Taro had entered.

  The mother uttered a single, muffled cry which was the forgotten spark in a dark and vicious canyon and, the spark having escaped, there was only darkness, but a darkness which was now darker still, and the meaning of her life became a little bit meaningless.

  Ichiro looked at his father, who did not look as would a father who had just lost a son, but as a man afraid. His face paled perceptibly as the mother came into the kitchen.

  “Mama,” said the father, and he might have been a boy the way he said it.

  “We don’t have enough nickels,” she said, trying to sound the way she would have sounded if Taro had never been born, but it was not the same and Ichiro felt it.

  “Ya, I get,” the father almost shouted as he jumped up. “The bank will still be open.” He threw on his overcoat and hastily departed.

  Ichiro started to pick the cards off the floor and felt his mother’s eyes on him. He took his time purposely, not wanting to look at her, for the strength that was the strength of Japan had failed and he had caught the realization of it in the cry and in the words which she had spoken. As if suddenly sensing what was in his mind, she quickly turned and left him alone.

  4

  There are stores on King Street, which is one block to the south of Jackson Street. Over the stores are hotels housed in ugly structures of brick more black than red with age and neglect. The stores are cafés and open-faced groceries and taverns and dry-goods shops, and then there are the stores with plate-glass windows painted green or covered with sun-faded drapes. Some bear names of exporting firms, others of laundries with a few bundles on dusty shelves. A few come closer to the truth by calling themselves society or club headquarters. The names of these latter are simple and unimaginative, for gambling against the house, whether it be with cards or dice or beans or dominoes, requires only a stout heart and a hunger for the impossible. And there are many of these, for this is Chinatown and, when the town is wide open, one simply walks into Wing’s Hand Laundry, or Trans Asia Exporting, Inc., or Canton Recreation Society with the stout heart and the hunger and there is not even a guard at the massive inner door with the small square of one-way glass.

  Inside the second door are the tables and the stacks of silver dollars and the Chinese and Japanese and Filipinos and a few stray whites, and no one is smiling or laughing, for one does not do those things when the twenty has dwindled to a five or the twenty is up to a hundred and the hunger has been whetted into a mild frenzy by greed. The dealer behind the blackjack table is a sickly, handsome Chinese, a pokerfaced dignitary of the house, whose soft, nimble fingers automatically remove bunches of five and ten and fifteen from the silver stacks. He is master for the moment over the kingdom of green felt, but he neither jokes with the winners nor sympathizes with the losers, for when the day is over and the money for the day’s labors is in his pocket he will set aside a dollar for his hotel room and give the rest back to the house because his is the hunger no longer accompanied by a stout heart, a sickness which drives him relentlessly toward the big kill which, when attained, drives him to the next bigger one and so on and on and on until he is again behind the table working toward his day’s wages from which he will set aside a dollar for the hotel room and give the rest back to the house.

  The dealer flipped up Kenji’s cards and matched five dollars against the five that was bet, for the house had eighteen and the young Japanese with the cane held two face cards.

  Ichiro watched Kenji ride the ten and hit twenty, then forty before he pulled it in and sat out several hands. Over at the dice table were half a dozen young Japanese who could not have been any older than Taro. A few were betting dimes and quarters, feeling their luck with the miserliness of the beginner who does not yet fully understand the game or the strained impulses within his young body. And there was one who held a fistful of bills and played with an intensity that was fearful to watch.

  “Here,” said Kenji to Ichiro, “play.” He shoved a stack of ten silver dollars over to his friend.

  “No,” he said, wanting to play very much.

  Kenji did not urge him. He played five as usual and again ran it up to forty. “For a change, I’m going to quit while I’m ahead.” He traded the silver for four twenties, a ten, and a five.

  Th
ey walked from game to game, watching the players for a little while.

  “I feel like drinking it up,” said Kenji, looking at Ichiro.

  “Fine,” said Ichiro, wanting to say that he did not want to go anyplace where too many would know him and of him, for he was afraid.

  They walked down the ugly street with the ugly buildings among the ugly people which was a part of America and, at the same time, would never be wholly America. The night was cool and dark.

  Halfway down an alley, among the forlorn stairways and innumerable trash cans, was the entrance to the Club Oriental. It was a bottle club, supposedly for members only, but its membership consisted of an ever growing clientele. Under the guise of a private, licensed club, it opened its door to almost everyone and rang up hefty profits nightly.

  Up the corridor flanked on both sides by walls of glass brick, they approached the polished mahogany door. Kenji poked the buzzer and, momentarily, the electric catch buzzed in return. They stepped from the filthy alley and the cool night into the Club Oriental with its soft, dim lights, its long, curving bar, its deep carpets, its intimate tables, and its small dance floor.

  There were a few people at the bar, a few more at the tables, and one couple on the dance floor, sliding around effortlessly to the Ralph Flanagan tune which was one of a hundred records offered by the massive, colorful juke box.

  It wasn’t until they had seated themselves at the bar and finished half their first bourbons on ice that their eyes became sufficiently accustomed to the darkness to enable them to distinguish the faces scattered around the club.

  “I like it here,” said Kenji contentedly.

  “Yeah, I see what you mean.”

  Kenji sipped his drink appreciatively, knowing that the night was long and that there would be other days in spite of the hurting of his leg. “If I didn’t have to sleep or eat, I’d stay right here. I’d work up to a nice, lazy feeling and keep it there by hoisting my arm every once in a while. That would be nice.”

  “Yeah, it would.”

  “For me, yes, but not for you.”