by John Okada
Mr. Carrick set cups on the table and poured the coffee, which was hot but weak. “When do you want to start?” he asked.
The question caught him unprepared. Was that all there was to it? Were there to be no questions? No inquiry about qualifications or salary or experience? He fumbled with his cup and spilled some coffee on the table.
“It pays two-sixty a month. Three hundred after a year.”
“I’ve had two years of college engineering,” he said, trying frantically to adjust himself to the unexpected turn of events.
“Of course. The ad was clear enough. You wouldn’t have followed it up unless you thought you could qualify and, if you did, we’ll soon find out. Don’t worry. You’ll work out. I got a feeling.” He pursed his lips gingerly and sipped his coffee.
All he had to say was “I’ll take it,” and the matter would be settled. It was a stroke of good fortune such as he would never have expected. The pay was good, the employer was surely not to be equaled, and the work would be exactly what he wanted.
He looked at Mr. Carrick and said: “I’d like to think about it.”
Was it disbelief or surprise that clouded the face of the man who, in his heartfelt desire to atone for the error of a big country which hadn’t been quite big enough, had matter-of-factly said two-sixty a month and three hundred after a year when two hundred a month was what he had in mind when he composed the ad since a lot of draftsmen were getting less but because the one who came for the job was a Japanese and it made a difference to him? “Certainly, Ichiro. Take all the time you need.”
And when he said that, Ichiro knew that the job did not belong to him, but to another Japanese who was equally as American as this man who was attempting in a small way to rectify the wrong he felt to be his own because he was a part of the country which, somehow, had erred in a moment of panic.
“I’m not a veteran,” he said.
Mr. Carrick creased his brow, not understanding what he meant.
“Thanks for the coffee. I’m sorry I bothered you.” He pushed himself back off the stool.
“Wait.” His face thoughtfully grave, Mr. Carrick absently drew a clean handkerchief from his trousers pocket and ran it over the coffee which Ichiro had spilled. He straightened up quickly, saying simultaneously: “It’s something I’ve said. God knows I wouldn’t intentionally do anything to hurt you or anyone. I’m sorry. Can we try again, please?”
“You’ve no apology to make, sir. You’ve been very good. I want the job. The pay is tops. I might say I need the job, but it’s not for me. You see, I’m not a veteran.”
“Hell, son. What’s that got to do with it? Did I ask you? Why do you keep saying that?”
How was he to explain? Surely he couldn’t leave now without some sort of explanation. The man had it coming to him if anyone ever did. He was, above all, an honest and sincere man and he deserved an honest reply.
“Mr. Carrick, I’m not a veteran because I spent two years in jail for refusing the draft.”
The man did not react with surprise or anger or incredulity. His shoulders sagged a bit and he suddenly seemed a very old man whose life’s dream had been to own a snowplow and, when he had finally secured one, it was out of kilter. “I am sorry, Ichiro,” he said, “sorry for you and for the causes behind the reasons which made you do what you did. It wasn’t your fault, really. You know that, don’t you?”
“I don’t know, sir. I just don’t know. I just know I did it.”
“You mustn’t blame yourself.”
“I haven’t much choice. Sometimes I think my mother is to blame. Sometimes I think it’s bigger than her, more than her refusal to understand that I’m not like her. It didn’t make sense. Not at all. First they jerked us off the Coast and put us in camps to prove to us that we weren’t American enough to be trusted. Then they wanted to draft us into the army. I was bitter—mad and bitter. Still, a lot of them went in, and I didn’t. You figure it out. Thanks again, sir.”
He was in the front room and almost past the woman when Mr. Carrick caught up with him.
“Miss Henry,” he said to the woman at the typewriter, and there was something about his manner that was calm and reassuring, “this is Mr. Yamada. He’s considering the drafting job.”
She nodded, smiling pleasantly. “You’ll like it here,” she said. “It’s crazy, but you’ll like it.”
He walked with Ichiro to the door and drew it open. “Let me know when you decide.”
They shook hands and Ichiro took the bus back to the hotel. He had every reason to be enormously elated and, yet, his thoughts were solemn to the point of brooding. Then, as he thought about Mr. Carrick and their conversation time and time again, its meaning for him evolved into a singularly comforting thought. There was someone who cared. Surely there were others too who understood the suffering of the small and the weak and, yes, even the seemingly treasonous, and offered a way back into the great compassionate stream of life that is America. Under the hard, tough cloak of the struggle for existence in which money and enormous white refrigerators and shining, massive, brutally-fast cars and fine, expensive clothing had ostensibly overwhelmed the qualities of men that were good and gentle and just, there still beat a heart of kindness and patience and forgiveness. And in this moment when he thought of Mr. Carrick, the engineer with a yen for a snowplow that would probably never get used, and of what he had said, and, still more, of what he offered to do, he glimpsed the real nature of the country against which he had almost fully turned his back, and saw that its mistake was no less unforgivable than his own.
* * *
—
He blew a stream of smoke into the shaft of sunlight that slanted through the window and watched it lazily curl upward along the brightened path. Stepping to the window, he looked down for a moment upon a parking lot with its multicolored rows of automobile hoods and tops. And beyond was the city, streets and buildings and vehicles and people for as far as the eye could reach.
Then he drew the shade and found himself alone in the darkness, feeling very tired and sleepy because he had been a long time without rest. It was all he could do to remove his clothes before he fell on the bed and let himself succumb to the weariness which was making him dizzy and clumsy.
He slept soundly, hardly stirring until he awoke in the quiet which was the quiet of the night, disturbed only by the infrequent hum of an automobile in the streets below. As the drowsiness faded reluctantly, he waited for the sense of calm elation which he rather expected. It did not come. He found that his thoughts were of his family. They were not to be ignored, to be cast out of mind and life and rendered eternally nothing. It was well that Kenji wished him to take the Oldsmobile back to Seattle. A man does not start totally anew because he is already old by virtue of having lived and laughed and cried for twenty or thirty or fifty years and there is no way to destroy them without destroying life itself. That he understood. He also understood that the past had been shared with a mother and father and, whatever they were, he too was a part of them and they a part of him and one did not say this is as far as we go together, I am stepping out of your lives, without rendering himself only part of a man. If he was to find his way back to that point of wholeness and belonging, he must do so in the place where he had begun to lose it. Mr. Carrick had shown him that there was a chance and, for that, he would be ever grateful.
Crawling out of the bed, he switched on the light and started to search through the drawers of the dresser. In the third one he found a Gideon Bible, a drinking glass in a cellophane bag, and two picture postcards. Lacking a desk, he stood at the dresser and penned a few lines to Mr. Carrick informing him that, grateful as he was, he found it necessary to turn down the job. He paused with pen in hand, wanting to add words which would adequately express the warmth and depth of gratitude he felt. What could he say to this man whom he had met but once and probably would never see again? What
words would transmit the bigness of his feelings to match the bigness of the heart of this American who, in the manner of his living, was continually nursing and worrying the infant America into the greatness of its inheritance? Knowing, finally, that the unsaid would be understood, he merely affixed his signature to the postcard and dressed so that he could go out to mail it and get something to eat.
Outside, he walked along the almost deserted streets. It was only a little after ten o’clock but there were few pedestrians and traffic was extremely light. He came to a corner with a mailbox and paused to drop the card. Lifting his eyes upward along the lamppost, he saw that he was on Burnside Street. In a small way, Burnside was to Portland what Jackson Street was to Seattle or, at least, he remembered that it used to be so before the war when the Japanese did little traveling and Portland seemed a long way off instead of just two hundred miles and the fellows who had been to Portland used to rave about the waitresses they had in the café on Burnside. He could almost hear them: “Burnside Café. Remember that. Boy, what sweet babes! Nothing like them in Seattle. Sharp. Sharp. Sharp.”
He ambled up the walk past a tavern, a drugstore, a café, a vacant store space, a cigar stand, a laundromat, a secondhand store, another tavern, and there it was. Just as they said it would be, Burnside Café in huge, shameless letters plastered across two big windows with the door in between.
A young fellow in a white apron with one leg propped up on the inside ledge smoked his cigarette and looked out on the world, waiting for business to walk in. When he saw Ichiro, his eyes widened perceptibly. He followed the stranger through the door and said familiarly: “Hi.”
Ichiro nodded and walked to the rear end of the counter where a middle-aged woman was standing on a milk box and pouring hot water into the top of a large coffee urn.
The young fellow pursued him from the other side of the counter and greeted him with a too-friendly grin: “Hungry, I bet.” He plucked a menu wedged between the napkin holder and sugar dispenser and held it forth.
“Ham and eggs. Coffee now,” he said, ignoring the menu.
“Turn the eggs over?”
“No.”
“Ma, ham and eggs sunny side up.” He got the coffee himself and set it in front of Ichiro. He didn’t go away.
Thick as flies, thought Ichiro to himself with disgust. A Jap can spot another Jap a mile away. Pouring the sugar, he solemnly regarded the still-grinning face of the waiter and saw the clean white shirt with the collar open and the bronze discharge pin obtrusively displayed where the ribbons might have been if the fellow had been wearing a uniform.
“You’re Japanese, huh? Where you from?”
He could have said yes and they would have been friends. The Chinese were like that too, only more so. He had heard how a Chinese from China by the name of Eng could go to Jacksonville, Florida, or any other place, and look up another Chinese family by the same name of Eng and be taken in like one of the family with no questions asked. There was nothing wrong with it. On the contrary, it was a fine thing in some ways. Still, how much finer it would be if Smith would do the same for Eng and Sato would do the same for Wotynski and Laverghetti would do likewise for whoever happened by. Eng for Eng, Jap for Jap, Pole for Pole, and like for like meant classes and distinctions and hatred and prejudice and wars and misery, and that wasn’t what Mr. Carrick would want at all, and he was on the right track.
“I’ve got two Purple Hearts and five Battle Stars,” Ichiro said. “What does that make me?”
The young Japanese with the clean white shirt and the ruptured duck to prove he wasn’t Japanese flinched, then flushed and stammered: “Yeah—you know what I meant—that is, I didn’t mean what you think. Hell, I’m a vet too . . .”
“I’m glad you told me.”
“Jeezuz, all I said was are you Japanese. Is that wrong?”
“Does it matter?”
“No, of course not.”
“Why’d you ask?”
“Just to be asking. Make conversation and so on. You know.”
“I don’t. My name happens to be Wong. I’m Chinese.”
Frustrated and panicky, the waiter leaned forward earnestly and blurted out: “Good. It makes no difference to me what you are. I like Chinese.”
“Any reason why you shouldn’t?”
“I didn’t say that. I didn’t mean that. I was just trying to . . .” He did a harried right face and fled back toward the window grumbling: “Crissake, crissake . . .”
A moment later, the woman emerged from the kitchen with his plate and inquired in Japanese if he would like some toast and jam. She did it very naturally, seeing that he was obviously Japanese and gracefully using the tongue which came more easily to her lips.
He said that would be fine and noticed that the son was glaring out of the window at a world which probably seemed less friendly and more complicated than it had been a few minutes previously. The woman brought the toast and jam and left him alone, and he cleaned the plate swiftly. He would have liked another cup of coffee but the greater need was to get out and away from the place and the young Japanese who had to wear a discharge button on his shirt to prove to everyone who came in that he was a top-flight American. Having the proper change in his pocket, he laid it and the slip on the little rubber mat by the cash register and hurried out without seeing the relief-mixed-with-shame look on the waiter’s face.
From the café he walked the few steps to the tavern next door and ordered a double shot of whisky with a beer chaser. He downed both, standing up, by the time the bartender came back with his change, and then he was out on the street once more. On top of the ham and eggs and toast with jam, the liquor didn’t hit him hard, but he felt woozy by the time he got back to the hotel. He had to wait in the elevator for a while because the old fellow who ran it also watched the desk and was presently on the telephone.
On the way up, the old man regarded his slightly flushed face and smiled knowingly. “Want a girl?” he asked.
“I want six,” he said, hating the man.
“All at one time?” the old man questioned unbelievingly.
“The sixth floor, pop.” The hotness in his face was hotter still with the anger inside of him.
“Sure,” he said, bringing the elevator to an abrupt halt, “that’s good. I thought you meant you wanted six of them. That is good.”
The old man was chuckling as Ichiro stepped out of the elevator and headed toward his room.
“Filthy-minded old bastard,” he muttered viciously under his breath. No wonder the world’s such a rotten place, rotten and filthy and cheap and smelly. Where is that place they talk of and paint nice pictures of and describe in all the homey magazines? Where is that place with the clean, white cottages surrounding the new, red-brick church with the clean, white steeple, where the families all have two children, one boy and one girl, and a shiny new car in the garage and a dog and a cat and life is like living in the land of the happily-ever-after? Surely it must be around here someplace, someplace in America. Or is it just that it’s not for me? Maybe I dealt myself out, but what about that young kid on Burnside who was in the army and found it wasn’t enough so that he has to keep proving to everyone who comes in for a cup of coffee that he was fighting for his country like the button on his shirt says he did because the army didn’t do anything about his face to make him look more American? And what about the poor niggers on Jackson Street who can’t find anything better to do than spit on the sidewalk and show me the way to Tokyo? They’re on the outside looking in, just like that kid and just like me and just like everybody else I’ve ever seen or known. Even Mr. Carrick. Why isn’t he in? Why is he on the outside squandering his goodness on outcasts like me? Maybe the answer is that there is no in. Maybe the whole damned country is pushing and shoving and screaming to get into someplace that doesn’t exist, because they don’t know that the outside could be the inside if
only they would stop all this pushing and shoving and screaming, and they haven’t got enough sense to realize that. That makes sense. I’ve got the answer all figured out, simple and neat and sensible.
And then he thought about Kenji in the hospital and of Emi in bed with a stranger who reminded her of her husband and of his mother waiting for the ship from Japan, and there was no more answer. If he were in the tavern, he would drink another double with a beer for a chaser and another and still another but he wasn’t in the tavern because he didn’t have the courage to step out of his room and be seen by people who would know him for what he was. There was nothing for him to do but roll over and try to sleep. Somewhere, sometime, he had even forgotten how to cry.
* * *
—
In the morning he checked out of the hotel and drove to the hospital. Visiting hours were plainly indicated on a sign at the entrance as being in the afternoons and evenings. Feeling he had nothing to lose by trying, he walked in and stood by the registration desk until the girl working the switchboard got a chance to help him.
“What can I do for you?” she asked sweetly enough and then, prodded into action by the buzzing of the board, pulled and inserted a number of brass plugs which were attached to extendable wire cords. Tiny lights bristled actively as if to give evidence to the urgency of the calls being carried by the board.
“I’ve got a friend here. I’d like to find out what room he’s in.”
“Sure. His name?”
“Kanno.”
“Kanno what?”
“Kenji. Kanno is the last name.”
“How do you spell it?” She consulted the K’s on the cardex.
“K-A-N—”
“Never mind. I’ve got it.” Looking up, she continued: “He’s in four-ten but you’ll have to come back this afternoon. Visiting hours are posted at the entrance. Sorry.”