No-No Boy

by John Okada

  “I’m on my way out of town. I won’t be here this afternoon.”

  “Hospital rules, sir.”

  “Sure,” he said, noticing the stairway off toward the right, “I understand.”

  The board buzzed busily and the operator turned her attention to the plugs and cords once more. Ichiro walked to the stairs and started up. Between the second and third floors he encountered two nurses coming down. When they saw him they cut short their chattering and one of them seemed on the point of questioning him. Quickening his pace, he rushed past them purposefully and was relieved when he heard them resume their talking.

  Up on the fourth floor, no one bothered him as he set out to locate Kenji’s room. Four-ten wasn’t far from the stairway. A screen was placed inside the doorway so that he couldn’t look directly in. He went around it and saw the slight figure of his friend up on the high bed with the handle of the crank poking out at the foot.

  “Ken,” he said in almost a whisper though he hadn’t deliberately intended to speak so.

  “Ichiro?” His head lay on the pillow with its top toward the door and Ichiro noted with a vague sense of alarm that his hair was beginning to thin.

  He waited for Kenji to face him and was disappointed when he did not move. “How’s it been with you?”

  “Fine. Sit down.” He kept looking toward the window.

  Ichiro walked past the bed, noticing where the sheet fell over the stump beneath. It seemed to be frighteningly close to the torso. His own legs felt stiff and awkward as he approached the chair and settled into it.

  Kenji was looking at him, a smile, weak yet warm, on his mouth.

  “How’s it going?” he asked, and he hardly heard his own voice, for Kenji had aged a lifetime during the two days they had been apart. Exactly what it was he couldn’t say, but it was all there, the fear, the pain, the madness, and the exhaustion of mind and body.

  “About as I expected, Ichiro. I should have been a doctor.”

  Kenji had said he was going to die.

  “You could be wrong. Have they said so?”

  “Not in so many words, but they know it and I know it and they know that I do.”

  “Why don’t they do something?”

  “Nothing to be done.”

  “I shouldn’t be here,” he said, not knowing why except that it suddenly seemed important to explain. “They told me to come back this afternoon but I came up anyway. Maybe I shouldn’t have. Maybe you’re supposed to rest.”

  “Hell with them,” said Kenji. “You’re here, stay.”

  It was quiet in the hospital. He’d heard someplace a long time ago that visitors were not allowed in the morning in hospitals because that’s when all the cleaning and changing of beds and mopping of floors were done. There wasn’t a sound to be heard. “Quiet here,” he said.

  “Good for thinking,” said Kenji.

  “Sure, I guess it is.” He wished Kenji would move, roll his head a little or wiggle his arm, but he lay there just as he was.

  “Go back to Seattle.”

  “What?”

  “Go back. Later on you might want to come to Portland to stay, but go back for now. It’ll turn out for the best in the long run. The kind of trouble you’ve got, you can’t run from it. Stick it through. Let them call you names. They don’t mean it. What I mean is, they don’t know what they’re doing. The way I see it, they pick on you because they’re vulnerable. They think just because they went and packed a rifle they’re different but they aren’t and they know it. They’re still Japs. You weren’t here when they first started to move back to the Coast. There was a great deal of opposition—name-calling, busted windows, dirty words painted on houses. People haven’t changed a helluva lot. The guys who make it tough on you probably do so out of a misbegotten idea that maybe you’re to blame because the good that they thought they were doing by getting killed and shot up doesn’t amount to a pot of beans. They just need a little time to get cut down to their own size. Then they’ll be the same as you, a bunch of Japs.”

  He paused for a long time, just looking and smiling at Ichiro, his face wan and tired. “There were a lot of them pouring into Seattle about the time I got back there. It made me sick. I’d heard about some of them scattering out all over the country. I read about a girl who’s doing pretty good in the fashion business in New York and a guy that’s principal of a school in Arkansas, and a lot of others in different places making out pretty good. I got to thinking that the Japs were wising up, that they had learned that living in big bunches and talking Jap and feeling Jap and doing Jap was just inviting trouble. But my dad came back. There was really no reason why he should have. I asked him about it once and he gave me some kind of an answer. Whatever it was, a lot of others did the same thing. I hear there’s almost as many in Seattle now as there were before the war. It’s a shame, a dirty rotten shame. Pretty soon it’ll be just like it was before the war. A bunch of Japs with a fence around them, not the kind you can see, but it’ll hurt them just as much. They bitched and hollered when the government put them in camps and put real fences around them, but now they’re doing the same damn thing to themselves. They screamed because the government said they were Japs and, when they finally got out, they couldn’t wait to rush together and prove that they were.”

  “They’re not alone, Ken. The Jews, the Italians, the Poles, the Armenians, they’ve all got their communities.”

  “Sure, but that doesn’t make it right. It’s wrong. I don’t blame the old ones so much. They don’t know any better. They don’t want any better. It’s me I’m talking about and all the rest of the young ones who know and want better.”

  “You just got through telling me to go back to Seattle.”

  “I still say it. Go back and stay there until they have enough sense to leave you alone. Then get out. It may take a year or two or even five, but the time will come when they’ll be feeling too sorry for themselves to pick on you. After that, head out. Go someplace where there isn’t another Jap within a thousand miles. Marry a white girl or a Negro or an Italian or even a Chinese. Anything but a Japanese. After a few generations of that, you’ve got the thing beat. Am I making sense?”

  “It’s a fine dream, but you’re not the first.”

  “No,” he uttered and it seemed as if he might cry, “it’s just a dream, a big balloon. I wonder if there’s a Jackson Street wherever it is I’m going to. That would make dying tough.”

  Ichiro stood and, walking to his friend, placed his hand on the little shoulder and held it firmly.

  “I’m going to write to Ralph,” said Kenji.

  “Ralph?”

  “Emi’s husband. I’m going to write him about how you and Emi are hitting it off.”

  “Why? It’s not true.” He felt the heat of indignation warm around his collar.

  “No, it isn’t true, but what they’re doing to each other is not right. They should be together or split up. If I tell him about you and how you’re hot for her, it might make him mad enough to come back.”

  Understanding what Kenji meant, Ichiro worked up a smile. “Seems like I’m not so useless after all.”

  “Tell her I’ve been thinking about her.”

  “Sure.”

  “And I’m thinking about you. All the time.”

  “Sure.”

  “Have a drink for me. Drink to wherever it is I’m headed, and don’t let there be any Japs or Chinks or Jews or Poles or Niggers or Frenchies, but only people. I think about that too. I think about that most of all. You know why?”

  He shook his head and Kenji seemed to know he would even though he was still staring out the window. “He was up on the roof of the barn and I shot him, killed him. He wasn’t the only German I killed, but I remember him. I see him rolling down the roof. I see him all the time now and that’s why I want this other place to have only people becau
se if I’m still a Jap there and this guy’s still a German, I’ll have to shoot him again and I don’t want to have to do that. Then maybe there is no someplace else. Maybe dying is it. The finish. The end. Nothing. I’d like that too. Better an absolute nothing than half a meaning. The living have it tough. It’s like a coat rack without pegs, only you think there are. Hang it up, drop, pick it up, hang it again, drop again . . . Tell my dad I’ll miss him like mad.”

  “I will.”

  “Crazy talk?”

  “No, it makes a lot of sense.”

  “Goodbye, Ichiro.”

  His hand slipped off his friend’s shoulder and brushed along the white sheet and dropped to his side. The things he wanted to say would not be said. He said “Bye” and no sound came out because the word got caught far down inside his throat and he felt his mouth open and shut against the empty silence. At the door he turned and looked back and, as Kenji had still not moved, he saw again the spot on the head where the hair was thinning out so that the sickly white of the scalp filtered between the strands of black. A few more years and he’ll be bald, he thought, and then he started to smile inwardly because there wouldn’t be a few more years and as quickly the smile vanished because the towering, choking grief was suddenly upon him.

  * * *

  —

  It was almost seven hours later when Ichiro, nearing the outskirts of Seattle, turned off the highway and drove to Emi’s house.

  He pressed the doorbell and waited and pressed it again. When no one appeared, he pounded on the door. Thinking, hoping that she must be nearby, he walked around to the back. With a sense of relief, he noted that the shed which served as a garage housed a pre-war Ford that looked fairly new. It probably meant that she hadn’t driven to town. He tried the back door without any luck and made his way around to the front once more.

  Tired and hungry, he sat on the step and lit a cigarette. It was then that he saw her, walking toward the house from out in the fields about where the man had been stooped over his labors a few mornings previously. Looking carefully, he saw that he was still there, still stooped over, still working.

  Emi covered the ground with long, sure strides. Occasionally she broke into a run, picking her way agilely over the loose dirt and leaping over mounds and the carefully tended rows of vegetables. He stood and waved and got no response, so he waited until she was closer before he raised his arm again. Still she did not wave back. Seeming deliberately to avoid looking at him, she approached the gate. Once there, she jerked her head up, her face alive and expectantly tense.

  “Hello, Emi.”

  “I saw the Oldsmobile. I thought . . .” She didn’t hide her disappointment.

  He felt embarrassed and unwanted. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly.

  She grasped the gate, which he had left open, and slammed it fiercely. With chin lowered, she pouted, her face swollen and defiant. Then she came up the walk, moving her legs reluctantly, and dropped on the step.

  Unnerved by her reaction, Ichiro fidgeted uneasily, thinking of something to say. At length, he too sat down beside her and remained silent. Without looking at her, he could sense that she was struggling to keep the tears from starting. There was a streak of brown dirt clinging across the toe of her shoe and he restrained the urge to brush it off.

  “It’s just that I wanted so much for him to come back.” She started speaking, almost in a whisper. “It somehow seemed more important for him to come back this time than the other times he went down there. He’s not coming back, is he?”

  “No, I think not. He told me to tell you that he’s thinking about you.”

  “I’m sorry,” she blurted out.

  “Sorry?”

  “I’m sorry I made you feel bad just now.”

  “You didn’t.”

  “I did and I’m sorry.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’ll make you something to eat,” she said and before he could refuse, rose and went into the house.

  In the kitchen, he watched as she moved from the refrigerator to the sink to the stove, fussing longer than necessary with each little thing that had to be done.

  He got the dishes and utensils from the cupboard and set them on the table. “Were you in love with him?” he asked.

  She turned and, apparently neither startled nor hurt, softly smiled. “In a way. Not the way I love Ralph. Not the way I might love you, but I loved him—no, he’s not gone yet—I love him too much but not enough.”

  “Any other time I might not understand the way you put that, but I do.”

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m glad if you do, but it really doesn’t matter. Love is not something you save and hoard. You’re born with it and you spend it when you have to and there’s always more because you’re a woman and there’s always suffering and pain and gentleness and sadness to make it grow.”

  “He said he was thinking about you.”

  “You already said that. Besides, it doesn’t need to be said.” She put the meat and potatoes in his plate and urged him to eat. For herself she poured a cup of coffee and stirred it absent-mindedly without adding cream or sugar.

  Hungry as he had thought himself to be, he found himself chewing lengthily on each little mouthful.

  “And you?”

  He looked at her, not quite understanding the intention of her words.

  “What will you do now?”

  “I haven’t decided,” he said honestly. “Strangely enough, I had a wonderful job offer in Portland, but I turned it down.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  He did so, dwelling at great length on his admiration for Mr. Carrick and the reasons for his final decision to refuse the job. Somehow, he had expected her to be impatient with what he had done, but when he finished she merely said: “It’s good.”

  “That I turned down the job?”

  “No, it’s good that you found out things aren’t as hopeless as you thought.”

  “Just like you said.”

  “I did say that, didn’t I?” She looked pleased. “This Mr. Carrick you speak of sounds like the kind of American that Americans always profess themselves to be.”

  “One in a million,” he added.

  “Less than that,” she said quickly. “If a lot more people were like him, there wouldn’t have been an evacuation.”

  “No, and one might even go farther and say there might not have been a war.”

  “And no problems for you and me and everybody else.”

  “Nothing for God to do either,” he said, without knowing why and, as soon as he had, he knew that they had just been talking. What it amounted to was that there was a Mr. Carrick in Portland, which did not necessarily mean that there were others like him. The world was pretty much the same except, perhaps, that Emi and he were both sadder.

  “Mr. Maeno will give you work, if you wish. I was speaking to him about you just before you came.”

  Rising, he went to the stove to get the coffeepot and did not answer until he sat down again. “That would be nice, but I can’t. Thanks anyway.”

  “Why?”

  “It won’t do any good. It’ll be like hiding. He’s Japanese. Probably admires me for what I did, I suppose. Maybe it doesn’t make any difference to him what I’ve done, but it does to me.”

  “What will you do then?”

  “Find a girl that’s not Japanese that’ll marry me.” Seeing the incredulous look in her face, he rapidly explained what Kenji had said to him.

  “He didn’t really mean it,” she replied. “He only meant that things ought to be that way, but I think he knew he was only dreaming.”

  “He did. It’s probably what makes him so unhappy and kind of brooding underneath.”

  “Is he really going to die?” She looked at him pleadingly, as if beseeching him to say that it was not true.

&nbs
p; All he could do was nod his head.

  Emi pushed her cup away abruptly, splashing some of the coffee onto the table. Then she cupped her face with her hands and began to sob, scarcely making a sound.

  “I have to go now,” he said. “I may not come to see you again and, then, I might. I like you a lot already and, in time, I’ll surely love you very deeply. That mustn’t happen because Ralph will probably come back.”

  “He won’t,” she cried, without taking her hands away.

  “I think he will. Ken said he was writing to Ralph. He’s got something in mind that’ll jolt him hard enough to make him see what he’s doing. He’ll come back. Soon.”

  He stood beside her a moment, wanting to comfort her. Slowly, he raised his arms, only to let them drop without touching her. Quickly he brushed his lips against her head and ran out of the house.

  8

  Ichiro’s father cradled the brown paper bag preciously in the soft crook of his arm and, with the other hand, pressed it firmly against his breast. In his hurry to get to the liquor store before it closed at eight o’clock, he had left home without a coat or hat. Now, his legs moved quickly, sweeping him along the walk, which he felt hazily underneath him. It was still March and cool enough for a topcoat. He shivered a little and felt fuzzy all over because it had been a while since the last drink and that’s how he felt when the effect of the liquor was beginning to wear off. It scared him to think that he might be sobering up. He ran, squeezing the bag tighter when its contents began to jiggle. The bag would have made a snug fit for four bottles, but he had only bought three and that meant they were fairly loose.

  “Next time I’ll be sure to buy four,” he muttered to himself. “Ya, four is best; a whole case, better. Sonagabitch, I’m thirsty. Sonagabitch, cold too. Plenty cold.”

  A block from the store he attempted to leap over the curbing and didn’t quite make it. Clutching the bag desperately, he managed to twist himself sufficiently in mid-air so that he hit the sidewalk with his shoulder. The impact cut his breath off momentarily and, as he lay gasping for air, he saw several people running toward him.