No-No Boy

by John Okada

  “Over here, fella,” Mr. Morrison called, stepping out into the hallway a few yards still further down. He was tall, blond, and wore a smart-looking blue suit. He motioned Ichiro into the office, saying: “Have a chair. Be with you in a minute.”

  There was a desk, a filing cabinet, a typewriter on a metal stand, and two chairs. He sat down on the one in front of the desk. It was several minutes before Mr. Morrison returned.

  “I’m Morrison,” he said with arm extended.

  Thinking that the man couldn’t be much over thirty, Ichiro took the hand and said: “Mine is Yamada. Ichiro Yamada.”

  “Ichiro Yamada,” repeated the man fluently. “How do I pronounce it?”

  “Good.”

  “Ought to,” he said with obvious elation as he skirted around the desk to his chair. “Spent fifteen months in Japan. Ever been there?”

  “No.”

  “Too bad. Go if you ever get a chance. Fine country. Fine people. Nihongo ga wakarimasu ka?”

  “A little bit.”

  “I speak it pretty good myself. Only way to get to know the people is to learn the language, I say. I learned it and I got to know them. I was there before the war, thanks to my dad. He did a lot of business there.” He offered Ichiro a cigarette and put one in his own mouth. “Now, tell me something about yourself.”

  “Not much to say. I need a job. I heard there might be one here.”

  “Someone who works here?”

  “No. A friend of a fellow who works here. You know Gary?”

  “Sure thing. Gary’s a fine worker, a real artist. He does the signs on our trucks.” Opening the center desk-drawer, Mr. Morrison withdrew a five-by-seven card and neatly lettered Ichiro’s name on the top. He asked the usual questions concerning parents, address, education, special abilities and noted the answers in the same neat manner on the lines below. Then, since the question which needed to be asked wouldn’t come out quite as easily as he had hoped, he made a pretense of studying the information on the card. Ichiro squirmed and Mr. Morrison smiled reassuringly and studied the card some more. Finally, he said: “Gary has a problem, you know.”

  Ichiro looked up, not quite understanding at first, but quickly grasping what Mr. Morrison was trying so hard to make as painless as possible for both of them. “My problem is the same one,” he said in a very level voice.

  “I see.” A look of disappointment crept over his face. To erase it quickly lest Ichiro notice, he tried to smile, but, failing, rose hastily and turned about to gaze out the window. “Nasty day,” he said emptily.

  “I know,” said Ichiro, sharing the man’s discomfort.

  “I’m sorry,” said Mr. Morrison, settling back into his chair. He smiled but with a weariness which made him appear for the moment an old man. “If the question is impertinent, say so, but tell me, if you will, why you didn’t comply with the draft.”

  “That’s a good question.”

  “Don’t you know?” He sounded almost angry.

  “Not exactly, Mr. Morrison. The evacuation, the camp, my parents, all of it, and then some, I guess.”

  “Have you any regrets?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re sorry then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Sure you are.” He slouched in his chair and folded his hands under his chin thoughtfully. “I like my work, Ichiro. I like it because I’m working with people and for people who need help. Drunks, morons, incompetents, delinquents, the physically handicapped. I’ve helped them all and it gives me great satisfaction. But you and Gary, there’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t belong here. All I can do for you is to give you a job and hope. That’s what makes it tough. Hope is all right, but it’s so much nicer when you can help it along. I can’t do that for you. I’ve thought about it a lot. Ever since Gary came. Youth, intelligence, charm, a degree in fine arts, health—he’s got everything. So have you. Makes me feel damned useless. Both of you could step into a hundred jobs out there in the city this very minute and do a more competent job than the people in them. Unfortunately, they never told me about a therapy for your kind of illness. Well,” he said, straightening up suddenly, “no point in adding my woes to yours. How would you like to work with Gary?”

  “I guess that would be all right.”

  “It pays thirty-five a week. A little more later on maybe.”

  He thought of the two-sixty a month offered to him by Mr. Carrick in Portland only a week before. I should have taken it, he thought; if Ma had been dead then, I would have. It would have been work that I would have liked. It could have led to something. Mr. Carrick would have been nice to work for. A lot of things could have been, only they weren’t. Morrison isn’t to be blamed for being young and disturbed. He means well. He’s doing the best he can. “That’s enough for me,” he answered.

  “No need to say yes right this minute, of course.”

  “Well, I would like to think some about it.”

  “Sure. Let me know in a few days.”

  “I will.”

  Mr. Morrison rose and came around the desk to shake his hand once more. “Stop by and chat with Gary long as you’re here. He can tell you more about the job than I can.”

  “Fine.”

  “Take the side door to your right. You can’t miss him.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Morrison, I’ll let you know.”

  The man held on to his hand all the way out to the hallway. It seemed as if he were reluctant to let Ichiro go, for not having done more. He seemed to be searching for something adequate to say. Finally, shaking his hand vigorously a last time, he said with great enthusiasm: “I know you’ll like working here. Maybe the three of us can find a solution to your peculiar situation. There’s an answer to everything, you know.”

  “Thanks,” he said again and walked down the hall to the door.

  * * *

  —

  He found Gary up on a stepladder, working on the last i in the word Rehabilitation, which was being painted on a huge, green van. With deft, sure strokes of the brush, Gary applied the red paint, filling in the outline of the letter, which he had made with equal care. Not until he had completed it and leaned back to appraise his own work did he seem to notice that he was being watched. Still, he did not turn immediately. Brush in hand, he dabbed carefully twice before he looked satisfied. Then he turned toward the entrance and, recognizing Ichiro, frowned thoughtfully.

  “Hello,” said Ichiro as Gary climbed down and came toward him.

  “Nice to see you, Itchy,” said Gary.

  They shook hands and Ichiro noticed that Gary still wasn’t smiling although he seemed friendly enough.

  “I was just in to see Morrison. He thinks he can fix it up for me to work here with you.”

  “Fine,” said Gary, “fine.” It occurred to him then that he was still holding the brush in his hand, and he walked to the back of the shop to place it in a can. He lingered there, fussing around with jars of paint and rags and shoving things into a semblance of order.

  Ichiro, slightly disconcerted by Gary’s cool behavior, walked up to the truck and examined the lettering. “You’re good. That’s all right,” he said.

  Gary turned abruptly, and he suddenly grinned broadly. “What the hell,” he exclaimed. “You ought to kick me in the ass. Let’s try again.” He extended his hand once more and shook Ichiro’s vigorously.

  “If this is treatment number two, I like it better,” said Ichiro, greatly relieved.

  Gary took cigarettes from his shirt pocket, shook one half out of the pack, and offered it to Ichiro. They lit up and sat on a couple of boxes against the wall.

  “I heard you were out,” said Gary.

  “Out?” grinned Ichiro. “If this is what it’s like being out, I wouldn’t have been so anxious.”

  Standing up, Gary walked up to the truck and studied
the unfinished job of lettering. He wasn’t tall, but slender with wide shoulders and strong, graceful arms and legs. He ran both hands through his thick, wavy black hair and stood poised for a moment with palms clasped behind his neck. “Maybe it’s a little easier for me,” he said softly as if to himself and, with back toward Ichiro, no longer aware of his presence. “I am a painter—that is, I think I am. I want to be a good painter, an artist. I’m painting now, but it wasn’t always that way. Before, it was talk. Sitting over cold cups of coffee covered with cigarette ashes and talking about life and sex and philosophy and history and music and real art and getting so all-fire worked up that I was ready to run out into the black night and splash paint all over the side of a building in a burning frenzy of creation but never moving and continuing to talk and dream and sit like I had a lead weight in my hind end. It wasn’t once in a while. It was all the time. Weeks, months, years, talking and squirming—and maybe working on canvas once in a long while, but only because you suddenly ran up against a day or a night when absolutely nothing was going on—and not being able to paint because the lead weight in the behind was sniffing around for the chair that wasn’t there. If I had spent the time painting that I did talking, I might have had a painting now, a real painting. I wasted a lot of time. God, there’s so much time that I’ve wasted.” Fingers tightening about his head, he squirmed as if in agony.

  Ichiro drew quietly on his cigarette and watched as the youthful figure worked the tension out of itself and started again to speak.

  “It was good, the years I rotted in prison. I got the lead out of my ass and the talk out of my system. I died in prison. And when I came back to life, all that really mattered for me was to make a painting. I came home and said hello to the family and tried to talk to them, but there was nothing to talk about. I didn’t stay. I found a room, next to the sky, a big, drafty attic atop a dilapidated mansion full of boarders who mind their own business. Old friends are now strangers. I’ve no one to talk to and no desire to talk, for I have nothing to say except what comes out of my paint tubes and brushes. During the day, I paint for my keep. At night, I paint for myself. The picture I want is inside of me. I’m groping for it and it gives me peace and satisfaction. For me, the cup is overflowing.”

  He turned and the peace he spoke of was clearly written on his face: “What was unfortunate for you was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  “Sure,” said Ichiro, as he looked deep into his friend’s eyes to detect the fear and loneliness and bitterness that ought to have been there and saw only the placidness reflected in the soft, gentle smile.

  “I’m not crazy,” said Gary.

  “I wasn’t thinking that,” said Ichiro reassuringly.

  “It’s just that I’m finally on the right track. If that makes me crazy, I won’t argue about it.”

  “If it’s right for you, that’s all that matters I suppose.”

  Going back to the worktable to get his brush, Gary ascended the ladder and resumed lettering. “I’ve got to get this out before lunchtime,” he said.

  “I might as well run along anyway,” answered Ichiro.

  “Stay and watch, if you like. It won’t bother me.”

  “It was nice seeing you again.” He started to walk out.

  “Wait.”

  Gary jumped down off the ladder and walked up to Ichiro. “I’m sorry if I made you feel unwelcome when you came. It wasn’t that at all. I’m just forgetting how to be sociable. I think we could get along very nicely working together.”

  “Thanks, but I think my mind was pretty well made up before I came here. You can tell Morrison that I’ve decided to pass up his offer. Maybe I’ll see you around.”

  “Sure.”

  As he started out, he remembered Freddie’s having mentioned Gary’s brief period of employment at a foundry. He paused and, standing at the entrance, called back: “Gary.”

  He was beginning to climb the ladder, but stopped on the third rung and waited.

  “What happened at the foundry?”

  “Happened?”

  “Yeah. Freddie said you had a good deal there.”

  Gary smiled. “Fine fellow, that Freddie. He didn’t tell you?”

  “No.”

  Descending to ground level, Gary came close to Ichiro. “I’m glad he didn’t, seeing you have to know. He would have made it sound worse than it really was. It was a good job, a good deal as far as the money was concerned. The work was hard, of course. With overtime and all, I was taking home close to a hundred a week. There were a number of vets in the same shop, even a couple I’d known pretty well at one time. They steered clear of me. Made it plain that I wasn’t welcome. But, hell, I have to eat too. I guess they spread the word around because, pretty soon, the white guys weren’t talking to me either. Birdie knew about it too, but it didn’t seem to matter to him. Birdie’s a colored fellow. He took a liking to me. He let everybody know that anyone wanting to give me a rough time would have to deal through him. I heard he used to spar with Joe Louis some years back. I had plenty of protection. I should have left then, I guess, but I figured if I got killed accidentally by a falling sewer pipe or had my brains mangled by a crowbar, maybe it was something I had coming to me. As I’ve said, I feel like a guy that’s come back from the dead. Living on borrowed time, you know. Makes one a bit anxious, of course, but there’s a peace about it that takes away all the ordinary fears of getting hurt or dying. I kept on working, ignored but not minding it. Really, it didn’t bother me one single bit. Birdie pretty near got into a couple of fights over me, but only because it seemed to bother him for some reason. I kept telling him not to go to bat for me, that I didn’t mind not being spoken to or being called names, but he couldn’t see how that could be. He was suffering for me, really suffering. There’s still plenty of good people around, you know.”

  Ichiro nodded, thinking of Kenji and Emi and Mr. Carrick.

  “There isn’t much more to say,” continued Gary quietly. “I knew, if I stayed on, that something would happen to me. I could feel it building up in the awful quiet that kept getting bigger and meaner every day. And they sensed that I wasn’t frightened and that seemed to make it all the worse. Again, I say I should have left like a sensible individual, but I didn’t. There was no guarantee that I wouldn’t run into the same sort of thing someplace else. The way I saw the whole thing was that the worst they could do to me was to kill me and, since that didn’t make one bit of difference to me, why should I give up a good income? It was all too simple. Somebody was smart enough to figure that I’d probably show a little more concern for someone else.”

  “Birdie?”

  “Yes, the bastards. They loosened the lugs on his car. He lost a wheel going fifty miles an hour and rolled over three times.” He added, with a voice full of emotion: “Not a scratch. He got out clean.”

  “They don’t know what they’re doing.”

  “I shouldn’t say that. They know too well what they’re doing. Go for broke, you know. You’ve heard it.”

  “Sure.”

  Gary rubbed the wooden tip of the brush thoughtfully against his cheek. “This is a bad time. Bad for us, that is. The atmosphere is full of emotion. Too much of the heart and not enough of the mind. Makes bastards out of good guys. Later on, things will soften down. Reality will make them lose some of their cocksureness. They’ll find that they still can’t buy a house in Broadmoor even with a million stones in the bank. They’ll see themselves getting passed up for jobs by white fellows not quite so bright but white. They’ll take a trip up to some resort, thinking this is God’s green land of democracy for which I killed a dozen Krauts, and get kicked in the face with the unfortunate mistake about the reservation story because he’d signed the letter Ohara and the guy at the resort thought it was good old Irish O’Hara. Tough to have a name like Ohara and feel that maybe when they made up the batch of orders upstai
rs one of the Lord’s workers neglected the apostrophe and so the guy turns up in the U.S.A. a Jap instead of an Irishman. That’s beside the point, however. When they find out they’re still Japs, they’ll be too busy to be mean to us.”

  “You really think there will come a time when what we’ve done will be forgotten?”

  “I didn’t say that. They’ll forget. Some of the guys who have it real tough might even envy us secretly. Time will make them forget, but I’m not so sure that we will. Right now, I say the situation is highly emotional. They’ve gone all out to prove that their blood is as red as Jones’s or Torgerson’s or Mayo’s or what have you. They’ve just got through killing and being killed to prove it and I don’t blame them one bit for not hesitating to kill us. You and I are big, black marks on their new laundry.”

  “What if it had turned out the other way?”

  Gary smiled. “You run along home and talk to yourself about any if’s and but’s about the thing. I only know what is. That’s what we’ve got to live with.”

  Ichiro stretched out his arm and grasped Gary’s hand firmly for a moment. “I’ll think about what you’ve said. Makes sense.”

  “Good luck.”

  “Thanks.”

  * * *

  —

  He walked out of the garage and past the new building and around the workshops and up toward the gate without seeing the old man still sitting on the truck that would never run again. The fine drizzle had turned to a steady rain and, waiting for the bus, he shivered slightly and noticed that he hadn’t buttoned up his raincoat. With groping fingers, he worked the buttons into the holes as he gazed back down the hill at the shabby collection of buildings which he had just left. The rain pelted his head, worked into his hair, and dripped down the back of his neck, but he was like a man whose mind was momentarily detached from his physical being.

  He was thinking about the apostrophe, the topside comma, the period with a tail on it. It was the little scale on which hinged the fortunes of the universe. It was the slippery, bald-headed pivot on which man hung, unborn and unnamed until suddenly he found himself squirming on one side or the other. It made a difference, of course, which side he chose to fall off on but, when a fellow can’t see for the heavy clouds down below, he simply has to make up his mind in a hurry and hope for the best. Was that the erratic way of the Almighty? Ohara, O’Hara. Lock up the apostrophes for a while. We’ve got too many Irishmen.