Butterfly's Shadow (25 page)

This was how his father had travelled when he made the journey to Washington, DC with the vets ten years before. But mood can transform an experience: Joey remembered Ben’s letters to Nancy, the picture they gave of the men; their buoyant spirits, their hopes on that outward journey, rocked by the train, retelling old army jokes, occasionally enjoying a shared slug of whiskey – an illegal activity under Prohibition – singing old songs. There had been army ditties, but also a song that Joey remembered hearing hobos singing as they tramped past his grandparents’ house years before, a song that at the time he thought was funny, with its chorus of sandwiches that grew on trees and streams of lemonade, but which he now saw differently, heartbreakingly, as a bum’s picture of a place of plenty. ‘The Big Rock Candy Mountain’ was just another way of describing a land of dreams, Cockaigne.

The men Ben rode with then were noisy, shaggy, shabbily dressed and confident; en route to confront the government, demand their rights.

Around Joey, barely visible in the boxcar gloom, his fellow
passengers swayed with the train. At the assembly Center they had been euphemistic evacuees. Now, bound for the camp, they would be prisoners. They crouched, sat or squatted neatly, elbows tucked close, trying not to embarrass their neighbours with bodily contact. Nobody lolled or sprawled; the older men attempted to protect their clothing from the filthy boxcar floor by placing scraps of paper precisely beneath buttocks, like doilies under cakes. They made no noise, and certainly no one would have thought of consuming alcohol. The mood was quiet, crushed. Not far from Joey an old man wept quietly; shamed, mortified: he had wet his pants. They had committed no crime but they were on their way to prison and they knew that none of them had any rights.

In Joey’s pocket, the cream-coloured envelope plastered with stamps had grown grubby. He drew it out now, and squinted inside, at the photograph. Cho-Cho looked grim, admonitory Half closing his eyes, he attempted to superimpose a younger, softer image on this angular woman. In the dimness he tried to imagine his mother’s mouth curving in a smile.

The sun from an early morning slant had moved high overhead, later sinking low in the sky. From time to time the train stopped, its engine dying into silence. Peering out, Joey would find they were stranded on a stretch of track in the middle of nowhere, shrivelled bushes casting no shade. Then, with a jerk and a laboured clanking, the train moved on, rocking, wheezing, sighing steam.

This time, when the train came to a halt, instead of silence they heard a clamour of voices, the barking of dogs. They had arrived at Tule Lake.

When they first heard the name, learned to pronounce it correctly:
Tulee
Lake, there had been conjecture. A lake. Would there be trees, the sound of birds, fish beneath the surface? Or
would it be an urban lake, an unknown Chicago, set about with modern blocks, noisy with streetcars?

Stiff from the journey, they climbed awkwardly from the baggage car, urged on by soldiers with rifles and bayonets. The rest emerged from the train, blinking in the sunlight. The corridors were awash with fluid and there was a stench of urine; toilets had overflowed, soaking shoes and baggage stacked in the corridors. Mothers held babies clasped in their arms. A group of unaccompanied children, dressed alike, faces blank, small hands linked, moved as one, bunched tightly together. All around, dry flatness encircled them; there was no lake to be seen. Far off, dull green patches indicated some sort of cultivation, but the green was thick with dust. They were in a place of dust; dust baked into a substance as hard as rock beneath their feet, the only landmark a low hill rising in the distance.

No streets. No streetcars, just a line of coaches waiting to suck in unwilling passengers and spew them out a few miles further away, at their desert destination.

Set in a shallow dust-bowl like a scattered house of cards stood row upon row of huts. Raw timber, tar-paper, crudely constructed, flimsy shacks. Joey recalled a long-ago walk with Nancy, looking for wild blackberries. They had come upon a cluster of huts thrown up by desperate and homeless men using whatever they could cull from the waste ground around them. The inmates had called such places Hooverville – a bitter joke at the expense of a president they held responsible for their plight. The huts before him now, geometrically placed in a grimly functional grid, formed the official equivalent of a Hooverville; a government-commissioned shanty town. But there was a fundamental difference: when the homeless had put up their scattered, patched and tattered dwellings they were free to come and go as they wished. Here, stumbling from the coaches, the new arrivals could see the campsite was ringed
by barbed wire with watchtowers at the corners. In the watchtowers were guards, with machine guns. The guns were trained on the camp itself, for the enemy lay within.

No one expected trouble on day one. The buses had disgorged them, shaky and exhausted, the walk to the distant gates was daunting. Children dragged their feet and soldiers called out mechanically, telling them to keep moving, khaki-clad sheepdogs rallying a tired flock.

Mr Takahashi felt more than tired; he felt unwell, and he stumbled, tripping on loose stones.

The day before, with his home clean and tidied, stacking dishes on shelves as though he were simply leaving on a short vacation, he had been approached by a neighbour, who had offered to buy his car.

‘I guess you won’t be needing it, where you’re going.’

The tone was amiable and Mr Takahashi was not offended by the insensitivity. After all, the statement was true. He pondered what the car might be worth; he had looked after it carefully, maintained it in immaculate condition.

His neighbour tapped a wheel thoughtfully with the toe of his shoe. ‘Tell you what: give you a dollar for it.’

For a moment Mr Takahashi thought it was a little joke; the American sense of humour. Then he saw the man was serious. A sourness rose up in his throat, a nausea. He said levelly, ‘The car is not for sale.’

‘No? Suit yourself. Be a heap of rust before you see it again.’

Long before, when Mrs Takahashi was still alive, the couple would drive out on a Sunday, heading east on the highway, then taking the back roads to a quiet fishing spot for Mr Takahashi. Though neither of them ever spoke of this, the setting was one that brought back their Tokyo childhood. In the distance Mount Hood loomed, its volcanic peak catching the sunlight. Below its slope the woods spread out, and curving below them was the river. Changing colour with
the seasons, the scene unrolled before them like a Japanese woodcut.

Now Mr Takahashi locked the door of the house and got into his car. Unhurriedly he followed the old route until he came, not to the fishing spot but to a place where the road ran alongside a high cliff overhanging the river. He got out of the car, released the brake and pushed hard – a small man, he needed all his force to get the vehicle moving. At last it inched forward, gained momentum and sped towards the edge. He watched as it flew on, beyond the rim. It seemed to hover for a moment, as though airborne, then dropped. There was a splash, a gurgling, and the car vanished beneath the dark blue water. He turned and walked back towards the road. He knew there was a filling station not far away. Somehow he would get a ride back to town.

Mr Takahashi stumbled on towards the camp gates. His abdomen throbbed, sending flashes of pain to his groin. A young man with a scarred cheek offered a helping arm and he accepted, nodding politely. They walked on in silence, slower than the rest, so that gradually they fell behind, overtaken even by a tiny, white-haired old woman holding a toddler by the hand. One of the soldiers barked an order to ‘keep going!’ Neither of the men looked up or replied, the younger simply increasing his support so that he was half carrying his companion.

They arrived at the gates and moved on through to the compound where Mr Takahashi disengaged himself and bowed briefly to his helper.

Ichir
bowed in return, carefully handing over the bag he had carried from the station.

‘You need a doctor,
senpai
.’

Mr Takahashi wandered away clutching his bag, his free hand pressed unobtrusively to his side. All around him voices filled the air – frightened children crying, parents calling out
anxiously, soldiers shouting orders. Bemused by the noise and uncertain where to go, his glasses thick with dust, Mr Takahashi had unknowingly circled back towards the barbed-wire fence and the gate. Startled by a shout, he quickened pace.

From the other side of the compound Joey heard a soldier bellowing, one among many that made up the general pandemonium. When the shouts were repeated, louder and with increasing stridency, he glanced about to locate the source.

More yells. A gunshot. A cry. Two shots in quick succession, a metallic counterpoint to the hubbub. Mr Takahashi staggered and turned. As he collapsed into the mud his face expressed bewilderment.

People came running, shouting accusations. It was a misunderstanding, the soldier yelled, almost tearfully. He thought the prisoner was trying to escape.

‘He was heading for the wire, for the gate!’

He had ordered the prisoner to stop. The man carried on walking towards the fence.

‘He shoulda stopped! I hollered loud enough!’

He stared around at the now silent crowd.

‘He coulda been trying to escape!’

A voice from the crowd: ‘He was sick! He barely made it from the station.’

Sweating and scared, the soldier called for backup: these people had landed him in trouble.

He was reprimanded. A senior officer pointed out that the men should remember not all prisoners understood English. (‘Well they friggin’ should,’ one guard muttered. ‘Bin here long enough.’)

Mr Takahashi was carried to the hospital block. His registration details were noted; a number had become a statistic: the first camp ‘incident’.

Joey surveyed the barracks: absurdly insubstantial, set in straight lines like children’s building-block dwellings. No big bad wolf would have a problem here: a huff and a puff would blow them all down without difficulty.

The huts were pitifully empty, all home comforts left behind. Theoretically, significant household goods – iceboxes, washing machines, valued furniture – were accepted for storage at the assembly centers ‘if crated and plainly marked with the name and address of the owner’. Much later Joey caught up with the reality: pianos, family heirlooms, lamps, crystal glasses, all carefully packed, crated and marked – and never seen again.

Thin sheets of plywood divided each flimsy structure into half a dozen ‘apartments’ for four, six, eight or ten occupants, defined by the number of beds they could hold. Many of the plywood walls extended only part of the way to the ceiling, lit by a single, bare light bulb hanging above the rooms.

A couple in front of Joey paused, hugging their possessions, to peer aghast through one of the doorways.

The young wife whispered a word or two, turning to her husband, appalled. Pressing fingertips to her lips in distress, she lifted a hand in a nervous movement to smooth her hair.

Joey caught the gesture, the curve of her cheek, and something fluttered at the edge of his mental vision: a woman, her head half turned, her rounded cheek, the collar of her kimono falling away from the nape of her neck, hair piled high. Fugitive, she was gone before he could study her. In his pocket a
photograph of the same woman in a dark frock, gazing directly at the camera, hands firmly in her lap.

A brief tour of inspection told Joey that one Tule Lake hut was much like another; the difference lay in the occupants. When Malinowski stepped ashore on his first Trobriand island and walked up the beach, he may not have been thinking of where he would sleep that night, but soon enough the decision would need to be made. Joey had assumed the great man occupied a wood and thatch hut, one of the village structures that encircled the yam store, the spiritual centre of the community. Until he saw a photograph of Malinowski sitting outside a tent, and readjusted his mental picture: of course the professional observer needed a tent set apart; it provided him with privacy and a chance to write up his day’s work. Joey, surrounded by strangers as foreign to him as the islanders to the anthropologist, possessed no tent; he would have no privacy here, in this ‘village’ of shoddy boxes.

The huts were built of cheap raw pine. As the wood dried, the planks had cracked and warped, pulling free of nails, the wood shrinking so that the dark knots contracted. When Joey touched one, the neat circle dropped out, leaving a hole.

Behind him a voice: ‘This could be a Peeping Tom paradise.’

Ichir
had decided Joey would make a congenial room-mate. He plucked two strangers from the crowd and manoeuvred them through the door: Kazuo. Taro. Now room-mates.