When the Emperor Was Divine (5 page)

Lordsburg was a nice sunny place on a broad highland plain just north of the Mexican border. That was how his father had described it in his letters.
There are no
trees here but the sunsets are beautiful and on clear days you
can see the hills rising up in the distance. The food is fresh and
substantial and my appetite is good. Although it is still very
warm I have begun taking a cold shower every morning to better
prepare myself for the winter. Please write and tell me what you
are interested in these days. Do you still like baseball? How is
your sister? Do you have a best friend?

THE BOY STILL LIKED BASEBALL and he was very interested in outlaws. He had seen a movie about the Dalton Gang—
When the Daltons Rode
—in Recreation Hall 22
.
His sister had won second prize in a jitterbug contest at the mess hall. She wore her hair in a ponytail. She was fine. The boy did not have a best friend but he had a pet tortoise that he kept in a wooden box filled with sand right next to the barrack window. He had not given the tortoise a name but he had scratched his family's identification number into its shell with the tip of his mother's nail file. At night he covered the box with a lid and on top of the lid he placed a flat white stone so the tortoise could not escape. Sometimes, in his dreams, he could hear its claws scrabbling against the side of the box.

He did not mention the scrabbling claws to his father. He did not mention his dreams.

What he said was,
Dear Papa: It's pretty sunny here in
Utah too. The food is not so bad and we get milk every day. In
the mess hall we are collecting nails for Uncle Sam. Yesterday
my kite got stuck on the fence.

THE RULES about the fence were simple: You could not go over it, you could not go under it, you could not go around it, you could not go through it.

And if your kite got stuck on it?

That was an easy one. You let the kite go.

There were rules about language, too:
Here we say Dining Hall and not Mess Hall; Safety Council, not Internal
Police; Residents, not Evacuees; and last but not least, Mental
Climate, not Morale.

There were rules about food: No second helpings except for milk and bread.

And books: No books in Japanese.

There were rules about religion: No Emperorworshiping Shintos allowed.

IN LORDSBURG, the girl said, the sky was always blue and the fences were not so high. Only fathers lived there. At night they could see the stars. And during the day, eagles.

Our father does not worship the Emperor. She said that too.

“Does he ever think about us?” asked the boy.

“All the time.”

HIS FATHER WAS a small handsome man with delicate hands and a raised white scar on his index finger that the boy, as a young child, had loved to kiss. “Does it hurt?” he'd once asked him. “Not anymore,” his father had replied. He was extremely polite. Whenever he walked into a room he closed the door behind him softly. He was always on time. He wore beautiful suits and did not yell at waiters. He loved pistachio nuts. He believed that fruit juice was the ideal drink. He liked to doodle. He was especially fond of drawing a box and then making it into three dimensions.
I guess you could say that's my
forte.
Whenever the boy knocked on his door his father would look up and smile and put down whatever it was he was doing. “Don't be shy,” he'd say. He read the
Examiner
every morning before work and he knew the answers to everything. How small a germ was and when did fish sleep and where did Kitty McKenzie go after they took her out of her iron lung?
You don't have to worry
about Kitty McKenzie anymore. She's in a better place now.
She's up there in heaven. I heard they threw her a big party the
day she arrived.
He knew when to leave the boy's mother alone and how best to ask her for ice cream.
Don't ask her
too often and when you do, don't let her know how much you
really want it. Don't beg. Don't whine.
He knew which restaurants would serve them lunch and which would not. He knew which barbers would cut their kind of hair.
The best ones, of course.
The thing that he loved most about America, he once confided to the boy, was the glazed jelly donut.
Can't be beat.

HIS MOTHER SAID it aged you. The sun. She said it made you grow old. Every night before she went to bed she daubed cream on her face. She rationed it out as though it were butter. Or sugar. It was Pond's. She'd bought a large jar at the pharmacy the day before they had left Berkeley. “Got to make it last,” she said. But already she had almost used it all up. “I should have planned ahead,” she said. “I should have bought two.”

“Maybe three,” said the boy.

She stood in front of the mirror tracing the lines along her forehead and neck with her finger. “Is it the light,” she asked, “or are there bags under my eyes?”

“There's bags.”

She pointed to a wrinkle by her mouth. “See this?”

He nodded.

“A recent development. Your father won't know who I am.”

“I'll remind him.”

“Tell him . . .” she said, and then her voice drifted off, and she was somewhere far away, and outside a hot dry wind was blowing up from the south and across the high desert plains.

ALWAYS, HE WOULD REMEMBER the dust. It was soft and white and chalky, like talcum powder. Only the alkaline made your skin burn. It made your nose bleed. It made your eyes sting. It took your voice away. The dust got into your shoes. Your hair. Your pants. Your mouth. Your bed.

Your dreams.

It seeped under doors and around the edges of windows and through the cracks in the walls.

And all day long, it seemed, his mother was always sweeping. Once in a while she would put down her broom and look at him. “What I wouldn't give,” she'd say, “for my Electrolux.”

One evening, before he went to bed, he wrote his name in the dust across the top of the table. All through the night, while he slept, more dust blew through the walls.

By morning his name was gone.

HIS FATHER used to call him Little Guy. He called him Gum Drop, and Peanut, and Plum. “You're my absolute numero uno,” he would say to him, and whenever the boy had woken up screaming from dark scary dreams his father had come into his room and sat down on the edge of his bed and smoothed down the boy's short black hair. “Hush, Puppy,” he whispered, “it's all right. Here I am.”

AT DUSK the sky turned blood red and his sister took him out walking along the outer edge of the barracks to watch the sun go down over the mountains. “Look. Look away. Look. Look away.” That, she told him, was the proper way to look at the sun. If you stared at it straight on for too long, you'd go blind.

In the darkening red twilight they would point out to each other the things that they saw: a dog chasing a porcupine, a tiny pink seashell, the husk of a beetle, a column of fire ants marching across the sand. If they were lucky they might see the Portuguese lady strolling along the fence with her husband, Sakamoto, or the lady with the white turban—she'd lost all her hair, they'd heard, overnight on the train—or the man with the withered arm who lived in Block 7. If they were very lucky, the man with the withered arm might even raise it—the arm—and wave to them.

ONE EVENING, while they were walking, the boy reached over and grabbed the girl's arm. “What is it?” she asked him.

He tapped his wrist. “Time,” he said. “What time?”

She stopped and looked at her watch as though she had never seen it before. “It's six o'clock,” she said.

Her watch had said six o'clock for weeks. She had stopped winding it the day they had stepped off the train.

“What do you think they're doing back home?”

She looked at her watch one more time and then she stared up at the sky, as though she were thinking. “Right about now,” she said, “I bet they're having a good time.” Then she started walking again.

And in his mind he could see it: the tree-lined streets at sundown, the dark green lawns, the sidewalks, boys throwing balls in backyards, girls playing hopscotch, mothers with pink quilted mitts sliding hot casseroles out of ovens, fathers with shiny black briefcases bursting through front doors, shouting, “Honey, I'm home! Honey, I'm home!”

When he thought of the world outside it was always six o'clock. A Wednesday or a Thursday. Dinnertime across America.

IN EARLY AUTUMN the farm recruiters arrived to sign up new workers, and the War Relocation Authority allowed many of the young men and women to go out and help harvest the crops. Some of them went north to Idaho to top sugar beets. Some went to Wyoming to pick potatoes. Some went to Tent City in Provo to pick peaches and pears and at the end of the season they came back wearing brand-new Florsheim shoes. Some came back wearing the same shoes they'd left in and swore they would never go out there again. They said they'd been shot at. Spat on. Refused entrance to the local diner. The movie theater. The dry goods store. They said the signs in the windows were the same wherever they went: NO JAPS ALLOWED. Life was easier, they said, on this side of the fence.

THE SHOES WERE black Oxfords. Men's, size eight and a half, extra narrow. He took them out of his suitcase and slipped them over his hands and pressed his fingers into the smooth oval depressions left behind by his father's toes and then he closed his eyes and sniffed the tips of his fingers.

Tonight they smelled like nothing.

The week before they had still smelled of his father but tonight the smell of his father was gone.

He wiped off the leather with his sleeve and put the shoes back into the suitcase. Outside it was dark and in the barrack windows there were lights on and figures moving behind curtains. He wondered what his father was doing right then. Getting ready for bed, maybe. Washing his face. Or brushing his teeth. Did they even have toothpaste in Lordsburg? He didn't know. He'd have to write him and ask. He lay down on his cot and pulled up the blankets. He could hear his mother snoring softly in the darkness, and a lone coyote in the hills to the south, howling up at the moon. He wondered if you could see the same moon in Lordsburg, or London, or even in China, where all the men wore little black slippers. And he decided that you could, depending on the clouds.

“Same moon,” he whispered to himself, “same moon.”

ON NIGHTS when he couldn't sleep he liked to think of the house they had left behind. He could still picture his old room very clearly: the One War One World map of the world on the wall, the
Joe Palooka
comic books spilling out from under the bed, the cowboy-and-Indian curtains his mother had sewn for him the summer before last, gently billowing in the breeze. He'd look out the window and see his father down below in the yard, plucking the caterpillars one by one off the snow pea plants with his long wooden chopsticks. He'd see the stone lantern covered with moss in the garden, and the statue of the fat round Buddha with its head thrust back, laughing up at the sky. He'd see his red Schwinn with the wide balloon tires leaning against the porch and on a good day he'd see Elizabeth Morgana Roosevelt on the other side of the white picket fence, playing with her little dog in the sun.

ELIZABETH HAD LONG YELLOW HAIR and a Pekinese dog named Lotus and was not related to the president in any way. The day before they left she had come to the house and given him her lucky blue stone from the sea. It was smooth and round and hard, like a bird's egg. Or a perfect blue eye. “When you come back,” she said, “we'll go to the beach.”

He had slipped the blue stone into his pocket and taken it with him to the assembly center at the Tanforan racetrack. Every night, in the horse stalls, he had slept with it under his pillow. At the end of the summer, when they were ordered to move inland, he had brought it with him on the train to Utah. He had promised to write her a letter the minute he got off the train.

THEY HAD BEEN off the train for a while now, but he had not written her a word. Still, her letters continued to arrive in the mail. She was the only one of his friends from before who had remembered to write. She told him about the blackouts in Berkeley, and the shortages of meat and butter. She said that her father was now an Air Raid Warden, and that her mother no longer wore silk stockings. She said that Greg Myer's brother had been shot down in the Battle of the Coral Sea and there was now a gleaming gold star in the Myers' front window. She told him she'd seen some Okies from the shipyard downtown, standing in line at the movies. They really did wear cowboy boots, she said. And she sent him things. A picture of a prancing stallion she'd seen at the Navy Relief Horse Show. A book of riddles. A tulip bulb, which he had named Gloria and planted inside of an old rusty peach can he had found behind the mess hall.

He wondered if Gloria was still alive, down there, beneath all that dirt—“Tamp it down, hard,” his sister had said—and if she was, would she be able to make it to spring?

A MEMORY FROM BEFORE: his sister arriving home from school with her new jump rope trailing behind her on the sidewalk. “They let me turn the handle,” she said, “but they wouldn't let me jump.” She had cut the rope up into tiny pieces and tossed them into the ivy and sworn she would never jump rope again.

EVERY WEEK they heard new rumors.

The men and women would be put into separate camps. They would be sterilized. They would be stripped of their citizenship. They would be taken out onto the high seas and then shot. They would be sent to a desert island and left there to die. They would all be deported to Japan. They would never be allowed to leave America. They would be held hostage until every last American POW got home safely. They would be turned over to the Chinese for safekeeping right after the war.