A Girl Like You: A Novel Part 11

"It's Spanish for orchard," Dr. Chiba tells them. "It's mountain country, the Sierra Nevada."

"How lovely," Tamura says with a sigh, flashing Satomi a smile.

Having discovered in herself the ability not to think too much of home and all she has lost, Tamura departs the temporary camp with her heart lifted. Surely nothing could be worse than the terrible place they are leaving. Perhaps in this Manzanar they will have finer lodgings, a place to make tea, a table to sit around.

They might be free of the disgusting black beetles that thrive in their present quarters. "Stinky bugs," the children call them, making a game of stamping on them, their faces gleeful at the gratifying crunch, at the prize of the occasional ooze of eggs that squirm from the broken bodies like toothpaste from the tube.

Dr. Chiba and his stoic daughter are being sent to the Tule Lake camp, which he thinks might be of more geological interest than their present confinement.

"Your daughter is a girl with backbone, Mrs. Baker," he tells Tamura as they part. "You should be proud of her. She is of this century, not cast in the old mold."

"She came wrapped in her father's caul, Dr. Chiba. I cannot claim credit."

"Half her blood is yours, Mrs. Baker."

"Yes, more than one drop."

The old man spits on the ground. "Ah, yes, the one-drop profile. How they love that old southern standby."

"Don't tell me to make the best of it," Satomi says when Tamura advises as much. "If we make the best of it, we accept it. I will never accept it."

"Oh, Satomi, you are under the same sky as at home wherever you go. It is the same sun that sets and rises wherever you are."

Manzanar.

The man-made geography of Manzanar seems at first to place it firmly among the more ugly sights on earth. Tamura, reaching for optimism, points out to Satomi the beauty of the mountains in the distance, the sound of the water from the stream that margins the perimeter of the camp.

"Keep looking to the east," she says. "It is beautiful in the distance."

But even as she encourages Satomi, her own heart drops at the sight of the dusty acreage, at the ranks of squalid quarters, narrow and dark as coffins. Her disappointment is almost unbearable.

"We've been sent to h.e.l.l!" Satomi exclaims. "Some orchard, huh?"

As they stand getting their bearings, the children of the camp are already at their favorite play.

"Kill the n.a.z.is."

"Kill the j.a.ps."

Their tinny shrieks shred what's left of Satomi's courage. How can they play in this desperate place, how can they be happy? All she wants to do is sleep a dreamless sleep until the devil has had his day, until he has grown tired of tormenting them.

"d.a.m.n it, we can't live here." she drops Tamura's case to the ground and covers her face with her hands. They are both shivering with the cold, their thin jackets little protection against the glacial mountain air.

"We have no choice," Tamura says. She picks up her case and heads toward the lines to be allocated a barrack number.

Situated between Independence and Lone Pine in Inyo County, Manzanar's ground had been a fruit orchard once, pretty then, perhaps, but rutty now, dirty-looking, with clumps of sagebrush hogging the land. A few gnarled half-dead pear trees are dotted about, black as witches' hats, their branches twisted as though in torture.

"Not the sort of trees you dreamed of, Mama."

It's almost autumn in Angelina, but winter comes early and hard in mountain country. The day is colder than any they have ever experienced, the sky dark, almost black. Satomi looks around for a splash of color in the camp but finds none.

"I'm sorry, my girl," Tamura says softly, as though she is to blame for their troubles. "You don't deserve this."

"You less than me, Mama."

Retreating to the horizon, the airless rows of barracks stretch beyond their vision. They have been constructed from planks harvested from old stables in such haste that no pride could be taken in the work. Wasted with age, the wood has splintered where it has been nailed unevenly to the studs that are already working themselves free. All sixteen of the barracks in the Bakers' allotted row are green with mold and warped where the tarpaper has rotted and peeled away.

"At least we have a stove," Tamura falters, almost in tears.

"But I don't see any wood, Mama."

"The beds are better here." Tamura pokes the hard Army cotton mattress. "They won't be so p.r.i.c.kly."

At the end of each barracks block, three low buildings hunker down. The first, a laundry room, echoes with the dismal sound of dripping water. There are four deep sinks and some worn scrub boards. c.o.c.kroaches cling to the damp walls in the twilight gloom. The second building houses the foul-smelling latrines, where, with only an inch or two of s.p.a.ce between the cracked pans, Manzanar's inmates must squat cheek by jowl with their neighbors, looking straight ahead so as not to offend. Only the last stall has a part.i.tion, a part.i.tion but no door, giving rise to the view that the intention was there but foiled, they suppose, by a dearth of wood.

"That will be the worst one to have, I should think," Tamura says as they inspect the facilities.

"Why, Mother? It looks like the best to me."

"Well, I imagine that people will check it first to see if it is empty. Whoever sits on that throne will be facing a receiving line."

The smell from the latrines makes Satomi wretch. She doesn't believe Tamura when she says they will get used to it. She never wants to get used to it.

Completing the squalid triad, a bleak shower house with a rough cement floor, its walls gloopy with soap sc.u.m, seems to Satomi to have been designed more for animals than for humans.

It isn't only the old who look at those buildings with horror. The young too feel the shame of having to share with the opposite s.e.x, of being thought so little of. Of all that is hateful at Manzanar, the latrines are the things that seem to Satomi to diminish humanity the most. Never mind that fate has chosen them to be unlucky, or that they have lost their names and become government numbers: those terrible latrines speak more potently of their lost future as Americans than any of the other humiliations that are heaped on them.

Tamura and Satomi's barrack, indistinguishable from their neighbors,' is placed two from the end of their row. The door doesn't fit, so that it has to be kicked shut, and there is a crack in the back wall as wide as a man's arm.

"Look, I can put my fist through this. Your chicken coop was a palace compared to this place, Mama."

"Oh, my sweet chickens," Tamura says in a shaky voice.

With her head up, glaring at the guards, Satomi goes about the camp collecting cardboard from the empty food boxes behind the mess halls. She ducks under the barracks, gathering up splinters of wood and rusting nails from the rubbish-strewn ground.

A guard pa.s.sing her turns as she goes by and gives a low appreciative whistle. She stifles the urge to catch up with him, to spit in his face. She wants him to challenge her, to tell her collecting wood is against the rules. She wants a reason to kick his shins, to scream at him. She wants to scream herself hoa.r.s.e, have a showdown.

"You will always have that problem," Tamura says pragmatically when Satomi tells her about the guard. "It's about men, nothing to do with being in Manzanar."

Stuffing the hole as tight as she can, Satomi spends hours compressing the cardboard, fixing the wood in a rough patchwork to the thin wall with bent and rusty nails, a rock for a hammer.

Tamura can't help thinking how useful Aaron's tools would be here. It had hurt to leave them with the pale-eyed man at the bus station. Perhaps he is using them himself; Aaron's big pliers, his pack of a.s.sorted screwdrivers, the little tool that she has forgotten the name of that he said he wouldn't want to be without, it was so useful.

"You have made a good job of it," she says, admiring Satomi's work. "Nothing will get through that."

But when their first dust storm comes, dirt and grit explode through the wall, sending the cardboard flying, crumpling the wood as though it is no more than paper. The force of the storm shocks them. It's like nothing Angelina had ever thrown at them.

"Like the winds of Neptune," Tamura says in amazement. They gasp and draw in their breath, laughing with relief when it's over.

"Oh, Mama." Satomi hugs Tamura. "You are the bravest person I know," and suddenly she is crying along with the laughter.

America is punishing them, the weather is punishing them. There is no forgiveness here, nothing gentle, only Tamura to hold on to.

She comes to know that flattened-out tin cans would have worked better on the hole. They are patched on most of the barracks, tacked around with nails that have bent in the gales but somehow managed to hold on.

"I expect your father would have known that," Tamura says.

The same unspoken rules of the inmates that had applied in the relocation center apply in Manzanar. Manners are all, and everyone must feign deafness, learn to look the other way, attempt politeness.

"Best not to comment on our neighbors' conversations," Tamura advises. "Not to be too loud in our own."

The part.i.tion walls are so thin that it is impossible to have a private conversation without being overheard. The sounds and smells that the human body is subject to come rudely through their walls, sighs and groans, spitting and farting.

But whatever the difficulties, the semblance of privacy must be maintained or neighbor could not look neighbor in the face. The children of the camp are beaten if they are caught spying through the knotholes of the barrack walls. They can't stop, though, as all the barracks look the same to them. It's easy to get lost, to think that they will never find their way home.

"I was looking for my mother," they wail when caught out.

"It would have been better to have arrived in summer," Tamura says, stating the obvious as she attempts to light a few sticks of wood in their stove. "It takes time to become accustomed to the mountain weather."

They are not prepared for the icy air, for the ground set hard as a hammer. The cold thickens the blood, makes movement sluggish. Even the birds hardly sing in Manzanar. They perch rather than fly, in case their wings should freeze and they should fall frozen to the ground.

"We don't have the clothes for it," Satomi despairs. "You must use my blanket as a shawl, Mama. Stay inside, your cough is getting worse."

As the relentless storms rock them, a leftover h.o.a.rd of Navy World War I peacoats arrive and are issued to every household.

"One for everyone," they are told. "You see, America cares for you, we have your interest at heart."

The coats are large, all one size. They are too big for the children, and on the women they trail to the floor and hang over their hands. Made of felt, they sop up the rain, making them too heavy to wear on wet days. It takes a week to dry them out, and the scent of mold never leaves them.

"They're better used as blankets, I suppose," Tamura says. "They're so heavy in the wearing they make my shoulders ache anyway."

If they didn't know it already, Manzanar during their first winter confirms to them that nature is boss. The wind howls at them, sucking its breath in, shrieking it out furiously, a mad creature intent on blowing them to kingdom come. It slams at the electricity poles so that the light goes and they have to take to their beds as soon as darkness falls.

It's bad enough faced straight-on, but they prefer it that way, even when it blows hard enough to move stones as if they are nothing but bits of cinder. When it charges them from behind, the barracks shake and tilt alarmingly.

"It's about to go," is the shout, setting neighbors to help knock in the loose nails, hammer the wood back together. On such occasions something of the atmosphere of a barn-build overtakes the detainees, a barn-build where your fingers freeze and your eyes burn in the whipping wind. A barn-build with no picnic to look forward to.

Satomi, bundled up in her peacoat, which flaps unpleasantly against her calves, wanders the camp, not knowing what to do with herself. People hardly acknowledge her, they are shy to speak to the tall, angry-looking white girl. They have heard that her father died at Pearl Harbor, an American hero, it's said. So why is she incarcerated here with them? Surely she must hate the very look of them, her father's murderers. But if that's the case, then what of her mother, the pretty Mrs. Baker, as j.a.panese as any of them?

"There's bound to be trouble when you marry out of your race," they say. "Bound to be complications."

On her walks around the camp she lingers by the groups of old Issei men, those born in j.a.pan, who cl.u.s.ter together rubbing their hands and stamping their feet against the cold. They hardly know how to be either, or what to do with their days. They would like to huddle inside but, unable to tolerate the beaten look of their wives, the sense of loss in their families, they prefer to face the deathly cold. Their breath freezes on the air as they crowd around the fires they light in discarded tin cans. They speak of the war in hushed tones, wonder how it's going, how j.a.pan is faring. Perhaps they never should have left the old country, never should have sired American children. Old loyalties stir in them, they are children of the Emperor, after all. They play go, an ancient game with mysterious rules involving black and white stones. The game attracts a rapt audience of their peers, who squat on the ground watching the stones intently. One old man sketches them as they play, with a piece of charcoal on cardboard, making swift flowing strokes, stopping every so often to blow some heat into his bony fingers. Satomi likes his work, thinks him a genius of the understated.

The veins on the back of the old men's hands rise thick, dark as bark, to join the burn marks they suffer from getting too close to the red-hot cans.

At first she had watched the matches and, like the old men, she had stood too close to the braziers and burned her hands. But after a while she lost interest. The game moves too slowly to hold her attention for long, and something about the players' patience seems too accepting to her. The fight has gone out of the old men. It's worrying.

"Playing games as though everything is normal," she says to Tamura. "And they hardly seem to notice the cold even though their lips are blue."

"They notice it, all right, Satomi, but what else can they do to forget their shame? It will be better for them in summer. The air will be sweet, they won't need their fires. Just think of it, we will be able to leave our door open, to breathe outside without burning our lungs."

"Some of them might die of the cold before then."

"Perhaps that is what they hope for."

Dog Days.

Summer, when it comes, is not without its own trials. Rains flood the latrines, so that excrement runs down the alley and bubbles up beneath the barracks, where it settles in thick slimy pools. Drawn to the toxic smell, flies swarm, causing the residents in the Bakers' row of barracks to name their road "Sewer Alley."

The children make a game of the infestations, seeing how many flies they can collect. They stack them up in old gallon jugs and empty bottles, any container they can lay their hands on. One boy proudly claims to have collected two thousand of the dirty, dark-bodied things.

With the winter behind them, Sewer Alley is always crowded now with inmates who prefer to live their summer lives outside. Used now to Satomi's aloof manner, and charmed by Tamura, their neighbors greet them with bows and good-mornings.

Satomi talks sometimes with the girls of her own age in the alley, but she hasn't made a special friend of any of them, doesn't want to. Lily's fickleness has made her cautious. There's a boy named Ralph a couple of barracks away, whom she often talks with. Ralph's a freethinker with an irrepressible desire to right wrongs. She likes to listen to him, likes his knockout smile. She's more interested in his friend, though, her neighbor's son Haru, whom she can hardly look at, he's so dazzling, so bright.

Unlike her, Ralph and Haru have chosen to attend the new high school, which is being held in the open on the ground by the mess hall. Books have to be shared, pencils too, and sometimes it's just too hot to sit on the earth with the sun scalding your head till you feel as though it will split open like an overcooked squash.

"It's worth it just to learn, though," Ralph says.

Volunteers are hurrying to finish building the wood and tar-paper block intended to house the students, to keep them from the extremes of the Owens Valley seasons.

"It will be better once we are inside," Ralph says. "You should come, Satomi. Don't let them steal your education too."

"I'll think about it." She knows, though, that she won't. School holds no attraction for her. It would be like returning to childhood, and in the vein of her father she doesn't care to be told what to do.

She had thought Ralph to be like her at first, half and half, but he turned out to be a different sort of half-and-half altogether.

"I am like you," he told her. "Only I'm half Mexican, half Irish."

He doesn't even have the one required drop of j.a.panese blood to explain his presence in the camp. It had been his strong feelings of kinship and outrage that had brought him to, and keeps him, in Manzanar.

"I grew up in the Temple-Beaudry neighborhood in Los Angeles," he tells her. "We were a mixed bunch, Basques, Jews, Koreans, Negroes. It didn't matter to us, we liked who we liked."

When Ralph talks it's like being in the light, Satomi thinks. He's a special person, sixteen but a man already, not afraid to say what he thinks. He had been a high school student when the order for the j.a.panese to vacate their homes had come.

"They were my friends," he says. "They'd done nothing to deserve it. It was unfair and cruel. We were taught the Const.i.tution at school and we were proud of it. Now it seems like it was all just words."