American Woman (44 page)

Inside camp, Jim Shimada is beaten by the pro-Japan gang over whether he'll say yes or no to the loyalty questions. Jim Shimada, before this, had not been a political person. There were ways in which camp, in the beginning, had almost seemed tailor-made for the restless teenager, before his parents lost their home and their just-purchased fruit stand because they'd failed to make mortgage payments while interned and unable to work; before he'd heard his mother sobbing one night on her cot. Before the Rubicon of the loyalty oath, when camp just seemed strangely—like camp. Unsworn, as-yet-uninquisited, neither a yes/yes, no/no, yes/no, or no/yes, Jim is picked up by one of the administrative security details in the midst of his bloody beating, which he is fiercely resisting, and transferred, away from his parents, to a new camp for “incorrigible” Japanese, which has just been established at the northernmost edge of the state, in the wild Cascades.

The Camp for Incorrigibles, unlike Manzanar, has no ameliorating aspects. There are no old people or children, no family groups whatsoever. None of the “amenities” that have been slowly established at Manzanar—the weekend dances for the young people, the permission to grow vegetables, the earnest white lady librarians who come from the cities with donated books. The Camp for Incorrigibles is an actual prison, even if none of its prisoners have been confined with due process. The cellblocks are horse-stable construction, with no heat or hot water to bathe. Jim has bronchitis almost from the time he arrives to the time he leaves, fifteen months later. He is also given, and gives in return, broken bones, concussions, knife wounds, purple bruises, split skulls, and continual torrents of verbal abuse. By now the war is an abstraction to them, the reviled “Japs,” half of them just teenage boys, who eat their often spoiled food, cast-off rations from everywhere else, beneath the poised muzzles of guns of white boys their same age, sometimes from their same towns. With overseas casualties climbing, Roosevelt reverses himself on Japs in uniform, and Japanese-American boys are invited to get out of camp by enlisting in segregated battalions. This is a moot point for Jim, not even thought of, but then the policy is liberalized further, and all boys in all camps over eighteen are drafted. Jim refuses; he suggests the government give back his parents' house and fruit stand, reimburse them for the years of lost income, and let them go home, and he'll think about it. He's tried and convicted of draft evasion, and transferred to a federal prison.

Before that, though; before the draft, the refusal, the trial, the words spoken in court and transcribed and ensconced in the great vault of criminal annals; before Jim Shimada's release under President Truman, who quietly pardons all the Jap draft resisters in 1947; before Jim briefly marries a young woman who is probably already unhappy to be attracted to him, who is made more unhappy by him, who bears him a daughter and then blessedly dies; before Jim renounces his country and takes his daughter to the land of his parents, Japan, and renounces it, too, and moves back, penniless and defeated; before the daughter embarks on her own catastrophic adventure; one night at the Camp for Incorrigibles, there's a riot, and then a jailbreak. As is often the case, the cause later can't be determined, but it seems trivial; it has something to do with the dinner. Dinner is rotten again, or there isn't enough. Chaos breaks out in the kitchen and spreads through the mess; boiling water is thrown on a man. Guards come running with guns, there's a general stampede. One of the incorrigibles runs outside and steals a truck and drives off wildly; others cling to the side doors or jump in the back, catching the outstretched hands of comrades. The truck careers wildly left and right, the boys and men bang back and forth, armed guards dive out of the way and then suddenly there is a breach, the front gate has been flattened, and those who've rushed out of the mess, which is smoky with tear gas and awful with shrieks, breaking glass, firing guns, without thinking rush into the night. Jim Shimada, just eighteen years old, always thin as a whip but now skinny, hacking from bronchitis, limping from a fresh fight, his cheek purple, his lip split, his thin shirt in shreds, runs also, awkwardly, in his camp-issue sneakers, which are splitting away from their soles. Like the runners of a marathon the escapees surge out as a mass, but then thin out, slow down, break into little groups. They are suddenly silent with terror. It is a winter night, well below freezing. Jim is inured to the cold now but sees his breath clouding the air, feels the burn in his throat. Above him he might see the distant pristine Cascade moon. The next morning the news of the “jailbreak” is sensational all over the land, is particularly trumpeted in Pauline's grandfather's chain of newspapers under such headlines as
JAPS BUTCHER COOK, OVERWHELM PRISON GUARDS, ATTEMPT FURTHER MURDEROUS RAMPAGE
, but it isn't a rampage at all. They jog wordlessly down the dirt road, by the delicate light of the moon. Soon they'll be picked up by soldiers with guns, soldiers of their own army, but for now they just slowly lose steam. They would die in these mountains, they know; there is nowhere to go. Anne unfolds her map of California and traces the McCloud River's route. She finds the long-ago site of the Camp for Incorrigibles by the small lake it once sat beside. No, Jim Shimada could never have made it. Even at their closest proximity the two places are almost fifty miles apart. Fifty miles of twelve-thousand-foot peaks and untamed wilderness. Still, for the mistress ensconced at McCloud the putative threat was delicious; perhaps those hysterical headlines had all been for her. Anne still remembers the passage, but she's glad that she brought the book with her. “One night we had the awfullest scare. The Japs at the camp had a riot—who knows what they all got so angry about? There the President was, letting them live without lifting a finger on your taxpayer dollars, but they still had to make a big fuss. They broke out and we
knew
they were coming to murder us all!”

T
HAT NIGHT
in her hotel room Anne lies in bed and treats herself to a bottle of wine. She has to be careful; on some nights like tonight, strangely stirred up and sad, she's gotten in bed with a drink, because it's fun to play with Little Man that way, and let him march up and down on her chest. She usually wakes up the next day with a throbbing hangover, Little Man looking down from the headboard at her with reproach. You're not supposed to fall asleep with your parrot, lest you roll over abruptly, and crush him.

But this night she lets herself drink, and thinks about the strange contacts that make up the world. “Joe Smith”—she knows now his name is Rob Frazer—and Jenny Shimada. The other Shimada, jogging down a dirt road on a subzero night by the light of the moon. Jim Shimada's not part of the story. Pauline's grandfather fifty miles off, his excitable mistress. None of this is the story. There's no room, there's no good place to put it; in the end it's just static and lint. The two girls who thought they could make history, while all the while
it
had made
them
: that's not even the story. Although Anne thinks she sees that part clearly, sees the actors hemmed into their stage, the stock costumes they wear, the old backdrop hanging in wait.

2.

M
onths before learning that Jenny had been arrested Jim Shimada felt a heightening of sensitivity, or maybe just of irritability. He hated to call it paranoia, but it
was
paranoia. If it wasn't that, it was something worse: guilt. A habit of guilt it repulsed him to find in himself. He had felt a tinge of guiltiness his whole life after being interned; the same blameless guilt that had made him feel disgust for his parents, and for everyone else who'd been wrongly accused. Jenny once had asked him why they knew no Japanese in California. “Do you
want
to?” he'd said. “They're all sheep!” But he'd been the same way and still was; so that he sweated when he saw a policeman; and though he even filed his taxes on time, he still expected the dark suits of the FBI men to appear on his doorstep again.

He'd been working in the greenhouse, sorting through and getting rid of the bulbs—he did it every year in June; if they hadn't been bought by now, no one was going to buy them, so they'd rot, unless he planted them himself—when his eye was caught by a movement outside on the road. The movement was irregular and slow, not simply swift movement, the cars that streaked past his outpost on the two-lane highway outside town. He thought it might be a customer, idling on the shoulder on the far side of the road while awaiting a chance to turn into his lot, but the crunch of gravel beneath tires didn't come, and so he peered out between tangles of leaves. To his left, a panel of black plastic in place of a pane sucked in and out like a lung with the slow wind outside. He didn't usually peer out like a suspicious old woman at the least sound of traffic, but something stirred in him and he remembered, as if under hypnosis, the same utterly mundane occurrence a few days before. A car, seeming to idle a while on the shoulder opposite his house. When he peered out he saw, briefly, a dark nondescript sedan with two men in the front seat, just pulling away. He dropped the bulbs and strode outside, but the car was receding now into the sun.

The black plastic patch had been on the greenhouse almost precisely the length of time Jenny had been gone. On this bulb-sorting day in June 1975, the length of time was three years and three months. Three years and three months since her boyfriend had been arrested, and she had disappeared, and several shrill articles about her—local girl, only daughter of Shimada of Shimada's Nursery—had appeared in the Stockton newspaper. He had been in the house at the time, sitting inside with the drapes drawn, the phone cord yanked out of the wall, the
CLOSED
sign on the door, when he heard the explosion of glass; the margin of the great pane had held on for an infinite instant after the hole was punched in the center before falling away in a second, more delicate crash. When he had finally ventured into the greenhouse he'd seen his plants and trees rippling in the unfamiliar breeze. Great sickleshaped shards of the glass, and then the tiniest flakes, and every size in between had been everywhere. For years to come, repotting a jasmine, or rearranging his shelves, he would keep finding more. The brick had lain on the floor with a note wrapped around it: a hackneyed, almost quaint vandalism except for how much it scared him.
Jap commies go home!

For the next several months he had been under matter-of-fact surveillance, and although the brick and the surveillance weren't connected, except insofar as they were both linked to Jenny, they felt like two sides of a coin. He had suddenly acquired a new customer, a man from nowhere in the area whose gardening needs, in spite of total gardening ignorance, brought him by the greenhouse every couple of days. But Jenny's trail had been cold from the start, and soon the fraudulent gardener had stopped coming in. Jim knew of nothing that would have made her trail less cold this summer than it had been for the past thirty-nine months. He decided that the slow-moving car might as easily be his brick-thrower, still frothing after all of these years. When paranoia was a habit, indifference felt fun. He told himself not to worry about it.

A few days later, he shaved. He was fifty years old and he could still go for days without shaving. His face still only produced sparse patches of hair that never spread into a beard; he still felt, as he had at eighteen, a little foolish and theatrical spreading shaving cream onto his face. Although at that age the lack of facial hair had grieved him, and now he liked it. One less thing to do every day. In every other way the face of himself as a young man was gone. Himself at eighteen: just a kid. He remembered dancing with the girl he liked, flipping her and sliding her between his legs. Though he rarely thought of it in benign terms, Manzanar had been a girl heaven; he'd never before or since had so many girls concentrated around him. Of course he wasn't thinking of the very beginning, when no one even had solid walls. He was thinking of the brief period of time further in, when camp life had been “ameliorated” to a surreal degree. The girl's name he needed a long moment, a squinting moment as he shaved, to remember. He'd thought he might marry her then. Camp life had been a strange shot of adrenaline that way: it yanked you out of the world, removed everything, hung you up in a void but for some reason instilled this unbearable urgent desire to grow up as quickly as possible, there where parental authority had been snuffed into nothing. Where parents had been made irrelevant, and children able to govern themselves—though what he hadn't yet seen was that the disempowerment of his parents had not brought adulthood to him, but childhood to all of them.

There he was at the dance. It was the same night this particular week as a “family workshop” being held by the absurd, self-important, bespectacled “camp psychologist,” who was really only another kid like Jim but with three years of college and so most of a bachelor's degree before being interned. In the camp context the kid had translated his aborted education into professional credentials; he was not just psychologist but prophet, explicator, architect of the new and improved Japanese-born American people. Another side to the seeming pan-adulthood the camp's real panchildhood promoted; by now, they had all been good enough to have been awarded the privilege of self-amusement by their captors. In part this had meant the frantic, overheated mixers; bands competing for fans; foolish hand-painted placards for
JOE IKEDA AND HIS SWINGING ALL-STARS
; everyone getting the sheet music to the current hits by mail order, seeing no real contradiction in their fervid pursuit of the latest in American wartime fashion from the inside of a jerry-rigged American prison. And, in part, it had meant a self-serious explosion of expertise, the high-mindedness of the “psychologist” masquerading as concern about the future. Jim had very honestly not given a shit for the future. He had been very interested in the girl who could dance, and she had been interested in him, and because they had thought they were instant adults they had embarked on a program of sex and amusement and had ignored the program for self-improvement.