Deep Purple (42 page)

He closed his eyes wearily. She was reluctant to leave him but knew the sooner they were assigned a room the sooner he would be able to rest.

The female interviewer asked her about her former occupation, and Amanda learned that they were all to be assigned jobs—with the unskilled workers receiving twelve dollars a month and the professional and highly skilled qualifying for sixteen to eighteen dollars.

Since practicing law was out of the question, she was assigned to the local newspaper, the
Poston Preview
, receiving sixteen dollars a month. Her father requested a job, despite the fact he didn’t need to work, and was assigned a position as cook for twelve dollars.

Finally they had their fingerprints taken and were trooped out across an open space
and into another hall for housing allotment, photographs, and a cursory physical examination before being loaded onto a truck with their hand luggage and driven to their appointed barracks.

She and her father were assigned to Block 9, Barrack 11, Room G.
They discovered there were six rooms to a barracks and twelve barracks to a block. Every block had its own mess hall, recreation hall, and combination laundry, showers, and toilets. The two of them trod to Room G and were left to survey a room ten by twenty feet with bare boards and beams and knotholes through the walls. In that space as many as three to five people were to live indefinitely!

It was completely bare, furnished only with a ceiling light, a closet space near the door, and three army cots. But
they did have two windows. A two-inch layer of alkali dust covered the Masonite floor. They were told each room was intended for three and that they would soon be receiving a new member to their “family.”

Forty-five minutes later the third member knocked a
t the door. Amanda opened it to confront a middle-aged, stout man with broad features and a large handlebar mustache. To her he looked exactly like a sumo-tori wrestler.

He introduced himself as Sam Tsuruda, a
keibi
—an American citizen who had been educated in Japan. After he settled his luggage, he began a nonstop discourse, telling them he was a widower from Portland, Oregon, who worked as a salesman for a wholesale produce company and going on to tell how he later operated berry farms in Washington.

But
always as he talked Amanda could feel his eyes sliding over her, assessing her. She knew that the next day she would appeal for another member to be selected for their “family.”

For that night she ha
d to be content to string a blanket, sectioning off her and her father from Tsuruda's ogling eyes.

CHAPTER 55

“
A
manda, you got that column ready yet?”

She looked up at Betty Yasaki, the copy editor of the
Poston Preview
, and shook her head, sighing. “After the administration staff sees this, I may find myself looking for another job.”

The young woman smiled and pushed her rimless glasses back atop her head. “
The worst that can happen is they’ll haul you out of the barracks in the dark of the night and shove you before a firing squad. Here, let me see the column."

Amanda took a deep breath and handed it to her. For three months she had been writing the "Poston Patter,”
an innocuous column that kept the residents informed about the center. Her duty consisted mainly of collecting the suggestions and news items turned in by each of the barracks’ stringers she had delegated and combining the news into a twice-weekly gossip column.

But Thanksgiving was the following Thursday, and she had decided that a
special column was in order. Perhaps reading of Nick’s election to the state senate two weeks before spurred her on. For three days she had agonized over each word of the column. She knew the words by heart.

The precious freedom of which we Americans are
so proud is not stolen from us in the sinking of the Maine or the riddling of Pearl Harbor, for this only fires our patriotism to greater effort. Our freedom is forfeited inch by inch through such innocent words as "compromise” and "convenience,” and "it’s not that important.” Then one day we find that our freedom has evaporated. Not only in the small daily things we do but, shockingly, in the spirit of our lives.

“
I see what you mean,” Betty said. "I feel censorship hiding around the corner. You want me to take it on over to the administration offices with the rest of the columns, or do you want to appeal to the administrators in person?”

She shrugged. “
I think my appeal would make little difference.”

Surprisingly, the Poston administration offices chose to
run Amanda’s column. Thanksgiving Day she was stopped many times in the mess hall and congratulated. And that evening people living in their barracks came by to thank her for expressing their own feelings about patriotism. For actually, most of the interned families were very proud of being Americans.

Privately, Amanda often wondered how they could feel so, especially when two weeks later a family in Betty
’s barracks received word their son had been killed in action in Italy . . . while they were still behind barbed wire. A mass meeting was held the following Sunday for a memorial service to honor the Japanese-American soldier. All the faiths were represented— Buddhist, Shinto, Christian—and even some former members of the American Legion participated.

Abou
t this same time Sam Tsuruda began to make trouble for Amanda. She had been able to persuade administration that if her father and she had to share their quarters with another member, they preferred a woman. Tsuruda’s dignity was highly affronted, and he moved out his belongings in a huff. As it turned out, the young woman the administration offices assigned to their room had just married three weeks before the evacuation in April. Less than two weeks after she settled in their stall the red tape was processed, and she was happily on her way to join her husband at the Topaz relocation camp in the Utah desert.

The affair with Tsuruda was not so happy. For the first few months Amanda merely felt uncomfortable in his presence. But then, toward the end of the mo
nth, he was appointed their barracks house captain. It was the house captain’s duty to make the rounds once a day and report the roll call held every morning and evening at curfew. Amanda began to notice that Sam lingered longer in their room, supposedly checking their quarters for, as preposterous as it seemed, weapons or communications apparatus. For a while she and her father managed to ignore him.

Nick, it seemed, she could not ignore. Once Betty caught her reading an article in the Saturday Review abou
t a business deal Nick had syndicated between Howard Hughes, the government, and several minor investors. “The business coup of the year will mean a Hughes Aircraft Company site near Tucson and more jobs for Arizonians,” announced the Saturday Review.

“
Why the sudden interest in Howard Hughes?” Betty asked, reading over Amanda’s shoulder.

“
I know the gentleman,” Amanda said curtly. “Nick Godwin— not Howard Hughes.”

“
Wow!” Betty breathed. “Isn’t he the owner of that palatial estate near Tucson—the Ironhold or something like that?”

“
The Stronghold,” Amanda corrected, smiling. “Yes, I guess you might say he’s more or less the owner,” she said, repeating a phrase Nick had used at their first meeting.

Christmas Eve day she rose earlier than usual in order to get
a shower before the stampede began to the combination laundry/washroom. Like everyone else, she wore only pajamas and robe as she made her way to the washroom. The winter wind was terribly cold and strong sweeping down across the open desert, and she was in too much of a hurry to reach the warmth of the washroom to look where she was going.

She was thinking how grateful she was for her homemade
getas
, the traditional wooden clogs, because they were built high enough to clear the mud puddles that swamped the area about the washroom. Next she looked up to find Sam Tsuruda blocking the washroom door.

“
You’re out early, Miss Shima.”

She shivered as the wind whipped around her, blowing her robe high. “
No earlier than you.” She made to move around him, and his stocky body stepped between her and the doorway again. “You’re breaking curfew law,” he said, leering.

How she wanted to tear that greasy smile from his face. “
At six forty-five the curfew is lifted—ten minutes, Mr. Tsuruda. I can’t imagine administration throwing me under lock and key for taking a bath ten minutes early.”

His protuberant eyes slimed their way down the length of her body, fastening on to the way the wind-whipped robe clung to her curves. “
They wouldn't have to know about it, would they? They wouldn’t have to know about extra rations of clothing or extra portions of food.”

“
Mr. Tsuruda, I am cold! Now are you going to let me pass? I don’t intend to freeze standing here arguing with you.”

“
I can keep you warm,” he muttered. His arms went about her in a bearlike hug. Together in the semidarkness of dawn they struggled. “This is ridiculous!” she raged, helpless as his hands fumbled at her robe ties while his mouth groped across her twisting head for her lips. She tried to scratch him.

Somehow, in the jostling, he slipped in the muddy water, splashing mud over both of them. She lunged for the door, more to keep her balance than in hope of the refuge it offered. She looked down at Tsuruda, who looked so silly spraw
led face down in the mud, and burst out in laughter. He staggered to his feet. A drop of mud clung to the broad tip of his nose.

“
You dare to laugh!” he roared like a bear.

Quickly she stepped inside the washroom, leaning against the closed door as she gas
ped with laughter. By the time a birdlike old woman arrived to do her laundry on the washboards, Amanda had recovered her aplomb. The outlandish incident was over as far as she was concerned.

When she returned to her quarters, her father was still in bed,
which was unlike him. He was coughing, trying to sit up. She put one arm about his waist and the other around his shoulders and maneuvered him into a sitting position. She hurried for the cough medicine the clinic doled out and poured a teaspoon. The clinic kept saying he would improve more visibly after the winter was over.

But the cold at Poston seemed far worse than the winters in Tucson. Their rooms froze at night, and Amanda would take their extra clothing and lay it over her father. “
It’s no use.” He smiled at her as he swallowed the vile-tasting medicine. “It’s my bones that are frozen, daughter.”

“
We shall take care of that," she said, smiling. With the little she had saved from her monthly salary she had ordered a sheet-iron stove through the community cooperative. That night, Christmas Eve, her father would be warm for once!

She put him back to bed and tucked the blanket from her bed around him. "I
’m going to help decorate the mess hall for Christmas,” she told him, kissing his still-smooth cheek. "And I shall be back soon with some breakfast.”

She was in and out the rest of the day, checking on her father. By dinnertime he felt well enough to go with the rest of the evacuees to the mess hall. Christmas seemed forced as they trooped inside for the sp
ecial dinner. Some of the younger men and women concocted a drink of grape jam and lemons, but it took a great deal of imagination to pretend it was the real thing.

More than one time during the Christmas Eve celebration she caught Tsuruda
’s weasel eyes on her, lingering over the way her jeans hugged her derriere. For once she wished the grape drink was inebriating. The gloom of the camp and her father’s worsening condition combined with Tsuruda’s blighting presence depressed her more than ever.

Later that
night she lay awake, listening to the man and wife in the room next to theirs as they made love. The whispered words, the gasping pants. She thought about Bob. Should she have married him? But as the woman’s soft cry of ecstasy reached her ears, it was not the thought of Bob that burned like a fever in her thighs and the pit of her belly. Her legs twitched. She tossed on her stomach, then on her back again. She pounded the moldy pillow with her fist and flopped it over, trying hopelessly to fluff it.

“
You’re not waiting up for Santa Claus?’’ her father teased from the other side of the room.

“
Hardly.” At dawn, just as she was getting to sleep, her father began to cough again, and she gave up and rose for the day.

On New Year
’s Day two events occurred—an ominous forecast of the year to come, she thought. She was leaving for the mess hall again, this time to help in the making of
mochi
, a special kind of rice used in celebrating the traditional Japanese new year. But as she put on the shabby coat, her father began to cough. This time blood spittled the handkerchief that he tried to hide from her. Even the black stove warming the room from the corner had not seemed to help.

Reluctantly she went on to the mess hall. She barely heard Betty as the young woman ran on
about the special guy she was interested in who lived in the bachelors’ quarters. Amanda’s mind agonized over her father as she pounded her wooden mallet into the rice.

Betty, working the sticky mass into rounded cakes, said,
‘‘I have told Tim about you, and he is very much amazed that you, a female, are a lawyer.”

“
Not quite,” Amanda replied dryly. “If I had already been sworn in, you can be sure I would have challenged the whole constitutionality of the evacuation.”

Betty
’s fingers halted in shaping the cake she held. “How?”

Amanda smiled. “
No need to be impressed. It’s not that difficult. I’d file a writ of habeas corpus, contending that the War Relocation Authority has no right to detain loyal American citizens who are innocent of all the various allegations the Army used to justify our evacuation.”

But her smile faded. It was difficult
—impossible—without her Certificate of Admission to the Bar. Less than two or three months and she would have been eligible for the swearing-in and her certificate! She smashed the mallet down on the boiled rice with a satisfying thud.

She left the
mochi
-making early, anxious to get back to her father. Outside the room’s flimsy door she could hear his hacking cough. When she entered, he smiled, but she could see the strain of his illness written in the shadowy eyes and the skin that was far yellower than his natural coloring. “We’re going to get a doctor," she announced firmly, trying to hide her fright.

Her father caught her wrist. His bony fingers still held a surprising a
mount of strength in them. "Amanda, a few hours either way isn’t going to make much difference. It's New Year’s. Let the doctors celebrate. Tomorrow will be soon enough.”

At first she refused to return for the New Year
’s celebration, but her father insisted. Knowing he would only wear himself out in trying to make her go, she acceded, though she did not plan to stay long.

As it happened, she never made it to the mess hall. Since she was late leaving their quarters, everyone was already a
t the mess hall. She hurried along through the shadows, clutching her coat around her. Suddenly a gorilla-like figure loomed before her. Mistakenly, she judged it best to keep walking rather than show fear. She began to veer to the lighted portion of the dirt street. The shadowy figure lumbered across her intended path, and now she saw the face. Sam Tsuruda.

“
What do you want?” she asked, forcing a calmness to her voice her pounding heart did not feel.