Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [102]
She plucked the page from the typewriter and laid it with others in the metal box on the desk.
She could see the waterfront, and the road that curved up the hill, going out of sight, then reappearing. Her hands rested in her lap, the wrists thin as a young girl’s but at thirty-eight she accepted the finely wrinkled skin, the dark patches on the pale surface, the knuckles large against bony fingers. Her rings had gone long ago; how little a diamond fetches when the market tilts the wrong way. Now her hands were bare of jewels, as they were when she was young. Young. She touched the faint scar on her throat.
She recalled standing by this window as a sailor in a white uniform walked up the hill to the house. Where once she watched, waiting for the unknown in fear, now she dared to dream of a future, unknown; a hope deferred for a lifetime. When the war was over, perhaps, whoever won, the victors and the humbled would come to an arrangement, they always did, and maybe another Pinkerton would find his way to her. She would place the metal box of letters on the low table where once a spinning top had flashed its red and yellow rings, and leave him to read his way through her life.
47
Living through hell was not the worst part; that came later, with recollection. Nobody warned him about the persistence of memory as battle injury.
At the beginning Joey thought of himself as a civilian in uniform. He felt he was an imperfect specimen but somehow doubted that the concept of wabi-sabi could be stretched to encompass a flawed warrior.
Gradually he adjusted, was transformed, became a hybrid organism: the soldier, a science fiction creature, part man, part machine. The machine obeyed orders, killed without feeling, fought on even when damaged. The man felt fear, remorse, pain. The man bled. Often he died. But before all that he travelled, crossing the ocean with his regiment, packed tight in an oversized can, from one continent to another.
Like new cars off a conveyor belt, men in uniform seem to resemble one another. No longer Tom, Dick or Harry, they are now part of a regiment; they have a rank, a number. The consequence, intended or not, is loss of personal identity, loss of difference. The helmet, the khaki combat gear, the backpack, the boots, blur physical differences to create a unifying portrait: GI Joe. But this particular batch of soldiers had more in common than the uniform. At embarkation a tired sergeant waved them on board without lifting eyes from clipboard: ‘Jap battalion, right?’
Joe had a fleeting urge to disagree; make irritating, hair-splitting, city-boy corrections: wrong, we’re Nisei, okay, sarge? He could guess the response: ‘What the fuck is that? Some kinda fancy name for Nips?’ Anyway, the sergeant was right: non-white, segregated, they were ‘the Jap battalion’. The melding had taken time. He had seen mainlanders and Hawaiians, thrust together, bristle with suspicions: the Hawaiians smarting at perceived snubs from the assimilated mainlanders; the reserved, urban mainlanders resentful of the boisterous islanders who spoke their own pidgin American, laughed a lot, sang songs, played the ukulele and defiantly donned their old grass skirts for fun. To the mainlanders, under the circumstances, fun was not an option.
The battalion filed on board, trim, compact. Many wore glasses. His chosen brothers, although he was the only one who stood out, once again the square peg. Among the others, a familiar figure from Tule Lake: a boy Joe had often seen hunched in a corner, pencil in hand, reading and annotating, lost to his surroundings.
‘It’s . . . Otishi, right? You always had your head in a book.’
‘Yeah. I’d planned to finish my Ph.D.’
How do you make God laugh . . .
Otishi glanced around. ‘I guess we’ve been promoted. From Yellow Peril to soldiers in the service of Uncle Sam: Japs, but our Japs.’
There were moments at sea, leaning on the rail of the boat, watching dark water foam into a wake of moonlit lace, when Joe recalled another boat