Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [75]
‘Listen, kid,’ Louis said, and then seemed to have no further words available. He cleared his throat, squeezed Joey’s shoulder, hugged him, punched his arm, gestures standing in for language that escaped him.
Nancy straightened his jacket and slipped a scarf round his neck.
Joey said, protesting, ‘Hey, I’ll boil!’
‘It might get cooler.’
She held him tightly, her face buried in his jacket, dry-eyed.
‘I’ll write every day. You write when you can.’ She shook her head. ‘What am I saying? You’ll be home before the mail gets delivered. Once they realise.’
Once they realise what? The sentence was never finished. Once they realise he’s not ‘really’ Japanese?
Walking down the street he felt Nancy watching him from the porch, arms crossed, clutching herself, holding on. At the corner he turned and waved and saw her step back into the house, closing the door quickly behind her.
He hefted Louis’s travel bag, shifting it from left to right hand. It was a strong bag, serviceable, but heavy even when empty. Joey could have taken something lighter, but to reject the bag would have hurt Louis’s feelings and today was hard enough already. Not for him to twist the knife.
The first time he had presented his papers, the official at the desk checked the details against a list before him.
‘Joseph T. Pinkerton, right?’ A routine glance up, down to the papers, up again. A double take.
‘So . . . Okaaay. Let’s check this out . . .’
How many lines had he waited in, since then? How many blurred-ink imprimaturs had been stamped on how many forms, how much checking of documents, instructions and counter-instructions followed . . . how many moments of perplexity?
Here lay confusion: all-American Joe Pinkerton, but born in Nagasaki. Son of an Oregon hero, a gold-medal swimmer, but maternal parent Japanese – and what was her name again, the mother? What kind of a name was that?
Joey grew accustomed to the discomfiture, the mistrust and the hostility engendered by the mismatch of his identity and appearance.
He was aware that he stood out as disconcertingly as if a wolf had been rounded up with the sheep. They were a herd, docile; they were slight, he was big-boned. They were dark, he was fair. Their murmured exchanges lapped around him in a language he had no knowledge of. They glanced up at him, anxious, puzzled. He looked them over with a dispassionate, assessing glance, this tired, huddled, relatively small mass. He had learned the categories: the Issei, who came over early and were never permitted citizenship; the Nisei, the second generation, born and raised American. Citizens. How fragile the word now seemed. And where did he fit into this categorisation?
There was an odd smell in these stark rooms, acrid, almost chemical. This too Joey learned to categorise: he came to recognise it as the smell of the sweat that breaks out on the skin of frightened people.
Registration had been the first shock, his realisation that here the human element did not exist; documentation ruled. There were no discussions, no nuances. A piece of paper, a signature, a stamp. Sheep and goats. Blessed are the pure in blood for they shall inherit the earth. The Japanese mother, the birthplace, these were the facts that categorised him. Duly identified, registered and above all documented, Joseph Theodore Pinkerton was set on a path without deviation. All that remained was to pack his bag and report back: a number, a cypher, tagged with a shipping label and dumped in a room to await transportation. Around him, other numbers, registered and tagged, waited in lines – men, women, children; ignorant of what was in store for them, gradually filling a vast hangar which had once been something else – possibly a postal depot or a storehouse, but was now the Portland Civil Control Station.
Walking into the control station he experienced his first encounter with the new order; a moment that somehow encapsulated all that was to follow.
As he made his way into the reception area, a guard lounging by the doorway caught his eye and beckoned him over amiably.