Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [76]
‘Sir? May I help you?’
Joe held up his bag, tagged and numbered. ‘Well now, you tell me . . .’
He watched the guard’s face switch expressions with the speed of a kid’s flicker-page booklet – from benevolence to astonishment to something approaching rage.
‘Okay, buster. Get back in line with the rest.’
He got back in line, looming over the heads of those around him, blue-eyed and six feet tall. No wonder the guard had mistaken him for a person.
The Portland Assembly Center – previously the Livestock Exhibition pavilion – had been hastily converted to its new role, that of way station, a halfway house while the detention centre proper was set up elsewhere.
Climbing from coaches and buses the ‘evacuees’, as they now were, milled about, uncertain where to go next. An elderly couple came towards Joey; then bowed and instinctively side-stepped, murmuring an apology. He wanted to grab them, shake them, spell it out: they didn’t need to get out of his way or apologise. He, too, was just a number.
Waiting in yet another line, leafing through a discarded newspaper, Joey paused at the obit page, glancing over a montage of faces: the famous recently deceased. Lives of achievement or notoriety reduced to a block of newsprint. His eyes slid down the names: Bronislaw Malinowski, born Krakow, Poland 1884 . . . influential British anthropologist and the founder of Functionalism.
He patted his bag, tracing the pack of books inside, among them his copy of Malinowski’s Argonauts of the Western Pacific, the pages dog-eared and marked with coffee stains. All that travelling – Papua New Guinea, the Trobriand islands, the Solomon Sea – and then the great man shuffled off his mortal coil in Connecticut, on a stint as Visiting Professor at Yale. We’re all connected, Malinowski said. Joey Pinkerton, resident alien, was also American.
A guard tapped him sharply on the arm with his baton: ‘Keep up with the line, feller.’
So: not American, not any more, his old identity consumed in the flames of Pearl Harbor, the waves that closed over the sinking ships washing away the last traces. Now, magically transformed, he had been reborn Japanese. The enemy.
He stood for a moment, swept by a sense of unbelonging, out of reach of earth and sky and air around him, like a fish floundering out of water. Silence rang in his ears.
Gradually, as though reaching him from a long way off, a susurration of meaningless words filled the air. He became conscious of grit in his shoe, an itching between his shoulder blades, thirst. He became aware of his surroundings.
In the distance an ugly, apparently derelict building sprawled, bulky against the sunlight. Next to him, a boy’s voice:
‘I guess that shit-hole has to be it. Home from home.’
Bawled instructions and counter-instructions; shouts, whistles . . . a wall of amplified noise falling on the bewildered crowd. A few boys of Joey’s age found themselves taking charge of what was becoming an unmanageable flock. Like a docent on a school outing Joey guided lost children back to their parents, took a pregnant woman’s bag, motioned others on ahead of him. Most were dressed with formality, as though bound for a family outing; the women in hats and gloves, the children unnaturally neat. But the faces were anxious, bemused. Old ladies wept quietly, trying to remain invisible.
When they reached the vast barn, it engulfed them, a labyrinth of empty spaces, like an unfinished theatre awaiting set-dressers and cast. Brusquely moved on by armed soldiers, the evacuees trailed through the corridors: elderly men and women, young mothers, grim youths, children, looking about them apprehensively. Part of some predetermined pattern, they waited. A strong smell of animal dung hung in the air.
Flimsy boarding divided the building into cramped temporary ‘apartments’. As Joey paused at a doorway a thin, dark boy with a scar on his cheek edged in behind him.
‘Jesus. They told us not to bring mattresses, but have you checked out these babies?’
On each iron bedstead an envelope of mattress ticking was filled with prickly hay.