Butterfly's Shadow - Lee Langley [84]
Deracinated, he felt at home nowhere – and certainly not in a tar-paper hut in a dust bowl. Most evenings he lay on the narrow bed, reading, tilting the book to catch the weak light of the overhead bulb, dwelling on exchange systems, solicitary gifts, wave-pattern navigation, magic necklaces, the sexual mores of remote peoples; the role of a father. It was difficult for tribal reasons for a father to give a gift to his son; what he passed on were intangibles: magic and dance. Assets that no one could take away. What would Ben have passed on to him, Joey pondered, had he survived? What precious, intangible paternal gifts would he now be cherishing?
What would those ethnographers have made of this community, this closed society? Almost certainly they would have integrated, tried to learn the language, investigated ceremonials and social customs. Joey could not do the same – or rather, he chose not to. He gazed into the darkness that lay behind his eyelids, and absented himself. The people he observed were no more than figures in a landscape. He himself, sealed in his bell jar, could not have been heard even had he called for help. And again that emptiness loomed, a chill place where warmth and comfort should have been. A shoulder to cry on, though Joey never cried.
He spent daylight hours in the open air, pacing the camp perimeter, gazing out over the flat land to the turtle-shaped hump of hill on the horizon. He was edgily aware of the watchtower looming above the barbed wire, the machine gun swinging lazily as the guard moved – but there was little personal risk that he’d get shot: blond haired, in his open-neck shirt he could have been an off-duty guard. Between pacing he made drawings: birds in flight or feeding; insects creating supply routes . . . When some of the women constructed a chicken-run in the compound, he sketched the strutting fowls, colouring his drawings with paint from the camp schoolroom.
Ichir studied Joey’s rough drawing of an aggressive rooster, nodding approvingly: ‘Hey man, you’re an artist.’
‘No. I lack originality.’
‘That’s Yankee thinking. The old Japanese artists were never expected to be original; they’d have got some funny looks if they tried originality. Follow the masters, was the rule. That’s why I’d be good at the superheroes. Keep faith with the masters!’
‘You need to come out of your shell,’ Taro said as they lined up for a shower. ‘This not talking to people, it’s no help.’
‘I’m not asking for help, I just want to be left alone.’
‘There’s a dance tonight,’ Ichir called from the open concrete shower stall. ‘You should come.’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘You’ll be sorry.’ He towelled himself dry and slipped on his shirt. ‘You wouldn’t want to miss the Café International Cabaret, featuring . . .’ He reached into a pocket, read aloud from a flimsy leaflet, “gaily attired Tri-State girls”. Who could ask for anything more? Tanoshimi yo! Let’s party!’
Taro called over: ‘Ever dated a Japanese girl, Joey?’
‘Never met one.’
Kazuo said thoughtfully, ‘I always meant to cross that fence, the word was, American girls are easy –’
‘Easy like a porcupine!’ Ichir laughed ruefully.
‘– but I never dated an American girl. I never knew how to get through to them. I guess I just don’t understand them.’
Joey said. ‘It’s not easy.’
Girls were a foreign country with their own customs and prohibitions. There were girls in that now remote outside world who gave signals Joey thought he understood, that encouraged border-crossing and exploration. Then, at a certain point, they threw up barriers, became as protective as aboriginal natives fending off unwelcome visitors to sacred sites.
American girls, blondes with June Allyson hairbands or Betty Grable sweaters, college classmates from homes no different from his own, were tricky enough. These Nisei, born in the USA, inhabited a terra incognita criss-crossed with cultural fault lines that could crack open beneath his feet. The old people believed in the old