“No?” He looks over at Alex, and surprises him by offering him a cigarette.
Alex holds it between his fingers, not lighting it. The car hits another bump in the road. Alex stares ahead, past the farthest reach of the headlight beams, at the gaping mouth of darkness waiting there. “I didn’t do it because of her. Not really. I did it because…” He pauses, trying to find the words. “It’s like how you had to be at school this past Friday night. Because you wanted to play football.”
“I’m the quarterback,” Frank says defensively. “The team needed me. Why wouldn’t I want to be there?”
“That’s not what I mean. Not exactly.”
Frank opens the window a crack, blows smoke out. “Then what exactly do you mean?”
Alex pauses, sorting out his thoughts. “I just wanted to feel … normal. Like a regular American teen. Not a Jap. Not a nonalien. Just a normal teen boy getting to dance with a pretty girl at a school dance. And tonight was my last chance. One last gasp before we go under.”
He turns to look at Frank. “Because I don’t know when we’ll be back here, Frankie,” he says, his voice cracking slightly. “I don’t know if we’ll ever get to be teenagers again.”
Frank doesn’t say anything. He keeps his eyes focused forward. After a moment, he flicks the cigarette butt away, and steps harder on the accelerator. Night flies past them, at them. Stars break out overheard, hard and sharp as tacks. Alex thinks of swirling eddies and frothing whitecaps and raging rivers and unknown waterfalls.
Back in the house, Alex expects a scolding from Mother. But she only stares briefly at his clothes, then offers him some leftover soup before retiring for the night. Frank turns in early, too.
Left alone downstairs, Alex stares out the window. He still hopes for a pair of headlights to appear in the driveway. For a car to pull up, Jessica Tanner to emerge in a pretty dress, her hair made up. Just because it’s curfew for you, doesn’t mean we can’t have our own little dance here, she says with a smile.
But of course that never happens. Jessica Tanner never comes. Alex doesn’t sleep a wink; he’s up all night until the dawn sun rises and it is evacuation day, and now nothing will ever happen, everything is too late.
16
MARCH 30, 1942
They wait on the front porch with their luggage neatly piled: six duffel bags fashioned out of a hardy corduroy-like material bought at Montgomery Ward. Dangling off each bag is a label inscribed with MAKI.
“So strange not to have Hero around,” Frank says.
“He’ll be fine with the Marshalls,” Mother says, her voice a bit hollow. “Where’s the truck? It’s late.”
Frank gets up, bored, brushes dirt off his pants. He peers into the mailbox out of habit, not expecting to find anything. “Oh, look,” he says, surprised, pulling out an envelope stuck to the bottom of the mailbox. It’s full of overlapping international postmarks.
Alex stands up immediately, takes the letter. It’s slightly damp, with dirt caked into a corner. “How long has it been sitting in there?”
Frank shrugs. “It was caught on something. Never saw it until just now.”
Usually, Alex tears open Charlie’s letters immediately, devouring them in a minute. But this time he stops himself. He slides the unopened letter into the inner pocket of his jacket. He’ll save it for the trip. Something to look forward to.
A large military truck, covered with a thick green canvas, finally arrives, an hour late.
Two soldiers jump out the back. They’re in full military garb, wearing hard hats, cuffed trousers, and dark-green uniforms with strapped vests. The taller of the two steps forward. “Mrs. Mayumi Maki, Mr. Francis Maki, and Mr. Alex Maki?” The soldier is holding a rifle with a fixed bayonet, sunlight glinting off it.
“Call me Frank.”
The other soldier, examining the piled luggage, glares at him. “Didn’t you read the instructions? It’s supposed to be only what you can carry.”
“And it is,” Frank says. “We can carry all of this.”
The soldier sets down his rifle and starts loading the duffel bags. Alex helps Mother up into the covered back of the truck. She sits on a wooden-slat bench while Frank helps load up. Her eyes wander over the empty porch, the locked front door, the empty backyard.
They push off, the truck kicking up dust. They pass the coop out back, the sheds with peeling paint, the old tire hanging from the tree. This, the last Alex will see of his home for a long time, the last time he’ll smell the strawberries already beginning to bloom and which the Marshalls have promised to help crop. The last time to see their farm, their home.
But it doesn’t seem real, this farewell. None of it does. In the back of his mind, he still believes he’ll be back later: later that day, later that week, later that month. It cannot be that they are being taken away. It cannot be that they can be wrenched away from their very own land and house when they have done absolutely nothing wrong. It cannot be that his motherland can be this cold-blooded, that she can be this ruthless to the bastard child he once only suspected he was but now at last knows he must be.
* * *
The army truck makes another stop along the way. The Tanaka family in a wealthier part of town. Their father—a successful businessman in the burgeoning grocery industry—was taken away months ago.
Mrs. Tanaka greets them with a tense nod, bowing as she climbs into the truck. The two Tanaka girls, twelve and ten, sit closely on either side of her. Like everyone else, the girls are wearing brown identification tags that hang off their coats like department-store price tags.
The truck heaves forward. The Tanaka girls, wearing thick overcoats, blink in synchrony. They seem bewildered. The older girl gazes out at the passing homes. She is looking for something. Or someone.
She stares at one house in particular as it slowly drifts by, a tall house with a steep, gabled roof. Scattered in the front yard are overturned bikes and crate scooters and Shirley Temple dolls and Red Ryder BB guns. Unlike the neighboring homes, all the curtains of this house are still drawn like eyelids clenched shut. As they pass, the older girl swivels her head, watching intently for any sign of movement within: a curtain drawn, a window opened, a door swung open. But nothing moves; no one comes running out. She softly bites her lower lip and when she closes her eyes, Alex sees a single tear slip out.
A few minutes before eleven, the truck slows on the south side of Eagle Harbor, stopping at the rear of a convoy of empty army trucks. A large crowd is gathered at the opposite end. More than two hundred Issei and Nisei, the young and the old, stand and sit in orderly fashion, as quiet as attendees at a funeral. Only the children make noise as they scamper around, too young to understand the enormity of the situation.
“Looks like we’re one of the last to arrive,” the soldier says. “Come on, let’s hurry.” A handful of other soldiers, identically uniformed, walk over to help out. They quickly unload the luggage.
They walk, Frank and Alex on either side of Mother. Mrs. Tanaka, clutching the hands of her girls, stumbles forward in a daze. The sunlight is muted behind a thin veil of clouds. A southerly breeze carries the rank smell of Murden Cove that comes at low tide when the mud flats and silt-covered banks are exposed.
No one speaks. Aside from the thump of boots, it’s quiet. The usually busy Eagledale Pier is otherwise deserted.
What it actually feels like—and this thought strikes Alex like a hard slap to the face—is Bainbridge Island has turned its back on them. Closed its eyes, pretending not to see. Soon this disagreeable task will be done with, and they can wash their hands of this unpleasant affair and return, humming right along, to normalcy. The island cleansed.
“Are you all right, Mother?” Frank asks. “Are we walking too fast?”
She shakes her head ambiguously, her lips thinning.
Overhead, faintly, the shriek of a heron. Or perhaps the squawk of a bald eagle.
“What did you expect?” Frank says to Alex. “A big send-off?” He stares straight
ahead. “Nope. To them, we’re already gone.”
They reach the waiting group of evacuees and drop their luggage. Everyone is dressed in their best clothing. Fedora hats and dark suits and double-breasted peacoats, knee-length coats with fur collars, dresses with crocheted collars, cashmere sweaters, hosiery, silk stockings, bobby socks, buckskin shoes, black oxfords. As if they’re heading out for a night on the town, catching a show in downtown Seattle.
It’s the dangling brown ID tag attached to their clothing that gives it away. These tags, with their names and ID numbers scrawled in, are identical to the tags on their luggage. As if they are no different from cargo to be shipped.
A quick head count is made. Minutes pass. A uniformed officer walks out with a bullhorn. Speaking with the same East Coast accent as the other soldiers, he announces that everyone has been accounted for and the time has come to board the ferry. Walk in a straight line, he instructs, two abreast and no more. Soldiers are not to aid in carrying bags. Young children may be carried. Do not stop. Do not talk. Keep walking.
They pick up their suitcases. They walk two abreast, each carrying their own suitcase. Leaving without fuss, without tears, as if they weren’t being torn from this island they had sunk deep roots into, figuratively and literally; as if they weren’t leaving behind three million pounds of strawberry; as if they weren’t leaving empty desks and chairs in their classrooms and roster spots on varsity sports teams. They walk in silence, dutifully and without protest; with a quiet dignity, they tell themselves, but this is a lie and maybe they know it, because this silence is really nothing but the shock and shame of the dispossessed.
Be the leaping frog, Alex thinks to himself. Do something. Say something. But he cannot.