Chapter Three Ren
Chapter Three
Ren
Life can change fast and it’s never for the better. It’s a thought that repeats in my head as I sit next to Mama and Emi, waiting to be loaded onto another godforsaken bus. It’s our second time getting on a bus like this, compliments of the government.
The first time was last month.
The president signed some sort of executive order, and evacuation notices appeared all over town.
You couldn’t walk six feet without running into one.
They were plastered on lampposts, bus stops, at the community centers, on church bulletin boards.
I imagined they would’ve stapled them to the damn pigeons if they could.
You couldn’t avoid the stupid things. Couldn’t escape the evacuation.
Nisei, issei, immigrant, natural-born American citizen—or in their words, alien, non-alien…
didn’t matter. You got more than one-sixteenth of Japanese in you?
Off you go. Where to? A Wartime Civil Control Administration Center. Oh, and bring:
Bedding and linens (no mattress) for each member of the family
Toilet articles for each member of the family
Extra clothing for each member of the family
Sufficient knives, forks, spoons, plates, bowls, and cups for each member of the family
Essential personal effects for each member of the family
No pets, no shipping items ahead, nothing aside from what you can carry. I stood next to Kai as Delilah was sold off cheap to some goober from Pacific Palisades. Kai was more upset over that than I’ve ever seen him over anything, including the Dodgers losing the World Series to the Yankees.
I never thought we had a lot of stuff, but turns out when you pack your life up into a fourteen-inch suitcase, you’re suddenly overflowing.
But hey, at least transportation is provided, right?
You just turn yourself in with your earthly goods stuffed into a briefcase and the United States government will slingshot you to the moon.
Only it wasn’t the moon.
Our Wartime Civil Control Administration Center, set up by the Army, was the Santa Anita Racetrack.
They wrapped it up real tight with barbed wire and packed us into stalls like a bunch of Baby Jesuses.
God knows we tried to avoid it. I submitted doctor’s note after doctor’s note about Emi being pregnant to the different agencies and government offices but didn’t get anything back other than a date for us to report.
Now we’re off onto the next stop of our grand tour.
It can’t be good if we started out in horse stalls.
What’s next? A pigpen? We don’t know because they won’t tell us, just like they wouldn’t tell us we were coming to the racetrack.
Instead, they’ve marked us up with paper tags.
Us and our suitcases. The tags spin in the breeze.
I snatch mine off and stuff it into my pocket because, God help me, I’m not a package in need of a shipping label.
Mama sees and snaps at me, but a few minutes later, she does it, too.
Our suitcases are loaded into the luggage compartment, and we are loaded into the cabin.
I help Emi up the steps. Mama follows behind us.
An aisle cuts through the center of the bus.
Rows of benches line the silvery interior.
It feels like we’ve been put in a sardine can.
I stop at one of the benches and let Mama and Emi in, then I sit.
We wait once again, scratching our flea bites, as others stream past us, filling the vacant benches.
Conversations begin, rising to mingle with the humid bus air.
“This is for our safety,” a mother says, blinking. She’s tiny, but her children, who wind over and under her, make it seem as though she has multiple limbs. A chubby baby babbles on her lap and reaches for her earring. “They are protecting us from the angry Americans—Ouch! Jace, you’re on my foot.”
“Protecting us?” Mr. Nomura interrupts. He’s the only person we know on the bus.
Everyone else in our neighborhood left early, finagling to be evacuated with other family members.
I didn’t get to say goodbye to Kai. His family was there one night and then gone the next.
We three Hamadas waited, lurking like ghosts in an apartment that used to be home, eating out of cans with disposable chopsticks since our dishes and cutlery were sold.
Mr. Nomura didn’t have anyone else, either, so he seems to be on the same schedule as us.
He’s still wearing his uniform. Bits of hay from his stall cling to the wool. “This is not protection.”
“They say we’re going to our permanent evacuation center, but I bet they are going to put us on ships and pack us off to Japan.
Which will be difficult because I don’t speak Japanese,” another woman says.
She wears a prim Sunday suit and a hat exploding with an unfortunate number of fabric flowers.
God knows how she kept her clothes pressed in this hell on earth.
Both the hat and the suit are bubble-gum pink, the happy color contrasting with the gloom slumping off the down-turned corners of her mouth.
“Or they could be taking us out to the middle of nowhere to shoot us all and be done with it.”
Next to me, Emi stiffens. I say to her, “It’s going to be okay. I’m sure wherever we’re headed is a lot better than here.”
“Who will look for us? Who will know what’s happened to us?” The pink-suited woman’s voice rises dramatically now that she has a captive audience. One of the children buries his head in the mother’s lap, but the other one makes a finger gun and pretends to shoot his siblings.
“What do you suggest?” Mr. Nomura snaps. “Anyone who resists gets arrested. So whether they want you dead here or there, it’ll happen. It isn’t our country anymore. Why, a common criminal has more rights than us.”
At the word criminal, his gaze slices to me. I try not to wince. Why couldn’t Kai be here and Mr. Nomura sent somewhere else? If anything proves I’m life’s punching bag, it’s this. We’re getting shuffled about like a deck of cards, yet he’s stuck to me like gum on a shoe.
“They’ll just line us up and bury us in a shallow grave,” the woman continues, as though Mr. Nomura didn’t say anything.
I turn my face to the window, even though I have to look across Mama and Emi.
Outside, a skirmish catches my attention.
A man is being dragged toward the bus, pulled along by two guards.
He has long black hair and wears a dark gray haori over loose, wide-leg tan pants.
Everyone on the bus is in Western clothing—we’ve all been trying to look as American as possible, like we’re from the cast of A Family Affair.
The man’s head is down, so it’s impossible to see his face, but he clutches a wood box.
Suddenly, my fox comes alive, pulsing as though I’ve touched it. It beats fast. For the first time, it isn’t in tempo with my heart.
“Poor old man,” Emi murmurs next to me. I look sharply at her.
“Old man?”
“That’s no way to treat an elder,” she says. I blink several times. It’s hard to see the guy’s face, but he’s definitely not an old man. Am I losing it? I put a hand to my head. Maybe it’s exhaustion. I haven’t had a good night’s sleep since we left home.
Together, the guards march the man toward our bus. With a swoosh, the bus door swings open and they thrust him on board. At the last moment, the box slips through his fingers. It thuds down the steps, landing on the pavement.
The man was hanging like a rag doll between the men, but at this, he turns, reaching for it.
Doesn’t say a single word while the guards cuss like longshoremen and shout.
More guards gather, forcing him forward.
The woman in pink cries out, and when I see the flash of a guard’s baton arcing through the air, I know why.
We cringe at the sickening sound of stick meeting skull.
Instantly, the man goes limp. The children, their eyes wide with terror, throw their arms around their mother, and she tries to hold them all.
Together, the guards lift the man onto the bus and drag him down the aisle.
“Move,” one of them barks to a couple sitting in the last bench. Quickly, they crowd into one of the other benches. The guards cast the man down before disembarking, leaving frightened silence in their wake. It catches us in its drift.
A woman in a blue dress rises.
“I’m a nurse. I should check on him. He’s elderly and needs care.”
Elderly. There it is again. Does everyone see him as an old man while I see him as…
what? What the hell is going on? I blink furiously and realize my fox has gone quiet.
Deathly quiet, in a way it never has before.
I touch it underneath my shirt, trying to wake it up.
Nothing. It’s the only thing outside myself confirming there’s something different about this guy.
Or maybe I just don’t want to face the fact that I’m cracking up big-time.
“Better not,” the woman in pink instantly hisses. “You’ll get us in trouble. He tried to escape. And maybe that’s the least of it. For all we know, he’s a maniac and he’ll attack us when he wakes up.”
“So, which is it?” Mr. Nomura snaps at her. “Was he trying to escape or is he a maniac?”
She casts a glare at Mr. Nomura and says evenly, “Both.”
Cautiously, the nurse slips into the aisle. She moves to the back of the bus, staying low so no one outside can see she’s moving. After a minute, Mr. Nomura stands.
“I tended to a man or two during the war,” he announces to no one in particular. Together, he and the nurse kneel next to the man and begin a whispered consult.
Everyone’s attention is fixed on the trio, but I look back out the window. There. The man’s box. It lies on its side, a rectangle of dark, polished wood. I can make out a single kanji carved into the top, a lone mark in the glossy finish.