Chapter Seven Ren
Chapter Seven
Ren
Dusty ground crunches under my feet as I walk down the firebreak the morning after Violet and I went to the creek.
I’m on practical business—to find a job, keep my eyes peeled for the man from the creek—but Violet keeps slinking through my mind like a damn shape-shifter.
I’m exhausted and should be worrying about Emi or puzzling over the bizarre man from last night, but I keep getting sucker punched by memories of Violet shimmying under the fence like some kind of ballerina turned thief.
She doesn’t belong in my head, where my thoughts are like lights blinking by on the freeway, rapid, sharp, either vaguely or keenly angry.
But she’s there, emerging from my tangled thoughts, reordering everything inside my head.
I spent time with her at the creek. This is the cost.
A raging infatuation.
Which is fantastic. I grip my fox and force myself to search the passing faces for the man from the creek.
Whoever he is, he has some kind of power.
Maybe he can help Emi in some way. After all, I saved that wooden box of his on the bus.
I’m not one to hold things over people, but if it gives me any sort of leverage, I’ll play that tune like a jukebox full of newly released records.
I keep my head on a swivel as I walk, hoping he’ll appear.
But the more I search, the more I realize just how big the camp is and how many people are trapped here.
If he doesn’t appear, I’ll just have to do what I can—earn enough money so I can bribe a guard in case there’s something Emi needs.
I move briskly as the sun burns off the nighttime cold.
I’ve thrown away my sling, despite Mr. Nomura’s warnings, so I’ll look fit for work.
Construction occurs almost everywhere, the camp stretching and rising around us, delivery, supply, and military trucks roaring in and out.
A lot of it is the WRA making sure the barracks are finished and adding spaces to accommodate the school, a library, rec rooms, and supplies.
But while they build structures in militant, monotonous gray from knothole-filled planks, I notice there’s another type of construction, designed and executed solely by us.
Across the way, in a grove of cottonwoods, workers lift traditional Japanese sliding panels onto a structure to make a dojo.
Others pack down clay from the Owens River to make sporting courts so each barrack can have one for tennis, basketball, or volleyball.
Several gardens are being planted, and I go to the biggest one because I figure they’ll need the most help.
It’s busy, full of workers and different projects.
President Roosevelt wants us to grow victory gardens for the war effort, but it’s clear this garden is going be a lot more than a vegetable patch.
Saplings in buckets sit in flatbed trucks.
A large hole is dug for a pond and wood soaks in tubs so it can be bent.
More lumber forms a seven-foot arch—a bridge?
Sticks are bound together with twine to make walking path rails.
I’m not surprised. In Los Angeles, Japanese men did most of the landscaping, and now they’re using their expertise here.
All the lawns and gardens back home have probably died. One can hope.
I approach the man giving orders.
“What?” he asks me.
“I’d like to work. I can do anything.”
He stares at me blankly. What is apparently the extent of his English.
I point to myself and then to the other workers.
He grabs my hands and frowns, shaking his head at the scab on my palm.
Little does he know that I’m biting the inside of my cheek to hide the pain he’s causing my shoulder.
I pull my hands back and point to the workers and myself again.
He lets out a huffy, impatient sigh, but he finally gestures to a rusty pickax and a hardscrabble patch of earth. I bow in thanks. Snatch up the pickax.
I’m not in the best condition for the task, as the man suspected.
The ache in my shoulder turns into teeth-clenching pain when I lift the pickax and drive it into the dirt, where it catches on the underside of a large rock.
Wresting the pickax free tears open the abrasion on my palm from holding the fox too tight.
I try to adjust my grip, but it doesn’t help.
I manage to get the rock free. Relying on my left arm but not my left hand, I awkwardly carry it over to a nearby pile and dump it.
It lands with a dull thud. I’m a mess. Screwed-up left hand, screwed-up right shoulder.
Loud laughter cuts through the garden. I look up, wiping newly sprung sweat from my forehead. Four young men wearing black bandannas, hachimaki-style, saunter into the garden. Someone beyond them catches my eye. I stop in my tracks.
There he is.
It’s the man in the blue kimono, except today he’s wearing Western clothes—fancy suit pants with an undershirt, making him simultaneously look like he’s off to an important business meeting and about to take a nap.
His shadow, though, is behaving properly for once.
The man cuts away. I abandon the pickax and start after him.
One of the young men steps in front of me, so suddenly that I almost run into him. I attempt to duck around him, but he moves with me, blocking me again. The man disappears from view. I bite back a curse and stop. I can tell this jerk-off with the bandanna wants something.
“Hey, what’s your name?” Everything about him exudes energy.
He begins circling me, investigating me from every side.
I don’t answer. Last time I took up with guys like this it ended…
very badly. Han’nin. I hear the word—criminal—in Mr. Nomura’s voice.
It suddenly occurs to me that he hasn’t said it since we arrived, but it doesn’t matter.
Just the sight of these guys and their matching black bandannas and stance puts me on edge.
“Eh, J-man, maybe he’s issei,” jerk-off number two interjects. For whatever reason, this makes them burst into laughter, though all it means is first-generation Japanese immigrant, as opposed to nisei, which is second.
“You don’t understand me?” the first one—J-man?—demands. He takes a step toward me. There’s enough aggression in it to make me meet his gaze. “Fresh off the boat? Anata wa eigo o hanashimasu ka?”
“Actually,” I say tonelessly, “I don’t speak Japanese.”
“Oh, so now he deigns to talk to us.” Triumphantly, the guy crosses his arms. “What’s with the tough-guy act?”
“Tough-guy act?” I arch an eyebrow. “Isn’t that all of you? Nice bandannas.”
“Dragon! I’ve been looking for you!” Kai suddenly bounds across the garden to us. I’m happy to see him, but then I pause. He has a black bandanna tied around his forehead, too. “J-man, this is Ren, my buddy. I can vouch for him. He’s the real deal. Ren, this is James.”
James glances narrowly from Kai to me. He stares hard at me, trying to get me to crumble. Then he extends his hand.
“We can always use another,” he says. “If Kai here says you’re in, you’re in.”
“I’m good,” I say, refusing to take his hand. “Thanks, though. Never really was one for bandannas…J-man, did you say your name is?”
“Ren’s joking.” Kai nudges me hard in the ribs. “You guys go on ahead. I’ll catch up in a minute.”
At first, it looks like James isn’t going.
Then he mutters under his breath and nods to his three stooges.
They take off, laughing and joking again.
Before they leave the garden, James looks over his shoulder at me, points to his bandanna, and points at me.
A bold smile flashes across his lips as though he knows something I don’t. Then he’s gone.
“What’s up?” I ask Kai, eyeing his bandanna. A sheepish expression crosses Kai’s face. “Is that your new baseball team?”
“No.” The sheepishness disappears, replaced by the sort of defiant look you give a parent. “We’re a crew. We’re organizing.”
“Kai, you didn’t even organize your sock drawer back home.
What the hell would you be organizing here?
” Kai has always been well-liked, from being on the baseball team to being homecoming king, so I suppose it shouldn’t be a surprise that he’s found a new friend group.
But it doesn’t seem like they’re just sitting around talking about girls or drinking booze, which people have been distilling in secret.
From my take of the situation, they’re angry and want to do something about it.
“Does your dad know you’re skipping school to hang out with those guys?
What about the baseball team you wanted to start? ”
“I want to do that, too, but I just met J-man and he told me a bunch of stuff,” Kai says, defiance now firmly in place on his face.
“Don’t you realize that the wages we’re supposedly entitled to get are half what they promised?
What’s more, they’re trying to turn us against each other and keep us weak.
” As he talks, Kai becomes more animated.
He’s always been a passionate guy, and his words pour easily from him.
“They’re bribing our own and making us traitors. ”
I rub my hand across my forehead. I get it.
Kai’s grievances are probably all accurate.
But I can’t fathom a world in which Kai or anyone else here will stop anything.
That’s the thing about having been beaten by life long ago.
You get to skip the cotton-candy idealism.
You know the best thing to do is keep your head down, your mouth shut, and your hands busy.
Because at the end of the day, you don’t know who your worst enemy is—them or you.
“Just don’t get into trouble, okay?” I sigh.