“Well, well, little Lucy Takeda,” Reg said, nodding to the family Lucy was sitting with. They blanched and slid away from her. “Good to see you up and about, looking fit as a fiddle this morning.”
Lucy wondered what response he was looking for, what words would make him go away.
“And your mother? I trust she is well also?”
“Yes,” Lucy said quickly, though in fact Miyako had resumed her late-night outings two or three times a week, and sometimes didn’t come home until Lucy was already asleep. On those nights Lucy occasionally woke to find her mother kneeling on the floor next to her bed, her head resting on the edge of the mattress. Miyako was losing weight again, and she sometimes clutched herself around the middle as though she was in pain. She wore long sleeves and high collars, but even so, Lucy had spotted bruises on her skin.
“But—” he made a show of looking around the room, assuming an exaggerated expression of concern “—I don’t see her here. She isn’t forgetting to eat, is she?”
“No...sir.” Lucy hated the papery tone of her voice, the tremor in her hands that betrayed her fear.
“Because you gotta eat, keep your strength up, times like these.” Reg squared his shoulders, his broad chest and powerful arms filling out his uniform shirt and tapering to the trim waist and muscular legs. Reg was rumored to have a punching bag and weights in his apartment rather than living room furniture; this only added to his allure among the young women in camp.
Lucy nodded faintly, unable to think of a response.
“You know...it’s been awfully nice to see her around again. The boys sure missed her. Your mother’s a class act.” Reg made a gun from his thumb and forefinger and pretended to shoot Lucy with it, making a clicking sound in his throat. He winked and finally turned and walked away, completing his tour of the mess hall before leaving to haunt other corners of the camp.
The couple she was sitting with exchanged a worried barrage of words in a mixture of Japanese and English, but Lucy didn’t listen. Her appetite was gone. She carefully wrapped two slices of bread in a handkerchief and headed back to her room, knowing she’d have to work hard not to let her face give her fears away.
16
The riots were followed by a relentless wave of cold. The new year came without incident, people cowering in their rooms under whatever warm clothes and blankets they were able to find. Donations from churches and deliveries of surplus clothing from the first war supplemented the meager belongings the internees had brought from home, and the oil heaters burned constantly, but it seemed as though no one was ever warm enough. There was only one heater per barrack, a barrel-shaped thing that could not produce enough heat for the entire building.
The business of the camp continued unabated. Deputy Chief Griswold promoted one of the full-time couriers to clerical assistant and asked Lucy to help out again a few days a week after school. If Mrs. Kadonada was aware of the distance between Lucy and her son, she was too discreet to mention it, but it seemed that she was especially solicitous as she gave Lucy stacks of letters and mimeographs to deliver. She asked after Miyako with no apparent irony, and for that kindness, Lucy was grateful. She wondered if Mrs. Kadonada understood that her errands in the frozen camp were preferable to afternoons alone with her thoughts in a warm room.
One Friday afternoon, Mrs. Kadonada gave Lucy an envelope stamped CONFIDENTIAL and addressed to Reginald Forrest, Property Manager, Warehouse One. Ordinarily such a delivery would only be handled by an adult courier; exceptions had to be approved by Deputy Chief Griswold. But the full-time courier was ill, and the deputy chief had left early to visit his fiancée in Sacramento for the weekend, so Mrs. Kadonada gave the envelope to Lucy and told her that, after she delivered it, she could consider herself finished for the day.
Lucy tried to tamp down her apprehension as she walked through camp. Since the day after the riot, she’d had no direct contact with Reg or Van Dorn, and she’d glimpsed George Rickenbocker only once, at the wheel of a truck going too fast down Avenue C. Over the holidays, Reg had agreed to guest-direct one of the holiday programs. His photo was featured in the
Manzanar Free Press,
playing Santa for the orphans in the Children’s Village, handing out gifts sent by church groups.
Lucy knew that it was impossible that Reg had changed, that a cruel and dangerous side of him hid underneath the glib public exterior. But this was only a simple delivery. She would find Reg, get his signature, thank him and leave; and that would be the end of it. This was what she told herself over and over as she walked, the cold wind reaching under her dress and through her woolen tights.
But when she arrived at the warehouse, it was locked. Lucy’s heart sank. Many of the offices closed early on Fridays, especially when bad weather threatened. She couldn’t return to the office with the letter; Mrs. Kadonada had said it was imperative that it be delivered today. She had to find Reg.
She would start with his apartment. Lucy walked past the garages, through the decorative gardens and benches at the edge of staff housing. Trying to ignore her skittering apprehension, she rounded the outside row of barracks. When she arrived at his door, marked with a metal plate stamped with his name, she knocked before she could lose her nerve.
There was no response. As she tried to decide what to do next, a young man in an MP uniform came around the corner, his gait uneven. When he saw Lucy, he gave her a sloppy salute.
“Well, hey there, girlie.”
“I am looking for Mr. Reginald Forrest to deliver this letter,” Lucy blurted, holding up the envelope.
“That’s a funny coincidence,” the man said, his words running into each other. “I was just with him. Check in the motor pool office.” He began fumbling at a door with a key, muttering under his breath. He was drunk, Lucy realized with growing unease. But she’d come this far; she had to try.
The front door of the motor pool office was locked, but Lucy followed the sounds of laughter around the back of the building. A slant-roofed addition housed the desks where the mechanics processed WRA paperwork and requisitions. At this hour, it should have been empty, but light leaked from the slats in the window blinds.
Lucy knocked on the door. Inside, voices rose in shouting and laughter, and no one answered. A tumbleweed rolled nearby, swept in by the winds, and Lucy felt the cold seep into her ears. As she stood there deliberating her next move, the wooden door pitched open and a man stumbled out.
“Oh Jesus, girl, where’d you come from?” he said. He had one hand on his crotch, which made him look both vulnerable and menacing. Lucy didn’t recognize him; he was wearing civilian clothes, stocky, and ruddy-faced.
“I have a letter for Mr. Forrest,” Lucy said in a high-pitched, formal voice, averting her eyes from his hand fumbling at his belt. “From Mr. Graves of the Minidoka Relocation Center.” This she knew only because she had read the typed return address, but saying it made her feel more official. The door was on a spring, but before it closed she glimpsed two Japanese girls inside. They wore bright lipstick and tight sweaters and leaned against each other on a sofa, clutching drinks and giggling. One looked vaguely familiar, a girl who played the ukulele in the variety shows and lived far on the other side of camp by the hospital, Block Twenty-eight or Twenty-nine.
“Well, have you ever heard of knocking?” the man said. “Reg isn’t here, haven’t seen him in a while. Maybe you ought to just take that letter back where you got it. In or out, make up your mind, I’ve got to drain the pipes so I’m going to recommend you choose in.”
He staggered along the side of the building, still fumbling with his pants, and Lucy realized that he meant to relieve himself against the wall. There was nowhere to go to escape watching him urinate, so she caught the door just before it clicked shut and slipped into the room, jamming the letter into her coat pocket.
“Well, lookee what the cat dragged in,” a man said from a chair tipped back against the wall. Lucy smelled burning wax and the unpleasant aroma she remembered from her father’s glass of whiskey, and the faint scent of vomit, and realized everyone here was drunk. Off to the side was a table laden with liquor bottles and a bowl of pistachios; broken shells littered the table and the floor. “All the way from across town.”
Lucy took a second look at the man, too massive for the chair in which he sat, and belatedly recognized Deputy Assistant Director Van Dorn. For some reason the notion made her blush, even though her overwhelming emotion was fear—fear of being found out, fear of being trapped here with these older girls, fear of things she couldn’t name. She turned around, thinking she might retreat before anyone else noticed she was there, but one of the young men had stepped between her and the door.
“Not so fast,” said a tall man standing at the table, pouring from a bottle into a short, squat glass held by a slight Japanese girl. The girl had her hand on his arm, her face tilted up to his. She stood with one foot, clad in a frayed silk pump that had seen better days, insinuated between his, her thighs rubbing against his legs.
The man pushed the girl away as though she were a low-hanging branch, and Lucy saw that it was George Rickenbocker. She would have known it was the man she’d seen with her mother in the storage room from his expression alone: he had the handsome, broad face and slicked-back dark hair of the characters in superhero comics—Superman or The Flash—but his smile was both amused and hungry, his eyes narrowed and appraising. “You’re Miyako’s girl, aren’t you? Fellas, look here, we got another little apple didn’t fall far from her mama’s tree.”
The girl plucked at his sleeve and said something breathy and high-pitched, and he batted her hand away. “Go on home,” he snapped, not bothering to look at her.
“But I don’t—” She got out only a few syllables before Rickenbocker seized her wrist and twisted it. She shrieked when he yanked it up behind her back, and he gave her a little shove toward the door when he let her go.
“I
said
go on home.” His voice was deadly cold. “Get your coat, now, and go.”
One of the girls on the couch leaned forward, her elbows on her knees, which were parted in a way that Lucy knew would horrify her mother. She whispered something to her friend, who closed her eyes and laughed. The slight girl stared at them beseechingly, but they refused to look at her. One of the MPs wordlessly fetched a green cloth coat from a pile on the coatrack and tossed it to her. She fumbled and it fell on the floor, and she had to bend down to pick it up. When she stood, there were tears in her eyes, but no one—the man, the girls, the MP—looked at her. Only Lucy watched her struggle to get her arms in the sleeves, and when their eyes met, the girl’s face contorted into an expression of fury. Then she was gone, the din of the party resuming before the door had closed all the way.
“Do you know who I am, little girl?” Rickenbocker demanded. Lucy looked more closely, at his thick, dark hair tinged with silver, the hard line of his jaw. “Your mother and I are good friends. George Rickenbocker, at your service.”
Lucy could manage only a small nod. The frayed edges of her composure ripped the rest of the way, and pure fear rushed in. This was the man who owned her mother’s evenings, who bruised her thin arms and could crush both her hands in one of his, who ran his hard, bristly jaw along her vulnerable, pale neck.
Rickenbocker went back to pouring his drink. He set down the glass and picked up a second, poured an inch into that one. He lifted the glass to his nose and sniffed, swirling the golden liquid inside. Van Dorn was watching, along with the others. Two, three, four of them, young men who all looked alike in their uniforms. Their faces were flushed and sweaty, and their shirts pulled loose from their pants. They watched and smiled, and she felt her face burn.
“I have to go,” she stammered. “I have to...”
But she couldn’t finish her sentence. The man who stood between her and the door folded his arms over his chest. She took a step toward him, but he didn’t budge. She stepped to the right, and he did too.
He was not going to allow her to pass. She was trapped.
“Sit down here,” Rickenbocker said, pulling an empty chair away from the wall, his voice unctuous, slippery. “Have a little drink.”
He handed her the glass, and when no alternative revealed itself to her, no ally to help her escape, Lucy sat with her legs pressed tightly together.
“I don’t think I—” she whispered, willing Rickenbocker to realize that she was just a child, of no significance or value to him.
“Drink.”
She put the glass to her lips, hands shaking, and took a tentative sip.
She expected the drink to taste bad, but she wasn’t prepared for the burn, the way it gouged at her throat. She almost gagged, but forced herself to close her throat around the fire and lick the residue from her lips before she set the glass down on the table. The taste seemed to coat her mouth on the inside and burn her tongue. She wished for ice, for a slice of the soft bread they served in the dining hall, something bland, something to wash the burn away.
“You’re just the spitting image of your mother, aren’t you,” Rickenbocker mused. He regarded her like a man at a museum contemplating an exhibit. “I can’t get over it. You see this, Van Dorn?”
Van Dorn nodded without looking. His attention had swung back to the girls. A game of cards was laid out on the table; one of the girls rolled four dice and shrieked at the result, and Van Dorn clamped a meaty hand on her thigh, pushing her skirt higher. Her giggle turned to a high-pitched trill, half excitement, half panic.
Rickenbocker paid no mind. He stared at Lucy, his eyes bright and glowing, a cigarette stuck to his lower lip as though it had been glued there. “Hard to believe. She must have had you when she was fifteen years old.”
Lucy forced herself to return his gaze. She cataloged each of his features, from the faint scar that bisected one sandy eyebrow to the slight bump on one side of his nose to his squarish, large teeth.