When the elevator let him off on the twentieth floor, Childan was already bowing mentally, preparing himself for the encounter in Mr. Tagomi’s offices.
THREE
At sunset, glancing up, Juliana Frink saw the dot of light in the sky shoot in an arc, disappear to the west. One of those Nazi rocket ships, she said to herself. Flying to the Coast. Full of big shots. And here I am down below. She waved, although the rocket ship of course had already gone.
Shadows advancing from the Rockies. Blue peaks turning to night. A flock of slow birds, migratory, made their way parallel with the mountains. Here and there a car turned its headlights on; she saw the twin dots along the highway. Lights, too, of a gas station. Houses.
For months now she had been living here in Canon City, Colorado. She was a judo instructor.
Her workday had ended and she was preparing to take a shower. She felt tired. All the showers were in use, by customers of Ray’s Gym, so she had been standing, waiting outdoors in the coolness, enjoying the smell of mountain air, the quiet. All she heard now was the faint murmur from the hamburger stand down the road by the highway’s edge. Two huge diesel trucks had parked, and the drivers, in the gloom, could be seen moving about, putting on their leather jackets before entering the hamburger stand.
She thought: Didn’t Diesel throw himself out the window of his stateroom? Commit suicide by drowning himself on an ocean voyage? Maybe I ought to do that. But here there was no ocean. But there is always a way. Like in Shakespeare. A pin stuck through one’s shirt front, and good-bye Frink. The girl who need not fear marauding homeless from the desert. Walks upright in consciousness of many pinched-nerve possibilities in grizzled salivating adversary. Death instead by, say, sniffing car exhaust in highway town, perhaps through long hollow straw.
Learned that, she thought, from Japanese. Imbibed placid attitude toward mortality, along with money-making judo. How to kill, how to die. Yang and yin. But that’s behind, now; this is Protestant land.
It was a good thing to see the Nazi rockets go by overhead and not stop, not take any interest of any sort in Canon City, Colorado. Nor in Utah or Wyoming or the eastern part of Nevada, none of the open empty desert states or pasture states. We have no value, she said to herself. We can live out our tiny lives. If we want to. If it matters to us.
From one of the showers, the noise of a door unlocking. A shape, large Miss Davis, finished with her shower, dressed, purse under her arm. “Oh, were you waiting, Mrs. Frink? I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” Juliana said.
“You know, Mrs. Frink, I’ve gotten so much out of judo. Even more than out of Zen. I wanted to tell you.”
“Slim your hips the Zen way,” Juliana said. “Lose pounds through painless satori. I’m sorry, Miss Davis. I’m wool-gathering.”
Miss Davis said, “Did they hurt you much?”
“Who?”
“The Japs. Before you learned to defend yourself.”
“It was dreadful,” Juliana said. “You’ve never been out there, on the Coast. Where they are.”
“I’ve never been outside of Colorado,” Miss Davis said, her voice fluttering timidly.
“It could happen here,” Juliana said. “They might decide to occupy this region, too.”
“Not this late!”
“You never know what they’re going to do,” Juliana said. “They hide their real thoughts.”
“What—did they make you do?” Miss Davis, hugging her purse against her body with both arms, moved closer, in the evening darkness, to hear.
“Everything,” Juliana said.
“Oh God. I’d fight,” Miss Davis said.
Juliana excused herself and walked to the vacant shower; someone else was approaching it with a towel over her arm.
Later, she sat in a booth at Tasty Charley’s Broiled Hamburgers, listlessly reading the menu. The jukebox played some hillbilly tune; steel guitar and emotion-choked moaning…the air was heavy with grease smoke. And yet, the place was warm and bright, and it cheered her. The presence of the truck drivers at the counter, the waitress, the big Irish fry cook in his white jacket at the register making change.
Seeing her, Charley approached to wait on her himself. Grinning, he drawled, “Missy want tea now?”
“Coffee,” Juliana said, enduring the fry cook’s relentless humor.
“Ah so,” Charley said, nodding.
“And the hot steak sandwich with gravy.”
“Not have bowl rat’s-nest soup? Or maybe goat brains fried in olive oil?” A couple of the truck drivers, turning on their stools, grinned along with the gag, too. And in addition they took pleasure in noticing how attractive she was. Even lacking the fry cook’s kidding, she would have found the truck drivers scrutinizing her. The months of active judo had given her unusual muscle tone; she knew how well she held herself and what it did for her figure.
It all has to do with the shoulder muscles, she thought as she met their gaze. Dancers do it, too. It has nothing to do with size. Send your wives around to the gym and we’ll teach them. And you’ll be so much more content in life.
“Stay away from her,” the fry cook warned the truck drivers with a wink. “She’ll throw you on your can.”
She said to the younger of the truck drivers, “Where are you in from?”
“Missouri,” both men said.
“Are you from the United States?” she asked.
“I am,” the older man said. “Philadelphia. Got three kids there. The oldest is eleven.”
“Listen,” Juliana said. “Is it—easy to get a good job back there?”
The younger truck driver said, “Sure. If you have the right color skin.” He himself had a dark brooding face with curly black hair. His expression had become set and bitter.
“He’s a wop,” the older man said.
“Well,” Juliana said, “didn’t Italy win the war?” She smiled at the young truck driver but he did not smile back. Instead, his somber eyes glowed even more intensely, and suddenly he turned away.
I’m sorry, she thought. But she said nothing. I can’t save you or anybody else from being dark. She thought of Frank. I wonder if he’s dead yet. Said the wrong thing; spoke out of line. No, she thought. Somehow he likes Japs. Maybe he identifies with them because they’re ugly. She had always told Frank that he was ugly. Large pores. Big nose. Her own skin was finely knit, unusually so. Did he fall dead without me? A fink is a finch, a form of bird. And they say birds die.
“Are you going back on the road tonight?” she asked the young Italian truck driver.
“Tomorrow.”
“If you’re not happy in the U.S. why don’t you cross over permanently?” she said. “I’ve been living in the Rockies for a long time and it isn’t so bad. I lived on the Coast, in San Francisco. They have the skin thing there, too.”
Glancing briefly at her as he sat hunched at the counter, the young Italian said, “Lady, it’s bad enough to have to spend one day or one night in a town like this. Live here? Christ—if I could get any other kind of job, and not have to be on the road eating my meals in places like this—” Noticing that the fry cook was red, he ceased speaking and began to drink his coffee.
The older truck driver said to him, “Joe, you’re a snob.”
“You could live in Denver,” Juliana said. “It’s nicer up there.” I know you East Americans, she thought. You like the big time. Dreaming your big schemes. This is just the sticks to you, the Rockies. Nothing has happened here since before the war. Retired old people, farmers, the stupid, slow, poor…and all the smart boys have flocked east to New York, crossed the border legally or illegally. Because, she thought, that’s where the money is, the big industrial money. The expansion. German investment has done a lot…it didn’t take long for them to build the U.S. back up.
The fry cook said in a hoarse angry voice, “Buddy, I’m not a Jew-lover, but I seen some of those Jew refugees fleeing your U.S. in ’49, and you can have your U.S. If there’s a lot of building back there and a lot of loose easy money it’s because they stole it from those Jews when they kicked them out of New York, that goddam Nazi Nuremberg Law. I lived in Boston when I was a kid, and I got no special use for Jews, but I never thought I’d see that Nazi racial law get passed in the U.S., even if we did lose the war. I’m surprised you aren’t in the U.S. Armed Forces, getting ready to invade some little South American republic as a front for the Germans, so they can push the Japanese back a little bit more—”
Both truck drivers were on their feet, their faces stark. The older man picked up a ketchup bottle from the counter and held it upright by the neck. The fry cook without turning his back to the two men reached behind him until his fingers touched one of his meat forks. He brought the fork out and held it.
Juliana said, “Denver is getting one of those heat-resistant runways so that Lufthansa rockets can land there.”
None of the three men moved or spoke. The other customers sat silently.
Finally the fry cook said, “One flew over around sundown.”
“It wasn’t going to Denver,” Juliana said. “It was going west, to the Coast.”
By degrees, the two truck drivers reseated themselves. The older man mumbled, “I always forget; they’re a little yellow out here.”
The fry cook said, “No Japs killed Jews, in the war or after. No Japs built ovens.”
“Too bad they didn’t,” the older truck driver said. But, picking up his coffee cup, he resumed eating.
Yellow, Juliana thought. Yes, I suppose it’s true. We love the Japs out here.
“Where are you staying?” she asked, speaking to the young truck driver, Joe. “Overnight.”
“I don’t know,” he answered. “I just got out of the truck to come in here. I don’t like this whole state. Maybe I’ll sleep in the truck.”
“The Honey Bee Motel isn’t too bad,” the fry cook said.
“Okay,” the young truck driver said. “Maybe I’ll stay there. If they don’t mind me being Italian.” He had a definite accent, although he tried to hide it.
Watching him, Juliana thought, It’s idealism that makes him that bitter. Asking too much out of life. Always moving on, restless and griped. I’m the same way; I couldn’t stay on the West Coast and eventually I won’t be able to stand it here. Weren’t the old-timers like that? But, she thought, now the frontier isn’t here; it’s the other planets.
She thought: He and I could sign up for one of those colonizing rocket ships. But the Germans would disbar him because of his skin and me because of my dark hair. Those pale skinny Nordic SS fairies in those training castles in Bavaria. This guy—Joe whatever—hasn’t even got the right expression on his face; he should have that cold but somehow enthusiastic look, as if he believed in nothing and yet somehow had absolute faith. Yes, that’s how they are. They’re not idealists like Joe and me; they’re cynics with utter faith. It’s a sort of brain defect, like a lobotomy—that maiming those German psychiatrists do as a poor substitute for psychotherapy.
Their trouble, she decided, is with sex; they did something foul with it back in the ’thirties, and it has gotten worse. Hitler started it with his—what was she? His sister? Aunt? Niece? And his family was inbred already; his mother and father were cousins. They’re all committing incest, going back to the original sin of lusting for their own mothers. That’s why they, those elite SS fairies, have that angelic simper, that blond babylike innocence; they’re saving themselves for Mama. Or for each other.
And who is Mama for them? she wondered. The leader, Herr Bormann, who is supposed to be dying? Or—the Sick One.
Old Adolf, supposed to be in a sanitarium somewhere, living out his life of senile paresis. Syphilis of the brain, dating back to his poor days as a bum in Vienna…long black coat, dirty underwear, flophouses.
Obviously, it was God’s sardonic vengeance, right out of some silent movie. That awful man struck down by an internal filth, the historic plague for man’s wickedness.
And the horrible part was that the present-day German Empire was a product of that brain. First a political party, then a nation, then half the world. And the Nazis themselves had diagnosed it, identified it; that quack herbal medicine man who had treated Hitler, that Dr. Morell who had dosed Hitler with a patent medicine called Dr. Koester’s Antigas Pills—he had originally been a specialist in venereal disease. The entire world knew it, and yet the Leader’s gabble was still sacred, still Holy Writ. The views had infected a civilization by now, and, like evil spores, the blind blond Nazi queens were swishing out from Earth to the other planets, spreading the contamination.
What you get for incest: madness, blindness, death.
Brrr. She shook herself.
“Charley,” she called to the fry cook. “You about ready with my order?” She felt absolutely alone; getting to her feet she walked to the counter and seated herself by the register.
No one noticed her except the young Italian truck driver; his dark eyes were fixed on her. Joe, his name was. Joe what? she wondered.
Closer to him, now, she saw that he was not as young as she had thought. Hard to tell; the intensity all around him disturbed her judgment. Continually he drew his hand through his hair, combing it back with crooked, rigid fingers. There’s something special about this man, she thought. He breathes—death. It upset her, and yet attracted her. Now the older truck driver inclined his head and whispered to him. Then they both scrutinized her, this time with a look that was not the ordinary male interest.