We scatter into the night—Jimmy and Shuji in one direction, me and Frankie in the other—swallowed up by the empty street.
We finally come to a stop in an alley. We’re doubled over, breathing hard. When he stands, I see he’s got a black eye and a bloody nose—backlit from the street, he looks like a young samurai, glowing and wrathful.
“Goddamn it all,” he says.
I straighten, tonguing my split lip.
Yeah.
I spit blood.
Goddamn it all.
THINGS I’M HOLDING ON TO
my anger
When I get home, Mom’s waiting up for me. She’s wearing her old robe, fraying at the cuffs, as she kneels in the living room, sorting our things into piles.
What stays behind: the carpets, the coffee table, boxes of Dad’s old clothes I didn’t know she’d kept.
What goes with us: sheets, blankets, cups and bowls and silverware for each of us, a hot plate, a kettle.
She looks up at me, pursing her lips, and for a second, I think she’s going to scold me. But she doesn’t. She just pats the bare floor until I sit next to her. “What happened to you, Shigeo?” she asks, turning my chin to the light.
I don’t meet her gaze. “Got in a fight.”
“With who?”
“The Kitano brothers.”
She clicks her tongue. “Those bad boys.”
I laugh—quietly, because Mas and Minnow are sleeping.
“You shouldn’t be fighting.”
“I know, Mom.” I sneak the last of Mas’s yearbooks from the “stay” pile. It’s filled with notes from his friends: Chinese friends, hakujin—white—friends, friends who have been evacuated. “But I wanted to fight something.”
She sighs. “You can’t change our situation with your fists.”
“But it has to change, Mom. Doesn’t it?”
She tugs at a stray thread on her sleeve. It unravels. “No, Shigeo, it doesn’t.”
Angry tears fall onto the pages of Mas’s yearbook, and I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “Then what do we do?”
She puts her hand on my shoulder and squeezes once. “Gaman.”
The word means something like persevere or endure. It’s a word for when you can’t do anything to change your situation, so you bear it patiently . . . or as patiently as you can, I guess.
I think of Mrs. Katsumoto and her thank-you note. I think of the people dressed in their best for their own eviction.
But I can’t do it. I can’t suffer nobly while we’re displaced. I can’t not feel this electricity inside me. I can’t not be hurt and angry and want to wrench things from the walls.
I don’t think “gaman” is in my vocabulary, either.
* * *
When CIVILIAN EXCLUSION ORDER NO. 41 tells us we’re being forced to leave, Twitchy steals one of the flyers. We sit behind the YMCA, where we know Mr. Tanaka won’t come chase us off, because Mr. Tanaka’s gone. Together, we read the instructions over and over, like the next time we read them, the words will be different.
We won’t have to evacuate.
We’ll be allowed to stay.
But nothing changes.
“I bet we’re going to Tanforan,” Twitchy says finally.
The Tanforan Assembly Center’s an old racetrack fifteen miles south of the city. That’s where Tommy and Stan ended up.
I don’t say anything as I tear the evacuation order into a square, ripping away the signature at the bottom—J. L. DeWitt of the Western Defense Command. He’s convinced we’re all a bunch of Jap spies, and I guess he’s convinced everyone else of it too, because, well . . . here we are.
I toss his name in the trash, where it belongs.
“That wouldn’t be so bad,” Twitchy continues. “It’s not that far from home, and at least we’d be together . . .”
I’m hardly listening. I’m creasing and pleating and bending the notice into something different, something other than what it is: the piece of paper that’s going to uproot us.
Under my hands, it becomes a square, a diamond, a crane with a long neck, a sharp beak, and the words “alien and non-alien” visible on one wing.
They can’t even use the word citizen for us Nisei, can they?
I want to crush the paper bird in my palm, like that would unmake every sentence of the exclusion order and all the men who wrote it.
“Hey, where’d you learn to do origami?” Twitchy asks, interrupting my thoughts.
I twirl the paper bird by its pointed tail. “Kinmon Gakuen,” I lie.
He makes a disbelieving sound. “Where was I that day?”
“In time-out,” I tell him with a smirk, “like usual.”
“Ha ha.” He eyes me like he knows I’m fibbing, but he doesn’t push me.
We don’t stay out, not like last time, because now we’re the ones who’re leaving. We have to go home. We have to help our families pack.
On the step next to me are black smudges where Mr. Tanaka used to stub out his cigarettes. I leave the crane perched next to them like a temple offering.
THINGS NO ONE KNOWS I HAVE
one of Dad’s hats
Don’t tell anyone, but Dad’s the one who got me into paper folding. He used to do it when he was happy, or when he was working through something he wasn’t ready to tell Mom about, but mostly when he was happy. I can remember Sundays when we went to Ocean Beach to fly kites and look for shells, and he’d be sitting in the sand, folding a piece of newspaper.
He didn’t make a fuss about it, either. You’d see him toying with a candy-bar wrapper or something, but you’d never see it take shape. He might leave it somewhere for you to find, if he was especially proud of it, but usually, it would just be gone. I don’t know if he threw them away or what.
Now I do it too, even though no one really knows about it, not even Twitchy. It’s kind of private, you know? It’s something just between me and Dad, even though he’s gone, too.
* * *
On Wednesday, Mas comes home with a fistful of ID tags. We have to mark all our luggage, and on the day of the evacuation, we have to wear them. Like we can’t be trusted to remember our own names.
I’m Ito, Shigeo.
NO. 22437.
INSTRUCTED TO REPORT READY TO TRAVEL ON: Saturday 5/9, 11:30.
That’s five days. Five days to pack up our entire lives.
They couldn’t even give us a week.
THINGS THAT HAVE TO STAY
the tin canister of marbles and baseball cards we buried somewhere in the backyard
the dent in the wall where Mas’s shoulder hit it when we were wrestling
the names we carved into the baseboard: MAS, SHIG, and a little fish for Minnow
Vultures.
The white people come around again, sniffing out bargains.
The Kitanos’ whole dry-cleaning business, equipment and all, goes for fifty dollars. I know because you can hear the ketos crowing about it as they head back to their Cadillac. Across the street, Jim Kitano steps out onto the sidewalk, and I meet his gaze. He’s got a greenish-yellow bruise on his jaw where Frankie punched him last Friday.
I nod at him.