I’m just a med-school flunky. Couldn’t even pass the entrance exam. I don’t know why the old man deludes himself I’m gonna be a doctor after the war.”
“You could be! Why don’t you get involved in the JACC? That’d look good on a med-school application.”
“I’m no Jackalope. Who appointed them as our leaders anyway? They’re just a bunch of college boys the government propped up after they’d dragged all the real leaders off to jail.”
Shame spread over Lily. Her father had been one of the men the FBI singled out first as an issei leader, an elder. They’d shown up in the middle of the night when he was in his pyjamas and hadn’t even let him change before dragging him in for questioning. Now he was imprisoned someplace far away and hadn’t responded to her letters in months. Why wouldn’t the JACC do anything to help him?
Japanese American Citizens Confederacy. JACC. It was getting to be a bad word around here. At first, all the nisei guys were members. You had to be a nisei — second generation, Japanese-American — in order to belong. Not surprisingly, the issei didn’t like being excluded. Nor did the kibei, that proud group of young men educated in Japan. Apparently, the government considered them the most dangerous, traitorous group of all.
JACCers. Jackalopes. Jackrabbits. Traitors. Lapdogs. The guys who sold the community out. While people once felt privileged to be associated with the JACC, now many were jumping ship. They were worried that next the fingers would be pointed their way with name-calling and raised fists.
Much as she felt terrible about her dad, why did Kaz have to swing so far in the opposite direction? He’d taken a liking to a certain group of kitchen boys who stood around outside the mess hall, immersed in smoke and secrecy. It bothered her that Kaz dressed as though he were part of their gang. Time and time again, she urged him to be more careful. Fantasizing that she alone had the power to reform him, reshape him in his father’s image. And then he’d marry her and they’d live in a beautiful white house with a trellis, like all doctors’ families, right in the centre of town.
Kaz laughed her warnings off. “What are you so scared of?”
“Are you crazy? You know where they send the troublemakers — a far worse prison.”
She’d heard rumours that the uniforms had a giant X on the back to make it easier for guards to shoot anyone trying to escape. Her poor father. If anything happened to him, she’d have no one.
“Look around you, Lily. Truth is they’re understaffed as hell. If we wanted, we could have the run of the place, easy.”
Something crumpled inside her when Kaz talked this way.
“What’s wrong, Water Lily? You’re crying.”
She shook her head, unable to speak.
“You can tell me.”
“It’s nothing. I’m fine.”
He leaned in and their lips brushed, her tears pooling, salty as seawater, in the cleft between their mouths. He kissed her more deeply and her arms reached for his shoulders, as though she were seizing a lifebuoy or a slippery rock.
“Can’t I take your picture?”
So they were back to this again. “Where’s your camera, Kaz?”
He extended the wooden box that was always tucked under his arm.
“That’s not a camera. It looks more like a lunch box.”
“That’s exactly what I want people to think. Can you keep a secret?”
She nodded.
He lifted the lid to expose a black metal dial. “It was easy enough to sneak in this lens and shutter. My friend Shig, who’s a carpenter, he made this box from scraps of wood, attaching the lens to an old pipe so the camera can focus.” He smiled at her astonishment.
“But … the film? How do you get the film?”
“You’d be surprised. Not everyone who works here agrees with what the government’s done. Some people are actually on our side.”
Someone on staff was sneaking in rolls of film?
From the satchel over his shoulder, Kaz pulled out something that expanded into a peculiar three-legged stand. He perched the camera down on top of it. “C’mon. It’s just one picture.”
“There’s a guard right over there. He can see us!”
“Oh, don’t worry about him. We have an understanding.”
And it was true: for some reason, the guard looked right past them. Because Kaz was the doctor’s son. Surely that must be why they cut him so much slack.
“So, okay then?”
There was something about the way Kaz kept looking at her, as if he alone had the power to create her image by crafting this whole desert mise en scène. Marlene Dietrich in Morocco, maybe. Or perhaps he was envisioning her as a more American girl — the spunky prostitute in Stagecoach, run out of town by those righteous ladies. She gazed out at the untamed landscape, hoping that she, too, would find her final refuge in John Wayne’s brawny arms.
“Smile like you’re Miss California.”
So she smiled. Blindly, she smiled. For the first time in her life, she wasn’t trying to look demure or dainty, she was just responding to the glow of energy on this man’s face, bright as the flash of a camera.
Aunt Tetsuko clomped over in homemade geta sandals, which Uncle Mas had fashioned from scraps of wood. She tripped on a knot of sagebrush that poked up between the floorboards. Her hair was pulled up in an old scarf like a cleaning lady. Lily was glad that her father had been spared from seeing his sister go to seed.
The hand on Lily’s arm felt like a chicken foot. “Who’s this boy you’ve been seen with?”
Ignoring the question, Lily pushed aside the grey blanket draped across the room like a curtain to partition off a small private space, where she shared a bunk bed with her cousin Audrey. Straw poked up through the crude mattress cover, rustling, itchy against the thighs.
Lily’s old bed had had a frilly white bedspread. Her collection of Japanese dolls used to perch on the dresser. She’d had to give them away to hakujin friends — supposedly for safekeeping, but she doubted she’d get them back. They’d had to pack quickly; she’d had to report to the community centre early the next morning, where the bus had come to get them. In the end, she’d just stuffed as many dresses as she could into two pillowcases and dragged them down the street. How she wished she’d brought a pretty blanket or a nice sheet at least.
Aunt Tetsuko followed and clawed her arm again. “Who is he? I won’t have you running around like some of the silly girls here!”
Youth was in the air — a new spirit of risk and rebelliousness that accompanied fathers and elders being dragged off. You could feel it in the way many of the young people eyed each other adventurously and kissed right out in the open. It terrified folks of Aunt Tetsuko’s generation, who’d barely dared to glance at the opposite sex until proper introductions had been made.
