Yukiko paused in her tale, unable to voice what happened, and I was glad. I did not need the details to know what Rose must have endured. The old lady was shaking, the memories so vivid in her mind that she must have felt transported back through those years and was once again that tiny girl, hiding beneath a pile of dirty laundry, watching her best friend being violated by a monster.
I touched her on her knee.
‘You were a child, Yukiko. There was nothing you could do to stop him. Don’t blame yourself, OK.’
‘I should have done something. Even if I’d shouted and run away, it would have made him stop. He would have feared repercussions, because I know now that he was an aberration — only one of a few men who were beastly towards us. He would have been punished for his crime then… instead of later.’
I now knew where Yukiko’s story was leading, but I did not want to rush her to the conclusion.
‘I helped Rose as best I could. I got cloths and cleaned her. She was bleeding, Joe, from down there: a small girl bleeding as if she was a woman. Afterwards Rose swore me to silence. She felt dirty, afraid, that somehow she was to blame for what that monster did to her. She thought that if the truth were told then she would be seen as spoiled and she would be disowned by her family, like a used vessel that was no good any more.’
‘But by keeping her secret you were also inadvertently allowing this man to get away with what he did. It must’ve been a terrible thing for you to carry, being so young yourself.’
‘Yes, a terrible burden, but it was worse than that, Joe. Later I learned that the soldier had raped other girls. One lady died. Not at his hand but indirectly. She was so ashamed that she took her own life. She was found hanging in a store closet. Her death wasn’t so much covered up as simply ignored. Life was hard in the internment camps, and she wasn’t the first to choose death over such a brutal and disheartening existence. But we knew, Rose and I, for we had been watching the monster watching her and knew what he’d driven her to.’
‘Her death was never investigated fully?’
‘No. People died from inadequate medical care, others from the high level of emotional stress they suffered. The lady was just another statistic, Joe, that’s all any of us were back then. We thought that the commanders suspected something was going on, but they chose to turn a blind eye. Finally — following the lady’s suicide — someone must have decided to take action because he was moved away. I heard later that he had been sent to Tule Lake. It sounds stupid, but I feared that he would hurt my father. I know now that he was a coward, and it was only helpless girls and ladies he had any interest in.’
I was cold. I had a ball of ice at my core and the more Yukiko explained the harder it grew. I knew about this dark episode in American history, but like many had not given it much thought.
When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, US citizens had feared another attack and war hysteria had seized the country. Pressure was placed on President Roosevelt to sign Executive Order 9066, and under the order 120,000 citizens of Japanese descent were forcibly removed from their homes and placed in internment camps, on the unfounded fear that they would spy for the Japanese. More than two thirds of those interned were American citizens and half of them were children. None had ever shown disloyalty to the US. During the course of the war ten people were convicted of spying for Japan: ironically all of them were Caucasian. People are horrified that Nazi Germany ran concentration camps — and rightly so — but no one wants to accept that we were also guilty of similar if less atrocious crimes. It made little difference that the US government later apologised, paying reparation to those families affected, because it would never make up for what they suffered at the hands of their own people.
Rink once told me how he’d come to be born and raised in Little Rock, Arkansas. Having been forced into swearing fealty to the US, the Japanese internees were finally allowed to return home in January 1945. Some of them, angered by their treatment, had returned to Japan, but some had stayed. However, their previous home was no longer available and, instead of returning to San Francisco from where they hailed, Yukiko’s family had settled in Arkansas, after her dad was returned to them.
It was much later when Yukiko had met a young Scottish-Canadian soldier called Andrew Rington and given birth to the first of three children. Rink had mentioned how Yukiko always felt no attachment to Little Rock and vowed that she would one day return to the West Coast, to her home in San Francisco.
I found it sad that the horror she’d endured then had continued to dog her the rest of her life. And it had finally killed her husband.
‘Tell me about this beast,’ I said. I couldn’t bring myself to call him a soldier.
Chapter 12
By 197 °Charles Peterson was on to his third marriage and it was no more successful than his previous two. In fact, if anything it was the worst position he’d been in. Each successive failure had brought him down, first from a homeowner to a man renting a squat, and now to this trailer on a patch of dusty ground surrounded by discarded electrical equipment he’d intended to fix up and sell but hadn’t got round to yet. There was that old place of his father’s out in San Francisco, but his wife had refused to pick up sticks and move halfway across the country, so here he was stuck in this shithole in the middle of nowhere. His latest wife was called Michaela, twenty-three years his junior, and already too old for his taste. He thought that before long he’d have to get shot of the bitch and go trawling for someone much younger. But he was stuck for now — at least until the brat was old enough to kick out on to the street with her. The useless bitch had purposely done it, he thought: forgot to take her pills. She knew he had no love of babies, the last thing he wanted making his life more miserable being a squawking toddler. Shit, how could a man think with all that howling going on, let alone find a fucking job to support them? His ass-wipe life was all her fault, and she’d asked for the smack in the jaw he’d given her earlier. Let her run off for a few hours, it’d do her good — see what she was missing. It certainly pleased him to have the trailer to himself for a while.
He was lying on the bunk, feet up, his hands crossed across his large belly. There was a Lucky Strike smouldering in the corner of his mouth, and a can of Bud balanced between his wrists. He was savouring the smoke and the brew, making them last because there was none left. Michaela best get her scrawny ass back soon and bring him more of each as he’d warned her to do. A TV played at the end of the trailer, the black and white picture flickering and rolling — a Sergeant Bilko rerun was airing, but he could hardly make it out. He fancied himself as a fixer-upper, but had put off the jobs waiting outside; he thought that maybe he should see to the TV first. Too much like hard work, he decided, and drew on the Lucky all the way down to the stub. The TV continued to flicker, the blue light flashing on his spectacle lenses. Phil Silvers was giving the little fat guy hell and Peterson laughed to himself, a bitter sound: the programme was nothing like his days in the army, far too naive for that.
He heard the soft thrum of an engine.
It wasn’t his beloved family returning to him, which was for damn sure. This engine sounded healthy, unlike their old Dodge that drank oil by the bucketful. Peterson was concerned. Sometimes some of the kids from the nearby town came out and took pot shots at the old machines standing on his lawn like sentries. Usually they used catapults or air rifles, but once one of them had used his daddy’s pump action and blew a hole through the back end of the trailer. Pity that seven-months-pregnant Michaela was sleeping at the other end at the time, it would have saved him the trouble he was having now. Still, he couldn’t allow the little punks to blast holes in his trailer, not when enough wind whistled through the cracks in the windows as it was. He flicked the stub of the cigarette into the neck of the empty Budweiser can, reached languidly for the length of pipe he kept down the edge of the bunk for just such an eventuality. He swung his legs out, sitting up, grunting. Then, cursing, he went to the door to see who was calling round this late of an evening.