Jon Cleary - The Phoenix Tree

‘Didn’t they intern all you guys?’ The Indian was sounding more sober by the minute; and more intelligent.

‘I spent two years in a camp over in Arizona. Then they let me out, guess they thought I could be trusted. I been working on a farm up in Utah.’

‘Where you going when you get across the border?’

‘I dunno. South America, maybe. They’re not so fussy down there – what you look like, I mean.’ It offended him to be talking like this, to have to act out this charade.

‘Yeah.’ The Indian nodded sympathetically. He was dressed in a dark shirt and coveralls and had an Indian blanket wrapped round his shoulders; but for the blanket and his plaits, he could have passed almost unnoticed in any American street crowd. But he was on the inside looking out of himself, the recognition of difference was in his own eyes. Then abruptly he sat up straight. ‘Truck’s coming!’

For a moment Minato heard nothing; then he caught the sound of a motor somewhere to the east. ‘What is it?’

‘The Patrol. They come along here every night. Dunno what they’re looking for. Japs or Indians going out or Mex’s coming in.’ He laughed softly; he was no longer giggling. ‘I’ll take you to the border. How much?’

‘Five dollars?’

‘Five bucks? You a fucking Jewish Jap?’ He had his prejudices; he didn’t lump all white Americans together. ‘Ten.’

‘Okay, ten.’ Minato stood up, listening to the truck getting closer. He put his injured foot to the ground and gasped with pain. ‘You’ll have to help me.’

‘Another five bucks.’ The Indian grinned in the moonlight. ‘We give up taking beads. It’s a cash economy.’

He offered his arm to Minato and the latter leaned on it. They set off along the arroyo, Minato hobbling painfully, the Indian slouching along; arm in arm they looked like old friends, or lovers, who had lost their way after a night out. To the east of them they could hear the grinding of the truck in low gear, as if it was ploughing its way towards them from the far end of the arroyo.

The Indian abruptly turned right, throwing Minato off-balance; the Japanese cried out with pain and the Indian gruffly muttered an apology. Minato clung to him as they stumbled up the bank of the arroyo. Like all Japanese he had always been meticulous in his bodily cleanliness and he was sickened by the smell of the Indian; but he had no other staff to lean on. They struggled up to the top of the bank and the Indian paused.

‘There they are.’ He spoke casually, as if he had been scouting for the enemy for over a century. Carleton, Sibley, Custer, the forces of the white man’s law and order, were marked on the horizons of his mind.

Minato saw the slowly bouncing beam of the headlights some distance away: maybe five hundred yards, maybe more. He was short-sighted, a handicap for a spy, and at night he had no idea of distance. He just knew that the Border Patrol truck, probably a pick-up, was too close for comfort.

‘Lay down,’ said the Indian. ‘You ain’t gonna be able to run with that ankle.’

He pushed Minato to the ground, then walked off without another word, straight towards the approaching truck. Minato lay flat to the ground and watched the Indian through a spiky hedge of low cactus. The Indian stopped about fifty yards away and stood waiting on the top of the bank. The truck continued to approach, its headlights beam moving from side to side like a blind giant’s white stick as it twisted its way along the arroyo. Then it pulled up immediately beneath the Indian.

The engine was switched off and a voice said, ‘That you, Jerry? You out here again, drunk again?’

The Indian was silhouetted against the glare of the headlights beneath him; in his tall hat and with his blanket wrapped round him he all at once had a dignity about him, a dark monument. ‘Just clearing my head, Mr Porter. I been celebrating Geronimo’s birthday.’

Minato could imagine the Indian chuckling to himself. But he lay waiting for the Indian to give him away: in a cash economy, the reward for capturing an escaped Japanese prisoner must be more than five or ten dollars. Then Minato remembered he was supposed to be a Nisei; maybe the Indian knew that a Nisei was worth nothing.

The man down in the arroyo laughed without humour. ‘You seen anyone around here while you been clearing your head?’

‘Ain’t no one here but us Indians, Mr Porter.’ Again Minato could imagine the quiet chuckle. He began to feel easier, safe.

The Border Patrol man said something that Minato didn’t catch; then the engine was started up again and the truck drove slowly on along the arroyo. The Indian watched it go, raising his hand in a mock salute of peace. Then he came unhurriedly back to Minato as the latter got awkwardly to his feet.

‘You gonna be okay now. We got about a mile to go.’

Minato looked steadily at him. ‘Why is a guy like you still here on the reservation? There are plenty of Indians like you in the army.’

‘The army don’t want no drunk. Anyhow, they know I’m still fighting with the Chiricahuas. They think I’m crazy, a crazy drunk.’ He laughed, not crazily but intelligently. ‘What army wants a crazy drunken brave?’

Minato didn’t know who the Chiricahuas were but he guessed they were warriors of long ago: maybe Indian samurai ? He took the other man’s arm again and they moved on. It was another half-hour, with Minato hobbling painfully, now clinging to the stinking Indian as if he loved him, before the Indian abruptly said, ‘Okay, this is it. You’re in Mexico.’

Minato sank down in the dust and looked up at him. ‘Don’t joke, I’m not in the mood for it.’ He had forgotten that he was supposed to be a farm worker; the rough accent was gone. ‘We should have come through a wire fence or something.’

‘There’s no fence, not around here, anyway. We’ve just crossed into Mexico, you take my word for it. Fifteen bucks.’ He held out his hand.

Minato felt in the suitcase, took out the roll of notes and peeled off three fives. ‘You’re not going to leave me ’way out here? I’ll give you another five to take me to the nearest road.’

The Indian put the bills in his pocket. ‘This is as far as I go. You wanna be careful with that money. I could of took it off of you. You know what they used to say – never trust an Injun.’

‘I’d kill you if you tried.’ Minato stood up, awkwardly but quickly. The scout’s knife was open in his hand, its blade a pale glint in the moonlight.

The Indian didn’t back off. His right hand came out from under his blanket; it held a knife, one with a longer blade than Minato’s. ‘Don’t try it, Jap. How many guys you killed with that potato-peeler?’

One: but what was that to boast about? Minato picked up his suitcase and backed away, on edge for the first hint that the Indian was about to plunge towards him. But the Indian didn’t move; instead, he grinned and put his knife back under his blanket. He looked steadily at Minato, then he turned on his heel and walked slowly back into the moon-softened darkness, like a ghost retreating into the past.

Then his voice came floating back, as clear on the desert silence as if he were only a few yards away: ‘You can’t win, Jap. You’re like us – the war’s lost!’

Minato sat down suddenly in the dust; it was his spirit, not his ankle, that buckled. For six months, ever since he’d been picked up, he’d fooled the Americans. Slowly he had let them think they had turned him round, converted him into a double-agent, a traitor to Japan. It had not been easy to fool them; the Americans had a pathological suspicion of all Japanese, even the US-born ones like Tom Okada. But subtly, he thought, he had hinted at his six years’ conversion to American thinking and institutions; but all the while he had remained as Japanese as ever. He was intelligent and objective enough to know that Japan was losing the war; but he wanted to go home to die in Japan, not live on, or at worst die, in America. And now it seemed that the long wait might end here in the Mexican desert.