Kindling

Prison did have its privileges.

Frankie hadn’t been incarcerated for more than a week when he was pleasantly surprised to discover that many of the other prisoners liked to play baseball. When Frankie saw some prisoners constructing a baseball diamond, he watched their progress from a discrete distance. When the games began, he stood nearby and watched till the final pitch, waiting in earnest for an opportunity to catch a foul ball and get a chance to exhibit his throwing arm. Finding a stray ball one day, he began to practice with it, throwing the ball against the backstop before and after games, until he finally lured in a sparring partner so that he could at least play catch.

As aspiring and practiced a ballplayer as Frankie was, he was younger than most of the ballplayers. And he was white; a white Jap, perhaps, but white enough to make him easy to overlook. But Frankie had his moments. He got to fill in for one of the bigger boys on occasion, and proved himself with the opportunities that he’d been provided. Frankie’s efforts on the field may not have bought him the glory that he’d dreamed of, but at least he’d made himself part of the group. He wasn’t quite as white as before.

Frankie had plenty of time for reading while he was incarcerated, so he would sometimes check out books from the Manzanar library. He read some boys’ books by Twain, Thoreau, and London. He enjoyed reading, though his reading was often wanting in comprehension.

Frankie sometimes visited one particular elderly man because Frankie liked to watch the old man carve faces in pieces of wood. The man was accomplished at sashi netsuke, a Japanese art of wood carving. After a while, Frankie began carving on his own. He began to carve within sight of the old man, hoping to attract the old artisan’s attention. The old man looked in Frankie’s direction many times, and then one day Frankie got his wish. The old man waved him over. Frankie humbly approached the old man. The artisan took Frankie’s carving and observed it. Then he put his blade between his thumb and forefinger and pressed the blade against the edge of one of Frankie’s cuts. When the old man moved his hand away, Frankie could see that the old man had given the cut an appearance of depth and shadow.

Frankie continued to get tips from the old man until the man disappeared. Perhaps he had died. Maybe he had been released or moved to another camp. Frankie didn’t know. He kept carving.

Later in the war, after camp security had been eased, prisoners were occasionally permitted to travel outside the gates of the camp. Father Steinbeck, who ran the prison chapel, started to take kids out on overnight hikes toward the mountain that towered over the camp. One time, Frankie was invited onto one of the Father’s outings. It was a lot of walking for Frankie’s short legs. It seemed to him that they hiked forever. As they hiked, the mountain grew and grew imperceptibly until it was too close to see. Finally, they camped at the foot of the great mountain, above a stream that flowed out onto the desert. Frankie wondered where the stream flowed from and where it flowed to. It must not have come from far into the mountains. There just wasn’t that much water in it. To where was it heading? Did it flow out past the orchard, or did it disappear into the desert sand before it ever got that far?

After the camping trip, something about the desert clung to Frankie. He found solace looking out at the desert through the barbed wire, even though the desert wind filled his eyes with dust. He would sometimes spend hours in a day just looking out over the low desert bush, at the mountain the inmates called “Whitney-san.”

Sometimes at night, Frankie would slip under the barbed wire perimeter fence and the tired eyes of the guards in their towers, and he’d walk out onto the desert. The desert was flat and sandy. He could cover many miles in the moonlight, and in time, he learned to even do without the moon. He could get by with the stars and the lights of the prison, and sometimes even a scent on the desert breeze. It surprised him how much his nose could detect out on the dark desert. He could even smell water.

It was during these solitary excursions on the open desert that Frankie discovered a fondness within his heart for the prison, or rather, for the orchard that predated the prison. As many times as he had seen the fruit trees, it had taken hours of solitude for him to notice that this orchard reminded him of the orchard that his father had worked. Looking out across the expanse of desert, he had realized that such orchards are not as commonplace has he had previously assumed.

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One day in spring 1941, just after Frankie had turned eight, he came home to find that neither of his parents was in or around the house. That was not an uncommon occurrence, but after a while of waiting and wondering, he began to worry. After a couple hours, a patrol car drove up to the house and his mother climbed out, covering her face. When she entered the house, Frankie could see that she had been crying. She walked straight back to the master bedroom.  He came to her and asked her what had happened. She didn’t respond.

Late that evening, Frankie’s mother told him that his father had been in an auto accident. He had been in a collision with a produce truck at a rural crossroads, and he had not survived.

Frankie and his mother had to leave their farm and move to San Francisco, where she had family. They couldn’t take the water lanterns with them, so Frankie released them into a nearby canal.

Soon after Frankie and his mother arrived in the city, his mother found that she couldn’t support him any more than she could support her koi, so she was forced to put him in an orphanage. He was placed in the Salvation Army Children’s Home, a Japanese orphanage in the city.

Though Frankie remembered being called a Jap once or twice, he had never really thought of himself as a boy of any particular race. This changed at the orphanage, but the identity he acquired was something of an anti-identity. He’d never thought of himself as particularly Japanese, so he saw the other Japanese-American kids at the orphanage as foreigners, and they in turn saw him as a hapa—a half-breed—when they didn’t see him as a Hakujin—a Caucasian. On any given occasion, the term that applied to him was generally the term that happened to do the most harm.

Frankie would soon come to realize that the world at large saw him as a Jap. He would live as an alien among aliens.

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Armen burned through a cigarette in his dream. There was much noise outside the door. Knocks and shouts about evacuation. Cars starting. Sirens. Distant explosions. Trucks roaring by. A motorcycle decelerating nearby. A knock. “Armen? You in there?”

It was Sue, he realized. The realization nearly failed to stir him, but he woke enough to reply, “it’s open.”

Sue jiggled the doorknob. “No it’s not,” She countered.

“Coming,” he groaned as he got up to let her in.

“What’s this, some kind of offering?” she asked with the remains of the feather held erect in her hand.

He threw out his hands and shrugged. “Sam. It was for Sam.”

“What’s Sam going to do with this?” she scoffed and whipped the feather on each side of Armen’s face, leaving a streak of ash black on his cheekbones. “A little eyeblack for the highway glare. Suits you.”

She tossed the charred feather skeleton on the floor and shook her head in disapproval. “You’ve heard about the evacuation? Of course not. You have your wallet? Anything else you need?” Armen looked around the floor, his dark hair wildly woven and dented, his dense beard matted and untrimmed.

She led Armen out to her bike and started it up. She handed him her helmet, tied back her slick black hair, wrapped a black bandana across her face, and slid a pair of broad sunglasses over her eyes. Armen mounted the back of her saddle and sleepily wrapped his arms around her.

They rode down the winding canyon as the conflagration exhaled smoke and spat sparks across the highway. Armen closed his eyes and felt the waves of heat and smoke pass. When he opened his eyes, he was riding through the fire’s wake. He saw a few fires amid the charred, smoldering wasteland. As they wound up a ridge, the wastes that they passed were no longer smoking. A couple miles on, he noticed green seedlings breaking through the charred earth and ash by the roadside. He saw tender shoots sprouting out of the root balls of pyrophytic shrubs. The fresh growth grew thicker and thicker as they rode on, until little trace of the fire could be seen beside the banks of the ash-loaded streams. As the bike swayed left and right with the highway, Armen noticed that he could see the deep blue evening sky. He turned back to the roadside and watched the grasses age with every turn.

The cycle roared as it swung through low, yellow hills peppered with jagged metamorphic castles and cattle. It crossed its last rise and hit the long straightaway that welcomed the riders to the Great Valley. Sue torqued the accelerator and the bike shot far into the valley darkness.

The wake of the cycle swept through a nightgown worn by the roadside. The gown held to a girl like a flag in a storm. The girl’s auburn hair leapt aloft in the highway wind with the sea of high grass behind her, all aglow in the firelight of the Range. Her amber eyes gazed up the highway at the orange glow that sat upon the Range like a sunset in the east, and the orange light of the igneous range burned in her eyes.

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It was going to be more than just another hot August day in Merced Canyon. Armen sensed something familiar in the air. He couldn’t figure whether it was good or bad, but it was irresistible. There’s something about a scent that reaches deep into us; deeper than ordinary consciousness—deeper than memory. There is something immediate about a scent that bridges time and brings faded memories into the sharp immediacy of the present. Armen decided to take the day off.

He took a walk up Foresta Road, a dirt road that winds up the north side of Merced Canyon, which is about three thousand feet deep at El Portal. Armen leaned against the bridge railing under the falls and let the last cigarette out of a pack he had been carrying around for a week. He lit up, took a couple drags, and continued at a casual pace up the road. It was a hot day, and the familiar thunderclouds gathered on the heights as the day’s heat amassed.

Upon reaching the town for which the road was named, Armen continued eastward to a summit that overlooks Merced Gorge. The sun rode hot and heavy over that summer day, bringing the sea of air below to a boil, and bringing everything within that sea to life. A light breeze could be felt everywhere. Air was sliding in to fill the places where the air before it had taken flight, pulling more air in from surrounding lands and following the great updraft into the sun.

Armen had seen enough, so he decided to turn back, but just then he saw someone standing down ridge. That was strange enough—if it was strange at all, but there was something oddly familiar about the silhouette between the ridge and the brewing clouds. Armen approached the figure. He was astonished to find that it was Sam. He might have wondered what Sam had been doing anywhere near Yosemite if he hadn’t been so stunned to see his old friend standing there on the ridgeback.

Sam stood alone on the summit, feeling the updraft and the sharpening gradient of the electric field, his long, sandy blonde hair whipped by the solar wind and charged by the voltage of the air. His translucent green eyes were dilated by the trance that had enwrapped him. The wind whipped through his tattered pants, striving to lift him as the Simorgh took up young Zal of the Shahnameh. So this Zal stood, waiting—it seemed—to be taken up by the atmospheric fire.

The igneous breezes slipped up the mountainsides, and upon reaching the ridge crests, took flight. More and more of the air was sucked inward and upward by the fire, upward into the frigid heights where heavy water vapor grew slow and heavy and fell out of the air as rain too short-lived to reach the earth, reabsorbed by hot air rising from below. Likewise, the great updrafts and downdrafts carried ions further and further apart, but the ions would only be held apart for so long. Electrical attraction would eventually overcome convection, and the divorced ions were reunited in explosions of current, plasma, heat, light, and sound. The terrible unifications cracked the air and split trees, igniting forests, and giving rise to another species of weather—wildfire.

“Take me.” Armen saw the words slip from his friend’s lips, something inside told Armen that Sam wasn’t speaking to him.

Thunderbolts split the air. Armen watched, and then he spoke his friend’s name. Armen put his hand on Sam’s shoulder—he wasn’t sure why. Maybe he wanted Sam to know that he was there. Maybe he meant to comfort him. Maybe he wanted to assure himself that he wasn’t comforting a phantom. Sam turned to Armen, his eyes glowing and damp, and he turned back to the updrafts, and the cloud over the ridgeback broke with a cracking, pounding violence that could knock a man off his heels.

Armen dropped his daypack, said “there’s food in here,” and turned to flee for shelter as the assault of the sky intensified. The wind danced uneasily amid the hammering thunderclaps and flashes. Smoke wafted from the land. Armen turned for a final look at his friend, and saw him standing amid the shadow and flashes of light, his long, sandy hair tossed wildly in the shifting wind.

Armen turned away, but then he looked back. Some mote had flashed high in the corner of his left eye. He looked up and saw it: a black fleck high amid the cumulonimbus. He turned his back to Sam and the storm.

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