When the Emperor Was Divine

TRAIN

The train moved slowly inland. Somewhere along the western edge of upper Nevada it passed a lone white house with a lawn and two tall cottonwood trees with a hammock between them gently swaying in the breeze. A small dog lay sleeping on its side in the shade of the trees. A man in a straw hat was trimming hedges. The hedges were very round. They were perfect green spheres. Someone—maybe that same man or maybe that same man’s gardener— had planted flowers inside of a red wagon next to the mailbox. In front of a wooden picket fence was a victory garden and a hand-painted sign that said FOR SALE. Behind the house was the dry bed of a lake and beyond the lake there was nothing but the scorched white earth of the desert stretching all the way to the edge of the horizon. On the map the lake was called Intermittent. Intermittent Lake. Because sometimes it was there and sometimes it wasn’t. It all depended on the rain.

“I don’t see it,” said the girl. It was September of 1942 and her face was pressed up against the dusty window of the train. She was eleven and her hair was black and straight and tied back in a ponytail with an old pink ribbon. Her dress was pale yellow with wide puffy sleeves and a hem that was beginning to unravel. Pinned to her collar was an identification number and around her throat she wore a faded silk scarf. Her shoes were Mary Janes. They had not been polished since the spring.

“See what?” asked her brother. He was eight years old and his number was the same as the girl’s.

The girl did not answer. The lake had been dry for two years but she did not know that. She had never seen the desert before and although she had been a good but not outstanding student who had learned the meanings of many words she had yet to learn the meaning of the word intermittent. She looked down again at the map to make sure the lake was really supposed to be there. It was.

Without lifting her eyes from the map she stuck out her hand. “Lemon, please,” she said. Her mother leaned over and dropped a lemon into the girl’s palm. The girl stood up and opened the window and tossed the lemon out into the desert. It soared through the air and hit a gnarled trunk of blackened sage as the white house grew smaller and smaller in the distance. The girl had once been the star pitcher of a softball team and she knew how to throw.

“Don’t lose that arm,” her mother said under her breath.

“I wasn’t planning on it,” said the girl. She put the map away in the suitcase beneath her seat and sat down. An old woman walked by, swaying slightly from side to side, and the girl smelled something damp and musty that reminded her of rotting leaves. It was the smell of fine, old silk. The girl took a deep breath and closed her eyes but she could not get comfortable. The seats were hard and stiff and she had not slept since they had left California the night before. The girl had always lived in California—first in Berkeley, in a white stucco house on a wide street not far from the sea, and then, for the last four and a half months, in the assembly center at the Tanforan racetrack south of San Francisco—but now she was going to Utah to live in the desert. The train was old and slow and had not been used in years. Broken gas lamps hung from the walls and the locomotive was fueled by a coal-burning boiler. Some of the passengers were sick from the uneven rocking of the cars and the crowded compartments smelled of vomit and sweat and, very faintly, of oranges. The soldiers had left a crate full of lemons and oranges on the floor of the car earlier that morning. The girl loved oranges—she had not eaten a fresh orange in months—but she could not think of eating one now. The train lurched forward and she leaned over and put her head between her knees.

“I think I’m going to throw up,” she said.

Her mother gave her a brown paper bag and the girl opened it up and began to heave. Her brother reached into the pocket of his trousers and gave her a tissue. She crumpled it in her fist as her mother slowly rubbed her back. “Don’t touch me,” said the girl. “I want to be sick by myself.”

“That’s impossible,” said her mother. She continued to rub her back and the girl did not push her away.

TOWARD NOON the train passed through a town south of Winnemucca. The shadows fell close to the buildings and the sky above was bright and clear. The girl saw a large sign on the side of a water tower that said BUY U.S. WAR BONDS EVERY PAYDAY. She saw advertisements for Old Schenley Whiskey and The American Melody Hour. They were still in Nevada and it was still Sunday. Somewhere in the distance church bells were ringing, and the streets were filled with people in their Sunday clothes walking home from the morning service. Three young girls in white dresses whirled by beneath matching white parasols. A boy in a blue suit pulled a slingshot out of his jacket and took careful aim at three blackbirds up high on a wire. Closer to the edge of town, a man and a woman were riding their bicycles across a bridge and the girl wondered if they were together or if they just happened to be on the bridge at the same time. The woman wore dark sunglasses and short yellow pants that showed her ankles and she did not look like she had been to church. She was laughing, and her hair was loose and red and blowing behind her in the wind. The girl leaned out the window and shouted, “Hey!” but the woman did not hear her, she was too far away, she was coasting down the far side of the bridge and the man was pedaling right behind her.

The train blew its whistle and the girl felt a hand press down on her shoulder. She pulled her head back into the car and looked up into the face of a soldier. He was a young man with light brown hair that bristled out from under the edge of his cap. Beneath his right eye there was a dark mole and she could not stop staring at it. Then she looked at his eyes and she could not stop staring at them either. The soldier had very nice eyes. They were dark green and looking right at her. “Miss,” he said, “shades down, shades down.” His voice was soft and low and he did not smile but she knew that he would if he could. She did not know how she knew this but she did.

“Yes, sir,” she said. She pulled down the shade and the man and the woman on the bridge were gone. They were together, she decided.

As the soldier made his way down the aisle calling out, “Shades down, shades down,” in his deep, melodic bass, she chimed in with him softly under her breath. And then, in a voice that was not soft at all, she called out, “Sir!” She had not meant to call out “sir” but the word had come out anyway. “Sir!” she said again. She could not help herself. “Sir sir sir!”

The soldier did not hear her.

As she leaned back in her seat the old man in front of her turned around and said something to her in Japanese. His face was deeply tanned and his neck was thick with wrinkles from many years in the sun. One of his hands was missing two fingers. The girl shook her head and said she was sorry, she only spoke English.

“So so so,” said the man. He turned away and pulled down the shade and the car grew a little darker.

When the soldier reached the end of the car he touched the gun on his hip, lightly, with his right hand, to make sure it was still there, and she thought of how he had touched her shoulder the same way—lightly, and with that same hand—and she hoped he would come back again. Then the last shade went down and the darkness was complete and she could not see the soldier at all. Now she could not see anyone at all and no one outside the train could see her. There were the people inside the train and the people outside the train and in between them there were the shades. A man walking alongside the tracks would just see a train with black windows passing by in the middle of the day. He would think, There goes the train, and then he would not think about the train again. He would think about other things. What was for supper, maybe, or who was winning the war. She knew it was better this way. The last time they had passed through a city with the shades up someone had thrown a rock through one of the windows.

The train slowed and crossed a wooden trestle over the dry bed of a river and then there were no more towns by the tracks, there was only the highway, and it was all right to raise up the shades. The girl pulled on the string at the bottom of the shade and the car flooded with sun.

“Do you think we’ll see horses?” her brother asked her.

“I don’t know,” said the girl. Then she remembered the mustangs she had read about in National Geographic. The Spaniards had brought them over hundreds of years ago and now there were thousands of horses just roaming around, wild. Every autumn they came down from the hills to graze on the high desert plains. If a cowboy needed a new horse all he had to do was go out into the desert and get himself one. It was as simple as that. She imagined a cowboy snapping his fingers and a horse, a wild white stallion, galloping up to him in a cloud of hot swirling dust.

So she told the boy that they probably would. They probably would see some horses. Because there were more wild horses in Nevada than in any other state. She had read that in the National Geographic too.

“How many do you think we’ll see?”

“Quite possibly, eight.”

The boy seemed satisfied with this answer. He laid his head down on his sister’s lap and drifted off to sleep.

The girl was still too exhausted to sleep. She leaned against the window and tried to remember when her brother had first started talking about horses. It had begun, she was almost sure of it, at Tanforan. All summer long they had lived in the old horse stalls in the stables behind the racetrack. In the morning they had washed their faces in the long tin troughs and at night they had slept on mattresses stuffed with straw. Twice a day when the siren blew they had returned to the stalls for the head count and three times a day they had lined up to eat in the mess hall on the ground floor of the grandstands. On their first night there her brother had plucked the stiff horse hairs out of the freshly whitewashed walls and run his fingers along the toothmarks on top of the double Dutch door where the wood was soft and worn. On warm days he had smelled the smell of the horses rising up through the damp linoleum floors and on rainy days when she had stayed inside writing letters to her father in Fort Sam Houston or Lordsburg or wherever it was that he happened to be her brother had gone out in his raincoat and his red rubber boots and walked around and around the muddy racetrack. One night when the flies were very bad and they could not sleep he had sat up suddenly in his cot and told her that when he grew up he wanted to be a jockey. The boy had never been on a horse before in his life. “A jockey is a small man,” she had said to him. “Do you want to grow up to be a small man?” He could not make up his mind. Did he want to ride the horses? He did. Did he want to be a small man? He did not. “Ride horses!” Mr. Okamura had shouted from the stall on the other side of the partition. “Eat lots, grow up to be big American boy!” shouted Mr. Ito from two stalls down. The next day the carpenters had come and nailed wire mesh over the windows and after that the flies were never so bad and for a long time the boy did not talk to her about horses or anything else late at night, he just slept.

BY LATE AFTERNOON the train had run out of water. The sun shone through the dirty glass panes and the air inside was stuffy and hot. During the night in the mountains above Tahoe the steam heat had gone on and now they could not turn it off. Or maybe they could but they wouldn’t, the girl didn’t know. She was sweating and her mouth was dry.

“Look at this,” the boy said to her. He was leafing through the pages of a book—Big Game Hunting in Africa. He stopped and pointed to a glossy photograph of a wild bull elephant charging through the African bush. “What do you think happened to the man who took this picture?”

The girl narrowed her eyes for a moment and thought. “Trampled,” she said.

The boy stared solemnly at the elephant for a long time and then he turned the page. A herd of gazelles was leaping gracefully across the savanna. The girl stood up and walked to the front of the car to wait for the toilet.

As she took her place in line she reached up to fix the bow in her hair. Her mother had tied it for her that morning but she had made it too loose. The girl yanked the bow tight but the ribbon snapped and her hair came tumbling down. She tossed the ribbon to the floor.

“Are you all right?” asked the man behind her. His hair was flecked with gray around the temples but she could not tell if he was young or old. He wore round steel-rimmed glasses and a handsome gold watch that no longer told the correct time.

“I don’t know,” she said. “How do I seem?”

“I think you’re all right.” He bent over and picked up the torn ribbon and carefully tied the two ends together. His fingers were long and fine and they moved with great precision. He tugged once at the knot to make sure it would hold and it did.

“You can keep it,” said the girl.

“It’s not mine to keep,” said the man. He gave the ribbon back to her and she slipped it into her pocket.

“It’s hot in here, isn’t it?”

“Very,” said the man. He pulled out a handkerchief and began to wipe his brow.

As the train rounded a curve the girl felt her legs sway beneath her. She reached out and steadied herself against the wall. “Last night it was too cold,” she said, “but now it’s so hot I can hardly breathe. Everything keeps on changing.”

“Isn’t that right,” said the man.

She looked at the letters embroidered in gold thread on the corner of his handkerchief and asked him what the “T” stood for.

“Teizo. But my friends just call me Ted.”

“And the ‘I’?”

“Ishimoto.”

“Can I call you Ted?”

“If you like.”

“Are you a rich man?”

“Not anymore.” He folded up the handkerchief and put it away. “That’s a nice scarf you’ve got on.”

“My father gave it to me. He used to travel a lot. He bought it for me the last time he went to Paris. I asked him to bring me a bottle of perfume but he forgot. He brought me this scarf instead. It’s very plain, isn’t it?”

He did not answer her.

“He bought himself a pair of shoes while he was over there, too. Fancy ones with little holes punched into the leather. And wooden shoe trees to put inside of them at night.” She looked down at her scarf again. The edges were frayed and worn. “The thing is, I already had a blue scarf. He bought me one the last time he went to Paris.” She sighed. “This isn’t what I really wanted.”

Ted Ishimoto took off his glasses and held them up to the window. “Someday it might be,” he said. He blew on the lenses and then wiped them on his shirt sleeve. “Is your father with you on the train?”

“No,” said the girl. “They sent him away. He was in Missoula for a while and then he was at Fort Sam Houston. Now he’s in Lordsburg, New Mexico. He said there were no trees there.”

“No trees!” said the man and then he shook his head sadly, as though this were a strange and terrible thing. “Does he write to you?”

The door to the lavatory opened and a woman came out and smiled at the girl. “Your turn,” she said.

The girl looked at Ted Ishimoto. “Don’t go away,” she said. She went inside and stared at her face in the mirror above the basin and knew what she saw: a plain girl in a plain blue scarf. She turned on the faucet but the faucet was dry. She tilted her head back and said, “Aaaah,” and then she smiled, but only just a little, and only at the corners of her mouth. She didn’t look like herself when she did that. She looked like her mother, only not as mysterious.

When she came out she held the door open. “My father never writes to me,” she said, even though this was not true. He had written to her every week since his arrest last December and she had saved every single one of his postcards.

“That’s a shame,” said Ted Ishimoto. He reached for the door but she did not let go of it just yet. She pointed down the aisle. “Do you see that lady over there?”

He nodded.

“Do you think she’s pretty?”

“She’s lovely.”

“She’s my mother.

“Your mother is a very beautiful woman.”

“I know. Everyone says that. She’s watching us.”

“That’s her job,” he said. “She’s tired. I can see it in her eyes. Tell her everything will be all right.” He bowed quickly and stepped into the lavatory. “You’ll have to excuse me now.”

The girl let the door go and walked slowly back to her seat. In the middle of the aisle a young girl of five or six was playing with a dirty doll on the floor. The doll had curly yellow hair and big china eyes that opened and closed.

“What’s your doll’s name?”

“Miss Shirley.” The young girl held the doll up shyly. “Mama bought her for me from the Sears catalog.”

“She’s beautiful.”

“You can’t have her.”

“That’s all right.” The girl continued down the aisle. She walked past several snoring passengers and a man who had fallen asleep with a newspaper folded over his face. She saw a young woman reading Burma Surgeon and an older man reading the Webster’s Dictionary and underlining words with a red pencil. She saw two boys fighting for a window seat and a pair of middle-aged women sitting quietly side by side knitting identical pairs of thick woolen socks in preparation for the bitter winter months yet to come.

When the girl found her seat and sat down the old man in front of her turned around and said something to her again, and again she did not know what it was. She wondered where his wife was, or if he even had a wife at all. She looked for his ring finger but his ring finger was one of the fingers that was missing. “What’s he saying?” she whispered to her mother.

“Something about strawberries. He used to grow strawberries.”

“That’s very nice,” the girl said to the old man.

He bowed his head and smiled.

“He doesn’t understand you,” said her mother.

“Yes he does.”

Her mother took out a hairbrush from her purse and said, “Turn around.”

The girl turned toward the window and closed her eyes as her mother began to brush her hair. “Pull hard,” she said.

“What happened to your bow?”

“Harder,” said the girl. The brush made a sound like soft cloth ripping. “It fell out.”

“You’ve got such pretty hair. You should wear it down more often.”

“Too hot.”

“Who were you talking to back there?”

“Nobody,” said the girl. “A man. A rich man.” She paused. “Ted,” she said softly. “He said to tell you everything would be all right.”

“He can’t know that for sure.”

“He said you were beautiful too.”

“Did he?”

“Yes he did.”

“You shouldn’t believe everything a man tells you.”

The girl turned around and looked at her mother’s face. There were little lines around her eyes that she had not noticed before. “When did you stop wearing lipstick?”

“Two weeks ago. I used it all up.”

The girl stood up and shook out her hair. Outside the window she saw a restaurant on the side of the highway called Dinah’s Shack. Three big trucks were parked in front of Dinah’s Shack. There was no other building around for miles. Bright yellow lines were painted on the asphalt but the trucks had not parked between them. They had parked wherever they wanted to. The door to the restaurant opened and a man wearing boots and a cowboy hat stepped out into the heat of the day, laughing at something that someone inside—maybe it was Dinah—had just said to him. When he saw the train he stopped and watched the cars go by and then he touched the brim of his hat with his forefinger and walked across the lot to his truck.

The girl did not know what it meant when a man touched his hat. Maybe it meant the same thing as a nod, or a hello. It meant that you had been seen. Or maybe it meant nothing at all. She reached into the pocket of her dress and fingered the knot on her ribbon. Then she reached for her scarf and turned to her brother. “Tell me something,” she said, “is this not the most beautiful scarf you have ever seen?”

The boy sat up straight in his seat and blinked several times.

“Tell me the truth,” said the girl.

“I always do.”

“Well?”

The boy paused. “I remember you wore a prettier one last year.”

“I didn’t wear a scarf last year.”

The girl turned around and looked down the aisle to see if Ted Ishimoto had come out of the lavatory yet. She saw the door open and a young woman with a baby come out. The baby was crying and its face was bright red. The front of the woman’s blouse was wet. Ted Ishimoto was gone.

She reached into her suitcase and took out a worn pack of playing cards and began to shuffle the deck. “Pick a card,” she said to the boy, “any card.”

The boy did not answer her. He was looking for something in his suitcase.

“All right,” she said, “I’ll pick a card.” She pulled out a card from the middle of the deck and slipped it out the window. “Guess what card that was.”

“I am not in the mood for cards right now.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” said the boy. “I forgot my umbrella. I thought I brought it but I didn’t.”

His mother gave him an orange. “You can’t remember everything,” she said.

“And even when you can you shouldn’t,” said the girl.

“I wouldn’t say that,” said her mother.

“You didn’t,” said the girl.

“We’ll find you another umbrella when we get off the train,” said his mother.

“We’re never getting off this train,” said the girl.

“We are,” said her mother. “Tomorrow.”

The boy began to hit the side of his head with the orange.

“Stop that,” said his mother.

The boy stopped. He bit down hard into the thick skin of the orange and the juice ran down his chin.

“Not like that,” said his mother. She took the orange and began to peel it slowly in one continuous motion. They were in no hurry, after all. “Like this,” she said. Her hands were thin and white and had only recently begun to spot with age. She had married late and had her children late and now she was aging early. “Are you watching me?” she asked.

“Yes,” said the boy. He opened his mouth and she placed a section of orange on his tongue.

The girl slipped the remaining cards one by one out the window until there was only one card left in her hand: the six of clubs. She could think of nothing special about the six of clubs. She turned the card over and looked at the photograph of Glacier Falls on the back. The summer before last her father had hired an Indian driver—a Hindu, he had called him—to take them to Yosemite and they had stayed at the Ahwahnee Hotel for a week. She had bought the deck of cards at the gift shop and her brother had bought a red wooden tomahawk. Every night they had eaten dinner in the fancy dining room beneath the enormous chandeliers. The waiters had worn tuxedos and called her miss and whatever she had asked for they had brought to her on a round silver tray. Every night she had asked for the same thing. Lobster. The lobster at the Ahwahnee was very good.

She wrote down her name across the six of clubs and slipped the card out the window.

TOWARD EVENING the train was near Elko. A man on the side of the road was stepping out of an old red truck. A woman sat in the passenger seat, staring straight ahead. The girl knew what the woman was staring at. She was staring at nothing. There was nothing out there to see. The man kicked the door of the truck over and over again as steam rose up from under the hood. “That’s right, just kick and kick,” said the girl. A raven flew across the sky and then the truck disappeared.

Her brother tapped her arm.

“What is it?”

“Trampled,” he said. “That man was trampled.” He licked the tip of his finger and drew an X through the dust on the window.

The girl opened her suitcase and gave him a piece of paper and a pencil. “Here,” she said, “you can draw on this.”

The boy drew a large square and inside of the square he drew a little man in a suit with giant shoe trees for feet. “That’s Papa,” he said. He added a mustache but something about the mustache was not quite right.

“Too wide,” said the girl.

“That’s it.” He erased the mustache and part of the man’s mouth and then he drew the mustache again, only not as wide, but forgot to fix the mouth. He gave the pencil back to his sister. “You draw,” he said.

She took the pencil and drew a sky full of stars above the man’s head.

“Give him a hat, too.”

She drew a wide black fedora with a tiny feather tucked beneath the hatband. The girl was very good at drawing. The year before last she had won first prize at Lincoln Elementary School for her line drawing of a pinecone. She had simply concentrated on seeing the pinecone and the drawing had drawn itself. She had hardly looked down at her pencil at all.

Soon the boy fell asleep and she took out her father’s postcards from her suitcase. One of them showed a tiny man fishing on the bank of a river. Beneath him were the words Greetings from Montana, The Treasure State. Another one showed the highest stack in the world. The highest stack in the world was in Anaconda, Montana. She flipped through the pictures of the Indian pueblos and the ancient cliff dwellings until she came to the postcard of the largest and finest auditorium in New Mexico: the Seth Hall Gymnasium at Santa Fe High School. Seth Hall looked like an enormous adobe house, only with cross bars over the windows. On the back of the card her father had written her a short note: Finally, summer has arrived. I am in good health and hope you all are well. I know your birthday is coming up soon. Please let me know what you would like and I will order it from the City of Paris department store in San Francisco and have them send it to you. Be good to your mother while I am away. Love, Papa. At the bottom of the card there was a P.S. and then a line of text that had been blacked out by the censors. She wondered what it was her father had wanted to tell her. She had not written him back—every day was like every other day and she could never think of anything new to say—but the blue silk scarf and the tiny bottle of Sweet Serenade perfume had arrived in the mail on her birthday anyway. She had used up the Sweet Serenade a long time ago. Now she could not even remember what it smelled like.

Outside the window dusk was falling. The mountains glowed red along the ridge tops and behind them the sky had turned deep violet. A soldier—a different soldier from before—walked through the car calling out, “Shades down.” From sunset until sunrise they had to keep the shades drawn. She put the postcards away and pulled down the shade. Her mother placed an old wooden suitcase beneath the window and sat down on the lid so the girl and boy could have the seats to themselves. “Lie down,” she said to them. “Try and sleep.”

LATER THAT EVENING the girl awoke to the sound of breaking glass. Someone had thrown a brick through a window but the gas lamps were broken and it was too dark to see. She was sweating and her throat was dry and sore and she wanted a glass of cold milk but she could not remember where she was. At first she thought she was in her yellow bedroom in the white stucco house in Berkeley but she could not see the shadow of the elm tree on the yellow wall or even the yellow wall itself so she knew she was not there, she was back in the stalls at Tanforan. But at Tanforan there were gnats and fleas and the awful smell of the horses and the sound of the neighbors on either side fighting until late in the night. At Tanforan the partitions between the stalls did not reach all the way up to the ceiling and it was impossible to sleep. The girl had slept. Just now she had slept. She had slept and dreamed about her father again so she knew she was not at Tanforan, either.

She called out for her mother.

Her mother reached out from her seat on the suitcase and put her hand on the girl’s forehead and smoothed back her wet black hair and said, “Hush, baby,” and the girl, who still could not remember where she was, remembered that her mother had not called her baby for a long time, not since the summer White Dog had run away and not come home for a week. This was before White Dog had grown old and tired and hurt his leg on the lawn mower. This was when White Dog was still a noisy white dog that would bark at anything no matter how big that thing was. This was when the girl was still eight and her father had let her walk alone to the corner store on a Sunday with a handful of pennies while he stood on the front porch and watched. She had come home with a fat copy of the San Francisco Chronicle and they had sat in the kitchen drinking large glasses of steaming hot cocoa and reading the comics—first Dick Tracy and Moon Mullins and then her favorite, Invisible Scarlet O’Neil—and nobody else in the house had been awake. Now she was eleven and she could not remember where she was. It was late at night and her mother was calling her baby and asking her if she was all right.

“Of course I’m all right,” said the girl. “I just want a glass of milk.” She reached out into the darkness and ran her fingers along the smooth siding of the train. “Where’s White Dog?”

“We couldn’t take him with us.”

“Where is he?”

“We left him at home. We’re on the train.”

The girl sat up in her seat and grasped her mother’s hand. “I dreamed about Papa,” she said. “He was wearing his fancy French shoes and we were in a boat going to Paris and he was singing that song again.” She began to hum because she could not remember the words.

“‘In the Mood,’” her mother said.

“Yes, that’s it, “‘In the Mood.’”

“What kind of boat was it?” the boy whispered.

“A gondola.”

“Then you were in Venice.”

“All right,” said the girl, “let’s just say that I was.” She pulled back the shade and looked out into the black Nevada night and saw a herd of wild mustangs galloping across the desert. The sky was lit up by the moon and the dark bodies of the horses were drifting and turning in the moonlight and wherever they went they left behind great billowing clouds of dust as proof of their passage. The girl lifted the shade and pulled her brother to the window and pressed his face gently to the glass and when he saw the mustangs with their long legs and their flying manes and their sleek brown coats he let out a low moan that sounded like a cry of pain but was not. He watched the horses as they galloped toward the mountains and he said, very softly, “They are going away.” Then a soldier with a flashlight and a broom came walking down the aisle. The girl let the shade fall back against the glass and told the boy to return to his seat.

“Where’s that brick?” asked the soldier. “Over here,” someone answered. The girl sat quietly listening to the soldier sweeping up the shards of broken glass. “Shades down,” she said to herself. “Shades down.” Then she closed her eyes and she slept.

SOMETIME DURING THE NIGHT the train entered Utah. It crossed the barren stretch of the Great Salt Lake Desert and then the Great Salt Lake itself. The lake was dark and shallow and had no outlet to the sea. It was what it had always been—an ancient body of water where nothing ever sank—but the girl did not see it. She was sound asleep but even in her sleep the sound of the rippling water came to her. An hour later the train stopped at the station in Ogden for water and ice, and the girl, who was thirsty, still slept. She slept through Bountiful and Salt Lake City and Spanish Fork and did not open her eyes until the train arrived at Delta the next morning. When she woke she did not remember the sound of the rippling water but it was with her, without her knowing. The sound of the lake was inside of her. At Delta, armed soldiers with bayonets escorted them off the train and the girl climbed down the metal stairs one by one with her suitcase and stepped out onto solid ground. The air was still and warm and she could no longer hear the low moan of the engine or the clicking of the wheels against the iron rails.

She covered her eyes with her hand and said, “It’s too bright.”

“It is unbearably bright,” said her mother.

“Keep walking, please,” said a soldier.

The boy said he was too tired to walk. His mother put down her bags and reached into her purse and gave him a piece of Chiclets gum she had been saving for weeks. He popped it into his mouth and then he followed his mother and sister between the double row of soldiers to the buses that had been waiting for them to arrive since before dawn.

They climbed onto a bus and the bus drove slowly down the shady streets of the town. They passed a courthouse and a hardware store and a diner full of hungry men eating breakfast before work. They ran through a yellow light and swerved to avoid hitting a stray dog. They passed block after block of white houses with wooden porches and neatly manicured lawns and then they were at the edge of the town. For several miles they drove past nothing but farms and alfalfa fields and the scenery was very pleasant. Then the bus turned onto a newly tarred road and drove in a straight line past the occasional clumps of greasewood and sage until it arrived at Topaz. At Topaz the bus stopped. The girl looked out the window and saw hundreds of tar-paper barracks sitting beneath the hot sun. She saw telephone poles and barbed-wire fences. She saw soldiers. And everything she saw she saw through a cloud of fine white dust that had once been the bed of an ancient salt lake. The boy began to cough and the girl untied her scarf and shoved it into his hand and told him to hold it over his nose and mouth. He pressed the scarf to his face and took the girl’s hand and together they stepped out of the bus and into the blinding white glare of the desert.