Free Rules of Honour by Matt Hilton Page B

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 1970 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