Free Eyes of the Emperor by Graham Salisbury Page A

were digging with picks and shovels.
    “Hey, come look,” I said.
    Chik, Cobra, and PeeWee squeezed in around me.
    It was a shock. Never in our lives had we seen white guys doing pick-and-shovel work.
    Cobra clicked his tongue. “Prisoners, ah? Must be a chain gang.”
    “But no guards,” Chik said.
    He was right. They were free men.
    The train moved on.
    Sweet let us raise the shades when we weren't in some town or city, and ho, what a sight. I'd never been anywhere that I couldn't see the ocean. It was the strangest feeling to be
inside
the land. Trapped in it. We were islanders, used to small places. Only because we knew the ocean did we understand endlessness like this—mountains far away in the hazy distance, dry desert, red hills, miles and miles of pastures, cows, horses, farmland so perfect it looked fake. Amazing.
    On and on, the train clicking along the tracks, with nothing from Sweet about where we were going.
Click, click, click
—the sound lulling me to sleep—until I realized something and popped awake. My birthday had come and gone on that ship!
    I was seventeen.

    Days later, when we just about couldn't take it anymore, we crossed into a green land of forests, lakes, cows, and no mountains.
    “You're in Wisconsin, grunts,” Sweet said, finally giving us something. “Anyone ever heard of it?”
    “Only all of us, you fool,” Cobra mumbled.
    When the train stopped, I peeked out the window.
    Yah!
    My scalp prickled. Felt like my hair rose straight up. Cobra was right—prison was right outside the window!
    Faces peered back at us through a chain-link fence—Japanese faces. And one face I could hardly believe.
    A guy standing off by himself.
    Sakamaki.
    Chik and Cobra shoved in around me. We gaped at him. And all those people. So sad, so beaten. A fire burned in my throat.
    “It's really true,” Cobra whispered.
    “Can't be,” Chik said. “No.”
    But there was the proof—Sakamaki. The guy we'd captured at Waimanalo.
    A feeling of complete emptiness washed over me. The feeling you get when you give up.
    But the train jolted and moved ahead.
    Sakamaki's fingers clutched the chain-link fence as we pulled away. He glared at us, his face strangely pockmarked. His eyes were fierce. Probably he still wanted to be shot.
    But the rest of those faces seemed hopeless and confused. Men and women, young, old. Who were they? What crime had they committed?
    We looked at them and they looked back, and something passed between us—something like deep, deep sorrow.
    But not Sakamaki. He lived in another world.
    The train stopped for the last time less than a mile down the line.
    From there we were bussed into Camp McCoy, a sprawlingarmy reservation of fields, forests, creeks, and low hills. Tall trees framed the camp itself, a tidy place.
    But back in the far corner of the camp was the prison. An internment center, they called it. Except for Sakamaki, it wasn't a place for enemies but for people the government had kicked out of all those West Coast states.
    Just people. Americans.

The air at Camp McCoy was fresh and sweet, and the summer sun blazed hot, just like at home.
    Cobra looked the place over with his usual squint. PeeWee and Golden Boy broke out their cards, and Chik wondered if there were any good-looking girls in town.
    “Now, this is more like it,” I said, because for the first time since any of us had been in the army, we slept in bunks with springs and mattresses and stored our gear in footlockers, and best of all, enjoyed clean latrines—
inside
the barracks.
    One night after chow, Chik fell back on his bunk with his hands behind his head. “This is the life, ah?”
    “Pfff,” Cobra scoffed. “Fools are so easily pleased, ah, Eddy?”
    I laughed and headed outside to sit on the steps to write a letter to Herbie.
    I thought for a long time before I wrote, remembering what home looked like. Kaka'ako, the harbor, the boatyard. Sharky and Opah. Ma and Herbie. Bunichi.
    And Pop. What was he