The Wreckage by Michael Crummey

Author:Michael Crummey [Crummey, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Historical
ISBN: 9780385660600
Publisher: Anchor Canada
Published: 2004-12-31T05:00:00+00:00

There was a new indoor pool in English Bay.

He happened on three boys he knew from the Japanese Language School, all members of the League of Divine Wind. They wore shorts and sandals, towels hung around their shoulders. They weren’t friends of his but they invited him along because they were pessimistic about their chances and wanted the comfort of numbers.

The manager was apologetic, shrugging helplessly as he explained the facility’s policy. The caustic smell of chlorine drifting out to them from the pool. He was an older man with a moon face under a straw hat, grey pants held high by suspenders. “Sorry, boys,” he said, and it seemed to make him lonesome to turn them away. It was almost possible to feel sorry for him. They walked all the way to a swimming hole near Steveston instead. Putting the place out of their minds.

But the refusal ate at him and the following Saturday he went back to the pool on his own. The old man shook his head again. “No Japs,” he said.

Nishino leaned against the doorframe while swimmers came and went and they chatted aimlessly awhile. He watched for a chink, a trap door, an open window in each word exchanged, in every casual detail. He told the manager he was living on a farm beyond Kitsilano and the old man smiled.

He said, “I lived in Kits for years before I moved into the city.”

The next week, Nishino brought a container of fresh strawberries from the farm. They ate the fruit together while the manager spoke about this and that, happy for the audience. He had an uncle who’d worked as a shift boss in a sawmill in the valley years before, and Nishino told him it was the very same sawmill where his grandfather first found work when he moved to British Columbia. It was a bald-faced lie but a safe one—the English had trouble telling one Japanese worker from another—and the manager seemed delighted by the information.

“You’re a clever little nip, ain’t you,” he said. And he apologized again, as he did regularly, for the pool’s policy. “People just won’t stand to share the place with your kind,” he said.

And then Nishino made his proposal. The pool opened at ten each day. The manager agreed to let him and his friends come down for a swim at seven-thirty in the morning, as long as they promised to be gone before it opened to the general public. “I won’t have enough paying customers to buy myself a quiff, they finds out I’m letting Japs in the water,” he warned.

The air in the poolroom was humid, as dense with moisture as the rainforest. They cannonballed and belly-flopped off the diving board in the deep end until their skin stung. Just after nine, the manager poked his head through the change-room door and shouted at them to finish up. They swam into the shallow end toward the stairs leading up to the deck. The other boys were halfway

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