Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  The two chewed their food so quietly and slowly that I could hardly believe they actually had the food in their mouths.

  “Dave?” the captain said to his XO, a familiarity in his voice that showed they had shared a lot of meals together.

  “Captain?” the XO responded.

  They both wiped their mouths at the same time, and I could swear I could see smiles on the side of their mouths that they had turned away from us, reserved solely for each other. Then they both took a bit of the opposite dishes, the captain eating my mole and the XO eating Noakes’ dish.

  “Captain?” the XO said.

  “Dave?” the captain said.

  The captain turned to Noakes and me, nodded, and waved us away with his fork, a nod of his head to us and then to his XO.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Della

  1943

  HELEN AND I BECAME VERY GOOD, VERY FAST. BOTH OF US ROSE up the ranks within the training room. We winked at each other each time we solved something one of our male student peers could not. We walked out of the room together each night and took a taxi to downtown DC to eat dinner and have drinks and dance with soon-to-be-gone soldiers until our feet hurt. Then we awoke each morning, excited to do our jobs for our country.

  “This is the best life, Helen,” I said one night.

  “It is, Della, it is,” Helen said.

  THE SECOND WE GOT OUT of training, however, things changed. The importance of breaking codes or my inability to break a code weighed on me more. I thought of those men out there fighting. I thought about them a lot. They carried their packs and their guns. They slept in huge metal tubes, one on top of another, crammed together for days beneath the ocean. I constantly thought about John. I thought about John in those metal tubes. I thought about his tiny ears. I worried about the pressure on them. I could imagine him sleeping in that canister of war, and I wished I could pluck him out of there and bring him home. I knew all the danger he was in. And I thought about loving him and not being able to tell him anything.

  School was fun. Training was more fun. But once I sat down at a wooden desk in the hot, humid room in Arlington Hall, and once the four-digit numeric codes fell onto my desk, the responsibility hit me hard. I was there to win the war. I was there to save lives.

  I shared a desk with four other women. Helen got sent to the Army code breaking unit. I got shipped to the Navy. I wished she was there with me. I wished we could work together, but we had no say in that. And we each had different jobs. I had been assigned to decipher the Japanese Navy’s shipping codes. These codes told us everything. With the war in the Pacific raging, their troops needed supplies on the ground. Their ships needed oil. Their sailors needed food. If we could cut off a shipping lane or if we could sink a transport ship, we hurt them, and we hurt them where it hurt the most.

  Luckily, before I got there, the team had figured out that a string of clusters of four numbers told us everything we needed to know. First, they told us where ships would originate. Then, they told us what they carried. Third, they told us where they were going. While this seems easy, the Japanese were always switching things up and changing the four-digit codes, so we spent our days breaking the ever-changing numbers.

  Helen, on the other hand, worked strictly to decipher codes for the US ARMY and translate the Japanese verbal messages that got picked up over the airwaves. While the codes were delivered in Japanese, they were also garbled and reordered, so Helen’s team did their best to break the terribly complicated messages that, even to those who knew Japanese fluently, wouldn’t be able to understand. It came across more like scrambled eggs than hard boiled.

  That summer, it got so damned hot in our room that I wanted to strip down and stand in front of the fan, and I didn’t care who saw me. We broke codes for eight hours a day. If they needed us longer, we stayed longer. We were put on shifts. The code breaking went on every hour of the day. During the first week, they shifted us around so damned much. First, they would put us on the morning shift. Then, they would move us to the graveyard shift, and then the swing shift, and then the graveyard shift again. There was no pattern. They did it—I know now—to mess with us and to see who could handle it.

  On the third day, Helen and I both started on the swing, and then, when I walked up to the desk to clock out, they said I had to stay for the graveyard. The officer just handed me a pile of codes to break and pointed me back to my desk without a word. There was no “please” or “thank you” that first week. The same thing happened to Helen. When I showed up at our apartment after two, full eight-hour shifts, she had just fallen down on the couch next to the fan and started yelling and bitching.

  “They did it to you too?” she asked when I walked in.

  “They sure as hell did,” I said. “They sure as hell did.”

  She went to the fridge, pulled out a bottle of chilled vodka, poured it into a tumbler with ice, and handed it to me.

  “Well, we know they can’t call us back for at least another eight hours, so we might as well pass out hard,” Helen said.

  We clinked our glasses, sipped on the drinks for a while, and fell asleep, both of us smiling. Sure, we bitched and moaned, but goddamnit, we loved it. We were both cracking codes and translating and using our brains to do something other than teach schoolchildren, and I’ll tell you goddamned what, I would do it all over again for years at a time if I ever had the chance. My life had become a big puzzle with consequences, and I was the best at solving those puzzles.

  As the first week went on, some girls either quit or were asked to vacate their post. One woman broke down after breaking codes for more than ten hours. She stood up, pulled the barrettes out of her hair, and she started throwing them in the giant fans that circulated the hot, muggy air throughout the room. The barrettes shot out of the spinning blades like shrapnel, and by the time we all figured out that we needed to start ducking, one of them had lodged itself another woman’s arm. The blade had cut it, making one end sharp enough to pierce skin, so when it came flying out of the fan at a hundred miles an hour, it dug into her arm, barely missing her main vein.

  Another girl, who I really liked, but who could not keep her mouth shut, got kicked out on day four. She could handle the long hours, but she just couldn’t stop gabbing about her family’s ranch in Texas. Big steer this and beautiful horse that and the most beautiful creek that ran through the whole place, blah, blah, blah.

  “What about the Dust Bowl,” I asked her. “How were they able to keep it?”

  She dropped her head down toward me and said, “Our hired hands, of course. They kept the horses fed, watered, and bathed. The steers had the best hay, shipped in for dirt cheap from places like Kansas and Colorado and Oklahoma. So cheap that we used it as bedding for the animals in their ranch house.”

  I wanted to smack her a couple times. They didn’t own a ranch like we owned a ranch. They owned a dude ranch, where the horses were pets, not property, and where the steers were raised solely for prime cuts of meat. I didn’t blame her though. It wasn’t her fault she didn’t know jack from shit. And she was smart too.

  But she couldn’t keep her mouth shut. They warned her once, and when she started talking about how she had taken a boat to Europe once, the local officer walked to her desk, picked up her codes, and escorted her out.

  A fourth didn’t make it through the week because she had to go to the bathroom and was told she would have to wait until break to go. She waited a few minutes, stood up, pulled her skirt up and her underwear down, and urinated in a fake bush next to her desk. She sat back down, smiled, and then went on code breaking. The officer led her out when the smell of urine started to ripen in the midday heat. It’s too bad. She was good.

  After the first week, Commander Edwards, the leader of the joint task force, asked the remaining women from both Helen’s group and mine to join him in the auditorium. I had met him once before.

  On my first day, he’d invited me and three other women to his office
to welcome us. His desk was so clean. It shined in the afternoon sunlight that came through the tall windows that looked out toward the east, out toward the war. Beside three files—ours, I figured—that sat on his desk, the only other thing that he kept there was a picture of his family. In it, he stood in his dress uniform. His wife, tall and brunette and striking in a way, stood next to him and placed her hands on the shoulders of twin boys. They all smiled a military smile: pierced lips and tight eyes, like they had been trained to always look this way in front of a camera. Even the small twin boys looked in control.

  He opened each of our files and perused them silently.

  “Trinidad, Colorado,” he said, kind of like a question but more like a judgment. “How did you get yourself way out here, Ms. Chavez?”

  I placed my hands on my knees to steady my legs. They had begun to shake in the cold room.

  “Mount Holyoke,” I said. “They offered me a scholarship to study there, sir.” I had never been around military officers in my entire life, but I picked up the “please,” “thank you,” and “yes, sirs” very quickly.

  “Do you know anyone here?” he asked.

  “Just my roommate Helen,” I said. “We became friends at school. We are sharing a place in DC.”

  “DC?” he asked. “Isn’t that difficult to get to and from every day?”

  I tried to not smile. The thought of not living stuck in the expansive dormitory made me so happy inside that I wanted to scream, It may take some time to get there and back, but holy shit, it’s worth it, Commander. I held this in, along with my smile, and gave him a more acceptable answer, “Yes, sir, it is, but the privacy is well worth it. I grew up on a ranch in the middle of nowhere. It’s exciting to be in the city.”

  He didn’t like that answer either. His frown and tossing of my file aside told me so.

  In the huge auditorium I found out why.

  “Please sit,” he told all of us, about thirty in total. We began the week with nearly sixty, but day after day, the desks got emptier.

  “Loose lips sink ships,” he belted out from the podium at the center of the stage at the front of the auditorium. “In our case, loose lips sink the ships of our brave men in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Any word of what we’re doing here or how we’re doing it could kill thousands of men that wake up every morning to the smell of an asshole sleeping less than a foot above them in the barrel of a submarine on the decks of a carrier. Loose lips sink ships.

  “I know that a few of you have found a way to live in the city. You are lucky enough to have a car, or a friend that has a car to drive you back and forth and that you have your own living space, outside the caring and watchful eye of all of us here,” he said.

  He found me and Helen in the crowd, glanced our way, for just long enough to let us know that he was talking to us.

  “I cannot forbid you from leaving your homes at night. I cannot legally even ask you to not leave, but I am sternly encouraging you to stay away from the city, from the restaurants, and from the night clubs. People are watching us. Ears are pinned open for any information the enemy can use against us. If you speak one word about what we are doing here to anyone, you will be tried for treason. Do you understand?” he asked, though no one dared answer him. We all just shook our heads in unison.

  Then I heard a tiny giggle float through the auditorium. I recognized that giggle. Helen had let it go. I knew she didn’t think what the commander said was funny, but I also knew that she couldn’t handle anything too serious for too long because it made her nervous and uncomfortable. When she was nervous and uncomfortable, she giggled.

  “Is this funny?” the commander walked around the podium and scanned the audience for the giggler. He locked eyes on Helen.

  Then I spoke up, to save her, because if he were to stare right at her she might just explode in laughter. She didn’t mean to be rude or disrespectful. Her body just couldn’t handle it.

  “That was me, sir,” I said. “I had to sneeze. I tried to hold it in, but it came out like a giggle, sir.”

  He paced the stage until he stood in front of me and looked down at me.

  “One more ‘sneeze,’” he emphasized sneeze, knowing that my lie was bullshit, and said, “and you’ll be sent back to that little hole in the wall you call home in Colorado. I will have a soldier escort you there myself. Understand, Ms. Chavez.”

  The words, “Yes, sir,” came out of my mouth, luckily. I was praying that Helen didn’t giggle again. She held it in and kept us both out of trouble. We were already the goddamned reason that he gave us all the lecture of loose lips and sinking ships. We didn’t need another reason to be the focus of his anger.

  “Also, no alcohol. I forbid alcohol while you are out in the city. Drunken lips not only sink ships, but they can also sink a whole operation,” he said.

  Please, Helen, don’t giggle, I thought to myself. Helen thinking about drunken lips, just the sounds of the words, could send her into a fit.

  “If any of you are caught out with alcohol on your lips, you will be tried for treason because women like yourselves are weak when it comes to keeping secrets when you’re sober. You can never keep secrets when you’re drunk, so we will assume that you shared secrets from your drunken lips,” he bellowed.

  First, I tell you right now, we were just as strong and just as secretive as any of those men who worked there. Hell, we were stronger and a hell of a lot more reserved, and I didn’t see him line the men up and tell them the same thing. This whole lecture was asinine, but I let that all slide because I had to pray with everything in my soul that Helen had closed her ears and did not hear him repeat “drunken lips.”

  He turned his back to us and walked back to the podium. I took a quick glance back at Helen and saw that she had stuffed the end of her handkerchief in her mouth and bit down hard on it. Her eyes swelled, and I could see that she was just about to lose it when he changed the subject.

  I found Helen outside the auditorium, her handkerchief still stuck in her mouth. I dragged her to the women’s room. When we found a stall, I pulled the cloth from her mouth.

  Immediately, she yelled with a shout of laughter that followed her words, “Super secrets and drunken lips. Holy God!” she screamed.

  I placed my head on her shoulder and laughed so hard that I could barely breathe. “Drunken lips!”

  We pulled ourselves together and came out of the bathroom to see Commander Edwards, with his arms folded across his chest, staring in at us.

  He shook his head, put his index and middle finger to his eyes and said, “I’m watching you two.”

  Chapter Forty-Six

  John

  1943

  WE KNEW IT WAS COMING. THE VETERAN SAILORS—THE SHELLBACKS—had been on the rest of us for a week, calling us pollywogs, kicking us in the ass when we walked down the hallway, pulling back the thin sheet that covered our bunks during our brief “quiet” and “private” times.

  “Your time is coming,” they’d say when they picked up their food from the line we had set up for them in the tiny mess hall. “Pollywog, give me another biscuit.” We weren’t supposed to, but both Noakes and I knew that if we didn’t, our time during the Crossing the Line Ceremony would be worse, and to be honest, when we had two seconds alone we hoped, together, that if we cooked well and gave extra food to the sailors who we knew might be extra mean that we might escape some of the worst of the initiation ceremony when the submarine surfaced on the equator.

  I think we hedged our bets well.

  The sun was nice. I have to admit that. We hadn’t had a chance to be in the sunlight for days. They lined all of us pollywogs up. They stripped us down to nothing, they made us climb the ladder up to the top of the boat, and then they made us stand in the hot sun of the equator with our hands above our head as King Neptune, one of the higher ranking officers dressed in a toga sheet with a titan spear, paraded in front of us with a hose that was connected to a gas bucket that spat urine on our bodies.
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  The urine initiated us into the court of King Neptune. Our captain stood at the end of the line and smiled. Every single one of the shellbacks had done this before. It was our turn to take the punishment. After our initiation by urine, a shellback walked behind us and whipped our calves and asses with a hose. It stung like hell, real hell. I wanted to turn around and jack him in the face, and I could see Noakes doing everything he could to not retaliate.

  We took our lashings, and then we dropped on all fours, formed a line—heads to asses—and crawled on the deck between shellbacks that kicked us in the ribs as hard as they could and sang songs to Neptune and navy chants we learned in boot camp.

  I smelled shit. Real shit. Not the smell of shit that came out our pores after a few days without a shower, but real shit. I lifted my head in our crawling Tonga line and saw a shellback pull shit from the back of his pants and smear it on the back of the guy in front of me. That was the first time I was glad I was a cook. Another shellback did the same thing and aimed his hand at my back and face, but he was stopped immediately by my captain’s voice, “Do not touch him with your shit, pollywog Cordova will be cooking for me and for us in less than two hours, and I don’t want any of your excrement near him.”

  “Yes, sir,” the shellback said. He let me and Noakes pass by him in our parade and smeared shit on the following guy.

  Then I thought I saw someone die. There had been rumors that men had died during the ceremony, and all of us newbies somewhat believed them but didn’t really want to. Right before they threw us overboard to clean us off, a shellback attached a long, frayed electrical wire of a generator to the end of broom. One sailor stood up, ready to jump overboard. When he leaned toward the edge of the boat, excited to clean the shit and urine off of his beaten ribs and legs, the shellback stuck the wired broom into his chest. The sailor convulsed and then fell into the water. The shock of the prod seemed to light up his eyes, and his fingertips shook like baby eels trying to escape the skin at the end of his palms.