Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  I waited for him to surface in the water. It scared the shit out of me.

  Then, after a long few seconds, his face rose out of the waves and smiled.

  Everyone went through this, except, you guessed it, Noakes and me, the same command to save the hands of the boys who provided us food. We escaped the shit. And we escaped the shock torture because we could cook.

  That morning, right after we jumped in the ocean to cleanse ourselves, a real baptism it felt like in the ocean on the equator, a pollywog got shocked, he fell to the water, and then he disappeared beneath the waves. The cavorting shellbacks didn’t see it. The captain didn’t see it. I don’t know if I even saw it, to be honest. It could have been my paranoid imagination, but I don’t think he ever came back up. A few minutes later, we were all called to board the ship again, dry off, sing new songs, receive our certificates and medals for crossing the equator, and then relax on top of the boat in the sun, joining the ranks of the shellbacks.

  I watched for that boy in the water. I never saw him come up. I wished that it was my imagination that created his body in the water in the first place. But I felt, deep down, that it wasn’t.

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Della

  1943

  THE FIRST FEW MONTHS WERE TEDIOUS. I CONTINUED TO WORK on breaking codes for eight to ten-hour shifts. I would break a string of Japanese Codes, deciphering where a ship had left port, where it was headed, and, to the best of my ability, the route it planned to take, what it carried. I would hand these off to the runner. The runner would take them to another analyst who would put it all together, matching where vessels were in the area, and then, I believe, relay the message to a submarine, cruiser, or battleship. But I never heard anything from anyone once I handed my info off to the runner.

  Helen dealt with the same thing. She would translate a message, unscramble it, and then send it off to a runner who would give it to an analyst—usually a jumbled mix of Japanese and a synthetic language they made up to throw us off—and she would never hear if she helped anyone, saved anything, or stopped something from happening.

  At night, if we both worked the day shift, we would drive back to our place in the city, take showers to clean off the day’s sweat, change, and then head out into town for dinner. We had more money than we had ever made teaching, and our apartment was fully funded by Helen’s dad who thought we were making the world a better place by guiding youth in the inner city of Baltimore. We ate out every night and then hit the nice clubs.

  I tried so much seafood. I never thought I would like it. My life had been filled with all things fried: beans, tortillas, corn, pork, beef (sometimes), and buñuelos. Seafood was fresh. It tasted like the ocean. It came out of the oven and sat clean and grease-less next to vegetables, green vegetables that were boiled or baked too. I fell in love with it all.

  Helen and I drank Manhattans and Old Fashioneds, and we sat in the clubs and imagined what our broken codes did to help our men in the ocean. John and I had ordered Manhattans together back in Hartford, but felt so stupid doing so. Helen made me feel like I should never feel stupid about anything.

  “I bet I saved four ships today,” I would say.

  “I bet I sank four ships today,” Helen would say.

  We imagined some general somewhere thanking us for what we had done.

  “If it weren’t for Helen and Della, we would have all perished today,” he would say in our imaginations. We gave each other the recognition we felt we deserved for sitting in that hot office for eight hours a day and scanning numbers or listening to garbled messages in headphones. If no one else would thank us, then damnit, we would do the thanking.

  And then, as it would always happen, men would come around. We sat in the corners and the shadows for a reason. We wanted to be left alone, but men are too stupid to figure this out. No wonder all the women were the best damned code breakers in Arlington. Men couldn’t break one simple code: women, sitting alone, talking vehemently together, engaged in their own damned conversation, want to be left alone. Nope, they couldn’t break that one.

  Inevitably, two men would walk up to our little table in the corner of a club, sit down next to us, ask us what we wanted to drink, wave the waitstaff over, order our drinks, and then smile as the woman placed them down on the table in front of us.

  “Thank you for these,” I would say.

  “Yes, thank you for these,” Helen would respond.

  “So, what are you two doing over here alone?” a man would say.

  “Talking,” I would say.

  “Yeah, talking to each other,” Helen would say.

  We broke the code down for them, and they still couldn’t decipher it. The message was very simple: we’re sitting alone because we want to sit alone, and, of course, talk about stuff that could get us hung for treason, but the men didn’t need to know the second part. They only needed to break the first part of the code—leave us alone. In their men’s minds, they thought the message was: these women are just being coy, and they want us to join them because there is no way they could actually be at the club having an intriguing conversation and not be looking for husbands. Wrong. Wrong answer. They would be fired in a heartbeat if they had our jobs.

  “David here, he is a stockbroker in the city, and I’m an attorney,” Robert (it always seemed like it was David and Robert or equivalently pedestrian names like that), would say, dismissing our responses.

  “Yep, I represent those who can’t represent themselves,” Robert would continue, easing back into his chair and smiling like he was some kind of goddamned hero.

  “You mean you’re an attorney. Isn’t that what attorneys do? They represent people who can’t represent themselves. Isn’t that your job?” Helen would say.

  As if he didn’t hear her, he would continue on, “I make a good living in the courtroom, and David here, his courtroom is the stock market. The stock market is a system of publicly traded—”

  “Yes, we know what the stock market is, Bob,” I would say to our new, oblivious, friend. Again, as if I didn’t speak, he would continue on, or David would break in and tell us something we already knew, leaning back in his chair and acting like a pompous wiener.

  “Thanks for the drinks, gentlemen, but we would like to continue our conversation about makeup and our vaginas,” I would say. The word “vaginas” would snap them out of their arrogant postures.

  To them, a young woman saying “vaginas” in public like that was very, very un-lady like, so they would give each other a look of mortification, stand up on cue together, and walk away, leaving our martinis in fronts of us to drink.

  We would delve right back into how we spent the day saving our men by breaking four-numbered codes and deciphering Japanese—purposeful—gibberish.

  Treason be damned.

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  John

  1943

  TWO WEEKS LATER WE DOVE, QUE PADRE. WE DOVE DEEP.

  The pressure in the barrel of the submarine grew up around us and squeezed tight. The moment the nose of the massive metal submarine dipped down and pushed through ocean into the darkness beneath, one guy lost his mind. He was a torpedo man. It was his job to load the torpedoes with the long ropes and levers and chains, pull them from their caskets in the torpedo room, hoist them up, shove them into the barrels of the biggest guns on earth, and then lock them in, all within minutes after another torpedo had been launched through the water and toward a Japanese ship.

  Noakes and I were cooking. It was our shift.

  We had just served up thirty sailors. We had gotten through quite a few boxes of food, so the hallways and the shitter and showers had been cleared. Fresh air hadn’t come through the submarine in more than twenty days, and even when everyone showered, the body odor they washed off still hung in the air and in their clothes and all over the place.

  THOSE DAYS IN THE SUBMARINE kitchen were some of my favorite, not just during those years, but some of favorite in my entire life.


  Noakes told me all about his life. It was a pretty good one for the most part, except for one big glaring clusterfuck of an uncle who tried to ruin it all.

  His uncle—his father’s brother—had always been an asshole, I guess.

  One day, as Noakes tells it, his dad and he went fishing. They climbed to the edge of lake Michigan with their rods in their hands and sat along the bank of a big pond where large-mouth bass begged for their bait. They had a great day. They caught ten fish, and they were going to cook them for dinner.

  Noakes’ dad, even way back then, was educated, the first in their family to go to college, and he had enough money to buy a nice house and get his kids to school. But his brother had none of that. He always wanted what Noakes’ dad had. Especially Noakes’ mom. That day when they came home from fishing, Noakes’ uncle had pinned Noakes’ mom down on the floor and had nearly ripped off her dress completely. Her eyes were wide open with fear when the door opened, and Noakes’ dad, looking down at his scared wife and his brother on top of her, lost his mind and beat his brother up until he almost died. Then Noakes’ dad dropped his brother off on the front door of the hospital and never picked him up. Noakes had never told anyone but me about that.

  Somehow, down there in the belly of a metal monster in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we found a way to laugh about the worst things that had happened to us before we got there, like they were only real above the water, like the hard earth was make believe.

  THE MORNING OF THE DIVE, right before the boy lost his complete shit, the captain walked into the kitchen behind us. Noakes, out of the corner of his eye and with a pile of hash browns on his spatula, noticed the captain walk in, turned an about face with hash browns steadily in place, and saluted.

  “Keep cooking while we talk,” he said.

  Noakes and I kept cooking, giving the captain enough attention to show him we were following orders.

  “Was this your goal, sailors? To cook? Did you put in for this?”

  “No, sir,” Noakes said, his brashness surprising me.

  But I followed suit.

  “No, sir, we both put in for different positions, sir,” I said. “Sir, can I expand, sir?”

  “Please do, Cordova,” he said.

  The eggs and the hash browns were moved around the grill like we were trying to slide between girls.

  “We scored the best in our boot class, sir, on all things, sir,” I said. I worried that my confidence may get me humbled quickly, but Noakes began to talk.

  “It’s because I’m black, sir, and Cordova here is not so white himself, sir,” Noakes said.

  Then we both shut up. We knew we had already gotten away with a lot of free speaking. We didn’t want to push it. We put our heads down and slung out ten more plates before the captain spoke again. “I’ll wire back to New London to see if this is the truth, and—” An alarm sounded, red lights flashing throughout the submarine. We weren’t under attack. A sailor had tried to break through and open the hatch to escape the submarine. The torpedo man.

  The captain disappeared. The conversation ended. We finished our shift, both of us worried that we may have said too much, that our accusation of a racist Navy may have gone too far. We spent our sleep time talking about how we thought we may have fucked up.

  We started our next shift with no sleep and anxious we might get some trouble for what we said. Beyond that, we worried that our extra ingredients might disappear and our privilege to use them for our meals might go with them. It was a long night that ended in a long day of cooking, both of us moving slowly across the kitchen.

  “The captain wants mole and your sausage dish today,” the head cook said behind us just as our shift had ended and we had begun to wipe the sweat from our brows.

  With springs in our legs, we popped up, both of us finding an eager sailor to take our food as extras.

  The head cook had already gotten us the last bit of chiles and shrimp and sausage and chocolate. We’d been at sea for nearly thirty days and had begun to run out of most anything that tasted good, so we had to make do with what we could find to add spice to our meals. We dug only for a few minutes because we knew the captain was waiting.

  “Take your time,” the head cook said. “This will be the last meal you cook because of what you blurted to the captain last time you spoke.” He smiled a smile that I could see came from him being glad we wouldn’t be taking his glory anymore. It’s a big deal to make the captain happy on a daily basis, and we had somehow dimmed that light. He didn’t like that one bit.

  We took our time. This go round, I was able to let the chicken stew in the mole for more than an hour, and Noakes marinated his shrimp and sausages until the spices and oils saturated the meats so fully that I could taste the richness of the dish even before he let it all simmer in the tomatoes and sauce.

  With the dishes plated, we followed the head cook to the captain’s room, our heads hanging low at our arrival, and waited for our reprimand and demotion to some shitty job like cleaning the shitters and showers. We didn’t want to be cooks, but we had come to love it and find out that it was one of the best damn gigs on the entire ship. We hated that we were stuck there because of the color of our skin, but we also didn’t want to give it up now that we had it. It’s one of those things in life that you can’t see coming and you don’t want to see going.

  The captain stepped out from his cabin and met us in the shrunken hallway. His XO stood behind him with two sets of papers in his hands.

  “I checked on you two, your boot records and scores,” he said.

  He waved his hand for the head cook to walk by him and place the food on the small table in his quarters. Behind the table above his bed, he had hung large nautical maps and image after image of Japanese war and transport ships. You could see the stress on the man’s face. There was no smile. We were getting close to the war, and it would be our duty to sink as many Japanese ships as possible before getting blown out of the water ourselves. We all knew that the second we asked to be assigned to a submarine.

  “You’ve both been reassigned,” he said. “We have one of the best gunners in the whole Navy, so I can’t give you that job, but I can do better. You need to grab all of your stuff and move to the torpedo room. You are now torpedo men. Do me proud.”

  He saluted us. We saluted him back.

  With no hoopla, we turned, walked quickly to our bunks, grabbed all of our gear, and walked to the torpedo room. On the way to the torpedo room, we passed sick bay and saw the boy. He lay unconscious on the bed with the medical officer over him. He had blood streaming down his face. The medical officer had begun to sew up his skin. Blood ran across his knuckles. Tears in his flesh bled so red that I couldn’t believe that just a few days earlier he was on top of the ship with us smiling in the sun when we crossed the equator.

  “What happened?” Noakes asked.

  “Well, you can’t leave the ship in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,” the medical officer said. “We knocked his ass out, first with a fist to the back of the head and then with a sedative. We’ll dump his ass off on some carrier somewhere out there, but until then, I’ll dope his dumbass up until we get there.”

  We nodded and kept walking. We’d heard about it, people flipping out, but in the year-long training to even board the sub, we actually didn’t expect to see it. They say the air pressure changes men. Even if they can pass all the tests, when we dive, the air pressure can fuck with the brain, they say.

  We grabbed two bunks that lay above two giant torpedoes and began following procedures. We had to learn fast. We had to learn smart. We did. We practiced loading the warheads into the canons for the two days it took to reach the middle of the Pacific theater. The torpedo problems—the misdirection, the misses, the duds—of the early war had been mostly solved, so Noakes and I had been put in charge of the most dangerous weapon in the Pacific Ocean that we knew of. We had no idea about what the scientists were cooking up in a laboratory a thousand miles away,
and to be honest, I am glad we didn’t.

  We were torpedo men. We missed the kitchen, but we were exactly where we wanted to be—together, fighting in the war.

  THE SMELL ALONE WOULD KILL ya, I swear. The armpits. The smell of body odor. It was a blessing to be put down in the torpedo room. On any given shift, there would only be two of us there with a couple of other guys sleeping in their bunks below the torpedo. Unless we were up and ready to fire. Then all six of us would jump up and place our hands on the long shafts of the Navy’s muscle like laying our hands on an altar.

  Our first patrol started off with a boom. We were lucky, I guess, or God or someone else was looking after our little boat in 1943 when we headed into the East China Sea. Our mission was solely to plant mines outside of Shanghai, but on our departure from the area we came across the Kinku Maru and the Daifuku Maru, two freighter ships. We fired on the Kinku, and she fired back, pushing us down into the depths. We hit her hard though, causing considerable damage. When we came back to the surface after hiding out in the depths for a bit, our captain ordered us to fire our torpedoes again, and we did. Noakes and I loaded and fired. At the end of the torpedoes’ trails, hundreds of feet across the depths, we sunk the Daifuku Maru. Two days later, in the same deep waters, we sunk the four-thousand-ton Hosei Maru and crippled other ships before heading back to Midway for a rest. We kicked ass, is what we did.

  On our second patrol, we were even better, even more precise. Somehow, again, the captain brought the Snook into firing range of two convoys, like we were ghosts or oracles. We came out of nowhere, and with just six torpedoes fired, Noakes and I sunk the Koki Maru and the Liverpool Maru. We were fucking brilliant.

  The cheers roared throughout the submarine when torpedoes struck a ship’s core and sank it. We felt like our flesh had been carried across the water on them like the skin on the farthest tip of powerful knuckles.

  Our third and fourth patrols were just as successful, sinking tankers and war ships, but it wasn’t until our fifth patrol that we realized our luck may have run out.