Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  They scheduled Helen and me on alternating shifts, so I only saw her for a moment on the third day after our encounter with Edwards. I gave her a hug, and she squeezed me back. We could have been in big trouble. They could have been building their case against us. We did share information with each other outside of the office, and this alone was a punishable offense.

  “We could run to Mexico,” Helen said that morning when we hugged.

  “I know the language,” I said. “Or we could just go to Trinidad. They’d never find us there either. No one wants to go there.” She smiled. I smiled. We let each other go and hoped we wouldn’t soon feel the cold, hard metal of handcuffs wrapped our wrists.

  “We could go to Norway,” she said.

  “I don’t have a passport,” I said.

  “Oh yeah, but we could pay our way there in sex,” she said.

  “But that would take a whole lot of effort on our backs, and I don’t think we have that kind of time,” I said.

  “Men don’t need much time, at least the ones I’ve been with,” Helen laughed.

  “Me too,” I said, though I had never slept with a man before.

  We shifted gears. The jokes ended. I headed off to work, and she walked toward her room to change her clothes and wait. We didn’t leave the house, except to go to work during those three days. We didn’t want to push it.

  I drove her car into Arlington, walked through security, nervous they would stop me, and then found my old, wooden desk in the cold office on the second floor of the naval decoding branch of the fort. Codes had been placed there in my “in” basket, and I began to break them down, looking for any correspondence between what the Japanese ships had to transport and where they transported it to. I searched for a battleship’s coordinates and where it headed. The numbers had become so garbled to slow down our attempts to reorder them by the near end of the war in 1943 that it took more effort and time to put it all together.

  “Ms. Chavez,” a man’s voice rang out over the heads of the code breakers.

  I looked up to see Colonel Edwards staring at me from the doorway.

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I stood up and walked around to the front of my desk.

  “Come with me,” he said. Without another word, he walked through the office door and down the hallway to his office at the corner of the building. Like time had slowed, I walked like a child ready to be whipped by her parents, knowing that once she entered the room, the punishment would come, but if she were able to walk really slowly, she could hold it off long enough to live another life in those moments.

  Helen stood next to Edwards’ desk.

  “Hi, Della,” she said. “An officer picked me up just a few minutes after you left this morning.”

  “That’s enough,” Colonel Edwards said. “Both of you, please have a seat. As you can see, we have something very serious to discuss this morning. Sit, and we’ll get started with the logistics of all of this.”

  In that office where I deciphered codes, that home where I lived with Helen, and in those clubs at night in downtown DC, I had never been happier in my adult life. Coronal Edwards was about to take all of that away in a short time, and I nearly began to cry, but Helen shook her head at me and pursed her lips.

  We both sat down in front of the frowning man. He pulled out both of our work files, histories of what we had done before we got there, and what we had done since. He flipped through the pages slowly. I wanted to reach across the desk and slap him. “Get it over with, you bastard!” I wanted to scream.

  He took his time, sighing with the turn of each page. He pulled out another folder, flipped through it, and then turned it toward us. Hundreds of four-digit numbers, thousands of paragraphs in Japanese, all mixed together in a what looked like a tossed salad of codes that had been thrown into a pile.

  “You two are the best we have,” he said. “And we need you to take care of this immediately. We have a boat, the USS Snook, that we believe is sitting below the water near one of the biggest Japanese shipments that we have seen in months. If we were to be able to get the submarine in the right shipping lane, we could severely handicap their war efforts. We could damage their whole Pacific fleet along with the ground troops that are waiting for the supplies.”

  He stood up, walked around the desk, and sat his ass crack right on the corner of the wooden frame. I never understood how men did this. It seemed painful to me.

  “We’ve set up a dedicated room for the two of you to work over the next twenty-four hours,” he said. “We need this done now.”

  Helen burst out laughing. Her roar shook my seat. Her worries had broken, and her relief left her in outward shout of happiness.

  Me, on the other hand, my adrenaline had released, and I felt my body sink back into my chair like a popsicle melting in the sun.

  Edwards looked at Helen, shook his head, and then called in another officer.

  “Show them to the room,” he said.

  We were assigned to one ship, the USS Snook. It had left Pearl Harbor on January 6th, 1944 and headed out toward the coast of the third biggest Japanese island, Kyushu. It was loaded with torpedoes armed to cripple some of the remaining Japanese armada, a blow that, if successful, could be one that could push us close to the end of the war in the Pacific Ocean. We had one responsibility: find the Japanese ships and sink them.

  I deciphered the numbered codes and Helen scanned and translated what came across the airways. We worked twelve hours a day for the next twenty-three days while the USS Snook crossed the Pacific toward Japan. We sifted through code after code and found that a Japanese gunship had planned to move across the Pacific Ocean off the coast of the Bonin Islands.

  With each ship that the Snook sunk, Colonel Edwards came into our office, poured us a glass of champagne, and sat with us, only speaking to list the ships names that the Snook had sunk. He didn’t say we sunk them. He didn’t reveal what happened. He sat down. He said names of ships. He toasted us. Then he left. He gave us no information that would put his career or ours in danger.

  By January 23rd, we were exhausted. It had been nearly three weeks since we started plotting the path of the USS Snook. We had taken her across the Pacific and into the theater, and on the 23rd, we led her to the coast of the Bonin Islands. She sat there waiting, just like we radioed the captain for her to do. We gave him the coordinates of the Magane Maru, a 3,120-ton gunboat.

  30°06´N 141°19´E

  That was where we found her. We worked on breaking her code for two of those three weeks with no real goddamned guarantee that we could, at all. We would lose the entire goddamned thread of numbers and letters. Then start the damn thing again.

  We followed the Japanese lines. Once we were able to record a set of transmissions after standing and twisting and turning knobs over and over again and again, we got the codes, found the “begin here” code that the US had cracked earlier that year and then the “end here” code. The room was hotter than the crack between a baboon’s ass, and our faces looked just as red.

  30°06´N 141°19´E

  We sent the code to the USS Snook. Then we waited.

  By the end of the day, we got the news. It sunk the Magane Maru. The gun boat heading out to kill more of our men.

  When we got home that night, right before I took a shower, I pulled out John’s letter, and I kissed the words. I thought about him out there in the Snook, floating next to that gunship, sitting under the water cooking for the captain. I wanted to hug him. I wanted to show him love. I ached to meet him in Hawaii. I’d never been anywhere tropical. The humid air of Washington, DC, didn’t fucking count. But who knew when this would all be over. I couldn’t tell him that I would meet him. I didn’t want to give him hope. I had signed away any freedom until the war was over. I could be in Arlington breaking codes long after his deployment ended.

  I loved him.

  I read the letter in the bathroom and cried that night for the first time since I found out that Ernie had been killed in t
he war. I got in the shower to wash away layers of dried and wet and dried-again sweat, the salt stinging my eyes, and to wash away the tears.

  When I got out, Helen sat on the toilet. I didn’t hear her come in. I didn’t see her come in, the palms of my hands covering my eyes to push back the tears and worry. She handed me a towel. She let me dry off, and then she said.

  “Della, goddamnit!”

  “What?” I said.

  I moved the towel across my face to dry my eyes and then wrapped it around my body.

  “John is on the Snook. Damnit, Della, you should have told me,” she said. “We need to get off this assignment. You need to tell Edwards. We can’t do this. What if we fuck up, Della? Can you live with that?”

  She was serious. Really serious.

  I dried my body, and with one slick move, I grabbed the letter that she had lifted from the counter and obviously read.

  “I can’t live with someone else trying to save John’s life. Not now. I was able to do it before we were assigned to the goddamned Snook, rationalizing that they weren’t in danger, but now that I know where they are, I can’t leave it up to anyone else,” I said.

  I wanted to slap her for reading my letter, but, instead, I knelt down next to her, placed my head on her knees and said, “And I need you too, Helen.”

  She placed her hands on my wet hair.

  “Vodka. Vodka is what we need,” she said.

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  John

  1944

  NOAKES AND I AND A FEW OTHER GUYS LOADED THE TORPEDOES into the barrel using those damn ropes and pulleys. I’d never sweated so much in my life. Noakes locked them in tight because he was the tallest and strongest, but I could clinch the barrels closed faster than anyone else.

  We wanted more control like the gunner had, but we were happy to be doing a real part in breaking apart the Japanese fleet. When we heard the sound of the torpedo speed out of the barrel, the cheers of our shipmates above us, and the announcement that we sunk another ship, it felt amazing, like we had somehow reached out a long arm, tapped the Japanese Navy on the shoulder, and slugged it hard in the face. That’s what we were doing out there, crippling the Japanese Army by taking away its supplies.

  It was all scary, being out there in the middle of the Pacific Ocean with a whole navy of ships looking to sink you because your submarine had sliced and diced them in the open water.

  By this time, talks about ending the war had already begun. The allies had started marching on Berlin, and Hitler had retreated, so there were already places in the open sea that had been deemed demilitarized, places we weren’t supposed to be. But we were there, sitting off the coast of Japan in early January, as deep as we could be under the ocean’s current. The moon sat two worlds above us. There was the underworld where we lived most our days, and the upper world where we got to stand in the ocean breeze, a place where our feet had nearly forgotten how the steady earth felt beneath them. And then there was the night sky. Sometimes we would surface and get to climb up on the long flat top of the submarine and look at the stars in the middle of the ocean. To me, it felt like those nights back in Trinidad with my dad and Manuel and Maria picking chiles and praying. After my parents died, it would be nearly ten years before I felt that warmth again. I felt moments of it before Maria left and before Manuel went to war, but those moments were fleeting and broken up by my grandfather’s rages. I finally felt that warmth again when Della and I spent that night together, but that too was ripped away from me, so when I looked at the stars in the middle of the ocean, I had to forget so much loss to remember glimpses of love.

  On February 23rd, we hit a goldmine. The captain led us into the deep water of the Pacific, and we dove until the dark of the water eclipsed the light of the sun. We dove under an eleven-ship convoy. We knew that if we could knock out this convoy that we would win a major battle at sea. The captain, somehow, knew exactly where the convoy was. He led us through and around them all.

  Noakes and I fired three torpedoes early on. They sunk three ships out of the thirteen. We celebrated quietly in our metal home, a wall of cold, dark sea around us. We had gotten damn good at our job. We loved to cook. We loved to make people happy, but we sure loved sinking ships too. There were rumors that some really smart men had been hired to decode the Japanese naval codes and those men had been relaying coordinates to our captains out at sea.

  Someday, I said to Noakes, if we ever get to meet those men, I was going to hug them and thank them for helping us out. There was a rumor that they had hired women to decode the messages, but all we could do was laugh at that notion. They would crack under the pressure.

  We shot those three torpedoes, sank three ships, and then we dove to hide for a while and attack the rest.

  “Women breaking codes. Hah!” everyone laughed, from the cooks to the enginemen to us.

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Della

  1944

  I HAD NEVER BEEN SO EXCITED AND SCARED AND WORRIED IN my whole goddamned life. We barely slept. When we got to go home at night, we didn’t go out. We opened beers and sat by the heater and watched the people walk by outside our window. We clinked our bottles and never said a word about what we had done that day. We didn’t have to. We lived it together.

  I felt like I was the USS Snook, angling through the waters.

  31°05´N, 127°37´E

  On February 23rd we led the sub under the bellies of an eleven-ship Japanese convoy and screamed with joy when we heard the Snook had downed three of those ships with quick hits from only three tornado shots to the metal ribs of the boat’s torso.

  “Della, Helen, get in here,” Captain Edwards screamed to us from his office. We’d huddled around the bombe machine, twisting and turning knobs to decode even more codes, to hopefully set up the Snook to win the goddamned Medal of Honor.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “The Snook lost its engine,” Captain Edwards said. “If they can get it going again, we need to point them away from the convoy. If they can’t, they will die out there, either by surfacing and releasing their air and getting shot by gunships or by staying put and getting blown out of the water by…”

  “The three Japanese submarines that joined the convoy yesterday,” Helen said. She had broken that code the night before when we had headed home.

  I couldn’t goddamned speak. I couldn’t do anything.

  “Della?” the captain said. “Are you alright? If we lose the Snook, it won’t be your fault. It’s an engine problem not an intelligence problem. You will not be blamed. We will assign you another ship.”

  “Della, let’s go to work. All we can do is plot a course for them to get out of there if they do get the engine going,” Helen said.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  John

  1944

  THE SHIP SAT QUIET UNDER THE WATER. WE WERE THERE SOLELY for reconnaissance. The captain, again, had known exactly where to be, but we were sitting blind and motionless because we couldn’t power up without being detected. We waited for twenty-six hours, just watching the coming and going of Japanese ships.

  After sitting for so long, our barrels loaded, the captain, his sixth sense piquing, turned the ship and moved us slowly back out to sea behind a Japanese war gun boat that headed east toward the United States western coast and Hawaii. We followed the war sub for forty miles into the deep water. We locked the torpedoes in and then we fired them, missing the submarine completely. We loaded more torpedoes.

  We tried again. And we missed again. At that point, the submarine had to know exactly where we were. It had to be either sprinting away from us or turning around to return fire. Our engine fired up to move, but then, as if a giant switch had been turned, the submarine engine fell silent except for giant thud that reverberated through the tiny hallways. The metal tube creaked in the water. We stopped moving completely. The engine had failed.

  Noakes stared at me. And I stared back at him. We both knew that this might be the
end of it all.

  “I wish I could have seen Della one more time,” I whispered, making the entire possibility that we might die any second real, our bodies exploding and floating out into the ocean like fleshy shrapnel for the fish to eat.

  “We’re not dead yet,” Noakes said. He gave me a hug. “We’re still breathing, John.”

  We could hear the engine of the other submarine through the thick metal casing of our own. The water vibrated around us.

  I shook Noake’s hand. He squeezed mine tightly.

  “Could go for some mole with hot chiles right now,” he said.

  “I could really go for some shrimp and rice,” I said.

  The whizzing sound of torpedoes zooming past the boat sent a chill down the sweat of my back.

  “Fire two torpedoes,” the captain said over the intercom. “Fire now! At twelve o’clock.”

  We went to work. Noakes lifted a torpedo with the pulley and shoved it in the giant barrel. He lifted the second one while I cinched down the metal door behind it. Then we let them fly. If we missed, there was no way we were going home. An explosive crash of the torpedoes slamming against metal reverberated back and shook the Snook hard. Another crash shook us again. We took the brunt of the aftershocks, but cheers rang from above us.

  “Get to the engine room, Noakes and Cordova. Fix the engine!” the captain shouted. There was no time for us to celebrate. We sat under three other ships. They could sink us easily. We ran.

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Della

  1944

  LIKE UNRAVELLING A MAZE FROM THE INNER LINE, WE WORKED backward through codes to find a way out for the Snook, if they ever got their engine started again. We looked at the last few days of codes for all the ships we knew were in the Japanese convoy and broke down where they came from, when they arrived, and where they might be at the exact moment we found out that the USS Snook sat in the middle of the ocean, lifeless with a target on them.