Let the Wild Grasses Grow

by Kase Johnstun

  There were hundreds of codes. Helen laid out all the ones she had deciphered over the last twenty-four hours, and I laid out all the ones that I had broken. We listed the names of thirteen ships, consisting of passenger ships, cruises, submarines, and gunners.

  “Son of a bitch,” I whispered.

  Helen rolled out the map of the area in front of me. She placed her hand on my back.

  “If this were me, what would you tell me to do, Della?” Helen asked.

  “I’d tell you to plot your goddamned ships because if you didn’t, there would be slim to no chance that they’d make it out of there alive,” I said.

  “Yep, now plot your goddamned ships,” she said.

  I picked up my marker, and I began to plot, starting with the Lima Maru at 31°05´N, 127°37´E.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  John

  1944

  WE LEFT OUR POST, RAN THROUGH THE NARROW CORRIDORS, and dropped down the ladder into the engine room. It felt like we had dropped into hell, the heat of the place searing our skin.

  Noakes opened the door to a wave of scorching air, and the smell of gasoline smacked hard against our faces. The whole room had been clouded with steam and smoke. We could barely see. I grabbed Noakes’ hand. He grabbed mine. We led each other through the winding pipes and gears that created a maze of hot, hot metal. The whole engine had overheated and came to the grinding halt that left us marooned in the ocean among ten Japanese boats that still looked for us in the depths.

  An engineman lay across the ground. Another lay on an exposed duct, barely conscious.

  “One of the piston rings broke and stopped removing exhaust,” the man groaned. “We need to get a new ring on and get the crankshaft moving again before we suffocate.” He pointed toward the trunk-style crankshaft and pistons behind Noakes. We had spent a year learning every part of the boat. Every submarine man had to. But it had been a while.

  The engineman passed out. I turned to Noakes. We ran to the closet in the engine room. We found the reserve piston rings. That would be the easy part. We had to get the shell that wrapped the crankshaft off, replace the ring, and start it all up again before we inhaled too much exhaust or got blown out of the water.

  We both wrapped our arms around the shell, squeezing and tugging at it together. When we got it open, we found that the piston ring had broken on the farthest ring from us. Normally, we could easily slide across the top of the whole thing, replace the ring with a wrench the size of an arm, and then get on our way. It was protocol to do so every time we left shore, but everything in that room had gotten so damn hot that the path to the piston was lit up red like the Devil’s altar.

  “I’ll go,” I said. “I’m smaller than you. Less surface contact.”

  “That doesn’t make any damn sense, John,” Noakes said.

  I jumped up on the top of the cylinder and slid across the top of it on my gut. I lay down, and with a big tug, I ripped the piston ring off. I could smell the sear of my skin while I felt it melt the flesh around my belly.

  “Give me the ring,” I said to Noakes.

  He handed it to me.

  I cranked it back on.

  “Pull me back,” I said.

  Noakes grabbed my legs and pulled me back across the hot metal.

  He steadied me on my feet next to the engine, and I looked down to see my shirt had melted into my skin. On the top of the cylinder, a long thin piece of shirt and flesh sizzled on the top of the engine. Pain ran through me like I had never felt before. A button had lodged itself inside my burnt flesh and then melted.

  There was a time that I wished I never surfaced from the bottom of the Truckee River. I had lain there and waited for the water to flow into my lungs and for my world to end so that I didn’t have to live in a world without my family or Della or the Chavezes or live in a world with my grandfather. But death never came. I always floated to the top and took a deep breath.

  Down there in the Snook, under the water, I did not want to die in the depths of the ocean. I didn’t want to let others die. I wanted to float up to the top and eventually take a deep breath and live in a world where I knew Della was happy somewhere, in a world where I had shed my grandfather’s hatred of me, and in a world where I could breathe deep, fresh air again, so I ignored the searing of my belly that ran from my waste to my nipple and waved to Noakes to fire it up.

  Noakes looked at me and shook his head. Then he hit the button to start the whole crankshaft up. It worked. The room began to clear of exhaust, and the purr of the engine woke the ship up from its deep sleep.

  We carried the other two men out of the engine room. The flesh from the left side of my belly sizzled and smoked on the engine behind us.

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Della

  1944

  TWO COOKS.

  Two cooks saved the ship. That’s the news we heard from Edwards. Two cooks put the engine back together and saved the ship.

  I knew one cook on the USS Snook. I knew it was John. I could see him there. Quiet. Brave. Withstanding the pressure. That would be John. Standing up to what came his way. That would be John.

  I was proud of him.

  “Now, let’s get them the coordinates to get out of there,” Edwards said.

  We handed them to him.

  “And, on the way out, they could hit the Lima Maru,” I said, doing my best to deliver the message without sounding like the Snook was any different from any other ship we delivered coordinates and information to.

  “Yes, yes, good, thank you, Della and Helen,” he said.

  We were dismissed. We went back to our desks and acted like it we had just broken any code from any general assignment, and we waited, again, to hear about the fate of the Snook. The information I had handed to Captain Edwards put John in danger again. I knew that. But it was my job, the one that I swore and would goddamned swear again to do. And I had to goddamned do it.

  I also had to live with not knowing if I sent John on a mission that he would not come back from, but to be honest, I knew that if anyone saved him, I saved him.

  Chapter Fifty-Eight

  John

  1944

  “NOAKES, CORDOVA, BACK TO YOUR POST,” THE XO SAID. WE received pat after pat after pat on the back and cheers from every sailor we passed on the way back to our post, but we were still in deep, deep shit. Now, two submarines flanked us. They knew exactly where we were.

  Out of nowhere, our captain announced that we were going to dive. The submarine dove deeper than it had ever been asked to dive before. We could feel the whole boat rattle and turn.

  We sat in the water, our ship quiet in the water, the sweat dry on our clothes and the air stiff from so much time without us moving through it. We waited. It’s crazy down there. Everyone remained completely quiet, as if the boats could hear us talking. At any moment, a submarine could approach from any angle and blow us out of the water. Our sweat evaporated in the heat by the torpedoes. Some boys prayed. Some kissed the charms they had brought with them. We were somewhere our government would never admit to us being if we sunk. We were in the middle of a dying war.

  “Fire, Noakes,” the captain told us over the intercom. Once we fired, the enemy would know exactly where we were and would fire back. We had to hit our target. Though Noakes and I had no control over the guidance of the torpedoes, it was our duty to load them correctly. If we didn’t, their projection and aim would falter. It was all on us. We knew it.

  We fired a torpedo, one aimed to go almost directly up. From the silence, the rush of the torpedo sounded like a hurricane when it cut through the water. We waited. We prayed.

  The explosion above us shook our submarine. But it wasn’t over. There were four boats up there, and we would not know what we hit until we surfaced.

  We loaded another torpedo, our arms shaking from exhaustion.

  Another explosion.

  At any moment, we could be blown out of the water, but we shoved a third torpedo into the h
ole, and we fired again. Then two more times.

  Two more hits.

  Another hit, this time directly east.

  The captain moved the boat back and forth. We did this four more times, and then we surfaced.

  There it was, the Lima Maru. It was split in two, sinking. Men jumped overboard and tried to swim, but the carrier drowned, and its three thousand soldiers drowned with it, the eleventh largest ship to be sunk in the entire war, a slice of metal in the even bigger ocean. I thought about those men for a minute, but then realized it was a soldier like one of them that killed Ernie and Manuel.

  The whole submarine cheered. We opened the hatch and stood on the top of the boat. The Japanese convoy had been reduced to giant pieces of metal that littered the sea.

  Though I knew the war was not done with me, I was done with the war.

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  Della

  1944

  EDWARDS WALKED INTO OUR WORKROOM THAT AFTERNOON and held out a telegram. The message had come from the Snook’s captain over the wire.

  Helen and I read the letter from the captain, confirming the Snook’s safety and conveying his thanks. That day, we watched the clock until our shift ended, exhausted from our brains to our toes, and when our time was done, we packed up our things and headed back to our apartment.

  I had sweated through the armpits of my shirt so goddamned bad that I just tossed it in the garbage can next to the toilet when I took off my clothes to shower. I stood in the water for ten minutes, letting the warmth of it encircle me. I cried. Something had broken inside of me, and, this time, I let it all out.

  The Snook was safe, and I was overwhelmingly relieved, but I wanted to so badly to know if John was safe, too.

  I got out of the shower and dressed. Helen had opened the bottle of vodka. We would not be called back to work for three days on Colonel Edwards’s assurance, and we got drunk and laughed and sang, “We are heroes too.”

  AND THEN, WITHIN JUST A few short months, the military complex didn’t need us anymore. It was 1945, the seas of codes had dried up, and the Allies were winning on all fronts. The Japanese had all but surrendered the Pacific.

  Colonel Edwards called all of the coders into the auditorium to release them from their duty. Overall, it was a shitty day that everyone knew was coming. His assistant asked Helen and me to wait outside the auditorium until we were called, so we did, sitting in our desks across from each other and only half smiling.

  When his assistant finally called for me and Helen to enter the auditorium, we walked in, sat down in two creaky, wooden chairs at the front of the auditorium. The air stood still but a mix of sweat and ten different kinds of perfumes lingered around us, the mist of hundreds of women’s presence still floating in the musty air of the empty auditorium.

  Edwards stood up from a table on the stage, straightened his jacket, and then walked down the short flight of stairs to the auditorium floor. He stopped in the middle of the wooden edge in front us, leaned back on it, and wrapped his arms across his chest.

  “You two are troublemakers,” he said. “Loose lips still sink ships. Remember that you will remain under oath until instructed by the United States of America that you are no longer under oath.” His lips tightened up and his arms squeezed his chest even tighter like he wanted to put himself in a goddamned straight jacket.

  We stood, thinking that was it. He wanted to lecture us one more time. I wanted to tell him to shove his lecture straight up his adulterous ass, but when I began to open my mouth, he gave us the universal sign to sit down, waving his hand palm down toward the seats.

  “Thank you for your service. The USS Snook will dock in Honolulu in three days,” he said. I wanted to ask him how he knew. How did he know that the boy that I grew up with, the boy I had fallen in love with, the boy I had ignored for two years because I had to was on that ship? But before I could, he stood up, walked away, and repeated, “Loose lips, sink ships.”

  We stood up, tried one last time to not laugh at Edwards and his loose lips, and we walked out of the auditorium, through the stuffy, hot hallways, through the doors and building and out into Arlington.

  Helen and I decided to treat the evening like a big event. We started the evening in out apartment with martinis and Manhattans. The sun dropped down early, hiding behind the apartment buildings to the west of us, but remnants of natural light shone through the window, breaking through the creases of the buildings, and highlighting the dust in the air. It felt magical to sit there and watch the dust, as if we were watching the world breathe.

  “I miss the tall buildings. DC is nice, but it’s no New York City. Want to come with me, Della?” she’d asked so many times. “We could rent an apartment together and teach.”

  “That sounds nice,” I’d say, but I wanted to see something different. I wanted to see the waters we protected. I wanted to see the Pacific Ocean. With Helen’s father paying for our rent over the last two years, I had saved up a lot of cash, and I dreamed of visiting the ocean. I dreamed of John there too. I knew the USS Snook was docking. I knew that I had to go see him, even if he didn’t forgive me for my cold, cruel letter.

  That night, we found the nicest seafood restaurant in DC. I ordered the lobster. Helen ordered a steak, and we drank champagne.

  “I’ll miss you, Helen,” I told her.

  “I’ll miss you too, Della,” she said.

  We drank and laughed. This part of our lives had ended, and another would begin. Just like the special moment in her apartment a couple years back—when we drank beer and sat without our blouses next to the fan—I knew that our last night in DC was special too, that we would never be able to relive it, to relive our lives the way we lived then. I would never have another friend like her.

  By that time, I have to be honest, I was ready to be done with work. No more sweaty rooms. No more silence. No more keeping Edwards’ secrets. I had helped win the war. I had saved John’s submarine, and I was ready to see the Pacific. Instead of using my one ticket the military promised me to go back to Colorado, I used it to take me to Hawaii. Helen packed her bags and went home to New York City. We hugged a thousand more times, and then we said goodbye, promising that we would find a way to see each other every year of our lives until we died.

  Two days later, after my flight across the Pacific, I stood and waited for the busses to come to the city. Waikiki beach was alive. It breathed in and out, so different from Colorado. Colorado’s breath is quiet and crisp and thin in the high mountains, but its taste on the tongue before it hits the lungs is full from the earth’s high crust and the animals that wander it. The breath of Waikiki and Honolulu moves thick and moist through the city, inhaling the sea air into the city and exhaling back out into the ocean. Sailors flow into alleyways and do not come back out. Locals walk among them like fish circling freely at the edges of a current that doesn’t know they are there. The ocean runs right up to the city, and sandy edges of the island, the link between a world that grows upward and world that lays out flat forever.

  I waited for the busses. I had my favorite white dress on. It was linen and light. It moved with me when I turned to look at the waves for a moment, and then back with my body when I swayed to see if the busses had come. When the breezes from the water blew by me, my hair, like my dress flowed along the edges of my skin, and I wished I could save that moment forever because right then I believed that John would get off the bus there instead of getting off a bus at the airport miles away on his way back to Nevada. I prayed that he would do what he said he would, that he would wait for me in Hawaii, even though I told him I would not come. He would listen to why I decided to cut him off and that he would forgive me. I wanted to capture that moment of hope in the breath of the sea.

  Two busses pulled up. Green and ugly and worn down like every other military bus I saw driving around Arlington and Hawaii. Young sailors, salivating at the goddamn chance to get drunk and laid, fell out of the bus like trash being emptied from a bin. I lo
oked for John, but when the first bus’ door closed, my hope was cut in half because he did not get off. I imagined him getting off another bus, one miles away at the airport, his gear over his shoulder and his face painted with that infuriatingly quiet sincerity that always covered it. Lips straight. Brows cinched. Eyes forward. Like he couldn’t smile just to goddamned smile.

  The doubt and the worry got to me. I didn’t want to be that woman who stood and waited alone for a man to never come, to keep standing there and staring at the last bus as it drove away like some idiota in love with a man who never loved her back. No one I knew would see me standing there and think this, but someone would. Someone, even if it were the damned bus driver who had probably seen hundreds of pregnant, young Hawaiian girls waiting there for men to return, standing there crying because they didn’t, either because they died at sea or boarded the other bus to fly home to their white high-school sweethearts. I looked at my dark skin, my black hair, the contrast between it and my white dress. I could easily pass for one of those poor girls, heartbroken and lost, and this memory would beat the living hell out of me, so before the second bus opened its door, I ran fifty feet away and sat down on a bench near the edge of the beach, crossed my legs, placed my hands in my lap, and acted like I was just enjoying the breath of Waikiki.

  A second bus drove up, and a short, dark man with John’s exact build exited first. He walked down the stairs, placing each foot down with purpose, and then turned and saluted a bunch of sailors as they rushed out and on toward the city. He stood there as the bus pulled away. He brought his hand down to his side and shoved it up under his shirt and just stood there rubbing his belly. And his goddamned face wore that goddamned sincerity. This time, however, I didn’t want to slap it. This time, I cried tears of relief and happiness and hope. He pulled his hand out of his shirt and turned to walk away, and for the first time in our lives, I followed him down the road instead of him following me.