Eyes of the Emperor

by Graham Salisbury

  My fist opened and closed.

  Wait, wait, wait, I told myself. Calm down. Do something stupid, you get court-martialed.

  I felt like a fool, backing down like somebody's shoeshine boy.

  Sweet headed over to Cobra's pit. “Look back and die, boys,” he said over his shoulder.

  Late that night I sat in the hole with Chik, staring out onto an oil-black sea, one pair of binoculars between us.

  Not knowing if we were going to be invaded was way worse than knowing, because my imagination was running wild. I could see the enemy scurrying in from the sea, quiet as rats—until the bullets flew, and then I got filled full of holes from the front and the back. Gave me the creeps. What would be worse, I wondered—getting shot in my chest or my back?

  Stop thinking like that!

  There was no moon. But deeper into the night the stars got so bright the ocean looked like a soft silver blanket. If the Japanese landed tonight, we would see them. And when they came dripping up out of the water with their bayonets gleaming in the starlight, we would be ready.

  Chik nodded off.

  I nudged him. “Come on, Chik. Stay awake.”

  “Yeah—yeah, I'm awake,” he said, jolting up. Then he nodded off again.

  “You can't do that. We're on watch.”

  “Okay, sure,” he said, yawning and rubbing his face.

  If the Japanese came, a lot of men would die, and I sure didn't want to be one of them. But not wanting to die wasn't cowardice. Cowardice was when you let your friends, or your island, or your country down, and no way would any of us do that.

  There were no dark shapes out on the ocean. No sounds but the constant whoosh of waves slapping the sand.

  But that didn't mean they weren't out there.

  I was on watch when the sun rose out on the horizon. Slim headed to his tent and Chik slid into the hole next to me, his helmet tumbling in ahead of him. Behind him I saw Sweet and another guy heading down the sandy knoll.

  Chik's hair stuck up every which way. He rubbed his face, his breath sour.

  “Put your helmet on, Sweet's coming—and check out who's with him.”

  Sweet and Captain Parrish walked up and stood over us. “Well, I'll be,” Captain Parrish said. “Eddy Okubo, right? McKinley? Graduated early?”

  “Yes, sir, that's me,” I said.

  “A promising shortstop, too, as I recall.”

  “Naah, my kid brother's the baseball player.”

  “So how'd it go last night?”

  “No problems, sir.”

  “Kind of quiet?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That's ‘Yes, sir,’ Private,” Sweet snapped.

  Captain Parrish raised his hand. “It's okay, Lieutenant.”

  Sweet's eyes carved me up.

  Captain Parrish glanced back toward the men in the machine-gun pit above us. “Lieutenant, have those men up there move their hole up the beach about fifty yards. Way it is now puts these men right in their line of fire.”

  For long seconds Sweet didn't respond.

  “Lieutenant?”

  “Consider it done, sir.”

  “Good. We don't want to be shooting our own men.”

  “No, sir,” Sweet said, his expression daring me to peep a word about what he'd told us last night.

  Captain Parrish turned toward the ocean. “I think one man on watch along this stretch ought to do it during the day, Lieutenant. We need all the help we can rustle up to string wire.”

  “Yes, sir,” Sweet said.

  “Hey, Eddy,” Captain Parrish said.

  I looked up.

  “When did you turn eighteen?”

  I blinked. “Uh…last summer, sir.”

  He studied me with raised eyebrows, then half-grinned. “Glad to have you in the army, Private.”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  For the next eight hours we strung double-apron barbed wire up and down the beach for miles in each direction. My muscles ached and salt stung the zillion scratches all over my arms, and all the time we worked, the mainland troops sat like mynah birds on the sandy hill, watching us.

  That night I fell into my tent so beat I didn't even bother to slap mosquitoes.

  In the murky light of dawn the next morning I was in the hole with Slim when I saw something splashing around out in the water.

  I grabbed the binoculars.

  “Something's out there,” I said, handing the field glasses to Slim.

  Slim panned the ocean until he found it. “Not something, somebody. Swimming, or… wait! … Ho! There's a small submarine out there, too—looks like it's stuck on the reef.”

  I grabbed the field glasses. It was a sub, all right, about a half mile out. But it was… strange, small, like a midget sub.

  The sight of it made me so alert I could have heard a fish jump. I checked the swimmer, struggling, going down, coming up, going down. Straight off from Cobra's position.

  “I'm going over to Cobra's hole.” I tossed the binoculars back to Slim and I ran down the beach.

  Cobra stood in the pit, motioning to four guys with weapons racing down from the trees. “Somebody drowning out there!”

  One guy stripped to his boxers, plunged in, and swam out.

  The sun's glow lit the sky from below the horizon, the sky cloudless and steel blue. The sub was a black shadow out on the reef.

  I crouched by Cobra.

  “Japanese sub,” he said. “And somebody in the water.”

  “Who's that swimming out?”

  “Sergeant Akui.”

  He made it to the drowning guy about ten seconds after he went down for the last time. Sergeant Akui dove under and brought him back up.

  I looked behind me, not wanting to get chewed out for leaving my hole. “Where's Sweet?”

  Cobra shrugged.

  The swimmer and Sergeant Akui slowly made it to shore and staggered out of the ocean, the Japanese guy stumbling, falling, coughing.

  Ho, I thought. Now we going see the face of the enemy. Spooky.

  He was naked, except for a white loincloth. His lips were blue and he was shivering, cold or scared or both.

  “Samui, samui,” he said, his teeth rattling. He struggled to bow and nod, stumbling up the sand.

  “What did he say?” Sergeant Akui asked, his eyes searching ours. “Anybody.”

  “He said he's cold,” Cobra said.

  Sergeant Akui said to the seaman, “ 'S okay, 's okay, we not going hurt you. You,” he called to Cobra. “Tell him not to worry. We won't shoot him.”

  Cobra spoke in his terrible Japanese.

  The seaman bowed and bowed, and said something that made Cobra's jaw drop.

  “Sergeant,” Cobra said. “He says he wants you to shoot him.”

  “What?”

  “He's deeply ashamed, because he was captured.”

  Sergeant Akui scowled. “Ask him his name.”

  Cobra did.

  “Sakamaki,” Cobra said.

  “Ask him if there was anyone else in that sub with him.”

  “Yes. One more guy still out there. But he drowned. The sub—They got lost. They were supposed to be heading to Pearl Harbor.”

  Sergeant Akui called to three soldiers. “You men get a raft and go find the body. You,” he said to Cobra. “Come with me. I need you to translate.”

  They walked up to the trees.

  The guys in the raft brought the drowned guy in. His body was cut up from being snagged on the reef. They wrapped him in some blankets and took him away.

  Sergeant Akui ordered me, Chik, and six more guys to go out to see if we could break the sub loose from the reef.

  We dragged two rafts into the ocean and paddled out. The water was warm, the sun now climbing up over the edge of the world.

  It was hard to imagine how two guys could fit in such a small sub. They'd have to be lying down. I couldn't do that, I thought. To be trapped underwater inside a steel tube with no windows would drive me crazy. Enemy or no
t, I respected those guys. They were braver than I was.

  “Hey,” one guy said, tossing me a coil of rope. “Knot that around the tower.”

  I slipped into the ocean and swam to the sub, careful not to get cut up on the reef. I worked one end of the rope into a loop and flung it over the tower. The dull, dark steel was rough as sandpaper, a cold weapon of war.

  We waited for the tide, and when the sub floated free we dragged it to shore.

  All this time I couldn't get Sakamaki out of my head. He wanted us to shoot him. Pop was right about those guys. It shocked me to actually see that fighting spirit. But I understood it: Sakamaki lived by the Bushido code of the ancient warriors. The shame of surrender or capture was a disgrace.

  I understood, because Sakamaki thought exactly like Pop.

  After more than a month in Waimanalo, me, Chik, and Cobra managed to wangle a twenty-four-hour pass home, the first we'd gotten since the bombs fell.

  When I walked in the door, Opah yapped and jumped like a flea at my knees. Ma nearly fainted. I hadn't called to say I was coming.

  “Hey, Ma,” I said, rushing up to hug her. “I'm on pass till tomorrow night. How's things at home? Good, I hope.”

  She fanned her face with her hand, smiling shyly.

  We sat on the old couch.

  Opah leaped onto my lap, and I scratched his belly, his back leg flying.

  Ma said, “How are you eating—”

  “Never mind about me, Ma. I'm fine. Where's Pop and Herbie? At the shop?”

  “Herbie's at school. Coming home soon. Your father is working, like always. Him and Bunichi.”

  She pushed herself up. “Come, I make you something to eat.”

  I knew that would make her feel good, so I followed her into the kitchen and let her fuss over me until Herbie came home.

  “Heyyy,” he said, smiling big.

  I stood and slapped the side of his arm. “So catch me up on what's been going on, ah?”

  We went outside and sat on the steps. Opah plopped down to sleep behind us.

  “So, the truth,” I said. “Everything all right here?”

  Herbie nodded. “We don't see Pop too much, but other than that, everything is just like before.”

  “That's a relief.”

  “How about you?”

  “Out at Waimanalo watching the beach.”

  “Sounds easy.”

  The Higashis' cat came up and rubbed against my leg. Opah lifted his head and the cat gave him a look. Opah put his head back down.

  Man, it was good to be home. I stayed out on the porch with Herbie until it got dark.

  When Pop came home, he started to grin when he saw me, but hid it, and nodded.

  While we ate, I told him what I was doing, him grunting and nodding.

  After dinner he went outside to sit on the steps like he did on most nights—watching people go by, sipping tea, sometimes carving a piece of wood. That night, I sat next to him.

  “How's everything going, Pop?”

  He thought so long I figured he wasn't going to answer. But then he said, “You good solja?”

  “Yeah, Pop, I'm a good soldier.”

  He nodded.

  We sat.

  “I sit in a sand pit and watch the ocean,” I added.

  Pop stared into the quiet Kaka'ako night.

  So peaceful, so sweet, the cool air smelling like jasmine. I could have sat on those steps forever.

  “In the paper I saw the guy, Sakamaki,” Pop said out of the blue. “You saw him where you was?”

  “I was there. He was a proud guy. He wanted us to shoot him.”

  Pop nodded.

  Mr. and Mrs. Higashi walked by. They waved, and Pop raised his chin.

  Then more silence.

  “Boy,” Pop said.

  I waited.

  “Me?” he said after a long pause. “I'm old country, yeah?”

  “Yeah.”

  “But not you, I know.”

  I nodded.

  “Ne'mind how I feel about Japan or what I want for you,” he said. “What you doing now … it's right.”

  I couldn't have squeaked out a word if my life had depended on it.

  “Hey, Eddy, listen to this,” Cobra said one morning, back in Waimanalo. He was reading a day-old newspaper in the speckled shade of the ironwood trees.

  I was lying on my back with my eyes closed.

  “They calling the states of Washington, Oregon, California, and the south part of Arizona military sites, now.”

  “How come?”

  He read, “The prospect that enemy aliens and persons of Japanese ancestry will be removed therefrom is good common sense.” He put the paper down. “That means—”

  “They kicking every Japanese out of all those states?”

  “That's what it says.”

  He read more: “Any large-scale evacuation of these areas cannot but impose hardship on countless innocent and law-abiding persons, but that is the way of war—and this country did not start it.”

  We looked at each other, then turned away. Cobra crumpled up the paper and threw it as far as he could.

  For almost five months we guarded an empty sea. Then, in May, we were called back to Schofield.

  “You grunts are shipping out,” Sweet said. “Who knows where? But you'd be smart to prepare yourselves, physically and mentally, because I'd say you boys are looking at combat, and that means some of you won't be heading back this way. So you might want to take one last look around.”

  Combat.

  That nightmare word and the smile in Sweet's eyes were like the snap and fizz of a fast-burning fuse.

  On June 5, 1942, the army loaded us onto the sugarcane train and sent us down to Iwilei Depot, near Honolulu Harbor—1,432 island troops.

  Finally, they were letting us be real soldiers. I was proud to stand up for something I believed in, no matter what guys like Sweet thought.

  But still, I was scared.

  Who would I be when I was looking down the barrel of some German rifle? Or worse, a Japanese one. Who would I be then? A soldier? Or a coward?

  From the depot, we marched with all our gear to the pier, where we were to board the USAT Maui, a transport ship.

  The minute I'd heard we were shipping out to the mainland, I called Mrs. Higashi and asked her to tell my family. When I saw Ma at the harbor with Herbie I felt overwhelmingly sad. I was about to leave the island—for the first time in my life.

  Herbie stood solemnly with his hands jammed into his pockets. His T-shirt and bare feet reminded me of everything I was leaving behind. From here on my life would be made up of things and places I'd never known before.

  Ma, wearing a gray dress and black sweater, looked shrunken into herself.

  I hugged her. “Where's Pop?”

  “Working.” She looked off to nowhere, her eyes glistening with tears.

  Herbie moved closer, surrounding her with his arm, something I'd never seen him do before. It both relieved and saddened me to know that he had grown a couple of years in the past few months.

  I let my barracks bag drop off my shoulder.

  Ma looked everywhere but at me, pressing a white handkerchief to her mouth.

  “Ma,” I said softly. “I going be okay. Please… don't worry.”

  She closed her eyes and tears squeezed out.

  “Herbie,” I said. “Write to me, okay? Every couple of weeks, if you can. Let me know what's going on. I'll write, too.”

  Herbie dropped his arm off Ma's shoulder and glanced away.

  “What?” I said.

  “You better come back …I mean… when it's over.”

  I reached out and ruffled his hair. “You got it, little man.”

  Herbie smiled, though he tried not to. He dug into his pocket. “Here.”

  “What's this?”

  “A good-luck charm.”

  I took the deep blue stone, polished smooth, like turquoise, but darker. “Where'd you get this?”

&n
bsp; “You know that team we play, the Rats?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, the pitcher, you know, the haole—Billy? I won that stone off him in a bet.”

  “You made a bet with a haole?”

  “Why not?”

  I shrugged. “What is this? Turquoise?”

  “Lapis. That's what Billy said. I like the color. You don't see stones like that around here.”

  “Sure don't.”

  I rubbed it between my finger and thumb, then dropped it into my pocket. “I'll carry it everywhere. Thanks, Herbie.”

  We glanced into each other's eyes, then quickly looked away. It wasn't something we usually did. We weren't like that. But we were getting that way.

  I shook his hand, then pulled him close and hugged him. So what if the guys saw? Who cared?

  “Write,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  I turned to Ma, who still wouldn't look at me. “I'll be back for sure,” I said, then hugged her.

  She shook her head, the handkerchief still pressed to her mouth. She was trembling.

  It tore me up, but I had to go.

  I headed onto the gangway with my platoon and Sweet, who was still with us, barking orders, scowling.

  Halfway up I glanced back one last time. I nearly ran back down when I saw Ma gazing up at the ship, her hands reaching toward me, almost lost in the waving crowd.

  A few hours later we were steaming out of Honolulu with news that a huge battle between the U.S. and Japan was raging to the west, at Midway Island. If the Japanese won, they'd take Hawaii next.

  That thought almost made me jump overboard and swim home. Ma, Herbie, and Pop were the ones who had to be brave, not me. The monster was looking down their throats.

  For the first time in years, tears fell from my eyes.

  We headed to San Francisco, berthed three decks down, where the air was stale and stank like fuel. We slept in triplestacked canvas bunks with less than two feet between them. The lightbulbs were dim and the portholes were blacked out. Before the first day was over, half of us were so seasick we couldn't even stand up.

  So, so miserable.

  Day after day.