Not much of the news was good. The Navy was laying mines outside harbors on the East Coast to try to keep German subs away. Congressmen were fuming that blackout regulations weren’t strict enough and were being ignored. The Nazis and Reds were both claiming victories in Russia.
Rooting for the Russians felt funny. Joe’s old man had admired Mussolini before he got too chummy with Hitler, and couldn’t stand Stalin. But the USA and the Soviet Union were on the same side now, like it or not.
“How’d it go, Joe?” his boss asked when he walked in.
“Pretty good, Mr. Scalzi, I think,” Joe answered. Dominic Scalzi’s family and the Crosettis both came from the same village south of Naples. That wasn’t the only reason Joe had a job there, but it sure didn’t hurt. He went on, “Thanks again for your letter. I had all my ducks in a row, and they really liked that.”
“Good, kid. That’s good.” Scalzi lit a Camel. Joe couldn’t see how he smoked them; they were strong enough to grow hair on your chest. The garage owner was a short, round man with a graying mustache. He blew a smoke ring, then sighed out the rest of the drag in a blue-gray cloud. “I shoulda told ’em you were a lousy good-for-nothing. Then they wouldn’t take you, and you could go on workin’ for me a little longer.”
“Probably not much,” Joe said. “If I don’t end up a Navy flier, the draft’ll get me pretty soon.”
“I said a little longer.” Dominic Scalzi was a precise man, a good thing for a mechanic to be. He jerked a thumb at the little washroom off to one side of the work area. “Go on and change into your coveralls. Long as you’re here, I’m gonna get some work outa you. See if you can clean the gunk outa Mr. Jablonski’s carburetor, will you? He’s been pissing and moaning about it for weeks.”
“I’ll try,” Joe said. “You want to know what I think, I think the carb on a ’38 Plymouth is a piece of crap.”
“I don’t give a damn what you think. I just want you to clean out the son of a bitch.” Scalzi’s uniform was an almost Navy blue, but all it had on it was Dom machine-embroidered over the left breast pocket. Joe’s was just like it except for the name.
He grabbed a hasty cigarette of his own while he changed out of his jacket and slacks and into the scratchy denim coveralls. Before he came out, he flushed the butt down the toilet. He figured on soaking the carburetor in gasoline before he got to work on it. Gasoline and cigarettes didn’t mix.
Once he’d soaked everything with the gasoline, he went after the valves and springs and made sure no deposits could interfere with their functioning. Then he reassembled the carb. His hands knew what to do, almost without conscious thought on his part. He had the carburetor back on the engine before he really noticed what he was up to.
The key was in the ignition. He started up the Plymouth, listened, and nodded to himself. The car sounded a hell of a lot better than it had when old man Jablonski brought it in. He waved to his boss. Scalzi came over, wiping his greasy hands on a rag. He listened, too, and gave Joe a thumbs-up. Joe grinned. It was turning into a pretty damn good day.
CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU liked the way things were going nowadays much better than he had a week earlier. The attack over the western mountains had made the Americans fall back for their very lives. They still hadn’t pieced together a line to match the one they’d held in front of Schofield Barracks and Wahiawa. With a little luck, they wouldn’t be able to.
They hadn’t quit, though. A Yankee machine gun up ahead spat death across a pineapple field. Shimizu crouched in a foxhole. Sooner or later, a grenade or mortar bomb would take care of the machine-gun crew. Then he’d advance again. Or, if one of his officers gave the order, he’d advance sooner than that. And if the machine gun blew out his brains or chopped his legs out from under him . . . in that case, like it or not, one of the chowderheads in his squad would get a star on each of his red-and-gold collar tabs.
Meanwhile . . . Meanwhile, Shimizu lit a cigarette from a pack he’d taken off a dead American. The tobacco was amazingly smooth and mild. Any way you look at it, the Americans live better than we do, he thought. He made twenty yen—about four dollars and sixty cents—a month. He wondered what an American corporal got paid. More than that, or he missed his guess.
Cautiously, he stuck his head up for a look around. He saw where the machine gun was: in a sandbagged position behind a creek. Whoever’d sited it had known what he was doing. If there were no mortars handy, he didn’t see how anyone could knock it out. The gunners would shoot a man with grenades before he got close enough to fling them.
He ducked down in a hurry. He wasn’t going to order anybody forward to throw his life away. Lieutenant Yonehara had done that, and what had it got him? Nothing but a grieving family back home.
Of course, Colonel Fujikawa or some other officer could order the men to advance, and they would have to go. What would happen to them afterwards? That was in the hands of karma. So Shimizu told himself, anyway.
“This way! Forward! It’s clear over here!” The shout came in Japanese, from ahead and to the right. It wasn’t just Japanese, either. It was Hiroshima dialect—from Shimizu’s own part of the country—and old-fashioned Hiroshima dialect at that. It sounded like somebody who’d never been off a farm in the back of beyond till the Army grabbed him. Shimizu would have thought only old grannies talked like that nowadays.
But if there was a way forward . . . He sprang out of his hole, shouting, “Come on, men! Let’s drive the Yankees back again!”
He wasn’t the only one who’d emerged. Quite a few soldiers had heard that shout. They all jumped up and started running ahead and to the right. And the American machine gun and nearby riflemen remorselessly chopped them down. Shimizu had learned better than to stay on his feet very long under fire like that. He threw himself flat and, still on his belly, started scraping himself a new hole in the ground.
Amid the screams of the wounded, somebody yelled, “Zakennayo!”—a pungent, all-purpose obscenity—and then went on, “Must be one of those Hawaii Japanese!”
Shimizu dug harder. He muttered, “Zakennayo!” too. They’d told him before he set out that there were more people of Japanese blood in Hawaii than any other group. From what he’d seen, that was likely true. Most of them had roots around Hiroshima, too. That was why the Fifth Division, which drew its manpower from that region, was on Oahu now. And they’d told him the Hawaii Japanese would be delighted to see these islands come under the Rising Sun.
That . . . wasn’t so obvious. Some of the older men and women seemed glad enough to see the Japanese. A lot of the younger ones, the ones born here, seemed anything but. This fellow had just got several soldiers shot. If we get our hands on him . . . Shimizu thought longingly.
He cursed again as he threw dirt in front of himself. The Americans and the damned Hawaii Japanese had suckered him. He squeezed the entrenching tool till his knuckles whitened. Of course the bastard sounded as if he came from the dark side of the moon. Most of the Japanese here had old-fashioned accents. They or their ancestors had been peasants to begin with, and the language here hadn’t changed with time as it had in Japan.
He’d just got the foxhole half as good as the one he’d left behind when mortar bombs did start whistling down around the American machine gun. Those bursts sounded sweet to him—but not sweet enough to make him stick his head up out of that foxhole. If he did, the Yankees were liable to blow it off for him.
“You got ’em. It’s safe. Come on!” The alluring Japanese voice came from ahead of him. This time, he sat tight. What could they do to that fellow if they caught him? He’d be even more fun to play with than an ordinary captive.
Soldiers were yelling, “Down! Stay down! It’s a trick!” But Shimizu heard feet running through the field. He also heard the machine gun stutter to life. Curses and screams followed. So did the thuds of bodies crashing to the ground. Shimizu added his own curses to the din. Now he was swearing at his own men at least as hard as at the Americans. If that voice had fooled th
em once—well, they weren’t expecting it. But if it fooled them twice . . .
“Stay down, baka yaro!” he yelled. Dumb assholes they were, almost dumb enough to deserve getting shot.
More mortar bombs fell around the machine-gun nest. “You can’t hit a damn thing!” that lying Japanese voice jeered. Maybe, on the principle that everything it said was full of crap, the mortars really had put the American machine gun out of action. Maybe—but Corporal Shimizu didn’t stick his head up to find out.
He didn’t hear any signs that the men around him were trying to advance, either. He breathed a sigh of relief. Some of them could learn after all. The ones who couldn’t had paid the price for their stupidity.
After a while, the machine gun started up again, this time sending a stream of bullets over to the left. When another machine gun there answered the fire, Shimizu did look out from his hole. A tank rumbled through the pineapple field, straight toward the American machine gun. Its bow gunner shot back at the Yankees. Enemy bullets clanged off its armor, now and then striking sparks but doing no harm.
The snorting mechanical monster stopped. The cannon in the turret bellowed. The shell burst just in front of the sandbags shielding the American gun. The enemy soldiers were brave. They kept right on shooting at the tank. It did them no good. The cannon spoke again. Sandbags flew. The machine gun kept firing even after that, but not for long. The tank’s bow and turret-mounted machine guns had a clear shot at the Americans now.
Corporal Shimizu sprang from his new foxhole. “Come on!” he shouted. “Move fast! Maybe we can catch that Hawaii Japanese and give him what he deserves!” If anything would get the men out of their holes and advancing, that ought to do the trick.
And it did. They splashed through the creek and past the shattered machine-gun nest. Not many riflemen had backed up the machine gunners. The Japanese soldiers gained several hundred meters before enemy fire forced them to hit the dirt and dig in again. Shimizu was proud of the dash they showed. But the man who’d tricked them got away. He didn’t know how lucky he was—or maybe he did.
LIKE MOST NINETEEN-year-olds in Honolulu, Kenzo Takahashi had Japanese friends and haole friends and Chinese friends and Filipino friends and friends who were a little bit of everything. Everybody was packed together with everybody else in school. A good many kids had parents who wished their friends came only from their own group. But that wasn’t how things worked in Hawaii—which was why so many kids were a little bit of everything.
With his friends who weren’t Japanese (and even, a lot of the time, with the ones who were), Kenzo was just Ken. That suited him fine; Ken was a good American name, and he was at least as American as he was Japanese. When he ate with his parents, he used hashi to shovel in rice and raw fish. When he wasn’t with his parents, he was likely to order fried chicken or spaghetti and meatballs. He liked them better. So did Hiroshi.
Since the attack on Pearl Harbor, though . . . All of a sudden, his haole friends didn’t want to know him any more. It wasn’t just that he was spending most of his time out on the Oshima Maru, either. He was—he’d never worked so hard in his life—but that wasn’t the point.
Going home from Kewalo Basin, he’d sometimes see people with whom he’d sat for four years in math and English and history and science classes. He’d see them . . . and, if they were white, they’d pretend they didn’t see him. Sometimes they would even turn their backs so he couldn’t possibly miss the point. That cut like a knife.
And he knew those haoles and their folks were lining up to buy the fish he and his father and brother brought in. They didn’t mind doing that at all. Oh, no, especially not when the fish the sampans brought in was the only fresh food coming into Honolulu these days.
What really hurt was when Elsie Sundberg acted as if she’d never set eyes on him in her life. Thanks to the wonders of alphabetical seating, he’d had the desk right behind hers in just about all the classes they took together. The alphabet could have played plenty of worse tricks on him: Elsie was blond, blue-eyed, and curvy, a cheerleader for the football team. She got better grades in English and history; he was stronger in science and math. They’d spent a lot of time coaching each other. They’d gone to a few movies together, held hands. He’d kissed her once. He’d thought about asking her to the prom, but by the time he got up the nerve to do it the star halfback beat him to the punch. She’d sounded genuinely sorry when she told him no.
And now . . . now he was nothing but a lousy Jap to her. It made him want to cry, or else to go out and kick something or somebody.
“It’s not right, goddammit,” he raged to Hiroshi later that evening. “I’m as much an American as she is.” The one advantage of having parents who’d never learned English was that he and his brother could use it without fear of eavesdropping.
His brother made a small production of lighting a cigarette. Only after a long, meditative drag did he answer, “It’s tough, all right. Some of that same shit’s happened to me, too.”
“Tough? Is that all you can say? What’s the good of trying to be an American if the stinking haoles won’t let you?” He pointed to the pack of Chesterfields. “Let me have one of those.”
Hiroshi did, and leaned close to give him a light. After they were both smoking, Hiroshi said, “Well, what other choice have you got? Do you want to stand up and cheer for Hirohito the way Dad does?”
“Jesus Christ, no!” Kenzo exclaimed. “That’s just embarrassing.”
“It’s worse than embarrassing these days.” Hiroshi dropped his voice even though his and Kenzo’s folks couldn’t understand. “It’s damn near treason.”
“Yeah. I know,” Kenzo said heavily. “But you can’t tell him anything. He won’t listen.” He sucked in smoke, then blew it out in a ragged cloud. What with the blackout and the radio being off the air almost all the time, the night was almost eerily quiet. That made it easy for him to hear the thunder in the middle distance—except it wasn’t thunder. The boom of the guns got louder and louder, closer and closer, as the days went by. “What do we do if . . . our side doesn’t win?”
“I don’t know.” His brother smoked his cigarette till the butt got too small to hold between his lips. Some people were even using toothpicks or alligator clips to hold tiny butts and squeeze an extra drag or two out of them. Tobacco wouldn’t last forever. Nothing in Honolulu would last forever. If Hawaii fell, nothing would last very long. Hiroshi stubbed out the remains of the Chesterfield and stared down at the ashtray. “What can we do? Try and keep our noses clean. Try and keep Dad from busting his buttons ’cause he’s so proud.”
“It’s a good thing the sampan’s going out again,” Kenzo said. “If Dad’s on the ocean, he can’t be on the streets. Somebody’d knock his block off for him.”
“Or maybe not, depending on where he is,” Hiroshi said. “As long as he stays Ewa side of Nuuanu Avenue, he won’t do too bad.”
Kenzo only grunted. That was a half truth. Older Japanese like his father often pulled for their native country. Most of the younger ones were as American as Hiroshi and himself. And none of the Chinese and Koreans and Filipinos who helped crowd Honolulu’s Asian district had any use for Japan. That had sometimes led to fights even before Pearl Harbor. Now . . .
Off in the distance, the thunder that wasn’t thunder rumbled again. Kenzo grunted again. “What do we do if . . . if the Japanese Army marches into Honolulu?” There. He’d said it.
“What can we do?” his brother said. Kenzo shrugged. He had no answer. He’d hoped Hiroshi would.
SABURO SHINDO LOOKED down on Honolulu from his Zero. Even from his height, he could see olive-drab trucks rolling through the city. The time had come—as far as he was concerned, the time was long since past—to give the Americans a lesson. He wondered why his superiors had held off for so long. He’d heard a lot of Japanese lived in Honolulu. Maybe the powers that be hadn’t wanted to hurt them, or hoped they could somehow get the Americans to give up. It hadn’t happened. As
far as Lieutenant Shindo was concerned, the best way to make somebody give up was to kick him in the teeth till he did.
Honolulu was about to get kicked in the teeth.
The place was defended. Puffs of black smoke from antiaircraft guns were already pocking the sky around the fighters Shindo led, and around the bombers flying above them. Antiaircraft guns were a nuisance. But they were only a nuisance. The Americans had next to no combat aircraft left. That was what really mattered.
Waggling his wings to the rest of the Zeros, Shindo dropped his fighter’s nose and dove on the city below. The other planes followed. Those olive-drab trucks—and the cars, and the buildings past which they drove—swelled from ant size to toy size to the real thing. Now the antiaircraft fire was above his planes. He laughed. The Yankees couldn’t depress their guns fast enough to stay with him.
As if trying to make up for that, small-arms fire reached for the Zeros. All the machine guns and rifles and pistols on the ground seemed to go off at once. Muzzle flashes and tracers sparked below Shindo. As usual, he ignored them. Odds were, all that stuff would miss him. Nobody could lead a speeding plane enough; people with small arms shot behind aircraft they aimed at. And if, by bad luck, this once they didn’t . . . Ground fire had already winged Shindo’s plane once. It could have been worse. But he couldn’t do anything about it one way or the other.
Come to that, he’d had to learn to shoot at ground targets. He was pretty good at it now. He didn’t know whether that truck convoy heading west through the center of town was carrying men or supplies or ammunition. He didn’t care. He shot it up any which way.
Flames exploded from some of the trucks. Gasoline, he thought. The less the Americans had, the less good they could get out of their cars and trucks and tanks. He pulled up and went around for another pass. A bullet banged through the Zero’s fuselage, about a meter behind where he sat. Sure as sure, put enough rounds in the air and some would hit. The plane kept flying. This one hadn’t hit anything important.
Days of Infamy Page 17
