Days of Infamy

by Harry Turtledove

  His toes dug into the sand as he and Charlie walked down to the Pacific. Waikiki Beach was crowded this morning—not with tourists, the way it usually was, but with fishermen. Swarms of people with a rod and reel, and quite a few people with just a rod and a length of line and a hook, were out trying their luck.

  A man in a straw hat, a loud floral shirt, and Bermuda shorts hauled a silvery fish out of the water. It wasn’t very big, but all his neighbors stared jealously. He stashed the fish in a creel he kept between his feet. Nobody was going to take his prize away from him.

  “Excuse us. ’Scuse us,” Oscar said over and over, pushing past the fishermen to get into the sea. Charlie was more direct. He used his surfboard’s nose to clear a path for himself. A couple of fishermen gave him nasty looks. He looked right back at them. They muttered to themselves, but that was all they did. Charlie hardly ever got into fights. That was mostly because nobody was crazy enough to want to take him on.

  A hook splashed into the water right by Oscar’s shoulder as he paddled out to sea. That wouldn’t have been any fun if it had bitten into him. He scowled back toward the beach, but he couldn’t even tell which would-be Izaak Walton had launched it.

  He breathed a sigh of relief when he and Charlie got out of range of such missiles. “Well, they won’t catch us instead of their minnows,” he said.

  “Yeah,” Charlie said, and then, “That one guy got a real fish. Don’t see that all the time, not off Waikiki Beach.”

  “These days, you take whatever you get,” Oscar said. Along with their surfboards, he and Charlie had hand nets and canvas sacks to hold whatever they caught. They could get a lot farther out to sea than the optimists who fished from the water’s edge. Or maybe they weren’t optimists. Maybe they were just hungry men doing what they could. Anything was better than nothing.

  Were he giving a lesson, Oscar would have turned back toward shore long since. But he wasn’t. Oahu receded behind him. The breeze came off the land. He wrinkled his nose. At just about the same time, Charlie said, “What’s that stink?”

  “It’s got to be the prisoners’ camp in Kapiolani Park,” Oscar answered. “I can’t think of anything else it could be.”

  Charlie Kaapu grunted. “That’s a nasty business.”

  “Everything that’s happened since the Japs landed is a nasty business,” Oscar said. Charlie grunted again. He didn’t say anything more, so Oscar took it for a grunt of agreement.

  Off in the distance, a couple of fishing sampans headed out to sea. The light breeze filled their sails. More and more sampans were abandoning engines for the wind. Without fuel, what good were engines? Without fuel, what good was anything? Oscar’s Chevy sat on the street. It wasn’t going anywhere. Even if he could get gas for it, the battery was sure to be dead by now.

  He was jealous of the sampans for the same reason the surf fishermen were bound to be jealous of him. As he could get fish the men on the beach couldn’t, so the sampans could find fish he’d never see. “Hey, Charlie!” he called.

  Charlie Kaapu looked up from his paddling. “What you want?”

  “You think we could rig a little mast and sail on a surfboard? That would let us get a lot farther out to sea than we can like this.”

  Charlie thought it over, then shook his head. “Waste time,” he said. Oscar shrugged. His friend might well be right.

  Something nibbled his finger. He looked into the water. A minnow darted away. Oscar laughed. His hands and feet were the bait he fished with. Even as he laughed, though, he also scanned the sea. Fish he wanted to catch weren’t the only sort out there. The Pacific also held fish that wanted to catch him. Sharks big enough to be dangerous were rare. Some people on the mainland imagined surf-riders devoured every day. That was a bunch of hooey. But a man who ignored the risk was a fool, too. It was like not watching the road when you got behind the wheel.

  “What do you think?” he asked Charlie after a while. “We out far enough?”

  Charlie looked back toward the shore. “I guess maybe. We don’t get anything, we can paddle some more.”

  “Okay.” Oscar stopped paddling and let his arm trail in the water. He fluttered his fingers. Now he wanted fish to come up to him. Here, isn’t this an interesting piece of seaweed? That was what he wanted to put across to the fish. I should be writing radio spots, he thought.

  A fish came up to see what he was selling. He had the net in his other hand. He didn’t advertise the net. He made a swipe with it—and the fish got away. “Oh, shit,” he said without too much heat. Such mishaps happened all the time.

  Charlie made a swipe of his own. He hauled something silvery out of the sea. As he stuffed it into his sack, he sent Oscar a sly smile. Oscar took his hand out of the water and flipped Charlie off. They both laughed. No mystical native talent had let Charlie catch a fish where Oscar failed. Before long, Oscar would be smiling and Charlie cussing. They both knew it. There wasn’t any point in getting excited. If you weren’t patient, you’d never make it as a fisherman.

  After a while, Oscar caught a little ray. Before he came to Hawaii, he would have thrown the bat-winged fish back. A few visits to Chinese and Japanese restaurants, though, had convinced him ray and even shark could be pretty tasty if you did them right. And he couldn’t be too choosy these days anyhow.

  A swarm of minnows flashed by, like shooting stars under the surface of the sea. Oscar and Charlie looked up, the same hopeful expression on both their faces. Minnows wouldn’t swim that way unless something was after them. And whatever was after them might really be worth catching.

  Oscar swiped with his net. He let out a whoop—his catch almost tore the handle out of his grasp. He hauled a mackerel up onto his surfboard. A few seconds later, Charlie caught one, too. They both stuffed the fish into their sacks and thrust the nets into the sea again. If there were more, they wanted them. And there were. Oscar got another one in nothing flat. I eat today, he thought.

  Lots of people in Honolulu had such worries these days. Unlike most of those people, Oscar had had them before. He’d spent a lot of time living from hand to mouth. There was a difference, though. When he’d worried about going hungry before, it was because he’d been short of money. Now he was short of food, and so was everybody else.

  He went on fishing even after he caught the second mackerel. What he didn’t eat today could go into the little icebox in his room for tomorrow. Or he could trade it for other food, or sell it to get the money he needed to pay the rent. He wondered if his landlord would take fish for the rent in place of cash. Before the war started, the idea would have been ridiculous. Not any more.

  “Well, shall we head back?” he asked at last, after a long dry stretch.

  “Why not?” Charlie Kaapu said. “Plenty for today.” He worried about tomorrow even less than Oscar did.

  They turned their surfboards toward the shore and began to paddle again. That was work: familiar work, but work. Oscar thought some more about putting a sail on the surfboard. It wouldn’t be pretty, but he was damned if he could see why it wouldn’t work. You did what you had to do. If you were making your living as a surf-rider, that was one thing. If you were using your surfboard mostly as a fishing boat, that was something else again.

  Waikiki Beach neared. The fishermen still cast their lines upon the water. Oscar glanced over to Charlie. “Shall we give ’em a show?” he said.

  “What else we got to do?” Charlie answered.

  They rode the breakers back to the beach. Oscar was used to standing up on a surfboard supporting a skittish tourist. Doing the same thing with a net in one hand and his sack of fish in the other was no huhu. Beside him, Charlie Kaapu might have been the incarnation of Kuula, the Hawaiian god of fishermen. You got the feeling nothing could make him come off his surfboard. That feeling might be wrong; Charlie could take a tumble like anybody else. But Oscar didn’t think he would, not this time.

  And he didn’t. Neither did Oscar. They glided smoothly up onto the sand. The
fishermen gave them a smattering of applause. Somebody reached into his pocket and tossed Oscar a quarter. Oscar caught it out of the air with his net. That won him some more cheers. He would have got more still if he could have balanced the coin on the end of his nose.

  He shrugged as he walked back to his apartment. He was a performer when he got on a surfboard. If he got paid for being a performer, what was wrong with that?

  A JAPANESE OFFICER shouted in his own language. Along with the rest of the prisoners in the Pearl City camp, Jim Peterson waited for the English translation. He didn’t have to wait long. As usual, a Hawaiian-born Jap about his own age stood next to the officer. The local wore a sharp sharkskin suit. He seemed happy as a clam to serve his new bosses.

  “You will be moved,” he said. “You will go to the north and central part of the island. Some of you will work in the fields. You will be well fed and well treated.”

  Peterson turned his head ever so slightly toward Prez McKinley, who stood beside him. “Yeah, and the check is in the mail,” he said out of the side of his mouth.

  McKinley snickered. He didn’t do it very loud, though. Guards watched the POWs. If you got out of line, they beat you. They stomped you, too, and hit you with sticks. They’d already killed at least one American. Nobody wanted to give them any excuse to go to work.

  And there were probably prisoners who couldn’t be trusted. Peterson didn’t like thinking so, but it was the way to bet. Some people were out for themselves, first, last, and always. If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. If you can’t lick ’em, lick their boots.

  The Jap with the sword on his hip shouted some more. The quisling in the sharkskin suit translated: “This move will begin in one hour. All able-bodied prisoners must go. It is an order from the Japanese Imperial Army.” The way he said it, God might have handed it to Moses on a tablet of stone.

  “What about the wounded? What about the sick?” somebody called.

  Questions—the mere idea that there could be questions—seemed to surprise both the translator and the officer. The officer growled something. If it didn’t mean, What the devil was that? Peterson would have eaten his hat. The local Jap spoke nervously in Japanese. The officer said something else. The translator returned to English: “They will come when they are fit. Until then, they stay here.”

  “They could put most of ’em on trucks and bring ’em along,” McKinley said as the gathering broke up.

  “They could, yeah, but why would they?” Peterson answered. “They can’t have a whole lot of fuel here. You think they’re going to waste it on Americans? You think they’re going to waste it on American prisoners, for crying out loud?”

  “For crying out loud is right,” McKinley said. “Don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I musta been outa my tree.”

  “For Japs, they’re being damn nice to give us an hour to get ready,” Peterson said. “It’s not like I’ve got a lot to pack. Outside of the clothes on my back, what I’ve got is a canteen and a deck of cards.”

  “Take ’em,” Prez McKinley said. “You can kill a lot of time with cards. And fill up the canteen before you start. God knows whether those monkeys’ll give us anything, no matter what they say.”

  That made more sense than Peterson wished it did. Rations had been anything but abundant here. And the Japanese didn’t bother to hide their contempt for the men who’d surrendered. Any American who gave them even the slightest excuse got beaten up. As far as the Japs were concerned, they were on top, the prisoners were on the bottom, and anybody who didn’t remember that was how things were supposed to work was asking for it.

  He had to stand in line to fill the canteen. He had to stand in line for everything in the prison camp. Might as well be in the service or something, he thought wryly. The one faucet the POWs were allowed to use was at the back of what had been a park building. Two Japs in a sandbagged machine-gun nest kept an eye on the queue.

  McKinley had a canteen, too. He rubbed his chin, which was sporting a pretty fair crop of grizzled whiskers. “Christ, what I wouldn’t do for some shaving soap and a razor,” he said.

  Peterson nodded. “Oh, yeah. We’re all going to look like we play for the House of David before too long.”

  They set out when the Japanese officer blew a whistle. It felt like about an hour to Peterson. He didn’t know for sure, having been relieved of his watch. The Jap had one on his wrist. Peterson wondered if he’d worn it when he got here, or if he’d stolen it since. He sure didn’t want to know badly enough to ask, though.

  The Japanese soldiers nervously eyed the prisoners as they came out of the barbed-wire enclosure the Japs had thrown up around the park. The soldiers gestured with their rifles: this way. Every one of the rifles had a bayonet fixed to it. The long blades gleamed in the sun. They weren’t worth much in combat, but for sticking a prisoner who couldn’t fight back they’d do just fine.

  Along with the other men, Peterson started to walk. The journey north was like running a newsreel backwards: the farther he went, the more distant in time the remains of the fighting were. Things seemed to go in waves that hadn’t been apparent while he crouched on the landscape with a rifle in his hand. A stretch of ground would look as if a giant had been stamping on it with hobnailed boots. That would be a place where the Americans had tried to make a stand. Then he would go forward through a few hundred yards of relatively unchewed terrain. After that would come another battered stretch of ground that would in fact have been the previous U.S. line.

  Once they got out of Pearl City and onto Kamehameha Highway, there were places where the retreating Americans had blown up the road to keep Jap-run vehicles from moving forward along it. Not all the holes had been repaired. Some of them were ten feet deep and thirty feet across. The prisoners, naturally, tried to go into the fields on either side to get around them.

  The guards shook their heads and gestured with their rifles. “Kinjiru!” they shouted.

  Kinjiru! meant something like, You can’t do that! It was one of the bits of Japanese Peterson had started picking up, however little he wanted any. “What do they want us to do, Prez?” he asked Sergeant McKinley. “Go through the goddamn hole? That’s nuts.”

  Nuts or not, it was what the Japs had in mind. “You make,” said one of them who knew a few words of English. “You go in.”

  Plainly, none of the prisoners wanted to do that. They piled up at the edge of the crater. The guards did some more yelling. Some of the gestures they used were pretty explicit. If you don’t go in, you’re going to get it. Not a POW went forward, though.

  “They can’t shoot all of us,” somebody said. Jim Peterson wished he were sure of that. For the moment, though, it seemed to be true.

  One of the guards went pelting off toward the rear. “The most junior man,” McKinley remarked.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Peterson said. By now, he’d got the hang of reading Jap Army rank badges. The more gold and the less red in the background, the higher the grade. Within each grade, the more stars, the higher the rank.

  For most of an hour, the standoff continued. Then that poor miserable private, his tunic now all sweaty, returned with the Japanese officer who’d started the parade and his interpreter. He looked things over, then spoke in his own language. The interpreter said, “He says you have to the count of five to obey the order you have been given. After that, the guards will begin to shoot. They will not stop shooting until you obey.”

  “Ichi,” the officer said. The interpreter held up one finger. “Ni.” Two fingers. “San.” Three . . . The guards raised their rifles to their shoulders and stared down the barrels.

  Peterson didn’t find out how to say four or five in Japanese. With almost identical frightened moans, half a dozen prisoners in the front ranks plunged down into the crater. They floundered over to the other side and started scrambling up toward the asphalt once more. Other men followed them. As soon as a couple made it up onto the highway again, they reached into the hole in the ground to
help their buddies climb out.

  Along with everybody else, Peterson went through the hole. He was filthy and weary by the time he made it to the other side. Going around would have saved time. It would have been ever so much easier. But it wasn’t what the Japs wanted.

  “You know what they’re doing?” he said as the march north resumed.

  “Lording it over us, you mean?” Prez McKinley said, trying without much luck to get the dirt off his tunic.

  “Yeah, that, too,” Peterson answered. “But they’re breaking us, taming us, like you’d break a mustang or something.”

  McKinley muttered to himself. It sounded like, “Try and break me, will they?” And maybe he had a point. But maybe not, too. If the Japs could get the Americans to do what they wanted without making a fuss for fear something worse would happen if they didn’t, wouldn’t that be enough to keep them happy? What more could they want, egg in their beer?

  Plenty of people were out in the fields, cutting down sugarcane and pulling up pineapple plants. The Big Five, the companies that had run Hawaii ever since the annexation, were probably having heart attacks. What the Big Five thought was the least of Jim Peterson’s worries. What he saw here actually made some sense. If Hawaii couldn’t import what it needed from the mainland, it would have to grow its own food. People were taking the first steps in that direction, anyhow.

  Yes, but can they grow enough soon enough? he wondered. All he could do was give a mental shrug. He didn’t know. At least they were trying.

  On went the POWs. A few people in the fields waved to them. That took guts, with Japanese soldiers watching the prisoners and others watching the laborers. Peterson wanted to wave back. He didn’t, though; it might have drawn the Japs’ notice to people who weren’t afraid to show they didn’t like the occupiers.