He drove another nail to make sure the plank stayed securely fastened. He might have to stay in the barracks he was building. He wanted to make sure the building kept off the rain. He didn’t have to worry about making sure the place was warm, the way he would have on the mainland. A good thing, too, because the Japs couldn’t have cared less if their prisoners froze.
He fastened another plank, and another, and another. He worked till a Jap outside the wire blew a horn. The bastard must have thought he was Satchmo Armstrong; he put some Dixieland into the call that let the POWs knock off for the day. And wasn’t that a kick in the nuts—a Jap who liked jazz? Peterson had run into some crazy things in his time, but that might have taken the cake.
The prisoners lined up to return their tools. The guards kept track of every hammer and saw and chisel and axe and screwdriver and pliers they issued each morning. If the count didn’t add up when the tools came back, there was hell to pay. They’d beaten the crap out of a guy who tried to stick a chisel in his pocket and walk off with it. You had to be nuts to think you’d get away with something like that, but young Einstein had taken a shot at it. He’d paid for his stupidity, too; he was still laid up in the infirmary.
Peterson turned in the hammer without any fuss. No matter what he wanted to do with it, he couldn’t, not with armed Japs ready to kill him if he got cute with the sergeant in charge of checking off the tools on a chart full of incomprehensible squiggles.
Prez McKinley stood a couple of men behind Peterson in line. He gave the Jap sergeant his saw. Then he and Peterson got bowls and spoons from their tent and headed for the chow line. The march up to Opana had taught them sticking with a buddy was a good idea. The Japanese had hardly bothered to feed the POWs on the trek across the island. What the guards did give out, the strong had tried to snatch from the weak. Two men together were stronger than any lone wolf could be. Nobody had robbed the two of them. They’d got to Opana in fair shape. Some of the weaker, hungrier men had lain down by the Kamehameha Highway and, too weary to go on, let the Japs do them in.
Here at the camp, having a buddy proved even more important than it had on the road. A buddy could hold your place in line if nature called or if you were busy trying to make some scheme pay off. A buddy might help you escape, too. Prisoners were duty-bound to try to get away. Nobody seemed hot to try it, though. Even under the Geneva Convention, the power holding prisoners could punish would-be escapees who failed. Since the Japs hadn’t signed the convention, no one was eager to find out what they’d do.
“I wonder what sort of gourmet treat we’ll have tonight,” Peterson said. “The pheasant under glass, do you think, or the filet mignon?”
“Shut the fuck up,” said somebody behind him in line.
“Hey, I can dream, can’t I?” Peterson tried to stay pleasant.
“Not while I gotta listen to you, goddammit.” The other prisoner didn’t bother.
It could have turned into a brawl. The main reason it didn’t was that Peterson was too worn and hungry to take it any further. He told McKinley, “Some people can’t take a joke,” but he didn’t say it loud enough for the angry POW in back of them to hear.
“Filet mignon . . . Hell, I didn’t know whether to laugh or to want to deck you myself,” McKinley answered. “Your belly’s empty, you take food serious.”
Peterson decided he must have stepped over a line if that was the most backing his friend would give him. Joking about steak and pheasant here felt like joking about somebody’s mother on the outside. You were asking for trouble if you did. But if you couldn’t joke, wouldn’t you start going nuts?
Such thoughts vanished from his mind when the chow line started snaking forward. His belly growled like a wolf. He had to clamp his lips together to keep drool from running down his chin. The spit flooding into his mouth reminded him that he took food as seriously as Prez McKinley, as seriously as the son of a bitch who’d resented what he’d said, as seriously as all the other sorry bastards cooped up here with him. The most beautiful prisoner-of-war camp in the world—but who gave a damn?
He looked down at his bowl. It was cheap, heavy earthenware, glazed white. It had probably come from a Chinese restaurant. He’d eaten chop suey out of bowls just like it plenty of times. Thinking about chop suey made him want to drool, too. I really was out of line with that crack, he decided.
Cooks slapped stuff into POWs’ bowls. Peterson wondered how they’d landed the job. Had they been cooks before the surrender, or had the Japs just pointed and said, “You, you, and you”? Either way, he was jealous of them. If anybody here came close to getting enough to eat, it had to be the cooks.
Plop! A ladleful of supper went into a bowl. Plop! Another ladleful, one man closer to Peterson. Plop! Another. Plop! Another. And then plop!—and it was his turn.
He stared avidly at the bowl as he carried it away from the chow line. Just behind him, McKinley was doing the same thing. Rice, some broth, some green things. He didn’t think the green came from proper vegetables. Some of it looked like grass, some like ferns, some like torn-up leaves boiled in with the rice. He didn’t care, not one bit. He drank every drop of the broth and made sure he ate every grain of rice and every bit of greenery—whatever the hell it was—the cook doled out to him.
He was still hungry when he finished—hungry, yes, but not hungry. Even partial relief might have been a benediction from on high. “Jesus!” he said. “That hit the spot.”
“Hit part of the spot, anyway,” McKinley answered. His bowl was as perfectly empty and polished as Peterson’s. “Give me about three of those, and some spare ribs to go with ’em. . . .” Before the surrender, he wouldn’t have talked so reverently about anything but women. People had taken food for granted then, fools that they were.
The two men carried their bowls over to what looked like a horse trough. For all Peterson knew, it had been a horse trough once upon a time. He sloshed his bowl in the water, and his spoon, too. You did want to keep things as clean as you could. Otherwise, you were asking for dysentery. With so many men packed so close together, you might come down with it anyhow, but you were smart to try not to.
After supper came the evening lineup and count. Nobody got to sack out till the Japs were happy with it. Some of the guards couldn’t count to twenty-one without undoing their fly, which didn’t make things any easier. It started to rain while the Americans stood in their rows. Nobody tried to get away from the rain. That might have fouled up the count and left them out there longer yet. At least it wasn’t a cold, nasty rain, like so many on the mainland. Not even the Japs could ruin the weather. Peterson stood there with rain dripping from his nose and ears and chin and the ends of his fingers. He felt sorry for the guys who wore glasses. They probably went blind after a few minutes.
Finally, the Japs decided no one had escaped. The sergeant in charge of the count gestured. The men in the first couple of rows could see him. When they peeled off, the rest of the Americans did, too.
Peterson and McKinley had been smart enough to pitch their tent on the highest ground they could find. The rain wouldn’t get the ground inside too muddy. Besides, it would probably stop before too long. A little on, a little off, a little on . . . There was the tent. “Home, sweet home,” Peterson said, not altogether ironically.
“Right,” Prez McKinley answered. They dried off as best they could and rolled themselves in their blankets. Sleep slugged Peterson over the head.
LEARNING TO HANDLE the sails that had sprouted on the Oshima Maru kept Kenzo Takahashi busy. He and Hiroshi were both surprised to find their father a good teacher. Most of the time, their old man lacked the patience to teach well. Not here: he took everything one step at a time, and didn’t ask them for more than they knew how to do. “It’s his neck, too,” Kenzo said in English as they came in after a fair fishing run.
“That’s part of it,” Hiroshi said, also in English. “The other part is, he’s learning it at the same time as he’s showing us. He doesn’t
have it down pat himself. If he did, he’d think we ought to know it just like that.” He snapped his fingers.
Kenzo didn’t need long to think it over. “Well, you’re right,” he said.
“What are you two going on about?” their father asked in Japanese. “You talking about me again?”
He knew they did that. He wasn’t a fool, however much Kenzo wanted to think of him as one. He didn’t have much education, but that wasn’t the same thing. “No, not about you—we were talking about the sampan and sailing,” Kenzo said, the second part of which held some truth.
Jiro Takahashi let out one of the grunts he used to show he didn’t believe a word of it. “You could do that in Japanese.”
“We feel more at home in English,” Hiroshi said, and that held nothing but the truth.
It got another grunt from the senior Takahashi. “Foolishness,” he said. “Foolishness any old time, but especially now. Japanese is the language everybody needs to know.”
He succeeded in getting his sons to stop speaking English for a while. Kenzo didn’t want to say anything in any language. Was Japanese going to drive English into second place in Hawaii? It would if Japan won the war and kept the islands. From all the news, that looked to be the way to bet right now. Wake Island and Midway were gone. The Philippines were going. Singapore had just fallen, finishing the British collapse in Malaya. And the Japanese were rampaging through the Dutch East Indies. The Dutch, the Australians, and the Americans seemed able to do little to stop them.
“Wouldn’t that be just our luck?” Hiroshi said—in English—to break that long silence. “We spend our whole lives trying to turn into Americans, and just when we start to get good at it it turns out not to be worth anything.”
“Funny,” Kenzo said. “Funny like a crutch.”
“You think I was kidding?” his brother asked.
“No.” Kenzo left it at that. Would he have to spend the rest of his life trying to make himself Japanese? The New York Yankees meant more to him than the Emperor did. On the mainland, spring training would be starting soon. The closest that came to Hawaii was the Cubs’ springtime home on Catalina Island near Los Angeles.
He and Hiroshi brought the Oshima Maru into Kewalo Basin. Their father watched everything they did, but said not a word. That had to mean they’d done it right. If they’d messed up, they would have heard about it.
As usual these days, Japanese soldiers took charge of the catch. Onto the scales it went, and the Takahashis got paid by weight. Also as usual, nobody fussed when they took some fish for themselves and for Eizo Doi. “Personal use?” a noncom asked Kenzo.
“Hai. Personal use,” he answered. The formula kept the soldiers happy. Kenzo saw speaking fluent Japanese was especially useful just now. He would sooner have slammed the sampan into a pier than admitted that to his father.
It was late in the afternoon, but not too late. They’d brought in as much fish as the Oshima Maru would hold. People hurried here and there, trying to get on with their lives as best they could. More than a few of them sent jealous glances toward Kenzo and his brother and father. If they hadn’t been three stalwart men walking together, they might have had trouble.
A girl coming out of a side street waved and called, “Ken!”
“Hi, Elsie,” he answered, not sorry to see her without her stuck-up friends. “How are you doing?”
The haole girl shrugged. “Okay, I guess. I’m looking for a job. Nobody has enough these days, but there isn’t much out there.” She shrugged again. “Everything’s gone to pot since . . . since the surrender.”
What had she almost said? Since the Japs took over? Something like that, Kenzo supposed. Well, she hadn’t said it. He asked, “Are you getting enough to eat?”
“Nobody’s getting enough to eat these days except people like you who catch your own,” Elsie said. “It’s not too bad. We’re not starving or anything.” Not yet hung in the air. “But we’re hungry some of the time.” By the way she said it, she’d never gone hungry before.
Neither had Kenzo. Elsie was right about that. A fisherman’s family might not have much money, but the Takahashis had always had food on the table. Impulsively, Kenzo held out a nice aku. The striped tuna was as long as his forearm. “Here. Take this back to your folks.”
She didn’t say, Oh, you shouldn’t, or anything like that. She reached out and took the fish by the tail. What she did say was, “Thank you very much, Ken. This means a lot to me.”
“Be careful with it. Don’t let anybody get it,” he told her. She nodded, then hurried away with the prize.
“What did you go and do that for?” his father said. “Now we have to tell Doi we’re short this time.”
“So we give him some extra next time,” Kenzo answered. “He knows we’re good for it. He’d better, everything we’ve brought him so far.”
“You’re sweet on this girl, neh?” his father said.
How am I supposed to answer that? Kenzo wondered. If he said he wasn’t, his old man would know he was lying. If he said he was, his father might pitch a fit. He might have pitched a fit any old time. With Japanese soldiers on the streets of Honolulu, with civilians of all colors scrambling out of their way and bowing as they went by . . . “Maybe some,” Kenzo said cautiously.
“Foolishness. Nothing but foolishness.” But his father left it there.
Hiroshi was the one who spoke up, and he did it in English: “Dad may be right. Is this a smart time to show you like a haole girl?”
“Jesus Christ! Not you, too!” Kenzo said.
His brother flushed. “I didn’t say it wasn’t a smart time to like her. I know you like Elsie, for crying out loud. I said it wasn’t a smart time to show you like her—and you know why as well as I do.”
As if to make his point for him, four or five more Japanese Army men turned the corner and came up the street toward the Takahashis. Kenzo had taken men in U.S. uniforms for granted. Getting used to the new occupiers was harder. Bowing didn’t grate on him the way it had to on haoles, though. He’d grown up with it, and took it for granted.
“I’m not going to do anything stupid,” Kenzo said.
“Good. Make sure you don’t,” Hiroshi told him.
Since it was still daytime, they went to Eizo Doi’s shop instead of his home. The place was tiny; if you weren’t looking for it, you wouldn’t find it. A sign over the door said HANDYMAN in English in small letters. The hiragana characters for the same thing were twice as tall.
Doi was tinkering with a bicycle’s chain and sprocket when Kenzo and his brother and father came in. “You have an icebox here?” Jiro Takahashi asked.
“Hai,” Doi answered. “Come on in back. So you make me lug the fish home, do you?”
“We didn’t want to knock on your door when you weren’t home—might scare your wife,” Kenzo’s father said. The handyman nodded. Kenzo grimaced. Nobody would have said that before the Japanese took Hawaii. Times had changed, and not for the better. Kenzo kept that to himself. He didn’t know who all of Eizo Doi’s friends were. Being wrong about such things could cost much more now than it had when the Stars and Stripes flew over Iolani Palace.
The handyman’s back room was even more crowded than the part of the shop where he worked: a dark jumble of handmade shelves full of a ridiculous variety of spare parts and odd tools and stuff that looked like junk to Kenzo but presumably was or might prove useful to Doi. Kenzo knew a couple of other handymen. They accumulated odds and ends the same way. If you weren’t part pack rat, you were in the wrong line of work.
Hiroshi pointed to the icebox—no, it was a refrigerator, for a plug snaked out of it. “Did you make that yourself, Doi-san?” he asked. Kenzo couldn’t tell whether his tone was meant to be admiring or appalled.
“Hai,” the handyman said again, looking pleased. “It’s not that hard. I got the motor from a drill press, the compressor from. . . . I don’t remember where I got the compressor. But I put everything together, and it works.
”
“That’s what counts,” Kenzo’s father said.
When Doi opened the refrigerator door, Kenzo saw a couple of bottles of beer and other things he had more trouble identifying. By the way some of those looked, he didn’t want to know what they’d been once upon a time. They’d been in there much too long. Doi happily piled fish on the shelves, which might have started their careers as oven racks. If he wasn’t going to worry about it, Kenzo wouldn’t, either.
After the Takahashis left the place, Kenzo said, “See? He didn’t care about that aku. I bet he didn’t even notice.”
His father shook his head. “He noticed. Or if he didn’t, his wife will when he takes the fish home. But you were right—they know we’re good for it sooner or later.”
Sooner or later. The phrase made Kenzo look to the northeast, toward the American mainland. Sooner or later, the USA would try to take Hawaii back. He was sure of that. When, though? And how? And what were the odds the Americans would succeed? Kenzo had no answers for any of those questions. He was sure of one thing, though: it wouldn’t be easy.
IN BACK OF Iolani Palace stood a barracks hall. Once upon a time, when Hawaii was an independent kingdom, it had housed the Royal Guards. Commander Minoru Genda had seen a photograph of the Guards in the palace: big men in fancy uniforms with hats that made them look like British bobbies standing at attention beside and behind a battery of polished brass field pieces.
Now the Iolani Barracks held only one man: a prisoner. Walking slowly across the brilliant green lawn toward the building—with the crosses set into its square, crenellated towers, it looked more like a medieval European fortress than a barracks—Genda turned to Mitsuo Fuchida and said, “This is a bad business.”
Days of Infamy Page 31
