A crackle like distant machine-gun fire snapped his attention back to the pine. “Timberrrr!” yelled one of the woodcutters—a cry he’d surely learned at the movies and not in the great north woods. Down came the tree, and slammed into the grass. Fletch wished it would have fallen on the Japs, but no such luck. They were too canny to let themselves get smashed.
The sergeant in charge of the guards collected the axes. Only after he had them both did he shout something in Japanese to his men. They chose volunteers—that was what it amounted to—and handed out saws. The POWs they’d picked went to work turning the fallen pine, which had to be sixty or seventy feet tall, into chunks of wood convenient for cooking food and boiling water. The guards watched these prisoners no less intently than they had the axemen. As far as they were concerned, saws were weapons, too.
Watching a fallen tree turned into firewood was less interesting than watching it fall in the first place. Along with most of the crowd, Fletch drifted away. If he hung around, there was always the chance that the Japs would find work for him, too. The Geneva Convention said officer prisoners genuinely had to volunteer to work, but the Japs hadn’t signed it and respected it only when they wanted to. They didn’t feed him well enough to make him feel like doing anything more than he had to.
“How’s it going, Lieutenant?” That was Arnie, the ersatz artilleryman who’d surrendered along with Fletch.
“What could be better? It’s the beachfront by Waikiki, right?” Fletch said. “I’m just waiting for the waitress to bring me another gin and tonic.”
Arnie grinned. He was skinnier than Fletch remembered. Of course, Fletch was probably skinnier than he remembered, too. He just didn’t get to see himself very often. Arnie said, “You got a good way of looking at things.”
“My ass,” Fletch told him. “If I had a good way of looking at things, I would have gone over the hill with Clancy and Dave.”
“Wonder what the hell happened to ’em,” Arnie said.
“Whatever it is, could it be worse than staying in the Royal Hawaiian here?” Fletch asked. He got another smile out of Arnie. Considering how things were in the camp, that was no mean feat.
But nobody was laughing a couple of days later. The guards started shouting for a lineup in the middle of the morning. That was out of the ordinary. By now, Fletch had learned to view anything out of the ordinary with suspicion. The Japs didn’t break routine to hand out lollipops.
He hoped there’d been an escape. Most of him hoped so, anyhow. People who left the perimeter on work details talked about “shooting squads”: groups of ten where, if one man ran, all the others got it in the neck. That was a brutally effective way to convince prisoners not to try to make a break—and to stop the ones who did want to try. There were no shooting squads inside the camp, though. If somebody’d dug a tunnel and sneaked off, more power to him.
Fletch’s hopes sank when the guards didn’t count and recount the men lined up in neat rows. They would have if they thought they were missing people, wouldn’t they? The commandant scrambled up onto a table in front of the POWs. As soon as he got up there, all the prisoners bowed. There would have been hell to pay if they hadn’t. Much less athletically, a local Japanese in a double-breasted suit that didn’t go with his tubby build clambered onto the table with the officer.
The Jap commandant shouted in his own language. He had one of those voices that could fill up as much space as it had to. A whole regiment could have heard his orders on the battlefield. The interpreter tried twice as hard and was half as loud: “We have captured four American soldiers. They did not surrender at the proper time. This makes them nothing but bandits. We treat bandits the way they deserve. Let this be a lesson to all of you.”
Guards marched in the four Americans. Poor bastards, Fletch thought. They’d been stripped to the waist. Their faces and torsos showed cuts and bruises. The Japs must have worked them over after they were caught. One of them staggered like a punch-drunk palooka. How many times had they hit him in the head? If he didn’t know everything that was going on around him, maybe he was luckier than his buddies.
None of them was Dave or Clancy. Fletch was glad of that. And then, in short order, he wasn’t glad of anything any more. To him, hung by the thumbs had always been a joke, something people said but nobody would ever do.
The Japs weren’t kidding. They tied ropes to a horizontal length of wood that had to be twelve feet off the ground, and to the Americans’ thumbs. They were viciously precise about it, too, making sure their captives had to stand on tiptoe to keep their thumbs from taking all their weight. Once they’d tied them, they gagged them. And then they walked away.
Another shout from the camp commandant. “Dismissed!” the interpreter said.
Japanese soldiers stood guard around the four Americans. They made sure none of the ordinary POWs drew near. The men they’d captured just hung there, without food, without water, without hope. Fletch didn’t need long to realize the Japs intended to let them die there. Every so often, one of them would sag down off his toes as weariness overcame him, only to be jerked up again by the agony in his hands. The rags tied over their mouths didn’t muffle all the noises they made.
It took six days before they hung limp and unmoving. The guards cut them down with bayonets. They crumpled to the ground. Even after that, though, one of them tried to roll himself up into a ball. The Japs stared at him, gabbling in their own language. One of them ran off to get an officer.
When the officer came back with him, he took a look at the feebly wiggling American, then snapped out a command in his own language. “Hai!” the guards chorused. Three of them raised their rifles and aimed them at the man they’d made into an example. The Arisakas barked together, too. After that, the American didn’t move any more.
With gestures, the guards ordered some of the POWs to drag the dead bodies to the burying ground. There already was one, for men who came down sick and couldn’t find the strength to get better on what the Japs fed them—and for men the Japs killed one way or another.
Fletch was the third man a guard pointed at. He didn’t try protesting that the Japanese couldn’t make him work. If he had, he figured two more POWs would have dragged him to the burying ground. The corpse whose ankle he had hold of didn’t weigh much; all the water was gone from it.
“You damn sorry son of a bitch,” he said.
“Oh, yeah?” The corporal who had the other leg shook his head. “He’s liable to be the lucky one. It’s over for him. How long will it last for us?” Fletch had no answer. The dead man’s head bumped along the ground. Will that be me one day? Fletch wondered. He had no answer for that, either.
“WHERE ARE YOU going?” Hiroshi Takahashi asked.
“Away from here. Any place at all away from here,” Kenzo answered. They were both speaking English to keep their father from knowing what they were saying. “I can’t stand hanging around this miserable tent.” He didn’t come right out and cuss; his dad knew what swear words were, all right.
“You better be back before we go out again, that’s all I’ve got to tell you,” Hiroshi warned.
“Yeah, yeah.” Kenzo ducked out of the tent before his brother could nag him any more. The way his father kept taking fish to the Japanese consulate, and the way he kept coming back looking as if he’d just had tea with Hirohito . . . Some of the reverence for the Emperor Kenzo had learned as a little boy still lingered, but knowing that Hirohito reigned over a country at war with the USA carried more weight. No matter what his old man thought, Kenzo remained determined to stay an American.
He had to bow, though, when a Japanese patrol marched up the street toward him. He’d learned how to do that properly as a little boy, too. The noncom who headed up the patrol recognized him as a countryman and bowed back, which he wouldn’t have done for a haole. That made Kenzo angry, not proud, but he didn’t show what he was thinking.
He bowed again several times as he walked through Honolulu. His route would have looked random
to someone who didn’t know the city well—and who didn’t know what had happened in it and to it since the Rising Sun went up over Iolani Palace. Since almost all food was supposed to go into community kitchens, the markets that had sprung up here and there were highly unofficial. Sometimes the Japs closed down one or another. More often, the people who ran them figured greased palms were part of the cost of doing business.
Fish here (sure as hell, he’d seen Eizo Doi selling some of what he got), taro there, rice somewhere else, yet another place for fresh vegetables . . . Yeah, you had to know your way around. You had to know your way around when you were buying, too, or you’d lose your shirt. The way things were these days, people with food they could sell had the whip hand.
But Kenzo wasn’t looking to buy. Going out on the Oshima Maru kept him fed. It also gave him food to bargain with. If he wanted a coconut, he could trade a flying fish for it. He didn’t need to lay out a stack of greenbacks fat as his fist. You could still buy almost anything if you had enough money, but enough swelled every day. People bargained frantically. Kenzo heard curses in half a dozen languages.
Whenever he saw a blond girl about his own age, he tensed. Was it . . . ? Whenever he got close enough to tell, he added some curses of his own to the electric air because, again and again, it wasn’t. He began to wonder if he was wasting his time. That only made him shrug. How could he be wasting it if he was doing what he wanted to do?
And then, when he was almost sure he wouldn’t run into Elsie Sundberg, he did. She was carrying a cloth sack that looked heavy, but that didn’t show what it held. Smart, Kenzo thought—a lot smarter than carrying food out in the open. The hungrier people got, the likelier they were to steal.
He waved. For a moment, Elsie didn’t think that was aimed at her. For another moment, she looked alarmed that she’d caught an Oriental’s eye. Then she recognized him. He almost laughed at the look of relief that passed over her face before she smiled and waved back. He picked his way toward her past hard-faced sellers and excitable buyers.
“Hi,” he said. “How are you? How are things?”
“Hi, yourself,” Elsie answered. “Not . . . too bad. I want to thank you again for that fish you gave me. That really helped my whole family a lot.”
“No huhu.” Kenzo did laugh then. Why not? A Jap tossing a Hawaiian word to a haole girl . . . If that wasn’t funny, what was? “Hope people aren’t giving you a rough time.” Hope the Japanese aren’t treating you the way whites treated local Japs before the war. He wondered why he hoped that. Wasn’t turnabout fair play? But Elsie had never treated him like a Jap—not till things got strange after the shooting started, anyhow, and then only for a little while.
She shrugged now. “Sign of the times,” she said, which neatly echoed what he was thinking.
“You have any trouble getting that tuna home?” he asked.
Elsie shrugged again. “A little. But I was lucky. There were cops around both times, so things didn’t get too messy. If those so-and-sos had got any pushier, I would’ve kicked ’em right where it hurts most. I was ready to.” She did her best to look tough.
Back in high school, Kenzo wouldn’t have imagined her best could be that good. But everybody’d had some painful lessons since then. “That’s the way to do it,” he said. “Uh—you want company taking your stuff home today?”
She hesitated, much the same way she had when he waved to her across the makeshift market. Then, as she had that time, she smiled again, smiled and nodded. “Sure, Ken. Thanks.”
“Okay.” Now he paused. “Your folks gonna start pitching a fit when you come up to the front door with a Jap?”
She blushed. He watched in fascination as the color spread up from her neckline all the way to the roots of her hair. But, yet again, she didn’t need more than a moment to gather herself. “Not when it’s somebody I went to school with,” she said firmly. She eyed him. “Is that good enough for you?”
“Yeah.” This time, Kenzo answered right away. She would have got mad at him if he hadn’t, and she would have had a right to. “You ready to go or you need more stuff?”
“I’m ready.” As if to prove it, Elsie hefted the bag. “Come on.”
Kenzo had hustled till he was almost breathless, hoping to run into her. Now that he’d succeeded, he had trouble finding things to say. Honolulu wasn’t a great big city; every step brought him that much closer to good-bye, which was the one thing he didn’t want to tell her.
Elsie did her best to help, asking, “How are your brother and your father?”
“Hank’s okay.” Kenzo used the name by which Hiroshi was known to haoles. “My dad . . .” He didn’t know how to go on with that. At last, he said, “Dad was born in the old country, and he’s . . . he’s happier with the way things are now than we are.”
“Oh.” She walked on for a little while. “That must make things . . . exciting to talk about.” Like him, she was looking for safe ways to say inherently unsafe things.
“Exciting. Yeah.” He laughed, not that it was funny. “Things get so exciting that most of the time we don’t talk about anything but fishing. You don’t want to whack somebody over the head with a brick on account of fishing.”
“I guess not.” Elsie took another few steps. He realized she had to feel as wary around him as he did around her. “You’re lucky that you’re able to go out there, especially with so many people hungry.”
“Some luck,” he said bitterly. “If I were really lucky, I’d be in college now. Then I could be working on a degree instead of a line full of hooks. Of course, afterwards I’d probably go out fishing with my old man anyway, because who’s gonna hire a Jap with a degree?”
“Was it really that bad?” Elsie was white. She hadn’t had to worry about it. She hadn’t even had to know the problem was there.
“It wasn’t good—that’s for darn sure,” Kenzo answered. “Lots more Japanese with good educations than places for them to work. You put somebody with a university degree in a shoe store or a grocery or out on a sampan and he starts wondering why the heck he bothered. You let him watch somebody with green eyes and freckles get the office job he’s better qualified for and he won’t be real happy about it.”
Quietly, Elsie said, “It’s a wonder you aren’t happier about how things are now.”
“I’m an American,” Kenzo said with a shrug. “That’s what everybody told me, even before I started going to school. People told me that, and I believed it. Heck, I still believe it. I believe it more than the Big Five do, I bet.” The people who ran the Big Five—the firms of Alexander and Baldwin, American Factors, C. Brewer and Company, Castle and Cooke, and the Theo. H. Davies Company—pretty much ran Hawaii, or they had till the war, anyhow. They ran the banks, they ran the plantations, they did the hiring, and they did the firing. And the higher in their ranks you looked, the whiter they got.
Another proof of who’d been running things here for the past fifty years was the neighborhood they were walking through as they neared Elsie’s house. These large homes—mostly of white clapboard with shingle roofs—on even larger lots were nothing like the crowded shacks and tenements west of Nuuanu Avenue, the part of town where Kenzo had grown up. They didn’t shout about money; they weren’t so rude or vulgar. But they admitted it was there, even the ones that had been wrecked or damaged in the fighting. And the people who lived in them were white.
Somebody had neatly mowed the Sundbergs’ front lawn. Kenzo wondered whether Elsie’s father pushed the lawnmower every Sunday morning or they had a gardener. Before the war, he would have bet on a gardener. Now? He admitted to himself that he wasn’t sure.
The front door opened before he and Elsie got to it. Mrs. Sundberg looked a lot like Elsie. Like her daughter, she also looked alarmed for a moment—what was this Jap doing here? Then, even without Elsie telling her, she realized which Jap he was likely to be, and her face cleared. “Mr. Takahashi, isn’t it?” she said politely.
“That’s right, Mrs
. Sundberg.” Kenzo was polite, too.
“Thank you for the fish you gave us. It was very generous of you,” she said. He nodded; he’d expected something like that. But she went on in a way he hadn’t expected: “It’s good to see you here. Now we can give you something, too.”
“Huh?” he said, which was not the most brilliant thing that could have come out of his mouth, but she’d caught him by surprise.
She smiled a slightly superior smile—a very haole smile. Elsie, who hadn’t got that trick down pat yet, giggled instead and then said, “Come on in, Ken.”
Mrs. Sundberg’s smile slipped a little, but only a little, and she put it back fast. “Yes, do,” she said. “We have lemonade, if you’d like some. Elsie, you get it for him, and I’ll go out back and do the honors.”
Inside, the house was pure New England: overstuffed furniture with nubbly upholstery, lots of turned wood stained a color close to dark cherry, and more pictures on the wall and knickknacks on tables and shelves than you could shake a stick at. “Thanks,” Kenzo said when Elsie did bring him some lemonade. That didn’t surprise him. Lots of people had lemon trees, you couldn’t do much with lemons but squeeze them, and Hawaii did still have plenty of sugar—if not much else. She carried a glass for herself, too. He sipped. It was good.
Mrs. Sundberg came back inside with half a dozen alligator pears, the rough skin on some dark green, on others almost black. “Here you are,” she said proudly.
“Thank you very much!” Kenzo meant it. Alligator pears—some people called them avocados—were a lot harder to come by than lemons. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had any.
“You’re welcome,” she said. “The darker ones are ripe now; the others will be in a few days. Feel them. When they start to get soft, they’ll be ready to eat.”
“Okay. That’s great. Thanks again.” Kenzo was glad she’d given him a number he could share evenly with his brother and his father. Had she done it on purpose? Probably; she wouldn’t miss a trick like that. He’d told Elsie what his living arrangements were, and that his mother hadn’t made it. If Elsie’d mentioned it even once, Mrs. Sundberg wasn’t the sort who’d forget.
Days of Infamy Page 35
