He thought she would hover over him and her daughter, but she didn’t. She went off into the back of the house somewhere. Somehow, that left him more on his best behavior than if she had hovered. He and Elsie talked about people from high school while they drank their lemonade.
When he finished his, he said, “I better go.”
Elsie didn’t say no. She did say, “Thanks for walking me home. That was nice of you,” which was almost as good.
“It’s okay. It was good to see you.” That was about a tenth of what Kenzo meant. Gathering his courage, he tried again: “Could we maybe, uh, see each other some more one of these times?”
He’d already seen she wasn’t as good as her mother at masking what she thought. He didn’t need to be a private eye or somebody like that to read what she was thinking. She’d known him a long time, but he was Japanese. He was Japanese, but she’d known him a long time—not quite the same as the other. Being Japanese meant something different now from what it had before December 7. Whatever it meant, he wasn’t a collaborator, or no more than you had to be to survive when the place where you lived was occupied. And so. . .
“Yes, we can do that,” she said.
“Swell!” He grinned like a fool. “So long.” He didn’t think his feet touched the ground at all as he went down the walk and out to the street.
THE TRAIN CHUGGED to a stop. “Pensacola!” the conductor shouted. “All out for Pensacola!”
Joe Crosetti leaped up from his seat. He grabbed his duffel bag from the overhead rack and slung it over his shoulder. All his worldly goods in a canvas sack—he felt proud, not impoverished. And he was so excited, he could hardly stand still. “Pensacola Naval Air Station!” he said. “Wings! Wings at last!”
Orson Sharp shouldered his duffel, too. “Keep your shirt on, Joe,” he said mildly. “They’re not going to let us fly this afternoon.”
“Yeah, but soon,” Joe said. “We can fly here. We’re gonna fly here. It’s not like Chapel Hill, where we couldn’t.”
“Okay,” his roommate said. Joe had the feeling he was hiding a laugh, and wondered if he ought to get mad himself. But then, as the swarm of cadets surged toward the door, he forgot all about it.
The last time he’d got off a train, it was in the middle of a North Carolina winter. He liked spring in Florida a hell of a lot better. He got a glimpse of the Gulf of Mexico. Just that glimpse told him he didn’t know as much about the ocean as he thought he did. The Pacific off San Francisco could be green. It could be gray. It could even be greenish blue or grayish blue. He’d never seen it, never imagined it, a blue between turquoise and sapphire, a blue that was really blue. The color made you want to go swimming in it. People went swimming off of San Francisco, too, but they came out of the water with their teeth chattering when they did.
Beside him, Orson Sharp said, “I’ve never seen the ocean before.”
That made Joe blink. To him, this was a variation on a theme. To the kid from Utah, it was a whole new song. “You wanted to be a Navy flier before you even knew what all that wet stuff was like?” Joe said.
Sharp didn’t get angry or embarrassed. “I figured I’d find out what I needed to know.” He was hard to faze.
“Buses! Buses to the Air Station this way!” somebody shouted. Cadets started heading this way. In the middle of the crowd and short, Joe didn’t even see which way the shouter pointed. He just went along, one more sheep in the flock. If everybody else was wrong, he’d be wrong, too, but he’d have a lot of company. They couldn’t land on him too hard unless he goofed all by his lonesome.
The buses were where they were supposed to be. A placard in front of the first one said, TO PENSACOLA NAVAL AIR STATION. This time, the flock had done it right. Cadets lined up to get aboard. The Navy was even bigger on lining up than grade school had been.
Joe got a little look at Pensacola as the bus rolled south and west toward the Naval Air Station. A lot of the streets had Spanish names. He remembered from an American history course that Florida had belonged to Spain once upon a time, the same as California had. He shook his head in wonder. He’d never expected that to matter to him—when would he get to Florida? But here he was, by God.
Oaks and palms and magnolias all grew here. The air was mild and moist, although this extreme northwestern part of Florida wasn’t a place winter forgot altogether, the way, say, Miami was. Frame and brick buildings, some with big wrought-iron balconies on the upper stories, lined the streets.
“Reminds me a little of New Orleans,” said somebody behind Joe. The comparison would have meant more to him if he’d ever been to New Orleans.
Whites and Negroes walked along the sidewalks and went in and out of shops and homes. They seemed not far from equal in numbers. As it had been in North Carolina, that was plenty to tell Joe he was a long way from home. Colored people in San Francisco were few and far between.
Because of the name, he’d figured the Naval Air Station would lie right next to the town. But it didn’t; it was half a dozen miles away. On the way there, Joe’s bus passed a massive fort of brickwork and granite. “This here is Fort Barrancas,” the driver said, playing tour guide. “The Confederates held it for a while during the War Between the States, but the Federals ran ’em out.”
Joe had heard people talk about the War Between the States in North Carolina, too. In San Francisco, it had always been just the Civil War. Cadets from the South seemed a lot more . . . serious about it than those from other parts of the country. Of course, their side had lost, which doubtless made a difference.
“Over there across the channel on Santa Rosa Island is Fort Pickens,” the driver went on. “It could’ve touched off the war if Fort Sumter didn’t. The Confederates never did take it, even though the fellow who attacked it was the same man who’d built it before the war. They kept Geronimo the Apache there for a while after they caught him, too.”
Leaning out past Orson Sharp, Joe got a glimpse of Fort Pickens. It had five sides, with a bastion at each corner. Even now, it looked like a tough nut to crack. He imagined gunfire sweeping the sand of Santa Rosa Island and shivered a little. No, trying to take a place like that wouldn’t have been any fun at all.
And then he forgot all about the Civil War or the War Between the States or whatever you were supposed to call it. Along with the gulls and pelicans fluttering over Fort Pickens, he spotted an airplane painted bright yellow: a trainer. The buzz that filled the bus said he wasn’t the only one who’d seen it, either. Excitement blazed through him. Before long, he’d go up in one of those slow, ungainly machines—except it seemed as swift and sleek as a Wildcat to him.
Pensacola Naval Air Station itself was a study in contrasts. The old buildings were old: brickwork that looked as if it dated from somewhere close to the Civil War. And the new ones were new: some of the plywood that had gone into hangars and administrative buildings hadn’t been painted yet, and hadn’t started weathering yet, either. And out beyond the buildings sprouted a forest of tents.
The driver might have been reading Joe’s mind. “You gentlemen will be staying in those for a while, I’m afraid,” he said. “We’re putting up real housing as fast as we can, but there’s a lot going on, and we’ve had to get big in just a bit of a hurry, you know.”
That got laughs all through the bus. A couple of years earlier, nobody’d wanted to hear about national defense, much less talk about it. Now nobody wanted to pay attention to anything else. But making up for lost time was no easier, no more possible, than it ever was.
Brakes groaning, the bus stopped. The cadets shouldered their duffels again. As they descended, a lieutenant commander came out of the closest old brick building and greeted them with, “Welcome to Pensacola Naval Air Station, gentlemen. You will have no mothers here. We assume you’re old enough to take care of yourselves till you show us otherwise—at which point we’re liable to throw you out on your ear. Now if you’ll line up for processing . . .”
Processing here was f
or the cadets about what it was for a cow going through the Swift meat-packing plant in Chicago. Joe didn’t end up with USDA CHOICE stamped on his backside, but that was almost all he escaped. The paperwork he filled out made what he’d done at Chapel Hill seem like the kindergarten course. “We ought to drop this stuff on the Japs,” he grumbled to Orson Sharp. “It’d smash ’em flatter than a ten-ton bomb.”
“It can’t be helped.” Sharp took everything, even bureaucratic nonsense, in stride. Joe didn’t know whether to admire him or to want to clobber him.
They shared a two-man tent a good deal more spacious than their four-man dorm room. Joe looked at a mimeographed handout a bored petty officer had given him. He rolled his eyes up to the heavens and let out a theatrical groan.
“For heaven’s sake, what is it?” Sharp asked. Any other cadet in the group would have said something more pungent than for heaven’s sake.
“Listen to this.” Joe read from the handout: “ ‘Flight training and academic preparation will continue in the ratio of three parts to two. Academic subjects to be covered will include the following: navigation, ordnance and gunnery, indoctrination, recognition, communications, and airplane engines.’ We’re stuck with more classes, for cryin’ out loud.” He would have been more pungent himself with anybody but his roommate. He refused to admit that Orson Sharp was a good influence on him.
“Well? We need to know all those things.” Sharp was so reasonable, he could drive anybody nuts.
“I thought we were done with notebooks and desks and tests. Lord knows I hoped we were.” Joe refused to cheer up, even though he already knew a lot about engines.
“I’m not thrilled, either, but we can’t quit now. We just have to go through with it.” Sharp wasn’t wrong. Joe didn’t clobber him. He couldn’t have said why, not to save his life.
COMMANDER MINORU GENDA was working in a Honolulu office that had once housed a U.S. Navy officer. The space was larger and better appointed than anyone below flag rank would have had in Japan, but nothing out of the ordinary here. His work was nothing out of the ordinary, either. That left him slightly discontented. He wouldn’t have minded leaving Oahu and going on to fight in the Philippines or the Dutch East Indies. Things were too quiet here. He wanted new problems to sink his teeth into.
He hadn’t had that thought more than ten minutes before an excited radioman ran into his office and exclaimed, “Sir, one of our picket boats has sighted two American carriers heading toward these islands!”
“Well, well,” Genda said. That was a surprise. He hadn’t expected the Yankees to try to raid Hawaii. “Give me more details.”
“Sir, there are no more details,” the radioman answered. “The picket boat’s signal cut off in the middle of the message.”
“Ah, so desu. I understand.” Genda nodded. No, he wouldn’t be able to get more details from the picket boat’s crew. No one this side of the Yasukuni Shrine for the spirits of the war dead would. Now he had to think about what to do to make sure the Americans paid for their folly. “Akagi and Soryu have been notified?”
“Oh, yes, sir,” the radioman said. “Captain Hasegawa says he wants to let the American ships come closer before he launches his attack against them. The Americans will have to come closer if they’re going to strike at Oahu.”
“Hai. Honto,” Genda said. That was why the picket boats were out there, some more than a thousand kilometers north and east of the island. No carrier-based bombers could fly that far and return to the ships that had launched them. Genda looked at his watch. It was almost three. He wouldn’t have been surprised if the Americans intended to run in towards Oahu all through the night, as the Japanese strike force had done back in December. Thinking out loud, he went on, “We caught them by surprise, though. They won’t play the same trick on us. We’ll be ready and waiting tomorrow morning.”
“Yes, sir,” the radioman said. “Do you need me to pass anything on to either of our carriers?”
“Just one thing—good hunting.”
THE AIRSTRIP BY Haleiwa had to be one of the most beautiful in the world. Out beyond the grass and the palm trees and the beach was the vast turquoise expanse of the Pacific. Neither the beauty nor the perfect climate did anything to salve Lieutenant Saburo Shindo’s temper. When he looked north to the Pacific, he saw only an opportunity he would not have. The Americans stuck their head in the tiger’s mouth when he happened to be ashore. Others aboard the Akagi and the Soryu would hunt them at sea. As for him . . .
Feeling like a caged tiger himself, he paced back and forth at the edge of the runway. The pilots drawn up at attention there followed him with their eyes. He glared at them, then deliberately stopped so they had to look west, into the sinking sun, to see him.
“I hope we will be unlucky,” he said. “I hope the men on our carriers will find the Americans and sink them before they can make their night run towards Oahu. But if the carrier pilots fail, we will see American planes overhead early tomorrow morning. Do you understand?”
“Hai!” the fliers chorused.
“You had better,” Shindo snarled. “Because you will be up and waiting for them when they arrive. You will be waiting for them, and you will make them sorry they dared come anywhere near this island. Do you understand that?”
“Hai!” they chorused again.
Shindo scowled. “All right, then. I will be up there with you, and I will be watching. Anyone who lets an American escape—even one American, do you hear?—will answer to me. I am more dangerous to you than any stinking Yankee pilot ever born. Do you understand that?”
“Hai!” the pilots said once more.
“Good. You’d better.” Shindo turned his back. “Dismissed.” He heard the men muttering, but he didn’t look at them again. Let them mutter. As long as they were worrying about him, they wouldn’t worry about the enemy. That was what he had in mind.
JANE ARMITAGE BROKE a nail weeding her potato patch. She hardly bothered to swear. That wasn’t because she didn’t want to seem unladylike. She couldn’t have cared less. These days, though, a broken nail was nothing to get excited about. She looked down at her hands. Before the war started, the only mark they’d had was a small callus on the side of her right middle finger: a writer’s callus. Now hard yellow calluses banded her palms. Her fingers were battered and scarred. Her nails . . . didn’t bear thinking about. They’d been a disaster even before she broke the latest one. She bit it off short and reasonably straight—why wait to go back to the apartment and dig out a manicure scissors? Then she got back to work.
Pretty soon she’d be able to knock off for the day. The sun was sliding down toward the Waianae Range. A shower would be—not quite heavenly, not without hot water, but welcome even so. Then she could go have supper. She was amazed how important food had become in her life now that she didn’t have enough of it. Just thinking of supper was enough to make her stomach rumble. It would go on rumbling after she ate, too.
Never enough . . . Everyone in Wahiawa got thinner by the day. That had to be true of everyone on Oahu, everyone in the Territory of Hawaii, but Jane hadn’t gone outside of Wahiawa since the fighting started. She felt as if she’d fallen back through time like someone in an H. G. Wells story. What was she but a peasant from the Middle Ages, tied to her little plot of land?
She paused again in her weeding. This time, it wasn’t a broken fingernail but a distant droning in the sky. She frowned. The Japs didn’t fly all that much, certainly not so much as the Army Air Corps had before Hawaii changed hands. Maybe they didn’t have as much fuel as they would have liked. Or maybe they just didn’t think they had anything to worry about. Whatever the reason, they didn’t.
And the swelling drone didn’t sound as if it came from Japanese planes. Jane had heard enough of them to know what they sounded like. She looked up. Coming out of the northeast, over the Koolau Range, was a V of big, two-engine, twin-tailfinned airplanes. She stared at them, hardly daring to hope that. . . .
They f
lew right over Wahiawa, low enough to let her make out the stars on their wings. They were! They were American planes!
Jane wanted to yell and scream and dance, all at the same time. She heard cheers here and there. She heard them, but she didn’t do anything except go on staring up at the sky. Too many people were out and about. Someone might see her and report her to the Japs if she celebrated too hard. You never could tell, and you didn’t want to take a chance.
How had they got here? They looked too big to be carrier planes. Had they flown all the way from the Pacific Coast? If they had, they surely couldn’t carry enough gas to get back. What were they going to do?
What they were going to do now was attack Wheeler Field, not far southwest of Wahiawa. A few antiaircraft guns started shooting at them, but only a few. The Japs must have been as taken aback as the Americans were when the war started. Would some Japanese politician stand up in whatever they used for a parliament and make a speech about April 18, the way FDR had about December 7? By God, I hope so! Jane thought savagely.
Crump! Crump! Crump! Yes, that was the noise of bursting bombs. Jane had become altogether too well acquainted with it to harbor any doubts. Give it to ’em! Give it to the lousy sons of bitches! She didn’t say a thing. She thought her head would burst with the effort of holding those loud, loud thoughts inside.
Not everybody bothered. She heard an unmistakable Rebel yell. And somebody shouted, “Take that, you fucking slant-eyed bastards!” She didn’t recognize the voice. She hoped nobody else did, either.
A column of greasy black smoke rose into the sky, and then two more in quick succession. They weren’t anything like the massive pall that had marked Pearl Harbor’s funeral pyre, but they were there. The bombers had hit something worth hitting.
The dinner bell rang, summoning people all over Wahiawa to the community kitchen. Jane’s amazement grew by leaps and bounds. For a few wonderful minutes, she hadn’t even realized she was hungry.
Days of Infamy Page 36
