“Yeah, but you fought like cats and dogs last time she was at your place,” Charlie said, which was true. “Why bang heads with a broad when it’s so easy to find one that doesn’t want to yell and throw stuff? Waste time.”
“We’re getting along pretty good now.” Oscar wasn’t about to claim any more than that. More would have let Charlie give him the horse laugh if things blew up in his face day after tomorrow.
They put up their sails and let the offshore breeze waft them out into the Pacific. Lousy name for this ocean, Oscar thought, remembering that the word meant peaceful. The brief taste of oceanic war he’d got up by Waimea was plenty to sour him on it forever.
After a while, the two of them separated. Charlie swung east, toward Diamond Head, while Oscar went west, toward Pearl Harbor. He thought the fishing outside the Navy base was better than it was farther east. That stretch of ocean had been restricted before the war; sampans hadn’t gone through it as they had everywhere else near Honolulu.
The Japs weren’t enforcing the restricted zone. Maybe nobody’d told them about it. If they did decide to crack down, Oscar had every intention of staying away from then on out. Falling foul of U.S. authorities would have meant a fine and maybe a little time in the cooler. If a Jap patrol caught somebody where he wasn’t supposed to be . . . They’d shoot first and wouldn’t bother asking questions.
But as long as there was no rule against being here, Oscar intended to make the most of it. He was well out to sea as he scattered grains of rice and dropped his line in the water. He wanted a good catch, enough to keep him and Susie eating for a while, enough to let him trade some so they wouldn’t have to eat nothing but fish till they wondered if they’d grow fins. Whether what he wanted was anything like what he’d get was another question. He’d find out pretty soon.
It was going to be a good day. He had ahi and aku and even a small mahimahi on the line as he drew it back onto the sailboard. He gutted the fish as fast as he could. Some of the offal would make more bait. The rest he kicked back into the Pacific. He’d put some distance between this spot and his next one. He hadn’t had any trouble from big sharks yet, and he didn’t want to start now.
Something splashed behind him. He turned, careful not to upset the sailboard. His jaw dropped. His eyes bugged out of his head. That was no shark, no pod of dolphins, no breaching whale. That was a goddamn submarine, its deck almost awash, its conning tower painted an oceanic blue.
I’ve had it, was the first thought that went through his head. He almost jumped into the water and tried to swim for it. Only the sure knowledge that that was hopeless kept him where he was. If they were Japs, maybe they were just intrigued with his contraption. Maybe they wouldn’t do him in for the fun of it.
A grubby sailor stuck his head and shoulders out of the top of the conning tower. In purest Brooklynese, he asked, “Hey, Mac, you speak English?”
Better than you do, buddy. Somehow, Oscar didn’t burst into hysterical laughter. That proved he owned more strength of character than he’d suspected. He made himself nod. “Yes,” he said, adding, “I grew up in California.”
“Oh, yeah? Says you.” The sailor sounded deeply skeptical. Oscar knew why: he was almost naked and very, very brown. Plenty of tourists figured him for at least hapa-Hawaiian, too; they were too dumb to know a blond Hawaiian was a lot less likely than a swarthy Swede. This guy was evidently somewhere on the same level of dumbness. “Don’t go away,” he said, and disappeared.
A minute later, another man took his place. This fellow looked just as unkempt, but wore an officer’s cap with a large grease spot on it. “I’m Woodrow Kelley,” he said. “They call me Woody. This is the Amberjack, and they were rash enough to put me in charge of her. Who are you, pal? Vinnie says you say you’re from California.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it, either.
“My name is Oscar van der Kirk, and yeah, I’m from California. I graduated from Stanford, matter of fact.”
“What are you doing here, then?” Kelley asked.
“I like it here,” Oscar answered simply. “I liked it a hell of a lot better before the Japs came, but I still like it.” He pointed at the sub—the Amberjack, Kelley had called it. “What are you doing here?”
“Who, me? I’m not here at all. You’re talking to a waddayacallit—a figment of your imagination.” The submarine’s skipper had a wryly engaging grin. “If I were here, I’d just be looking around, seeing what I can find out. What the hell’s that thing you’re riding on, for instance?”
“I call it a sailboard,” Oscar said. “It lets me fish farther from shore than a regular surfboard would.”
“Your idea?” Woodrow Kelley asked. Oscar nodded. Kelley eyed the hybrid craft. “Pretty neat, I’d say. How far could you go on it?”
“Beats me,” Oscar answered. “I never tried anything really fancy. All I wanted to do was get out where the fishing was better than it is by the beach.”
“Could you sail to another island?” Kelley persisted.
“I suppose so, if the wind didn’t let me down,” Oscar said. Molokai was only about forty miles away, Lanai not much farther, and Maui a short hop from either one. Even so, he went on, “I’d sure rather do it in a real boat, though. Not much margin for error in this thing. How come?”
“Just thinking out loud,” the sub’s skipper said. Oscar knew bullshit when he heard it, but he was in no position to call the other man. Kelley went on, “How are things in Honolulu?”
“You don’t have spies to tell you stuff like that?” Oscar asked.
“How do things look to you?” Kelley said, another answer that wasn’t an answer. That was probably fair enough. A Navy officer wouldn’t talk about spies with a guy on a sailboard.
Oscar thought. “People are hungry, but they aren’t quite starving. You try and keep your head down so the Japs don’t notice you.”
“Okay.” Kelly nodded. “How about the local Japs?—the ones who were living here before the invasion, I mean.”
“Some of ’em—usually older ones, I’d say—like it with Japan in charge. The ones my age and younger are mostly as American as anybody else. But an awful lot of them just want to go on about their business, same as most folks. As long as they get left alone, they’re happy.”
“Uh-huh.” Woody Kelley nodded again, this time as if telling himself not to forget that. “How much of the rest of the island have you seen?”
“Not much, not since the war started. There’s no gas for ordinary people’s cars.” Oscar pointed up toward the conning tower. “Hey! Can you do something for me?”
“I dunno. Try me.”
“Let my folks know I’m okay, please. Bill and Enid van der Kirk, in Visalia, California. And my brother Roger.” Oscar paused. In for a penny, in for a pound, he decided. “And a gal named Susie Higgins has family in Pittsburgh. They ought to know she’s all right.”
“Visalia. Pittsburgh.” Kelley looked down. Oscar hoped that meant he was taking notes. When he looked up again, he said, “They’ll get the word. It may take a while. We’ll have to clean it up so they can’t tell how it came from Hawaii to the mainland.”
“Gotcha,” Oscar said. “Thanks, pal.”
“Any time,” Kelley said. “You want some real chow—canned stuff—to go along with your fish there?”
Spit flooded into Oscar’s mouth. Canned stuff was precious, not least because so much of it had already been eaten. But, regretfully, he shook his head. “I better not. Anybody sees me coming off the beach with it, he’s gonna know damn well I didn’t catch it on a hook.”
Woody Kelley chuckled. “Okay, van der Kirk. Makes sense. You’re nobody’s dummy, are you?”
Except for Charlie Kaapu, he was the first person who’d said anything like that in years. Most folks figured Oscar was a jerk for preferring surf-riding to making something of himself. In his occasional gloomy moments, he’d had the same thought himself. So when he said, “Thanks,” he really sounded as if he meant it.
“Sure thing,” Kelley said. “Listen. One more time . . . You’ve never seen me. You’ve never heard of the Amberjack, right?”
“Who? What?” Oscar said, and the officer—who couldn’t have been any older than he was—laughed again. He touched his index finger to the brim of his grimy cap in something halfway between a wave and a salute. Then he vanished into the conning tower. A hatch clanged shut behind him.
The submarine slipped below the surface. Oscar guffawed. He’d watched subs go underwater in the movies. One thing the movies didn’t tell you, though, was that the bubbling submergence sounded like the world’s biggest fart in a bathtub.
He gave his attention back to the fishing line. Whether American subs were prowling around Oahu or not, he still had to eat. Keeping a full belly was everybody’s number-one worry these days. When he got back to shore, he wondered if he’d hear that the Amberjack had surfaced and plastered a Japanese barracks or gun position. Nobody said a word about anything like that, though. He supposed the sub was just on a snooping run. Too bad, he thought.
“How did it go?” Susie asked when he got back to the apartment.
“Pretty well,” he answered, and displayed a mahimahi he hadn’t traded. It would be tasty tonight. He wanted to tell her he’d passed the word that she was safe. He wanted to, but he didn’t. If he couldn’t keep from running his own mouth, how could he expect her to manage it? Even if he couldn’t talk, he’d done a good deed. Some people said the best good deeds were the ones you didn’t talk about. Oscar wasn’t convinced. As far as he could see, this one was just the most frustrating.
JIRO TAKAHASHI LET his sons sail the Oshima Maru back toward Kewalo Basin. By now, Hiroshi and Kenzo handled the sampan’s rig nearly as well as he did. When they were working, they didn’t have time to grumble that he’d be taking fish to the Japanese consulate once they came ashore.
Actually, they’d almost given up nagging him about going to the consulate. He was, after all, a Japanese citizen. And he was at least as stubborn as his two blockheaded sons. They weren’t about to make him change his mind. The more they tried, the harder he dug in his heels.
By now, even they seemed to have figured that out. As Kenzo swung the sail about to change tacks on the way back to Honolulu, Hiroshi changed tacks on the argument. “Father-san, you really shouldn’t let the occupiers use you for propaganda,” he said.
“Propaganda?” To Jiro, it was nothing but a fancy word. “A reporter asked me questions. I answered them. So what?”
“If the United States comes back to Hawaii, people will remember things like that. They won’t like them,” Hiroshi said.
“If that’s all you’re worrying about . . .” Jiro snorted. “The United States isn’t coming back. These islands are Japanese now. They’re going to stay that way.”
“Are you sure?” Hiroshi asked. “What about the American bombers? What about that submarine?”
“What about them?” Jiro said. “We bombed San Francisco. Our submarines have shelled the mainland. It evens out. We won’t put soldiers over there, and I don’t think they can put soldiers over here.”
“We?” But Hiroshi let it go. They’d quarreled over that ever since the day the war started. Jiro’s we focused on his homeland and the Emperor, Hiroshi and Kenzo’s on the country where they were born.
Kewalo Basin was getting close. Kenzo made a short tack, then a longer one, and slid into the basin as smoothly as Jiro could have done it. The sampan glided up to a quay. Hiroshi hopped up onto the planking and made the boat fast.
The Takahashis weighed the bulk of the catch on the scales now supervised by Japanese soldiers. The soldiers paid them by weight, as usual. With all food so scarce on Oahu, the finest ahi was worth no more—officially—than trash fish Jiro would have thrown back into the sea before the war.
Officially. But Jiro and Hiroshi and Kenzo didn’t carry trash fish away from Kewalo Basin. Oh, no. What they carried away for “personal use” was the best of what they’d taken that day: ahi and mahimahi. They’d eat some, sell or trade some, and Jiro would take some to the Japanese consulate, as he’d got into the habit of doing.
“Waste of fish,” Kenzo said as Jiro headed up Nuuanu Avenue. “Waste of money, too.”
Jiro stopped and scowled at his younger son. “You mind your business,” he said angrily. “You mind it, you hear me? You go sniffing round after that haole girl, and then you go telling me what to do? Ichi-ban baka!” He spat on the sidewalk in scorn.
He wondered whether Kenzo would come back at him as hotly as he sometimes did. If that happened, Hiroshi would pitch in on his brother’s side, and Jiro would have to start screaming at both of them. Back in Japan, he told himself, such a thing would never happen. Back in Japan, youngsters respected their elders. He conveniently forgot that one of the reasons he’d been eager to come to Hawaii was so he wouldn’t have to bang heads with his father any more.
But this argument collapsed instead of going on to the screaming stage. Kenzo wasn’t fair-skinned to begin with. All his time on the Oshima Maru had browned him further. Even so, he turned red. He muttered something unintelligible under his breath and turned away from Jiro.
Ha! Jiro thought. My shot went home like a torpedo hitting an American battleship. He went his way, while his sons went theirs. He wanted to do some more yelling at Kenzo for sniffing after a haole girl now, of all the idiotic times. Just as he wouldn’t listen to Kenzo, though, his son was unlikely to heed him.
Reiko and I should have arranged marriages for both of them. It would have happened like that in Japan. Here? Well, it might have. But the American nonsense about falling in love and living happily ever after had a grip on a lot of young Japanese in Hawaii. Who could guess whether Hiroshi and Kenzo would have gone along? No one would ever know now. That seemed plain enough.
Up the street Jiro went. The Rising Sun fluttered above and in front of the consulate. As usual, the soldiers standing guard outside both teased Jiro about the fish he’d brought and admired them. Before they went into the Army, they’d mostly been farmers or fishermen themselves—men of his own class. He laughed at their gibes, and sassed them back the same way. They understood one another.
After they got done with those friendly rituals, the soldiers passed him on to the men inside. That was a different business. Those people wore Western-style suits and had fancy educations—you could tell by the way they talked. Jiro spoke to them with careful politeness. He didn’t want to seem like some backwoods buffoon.
Consul Kita was in a meeting. A secretary took Jiro to meet Chancellor Morimura. With his long face, his large eyes, and especially with his missing finger joint, Morimura always put Jiro in mind of a samurai of old. His sharp suit somehow strengthened the impression instead of detracting from it.
As always, the young chancellor admired Jiro’s catch. His good manners seemed natural, effortlesss, not the product of care and a constant struggle against saying the wrong thing. He asked where Jiro had taken the Oshima Maru today and how the fishing had gone. And then he asked, “And did you notice anything out of the ordinary while you were at sea, Takahashi-san?”
“Out of the ordinary?” Jiro frowned. “I don’t think so, sir. Can you tell me what you’ve got in mind?”
“Well . . .” Morimura steepled his fingers. With that missing joint, one pair didn’t meet, so the steeple would have a leak when it rained. “There are reports that another American submarine has been sniffing around—rumors, really, more than reports. Did you see one today?”
“No, sir. I didn’t,” Jiro answered without hesitation. “I would have said so right away if I had.”
“All right. I thought you would.” Morimura pulled a map from one of the desk drawers. “And you were . . . here, more or less?” He used a pencil for a pointer to show just where the sampan had gone. Jiro was so impressed, he had to remind himself to nod. The consular official went on, “What time would that have been? Do you remember?”
; “We got there late in the morning, and we fished till early afternoon. Then we sailed back to Kewalo Basin,” Jiro said. “We made a short trip to keep the fish fresh—not so easy now that ice is hard to get—and we didn’t want to spend a night on the sea. Why, sir, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“Negative information isn’t as good as positive, but it’s better than nothing,” Morimura replied. “Now at least I know one place where this submarine, if there was a submarine, wasn’t.”
“It didn’t shoot at the island here—I would have heard about that,” Jiro said. “From what you tell me, it didn’t torpedo any ships. Why would a submarine come at all, if it didn’t do any of those things?”
“To spy,” the young man from Japan told him. “Submarines and flying boats—those are what the Americans can use. And they do. They keep sneaking around. I don’t know if there really was a submarine this time, but there could have been.”
“I see.” Jiro wasn’t altogether comfortable with what he saw. Why would the United States spy on Hawaii if it wasn’t thinking about taking back the islands? And if it was, that meant his sons were right. Few fathers faced a more depressing prospect than that.
Some of what he thought must have shown on his face. Tadashi Morimura smiled at him. “Don’t worry, Takahashi-san. If the Americans try to stick their long snouts back here again, we’ll bloody those snouts for them and send them home.”
“Good!” The word was an exhalation of relief. Jiro hadn’t done badly under the Americans—he’d done better here than he would have in Japan. But not only did he remain loyal to the country that had given him birth, an American triumph and a Japanese defeat would be his sons’ triumph and his defeat. He didn’t care to think about that.
Morimura smiled again. “You are a true Japanese,” he said. “One of those times when you visit us, you must record your feelings about your mother country.”
Days of Infamy Page 46
