Days of Infamy doi-1 Page 11

  His sons didn’t seem to see it like that. They both turned away from him. Hiroshi said, “I’m not going to translate that for the soldiers, Father. And you’re lucky I’m not, too, or we’d all end up in trouble.”

  Kenzo added, “This is our country. We were born here. We like it here. We don’t want anything to do with Japan now that she’s at war with us.”

  Another fisherman, a weathered fellow of Jiro’s generation named Tetsuo Yuge, shouted angrily at the two younger Takahashis: “How dare you talk to your father like that? If my boys were that rude, I’d be ashamed of myself-and of them.”

  Jiro wondered what the other fisherman’s sons would say if they were here. One of them worked at a gas station; the other was a bank clerk. They thought of themselves as Americans, too; Tetsuo had complained about it. Jiro said, “War makes everybody crazy for a while. Sooner or later, things will straighten out.”

  Several of the tall American soldiers put their heads together. When they separated, the man with stripes on his sleeves shouted in English. Some of the younger men, the ones who understood what he was telling them, started to walk off. Kenzo translated: “He says we have to leave. He says this place is off-limits for civilians. That’s Army talk-it means we’re not allowed here.”

  “Can he do that?” Jiro asked doubtfully. He didn’t like the idea of leaving the Oshima Maru tied up where soldiers who hated Japanese could do whatever they wanted to her.

  But both his sons nodded. Hiroshi said, “It’s martial law. If the soldiers say we have to do it, we have to do it. The only ones who can change things now are other soldiers.”

  “This would never have happened if Japan hadn’t jumped on us,” Kenzo said.

  “What are we going to do without a day’s catch? What are we going to do without a day’s pay?” Jiro asked. “And how long will the soldiers”-he almost said the American soldiers, but judged that would cause more trouble than it was worth-“keep us from going to sea? What will we do for money if it’s a long time?”

  Those were good questions, important questions. Jiro knew that. Neither of his sons had any answers. He didn’t see what else they could do but go back home. Reiko would have a lot of questions for them then. Jiro didn’t have any answers, either.

  JANE ARMITAGE WAS glad they’d called off school for the day in Wahiawa. Half the kids in her third-grade class were Japs. They were bright and eager. They were respectful, and they mostly worked harder than haoles. But she didn’t think she could stand the sight of so many slanty-eyed faces right now.

  She’d had a devil of a time getting used to what people in Hawaii looked like when she came over with Fletch. Columbus, Ohio, wasn’t like this at all. In Columbus, the Negroes mostly stayed in Bronzeville on the east side of town. Elsewhere, even Italians were out of the ordinary. Her own blond, blue-eyed good looks were as normal as sunshine. Not here. Hawaii was different. Coarse black hair and swarthy skin were the expected; she was the one who stood out.

  When she caught herself wondering how Fletch was doing, she grimaced. Without the war, she wouldn’t have given a damn. Without the war, she would have just waved bye-bye if he jumped off a cliff. But she didn’t want the Japs blowing him up. Even for her, that went too far.

  She wondered if he was sober. If he wasn’t, he’d be sorry. If he was… he’d be in the war, and he might be sorry anyway. “Shit,” Jane said crisply. Inside the apartment she no longer shared with him, who’d hear her swear?

  Bright sunlight streamed in through the window. It would be another warm day-not hot, for it probably wouldn’t get to eighty, but warm. Tonight, it would drop into the sixties, which was as cold as it ever got. Columbus might have snow on the ground. Jane hadn’t needed any time at all to get used to the weather.

  The window was open. Why not, when the air was the sweetest in the world? But along with the smells of flowers that bloomed all year around, the stink of smoke came in today. The Japs had jumped on Wheeler Field and then on Schofield Barracks with both feet. By what the breeze said, some of those fires were still burning.

  And what the Japs had done to Pearl Harbor! The smoke in the south blotted out a big part of the sky. It reached up toward the sun, and looked so very thick and menacing, it might bring down night at noon if it climbed high enough to blot out the source of light and warmth.

  After lighting a cigarette, Jane turned on the radio, a fancy set Fletch had bought with money that could have been better spent elsewhere. So Jane had thought at the time, anyhow. Now she did some more swearing when the ordinary bands brought in nothing but silence and static. The Hawaiian stations were still off the air, then. She switched to the short-wave tuner. She’d never dreamt how desperately she could crave news from the outside world.

  As she turned the dial, she got more static in snarling bursts, and then a man speaking a language she didn’t understand-Italian, she thought, or possibly Spanish. Whoever he was, he sounded full of himself, and also full of hot air. Jane spun the dial some more.

  She got a squawky, singsong Oriental language next, and then a program of dance music that could have come from almost anywhere on the planet. Music wasn’t what she was after now, though. The next station she found featured somebody-Hitler? — bellowing in German. She understood some German; she’d studied it at Ohio State. But this fellow used a dialect she had trouble following, and he was going a mile a minute. All she could do was pick up a word here and there. She gave the dial another twist.

  English at last! A strong, New York-accented voice said, “-Twelve-thirty this afternoon, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war against the Empire of Japan. He called December seventh, the date of the Japs’ unprovoked attack against Pearl Harbor in the Territory of Hawaii, ‘a date which will live in infamy.’ ”

  Jane looked at a clock on the mantel. It was half past eight here. Washington was five and a half hours ahead of Hawaii time, so the President had spoken about an hour and a half before.

  “Swift Congressional approval of the request is expected,” the announcer went on. “There are rumors that the Japs are trying to land soldiers in the Hawaiian Islands, but these are so far unconfirmed. If they prove correct, it is expected that the soldiers of the Hawaiian Department will drive the invaders into the sea.”

  “They’d better!” Jane exclaimed. She thought about her not former enough husband and his friends, all of whom drank too much. She thought about the stories they told of their ignorant, inept enlisted men. She thought about how they always complained the government didn’t spend enough money on paper clips, let alone on important things. And she thought about how they were going to be the ones who threw the Japs back into the sea.

  She started worrying in earnest then.

  “Outrage continues pouring in around the country at the dastardly Japanese deed,” the newscaster said. Jane had never heard anyone actually use the word dastardly before. It sounded like bastardly, which sure as hell fit the situation.

  The newsman went on yammering about Japanese attacks in the Philippines and other places she couldn’t have found without a big Rand McNally to give her a hand. Then he talked about what the Germans were doing in Russia. It sounded as if the Russians were trying to counterattack, but it had sounded like that before, and Hitler’s troops were in the suburbs of Moscow.

  Jane turned off the radio and did the breakfast dishes. There weren’t many; she’d had cornflakes and a glass of apple juice. Even so, she paused with the Bon Ami-soaked dishrag. The cereal and the juice both came from the mainland. If the Japs really were trying to invade Oahu, how would ships from the States get here? How much food did Hawaii have on its own? How much could it grow if it had to?

  She laughed. “How much pineapple and sugarcane can we eat?” That wasn’t a joke. Hawaii grew more pineapple than any other place in the world, and lots and lots of sugarcane. But because the Territory grew so much cane and pineapple, it didn’t grow a whole lot of anything else.

  Off to the west, ant
iaircraft guns started booming. Jane’s mouth twisted into a sour grimace. That she could tell they were antiaircraft guns proved she’d spent too much time with Fletch Armitage. Field guns had a different report-deeper and more prolonged-and didn’t fire so quickly.

  What could Fletch tell about anything that mattered to her? Not a thing, not as far as she could tell. All that mattered to him were guns and booze and the bedroom-and he hadn’t been nearly so good there as he thought he had.

  Muttering to herself, she finished the dishes. The thought that had come to her while she was washing the cereal bowl wouldn’t go away. Maybe a trip to the grocery would be smart, to stock up on things just in case. She wished Wahiawa had a Piggly Wiggly, the way Honolulu did. You could do all your shopping in one trip at the supermarket. With a corner grocery, you were never sure ahead of time what they’d have and what they wouldn’t.

  And Japs ran most of them. She’d learned not to give that a second thought. Now she was going to have to unlearn it again. Things had changed. Exactly how they’d changed… well, she’d just have to wait and see.

  A quarter to nine was too early to go to the store. There was another reason to wish for a Piggly Wiggly. Stores like that opened earlier and stayed open later than little family businesses.

  She spent an hour or so cleaning the apartment. That was all it needed. Keeping it clean was a lot easier with Fletch gone. The Army was supposed to have made him neat, but it had fallen down on the job. Or maybe it was just that, while he lived with her, he expected her to do all the work, and he didn’t care how much it was. Whatever it was, she was glad to be out from under it.

  When she did come out trundling a little metal folding grocery cart behind her, she found the streets of Wahiawa full of soldiers. Since the town was right next door to two divisions of Army men, that wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world. But they usually came here to get drunk or get laid or pawn something for the cash they needed to get drunk or get laid.

  These weren’t men on leave out for a good time. They wore the steel derbies that made them look like British soldiers from the Great War and carried rifles with fixed bayonets. And they had the air of men who knew damn well they were doing something important and something that might be dangerous.

  Jane was glad she’d chosen to walk. The soldiers were setting up roadblocks and barricades in the streets, which snarled traffic to a fare-thee-well. Horns blared. “What the hell are you doing?” a fat, middle-aged man shouted from behind the wheel of his Ford.

  A sergeant who usually dealt with a swarm of privates had no trouble putting one mouthy civilian in his place. “What are we doing?” he echoed. “We’re making sure you don’t get your stupid ass shot off, that’s what. And this is the thanks we get? The horse you rode in on, too, buddy.” He spat in magnificent contempt.

  The fat man deflated like a leaky balloon. Jane had all she could do not to giggle. Years as an Army wife had acquainted her with the talents of sergeants. This one turned back to his men. They hadn’t missed a beat. As soon as they had their barricade finished, they hauled a cannon up behind it. It wasn’t one of the bigger guns Fletch dealt with, but an antitank weapon. Seeing its snout pointing north gave Jane pause.

  When she got to the grocery store, she discovered she wasn’t the only one who’d had the same idea. The line stretched out the door. Some of the women in it were haoles, others Japanese or Chinese or Filipino, though there were just a couple of the latter. Most of the Filipinos on Oahu were men brought in to work in the fields. They sometimes brawled because they didn’t have enough women to go around-or got into knife fights over the ones there were, or over fighting cocks, or over nothing in particular. Jane didn’t have much use for Filipinos.

  Two Japanese women right in front of her chattered in their own language. She’d heard Japanese almost every day since coming to Hawaii. She took it as much for granted as the perfect weather or the funny birds or the palm trees. She had taken it for granted, anyhow. Now she eyed the women suspiciously. What were they saying? What were they thinking? If the Japs got this far-almost inconceivable, but for the soldiers in the streets-what would they do?

  The white housewife who came out of the store was loaded down with so many groceries, she could hardly walk. She gave the Japanese women a hard stare. “Goddamn lousy Japs,” she said, and trudged on.

  They plainly understood English. They stared after her, their flat, narrow-eyed faces unreadable, at least to Jane. For close to a minute, neither of them said anything in any language. Then they started speaking again-in Japanese. Jane didn’t know whether to want to applaud them or kick them in the teeth.

  By the time she got into the grocery store, it looked as if a swarm of locusts had been there ahead of her. And so they have, she thought, and I’m another one. She bought canned vegetables and Spam and yams and potatoes and crackers-everything she could think of that would keep for a while. Well, almost everything: try as she would, she couldn’t make herself get a sack of rice. Other haoles weren’t so fussy. Jane shrugged. She liked potatoes better anyhow. She bought toilet paper and Kleenex and soap, too.

  She brought her cart up to Mr. Hasegawa. He totaled everything up, not on a cash register but with a pencil on the back of an old envelope. “Twenty dallah, fo’ty-t’ree cent,” he said at the end of his calculations.

  On impulse, she asked him, “What do you think of all this?”

  His face closed down, the same way those of the Japanese women outside the store had. “Very bad,” he said at last. “We have war, where get more groceries?”

  That undoubtedly wasn’t a tenth of what was on his mind, but it wasn’t far removed from what Jane and the other panic shoppers were thinking, either. She set a twenty and a one on the counter. The storekeeper gave her a half-dollar, a nickel, and two pennies. She bumped her little cart out of the grocery store and headed home.

  One of the soldiers manning the antitank gun sent a wolf whistle after her. She ignored him, which only made him laugh. Getting mad at them-letting them see you were mad at them-just encouraged them. Fletch had been right about that.

  What else had Fletch been right about? Jane angrily shook her head. No matter how much her in-the-process-of-becoming-ex-husband had known about soldiers and artillery pieces, he hadn’t known a goddamn thing about being a husband. If he’d been married to anything, it was the Army, not her.

  She looked back at the soldiers. She looked south at the appalling black smoke rising from Pearl Harbor-and west at the smaller smoke clouds from Wheeler Field and Schofield Barracks. All she’d done to Fletch was throw him out of the apartment when she couldn’t stand living with him another minute. Being married to the Army was liable to get him killed.

  FLETCHER ARMITAGE STUCK a fresh five-round clip in his Springfield and worked the bolt to chamber the first cartridge. He wanted something that would hit from farther away than he could throw a rock. He still had the officer’s.45 on his hip, but he hadn’t used it for a day or two. The soldier who’d been issued the rifle wouldn’t miss it; a Japanese shell had cut him in half.

  The roadblock south of Haleiwa to which he’d added his gun hadn’t held the Japanese for long. They hadn’t come straight at it. He could have slaughtered a million of them if they had. Instead, they’d gone around, through the cane and pineapple fields. The bastards were like water or mercury; they flowed through the tiniest gaps in the American line-and came out shooting on the other side.

  He still had the 105mm gun. He still had the De Soto that hauled it, too. The windshield had been shot out of it. A bullet hole went through both rear doors. The round hadn’t gone through any of the men in the back seat. Fletch didn’t know why it hadn’t. Maybe God was on his side after all. But if He was, why had He turned so many Japs loose on Oahu?

  A bullet from off to the left cracked past his head and ricocheted off the barrel of the field gun. He ducked, automatically and much too late. He had no idea whether the bullet was American or Japanese. If many
more came from that direction, though, he’d have to pull up stakes and fall back again… if he could. If he couldn’t, he’d fall back without it, and take along the breech block so the Japs couldn’t turn the piece around and start shooting it at his side.

  More shooting did come from off to the left, but most of it came from two American machine guns. They fired noticeably faster than their Japanese counterparts. Maybe the Japs, instead of flowing through a hole, had walked into a buzz saw this time. Fletch’s lips skinned back from his teeth in a savage grin. Jesus, he hoped so!

  And so it seemed, for the shooting moved farther north. “My God,” one of the artillerymen said wearily. “I didn’t think them slanty-eyed fuckers knew how to back up.”

  “I don’t think they’re doing it on purpose. I think we’re doing it to them. There’s a difference,” Fletch said. The artilleryman paused in the act of lighting up a cigarette long enough to nod.

  A wild-eyed foot soldier burst out of the cane to the left of the Kamehameha Highway. Half a dozen men around the gun swung their rifles toward him. He didn’t seem to notice how close a brush with death he’d just had. All he did seem to notice was the single silver bar on each of Fletcher Armitage’s shoulders. “Thank God!” he said. “An officer!”

  “What the hell?” Fletch said. Most of the time, enlisted men wanted nothing to do with officers. They hoped their superiors would leave them alone. When a PFC actually came looking for a first lieutenant, something was rotten in the state of Denmark.

  “Sir, come with me, please.” The PFC sounded close to tears. “There’s something you need to see.”

  “What is it?” Fletch asked.

  The soldier shook his head. “You got to see it, sir. Christ almighty!” He gulped as if fighting his stomach.

  Fletch had already seen much more than he ever wanted to. War was nothing like the sanitized version the Army had got ready for in the drills on the mainland and around Schofield Barracks. People didn’t just get killed. They got blown to pieces. They got chopped to shreds. They got holes punched through them-not neat, tidy holes but ones that poured-often gushed-blood. Fletch had smelled shit and burnt meat, sometimes from the same wounded man. He’d heard shrieks that would haunt him as long as he lived-which didn’t look like being long.