End of the Beginning Read online

  The convoy of buses had Pacific Coast Highway almost to itself. Gasoline rationing had made civilian traffic disappear. Les saw only a handful of cars coming north. Most of the vehicles in the other lane were trucks painted olive drab.

  The Pacific was more interesting and prettier. Gulls and terns glided overhead. Waves rolled up onto the beach. In Hawaii, surf-riders would have skimmed ashore atop them. Nobody’d thought of doing that here. Every so often, a lone man or a knot of two or three friends would stand by the edge of the sea with fishing poles. Dillon saw a lot of fishermen, but he never saw anybody catch anything.

  Then the buses got down into San Diego. They rolled right past the park where the Padres played. The team must have been on the road, because the ballpark was quiet and empty. Talk inside Les’ bus got louder and more excited when it pulled into the harbor. He didn’t see any battlewagons or carriers tied up there; they’d probably already put to sea. The harbor was full of ungainly Liberty ships and the destroyers that would escort them and—everybody hoped—keep subs away.

  With a squeal of brakes that needed work, the bus shuddered to a stop. “Everybody out!” Les said. “You’ve got a chance to stretch your legs, so you better take it. You think we were tight in here, wait till we get on the damn troopship. Only difference between us and sardines there is, they won’t pack us in olive oil.”

  Some of the Marines laughed. Most of them didn’t. They’d been through last year’s abortive campaign, and they knew this wasn’t going to be a trip to Hawaii on a luxury liner.

  They did stretch and twist when they got down on the concrete. Les lowered his pack to the ground. Something along his spine crunched when he stretched. He was older than the men he led. He was in good hard shape for a man his age, but every now and then his body insisted on reminding him that good hard shape for a man in his forties wasn’t the same as it had been when he was in his twenties. He hoped he would be able to keep up when they landed on Oahu.

  If they landed on Oahu. Things had gone wrong once. He hoped they wouldn’t go wrong again, but life didn’t come with a money-back guarantee. Too damn bad, he thought.

  “My company, form on me!” Captain Bradford called from a nearby bus. “We’ll be boarding that ship.” Since Dillon’s bus stood between him and his company commander, he couldn’t see which ship Bradford had in mind. It didn’t matter much; Liberty ships were as like as peas in a pod, only a lot uglier.

  Bradford pointed again when Les could see him. Valdosta Liberty was stenciled in big white letters on the black paint at the freighter’s stern. But for the name, she could have been the Alamogordo Liberty or the Missoula Liberty or any of the others crowding Coronado Bay.

  Up the gangplank he went. Merchant seamen in dungarees crewed the ship. He didn’t much like that, but he couldn’t do anything about it. The Navy had trouble finding sailors for all its new warships, let alone troopships. But if trouble came, would these civilians know what to do with the antiaircraft gun at the Valdosta Liberty’s bow?

  Hell with it, he thought. If they don’t, some of us’ll take over. Any Japs want this ship, they’ll have to pay the bill for her.

  Captain Bradford, being an officer, would share a cabin with his social equals. Dillon, being a noncom, went down into the bowels of the Liberty ship with the rest of the Marines. The air down belowdecks felt still and dead. It would only get worse. They’d be sailing south, so it would get hotter. The men wouldn’t have many chances to bathe. Odds were the galley would serve beans, too. All things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia, Dillon thought.

  Nobody gave a damn about his opinion. He got his platoon settled in the cramped space available as best he could. The first card games started even before all the men had slung their packs up onto their bunks. The Valdosta Liberty’s engines came to life. He felt them through the soles of his feet as well as hearing them. The whole fabric of the ship vibrated. Then she began to move.

  “Here we go again,” somebody said. Les nodded. That summed it all up as well as anything.

  KENZO TAKAHASHI MOVED LIKE AN OLD MAN. By late afternoon, he felt all the bruises and lumps the Japanese soldiers had given him earlier in the day. He kept walking all the same. He had to find out if Elsie was okay.

  He flinched when he walked past a squad of Japanese soldiers. But he bowed, too, so they didn’t bother him. He might have been bruised, but he wasn’t wearing a scarlet letter (he laughed at himself for remembering American Lit at a time like this). Besides, they were on duty, not on leave and drunk. And he wasn’t walking with a girl, which no doubt counted most of all.

  He flinched again when he went up the Sundbergs’ walk and knocked on the front door. If Elsie wasn’t there . . . If she wasn’t there, Mrs. Sundberg would start screaming at him, and how could he blame her?

  The door opened. Elsie’s mom stared out at him. Then she said, “Ken! Thank God!” and hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. She pulled him into the house and called, “Elsie! Ken’s here!”

  From the back of the house, Elsie squealed. She came running up to Ken, threw herself into his arms—she almost knocked him over—and gave him a kiss. It wasn’t the sort of peck he’d got from her mother, either. It was the real McCoy. And Mrs. Sundberg, who stood there watching, didn’t pitch a fit. She beamed at him and Elsie.

  After the kiss ended, Elsie took a real look at him. “Oh, Ken!” she exclaimed. “You got hurt!”

  “It’s not too bad,” he said, and that kiss made him less of a liar than he would have been a couple of minutes earlier. “I’m just glad you got away from those bastards, that’s all.” He bobbed his head toward her mother. “Excuse me.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” Mrs. Sundberg said warmly. “Elsie told me what you did. Thank you. Thank you from the bottom of my heart.” She eyed him, too. “Can I get you some ice?”

  “Probably too late for that,” Kenzo answered. “I’ll be okay in a few days. They didn’t kick me in the teeth, and my ribs are just sore. Nothing’s busted.”

  “I’m so sorry!” Elsie squeezed his hands in hers.

  He shrugged. “Not your fault. Those miserable goons . . .” He couldn’t call them what he wanted to, not in front of Elsie and her mother.

  “They certainly are.” Mrs. Sundberg’s voice wasn’t warm any more, not when she talked about the Japanese soldiers. She turned to Elsie. “I’m going to let the neighbors know Ken’s all right, too. I’ll be back in a while. I know the two of you have a lot to, uh, talk about.”

  He felt he’d earned his American name. Out the door Mrs. Sundberg went. Kenzo nodded to Elsie. “Hiya,” he managed.

  She wasn’t laughing. She looked on the edge of tears. “They really could have killed you,” she said.

  “Yeah, well . . .” He shrugged again. It hurt. He went on, “They would have done some pretty horrible things to you, too.”

  Her face twisted. “You hear stories about things like that, but you don’t think they can happen to you. Then they do—or they almost do.” She looked down at the rug. “You hear stories about heroes, too, but you never think you know one.”

  “Anybody would have done the same thing,” Kenzo said.

  “I don’t think so.” Elsie sounded almost angry. “I don’t think you should be so modest, either. They could have killed you.”

  It wasn’t that she was wrong. On the contrary. Uncomfortably, he said, “I don’t like thinking about that any better than you like thinking about, uh, the other stuff.”

  “Okay,” Elsie said; that must have made sense to her. “What do you want to think about instead? How about this?” She kissed him again.

  The kiss took on a life of its own. His arms tightened around her. She molded herself against him. He squeezed her backside, pressing her closer yet. She didn’t try to pull away. She just made a wordless sound of pleasure.

  They finally broke apart, but not very far. “Elsie—” he began, and stopped.

  “I know, sweetheart. It’s okay.
It’s . . . better than okay.” She kissed him once more, gently this time. “You risked your life for me. That counts for a lot. Anything I can do to pay you back is pretty small stuff, anything at all.”

  “You don’t have to do anything because of that,” he said. “I didn’t do it to get paid back.”

  “I know. It’s better that way,” Elsie said. “Suppose I do it because I want to, then?”

  This time, he kissed her. When his hand found her breast, she didn’t try to slap it away. She just made that happy noise again. He made one quite a bit like it, but deeper. After a while, his heart pounding, he asked, “What about your mom?”

  Elsie laughed. “She won’t be back for a while. Mom’s no dummy. She didn’t leave by accident. Don’t worry about that.”

  “I’m not worried about anything,” Kenzo said, which would do for an understatement till a bigger one came along.

  “Come on, then.” She took his hand and led him back to her bedroom.

  A teddy bear almost the size of a three-year-old sat on the bed. Elsie set it on the floor with its back to the bed. Then she nodded, as much to herself as to Kenzo, and pulled the sun dress off over her head. She sat down on the edge of the bed to take off her bra and panties.

  Kenzo tried not to stare as much as he wanted to. “You’re beautiful,” he whispered. He got out of his own clothes in a hurry.

  “Oh, Ken!” Elsie said when she saw the bruises and welts on his ribs and his back and one thigh. She jumped up and kissed them one by one, so softly that her lips almost weren’t there. “Is that better?” He didn’t know what it did for the bruises. What it did for the rest of him was obvious. Elsie giggled.

  They lay down together. It wasn’t quite Kenzo’s first time, but it was his first time with anybody who mattered to him, who didn’t want him to go away as soon as he could so she could take on somebody else. Elsie sighed when his mouth found the pink tips of her breasts.

  A little later, with him poised above her, she inhaled sharply. “Be careful,” she said. “It hurts.”

  “I’ll try,” he told her, though nothing in all the world could have kept him from driving deeper then. Elsie bit her lip, but didn’t say anything more. Before long, his world exploded in delight. As he came back to himself, he asked, “Are you okay?”

  “I—think so,” she answered. “They say it’s supposed to hurt the first time, and they aren’t wrong. But you’re sweet.” She squirmed under him. “Let me up. I don’t want to leave a stain on the bedspread.” When she stood up, she laughed and said, “Oops—too late. Well, cold water will get most of it out. I hope.”

  “Me, too.” He felt foolish, and started getting dressed again. Elsie carried her clothes down the hall to the bathroom. She walked spraddle-legged, as if she’d been riding a horse for a long time. When she came back she had a wet washrag, which she used to scrub at the red stain.

  “There,” she said after a bit. “That’s better, anyhow.”

  “Uh-huh.” Kenzo didn’t know what to do or say next. He tried, “I think maybe I better go.”

  “Okay,” Elsie said, and then, in a different tone of voice, “I hope to God I don’t catch.”

  “Catch? Oh!” Kenzo said. Neither of them had worried about that while it was going on. “I hope you don’t, too. That would be terrible.”

  “It would be complicated, anyway,” Elsie said.

  If you knocked a girl up, you either ran away and started over somewhere else or you married her. Kenzo couldn’t run far, not the way things were now. He didn’t want to marry anybody yet, though he didn’t suppose Elsie would be too bad. But she was dead right: no matter who ran Hawaii, a Japanese guy marrying a haole girl would cause complications. They’d be different complications, depending on whether the Rising Sun or the Stars and Stripes flew over the islands, but they’d always be there.

  He and Elsie walked out into the front room. “We’ll be careful,” she said. He didn’t know if she meant careful about her not getting pregnant or careful about going where Japanese soldiers could cause trouble. It struck him as a good idea either way.

  “Sure,” he said. “So long.” He kissed her, then went out the door. He looked back when she closed it, but didn’t blow her a kiss or anything. The neighbors didn’t need to know. Neither did Elsie’s mom—not officially, anyhow.

  CORPORAL TAKEO SHIMIZU LED HIS SQUAD through the streets of Honolulu. It was a routine patrol. Nobody gave them any trouble. By now, the locals had learned to bow and get out of the way when they saw Japanese soldiers. They hadn’t needed object lessons for quite a while.

  The only thing even slightly unusual that Shimizu saw was a local Japanese man, about the age of most of the privates in his squad, who walked along whistling even though a black eye and a fat lip said he’d been in a brawl and probably lost it. Shimizu almost stopped him and asked him what he was so happy about, but in the end he didn’t. Being happy wasn’t against the rules.

  He wasn’t the only one who noticed the local. “Whatever that guy’s been drinking, I want some,” Private Wakuzawa said.

  That was funny enough to make not only Shimizu but also several other soldiers laugh. Wakuzawa was already the most cheerful man in the squad. Why did he need anything to make him happier yet? Better something like that should go to Senior Private Furusawa, who thought too much for his own good—or so it seemed to Shimizu, anyhow.

  Soldiers were drilling in a park. They weren’t Army men—they belonged to the special naval landing forces. They wore olive-drab uniforms, not Army khaki, and their boots were black rather than brown.

  The Navy officer putting them through their paces wouldn’t be satisfied with anything less than perfection, and didn’t want to recognize perfection when he saw it. “You are not worthy of dying for the Emperor!” he screamed at the sweating, panting soldiers. “Not worthy, do you hear me?”

  “Hai, Captain Iwabuchi!” the soldiers chorused.

  “Then act like it, damn you!” Iwabuchi roared. “If we have to fight the Americans, we are going to make them drown in their own blood! And how do we do that? By making them drown in our blood!”

  “Hai, Captain Iwabuchi!” the troops from the naval landing force repeated.

  Iwabuchi pointed toward Shimizu and his squad. “Look at those Army men! They’re soft. They’re ragged. Do you want to be like them? You’d better not! You have to want to die for the Emperor. You have to be proud to die for the Emperor! The man who does not fear death, the man who welcomes death, will surely be triumphant!”

  “Hai, Captain Iwabuchi!” the Navy men said once more.

  Shimizu was furious, though of course he did not show it in the presence of a superior. A Navy captain ranked with the commander of his regiment or any other Army colonel, too: not just a superior but an almost godlike figure. Despite that, Shimizu’s own opinion of the special naval landing forces was not high. They made good enough occupation troops. But when they had to fight other soldiers, they didn’t fare so well. Despite these drills, the Army did a much better job of training its men in infantry tactics than the Navy did.

  Captain Iwabuchi went right on yelling at his men. They might not fight skillfully under a leader like that, but they would fight hard. They would fear him more than they feared the Americans, and they would have reason to. An officer like that would kill anybody who he thought was hanging back.

  “We’ll leave this place a ruin! We’ll never give in!” he shrieked. “A ruin, do you hear me? Not one brick left on top of another!”

  “He’s not so tough,” Yasuo Furusawa said, but he sidled up to Shimizu and spoke in the next thing to a whisper, taking no chances that the fanatical officer could overhear him.

  “I was thinking the same thing,” Shimizu answered—also in a low voice. After a moment, he went on, “Nothing wrong with dying for the Emperor, mind you. There’s no better end for a Japanese soldier. It’s an honor. It’s a privilege.” He’d had all that drilled into him in basic training, and he
believed it. Even so . . . “The real point, though, is to make the enemy die for his country first.”

  “Hai!” Furusawa nodded. “I think that’s just right, Corporal-san. And I don’t think it ever once crossed that Captain Iwabuchi’s mind.”

  “No, I don’t, either. But all we can do about it is feel sorry for those poor Navy men.”

  “Maybe it won’t matter,” Senior Private Furusawa said. “Maybe the real Navy will beat the Americans on the sea, the way they did last year.”

  “Of course they will.” Shimizu couldn’t show doubt about anything like that. It would have been unpatriotic. He did think Captain Iwabuchi couldn’t have been much of an officer. If he were, he would have had shipborne duty. Instead, he was stuck doing things that weren’t really a Navy officer’s proper job. Serves him right, Shimizu thought.

  Even after his squad turned the corner, he could still hear Captain Iwabuchi screaming at his men and haranguing them. He might push them too far. Japanese military men were an enduring lot. They had to be. But even endurance had its limits. He wondered if Iwabuchi might suffer an unfortunate—oh, such an unfortunate!—accident. Every once in a while, things like that did happen.

  The rest of the patrol stayed routine. Shimizu approved of routine. Routine meant nothing was going wrong. It also meant he didn’t have to think for himself. If he didn’t have to think, he couldn’t make any mistakes. If he didn’t make any mistakes, his own superiors couldn’t start yelling at him. They wouldn’t be as bad as Captain Iwabuchi, but all the same he didn’t fancy an officer shouting in his face and maybe slapping him around.

  He brought his men back to the barracks. He made his report to Lieutenant Horino, the platoon commander. He mentioned marching past the park where Iwabuchi was drilling his men; he couldn’t very well leave it out. “Ah,” Horino said. “And what did you think of that, Corporal?”