End of the Beginning Read online

  In spite of everything, Jim Peterson smiled. “Just like in the movies.”

  “Fuckin’-A, man!” Charlie said. “Just like in the movies!”

  “Well, if you’re gonna do it, do it fast,” Peterson said. “I don’t know how much longer I’m going to last, and God only knows how long the Japs’ll let anybody last.”

  “Cover for me at roll call in the morning,” Charlie Kaapu said.

  “Will do,” Peterson answered, though he feared the Japs would notice Charlie was missing even if their count came out right. They had trouble telling one emaciated white man from another, yeah. All Occidentals look alike to them, Peterson thought, and damned if he didn’t smile again. But Charlie was only half white—and only half emaciated, too, which counted for more. He stood out. He had as much life in him as half a dozen ordinary POWs put together. He . . .

  As if to prove his own point, Peterson fell asleep then, right in the middle of a thought. He woke up some time later—he didn’t know how long. Charlie Kaapu wasn’t lying beside him any more. Good luck, Charlie, he thought, and then he fell asleep again.

  Three men died during the night. The POWs who lived on carried the corpses out with them so the guards could keep the precious count straight. And those living POWs did what they could to keep the guards from noticing one of their number wasn’t there and wasn’t dead. They shifted around in the ranks that were supposed to be still and unmoving. The Japs clouted several of them. The guards would do that without an excuse. When they had one, they did it even more.

  But they were stupider than Peterson had figured them for. He thought the Americans were going to get away with their deception, and wondered how the Japs could fail to miss what wasn’t right in front of their noses. The answer wasn’t all that hard to find. Their officers didn’t want smart bastards here. They wanted mean bastards—and what they wanted, they got.

  Still and all, the Japs would have had to be dumber than a pile of pebbles not to notice pretty damn quick that Charlie Kaapu wasn’t there. They were just about to let the POWs queue up for the miserable breakfast when a corporal let out a yelp, as if somebody’d poked him with a pin: “Kaabu!” When the Japs tried to say p, it mostly came out as b. Peterson had got used to being called Beterson.

  Naturally, Charlie didn’t answer. The guards had the conniptions they should have had twenty minutes earlier. They started beating people in earnest, with swagger sticks, with rifle butts, and with their fists. They kicked men who fell, too. They were even more furious than Peterson had figured they would be.

  And they weren’t just mad at the POWs. They also screamed at one another. The men who’d been on watch during the night would surely catch holy hell. That didn’t break Jim Peterson’s heart. It couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of people.

  The prisoners didn’t get breakfast that morning. They got marched straight into the tunnel instead. The Japs cut them no slack. If anything, the guards worked them even harder than usual. Anyone who faltered got beaten or kicked without mercy. Along with taking out endless buckets of rock, the POWs dragged out several corpses.

  They got no supper that night, either. Nobody dared say a word. If the Japs kept that up for another few days, they wouldn’t need to worry about escapes from the Kalihi Valley any more. All the POWs here would be dead.

  A few months earlier, mistreatment like this might have prompted lots of men to try to escape. No more. Next to nobody had the strength. And the guards would be shooting at their own shadows now. The prisoners went nowhere. The timing was bad.

  Just before sunup the next morning, two trucks came up to the camp in the Kalihi Valley from Honolulu below. Jim Peterson and the other prisoners stared in amazement. The trucks themselves were ordinary: U.S. Army vehicles the Japs had commandeered, painting over the white star on each driver’s-side door. But their being here wasn’t ordinary. They were the first trucks Peterson had seen since coming to the punishment camp.

  And, instead of getting the prisoners to do the work for them the way they almost always did, the Japs unloaded the trucks themselves. The contents seemed harmless enough: crates with incomprehensible Japanese squiggles on the sides. The guards lugged them over to the mouth of the tunnel. Then they set up another machine-gun position nearby, and posted several riflemen next to the crates, too.

  “They treat that shit like it’s the Hawaiian crown jewels,” another prisoner remarked to Peterson.

  “How do you know it’s not?” he said. “If their side’s losing, this is a hell of a place to stash ’em.”

  He got a lesson in the way rumors worked. By the time the POWs assembled for roll call half an hour later, everybody was convinced the Japs were going to stow the Hawaiian crown jewels in the tunnel. No one had any evidence that that was so, but nobody seemed to need any, either. In nothing flat, a chance comment swelled into one of those things everybody knew.

  Another thing everybody knew was that the Japs were going to be double tough on the count this morning. Peterson and the other POWs had only been guessing about the crown jewels. What everybody knew turned out to be dead right this time. No one presumed even to twitch as the guards stalked along the prisoners’ ranks. One luckless fellow who sneezed with a guard right behind him got beaten and kicked till he lay on the ground, all bloody and groaning.

  Peterson shuddered to think what would happen if the Japs screwed up the count even though the prisoners were cooperating. For a wonder, the guards didn’t. For what felt like an even bigger wonder, they let the POWs line up for breakfast. As always, it wasn’t much and it wasn’t good. After a day and a half of emptiness and brutal labor, anything at all in Peterson’s belly seemed wonderful. He knew he was still a starving man. But he wasn’t starving quite so fast.

  After the prisoners ate, the guards pointed toward the tunnel mouth. “All go! All go!” they shouted, and, “Speedo!”—the English they used for, Make it snappy, Mac! Of course, a clout in the head with a rifle butt or a length of bamboo was as much a part of a universal language as a smile or a caress. Somehow, the poets had never got around to singing the praises of a good, solid wallop.

  When the Japs said, “All go!” they weren’t kidding. They routed out the cooks and sent them into the tunnel, too. And they made the healthier prisoners—health being very much a relative term here—carry the men who were too sick to walk but not yet dead into the shaft. “American bomber!” they said. That made Peterson wonder. For one thing, the American attackers had shown exactly no signs of caring about the Kalihi Valley. For another, up till now the Japs had shown exactly zero interest in their prisoners’ safety. No, that wasn’t quite true. The Japs sometimes went out of their way to decrease safety for the POWs. Improving it was another story.

  More or less fortified by his more-or-less meal, Peterson attacked the rock face with a pick. Other prisoners scooped up the rock he’d torn loose, loaded it into baskets, and carried it away. Peterson heard gunshots from the direction of the tunnel mouth. He didn’t think much of it—the Japs often got a wild hair up their ass—till a POW came staggering back toward the excavators. “They’re killing us!” he shouted. “They’re shooting us!” Then he fell over. Peterson marveled that he could have come so far so fast shot through the chest.

  Work came to a ragged halt. One by one, picks and shovels fell silent. No guards lashed out with clubs or shouted, “Speedo!” and “Isogi!” In fact, no guards seemed to be in the tunnel at all.

  When Peterson realized that, ice ran through him. “The Japs don’t have the crown jewels in those boxes!” he shouted. “They’ve got dynamite! They’re going to blow in the tunnel mouth and trap us in here!”

  He threw down his pick. The steel head clanked on stone. A moment later, he picked up the tool again. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but he couldn’t get a better one till he knocked a Jap over the head and stole his Arisaka.

  “Come on!” he yelled. “They aren’t going to get away with this, God damn them!” He started back up the
long, straight shaft the POWs had dug. Nor was he the only one. Everybody who still had the strength stormed up the tunnel toward the tiny circle of light at the end.

  The Japs must have known something like that would happen. They’d shifted the machine guns that had protected those crates so they pointed straight down the tunnel. They fired a burst. A few rounds struck home at once. Others viciously ricocheted off ceiling, floor, and tunnel walls before finding a prisoner to wound.

  That wasn’t the worst of it. The worst was listening to the machine gunners laugh as they squeezed off some more rounds. In their shoes, Peterson would have laughed, too. Why not? They could fire those Nambus till the barrels glowed red, and the poor bastards they were killing couldn’t even shoot back.

  “We’ve got to keep going!” he cried. “It’s our necks if we don’t!”

  “It’s our necks if we do,” somebody else said, which was just as true.

  “I’d rather get shot than buried alive.” Peterson wished he had some better choices, but those seemed to be the only ones on the menu.

  He’d had nightmares where he was trying to run somewhere but his feet seemed stuck in quicksand. This was one of those, except it wasn’t a nightmare. It was real. If he didn’t get to the mouth of the tunnel before the camp guards did whatever they did, he never would.

  Their machine gunners kept on shooting down the shaft. They kept on laughing between bursts, too. Then they stopped shooting. Peterson could think of only one reason why they would do that. They must have lit the fuse, and they were all running for cover.

  And he was too far away. He knew he was too far away. He tried to force more speed from his poor, abused carcass, but a shuffling shamble was all it would give him. Quicksand, he thought desperately. Quick—

  He was one of the leaders of the mob of POWs. He’d got within a hundred yards of the tunnel mouth when the Japanese explosives went up. The next thing he knew, it was black, and untold tons of rock were coming down on him. Oh, good, he thought. At least I’m not bur

  OSCAR VAN DER KIRK JUMPED when somebody knocked on his door a little before eleven. Susie Higgins jumped higher. She’d seen horror out on the street. Oscar had just heard about it. “Who the hell’s that?” she said, her voice shrill with fear.

  “Don’t know.” Oscar heard the fear in his own voice, too. The knock came again, quick and urgent. Two years earlier, whoever it was would have just walked in. Odds were long against the door’s being locked in those days. Now . . . Now was a different story. Oscar’s fear swelled with each tap. Anybody out after curfew was in trouble with the Japs. Anybody in trouble with the Japs these days was as good as dead. And so was anybody who helped someone in trouble with the Japs.

  “Don’t let him in,” Susie whispered.

  “I’ve got to,” Oscar said. “I wouldn’t let those bastards get their hands on a gooney bird, let alone a man.”

  Before Susie could start a fight—and before he could lose his nerve—he threw open the door. “Oscar,” croaked the man in the hallway. He was about Oscar’s height, but only skin and bones draped in rags. His eyes burned feverishly, deep in their sockets. A powerful stench came off him in waves, a stench that said he hadn’t bathed in weeks.

  “Who the—?” But Oscar broke off with the question unfinished. “Charlie? Jesus Christ, Charlie, get your ass in here!”

  Charlie Kaapu gave him a ghost of the grin he knew. “Then get out of my way.” Numbly, Oscar did. Charlie staggered past him and into the little apartment. If Oscar had ever wanted to see a dictionary illustration of the phrase on your last legs, here it was in front of him. He was so shaken, he didn’t even close the door after Charlie till Susie hissed at him.

  She gasped when she got a good look at the hapa-Hawaiian. He wasn’t just four steps from starving to death. Somebody—the Japs, Oscar supposed—had been beating on him with sticks. The welts showed it: on his arms, across his face, and, visible through the holes and tears in his shirt, on his chest and back as well. He was missing some teeth he’d had when the Japs got hold of him.

  He sat down on the ratty rug, as if his legs didn’t want to hold him up—and they likely didn’t. “You think I look bad, you ought to see the other poor bastards up in the Kalihi Valley,” he said. “Next to them, I’m Duke goddamn Kahanamoku.”

  “Here.” Susie ran to the icebox and pulled out a couple of ripe avocados and a mackerel.

  Suddenly, Charlie’s attention focused on her like a searchlight. In the presence of food, he forgot about everything else. Oscar didn’t suppose he could blame him, either. “Let me have those, please,” Charlie said, an unusual restraint in his voice. He sounded like a man holding himself back from leaping on what he wanted.

  “I was going to do something with the fish—” Susie said uncertainly.

  He shook his head. His hair and scalp were full of scabs, too. “Don’t bother,” he told her. “I’ve eaten fish Jap-style plenty of times. And I don’t much want to wait, you know what I mean?”

  Without a word, Susie gave him the mackerel and the alligator pears. Oscar didn’t think he’d ever seen her speechless before, but she was now. Charlie made the avocados and the fish disappear in nothing flat. He ate with a singleminded concentration like nothing Oscar had ever seen. Oscar didn’t try to talk with him till nothing was left but peel and seeds and bones. If he had spoken, he didn’t think Charlie would have answered, or even heard him.

  “Oh, Lord, that was fine.” Charlie looked down at his rubbish. He’d even eaten the eyes out of the mackerel’s head. “I do that for days and days at a time, I start to be a man again.”

  “Won’t be easy, not till the Americans get here,” Oscar said.

  “Yeah.” Charlie Kaapu nodded. “I was hoping they’d be here already—all that shooting we heard down here from up in the valley. But I see it ain’t so. Some crazy Jap motherfucker almost shot me for the fun of it before I got here. ’Scuse me, Susie.”

  “It’s okay,” Susie said. “I know about the crazy Jap motherfuckers. I know more than I ever wanted to.” She shuddered.

  “What did they do to you, Charlie?” Oscar asked.

  “Well, they taught me one thing—I ain’t never gonna screw around with no Jap officer’s special lady friend no more,” Charlie Kaapu said. In spite of himself, Oscar laughed. So did Susie. She clapped her hands, too. Charlie went on, “But you didn’t mean that. They tried to starve me to death. They tried to work me to death. When I didn’t start dying fast enough to suit ’em, they tried to beat me to death, too. The other guys there were POWs who were hard cases. Imagine what I’d look like if I was there three times as long. That’s them.”

  “My God,” Susie said after trying to imagine that. “How come they aren’t all dead?”

  “Lot of ’em are,” Charlie answered. “More dyin’ every day, too. But a hard case is a hard case, and some of ’em stayed alive just to spite the Japs. This guy named Peterson shoulda been dead months ago, but he was still breathin’ when I got away. One tough son of a bitch, you bet.”

  “What the heck did they have you doing in the Kalihi Valley?” Oscar said. “I’ve been up there. It’s nothing but the river and trees, all the way back to the mountains.”

  “Don’t I know it!” Charlie said. “What were we doin’? We were digging a tunnel through the mountains to the damn windward coast, that’s what. Digging with picks and shovels and crowbars and baskets, mind. The Japs didn’t give a shit if we ever got there. It was something to work us to death with, that’s all.”

  “My God,” Oscar muttered. People had talked about ramming a tunnel through the mountains for years. He supposed they would have got around to it sooner or later. When they did, he supposed they would have used dynamite and jackhammers and all the others tools mankind had invented to make sure jobs like that didn’t take forever.

  “Can I have a bath or a shower or something?” Charlie said. “I’m filthy, and I’m lousy, too. I hope you guys don’t get company on account
of me.” Oscar hoped the same thing. He automatically started to scratch, then jerked his hand down. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Susie doing the same thing. It would have been funny if it hadn’t been so grim. And Charlie was filthy; the rank smell that came off him filled the apartment.

  “Go ahead,” Oscar told him. “I wish I had soap and hot water, that’s all. You can wear some of my clothes when you come out. Toss yours out and I’ll get rid of ’em.”

  “Will do,” Charlie said. “We’re about the same size—well, we used to be, anyway. I can’t get over how fat people look.” Oscar and Susie were both skinnier than they had been when Japan took Oahu, and they were better off than most people because Oscar caught so many fish. To a skeleton, though, a skinny man had to look fat. Charlie went into the bathroom, then stuck his head out again. “What was all the shooting about a couple of nights ago? That’s why I thought the Army would be back here.”

  “They cleaned out the prison camp in Kapiolani Park,” Oscar answered. They rescued a bunch of guys who looked just like you. He didn’t say that. Except by not screwing around with women he should have left alone, Charlie couldn’t help the way he looked. Oscar added, “I guess they were afraid the Japs would start killing people if they just left ’em there.”

  “Jeez, I believe that,” Charlie said. “I was hoping I could take soldiers back to Kalihi Valley. God knows what’s gonna happen to my buddies now.”

  He closed the door again. Water started to run. In a low voice, Oscar said, “He’s gotta stay here for a while, babe. I’m sorry, but I don’t know what else we can do.”

  Susie waved the words aside. “It’s okay. You’re right. We can’t do anything else. My God! Did you see him? He looks like a photo in Life or National Geographic where they’re talking about famine in India or China or somewhere like that.” Now she did scratch her head. She smiled sheepishly, but said, “For heaven’s sake, throw his clothes somewhere far, far away. I’m going to imagine I’m itching for the next week, whether I really am or not.”