Days of Infamy (21 page)

Was he an invader who'd learned the language in college on the mainland? Or was he a local Jap doing what the occupiers told him? Would the local Japs do what the occupiers told them? Were they cheering to see the Stars and Stripes come down and the Rising Sun go up?
Some of them are, I bet
, Jane thought furiously.

She wondered if she ought to go listen to the Jap commander, or if the order was a trick or a trap. Reluctantly, she decided she had to take the chance.
If the Japs gave more orders at this gathering, she didn't want to get shot for not knowing what the rules were. Makani and California was only a few blocks east of Kamehameha Highway, and only a few from her building. She locked the door behind her when she left, not that that would do much good against a rifle butt.

Other people were also coming out of hiding. Jane waved and nodded to the ones she recognized. They all tried to pretend the Japanese soldiers prowling the streets weren't there. The Japs just eyed the
haoles
. They talked with the Japanese who'd lived in Wahiawa. Some of those Japanese answered, too. Tone of voice was plenty to tell Jane the shoe was on the other foot, all right.

One of the local Japanese, a man who ran a nursery, stood on a table with a Jap officer at Makani and California. The local man translated for the invader: “Major Hirabayashi says that from now on you must bow to all soldiers of the Empire of Japan. You must make way for them on the street. Soldiers may stay with people here. If they do, you will be responsible for their room and board.”

The locals muttered at that. They did no more than mutter, though, not with soldiers all around. Major Hirabayashi went on, “All guns must be turned in. Anyone found with a gun after three days' time will be executed. Also, all food in Wahiawa will be shared. When ordered, you will deliver your supplies to a central distribution point. Anyone caught hoarding after that will also be executed.”

More mutters. A dull horror washed over Jane. So much for what she'd bought. If only she lived in a house with a yard. She could have buried some by dead of night. Not with only an apartment around her, and lots of nosy neighbors.
Maybe I should have run away after all
.

T
HE
O
SHIMA
M
ARU
'
S
planking throbbed under Jiro Takahashi's feet. Diesel growling at the sampan's stern, it scooted out into the Pacific. Takahashi was happy. “Now we get to go work again,” he said. Staying at home without working had been harder on him than all the backbreaking labor he went through here on the ocean.

His sons seemed less delighted. “Merry Christmas,” Hiroshi said, in sarcastic English. Jiro had always bought the boys presents at Christmastime. Why not? Everybody else did. But for the presents, though, the day meant nothing to him. What difference did a
haole
holiday make?

In Japanese hardly less sardonic, Kenzo added, “You know why they've let us go out again, don't you, Father?”

“I don't care why,” Jiro said. “Isn't it good to breathe clean air?” The tank farms at Pearl Harbor had mostly burned themselves out by now, but acrid, eye-stinging haze still filled the air in Honolulu. No sooner had Jiro praised the air away from the city than he lit a cigarette. “Have to be careful with these,” he remarked. “They're starting to run low.”

“They're starting to run low on everything,” Kenzo said. “That's why they've let the sampans out. They really
need
the fish we bring back.”

“As long as there's diesel fuel, we'll do all right,” Jiro said. “Lots of things can happen to a fisherman, but he probably won't starve.”

“How long will there be diesel fuel?” Hiroshi asked. “It comes from the
mainland just like everything else. It came from the mainland, I mean. Nothing's going in or out, not any more.”

“If Japan wins, she can send us diesel fuel,” Jiro said.

To his annoyance, Hiroshi and Kenzo both laughed at him. “Don't you remember, Father?” his older son said. “One of the big reasons Japan got into a fight with the United States was that we wouldn't sell them oil any more. They won't have any to spare for Hawaii.” Kenzo nodded in agreement with his brother.

Jiro glared at his sons. He
had
forgotten about the oil embargo. Not only were they rude for laughing, they were right, which made it three times as bad. And, to Hiroshi and Kenzo, the United States was
we
and Japan was
they
. Jiro had already bumped into that, but he liked it no better now.

Hiroshi rubbed his nose in the point: “Everything except pineapple and sugar comes from the mainland, just about. If we need blue jeans or shoes or canned milk or canned corn or flour for bread or—or—anything, they have to ship it in.”

“Remember when they had the dock strike on the West Coast five years ago?” Kenzo added. “We were down to two weeks' worth of food by the time it ended—and that was when things were coming in from the East Coast, and from Australia and Japan, too. Where will we get supplies now? We'll start going hungry a lot faster.”

“All right. All right.” Jiro wanted to cuff both of them. He couldn't. They were grown men, and both bigger than he was. And they were so very, very different from him. He wondered what he'd done wrong. If he'd been a better father, wouldn't he have had sons who were more Japanese?

He busied himself on the sampan, not that there was much to do. The engine chugged away. It was noisy, but it was reliable. He almost wished it would have broken down. That would have given him the excuse to haul out the tool kit and tinker with it. Then he could have ignored his milkshake-guzzling, hamburger-munching boys. As things were, he just stared back toward the receding bulk of Oahu.

Hiroshi said something in English. Kenzo laughed. Neither of them bothered to translate for Jiro.
They must be talking about me
, he thought resentfully. They thought they knew everything and their old man didn't know anything. Well, by the look of things, they'd backed the wrong horse in the
war. Every day the rumble of artillery came closer to Honolulu. The Japanese advanced. The Americans retreated. They couldn't retreat much farther, or they'd go into the Pacific.

He felt the way the
Oshima Maru
bumped over the waves. He watched terns and boobies and frigate birds. He remembered gulls raucous over the Inner Sea when he was young. They could guide a fisherman to schools of smelt or mackerel. But gulls, except for rare vagrants, didn't come to Hawaii. A man had to use what other birds gave him.

There were boobies, plunging into the sea. Japanese dive bombers must have looked like that when they swooped down on the American ships at Pearl Harbor. They hadn't gone into the sea, though; they'd pulled up and flown away to strike again and again. “
Banzai!
” Jiro said softly. “
Banzai!
” He didn't think his sons heard him. That was just as well.

He steered toward the boobies. One of them came to the surface with a foot-long fish writhing in its beak. Jiro nodded. He waved to Hiroshi and Kenzo. They'd already started dumping
nehus
into the water and getting the lines ready. They did know what needed doing.

Thrilled to be free, unaware of the fate awaiting so many of them, the minnows swam off in all directions, silver flecks under the blue of the sea. And bigger flashes of silver rose to meet them. Some of those fish would get themselves a meal. Some would bite down on silver hooks, not silver scales. Instead of getting meals, they would become meals themselves.

Across miles of ocean, booms came from the north. “Are those the coast-defense guns again?” Kenzo asked.

That would have been Jiro's guess, too. But Hiroshi shook his head. “I don't think so,” he said. “I think those are some of the ships in Pearl Harbor, shooting at the Japanese as they come farther south.”

“You notice they couldn't get
out
of Pearl Harbor,” Jiro said. Both his sons sent him stony looks. He ignored them. He knew it was true, and so did they, however little they liked it. The very day the war started, Japanese bombers in the third wave had sunk two light cruisers in the channel leading from the harbor to the Pacific. That had corked the bottle and made sure the rest of the ships stayed put. Since then, Japanese planes had pounded them again and again.

Some of the ships still had working guns. Every so often, they opened fire.
They were heavier artillery than any based on land except the coast-defense batteries. Jiro suspected Japanese planes would return before long. After that, very likely, fewer Navy guns would fire on his country's soldiers.

My country's soldiers
, Jiro thought again, and nodded to himself. Yes, Japan was his country. It always would be. And if Hiroshi and Kenzo didn't like that or couldn't understand it, too bad.

The fish didn't seem to care about the distant artillery. When the Takahashis pulled in the lines, they had plenty of
aku
and
ahi
on them, as well as a few
mahimahi
that had come to join the feast. The frenzy of gutting them and getting them into storage came next.

Then it was more minnows over the side, and fish guts, too, and the lines went back into the Pacific with them. The guts, Jiro knew, would draw sharks, but sharks were also good to eat, even if a lot of
haoles
were too dumb to believe it. He didn't think he would have any trouble selling them, not today.

He and his sons brought in fish till the sun sank low in the west. Then Jiro started up the diesel again and took the
Oshima Maru
back to Kewalo Basin. “Now we see how we do,” he said as they tied up there.

“We see how scared people are, you mean,” Hiroshi said. Jiro only shrugged his aching shoulders. In the end, it all boiled down to the same thing.

Along with the Japanese and Chinese buyers in the marketplace, there were also tall American soldiers with bayonets on their rifles. Fear stabbed at Jiro when he saw them. Were they there to enforce price controls or, worse, to confiscate the fish the Takahashis had worked so hard to catch? If they were, Jiro was damned if he intended to go out again the next morning. He'd built his life on the cornerstone of hard work, but hard work with the expectation of fair pay for it. If he didn't get his reward, what point to putting to sea?

But the soldiers only kept order. They needed to keep order, too, because the buyers sprang at Jiro, Hiroshi, and Kenzo like starving wolves. They frantically bid against one another. By the time they were through, Jiro had three times as much money in his pocket as he'd imagined in his fondest dreams.

He had so much money, he was tempted not to take home some especially fine
ahi
for Reiko. But the thought of what his wife would say if he didn't was plenty to conquer even greed. “We'll be rich!” he said to his sons. “Rich, I tell you!” He could think about the money he
had
made, if not the bit of extra cash that would have been in his pocket if he'd sold the rest of the tuna.

Then Hiroshi spoiled even that, saying, “No, we won't. The buyers will just
jack up the price they charge. Everybody's jacking up the prices he charges. Look at that.” He pointed to the window of a
haole
grocery store they were walking past. He and Kenzo both read English fluently, which Jiro didn't. “Flour is half again what it was when the war started. Rice the same. Onions are double. And look at oranges—a dollar thirty-five a dozen! That's two and a half times what they were before, easy.”

Some of Jiro's glee evaporated. Then it returned, or a portion of it did. “Yes, the prices are up, but what I got paid is up even more.”

“How much did you shell out for diesel fuel?” Kenzo asked.

Jiro scowled. “Old man Okano is a highway robber,” he said. But this time his glee didn't come back. He knew he couldn't have got a better price from anybody else, Japanese, Chinese, or
haole
. Diesel fuel was heading straight through the roof. The Army needed a lot of it, and, as his sons had said, no more was coming in from the mainland. And gasoline was going up even faster than diesel fuel. Which meant . . .

“All right, we won't get rich,” Jiro said. He was less upset than he might have been. He wouldn't have known what to do as a rich man anyhow.

Kenzo asked, “What happens when there is no more fuel? Can we take the engine off the sampan and rig a mast? Hiroshi and I don't know anything about handling a sail.”

“I've done it, back when I was young,” Jiro said. “I think I can still manage. I'd want somebody who really knows what he's doing to see to the rigging, I expect.” He stuck a hand in his pocket. Something like that wouldn't come cheap. His imagined wealth seemed to be dripping away even faster than he'd got it.

T
HE DAY AFTER
Christmas, Joe Crosetti reported to the San Francisco Naval Aviation Selection Board. A big blond Swede named Lundquist chaired the board. He looked at Joe's papers and smiled. “Are you any relation to Frankie Crosetti, young man?” he asked.

Joe smiled, too, in a resigned way. If he had a dime for every time somebody'd asked him if he was related to the Yankees' shortstop, he might have been making more dough than Frankie was. “No, sir, not that I know of,” he answered. “Oh, there may be some kind of connection between his family and mine back in the old country, but it's nothing anybody can prove.”

“Okay. Doesn't matter one way or the other,” Lundquist said. “I wondered, that's all. How old are you, son?”

“I'm nineteen, Mr. Lundquist.” Crosetti knew he looked younger. He was five-seven and on the skinny side, with a narrow, swarthy face and a thick shock of curly black hair. He did have a five o'clock shadow that came out at three, but it was five after nine in the morning now; he'd got to the board as soon as it opened, and he'd shaved just a couple of hours before.

“You graduated from high school . . . ?”

“A year and a half ago, sir. My diploma's in with my papers.”

“All right. And what are you doing now?”

“I'm a mechanic at Scalzi's garage, sir,” Joe answered. “My old man's a fisherman. Sometimes on weekends I go out with him. I used to do it every summer and Christmas vacation till I got this job.”

“So you know your way around the water, do you?”

“A little bit, maybe. I'm an okay sailor, but I'm not a
sailor
, you know what I mean?”

Lundquist and the rest of the men on the board looked at one another. Joe tried to figure out what that meant, but he couldn't. The chairman said, “When you were in high school, did you play any sports?”

“Yes, sir,” Joe answered. “I played second base on the baseball team, and I was a backup guard on the basketball team.”

“No football?”

Joe shook his head. “I like playing touch in the park, but I'm not a great big guy.” That was an understatement. “I didn't have a prayer of making the team. How come you want to know?”

“Teamwork,” Lundquist told him. “Basketball is good, football's even better. Baseball shows coordination, but less of the other.”

One of the other men spoke up: “Second and short need it more than other positions. They have to work together if they're going to turn double plays.” His wiry build suggested he might have been a middle infielder in his day. Whether or not, he was dead right, and Joe nodded. He and Danny Fitzpatrick, his shortstop, had taken endless ground balls and practiced 6-4-3 and 4-6-3 double plays till each knew in his sleep what the other was going to do.