“Just their lousy three-inch popguns,” McKinley shouted through the din.
“Yeah, I know,” Peterson answered. “But where’s our artillery?” Most of it had been wrecked, and most U.S. artillerymen were likely dead. Jap fighters and dive bombers had gone after the American guns with everything they had. It made sense. Rifles and machine guns were just nuisances on the battlefield. Artillery killed.
Artillery also pinned down U.S. infantry so Japanese foot soldiers could advance. If you rose up to shoot at the Japs, you asked to get flayed by flying fragments. If you didn’t, you had the enemy sliding around your flank.
Peterson and McKinley both rose up. You could take your chances with shellfire. Sometimes you had to. But if the Japs flanked them out of this position, where would they go? Into the Pacific, that was where. They had next to no place left to retreat.
And, sure enough, the Japs were coming. Both Americans fired. The Japanese soldiers went down. Some of them shot back. Others dashed past them, running all crouched over. Then they dove for cover and the ones in the rear advanced.
“Fire and move,” McKinley said, slapping in a fresh clip. “It’s pretty when you do it well, and those bastards know how.”
“Terrific.” Peterson snapped off another shot. This was one of the intricacies of ground combat he’d never imagined when he was flying fighter planes. The sailors coming up into the line from Pearl Harbor hadn’t, either. Maybe some of them did now. A lot of them had got shot before they could learn.
A shell slammed into the house with a rending crash. The walls shook. Part of the roof that hadn’t fallen in did now. A bullet came in through the window and clanged off a pot hanging on the far wall. Peterson waited for the American machine gun to start slaughtering the oncoming Japs. When it stayed silent, he glanced over to Sergeant McKinley. If Prez said this was the place to make a stand, he’d do it. This was part of what he’d signed up for.
But McKinley said, “We’d better fall back a couple of houses. We don’t want ’em to go sliding around behind us and cutting us off. That’s how you get captured.” He made a horrible face.
“Right,” Peterson said tightly, and made another one. They did fall back, and fell in with more Americans. It was only a tiny retreat. Now the Japs would have a tougher time breaking through. So Peterson told himself, over and over again. He had a devil of a time making himself believe it.
BY THE TIME the train pulled into the station at Durham, North Carolina, Joe Crosetti, who’d never been out of California before, had stared out the window in fascination all the way across the country. Going over the Rockies had been something. Going across the Great Plains had been something, too-miles and miles and miles as flat as if somebody’d ironed them, half the time under a blanket of snow. Seeing all that white was pretty amazing by itself. It had snowed in San Francisco only two or three times in Crosetti’s life, and never since he was a kid. But there it was, white and silent and beautiful.
Joe thought so, anyway. Sitting next to him was a guy named Orson Sharp, who’d got on the train in Salt Lake City. “It’s just snow, for heaven’s sake,” he said. He was blond and pink-cheeked and earnest, with the start of a double chin. Aside from that, there was nothing soft about him; he was on the chunky side, that was all, the sort who would have played the line in football.
“Maybe it’s just snow to you, but it’s snow to me,” Joe answered. Orson Sharp only shrugged. Joe got the feeling he thought that was funny to the point of being ridiculous, but was too polite to say so. Most fellows his age would have razzed Joe unmercifully if they thought something like that. Crosetti eyed Sharp with something approaching suspicion, wondering what his angle was.
As the train got farther east, it rolled past-sometimes rolled through-forests full of bare-branched trees. That bemused Joe, too. Some of the trees in San Francisco lost their leaves: some, yeah, but not all. These looked like a horde of skeletons with their arms held high.
Streams and ponds had ice on them-not all, but the smaller ones. That was something else Joe hardly ever saw back home. San Francisco never got very hot, and it never got very cold, either. As far as he was concerned, that was the way things were supposed to work.
When he said so, Orson Sharp did laugh. “Maybe where you come from,” he said. “In Salt Lake, it can get up over a hundred and down below zero, too. Having the same weather all the time must get boring.”
“It’s not the same all the time,” Joe said. He didn’t think so, anyway. Maybe things looked different if you came from somewhere like Utah.
He hadn’t needed long to decide Orson Sharp was a strange breed of cat. Trainees bound for Chapel Hill filled the car. Blue language filled the air. Most guys, among themselves, used profanity for emphasis, almost for punctuation. Joe did, and he’d never thought of himself as particularly foulmouthed. But as far as he could tell, Sharp didn’t swear at all.
He didn’t drink coffee, either. When they went to the dining car, Joe guzzled the stuff. “Gotta get my heart started some kind of way,” he said.
He wondered if Sharp would give him an argument, the way temperance people did if you had anything good to say about the demon rum. But the would-be flier from Salt Lake just nodded and said, “Whatever you think is right for yourself.”
“How come you don’t think it’s right for you?” Joe asked, quickly adding, “Don’t answer if you think I’m sticking my nose in where it doesn’t belong.” He didn’t want to get Sharp mad. Strange breed of cat or not, he seemed a pretty good guy.
And he smiled now. “That’s okay. I don’t mind. My religion teaches that we shouldn’t smoke or drink alcohol or coffee or tea.”
“Your religion?” Joe scratched his head. He knew some Jews, and knew they didn’t eat pork or, if they were strict enough, shrimp or lobsters or clams, either. But they drank-and they drank coffee, too. And they smoked. Then, probably slower than it should have, a light went on in his head. “You’re one of those Mormons, aren’t you?”
“That’s right.” Orson Sharp laughed. “Haven’t you ever seen one before?”
“Probably-San Francisco’s a big city. But not that I ever knew of.” Joe gave Sharp a curious look. Did he have three wives back home? Did his father have three wives, or thirty-three? That was what you heard about Mormons.
He suddenly realized Sharp knew just what he was thinking. “Well?” the other young man said. “No fangs, no horns, no tail.”
Joe’s ears got hot. He suspected he turned red. To keep from showing it, he raised his coffee cup to his lips. Then he lowered it. Even something as ordinary as drinking coffee all at once felt funny. “Heck with it,” he said. “I’m a Catholic. There’s people who don’t like us, either. But we’re all Americans first, right?”
Instead of coffee, Orson Sharp had a glass of apple juice by his plate of bacon and eggs and hash browns. He lifted it as if making a toast. “We’re all Americans first. That’s just right. And we’re not America First, either.”
“Damn straight!” Joe exclaimed. “Those damn fools helped the Japs catch us with our pants down in Hawaii. You listen to them, nothing could ever happen to us, so we didn’t have to worry about the war. Shows how much they knew, doesn’t it?”
“Most of them have wised up since then,” Sharp said, and Joe nodded. Pearl Harbor and the invasion had knocked the bottom out of isolationism. Just about everyone who’d believed in it had come to his senses since. The handful who hadn’t were crackpots and chowderheads and pro-fascists: nobody worth paying any attention to.
“Listen,” Joe said. “If we get a chance to pick roomies when we get where we’re going, you want to stick together?”
“Sure,” Sharp said. “Why not?” He stuck out his hand. In the clasp, it almost swallowed up Joe’s.
Young Navy officers-ensigns and lieutenants, junior grade-met the train at the Durham station. They divided the newly arrived flying cadets into groups of fifty or so. The ensign in charge of Joe’s group was a tall
, green-eyed fellow named Don Ward. “I am your mother,” he announced in an accent not far removed from where they were. Several people snickered. Ward waited till they were through, then repeated himself: “I am your mother. That’s what they call my duty. I am supposed to shepherd you all through this here training course, and I aim to do it. I am also supposed to keep you out of mischief, and I aim to do that, too.”
He got his charges aboard a bus that barely held them and their luggage. With much grinding of gears, the bus chugged toward Chapel Hill, about twelve miles away. The town proved tiny, the business block hardly more than a block long. Homes seemed pleasant enough, often separated from one another by ivy-covered walls. Except for the cedars, all the trees that would have given shade in the summertime were naked now. Without their leaves on them, Joe couldn’t tell one kind from another.
The University of North Carolina dominated Chapel Hill. The bus wheezed to a stop in front of a three-story brick building. A native Californian, Joe didn’t like brick buildings; they fell down in earthquakes. He laughed at himself, wondering when North Carolina had last had an earthquake. That would be okay.
“This is Old East,” Ensign Ward told his charges. “It’s almost a hundred and fifty years old-the oldest state college building in the country.”
Maybe he thought people would be impressed to hear that. Joe was impressed, all right, but probably not the way Dillon had in mind. Wonderful, he thought. They’re sticking us in a goddamn ruin.
“Old East will be your home while you’re here. You will be four to a room.” Ward waited out the groans, then went on, “This is not the worst introduction to Navy life. If you can’t get the hang of living in each other’s pockets, you probably don’t belong here. Ships are crowded places. You need to get used to the idea. If you’ve already started pairing off, that’s okay. We’ll try to accommodate you.”
Joe caught Orson Sharp’s eye. The cadet from Utah nodded. In a voiceless whisper, Joe asked, “Got anybody else in mind?”
Sharp shook his head. “Not yet. How about you?” he answered, just as quietly.
“Nope,” Joe said. “Want to trust to luck? Or do you see anybody you especially want to snag?”
“Luck will do,” Sharp said. “This looks like a pretty good bunch of guys. How can we go wrong?” He and Joe were about the same age, but Joe felt ten years older. Somehow, the cadet from Utah had missed out on his share of cynicism. How can we go wrong? Joe thought. Just wait and see. You’ll find out how we can. But Orson Sharp expected things to go right, not wrong. Joe didn’t know whether to call him a Pollyanna or to envy him his confidence.
They got joined up with Bill Frank, who was from Oakland, and Otis Davis, who’d got on the train in St. Louis. Frank and Davis seemed to be a pair, too. That made Joe feel a little better-at least they weren’t guys nobody else wanted anything to do with.
The room… wasn’t as bad as Joe had expected. That was about as much as he could say for it. It wasn’t big enough to swing a cat, but he hadn’t looked for anything different there. The iron-framed bunk beds also came as no surprise. It did boast electricity and running water, even if you could tell they were add-ons. The people who’d built the room hadn’t thought there would ever be such things.
Whoever built the room hadn’t thought there would ever be such things as human beings in it, either. That was how it seemed to Joe, anyhow. The window was tiny and set high in the wall, so it let in only a little light and gave a lousy view. And the place had a peculiar kind of airlessness to it. It felt stuffy with the door open and got downright stifling with the door closed.
Otis Davis said, “I’m glad we’ll be out of there before the hot weather comes. This place’d be a bake oven like you wouldn’t believe.”
“Gevalt! ” Bill Frank said. “I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Only goes to show you’re from the West Coast,” Davis said. “If you came from a place where it gets hot and muggy, you’d know the signs.”
“This is a pretty crazy town, not even big enough for a train station,” Joe said.
Don Ward stuck his head into the room. “Supper at 1800,” he announced. “That’s an hour and a half from now. Lights out at 2130. Reveille tomorrow-and every day-at 0530. Tomorrow you’ll draw your clothes and do another pile of paperwork. And after that, gentlemen”-his grin went hard and ruthless-“we put you to work.”
Joe was still slow at translating military time into what he was used to. He said, “Lights out at half past nine, sir? Is that right?” He hadn’t gone to bed that early since he was thirteen years old.
But Ward only nodded. “That is correct, Mr. Crosetti.” People didn’t have any trouble remembering Joe’s last name once they heard it. Accurately interpreting the expression on his face, Ward added, “You’ll find enough to do to tire yourself out by then. Trust me, Mr. Crosetti-you will.” And, leaving that promise behind, he went down the hall to pass the word to the next dorm room.
“SO SORRY, JIRO-SAN,” Tomatsu Okamoto said nervously. “So sorry, but I haven’t got any more fuel to sell you. I’m all out.”
Flanked by his sons, Jiro Takahashi glowered at the man from whom he’d been buying diesel fuel for years. He’d known this day was coming, but he hadn’t expected it so soon. “You had plenty day before yesterday,” he growled. “Where did it go? Did you drink it?”
Okamoto laughed nervously. “Not me,” he said. “The Army confiscated everything I had left. They said they had to keep their trucks running as long as they could.”
“Does anybody else have any?” Jiro asked. “Do you know?”
“I don’t know, not for a fact, but I wouldn’t bet on it,” Okamoto answered. “I’m not a big operator, not even close. If they’re down to taking away my stock, they’ve already sucked the others dry.”
Jiro nodded. That made more sense than he wished it did. “What am I going to do now?” he asked, not so much of old man Okamoto as of the whole uncaring world around him. “How am I supposed to take the Oshima Maru out if I can’t get fuel for her?”
“Weren’t you talking about knowing somebody who could fit her out with a mast and sail, Father?” Hiroshi said. “It’s about time.”
“Yes, I was talking about that,” Jiro said. “But I don’t know how long it will take. I don’t know how much it will cost. Jesus Christ!” He clapped a hand to his forehead. “I don’t even know if that Doi fellow is still alive.”
“If he isn’t, it’ll take longer,” Kenzo said.
Hiroshi laughed. Even old man Okamoto laughed. Jiro glared at his younger son. What kind of a joke was that? An American joke, that was what. Jiro didn’t think it was funny (though he might have if Okamoto had told it). It was just annoying to him.
“Eizo Doi, the handyman fellow?” Okamoto asked. Jiro nodded. Okamoto said, “He’s still around-at least, I saw him three or four days ago. You think he can put a sail on a sampan?”
“I don’t know for sure. He’s talked about it,” Jiro answered. “If he can, I’m still in business, whatever business there is. If he can’t…” The fisherman spat on the sidewalk. “If he can’t, I have to find something else to do.”
“Like what?” Okamoto asked with interest. Jiro only shrugged. Except for his stint in the fields, he’d been a fisherman all his life. He didn’t know anything else. He didn’t want to know anything else.
“What are we going to do if we can’t put to sea today?” Hiroshi asked.
Jiro shrugged again. Again, he had no idea. Reiko would be surprised to see him and their sons home so early. Whether she’d be happy to see them… That was liable to be another story.
Hiroshi and Kenzo and he had just started back from old man Okamoto’s when Japanese bombers appeared overhead. The air-raid sirens didn’t begin to wail until after antiaircraft guns opened fire and bombs started whistling down. “Oh, Jesus Christ!” Jiro exclaimed in dismay. His sons both swore in English.
He wasn’t so frightened as he might have been. The
Japanese planes had been in the habit of dropping most of their bombs farther east, on the haole part of town. The ones that had hit around here had seemed like accidents-to everyone except the people they landed on, of course.
But things were different this morning. This morning, bombs rained down all over Honolulu. When one burst a couple of hundred yards ahead, it sounded like the end of the world. If it had burst any closer than that…
Kenzo grabbed him by the arm. “We’ve got to find some cover, Father!”
He was right. Jiro could see that. But where? Farther east, where things were more open, they’d dug air-raid trenches. Not many of those here, not with concrete and asphalt covering so much of the ground. Not many cellars to huddle in, either; hardly any buildings in Honolulu had them.
His younger son pointed to a deep doorway. That would have to do. It would, unless a bomb burst right in front of them-or unless the building came down on top of them. Jiro did his best not to think of such things.
More and more people crowded into the doorway. Women screamed when bombs burst close by. So did several men. Others cursed in a variety of languages. So did several women. Neither the men’s screams nor the women’s curses affronted Jiro the way they would have under different circumstances. He was almost frightened enough to piss himself. Why should anyone else be different?
Hiroshi pointed up into the sky. “One of them’s coming down!” he shouted in Japanese. Then he said what was probably the same thing in English.
Sure enough, a Japanese bomber trailing smoke and fire plummeted out of the sky, swelling enormously as it did. Jiro wondered about the men inside. Were they dead? If they weren’t, what were they thinking as they plunged to their deaths? Could they keep the Emperor in their minds? Or did bright panic swallow everything else?
Panic swallowed everything else in the voice of a woman by Jiro as she shrieked, “It’s coming down on us!”
Jiro wanted to call her a stupid idiot. He wished he could. But she was right. He started to scream himself when he thought the doomed bomber would smash into the building in whose doorway he huddled. It didn’t. It crashed into a laundry half a block away. A fireball erupted-the plane must have had almost a full load of fuel on board. Blazing fragments pinwheeled off and went flying along the street.
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