Grenade

by Alan Gratz

  Hideki’s fists tightened around the sack of clothes he carried. He was a coward. But it wasn’t his fault. He was just born that way. And no amount of ceremonies and offerings to his ancestor had been able to free him from it.

  Maybe, he thought, it was time to try a more direct approach. Maybe it was time to override his ancestor’s cowardice with his own bravery.

  Hideki stood tall. “I’m going to stay,” he announced.

  His father and sister protested, but there was no time, and they couldn’t make him go. His mother and little brother were swept up the ramp by the surging crowds, and Hideki waved good-bye to them. The Japanese soldier nodded his approval at Hideki and went to harass someone else.

  Kimiko smacked Hideki on the back of his head. “Idiot,” she told him.

  Kimiko’s rebuke echoed in Hideki’s mind now as the shelling from the American battleships abruptly stopped. The silence was startling. There could only be one reason the Americans weren’t shooting anymore, Hideki realized—because they were afraid of hitting their own soldiers. That meant there had to be Americans close by!

  The bushes outside the cave rustled, and Hideki’s breath caught in his throat. He pulled one of his ceramic grenades from his jacket pocket and removed the rubber cap. He wished he had one of the real grenades, the kind where you just pulled a safety pin to activate it. He held the striking cap close to the fuse, his hands shaking.

  “Wh-who goes there?” Hideki called, trying his best to hide the fear in his voice.

  People emerged from the bushes, and Hideki relaxed. It was an Okinawan family—an old woman, a mother with a baby in her arms, and a girl much younger than Hideki who clung to her mother’s dress.

  “You must let us in, please,” the mother said, trying to keep her voice down. “There are Americans all around us. We can’t let them capture us.” She pulled her children closer. The old woman’s face was streaked with tears.

  “Come on in, then! Hurry!” Hideki told them.

  Yoshio and some of the other boys had noticed that the bombing had stopped, and they came to the mouth of the cave to see what was happening. As soon as he saw the Okinawan family trying to come inside, Yoshio blocked their way.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” Yoshio said. “You can’t come in here. This is a military cave.”

  Hideki wanted to argue—wasn’t it the army’s job to protect the people of Okinawa? But he didn’t want Yoshio to turn on him again.

  “Go away!” Yoshio told the family.

  “Yes,” Hideki said, brandishing his grenade to show them he meant business. “This cave belongs to the Blood and Iron Student Corps. Go hide somewhere else.”

  A strange noise came from the other side of the hill. A motorized rumbling like the sound of a bus.

  The women and children heard it too, and they turned and ran away, screaming. Hideki’s heart raced, and his stomach twisted. Was this it for real? Had some of the Americans gotten past the beach? Was he finally going to have to fight?

  “Hideki, go see what it is,” Yoshio said. He shoved Hideki with both hands, and Hideki stumbled outside into the harsh daylight.

  Be brave like the kamikazes, Hideki reminded himself. Grenade in one hand, rubber striking cap in the other, he took a deep breath and ducked into the bushes at the top of the hill. He crept forward until he could see over the ridge.

  The dirt path below him was lined with American vehicles. Gray trucks filled with soldiers. Enormous clanking green things with cannons on top and treads for wheels. Open-topped jeeps pulling giant guns on trailers. There were scores of them. They kept coming around the bend in the road. And kept coming and coming.

  Hideki ducked deeper into the thicket, afraid they would see him. His hands shook. How was this possible? How had the American devils been able to get so many vehicles past the Japanese defenses? Hideki had seen more automobiles on that road in five minutes than there had been in all of Okinawa before the war.

  Hideki’s shaking fear crystallized into a hard knot in his stomach, and he knew what he had to do. He had to take out one of those trucks with a grenade. This was his moment. This was his fate. He stood up, fully exposed if any of the soldiers in the trucks had bothered to look up at him, and got ready to strike the match-like fuse on his grenade.

  For the Emperor, Hideki told himself. For Japan. For my family.

  Hands grabbed Hideki and pulled him back into the bushes before he could activate his grenade. Hideki turned around. It was Yoshio!

  “What are you doing?!” Hideki cried.

  “The Americans—they’re close by!” Yoshio told him.

  “I know! The road down there is full of them!”

  “No, you fathead. Closer than that!” Yoshio said. “One of the boys heard somebody crashing through the forest, and we’re all going to attack!”

  “Down! Down! Sniper!” Starks yelled.

  Ray scrambled under the wooden fence that kept the pig inside. Pak!—another bullet hit right where he’d been lying two seconds ago.

  Ray flattened himself in the mud. There was a ridge underneath the fence that was just tall enough to hide behind, but no more. He held his helmet with both hands as the rest of his squad crawled under the fence and flopped into the muck beside him.

  “What about Hard-luck?” Starks asked. There was barely room for all five of them behind the little ridge.

  “Dead,” Sergeant Meredith answered. He unlatched the bayonet from his rifle, balanced his helmet on top of the bayonet, and slowly raised his rifle above the ridge line.

  Pak! The sound of the sniper’s rifle was quickly followed by the sound of the bullet hitting the helmet. Pang! Ray watched the helmet tumble toward the pig, who was still snuffling away on the other side of the pen. Ray saw the hole where the bullet had gone clean through the helmet. He swallowed hard.

  “Dang. That guy’s good,” Gonzalez said.

  “Wait—shhhh,” the sergeant said. He waved them all quiet, and over the sound of the pig grunting, Ray heard a sound he recognized from his hunting days.

  “Bolt action,” Ray whispered.

  Sergeant Meredith nodded, and Ray felt a quick lick of pride, like he’d answered a question right in class.

  “He has to manually chamber a new round every time he fires,” the sergeant said. “That gives us a chance. You think you’d recognize that sound again?” he asked Ray.

  Ray nodded.

  “All right. Gonzalez, Big John, get those BARs ready to go. Ray, next time that sniper shoots, I want you to get over that fence and run to that well on the other side of the road. We’ll lay down cover fire for you. You hide there, and the next time you hear that bolt action, you chuck a grenade at it. Got it?”

  Run across an open road with a sniper out there? Ray’s breath came quick. He felt lightheaded, but he nodded. He wriggled out of his pack, pushed his helmet down on his head again, and gripped his M-1 rifle so hard his knuckles turned white.

  He would do it. He had to do it. This was what he’d signed on for, after all. Why he’d left his home in Nebraska.

  He remembered how his father had argued with him, forbidden him to go.

  “You’ve got a deferment from the government!” his father had shouted. “You don’t have to go, and we still need you on the farm.”

  “I just—I gotta do my part before the war ends,” Ray had told him.

  There hadn’t been a whipping this time. Ray was too old for that. It was hypocritical for his Pa to protest anyway, and they both knew it. Ray’s father had done the same thing when he was Ray’s age—run off to join the Marines to fight in the Great War.

  And they both knew the real reason Ray had wanted to leave home. The long scar on his left arm peeking out from his shirt sleeve was all the reminder Ray needed.

  Pak! A bullet hit the mud with a thwack a half an inch from Big John’s boot.

  “Jumpin’ Jehosephat!” Big John yelled, wiggling his legs up closer to him. But Ray was already leaping over
the fence. His feet hit the ground with a thump and he ran like blue blazes for the protection of the stone well across the road. The well had appeared closer before, but now it looked like it was half a mile away.

  Stay low. Run like hell.

  Behind him, Gonzalez and Big John opened up with their big Browning Automatics to create cover fire for Ray. Chu-chu-chung! Chu-chu-chu-chu-chung! The guns chewed the ferns and palm fronds along the bank into shreds. Ray stumbled but kept his feet, desperately trying to remember how long it had been since the last sniper shot. Three seconds? Four? How long did it take him to chamber a new bullet after he’d taken a shot at a deer?

  Ray made it across the dirt road and threw himself at the base of the round well. The BARs stopped firing. Ray’s chest heaved, and he struggled to catch his breath. No time to rest though. He dropped his rifle and fumbled for a grenade, his hands shaking. He wondered if the sniper had even seen him through all that cover fire.

  Pa-kow! A piece of the well’s stone wall blew up in Ray’s face, and he ducked away. That answered that question. The sniper rifle’s report was much louder now, much closer. Ray popped up, heart in his throat, and strained to listen for the sound of the rifle’s bolt sliding back and forth. He was totally exposed standing there, and Gonzalez and Big John couldn’t fire again to cover him, or he wouldn’t be able to hear the sound of the bolt.

  Ch-chik.

  There! Ray picked a spot in the trees he thought the sound had come from, pulled the pin, and threw his grenade toward the green hillside. He dropped down and grabbed his helmet to his head.

  KA-THOOM! The hillside above him exploded, showering everything with dirt and rocks and plants.

  “Hands in the air! Stay where you are!” Sergeant Meredith yelled.

  Ray grabbed his rifle and peeked out from behind the well. The sniper had tumbled out of the ground cover on the hill and was just getting to his feet. Ray hadn’t hit him, but he’d flushed him from hiding.

  Rifle raised, Ray got to his feet and ran at the Japanese soldier—or was he Okinawan? He wasn’t wearing a uniform and didn’t have any other equipment.

  “Dang, he’s just a kid,” the Old Man said as the others ran up.

  He was a kid, Ray realized. He was cowering and sniffling like he’d gotten in trouble. He couldn’t have been more than twelve years old.

  “Well, there’s your first Jap,” Big John told Ray.

  “I think he’s Okinawan,” said Ray.

  “If he was shooting at us, he’s a Jap,” Big John said.

  “So, do we take him prisoner?” Ray asked. “I’ve got my Japanese phrase book—”

  Sergeant Meredith shook his head. “We can’t take prisoners, kid. We have to keep moving.”

  Ray didn’t understand. “But what about the support services for Okinawans?”

  “That’s for refugees,” the sergeant told him. “He’s an enemy combatant.”

  “You want to do the honors?” Big John asked Ray. “You flushed him out.”

  Ray still didn’t understand what was going on, and Sergeant Meredith shook his head at Big John.

  Big John shrugged, pulled out his pistol, and shot the boy. Ray almost jumped out of his boots, but only Gonzalez flinched with him. The others, the ones who’d been together at Peleliu and beyond, they didn’t bat an eye.

  Big John put his pistol back in its holster and clapped Ray on the shoulder. “Now,” he said, “let’s take Hard-luck’s body back, and get you to cooking up that pig.”

  Hideki’s hands were so sweaty he worried the grenade he held would slip right out of his grasp. He wiped a hand on his jacket and nodded to Katsumasa, who was a few yards to his left. All the boys were hiding behind whatever bushes and tree trunks hadn’t been destroyed by the offshore bombardment. As a group they crept forward, drawing closer to where they had heard someone crashing through the undergrowth.

  Hideki strained to catch every sound, every movement. Yoshio waved for everyone to stop, and then Hideki heard it—the crunch and snap of heavy footfalls on the forest floor. Someone was coming! The footsteps got louder, more urgent, and Hideki heard a man’s breath.

  This is it, he thought. This is my moment of glory. But Hideki didn’t feel glorious. His stomach was tied up in knots and he could barely breathe. He wasn’t even sure he could stand.

  One of the boys jumped out from where he was hiding and yelled “Banzai!” and more of them did the same. Hideki borrowed some of their courage and leaped to his feet, ready to strike the fuse on his grenade and throw it at an American soldier.

  But it wasn’t an American soldier. Huffing along the trail was Norio Kojima, their school principal! The portly man’s uniform was muddy and torn, and he hugged a tall canvas sack to his chest.

  Principal Kojima cried out in surprise as the boys all popped up screaming and brandishing grenades, and he tripped over his own feet and fell to the ground. The sack broke his fall, but something inside it shattered and snapped. Framed pictures spilled out onto the forest floor.

  “No—no!” the principal cried.

  “Principal Kojima?” Hideki said. Luckily, none of the boys had activated their grenades, and now they all hurried to help their principal to his feet.

  “The Emperor—the pictures of the Emperor!” Kojima said. “Some of them have been damaged!”

  Hideki picked up one of the framed photographs that was still intact. It was a picture of Emperor Hirohito. A portrait of the Emperor hung in every room at school. Hideki and the other boys had to bow to the picture and the Japanese flag every time they came or went. Principal Kojima must have collected every one of the portraits and stuffed them into this sack.

  Principal Kojima scrambled to collect the other pictures. “It is my sacred duty to protect the Divine Emperor’s photographs!” he said. “I’m taking these north to the Imperial Photograph Guardian Unit. The Emperor’s spirit must be protected!”

  Hideki had never seen Principal Kojima so frantic, and it scared him a little. He could tell the other boys were frightened too. But Hideki understood the principal’s concern. A person’s spirit, what the Okinawans called “mabui,” was like his soul. It’s what made you who you were. Everybody had a mabui, including Hideki. A mabui was immortal, and transferable. A ring you inherited from your grandmother might have her mabui in it. A watch your father had owned might still carry his mabui. You could even lose your mabui if you weren’t careful. And pictures, whether they were drawings or photographs like these of Emperor Hirohito, they carried part of a person’s mabui in them too. So it was like each of these photos was a little piece of the Emperor’s soul.

  It was the mabui of Hideki’s cowardly ancestor, Shigetomo Kaneshiro, that still cursed every third generation of Hideki’s family. Hideki’s own mabui shared space inside him with the spirit of Shigetomo. As long as Shigetomo’s spirit was still restless, Hideki would never know peace, and could never truly be himself.

  Hideki’s sister had tried to help him with Shigetomo’s mabui in her official role as a yuta. But Kimiko had always had more success with other people. Once, Hideki remembered, he had gone with her on a house call to a family with a young boy who kept getting in trouble at school. That day Kimiko had worn a white bashōfu, a lightweight banana-fiber kimono, that matched the streak in her hair.

  “Shinsei keeps getting into fights!” the boy’s mother had complained. “I have to bring him home at least once a week. His older brother, Ichiro, never got into trouble like this!”

  Shinsei was a scruffy, surly boy of seven with a thin trickle of snot running down his dirty face. Hideki thought he looked like trouble, but Kimiko smiled at the boy and talked to him like an adult.

  “Have you been having bad dreams, Shinsei?” she asked him.

  Shinsei frowned and looked away. In the next room, a baby cried, and Shinsei’s mother got up to see to it.

  “Shinsei?” Kimiko tried again.

  “Yes,” the boy grunted. “A female wolf comes and chases me out of
the house and won’t let me back in.”

  “I think I understand,” Kimiko said.

  “You do?” Shinsei asked.

  “You do?” Hideki asked. He was confused. None of it made any sense to him.

  “The wolf in Shinsei’s dream represents a female ancestor born in the year of the dog,” Kimiko explained. When Shinsei’s mother came back, Kimiko asked her if there was someone matching that description who had been a troublemaker in the past.

  “Yes, my Aunt Toshi!” the mother said. “My mother’s middle sister. She was always running around with boys my grandfather didn’t like. Oh, the fights they would have.”

  Kimiko nodded. “Shinsei has his Great-Aunt Toshi’s mabui on him. She’s still acting out through him. Go once a week to the family tomb where she is buried—just the two of you—and perform the ceremony I teach you.”

  “You got all that from his dream about a wolf?” Hideki asked later as he and Kimiko walked home.

  Kimiko grinned. “Well, not all of it. Being a yuta is about listening to our ancestors, but it’s about paying attention to the living too. Did you hear the cries from the other room? There’s a new baby in the house. And his mother mentioned an older brother, which makes Shinsei the middle child. The oldest brother has all the responsibility, and the baby gets all the mother’s attention. Shinsei doesn’t have a role in the family anymore, so he acts out to get any kind of attention, even if it’s negative attention. He probably doesn’t even know he’s doing it. But now he and his mother will spend time together once a week walking back and forth to the family tomb to perform a ceremony together, and Shinsei will get lots of attention without having to get into trouble.”

  “So … all that about his Great-Aunt Toshi, you just made that up?” Hideki asked.

  Kimiko smacked him on the head. “No! Her mabui really is on him. She was a middle child too, didn’t you hear? She probably went through the same thing, only there was no yuta to send her on long walks to the family tomb with her mother, so she never got over it.” Kimiko’s voice grew quiet. “I hope Shinsei’s trips to the family tomb with his mother will bring both him and his Great-Aunt Toshi peace in the end.”