Above the East China Sea: A Novel (22 page)

I joined the other girls and bowed my head, ashamed of Okinawa.

“The lieutenant reminds us that water is not to be wasted on bathing or for any purpose other than drinking. Do you all understand?”

As one the Princess Lily girls shouted out a rousing,
“Hai!”

The lieutenant bowed in response, his long, curved sword sweeping out behind him. In the split second before he stood back up, his gaze locked on someone in the crowd. I followed it and found Hatsuko in the moment that her eyes met his. Hatsuko jerked her glance away from the lieutenant’s, but not before a blush had crimsoned her face. Nakamura gave a barely perceptible nod in her direction and left.

“Group leaders!” Head Nurse Tanaka called out brusquely. Four students stepped forward. Of course Hatsuko was one of them. “Gather up your supplies.” She nodded toward three sopping tangerines already heavily perforated from earlier practice groups, and one rusty old syringe.

I joined the girls who clustered around Hatsuko. My beautiful cousin Mitsue was the first to notice me. She smiled such a wide smile that two dimples dented her cheeks, and she rushed over to hug me. I hadn’t seen her since she’d gotten engaged to a soldier, Masaru, whose name meant Victory, and she seemed even lovelier than she had before. When my sister spotted me she squealed, clapping her hands over her mouth to silence the shriek.

“Little Guppy, you came! I can’t believe that Mother and Father actually allowed you to leave. Aaah, you’re so dusty, and your hair!” My sister plucked a dead leaf from my hair, smoothed the crazy waves down
with her fingers, turned me to face her friends, put her arms around me, rested her chin on the top of my head, and, squeezing hard, whispered to her friends, “Look, everyone, it’s my little sister, Tamiko. My darling Tami-chan. We call her Little Guppy. Doesn’t she look just like a little guppy? A cute little guppy?”

“She does!” a girl with straight, shiny bangs whispered back. “She reminds me of my little sister. Oh, I miss my Kiko-chan so much. Will you be my little sister too?”

The six other girls in Hatsuko’s unit all agreed on the spot that I had to be their little sister as well. Just as Hatsuko had promised, I was not only welcomed but adopted as a mascot. The Japanese were another story. In order to ward off any suspicion that I might be a spy, Hatsuko took off her Princess Lily pin.

“Here,” Hatsuko said, “put this on.”

“Big sister, I can’t. That’s your school pin.”

She brushed aside my protest, pinning the lily on my blouse herself. “You need it more than I do. Everyone knows me. I’m head girl. That’s the head-girl pin. Though the soldiers don’t know us by name or face, they all recognize a head-girl pin. They won’t question you if you’re wearing one.” I glanced down and tried to see what the difference was between her pin and the other girls’, but they all looked identical to me.

Before I could ask what distinguished a head-girl’s pin, Hatsuko interrupted with a question of her own: “So did you see the secret we’ve been working on?”

“The tunnels? They’re astonishing.”

“And there are dozens, hundreds more like them all over the island.”

“Even hospitals,” Sachiko added. “Where we will serve as nurse’s aides, helping patients write letters and cheering them on as they prepare to return to battle. All safe beneath the flag of the Red Cross.”

The other girls nodded, excited by the grand adventure they were all on.

“Girls! Girls!” Head Nurse shouted. “Stop gabbling like a bunch of silly geese! Your turn to have your photographs made will be next. You may take ten minutes, no longer, to return to your room and prepare.”

We rushed to the girls’ room, where Mitsue gave me a uniform she’d outgrown. As the girls smoothed their hair into sleek braids, I bemoaned the sorry state of the short, wavy mop atop my own head.

“I’ll fix it,” Mitsue volunteered. In an instant, she had produced two rubber bands and swept my hair into pigtails that everyone agreed were
chura.
Without a mirror, I trusted that my new hairstyle was truly as cute as they had proclaimed it to be. More than my hair, though, I yearned to view myself in the uniform of a Princess Lily girl. But there wasn’t time to find a mirror large enough before we rushed off to the empty classroom that had been set aside for the photographer’s use. There we stood in line and waited while he opened the heavy metal case containing his equipment. He tacked up a large piece of canvas over one wall for a backdrop, set up a wooden tripod, then mounted a camera with a bellows on it.

The photographer wore a soiled white shirt with a battered tie knotted at his scrawny neck. His most notable feature was large ears with points at the top like a bat’s wings. In spite of his scary ears, he was a jolly soul who made silly jokes as he asked each girl her name and the name of her village. He carefully recorded the information in a notebook, positioned the girl in front of the canvas, stared down into the viewfinder of his camera, held a bulb out, then said, “Oh, you, I know your type. You have too many boyfriends to count, don’t you?” When the girl laughed, he squeezed the bulb and the shutter clicked. No matter how many times they’d heard his silly joke, each girl in turn smiled when the photographer accused her of being a heartbreaker.

The only girl he didn’t tease was Mitsue. In fact, when he looked into the viewfinder and beheld her he was struck dumb. As if not believing what his camera was recording, he glanced back up at his subject. Instead of flapping his hand one way or the other and saying to her what he’d told the rest of us—“A bit more to the right. Now back to the left. Chin down. Hold it. I bet you have too many boyfriends to count, don’t you?”—he stepped over to my cousin and touched her, gently positioning her first one way, then another. He arranged her hands, her arms, pivoted her shoulders. He smoothed imaginary wrinkles from her uniform as if she were a work of art and he the curator. We all stopped laughing and something uneasy passed through us as we witnessed the power of female beauty to enslave the male beholder, a power that the rest of us knew instinctively we would never possess.

After he took so many pictures of Mitsue that the bat-eared photographer had to change the film, it was Hatsuko’s turn, then mine. He
snapped off our individual photos in a glum, automatic manner without any boyfriend teasing, as if Mitsue had made him feel like a heartbroken suitor. When he was finished with our photos, my sister begged him to take one of the two of us together. “Please,” she explained, “she’s my little sister.”

“There are lots of sisters here,” the photographer grumbled, speaking in our native dialect. “I’m supposed to take individual photos for your official records just the way they do them in Japan.”

I put on my best backcountry accent and said, “But this one will be for our sweet little
anmā.
Please, sir, please.” I made my silliest Little Guppy face, popping my eyes out and puffing up my cheeks before I took a chance and added, “I thought big ears were supposed to be the sign of a generous nature.”

The photographer laughed then, seeming relieved that I’d turned his job back into a silly game, and said, “Oh, what the hell, get in there with your sister.” He waved me back into the frame. “In times like these a little silliness is worth a lot.”

I stood in front of my sister and she rested her hand on my shoulder. I knew I looked even more like a guppy than I usually did as I grinned into the photographer’s camera, but I couldn’t help myself from smiling so wide that my cheeks ached, because I had done it: I was with Hatsuko and the Princess Lily girls in Shuri.

TWENTY-ONE

“Oh, we are in-country now, motherfuckers,” Kirby says.

Me, Jacey, Wynn, and DaQuane are following Kernshaw through a wooded ravine on the edge of base housing. The Apes are out in force, patrolling the streets, looking for curfew breakers to bust, so we’re sticking to the overgrown ravine that runs behind the neighborhoods. The jungly undergrowth is slick and has a squishy, tropical smell. It is alive with trip wires of vine and sticky nets of spiderweb. I’m hanging back with Jacey, who’s wearing strappy sandals and having
trouble picking her way over the roots that run through the ravine like veins on the back of a man’s hand. Up ahead the guys are talking about Jake.

“Why’s he gotta be that way?” DaQuane asks. “It’s not like anything would ever happen to him even if we did get caught.”

“Shit, no,” Kirby agrees. “As long as generals like to play golf and his family keeps the course looking like fucking Pimlico, he is untouchable.”

“Pimlico is a horse racing track, turd munch,” Wynn points out.

“Okay, but that other one? Where they wear the green jackets and shit. That’s why the Furusatos are royalty on Kadena. Jeez, they live in base housing, right? Go to base schools? Get to shop at the commissary? You cannot tell me that they are not majorly connected.”

“They have to be,” Wynn agrees. “They’re probably the reason that angry mobs aren’t protesting about so much prime real estate being used so American generals can knock white balls around with a stick.”

“Don’t get me wrong; I love the guy—”

“Except when he goes off on his Oki shit.”

“Except when he goes off on the Oki shit. Precisely.”

Jacey and I hang back, letting the guys drift out of earshot. “Look,” she whispers, and I follow her finger to a dense grove of low-lying vegetation. It sparkles with fireflies. “Wow, I can’t remember the last time I saw fireflies.”

“Me neither. When Codie and I used to go stay with our grandma in Missouri, they were everywhere. Codie loved fireflies. We’d catch them in jars outside Grandma’s house and light up entire rooms with them bright enough to read by.”

As we watch the enchanted circuitry blinking on and off, it takes me a minute to realize that I’ve just spoken Codie’s name out loud. And talked about her in the past tense.

“Luz?”

“Yeah?”

“I’m really sorry about your sister.”

I nod, tamping down the little flare of anger that blazes up anytime anyone says something terminally lame like that, something about being sorry.

Jacey heads up the path, but I remain rooted to the spot. She pauses. “You okay?”

“Yeah, sure.”

She holds a branch out of the way and waits for me. I stoop under; she’s nice. She’s just a nice person who said the wrong thing because there is no right thing to say. There never will be. We rush to catch up to the guys.

The ravine trail ends at the USO parking lot on the edge of junior officer housing. Kirby points to the house nearest to us. The number 2283 is stenciled in black letters on the front. “That’s it.”

The boxy white cinder-block house is indistinguishable from all the other boxy white cinder-block houses around it. Except that the other houses each have a nameplate with the last name and rank of the soldier assigned to the house, and there is no name attached to number 2283.

“Really?” Jacey asks. “That’s it? That’s Murder House? It just looks like your average dumpy base house.”

“What were you expecting?” Kirby snaps. “All kind of haunted-house shit? Bats flying out the windows and a hunchback with a limp answering the door? It’s a freakin’ base house, dude. Jeez.”

“Sorry,” Jacey apologizes.

In the thin drizzle of violet illumination cast by the streetlight half a block away, number 2283 does feel haunted in its own way. It appears smaller, more compact than the other houses. As if those other houses have expanded to hold the lives within them, but this one, isolated at the edge, though exactly the same size, seems smaller, shrunken. Like it was standing off by itself, holding a grudge.

“Is anyone living here?” Jacey asks.

“Not for years,” Kirby answers with a new authority in his voice. “The air force stopped assigning families to it a long time ago.”

DQ bobs his head from side to side, only glancing at the house out of the corner of his eye, the way you don’t look directly at a growling dog. “So it’s all locked up? What? We gonna break a window? Destruction of government property. That is a federal offense. Leavenworth, man.”

Kirby grins and dangles a key on a string hanging from a metal-ringed tag with the number 2283 written on it in black Sharpie.