Bomb (9780547537641) (3 page)

Soon there was a harsh sound of engines, and coming toward the island were four small, dark shapes separated from each other by several hundred feet. For a moment, he thought they might be Japanese boats. More soldiers to reinforce the men at the weather station. More trouble. More cruelty. More threats.

Jonjen, also straining his eyes to pierce the darkness, said anxiously, "Oh, I hope they're Americans. I hope. I hope..."

His words were spoken as prayer. "Hope" was often said on Bikini. The people
hoped
it would rain;
hoped
the trees would bear much fruit;
hoped
the tuna would school;
hoped
much copra would be made.

As the boats came nearer, Chief Juda shouted, "All women and children to the barrier beach!"

Sorry's mother, grandmother, sister, and Tara started running with the others toward the windward side of the island, across the shallow ravine, where there was thick undergrowth, berries, and edible fruit. But Sorry stood by Jonjen, looking at the white bow curls sprinkled with phosphorus. The boats were moving relentlessly toward the beach, their engines hammering, exhaust rising like silver steam. Sorry suddenly had trouble breathing.

Finally, three landing craft pushed up on the shore, dropping their flat bows. The fourth seemed to have gotten hung up on a coral head about a hundred yards from the beach and was motionless. The engine on that one was roaring, trying to break the boat free. Some of the coral heads in the lagoon were larger than the village dwellings.

Then there were distinct voices. Sorry knew they didn't belong to Japanese soldiers. His fear went away like a school of rabbitfish chased by slashing bonitos. In its place, he felt great relief.

The men who had been in the boats, dim figures bulky with equipment, began to move quickly and almost silently into the palms.

They disappeared into the dark groves, heading toward the weather station. Soon, explosions rang out, and Sorry bolted the opposite way, joining his grandfather and the other fleeing village men. It was not their battle. The Japanese and the Americans had been killing each other for more than two years.

Then the noise stopped and aside from the new voices, it became quiet. The voices were calm, untroubled by what had just happened. No shouting, no harsh words.

Jonjen said, "I think it's safe now."

Though the sun had yet to rise, yellow-gray daylight was spreading quickly, and Sorry returned with the others to the center of the village, near the
monjar,
the church, and the council-school structure. There were several hundred U.S. marines there in full combat gear, talking and smoking. The "battle" of Bikini was already over.

Chief Juda, who had taken time to tug on a shirt and trousers, though his callused feet were bare, said, "Welcome," to the tall marine who seemed to be in charge. Juda could speak two words of English,
welcome
and
good-bye.

Everyone laughed when the marine replied, "
Yokwe-yuk.
"

In Marshallese,
yokwe-yuk
meant
hello
and
farewell
and
love to you.

The tall marine, taller by three hands than any Bikinian, wore an olive-colored helmet, and Sorry saw a pistol at his hip. But his eyes were blue and friendly. He smiled, shook hands with Juda, and spoke to his
riukok,
his interpreter, a man from another Marshall atoll, who wore white man's clothing, white man's sunglasses, and a white man's wristwatch.

Addressing the gathered people, the
riukok
said, "Your troubles are over. Rather than be captured, the Japanese have killed themselves. They were hiding in a bunker."

The plundering and raping were over. The people no longer needed to fear the men in the wooden house. Lokileni and the other women could breathe easier.

The officer spoke again and the interpreter said, "We'll bury the enemy for you and give you all their food supplies and some of their equipment."

"Thank you, thank you," said Juda in Marshallese.

Sorry had heard only what Tara had said about Americans but was immediately impressed with their kindness and generosity. They shared. They were not at all like the Japanese. At least this tall marine wasn't. He again shook hands with Juda when the American flag was raised.

Sorry's mother told Lokileni to run to their house for a seashell necklace, an
alu.

When Lokileni returned, her mother placed the
alu
around the marine's neck and chanted in Marshallese:

 

This
alu
I bring and place upon you
As a reminder of us
On this joyous occasion.

 

After hearing the translation the tall marine said solemnly, "I accept on behalf of all my men."

Ruta Rinamu smiled. She had long black hair and a round face and large dark eyes that usually sparkled like the white water of the barrier reef when sun was shining on it. Lokileni had her eyes.

Soon, holes were dug for the enemy soldiers and they were buried nude near the barrier reef, dumped in without regret or ceremony.

After the burial, Sorry joined the rest of the islanders, who stood lined up while navy doctors checked them for health. There was little sickness on Bikini. The diet of fish, coconuts, and taro was a healthy one.

At sundown, Sorry was on the shadowy beach with everyone else, saying, "
Kommol, kommol"—Thank you,
and
All good things to you
—as the Americans returned to their boats.

Then everyone went to the church to thank God for deliverance. Juda lit his lantern, they sang songs, and Jonjen, who always looked distinguished in his white waiter's jacket—a gift of long ago—read Psalm 147 from the Marshallese Bible: "Praise the Lord! For it is good to sing praises to our God..."

Then they took dried-palm-frond torches and—singing again, this time "Amazing Grace," Sorryy's favorite hymn—went toward the weather station to see what was there. It was a night Sorry would never forget—thirty or forty torches, blazing red, crackling, flowing toward the barracks against the black, calm night, the voices carrying out over the splash of low surf.

The women who had cleaned the wooden building, including his mother and Yolo, already knew what was there—different things from Japan. Tools and food and kimonos and sandals and books and rice bowls and chopsticks and beer. The marines had taken the guns.

Chief Juda said he would divide everything equally among the eleven families when it was daylight.

Sorry saw a thick Japanese magazine with many photographs in it and decided to ask Juda for that gift in the morning.

Several hours later, the American ships sailed off into the night and the islanders began a
kemen,
a celebration.

***

They were richer by eighty big bags of rice and hundreds of tins of fish and red meat and cans of vegetables that no one had ever eaten or even seen before, and life on Bikini would slowly return to normal, Jonjen predicted.

In the morning, Sorry claimed the magazine.

 

In 1939, world-famous physicist Albert Einstein wrote to U.S. President Franklin O. Roosevelt warning him that Germany had the capability of producing a "horrible military weapon," an atomic bomb.

Sorry took his magazine and crossed the ravine to the barrier beach to sit in the shade of some bushes that had thick, waxy leaves. Plants out there had to be tough to withstand the salt spray carried by wind toward the village. He'd often go there alone to think about things and wonder what was beyond the horizon. Sometimes he'd find a mound of bright shells and blossoms, an offering made by Grandmother Yolo to the old gods. It was a lonely place.

Among the trees that grew on the barrier-reef side of the island was the
tournefortia,
its brown, tangled, bare branches looking like long fingers. Grandmother Yolo said it talked at night; she recently heard it say something terrible was going to happen to them. Yolo didn't speak anymore unless the matter was of grave concern.

Sorry was amazed by the pictures in the large magazine. There were buildings ten times as tall as their palm trees. There were ships that seemed to be half as long as the island; there were machines that ran on tracks. Everyone wore clothes. There were many other things that he'd heard about but had never seen. He'd often wondered about that other world, the
ailīnkan,
and what it was really like. Now, at last, he was seeing it, and he wanted to go there.

He sat under the wax-leaved bushes, near a moist taro pit, for three hours that morning, turning the pages back and forth, the ocean slamming nearby. Then he walked home, thinking that he'd ask Lokileni to make a pocket out of pandanus to store the magazine.

Making mats was woman's work. Men were not allowed to do it. In the old days, women were not allowed to fish from the canoes. From the shore, yes; the canoes, no. There were strict laws. Even now, only men could cook over open fires. Men were not allowed to bake in the
um,
the pear-shaped oven made of piled pieces of coral rock.

Usually, everyone slept at midday, when
al,
the equatorial sun, was hottest. Even the dogs and pigs and chickens slept. The only sound was the flutter of palm fronds, wind being almost constant from December to April. Usually, Sorry slept, too. This day he couldn't. He stayed on his mat and pored over the magazine, looking for two or three minutes at each picture, then looking again. He was hungry for knowledge of the other world.

***

In the afternoon he went about his two main chores, the first of which, gathering green coconuts, he shared with Lokileni. His toes gripped the narrow notches on the palm trunk. As a climber she was as good as he was, but she didn't have the strength to twist off more than two or three.

From the ground, she called up, "Do you see any fish?"

He'd forgotten to look. Everyone who went aloft for coconuts spent a few minutes searching the lagoon for schools of fish that might be moving out there. Frothing water was the sign. The conch would blow. Then canoes would be quickly launched to skim out and drop the nets.

"Can't see any," he yelled back, twisting off a fat coconut.

He remembered the day he'd climbed his first palm, when he was five; how proud his father had been. Water from thirty coconuts was what each family needed daily during the drought season. Rain came only in the summer and the villagers trapped it as best they could, storing it in hollowed tree trunks and large tins, and now in the Japanese cisterns as well.

Without the coconut they could not survive. There was little or no fresh water on the northern low atolls. After the pint of coconut water was drained, the nuts were split and the immature meat was fed to the pigs, dogs, and chickens. Food was never wasted. For centuries they had lived off what the island and the sea gave them.

But it was always the coconut that was the true staff of life. The palm bark, scraped to a powder, would stop open wounds from bleeding. The root, mashed to a pulp, would stop a toothache. In his prayers, Grandfather Jonjen often talked about the amazing coconut.

The only other usable tree was the
bop,
the strange pandanus, which Jonjen said was one of the oldest plants on earth. The female pandanus fruit looked like a pineapple. Jelly from it could be dried and used for food on long ocean voyages. In ancient times even sails were made of pandanus. The hard surface of the long, dry, ribbonlike leaves made perfect roofs and matting. Sorry often chewed the inner end of the pandanus fruit, the orange-colored starchy pulp. The pollen from male flowers, mixed in coconut oil, made a love potion.

And Grandfather Jonjen also remembered the
bop
in his prayers, asking for the tree's good health.

***

As soon as they'd piled the coconuts near the cookhouse, Sorry picked out a spear from his father's collection and returned to the barrier reef. He could have walked along the lagoon shore, but the fish there were usually smaller and harder to jab. And he wanted to get back to the magazine. The ocean side provided easier targets, though it was dangerous when the rollers were high—gathering far out, crashing on the lip of the solid reef, sending up salt spray, flooding white foam in, then sucking it out. Some days the sea warned with deafening noise, telling the islanders not to enter it. Other days, it smiled and welcomed visitors.

The sea had been both his friend and his enemy from the time he could just crawl over the sand. Elders always explained to children about the sea, said to watch it and listen to it, hear it speak of love and speak of danger.

Sorry believed his father had died somewhere along the barrier reef. Badina had not been in a canoe that day, fishing in the lagoon. He'd taken a spear and headed for the reef. That much was known. Sorry believed a shark had gotten him, probably a vicious tiger, while it swam in the inshore waters looking for a finned target. His body was never found. Sorry was always very careful when he speared in the reef waters.

This day the waves were moderate, and he went beneath where they were breaking, swam under them, and came up in clear water, with blue coral heads and waving sea grass beneath him. Rainbows of fish were down there, going in and out of the coral valleys, caverns, and passages. There were wrasse and grouper and blacktail snappers and the usual smaller schools of pink and yellow and green. He saw a moray eel ducking into a crevice, there to await a meal.

He was wearing a pair of homemade goggles, eyepieces he'd carved from hardwood with glass lenses from a washed-up bottle, broken and shaped by rubbing on coral. Diving, he could keep his eyes open. The goggles were attached to his head by
sennit,
palm twine. It was made by rolling coconut fiber between the hand and thigh, forming a thread an eighth of an inch thick.
Sennit
was strong enough to hold a sixty-pound tuna. By old law, women could not roll
sennit.
He'd rolled yards of it.