Days of Infamy (47 page)

“I guess not.” Elsie took another few steps. He realized she had to feel as wary around him as he did around her. “You're lucky that you're able to go out there, especially with so many people hungry.”

“Some luck,” he said bitterly. “If I were really lucky, I'd be in college now. Then I could be working on a degree instead of a line full of hooks. Of course, afterwards I'd probably go out fishing with my old man anyway, because who's gonna hire a Jap with a degree?”

“Was it really that bad?” Elsie was white. She hadn't had to worry about it. She hadn't even had to know the problem was there.

“It wasn't good—that's for darn sure,” Kenzo answered. “Lots more Japanese with good educations than places for them to work. You put somebody with a university degree in a shoe store or a grocery or out on a sampan and he starts wondering why the heck he bothered. You let him watch somebody with green eyes and freckles get the office job he's better qualified for and he won't be real happy about it.”

Quietly, Elsie said, “It's a wonder you aren't happier about how things are now.”

“I'm an American,” Kenzo said with a shrug. “That's what everybody told me, even before I started going to school. People told me that, and I believed it. Heck, I still believe it. I believe it more than the Big Five do, I bet.” The people who ran the Big Five—the firms of Alexander and Baldwin, American Factors, C. Brewer and Company, Castle and Cooke, and the Theo. H. Davies Company—pretty much ran Hawaii, or they had till the war, anyhow. They ran the banks, they ran the plantations, they did the hiring, and they did the firing. And the higher in their ranks you looked, the whiter they got.

Another proof of who'd been running things here for the past fifty years was the neighborhood they were walking through as they neared Elsie's house. These large homes—mostly of white clapboard with shingle roofs—
on even larger lots were nothing like the crowded shacks and tenements west of Nuuanu Avenue, the part of town where Kenzo had grown up. They didn't shout about money; they weren't so rude or vulgar. But they admitted it was there, even the ones that had been wrecked or damaged in the fighting. And the people who lived in them were white.

Somebody had neatly mowed the Sundbergs' front lawn. Kenzo wondered whether Elsie's father pushed the lawnmower every Sunday morning or they had a gardener. Before the war, he would have bet on a gardener. Now? He admitted to himself that he wasn't sure.

The front door opened before he and Elsie got to it. Mrs. Sundberg looked a lot like Elsie. Like her daughter, she also looked alarmed for a moment—what was this Jap doing here? Then, even without Elsie telling her, she realized which Jap he was likely to be, and her face cleared. “Mr. Takahashi, isn't it?” she said politely.

“That's right, Mrs. Sundberg.” Kenzo was polite, too.

“Thank you for the fish you gave us. It was very generous of you,” she said. He nodded; he'd expected something like that. But she went on in a way he hadn't expected: “It's good to see you here. Now we can give you something, too.”

“Huh?” he said, which was not the most brilliant thing that could have come out of his mouth, but she'd caught him by surprise.

She smiled a slightly superior smile—a very
haole
smile. Elsie, who hadn't got that trick down pat yet, giggled instead and then said, “Come on in, Ken.”

Mrs. Sundberg's smile slipped a little, but only a little, and she put it back fast. “Yes, do,” she said. “We have lemonade, if you'd like some. Elsie, you get it for him, and I'll go out back and do the honors.”

Inside, the house was pure New England: overstuffed furniture with nubbly upholstery, lots of turned wood stained a color close to dark cherry, and more pictures on the wall and knickknacks on tables and shelves than you could shake a stick at. “Thanks,” Kenzo said when Elsie did bring him some lemonade. That
didn't
surprise him. Lots of people had lemon trees, you couldn't do much with lemons but squeeze them, and Hawaii did still have plenty of sugar—if not much else. She carried a glass for herself, too. He sipped. It was good.

Mrs. Sundberg came back inside with half a dozen alligator pears, the rough skin on some dark green, on others almost black. “Here you are,” she said proudly.

“Thank you very much!” Kenzo meant it. Alligator pears—some people called them avocados—were a lot harder to come by than lemons. He couldn't remember the last time he'd had any.

“You're welcome,” she said. “The darker ones are ripe now; the others will be in a few days. Feel them. When they start to get soft, they'll be ready to eat.”

“Okay. That's great. Thanks again.” Kenzo was glad she'd given him a number he could share evenly with his brother and his father. Had she done it on purpose? Probably; she wouldn't miss a trick like that. He'd told Elsie what his living arrangements were, and that his mother hadn't made it. If Elsie'd mentioned it even once, Mrs. Sundberg wasn't the sort who'd forget.

He thought she would hover over him and her daughter, but she didn't. She went off into the back of the house somewhere. Somehow, that left him more on his best behavior than if she had hovered. He and Elsie talked about people from high school while they drank their lemonade.

When he finished his, he said, “I better go.”

Elsie didn't say no. She did say, “Thanks for walking me home. That was nice of you,” which was almost as good.

“It's okay. It was good to see you.” That was about a tenth of what Kenzo meant. Gathering his courage, he tried again: “Could we maybe, uh, see each other some more one of these times?”

He'd already seen she wasn't as good as her mother at masking what she thought. He didn't need to be a private eye or somebody like that to read what she was thinking. She'd known him a long time, but he was Japanese. He was Japanese, but she'd known him a long time—not quite the same as the other. Being Japanese meant something different now from what it had before December 7. Whatever it meant, he wasn't a collaborator, or no more than you had to be to survive when the place where you lived was occupied. And so. . .

“Yes, we can do that,” she said.

“Swell!” He grinned like a fool. “So long.” He didn't think his feet touched the ground at all as he went down the walk and out to the street.

T
HE TRAIN CHUGGED
to a stop. “Pensacola!” the conductor shouted. “All out for Pensacola!”

Joe Crosetti leaped up from his seat. He grabbed his duffel bag from the
overhead rack and slung it over his shoulder. All his worldly goods in a canvas sack—he felt proud, not impoverished. And he was so excited, he could hardly stand still. “Pensacola Naval Air Station!” he said. “Wings! Wings at last!”

Orson Sharp shouldered his duffel, too. “Keep your shirt on, Joe,” he said mildly. “They're not going to let us fly this afternoon.”

“Yeah, but soon,” Joe said. “We
can
fly here. We're
gonna
fly here. It's not like Chapel Hill, where we couldn't.”

“Okay,” his roommate said. Joe had the feeling he was hiding a laugh, and wondered if he ought to get mad himself. But then, as the swarm of cadets surged toward the door, he forgot all about it.

The last time he'd got off a train, it was in the middle of a North Carolina winter. He liked spring in Florida a hell of a lot better. He got a glimpse of the Gulf of Mexico. Just that glimpse told him he didn't know as much about the ocean as he thought he did. The Pacific off San Francisco could be green. It could be gray. It could even be greenish blue or grayish blue. He'd never seen it, never imagined it, a blue between turquoise and sapphire, a blue that was really
blue
. The color made you want to go swimming in it. People went swimming off of San Francisco, too, but they came out of the water with their teeth chattering when they did.

Beside him, Orson Sharp said, “I've never seen the ocean before.”

That made Joe blink. To him, this was a variation on a theme. To the kid from Utah, it was a whole new song. “You wanted to be a Navy flier before you even knew what all that wet stuff was like?” Joe said.

Sharp didn't get angry or embarrassed. “I figured I'd find out what I needed to know.” He was hard to faze.

“Buses! Buses to the Air Station this way!” somebody shouted. Cadets started heading
this way
. In the middle of the crowd and short, Joe didn't even see which way the shouter pointed. He just went along, one more sheep in the flock. If everybody else was wrong, he'd be wrong, too, but he'd have a lot of company. They couldn't land on him too hard unless he goofed all by his lonesome.

The buses were where they were supposed to be. A placard in front of the first one said,
TO PENSACOLA NAVAL AIR STATION
. This time, the flock had done it right. Cadets lined up to get aboard. The Navy was even bigger on lining up than grade school had been.

Joe got a little look at Pensacola as the bus rolled south and west toward the Naval Air Station. A lot of the streets had Spanish names. He remembered from an American history course that Florida had belonged to Spain once upon a time, the same as California had. He shook his head in wonder. He'd never expected that to matter to him—when would he get to Florida? But here he was, by God.

Oaks and palms and magnolias all grew here. The air was mild and moist, although this extreme northwestern part of Florida wasn't a place winter forgot altogether, the way, say, Miami was. Frame and brick buildings, some with big wrought-iron balconies on the upper stories, lined the streets.

“Reminds me a little of New Orleans,” said somebody behind Joe. The comparison would have meant more to him if he'd ever been to New Orleans.

Whites and Negroes walked along the sidewalks and went in and out of shops and homes. They seemed not far from equal in numbers. As it had been in North Carolina, that was plenty to tell Joe he was a long way from home. Colored people in San Francisco were few and far between.

Because of the name, he'd figured the Naval Air Station would lie right next to the town. But it didn't; it was half a dozen miles away. On the way there, Joe's bus passed a massive fort of brickwork and granite. “This here is Fort Barrancas,” the driver said, playing tour guide. “The Confederates held it for a while during the War Between the States, but the Federals ran 'em out.”

Joe had heard people talk about the
War Between the States
in North Carolina, too. In San Francisco, it had always been just the Civil War. Cadets from the South seemed a lot more . . . serious about it than those from other parts of the country. Of course, their side had lost, which doubtless made a difference.

“Over there across the channel on Santa Rosa Island is Fort Pickens,” the driver went on. “It could've touched off the war if Fort Sumter didn't. The Confederates never did take it, even though the fellow who attacked it was the same man who'd built it before the war. They kept Geronimo the Apache there for a while after they caught him, too.”

Leaning out past Orson Sharp, Joe got a glimpse of Fort Pickens. It had five sides, with a bastion at each corner. Even now, it looked like a tough nut to crack. He imagined gunfire sweeping the sand of Santa Rosa Island and shivered a little. No, trying to take a place like that wouldn't have been any fun at all.

And then he forgot all about the Civil War or the War Between the States or whatever you were supposed to call it. Along with the gulls and pelicans fluttering over Fort Pickens, he spotted an airplane painted bright yellow: a trainer. The buzz that filled the bus said he wasn't the only one who'd seen it, either. Excitement blazed through him. Before long,
he'd
go up in one of those slow, ungainly machines—except it seemed as swift and sleek as a Wildcat to him.

Pensacola Naval Air Station itself was a study in contrasts. The old buildings were
old
: brickwork that looked as if it dated from somewhere close to the Civil War. And the new ones were
new
: some of the plywood that had gone into hangars and administrative buildings hadn't been painted yet, and hadn't started weathering yet, either. And out beyond the buildings sprouted a forest of tents.

The driver might have been reading Joe's mind. “You gentlemen will be staying in those for a while, I'm afraid,” he said. “We're putting up real housing as fast as we can, but there's a lot going on, and we've had to get big in just a bit of a hurry, you know.”

That got laughs all through the bus. A couple of years earlier, nobody'd wanted to hear about national defense, much less talk about it. Now nobody wanted to pay attention to anything else. But making up for lost time was no easier, no more possible, than it ever was.

Brakes groaning, the bus stopped. The cadets shouldered their duffels again. As they descended, a lieutenant commander came out of the closest old brick building and greeted them with, “Welcome to Pensacola Naval Air Station, gentlemen. You will have no mothers here. We assume you're old enough to take care of yourselves till you show us otherwise—at which point we're liable to throw you out on your ear. Now if you'll line up for processing . . .”