Connie Willis - Passage

“Battleship!” he snorted. “Aircraft carrier. Best damn one in the Pacific. Sank four carriers at the Battle of Midway before a Jap sub got her. Torpedo. Got a destroyer that was standing in the way, too. The Hammann. Went down just like that. Dead before she even knew it. Two minutes. All hands.”

She still couldn’t find his age. Allergies to medications. Health history. He’d marked “no” to everything from high blood pressure to diabetes, and he looked spry and alert, but if he was eighty—

“…took the Yorktown a lot longer to sink,” he was saying. “Two whole days. Terrible thing to watch.”

Work history, references, person to contact in case of emergency, but no birthdate. By design?

“…the order to abandon ship, and the sailors all took off their shoes and lined them up on the deck. Hundreds and hundreds of pairs of shoes—”

“Mr. Wojakowski, I can’t find—”

“Ed,” he corrected, and then, as if he knew what she was going to ask next, “I joined the navy when I was thirteen. Lied about my age. Told ’em the hospital where they had my birth certificate had burned down. Not that they were checking things like that right after Pearl.” He looked challengingly at her. “You’re way too young to know what Pearl Harbor is, I s’pose.”

“The Japanese surprise attack on Pearl Harbor?”

“Surprise? Thunderbolt, is more like it. The U.S. of A. just sitting there, mindin’ her own business, and blam! No declaration of war, no warning, no nothin’. I’ll never forget it. It was a Sunday, and I was reading the funny papers. ‘The Katzenjammer Kids,’ I can still see it. I look up, and in comes the lady from two doors down, all out of breath, and says, ‘The Japs just bombed Pearl Harbor!’ Well, none of us even knew where Pearl Harbor was, except my kid sister. She’d seen it in a newsreel at the movies the night before. Desperadoes, that’s what was playing. Randolph Scott. And the very next day, I went downtown to the navy recruiting center and signed up.”

He paused momentarily for breath, and Joanna said quickly, “Mr.—Ed, what made you volunteer for the project? How did you find out about it?”

“Saw a notice in the recreation center at Aspen Gardens. That’s where I live. And then when I came in and talked to the doc, I thought it sounded interesting.”

“Had you ever been involved in a research study here at the hospital before?”

“Nope. They put up notices all the time. Most of them you have to have some special thing wrong with you—hernias or can’t see good or something, and I didn’t, so I couldn’t be in ’em.”

“You said the project sounded interesting,” Joanna said. “Can you be more specific? Were you interested in near-death experiences?”

“I’d seen shows about ’em on TV.”

“And that was why you wanted to participate in the project?”

He shook his head. “I had more than enough near-death experiences in the war.” He winked. “Tunnels and lights, let me tell you, they’re nothing compared to seeing a Zero coming at you, and the machine gun you’re supposed to be firing jams. Those damned 1.1 millimeters, they were always sticking, and you had to have a gunner’s mate crawl underneath ’em with a hammer and unjam ’em. I remember one time Straight Holecek, we called him Straight ’cause he was always drawing to inside straights, well, anyway, he—”

No wonder Richard had been reluctant to have her question Mr. Wojakowski with Amelia coming in a few minutes. He’d moved around to stand behind Mr. Wojakowski. She glanced up at him, and he grinned at her.

“…and just then a Zero dived straight at us, and Straight gives a yelp and drops his hammer right on my foot, and—”

“So if it wasn’t NDEs you were interested in, what was it about the project that interested you?” Joanna asked.

“I told you I served on the Yorktown,” he said, “and let me tell you, she was a great ship. Brand-new and bright as a button, and real bunks to sleep in. She even had a soda fountain. You could go in there and order a chocolate malted or a cherry phosphate, just like the drugstore back home.” He smiled reminiscently. “Well, after we hit Rabaul, they put Old Yorky, that’s what we called her, on patrol duty down in the Coral Sea, and for six weeks we just sat there, playing acey-deucey and bettin’ on whose toenails’d grow the fastest.”

Joanna wondered what this had to do with why he had volunteered. She had a sneaking suspicion there was no connection at all, that he simply used any opening anybody gave him to talk about the war, and if she didn’t stop him, he’d go right on through the Battle of Midway.

“Mr. Wojakowski,” she said. “You were going to tell me why you volunteered for this project.”

“I am,” he said. “Well, so anyway, we’re sitting there twiddling our thumbs, and by the end of a week we were bored as hell and couldn’t wait for the Japs to dive-bomb us. At least it’d be something to do. Speaking of dive-bombing, did I ever tell you about what Jo-Jo Powers did at Coral Sea? The first time out his squadron doesn’t hit anything, all their torpedoes miss, and so he’s getting ready for his second run, and he says, ‘I’m going to hit that flight deck if I have to lay my bomb on it myself,’ and—”

“Mr. Wojakowski,” Joanna said firmly. “Your reason for volunteering.”

“You ever been over to Aspen Gardens?”

She shook her head.

“You’re lucky. It’s just like being on patrol duty in the Coral Sea, only without the acey-deucey. So I thought I’d come on over and do something interesting.”

Which was an excellent reason. “Have you ever had a near-death experience yourself, Mr. Wojakowski?”

“Not till the doc put me in that doughnut thing all hooked up like Frankenstein. I’d always thought that tunnel and light and seeing Jesus stuff was all a bunch of hooey, but, sure enough, there I was in a tunnel. No Jesus, though. I still say that’s a bunch of hooey. I saw too much stuff in the war to put much stock in religion. One time, at Coral Sea—”

She let him ramble on, satisfied that he wasn’t one of Mr. Mandrake’s spies. It was clear the real reason he’d volunteered was to have somebody new to tell his war stories to. And if Mr. Mandrake tries to pump him, it’ll serve him right, she thought, smiling to herself. He’ll get the whole history of the war in the Pacific. And if Amelia didn’t get here soon, she would, too. She glanced at the clock. It was nearly two. Where was she?

Joanna’s pager beeped. “Excuse me,” Joanna said and made a point of pulling it out of her pocket and looking at it. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ve got a call I’ve got to take.”

“Sure, Doc,” he said, looking disappointed. “Those are great little gizmos. Wish we’d had ’em back in WWII. It sure woulda helped the time we—”

“We’ll call you as soon as we’ve finished setting up the schedule,” Joanna said, escorting him firmly across the lab to the door with him still talking. She opened the door. “We should know in a day or two.”

“Anytime’s fine. I got all the time in the world,” he said, and Joanna felt suddenly remorseful.

“Ed,” she said, “you never finished telling me about the dive-bomber, the one who said he’d hit the flight deck if he had to lay the bomb on there himself. What happened to him?”

“You mean Jo-Jo?” he asked. “Well, I’ll tell ya. He said he’d sink that carrier if it was the last thing he ever did, and he did it, too. It was a sight to see, him coming in straight at the Shokaku, his tail on fire, Zeroes all around him. But he did just what he said he was gonna do, laid that bomb right on her flight deck, even though he couldn’ta been more than two hundred feet above that deck when he dropped it, and then, wham! his bomber crashed into the ocean.”