Harry Turtledove - End of the Beginning

If anyone saluted poorly or in a sloppy way, the officer could land the whole squad in trouble. If Shimizu hadn’t seen him, and the men marched past without saluting… He didn’t care to think about what would have happened then. Aside from the beating he and his men would have got, his company commander probably would have busted him back to private. How could he have lived with the disgrace?

Well, it hadn’t happened. The captain saw the salutes. He must have found them acceptable, for he went on about his business without ordering Shimizu’s men to halt.

“Keep your eyes open,” Shimizu warned. “Later we’ll be going through Hotel Street. There will be plenty of officers there, outside the bars and the fancy brothels. A lot of them won’t care that they’re on leave.

If you don’t spot them, if you don’t salute, they’ll make you sorry. Wakarimasu-ka? ”

“Hai!” the soldiers chorused. It was a rhetorical question; by now they’d had plenty of time to learn to understand the vagaries, the vanity, and the touchy tempers of the officers under whom they served. And since those officers had essentially absolute power over them, mere understanding wasn’t enough. They had to placate and propitiate those officers like any other angry gods.

They got their own back by coming down hard on the people over whom they ruled. Furusawa pointed to a haole man in his twenties. “He didn’t bow, Corporal!”

“No, eh?” Shimizu said. “Well, he’ll be sorry.” He raised his voice to a shout: “You!” He also pointed at the white man.

The fellow froze. He looked as if he wanted to bolt, but he feared the Japanese would do something dreadful to him if he tried. He was absolutely right about that. He also realized what he hadn’t done. He did bow now, and spoke with desperate urgency-in English, since he knew no Japanese.

That wouldn’t save him. Shimizu tramped up to him and barked, “Your papers!” He spoke in Japanese, of course: it was the only language he knew. His tone and his outthrust hand got his meaning across. The local man pulled out his wallet and showed Shimizu his driver’s license. It had his photograph on it.

Shimizu gave him a stony glare even so. The white man reached into the wallet and pulled out a ten-dollar bill. Shimizu made it disappear fast as lightning-it was more than the Army paid him in two months. Despite the bribe, he slapped the man in the face, the way he might have slapped one of his own soldiers who’d done something stupid. The white man gasped in surprise and pain, but after that he took it as well as a soldier might have. Satisfied, Shimizu nodded coldly and went back to his men.

“Come on,” he told them. “Get moving.” Down the street they went. He looked back over his shoulder once. The white man was staring after them, eyes enormous in a cloud-pale face.

Hotel Street was as raucous and lascivious a place as ever. Shimizu wished he were visiting it on leave and not on patrol. Music blared from the open doorways of half a dozen dives. Some of it was Japanese, the rest the syrupy-sweet tunes of the West. Shimizu had heard that Americans found Japanese music peculiar. He knew he thought Western music was strange.

Harried-looking military policemen tried to keep some kind of order. Drunk soldiers and sailors wanted no part of it. Every so often, the military policemen knocked a couple of heads together. Even that accomplished less than it would have anywhere else.

“The Americans are foolish to attack our ships,” Senior Private Furusawa said. “If they dropped bombs on Hotel Street, they could wipe out all our forces.” Everybody in Shimizu’s squad laughed, for it was funny, but the laughter quickly stopped, for it also held too much truth.

“Here! You!” A military policeman pointed at Shimizu. “Come take charge of this man.” He shook a sozzled sailor, who giggled foolishly.

“So sorry, Sergeant- san, but we’re on patrol and we still have a lot of ground to cover. Please excuse me,” Shimizu said. Because he and his men were on duty of their own, the military policeman had no choice but to nod. Shimizu didn’t smile till the fellow couldn’t see him any more. Saying no-being able to say no-to one of the hated military police felt wonderful. “Forward!” he called, and the patrol went on.

OSCAR VAN DER KIRK AND CHARLIE KAAPU SAT IN A WAIKIKI SALOON DRINKING what the bartender alleged to be Primo beer. Hawaii’s native suds had never been a brew to make anybody forget fancy German beer-or, for that matter, even Schlitz. This stuff tasted more like bathwater after the University of Hawaii football team got clean in it.

Charlie had a different opinion. “So,” he asked the man behind the bar, “how sick was the horse when he pissed in your bottles?”

“Funny,” the barkeep said. “Funny like a crutch. You try getting fucking barley these days. For beer brewed from rice, this ain’t half bad.”

“Beer brewed from rice is sake, isn’t it?” Oscar said.

“Sort of. I have some of that, in case any Japanese officers wander in,” the bartender said. By the way he said Japanese officers, he meant Japs. But he wouldn’t say that, not around people he didn’t completely trust. Oscar knew he and Charlie weren’t informers, but the barkeep didn’t. Fiddling with his black bow tie, he went on, “There are some real hops in this, though. It’s doing its best to be beer, honest.”

“That’s not very good,” Charlie said, and then, incongruously, “Give me another one, will you?”

“Me, too,” Oscar said as he emptied his glass. “Primo’s closer to real beer than what they call gin or okolehao is to the real McCoy these days.”

“You got that right, brother.” Charlie Kaapu made a horrible face.

“Yeah, well, you don’t want to know some of the shit that goes into them.” The bartender set up two more beers. “Four bits,” he said. Oscar slid a half-dollar across the bar. The bartender scooped it up.

Oscar raised his glass. “Mud in your eye,” he said to Charlie.

“Same to you,” the half-Hawaiian surf rider replied. They both drank. They both sighed. This Primo wasn’t good, even if it wasn’t so bad as it might have been. Charlie sighed again. “We ought to do something different,” he said.

“Like what?” Oscar asked. “Just getting along is hard enough.”

“That’s the point,” Charlie said. “That’s why we ought to do something different.”

Back when Oscar was at Stanford, his philosophy prof would have called that a non sequitur.

Somehow, he didn’t think Charlie would appreciate philosophy. “What have you got in mind?” he asked.

“We ought to go back to the north shore,” Charlie said. “We haven’t been up there in a hell of a long time.”

Oscar stared at him. “Are you out of your goddamn mind?” he exclaimed. “The last time we did go up there, we damn near got killed.” Just thinking about it brought back gut-wrenching, bladder-squeezing raw terror.

“Yeah, I know.” His hapa -Hawaiian buddy looked vaguely embarrassed. Maybe he was remembering fear, too. But he went on, “That’s another reason to go back. It’s like when you fall off a horse-you get back on again, right?”

“I guess.” Oscar was vague about horses. His father’s construction business had been completely motorized by the time he was born. Dad went on about a competitor who’d thought trucks were only a passing fad, and stuck with horse-drawn wagons. He’d gone broke in short order.

“Sure you do.” If Charlie Kaapu had any doubts, he hid them very well. “Besides, the surf down here is rotten. I want something I can get my teeth into.”