Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Three or four more men keeled over waiting in the chow line once the commandant finally got done blathering. All but one came around when the men in line chafed their wrists and slapped their faces. That one, though, wouldn’t get up again till the Last Trump blew. He looked absurdly peaceful, lying there on the ground. Nothing bothered him any more. Fletch wished he could say the same.

When he did get fed, it was the same inadequate ration of rice and greens the cooks had been dishing out all along. It seemed like a six-course dinner at the Royal Hawaiian. Having anything in his stomach felt almost unnatural. And then, after he’d all but inhaled it, he realized he was just about as hungry as he had been before he got it.

It was better and more filling than a seared gecko. That he was reduced to such comparisons told him more plainly than anything else how degraded he’d become since the surrender. And what did he have to look forward to? Slave labor on starvation rations. He wondered how Clancy and Dave had done since they’d bailed out instead of giving up. One thing seemed obvious: it couldn’t have been a whole hell of a lot worse.

Of course, the Japs might have caught them and killed them, too. From where Fletch sat now, that didn’t look a whole hell of a lot worse, either.

KENZO TAKAHASHI SPLASHED Vitalis on his hands and then ran them through his freshly washed hair. The spicy smell of the hair tonic took him back to the days before the war. The bottle had cost him two nice aku. Once he’d rubbed in the lotion, he combed vigorously.

His brother clucked, watching him spruce up. “You sure this is a good idea, Ken?” Hiroshi asked dubiously.

“Not you, too, Hank!” Kenzo exclaimed. He looked down at himself. He wished he had something fancier than dungarees and a work shirt to wear. At least they were clean. Thanks to a Chinaman whose laundry had survived the fighting, he wouldn’t have the stink of stale fish fighting the Vitalis.

Hiroshi seemed embarrassed, but he was also stubborn. “Yeah, me, too. Taking out a haole girl right now isn’t the smartest thing you ever did.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ!” Kenzo stuck the comb in his hip pocket and threw his hands in the air. “I’m not going to marry her. I’m not going to molest her, either.” He had the small satisfaction of watching his brother turn red as he went on, “All I’m going to do is take her to a movie, so what are you jumping up and down for?”

“You can say that to me. I don’t have any trouble with it,” Hiroshi persisted. “What if you have to say it in Japanese to a bunch of soldiers? You’re asking for trouble, is what you’re doing.”

“Oh, yeah?” Kenzo said. “I’ll tell ’em my dad’s in tight with the Japanese consul. They’ll leave me alone so fast, it’ll make your head swim.”

The scary thing was, he was probably right. Connections never hurt anybody. That had always been true, and it seemed all the more so now. Kenzo wished his father had nothing to do with Consul Kita and the rest of the Japanese at the consulate. The more often Dad went over there and talked with those people, the more self-important he seemed to get. He just wouldn’t see they were using him as a collaborator. The idea of using his trips over there against the occupiers struck Kenzo as delicious. Turnabout is fair play. Who’d said that? He couldn’t remember. His English teachers would have frowned. At least he remembered the phrase. That was what really mattered, wasn’t it?

Hiroshi said, “The haoles won’t like it, either.”

“Hey, butt out, okay?” Kenzo’s temper started fraying. “Let me worry about it. It’s my business, not yours.”

“You’re as pigheaded as Dad is.”

That probably-no, certainly-held more truth than Kenzo wished it did. He could either fight with Hiroshi or go get Elsie Sundberg. He chose the latter without hesitation, and without a backwards glance. Just getting out of the tent, getting out of the refugee camp, seemed wonderful. Sunday afternoon felt almost as good as it would have before the war.

Try as he would, though, he couldn’t pretend December 7 and its aftermath hadn’t happened. Too much reminded him of the changes Honolulu and all of Hawaii had seen. The ruins left from the fighting, oddly, often seemed the least of those changes. The gangs of scrawny POWs clearing rubble with picks and shovels under the guns of Japanese soldiers were much more alien to what Kenzo was used to than the rubble itself. Seeing all those hungry haoles made him feel guilty for being well fed.

Before Honolulu changed hands, it had had as much traffic as any other American city of about 200,000 people. Now moving cars and buses had disappeared from the streets, though many were parked at the curb, more often than not sitting on one or more flat tires. Gasoline and diesel fuel for civilian use had simply dried up. If the Japanese couldn’t spare fuel for fishing sampans-and they couldn’t-they couldn’t spare it for anything.

Shank’s mare, bicycles, a few horse-drawn carriages exhumed from God only knew where, rickshaws, and pedicabs did their best to take up the slack. Kenzo hated the idea of one man hauling another-by which he proved how American he was. Some of the haulers were haoles, which also would have been unimaginable before December 7. The smug look on a Japanese officer’s face as a big blond man pulled him along Vineyard Boulevard stuck in Kenzo’s memory forever.

The Stars and Stripes was gone. Hawaii’s flag still flew here and there, and looked much like that of the USA at a distance, but Old Glory was as extinct as moving motorcars. The Rising Sun had replaced it. Japan’s flag flew over post offices and other public buildings, and also over or in front of houses and businesses owned by people who wanted to get in good with the new occupiers. Not everyone who flew the Rising Sun was Japanese-not even close. Plenty of people of all bloods judged the Japanese Empire was here to stay.

Also gone, or nearly so, were the pigeons and the once even more numerous zebra doves. Kenzo knew what had happened to them. Lots of people were hungry these days, and zebra doves weren’t hard to catch. The foolish little birds did everything but carry EAT ME! signs. Mynahs, by contrast, persisted. They were less appetizing than pigeons and doves, and also had the brains to fly away when people started sneaking up on them.

Kenzo saw plenty of soldiers and sailors heading down toward the red-light district centered on Hotel Street. The uniforms and the faces had changed. The look of greedy expectation on those faces hadn’t.

When Kenzo got farther east, into the haole part of town, the absence of moving motorcars was the main thing that told him how times had changed. Lawns remained neatly mowed; trees were still neatly trimmed. A majority of the houses wrecked by bombs and shellfire had been pulled down by now, so their lots looked as if they were just vacant.

Elsie had always liked him fine. Before the war, her folks wouldn’t have been so happy if he’d shown up to take her out. They weren’t so stuffy about that kind of thing as some haoles, but they wouldn’t have been dancing in the streets, either. Now… When he knocked on the door now, Elsie’s mother opened the door and smiled and said, “Hello, Ken. Come in. Elsie will be ready in just a minute.” The smile seemed genuine. If it wasn’t, she could have gone on stage with it. She used his first name now, too, he noticed, which she hadn’t the first time he’d come over.

“Thank you, Mrs. Sundberg,” Kenzo answered, and did. So much room inside! He’d had that thought before. The apartment where he’d grown up couldn’t have had a quarter as much space. He refused to think about the tent where he was living now.