Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

When she caught herself wondering how Fletch was doing, she grimaced. Without the war, she wouldn’t have given a damn. Without the war, she would have just waved bye-bye if he jumped off a cliff. But she didn’t want the Japs blowing him up. Even for her, that went too far.

She wondered if he was sober. If he wasn’t, he’d be sorry. If he was… he’d be in the war, and he might be sorry anyway. “Shit,” Jane said crisply. Inside the apartment she no longer shared with him, who’d hear her swear?

Bright sunlight streamed in through the window. It would be another warm day-not hot, for it probably wouldn’t get to eighty, but warm. Tonight, it would drop into the sixties, which was as cold as it ever got. Columbus might have snow on the ground. Jane hadn’t needed any time at all to get used to the weather.

The window was open. Why not, when the air was the sweetest in the world? But along with the smells of flowers that bloomed all year around, the stink of smoke came in today. The Japs had jumped on Wheeler Field and then on Schofield Barracks with both feet. By what the breeze said, some of those fires were still burning.

And what the Japs had done to Pearl Harbor! The smoke in the south blotted out a big part of the sky. It reached up toward the sun, and looked so very thick and menacing, it might bring down night at noon if it climbed high enough to blot out the source of light and warmth.

After lighting a cigarette, Jane turned on the radio, a fancy set Fletch had bought with money that could have been better spent elsewhere. So Jane had thought at the time, anyhow. Now she did some more swearing when the ordinary bands brought in nothing but silence and static. The Hawaiian stations were still off the air, then. She switched to the short-wave tuner. She’d never dreamt how desperately she could crave news from the outside world.

As she turned the dial, she got more static in snarling bursts, and then a man speaking a language she didn’t understand-Italian, she thought, or possibly Spanish. Whoever he was, he sounded full of himself, and also full of hot air. Jane spun the dial some more.

She got a squawky, singsong Oriental language next, and then a program of dance music that could have come from almost anywhere on the planet. Music wasn’t what she was after now, though. The next station she found featured somebody-Hitler? — bellowing in German. She understood some German; she’d studied it at Ohio State. But this fellow used a dialect she had trouble following, and he was going a mile a minute. All she could do was pick up a word here and there. She gave the dial another twist.

English at last! A strong, New York-accented voice said, “-Twelve-thirty this afternoon, President Roosevelt asked Congress to declare war against the Empire of Japan. He called December seventh, the date of the Japs’ unprovoked attack against Pearl Harbor in the Territory of Hawaii, ‘a date which will live in infamy.’ ”

Jane looked at a clock on the mantel. It was half past eight here. Washington was five and a half hours ahead of Hawaii time, so the President had spoken about an hour and a half before.

“Swift Congressional approval of the request is expected,” the announcer went on. “There are rumors that the Japs are trying to land soldiers in the Hawaiian Islands, but these are so far unconfirmed. If they prove correct, it is expected that the soldiers of the Hawaiian Department will drive the invaders into the sea.”

“They’d better!” Jane exclaimed. She thought about her not former enough husband and his friends, all of whom drank too much. She thought about the stories they told of their ignorant, inept enlisted men. She thought about how they always complained the government didn’t spend enough money on paper clips, let alone on important things. And she thought about how they were going to be the ones who threw the Japs back into the sea.

She started worrying in earnest then.

“Outrage continues pouring in around the country at the dastardly Japanese deed,” the newscaster said. Jane had never heard anyone actually use the word dastardly before. It sounded like bastardly, which sure as hell fit the situation.

The newsman went on yammering about Japanese attacks in the Philippines and other places she couldn’t have found without a big Rand McNally to give her a hand. Then he talked about what the Germans were doing in Russia. It sounded as if the Russians were trying to counterattack, but it had sounded like that before, and Hitler’s troops were in the suburbs of Moscow.

Jane turned off the radio and did the breakfast dishes. There weren’t many; she’d had cornflakes and a glass of apple juice. Even so, she paused with the Bon Ami-soaked dishrag. The cereal and the juice both came from the mainland. If the Japs really were trying to invade Oahu, how would ships from the States get here? How much food did Hawaii have on its own? How much could it grow if it had to?

She laughed. “How much pineapple and sugarcane can we eat?” That wasn’t a joke. Hawaii grew more pineapple than any other place in the world, and lots and lots of sugarcane. But because the Territory grew so much cane and pineapple, it didn’t grow a whole lot of anything else.

Off to the west, antiaircraft guns started booming. Jane’s mouth twisted into a sour grimace. That she could tell they were antiaircraft guns proved she’d spent too much time with Fletch Armitage. Field guns had a different report-deeper and more prolonged-and didn’t fire so quickly.

What could Fletch tell about anything that mattered to her? Not a thing, not as far as she could tell. All that mattered to him were guns and booze and the bedroom-and he hadn’t been nearly so good there as he thought he had.

Muttering to herself, she finished the dishes. The thought that had come to her while she was washing the cereal bowl wouldn’t go away. Maybe a trip to the grocery would be smart, to stock up on things just in case. She wished Wahiawa had a Piggly Wiggly, the way Honolulu did. You could do all your shopping in one trip at the supermarket. With a corner grocery, you were never sure ahead of time what they’d have and what they wouldn’t.

And Japs ran most of them. She’d learned not to give that a second thought. Now she was going to have to unlearn it again. Things had changed. Exactly how they’d changed… well, she’d just have to wait and see.

A quarter to nine was too early to go to the store. There was another reason to wish for a Piggly Wiggly. Stores like that opened earlier and stayed open later than little family businesses.

She spent an hour or so cleaning the apartment. That was all it needed. Keeping it clean was a lot easier with Fletch gone. The Army was supposed to have made him neat, but it had fallen down on the job. Or maybe it was just that, while he lived with her, he expected her to do all the work, and he didn’t care how much it was. Whatever it was, she was glad to be out from under it.

When she did come out trundling a little metal folding grocery cart behind her, she found the streets of Wahiawa full of soldiers. Since the town was right next door to two divisions of Army men, that wasn’t the biggest surprise in the world. But they usually came here to get drunk or get laid or pawn something for the cash they needed to get drunk or get laid.

These weren’t men on leave out for a good time. They wore the steel derbies that made them look like British soldiers from the Great War and carried rifles with fixed bayonets. And they had the air of men who knew damn well they were doing something important and something that might be dangerous.

Jane was glad she’d chosen to walk. The soldiers were setting up roadblocks and barricades in the streets, which snarled traffic to a fare-thee-well. Horns blared. “What the hell are you doing?” a fat, middle-aged man shouted from behind the wheel of his Ford.