Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

And, as far as he could tell, doing it did neither him nor the American position one damn bit of good. A couple of hours later, he got the order to fall back to the outskirts of Wahiawa. The Army would try to make another stand there.

OSCAR VAN DER KIRK’s life swayed back and forth between something approaching normality and something approaching insanity. Some of the tourists the war had stuck on Oahu still wanted surf-riding lessons. He gave them what they wanted. Why not? He needed to pay his rent just like anybody else. His landlord, a skinflint Jap named Mas Fukumoto, would have flung his scanty belongings out in the street the day after he failed to pay.

He’d had the crummy little apartment on Lewers Street for a couple of years now, after getting the heave-ho from another place much like it. All that time, of course, he’d known Mas Fukumoto was a Jap. He’d known Fukumoto was a skinflint, too. As a matter of fact, he’d never known a landlord who wasn’t a skinflint. The one who’d tossed him out when he got behind was Irish as Paddy’s pig.

But to think of Mas Fukumoto as a skinflint Jap now was to think of him as an enemy-as the enemy-in a way it hadn’t been before December 7. Oscar didn’t know Fukumoto wasn’t loyal to the United States. He had no reason to believe his landlord wasn’t, in fact. That didn’t keep him-and a lot of Fukumoto’s other haole tenants-from giving the man a fishy stare whenever they saw him.

And even when Oscar paddled out into the Pacific-warm despite its being the week before Christmas-with a wahine from Denver or Des Moines, he couldn’t help seeing and smelling the black, stinking smoke that still rose from the Navy’s shattered fuel tanks at Pearl Harbor.

The wahines mostly didn’t care. They’d come to Hawaii to forget whatever ailed them on the mainland. They intended to go right on forgetting, too. And when they couldn’t forget, they said things like, “Well, but that’s all going on way up there. Everything’s pretty much okay down here in Waikiki and Honolulu, right?”

That was a strawberry blonde named Susie. She’d come to Hawaii from Reno to forget about a recently ex-husband, and she was doing quite a job of it, too. She was ready for any kind of lessons Oscar wanted to give her. He had a sure instinct about such things.

He wondered if saying something would mess up his chances. Lying there on the surfboard with her, he shrugged a tiny shrug. She wasn’t the only fish in the sea. He said, “Wahiawa’s only half an hour away. The north coast is only an hour away-a buddy of mine and I were surf-riding up there when the Japs landed. They were shooting at us.”

Susie looked back over her slightly sunburned shoulder at him. Her eyes were blue as a Siamese cat’s. “What was that like?” she asked.

When the bullets started flying back and forth, I pissed myself. Nobody but me’ll ever know, because I was dripping wet anyway, but I damn well did. “Not a whole lot of fun,” he answered out loud, which was not only true but sounded tough and not the least bit undignified. He wondered if the same thing had happened to Charlie Kaapu. No way to ask, not ever.

What he said seemed to satisfy Susie. She made a little noise, almost a purr, down deep in her throat. “I’m glad they missed,” she told him.

“Me, too,” Oscar said, and she laughed. If he lowered his chin a couple of inches, it would come down on her cotton-covered backside. He decided not to. Unlike some of the women to whom he gave lessons, Susie didn’t need much in the way of signals. He paddled out a little while longer (so did she, not very helpfully), then swung the surfboard back toward the beach. “This time, we’re going to get you up on your knees on the board, okay?”

“What happens if I fall off?” she asked.

“You swim,” he answered, and she laughed. He started paddling shoreward. “Come on. You can do it. I’ll steady you.” And he did, kneeling behind her with his hands on her slim waist. That was a signal of sorts, but it was also line of duty, and she could ignore it if she wanted to. She laughed again. She wasn’t ignoring anything-except the Japs. Oscar wished he could do the same.

Actually, her sense of balance was pretty good-plenty good enough to keep her kneeling on the board with only a little support. The surf wasn’t very big-Oscar had chosen this place with care. But she got enough of the roller-coaster thrill to let out a whoop as they neared the beach.

“Wow!” she said when the surfboard scraped to a stop on the soft sand. There were stars in her eyes. She turned back and gave him a quick kiss. “Thank you.”

“Thank you,” he said, keeping any hint that he’d expected it out of his voice. If they knew you knew, they got coy. “Want to try it again?”

“Sure,” she said, “unless you’d rather just go on back to my room instead.”

Even Oscar hadn’t thought she’d be that brazen. Sometimes the ride lit a fire, though; he’d seen that before. He said, “Well, you’ve paid for two hours of lessons. Afterwards… I don’t have anything else going on, so…”

“I like the way you think-among other things,” she said. “Okay, we’ll do that.”

And they did. By the end of the lesson, she was kneeling unsupported. She did fall off on one run, but struck out strongly for the shore. When the lessons were done, she gave Oscar her room number. He took the board back to the Outrigger Club, then went over to the hotel.

If he’d gone in with her, the house detective would have had to notice. This way, the fellow just tipped him a wink and looked in the other direction. All along Waikiki Beach, the house dicks and the surf-riding instructors had their informal understandings. A few dollars every now and then, a few drinks every now and then, and nobody got excited about anything. No huhu, Charlie Kaapu would have said.

Oscar knocked on the door. “It’s open,” Susie called. He turned the knob. She lay on the bed, naked and waiting.

“Jesus!” he said. “What if I’d been the plumber or something?”

Those blue eyes went wide in some of the phoniest innocence he’d ever seen. “That depends,” she said throatily. “Is the plumber here good-looking?” Oscar’s jaw dropped. Susie’s laugh was pure mischief. “Since it’s you, how’s your plunger?”

“Let’s see,” he managed, and slipped off his trunks. By the way she eyed him, he passed muster. He got down on the bed beside her. She slid toward him. He rapidly discovered she had no inhibitions hidden anywhere about her person. Once she got back to the mainland, she’d probably rediscover them. He’d known more than a few other women who left them behind in San Pedro or San Francisco or Seattle. This one seemed an extreme case-not that extremes couldn’t be extremely enjoyable.

He was poised to find out just how enjoyable she could be when sirens started wailing and bells started clanging. “What the hell is that?” Susie exclaimed, and then, “Whatever it is, for God’s sake don’t stop now.”

But Oscar said, “That’s the air-raid siren. We’d better get in the trenches.” Having been under fire once, he didn’t care to repeat the experience. He’d helped dig some of the trenches that marred the greenery around the hotel buildings.

Susie stared at him. “Don’t be silly. They wouldn’t bomb Waikiki. We’re civilians. ” She spoke the last word as if it were a magic talisman.

“Maybe they wouldn’t, not on purpose,” Oscar said, though he wasn’t convinced. “But Fort DeRussy’s just Ewa from the Waikiki hotels.” She sent him a blank look. “Just west,” he explained impatiently, adding, “If they bomb that and they miss…”