Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

Two days later, somebody knocked at the door. Fear shot through her. These days, a knock on the door was likely to mean trouble, not a neighbor wanting to borrow a stick of butter. The knock came again: loud, insistent. Jane trembled as she went to open the door. She’d started taking in another lesson Americans should never have had to learn.

Tsuyoshi Nakayama stood there, with two younger local Japanese behind him. “You are Mrs. Jane Armitage?” he said. Jane nodded. He made a check-mark on a list. “Where is your husband, Mrs. Armitage?”

“I don’t know. We were getting a divorce when-when the war started,” Jane answered. That was true. No one could say it wasn’t. She didn’t want to tell him she’d been married to a soldier. Who could guess what he or Hirabayashi might do if she did? He could find out if he poked around. But even if he did, she hadn’t lied.

The gardener just shrugged now. “You live here alone, then?” he asked. Jane’s head went up and down again. Yosh Nakayama nodded, too. He wrote something else on the list. What was it? Jane couldn’t tell. Not knowing alarmed her. Nakayama looked up. “We may run short of food,” he said.

This time, Jane nodded eagerly. If he wanted to talk about food, he didn’t want to talk about Fletch. Everybody had to worry about eating. Not everybody had to worry about a husband in the Army.

“I am going to give you turnip seeds and pieces of potatoes with eyes,” Nakayama said. “You will plant them. You will grow them. You will take care of them. We hope we can start growing things to eat soon enough to keep from getting too hungry.”

“Plant them where? How?” Jane asked. She didn’t know the first thing about farming. But it looks like I’m going to find out.

“You have been assigned a plot,” Yosh Nakayama told her. “I have tools for you.” The young men behind him carried a spade, a hoe, a rake, and a trowel. They thrust them at Jane now. Nakayama went on, “Plenty of people here know what to do. Ask them. They will be in the fields, too. And the seeds come with instructions. Follow them. Follow them with care.”

“Turnips?” Jane couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten a turnip. Back in Ohio, they fed hogs more often than people.

Nakayama shrugged. “They grow fast. You can eat the root and the greens. We have to do whatever we can. We will all be hungry soon. Other people will raise beans and corn and squash and whatever else we have. We need to work hard. Otherwise, we will be worse than hungry.”

What about the Jap soldiers? Will they help us farm? But Jane didn’t have the nerve to ask the question. She accepted the seeds and the quartered potatoes. All she did ask was, “Where will my, uh, plot be?”

“I will show you. Come on.” He led her downstairs and out to the street. A whole stretch of lawn had been divided into sections with stakes and twine. Yosh Nakayama pointed to one of those sections. “This is yours. You will clear it and plant it.”

“Clear it?” Jane echoed. The gardener just nodded impatiently. Jane looked down at her hands. They were nice and soft. The only callus she had was a small one on the middle finger of her right hand: a writer’s callus. That was going to change if she had to dig out all that grass and plant vegetables. She sighed, not too loud. “What about bugs and things?”

“It is a problem,” Nakayama admitted. Hawaii was chock full of all kinds of bugs. You couldn’t ship local fruit to the mainland for fear of turning them loose there. He went on, “We do have to try, though. If we don’t try, we try starving instead. Which would you rather do?”

Jane had no answer to that, none at all.

FLETCHER ARMITAGE STARED in dismay at the De Soto that had hauled his 105 down from the north coast of Oahu to not far from the outskirts of Honolulu. The De Soto sat on the grass, sad and lopsided. Fletch was glad the burst of Japanese machine-gun fire had missed him and his crew. And so it had, but there were fresh holes in the car, and three of its tires were flat.

One of the infantrymen he’d collared into serving the gun came up beside him and said, “Sir, if it was a horse, I’d shoot it.”

“Yeah.” Fletch had fixed flats before, but he saw no way in hell to do it this time. Two of those inner tubes didn’t just have holes in them. They’d been chewed to pieces. Then he brightened. “Tell you what, Clancy. There’s houses around here. If you and your buddies bring me back wheels with fresh tires on ’em, I won’t care where they came from.”

He’d started breaking rules when he commandeered the De Soto in the first place. He was ready to keep right on doing it if that meant he could go on hitting back at the Japs. Maybe somebody would make him go stand in a corner later on. He’d worry about that then, if there was a then.

“I’ll see what we can do, Lieutenant,” Clancy said with a grin. “Hey, Dave! Arnie! Come on!” He appreciated larceny. By now, he and his pals made pretty fair artillerymen, too. Baptism by total immersion, Fletch thought.

The soldiers grabbed their rifles and hurried off. If some civilian didn’t fancy watching the wheels from his car walk with Jesus, a Springfield was a terrific persuader. Fletch hoped the men found a Jap to rob, not a haole. That wasn’t fair, but he didn’t give a damn. Every time he saw an Oriental face, he suspected its owner was on the enemy’s side.

Airplanes droned by, high overhead. He gave the Japanese bombers the finger. That was all he could give them. Even as he did it, he knew a certain amount of relief: they weren’t going to drop anything on him. If not for the Japs’ air power, he thought the Army would have held them. Yeah, and if ifs and buts were candied nuts, we’d all have a hell of a Christmas.

As things were, the Americans were losing hope. He could feel it. They’d thought they could stop the Japs in front of Schofield Barracks and Wahiawa. Then those enemy soldiers appeared in their rear-and they hadn’t been the same since. He had to admire the Japs who’d got over the Waianae Range. That didn’t mean he didn’t want to kill them all, but he knew they’d pulled off something astonishing. After its hasty retreat from a line that was just coming together, the U.S. Army simply hadn’t been the same.

If it got shoved off the hills here, the next stops were Pearl Harbor and Honolulu. Fletch wondered if he’d have to aim his 105 up Hotel Street at the advancing Japanese. Soldiers and sailors would fight like madmen to hang on to the red-light district… wouldn’t they?

He heard more airplane engines. These weren’t droning-they were screaming. Fletch dove for a hole in the ground. He hadn’t been on the receiving end of a dive-bomber attack for a while. He could have done without the honor now, too. The Japs cared for his opinion as much as they usually did.

One of the planes shot by overhead almost low enough for him to reach up and snag the fixed landing gear. The bomb went off much too close. It slammed his face down into the dirt. He spat mud, and tasted blood when he did it. That didn’t surprise him. He was probably also bleeding from the nose and ears. He counted himself lucky: he was still breathing.

And, with luck, he still had his gun crew. Clancy and Dave and Arnie were off scrounging tires. Fletch climbed out of the hole. His dive left him even filthier than he had been a minute before. They said it couldn’t be done, he thought vaguely. He felt vague, all right, as if he’d just taken a Joe Louis right to the jaw. Blast could do that to you.

Then, looking around, he couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry. The bomb had flipped the commandeered De Soto over on its back like a turtle, except turtles didn’t catch fire when that happened to them. With or without new tires or wheels, it wasn’t going anywhere ever again. That was almost funny.