Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

A man in a straw hat, a loud floral shirt, and Bermuda shorts hauled a silvery fish out of the water. It wasn’t very big, but all his neighbors stared jealously. He stashed the fish in a creel he kept between his feet. Nobody was going to take his prize away from him.

“Excuse us. ’Scuse us,” Oscar said over and over, pushing past the fishermen to get into the sea. Charlie was more direct. He used his surfboard’s nose to clear a path for himself. A couple of fishermen gave him nasty looks. He looked right back at them. They muttered to themselves, but that was all they did. Charlie hardly ever got into fights. That was mostly because nobody was crazy enough to want to take him on.

A hook splashed into the water right by Oscar’s shoulder as he paddled out to sea. That wouldn’t have been any fun if it had bitten into him. He scowled back toward the beach, but he couldn’t even tell which would-be Izaak Walton had launched it.

He breathed a sigh of relief when he and Charlie got out of range of such missiles. “Well, they won’t catch us instead of their minnows,” he said.

“Yeah,” Charlie said, and then, “That one guy got a real fish. Don’t see that all the time, not off Waikiki Beach.”

“These days, you take whatever you get,” Oscar said. Along with their surfboards, he and Charlie had hand nets and canvas sacks to hold whatever they caught. They could get a lot farther out to sea than the optimists who fished from the water’s edge. Or maybe they weren’t optimists. Maybe they were just hungry men doing what they could. Anything was better than nothing.

Were he giving a lesson, Oscar would have turned back toward shore long since. But he wasn’t. Oahu receded behind him. The breeze came off the land. He wrinkled his nose. At just about the same time, Charlie said, “What’s that stink?”

“It’s got to be the prisoners’ camp in Kapiolani Park,” Oscar answered. “I can’t think of anything else it could be.”

Charlie Kaapu grunted. “That’s a nasty business.”

“Everything that’s happened since the Japs landed is a nasty business,” Oscar said. Charlie grunted again. He didn’t say anything more, so Oscar took it for a grunt of agreement.

Off in the distance, a couple of fishing sampans headed out to sea. The light breeze filled their sails. More and more sampans were abandoning engines for the wind. Without fuel, what good were engines? Without fuel, what good was anything? Oscar’s Chevy sat on the street. It wasn’t going anywhere. Even if he could get gas for it, the battery was sure to be dead by now.

He was jealous of the sampans for the same reason the surf fishermen were bound to be jealous of him. As he could get fish the men on the beach couldn’t, so the sampans could find fish he’d never see. “Hey, Charlie!” he called.

Charlie Kaapu looked up from his paddling. “What you want?”

“You think we could rig a little mast and sail on a surfboard? That would let us get a lot farther out to sea than we can like this.”

Charlie thought it over, then shook his head. “Waste time,” he said. Oscar shrugged. His friend might well be right.

Something nibbled his finger. He looked into the water. A minnow darted away. Oscar laughed. His hands and feet were the bait he fished with. Even as he laughed, though, he also scanned the sea. Fish he wanted to catch weren’t the only sort out there. The Pacific also held fish that wanted to catch him. Sharks big enough to be dangerous were rare. Some people on the mainland imagined surf-riders devoured every day. That was a bunch of hooey. But a man who ignored the risk was a fool, too. It was like not watching the road when you got behind the wheel.

“What do you think?” he asked Charlie after a while. “We out far enough?”

Charlie looked back toward the shore. “I guess maybe. We don’t get anything, we can paddle some more.”

“Okay.” Oscar stopped paddling and let his arm trail in the water. He fluttered his fingers. Now he wanted fish to come up to him. Here, isn’t this an interesting piece of seaweed? That was what he wanted to put across to the fish. I should be writing radio spots, he thought.

A fish came up to see what he was selling. He had the net in his other hand. He didn’t advertise the net. He made a swipe with it-and the fish got away. “Oh, shit,” he said without too much heat. Such mishaps happened all the time.

Charlie made a swipe of his own. He hauled something silvery out of the sea. As he stuffed it into his sack, he sent Oscar a sly smile. Oscar took his hand out of the water and flipped Charlie off. They both laughed. No mystical native talent had let Charlie catch a fish where Oscar failed. Before long, Oscar would be smiling and Charlie cussing. They both knew it. There wasn’t any point in getting excited. If you weren’t patient, you’d never make it as a fisherman.

After a while, Oscar caught a little ray. Before he came to Hawaii, he would have thrown the bat-winged fish back. A few visits to Chinese and Japanese restaurants, though, had convinced him ray and even shark could be pretty tasty if you did them right. And he couldn’t be too choosy these days anyhow.

A swarm of minnows flashed by, like shooting stars under the surface of the sea. Oscar and Charlie looked up, the same hopeful expression on both their faces. Minnows wouldn’t swim that way unless something was after them. And whatever was after them might really be worth catching.

Oscar swiped with his net. He let out a whoop-his catch almost tore the handle out of his grasp. He hauled a mackerel up onto his surfboard. A few seconds later, Charlie caught one, too. They both stuffed the fish into their sacks and thrust the nets into the sea again. If there were more, they wanted them. And there were. Oscar got another one in nothing flat. I eat today, he thought.

Lots of people in Honolulu had such worries these days. Unlike most of those people, Oscar had had them before. He’d spent a lot of time living from hand to mouth. There was a difference, though. When he’d worried about going hungry before, it was because he’d been short of money. Now he was short of food, and so was everybody else.

He went on fishing even after he caught the second mackerel. What he didn’t eat today could go into the little icebox in his room for tomorrow. Or he could trade it for other food, or sell it to get the money he needed to pay the rent. He wondered if his landlord would take fish for the rent in place of cash. Before the war started, the idea would have been ridiculous. Not any more.

“Well, shall we head back?” he asked at last, after a long dry stretch.

“Why not?” Charlie Kaapu said. “Plenty for today.” He worried about tomorrow even less than Oscar did.

They turned their surfboards toward the shore and began to paddle again. That was work: familiar work, but work. Oscar thought some more about putting a sail on the surfboard. It wouldn’t be pretty, but he was damned if he could see why it wouldn’t work. You did what you had to do. If you were making your living as a surf-rider, that was one thing. If you were using your surfboard mostly as a fishing boat, that was something else again.

Waikiki Beach neared. The fishermen still cast their lines upon the water. Oscar glanced over to Charlie. “Shall we give ’em a show?” he said.

“What else we got to do?” Charlie answered.

They rode the breakers back to the beach. Oscar was used to standing up on a surfboard supporting a skittish tourist. Doing the same thing with a net in one hand and his sack of fish in the other was no huhu. Beside him, Charlie Kaapu might have been the incarnation of Kuula, the Hawaiian god of fishermen. You got the feeling nothing could make him come off his surfboard. That feeling might be wrong; Charlie could take a tumble like anybody else. But Oscar didn’t think he would, not this time.