Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“Of course you won’t-you won’t be able to afford it,” somebody else told him, adding, “The only thing worse than a lousy lay is no lay at all.” The whole squad laughed at that. It explained why they’d stood in line better than anything else could have done.

“Move along,” the military policeman said again, this time in a voice that brooked no argument.

“Salute!” Shimizu told his men, and they did. Some of them were clumsy, but the military policeman didn’t complain. When they got to the end of the alley, they turned left to go back up to Hotel Street. “You all still have money?” Shimizu asked. Their heads bobbed up and down. “Good,” he said. “In that case, let’s drink some more.” Nobody said no.

WHEN OSCAR VAN der Kirk paused at the water’s edge on Waikiki Beach to assemble his contraption, the men fishing in the surf paused to stare at him. One of them said, “That’s the goddamnedest thing I ever set eyes on.”

“I never saw anything like it,” another agreed.

“Glad you like it,” Oscar said. Because he was a happy-go-lucky fellow, he made them smile instead of getting them angry. It did look as if his surfboard’s mother had been unfaithful with a small sailboat.

He’d had to find a Jap to do the work. That made him queasy in a way it wouldn’t have before the war started. He’d paid that Doi character twenty-five bucks-which happened to be all the cash he had-plus a promise of fish when he went out to sea. Doi didn’t speak a hell of a lot of English, but he had no trouble at all with numbers.

What if I stiff him? Oscar wondered, not for the first time, as he fit the small mast and sail to the surfboard. Only a Jap, after all… But a Jap wasn’t only a Jap, not these days. If the handyman had any kind of connections with the occupiers… Well, that might not be a whole lot of fun.

And besides, Doi had giggled like a third-grade girl when he finally figured out what the deuce Oscar was driving at. “ Ichi-ban! ” he’d said. Oscar knew what that meant, as any kamaaina would. How could you stiff a guy who got so fired up about your brainstorm? Oh, you could, but how would you look at yourself in the mirror afterwards?

Into the Pacific went the-whatever the dickens it was. Oscar didn’t know what to call it any more. It wasn’t exactly a surfboard, not now. But it wasn’t quite a boat, either. Neither fish nor fowl, Oscar thought. It would be pretty foul, though, if he couldn’t get any fish. Wincing to himself, he went into the Pacific.

Till he got out past the breakers, he lay on his belly and paddled as he would have with a wahine on the surfboard instead of a mast (he didn’t-he wouldn’t-think about Susie Higgins). But once he made it out to calm water… Everything changed then.

He stood up on the surfboard. He could do that riding a wave as tall as a three-story building. It would have been child’s play for him here even without the mast, but the tall pole did make it easier. And then he unfurled the sail.

“Wow!” he said.

The breeze came off the mainland, as it usually did in the morning. The sail filled with wind. Oscar had had an argument with Eizo Doi about how big to make it. He’d wanted it bigger. The handyman had kept shaking his head and flapping his hands. “No good. No good,” he’d said, and he’d pantomimed a capsizing. He’d been right, too. Oscar tipped the hat he wasn’t wearing to the Jap.

Even the small spread of canvas Doi had put on the mast was plenty to make the surfboard scoot along like a live thing. And the breeze was none too strong. A real wind would have made the board buck like a bronco. Oscar wouldn’t have wanted to try to control it. This, though, this was as right as Baby Bear’s porridge.

An hour with the surfboard- sailboard? Oscar wondered-took him farther out to sea than he could have gone paddling half the day. The northern horizon started to swallow Diamond Head and the hills behind Honolulu. Fishing sampans rarely bothered putting out lines or nets where they could still see the shore, but nobody without one could come even this far. With luck, that meant Oscar had found a pretty good spot. He furled the sail and glided to a stop.

The Japs who went out in sampans used minnows for bait. Oscar didn’t know where to get his hands on those. Next best choice would have been meat scraps. But meat scraps were worth their weight in gold these days. People were eating dog food and cat food. They’d be eating dogs and cats pretty damn quick, too. For all Oscar knew, they already were.

He couldn’t even cast bread upon the waters. Bread was as extinct as the mamo birds that had given Hawaiian kings yellow feathers for their cloaks. Oscar had to make do with grains of rice. With luck, they would lure small fish, and the small fish would lure bigger ones-although nobody turned up his nose at even small fish these days.

“Come on, fish,” Oscar said, scattering the grains. “Pretend it’s a wedding. Eat it up. You know you want to.”

He had the net he’d used when he went out with Charlie Kaapu. And he had a length of line with a motley assortment of hooks on it that Eizo Doi had thrown in with the mast and sail. What he didn’t have was any bait for the hooks. I should have swatted flies or dug up worms or something, he thought. Next time. I’m making it up as I go along.

Glints of silver and blue in the water said the rice was luring fish of some sort, anyhow. He started swiping with the wide-mouthed net. Sure as hell, he caught flying fish and other fish he had more trouble naming and some squid that stared reproachfully at him. He wasn’t wild for squid himself-it was like chewing on a tire-but he knew plenty of people weren’t so fussy.

When he drew in the line, he felt like shouting. It had four or five mackerel on it, and a couple of dogfish, too. He wouldn’t have eaten shark before he came to Hawaii, either, but he knew better now. Besides, flesh was flesh these days. He wasn’t about to throw anything back.

He hadn’t seen any bigger sharks sliding through the sea. These days, their streamlined deadliness put him in mind of Jap fighter planes, a comparison that never would have crossed his mind before December 7. Any surf-rider had to be alert for them. A surf-rider with a crate full of fish had to be a lot more than alert. Now he had to get the fish back to Oahu.

That might also turn into an adventure. The breeze was still blowing from the north. If he kept on running before it, the next stop was Tahiti, a hell of a long way away. He felt like Mickey Mouse as the sorcerer’s apprentice in Fantasia. Had he started something he didn’t know how to finish?

“Making it up as I go along,” he said again, this time out loud. The sampans went out and came back. He ought to be able to do the same… but how? He tried to dredge up memories of high-school trig and physics. Triangles of forces, that’s what they were called. What to do with them, though?

Memory didn’t help much. Maybe experiment would. If he set the sail so he ran before the wind, he was screwed. That meant he had to set it at some different angle. His first effort got him moving parallel to the shore. That didn’t hurt, but it didn’t help, either. If he swung the sail a little more…

Bit by bit, he figured out how to tack. He didn’t have the seafaring lingo to describe what he was doing, even to himself. That made things harder. But his confidence grew as each successive reach brought him closer to land.

Beginner’s luck carried him back almost exactly to the point from which he’d set out. There were the waves rolling up onto Waikiki Beach. He started to take down the sail and mast and ride in on his belly.