Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

“No huhu.” Kenzo did laugh then. Why not? A Jap tossing a Hawaiian word to a haole girl… If that wasn’t funny, what was? “Hope people aren’t giving you a rough time.” Hope the Japanese aren’t treating you the way whites treated local Japs before the war. He wondered why he hoped that. Wasn’t turnabout fair play? But Elsie had never treated him like a Jap-not till things got strange after the shooting started, anyhow, and then only for a little while.

She shrugged now. “Sign of the times,” she said, which neatly echoed what he was thinking.

“You have any trouble getting that tuna home?” he asked.

Elsie shrugged again. “A little. But I was lucky. There were cops around both times, so things didn’t get too messy. If those so-and-sos had got any pushier, I would’ve kicked ’em right where it hurts most. I was ready to.” She did her best to look tough.

Back in high school, Kenzo wouldn’t have imagined her best could be that good. But everybody’d had some painful lessons since then. “That’s the way to do it,” he said. “Uh-you want company taking your stuff home today?”

She hesitated, much the same way she had when he waved to her across the makeshift market. Then, as she had that time, she smiled again, smiled and nodded. “Sure, Ken. Thanks.”

“Okay.” Now he paused. “Your folks gonna start pitching a fit when you come up to the front door with a Jap?”

She blushed. He watched in fascination as the color spread up from her neckline all the way to the roots of her hair. But, yet again, she didn’t need more than a moment to gather herself. “Not when it’s somebody I went to school with,” she said firmly. She eyed him. “Is that good enough for you?”

“Yeah.” This time, Kenzo answered right away. She would have got mad at him if he hadn’t, and she would have had a right to. “You ready to go or you need more stuff?”

“I’m ready.” As if to prove it, Elsie hefted the bag. “Come on.”

Kenzo had hustled till he was almost breathless, hoping to run into her. Now that he’d succeeded, he had trouble finding things to say. Honolulu wasn’t a great big city; every step brought him that much closer to good-bye, which was the one thing he didn’t want to tell her.

Elsie did her best to help, asking, “How are your brother and your father?”

“Hank’s okay.” Kenzo used the name by which Hiroshi was known to haoles. “My dad…” He didn’t know how to go on with that. At last, he said, “Dad was born in the old country, and he’s… he’s happier with the way things are now than we are.”

“Oh.” She walked on for a little while. “That must make things… exciting to talk about.” Like him, she was looking for safe ways to say inherently unsafe things.

“Exciting. Yeah.” He laughed, not that it was funny. “Things get so exciting that most of the time we don’t talk about anything but fishing. You don’t want to whack somebody over the head with a brick on account of fishing.”

“I guess not.” Elsie took another few steps. He realized she had to feel as wary around him as he did around her. “You’re lucky that you’re able to go out there, especially with so many people hungry.”

“Some luck,” he said bitterly. “If I were really lucky, I’d be in college now. Then I could be working on a degree instead of a line full of hooks. Of course, afterwards I’d probably go out fishing with my old man anyway, because who’s gonna hire a Jap with a degree?”

“Was it really that bad?” Elsie was white. She hadn’t had to worry about it. She hadn’t even had to know the problem was there.

“It wasn’t good-that’s for darn sure,” Kenzo answered. “Lots more Japanese with good educations than places for them to work. You put somebody with a university degree in a shoe store or a grocery or out on a sampan and he starts wondering why the heck he bothered. You let him watch somebody with green eyes and freckles get the office job he’s better qualified for and he won’t be real happy about it.”

Quietly, Elsie said, “It’s a wonder you aren’t happier about how things are now.”

“I’m an American,” Kenzo said with a shrug. “That’s what everybody told me, even before I started going to school. People told me that, and I believed it. Heck, I still believe it. I believe it more than the Big Five do, I bet.” The people who ran the Big Five-the firms of Alexander and Baldwin, American Factors, C. Brewer and Company, Castle and Cooke, and the Theo. H. Davies Company-pretty much ran Hawaii, or they had till the war, anyhow. They ran the banks, they ran the plantations, they did the hiring, and they did the firing. And the higher in their ranks you looked, the whiter they got.

Another proof of who’d been running things here for the past fifty years was the neighborhood they were walking through as they neared Elsie’s house. These large homes-mostly of white clapboard with shingle roofs-on even larger lots were nothing like the crowded shacks and tenements west of Nuuanu Avenue, the part of town where Kenzo had grown up. They didn’t shout about money; they weren’t so rude or vulgar. But they admitted it was there, even the ones that had been wrecked or damaged in the fighting. And the people who lived in them were white.

Somebody had neatly mowed the Sundbergs’ front lawn. Kenzo wondered whether Elsie’s father pushed the lawnmower every Sunday morning or they had a gardener. Before the war, he would have bet on a gardener. Now? He admitted to himself that he wasn’t sure.

The front door opened before he and Elsie got to it. Mrs. Sundberg looked a lot like Elsie. Like her daughter, she also looked alarmed for a moment-what was this Jap doing here? Then, even without Elsie telling her, she realized which Jap he was likely to be, and her face cleared. “Mr. Takahashi, isn’t it?” she said politely.

“That’s right, Mrs. Sundberg.” Kenzo was polite, too.

“Thank you for the fish you gave us. It was very generous of you,” she said. He nodded; he’d expected something like that. But she went on in a way he hadn’t expected: “It’s good to see you here. Now we can give you something, too.”

“Huh?” he said, which was not the most brilliant thing that could have come out of his mouth, but she’d caught him by surprise.

She smiled a slightly superior smile-a very haole smile. Elsie, who hadn’t got that trick down pat yet, giggled instead and then said, “Come on in, Ken.”

Mrs. Sundberg’s smile slipped a little, but only a little, and she put it back fast. “Yes, do,” she said. “We have lemonade, if you’d like some. Elsie, you get it for him, and I’ll go out back and do the honors.”

Inside, the house was pure New England: overstuffed furniture with nubbly upholstery, lots of turned wood stained a color close to dark cherry, and more pictures on the wall and knickknacks on tables and shelves than you could shake a stick at. “Thanks,” Kenzo said when Elsie did bring him some lemonade. That didn’t surprise him. Lots of people had lemon trees, you couldn’t do much with lemons but squeeze them, and Hawaii did still have plenty of sugar-if not much else. She carried a glass for herself, too. He sipped. It was good.

Mrs. Sundberg came back inside with half a dozen alligator pears, the rough skin on some dark green, on others almost black. “Here you are,” she said proudly.

“Thank you very much!” Kenzo meant it. Alligator pears-some people called them avocados-were a lot harder to come by than lemons. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d had any.

“You’re welcome,” she said. “The darker ones are ripe now; the others will be in a few days. Feel them. When they start to get soft, they’ll be ready to eat.”