Days of Infamy (18 page)

“You see how that Jap tank tipped his hat to our gun?” one of the infantrymen yelled.

Fletch laughed his head off. It was a pretty good line, and all the better because it came from somebody so raw. But that wasn't the only reason. He felt giddy, almost drunk, with relief. The odds had favored the tank, not him. All
he had to protect him from fragments was a flimsy shield. He'd had to be dead accurate to kill before he got killed—and he'd done it.

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.

O
SCAR VAN DER
K
IRK
'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 . . .”

Susie reached out and gave him a regretful squeeze. “Okay, I'm sold,” she said, all the kitten gone from her voice. “The trenches.” She ran for the bathroom, and emerged in her bathing suit by the time Oscar had his on again.

They weren't the only scantily dressed people hurrying down the hallways. The sharp, flat
boom!
of a bomb bursting not far away made several people—not all of them women—scream and made everybody hurry faster. More bombs went off as Oscar and Susie raced across the lawn and scrambled down into a trench.

Antiaircraft guns at the fort added to the din. Sure enough, DeRussy was what the Japs were after. Most of their bombs fell on it—most, but not all. When a bomb burst on the hotel, it made a noise like the end of the world. Sharp fragments of hot metal hissed and screamed by overhead. The ground shook, as if at an earthquake. Blast stunned Oscar's ears. As if from very far away, he heard Susie say, “Well, you were right.” She kissed him—more, he judged, from gratitude than passion.

And then an armor-piercing bomb, or maybe more than one, penetrated the reinforced concrete protecting the coast-defense guns in the fortress and their magazines. The explosions that followed made the ones from the bombs themselves seem like love pats. Chunks of cement and steel rained down out of the sky. Shrieks said some of them came down in trenches. Oscar wondered how many men Fort DeRussy held—had held, for they were surely dead now.

The raid lasted about half an hour. The antiaircraft guns kept firing for five or ten minutes after bombs stopped falling. Shrapnel pattered down out of the air along with debris from the fort. Oscar wished for a helmet. That stuff could smash your skull like a melon.

Despite the secondary explosions, people started climbing out of the
trenches. “Christ, but I want a drink!” somebody said, which summed things up as well as Edward R. Murrow or William L. Shirer could have done.

Susie let out a wordless squawk of dismay. She pointed at what had been her room and was now nothing but smoking rubble. Oscar gulped. If they'd ignored the sirens and gone on with what they were doing, they might have died happy, but they sure would have died.

Then Susie found words: “What am I going to do? All my stuff was in there. God damn the dirty Japs!”

Oscar heard himself say, “You can move in with me for a while if you want to.” He blinked. He'd taken in stray kittens before, and once a puppy, but never a girl. It wasn't even that he was all that crazy about Susie. If it hadn't been for the war, they'd have screwed each other silly for a few days and then gone their separate ways. But he didn't see how he could leave her stranded here with nothing but the bathing suit on her back.

By the way she eyed him, she was making some calculations of her own. “Okay,” she said after a few seconds. “But it's not like you own me or anything. Whenever I want to walk out, I'm gone.”

“Sure,” Oscar said at once. “I don't have any trouble with that. If you start driving me nuts, I'll hold the door open for you. In the meantime, though . . .” He stuck out his hand. “Uh, what's your last name?”

“Higgins,” she said as she shook it. Her hand almost got lost in his, but she had a pretty good grip. “What's yours?” He told her. “Van der Kirk?” she echoed, and started to laugh. “You're so brown, I would've figured you for a dago.”

He shrugged. “I'm out in the sun all the time. That's one of the reasons I like Hawaii. You want to see the place? It's only a few blocks
mauka
from here.” Susie Higgins looked blank again. “North. Toward the mountains,” Oscar told her. Hawaiian notions of directions had baffled him, too, when he first got to Oahu. Now he took them for granted. But he was on his way to becoming a
kamaaina
—an old-timer—here; he wasn't a just-arrived
malihini
any more, the way Susie was. “Come on,” he said, and she went with him.

The apartment building plainly didn't impress her. Well, it didn't much impress Oscar, either. She did seem surprised when he opened his door without a key. Once she walked in, she said, “Oh, I get it. You don't bother to lock it because you don't have anything worth stealing.”

“Only things I own that are worth anything are my car and my surfboard,
and my car isn't worth much,” Oscar answered with another shrug. “You don't
need
much to live here.”

Susie didn't say anything about that. Even so, he got the idea she wasn't going to stay there forever, or even very long—she was a girl who liked
things
. He could tell. What she did say was, “You want to lock the door now?”

“How come?” he said, and then, “Oh.”

She laughed at him. He deserved it. He laughed, too. She said, “We were doing something or other when that air raid started.” As if to remind him what, she peeled off her bathing suit.

The bed was narrow for two, but not too narrow. Things were going along very nicely when a great roar made the walls shake and the window rattle—it was a miracle the window didn't break. Susie squealed. Oscar needed a bit to recover. John Henry the Steel-Driving Man would have needed a moment to recover after that. He'd just started again when another identical roar made Susie squeal again.