In War Times (38 page)

Sam pulled out several heavy, embossed documents, a small black bound book, a stapled contract that said U.S. Navy on the top, and a sealed, bulging letter-sized envelope. Bill half rose from his seat and reached over the desk. “There should be—yes.” Sam shook out a cardboard ID card. Bill frowned. Then another slid out and he nodded.

“You have two. That fancy one—yeah, that’s it—is top clearance.” He smiled wryly. “Mine is not. You’re a civilian, so…”

“So I don’t have to salute.”

“Well, that, among other things. Keep this card in your wallet at all times.”

Sam picked up the other card. “That’s the one you’ll use most of the time,” said Bill.

Sam compared the two and looked up. “So most people aren’t supposed to know I have this clearance level.”

“Correct.” He opened another drawer and pulled out a file. It contained a small pile of crisp, white papers. He lifted the first one, scanned it, and slid it to Sam. “That’s your address. You’re with the enlisted men. Navy housing.”

“My wife is going to love this. We weren’t supposed to be on the base.”

“She really won’t like the fact that you’re smack at the end of the runway. You’ll get a good close look at the underside of every plane that takes off. Screws up television reception.”

“Thanks, but this wasn’t the agreement.”

“It’s just until you get settled and your furniture arrives. It should be here in about two months.”

“Two months!” Sam was beginning to remember why he had run when his discharge papers were issued.

“It’ll give you time to decide where to live. She’ll have neighbors. Most of the men there are on subs, so they’re gone for weeks at a time. The women are pretty close. They’ll help her get oriented.”

“Good of you to think of that.”

“They’re town houses, so they’re all real close.”

“I want officer’s housing, at least. A duplex or a single.”

“I’ll put in for it, but don’t hold your breath. You can move out any time you find another place to live.”

Sam sat back in his chair. Obviously they wanted to keep an eye on everything. Maybe it was the long trip, but somehow all of these details didn’t seem that important once he registered them. This job was his entree to the places he needed to be. It was kind of like MAD—Mutual Assured Destruction, the latest acronym for the atomic buildup. He knew something, or
was
something, that the government needed.

He carried the HD4 with him, in his pants pocket. Its resemblance to clay had inspired him to divide it up and roll it into cigarette-like cylinders and put them in a silver cigarette case. As he had rolled them, he almost wished that just touching it might once more affect him like lightning, change him into one of Hadntz’s new, infinitely better humans; split time—

Except for Bette and his children.

He would not have continued to work on it if he thought that would happen, but it seemed quiescent, and was. The forces that had changed it had left it in this form, and it was his responsibility to decide what to do with it.

They only suspected he had it. On the other hand, they had all the access, all the power, all the inner workings of the mystery he needed to solve, the one that seemed newly urgent.

Nevertheless, he took his time reading the contract before signing.

After Bill locked up his desk they shook hands, Bill grinned. “Think it’s too early for a beer? You need to know where the Officer’s Club is.”

They soon found that the television schedule existed only because someone had thought there ought to be one, but the actual shows bore only a loose relation to their scheduled times. Sharp-beaked orange birds-of-paradise bloomed next to their front porch. Hibiscus, double-ruffled and peach-hued, edges blazing brilliant red, bobbed in their neighbor’s hedge. Ephemeral showers washed over several times a day. When the banana trees rustled in the wind it sounded like it was raining, and Bette always dashed out to take the clothes off the line, only to find that she had missed the actual rain.

Keenan had probably walked the same routes at the Navy base as Sam now did, prowled the same hallways as he trained as a radio ensign. Sam never lost that awareness.

Out in Pearl Harbor, a flag, flown at half-mast, and a plaque marked the site of the sunken USS
Arizona
.

At dawn one morning he took a boat and cast a lei over the site. It floated on the crystalline water while the sun rose, swiftly as it did here near the equator, and Sam wished then that he truly did have the power and the courage to change history and give Keenan back his life. What might Keenan have done? He was always quicker, more intelligent, more sure of everything.

Sam became involved in designing the fire protection for a proposed
Arizona
Memorial.

It was Saturday. Sam was brewing tea and Jill was at the kitchen table paging through a Superman comic book, her chest tan. She never wore a shirt because it was always so warm and sunny. She seemed to have taken to the place well. She fashioned a covered wagon out of her Radio Flyer and a bamboo mat and pulled her brother and sister, using her Huffy bike as a stand-in for horses. She could walk to the library, and read fairy tales incessantly in fat collections with different-colored covers. She got to buy a new Hardy Boys book at the PX every week. As far as Sam could tell, she was in hog heaven.

“Daddy, when are we going to get an atomic toaster?”

“What?” He measured out tea leaves.

“An atomic toaster. I just saw a show about it.
Our Friend the Atom
.”

Sam shook his head in semi-disgust but said nothing. He did not like Disneyfication, which seemed to be reaching into all corners of the known universe, but his kids were steady fans of the
Wonderful World of Color
, which they watched every Sunday night, although in black-and-white. The horror of Hiroshima was being whitewashed; atomic energy was a marvelous boon, granted them by a magnanimous genie.

But he and Bette were doing the same thing with the HD4, weren’t they? Ignoring it.

Jill continued enthusiastically. “The whole world is made of Ping-Pong balls but they’re so little we can’t see them. They just found out about them. A genie let them out of the bottle. And now we’re going to have atomic toasters and atomic everything.”

“What’s so good about an atomic toaster?”

“It’s cleaner.”

“Cleaner than what?”

“I guess you don’t have to clean out the crumbs all the time. I don’t think it burns the toast, either.”

“We’ll think about it. Let me know when you see one in the PX.”

Sam sighed as she turned another page. Jill was crazy about her comic books. She stacked them on the back of the toilet next to his crossword magazines. She sprawled on the couch with them propped on her stomach. She rode her bike to the drugstore every Tuesday afternoon to be there when the shipment arrived.

Superman was hard at work saving the world and protecting his secret identity. Lois Lane loved Superman, but not his secret identity, Clark Kent. Letters to the editor marveled over discoveries of all the double-L’ed characters—Lana Lane, Lex Luthor, as if Superman had fallen onto an alphabet planet where such things were of prime importance. He weakened in the presence of green, glowing kryptonite. Bizarro was his pathetic, mineral-white counterpart.

The easy division between good and evil in the world of Superman bothered Sam. Because there was no such thing. Nevertheless it was there in everything the culture fed her. Black and white. Easy-to-identify sides. Bad guys simply bad; good guys simply good.

He imagined his own comic book character, Air Girl. Air Girl had her own plane and solved mysteries and caught crooks. Air Girl captured spies. Air Girl was Bette and Her Pals, during the war, smart women with good-paying jobs. They were much more possible than Superman. Their limit was that they were real.

He wanted Jill to be Air Girl. Why wasn’t there a comic book for her? Supergirl’s powers seemed limited, subordinate to Superman’s.

“Get ready,” he said. “We’re going to the beach.” Holding his glass of iced tea, he stepped into the backyard.

Brian was next door, as usual, with his best friend Danny, and his warren of blasted battle territory. “Put that platoon over there—no! Behind that hill.” Danny was the imperious commander. Brian, a few years younger, appeared to be the private who had not yet learned the value of lying low and keeping out of the sight of officers.

“Good.” Danny bent and chose carefully from a neat pile of rocks. “I think this is a job for the eighty-millimeter.”

“Can I fire it this time?” asked Brian hopefully.

“Get out of the way.” Danny threw a fast underhand and all of the little green soldiers Brian had painstakingly assembled went flying. “Ha!” he crowed. “Direct hit on the Germans.” Because of their environment, which included not just Japanese, but Koreans, Chinese, and many other Asian nationalities, Danny was forbidden to fight any battles that involved the Japanese.

“Hi, Mr. Dance,” he said, dusting hands together in satisfaction. “Did you see that? Okay, Brian. Now they’re sending in the tank reinforcements. They have to cross the river—fill up the river, okay? Looks like it dried up.”

Brian obediently trotted over to the hose. When he wasn’t playing with Danny, Bette had to shoo him away from the television set. With Danny, he was working his way through every movie about WWII that happened across the screen.

“We’re going to the beach,” Sam told him. “Get your stuff.”

“Take the amphibian!” Danny shouted as Brian dashed into the house. The screen door slammed.

Waves chased one another across an immense fetch to finally burst against lava rock outposts in a wild clash of foam at Kaena Point, Oahu’s remote northwest tip. The water sluiced through tiny crystalline pools where otherworldly creatures of impossible pastel delicacy flourished. The briny smell of these pools, the sharpness of the rocks upon which his children often cut themselves so that brilliant red blood ran down their thin brown legs without them noticing, the green dense fleshy fringe of naupaka all transported them in a group, a tableau, to another time in which they existed perfect, in relationship to themselves and to the world, the lines between them taut and straight as the schematics in a pool shark’s brain, stretching and changing constantly, singing lines carrying a current of love.

He watched Brian bend to examine something in a tide pool, the boy a stubby curve of brown bisected by a dash of bright red shorts. Jill’s long hair flowed this way and that in the wind; Bette hovered over Megan, only two. Bing Crosby crooned as if a celestial voice from their transistor radio that every cloud had a silver lining.

Sam, right here, right now, saw only the silver. Having his family here where Keenan had been was strangely like having him here as well.

The rocks were a graceful scallop along the shoreline beneath the perpendicular, brownish-green cliffs of Kaena Point. The steep plunge of land into the blue Pacific was interrupted only by the narrow dirt road along which they had bumped to reach this place. The wind held the fresh scent of infinity, sweet and salty and fully ionized. A dark cloud boiled up a few miles east along the coast but would spend itself in swift showers soon. A military plane from Dillingham a few miles away took off and veered Maui-ward.

Sam pondered a great deal over how much of his country was top-secret, hidden from civilians. Two thousand feet above him and half a mile back from the Point was a golf ball-shaped installation, part of the DEW line. Fly across the country and if you knew what you were looking at from forty thousand feet the land was a quilt of off-limits military property.

Bette was right. They were still at war in what was now called peacetime, and bright plastic Hasbro toys, Krazy Ikes and Mr. Potato Heads, the residue of wartime research, shone like beacons to children from black-and-white television screens, leaving the kids to imagine the colors. Jill got up at six every Saturday morning and watched the test pattern until hours of cartoons played out, then watched
Rin-Tin-Tin, Sky King, Fury
, and
Lassie
until
American Bandstand
came on with “those boring teenagers,” at which time she finally went outside to play. All against this backdrop of quiet preparation for the next war, which, from his point of view, permeated the entire world.

Swooping up Megan, Bette stood straddle-legged in a tide pool and raised her against the sky, jouncing her up and down. Sam could hear Megan’s squeal of delight mingle with the wind.

The Pacific, the present, was primary colors, brilliant light. The war was somber browns and greens and blacks; black trees sketched against white fields, their fractal filigree stark against gray winter sky, and camps of the brutalized dead. This light washed that from him.

It was a little after ten at night. The banana trees flapped in darkness, sounding like leathery cloth being rubbed and scraped by diligent eternal launderers. Sam, at the kitchen table, finished his newspaper and climbed the narrow stairs, stuck his head in their bedroom door. Bette was snoring.

He looked in on the kids. Jill had the upper bunk, Brian the lower, and Megan slept on a cot.

The bookshelf that formed Jill’s headboard was crammed with comic books. Sam’s new Philco transistor was hidden beneath her pillow, tuned to top-ten hits like “Itsy Bitsy Teenie Weenie Yellow Polka Dot Bikini.” Every night after she fell asleep he got it out, turned it off, and put it in the bathroom so he could listen to it in the morning while he shaved.

Reaching beneath her pillow, he was startled when she turned, wide awake, her face wet with tears. “Why are they doing it?” she asked.

“What?” He sat down on the side of the bed.

“Killing each other. People are killing each other all the time, and hurting each other.”

“You’ve been listening to the news,” he said quietly. “You told me you turned it off.”

“I do when it’s on KPOI. It only lasts three and a half minutes.”

“So what station is this on?”

“The BBC. There’s always news. Wars and murders. People are dead all the time.”