A grubby sailor stuck his head and shoulders out of the top of the conning tower. In purest Brooklynese, he asked, “Hey, Mac, you speak English?”
Better than you do, buddy. Somehow, Oscar didn’t burst into hysterical laughter. That proved he owned more strength of character than he’d suspected. He made himself nod. “Yes,” he said, adding, “I grew up in California.”
“Oh, yeah? Says you.” The sailor sounded deeply skeptical. Oscar knew why: he was almost naked and very, very brown. Plenty of tourists figured him for at least hapa — Hawaiian, too; they were too dumb to know a blond Hawaiian was a lot less likely than a swarthy Swede. This guy was evidently somewhere on the same level of dumbness. “Don’t go away,” he said, and disappeared.
A minute later, another man took his place. This fellow looked just as unkempt, but wore an officer’s cap with a large grease spot on it. “I’m Woodrow Kelley,” he said. “They call me Woody. This is the Amberjack, and they were rash enough to put me in charge of her. Who are you, pal? Vinnie says you say you’re from California.” He didn’t sound as if he believed it, either.
“My name is Oscar van der Kirk, and yeah, I’m from California. I graduated from Stanford, matter of fact.”
“What are you doing here, then?” Kelley asked.
“I like it here,” Oscar answered simply. “I liked it a hell of a lot better before the Japs came, but I still like it.” He pointed at the sub-the Amberjack, Kelley had called it. “What are you doing here?”
“Who, me? I’m not here at all. You’re talking to a waddayacallit-a figment of your imagination.” The submarine’s skipper had a wryly engaging grin. “If I were here, I’d just be looking around, seeing what I can find out. What the hell’s that thing you’re riding on, for instance?”
“I call it a sailboard,” Oscar said. “It lets me fish farther from shore than a regular surfboard would.”
“Your idea?” Woodrow Kelley asked. Oscar nodded. Kelley eyed the hybrid craft. “Pretty neat, I’d say. How far could you go on it?”
“Beats me,” Oscar answered. “I never tried anything really fancy. All I wanted to do was get out where the fishing was better than it is by the beach.”
“Could you sail to another island?” Kelley persisted.
“I suppose so, if the wind didn’t let me down,” Oscar said. Molokai was only about forty miles away, Lanai not much farther, and Maui a short hop from either one. Even so, he went on, “I’d sure rather do it in a real boat, though. Not much margin for error in this thing. How come?”
“Just thinking out loud,” the sub’s skipper said. Oscar knew bullshit when he heard it, but he was in no position to call the other man. Kelley went on, “How are things in Honolulu?”
“You don’t have spies to tell you stuff like that?” Oscar asked.
“How do things look to you?” Kelley said, another answer that wasn’t an answer. That was probably fair enough. A Navy officer wouldn’t talk about spies with a guy on a sailboard.
Oscar thought. “People are hungry, but they aren’t quite starving. You try and keep your head down so the Japs don’t notice you.”
“Okay.” Kelly nodded. “How about the local Japs? — the ones who were living here before the invasion, I mean.”
“Some of ’em-usually older ones, I’d say-like it with Japan in charge. The ones my age and younger are mostly as American as anybody else. But an awful lot of them just want to go on about their business, same as most folks. As long as they get left alone, they’re happy.”
“Uh-huh.” Woody Kelley nodded again, this time as if telling himself not to forget that. “How much of the rest of the island have you seen?”
“Not much, not since the war started. There’s no gas for ordinary people’s cars.” Oscar pointed up toward the conning tower. “Hey! Can you do something for me?”
“I dunno. Try me.”
“Let my folks know I’m okay, please. Bill and Enid van der Kirk, in Visalia, California. And my brother Roger.” Oscar paused. In for a penny, in for a pound, he decided. “And a gal named Susie Higgins has family in Pittsburgh. They ought to know she’s all right.”
“Visalia. Pittsburgh.” Kelley looked down. Oscar hoped that meant he was taking notes. When he looked up again, he said, “They’ll get the word. It may take a while. We’ll have to clean it up so they can’t tell how it came from Hawaii to the mainland.”
“Gotcha,” Oscar said. “Thanks, pal.”
“Any time,” Kelley said. “You want some real chow-canned stuff-to go along with your fish there?”
Spit flooded into Oscar’s mouth. Canned stuff was precious, not least because so much of it had already been eaten. But, regretfully, he shook his head. “I better not. Anybody sees me coming off the beach with it, he’s gonna know damn well I didn’t catch it on a hook.”
Woody Kelley chuckled. “Okay, van der Kirk. Makes sense. You’re nobody’s dummy, are you?”
Except for Charlie Kaapu, he was the first person who’d said anything like that in years. Most folks figured Oscar was a jerk for preferring surf-riding to making something of himself. In his occasional gloomy moments, he’d had the same thought himself. So when he said, “Thanks,” he really sounded as if he meant it.
“Sure thing,” Kelley said. “Listen. One more time… You’ve never seen me. You’ve never heard of the Amberjack, right?”
“Who? What?” Oscar said, and the officer-who couldn’t have been any older than he was-laughed again. He touched his index finger to the brim of his grimy cap in something halfway between a wave and a salute. Then he vanished into the conning tower. A hatch clanged shut behind him.
The submarine slipped below the surface. Oscar guffawed. He’d watched subs go underwater in the movies. One thing the movies didn’t tell you, though, was that the bubbling submergence sounded like the world’s biggest fart in a bathtub.
He gave his attention back to the fishing line. Whether American subs were prowling around Oahu or not, he still had to eat. Keeping a full belly was everybody’s number-one worry these days. When he got back to shore, he wondered if he’d hear that the Amberjack had surfaced and plastered a Japanese barracks or gun position. Nobody said a word about anything like that, though. He supposed the sub was just on a snooping run. Too bad, he thought.
“How did it go?” Susie asked when he got back to the apartment.
“Pretty well,” he answered, and displayed a mahimahi he hadn’t traded. It would be tasty tonight. He wanted to tell her he’d passed the word that she was safe. He wanted to, but he didn’t. If he couldn’t keep from running his own mouth, how could he expect her to manage it? Even if he couldn’t talk, he’d done a good deed. Some people said the best good deeds were the ones you didn’t talk about. Oscar wasn’t convinced. As far as he could see, this one was just the most frustrating.
JIRO TAKAHASHI LET his sons sail the Oshima Maru back toward Kewalo Basin. By now, Hiroshi and Kenzo handled the sampan’s rig nearly as well as he did. When they were working, they didn’t have time to grumble that he’d be taking fish to the Japanese consulate once they came ashore.
Actually, they’d almost given up nagging him about going to the consulate. He was, after all, a Japanese citizen. And he was at least as stubborn as his two blockheaded sons. They weren’t about to make him change his mind. The more they tried, the harder he dug in his heels.
By now, even they seemed to have figured that out. As Kenzo swung the sail about to change tacks on the way back to Honolulu, Hiroshi changed tacks on the argument. “Father-san, you really shouldn’t let the occupiers use you for propaganda,” he said.